Editorial Board
Editor
Dale Southerton
University of Manchester

Advisory Board
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania

Frank Trentmann
Birkbeck College

Karin Ekström
University of Borås

Alan Warde
University of Manchester

Peter Jackson
University of Sheffield

Rick Wilk
Indiana University

Copyright © 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

FOR INFORMATION:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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

Encyclopedia of consumer culture / edited by Dale Southerton.

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

v. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

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

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

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

HC79.C6E53 2011

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

306.3—dc22

2011009422

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

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

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

1
83
129

D
E

421
483

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

567
623
695
753
821

K
L
M
N
O

827
833
883
1023
1049

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

1075
1185
1193
1241
1427

U
V
W
Y
Z

Index 1557

1493
1501
1515
1547
1555

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

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

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

viii

List of Entries

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

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

List of Entries

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

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

ix

x

List of Entries

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

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

List of Entries

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

xi

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

xii

List of Entries

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

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

List of Entries

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

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

xiii

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

Everyday Life

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

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

xvi

Reader’s Guide

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

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

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

Reader’s Guide

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

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

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

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

xvii

xviii

Reader’s Guide

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

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

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

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

Reader’s Guide

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

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

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

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

xix

xx

Reader’s Guide

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

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

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

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

xxi

Contributors
Andrea Abbas
University of Teesside

Anna Barford
University of Sheffield

Chris R. Birchenhall
University of Manchester

Lisa Adkins
University of Newcastle,
Australia

Mauro Barisione
University of Milan

Megan K. Blake
University of Sheffield

Robert Batchelor
Georgia Southern University

Regina Lee Blaszczyk
University of Pennsylvania

Janeen Baxter
University of Queensland

Francesco Boldizzoni
Bocconi University

Geoffrey Beattie
University of Manchester

Federico Boni
Universita degli Studi di
Milano

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

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

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

Contributors

xxiii

Lyn Calcutt
Griffith University

Irene Cieraad
Delft University of Technology

Mario De Benedittis
Universita degli Studi di Milano

Norah Campbell
Trinity College Dublin

Simone Cinotto
University of Gastronomic
Sciences

Neil De Marchi
Duke University

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

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

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

Matthew Cole
University of Birmingham

Kimya N. Dennis
North Carolina State
University

Craig Carson
University of Chicago

Benjamin Coles
University of Sheffield

Rutledge M. Dennis
George Mason University

Ellis Cashmore
Staffordshire University

Davide Consoli
University of Manchester

Stuart Derbyshire
University of Birmingham

José Esteban Castro
Newcastle University

Tim Cooper
Nottingham Trent University

John Desmond
St. Andrews University

Miriam Catterall
The Queen’s University of
Belfast

Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania

Nikhilesh Dholakia
University of Rhode Island

Garry Crawford
University of Salford

Paddy Dolan
DIT Center for Consumption
and Leisure Studies

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

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

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

Sophie Chauveau
Universite de Lyon

Ranjana Das
London School of Economics

Jessica Chelekis
Indiana University

Noelle Davies
Baylor University

Michael Chibnik
University of Iowa

Deborah S. Davis
Yale University

Lyndie Christensen
Nebraska Wesleyan University

Mark Davis
University of Leeds

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

xxiv

Contributors

Bruce Epperson
Bruce Epperson Associates

Sebastian Garman
Brunel University

Leslie Haddon
London School of Economics

Angelika Epple
University of Bielefeld

Thomas Gencarelli
Manhattan College

Henrik Hagtvedt
Boston College

Thomas Hylland Eriksen
University of Osio

James W. Gentry
University of Nebraska

David Evans
University of Manchester

Alexandra George
University of New South Wales

Håkan Håkansson
BI Norwegian School of
Management

Michelle Everson
University of London

Güliz Ger
Bilkent University

Jonathan Everts
Universität Bayreuth

Karl Gerth
Merton College

William Farrell
Birkbeck College, University of
London

Rossella Ghigi
Universita degli Studi di Bologna

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

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

Marianna Fotaki
University of Manchester

Nicky Gregson
University of Sheffield

Aubrey R. Fowler
Valdosta State University

Christian Greiffenhagen
University of Manchester

Adrian Franklin
University of Tasmania

Erik Grimmer-Solem
Wesleyan University

Lars-Erik Gadde
Chalmers University of
Technology

Jukka Gronow
University of Uppsala

Jie Gao
Stony Brook University

Kolleen M. Guy
University of Texas at San
Antonio

Meryl Gardner
University of Delaware

Wencke Gwozdz
Copenhagen Business School

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

Contributors

Torbjörn Hjort
Lund University

Ron Johnston
University of Bristol

Charles Lemert
Wesleyan University

Peter H. Hoffenberg
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Nathan Jurgenson
University of Maryland

Roger Leong
National Gallery of Victoria

Margaret K. Hogg
Lancaster University
Management School

Elihu Katz
University of Pennsylvania

Nils Lindahl Elliot
Independent Scholar

Inge Kaul
Hertie School of Governance

James Livesey
University of Sussex

Robin Kearns
University of Auckland

Sonia Livingstone
University of London

Sandra Keiser
Mount Mary College

Omar Lizardo
University of Notre Dame

Margit Keller
University of Tartu

Orvar Löfgren
University of Lund

Simon Kemp
University of Canterbury

Brian Longhurst
University of Salford

Unni Kjærnes
The National Institute for
Consumer Research (SIFO)

Amanda D. Lotz
University of Michigan

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

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

xxv

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

Cynthia K. Isenhour
University of Kentucky

Torben Huus Larsen
University of Southern
Denmark

Peter Jackson
University of Sheffield

Jörgen Larsson
University of Gothenburg

John Mathiason
Syracuse University

Mikko Jalas
Helsinki School of Economics

Steph Lawler
Newcastle University

William Jankowiak
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Rebecca Leach
Keele University

Chiara Mauri
University of Bocconi Via
Bocconi, 8

Paul H. Johnson
University of Durham

Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen
University of Helsinki

Juliana Mansvelt
Massey University

Harvey May
Queensland University of
Technology

xxvi

Contributors

Vanessa May
University of Manchester

Jonathan Morris
University of Hertfordshire

Wendy Parkins
University of Otago

Robert N. Mayer
University of Utah

James C. Morrison
Aaron River Communications

Caitlin Patrick
University College Dublin

Anne McCants
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT)

Pablo Muchnik
Emerson College

Vanessa M. Patrick
University of Houston

David Muggleton
University of Chichester

Charles Pattie
University of Sheffield

Stewart Muir
University of Manchester

Eugenia Paulicelli
City University of New York

Anne Murcott
University of Nottingham

William Pawlett
University of Wolverhampton

Claire Nally
University of Northumbria

Ceri Peach
University of Oxford

Michelle R. Nelson
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign

Anna Cristina Pertierra
University of Queensland

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

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

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

Steven Miles
University of Liverpool

Jacob Ostberg
Centre for Fashion Studies,
Stockholm University of
Business

Vincent Miller
University of Dayton

Cele C. Otnes
University of Illinois

Jibonayan Raychaudhuri
Essex University

Barbara Misztal
University of Leicester

Jan Pahl
Kent University

Geof Rayner
Brunel University

Sabine Moeller
European Business School

R. E. Pahl
Essex University

Arthur P. J. Mol
Wageningen University

Mika Pantzar
Helsinki School of Economics

Lucia A. Reisch
Copenhagen Business
School

Ryan Moore
Florida Atlantic University

Luca A. Panzone
University of Manchester

Emanuela Mora
Università Cattolica del Sacro
Cuore

Nicholas Park
Nebraska Wesleyan
University

Mark Ramsden
Kingston University

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

Contributors

Silvia Rief
University of Innsbruck

Jensen Sass
Yale University

Marco Solaroli
University of Milan

Giorgio Riello
University of Warwick

Roberta Sassatelli
Universita Statale di Milano

Vincent Song
University of Sheffield

George Ritzer
University of Maryland

Mike Savage
University of York

Dale Southerton
University of Manchester

Lauren A. Rivera
Northwestern University

Andrew Sayer
Lancaster University

Gert Spaargaren
Wageningen University

Ken Roberts
University of Liverpool

Theodore R. Schatzki
University of Kentucky

Mike Robinson
Leeds Metropolitan University

Joachim Scholderer
Aarhus University

Michelle Stack
University of British
Columbia

Mark Roodhouse
University of York

Jonathan E. Schroeder
Rochester Institute of
Technology

Jutta Roosen
Technische Universitat
Munchen
Inge Røpke
Technical University of
Denmark

Alan Scott
University of Innsbruck
Sue Scott
Glasgow Caledonian University

xxvii

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

Daniel Scroop
University of Sheffield

Luca Storti
Universita degli Studi di
Torino

Åsa Rosenberg
University of Gothenburg

Giovanni Semi
University of Turin

Pekka Sulkunen
University of Helsinki

Julia Rothenberg
Queensborough Community
College, City University of
New York

Joanne Sharp
University of Glasgow

Oriel Sullivan
University of Oxford

Mimi Sheller
Drexel University

Takeda Hiroko
University of Tokyo

Malcolm Rutherford
University of Victoria

Robert J. Shepherd
The George Washington
University

Berna Tarı
TOBB Ekonomi ve Teknoloji
Universitiesi

Jennifer M. Silva
University of Virginia

Nicole Taylor
RMC Research Corporation

Chris Simms
University of Portsmouth

Tobias Thomas
Helmut-Schmidt University

Leslie Sklair
London School of Economics

Avinash Thombre
University of Arkansas at Little
Rock

Marta Rodrigues Vilar Rosales
New University of Lisbon

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

Greg Smith
University of Salford
Magnus Söderlund
Stockholm School of
Economics

Catherine Tosenberger
University of Winnipeg
Anna Lisa Tota
University Rome III

xxviii

Contributors

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

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

Darach Turley
Dublin City University

Barbara Wasner
Universitat Passau

Rodanthi Tzanelli
University of Leeds

Matthew Watson
University of Sheffield

Ebru Ulusoy Akgun
University of Texas–Pan
American

Nick Webber
Birmingham City University

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

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

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

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

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

xxix

xxx

Introduction

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

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

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

Introduction

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

xxxi

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

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

xxxii

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Introduction

•
•
•
•
•
•
•

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

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

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

xxxiii

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

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

xxxiv

Introduction

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

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

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

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

2

Acculturation

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

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

Actor-Network Theory

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

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

3

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

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

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

4

Actor-Network Theory

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

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

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

Addiction

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

5

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

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

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

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

6

Addiction

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

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

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

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

Adornment

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

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

7

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

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

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

8

Adornment

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

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

Adorno, Theodor

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

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

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

9

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

10

Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising

Table 1

Population
Advertising

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

Rest of World

300 million
$280 billion

6.3 billion
$350 billion

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

12

Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising

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

13

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

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

14

Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

AESTHETICIZATION
EVERYDAY LIFE

OF

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

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

15

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

16

Aestheticization of Everyday Life

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

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

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

Aestheticization of Everyday Life

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

17

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

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

18

Aestheticization of Everyday Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

19

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

20

Aesthetics

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

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

Affluent Society

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

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

21

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

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

22

Affluent Society

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

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

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

Affluent Society

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

23

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

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

24

Age and Aging

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

AGE

AND

AGING

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

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

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

Age and Aging

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

25

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

26

Age and Aging

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

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

Age and Aging

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

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

27

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

28

Age and Aging

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

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

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

Age and Aging

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

29

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

30

Age and Aging

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

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

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

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

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

AIR

AND

RAIL TRAVEL

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

31

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

32

Air and Rail Travel

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

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

Alienation

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

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

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

33

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

34

Alienation

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

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

Alternative Consumption

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

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

35

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

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

36

Alternative Consumption

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

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

Alternative Consumption

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

37

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

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

38

Alternative Medicine

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

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

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

Althusser, Louis

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

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

39

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

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

40

American Dream

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

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

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

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

American Dream

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

41

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

42

Americanization

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

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

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

Americanization

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

43

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

44

Americanization

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

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

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

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

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

45

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

46

Anomie

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

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

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

Anorexia

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

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

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

47

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

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

48

Anorexia

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropology

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

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

49

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

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

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

50

Anthropology

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

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

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

Anthropology

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

51

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

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

52

Anthropology

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

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

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

Anthropology

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

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

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

53

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

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Anthropology

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

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

Anthropology

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

55

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropology

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

57

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

58

Appropriation

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

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

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

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

Appropriation

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

59

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

60

Architecture

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

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

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

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

Architecture

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

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

61

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

62

Architecture

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

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

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

Architecture

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

63

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

64

Architecture

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

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

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

Art and Cultural Worlds

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

ART

AND

CULTURAL WORLDS

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

65

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

66

Art and Cultural Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

67

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

68

Asceticism

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

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

Attitude Surveys

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

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

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

69

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

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

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Attitude Theory

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

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

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

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

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

Attitude Theory

71

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

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

Current State of the Art

Future Directions

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

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

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Audience Research

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

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

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

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

Audience Research

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

73

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

74

Authenticity

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

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

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

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

Authenticity

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

75

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

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Authenticity

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

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

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

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

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

77

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

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Automobiles

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

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

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

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

Automobiles

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

79

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

80

Automobiles

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

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

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

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

81

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

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

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

83

84

Barbie Dolls

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

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

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

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

Barbie Dolls

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

85

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

86

Barthes, Roland

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

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

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

Bataille, Georges

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

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

87

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

88

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

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

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

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

89

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

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

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Beauty Myth

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

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

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

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

Belonging

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

91

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

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

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

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

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Belonging

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

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

Benjamin, Walter

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

93

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

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

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Benjamin, Walter

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

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

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

Bicycles

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

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

95

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

96

Bicycles

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

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

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

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

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

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

BINGE

AND

EXCESS

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

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

97

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

98

Binge and Excess

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

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

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

Body, The

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

99

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

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

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

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

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

100

Body, The

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

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

Body, The

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

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

101

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

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Body, The

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

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

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

Body Shop, The

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

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

103

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

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Body Shop, The

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

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

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

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

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

105

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

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Bounded Rationality

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

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

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

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

Bounded Rationality

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

107

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

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Bourdieu, Pierre

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

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

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

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

Branding

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

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

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

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

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Branding

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

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

Branding

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

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

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Branding

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

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

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

Branding

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

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

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Branding

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

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

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

Branding

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

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

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

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Branding

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

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

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

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

Braudel, Fernand

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

117

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

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

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Braudel, Fernand

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

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

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

Bricolage

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

119

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

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Bricolage

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

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

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

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

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

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

121

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

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British Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Broadcast Media

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

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

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

Broadcast Media

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

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

125

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

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

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Broadcast Media

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

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

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

Broadcast Media

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

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

BUZZ MARKETING
See Markets and Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

130

Capitalism

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

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

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

Capitalism

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

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

131

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

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

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Capitalism

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

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

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

Car Cultures

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

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

133

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

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

134

Car Cultures

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

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

Carbon Trading

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

135

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

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

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

136

Carbon Trading

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

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

Carbon Trading

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

137

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

138

Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets

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

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

CAR-BOOT SALES
FLEA MARKETS

AND

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

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

Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets

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

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

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Caribbean and the Slave Trade

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

CARIBBEAN

AND THE

SLAVE TRADE

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

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

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

Caribbean and the Slave Trade

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

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

141

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

142

Caribbean and the Slave Trade

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

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

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

Caribbean and the Slave Trade

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

143

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

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

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Caribbean and the Slave Trade

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

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

Caribbean and the Slave Trade

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

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

145

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

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

146

Carnivals

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

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

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

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

Carnivals

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

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

147

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

148

Carnivals

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

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

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

Celebrity

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

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

149

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

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

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

150

Celebrity

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

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

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

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

Celebrity

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

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

151

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

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

152

Channels of Desire

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

CHANNELS

OF

DESIRE

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

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

Channels of Desire

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

153

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

154

Childhood

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

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

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

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

Childhood

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

155

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

156

Childhood

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

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

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

Childhood

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

157

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

158

Christianity

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity

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

159

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

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

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

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Christianity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

161

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

162

Cinema

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

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

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

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

Cinema

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

163

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

164

Circuits of Culture/Consumption

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

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

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

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

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

Circuits of Culture/Consumption

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

165

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

166

Citizenship

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

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

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

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

Citizenship

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

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

167

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

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Citizenship

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

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

Citizenship

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

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

169

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

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Citizenship

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

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

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

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

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

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

171

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

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Civil Society

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

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

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

Civilizing Processes

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

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

173

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

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

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Civilizing Processes

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

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

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

Civilizing Processes

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

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

175

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

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

176

Civilizing Processes

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

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

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

Clothing Consumption

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

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

177

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

178

Clothing Consumption

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

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

Clubbing

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

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

179

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

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

180

Clubbing

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

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

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

Coca-Cola

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

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

181

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

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

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Coca-Cola

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

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

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

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

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

Coffee

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

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

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

183

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

184

Coffee

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

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

Coffee Shops

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

185

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

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

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

186

Coffee Shops

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

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

Cognitive Structures

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

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

187

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

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

188

Cognitive Structures

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

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

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

Cognitive Structures

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

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

189

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

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

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Cognitive Structures

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

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

Cognitive Structures

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

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

191

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

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

192

Cold War

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

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

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

Cold War

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

193

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

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Collecting and Collectibles

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

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

COLLECTING

AND

COLLECTIBLES

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

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

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

Collecting and Collectibles

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

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

195

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

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Collecting and Collectibles

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

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

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

Collecting and Collectibles

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

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

197

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

198

Collective Consumption

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

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

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

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

Collective Consumption

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

199

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

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Collective Identity

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Identity

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

201

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

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Collective Identity

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

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

Collective Identity

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

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

203

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

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

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Colonialism

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

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

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

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

Colonialism

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

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

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

205

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

206

Colonialism

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

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

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

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

Colonialism

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

207

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

208

Comics

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

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

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

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

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

Comics

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

209

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

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Commercialization

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

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

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

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

Commercialization

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

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

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Commodification

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

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

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

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

Commodification

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

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

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Commodities

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

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

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

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

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

Commodities

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

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

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

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Commodities

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

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

Commodities

understandings of commodities to understandings of
their related social and cultural practices has been
signaled as part of the wider “cultural turn.”
For inquires into commodities, the cultural turn
represented a shift from research-dominated Marxist
ideologies to research that closely interrogates the
cultural spaces of consumption and integrates them
into the spaces of commodity production. These “circuits of culture,” where commodities are comprised
of various social, material, and discursive “flows,”
have come to signal the production, performance,
and practice of commodities within what was formerly referred to as a commodity chain. The cultural
turn has come to symbolize a period of inquiry into
commodities where accounts of production and
accounts of consumption were separated theoretically, methodologically, and epistemologically into
divergent, occluded spaces.
This division of commodity spaces represented
both a growing unease at productionist accounts of
commodities focused or derived from (post-)Marxist
perspectives on economies and development on one
side and a reluctance to include cultures of consumption on the other. Needless to say, the cultural turn
has not gone unnoticed, and following it is a flurry
of debates surrounding its purpose, veracity, and relevance, especially in light of the many (post-)Marxist
concerns about the reproduction of capital that are,
for many, still valid. Responding to David Harvey,
questions appeared about the need to continually
lift the veil of commodity fetishism (to illustrate the
inequity that “hides” behind production), or whether
it made more sense to “get with it” (Cook, Crang,
and Thorpe 2004).
The social sciences have taken a broad look at
the sites and roles of commodity consumption as
performances of cultural reproduction. Commodity
cultures, consumption, and the consumption of culture through commodities, in turn have enjoyed a
rich and diverse set of discussions and debates. For
instance, Peter Jackson has worked broadly across
topics of culture, identity, and appropriation within
a wide range of topics loosely surrounding materiality and material culture. Nicky Gregson and Louise
Crewe, similarly, have published rich accounts of
consumption cultures, focusing on consumers and
social practice surrounding the production of commodities through the consumption of secondhand
goods as well as through objects/commodities that

217

fall outside the typical pathways of production to
consumption to include a second, or even tertiary
“life” to objects. These accounts in particular have
further called into question the “life” of commodities
by arguing through material culture and materiality that commodities have many different trajectories beyond the Marxist version of production and
consumption.
Within this context, however, commodities
research has (re)turned to the political salience of
commodity fetish as a mechanism for hiding social
relations and simultaneously to materiality as a
means to connect disparate places and practices.
This concept of the fetish, in one way or another, has
informed most of the work in cultural studies (and
aligned disciplines) surrounding commodities, even
though researchers often prefer other metaphors in
the pursuit of commodity analysis (Castree 2001).
Paralleling GCC and GVC, but in cultural contexts,
the methodologies and core theoretical perspective of
working with the fetish is to lift its veil or to uncover
the social and ecological consequences behind production, within its political, economic, and cultural
frameworks.
Harvey (1990, 423), in his heavily cited essay,
“Between Space and Time,” advocates deploying the
fetish with its “full force” by following (capitalist)
materiality “backward” to uncover the “fingerprints
of exploitation” (or at least their social histories)
implicit in commodity production. And to do this, it
is necessary, according to Noel Castree, to consider
where (both literally as well as intellectually) the
fetish comes from and what happens when a commodity is defetishized. Ian Cook and Phil Crang note
the phenomenon of defetishization but place it within
the context of the double commodity fetish produced
by various knowledges about commodities. These
knowledges are produced through consumer engagement with the commodity, places of retail, and advertisements, as well as its wider cultural spaces, and
they become the rationale for commodity consumption in the first place.
This leads to questions concerning what, exactly,
is consumed when a product is embedded with
meaning, context, and (geographical) knowledges.
This leads to questions regarding the identity of
commodities, their agents, and ultimately their geographies. This argument has been extended into all
aspects of “modern life,” as commodities, however

218

Commodities

defined, are necessarily always consumed alongside
their images and imaginations, and likewise images
and imaginations alongside their commodities. The
different workings of the commodity fetish, as visible
in brands, images, meanings, and so on, as well as
the disassociative processes that the fetish seems to
produce, have led to researchers uncovering, unveiling, getting behind, or otherwise having to somehow
deal with it. Thus, working with commodities in
some way entails unraveling the fetish by, in part,
interrogating the knowledges that are implicated in
its formation. This is not to imply that commodity
processes or those of the fetish are relevant only to
contemporary Western consumer culture. Thomas
Richards, for instance, interrogates Victorian-era
commodity fetishes, signaling an earlier, though
recognizable, consumer culture; whereas Nicholas
Thomas examines commodities (and their exchange)
in non-Western contexts.

Recent Approaches and Trends
Recent approaches to commodities have been to
articulate the distance between consumers and producers in an ethical turn to reconnect them, and from
a postcolonial perspective to examine the mediating
roles of commodities and commodity cultures in constituting colonial and postcolonial power relations.
Researchers have sought to articulate notions of distance and distanciation when discussing commodity fetishes and their unveiling. However, uncovering
fetishes and revealing the distances that they imply
produces a new set of representations and imaginaries that replace one set of power relations with
another.
More recently, as epistemological divisions in the
social sciences have broken down, sites of commodity production and commodity consumption have
been called into question. Recent trends incorporate
understandings of the commodity fetish as its own
social-cultural production, with the materiality of
commodities themselves to argue that commodities
are produced alongside the materiality of the object.
The material of an object may be produced in one
place while the commodity is produced someplace
else entirely. This leads to a notion of commodities
where they are identified and produced by consumers who ascribe them with value.
Benjamin Coles

See also Branding; Circuits of Culture/Consumption;
Commodification; Spices; Sugar; Tea; Value: Exchange
and Use Value; World-Systems Theory

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Castree, Noel. “Commentary: Commodity Fetishism,
Geographical Imaginations and Imaginative Geographies.”
Environment and Planning A 33 (2001): 7.
Cook, Ian. “Follow the Thing: Papaya.” Antipode 36,
no. 4 (2004): 642–664.
Cook, Ian, Phil Crang, and Mark Thorpe. “Tropics of
Consumption: ‘Getting with the Fetish’ of ‘Exotic’
Fruit?” In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by
Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer, 173–192. Abingdon,
UK: Routledge, 2004.
Fine, Ben, and E. Leopold. The World of Consumption.
London: Routledge, 1993.
Frank, Andre Gunder. Mexican Agriculture, 1521–1630:
Transformation of the Mode of Production. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Gereffi, Gary, John Humphrey, and Timothy Sturgeon. “The
Governance of Global Value Chains.” Review of
International Political Economy 12, no. 1 (2005): 78–104.
Gereffi, Gary, and Miguel Korzeniewicz. “Introduction:
Global Commodity Chains.” In Commmodity Chains
and Global Capitalism, edited by Gary Gereffi and
Miguel Korzeniewicz, 1–14. West Point, VA:
Greenwood Press, 1994.
Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. Second-Hand Cultures.
London: Berg, 2003.
Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the
Geographical Imagination.” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 80, no. 4 (1990): 418–434.
Jackson, Peter. “Commodity Culture: The Traffic in
Things.” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geography 24, no. 1 (1999): 95–108.
Raikes, P., M. F. Jensen, and Stefano Ponte. “Global
Commodity Chain Analysis and the French Filiere
Approach: Comparison and Critique.” Economy and
Society 29 (2000): 390–417.
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian
England. London: Verso, 1991.
Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material
Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System I:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Organization of the
European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century.
New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Communication Studies

COMMODITY FETISHISM
See Body Shop, The; Commodification;
Commodities; Marxist Theories; Obsession;
Philosophy; Reification; Simulacrum

COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Communication studies is a multifaceted academic
field that deals with the production, transmission, and
consumption of symbols and messages through different media and in different contexts. Because communication is a primary activity in the social life of
humans, communication processes encompass a wide
range of activities, including speech and face-to-face
conversation, journalism and news making, uses in
mass media and consumption, interaction using new
media, and professional and political communication.
Although the way people communicate with
one another has been the subject of reflection since
ancient times, organic studies of communication
mainly developed in the twentieth century and only
took on the form of a discipline after World War II.
Today, communication studies is an interdisciplinary
field that embraces several theories and methodologies in both the social sciences and the humanities,
including sociology, psychology, anthropology,
political science, economics, semiotics, literary studies, linguistics, and rhetoric. Differences of context
and the variety of disciplines involved are the reasons
for both the fragmentation of the field and for the
interest shown in it by various different academics,
from many traditions and subfields. Consequently, it
suffers from a lack of scientific consensus regarding
common paradigms and a shared historical narrative.
In the initial period of the development of communication studies, theoretical approaches, content analysis,
and historical works were prevalent, and the increasing
maturity of the discipline has brought a further expansion of its methods and perspectives over the past thirty
years, especially in the fields of ethnography and qualitative research. Moreover, a more complex relationship between production and consumption has been
developed, specifically regarding the role of the audience and the situated media consumption processes.
For this reason, the subfields of media applications and
audience research are also relevant to consumer culture

219

in today’s world, in that they consider the material and
cultural processes involved in the consumption of communication and the role of communication in shaping
the same consumer practices.

The Historical and Theoretical
Origins of the Field
The crucial role of communication and the heterogeneity of the elements and contexts that characterize
communication processes in human life are reflected
in the fact that the study of communication can be
traced back to the ancient roots of human knowledge. The central role of communication in human
relationships first emerged as a coherent concept
among Greek thinkers, notably in the work of Corax
and Tisias, the founders of the Greek school of rhetoric, and of rhetoric as a discipline, in Syracuse in the
fifth century BC. This seminal notion of communication was closely connected to its relevance as a tool
of persuasion in courtroom and political debates.
The same perspective flourished in Greek philosophy, and Aristotle was the first to further developed the analysis of communication in his notable
work Rhetoric, in which he reaffirmed the concept
of communication as a skill devoted to persuasion.
In so doing, he addressed the role of the orator and
the centrality of strategy in communication and the
delivery of the intended message. Aristotle’s legacy
was later inherited by Latin writers such as Cicero
and Quintilian and later by Saint Augustine of
Hippo, who further developed Aristotle’s approach
to communication, including his interpretation of the
Bible and holy writings. This strongly contributed
to establishing rhetoric as a crucial discipline in the
Christian cultural system during the Middle Ages.
In the modern age, several Western philosophers
have been involved in the debate surrounding languages and communication (i.e., Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard),
but only in the second half of the nineteen century
did the study of communication become central in
disciplines such as philosophy and, later, linguistics,
sociology, and psychology. A major reference point
in the analysis of communication and language lies in
the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, who settled the
philosophical basis for the development of semiotics, one of the main disciplines that contributed to
the analysis of communicative paradigms and codes.
Together, with Peirce’s work, a crucial contribution to

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Communication Studies

structuring the study of communication came from
the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who established
more coherently, and with more structure, the basis
of linguistics and semiotics, which strongly influenced the work of other scholars, such as Roland
Barthes and the whole tradition of cultural studies.
In sociology, the first attempt to find a relevant place
for communication in social interaction came with
the work of Charles Cooley. In his 1909 book Social
Organization, Cooley defines communication as one
of the bases of the social relations between humans
and gives it a wide ranging definition, including “the
expression of the face, attitude and gesture, the tones
of the voice, words, writing, printing, railways, telegraphs, telephones, and whatever else may be the latest achievement in the conquest of space and time”
(Cooley 1909, 61). The work of Cooley, together
with that of George Herbert Mead, first illustrated
the importance of the centrality of communication in
social processes and was at the basis of the development, in the 1960s, of the sociological perspective of
symbolic interactionism, which gave communication
a constitutive place in the study of social relations.
The meaning of the word communication strongly
changed at the beginning of the twentieth century.
While in the nineteenth century communication was
initially used on a regular basis to refer to physical
means of communication, such as railways and roads,
later, with the development of infrastructures such as
telegraphy in the second half of the nineteenth century,
communication came to be used also to identify the
transmission of information and meanings, permitting
“for the first time the separation of communication
and transportation” (Carey 1989, 203). It was from
this separation that a modern interpretation emerged
of what communication is, based on the notion of the
exchange of messages with the use of communication
technologies, broadcasting media, and the circulation
of mass culture, which were to become dominant in the
twentieth century.

The Coming of Mass Communication and the
Multiplication of Theories and Models
The Second Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new innovations and new communication
technologies, such as the telegraph, were the bases
of a change in human communication, as well as of
the development of the study of communication. In
the twentieth century, many new communications

technologies, such as photography, sound recording,
telegraphy and the telephone, and finally wireless
communication, were widely applied in society. These
new technologies emerged together with the parallel
development of popular masses, political rights, and
the commercialization of information.
The beginning of the twentieth century saw the
affirmation of newspapers in the United States and
consequently the birth of journalism as a professional
activity as well as a field of teaching and a subject
of reflection. Thus, it is not surprising that the most
influential work on communication in the twentieth
century was the seminal study of public opinion and
the role of newspapers in shaping social knowledge by
Walter Lippmann in 1922. Lippmann’s work analyzes
the role of communication in the context of the rise of
new mass communication technologies and, although
not a general theory of communication, it addresses
the problems that arose in the new American society
with the development of both commercial journalism
and press and media conglomerates.
A more functionalist tradition in communication
studies emerged in the United States during World
War II and contributed to establishing the study of
communication as a discipline, often closely connected to corporate and governmental institutions.
The institutionalization of communication studies in
U.S. higher education and research is usually traced to
Columbia University and the University of Chicago.
At Columbia University, it was Paul Lazarsfeld who
established the Bureau of Applied Social Research in
1944, as a prolongation of the Radio Project that he
had coordinated from 1937. Lazarsfeld’s and Elihu
Katz’s research work, Personal Influence (1955), is
still a classic work in communication studies, developing the classic concept in the “media effects” tradition of “two step flow communication,” in which
the influence of the media was seen as crucially mediated by “opinion leaders.”
After World War II, different ways of dealing with
communication emerged in the social sciences and
humanities, as well as in other fields, such as mathematics. It was from this field that the most influential
theoretical model of communication was developed
by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949). The
Shannon-Weaver model is a mathematical theory
of communication whereby the authors describe
the process of communication as a linear process in
which there is a source of information that sends a
signal though a channel to a receiver, thus arriving at

Communication Studies

its destination and in which “noise” (anything added
to the signal during the process and not intended by
the source) represents one of the main problems in the
transmission. Although the Shannon-Weaver model
has been highly criticized for its linearity and lack of
cultural depth, it represents the major reference point
for the subsequent development of other “processual”
conceptions of communication (see Fiske 1982).
While the early study of communication in the
United States developed a functional relationship
with journalism, commerce, and governmental institutions, in Europe a more critical and pessimistic
reflection about the role of mass media communication developed. Indeed, in Europe, eclectic writers
and artists contributed to developing a debate about
new communication technologies, as in the case of
the German comediographer Bertold Brecht, who
debated the educational and civil role of radio in the
1930s. Brecht also influenced the work of Walter
Benjamin, who first questioned the negative role of
new reproduction technologies and their impact on
European cultural traditions and aesthetics. It was
from this perspective that the critical tradition of the
Frankfurt school developed, especially with the work
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on the
role of the culture industries and the negative political effect of the new forms of communication, which
were characterizing the modern twentieth-century
capitalist society. Despite the different interpretations given to the changes around the time of World
War II, mostly shaped by increasing technological
innovations in the ways people communicate, communication became a relevant and recurrent issue in
human and social science, opening the doors to the
centrality of communication in social theories in the
1960s and 1970s.

Communication at the Center of Sociocultural
Analyses of Society
During the 1960s, communication and mass media
acquired a crucial role in several explanations of
the sociocultural changes that were taking place.
The most relevant attempt that has been made
to explain the changing postwar Western society
through communication processes is that developed
by the Toronto school of communication, which
started with the work of Harold Innis and Eric A.
Havelock and developed and became famous with
the work of Marshal McLuhan. More specifically,

221

the tradition started with Innis’s work Empire and
Communication (1950), in which he describes how
communications media influence the rise and fall of
empires, tracing the role of media such as stone, papyrus, and paper from ancient times to the modern age.
This tradition, characterized by the evident attention
being paid to means of communication was further
developed by McLuhan, who became the most wellknown of the academics in the field of media and
communication studies, gaining huge popularity
even beyond an academic audience. McLuhan recognized that the evolution of communication played
a crucial role in the human historical development
and that social changes following the World Wars
were directly connected with the rising of electrical
communication technologies, which contributed in
transforming the world into a “global village.”
Moreover, McLuhan’s contribution is also associated with his famous phrase “the medium is the
message,” coined to argue that the characteristics of
the medium itself strongly influence the content of
communication and the ways in which this content
is perceived by the audience. The influential tradition of the Toronto school and of the McLuhan
approach has been carried on by other academics,
such as Joshua Meyrowitz, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and
Derrick de Kerckhove. It was with the popularity
of McLuhan’s work that communication became a
crucial term and concept in modern Western society.
In the 1960s and 1970s, another major reference
point in the development of communication studies
developed in Europe with the tradition of British
cultural studies. Cultural studies are important for
communication studies because they take a rather
interdisciplinary approach toward the areas of
culture and communication, in so doing providing
convergence between a humanistic textual approach
and a more ethnographical and socio-anthropological tradition. Stuart Hall, the key figure in cultural
studies, made a particularly strong contribution to
communication studies with his definition of the
“encoding/decoding model of communication.” This
model insists on the fact that the decoding of messages does not follow inevitably from the process
of encoding, thus highlighting the importance of an
active interpretation by the audience. It is also to be
noted that, during the 1980s, academics in the field
of cultural studies strongly helped to establish communication studies as a coherent and well-defined
academic field, one example being their contribution

222

Communication Studies

to defining a critical reconstruction of the traditions
and historical perspectives of communication studies. One of the main contributions in this sense is the
work of John Fiske on communication and popular
culture, which illustrated the relevance of the interdisciplinarity of the field, the centrality of signs and
codes, and the dominant role of communication in
the entire cultural system of modern Western society.
At the same time, a more pessimistic perspective
on the role of mass communication in society also
emerged among European, and most notably French,
theorists, such as Jean-Françoise Lyotard and Jean
Baudrillard. Lyotard described how new communication technologies contributed, together with other
sociocultural processes, to produce the end of comprehensive explanations of the social experience at the
basis of the modern age, arguing that the collapse of
these modern “meta-narratives” produced the rising of
a new “postmodern condition.” Notably, Lyotard was
the first to introduce the idea of “postmodernist” in the
fields of philosophy and social science, influencing in
a decisive way the intellectual scenery of the next two
decades. Baudrillard developed an even more relativist view of the role of communication, arguing that,
in postmodern society, electronic media are generating
“simulacra,” which are signs and symbols completely
dissociated from reality. This perspective also informed
Baudrillard’s account of the consumer society, which is
characterized, for the French theorist, by the predominance of signs and symbols over the functional and
economic value of commodities.

Audience, Participatory Culture,
and Consumption
In the last two decades, the field of communication
studies has been characterized by a further fragmentation of theories and approaches, as well as the diffusion
of its concept and perspective into other fields. More
specifically, communication studies and the study of
consumer culture have interacted at different levels.
On one level, there is a direct connection that consists
of the study of the consumption of media and communication and audience research. In this subfield, historically we find two different tendencies: the first one,
developing the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school tradition,
stresses the power of media and cultural industries and
considers the audience as passive; and the second one,
which stresses the active aspect of the consumption
of media, where the audience is able to give different
meanings, as well as use the media and their contents

in different ways. British academics such as Roger
Silverstone and David Morley developed the study of
media consumption, particularly in relation to television, and defined a new way of dealing with the study
of communication, integrating different approaches in
communication studies, especially the anthropological
perspective. From a methodological point of view, in
the 1980s, communication studies started to incorporate ethnography as a tool for studying communication
processes and the role of media in society. This perspective also produced a renewal of part of the field, paying
more attention to the material and situated dimension
of media consumption, for example, as in the case of
the symbolic dimension of household communication
technologies (Silverstone and Hirsh 1992).
Another level regards the appropriation of consumer culture issues into the debate concerning the
change in the use of media and communication processes. With the diffusion of new forms of communication that blur the preceding boundaries, such as
those between face-to-face communication and mass
media communication, the analysis of active participation by people in the consumption of media
communication became crucial. In recent years, new
forms of interpersonal communication, such as social
networks, mobile phones, and personal communication devices, have clearly shown a convergence
between media and technology-based communication
and ancient and traditional interpersonal communication, inducing media academics such as Henry Jenkins
to highlight the active nature of the audience in the
resulting new participatory communication culture.
Finally, another means of interaction between
communication and studies on consumption consists
of the permeation of concepts and theories from communication studies into work that is explicitly rooted
in consumer culture. For example, Celia Lury, faced
with the notion of “brand” and its role in consumer
culture, brought the centrality of communication and
media environment to the center of the explanation
of consumption processes. More generally, concepts,
theories, and references belonging to the fragmented
field of communication studies often have an ever
greater role in the study of different forms of consumer culture and practices.
Paolo Magaudda
See also Audience Research; Broadcast Media; Content
Analysis; Cultural Studies; Internet; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Print Media;
Semiotics

Companies as Consumers

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by
Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995.
Carey, James. Communication as Culture. London:
Routledge, 1989.
Cooley, Charles. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger
Mind. New York: Scribner, 1909.
Fiske, John. Introduction to Communication Studies.
London: Routledge, 1982.
Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television
Discourse. Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, 1973.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming.
New York: Continuum, 1998.
Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto, ON:
University of Toronto Press, 1950.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York:
New York University Press, 2006.
Katz, Elihu, and Paul Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence.
New York: Free Press, 1955.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan,
1922.
Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne: rapport
sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Morley, David. The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and
Decoding. London: British Film Institute, 1980.
Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical
Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1949.
Silverstone, Roger, and Steve Hirsh. Consuming
Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic
Spaces. London: Routledge, 1992.

COMPANIES

AS

CONSUMERS

This entry focuses on companies as buyers involving
purchasing and related activities impacting on the
supply side of firms. Purchasing and other activities
influencing the supply side of companies are important in two respects. First, purchasing involves
the operations necessary to supply a firm with its
input in terms of materials, products, equipment,
services, and so on. Efficiency and effectiveness
in these processes are critical to the performance
of the buying firm. Second, knowledge about the
buying processes of a company is important to its

223

suppliers. Such information supports ambitions of
selling firms to influence potential buyers. Thus,
the understanding of organizational buying behavior is a significant issue in the marketing literature.
In this entry, attention is directed to the perspective
of buying firms.
What corporations buy is used in various ways.
Some acquisitions are aimed at direct utilization
or further processing in the operations of the company, for example, oil, pulp, steel plates, and such.
Other items appear as identifiable parts of the buying company’s offerings to its customers. Some of
these, such as the engine of a car or the processor
of a computer, may be particularly significant to the
functioning of the end product. These purchases
are made on a continuous basis, which is also the
case for items that are used in the manufacturing
operations of the company, such as hand tools
and fastenings. Other purchases are conducted on
an irregular and less frequent basis, for example,
large machinery and buildings. The variety in the
nature of what is purchased calls for diversity in
purchasing arrangements and supply strategies. In
this discussion of corporations as buyers, the following issues are examined: the role of purchasing
in the company, purchasing efficiency and the role
of suppliers, frameworks for analysis of purchasing
issues, and strategies for purchasing.

The Role of Purchasing in the Company
Companies buy things to be used in their own operations. The purchasing department is therefore only
one of the company functions involved in what is
ongoing at the supply side. In many situations, the
features of the purchased item are specified by the
technical functions in the company. Both product
development and production have considerable
impact in this respect and may sometimes determine not only the specification of what to purchase
but also from whom to buy. In decisions concerning what supplier to select, the viewpoints of other
functions may be critical. The finance function will
evaluate various alternatives in terms of price and
financial stability. Logistics and quality give priority
to suppliers depending on their capacity and reliability in delivery and supply consistency. In situations
where the input is critical to the functioning of the
products sold by the company, the marketing department will be influential in decisions concerning purchasing and supplier selection.

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Companies as Consumers

Given the interdependencies between departments
and their functions, the organization of the buying company impacts its activities at the supply side.
There are two main organizational alternatives when
it comes to the position of purchasing in the company:
centralization and decentralization. Centralization
makes it possible to concentrate the company’s
resources for purchasing, primarily when it comes to
human resources. The people involved in purchasing
become specialized and are provided with accurate
knowledge of available suppliers and their capabilities. The centralized purchasing department functions
as a coordinator of the contacts between the buying
company and its suppliers.
The main drawback with a centralized organization is that purchasing is separated from the technical
functions. The decentralized purchasing organization
is the response to this problem. In these arrangements, purchasing is an integral part of the larger
context with which it is associated. By being located
in physical proximity to production and other functions, the individual purchaser will have more knowledge of the connection between what is purchased
and how this is used. The main disadvantage with
decentralized purchasing is that buyers will be less
specialized and, in this respect, less professional. The
buyer has to be a generalist with a broad competence
area related to several functions and also to supplier
markets of great diversity. The organization of purchasing has to reflect the organizational structure of
the company as a whole, and so it would be impossible to have a centralized purchasing organization in
a decentralized company.
For long time, purchasing was considered mainly
a clerical function, and a historical review claims
that the purchasing department even in the 1970s
was considered “not exactly a prestige position”
(Morgan 1999, 73). Purchasing personnel processed
procurement decisions that often were taken by other
departments, such as production or top management. Igor Ansoff characterized purchasing as an
administrative function rather than a strategic one.
The increasing attention to outsourcing that started
in the 1980s changed these conditions considerably.
Outsourcing made it possible for a company to focus
on the activities that are critical from a strategic point
of view and for others to rely on suppliers with particular capabilities. Owing to these modifications,
purchasing expenditures increased significantly, and
for many companies, the costs of purchased goods

and services came to account for 60 to 70 percent
of the total cost. The importance of suppliers is further accentuated by the fact that in many cases they
serve as sources of technical competence and together
these conditions have made purchasing a strategic
function. The enhanced importance of the supply side
affected not only the role and image of the purchasing
departments; other modifications concern the view
of efficient purchasing, the role of suppliers and the
relationships with these.

Purchasing Efficiency and the Role of Suppliers
Efficiency in purchasing can be considered from two
perspectives. One point of view is to regard each purchase in isolation and make the best possible deal
in this single transaction. According to this transactional view of efficiency, a buying firm should avoid
becoming dependent on individual suppliers because
such conditions constrain the buyer from “playing
the market.” Moreover, independence from suppliers
is supposed to encourage competition among them
and also reduce the risks of becoming locked into
the technology of a particular supplier. When the
transactional view of efficiency is advocated, suppliers are considered exchangeable sources of standardized supplies. To be able to switch to another source
when better conditions are available elsewhere, buying firms keep suppliers at arm’s-length distance and
supplier evaluation is focused primarily on price.
The transactional view of efficiency has its clear
merits when it comes to isolated purchases of standardized offerings. However, for corporations as
buyers, the situation is often quite different. A single
purchase is normally part of a series of transactions
over time, for example, a car assembler is continuously buying the same type of engine from its supplier over the lifetime of a specific model generation.
Moreover, the individual purchase is only one of several others taking place at the same time, because the
car assembler also needs bumpers, dashboards, and
numerous other components and systems to supplement the engine. An alternative view of purchasing
efficiency is, therefore, to consider the single purchasing decision in a context that is extended both
in time and space. Promoting efficiency in a series
of transactions over time requires the buying firm to
abandon the view of supplier dependence as something that should be avoided. Joint action with suppliers in terms of product adaptations, technological

Companies as Consumers

collaboration, and logistics synchronization in terms
of just-in-time deliveries are means of enhancing
performance on the supply side. These cooperative
efforts build on investments in relation to specific
business partners. The role of these suppliers is significantly different from the role of those involved
in transactional exchange. In this case, the supplier
serves the buyer in a nonstandardized way, and both
what is exchanged and the way it is exchanged may
be tailor-made to specific requirements.
Similar to other investments, the costs for these
joint arrangements appear from the start, whereas
the benefits materialize only over time. Therefore,
high-involvement relationships tend to be long term,
because switching to another supplier would turn
the joint efforts into sunk costs and require investments in relation to a new source. In close relationships, the buyer is deliberately dependent on the
supplier, because the benefits of collaboration cannot
be obtained without dependence. At the same time,
however, the supplier is dependent on the buyer owing
to its own investments, making it a case of mutual
dependence—or interdependence—in the relationship.
Increasing involvement with suppliers is also a
means to extend the view of efficiency in the space
dimension, implying that a single purchase is one
of several purchases at the same time. For example,
at a construction site, numerous building materials
and equipment are needed simultaneously. The main
contractor could consider each purchase in isolation
and turn to different suppliers to find the best deal.
The alternative view of efficiency would suggest the
contractor use a distributor to provide a whole package of these supplies at this construction site. An even
more extended scope in the space dimension would
be to use this distributor in a similar way at all the
sites where this contractor is involved.

225

uations a company should rely on vertical integration backward, and thus control its input within
its ownership boundary—a strategic issue that will
be further explored later in this entry. The second
framework applied in the analysis of single purchases
relates to models of rational decision making. Arjan
van Weele describes the purchasing activities in these
models as following a process from recognition of
need, through specification of what to buy, locating
potential vendors, and the evaluation of these.
When the view of purchasing efficiency is extended,
the scope of the framework must be adjusted as well.
The focus on intraorganizational aspects, typical
of TCA, has to be shifted to an interorganizational
perspective where the involvement with suppliers is
emphasized. Such a view will take the interaction
between buyer and supplier and the business relationship between the two as the point of departure, as
Richard Lamming found. However, what is going on
in the relationship between two firms is considerably
influenced by their relationships to other firms. The
most obvious connections to the relationship between
two parties are the customer’s customer and the supplier’s supplier. Including these firms and also companies further upstream and downstream provides a
supply chain perspective on purchasing. Finally, not
even supply chains appear in isolation. Efficiency
and effectiveness in a particular supply chain is, to a
large extent, dependent on how this chain is related
to other chains. Analyzing the consequences of these
connections requires a holistic perspective. Such
a view is offered by Lars-Erik Gadde and Håkan
Håkansson with the industrial network model and its
analysis of business operations in three related dimensions: activities, resources, and actors, thus leading to
a supply network perspective on purchasing.

Strategic Issues in Purchasing
Frameworks for Analyzing Purchasing Issues
The different perspectives on purchasing efficiency and the role of a supplier call for their specific theoretical models and analytical frameworks.
With a focus on the single purchase, two particular
approaches are emphasized. Models emanating from
transaction cost analysis (TCA) make it possible to
determine whether a single purchase is most efficiently undertaken by playing the market or developing a close relationship, according to Peter Kraljic.
TCA also makes it possible to evaluate in what sit-

One of the first advocates of the strategic significance of purchasing was David Farmer, who criticized the passive role ascribed to the function at the
time. Farmer claimed that any company that ignores
potential supply strategies of a creative rather than
a defensive nature is forgoing sources of efficiency
and effectiveness. Over time, the importance of purchasing has been generally acknowledged, and this
enhanced significance in turn called for strategies for
handling purchasing, notes Björn Axelsson, Frank
Rozemeijer, and Finn Wynstra. There is no general

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Companies as Consumers

agreement about what specific aspects in purchasing and supply should be perceived strategic. The
following discussion is based on three central issues:
(1) what to purchase, (2) the involvement with individual suppliers, and (3) coping with the whole supplier base.
The first issue—what to purchase—draws attention to a feature of corporations as consumers hitherto not touched on. In reality, corporations consume
not only what they purchase; in their operations, they
rely also on their own input, and so the question of
whether to buy or to make what is needed has always
been an important issue. Ambitions to strategically
control input resources favor the make approach.
On the other hand, investments in highly specialized resources may lock the firm into conditions that
might become problematic as technology develops.
Lacking in-house capacity and capabilities in comparison with those available from suppliers is another
argument for outsourcing. The developments on the
supply side mentioned earlier changed the nature of
the make-buy decision. As long as critical resources
were held internally, the decision whether to make or
to buy could be changed from one year to another,
since supplier contributions mainly concerned standardized input. When companies specialize and
outsource to rely on the technological capabilities of
suppliers, these decisions become more irreversible.
This is because a main mission for the buying company is to focus on its core competence and thus to
be able to avoid investments in knowledge related to
what has been outsourced.
The second strategic issue is concerned with
the involvement with individual suppliers and
thus the closeness of the relationship. With a lowinvolvement approach, the buying company escapes
dependency on suppliers, which provides certain
benefits as expressed earlier. On the other hand, high
involvement is a prerequisite for gaining benefits
potentially available from exploitation of suppliers’ resources. The benefits from a relationship can
be enhanced through increasing involvement, thus
making resource sharing and activity synchronization possible. However, these benefits are associated with increasing costs since high-involvement
relationships are always resource demanding. The
buying firm therefore has to carefully scrutinize what
relationships to prioritize in terms of high involvement. Moreover, the outcome of these partnerships
has to be continuously monitored to secure that the

resource input into a relationship is more than outweighed by benefits, since conditions for joint actions
may change considerably over time.
The third strategic issue concerns the configuration of the supplier base. Any supplier base shows
significant variety in terms of relationship involvement. With some suppliers, the buying firm prefers
an arm’s-length distance, since increasing involvement
would not pay off, while other relationships are characterized by close proximity. The low-involvement
approach normally leads to quite a large supplier base
since ambitions to promote competition require a
multiple sourcing strategy, implying that the buying
firm relies on a number of suppliers for each item. The
reorientation of purchasing considerably impacted on
the view of the supply base. As claimed earlier, highinvolvement relationships are costly, and so companies have reduced the number of suppliers by turning
to single sourcing. Moreover, the extended scope of
purchasing decisions affects the features of the supplier base. By consolidating purchases of different
items to one supplier, the buying firm can substantially reduce both its supplier handling costs and the
number of transactions. Furthermore, the size of the
supplier base has been reduced through a shift from
component purchasing to system sourcing, meaning
that a buying company, rather than sourcing five components from five suppliers, appoints one of these (or
another company) to purchase the components and
then assemble these and supply an integrated system.

Conclusion
The exposé of corporations as buyers illustrates the
strong interdependencies between the various aspects
of purchasing arrangements and supply strategies.
There are clear connections between the role of purchasing in the company, the view of efficient purchasing, the role of suppliers, and the relationships
with these. Moreover, the standpoints taken in these
respects will impact both on what analytical conceptualizations of purchasing are appropriate and the strategies for purchasing. The discussion of changes over
time concerning these issues relates to the major reorientation on the supply side of companies during the
late 1900s. However, these changes should not necessarily be seen as a definite trend for the future. To a
large extent, these changes are explained by the overall
strategy of companies to specialize and consequently
outsource activities to suppliers. The strong reliance

Comparing Consumer Cultures

on outsourcing in the beginning of this decade makes
it highly relevant to pose the question of whether outsourcing has been driven too far. In fact, there are clear
indications of an overexploitation of outsourcing, and
many companies therefore have turned their attention
to insourcing. Such a shift will impact on the conditions at the supply side and modify current trends in
purchasing arrangements. The historical review mentioned previously (Morgan 1999) shows that both
the significance of purchasing and the arrangements
at the supply side are characterized by variation over
time, depending on general business conditions and
the overall strategy of companies.
Lars-Erik Gadde and Håkan Håkansson
See also Consumer Demand; Cycles of Production and
Consumption; Delocalization; Industrial Society;
Innovation Studies; Markets and Marketing; Network
Society; Outsourcing

Further Readings
Ansoff, Igor. Corporate Strategy. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1965.
Axelsson, Björn, Frank Rozemeijer, and Finn Wynstra, eds.
Developing Sourcing Capabilities: Creating Strategic
Change in Purchasing and Supply Management.
Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2005.
Christopher, Martin. Logistics and Supply Chain
Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks.
London: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2005.
Farmer, David. “Developing Purchasing Strategies.”
Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management
14 (Fall 1978): 6–11.
Gadde, Lars-Erik, and Håkan Håkansson. Supply Network
Strategies. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2001.
Kraljic, Peter. “Purchasing Must Become Supply
Management.” Harvard Business Review 60, no. 5
(1982): 109–117.
Lamming, Richard. Beyond Partnerships: Strategies for
Innovation and Lean Supply. Hemel Hempstead,
UK: Prentice Hall, 1993.
Monczka, Robert, Robert Handfield, Larry Giuinipero, and
James Patterson. Purchasing and Supply Chain
Management. London: Cengage Learning, 2008.
Morgan, Jim. “Purchasing at 100: Where It’s Been, Where
It’s Headed.” Purchasing Magazine 11 (November,
1999): 72–94.
Sheth, Jagdish. “A Model of Industrial Buyer Behavior.”
Journal of Marketing 37, no. 4 (1973): 50–56.
van Weele, Arjan. Purchasing and Supply Chain
Management. London: Thomson Learning, 2005.

227

COMPARING CONSUMER CULTURES
Comparative accounts of consumer cultures represent attempts to contrast or compare consumer practices and behaviors across different national contexts.
They can demonstrate global cultural patterns, such as
Americanization, convergence, and differentiation, and
reveal qualitative breadth in consumer cultures, past
and present. The Americanization thesis holds that consumer culture is a phenomenon definitive to the United
States, spreading through globalization processes,
including mainstream and niche cultural channels as
well as trade and international retailing. Similarly, convergence is the idea that these forces homogenize, so
that societies increasingly resemble one another in a
common consumer culture, usually implicitly based on
Western Europe or the United States. Differentiation
or diversification argues rather that cultural differences
are more striking or persistent than similarities, due
to national institutional arrangements and preexisting
cultural values. While in some discussions consumer
culture is taken to mean the varying extent to which
societies demonstrate “consumerist” values, other discussions highlight qualitative differences in the kind of
consumer culture that is found in different contexts.
In addition to contributions to mainstream debates
about globalization, studies comparing consumer
cultures can complement analysis of economic and
social conditions across countries and abstract indicators of well-being, such as growth and gross domestic
product (GDP). Comparing consumer cultures may
provide comparative information on the use of time,
money, and leisure, illustrating differences in the performance of social practices and experience of daily
life. A consumption-oriented perspective also connects geopolitical and socioeconomic trends relating
to welfare and international trade with smaller-scale
economic and sociological processes.
Comparing consumer cultures, like the study
of consumer culture, is relatively new, but relevant
cross-national analysis of consumer behavior and
retailing strategy date from the 1950s. Studies
such as James B. Jefferys and Derek Knee’s (1962)
Retailing in Europe: Present Structure and Future
Trends and Robert Bartels’s (1963) Comparative
Marketing: Wholesaling in Fifteen Countries reflect
on the changing landscape of shopping in different
societies, despite overtly focusing on production
and distribution data. Early trends noted were the

228

Comparing Consumer Cultures

increasing size of shops and accompanying increases
in retail sector work and consumption, the authors
predicting that as sales made per person increase,
so would consumption per head. In other words,
consumerism booms with efficiency savings made in
goods provisioning; especially when employment in
retail becomes widespread.
Comparative historical and sociocultural accounts
of consumer culture date mainly from the 1990s
onward and can be split roughly into three main
types. Edited books containing geographically specific case studies of consumer culture are common,
and many provide historical accounts of certain time
periods as well as focusing on particular countries.
These give a diverse and kaleidoscopic vision of consumer cultures and offer qualitative explorations of
niche consumption practices or discuss formative
stages in the development of consumerism. Examples
include the focus on U.S. and Western European
consumption in Getting and Spending (Strasser,
McGovern, and Judt 1998) and, in the edited collection The Making of the Consumer (Trentmann
2006), the understanding of key moments and
features of consumer cultures development across
various countries is highlighted. Other collections,
such as Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan’s
(2006) The Ambivalent Consumer, offer comparisons within chapters.
These books often make clear that consumer cultures are plural and multiform, with historical and
geographical contingency rendered explicit through
anthropological analysis of specific consumer groups
and consumer goods. Peter Stearns (2006) notes that
new cultural values are adopted, refined, and resisted
in a combination of convergence and differentiation,
distinct between and even within societies. Methods
are most often qualitative, with archival research
particularly common in historical accounts. As Susan
Strasser and colleagues have noted, the overall impression becomes “not so much a separate field as a prism
through which many aspects of social and political life
may be viewed” (1998, 1). The potential for edited
book collections on consumer cultures thus remains in
drawing out some of the cultural and social processes
rendered visible by closer analysis of consumption.
Quantitative analyses typically compare more
general aspects of consumer culture over a larger
number of national contexts. These accounts use
household spending data from sources such as
Eurostat and Eurobarometer and time-use surveys

such as the Multinational Time Use Survey. Though
limited by availability, data for a range of countries
over several decades allow patterns in consumer
behavior and time use to be identified. Works such
as Jonathon Gershuny’s (2000) Changing Times:
Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society provide
good indications of broad intercontinental trends in
consumer culture. Contribution toward convergence
and differentiation debates can also feasibly be made.
Göran Therborn (1995) shows that spending on
food and housing decreases over time with respect
to spending on recreation and culture across a large
number of European countries. The identifying of
this common trajectory supports a perceived cultural
convergence, while closer analysis of time-use data
alongside spending patterns show divergences in the
detail of practices attributable to institutional differences, such as continuing disparities in time spent
watching television between countries (Gronow
and Southerton 2010). Jukka Gronow and Dale
Southerton also find that individuals in more affluent
countries participate in more varied leisure activities
than those in less affluent countries. In sum, comparative studies based on large social surveys are good
for understanding general similarities and differences
between countries and for identifying different typologies of consumer cultures.
A third form of comparing consumer cultures
combines the depth of qualitative snapshots of consumer culture with the range and power of quantitative studies. These book-length comparative
analyses tend to focus on particular social practices
in consumer societies (for trust in food, for example,
see Kjaernes, Harvey, and Warde 2007). They use a
mixture of quantitative and qualitative data to offer
substantial interpretation and discussion of trends
across different countries. Such work relies on teams
of researchers and, methodologically, tends to draw
on new or existing survey data in conjunction with
focus groups or qualitative interviewing.
Global perspectives on consumer culture have
led to a questioning of some common assumptions.
In particular, the convention of taking the United
States as the historical birthplace and definitive
iteration of consumerism contradicts findings from
both historians and cultural analysts. The development of consumer culture stems from colonialist
trade and the consumption of these goods by early
Western European aristocracy. Important consumer
institutions, such as the chain and department store,

Confectionery

originated in the United Kingdom and France and in
the 1790s and 1830s, respectively. Peter N. Stearns
(2006) estimates that the influence of American
consumer culture only began to influence Western
Europe, rather than the other way around, from
the 1880s onward. The development of mass consumption, however, as demonstrated by penetration
rates of significant consumer durables, such as the
radio, car, and television, occurs most distinctly in
the United States (Therborn 1995). These devices,
argues Therborn, foster cultural changes, such as
“the walled-off individual/family rather than the collective circle and public dialogue” (145), while Colin
Campbell (1987) traces the roots of this perceived
individualism back to Enlightenment ideas about
material progress and a new sense of self brought
about by the Romantic ethic. The point is not to
favor one or the other, but to recognize the contingency of both Europe and the United States in the
development of the consumer. Acknowledging this
common bias and pointing out American exceptionalism, Garon and Maclachlan’s The Ambivalent
Consumer takes Japan as the reference point in an
excellent analysis of East Asian consumption.
It is perhaps in approaching new environmental
and political imperatives where the comparison of
consumer cultures has the most potential. Decreasing
political accountability in many countries due to globalizing trade and the deregulation and the neoliberal
privatization of much business is said to spur new
forms of consumerist resistance (Harrison, Newholm,
and Shaw 2005). These include boycotts and other
forms of critical consumerism, such as fair trade and
culture jamming, and cross-national analysis of such
movements offers clues to understanding how to
engage and mobilize citizen consumers. Consumption,
meanwhile, is identified by governments as well as
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as central to
problems of sustainability, not least in the incompatibility of production-linked growth to cutting energy
usage and carbon pollution. Analysis of consumer
behavior, roles, and responsibility with regard to these
agendas is ongoing, and future work should continue
to reflect their global nature.
Luke Yates
See also Americanization; Consumer Expenditure
Surveys; Consumption and Time Use; Consumption
Patterns and Trends; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption; Globalization;

229

Inequalities; McDonaldization; Political and Ethical
Consumption

Further Readings
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Gronow, Jukka, and Dale Southerton. “Leisure and
Consumption in Europe.” In Handbook of European
Societies, edited by Stefan Immerfall and Göran
Therborn, 355–384. New York: Springer, 2010.
Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw. The
Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005.
Kjaernes, Unni, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde. Trust in
Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History: The
Global Transformation of Desire. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Strasser, Susan, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, eds.
Getting and Spending: European and American
Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Therborn, Göran. European Modernity and Beyond:
The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000.
London: Sage, 1995.
Trentmann, Frank. The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.

CONFECTIONERY
Confectionery is the generic term for all foods composed mainly of sugar. While its history is connected closely to the process of industrialization and
nineteenth-century changes in taste, the history of
sugar and sweetness began much earlier. Sugar—in
the sense we are familiar with today—goes back to
the early Middle Ages and the Arab occupation of
Spain (700–1492). “Sugar,” says the most prominent
sugar historian, Sidney W. Mintz, “followed Koran”
(1985, 25). Looking at the history of the Americas,
it is also true to say “sugar followed Christianity,”
because it was the Christian conquerors who first
introduced sugar plants to the continent in the early
sixteenth century. Up until the nineteenth century,
world sugar consumption depended on growing
sugar on plantations; and this was combined mostly
with exploitation, child and slave labor, and a worldwide division of labor. Sugarcane plantations in, for

230

Confectionery

example, Brazil or the Caribbean produced only the
raw sugar that was then shipped to the metropoles.
These not only held the monopoly on refining sugar
but also constructed and delivered all the necessary
machines and instruments for the production of
sugar. The only colonies that refined sugar and distilled rum for themselves were the English ones in
North America—perhaps a first hint of their move
toward independence.
In early modern times, sugar was a luxury good. It
entered the tastes and recipe books of the rich during
the sixteenth century. At this time, its main use was
not for the production of confectionery, but as a spice
or preservative. Sugar was also a main component of
medicine: sugar sweetened otherwise bitter pills and
liquids. The etymology of confectionery traces back
to the Latin word confectionaris originally used to
designate a pharmacist.
Sugar was not the only sweetener during that
epoch. The common people obtained their sweet flavors from fruit or honey. However, by the end of the
eighteenth century, sugar consumption had already
increased dramatically and reached thirteen pounds
per capita in Great Britain. The triumphal procession
of sugar and confectionery through the nineteenth
century was accompanied by other profound changes
in diet and taste, and it is connected to the history of
chocolate and cocoa. Cocoa entered Europe as a luxury drink when Hernán Cortés brought it back from
the Aztec Empire. However, it only met European
tastes when mixed with sugar or other ingredients.
In early modern times, cocoa became increasingly
prominent as a luxury drink at the European courts.
Due to its nutritional value, it also gained popularity among ordinary people as a medical treatment.
Chocolate for eating instead of drinking was a product of the early nineteenth century.
Napoleon’s continental blockade of England in
1806 interrupted the distribution of raw cane sugar
from the colonies. Continental manufacturers started
to invest in extracting sugar from sugar beets—
something that had not been profitable before. This
was the time in which a new professional group started
to play an important role in the processing of modern food: the food chemists. They were the ones who
defined national standards for chocolate and other
confectionery at the end of the nineteenth century.
Solid chocolate only became possible through a
conjunction of technical innovations, changing standards of nutrition, the birth of food chemistry, and an

army of female workers. As sugar became cheaper,
small confectioners sold sweetmeats for a local market. However, due to the small profit margin in the
candy business, larger businesses took over control of
the regional supply. The production of chocolate was
more interesting for them, because it required extensive investment in equipment. This rapidly forced
small businesses out of the market. It was probably
the Dutchman Coenraad Johannes von Houten who
first introduced two new procedures into chocolate
production: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a hydraulic press to help reduce the fat in cocoa
by 50 percent through extracting the valuable cocoa
butter; and, some decades later, so-called alkalization.
Both innovations helped to make cocoa more soluble
and easy to digest. The Englishmen Joseph S. Fry,
who took over his mother Anna’s chocolate firm, did
not just mix the pulverized cocoa beans with sugar,
but he also put back the cocoa butter that had been
extracted. He then pressed the viscous substance and
formed slabs of chocolate.
It was the invention of new machinery (to perform
conching) and new procedures (mixing with pulverized condensed milk) that made chocolate what it still
is today: a mixture of cocoa, sugar, milk, potash for
alkalization, and different spices. During the nineteenth
century, consumer markets changed profoundly. Sugar
and sweetmeats became ubiquitous—and not just
as providers of quick energy and cheap calories for
industrial workers. “Sweetness” developed from characterizing a certain (nonbitter) taste into a personal
attribution of children and middle-class female consumers. These newly constructed “sweet” consumers
became the main target group of confectionery. The
leading British confectioner, Cadbury Brothers, was
the first to emphasize the connection between boxes
of chocolate and romance. Chocolate, however, went
on to conquer further consumers: it was sold to armies
and distributed to soldiers to boost their energy in
emergencies. Most European chocolate businesses—
family enterprises such as Cadbury, Rowntree’s,
Suchard, Lindt, Stollwerck, and many others—made
their biggest profits during wartime.
Even though many family enterprises retained
their independence up until the late-twentieth century,
very few parent companies still dominate the market
today. The confectionery industry registers its strongest growth in profits through functional food—a
development that can be traced back to the early history of sugar as a medicine. Nonetheless, the bitter

Conspicuous Consumption

taste of chocolate still accompanies sweet products
today: it remains a product of inhuman labor conditions on cocoa plantations.
Angelika Epple
See also Colonialism; Dieting; Food Consumption;
History; Innovation Studies; Luxury and Luxuries;
Obesity; Sugar

Further Readings
Fitzgerald, Robert. Rowntree and the Marketing
Revolution, 1862–1969. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
MacLeod, Murdo J. “Cacao.” In The Cambridge World
History of Food, edited by Kenneth F. Kiple and
Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, 635–641. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar
in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.
Mintz, Sidney W. “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness.” In Food
and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and
Penny Van Esterik, 357–369. New York: Routledge,
1997.
Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That
Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World
Economy, 1400 to the Present. 2nd ed. Armonk, NY:
M. E. Sharpe, 2006.
Woloson, Wendy A. Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery,
and Consumers in 19th Century America. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
Conspicuous consumption is the use of commodities and possessions to display and demonstrate
financial and social standing. The concept of conspicuous consumption was coined, theorized, and
popularized by Thorstein Veblen. An economist,
sociologist, and a pioneer in the study of consumption, Veblen was a key figure in the development
of sociology in America. The Theory of the Leisure
Class (1899/1970) is his treatise on the effects and
influence social and cultural change has on economic
changes in society. In this work, Veblen demonstrates
the increasing importance of money as a means to
rank people, and as a measure of social standing.
One of the first major contributions to the literature on consumption, this book provides the classical sociological account and analysis of conspicuous

231

consumption. Veblen developed an important concept by drawing attention to the role consumption
plays as the key way of gaining and indicating social
status in modern societies.
Veblen shows how rare, expensive, and highly visible commodities are acquired for their social and cultural value, rather than for useful purposes, and how
they are a means by which elite social groups mark
their existence and privilege to other groupings. His
focus was the emergent American nouveaux riches of
the late-nineteenth century. This new social group of
newly rich individuals was an element of the upper
classes, who Veblen famously called the “leisure
class.” This social group publicly demonstrated their
status through the use of consumer goods in leisure
practices and also practiced a conspicuous absence
from all useful employment, in other words they
engaged in “conspicuous leisure.”
Leisure here is not laziness or indolence, instead,
what it refers to is time that is consumed nonproductively. This enables the leisure classes to demonstrate
their financial ability to afford a life of idleness, and
reflects their belief in the “unworthiness” of productive work. The “conspicuous abstention from labor
therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior
pecuniary achievement and the conventional index
of reputability” (Veblen in Lerner 1948/1975, 86).
However, for conspicuous consumption and leisure to
be effective, there needs to be an excessive consumption of resources and an explicit display of waste and
wastefulness, one that requires an individual to have
a circle of others around himself or herself to consume this excess vicariously. These individuals, family, friends, servants, or competitors, act as vehicles
through which to display prodigious wastefulness.
As Stephen Edgell has noted, there are three key
factors that contribute to conspicuous consumption.
First, there is cost or conspicuous expense. Second,
there is the abstention from productive work, or what
Veblen calls conspicuous leisure. Third, there is the
extravagant consumption of resources, or what can
be termed conspicuous waste. In short, conspicuous
consumption can be characterized as the conspicuous consumption of money, time, and resources.
In outlining his theory of conspicuous consumption, Veblen notes that in every society there are
two types of economic activity, that which involves
“workmanship” or “serviceability,” and consequently
enhances material life, and that which involves “predation” or which exploits and enhances social repute.

232

Conspicuous Consumption

With regard to the production of goods and services,
this dualism leads Veblen to identify two types of
work, industrial and nonindustrial occupations, and
two types of commodities, useful and wasteful. Useful
commodities are vital to sustain human life, whereas
wasteful commodities are crucial to sustaining social
status and social standing.
Veblen argues that in the early stages of the economic evolution of societies, the differentiation of
production and consumption in terms of useful and
wasteful activities reflects gender divisions in society, with women dominant in serviceable activities,
and men in predatory ones. However, in the later
stages of economic development, this differentiation begins to reflect class divisions too, as the lower
classes concentrate on useful activities, whereas the
upper classes dedicate themselves to wasteful activities. Veblen suggests that in economically abundant
modern societies, there is a heightened competition
for social status, and the key means of indicating
social standing is financial or pecuniary. This takes
the form of the conspicuous consumption of goods
and services directly or vicariously: “Conspicuous
consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure” (Veblen in Lerner
1948/1975, 117).
Reputation is associated with appearances, and
people seek to outwardly show their wealth through
the possession and display of items that are expensive
and valuable. This is found first among the upper
classes but it then spreads to all classes in modern
societies; Veblen called this process “emulation.”
Veblen saw social hierarchy as a continuum from
rich to poor, with the subordinate classes tending to
emulate, assimilate, or take on the traits, practices,
behavior, and values of the rich, or the leisure class.
Veblen argues that in communities dominated by
workmanship, emulation is of an industrial kind,
and not very pronounced, but in societies where
predation dominates, emulation is financial and is
more marked. Hence, displays of “good” taste (as
represented by the purchase of costly and prestigious
items) are copied, as those lower down the social
hierarchy adopt the consumption patterns of the
social upper classes.
This is sometimes called the “trickle-down effect,”
as it captures how the practices and preferences of
the elite can trickle down to other social groupings.
The higher social groupings, however, continually update their consumer patterns to distinguish

themselves from those further down the social ladder.
Implicit within this theory is the belief that there is a
degree of agreement over which items are desirable
and prestigious in society. Veblen uses the example
of expenditure on clothing and fashion as an illustration of the key characteristics of conspicuous
consumption, such as emulation, wastefulness, and
evidencing one’s pecuniary standing and repute. He
considers “dress” a particularly apt example because
it is always in evidence, and can indicate financial
standing to everyone at a first look. A feature of fashion is the rapid and continual changing of styles, and
Veblen suggests that an elite group can mark itself
off from neighboring classes by wearing dress that
is seen as stylish and distinctive. The fashions of the
elite will then trickle down to, or be emulated by, the
other classes. When other classes copy these fashions,
the elite will adopt a new one to ensure their distinctiveness from those lower down the social hierarchy.
As Edgell has highlighted, Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption has been subject to a deal of
criticism, in particular for having limited historical
relevance, lacking currency, and also contemporary
applicability. Furthermore, it has also been suggested that the theory is oversimplified, incomplete,
and that in Veblen’s conceptualization, there is a
lack of attention to the role that pleasure plays in
consumption. Colin Campbell has drawn attention
to the lack of clarity in Veblen’s theorization of the
concept and points to the difficulties in empirically
researching conspicuous consumption, especially as
it is something that people may be unwilling to admit
to engaging in.
Yet, the concept of conspicuous consumption is
still cited and deployed in a range of academic contexts, to explain and inform our understanding of
consumer culture and the consumption of various
goods and services, from food and schooling to fashion and tourism. In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu’s
landmark study of class and cultural consumption
in France in the 1960s, there is an emphasis on
economic and cultural capital and on the display of
taste as a means of classifying social groups, ideas
that seem to have drawn on Veblen’s insights. Veblen
has shown how commodities were mobilized by the
American leisure classes to demonstrate social distinction and rank, and he identifies a complex and
elaborate social hierarchy based around consumer
patterns and choices, one that is still resonant today.
Although Veblen’s identification of the social and

Consumer Anxiety

cultural significance of consumption is something
that contemporary scholars of consumer culture take
for granted, when he first outlined it, more than a
hundred years ago, he was breaking a path for the
developing sociology of consumption and consumer
culture to follow.
Gaynor Bagnall
See also Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Fashion;
Leisure; Lifestyle; Positional Goods; Social Distinction;
Status; Taste

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984.
Campbell, Colin. “Conspicuous Confusion: A Critique of
Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.”
Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 37–47.
Edgell, Stephen. “Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous
Consumption after 100 Years.” History of Economic
Ideas 7, no. 3 (1999): 99–125.
Edgell, Stephen. Veblen in Perspective: His Life and
Thought. New York: M. E. Sharp, 2001.
Lerner, Max, ed. The Portable Veblen. New York: Viking,
1975. First published 1948.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study of Institutions. London: Unwin, 1970.
First published 1899.

CONSUMER ANXIETY
Consumer anxiety refers to the theory that personal
consumption can sometimes provoke anxiety for an
individual because of the perception that others will
judge his or her consumption choices negatively. The
existence of consumer anxiety is premised on the concern that one’s publicly visible and personally identifiable consumer practices, such as styles of dress,
adornment, hairstyles, or living spaces, are open to
judgment by others. While the theory rests on processes of judgment or evaluation in the context of
individual and group interactions, it also unites the
visual, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of social life.
The possibility of consumer anxiety is also a reflection of larger scale, background, cultural processes.
From a theoretical perspective, the essence of the
theory is that in consumer societies, the proliferation
of consumer choice leads to uncertainty about the

233

nature of a socially correct choice and the related fear
that others may negatively judge an individual on the
basis of the consumer choices he or she makes. The
thematic core of the theory can be found in a variety
of key texts in classical and contemporary theories on
social change, consumption, and lifestyle, and especially in the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony
Giddens. The concept was brought to recent prominence as a contemporary problem in consumption
studies in a key article by Alan Warde and an empirical follow-up by Ian Woodward. Within business
and marketing studies, the existence of risk as an element of consumer behavior has been acknowledged
for somewhat longer, though in this field it is more
frequently conceptualized through psychological
models of behavior (Taylor 1974; Bauer 1960).
The existence of consumer anxiety is a result of
the interplay of both social and individual processes.
According to the theory, consumption can be a type
of social risk, whereby one’s social status may be
challenged or eroded because of negative judgments
others make about the things one consumes or the
way one consumers them. These negative judgments
may also lead to relatively minor or transient types
of psychological pain, such as self-doubt, loss of selfesteem, or embarrassment. For example, individuals
may be sanctioned because they are judged as wearing the wrong color to a particular social setting, such
as a funeral, or because they show too much of their
body relative to what might be considered generally appropriate in certain social settings. Consumer
anxiety may also arise from the economic implications of one’s consumption habits, such as personal
overspending, or from the morally evaluated dimensions of one’s personal consumption, such as perceived greed, or the environmental consequences of
personal consumption choices.
Within the domain of consumption, which is to
some degree based on matters of aesthetics, personal
taste, knowledge, and expertise and skills of judgment, it is possible to identify how anxiety could
come to be played out in a range of fields of consumption. Consumption choices, styles, and possible
tastes have multiplied exponentially and change
their characteristics and meanings rapidly to the
extent that keeping up is difficult. On the face of it,
there are few authorities to consult on such choices
that can be seen by individuals, after all, as matters
of individual taste. In this context, it is worth revisiting Bauman’s observation on the dilemma associated

234

Consumer Anxiety

with freedom in postmodernity as it perfectly captures the uncertainties individuals may face in relation
to such choices—“It means the exhilarating freedom
to pursue anything and the mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name
of what one should pursue it” (Bauman 1992, vii).
In what might be thought of as the structural elucidation of the theory of consumer anxiety, Warde
argues that consumption choices can be problematic,
risky, or anxiety provoking, though this will depend
on social context, the relative cultural authority of
the person who is selecting and consuming the good,
and the degree of importance the person invests in
his or her own and others’ perception of personal
consumption choices. Warde’s analysis offers a
social-structural theoretical model of the processes
and forces that may shape potentially risky consumption selections. The theoretical groundwork for
his model is articulated in the writings of Bauman,
Ulrich Beck, and Giddens, in the tradition of British
and European postmodern social change literature of
the 1980s and 1990s. Structural variants of the theory, such as Warde’s, embed consumer anxiety within
larger discourses on the existence of uncertainties in
the contemporary era and highlight the ways anxiety and larger contexts such as risk, uncertainty, and
threat have been a dominant thread in recent theories
of social change. For this structural model of consumption anxiety, the institutional reasons for such
feelings of doubt and uncertainty are fundamentally
congruous, resting on a thesis concerning the dissolution of the importance of traditional institutional
influence on cultural life and an associated intensification in the importance and weight given to individual responsibility and biography in assembling
social identities. Both of these processes—increased
personal responsibility and choice and the diminished role of authority in social relations—accord
consumption greater weight in constructing identity,
but also make it a domain of risk.
Based on an appropriation of the Durkheimian
typology of suicide, Warde goes on to argue that for
those who are predisposed to experience anxiety,
adequate “insurance” is generally found by investments in specialist bodies of knowledge that assist
in dampening perceptions of danger and providing
expert justifications for aesthetic choice; for example,
advertising, peer groups, and magazines. On the
other hand, there are those who feel no such anxieties, are relatively disengaged from the game of status

and identity-driven consumption, and are seen to
have little personal interest invested in their choices.
This group, less invested in the external evaluation of
their choices and more independent of status games,
is less likely to experience anxiety.
Woodward proposes a social performance perspective on consumer anxiety. He argues that it is
only in the space of social performance that anxiety
can surface, whereby an actor’s taste credentials—his
or her degree of knowledge, competence, or aesthetic
skill—comes into question. Using social performance
theory, Woodward argues that there must be an aesthetic fusion between the material and discursive; a
coming together of actors, objects, scripts, and audience where consumption performances are experienced as convincing or authentic by the participant.
But, alongside any performance is contingency and
open-endedness, where scripts or narratives can
break down or go awry and lose their communicative
efficacy. It is in the process of displaying the veracity or finesse of one’s aesthetic choices that anxieties
or uncertainties about one’s performative mastery of
various consumption scripts and props can surface.
He also points to the existence of different types of
anxiety, premised on whether apparent anxieties
relate to external factors, such as social status, or
internal factors, such as self-identity.
Anxiety is an important subject in consumption
studies. One theory is that certain social fractions are
more prone to experience anxiety as an element of
their consumption style, and that this is, in fact, one
important element driving their high levels of ongoing discretionary, “expressive” expenditure. Pierre
Bourdieu, for example, vividly illustrates the possibility that anxieties afflict social fractions differentially
in his dissection of the consumption patterns of the
petite bourgeoisie class. He suggests that the petite
bourgeoisie have an obsession with stockpiling cultural symbols, identify culture with mere knowledge,
and adopt a strategy of overearnest cultivation. He
says that the petit bourgeoisie are caught in an “anxious quest for authorities and models of conduct”
(1984, 331), whose fatal cultural move is to combine
a hunger for consuming with anxiety to demonstrate
their competence. Alternatively, another possibility is
that certain anxieties underpin all consumption acts,
irrespective of social class or background. That is,
acquisitiveness as a cultural practice may be associated
with a form of anxiety—what has been called “the
consuming desire of consuming” (Bauman 2001, 13).

Consumer Apathy

Consumer societies thus very rarely satisfy needs, and
if they do, it is often only temporarily. In fact, through
their constant rejuvenation of fashion, style, and
wants, consumer society actually multiplies scarcities,
and as a result, it also multiplies anxieties through the
stimulation of continuously unfolding desires.
Ian Woodward
See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer
Illnesses and Maladies; Consumer Society;
Individualization; Lifestyle; Postmodernism; Risk
Society; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings
Bauer, R. A. “Consumer Behaviour as Risk Taking.” In
Dynamic Marketing for a Changing World, edited by
Robert S. Hancock, 389–398. Chicago: American
Marketing Association, 1960.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open
University Press, 1988.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London;
Routledge, 1992.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Consuming Life.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 1, no. 1 (2001): 9–29.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Taylor, James W. “The Role of Risk in Consumer
Behavior.” Journal of Marketing 38 (April 1974):
54–60.
Warde, Alan. “Consumption, Identity-Formation and
Uncertainty.” Sociology 28, no. 4 (1994): 877–898.
Woodward, Ian. “Investigating the Consumption Anxiety
Thesis: Aesthetic Choice, Narrativisation and Social
Performance.” The Sociological Review 54, no. 2
(2006): 263–282.

CONSUMER APATHY
There are two senses in which the consumption
activity of individuals tends to be described as apathetic. The term consumer apathy is sometimes used
in marketing studies and financial journalism to classify certain forms of consumption decision making
that result in consumers failing to respond to marketing messages. More generally, notions of consumer
apathy are invoked in the context of political and
ethical critiques of consumer culture, especially those
discussing barriers to change in the nature of contemporary consumption in the developed world.

235

As an occasionally invoked marketing term, consumer apathy is used in a contestably apolitical manner to describe the tendency of consumers to resist
changing from one product or brand to another.
Similarly, consumers might be described as apathetic
if they eschew particular forms of consumption activity (such as online shopping) or refuse to purchase
certain products or brands for reasons of unfamiliarity, suspicion, or “laziness.” Used in this manner,
consumer apathy merely describes, albeit in pejorative language, a key aspect of consumer behavior:
our tendency to consume habitually in the sense
of becoming comfortable with known products,
brands, and ways of shopping. For marketers, this
presents as a problematic of consumer complacency
in which the adoption by individuals of new products or new ways of consuming is undercut either by
their consumption habits or by a consumer malaise
whereby individuals feel overwhelmed by consumer
choice and marketing messages and thus stick to
familiar consumption practices.
Beyond the realm of marketing there is a much
more widespread concern with consumer apathy in
contemporary critical literature on consumer culture and among activists and advocates involved in
movements for sustainability and responsible consumption. Here, apathy is once again understood
as a complacency by individual consumers (and by
consuming populations) toward change and alternative action. However, this is interpreted as a political
and ethical complacency driven by a refusal to accept
and/or act on the need for personal and social change
in what and how much is consumed, particularly in
wealthy nations. Western citizens, it is argued, routinely fail to “consume with care” despite living in a
world where levels of consumption far exceed what
is environmentally sustainable and where rich world
populations enjoy grossly unequal access to the
global production of consumer goods and services.
Contemporary consumption critics and activists identify three key aspects of responsible and
sustainable consumption. First, consuming sustainably expresses an ethic of care toward the natural
environment; an environment that provides the
resources consumed now and in the future and
that must accommodate consumer waste. Second,
consuming responsibly engages with the local and
global ethics of market exchange by recognizing the
need for fair terms of trade between developed and
developing nations, the importance of maintaining

236

Consumer Apathy

local, small-scale economies, and the imperative to
guarantee equal access of people globally to the goods
and resources necessary for a flourishing life. Finally,
critics argue that we must also attend to the social
and cultural implications of uncontrolled levels of
consumption, insisting that consumeristic attitudes
and behaviors undermine social cohesion by privileging a consumption-based individualism and valorizing material greed.
Clearly, a consumer apathy can be said to be present only at the point where individuals are aware
of and concede (or at least partially concede) these
and other potential environmental, global, and social
implications of their consumption behavior but disregard or avoid the imperative for personal change.
There is some empirical evidence to suggest a generalized disjunction between an awareness of the impacts
of consumption on the one hand and people’s everyday consumption decisions on the other. Surveys in a
range of wealthy nations, for example, have indicated
a relatively high public awareness of and belief in the
probable environmental and ethical implications of
personal and household consumption.
Nevertheless, this high awareness tends not to
translate into actual buying behavior. Most individuals continue to opt for cheapness and ease of purchase
and use over and above explicit political or ethical
considerations in their consumption decisions. This is
true both in terms of the purchase of material goods
and the use of energy resources. Similarly, while ethical products (such as free-range eggs), fair exchange
goods (such as fair trade tea and coffee), and sustainable items (such as recycled paper) are now a routine
presence on supermarket shelves in countries such
as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom,
Australia, and elsewhere, such goods have usually
captured only a small share of their respective product
markets. Thus, even when presented with alternative
consumption possibilities, only a minority of Western
citizens seem to opt for these alternatives.
Given this evidence, it would appear that political
apathy (and a level of hypocrisy) certainly goes some
way to explaining why individuals may at the same
time be aware of and even accept arguments for consumer change but fail to translate this into everyday
consumer practices. Nevertheless, any simple designation of consumers as apathetic by those advocating
change is of limited analytical use. Though contemporary critics might lament a trend toward consumer
apathy, they have more vigorously identified deeper

sociological factors underlying globally dominant
forms of consumption. An influential and accessible
body of contemporary social critique has reemphasized socialization and emulation as the drivers of
first-world “hyperconsumerism.” Far from being
merely apathetic, critics argue, the consciousness of
first-world citizens has been resoundingly shaped by
a culture of marketing and consumerism. As a result,
individuals are addicted to the competitive pursuit of
social status and personal identity through material
acquisition. This return to manipulationist explanation has, however, been conjoined with a more optimistic identification of a groundswell of resistance
to the consumerization of life. An increasing proportion of Western “consumers,” critics insist, are
seeking alternatives rather than sinking into apathy,
a fact that is demonstrated by the number of Western
citizens who opt to “downshift” (that is, voluntarily
earn and consume less).
In a somewhat different vein, the ideology of individualism implicit in the charge of consumer apathy
has been contested by others. One of the central criticisms made of calls for sustainable and responsible
consumption is that they often reduce a politics of
change to individual political will. In the process,
what is interpreted as consumer apathy may in fact
speak of the systemic constraints placed on people,
particularly through low income and inflexible systems of provision, to transform their consumption
practices.
Notions of consumer apathy are implicitly contested also in contemporary scholarship on the
dynamics of consumption. Recently, scholars have
sought to understand consumption decisions and the
maintenance of cultures of consumption by variously
emphasizing the social, technological, emotional,
and phenomenological context of material practices. Rather than reduce consumption decisions to
a question of straightforward manipulation, emulation, or socialization, emphasis has been placed on
comprehending the emotional and psychophysical
importance of objects in people’s lives, as well as the
manner in which much consumption activity is systemically bound up with changing social conventions
and customs, as well as constant technological innovation. This does not negate calls for change in the
nature of commodity use or deny the role of individuals in consuming differently. Rather, it grapples with
the complexity of factors underlying our attitudes
and actions toward the material world and renders

Consumer Behavior

the process of change collective and structural rather
than principally a product of individual behavior.
Although consumers, particularly in wealthy nations,
thus remain open to the charge of political and ethical complacency, a politics of consumption that rests
on the conventional dualism of individual action versus apathy remains interpretatively limited in comprehending how consumption might be transformed.
Kim Humphery
See also Affluent Society; Alienation; Citizenship;
Consumer Anxiety; Consumer Behavior; Consumer
Illnesses and Maladies; Fair Trade; Political and
Ethical Consumption

Further Readings
Dant, Tim. Materiality and Society. Buckingham, UK:
Open University Press, 2005.
De Graaf, John, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor.
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. San Francisco,
CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2001.
Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw, eds.
The Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005.
Humphery, Kim. Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West.
Cambridge: Polity, 2010.
Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity,
2008.
Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds.
Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002.
Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
Shove, Elizabeth. Cleanliness, Comfort and Convenience:
The Social Organisation of Normality. Oxford: Berg,
2003.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Consumer behavior is a field of study that generally
falls under the umbrella of marketing and is associated with consumer research. Consumer behavior
is defined as being concerned with “individuals or
groups acquiring, using and disposing of products,
services, ideas or experiences” (Arnould, Price, and
Zinkhan 2002, 5) and as “the study of the processes
involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use or dispose of products, services, ideas or
experiences to satisfy wants and needs” (Solomon et
al. 2006, 6). Consumer behavior can be regarded as

237

having evolved from buyer behavior and a concern
with rational buyer decision making, often typified
by an interest in cognition, affect, and behavior. The
shift in title from “buyer” to “consumer” often represents a broadening of interest beyond constituting
the subject as prospective buyer of interest to profitmotivated marketing managers, toward a more general concern with what the consumer might be and
how he or she engages with and is engaged by community and context. Hence, the study of consumer
behavior is increasingly interdisciplinary and draws
from a broad range of social sciences, including economics, anthropology, culture studies, media studies,
sociology, as well as literary theory, art history, and
philosophy.
A foundational framework within consumer
behavior is the so-called C-A-B model, which is the
process-flow from cognition to affect to behavior; a
model that aids variable analysis toward the object
of predicting buyer behavior (Howard and Sheth
1969). An influential iteration of this core model is
Gary Armstrong and Philip Kotler’s buyer decision
process, which charts the flow of rational buyers
as they move from need recognition, information
search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision,
and ultimately postpurchase evaluation. Other influential studies within this general body of research
include the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and
Cacioppo 1986), which adjusts the C-A-B model to
note that consumers’ antecedent level of involvement
(the degree of past involvement in product information) will mediate their likelihood of engaging with
product information, and also the servicescape model
(Bitner 1992), which updates the C-A-B model to
include insights from environmental psychology, such
as the mediational influence of tangible cues like store
layout and intangible cues like background music.
A criticism of such a theoretical approach is that
it tends to portray consumers as passive individuals
who simply respond to environmental forces that
operate largely beyond their control and implies that
the predictive mechanics of purchase decisions are
somehow made in isolation from a social world. In
addition, that consumer behavior may not always be
an entirely rational affair that can be predicted and
explained by positivistic models, which was argued
by Morris B. Holbrook and Elizabeth C. Hirschman,
who called for a more experientialist understanding
of hedonic (e.g., pleasurable) consumer behavior
(refers to the richness of the consumption experience

238

Consumer Behavior

and the fantasies, feelings, and fun often contained
therein). This approach, coupled with a contemporary interest in importing insights from humanities
and anthropology, may be regarded as contributing
to a shift in the study of consumer behavior beyond
positivistic concerns, a shift acerbated by the growing
influence of postmodern theory in the mid-1990s,
an increased sensitivity of critical perspectives, and
a convergence of interest in studying consumption
with other subject areas outside of marketing.
An iconic work that has led the way in respect
to studying consumers in their everyday environments was the so-called consumer behavior odyssey
embarked on by Russell Belk and others in 1986. Over
twenty consumer researchers conducted qualitative
research as they traveled between the East and West
U.S. coast in a giant recreational vehicle. This epic
adventure ambitiously sought fresh ways of acquiring knowledge about the nature and experiences of
consumer behavior and did so in rich contexts from
which to generate new theories about the following:
marketplace interactions and brand communities, the
power of the past in terms of memories and collections, the consumption patterns of upper-middle-class
females, and the secularization and sacralization processes at work in contemporary society. The odyssey
might be regarded as revolutionary in that it broke
boundaries and stimulated substantive theoretical insights through the use of innovative research
methods and was an empirical rejection of narrow
managerial concerns; a methodological rejection of
quantitative, experimental, and sample-based studies;
a metaphorical rejection of information-processing,
cognitive-affect-behavior modeling paradigms; and a
rhetorical pioneering of new forms of research representation, including photos and films.
A further seminal inquiry into the multidynamism of consumption was presented by Douglas
Holt’s typology, which he derived from a longitudinal study of baseball spectators in Chicago. Further
to the hedonic categorization of consumption as a
rich site of experiencing fantasies, feelings, and fun,
Holt noted that consumption could also be a form
of integration as consumers manipulate the meaning
of objects and use these objects to classify themselves
and others.
Studies such as the consumer behavior odyssey and
Holt’s typology of consumer behavior in addition to
the general influence of poststructuralist and multidisciplinary approaches have created space within consumer behavior for investigating cultural components

that provide rich accounts of the lived experiences
that regularly define consumption. This cultural perspective shifts the focus from a narrow concern with
purchasing acts toward broader conceptualizations
of the experiences embodied in consumer behavior.
Consequentially, a series of alternative methodologies
were developed and imported from other disciplines
and these have included introspection, ethnography,
as well as methods developed within literary theory.
As the subject area evolves, there is increased interest
in sociocultural, experiential, and symbolic aspects
of consumption as well as the complex dynamics
among consumer identity projects, popular culture,
marketplace structures, emergent sociohistoric patterning of consumption, and marketplace ideologies
(Arnould and Thompson 2005). Crucially, this body
of work is decreasingly concerned with developing research purposeful for marketing practice and
increasingly in conversation with related subject
areas, as evidenced by the output of such interdisciplinary journals as Journal of Consumer Culture and
Consumption, Markets & Culture.
An implication of the postmodern turn within
consumer behavior in addition to the development of
interest in areas such as consumer tribes is a growing
recognition of how consumption activities can also
be productive. Hence, just as the subject area evolved
beyond its previous name of buyer behavior, Fuat
Fırat and Nikhilesh Dholakia speculate that the term
consumer behavior might well be redundant and a
new terminology required.
Alan Bradshaw
See also Advertising; Bounded Rationality; Cognitive
Structures; Desire; Markets and Marketing; Methods
of Market Research; Psychology; Theory of Planned
Behavior

Further Readings
Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An
Introduction. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 2000.
Arnould, Eric, Linda Price, and George Zinkhan.
Consumers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Arnould, Eric, and Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer
Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research.”
Journal of Consumer Research 31 (March 2005):
868–882.
Belk, Russell. Highways and Buyways: Naturalistic
Research from the Consumer Behavior Odyssey. Provo,
UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1991.

Consumer (Freedom of) Choice
Bitner, Mary Jo. “Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical
Surroundings on Customers and Employees.” Journal of
Marketing 56 (April 1992): 57–71.
Firat, Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. Consuming People:
From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption.
New York: Routledge, 1998.
Hirschman, E. C. “Ideology in Consumer Research, 1980–
1990: A Marxist and Feminist Critique.” Journal of
Consumer Research 19 (March 1993): 537.
Holbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. “The
Experiential Aspects of Consumption: Consumer
Fantasies, Feelings and Fun.” Journal of Consumer
Research 9 (September 1982): 132–140.
Holt, Douglas. “How Consumers Consume: A Typology of
Consumption Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research
22 (June 1995): 1–16.
Howard, John A., and Jagdish Sheth. Theory of Buyer
Behavior. New York: John Wiley, 1969.
Petty, Richard, and John Cacioppo. Communication and
Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude
Change. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986.
Solomon, Michael, Gary Bamossy, Søren Askegaard, and
Margaret K. Hogg. Consumer Behaviour: A European
Perspective. 3rd ed. Harlow, UK: Financial Times/
Prentice Hall, 2006.

CONSUMER (FREEDOM

OF)

CHOICE

Freedom of choice is one of the core ideas underpinning the functioning of (post)modern society.
Although choice means different things to different
people in various points in time, its positive connotations are rarely questioned. Whether it is conflated
with consumerism, market, or individual autonomy,
choice stands for much wider social, political, and
philosophical conditions. The origins of the idea can
be traced back to the Western tradition of moral philosophy and, later on, to economics. Recently, though,
it has been extended to almost every aspect of life as
a part of reflexive postmodernity where everything is
negotiable and a matter of individual choice.
However, choice is also an ideological proposition. It is firmly rooted in neoclassic economics and is
central to market liberalism given its focus on property rights, individual freedom, competition, and
self-interest as it was first conceptualized by moral
philosopher Adam Smith, who is also considered the
father of modern economics. The idea of freedom
of choice is also at the heart of the libertarian social
theory developed by Austrian school economists

239

Friedrich Hayek and his colleagues (Ludwig von
Mises and Israel Kirzner) in the 1940s and during the
postwar period. In this context, choice stands for the
archetypal normative idea and one of the grand narratives dominating public discourse. Furthermore,
normative judgments about the value of choice as a
manifestation of personal autonomy are still central
to moral philosophy concerns, ranging from neoAristotelians (e.g., Alistair McIntyre) to neo-Kantian
contractarian theorists (e.g., John Rawls).
One way to distinguish between different
approaches to choice is to separate normative and
descriptive theories concerned with choice by positioning them alongside a continuum that ranges from
a priori reasoning of how people ought to make
choices to how choices actually happen in reality.
Ethics (moral philosophy), jurisprudence, political
philosophy, and theology fall into the former category, whereas cognitive psychology and decision
science, offering descriptive empirical accounts of
how choices are made in real-life settings, belong
to the latter. Many economic theories, including
rational choice, public choice, and consumer choice
theory, occupy a middle ground between normative
and empirical accounts, as some of their underlying
assumptions of how choices should be made have
been disproved; many more remain unverified.
To economists, choice is premised on the belief
that the individual is all-knowing, calculating, and
an inherent utility maximizer, and thus the best judge
of his or her own well-being, and that consumer sovereignty and giving people choice will force them to
reveal their preferences. According to these beliefs,
choice is best served through the development of
active, critical consumers, even if they cannot always
act as perfectly knowledgeable agents. Neoclassical
economics and their various derivatives (consumer
choice or public choice theory) do not claim to literally describe the deliberations that most individuals
actually make conscious choices. They rather postulate the deliberations that, if an individual had ever
actually made them, would have led to the choices
that economic theory predicts.
Consumer choice theory, for example, defines
rational consumer choices as those that lead the
consumer to maximize his or her utility (satisfaction, happiness). It assumes that utility is derived by
getting more of the goods that express the buyer’s
preferences. Although the marginal benefit of each
additional unit of goods or services successively
declines, consumer choice theory assumes it is always

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Consumer (Freedom of) Choice

positive and never reaches zero. Thus, consumers are
not only unsatiated, but they are actually insatiable.
For them, more is always better. Rational consumer
choice thus consists of adjusting the pattern of one’s
spending to maximize one’s utility. To describe and
explain in a mathematically coherent way how consumer choices aggregate to form market demand,
consumer choice theory has to make many ancillary
assumptions. These include the assumption that consumers (or at least, rational ones—consumer choice
theory does not consider irrational consumers or
their choice, except to dismiss them as “irrational”
or an “imperfection”) have well-defined and complete preferences. Because it is difficult to give the
concept of utility a plausible evidential basis, variants
of consumer choice theory have been developed that,
as far as possible, either refine the assumption of utility maximization or replace it.
Public choice theory, on the other hand, is a branch
of economics developed after studying spending and
the way large bureaucracies function. It applies to
collective decision making the same analytic principles that economists use to analyze people’s actions
in the marketplace. Public choice theory assumes
that people are motivated mainly by self-interest.
Although most people base some of their actions on
their concern for others, the dominant motive in people’s actions in the marketplace—whether they are
employers, employees, or consumers—is a concern
for themselves. Public choice economists make the
same assumption: that although people acting in the
political marketplace have some concern for others,
their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest.
Of the vast array of ethical and political theories
that are concerned with the diverse and often conflicting assumptions about the nature and process
of choice, neoclassic economics have arguably had
the greatest influence on the development of public
policy in the last two decades. The more recent shifts
to individual choice and the language of consumerism in public services can be traced back to the new
public management discourse and its reliance on business philosophy to improve the performance of public
agencies. In this context, the active consumer armed
with the power of exit is instrumental to improving
the quality and efficiency of services offered. These
assumptions have been traditionally opposed to collectivist values, such as equity and the supremacy of
community-defined needs, where individual choice
is superseded by the notion of the public good. The

concept of demand denoting what users of services are
prepared to pay for is replaced by that of needs, implying what services or goods citizens think they may
require at someone else’s expense. Choice, defined as
the consumer power of “exit” from the system, is then
opposed to “voice” as a mechanism for citizen participation that diminishes if choice is fully exercised, as
theorized by American economist Albert Hirschman.
However, more recently it has been suggested that
policies aimed at the well-informed, empowered, and
autonomous citizen who is able to choose from a range
of available alternatives in public sphere, need not necessarily be an expression of the market ethos designed
to serve the individualistic goals of an increasingly
business-minded society. Thus, the interest in using
choice and competition in public policy arguably represents an attempt to reconcile what is considered to be
an “artificial dichotomy” of “exit” or “voice” by many
(third way) governments. This rationale is premised on
the assumptions of contestability (the threat of competition) rather than competition per se, although most of
these policies are underpinned by normative assumptions whereby the role of evidence is limited to assessing their feasibility for policy purposes.
Whereas many theorists and, increasingly, policymakers justify choice as a necessary response to
consumerist users’ expectations, they assume that
individuals act as if they were perfectly rational and
well informed. Others have questioned premises
on which the freedom of choice and autonomy are
based. The assertion of people choosing rationally,
which presupposes that utility is derived by getting
more of the desired goods, demonstrates a superficial
understanding of human motivation in economic
thinking and renders these assumptions paper-thin,
according to contemporary British economist, Ben
Fine. Economics offers an undersocialized account
of choice that is devoid of psychological depth.
However, choices are socially constructed and emotionally determined, and hence they depend on what
is offered and who chooses what, when, and why.
The process of choice itself occurs via highly imperfect processing of accessible information, as clinical
psychology and decision-making science have demonstrated, and is also subject to the conscious as well
as unconscious psychological conditioning.
The consumerist approaches in public services
have also been criticized with regard to both their
appropriateness and effectiveness. First, consumerism
is about allocating privately produced goods or commodities via market pricing mechanisms to willing

Consumer Co-Operatives

buyers and not about generating public goods. If left
to the market alone, some public goods, such as welllit public streets, may not be produced at all. Second,
public goods are noncompetitive and nonexclusive,
since one person’s consumption does not exclude
that of another. Moreover, their effects also extend
to both users and nonusers. Immunization is a classic example of such an effect, known as an externality to economists. Also unlike in consumerism,
user-provider collaboration is often crucial to public
service outcomes involving an element of coproduction. Consumer choice appears to be an important
value in society; however, it cannot be harnessed to
deliver public goods or to improve equality because
of differences in individual abilities and preexisting
inequalities of income, education, and access unless
it serves the purpose of enacting social fantasies that
are disguised as policies.
Marianna Fotaki
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Sovereignty;
Economics; Lifestyle; Moralities; Preference
Formation; Seduced and Repressed; Self-Interest

Further Readings
Buchanan, James, and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of
Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.
Fine, Ben. The World of Consumption. London: Routledge,
2002.
Fotaki, Marianna, Alan Boyd, Liz Smith, Ruth McDonald,
Adrian Edwards, Glyn Elwyn, Martin Roland, and Rod
Sheaff. Patient Choice and the Organisation and
Delivery of Health Services: Scoping Review. A report
to the National Institute for Health Research,
Department of Health. London: National Institute for
Health Research, 2006.
Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses
to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory:
An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica
47 (1979): 263–291.
Kirzner, Israel. The Economics Point of View. New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1976. First published 1960.
McIntyre. Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.
3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2007. First published 1981.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
Sen, Amartya. “Rational Fools: A Critique of the
Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory.”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1977): 317–344.

241

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahan and
T. Cadell, 1776.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations: A Selected Edition. Edited by
Kathryn Sutherland. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
von Hayek, F. Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1944.
von Mises, Ludwig. Human Action: A Treatise on
Economics. London: Hodge, 1949.

CONSUMER CO-OPERATIVES
Consumer co-operatives are enterprises owned and
controlled by their members and run primarily for
the mutually beneficial provision of goods or services.
The most common forms of consumer co-operatives
are grocery retailers, pharmacies, credit unions and
banks, health and welfare co-operatives, housing cooperatives, and utility providers. Co-operatives are
distinguished from normal businesses by democratic
forms of governance, by equity capital not being
listed, and, in the case of consumer co-operatives, by
usually distributing profit in proportion to patronage. Membership is usually open and normally one
member has one vote. Costs of membership may be
nominal or require significant capital investment.
Organizational structures and legal forms vary,
even within jurisdictions. Consumer co-operatives
are as varied as “community supported agriculture”
schemes, where consumers collectively buy direct
from farmers; agricultural supply, services, and marketing co-operatives, commonplace in both North
America and Europe; Japanese mass membership
“joint buying” clubs; and renewable energy cooperatives, such as the significant Danish co-operative
wind turbine sector. Innovative examples include
Canada’s Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) and
Seattle-based Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI),
both producers and chain retailers of outdoor clothing and sporting equipment, with membership in the
millions; Co-operative Auto Network in Vancouver,
a car-sharing scheme; and the UK’s Phone Co-op,
which provides telephone and Internet services.
Consumer co-operatives vary in scale from
single retail outlets to the United Kingdom’s The
Co-operative Group, the world’s largest consumer
co-operative. As well as being the country’s fifth
biggest grocery retailer, it includes pharmacies,

242

Consumer Co-Operatives

travel agents, funeral services, banking, insurance
and investment services, as well as being the United
Kingdom’s biggest agricultural landowner. Mutual
financial institutions have generally dominated the
housing finance and life insurance markets in the
United States and the United Kingdom, as well as
much of the developed world.

History of the Co-Operative Movement
Organized co-operation around provisioning has
been a central feature of all human societies. The
modern co-operative movement is widely regarded
to have originated in reaction to the increasing
marketization of society and erosion of traditional
community provisioning practices. The historical
development of national co-operative movements
closely followed the process of industrialization.
Consumer co-operatives first appeared in England
in the 1760s, among shipwrights, who bought and
operated their own flour mills. The driving motivations were the increasingly widespread adulteration
of flour and the profiteering of local monopolies of
millers and bakers. Monopoly profiteering through
the notorious “truck” system of capitalist-owned
“company shops” was a key factor in the growth
of co-operative retailing. In the Victorian era, Frank
Trentmann notes, monopolies of gas and water motivated the establishment of utility co-operatives, which
were formative of a British “consumer” identity.
The Rochdale Pioneers are conventionally
regarded as the founders of the co-operative movement. In 1844 in Rochdale, northwest England, a
group of artisans established a co-operative shop
selling flour, oatmeal, sugar, and butter, which
became the prototype of the consumer co-operative.
While co-operative experiments were taking place
elsewhere in Europe at the same time, according to
Johnston Birchall, it was only when existing co-operatives, such as the Zurich Consumverien, adopted
the Rochdale system that national movements found
widespread success.
The key innovations of the Rochdale Pioneers
(and central principles of the co-operative movement
to this day) were distributing surpluses regularly in
proportion to purchases (the “dividend” or patronage refund); fixed or limited return on shares, which
remained at their original value; open membership;
one member, one vote; and a principle encouraging
investment in the education of members.

By the end of the nineteenth century, British
co-operative societies had 1.7 million members,
according to Birchall, and the Co-operative Wholesale Society (predecessor of The Co-operative
Group) was one of the largest companies in the world
and a major manufacturer, grower, and importer.
By 1914, significant consumer co-operative sectors
existed throughout Europe, Russia, and Japan; with
the British being the largest, followed by the German.
During the interwar period, the movement grew
steadily in Western Europe and became more firmly
established in North America, whereas in the fascist
countries and Bolshevik Russia it was destroyed.
From its zenith shortly after World War II, during
which, Birchall notes, it provided nearly a quarter
of all British groceries and provisions, the retail cooperative movement in Europe began a long decline.
Having to a large degree invented modern retailing,
this decline, suggests Peter Gurney, represented an
inability to compete with the new, spectacular consumerism of the chain stores. From the 1980s there
was also a strong trend in the English-speaking
economies toward de-mutualization in the financial
sector. However, consumer co-operatives flourished
in Japan, strengthened by the rapid growth of joint
buying groups (han) from the 1960s onward.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the “new wave” of
consumer co-operative whole foods stores in Europe
and North America; and, following a period of
decline, the growth of ethical consumerism, organic
agriculture, and the fair trade movement has driven
the growth of the “alternative” grocery sector and
with it consumer co-operatives (see Lang and Gabriel
2005, 48–53). Restructuring and consolidation has
seen a revival of some mainstream European movements more recently, which have also exploited and
fostered the new consumer interest in sustainability
and ethical consumption. The Co-operative Group
in the United Kingdom is notable for its development of ethical and environmental policies informed
by regular membership surveys. Since the financial
crisis of 2008, consumer co-operatives have reported
increased turnover, according to Birchall and Lou
Hammond Ketilson, and financial co-operatives,
generally, remain financially sound.

Consumer Co-Operatives Worldwide
Consumer co-operatives are commonly affiliated with
national co-operative federations, and ultimately the

Consumer Co-Operatives

International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the global
union of co-operative federations. The ICA claims
to represent over 800 million worldwide, including
18 consumer co-operative federations from 16 countries, in Europe, as well as Russia, Canada, and Japan.
The European Community of Consumer
Co-operatives states it represents 3,200 co-operatives
with a turnover of more than 70 billion euros and
25 million members. The largest supermarket chains
in Italy (Coop Italia) and Switzerland (Migros) are
consumer co-operatives. Scandinavian consumer
co-operatives also have significant market share of
the retail sector. According to Birchall and Ketilson,
co-operative banks in Europe have a market share of
20 percent and serve 159 million customers, among
them Rabobank, the largest agricultural bank in the
world, which counts 50 percent of Dutch citizens as
members.
Elsewhere, while Japan has a highly developed consumer co-operative sector, they exist on a smaller scale
in the United States, although they have and continue
to play a significant role in agriculture, where they often
function as both producer and consumer co-operatives.
Other significant forms of consumer co-operatives
in the United States include credit unions (similar to
British building societies), housing co-operatives, and
co-operative electric utilities. Consumer co-operatives
also play a significant role throughout the developing
world. Birchall notes the important role played by savings and credit co-operatives in development, a role
recognized by the United Nations.

Workers and Consumers in the Co-Operative
Movement
While consumer co-operatives are distinguished
from workers’ co-operatives, where membership is
restricted to the workers in an enterprise, workers in
consumer co-operatives are usually both members and
consumers of its goods and services. As Lang notes,
the co-operative movement of nineteenth-century
England made no distinction between people as consumers and as producers, regarding the separation as a
ruse of capitalism. Consumption was the medium, as
Trentmann puts it, for strengthening the brotherhood
of workers. While the co-operative movement valorized the consumer, Gurney notes, historically this was
sometimes to the neglect of the conditions of workers. This emphasis on consumption is reflected in a
complex and often antagonistic historical relationship

243

between the co-operative movement and the socialist,
syndicalist, and anarchist movements.

Contemporary Relevance and
Theoretical Issues
Against historical and political stances critical of the
significance of the co-operative movement, Gurney
argues that practices of the movement, such as distributing dividends, alongside the “practical socialism” of working-class educational initiatives and
female participation amounted to a “culture of cooperation,” which offered an emancipatory alternative to mainstream capitalism. Both the history
and contemporary scale of consumer co-operatives,
operating outside of mainstream economic logic
while participating in the real economy, challenge
a commonplace oversimplification in social science
that interprets modernity as a process of increasing marketization. While the origins of consumer
co-operatives lie in response to marketization and
industrialization, the movement’s newer forms and
contemporary revival can be related, suggests Lang,
with consumer disenchantment with conventional
modes of market relationship.
Dan Welch
See also Alternative Consumption; Capitalism; Fair
Trade; Political and Ethical Consumption;
Prosumption; Responsible Consumption; Voluntary
Associations

Further Readings
Birchall, Johnston. The International Co-operative
Movement. Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press, 1997.
Birchall, Johnston. “Consumer Co-Operatives in Retrospect
and Prospect.” In The New Mutualism in Public Policy,
edited by Johnston Birchall. London: Routledge, 2001.
Birchall, Johnston, and Lou Hammond Ketilson. Resilience
of the Cooperative Business Model in Times of Crisis.
Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2009.
Black, Lawrence, and Nicole Robertson, eds. Consumerism
and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British
History: Taking Stock. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2009.
Gurney, Peter. Co-operative Culture and the Politics of
Consumption in England, 1870–1930. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Lang, Tim, and Yiannis Gabriel. “A Brief History of
Consumer Activism.” In The Ethical Consumer, edited

244

Consumer Culture in Africa

by Rob Harrison, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw,
39–54. London: Sage, 2005.
Trentmann, Frank. “The Modern Genealogy of the
Consumer: Meanings, Identities and Political
Synapses.” In Consuming Cultures, Global
Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational
Exchanges, edited by John Brewer and Frank
Trentmann, 19–70. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

mass consumption began with the “civilizing” projects
of colonial states and mission groups. The ways in
which consumption has diffused throughout the continent has been influenced by African consumers’ differential access to the power and economic resources
accompanying state formation and missionary work,
according to Timothy Burke.

Diffusion of Imported Luxuries

CONSUMER CULTURE

IN

AFRICA

Consumer culture has consumed Africa, but as with
other invasions, Africa has also consumed consumer
culture in ways both familiar and exotic in comparison to developments in the West. Focusing primarily
on consumer culture in sub-Saharan Africa, a continental region of some 750 million people, this entry
draws out key issues relating to the diffusion of
luxuries, the endurance of local practices, creolization, parallel modernities, adverse consequences,
and anticonsumerist trends. The discussion excludes
Arab North Africa because the forces in play are different there.

Economic Backdrop
Conventional measures provide a generally bleak
portrait of African economies; the continent hosts the
world’s poorest countries (“Facts on Africa” 2000;
United Nations 2003). Further, the distribution of
incomes is skewed, creating small segments of wealthy
and large segments of very poor consumers (e.g.,
Burgess, Harris, and Mattes 2002). Even in Ghana,
gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is just over
US$400, and in South Africa, over 60 percent of
rural households remain unelectrified (Madubansi
and Shackleton 2006). However, while standard economic indicators are not false, they tend to conceal
more than they reveal about Africa’s vibrant consumer culture. For example, cell phone coverage has
been widely extended with dramatic positive consequences for improvements in communication and the
flow of information, including market information.
In the precolonial period, commerce was spotty, and
thus mass consumption was often limited to that which
was regionally or locally produced, even as caravans
and, on the coasts, ocean-going ships traded high-value
consumer goods between urban centers over long distances. Many agricultural commodities from Asia and
the New World diffused rapidly in Africa, however,

Three intertwined themes concern Africa’s engagement
with consumer culture. First, in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, as Africa was incorporated into
the global economy through the sales of raw materials or labor to Western interests, novel consumer
goods allowed some people to emphasize individual
identity at the expense of forms of identity based on
groups such as lineages and clans. Today, imported
consumer goods from Europe and more recently from
Asia provide vehicles for constructing “modern” cosmopolitan consumer lifestyles and identities. Exotic
consumer goods from the metropolitan countries are
now used widely to convey status and prestige. Cars
(see the “mama Benz” of Togo or the wa-Benzi of East
Africa), clothing, and buildings, both private homes
and public buildings such as mosques, become important indicators of status. This engagement with exotic
consumer goods has been fueled by the diffusion of
sophisticated market apparatus, transportation, and
communications, and the flow of migrants between
Africa and Europe, not to mention the “prosperity
doctrine” of some missionary churches.
The economies of some countries are dependent on the production and export of one or a few
commodities. Thus, the economies of Zambia or
the Democratic Republic of the Congo are largely
dependent on minerals exports. Nigeria has become
a major petroleum exporter, while the economy of
Cote d’Ivoire is largely dependent on cocoa, coffee,
and palm oil. This concentration of production is
coupled with an uneven distribution of wealth and
purchasing power. Those people who manage production and export are often elite consumers. Their
luxury consumption patterns continue to be influenced by the colonial experience. French-speaking
Africans consume a higher proportion of French
luxuries, and English-speaking Africans consume
more of the English variety.
The bulk of consumers, however, controls a relatively small share of their nation’s total purchasing
power. Their consumption behavior is molded by

Consumer Culture in Africa

more local tastes and preferences and constrained by
limited purchasing power. Malnutrition, especially
among women and children, remains a problem
even in wealthier countries. Nonetheless, particularly
through the vehicle of life cycle celebrations, and
often via the situational influence of young brides
and their families, many imported goods have diffused widely throughout African communities. Often
this troubles both public authorities and the populace
because of the exceedingly high costs of marriage.

Enduring Local Tastes
Second, longstanding precolonial consumption practices typically remain strongly rooted, even as contemporary practices associated with the colonial and
postcolonial experiences are layered over them. Thus,
studies of household expenditure patterns in Ghana,
Tanzania, and Cote d’Ivoire show that the share of
household expenditures on food remains relatively
high, even at higher levels of income, although Engle’s
law suggests that the share of income spent on food
should decline with income increases. Likely explanations, according to Christopher Udry and Hyungi
Woo, are relative poverty, the weakness of formal
financial investment opportunities, and the normative importance of social investments in networks of
kin, credit, and cult; in other words, in social capital
as a source of security and status.
Consumption of traditional products has, in many
cases, persisted and indeed thrived. Fish from the
inner delta of the Niger and the east African lakes,
livestock and hides produced in semiarid regions, salt
and dates produced in desert oases, kola nuts from
the Guinea Coast, and the mildly narcotic khat in the
Horn region, for example. Kola nuts, widely traded
in West Africa, continue to play an important role
in symbolizing hospitality, marital alliance, political
affiliation, and ritual obeisance. Throughout contemporary African communities, both rural and urban—
from the Haya in Tanzania to the Bobo in Burkina
Faso—locally brewed beers and palm wine are ubiquitously marketed.
Among the poorer consumer segments, consumption choices are often embedded in patterns of behavior that are perceived to be traditional. For many,
motivations driving consumption are achieving
increased family solidarity or social standing within
local networks of prestige, not individual consumer
prestige. For example, with remittances from male
kinsmen working abroad, female elders in Wolof

245

Murid communities in Senegal not only finance
consumption associated with baptisms, weddings,
and funerals, but also acquire the clothing and
the coiffure that indexes their prosperity and draws
newcomers into their networks of exchange. . . .
Female elders participate in exchange contests driven
by ostentatious displays of wealth and conspicuous
consumption. For women, value is action, the capacity
to move money through commercial and ritual
circuits and to achieve social, economic and biological
production. (Buggenhagen 2001, 393–394)

A key role for consumer goods in Africa is their
ability to display wealth, life force, and status and
exert power over others when given as gifts. Consumer
goods are important insofar as they tell a tale about
the resources available to the broader kin group.

Creolization
Creolization describes consumption patterns that
combine elements of local and foreign consumption
traditions, and this is ubiquitous. For example, there
has been an explosion of fast food in African countries. In Nigeria, foreign fast food is a predominantly
urban phenomenon, whereas traditional fast food
is found everywhere. Traditional fast food is mainly
prepared with indigenous ingredients and conforms
to local taste. Foreign models are more diversified,
as urban populations embrace consumption patterns broadly similar to cosmopolitan ones, under
the impetus of resource availability and following
modern trends (Olutayo and Akanle 2009, 210).
Proliferating fast food can be found in most of the
larger African urban centers.
African ideas of the body are very important in
accounting for African consumption of creolized
clothing and cosmetics. Self-respect, kinship status, wealth, and identity are bound tightly together
with the wearing of clothing, particularly on public
occasions. In clothing consumption Africans generate, concretize, and experience meaning, significance,
and value. Handmade “traditional” garb becomes
a luxury. Made-to-order clothing combining metropolitan and local materials and aesthetics is a significant component of most household expenditures.
Creolized clothing consumption may reach its apogee
in the behavior of Congolese sapeur, who participate
in elaborate rituals of conspicuous consumption of
French fashions that incorporate traditional ideas
about the accumulation of life force. In addition, the

246

Consumer Culture in Africa

countries of sub-Saharan Africa form the world’s
largest secondhand clothing destination, receiving
close to 30 percent of total world exports in 2001,
with a value of US$405 million in 2003 (United
Nations 1996, 2003). Throughout Africa, consumers
incorporate secondhand clothing into their dress universe. Cosmetics and skin care products have been
widely marketed. In East Africa, Unilever has effectively employed gender and class market segmentation. L’Oréal has developed a line of inexpensive
shampoos, soaps, and shower gels to emphasize skin
softness, something to which West African women
are sensitive.
Finally, Africans have become avid producers and
consumers of creolized music and video products.
A host of pop music hybrids include Congo, Cote
d’Ivoire, and Mali as major sources with Madagascar,
Nigeria, and South Africa close behind. Nigeria is a
major video producer. Popular varieties range from
staid recordings of Islamic sermons to soap operas
that deal with social and political controversies; both
often offer consumers rather explicit didactic lessons
about modernity and its discontents.

Parallel Modernities
A third trend is African consumers’ imaginative
engagement with alternative modern worlds that are
different from their own but also without the ideological and political baggage associated with the former colonial powers. The Islamic Middle East and
Hindu South Asia offer alternative models of consumption. In immediate sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic
practice, dress, and ornament has become de rigueur
for political and commercial elites. South Asian consumer styles diffused through Bollywood films contain a focus on kinship and marriage and resilient,
conservative moral codes and provide an alternative
to local “tradition” and Western modernity alike
that many find appealing. Indian films have been valued consumer goods in offering a long running and
evolving commentary on gender relations, materialism, and love.

Consequences
One consequence of Africans’ participation in
global consumer culture is “accelerated consumerism, . . . producing consumers without affordability
and affordability without the typical signs of effort.
Everyone seems gripped by ‘the allure of accruing

wealth from nothing’ or of spending without earning, as ‘the will to consume outstrips the opportunity to earn.’ . . . Selling adults and children into
slavery and prostitution, migrating in search of
greener pastures, . . . and seeking magical solutions
to material predicaments . . . are increasingly attractive options” for less fortunate Africans. “Accelerated consumerism . . . heighten[s] the uncertainties
in African lives” and increases the helplessness of
socially marginal people, especially children and
women (Nyamnjoh 2005, 296). Property crimes
have become rife in Africa’s bigger cities. Certain
long-standing values, such as the equation of feminine
beauty and weight in a context of changing foodways, are leading some Africans into health problems associated with obesity. Thus, adverse effects
accompany the spread of consumer culture in Africa.
A complicated relationship between consumerism
and white racial attitudes and African reactions is
evident, especially in eastern and southern Africa.
There, marketing campaigns associated with cleanliness and “decency” have tended to incorporate
white racist attitudes. Concomitantly, the diffusion of
Western commodities “has frequently been regarded
in southern African societies as a negative and
oppressive experience,” part of an overall pattern of
“submission to white authority” (Burke 1996, 203).

Anticonsumerism
Anticonsumerist movements—indirect responses
to International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural
adjustment programs, direct responses to rapid social
change—exist in sub-Saharan Africa as they do elsewhere. In general, anticonsumerist sentiments are
bound up with rejection of the foreign, usually the
Western. One current is associated with fundamentalist Islamic movements; another with Pentecostalism,
which paradoxically adopts both a gospel of prosperity and a distrustful attitude toward foreign commodities that Pentecostals link to a spiritual struggle
against satanic forces. In both cases, a solution to the
dangers of Western consumption is sought through
spiritual practices and the control of desire. A third
response is the expansion of occult claims, specifically witchcraft accusations, that are often associated
with jealousy and envy directed toward the haves by
the have-nots, but also represent a dialogue about
wealth, poverty, morality, and modern consumerism.
Eric J. Arnould

Consumer Culture in East Asia
See also Caribbean and the Slave Trade; Colonialism;
Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Culture in
Latin America; Glocalization; Inequalities; Measuring
Standards of Living; Social and Economic
Development

Further Readings
Buggenhagen, Beth Anne. “Prophets and Profits: Gendered
and Generational Visions of Wealth and Vision in
Senegalese Murid Households.” Journal of Religion in
Africa 31, no. 4 (2001): 373–402.
Burgess, Steven M., Mari Harris, and Robert B. Mattes. SA
Tribes: Who We Are, How We Live and What We Want
from Life in the New South Africa. Cape Town, South
Africa: New Africa Books, 2002.
Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
“Facts on Africa.” Jeune Afrique (November 2000): 7–13.
Madubansi, M., and C. M. Shackleton. “Changing Energy
Profiles and Consumption Patterns Following
Electrification in Five Rural Villages South Africa.”
Energy Policy 34 (2006): 4081–4092.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Fishing in Troubled Waters:
Disquettes and Thiofs in Dakar.” Africa 75, no. 3
(2005): 295–324.
Olutayo, A. O., and Olayinka Akanle. “Fast Food in
Ibadan: An Emerging Consumption Pattern.” Africa 79,
no. 2 (2009): 207–227.
Udry, Christopher, and Woo Hyungi. “Households and the
Social Organization of Consumption in Southern
Ghana.” African Studies Review 50 (September 2007):
139–153.
United Nations. 1995 International Trade Statistics
Yearbook. Vol. 2, Trade by Commodity. New York:
Author, 1996.
United Nations. World Economic and Social Survey 2003.
New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
United Nations, 2003.
Weiss, Brad. “Northwestern Tanzania on a Single Shilling:
Sociality, Embodiment, Valuation.” Cultural
Anthropology 12 (August 1997): 335–362.

CONSUMER CULTURE

IN

EAST ASIA

The purchase of products for other than utilitarian reasons is a benchmark indicator of a modern
consumer society. In this sense, the consumption
practices found in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,
China, and Hong Kong are distinctly modern.
Throughout East Asia, the assimilation of European

247

and American products and practices as well as the
adaptation of these products and practices to local
conditions has been a hallmark of the consumption
process. This phenomenon of borrowing and adapting dates back to the earliest years of the Meiji era
(1868–1912) in Japan. By the 1920s, baseball, jazz,
and Western clothing and hair styles were common
in urban Japan. However, Simon Partner notes that
in postwar Japan, an intensive industrialization effort
supported by the United States led to the growth of
a large middle class and the emergence of mass consumption. Similar economic policies in South Korea
and Taiwan, in turn tied to the end of military rule in
both states and the development of vibrant civil societies in the 1980s, led to a similar result. It is worth
noting that in all three of these states, the emergence
of a mass consumer society occurred during years
of an overt American military presence. However, it
would be an error to conclude that East Asian societies became consumer societies as a result of occupation and subsequent Americanization. Instead, it is
more accurate to say that Japan, South Korea, and
Taiwan transformed American concepts and products into distinctly local “things” within a strongly
Confucian moral framework.
East Asian state policies and social norms have
historically encouraged savings and thrift, and consumer credit was, until relatively recently, much more
restricted than in the United States. Beginning in the
late-nineteenth century, the Japanese government
encouraged citizens, particularly women (who generally controlled family spending) to save through a
national postal savings system as a means of helping the state to grow militarily and economically.
After World War II, consumer credit first appeared
in the form of installment payments in large Japanese
department stores, while bank credit for individuals
was legally limited. During the 1980s, Japan and the
United States were sharply at odds over credit issues,
with American officials arguing that Japanese credit
policies encouraged consumer savings and discouraged the consumption of foreign goods and services.
Japanese officials, in contrast, argued that American
consumers lived beyond their means by relying on
easy credit. In the wake of an economic downturn
that began in the late 1980s, the Japanese government ended limits on revolving credit in 1992, which
enabled citizens to roll over their monthly credit
debts. In South Korea, the government of President
Park Chung-Hee (1961–1979) emphasized patriotic

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Consumer Culture in East Asia

consumerism in the service of national development.
Imports of consumer goods were strictly limited,
while domestic productions focused on exports. This
left Koreans of all social classes tied to a shared narrative of a future time of greater consumption.
However, as the economy boomed in the 1980s,
domestic consumption sharply increased, along with
visible social inequities. A resulting “eliminate excessive consumption” campaign launched by the government and supported by mass media was highly
gendered, targeting the presumed waste and excess of
women, according to Laura Nelson. Korean women,
like Japanese women, are popularly viewed as the
managers of family money and hence the primary
consumers in a household. In the wake of the Asian
financial crisis from 1997 to 1998, the South Korean
government stopped campaigning against conspicuous consumption and instead began to encourage the
“appropriate” consumption of domestic goods as a
means of strengthening the economy. As in Japan,
this policy shift has resulted in the rapid growth of
credit card use among South Koreans, with all of the
attendant side effects, including bankruptcy.
In China, consumption practices have followed
a very different path. After 1949, urban housing
was nationalized, as were most factories and businesses. Even basic goods were rationed, including rice, meat, and oil. By the time of the Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976), consumerism as a practice
had largely disappeared, as had the ability of most
people to travel and consume. Following the start
of reform policies in 1979, the Chinese Communist
Party encouraged foreign investment, particularly
from its East Asian neighbors, in export-related
light industries, such as textiles, toys, and electronic
products. As late as 1989, most urban residents still
lived in state housing, worked for state companies,
and had little disposable income. However, in the last
two decades, most state housing has been privatized,
the state employment sector has shrunk dramatically,
and both domestic and foreign companies produce
consumer products for the domestic market. Today,
both urban and rural residents have access to durable
goods, such as televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, and now automobiles, along with private
housing estates and travel.
Consumer behavior in Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan, and increasingly China looks much like
consumer behavior in the United States. Citizens
increasingly use credit cards instead of cash, and

personal debt continues to rise. However, while mass
consumption is clearly a fact in East Asia, the social
norms that guide consumer behavior, popular views
about savings and credit, and the place of community
and nation in individual consumer choice are very
different than in the United States. First, the notion
of the consumer as sovereign king, or the measure of
public good defined as individual consumer choice,
is not as evident. Instead, a dynamic tension remains
in Confucian-dominated societies such as Japan,
South Korea, and China over the issue of consumption and how to pay for this. According to Sheldon
Garon and Patricia Maclachlan, these societies
exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward conspicuous
consumption, especially when it is seen to infringe on
morality, community, and the nation. In all of these
societies, individual consumer choices have for more
than a century been linked to issues of patriotism and
national unity. As Japan rapidly modernized in the
early decades of the twentieth century, citizens were
instructed to consume Japanese products. Similarly,
in Republican China, consumption was explicitly
linked to an emerging national identity, Karl Gerth
reports. Indeed, in the years preceding the Japanese
invasion and occupation that lasted from 1937
until 1945, Chinese consumer boycotts of Japanese
products were a tool of resistance and a means of
cultivating a national identity. The role of consumption in the building of a nation has been especially
important in the Republic of Korea. Classified as one
of the poorest countries in the world in 1960, South
Korea by 2000 has the thirteenth largest economy in
the world. Yet until the early 1990s, Japanese mass
media products were banned, a by-product of the
Japanese occupation that lasted from 1905 until
1945, and calls to “buy Korean” are frequently
voiced in the media.
This societal tendency to consume as citizens of
a collective society rather than as autonomous individuals is manifested in debates over imported products such as beef, fruits, and rice in Japan and South
Korea. Indeed, it is increasingly clear to researchers
that Korean, Japanese, and to some extent Chinese
consumers make choices based not simply on their
individual self-interest in the form of lowest prices,
but instead on a more complex set of factors that
take account of, broadly, national interests, but also
the personal interests of their fellow countrypeople.
In short, personal consumption that is too personal
is morally suspect, particularly in Japan and South

Consumer Culture in Latin America

Korea, and hence to be questioned. The distinct shift
in the past decade in both state policies and social
attitudes toward credit-driven consumption has
heightened this debate, particularly in regard to the
role of youth.
This leads to a final issue, that of the cultural effects
of increased consumption, especially of foreign goods
and services. As noted at the beginning of this entry,
Western consumer products, fashions, and styles have
been part of East Asian consumption patterns for
almost a century. Nevertheless, worries about cultural
degradation continue. The effects of conspicuous
consumption on the moral worth of Korean women
and youth is a common media topic in South Korea,
according to Nelson, while the Chinese government
launched a campaign against “spiritual pollution”
in 1983 and again following the 1989 Tiananmen
events. However, unlike in South Korea, Japan, and
to some extent Taiwan, the Chinese government
shows little concern for the cultural impact of heightened consumerism. Instead, both the government and
the Communist Party appear more focused on the
potential empowerment of consumers.
Robert J. Shepherd
See also Americanization; Consumer Policy (China);
Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumption in Postsocialist
China; Inequalities; Japan as a Consumer Culture;
Licensing of Clothing Brands; National Cultures

Further Readings
Garon, Sheldon, and Patricia Maclachlan, eds. The
Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in
East Asia and the West. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006.
Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the
Creation of a Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004.
Maclachlan, Patricia. Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan:
The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Nelson, Laura. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and
Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000.
Nishimura, Takao. “Household Debt and Consumer
Education in Postwar Japan.” In The Ambivalent
Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and
the West, edited by Sheldon Garon and Patricia
Maclachlan, 260–280. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006.

249

Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and
the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley:
University of California, 2000.

CONSUMER CULTURE
LATIN AMERICA

IN

Latin America, the region including Mexico, Central
America, the Caribbean, and South America, is
undergoing rapid changes in consumer-based identities, consumption practices, and material culture.
Over time, its peoples have developed “hybrid”
consumer cultures combining European, North
American, indigenous, and African goods, rituals, and
attitudes and reflecting the region’s political and economic subordination to Europe and the United States.
Scholarship on consumer culture in Latin America
began in earnest in the 1980s, though observations
regarding consumers appeared earlier. The region is of
interest because it evidences patterns found in wealthy
countries—individualization, ownership concentration in the media industry, modern retail formats, and
consumers’ quest for authentic experiences—while
retaining its distinct cultures and history. The region’s
history and consumption patterns are reviewed alongside the case of Chile, a country whose free market
policies significantly altered its consumer landscape.
Suggestions are offered for further research.

Historical Features
Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser extent, Britain,
France, and the Netherlands) colonized Latin
America beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europeans found a sophisticated material culture, especially within the Aztec and Inca Empires.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, Europeans
brought African slaves with distinct cultures to the
continent. During the colonial era, Europeans, native
peoples, and Africans formed families, forming a
hybrid culture including elements from each group.
Arnold Bauer’s Goods, Power, History contends
that during the colonial era (1492–1824), Europeans
attempted to impose their food, dress, town planning, and religious rituals on mixed-race (mestizo)
native peoples. Many members of the latter groups
attempted to imitate the Europeans through dress
or behavior to improve their quality of life (or in
the case of native peoples, to escape labor and tax

250

Consumer Culture in Latin America

obligations). Still, many indigenous and African communities retained precolonial dress, food, adornment,
and rituals, while others adapted imported goods to
local contexts. After the Latin American independence
wars (1810–1824), Latin American-born “creole”
elites emulated French and British elites’ consumption
styles to distinguish themselves from their mestizo,
indigenous, or black countrymen; mestizos emulated
elites; and rural native peoples living in separate communities retained consumption traditions.
Following the onset of the Great Depression from
1929 to 1931, Latin American governments sought
to reduce their reliance on export sales to gain hard
currency needed to purchase imported manufactured
goods, adopting policies that protected or helped
create local manufacturers. These “import substitution industrialization” policies coincided with elites’
increased support for national identities defined as
“mestizo” rather than “white.” The era witnessed
the standardization of domestic consumer goods and
government promotion of locally based cultural activities and products (particularly film and folk arts).
Since the 1970s and 1980s, policies reducing
government controls over production and trade
contributed to the increased influence of U.S.-based
products, retailers, brands, and multimedia entertainment, reflecting the process of globalization—
increased economic, political, social, and cultural
connections across regions and nations.

Contemporary Patterns
Current research asks the following questions:
(a) Is globalization changing Latin American cultures through the introduction of North American
and European models of consumption? (b) Are new
forms of consumption making Latin Americans
more individualistic, oriented toward private life,
and politically apathetic? (c) How do new forms of
consumption intersect with social inequality?
Néstor García Canclini’s Consumers and Citizens
contends that Latin American tastes in entertainment products are becoming more “Americanized”
and privatized. The author uses survey and interview
data to argue that social identities formerly rooted
in political participation (through unions, associations, or parties) are increasingly linked to membership in global consumption-based communities, such
as groups of rock music fans. This change reflects
decreasing state support for domestic entertainment

industries, declining popularity of political ideologies
promoting social change, and more concentrated U.S.
corporate ownership of entertainment industries. He
finds variations in consumer tastes in film, television,
and art across age groups and social classes, but
notes that Latin Americans mostly watch U.S. film
and TV programs in their homes.
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld’s The Native Leisure
Class analyzes native people in the city of Otavalo,
Ecuador, and argues that globalization has promoted
the revival of indigenous culture. Native weavers
and merchants have gained commercial success selling local and regional crafts to U.S. and European
customers seeking “authentic” goods. They display
growing wealth by sponsoring traditional fiestas,
wearing expensive native dress, and building homes
in their native city. Their increased wealth has intensified class divisions in Otavalo.
Richard Wilk’s Home Cooking in the Global
Village, a history of food in Belize (the former
British colony in Central America), shows that since
Europeans’ first arrival to its territory, Belize has
relied on both imported and domestic ingredients
in foods. However, most Belizeans rejected native
dishes until the late-twentieth century. British colonial officials encouraged local employees to consume
imported processed foods, giving imports high status
among middle- and upper-class Belizeans (though the
latter secretly enjoyed “bush food,” traditional rural
cuisine using locally based ingredients), while poor
Belizeans developed unique recipes mixing local and
imported ingredients. When Belizeans migrated to
the United States during the 1970s, they missed local
foods and opened restaurants selling national dishes.
U.S. tourists in Belize sought “unique” local food,
and returning Belizeans opened restaurants there
while taking pride in local dishes. Contemporary globalization created the conditions through which local
foods became popular among Belizeans.
Maureen O’ Dougherty’s Consumption Intensified
studies how Brazil’s middle class coped with that
country’s extremely high inflation during the 1980s.
The author finds that members of this group went
to great lengths to maintain their socioeconomic
status. They purchased foreign goods during trips to
the United States, visited Disneyworld, and bought
imports in illegal Brazilian markets, all to retain their
membership in Brazil’s middle class. Each of these
studies shows the complex and unpredictable effects
of contemporary globalization on local subjects.

Consumer Culture in the USSR

Consumer Culture in Chile
Because of its free market economic policies, Chile
would seem the most likely Latin American country to embrace American and global consumer
products, images, and ideas. Beginning in the 1970s
during General Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian rule
(1973–1990), the government applied free market
policies, such as privatization of businesses and services, tax reductions on imports, and deregulation of
urban land markets. Since the late 1970s, but most
forcefully after 1990, Chile has witnessed a boom in
shopping centers, big-box stores, gated communities,
and credit card use; as well as the consumption of
American, European, and Japanese television, film,
music, and products.
Scholars have competing interpretations of these
developments. Tomás Moulian’s El Consume me
Consume contends that Chileans are status conscious
consumers caught in a cycle of debt and spending
who find an outlet for hedonistic desires through
shopping mall visits. In contrast, Eugenio Tironi’s
La Irrupción de las Masas y el Malestar de las Elites
views growing purchases among low- and moderateincome Chileans as evidence of the democratization
of consumption. In a third view, the Programa de
las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo’s (PNUD)
Nosotros, los Chilenos argues that Chileans develop
their identities through consumer goods and images,
reflecting the “aestheticization of everyday life.”
Others question the view that Chileans are increasingly individualistic consumers. Heidi Tinsman’s
“Politics of Gender and Consumption in Authoritarian
Chile, 1973–1990” finds that female agricultural
workers used earnings to gain independence from
husbands, give gifts to friends, and challenge traditional gender norms. Joel Stillerman’s “Gender, Class
and Generational Contexts for Consumption in
Contemporary Chile” found that working-class male
wage earners largely control family budgets, while
men and women exhibit distinct priorities for household expenses. Spouses restrict personal consumption
to provide for children and elderly parents and to
uphold the moral value of self-control.

Conclusion
Like the rest of Latin America, Chile provides ambiguous evidence regarding the effects of globalization
on consumer practices and identities. Survey research
and comparisons within and beyond the region will

251

illuminate the attitudes and practices of consumers
across social groups while rooting analyses in comparative and theoretical debates. Ethnographic,
audiovisual, and autobiographical inquiry will provide insight into consumer subjectivities and the
integration of consumption into everyday routines.
Examination of youth subcultures, digital cultures,
and variations across racial and ethnic groups will
enrich our understanding of diverse consumer groups.
Joel Stillerman
See also Anthropology; Colonialism; Ethnicity/Race;
Food Consumption; Globalization; Individualization;
Inequalities; National Cultures

Further Readings
Bauer, Arnold. Goods, Power, History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi. The Native Leisure Class.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
García Canclini, Néstor. Consumers and Citizens.
Translated and Introduction by George Yúdice.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Moulian, Tomás. El Consumo me Consume. Santiago,
Chile: LOM ediciones, 1998.
O’Dougherty, Maureen. Consumption Intensified. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo
(PNUD). Nosotros, los Chilenos. Santiago, Chile:
Author, 2002.
Stillerman, Joel. “Gender, Class, and Generational Contexts
for Consumption in Contemporary Chile.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 4, no. 1 (March 2004): 51–78.
Tinsman, Heidi. “Politics of Gender and Consumption in
Authoritarian Chile, 1973–1990.” Latin American
Research Review 41, no. 3 (2006): 7–31.
Tironi, Eugenio. La irrupción de las masas y el malestar de
las elites. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Grijalbo, 1999.
Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.

CONSUMER CULTURE
IN THE USSR
Soviet culture of consumption sounds paradoxical
to those who associate culture with civilized manners and consumption with abundance of goods and
service. What many people from the Soviet Union
(or, formally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,

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Consumer Culture in the USSR

or USSR) and other socialist countries remember
are shortages, long waiting lines, and crude service
personnel in the shops and restaurants. They can,
however, also cherish the memories of such services
and such consumer goods that they cannot afford
any longer under the new conditions of the market
economy. These two seemingly contradictory experiences had one and the same cause. The Soviet economy was a centrally planned economy. Therefore,
the great majority of consumer goods were not sold
to the customers for their market prices. Prices were
determined by the state planning offices and, in the
last instance, by the ruling Communist Party of the
Soviet Union. Therefore, in socialism supply did not
meet demand. Many ordinary consumer goods, food
included, were often scarce (“deficit”) and in great
demand. Money alone was no guarantee of such
goods. More important was the “privilege of access.”

Access to Goods
In a centrally planned, socialist economy, one could
get access to deficit goods by one of four ways:
first, one could wait for them—either concretely by
standing in a line, often for hours or even overnight,
whenever the desired goods happened to be available in the local shops. Second, one could have access
to such goods due to one’s social position or one’s
workplace. Until the very end of the Soviet Union,
many consumer goods and durables from better food
to cars and refrigerators, as well as, for instance,
new apartments and summer cottages, were distributed through the workplaces and other official
social organizations. The consumer, as a rule, had to
pay the full, official price for them, which the state
planning offices had determined. The main difference was that they were either not at all available
or sold only very irregularly in the ordinary Soviet
shops. Third, one could buy them in the local kolkhoz market, where peasants sold the produce of their
small private plots. The prices of these, mainly food
items, came closest to the “real” market prices. They
were usually much higher than the prices in the stateowned or co-operative food stores. The main difference was that, on the peasant markets, they were
available without long waiting lines. These peasant
markets selling food products grown on very small
peasant plots of land catered to the Soviet consumption of many major food items, from milk and eggs
to fresh vegetables and meat.

Finally, one could buy consumer goods, food
included, on the black market. Although official
statistics do not exist, it can be estimated that the
share of the black market in the distribution of many
consumer goods was quite remarkable. Black market prices were often quite out of proportion. For
instance, for a pair of illegally imported American
jeans, one would have to pay almost the whole
monthly wages of an industrial worker. The products sold on the black market came basically from
two sources: they were either stolen from the state
economic organizations or illegally imported from
abroad. A third alternative was that people who had
access to them due to their privileged position sold
them further to other private customers.
The Soviet system of consumption had another
important feature: large regional differences in the
availability of almost all consumer goods but in
particular more highly valued fashionable items and
novelties. These were heavily concentrated in the big
cities and in Moscow in particular. To get access to
such goods, people often had to travel long distances.
Numerous are the stories about the long “shopping
lists” that anyone visiting the capital from the provinces on work or pleasure was expected to bring
back home to their friends, neighbors, colleagues,
and relatives.

Infrastructure of Consumption
The basic infrastructure of Soviet consumption was
created in the 1930s, almost twenty years after the
October Revolution, at the time of the consolidation of Stalin’s power. The Soviet distribution chain
consisted of several types of stores and service
units. The so-called commercial shops, restaurants,
cafés, and canteens were open to anyone who had
money to buy their products and services. They sold
their goods for officially established state prices.
Gastronom and Bakaleya food stores, as well as
the central department stores in bigger cities, represented the upper end of this commercial system of
distribution; rural cooperative shops and local canteens, its lower end. Prices differed between these
institutions but so did the quality and the selection
of goods on sale. The closed system of distribution
was an equally important source of consumption at
these commercial shops. It consisted of stores, restaurants, canteens, and other service centers open only
to a limited clientele attached to a ministry, factory,

Consumer Culture in the USSR

a railway depot, an educational or a research institution, and so on. Many important goods, from better, festive food items to highly valued durables, were
distributed through such closed outlets. The higher
functionaries of the central party organizations, the
more important ministries, and the state police had
their own closed shops and fashion ateliers. Bigger
and more prosperous factories and other workplaces
could also provide food for their workers with lower,
subsidized prices than the commercial shops. Most
important, to be attached to one of these closed outlets was often the only way for an ordinary Soviet citizen to get access to better quality consumer goods.
Since these economic, educational, and administrative organizations greatly differed in their economic and political importance and had quite varied
resources at their disposal, the type of organization
to which a consumer was officially attached through
his or her work or study place made a major difference in his or her living standards. It was quite common, for instance, that the workers at a strategically
important economic organization that was situated in
far corner of the country could be compensated by
the special distribution of such highly valued and rare
goods as, for instance, imported Italian boots or fresh
vegetables all year around. The goods distributed
through these closed outlets could be of high quality,
luxury goods but, at the same time, the customers
always had to be satisfied with the limited “nomenklatura” of goods available in their own particular
closed shop or restaurant. If not satisfied, they could
not simply go to another shop with an assortment of
goods better to their liking.
The illegal economy, black markets, and the
economy of favors plagued the Soviet Union and all
socialist countries until their very end. The authorities declared, mostly with limited success, campaigns
against economic corruption. It was a natural consequence of the planned state economy with administratively strictly fixed prices and quantities of
products. As some researchers have claimed, corruption was both deeply rooted in the system and quite
necessary to its functioning. This nonofficial system
of distribution compensated for the rigidity of the
official economy and made it run more smoothly.
Equally important was that almost everyone was, in
one way or another, involved in the dealings of this
informal and often illegal economy, which consisted
of anything from doing a favor for a friend or a relative (e.g., servicing a car ahead of the line or selling a

253

fashionable dress “under the counter”) to large-scale
financial operations by organizing private production and distribution of goods on the side (e.g., car
spare parts or fur coats and hats). Black market deals
did not restrict themselves to the relations between
the producers and their private customers. Such
operations were common in the nonofficial exchange
relations between big factories, which took place
alongside the annual plans.
The authorities fought regularly against this illegal
economy and corruption by organizing campaigns
of discipline, publishing news about illegal activities, imposing heavy punishments after court cases.
During Leonid Brezhnev’s government, the illegal
economy became an inevitable part of the planned
economy. As long as it was kept within the “normal” limits, it was tolerated, and only cases of excessive accumulation of private wealth were publicly
condemned and actively prosecuted. Since almost
everyone was involved, the strict following of the
written law and effective control would have made
everyone a criminal. Quite often, the members of
the Communist Party caught in the “normal” illegal
activities were, for instance, simply reprimanded by
their workplace party organization.
Being a successful consumer in the Soviet Union
was often a whole-day profession. To get access to the
fashionable and valued rare goods, one had to have
either a lot of time to stand in a waiting line, the right
connections to the right people, or a lot of money
to buy it on the black market. Soviet citizens with a
lot of time at their disposal, such as retired people,
could—by standing in waiting lines for others—make
a remarkable difference in their otherwise meager
economic conditions. One could also improve one’s
economic position by selling such valuable goods,
like private cars or fine clothes, for a higher price than
one had paid for them. Despite the quite remarkable
postwar rates of economic growth and the rapidly
rising living standards of the Soviet citizens, shortages did not disappear. On the contrary, it looked
as if the more the country produced, the bigger the
shortages and waiting lines became. In many cases,
the demand for consumer goods was almost endless, and the Soviet consumers were never satisfied.
Paradoxically, at the same time goods could remain
unsold on the shop shelves due to their inferior quality or unreasonably high price.
The Soviet Union enjoys the questionable reputation of being the only country that introduced the

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Consumer Culture in the USSR

rationing of the basic foodstuffs under peace time
conditions. After the October Revolution of 1917
and the following civil war, the Bolsheviks made serious concessions to their ideological goals by allowing
small-scale private enterprises and peasant farms.
This period of the New Economic Policy (NEP)
ended with the introduction of the first of the Five
Year Plans in 1928 to 1929. By the end of the 1920s,
all private economic enterprises, in manufacturing,
trade, and service, had been closed and the violent
collectivization of agriculture started. Together with
the program of forced industrialization, which concentrated all the economic resources of the country
into building the basics of “heavy” metallurgical
industry and electric power stations, collectivization
lead to the starvation of millions of people in the
early 1930s. Those who survived lived under very
meager conditions on the limited rations of food they
received from the state, which depended on the presumed importance of their contribution to the Soviet
economy. The kolkhoz peasants mostly had to make
do with the produce of their small private plots since
the whole agricultural product of their kolkhozes
went directly to the state.
The strict rationing of basic foodstuffs ended first
in 1936, only to be start again after the outbreak of
World War II. After the war, it took a long time for the
Soviet economy to recover and return to “normalcy.”
The prewar standards of consumption were reached
first in the second half of the 1950s. Therefore,
despite the fact that many basic institutions of
Soviet consumption, such as the “commercial”
Gastronom and Bakaleya food stores and the state
department stores, were established before the war,
one can, with good reason, start counting the history
of the Soviet system of consumption from the end of
the 1950s.
The postwar decades witnessed the gradual, limited opening of the Soviet economy to international
markets. The founding of the COMECON, the economic organization of the East European communist
states, created a common internal Eastern European
market for planned economies. Even though never
totally abandoning the doctrine of socialist selfreliance and the primacy of the needs of “heavy”
(machine building) industry, the Soviet Union started
to import consumer goods from the West. To many
ordinary Soviet citizens, Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to import grain from the United States was a
crucial sign of policy change. The threat of large-scale

famines, which plagued the country in the early
1930s, was thereby avoided. The inefficiency of the
domestic, collectivized agriculture left Soviet citizens
at the mercy of the annual variations in domestic
harvests. Even though Soviet citizens did not have
to suffer from pure hunger anymore, they had, as
a rule, no guarantees of the regular supply of many
of the basic agricultural products, which led to their
hoarding, which further interfered with their regular
supply to the customers.
The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the
1960s are generally regarded as the golden years of
the Soviet economy, when its economic growth was
rapid and the general standard of living grew faster,
only to start slowing down in Brezhnev’s later years,
generally known as the period of the “stand-still.”
The Soviet Union declared an open and peaceful
competition with the leading countries of the West,
with the United States, the richest and biggest capitalist economy, as the main competitor. The leaders
of the Soviet Union promised that due to the superior
effectiveness of its planned economy, the country
would reach and overstep the standards of living of
the most advanced capitalist countries. Khrushchev
boasted notoriously of overcoming the per capita
production of meat in the United States.
In declaring this open competition, the Communist
Party implicitly acknowledged that many features
of the Western consumer society were worth copying, from American fast food to Paris fashion, from
supermarkets to private, family cars. Despite great
efforts, the Soviet economy lagged substantially
behind in the per capita consumption of many items
of individual consumption, from meat and milk to
private cars and living space. Soviet households kept
pace with the “workers living under the yoke of capitalism” as far as the ownership of the radios, TVs,
refrigerators, and sewing machines was concerned.
Many of these items of home technology were, in
addition, produced in a variety of models and prices.
Such quantitative comparison, however, does not tell
anything about the quality of the available products,
a permanent source of worry to Soviet planners and
consumers. Not to speak of the availability of, say,
more fashionable and varied clothing.
The process of urbanization was exceptionally
rapid in the Soviet Union, with tens of millions of
people within a short period of time moving from
the countryside to the new suburbs of the cities, with
their shopping and service centers. The 1970s saw

Consumer Culture in the USSR

the establishment of huge service centers, with fashion ateliers, dry cleaners, hairdressers, photo ateliers,
and so on, in bigger cities and suburbs all over the
country. The theories of convergence popular among
social scientists in the West—and living “undercover” even in the East—seemed to have much to say
for them. The living styles as well as the future hopes
of the suburban middle class, or as it was called in
the Soviet Union, the “intelligentsia,” as well as those
of the qualified industrial workers had much in common in the East and the West.

Ideological Factors
As the Soviet ideologists repeated, such comparisons
did not really do justice to the living standards and
the real quality of life of the Soviet citizens. The conditions under which Soviet consumers lived differed
remarkably from those under capitalism. Instead of
private consumption, more collective forms of consumption were to be preferred. The Soviet citizen had,
for instance, a right to free, state-financed education
and health care. All forms of collective traffic, planes
to buses, were subsidized and promoted. Most notably, such vital communal services as housing, electricity, and telephones were cheap and heavily subsidized.
The local authorities had a responsibility to offer a
suitable living space to their inhabitants. Long waiting
lines and serious shortages were, again, the other side
of the coin. Even though the Soviet government since
the 1960s increasingly invested in big urban housing
projects, most Soviet citizens lived either in very small
apartments or shared a room in a dormitory.
One important ideological factor promoting the
collective forms of consumption was the promise
to liberate Soviet women from the slavery of housework. The Soviet family was encouraged to eat out
in a public canteen and the Soviet housewife to order
a new dress from the local fashion atelier rather than
sew it herself. That the Communist Party never could
keep its promise of liberating women from the burden
of housework and, in fact, by idealizing the role of
the woman as a mother rather petrified the traditional
gender roles, is another story. This was by far not
the only unsolved tension inherent in the building of
socialism.
The opening of the two large car factories in
the beginning of the 1970s marked both ideologically and in practice an important shift toward the
Western ideals of consumerism. Now, for the first

255

time in Soviet history, it became possible for an
ordinary worker to think about buying a private car
of his or her own. Even though the car density in
the USSR never reached that of the United States,
Germany, or the United Kingdom, the “automobilization” of the Soviet citizens had far-reaching ideological and practical consequences. First, the freedom
of transport made Soviet citizens less dependent on
the authorities. A private car also opened up new
economic opportunities to private citizens. Second,
in addition to new and better roads, the millions of
new cars needed garage space, service and repair stations, as well as huge amounts of spare parts, the
production of which lagged badly, creating a huge
black market of “favors.”
Since the Soviet society claimed to be an egalitarian society—privileges had to be earned—all the
goods of life had, in principle, to be available to all
the decent and hard-working Soviet citizens at the
same time. If a new consumption good was taken
into production, it should be available to everyone
and not only to those with money, as was the case
in capitalism. This meant that everything had to be
mass produced, in millions and millions of similar,
standardized copies available all over the Soviet
Union, from Vladivostok to Riga, from Tashkent to
Murmansk. This made the introduction of novelties a
big problem in the Soviet economy and seriously limited the variety of the available consumer goods. All
novelties had to be accepted into the economic plan
and their price centrally set in Moscow. Therefore,
it was often easier to fulfill the existing quantitative
plans. At the same time, as the planning authorities
admitted, novelties and a greater variety of goods
were in great demand.
There was a basic tension in the official ideology
of the Soviet consumption. On the one hand, the
party promised its loyal and hard-working citizens
increasing material well-being. The Soviet worker
would, in the near future, enjoy all those pleasures
that their comrades living under the yoke of capitalism could only dream of. On the other hand, petit
bourgeois philistinism posed the greatest threat to the
building of the new communist society. The Soviet
citizen was expected to care for the higher, spiritual
values of life and to be dedicated to the building of
socialism instead of being tempted by material consumption. In the last instance, the Soviet government
and the Communist Party preserved—through their
planning offices—for themselves, the right to decide

256

Consumer Demand

which needs and desires deserved to be satisfied and
which not. This was a task too demanding to be left
to the individual consumer. Thus, a strong collectivist
ideology permeated the society.
The promise of gratifying all the rational needs of
its consumers was one of the major pillars of legitimating the socialist rule in the USSR as well as in other
socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Consumption
was a permanent source of dissatisfaction as well as an
officially tolerated and even actively encouraged target
of citizen’s complaints. With the gradually increasing
material well-being and rising standards of demand,
the concrete objects of complaints naturally changed
too. Whereas customers in the immediate postwar
years could complain about light summer shoes,
which were on sale only for the left foot, in the 1970s
and the 1980s the long lines and the long waiting time
to get the right to buy a private car annoyed the Soviet
citizens. To the authorities’ surprise, customers did not
necessarily become more satisfied as a consequence
of the rapidly increasing production figures of many
consumer goods. Under socialism, the government
and the Communist Party took the full responsibility
for the satisfaction of the needs of the citizens, a promise that became all the more difficult to keep with the
continuously growing needs and increasing individualization of demand (Bauman 1990–1991).
Jukka Gronow
See also Citizenship; Comparing Consumer Cultures;
Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe;
Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to
the Cold War; Industrial Society; Informal Economy;
Socialism and Consumption; Systems of Provision

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Communism: A Post Mortem.” Praxis
International 10, nos. 3–4 (1990–1991): 185–192.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common
Luxury and the Ideals of Good Life in Stalin’s Russia.
Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Hanson, Philip. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy:
An Economic History of the USSR from 1945. London:
Longman, 2003.
Harrison, Mark. “Economic Growth and Slowdown.” In
Brezhnev Reconsidered, edited by Edwin Bacon and
Mark Sandle, 38–67. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002.

Hessler, Julie. A History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy,
Retail Practices and Consumption, 1917–1953.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Osokina, Elena. Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution
and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941.
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.
Millar, James R. “The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution
to Acquisitive Socialism.” Slavic Review 44, no. 4
(1984): 694–706.
Millar, James R., ed. Politics, Work and Daily life in the
USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Siegelbaum, Lewis. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet
Automobile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

CONSUMER DEMAND
Economists have looked at consumer demand both
at the macro- or aggregative level and at the level of
individual choice (microlevel). At the aggregative level,
beginning in the 1930s with the first systems of national
accounts, consumption spending, private investment,
government outlays, and net exports were dubbed the
components of overall demand. Private consumption
alone, in recent years, has exceeded two-thirds of all
spending in the U.S. economy. John Maynard Keynes,
in his book The General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money (1936), explained the depth and
persistence of unemployment in the Great Depression
as a failure of confidence reflected in too little business
investment and private consumer spending. He suggested that consumption depends on current income,
and made much of what he called the marginal propensity to consume, or the ratio of consumption to
income, which he took to be less than one.
If, through a shock to confidence, a negative change
in income occurs, this translates into a negative change
in investment or consumption, but that causes a drop in
the incomes of those who depend on consumption
spending, and so on, through many rounds. The total
loss of income here exceeds that of consumption, and
both will exceed the initial changes if the marginal
propensity to consume is less than one. This is known
as the multiplier effect. It works negatively, accentuating downturns, but also positively; and Keynes urged
that governments engage in stimulus spending to offset shortfalls in private consumption and investment.
Even if this increases the fiscal deficit, the multiplier
effect on incomes and thence on tax revenue means
that a public stimulus can be self-financing over time.

Consumer Demand

Argument ensued over the size of the multiplier
and as to whether the exogenous income variable should be absolute or relative income. Milton
Friedman (A Theory of the Consumption Function,
1957) mounted a more basic challenge, urging that
rational economic agents do not respond to current
income but spend out of so-called permanent income:
the discounted value of expected future income,
including years of active earning and years during
which savings are drawn. Rational people therefore
do not rush to spend a one-time government payment in time of recession. They might spend, but in
principle, it will be only that small fraction of a government stimulus that is appropriate after folding the
one-time largesse into lifetime income, and bearing in
mind that future tax rates may have to be increased
to eliminate the government debt issued to cover the
one-time outlay. This thinking applies symmetrically
to saving, or nonspending, with the implication
that such things as the setting up and management
of retirement accounts can safely be left to citizens
themselves. Almost eighty years of empirical research
on these issues has not proved univocal.
Despite the more immediate policy implications
coming out of the macroanalysis of consumption,
probably more effort in the twentieth century went
into the analysis of consumer choice at the microlevel. This was part of bringing consumer choice
under the umbrella of rational (that is, utility maximizing) decision making.
In the 1860s, William Stanley Jevons (in The Theory
of Political Economy, 1871) asked how individual
consumers could maximize the utility derived from
their spending. He arrived at a simple and elegant rule:
a person should spend in each desired direction up to
the point where incremental (marginal) utility is just
equal to price. Since budgets are finite and if, as Jevons
believed, the marginal utility of at least basic goods
decreases as more is consumed, this in-principle solution also seems practical. But there is a serious problem: the utility involved is subjective and individual
utilities are not comparable between people.
To avoid this difficulty, Vilfredo Pareto, at the very
end of the nineteenth century, opted for ordinal measurement, applied the notion of indifference to the
ordering of preferences, and dispensed with “utility”
as a motivating and determining factor in consumer
choice (see Ranchetti 1998). Desired goods might be
more or less preferred, or judged the same as alternatives, all without numerical measurement and without an appeal to “utility.”

257

Like-minded economists in the 1930s, such as Paul
A. Samuelson, influenced by operationalist thinking,
took Pareto’s concepts further, looking only to the
actual choices of individuals, and reducing these to
the observables price and quantity. Samuelson and
a whole generation of economic theorists after him
sought ways to order preferences by restricting them
in various ways—for example, insisting that there is a
(consistently) most-preferred bundle, and that indifference curves are strictly convex—so as to make them
consistent with both rational, maximizing behavior and with basic economic notions, such as that
demand curves slope downward (less is bought when
price is raised). This combination has numerous
practical implications, such as what can be expected
of motorists and of rational buyers of motor vehicles
if oil prices quadruple.
An important aspect of this line of analytical
development is that preferences came to be treated
as a primitive: changes in prices and income are
examined for their impact on behavior, taking preferences as given. This element of a methodological
credo was articulated sharply by George Stigler and
Gary Becker. They made the strong claim that virtually any economic behavior can be explained using
only relative prices and income (or wealth), without
gratuitous appeals to changes in preferences or to
nonrational behavior. The aim was to avoid turning
the analysis of choice into a tautology.
To illustrate the point: for consumers to use
store-sponsored Christmas funds rather than leaving the same amount in interest-bearing savings
accounts involves them in loss. It might be suggested
that funds are used nonetheless because people do
not trust themselves to have the savings designated
for Christmas gifts when the time comes. Such an
explanation, however, invokes loss of willpower as
a purely arbitrary stop gap, one that works ex post
yet empties the theory of predictive power. It is better
then to frame an observable outcome due to change
in a strictly economic variable. Thus, for example, if
interest rates on savings accounts were to increase,
we should expect a reduction in the use of Christmas
accounts. This makes use of the economists’ preferred variables: relative prices and the impact on
wealth as what ultimately matters to a rational individual (Stigler 1966).
The story so far has modern economists shunning
the investigation of consumers’ motivations and turning away especially from psychological, sociological,
and cultural explanations. It was not always so. In

258

Consumer Demand

the eighteenth century, it was common to analyze
sentiments. The division then was between those who
deplored “unnecessary” consumption and those who
argued that, with necessities readily obtainable for
most people in “civilized” countries, almost all goods
were nonnecessaries anyway. This was the position
of physician–social critic Bernard Mandeville, who
held that goods of the mind—wants, as distinct from
strict needs—are infinite, and our tastes infinitely
varied. Hence, since we can provide ourselves with
only a tiny portion of the things we would like to
enjoy, we are dependent on others for the rest. Social
relations thus arise out of our need to persuade others that they serve themselves in serving us. But the
driving force is our desire to consume.
Adam Smith, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, turned this into a theory of economic specialization and progress. He wrote about capital and
production, but insisted that, since we produce only
to consume, it is imperative that producers know
what is wanted. Smith made it his own business to
explore the characteristics of goods that give us pleasure. Operating at a fairly high level of abstraction,
he identified four pleasure-yielding attributes: form,
coloration, novelty, and rarity or uniqueness.
Smith’s focus on the pleasure-yielding characteristics of goods was lost, partly due to John Stuart
Mill’s mid-nineteenth-century removal of consumption from the body of economic principles, replacing
it with distribution. It was revived in the 1960s by
psychobiologist D. E. Berlyne. Common to Smith and
Berlyne was the notion that, above some threshold
level, pleasure varies with the intensity of a stimulus,
increasing with complexity, challenge, interestingness, and so on, but only up to a point: it declines
again as these become overwhelming. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the view that we buy not goods but bundles of pleasing characteristics was offered as a new
way to think about consumer demand by economists
Bernard Houthakker and Kelvin Lancaster (see
Lancaster 1966), but realized its potential more in
the applied field of measuring the impact of product
improvements on living standards than in the economic theory of optimal consumer spending.
In the last three decades, the Stigler-Becker view
on what counts as an acceptable economic explanation of consumer behavior has been challenged by a
wide range of experimental evidence showing that,
while the older tradition supplies a coherent normative account, actual human beings consistently

behave in ways that differ from that model. The consistency of the deviations and thus the predictability
of actual behavior in a variety of settings has given
rise to a new category, the “regular yet nonrational,”
or quasi-rational agent (Russell and Thaler 1988).
Richard Thaler and others in the field known as
behavioral economics do not dismiss the value for
normative purposes of assuming fully rational agents,
but urge that descriptive accuracy requires that we
also allow for psychological findings that enrich the
range of behaviors asking for analysis. They argue
for replacing the individual’s utility function with a
psychologically richer “value” function, which allows
for “noise” traders in financial markets along with
the “smart” money. The former act on sentiment,
whim, perhaps follow the herd, and so on, whereas
the latter try to act on full information. They also
insist that findings such as the following be taken seriously: that individuals seem regularly to regard gains
differently from losses; they view out-of-pocket costs
differently from opportunity costs, underweighting
the latter in the same way as they value goods possessed more highly than their actual costs; they prefer
binding themselves (as to a Christmas fund) because
commitments made at a long temporal distance tend
to weaken as the moment of real choice approaches;
and so on. Clearly, the implications of such findings
complicate as they also enrich the traditional microeconomic analysis of consumer choice and acceptance
is hard won, though formal professional recognition
gained some ground with the 2002 award of the
Nobel Memorial Prize in economics to the experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman, cofounder of
this line of research with Amos Tversky.
Neil De Marchi
See also Bounded Rationality; Economics; Income;
Innovation Studies; Keynesian Demand Management;
Preference Formation; Price and Price Mechanisms;
Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Berlyne, D. E. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York:
Appleton-Crofts, 1971.
Lancaster, Kelvin. “A New Approach to Consumer
Theory.” Journal of Political Economy 74 (1966):
132–157.
Ranchetti, Fabio. “Choice without Utility? Some
Reflections on the Loose Foundations of Standard
Consumer Theory.” In The Active Consumer: Novelty

Consumer Dissatisfaction
and Surprise in Consume Choice, edited by Marina
Bianchi, 21–45. London: Routledge, 1998.
Russell, Thomas, and Richard H. Thaler. “The Relevance
of Quasi Rationality in Competitive Markets.” In
Decision-Making: Descriptive, Normative and
Prescriptive Interactions, edited by David E. Bell,
Howard Raiffa, and Amos Tversky, 508–524.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Samuelson, Paul A. “Consumption Theory in Terms of
Revealed Preference.” Economica 15 (1948): 243–253.
Stigler, George J. The Theory of Price. 3rd ed. New York:
Macmillan, 1966.
Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. “De gustibus non est
disputandum.” American Economic Review 67 (1977):
76–90.
Thaler, Richard H. “Toward a Positive Theory of
Consumer Choice.” Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization 1 (1980): 39–60.
Thaler, Richard H., ed. Advances in Behavioral Finance.
New York: Russell Sage, 1993.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of
Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211
(January 1981): 453–458.

CONSUMER DISSATISFACTION
Within the context of consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction (CS/D), dissatisfaction is the attitude that a
consumer develops after he or she has evaluated his or
her consumption experience of a product or service.
Dissatisfaction can arise from the failure of a product
or service to meet a consumer’s expectations, from
negative perceptions of the performance of a product
or service during consumption, from negative feelings
experienced during the consumption of a product or
service, or from a combination thereof. Much of the
psychology-based research into consumer dissatisfaction falls under the umbrella of CS/D.
Consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction draws on a
number of different psychological theories to explain
the attitudes that individual consumers develop in
reaction to their experiences with specific goods and
services. These theories include expectancy disconfirmation, attribution theory, and equity theory. There is
increasing evidence, however, according to Wayne D.
Hoyer and Deborah J. MacInnis that dissatisfaction
can also be generated by postpurchase feelings that
are independent of disconfirmation judgments, and
according to John C. Mowen and Michael Minor,

259

that involve experientially based affective feelings
(i.e., the positive or negative feelings that flow from
our experiences with products and services). Also,
Susan Fournier and David G. Mick have challenged
the applicability of the dominant comparison standards paradigm for explaining all cases of CS/D.
The early work on CS/D built on Rolph E.
Anderson’s 1973 study on disconfirmed expectancy
and Richard L. Oliver’s 1980 expectancy disconfirmation model. Drawing on four psychological
theories (cognitive dissonance-assimilation; contrast; generalized negativity; assimilation-contrast),
Anderson illustrated how customer dissatisfaction
occurs at the point when the increasing disparity
between expectations and actual product performance can no longer be accepted by consumers.
Building on this work, Oliver argued that consumer
expectations can be seen as not only providing the
foundation for attitude formation, but also serving as
an adaptation level for subsequent satisfaction decisions. There are three possible outcomes using this
comparison standards approach. First, if product or
service performance exceeds expectations, then positive disconfirmation occurs. Second, if product or
service performance equals expectations, then simple
confirmation occurs. Third, if product or service
performance is worse than expected, then negative
disconfirmation occurs. Dissatisfaction flows from
the failure of a product or service’s performance to
match a consumer’s expectations.
Sarah Fisher Gardial and colleagues have noted a
variety of standards for evaluating product performance. However, according to Hoyer and MacInnis,
postdecision feelings can also occur independently
of disconfirmation judgments, whenever consumers’
feelings about a product or service arise directly from
their experience of using it. Negative feelings generated by using a product or a service encounter (e.g.,
anger, distress, frustration) can also lead to feelings of
dissatisfaction, according to Robert Westbrook and
Oliver.
Dissatisfaction can also be explained by attribution theory (i.e., how individuals try and account for
events), as shown by Valerie S. Folkes. Three factors
influence individuals’ explanations of events: stability,
focus, and controllability. Stability is about whether
or not the cause of the event is temporary or permanent. Focus is about whether the problem relates
to the marketer or the consumer. Controllability
is about the extent to which the event is under the

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Consumer Dissatisfaction

marketer’s or the consumer’s control. Hoyer and
MacInnis found that dissatisfaction is more likely
to arise in cases where the cause of the problem is
perceived to be permanent, beyond the customer’s
control, and related to marketers’ actions.
Equity theory is the other main source of explanations for CS/D and complements the dissatisfaction
paradigm. Central to equity theory is the perception
of fairness from both the buyer’s and seller’s perspectives. Equity and disconfirmation processes can often
coexist. Whereas the former processes are more concerned with interpersonal aspects and the outcomes
for the seller as well as the buyer, the latter processes
focus on expectations and performance, according to
Hoyer and MacInnis.
Research by Fournier and Mick challenges the
applicability of the dominant comparison standards
paradigm for explaining all cases of CS/D. Their
research indicates that there are some cases of CS/D
where the CS/D model of preconsumption standards
is insufficient to explain satisfaction/dissatisfaction.
From their results, they propose
(1) an inverted form of the ED [expectations-disconfirmation model of satisfaction response] model in
which the disconfirmation of expectations promotes
satisfaction; (2) an extended version of the desires
model, which includes the life themes, life projects,
and current concerns that propel product desires;
(3) the induction of a new experience-based norms
standard that underpins a unique dependency model
of satisfaction; (4) expanded conceptualizations of
the relief and novelty satisfaction modes, including
awe, trust, helplessness, resignation and love.
(Fournier and Mick 1999, 14–15)

Most important from the point of view of marketing managers, dissatisfaction is seen to deter repurchase behavior, while satisfaction drives repurchase
behavior. Marketing managers need to understand
CS/D because consumers’ evaluation of products and
services during the postpurchase/consumption stage
feeds directly back into future purchase behavior and
provides the basis for building customer loyalty and
longer-term relationships between firms and their
customers. Significantly, Charlotte Klopp and John
Sterlicchi estimate that only one in twenty-six dissatisfied customers complains; that twelve positive experiences are required to counter one negative
experience; and that it is five times more expensive to

attract a new customer than to keep an old one. Only
a minority of dissatisfied customers seeks redress or
complains to an outside body. Many do nothing at
all because they do not believe that it is worth the
time and effort, or they are not convinced that they
will be able to find anyone interested enough in helping them resolve their complaint. However, although
dissatisfied consumers often do not complain officially, they are likely to avoid the product or service
in the future (or that particular brand or service provider), and may also spread negative word of mouth
to friends. The Internet has opened up many new
possibilities for consumer-to-consumer contact and
grievances over a transaction or marketers’ activities
can spread quickly, gaining momentum as they are
publicized through social networks.
In the future, it is likely that researchers will have
to pay more attention to macrolevel dissatisfaction
issues, such as consumers’ negative reactions to the
marketplace itself, and to theories that draw on
sociological understanding of group behaviors and
economic theories about the nature of exchange (e.g.,
boycotting and downshifting).
Margaret K. Hogg and Pauline Maclaran
See also Attitude Theory; Consumer Apathy; Consumer
Behavior; Consumer Moods; Emotions; Methods of
Market Research; Psychology; Store Loyalty Cards

Further Readings
Anderson, Rolph E. “Consumer Dissatisfaction: The Effect
of Disconfirmed Expectancy on Perceived Product
Performance.” Journal of Marketing Research 10, no. 1
(February 1973): 38–44.
Folkes, Valerie S. “Recent Attribution Research in
Consumer Behavior: A Review and New Directions.”
Journal of Consumer Research (March 1988): 548–565.
Fournier, Susan, and David G. Mick. “Rediscovering
Satisfaction.” Journal of Marketing 63 (October 1999):
5–23.
Gardial, Sarah Fisher, D. Scott Clemens, Robert B.
Woodruff, David W. Schumann, and Mary Jane Burns.
“Comparing Consumers’ Recall of Prepurchase and
Postpurchase Product Evaluation Experiences.” Journal
of Consumer Research 20 (March 1994): 548–560.
Hoyer, Wayne D., and Deborah J. MacInnis. Consumer
Behavior. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Klopp, Charlotte, and John Sterlicchi. “Customer
Satisfaction Just Catching on in Europe.” Marketing
News 24, no. 11 (May 1990): 5.

Consumer Durables
Mowen, John C., and Michael Minor. Consumer Behavior.
5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.
Oliver, Richard L. “A Cognitive Model of the Antecedents
and Consequences of Satisfaction Decisions.” Journal of
Marketing Research 17 (November 1980): 460–469.
Oliver, Richard L. “Cognitive, Affective and Attribute-Bases
of the Satisfaction Response.” Journal of Consumer
Research (December 1993): 418–430.
Westbrook, Robert A., and Richard L. Oliver. “The
Dimensionality of Consumption Emotion Patterns and
Consumer Satisfaction.” Journal of Consumer Research
(June 1991): 84–91.

CONSUMER DURABLES
Industrialized societies are characterized by a proliferation of consumer durables, defined as goods
used repeatedly or continuously in a domestic context. Such goods include: vehicles, major household
appliances, house and garden tools and equipment,
furniture and furnishings, carpets and other floor coverings, major recreation goods, telephones, clocks,
jewelry, watches, and audiovisual, photographic,
and information processing equipment. Reference
to being used “repeatedly or continuously” indicates
that the distinction between durable and nondurable
goods is not based on physical durability (e.g., coal is
highly durable in a physical sense but can be burned
only once). This proliferation of goods both underpins and shapes our consumer culture.
The life spans of different consumer durables
are variable, although such products are characterized by relatively long periods between purchases.
The definition used in the international standard
classification for individual consumption expenditure (Classification of Individual Consumption by
Purpose, or COICOP) refers to such goods being
used “over a period of a year or more,” assuming
a normal or average rate of physical usage (United
Nations 1993). Other authorities apply a threshold
of three years and the category “semi-durable” is
sometimes used to describe products for which the
expected life span is not substantially more than
a year. Examples of semi-durable goods include
clothing, footwear, household textiles, small appliances, household utensils, sports and camping
equipment, games, and toys. Nondurable goods
(often described as consumables, disposables, or

261

perishable items) are, by contrast, either used up after
a single use or within a year.

Emergence of the Consumer Society
Rising demand for consumer durables is not only
a recent trend, European historians have traced a
“remorselessly creeping demand for more and better consumer goods” (de Vries 1993, 101), notably
kitchenware, tableware, furniture, and furnishings,
since the early modern period (late-fifteenth to lateeighteenth centuries). Toward the latter stages of this
period, in particular, there was a diffusion of new
goods, increased quantities of familiar items, and
more luxurious versions of others. Some of these
changes led to reduced durability, as when glass and
pottery replaced wooden and pewter tableware.
There were also more frequent changes in fashion—
and these were not limited to clothing but applied
other goods such as china.
There is evidence that the price of clothing and many
consumer durables fell substantially in this period, at
least in Britain and America, which increased access
to such items. As a consequence, the share of wealth
accounted for by consumer durables, as revealed
through probate inventories, did not change much.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, however,
new materials, such as plastic, vulcanized rubber, photographic film, and, early in the twentieth century,
artificial fibers such as rayon and nylon, provided
opportunities for new or improved products, and
consumer demand was fueled by a growth in advertising and the emergence of department stores. In the
period following World War I, there was a notable
shift in family budgets, with the proportion of
expenditure on food falling while that on consumer
durables increased. Cars increased in popularity,
labor-saving products transformed households, and
televisions not only brought a new form of entertainment into people’s homes but also, through advertising on commercial channels, stimulated demand
for more consumer durables. Planned obsolescence,
notably through periodical changes in style, led to
shorter product life cycles. Such changes intensified
after World War II, as consumerism encroached into
new territories within society and attitudes changed
to the use of credit.
The prevailing level of ownership of consumer
durables in different countries around the world
reflects substantial variations in income and wealth.

262

Consumer Durables

For example, in developing countries at the turn
of the millennium only one in five people owned a
radio, one in seven owned a television, one in twenty
had a telephone, and one in sixty owned a car, goods
considered necessities by most people in industrialized nations. Around a billion people live with few,
if any, consumer durables. Meanwhile, people in
the United States, accounting for 5 percent of the
global population, were consuming 30 percent of the
world’s energy resources. Between these extremes, a
consumer-oriented middle class emerged during the
twentieth century in many regions beyond the West,
notably India, Brazil, Mexico, and countries in the
Far East, such as Japan and, more recently, China.

Consumption, Need, and Well-Being
Consumer goods have a critical role in reflecting
modern culture; they represent the “visible part” of
culture, acting as a concrete and public record of the
ideas, categories, and principles that make up culture. Sociologists and social anthropologists have
drawn attention to the ways in which consumer
goods, including both durables and semi-durables,
do not merely satisfy people’s functional needs but
communicate meanings and shape identities. This is
especially true of clothing and accessories but also of
many other items, notably portable communications
devices, such as the iPhone.
There is an extensive and growing literature
on the social dimension to consumption, from the
development of early concepts, such as conspicuous
consumption, to more recent work on positional
goods, which suggests that the acquisition of consumer durables is determined as much by a desire to
establish distinction between people as by functional
requirement. Historically, the possession of consumer durables was associated with the fulfillment
of needs and, by implication, increased well-being.
As affluence has grown, however, such relationships
have increasingly been questioned through discourse
on the nature of needs (as distinct from wants) and
the relationship between economic growth and
quality of life.

Sustainability
The proliferation of consumer durables has attracted
considerable attention in contemporary debate on
sustainable development. Consumption in industrialized nations is widely regarded as unsustainable but

there remain differences of opinion on whether sustainable consumption could be achieved by changing the type of products (e.g., through increased
energy efficiency, recyclability, and miniaturization)
or demands a reduction in the number consumed.
Many argue that the finite reserves of raw materials,
such as metals, make it impossible for current levels
of consumption typical of the lifestyles of those living
in the industrialized world to be maintained should
those lifestyles be adopted by those living in industrializing nations.
In response to concern about mounting levels of
waste, the European Union included vehicles and
electrical and electronic equipment within its designated “priority waste streams” and passed legislation aimed at increased recycling and the removal of
hazardous materials. Since the early 1990s, household appliances and consumer electronics had to be
labeled according to their energy efficiency and, in
the case of refrigeration equipment, a minimum performance is required. Other countries are similarly
introducing measures to reduce the environmental
impact of consumer durables. In Japan, the Top
Runner Programme identifies the most efficient
model on the market and then stipulates that its efficiency must become the industry standard within a
certain number of years.
Recent interest in resource productivity has drawn
attention to the fact that the utilization rate of many
consumer durables is low. In other words, many such
products are only used infrequently, notably vehicles
and household appliances. This is particularly significant when the product is subject to technological
advances, such as improved energy efficiency. The
debate on whether, from an environmental perspective, consumer durables that are old and relatively
inefficient but still function should be discarded is
unresolved and depends on the likelihood of future
improvements in efficiency.

Product Life Cycles and Product-Service
Systems
Research into the whole life span of consumer durables (i.e., acquisition, use, and disposal) has taken on
a growing significance through this debate. A wide
range of methodologies is relevant, including surveys, ethnographic techniques, and life cycle analysis. Each raises problems, whether privacy concerns
relating to ordinary domestic situations; the need for

Consumer Education

longitudinal research, which is costly and demands
stable research teams; or the data requirements of life
cycle analysis.
Discretionary replacement of consumer durables
has become increasingly common as producers have
increased the reliability of products such as televisions, and the replacement timing of such products,
particularly in saturated markets, has attracted interest from different disciplines.
Marketing researchers have long been interested
in how to accelerate the timing of buyers’ replacement decisions while, more recently, product design
researchers have explored how users might be
encouraged to keep functioning products. Designers
with an interest in sustainability have begun to question their role in the proliferation of products and
concepts, such as design for longevity, and productservice systems have emerged as a response to unsustainable consumption. Product-service systems take
as a starting point the idea that users are not concerned so much with the product itself as with the
service that it supplies: the user of a washing machine
does not desire a rotating drum but clean clothes.
This, in turn, has led to suggestions that a new business model, in which people pay for the service provided by products instead of paying to own them,
would be more efficient. Critics have responded that
this appears similar to leasing or rental and, contrary
to intention, may lead to users updating products
even more regularly to take advantage of the latest
technology.

263

See also Consumer Demand; Domestic Technologies;
Eco-Labeling; Household Budgets; Industrial Society;
Materialism and Postmaterialism; Planned
Obsolescence; Waste; Well-Being

Further Readings
Bayus, Barry L. “Accelerating the Durable Replacement
Cycle with Marketing Mix Variables.” Journal of
Product Innovation Management 5, no. 3 (September
1988): 216–226.
de Vries, Jan. “Between Purchasing Power and the World of
Goods.” In Consumption and the World of Goods,
edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 85–132.
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Gordon, Robert B., Marlen Bertram, and Thomas E.
Graedel. “Metal Stocks and Sustainability.” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006):
1209–1214.
McCracken, Grant D. Culture and Consumption.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Shammas, Carole. The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England
and America. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History.
New York: Routledge, 2001.
United Nations. System of National Accounts 1993. http://
unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/1993sna.pdf.
United Nations Development Programme. Human
Development Report 1998. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Van Nes, Nicole, and Jacqueline Cramer. “Conceptual
Model on Replacement Behaviour.” International
Journal of Product Development 6, nos. 3–4 (2008):
291–309.

An Ethical Future?
The emergence of ethical criteria in decision making, both by producers and consumers, is a further
key market development. Many consumer durables
are made by major international companies, who are
facing demands from investors for practices compatible with corporate social responsibility. Meanwhile,
increasing numbers of consumers are using ethical criteria in their purchasing decisions, and this
is influencing contemporary retailing, with sales of
consumer durables produced and marketed on the
basis of environmental and social criteria becoming
increasingly significant. The development of secondhand markets such as eBay enables the reuse of
unwanted goods while reflecting the excesses of contemporary consumerism.
Tim Cooper

CONSUMER EDUCATION
Although people have been consuming goods and
services in the marketplace for years, the terms consumer culture and consumer education only came
into use at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Transacting in the global marketplace of the twentyfirst century is a complex, nuanced process necessitating special training and socialization processes,
available through consumer education. Over the past
fifty years, efforts to conceptualize consumer education have become more refined, progressive, and
innovative. Starting with the seminal work of Rosella
Bannister and Charles Monsma, conceptions of consumer education are traced up to 2009, drawing

264

Consumer Education

on work from Canada, the United States, and the
European Union.
Bannister and Monsma tendered the most enduring understanding of consumer education, published
in a monograph containing a classification system
of 154 consumer education concepts. Through consumer education, people accumulate, in a progressive, empowering manner, the knowledge, skills,
attitudes, and behaviors considered necessary for
(a) managing resources, (b) engaging in rational consumption behavior, and (c) taking actions as citizens.
Using their model, conventional consumer education programs assumed there were three major market players, each with different roles and interests:
consumers (including consumer organizations), businesses, and governments. It is assumed that businesses
have the advantage over consumers, necessitating
government rules and regulations to protect people
in their consuming role. To ensure that the interests
of consumers were respected, consumer educators
planned curricula that taught skills and knowledge
pertinent to (a) decision making; (b) resource management (financial planning, shopping for goods and
services, and conserving); and, (c) participating in the
marketplace. The latter included both (a) consumer
protection, rights, laws, and assistance and (b) consumer advocacy and representation of consumers’
interests relative to business. The intent of consumer
education was to help people get the best value for
their money by making reasoned purchase decisions, complaining if they did not get their money’s
worth, taking action on behalf of other consumers,
and appreciating how the economy worked so they
could function efficiently as consumer agents. Such
educated consumers were considered to be “empowered” market players.
In the 1980s, three key consumer education
initiatives began to shift the field’s focus. First, the
International Organization of Consumer Unions
(IOCU, now called Consumers International, CI)
created a charter for consumer action, comprising
five consumer responsibilities. This educational tool
augmented the prevailing focus on consumer rights.
Second, hand-in-hand was IOCU’s publication of
Promoting Consumer Education in Schools (remaining one of today’s gold standards). The boundaries of
consumer education were pushed beyond the focus
on interests and rights to include an understanding of the impact of consumption decisions on the
lives of others and about how to act and behave

conscientiously. Third, in 1985, the United Nations
released its Resolution for Guidelines for Consumer
Protection. It strongly advised consumer educators
to include the environmental, social, and economic
impacts of consumer choices and promote sustainable consumption patterns.
These three previous initiatives were precursors
for another shift in consumer education, a move
from consumer rights and privileges to socially and
environmentally responsible consumption. A 1999
update of IOCU’s Promoting Consumer Education
in Schools included global citizenship, a concern for
society at large, conscientious decision making, sustainability, solidarity with underprivileged members
of society and nature, and a moral dimension. As
well, a subtle shift was occurring in how consumer
educators understood the term consumer empowerment. Earlier and current versions of consumer education assumed that consumers were empowered if
they could use information and take advantage of
the competitive market by being knowledgeable,
confident, assertive, and self-reliant. With the right
information, people could make the right purchase
decisions, thereby driving competition, innovation,
and choice in the market. Moving past this position,
a 1999 U.K. initiative developed a Framework for
the Development of Consumer Skills and Attitudes,
predicated on the belief that consumer education
should benefit society as a whole; instead of serving
self-interest, it should serve societal and environmental interests. Now, an empowered consumer was
someone who had found the inner power and agency
to effect change in the marketplace for the betterment of others and the ecosystem.
To achieve this new objective, consumer educators
in many countries embraced another innovation in
the mid-1990s. By integrating consumer education
with global and citizenship education, they identified
synergies such that people were prepared to be citizens first and consumers second; that is, consumercitizens. Using this conceptualization better ensured
the transformation of the consumer culture so that
people were provoked to reach out of their private
worlds to the shared, public, global community.
Motivating consumers to participate in the marketplace as active and informed citizens become a
major goal of consumer education. The Consumer
Citizenship Network (CCN) actively promoted this
approach. It was keen to translate ethical, sustainable, and citizenship values into everyday practice

Consumer Education

through conscientious participation in the market.
CCN believed any conceptual framework for consumer citizenship should be democratic, experimental, holistic, and humanistic.
In this vein of thought, Sue McGregor, in 2002,
tendered the idea of participatory consumerism as
a way to teach consumer education for the betterment of the human family and its home, the earth.
By marrying participatory development theory with
citizenship education, a new form of consumer
education was developed that involved vulnerability, risk-taking, trust, cooperation, public discourse
and dialogue, openness with healthy suspicion, and
patience with impatience. Perceiving citizens as participating consumers was a powerful way to extend
consumer education to include (a) sustainable consumption, (b) the promotion of human dignity and
quality of life (human and social development), and,
(c) the perspective of interdependence.
In 2002, Victoria W. Thoresen (the founder of
CCN) prepared a Resource Handbook for Consumer
Education. A rich pedagogical tool, it is prefaced with
an accounting of how she conceptualized consumer
education. Her approach encompasses a connection
to the management of the global society’s collective life
(in addition to individual responsibility); it deals with
sustainable development—human, social, economic,
and ecological; it assumes consumer education is an
essential aspect of becoming liberally educated (critical thinking and processes, insights into choice consequences); it inherently requires an integrated, holistic,
interdisciplinary approach; and, finally, it is concerned
with the just distribution of the world’s resources.
In 2002, McGregor expanded consumer education
into the realm of peace education, whereby people in
their consumer role would learn to adhere to social
values including justice, tolerance, respect, solidarity, nonviolence, security, equality, and peace. From a
peace perspective, consumer education shifted from
preparing people to function in a free market to functioning in a fair trade market structure. Ultimately,
society would create and function within economies
of care, moral economies that would replace the
current capitalistic market maintained by consumer
capitalism and a consumer culture.
Jennifer A. Sandlin retheorized consumer education using cultural studies. She positioned consumer
education as a political site of resistance against the
consumer culture. Assuming all educators and learners are social activists and political agents, consumer

265

education could facilitate the struggle for knowledge
and power. Through a more critical consumer education, with a focus on the intersections of power and
consumption, consumer educators gained the potential to open the door for democracy and social justice.
To that end, Sandlin proposed they need to be aware
of three orientations to teaching about consumption:
(1) embracing consumption as a desired activity,
(2) individually questioning life in a consumer culture, and (3) collectively politicizing and fighting
consumerism. In 2005, McGregor extended Sandlin’s
typology, adding (4) the empowerment approach for
mutual interest.
In 2006, McGregor developed a moral consciousness approach to consumer education whereby educators problematize the morality of consumer choices.
They could augment curricula by adding the affective
domain of learning (focused on values), by giving
more credence to the care and justice concepts of
morality, and by using established moral development
models to build a principled conscience in consumers.
To that end, McGregor developed the idea of
five orders of consumer adulthood. This theory
assumes that people grow through increasing levels
of competence, care, and concern for others while
consuming (from first to fifth order): me (impulse
and emotions); me (self-centered, imperial self);
us (defined by peers); all of us (able to create and
sustain a consumer self); and, other-global (morally
responsible to world and all of life). The pressures
of the modern consumer culture require people to
operate at the fourth order because the third order is
inadequate for meeting the complex moral demands
of consumer adulthood in the twenty-first century.
Most people function at the second level (focus
on “me”), meaning they are not prepared for the
complex reasoning inherent in judging purchases in
a global marketplace. Using this conceptual innovation, consumer educators can quit blaming unethical
consumers, start appreciating they cannot be held
responsible for what is beyond their current mental
capacity, and then teach accordingly.
In 2007, McGregor positioned consumer education at the interface between social learning theory
(SLT) and the principles of education for sustainable
development (ESD). SLT assumes that people learn
by observing or modeling others’ behavior. This
interface enabled consumer-citizens to appreciate
diversity, participation, shared power, interconnectedness, and interrelatedness. Consumers could value

266

Consumer Expenditure Surveys

systems thinking and multiple perspectives, and
appreciate that people learn sustainable consumption
“by watching others.” In 2009, she created the idea
of transdisciplinary consumer citizenship education.
Sue McGregor
See also Citizenship; Consumer Behavior; Consumer
Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer
Socialization; Higher Education; Moralities;
Motivation Research

Thoresen, Victoria W. Consumer Citizenship Education
Guidelines. Vol. 1, Higher Education. The Consumer
Citizen Network, 2005. https://www.hihm.no/content/
download/4916/43166/file/4%20guidelines.pdf.

Website
The Consumer Citizenship Network. http://www.hihm
.no/concit.

CONSUMER EXPENDITURE SURVEYS

Further Readings
Bannister, Rosella, and Charles Monsma. The Classification
of Concepts in Consumer Education. Monograph 137.
Cincinnati, OH: South-Western, 1982.
European Module for Consumer Education: The Final
Report. London: University of North London, 2001.
Hellman-Tuitert, Grada. Promoting Consumer Education
in Schools. 2nd ed. London: Consumers International,
1999. http://www.ciroap.org/ce/doc/pces_grada.pdf.
International Organization of Consumers Unions.
Consumer Action in Developing Countries: A Consumer
Action Charter. Consumercraft 1. Penang, Malaysia:
Author, 1980. http://www.scribd.com/doc/133236/
Consumer-Action-Handbook.
Lusby, Linda A. Consumer Decision Making in a Global
Context. Wolfville, NS: Acadia University, 1992. http://
eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED346313.pdf.
McGregor, Sue L. T. “Consumer Citizenship: A Pathway to
Sustainable Development?” Keynote at the International
Conference on Developing Consumer Citizenship.
Hamar, Norway: Hedmark University College, 2002.
http://www.consultmcgregor.com/documents/keynotes/
norway_keynote.pdf.
McGregor, Sue L. T. Consumer Education as a Site of
Political Resistance: 50 Years of Conceptual Evolutions.
Monograph 201001. Seabright, NS: McGregor
Consulting Group, 2010. http://www.consultmcgregor
.com/documents/publications/monograph_consumer_
education_2010.pdf.
McGregor, Sue L. T. Consumer Moral Leadership.
Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2010.
Sandlin, Jennifer A. “Culture, Consumption and Adult
Education: Refashioning Consumer Education for
Adults as a Political Site Using a Cultural Studies
Framework.” Adult Education Quarterly 55, no. 3
(2005): 165–181.
Thoresen, Victoria W. Resource Handbook for Consumer
Education. Oslo, Norway: Consumer Council of
Norway, 2002. http://forbrukerportalen.no/filer/fil_
handbook.pdf.

Consumer expenditure surveys (CES), or family
expenditure surveys (FES) as they had been called in
Britain until recently, are studies that primarily aim
to collect data related to household expenditures for
goods and services used in everyday life. The British
former FES was taken over by the Expenditure and
Food Survey, at the merger with National Food
Survey in 2001, and was renamed the Living Costs
and Food Survey in 2008. These U.S. and U.K. surveys and their equivalents in other countries are conducted by the statistical departments of the central
governments and provide information on household
incomes and expenditures, as well as demographic
and economic characteristics of household members.
The collected data are used to calculate, in official
terms, the weights for an index of prices, which are
applied as a deflator for incomes and costs of living.
They also provide timely and detailed information
on spending patterns of different types of households
that can meet the data needs of the researchers and
students of consumer culture.
One of the oldest of such data-collecting exercises
was carried out in 1888 to 1891 by the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics under the leadership of Carroll
Wright. There had been a few experimental surveys
of the standard of living of the poor conducted by
the forerunning European researchers in the midnineteenth century, such as Frédéric Le Play, Edouard
Ducpetiaux, and Ernst Engel. In Britain, while the
classic poverty surveys of London by Charles Booth
in 1886 to 1899, and of York by Seebohm Rowntree
in 1899 to 1900, provided the backdrop, the first
official national survey was conducted by the Board
of Trade in 1904. Several attempts to update the
cost-of-living index followed the initial enquiries on
both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1930s and after
World War II, in tandem with the development of the
method of large-scale sample survey throughout this

Consumer Expenditure Surveys

earlier period. The current practice of continuous
annual surveys was established in 1957 in Britain and
in 1979 in the United States. Other Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
countries also established a similar practice around
this period: Italy in 1968, Canada in 1953, Germany
in 1962, France in 1965, and Japan in 1946. The
surveys are conducted quinquennially in France and
Germany. Consumer expenditure surveys, in current
forms, provide essential information on consumption patterns that can be compared statistically
over a long period of time and also across different
countries.
The basic framework of the surveys usually consists of the diary survey and the interview survey.
In the United States, the two surveys—diary and
interview—employ a different data-collection technique and sample. In the interview survey, each family in the sample is interviewed every three months to
recall large expenditures and regular payments over
five calendar quarters. In the diary survey, which is
particularly designed to collect detailed expenditures
on food, the respondent family is asked to keep
records of expenditures daily for a two-week period.
In Britain, on the other hand, the interview and diary
surveys are both collected from the same sample of
respondent households. The Household Interview
Survey is designed to collect information about regular household bills and expenditure on major but
infrequent purchases.
The diary survey is used to collect data on personal
expenditure, and is kept by each household member
for two weeks. The two-week survey periods are
rolled over throughout the year to cover seasonal
variation in expenditures. This unique characteristic
of the U.K. survey provides an opportunity for the
data reusing researchers to analyze the purchase frequency and the expenditure level separately. In the
U.S. survey, not all items are recorded on the detailed
expenditures level in the diary survey, except for
food. Even when the coverage overlaps between the
interview survey and the diary survey, the data from
the two survey components sometimes present different results. In the case of the U.K. survey, the unique
characteristic of diary surveys (often called the “zero
expenditure problem,” i.e., that a zero expenditure
is recorded for goods with longer purchase cycles in
case the survey period did not coincide with an actual
purchase) provides a useful measure in drawing out
more illustrative aspects of consumer behavior.

267

Since the inception of the surveys, the resulting
data have been used by economists to improvise
their theoretical models of income and expenditure
and to perform aggregate demand analyses, but the
data have not been used as much by sociologists
and historians. The survey data are of value to those
interested not just in economic welfare but also in
cultural tastes and lifestyles of particular segments of
the population, such as elites and professionals, the
elderly and the young, low-income families, urban
families, and rural residents, those earning millions
of dollars and those receiving state benefits. Deeper
analyses of consumer culture can be made using
individual demographic data, which are collected
alongside information on incomes and expenditures,
including those on age, sex, marital status, employment status, region, and occupational class.
Recent usages of consumer expenditure surveys
include: research on generational gap in car ownership, meat consumption, vegetarianism, social mobility, child poverty, baby boomer lifestyle, purchase
of console computer games by teenagers, Internet
usage, retirement, drinking habits, and fashion consumption by men and women. The important point
is that those consumer expenditure data that on the
surface appear to be rather impersonal lists of arbitrary numbers can in fact be used to illustrate the
social and cultural aspects of human lives—what
people like and what people desire. By analyzing the
expenditure data, or even the electronic point of sales
(EPOS) data if available, researchers can reveal the
shape of the social space that creates “distinction”
and also test whether the marketing cliché “you are
what you buy” actually applies.
There are some unique methodological techniques
that can be used to determine consumers’ tastes and
choices from numerical figures on spending. Among
the examples are two-stage analysis and multivariate analysis, which can be performed using leading
statistical data analysis packages, such as Stata and
R. Two-stage analysis and its allied techniques (such
as Heckman sample selection model, double hurdle
model, and two-part model) are used to treat the
zero expenditure problem and to measure consumer
demand in two stages: (1) frequency of purchase, and
(2) the level of spending at each transaction. These are
based on different decisions, influenced by different
factors. An interesting case, for example, is the case of
fast fashion: considering the changes over the years,
shopping frequency may be influenced by the shift

268

Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

to a faster fashion cycle, while expenditure levels are
affected by clothing price deflation and casualization
of styles. Although part of the same trend, expenditure level is negatively related to this trend, while
shopping frequency is positively related to this trend.
Spending data thus can also be seen to manifest subtle
changes in the direction of fashion that on the surface
may appear difficult to numerically conceptualize.
Two-stage analysis is an effective technique for
focusing on one category of shopping items at a time,
and multivariate analysis and its allied techniques,
such as factor analysis, correspondence analysis, and
principal component analysis, are useful methods
to reveal social norms and customs associated with
shopping habits over multiple items. These methods
have been used in pioneering studies, such as Pierre
Bourdieu’s Distinction, which graphically visualized
the differences in taste among people with different
economic and cultural capitals, and also in Arnold
Mitchell’s “Psychographics,” which revealed the
multiplicity of American lifestyles.
Although these pioneering works used attitudinal
survey data (e.g., likes and dislikes of certain consumer items) to reveal social disparity in consumer
preferences, numerical data, such as the Household
Expenditures Survey, can also be used to analyze the
differences in tastes and lifestyles among surveyed
consumers. One example is the case of changing
social space of British consumers. Using factor analysis, researchers can obtain the correlation among
multiple shopping items, ranging from bread and
butter to taxi and dental services, factored in terms of
spending as proportion of the total household expenditure. They can then plot these resulting figures on to
multidimensional space, as a map of shopping items.
Spending data can therefore be a valuable source for
the analysis of consumer culture when used with care
and appropriate statistical techniques.
Shinobu Majima
See also Clothing Consumption; Consumption Patterns
and Trends; Econometrics; Economics; Electronic
Point of Sale (EPOS); Food Consumption; Measuring
Standards of Living; Methodologies for Studying
Consumer Culture

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice.
London: Routledge, 1989.

Brown, Clair. American Standards of Living, 1918–1988.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.
Hoinville, Gerald. “Methodological Research on Sample
Surveys: A Review of Development in Britain.” In
Essays on the History of British Sociological Research.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Kemsley, W. F. F., R. U. Redpath, and H. Holmes. Family
Expenditure Survey Handbook: Sampling, Fieldwork,
Coding Procedures and Related Methodological
Experiments. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
1980.
Majima, Shinobu. “Affluence and the Dynamics of
Spending.” Contemporary British History 22, no. 4
(2008): 573–597.
Mitchell, Arnold. The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are
and Where We’re Going. New York: Warner Books, 1984.

CONSUMER ILLNESSES
AND MALADIES
Consumer illnesses and maladies include consumption practices that medical professionals, as well as
society in general, consider to be a sickness or addiction, usually characterized by individuals’ inability to
control their consumption. The types of consumption
that fall in this category include eating disorders
(binge eating, bulimia, and anorexia); addictions to
sex, gambling, and work; compulsive buying; kleptomania; and hoarding. More recently, the category of
consumer illnesses has been widened to include other
types of illnesses, such as addiction to the Internet.
“Compulsive consumption” is a label often used to
refer to all of these consumer illnesses, and is defined
as “a response to an uncontrollable drive or desire
to obtain, use, or experience a feeling, substance, or
activity that leads an individual to repetitively engage
in a behavior that will ultimately cause harm to the
individual and/or to others” (O’Guinn and Faber
1989, 148).
Psychiatrists classify consumer illnesses as mental disorders, usually obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD), impulse control disorder (ICD), or a combination of both. Researchers have studied these
disorders largely in postindustrial Western societies
and generally agree that these disorders are a product
of—or can best find expression in—consumer societies. In the mid-1980s, researchers in a wide variety
of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology,
psychology, philosophy, marketing, and economics,

Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

began publishing studies on compulsive buying in
attempts to define and classify this consumer illness, measure its prevalence in the United States, and
explain the underlying causes of compulsive consumption. Some medical professionals have examined genetic and neurological factors of consumption
addiction, whereas psychiatrists tend to focus on an
individual’s childhood experiences and self-esteem.
Social scientists, particularly anthropologists and
sociologists, have examined consumer illnesses in the
context of the consumer societies in advanced liberal
societies, noting that as consumption is an important
part of defining selfhood and identity creation in latemodern societies, consumer illnesses are intimately
linked to issues of identity and the self.

Consumer Illnesses and Addiction
One of the main problems in the scholarship of consumer illnesses lies in the issue of defining addiction
in the first place. In a strictly biological definition,
addiction refers only to psychoactive substances
(such as drugs, alcohol, and tobacco) that produce
chemical alterations in the brain. However, even
those studying addiction at the cellular and genetic
level agree that psychological, social, and cultural
factors play a role in drug, alcohol, and gambling
addictions. What is uncertain is the degree to which
these factors are responsible for triggering or leading to an individual’s addiction to a particular substance. Current research has yet to pinpoint the
nature of addiction or resolve the extent to which
addiction can be identified with brain dysfunctions,
as evidenced in the title of a volume on the most
recent addiction research, What Is Addiction? (Ross
et al. 2010). Many psychiatrists have eschewed the
term addiction altogether in favor of dependence;
and substance dependence is the phrase used in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), as opposed to addiction.
A philosophical issue with the notion of addiction is the question of the extent to which addicts
can or cannot control their behavior, or the question
of free will versus compulsion. Scholars from a variety of disciplines note that most people diagnosed as
addicts break their dependence on their own, without any sort of assistance. This suggests that addicts
can exercise a measure of control over their behavior,
albeit with difficulty. However, scholars also note
that unless the individual’s underlying emotional

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and psychological issues (usually anxiety and/or
depression) are resolved, he or she will likely relapse.
Gene M. Heyman attempts to apply the same psychological principles used in everyday decisions to
addiction; in other words, he views addiction as an
inherent outcome of choice. He argues that because
hard drugs—particularly cocaine and heroin—bind
directly to receptor sites in the brain, the intoxication effect undermines the appeal of other options
to the point that addicts adopt a local frame of reference that prioritizes immediate gratification over
consideration of long-term well-being. In concluding
that drug addiction is a matter of chemical reactions
in the brain that reorient consumers to an immediate frame of reference that is blind to negative consequences, Heyman suggests that treatment should
decrease the reward value of the drug and increase
the reward value of abstinence, thereby repackaging “global bookkeeping” (long-term evaluation of
aggregated choices) to appear as immediate benefits.
Although Heyman’s model of drug addiction
as choice offers an explanation of how addiction
works, it does not address the question as to why
some people become addicted to drugs and others do
not. Some scholars have identified common themes
in the lives of drug addicts that may indicate personal and social factors that lead to drug addiction.
Dysfunctional family life (either present or past), low
self-esteem, depression, and anxiety are personal
characteristics that are highly prevalent among identified drug addicts and alcoholics. Unlike Heyman,
Elizabeth C. Hirschman argues that although addictive consumption behavior may stem from a desire
for pleasure for some, it is also a response to a need
to reduce emotional stress, which can be triggered
by anxiety-inducing situations and events. In her
comparison of addicted and nonaddicted drug users,
Hirschman argues that nonaddicted drug and alcohol users are better at managing their consumption
because they have greater emotional stability and
self-esteem. In correlation to this, she found that
among the drug and alcohol users she interviewed,
addicted consumers suffered from greater emotional
problems than nonaddicted consumers before their
first use of drugs.
Neuroscientists argue that aside from drug and
alcohol addiction (and perhaps pathological gambling and binge eating disorders), other consumer
illnesses such as compulsive buying do not qualify
as true addictions because there is no evidence that

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Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

these phenomena share the same behavioral or
neurobiological features. In contrast, social sciences
studying compulsive buying observe that from a
phenomenological perspective, the experience of
compulsive buyers is very similar to that of drug
addicts. Hirschman also demonstrates that not only
do many drug addicts simultaneously engage in other
types of compulsive consumption behavior (such as
ritualistic exercise and shopping splurges), but they
also overcome their addictions by rechanneling their
compulsions to other, usually more socially acceptable, consumption behaviors. She relates the story
of a former methamphetamine addict who was able
to quit using drugs, but now watches television for
sixteen hours a day, randomly changing the channel
every few minutes.
In 1995, Ronald Faber and colleagues conducted
a study that found the comorbidty of binge eating
disorders and compulsive buying is statistically significant, indicating that both binge eating and compulsive buying are similar responses to the same set
of problems. Hirschman argues that, ultimately, the
underlying problems that lead to disordered consumption are incomplete, inadequate, or inauthentic self-identities. In dysfunctional families, children
learn to separate themselves from their true feelings.
As these children grow up, they come into contact
with drugs and alcohol, which can provide a feeling of comfort and security, however temporary. Just
as Hirschman found that drug addicts often engage
in other forms of compulsive consumptions, other
scholars have linked many of these same issues of
incomplete identities to compulsive buying and
hoarding.

Compulsive Buying and Hoarding
In the early twentieth century, the term oniomaniacs was coined by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin to
refer to compulsive buyers and was included among
a variety of impulse disorders that also included
pyromania, kleptomania, and extreme collecting, or
hoarding. Although some social scientists see compulsive buying as an outcome of late modernity,
Faber wonders if compulsive buying is a problem
that has been truly increasing only in the past couple of decades, or if it is just recently receiving widespread media and scholarly attention.
One problem with defining compulsive buying
is the various labels scholars use, such as shopping

addiction, compulsive shopping, excessive buying,
and uncontrolled buying. Some researchers use the
terms shopping and buying interchangeably, while
others make important distinctions between the two.
Researchers agree that compulsive buying is a behavior that occurs repetitively, is considered excessive,
and has negative consequences. For compulsive buyers, going on shopping trips is a response triggered by
a certain set of feelings or circumstances; and according to Faber, compulsive buyers report going on compulsive buying trips two to three times per week.
In making this observation, however, most psychiatrists do not consider compulsive buying to be a
type of physiological addiction, but rather consider
it to be a mental disorder. Nancy Ridgway and colleagues observe that while most researchers classify
compulsive buying as an impulse control disorder,
ICDs are defined as irresistible impulses to perform
harmful behaviors. On the other hand, most definitions of compulsive buying include descriptions that
characterize it as an OCD; that is, obsessive thoughts
and compulsions that cause distress and interfere
with a person’s everyday functioning. Ridgway and
colleagues note that researchers more recently view
ICD and OCD as two extremes on a continuum of
an obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum. Compulsive buying and other consumer illnesses, such
as Internet addiction and pathological gambling,
exhibit characteristics of both disorders and fall
somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Ridgway
and colleagues go on to observe that most definitions of compulsive buying confound outcomes of
the disorder—financial and emotional harm, damage
to social relationships—with characteristics of the
disorder; they argue that people with higher income
levels may engage in compulsive buying without
necessarily suffering from financial consequences.
Although compulsive buying is highly associated with issues of identity, the act of buying does
not have the same function for all compulsive buyers. Some compulsive buyers indicate that the items
they purchase are not important in themselves and
have little to do with the compulsion; rather, they
find the experience of buying itself, not possession of
the object, provides the temporary relief and enjoyment they seek (O’Guinn and Faber 1989). In contrast, hoarders who are also compulsive buyers tend
to be much more emotionally attached and invested
in the objects they purchase than the average consumer. A key characteristic connecting pathological

Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

consumption to incomplete or inadequate identities
is fantasy. Some scholars have linked a high frequency of fantasizing to compulsive consumption,
whereas others see fantasy as a way to engage in
denial of one’s consumption addictions.
Researchers have identified some consumer illnesses as being highly skewed toward one gender
or another, such as compulsive gambling (men)
and compulsive buying (women). Some researchers
explain such gender specificity of these compulsions
as a product of gender socialization: young girls are
socialized with a “shopping” orientation, whereas
society considers gambling a more appropriate activity for men. However, some researchers suggest that
men who are compulsive buyers are often underrepresented in studies because they are less likely to
identify their problem as such or they are less likely
to seek treatment.
Hoarding as a consumer illness has attracted
even less attention from researchers than compulsive
buying, despite increasing attention to the topic in
popular media. Hoarders have immense difficulties
throwing away anything that they acquire, and their
homes are so filled with “clutter” that there is often
only a narrow path of space for people to navigate
through rooms; some rooms may become so filled
that they are impossible to enter altogether. The most
obvious signs of hoarding, then, are an inordinately
excessive acquisition and accumulation of things.
However, Randy Frost and Gail Steketee define
hoarding not by how many possessions a person has,
but as excessive acquisition of possessions that causes
distress and impairs normal functioning. Hoarders
feel an enormous amount of attachment to their
possessions, and do not distinguish between what
appears to be junk or trash to most people (empty
cereal boxes, expired coupons) and valuable possessions, such as tax returns or a car title. In their study,
Frost and Steketee found that common characteristics
among hoarders include perfectionism, indecision, a
highly active imagination, and powerful beliefs about
and attachments to objects. As in other types of consumer illnesses, Frost and Steketee found that hoarders suffer from emotional problems, low self-esteem,
come from dysfunctional families, and suffered some
kind of trauma or abuse. Many hoarders exhibit
other kinds of consumption illnesses, such as compulsive buying, kleptomania, and binge eating disorders.
Like other researchers, Frost and Steketee maintain that hoarders have to address their underlying

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emotional issues, sense of identity, and relationships
to their possessions before they can recover.

Consumer Illnesses and Society
In arguing why compulsive gambling should be considered a “true” addiction as opposed to so-called
sex, work, and shopping addictions, Don Ross and
Harold Kincaid observe that the late-twentiethcentury view of addiction as a disease has enabled
the medicalization of more mundane practices, so
that addiction is relative to the point of view of the
observer. To complicate matters, Shirley Lee and
Avis Mysyk state that compulsive buying ought
to be considered an addiction, against Ross and
Kincaid’s admonition. In their terms, Lee and Mysyk
see the terms compulsion and addiction in opposition, with the former representing a wider, social origin and the latter representing a medical condition.
They argue against labeling compulsive buying as a
mental disorder because they see it as a social disorder, arising from the Western consumer-driven economy, with the attendant ease of access to credit and
credit cards. Lee and Mysyk note that the surge of
interest in compulsive buying beginning in the mid1980s coincided with the economic crisis of the
1980s and 1990s. As personal bankruptcy rates in
North America rose throughout these two decades,
the media applied metaphors of illness to the phenomenon. Ultimately, the “jobless recovery” of this
economic crisis did not come from investments by
businesses, but by consumers. Lee and Mysyk suggest that the low self-esteem and anxiety present in
compulsive buyers may stem from living in a consumer society that encourages consumption while
simultaneously blaming them for doing so.
Gerda Reith agrees that a medicalization of
addictive consumption is an important feature
of popular discourse in Western societies, but she
widens the historical scope beyond the economic
crisis of the late-twentieth century. She uses Michel
Foucault’s theory of governmentality to frame her
discourse analysis of addiction and consumption in
late modernity. She argues that the lack of public
regulation of individuals in our neoliberal society is
compensated by the regulation of personal choice
through market options. Using Foucault’s theory of
governmentality, Reith argues that in a society that
enacts governance through freedom, where freedom
means choosing among vast arrays of commodities

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Consumer Interviews

and experiences, the addict refuses this “freedom”
by refusing to choose. Although Reith agrees with
other consumer culture scholars that consumer illnesses are intimately linked to issues of the self
and identity, she asserts that, ultimately, consumer
pathologies are the embodiment of the tensions
inherent in the use of consumer “freedom” as a
form of social control.
Like Heyman’s model of addiction that focuses
on individuals’ frame of reference, Reith’s social
discourse analysis of addiction demonstrates how
and where addictive consumption originates, but
does not offer an explanation of why some people
become addicted consumers and others do not,
nor why or how many addicts break their addictions on their own. The wide range of disciplines
involved in the research of consumption illnesses
suggests that consumer illnesses stem from the
interaction of a variety of factors at individual and
social levels.
Jessica Chelekis
See also Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Society; Desire;
Gambling; Governmentality; Identity; Psychoanalysis

Further Readings
Belk, Russell. “Are We What We Own?” In I Shop,
Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for
Self, edited by April Lane Benson, 57–104. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Faber, Ronald J. “Self-Control and Compulsive Buying.”
In Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for
a Good Life in a Materialistic World, edited by Tim
Kasser and Allen D. Kanner, 169–187. Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association, 2003.
Faber, Ronald J., Gary A. Christenson, Martina de Zwaan,
and James Mitchell. “Two Forms of Compulsive
Consumption: Comorbidity of Compulsive Buying and
Binge Eating.” Journal of Consumer Research
22 (December 1995): 296–303.
Frost, Randy O., and Gail Steketee. Stuff: Compulsive
Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
Heyman, Gene M. “Addiction: A Latent Property of the
Dynamics of Choice.” In What Is Addiction? edited by
Donald Ross, Harold Kincaid, David Spurrett, and Peter
Collins, 159–190. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Hirschman, Elizabeth C. “The Consciousness of Addiction:
Toward a General Theory of Compulsive
Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research
19 (September 1992): 155–179.

Lee, Shirley, and Avis Mysyk. “The Medicalization of
Compulsive Buying.” Social Science and Medicine
58 (2004): 1709–1718.
O’Guinn, Thomas C., and Ronald J. Faber. “Compulsive
Buying: A Phenomenological Exploration.” Journal of
Consumer Research 16 (September 1989): 147–155.
Petry, Nancy M. Pathological Gambling: Etiology,
Comorbidity and Treatment. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association, 2005.
Reith, Gerda. “Consumption and Its Discontents:
Addiction, Identity and the Problems of Freedom.” The
British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004): 283–300.
Ridgway, Nancy M., Monika Kukar-Kinney, and Kent B.
Monroe. “An Expanded Conceptualization and
Measure of Compulsive Buying.” Journal of Consumer
Research 35 (December 2008): 622–639.
Ross, Don, and Harold Kincaid. “Introduction: What Is
Addiction?” In What Is Addiction? edited by Donald
Ross, Harold Kincaid, David Spurrett, and Peter Collins,
vii–xi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

CONSUMER INTERVIEWS
Interviews with consumers are an increasingly relevant methodology within consumption studies and
consumer research that either replace or complement other data collection forms, such as quantitative or observational research. Consumer interviews
can be defined as direct research encounters between
researchers and either individuals or groups, characterized by research subjects being encouraged to give
extended or reflective verbal answers to researcher
questions. Consumer interviews are mostly done in
face-to-face settings where researchers and interviewees are in direct physical proximity, though
they can also be done remotely, for example over the
Internet or by telephone. Though consumer behavior studies are sometimes done in interview format
via extended surveys, what distinguishes consumer
interviews is the fact that they allow for reflective,
individualized responses to a relatively unstructured
or semi-structured interview format. Furthermore, a
significant point of difference is that survey type interviews are often extensively based on closed questions,
referring to questions with a limited number of predefined answer options. In contrast, many consumer
interviews have encouraged further probing, extension, and flexibility on the part of the interviewer,
meaning there is greater opportunity for interviewees
to give individualized responses.

Consumer Interviews

The Rationale for Interview Research
in Consumer Studies
The dominant paradigm of research in studies of
consumer behavior has been influenced by quantitative, behavioral, and positivistic methodological
approaches, frequently derived from research styles in
business studies and psychology. Consumer researchers have traditionally tended to prefer quantitative
over qualitative approaches. They have operated
with the assumption that representative population
surveys using closed questions, rather than face-toface interviews, was the best way to access reliable
forms of behavioral data that could inform models of
consumer behavior and choice. Much of this genre of
research is associated with marketing, business, and
consumer research studies, most strongly developed
in North America, with the main aim to apply scientific research techniques to understand, predict, and
attempt to manipulate consumer behavior.
However, in recent decades, there has been an
important developing paradigm shift based on a
growing awareness of the importance of qualitative, interpretive, and meaning-based approaches
in studies of consumer behavior. Though methodological innovators within consumer research have
often come from, or been inspired by, related fields
of consumer research within sociology or anthropology, this methodological shift has occurred not
just within these fields but also in the traditional
core fields of marketing and business studies.
Rather than being mere complements to traditional
approaches or exploratory projects, many researchers across the entire consumer studies field now
acknowledge that qualitative approaches are essential in allowing researchers access to various types
of information, perspectives, and data that would be
impossible to gather using traditional quantitative
survey approaches.
Consumer interviews should be considered as part
of the broad tradition of qualitative social research.
Qualitative research is a diverse field that has been
historically constructed through a range of unique
and often dispersed methodological traditions, such
as symbolic interactionism, ethnography, visual
research, and even conversation analysis. Yet, at
its heart, what is common to this type of research
is the researcher’s commitment to interpreting and
understanding a person’s reasoning for his or her
actions and beliefs. Qualitative researchers often take
sociologist Max Weber’s methodological platform

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of verstehen as a fundamental point of inspiration
for their research methods. The verstehen idea refers
to the goal of understanding the basis of human
actions using the reasoning perspectives of people
themselves. It is held that this approach yields deep
insights into the meaningful basis of social action and
its consequences.
Consistent with this goal, qualitative research is
most often presented in textual rather than numerical
form so that the content and context of interviewee’s
comments are preserved, as much as possible, in
original transcribed form, allowing maximum interpretive scope for the analyst. Interview of research is
also often conducted using an inductive approach,
meaning that the researchers go into their project
with a broad sense of their research questions and
goals, but often without firm hypotheses and rigid
question agendas, which are seen to limit the interviewees’ capacity to give their own accounts. This
relatively open-ended approach can lead to significant in-depth insights for researchers, allowing access
to consumer’s own lines of commonsense reasoning.
Yet, on the downside, such insights are unlikely to
be statistically robust findings, and so they cannot
be taken as the representative views of a population.

Types of Research Interviews
There are a number of major types of research interviews that are typically used in consumer research.
First are structured types of interviews. Structured
interviews involve asking a series of questions in
strict order with little or no room for spontaneity,
innovation, and further exploration of answers, or
for altering the questions that are asked. Rather
than a conversation, this type of interview can often
resemble a simple question and answer session, with
the researcher asking a precalculated series of questions and the interviewees given little encouragement
to go further than their initial thought or response.
This type of closed questioning often resembles a
social survey questionnaire, though of course it can
provide more information, such as nonverbal cues
or the use of visual or material prompts. The major
advantage of the structured and closed interview
is that it reduces possible interviewer effects on the
responses and achieves a high degree of uniformity in
research procedures across the interview cases.
At the other extreme are unstructured interviews.
In an unstructured interview, the researchers may
begin with an awareness of the types of topics they

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Consumer Moods

wish to broach in an interview and perhaps a few
general questions. However, in this type of interview,
there is a conscious effort to explore a topic without
predetermined questions that can lead interviewees
to matters they may not have raised or considered
important. So, this type of interview is very much
interviewee led, meaning the interview structure is
completely flexible and the interviewee can determine its direction more so than the interviewer. The
major advantage of this style of interview is that it
can lead to a fertile type of free association on the
part of the interviewee, so that many issues can be
raised that the interviewer and interviewee would
likely never have thought of, let alone verbalized in
a more structured interview setting. The downside
of this interview style is that there is little uniformity
across interviews, potentially causing problems of
comparison and making generalization difficult for
the researcher.
Between these two extremes is the semi-structured
interview. In this type, the interview begins with a
series of questions or broad topic areas that are generated and directed by the project’s research questions,
though there is considerable opportunity to go outside and beyond these questions and to let the interviewees take the interviews in any direction they may,
much like a conversation. In fact, the semi-structured
interview is often characterized as conversational in
nature. The major advantage of this type of interview
approach is that the interviewers will often discover
aspects of the topic and its relation to other facets
of behavior or beliefs that they had not conceived
of at the start of their research. By intentionally not
delimiting topics, nor how interviewees may freely
associate them with other topics, the researchers may
be able to access a universe of symbolic meanings
and interpretations they may never have imagined.
Rather than necessarily be considered “off topic” or
irrelevant, if they are encouraged by the researcher,
such meanderings can generate unexpected, intriguing, and often innovative research findings.

a severe questioning of the value of traditional methods. In the main part, this questioning of traditional
data collection methods such as the interview relates
to a larger, multifaceted challenge to the knowledge claims traditionally made within the social and
behavioral sciences. In the context of the interview,
such questioning asks whether the research interview is in fact a simple vessel for transferring objective knowledge from interviewee to interviewer, or
whether it is a social setting where what is produced
as knowledge is a direct product of the research process itself. Thus, the question is whether data collected in a research interview be regarded as either
unobtrusively “found” by the researcher, or “made”
within the research context itself and therefore not
objective or independent. To recognize they are
“made” acknowledges they are texts that are actively
constructed within the research interview, both
embedded within and a product of wider discourses,
including discourses of research and data collection,
which are the basis of its construction. These matters,
however, have not meant that the interview has completely fallen out of favor in consumer studies, but
that researchers use it more carefully and reflexively.
Ian Woodward
See also Consumer Behavior; Conversation Analysis;
Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Photography and Video; Surveys

Further Readings
Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society.
New York: Routledge, 1995.
Denzin, Norman. Interpretive Interactionism. London:
Sage, 1989.
Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. “Active
Interviewing.” In Qualitative Research: Theory, Method
and Practice, edited by David Silverman, 113–129.
London: Sage, 1997.
Woodward, Ian. “Domestic Objects and the Taste
Epiphany: A Resource for Consumption Methodology.”
Journal of Material Culture 6, no. 2 (2001): 115–136.

Current Issues in Interview Research
Though the research interview in its various guises
has been a stalwart method in the social, behavioral,
and business sciences for some decades, in recent
times its usefulness and general applicability has
been questioned. This questioning has come generally from the point of view of the postmodern and
cultural turn in the social sciences, which has led to

CONSUMER MOODS
Consumer moods are the phenomenological properties of individual consumers’ affective states. For
example, a consumer may be in a good mood or a
cheerful mood. Such moods are subcategories of

Consumer Moods

feeling states, where feeling states are general and
pervasive affective states. They can be contrasted
with feelings directed toward an object or product, which are associated with product attitudes.
Consumer moods are transient and mild, and so can
be contrasted with feelings that are more stable and
permanent, such as those associated with dispositions
or neuroticisms. They can also be distinguished from
emotions that are more intense, attention-getting,
and disruptive of ongoing processing and behavior.
The word mood has many interpretations in common parlance and many usages in consumer culture.
For example, one might refer to mood as a property of a consumption environment, and describe
one store as having a “funky mood” and another as
having an “opulent mood.” Alternatively, one might
refer to mood as a property of a consumption-related
message and describe one advertisement or pointof-purchase display as having a “playful mood”
and another as having a “melodramatic mood.” In
addition, one might refer to mood as a property of
an object of consumption, and refer to one automobile as having a “youthful mood” and another
as having a “serious mood.” Finally, mood can be
used to describe the affective tone of the consumer
population in the aggregate with respect to specific
economic conditions or their expectations for their
own future economic well-being. This usage is common in the popular press, which periodically refers
to consumers as being in a “cautious mood” when
spending is relatively low and as being in an “optimistic mood” when spending is relatively high.
Specific moods can be differentiated phenomenologically and conceptually, and have been investigated along three dimensions: pleasure, arousal,
and dominance. Of these dimensions, pleasure has
received the most attention, and the great preponderance of the research has investigated the effects
of consumers’ positive and negative moods, either
relative to each other or relative to a neutral (control) mood.
In all domains of life, people try to read and
anticipate each other’s moods and use that information to facilitate social and professional interactions.
For example, someone might consider a friend’s
mood before asking to borrow her car, and one
might consider one’s own mood before deciding
whether to eat ice cream. Analogously, knowledge
of consumers’ moods provides insight into their cognitive, decision-making, and behavioral reactions.

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Consumers’ moods are an important aspect of consumer culture because they are easily influenced by
aspects of the consumption environment and interactions with marketers, and because they have important effects on consumers’ thoughts, feelings, and
behavior. Because moods are omnipresent and affect
consumer behavior across a wide range of internal
states and external behaviors, and because they can
be easily influenced by aspects of the consumption
environment, it is important to understand both the
processes and outcomes they influence and the ways
aspects of the consumption environment influence
moods.

Effects of Positive Moods on Attitude
Formation, Cognitive Organization,
and Flexibility
The earliest work on the effects of feeling states
found that mood states often bias evaluations of
novel and familiar stimuli in mood-congruent directions and bias judgments of the likelihood of moodcongruent events in mood-congruent directions.
Findings also revealed that mood during exposure
to information enhances recall of mood-congruent
information and mood during retrieval of information from memory enhances recall of moodcongruent items, and a match between exposure and
retrieval moods enhances recall.
Investigations by Alice M. Isen and her colleagues
have found that positive moods appear to trigger
retrieval of broad categories of information in memory, and that the influence of positive mood depends
on situational factors. Although those in positive
moods often evaluate stimuli more favorably, they
do not do so blindly. Positive mood leads to positive
evaluation of neutral stimuli, but does not influence
the evaluation of clearly positive or negative stimuli,
and positive mood improves satisfaction with an
interesting job, but not a boring one. Findings indicate that positive moods enhance the likelihood of
performance of behaviors with positive expected
outcomes but decrease the likelihood of performance
of behaviors with negative expected outcomes.
Experiments have shown that positive mood fosters
social responsibility, helpfulness, improved social
interaction and functioning, and provides evidence
that such prosocial behavior is due to flexible thinking and problem solving rather than being caused by
giving in or social compliance. Finally, findings indicate that positive mood is associated with creativity,

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Consumer Moods

flexible thinking, and willingness to pursue unusual,
but not too risky, alternatives.
Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues built on
this research to investigate the implications of positive
affective states over time. They developed and tested
the “broaden-and-build” theory, which posits that
although positive moods are short-lived, their effects
are cumulative and durable. Each instance of positive
mood results in increased personal resources, which
accumulate and function as reserves that help individuals manage future threats and enhance personal
growth and resilience. Thus, the broaden-and-build
theory suggests and evidence supports that the effects
of positive moods accumulate and compound over
time, so that experiencing good moods makes people
more knowledgeable, better integrated socially, more
effective, more resilient to future problems, and generally healthier.

Affect Infusion Model
Joseph P. Forgas and his colleagues have developed
and tested the affect infusion model (AIM). The
model assumes that the nature and magnitude of the
role of affect on processing depends on the kind of
processing strategy used, and that people will tend to
use the easiest strategy that will give them a response.
They conceptualize strategies as varying along the
degree of effort involved and the degree of openness
or constructiveness of the information-search strategy. The two dimensions define four processing styles:
substantive processing (high effort/constructive),
motivated processing (high effort/closed), heuristic processing (low effort/constructive), and directaccess processing (low effort/closed). According to
AIM, affect is unlikely to influence the attitude elicited when attitude is based on merely closed tasks
(i.e., motivated or direct-access processing) and more
likely to affect the attitude elicited when constructive
processing is used (i.e., substantive or heuristic processing). The motivated processing strategy involves
highly focused and selective thinking that is dominated by a specific motivational object.
For example, when asked to evaluate how a particular pair of jeans looks on his wife, a husband’s
response is likely to be dominated by the motivation
to produce an acceptable response. According to the
AIM, he is unlikely to use constructive processes to
form his attitude and is unlikely to be influenced
by his momentary mood. The direct-access strategy
involves the direct retrieval of a preexisting response,

and is most likely when one has already formed an
attitude, and when there is no reason (cognitive,
affective, situational, or motivational) to do anything
other than retrieve the stored response. Under such
circumstances, AIM would argue that a consumer
will simply retrieve his or her attitude and that it will
not be influenced by the consumer’s mood.
Heuristic and substantive processing requires
more open-ended information search, and AIM predicts that such processing will involve more influence
of affect. Heuristic processing is used when consumers have little motivation, opportunity, or inclination
for more detailed processing (e.g., when asked to
respond to survey questions). Consistent with the
feelings-as-information approach (see the next section), heuristic processing can reflect the influence of
affect when feelings are used as a simple inferential
cue to indicate how consumers feel about products.
Substantive processing is used when the other three
types of processing prove inadequate; it requires consumers to actively combine novel information with
memory-based information to produce an attitude.
Such processing is likely when consumers are ready,
willing, and motivated to engage in effortful, open
attitude formation.
AIM predicts, and empirical findings support,
greater affect infusion and mood congruence when
substantive processing is used relative to the other
processing strategies. In an article in Psychological
Inquiry titled “Missing in Action in the AIM:
Positive Affect’s Facilitation of Cognitive Flexibility,
Innovation, and Problem Solving,” Isen argues that
the AIM does not adequately account for findings
that show that positive affect leads to thorough,
adaptive, creative decision making.

Feelings-as-Information
Norbert Schwartz, Gerald Clore, and their colleagues
have developed the feelings-as-information approach
to understanding mood effects; and Michel Tuan
Pham has expanded and extended its implications
for consumer behavior by developing and testing the
generalized affect-as-information model (GAIM) of
judgment. This perspective suggests that individuals use their apparent affective response to target a
basis for judgment. Thus, when a consumer is shopping, she might ask herself, “How do I feel about
this product?” A crucial finding of the feelings-asinformation school of research is that it is difficult for
people to distinguish their preexisting feelings from

Consumer Moods

their affective responses to a product under consideration. Thus, they are likely to evaluate any product
more favorably when they are in positive rather than
negative moods.
When they are aware that their feelings are due
to a source unrelated to the product under consideration, such mood-congruent effects on attitude
formation disappear. This helps explain an apparent paradox: Even though intense emotions are, by
definition, stronger than moods, they are less likely
to be misattributed to target objects because they
are more salient and because consumers are able to
differentiate them from their feelings toward target
objects. The feelings-as-information hypothesis has
been demonstrated to influence judgments in ways
consistent with the goals associated with feelings, the
ways in which feelings are perceived, the dimensions
of feeling states, and the nature of feelings triggered.
Since moods are an ever-present aspect of all phases
of the consumption process, feelings may be used as
information while consumers are evaluating their
needs, products, retailers, consumption uses, and
disposal options. The feelings-as-information model
would suggest that awareness of their moods may
enable consumers to make more objective choices
throughout all phases of consumer behavior.
On a more global level, Pham has suggested that
the misattribution of incidental mood states may
explain the effect of the weather on the stock market.
The above-average stock market performance on
sunny days and the below-average performance on
rainy and winter days may be due to good weather
putting investors into good moods that are misinterpreted as optimism about the stock market and
inflated attitudes toward investing and bad weather
putting investors into negative moods that are misinterpreted as pessimism about the stock market and
depressed attitudes toward investing.
Rajagopal Raghunathan and Pham used the
affect-as-information perspective to investigate the
impact of sadness and anxiety on decision making.
Findings indicate that sad people were biased in
favor of high-risk, high-reward options because sadness primes an implicit goal of reward replacement,
and that anxious people were biased in favor of
low-risk/low-reward options because anxiety primes
an implicit goal of uncertainty reduction. Findings
also revealed that feelings led to choices that enabled
people in both conditions to anticipate feeling better.
Raghunathan, Pham, and Kim Corfman replicated

277

and extended these findings and documented what
they called “displaced coping,” where affective states
with salient sources influenced decisions that were
seemingly but not directly related to the source of the
affective state.
Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Lerner have proposed and found support for the appraisal tendency
framework to understand the effects of specific
negative feeling states. The framework suggests that
each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive
new events and objects in ways that are consistent
with the original cognitive-appraisal dimension
of the emotion. Consistent with the appraisaltendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgments of future events and risk-averse
choices, whereas angry people made optimistic
judgments and risk-seeking choices. Also consistent
with appraisal-tendency theory, disgust resulted in
reduced selling and choice prices and eliminated the
endowment effect; and sadness reduced selling prices
but increased choice prices, producing a reverse
endowment effect in which choice prices exceeded
selling prices. Although conceptualized with regard
to emotions rather than moods, the appraisal
tendency framework is consistent with the feelingsas-information approach and is likely to have implications for consumer mood effects.
In addition to influencing decision making
in mood-congruent directions, the feelings-asinformation perspective suggests and findings support that mood influences the strategy of information
processing people are likely to adopt. Because negative moods are associated with difficulties, they tend
to elicit decision-making styles that involve attention
to specific aspects of the apparently difficult situation.
Because positive moods are associated with benign
environments, they signal that it is okay to rely on
usual routines and preexisting knowledge structures.
This is consistent with evidence that positive moods
are associated with evaluating brands using global
processing strategies and negative moods are associated with using detail-oriented brand evaluation
strategies. Interestingly, use of the dominant strategy
for each affective state results in better postdecision
mood than use of the nondominant strategy, suggesting mood management advantages of using the
“right” processing strategy. Consistent with the other
findings for feelings-as-information, mood effects on
processing style are eliminated when the informational value of the information is called into question.

278

Consumer Moods

Mood Management
There is anecdotal, experiential, and laboratory
evidence that people deliberately manage or adjust
their moods to improve task performance and for
hedonic satisfaction. Thus, consumers may deliberately moderate their positive moods or assuage
their negative moods when doing so will enable
them to make better choices. In addition, some consumers use shopping itself to manage their moods,
and for compulsive shoppers, compulsive buying
occurs in response to negative emotions and results
in a decrease in the intensity of the negative emotions. If consumers believe their feelings are fleeting,
those who are happy engage in affect regulation in
an effort to extend the good feelings, while if consumers believe their feelings are lasting, those who
are unhappy engage in affect regulation in an effort
to repair their moods. Harri T. Luomala and Martti
Laaksonen analyzed consumption behaviors to
identify their mood-alleviating therapeutic powers, the mood-alleviating power of self-gifts, and
the differences in mood regulatory activities across
cultures. They have found that mood-regulatory
activities are less consumption-oriented, have more
socially based emotional consequences, and are more
easily pursued and more effective in collectivistic cultures as opposed to individualistic cultures. Finally,
research has found support for the existence of both
automatic cognitive strategies for affect regulation
and strategies involving conscious sequencing of consumption choices (e.g., listening to music).

Personality Traits as Moderators
of Mood Effects
Findings indicate that personality traits moderate the
effects of mood states. People who are lower in need
for cognition and those who are higher in opennessto-feeling may be more influenced by the effects of
their moods. In addition, the effects of affective states
may be attenuated for individuals who are high on
need for approval and Machiavellianism. Finally,
low self-monitors feel more distinctive from their
environment than high self-monitors when asked to
imagine a context that differed in valence from their
mood, and these feelings lead them to prefer contexts that are congruent in valence with their moods.
In contrast, high self-monitors prefer contexts that
differ in valence from their mood. The Following
Affective States Test (FAST) can be used to ascertain

which individuals use their current feelings as a
basis for their judgments. Since stable individual difference factors and transitory moods interact to affect
consumption-related thoughts and behaviors, consumer education programs may enable consumers to
assess their own sensitivity to specific mood effects.

Future Research
In addition to ongoing research in all of the areas
discussed in this entry, psychobiologists are working
on understanding the core mechanisms underlying
the interrelationship among mood states, internal
processes and states, and behavioral action. Piotr
Winkielman, Brian Knutson, Martin Paulus, and
Jennifer Trujillo provide insights from biopsychological models that shed light on how moods influence
processes that are relevant to consumption culture,
including values, perception, attention, memory,
judgment, and choice. Their work suggests that the
interface between behavior science and neuroscience
may be a fruitful area for research to better understand the complex interactions and their role in consumer culture.
Meryl Gardner
See also Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior;
Emotions; Methods of Market Research; Motivation
Research; Neuromarketing; Well-Being

Further Readings
Forgas, Joseph P. Handbook of Affect and Social
Cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001.
Fredrickson, Barbara. Positivity: Groundbreaking Research
Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of
Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive.
New York: Crown, 2009.
Gardner, Meryl P. “Mood States and Consumer Behavior:
A Critical Review.” The Journal of Consumer Research
12, no. 3 (December 1985): 281–300.
Isen, Alice M. “Missing in Action in the AIM: Positive
Affect’s Facilitation of Cognitive Flexibility, Innovation,
and Problem Solving.” Psychological Inquiry 13, no. 1
(2002): 57–65.
Keltner, Dacher, and Jennifer S. Lerner. “Emotion.” In
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan
T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey, 5th
ed., 317–352. New York: John Wiley, 2010.
Lewis, Michael, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa
Feldman Barrett. Handbook of Emotions. 3rd ed.
New York: Guilford Press, 2008.

Consumer Nationalism
Luomala, Harri T., and Martti Laaksonen. “A Qualitative
Exploration of Mood-Regulatory Self-Gift Behaviors.”
Journal of Economic Psychology 20, no. 2 (April 1999):
147–182.
Moore, Bert S., and Alice M. Isen. Affect and Social
Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Moore, William N. Mood: The Frame of Mind. New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1989.
Peterson, Robert A., Wayne D. Hoyer, and William R.
Wilson. The Role of Affect in Consumer Behavior.
Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984.
Pham, Michel Tuan. “The Lexicon and Grammar of Affect
as Information in Consumer Decision Making.” Social
Psychology of Consumer Behavior (2009): 159–192.
Raghunathan, Rajagopal, and Michel Tuan Pham. “All
Negative Moods Are Not Equal: Motivational
Influences of Anxiety and Sadness on Decision
Making.” Organizational Behavior and Human
Decision Processes 79, no. 1 (July 1999): 56–77.
Raghunathan, Rajagopal, Michel Tuan Pham, and Kim
Corfman. “Informational Properties of Anxiety and
Sadness, and Displaced Coping.” Journal of Consumer
Research 32 (March 2006): 596–601.
Schwarz, Norbert, and Gerald L. Clore. “Mood as
Information: 20 Years Later.” Psychological Inquiry
14, nos. 3/4 (2003): 296–303.
Winkielman, Piotr, Brian Knutson, Martin Paulus, and
Jennifer Trujillo. “Affective Influence on Judgments and
Decisions: Moving towards Core Mechanisms.” Review
of General Psychology 11, no. 2 (2007): 179–192.

CONSUMER NATIONALISM
Consumer nationalism combines two of the
most important historical forces in modern history: the advent of consumerism and nationalism.
Consumerism refers to consumption of branded,
mass-produced goods and services and the orientation of social life around them. That is, consumerism involves the creation or reproduction of social
identity through the consumption of mass-produced,
branded, and advertised things. Consumer nationalism refer to efforts to define buying and using (or
consumption) as a political statement through the
nonconsumption of things from an offending country or countries and the consumption of one’s own
nationally produced goods and services.
Consumer nationalism often has two sides:
nonconsumption of imports and consumption of

279

domestic goods and services. Of the two, boycotts
are the most visible and common form of consumer
nationalism. Boycotts have been a central part
of nationalist movements since at least the Boston
Tea Party in 1773, when American colonialists
destroyed crates of tea imported by the British East
India Company to protest disadvantageous British
tax policies. Since then, boycotts have been used
by consumers in innumerable countries to express
nationalism. Consumer nationalist boycotts have
been launched against citizens of the same nation for
a perceived injury by other members of that nation,
including periodic boycotts by Americans of companies sponsoring “un-American” movies or the
Nazi-led boycott against Jewish businesses in 1933.
Such boycotts have been used frequently by consumers against targeted foreign countries. Boycotts
against Japan, for instance, figured prominently in
international relations on the eve of World War II, as
consumers in countries such as the United Kingdom
and United States launched boycotts to protest that
country’s policies in China.

Consumer Nationalist Movements
The modern Chinese experience reveals the range of
consumer nationalist activities, ranging from boycotts
led by individuals to state-enforced consumption of
domestic products. Such activities in the era of imperialism precipitated or accompanied major turning
points in relations between imperialist powers and
their colonies. China had significant anti-imperialist
boycotts in 1905, 1915, 1919, 1923, 1925, 1928,
1931, and then nearly continuously into the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Such boycotts
may have even provoked the war with Japan, which
sought to ensure continued market access. After the
Chinese Communist victory in 1949, Chinese leaders finally and completely gained control over tariffs.
Within a few years, the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) government effectively banned the importation of virtually all consumer goods, particularly
those from capitalist countries. Chinese consumers
had little choice but to “buy Chinese.” Thirty years
later, China dramatically changed course. With the
initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms,
China slowly began to import consumer goods.
As the range and volume of imports have grown
with global trade liberalization since the 1990s, consumer nationalist exploitation of the historic tension

280

Consumer Nationalism

between “domestic products” and “foreign products” periodically reemerges, even as the foreign/
domestic categories of products become obsolete. In
the Chinese case, with the lead up to its ascension
to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001,
there have been at least three reasons for renewed
consumer activism. First, China’s WTO commitments allow easier market access for multinationals,
rendering countless domestic enterprises uncompetitive and creating millions of unemployed workers.
Second, a new generation of patriotic students continues to invoke the language of economic nationalism and call for boycotts, as did those participating in
the widespread boycotts of the French retailing giant
Carrefour in China in the spring of 2008 in retaliation for the disruption of the Olympic torch relay in
Paris. Finally, domestic consumers periodically call
for boycotts of specific foreign products when they
feel consumers collectively have been treated poorly
or differently by multinational companies.
China has not been the only country with consumers who have attempted to combine nationalism
and consumerism. The swadeshi (“belonging to one’s
own country”) and noncooperation movements in
India (1904–1908, 1920–1922) are the best-known
and best-studied equivalents of China’s consumer
nationalism. As noted, Americanists have been aware
of links between consumerism and nationalism since
late colonial times, through the anti-Japanese boycotts of the 1930s and the boycotts of French products in 2003 to protest French opposition to the Iraq
War. Likewise, Japan, Ireland, Korea, Britain, France,
Germany, Nigeria, and Spain, among other countries, also experienced similar consumer nationalist
movements with varying intensity in nation-making
projects from late colonial times to the present.
Movements of consumer nationalism in these countries generated their own vocabularies, vocabularies
used both by contemporary participants and in later
scholarly studies, including terms such as nationalizing consumer culture, indigenization, indigenism,
domestication, import-substitution, decolonization,
autarky, and de-foreignization.
Similar to the concept of modern nationalism,
the ideas and practices of consumer nationalism
have spread from country to country. Before World
War II, Chinese consumer nationalists, for instance,
regularly sought to inspire consumers with reports
on the activities of similar efforts in other countries. Consumer nationalism, thus, is best seen as a

transnational phenomenon. That is not to suggest
these movements unfolded in a uniform way. What
makes, for instance, the Chinese case particularly
interesting for comparative purposes is that the
country was not formally colonized yet lacked many
aspects of sovereignty, including the ability to set tariffs, which forced consumer nationalist efforts to be
directed against foreign countries directly rather than
at national policymakers. Likewise, as China was,
to use the common Chinese term for its situation,
“semi-colonial,” consumer nationalist efforts were
not, nor could have been, solely state directed.

Historical and Contemporary Investigation
Consumer nationalism is a potentially rich field of
historical and contemporary investigation. Despite
the emergence of consumer nationalist movements
throughout the world, historians have neither
devoted much attention to them nor suggested that
they are key aspects of nation-making. When mentioned at all, the nationalization of consumer culture
is treated as a natural by-product of the creation of
nation-states. In fact, the causes and consequences
of nationalizing commodities played a crucial role in
creating nations. Perhaps modern nation-states did
not precede the notion of each nation having its own
“national products.” Rather, these two constructs
may have evolved together. Nation-making included
learning, or being coerced, to shape preferences
around something called the nation and away from
items deemed “foreign”—a problematic process
reinforced by institutional elaborations. Consumer
nationalists drove such elaborations.
The notion of “consumer nationalism” complicates the study of consumerism. Discussions of consumerism rarely address the place of nationalism.
Rarely do studies of India, the most promising parallel to China, provide comprehensive accounts of a
consumer nationalist movement. These studies generally subordinate aspects of the national products
movement to either business strategy (e.g., attempts
by Bengali textile producers to preserve their market
share) or Mohandas Gandhi’s attempt to promote
spiritual revival through self-reliance. Likewise,
there is more than one kind of consumer nationalism. The Chinese case, which promoted consumption, provides a sharp contrast to Gandhi’s emphasis
on simple living and tradition. Despite Gandhi’s
emphasis on limiting material desires and creating

Consumer Policy (China)

self-sufficient villages, his ideas overlapped with the
dominant Chinese linkage on one fundamental issue.
Both rejected a simple embrace of capitalist relations
that privileged price over provenance. Criticizing
those who argued that the use of home-spun was
costlier than mill-made cloth, Gandhi said that if
expense were the most important issue, then, by the
same logic, we should kill our aged parents and children “whom we have to maintain without getting
anything in return.”
Similarly, fusing the concepts of “consumerism” and “nationalism” also complicates the study
of nationalism, which rarely addresses attempts
to nationalize consumer culture. Studies of economic nationalism focus on the political discourse
of economic and political leaders rather than on a
widespread and multidimensional social movement.
Moreover, some studies recognize “nationality” as a
significant category of consumption without explaining the historical origins. Studies that do integrate
consumerism and nationalism should emphasize the
range of participation, from voluntary to coerced
to violently enforced. Consumer nationalism often
sanctions coercion, and attempts to restrict consumption exclusively to “national products” may
include violence, particularly during boycotts. U.S.
congressional representatives backing a boycott of
the French in 2003 settled for simply changing the
name of “French fries” to “Freedom fries.” But for
Chinese consumer nationalists in the first half of the
twentieth century, by contrast, it was not enough for
citizens simply to read the same nationally circulated
newspaper and imagine the same national events. To
be Chinese, one had to buy Chinese.

Current Trends
Consumer nationalism continues to evolve. The
latest forms explicitly promote consumption—the
more, the better—as a way to help the country. In
the aftermath of September 11, 2001, for instance,
U.S. President George Bush and New York Mayor
Rudy Giuliani called on Americans to express their
patriotism by spending money, preferably in New
York City. And, in the wake of the global financial
crisis of 2008, China’s leaders have called on its citizens to rescue the country (and the world) by making
up for American and European export markets with
domestic consumption.
Karl Gerth

281

See also Citizenship; Collective Identity; Consumer
Culture in East Asia; Consumer Policy (China); Italian
Fascism and Fashion; National Cultures; Orientalism;
Postcolonial Theory

Further Readings
Adedeji, Adebayo, ed. Indigenization of African Economies.
New York: Africana, 1981.
Bayly, C. A. “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry):
Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930.” In The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
edited by Arjun Appadurai, 285–321. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How
Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Chandra, Bipan. The Rise and Growth of Economic
Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian
National Leadership, 1880–1905. New Delhi, India:
People’s Publishing House, 1966.
Frank, Dana. Buy American: The Untold Story of
Economic Nationalism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Friedman, Monroe. Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change
through the Marketplace and the Media. New York:
Rutledge, 1999.
Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the
Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
Hilton, Matthew. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century
Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Misra, Om Prakash. Economic Thought of Gandhi and
Nehru: A Comparative Analysis. New Delhi: M D, 1995.
Nelson, Laura. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and
Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000.
Orlove, Benjamin S., ed. The Allure of the Foreign:
Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Sarkar, Sumit. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal,
1903–1908. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Commerce,
Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

CONSUMER POLICY (CHINA)
Since 1949, consumer policy in China has been
closely connected to the ideological direction of ruling Communist Party elites. After the establishment

282

Consumer Policy (China)

of the People’s Republic of China, a command economy was established that went much further toward
controlling all aspects of everyday life than found
in the former Soviet Union. On gaining power, the
Chinese Communist Party nationalized urban land
and businesses and collectivized farmland. In addition, all citizens were limited in their movements by
strict residency laws (known as the hukou system)
that defined where a person could live and work.
Within urban areas, production was organized
around work units (danwei), distinct spatial compounds designed to house, feed, entertain, educate,
care for, and monitor residents. In addition to their
role as the state-in-practice, work units served as
the primary social web for members and as a foundational aspect of identity, according to Joe C. B.
Leung. In rural areas, social control was centered on
communes. However, unlike urban residents, rural
peasants did not receive access to subsidized basic
goods and services.
At its height, this command economy transformed
all consumer products and services into planned
productive sectors, with access primarily via a ration
system. This system was strained by the side effects
of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during
which time production of both foodstuffs and consumer products was disrupted by political in-fighting
and ideological campaigns. Following the death of
Mao Zedong in 1976 and the ascendancy to power
of Deng Xiaoping, economic reforms aimed at dismantling the command economy were instituted.
Known in Chinese as găigé kāifàng (reform and
opening), these ongoing policies have encouraged
foreign investment, effectively privatized agricultural
production, pushed state enterprises to be competitive, allowed private production, and eliminated
production and price controls. These policies have
also aimed at shifting welfare provisions, particularly
housing, from work units, communes, and cooperatives to private citizens.
Housing reforms in urban areas began with an
experimental program in Xian and Nanjing in 1979
to construct and sell new housing at cost. This policy
failed because few people could afford to purchase
a new apartment at cost, according to Xing Quan
Zhang. Next, a subsidized program was tried in
Zhejiang and Hubei Provinces in 1981 to 1982.
Under this program, new housing stock was jointly
funded by the central government, work units,
and individual occupants, with each contributing

one-third of the construction cost. This program was
rapidly expanded to approximately three hundred
cities by 1986, including Beijing. In 1988, state ownership of land was legally separated from individual
use-rights. This law was further revised in 1990 to
allow anyone who held use-rights to transfer or sell
these. In a 1991 decree, the State Council institutionalized the tripartite investment structure for new
housing stock between central government organs,
work units, and work unit members.
These initial reforms focused on increasing the
supply of housing not through privatization but
through what the government termed commoditization, in which private citizens became, in effect,
partners with their work units and central state ministries. This joint funding program enabled residents
without access to subsidized housing to gain access
to a different sort of subsidized housing, in which
they held limited use-rights, in exchange for a third
of the cost of this housing. More complicated was
how to apply housing reforms to already-existing
state housing, most of which was located within
state-owned enterprises (SOE). Beginning in the early
1990s, work units transferred use rights of apartments to their occupants at fixed prices. In 1995,
the State Council legalized the construction of commercial housing (shangpin fang) for sale at market
prices as well as “economical” housing (jingji fang)
for lower-middle-class residents. In 1997, new regulations required that work-unit-funded housing units
be sold at “cost price,” which carried full property
rights for buyers. Finally, in 1998, all state-affiliated
enterprises and institutes were prohibited from constructing any further housing.
The reform period has brought significant changes
to work units. Initial reforms that were designed to
introduce competition into the production process,
increase economic efficiency, and eliminate nonproductive and inefficient work units had the paradoxical effect of strengthening some forms of work units,
particularly service-oriented units. Because these initial reforms allowed administrators to keep a larger
percentage of the revenue they generated, well-run
work units could invest in social services and housing
for their members, increasing dependency on work
units. Indeed, while many industrial state enterprises
have struggled to adapt to market-driven administrative logic, others, usually service or educational
institutions in desirable locales, have thrived. These
schools offer Chinese language training to foreign

Consumer Policy (China)

students and foreign languages to Chinese students
through a strategic marketing of their own status.
Schools that have been most adept at adapting to this
language market have generated sufficient revenue
to maintain foundational aspects of state socialism,
such as subsidized food, medical care, and (for certain employees) housing.
Beyond housing, government policies have increasingly encouraged mass consumption, as domestic
consumption is now seen as a means of offsetting
China’s reliance on export-driven growth. Important to note, the Chinese government shows relatively little concern for the cultural impact of
heightened consumerism. From the National Basketball Association to McDonald’s, South Korean
and Taiwanese pop music to French and Italian
fashions, Chinese citizens consume foreign products.
This is in part connected to the fact that much of
what on the surface is foreign is actually produced
in China. Moreover, research suggests that even
the consumption of the seemingly most foreign of
products involves a dynamic process of adapting to
local social and cultural norms, and hence becoming
“local.” For example, in the case of McDonald’s,
this corporation succeeds in East Asian societies
such as China precisely because it functions not as a
symbol of American culture but as a sign of domestic modernity, notes James Watson. Similar findings
are evident in Deborah Davis’s study of more general eating habits, fashion, and entertainment.
Rather than being concerned about the cultural
effects of increased consumption, both the government and the Communist Party appear more
focused on the potential empowerment of consumers
and how this might affect party rule. This concern
focuses on two main areas, real estate disputes and
the growth of private housing estates, and consumer
anger at tainted products. While state officials have
sought to implement rules that mandate market
value compensation for land seizures, disputes continue, especially in core urban centers. Displaced
residents, usually working class, often complain that
the compensation they receive for their lost housing
only allows them to live in suburban areas, and public protests are increasingly common. In new private
housing developments, voluntary homeowner associations now exist as a potential voice to channel the
demands of increasingly affluent middle- and upperincome residents. In both cases, these issues become
public through the mass media, which, despite being

283

nominally government controlled, is largely driven
by consumer demand. These two factors intersect in
the case of public anger at dangerous consumer products, such as the widespread media attention within
China given to tainted baby formula in the fall of
2008. This in turn relates to increased demands by
consumers for new government oversight over production, a key sign of a potential consumer-driven
emergence of a civil society within China.
The China Consumer’s Association (CCA), established in 1984, is designed to protect and promote
consumer rights while publicizing consumer safety
issues. CCA functions as an umbrella organization for over 3,000 local consumer organizations.
Although these local groups are largely nongovernmental organizations, CCA is linked with the
Chinese Communist Party and acts as a facilitator at
the national level, as well as a vehicle for maintaining
Chinese Communist Party control over potentially
explosive social issues. It thus functions as more of
an educational organization than an activist group,
avoiding direct conflict with state institutions.
CCA is credited with the development of the first
consumer rights legislation in the People’s Republic
of China, the Law for the Protection of Consumer
Rights, implemented in 1993. It also publishes a
monthly magazine that publicizes product safety
warnings, offers product testing and analysis, and
investigates product recalls. It thus serves as a good
example of how rights-based institutions function in
today’s China.
Yet the success of the CCA points to another key
fact, according to Pun Ngai: the shift from a command to a consumer-driven economy has led to
the reemergence of a stark class divide between the
relatively few who have become consumer citizens
and a larger majority who produce so others may
consume. It is this latter group, consisting of peasant
migrants who fill low-wage factory and construction
jobs, serve the new elites as nannies and cooks, and
are most affected by the erasure of state welfare policies that poses the most significant potential threat to
the post-Maoist regime.
Robert J. Shepherd
See also Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer
Culture in the USSR; Consumer Nationalism;
Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy
(Japan); Consumer Policy (United States);
Globalization; Mass Production and Consumption

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Consumer Policy (European Union)

Further Readings
Bray, David. Social Space and Governance in Urban China.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Davis, Deborah, ed. The Consumer Revolution in Urban
China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Dittmer, Lowell, and Lu Xiaobo. “Personal Politics in the
Chinese Danwei under Reform.” Asian Survey 36, no. 3
(March 1996): 246–267.
Leung, Joe C. B. “The Transformation of Social Welfare
Policy: The Restructuring of the Iron Rice Bowl.” In
China in the Post-Deng Era, edited by Joseph
Y. S. Cheng, 617–644. Hong Kong: Chinese University
Press, 1998.
Naughton, Barry. “Danwei: The Economic Foundations of
a Unique Institution.” In Danwei: The Changing
Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative
Perspective, edited by Lu Xiaobo and Elizabeth Perry,
169–194. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Ngai, Pun. “Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom
of Consumer Revolution in ‘Globalizing’ China.”
Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2004): 469–492.
Wang, Yaping, Wang Yunlin, and Glen Bramler. “Chinese
Housing Reform in State-owned Enterprises and Its
Impact on Different Social Groups.” Urban Studies 42,
no. 10 (2005): 1859–1878.
Watson, James, ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in
East Asia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
2004. First published 1997.
Zhang, Li. “Forced from Home: Property Rights, Civic
Activism, and the Politics of Relocation in China.”
Urban Anthropology 33, no. 3 (2004): 247–281.
Zhang, Xing Quan. Privatization: A Study of Housing
Policy in Urban China. New York: Nova Science, 1998.

CONSUMER POLICY
(EUROPEAN UNION)
The European Union (EU), and in particular its
executive arm, the European Commission, is considered to be the foremost champion of consumer
rights in the world as of 2010. The commission’s latest action program (2007–2013) in the field of consumer policy (Decision No 1926/2006/EC) contains
numerous proposed legislative measures to add to an
already large array of EU consumer protection legislation. The program is backed by 156.8 million euros
of funding and details its main objectives as being:
(1) “to ensure a high level of consumer protection,
notably through better consultation with consumers

and better representation of their interests”; and
(2) “to ensure the effective application of consumer
protection rules, in particular through cooperation on enforcement, information, education and
redress.” The program thus not only signals a willingness to take action in favor of the consumer, but
also provides the material means for consumer protection and confirms the EU’s commitment to democratic innovation in the matter of policy formation.
Given the substance of European consumer policy, it is perhaps surprising that the history of consumer protection within the EU is a relatively recent
and troubled one. Notwithstanding the release in
1975 of a European Economic Community (EEC)
Council Resolution on a Preliminary Programme
for a Consumer Protection and Information Policy
(OJ 1975 C92/1), the European treaties, first established the EEC (in the Treaty of Rome, 1957) and,
second, the European Union (in the Treaty on
European Union, TEU, 1992, now the Treaty on the
Functioning of the European Union, TFEU, 2010)
only endowed the supranational body with an
explicit competence to pursue consumer protection
policies in 1987 (in the Single European Act, SEA).
The 1975 resolution declared that it would provide the European consumer with an ambitious
set of rights: the right to protection of economic
interests, the right of redress, the right to information and education, and the right of representation.
However, and despite its rhetoric, the resolution
was merely a statement of intent and the subsequent
history of the development of EU consumer policy
is better described as an accidental process, caused
by judicial and legislative spillover from European
efforts to establish a common and then a single
market. Equally, the establishment of EU consumer
protection policy has been characterized by tensions
between the need to protect the European consumer
from the potential ill-effects of market integration
and the desire to encourage the European citizen to
adopt the mantle of an economic citizen to confidently engage in European market building.
The primary and founding tension between the
EU’s vision of its citizens as, on the one hand, economic units with the necessary freedom to engage in
the process of market building, and, on the other, as
individuals who must be protected from any harm
that might be caused by market integration, is still to
be found within the language deployed by the commission directorate general responsible for health

Consumer Policy (European Union)

and safety and consumer affairs. According to its
director, consumers are essential to economic growth
and job creation. Yet, across the European Union,
consumers lack confidence in cross-border shopping.
As a consequence of such formulations, it is perhaps
all too easy to begin to question the commitment to
consumer policy within the EU: are European policymakers less concerned with protecting consumers
from harm and more concerned with encouraging
individual Europeans to act as units of economic integration? This tension and struggle to define the role
of the European consumer has haunted each of the
three historical stages of the evolution of European
consumer policy: (1) a period encompassing judicial
efforts to overcome national barriers to trade and to
give the market consumer an appropriate “European
character”; (2) a period of European re-regulation,
led by the commission that sought to ensure a high
level of legislative protection for European consumers; and (3) a final period, during which the EU is
seeking to respond to an apparent loss of confidence
of European consumers through intensified efforts to
ensure a measure of consumer representation within
policy making.

Negative Integration, Deregulation,
and Judicial Activism
The story of the period of judicial activism that
spanned the 1980s and saw the European Court of
Justice (ECJ) give decisive impetus to the establishment of an integrated European market is also one
that is indicative of the political lack of will that
retarded achievement of the goals laid down by the
EEC treaty. The Council of Ministers was required
by the treaty to legislate to harmonize the market
regulating provisions of the member states.
Predictably, national resistance to specific
instances of change, taken together with the sheer
mass of national regulation requiring harmonization,
determined that this strategy of positive integration would fail to meet the target of the creation of
a European market by 1969. Following a period of
economic stagnation in the 1970s, however, the general political and economic recognition of the failings
in national economies perhaps convinced the ECJ to
make use of its own powerful and liberalizing legal
mechanisms to give birth to the European market
through the deregulatory setting aside of national
regulatory provision. The notion of European legal

285

supremacy and the direct effect of European provisions within the legal systems of the member states
thus allowed the court to give full effect to provisions
such as the free movement of goods and the nondiscrimination principle (Article 34 TFEU), the freedom
to provide services (Article 53 TFEU), and European
competition law (Article 101 TFEU), in the service of
negative integration, or a judicially established single
market.
The corollary of such market-building deregulation, however, was an inevitable series of encounters
between the ECJ and individual national citizens,
in their guise as consumers, during which the court
struggled to identify an appropriate character for
the European consumer. “The member states must
not crystallize given consumer habits so as to consolidate an advantage acquired by national industries concerned to comply with them” (Commission
v. Germany [1987] ECR [European Court Ruling]
1227). Thus spoke the ECJ in relation to German
beer purity laws. All protest by the German government that provisions restricting the ingredients in
beer served a legitimate consumer protection aim fell
on deaf judicial ears as Article 34 was deployed to
unpick the complex of national standards applied to
production processes. Certainly, consumer protection
remained a legitimate legislative goal of the member
states and would also remain a guiding feature of
internal market policy. Yet, the vital legal principle
of proportionality would be wielded by the court to
review national standards: does national legislation
really serve the aims it is designed to pursue; could
less restrictive measures be applied to achieve the
same goals? In other words, the German consumer
would be relieved of culturally set standards determining the nature of beer and would be exposed to
products labeled “beer” by “foreign” cultures. By
the same token, however, labeling and information
on the ingredients of beer would not only be an adequate means to protect the “de-cultured” German
consumer, but would simultaneously serve consumer
protection through the widening of consumer choice,
as all beer-drinkers throughout the community might
decide for themselves which cultural form of beer
was most palatable to them.
In addition to championing consumer choice,
the court was quick to add the concept of the entrepreneurial consumer as Article 53 TFEU was held
to require that large-scale consumers, with access
to legal advice, could not be bound by national

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Consumer Policy (European Union)

provisions designed to protect the “average” insurance consumer (Commission v. Germany [1986]
CMLR [Common Market Law Reports] 69). At
the same time, competition law could be deployed
to break down rate-setting cartels in fire insurance markets, which likewise constituted a barrier
to cross-border consumer choice (Sachverband
der Deutschen Feuerversicherer [1987] ECR 405).
Certainly, this radically deregulating court remained
interested in consumer protection. However, consumer protection was similarly subordinated to
the goal of creation of the integrated market: “Free
movement of goods concerns not only traders but
also individuals. It requires, particularly in frontier
areas, that consumers resident in one member state
may travel freely to the territory of another member state to shop under the same conditions as the
local population” (GB-INNO-BM v. Confederation
du Commerce luxembourgeois [1990] ECR I-667).
Accordingly, the major aim of consumer protection
within the court’s jurisprudence was the creation of
an informed and confident consumer: under community law concerning consumer protection, the provision of information to the consumer is considered
one of the principal requirements.

Executive Re-Regulation
The limits to such deregulatory judicial activism,
however, were always readily apparent. EU member states still retained a great deal of competence to
regulate national areas of life, and the court likewise
reined in its “confident” and “informed” consumers on a number of occasions to avoid contentious
issues. Thus, for example, it declined pleas to overturn Sunday trading legislation that was founded in
the demand that consumers should have seven-day-aweek access to goods. It similarly approved national
measures demanding stricter tobacco labeling
requirements than the European norm and restricted
the jurisdictional reach of Article 34, applying it only
to processes of production and not to selling arrangements. Most notably, it has latterly begun to restrict
the jurisdictional reach of the European consumer
within national orders, refusing, for example, to
apply the Doorstop Selling Directive (ECC Directive
no 85/577) to third-party bank guarantees with
the “classical” contractual argument that the third
guarantor was not privy to the consumer contract
(Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechselbank AG v.

Edgar Dietzinger [1998] ECR-I 01119). Where the
“frontier” European consumer has already played
its vital part in creating the internal market, the ECJ
is no longer willing to intervene to define his or her
more substantive characteristics, leaving us with a
question of whether executive action within the EU
has more clearly defined the positive contours of
European consumption.
As the ECJ withdrew from its central role in
creating the European consumer, the European
Commission readily filled the gap. Always highly
aware of the legitimation potential of direct appeals
to the European citizen, a long-standing interest of
the commission in consumer affairs was strengthened by the necessarily deregulatory tendencies of
ECJ jurisprudence. Although liberalization was
required to effect market integration, the interests
of the newly established European market were
not necessarily wholly liberal, at least in matters
of regulatory policy. Thus, member states retained
a legitimate interest in regulation in defense of the
consumer’s health and safety (Article 36 EC). As the
ever-growing list of cases before the ECJ attested,
they were still prepared to defend such interests
vigorously. Some form of harmonized regulation
would accordingly be necessary to avoid the myriad
inefficiencies of tortuous court proceedings. Equally,
however, regulatory standards common to all the
member states may be and are demanded by business itself, to facilitate the growth of integrated markets and efficiencies of scale. Taken together with
an undoubted consumer interest in the ability of
harmonized standards to ensure the transparency of
transactions of a cross-border character, the benefits
of re-regulatory harmonization within the newly
founded market were highly convincing.
Accordingly, new strategies were developed to
secure a measure of harmonization within the new
internal market. First came The New Approach.
Given the failure of traditional political harmonization, the commission’s Green Paper on the completion of the internal market of 1985 adopted
a different strategy. Mindful that a succession of
Councils of Ministers had failed to agree on the
provisions of directives regulating individual market sectors, the commission evolved the concept of
framework directives, whereby the European Council would devolve to the commission general regulatory powers for broader economic areas. In turn, the
commission, together with committees of member

Consumer Policy (European Union)

state representatives, scientific experts, and consumer interest groups, would concretize individual
regulatory standards to combat individual sectorial
dangers. Second, however, the commission also concerned itself with protection. The high level of protection guaranteed to consumers by the SEA heralded
the first explicit development of a European competence in consumer affairs. The commission, having
the sole European competence to make legislative
proposals, was accordingly free to begin to suggest
to the European Council a series of direct legislative
mechanisms in protection of the consumer. The fruits
of this effort to concretize the commission’s character
as “friend of the European consumer” are accordingly to be found in the Directive on Consumer
Credit (87/102), the Directive on Doorstop Selling
(85/577), the Directive on Package Travel (90/314),
the Directive on Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts (93/13), and the Protection of Consumers in
Respect of Distance Contracts (97/7).

A Politicized European Consumer
Given this veritable avalanche of regulatory standards, as well as of corrective interventionist provisions of contract law, it might be assumed that the
notion of the European consumer and European consumer law has come of age. In other words, surely
we can now say that a distinct body of European
law promotes a particular view of the European
consumer? The answer to this question, however, is
no. European policy making is still marked by tension between the goals of market building and the
notion of a high-level of protection for the consumer.
Accordingly, although the rhetoric of the European
Commission appears to support “rational” market
regulation, or notions of the confident and informed
consumer, some of its measures seem to have gone
beyond what is necessary to ensure information flow
to the consumer, and have instead begun to shape the
product offered (e.g., unfair contract terms regulation). On the one hand, this may be a legitimate measure of consumer protection. On the other, however,
it has also drawn much criticism, both within the
member states and within the ECJ, who have argued
that such measures represent too great an inroad
into the private law autonomy of the member states
(see Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechselbank AG
v. Edgar Dietzinger [1998] ECR-I 01119). By the
same token, the scientific presence within committees

287

seeking to ensure the health and safety of consumers may ensure that rationality is the guiding principle for the creation of standards to be applied to
modes of production. Equally, however, in areas such
as the regulation of genetically modified organisms,
a politically oriented commission interest may also
be argued to have resulted in the erection of new
European “cultural” standards of production.
So what is the exact character of the modern
European consumer? One possible, though tentative, answer might be that the European consumer is
now also a politicized consumer. Alternatively, it may
be argued that we have now entered a third period
within the story of the European consumer, heralding the evolution of a political conception of consumption in the EU. Thus, the 2007 to 2013 action
program also commits the European Commission
to a clear definition of consumer policy that distils
out considerations of the protection of health and
safety to the general regulatory framework and
instead locates the core of consumer policy in efforts
to unite the forces of a “diffuse” consumer interest
with the interests of the market. Building both on
the strengthening of established European standardization bodies maintained by European industry and
on the release of framework consumer policy directives, the program distances member state authorities
from the day-to-day governance of consumer affairs
within the EU. Instead, the program represents an
intensification of commission efforts to establish the
character of the citizen consumer through the direct
democratization of the market. No longer should
standards be imposed by political legislation. Instead,
partnership within the modes of production between
industry, consumers, and the executive (commission oversight of the standardization procedure and
of standard-setting committees) will, if successful,
bring consumers into a direct relationship with the
European market.
With this, the political character of the commission’s current consumer policy strategy is readily
apparent as the character of European market–
citizen consumer steps up to represent diffuse consumer interests. Interaction between consumer
interests groups and industry standard setting bodies should represent an advance beyond an informational model that places its regulatory faith in
market transparency and provision of information
to the consumer by the distribution network at the
point of sale. Instead, consumers will themselves be

288

Consumer Policy (Japan)

pivotal in the matter of creating products by virtue
of their presence within standardization processes,
thus democratizing the market.

Conclusion
Markets are always socially embedded—this insight
derives from the political economist, Karl Polanyi.
In the terms of this short contribution, this means
that the European consumer was originally embedded within the integrationist logic of a European
legal system dedicated to creation of the internal
market. With time, however, the confident and
informed consumer also began to be embedded
in a scheme of executive regulatory action, which
sought—and still seeks—to offer the consumer a
high level of protection. Nonetheless, in the wake
of consumer scandals, such as the failure of the EU
to prevent the spread of BSE (bovine spongiform
encephalopathy), tension has grown between the
original consumer function of building the internal market and demands that consumer protection
within the single market be intensified. The commission’s answer to this tension is manifested in its
desire to create a politicized European-market citizen consumer who might be politically involved in
every stage of the production of goods and services
within Europe. Nonetheless, we must wait and see
whether this reliance on the strength of European
civil society (industry and consumers) will suffice to
maintain confidence in the single market and protect its consumers.
Michelle Everson
See also Consumer Education; Consumer Nationalism;
Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (Japan);
Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer
Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; European
Union

Further Readings
Bamforth, Nicholas. “The Limits of European Union
Consumer Contract Law.” European Law Review 24,
no. 4 (1999): 410–418.
Howells, Geraint, and T. Wilhelmsson. “EC Consumer
Law: Has It Come of Age?” European Law Review 28,
no. 3 (2003): 370–388.
Weatherhill, Stephen. EC Consumer Law and Policy.
London: Longman, 1997.
Weatherhill, Stephen. EU Consumer Law and Policy.
London: Elgar European Law Series, 2008.

CONSUMER POLICY (JAPAN)
Consumer policy in Japan began under U.S. occupation in 1947 with the Prohibition of Private
Monopolization and Maintenance of Fair Trade Act
(commonly known as the Anti-Monopoly Act) and
the Food Sanitation Act. Reflecting the struggling
economic state of the late 1940s and early 1950s,
in which, as John Dower describes in his book
Embracing Defeat, unemployment was a major
issue and a strict retrenchment policy was implemented, the initial development of consumer policy
was slow. Only two more sets of laws were added
during this period, namely the Japanese Agricultural
Standards Act (JAS Act) of 1950 and the Regulations
for Receiving Capital Subscriptions, Deposits, and
Interest on Deposits Act of 1954.
The break out of the Korean War (1950–1953)
changed the course of the Japanese economy, setting a path to the so-called high economic growth
period (1955–1973). Japan’s average annual growth
rate during this period was 9.1 percent, and Japan’s
gross national product (GNP) per capita ranked the
second highest after the United States in 1968. Consumption played a major and vital role in realizing
this rapid and what is often-described as “miraculous” economic growth. For example, many households eagerly purchased electric appliances such as
washing machines, televisions, and fridge-freezers
in the 1950s and 1960s. According to statistics
released by the Cabinet Office, the ownership rate
of fridge-freezers increased from 10.1 percent in
1960 to 89.1 percent in 1970. The first recorded
entry of color televisions (0.3 percent) was only
made in 1966, but by 1970, the figure had risen to
26.3 percent.
While Japan was quickly becoming a mass consumption society during the high economic growth
period, rapid and aggressive economic development
also caused a series of consumer problems resulting
from industrial accidents, corporate malpractice, and
environmental destruction. The cases of Minamata
disease caused by methylmercury pollution in the
1950s, arsenic-contaminated powdered milk produced by Morinaga in 1955 as well as thalidomide
in 1962, and Kanemi yusho incident (PCB-tainted
oil syndrome) in 1968, to name but a few prominent examples, brought large-scale and tragic harm
to many victims, including small children. These

Consumer Policy (Japan)

problems energized consumer movements, often
organized by married women, which demanded
that the national government implement measures
to tackle consumer issues. The national government
also acknowledged the need to update consumer policy to respond to the development of a more affluent
mass consumer society. As a result, the Basic Law for
Consumer Protection that prescribed the framework
of consumer policy until the 2000s was established
in 1968, while new laws such as the Pharmaceutical
Affairs Act (1960), the Installment Sales Act (1961),
and the Law for Preventing Unjustifiable Extra or
Unexpected Benefits and Misleading Representation
(1963) were introduced. In addition, the Food
Sanitation Act was amended in 1957.
The government also undertook major institutional reforms of the consumer administrative system. In the early 1960s, multiple ministries set up a
division to work on consumer issues, for example,
the Consumer Affairs Department of the Ministry
of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (1964), the
Consumer Affairs Department of the Ministry of
International Trade and Industry (1965), and the
Quality of Life Bureau of the Economic Planning
Agency (1965). In addition, the government
launched the National Consumer Affairs Centre
of Japan (1970), whose local branches continue to
provide consumer information, deal with consumer
complaints, carry out product tests, and conduct
consumer training programs.
The development from the late 1960s to the early
1970s, in particular the implementation of the Basic
Law for Consumer Protection, certainly advanced
consumer policy administration at both the
national and local levels in Japan, while, as Patricia
L. Maclachlan discusses, consumer movements organized by mainly married women exercised the limited
but positive political influence. Yet the new administrative system also contained some structural problems. First, a “Basic Law” in the Japanese legal and
political system tends to project political goals and
ideals to be achieved through administrative activities, rather than provide provisions to tackle concrete
issues and problems. This was very much the case
for the Basic Law for Consumer Protection. In the
1970s and 1980s, as the Japanese consumer society
matured further, new types of consumer problems
emerged, for example, problems caused by multiple debts and asset-building, and the government
had to legislate for individual cases a posteriori.

289

Second, the institutional arrangement of the
National Consumer Administration was highly fragmented, with a multitude of departments, bureaus,
and commissions being scattered across different
ministries. When a major institutional reform of the
National Consumer Administration was discussed in
the 2000s, ten different government bodies (Cabinet
Office, one commission, six ministries, and two
agencies) all supervised different aspects of consumer
policy, but often with overlapping roles (International
Affairs Office 2006).
Finally, the different divisions that oversaw consumer policy were generally marginalized in their
respective government bodies, reflecting the position
of consumer issues in the Japanese political system.
Not to mention the iron triangle’s (the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in office since 1955
except for 11 months in 1993–1994, the national
bureaucracy, and big business) long-standing policymaking bias toward producers, which often prioritized economic interests over consumer welfare.
It was in the 2000s, with the impact of globalization and the changing environment surrounding
Japanese consumers, when the Japanese government
at last started to overhaul the consumer administration system rooted in the 1960 and 1970s. The
Consumer Policy Committee of the Quality of Life
Advisory Council (attached to the Cabinet Office)
published a report titled “The Ideal Consumer Policy
for the 21st Century” in May 2003. The report
made the following three recommendations for consumer policy reform. First, it stated that consumers
should be viewed as “independent subjects” who
can responsibly organize their own consumption
patterns rather than as “those who are protected.”
Second, it asserted that consumers have a right to
secure a safe lifestyle and should be able to access
the information necessary for making appropriate
product choices. Industries are now obliged to play
a role in achieving this goal, along with both administrative bodies and consumers. Third, the report
argued that consumer policy should effectively
utilize the market mechanism rather than applying
extant regulations.
In line with these recommendations, the Basic
Law for Consumer Protection was revised in June
2004 to become the Basic Law for Consumers. In
particular, the new law emphasizes the idea of the
“independent” and “responsible” consumer, and the
National Consumer Affairs Centres across Japan

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Consumer Policy (United States)

have been repositioned as institutions for providing
training and support for such “consumer citizens.”
Indeed, the latest White Paper on the Quality of Life
introduces “consumer citizenship as ‘an emerging
trend in Western societies’ and advocates the importance of ‘re-envisioning the nation from the perspective of consumer citizens’” (International Affairs
Office 2009, 167).
The institutional reforms of the early 2000s
left untouched the issue of the fragmented nature
of the National Consumer Administration system.
Yet a series of food scares related to imported food
products that happened in the mid to late 2000s led
to growing public anger over the government’s
handling of food safety issues. In particular, in
January 2008, ten people across Japan were poisoned by frozen dumplings imported from China.
This incident, which remains unsolved to this day,
shed light on the institutional problems rooted in
the disjointed administrative system. The underlying lack of coordination caused delay in information
circulation and cooperation between government
bodies and retailers, and intensified the degree of
anxiety over food safety. The then national government, which was already suffering from a great
deal of unpopularity stemming from public dissatisfaction over life-related issues, such as medical
insurance, reacted to the situation by establishing
in September 2009 a new Consumer Agency with
the capacity to comprehensively deal with matters
related to consumer safety.
Takeda Hiroko
See also Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Policy
(China); Consumer Policy (European Union);
Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer
Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer
Testing and Protection Agencies; Japan as a Consumer
Culture

Further Readings
Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of
World War II. London: Penguin, 2000.
International Affairs Office, Quality-of-Life Policy Bureau,
Cabinet Office. “Consumer Policy Regime in Japan.”
2006. http://www.consumer.go.jp/english/cprj/index.html.
International Affairs Office, Quality-of-Life Policy Bureau,
Cabinet Office. Kokumin seikatsu hakusho [White
paper on the quality of life]. Tokyo: Shadan Hōjin Jiji
Gahōsha, 2009.

Maclachlan, Patricia L. Consumer Politics in Postwar
Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Mukaida, Naonori. “21-seiki no shōhisha-hō to shōhisha
seisaku” [Consumer laws and consumer policy in the
21st century]. Nihon Keizai Hōgaku Nenpō [The
Annual of the Japan Association of Economic Law]
29 (2008): 1–14.
Vogel, Steven L. “Can Japan Disengage? Winners and
Losers in Japan’s Political Economy, and the Ties that
Bind Them.” Social Science Japan Journal 2, no. 1
(1999): 3–21.

CONSUMER POLICY
(UNITED STATES)
Consumer policy is the domain of public policy
devoted to addressing the marketplace problems
of buyers of goods and services. Consumer policy
is made in the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches of government and at the local, national,
and international levels of government. Whereas
individuals decide every day through their purchases
what they perceive to be in their personal consumer
interest, consumer policy represents a collective
interpretation of what constitutes and promotes
consumer welfare. Consumer policy thereby reflects
deeply held cultural values regarding the rights and
responsibilities of consumers and the various businesses with which they transact.
The primary goals of consumer policy are to
assist consumers in making sound decisions and in
resolving any problems that arise after purchases
have been made. Policies that require information
on package labels or prohibit businesses from colluding to raise prices reflect the first goal; and policies setting minimum standards of product safety
or establishing small claims courts for consumers to
quickly and inexpensively seek redress exemplify the
latter goal. Industries that, over time, have been most
visibly influenced by consumer policy involve food,
pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, tobacco products,
and credit. Examples of federal statutes controlling
these industries stretch from, in 1906, the Pure Food
and the Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act to, in
2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco
Control Act and the Credit Card Accountability,
Responsibility and Disclosure Act.

Consumer Policy (United States)

The first step in the process of creating a consumer
policy is placing an issue on the policy agenda, the
list of problems that people inside and outside government believe require serious attention at any given
time. The work of placing problems on the policy
agenda is accomplished by what Michael Pertschuk
calls policy (or social) entrepreneurs. Whereas business entrepreneurs drive innovation in for-profit
organizations, policy entrepreneurs seek transformational change that will benefit broad groups (such as
consumers) and/or society at large.
Consumer policy entrepreneurs have contributed
to fundamental shifts in cultural definitions of consumer problems. The most basic change occurred
around the turn of the twentieth century and involved
a transition from caveat emptor, the notion of buyer
beware, to an acceptance of some degree of government responsibility for consumer welfare. Consumer
policy entrepreneurs have also brought about other
dramatic cultural shifts. For example, until the
1960s, automobile-related accidents were considered
the fault of “the nut behind the wheel.” Consumer
activists, led by Ralph Nader, successfully promoted
the idea that changes in car design could reduce the
number and severity of automobile-related accidents.
Similarly, antismoking activists initially faced a culture that denied the dangers of cigarette smoking or,
paradoxically, blamed any adverse health outcomes
on people who should have realized the obvious
dangers of smoking. Consumer policy entrepreneurs,
over a period of several decades, changed the culture
of smoking to the point where cigarettes are viewed
as inherently dangerous and meriting tight control,
including restrictions on marketing them to children.
An accident, tragedy, or scandal will often catapult a consumer problem onto the policy agenda,
but such events are rarely sufficient to create a consumer policy. Policy entrepreneurs must also offer
specific and credible policy proposals, mobilize public support, effectively lobby policymakers, defend
their proposals against groups who might oppose
them, master the art of compromise, ensure proper
policy implementation, and evaluate policy effectiveness. Often, by the time the policy process has
run its course, the original consumer problem has
morphed and requires renewed attention from policy
entrepreneurs.
Consumer policies aim to change the behavior of
businesses or consumers, or both. The primary tools
for bringing about these changes are information/

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education, financial incentives, and direct behavioral
controls. Policies that provide consumers with basic
knowledge (education) or product-specific details
(information) are typically the least controversial
form of consumer policy because they preserve freedom of choice and action. Compare, for example,
nutrition labels on beverage packages versus a tax on
high-sugar beverages versus a ban on sodas. Typically,
only when information/education policies have failed
to achieve a given policy objective are stronger forms
of consumer policy considered legitimate.
In addition to valuing individual freedom of
choice, U.S. culture favors free markets and limited
government intervention. Hence, consumer policy
entrepreneurs must present a compelling argument
in favor of government intervention in markets
on behalf of consumers. One approach is to argue
in terms of consumer rights, as President John F.
Kennedy did in 1962. Kennedy asserted that consumers had the right to be safe, the right to be informed,
the right to have choices, and the right to be heard by
government decisionmakers.
The concept of rights is problematic inasmuch as
rights presume a shared sense of fairness, but people
vary in their sense of what is fair. One person might
consider it fair and a matter of common sense that
drugs be extensively tested for safety before being
released on the market. Another person might feel
it is unfair and life-threatening to someone suffering
from an incurable disease to subject new drugs to
excessive testing.
Because of the potential weakness of arguments
based on rights, consumer policy entrepreneurs frequently combine references to rights with additional,
more economically grounded justifications for the
enactment of consumer policies. One such argument
is that free markets are indeed fine guarantors of consumer welfare, but free markets often do not exist.
Instead, markets are often controlled by a single firm
or a few large ones, with the results that prices are
high, quality is low, and innovation is slow. A century ago, this monopoly (or oligopoly) argument was
leveled at “trusts” in the oil, coal, meat, and sugar
industries; today, complaints against Microsoft have
a similar basis.
A second rationale for consumer policy is that,
even when markets are competitive on the sellers’
side, buyers can lack the information necessary to
play their proper role in the free enterprise system.
Efficient markets presume informed consumers who

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Consumer Policy (United States)

reward firms offering good value to the consumer
and withhold their dollars from firms offering poor
quality products at excessive prices. In some cases,
the ideal of the well-informed consumer is impeded
by deliberate deception on the part of some sellers. When this occurs, it is fairly easy for consumer
policy entrepreneurs to justify strong prohibitions
against deceptive advertising and misleading sales
practices. Consumers can be poorly informed,
however, in the absence of any misconduct by
sellers. It is often not feasible for consumers to be
well informed before making important decisions.
Without supportive consumer policies, for example,
how is a consumer supposed to know whether a
pharmaceutical product will be safe and effective
or whether a set of tires will be free of defects? The
consumer would have to purchase and use a product to find out. (Even then, the quality of the product might not be apparent for a long time.) George
A. Ackerlof notes that when such “informational
asymmetries” exist in consumer markets, buyers
may pay too much for low quality and not enough
for high quality. Supportive consumer policies can
remedy this situation.
A final justification for consumer policy is the
inability of markets to operate properly, even when
sellers are numerous and buyers are studious.
Markets are well-suited to consider the costs and benefits experienced by buyers and sellers, but markets
have no inherent mechanism for taking into account
any “external” costs and benefits that accrue to third
parties. These externalities can be substantial, as in
the case of a gas-powered lawnmower that belches
air pollutants or a car that runs over a pedestrian. It
requires consumer policy to curb these externalities
and create a situation that makes sense for all parties,
not just the buyer and seller.
Legislators rely heavily on justifications of fairness and properly functioning markets in pressing for
consumer statutes. Accordingly, the title of a piece
of proposed legislation will typically contain one or
more of the following unassailable words: fair, equal,
truth, accurate, or accountable. Once a statute has
been passed and signed, consumer policy often shifts
to regulatory agencies or courts, where the meaning
of such high-sounding terms is made more precise. In
the United States, neither regulators nor judges are
supposed to go beyond the intent of Congress, but in
practice, both actors make consumer policy via their
decisions. The boldest headlines are generated by

multibillion dollar class action settlements, such as
those involving cigarette, drug, and car manufacturers, but consumer policy is made quietly on a daily
basis in agency hearing rooms and judicial chambers.
Once consumer policies have been agreed on
and implemented, a final task remains: determining whether policy goals have been successfully
achieved (effectiveness) at a reasonable cost to society (efficiency). Policy proponents tend to focus on
effectiveness and critics on efficiency. For example,
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) touts the hundreds of thousands of lives
saved by safety features such as seat belts, air bags,
and child restraints. Annual safety inspections for
vehicles, in contrast, appear to save only a few lives
and at a very high cost per life.
Evaluating consumer policies is a challenging
scientific task. Experimental designs appropriate
to laboratory settings can rarely be applied to consumer policies. Studies that compare before and after
a policy’s implementation are unable to control for
other changes that might have taken place during the
study period. Similarly, research comparing jurisdictions with and without a particular policy cannot
rule out the possible effect of other differences across
locations. Despite these difficulties, evaluating the
effectiveness and efficiency of consumer policies provides scientists with an important avenue by which
to contribute to the consumer policy process.
The first national consumer policies were enacted
in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth
century. A century later, consumer policy remains a
vibrant domain of public policy in the United States,
whether the topic is identity theft, mortgage modification scams, bank overdraft fees, health care privacy, or
food safety. Moreover, consumer policy is deeply connected to other policy domains, including safeguarding the banking system, providing adequate retirement
income, striking a balance between international trade
and national sovereignty, and curbing climate change.
Consumer policy can play an important role in helping society meet all these challenges and will therefore
retain a prominent position on the U.S. policy agenda.
Robert N. Mayer
See also Consumer Nationalism; Consumer Policy (China);
Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy
(Japan); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and
the Law; Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies;
Media Convergence and Monopoly

Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)

Further Readings
Ackerlof, George A. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality
Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500.
Kennedy, John F. Special Message to the Congress on
Protecting the Consumer Interest. March 15, 1962.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9108.
Pertschuk, Michael. Revolt against Regulation. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982.

CONSUMER POLICY
(WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION)
In its original constellation as the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the system for regulating world trade had little if any impact on the
consumers of its own member states. The main
objective of GATT was simply the reduction of
protective trade tariffs. Although GATT may have
impacted on the pricing of “foreign” products and
services bought by consumers beyond their own
domestic markets, the system it sustained did not
require alterations in domestic product and product process regulation. Accordingly, consumer goods
and services were fashioned by national regulation
and thus remained identifiable “national” goods
from distinct “national” producers. From the 1970s
onward, however, intensification of domestic economic regulation, especially in the fields of health
and safety and consumer and environmental protection, led to a shift of emphasis to nontariff barriers
to free trade.
From the 1980s onward, the political-economic
consensus within the developed world that national
regulation was now damaging to economic development intensified pressure on the old regime.
Accordingly, in 1994, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established with a distinct aim, not
simply to enable world trade, but to enable “free”
world trade. The most important reforms introduced by the WTO included overhaul of procedures
of dispute settlement and the conclusion of special
agreements concerning nontariff barriers to free
trade, such as the Agreement on the Application
of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), the
Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), as
well as trade rounds dealing with provision of services. These agreements aim to balance the global

293

economic objective of free trade with the domestic
regulatory concerns of WTO members by laying
down the forms of regulation of domestic products
that are acceptable within the world trade regime.
An enlightening parallel that might be drawn is
thus between the WTO regime and the integrated
European market within the European Union, and,
in particular, with Articles 34 and 36 of the Treaty
on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
Just as Article 34 of the TFEU sought to open up
a European market to free trade, the WTO order
would likewise open up a world order to trade.
Equally, however, just as Article 36 of the TFEU
balanced the free trade aim against the “necessary”
regulatory measures taken by EU member states
in pursuit of consumer, environmental, and health
and safety protection, the SPS and TBT agreements
would give effect to the same balance at international level. By the same token, the WTO order
would thus likewise intervene into national orders,
reproducing a European constellation by directly
testing national regulation for its appropriateness
within a global free trade order. It would thus begin
to change the product and product process regulation maintained at national levels, impacting the
characteristics of the particular good that consumers
might buy, and—ultimately—would also shape the
nature and perceptions of the global consumer.
Here, however, all parallels with the European
experience end. WTO members did not confer
“positive” regulatory powers on the organization,
although they did agree that WTO law should
restrain the exercise of domestic regulatory powers. The WTO itself does not have its own government or executive branch. Accordingly, neither
does it have re-regulatory competences comparable
with those found within the EU, which allow that
organization to harmonize the consumer protection laws of its own member states. As a result, the
process of the reshaping of product and product
process regulation has been at the global level, and
thus the process of the creation of a distinct global
consumer has not been a matter for political discussion. Instead, it has primarily been for the panels
of the WTO—the individual judicial bodies who
decide in international trade disputes—as well as
for the Appellate Body of the WTO to decide which
measures of national protective regulation are compatible or not compatible with the WTO system. In
this endeavor, panels and the Appellate Body have

294

Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)

also drawn heavily on the work of nongovernmental international bodies and governmental actors
who engage in quasi-legal norm-production at the
international level, especially so in the field of product safety; bodies such as the Food and Agricultural
Organization (of the UN), the Codex Alimentarius
(a standardization body set up to govern international food production standards), the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development, and
the World Health Organization.
The situation whereby the compatibility of
national measures for the protection of the consumer with the WTO free trade regime is assessed
without reference to a political process in which
citizens might express their ethical and social concerns about global consumption has created a
great deal of concern. Where consumer protection is a matter for judicial bodies at the global
level and, sometimes quite obscurely for semigovernmental organizations, the fear is raised that far
too great an emphasis will be laid on free trade
and far too little respect will be shown for “consumer protection,” or, more particularly, the
notion that consumer goods should, in some way,
also reflect the ethical, social, and political concerns of the societies in which they originate. Hugo
Chavez, president of Venezuela, has denounced
global consumption, deeming it to be a product
of the U.S. emphasis on free trade regimes, stating
that “American consumerism threatens the globe”
(“Consumerism Threatens Globe: Chavez” 2006).
Chavez’s concerns, however, are likewise shared
by more mainstream academic thought, as authors
such as John Rawls have declared that “[T]he
long-term result of this—which we already have
in the United States—is a civil society awash in a
meaningless consumerism of some kind” (Rawls
and van Parijs 2003, 9).
The charge that it is promoting “meaningless
consumerism” is thus one that is often leveled at
the WTO. Similarly, however, some commentators
applaud its ability to maximize consumer utility
by setting aside restrictive and outmoded schemes
of national regulation. However, given the relative
youth of the WTO, its lack of a political executive, and
equal lack of a clear political position on the nature of
consumption, it is little wonder that the WTO’s relation with the consumer and consumption is far more
complex. Instead, review of the reports of WTO panels and those of the Appellate Body reveals that there

is a conflict within the organization with regard to
its treatment of consumption—that is, with regard to
the question of whether measures maintained at the
national level for the protection of consumers should
be assessed with simple regard to “scientific” evidence of their effectiveness or otherwise, or whether,
by contrast, some degree of political control should
be exercised over consumer protection regulation at
member state level, such that the global consumer
also retains a “political character.”
Two particular cases are discussed briefly to
illustrate this point. The latest panel decision on
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the
latest Appellate Body decision on the use of hormones in cattle are exemplary of the confusion still
visible within the WTO regime. Both cases concern
disputes (primarily) between the United States and
the European Union, and in particular between their
diverging views of consumption and the appropriate nature of consumer protection. Equally, both
cases demonstrate the heavy reliance of the WTO on
quasi-governmental norm production and, in particular, the production of norms to govern the scientific
analysis of risk to the consumer. Finally, the cases
come to very different conclusions concerning the
degree of political intervention that may be allowed
at the national level in protection of the consumer, or
construction of the act of consumption.

The Dominance of Science: Genetically
Modified Organisms
The dispute between the European Union, the
United States, Canada, and Argentina on the legitimate or otherwise use of GMOs in foodstuffs is
important for a variety of reasons. Foodstuffs generally are highly politicized consumer products and
have been generally subject to regulatory supervision; GMOs are likewise the most technologically
advanced and most controversial of all foodstuffs, if
not of all consumer products. Thus, technologically
advanced GMO production is led by the United
States, but has also been mastered by countries
such as Brazil and India, giving rise to ambivalent
socioeconomic implications as development imperatives clash with agrarian employment concerns. The
most intensive debate, however, focuses on the risks
posed by GMOs. Both GMO skeptics and adherents agree that there is little evidence that GMO
food poses a positive risk to health. Nonetheless,

Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)

the major concern remains that non-GMO crops
will be contaminated by GMOs released into the
environment. Likewise, conflict rages on the meaning of consumer anxiety and choice: do we have a
right to know what we are eating; might governments demand GMO labeling since the majority of
their citizens refuse to accept them; is the European
Union correct to have included ethical issues within
its GMO authorization regime?
The substance of the case revolved around the
acceptability of the EU authorization system for
GMOs and, in particular, the principle of precaution,
which allowed EU member states to refuse to market
products where there was some indication that they
might pose risks to consumers or to the environment. U.S. authorities often approve products unless
scientific evidence exists confirming risk. Italy and
Austria, among other EU member states, had made
use of their right to reject various GMO products
(modified maize products) on the basis of concerns
that they might be a danger to consumers and the
environment. The complainants, led by the United
States, argued that the European Union had imposed
a de facto moratorium on approvals of biotech products, tolerating “national marketing and import bans
on biotech products.” The legal point at issue was
one of whether the EU authorization system—in
particular, its precautionary approach—was compatible with Articles 5.1 and 5.7 of the SPS agreement,
which demanded that national regulatory measures
be based on a risk assessment (5.1) and also that a
risk assessment be “adequate” in cases where science
was still developing and was not able to give a full
and final appraisal of the risk posed.
The WTO Panel deciding the case in 2006, however, was unconvinced by European arguments.
Conceding that the area of GMOs was one where
science and scientific assessment of risk was still
evolving, the panel nonetheless drew heavily on the
work and reports of quasi-governmental bodies at
the international level (WTO, Codex Alimentarius,
Food and Agriculture Organization) to support its
conclusion that individual European countries had
not engaged in adequate risk assessment of the products to be marketed. The crux of the problem was the
precautionary principle. The European Union argued
that the notion of “adequate” should include the
levels of protection politically demanded by the legislature at the national level, such that even slight indications of potential harm might trigger a ban under

295

the precautionary principle. For the panel, however,
this amounted to confusion between processes of risk
assessment (wholly scientific) and processes of risk
management (political decision on how risk is best
to be managed). Drawing on the distinction made
by international bodies between risk assessment and
risk management, the panel stated that the process of
risk assessment could not be influenced by the precautionary principle.

Politicized Perceptions of the Consumer:
Hormones in Cattle
The refusal of the WTO Panel to recognize the relevance of the EU’s precautionary principle within
the assessment of the risks posed by GMO products
might thus be taken as an indication that the WTO
system is hostage to “meaningless consumerism.”
The principle is political in nature, strongly influenced by ethical and social concerns that place the act
of consumption in a wider political environment that
seeks to regulate goods, not simply because they have
proven to be harmful to individuals, but because they
are also to be shaped by the perceptions of the political community as a whole. Where science is given
dominance, ethical and social concerns must perforce
cede to its rational arguments that no harm is visible.
Yet, GMOs are not the end of the story. Instead, the
2008 decision of the WTO Appellate Panel on the
banning by the European Union of certain hormones
within cattle has demonstrated a wholly different
WTO approach to the act of consumption.
European regulatory treatment of hormones in
cattle is motivated by the same concerns that underlie
its GMO authorization regime. Again, precaution is
not simply about preventing the harm that can be
proven to be caused to individual consumers within
the food chain. Instead, it is also about the ethical
and social construction of the food chain with reference to the value established within the political
process. Once again, it was thus not surprising that
bans on hormones drew complaints from the United
States. However, in this case, the WTO Appellate
Body determined that risk is not only “ascertainable in a science laboratory operating under strictly
controlled conditions, but also risk in human societies as they actually exist, in other words, the actual
potential for adverse effects on human health in the
real world where people live and work and die”
(European Commission 1998, 187). Stating clearly

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Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare

that the interests of the legislature must be taken into
account within risk assessment (co-originality of risk
assessment and management), the Appellate Body
firmly placed the act of consumption in the society
in which it was performed. Consumer goods may be
shaped by wider social and ethical concerns.

Future Directions
How will the WTO regime develop in the future;
and how will it contribute to the shaping of the
nature of the act of global consumption? It is still
far too early to say with any certainty. However, the
WTO will likely always be confronted by issues of
consumption.
Michelle Everson
See also Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy
(European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan);
Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer
Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer
Testing and Protection Agencies; European Union;
Global Institutions

Further Readings
“Consumerism Threatens Globe: Chavez.” The Hindu.
January 28, 2006. http://www.thehindu.com/2006/01/
28/stories/2006012802941400.htm.
European Commission. “Measures Concerning Meat and
Meat Products (Hormones).” Report of the Appellate
Body, DSR 1998:I, 135, February 1998.
Joerges, Christian, and Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, eds.
Constitutionalism, Multilevel Trade Governance and
Social Regulation. Oxford: Hart, 2006.
Rawls, John, and Philippe van Parijs. “Three Letters on
The Law of Peoples and the European Union.” Revue
de philosophie économique 7 (2003): 7–20. http://www
.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/etes/documents/
RawlsVanParijs1.Rev.phil.Econ.pdf.
Scott, Joanne. The WTO Agreement on Sanitary and
Phytosanitary Measures: A Commentary. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
World Trade Organization Panel. “European
Communities—Measures Affecting the Approval and
Marketing of Biotech Products,” WT/DS291/R, WT/
DS292/R, WT/DS293/R, September 29, 2006
(06–4318).
World Trade Organization Panel. United States—Continued
Suspension of Obligations in the EC—Hormones
Dispute (AB-2008–5), WT/DS320/AB/R, October 16,
2008 (08–4928).

CONSUMER PROTEST: ANIMAL
WELFARE
Animal welfare, meaning a human concern for the
physical and psychological state of nonhuman animals, remains one of the most controversial moral,
political, and cultural issues in contemporary consumption. Animal welfare illustrates that consumer
mobilization is not only about rights, but also about
social responsibility. This seems to represent a widening and generalization of issues that have been raised
under the headings of “political” and “ethical consumerism.”
Theoretically and empirically, animal welfare connotes a variety of core debates within the study of
consumption as it draws attention to the political
foundations of consumer mobilization, challenges
the conventional idea of consumer rights and responsibility, and constitutes a marker for the evolvement
of alternative consumer identities.
Although consumer concerns for animal welfare
are associated with a number of issues, including the
condition of farmed animals and fish, the concern
for wild animals, and the treatment of laboratory
animals, farm animal welfare appears as the most
important topic since it questions eating habits as
core activities of everyday life.

Human-Animal Relations
To understand animal welfare as a consumer concern, attention has been directed to how the humananimal relationship is embedded in cultural and
religious understandings. Tim Ingold contends that
with the emergence of pastoral societies, humans’
relationships with animals shifted from being based
on a principle of trust to that of domination—
humans must care for animals, but that does not
necessarily question the human as the master. The
treatment of an animal, and in particular how it is
killed, cannot take place without symbolic precautions. Mythic and religious domains here are important to understand the process of legitimizing the
killing of animals for food. Some religions treat animals as the property of their owners, codifying rules
for their care and slaughter—often referred to as ritual slaughter—intended to limit the distress and pain
animals feel under human control. Claude Fischler,
among others, suggests that science has undertaken

Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare

the role of legitimizing killing for food by objectifying animals through processes of “de-animation.”
“In the food business,” he argues, “the animal has
become an object or rather less than an object: just
stuff” (Fischler 1990, 133).
As animal welfare began to take a larger place in
Western public policy in nineteenth-century Britain,
particularly with the emergence of the animal rights
movement, the idea of animals as things or “animal
machines”—as Descartes expressed it—was challenged. Since then, the welfare approach has had
human morality and human behavior as its central
concern. The issue of animal welfare is, however,
still debated. Animal welfare can be seen as a position where it is morally acceptable for humans
to use nonhuman animals, provided that adverse
effects on animal welfare are minimized as far as
possible. Critics have suggested that animal welfare—as a pragmatic and reformist approach—is
contrasted to the animal rights and the animal liberation positions, which hold that animals should not
be utilized by humans, and should not be regarded
as their property.
Issues of legitimacy therefore still remain high on
the agenda. The cultural influences on human-animal
relations (such as the personification of animals) as
well as modern production systems as such seem to
produce an opening-up regarding the societal handling of animals for food, questioning norms as well
as organizational procedures.

Animal Welfare as a Consumer Concern
Consumer protest can be expressed in various ways,
according to Michele Micheletti: by refusing to buy
products they find harmful to themselves or others,
by deliberately choosing specific products to support the principles under which they have been produced, or to protect themselves or others from harm.
This may take the form of preferring (buycott, for
example, those that are labeled as animal friendly)
or avoiding (boycott) products. The response may
also be more drastic, by declining to purchase and
eat certain product categories and being a vegetarian
to protest against the mistreatment of animals.
Animal welfare and the way it is associated
with political consumerism challenges the idea
of the choosing self in the study of consumption.
The current focus on animal welfare is frequently
categorized as “ethical choices,” often with an

297

ideological and moral framing of individual rational choice. In this perspective, animal welfare as a
consumer concern can be seen as consistent with
classical liberalistic approaches, where consumers
are perceived as voters who, through their purchasing power, prize or penalize producers or products.
Consumer initiatives, then, are echoed by welfarespecific labeling schemes among retailers and manufactures. Against this position is a growing literature
arguing that instead of representing individual acts
of decision making in the market, consumption
should be regarded as sets of institutionally and
normatively embedded social practices. Pet-keeping
practices, where animals may enter the sphere of
family as “companion animals,” affect our distinction between human and nonhuman beings, notes
Donna Haraway. From this point of view, animal
friendliness can be seen as a practice by which social
and individual identities have first been explored
and expressed through consumption, translated into
demands, and then become the basis of voice and
mobilization for single-issue politics.
Within the international consumer movement,
there was growing concern already in the 1960s
against its emphasis on the right to choose as a framework for consumer empowerment. Regarded as the
collective representative of the consumer interest,
the consumer movement was criticized for addressing mainly marketplace concerns and distancing
itself from the need for social responsibility, such as
human rights, animal welfare, gender equity, and so
on. There are tensions, however, between caring for
animals and consumer interests related to food policy
issues, such as nutrition, hygiene, and taste.
In a wider perspective, animal welfare activism
draws parallels with environmental activism, antiglobalization, and anticonsumerism in its critique of
affluent society and the condemnation of modern corporations and neoliberal capitalism. Although controversial in the consumer movement itself, animal
welfare has become one of a number of new issues
that reframe consumer rights, as well as adding to the
range of issues included within the consumer interest.

Consumer Protest and the Politics of
Animal Welfare
Animal welfare, and particularly the well-being of
farm animals, emerged as an issue of concern in the
early 1990s, and in the early twenty-first century it

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Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare

seems to be on the public agenda of many Western
countries as a social problem, a problem that society
needs to address. Governments are increasingly
approaching people—and their purchasing power—
as a part of public policy solutions in terms of “new
governance” or “public-private partnerships.”
Recent surveys in seven European countries have
demonstrated that although a large portion of people
investigated is concerned about the welfare of farm
animals, consumer activism and protesting varies
across national borders (Kjærnes et al. 2008). This
study suggested that high levels of consumer activism in terms of boycotting and buycotting seem to
correspond with how the responsibility for animal
welfare is acknowledged between the consumers,
market actors, and the state. In countries such as the
United Kingdom and the Netherlands, animal welfare is a mobilizing issue and seems to have become
a part of normal consumer practice in conjunction
with animal rights mobilization and the emergence
of animal welfare labeling schemes. In Scandinavia,
where animal welfare concerns associated with purchases appear to be relatively new, consumers expect
the state to take a larger responsibility. The extent
to which consumers express their animal friendliness
through consumer practices is therefore highly variable, dependent on what the market offers them, and
the interest among farmers, industry, food retailers,
nongovernmental organizations, and state legislation
at varying national levels. The case of animal welfare
illustrates how consumer protest is affected by institutional contexts.
Although it can be said that animal welfare and
consumer mobilization have benefited from each
other, there are ethical and political controversies
as well. The animal rights movement argues that
the focus on animal welfare in the form of marketbased initiatives not only fails to challenge animal
suffering, but may actually prolong it by legitimizing the property rights over animals. Animal rights
advocates, such as Tom Regan, argue that the animal welfare position (advocating for the betterment
of the conditions of animals, but without abolishing
animal use) is inconsistent in logic and ethically
unacceptable.
Consumers mobilizing for animal welfare challenge fundamental religious practices, such as ritual
slaughter. There is a growing tension between animal welfare advocates on the one hand, arguing

that forms of ritual slaughter are inconsistent with
humane killing methods, and religious leaders, particularly among Jewish and Muslim communities, on
the other, who hold that ritual slaughter is crucial for
religious and cultural identity.
There are political controversies as well, particularly related to the division of responsibility between
the state, producers, and the consumer. When governments rely on consumers’ willingness to pay for
the more animal-friendly product as a means to
improve animal welfare standards, consumers may be
expected to take on new responsibilities without being
equipped to do so. This places responsibility for achieving animal welfare on the shoulder of the individual
rather than on the state, questioning to what extent
demands for reform can be channeled through consumer practices.
Arne Dulsrud
See also Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer
Protest: Environment; Consumer Regulation;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Food Consumption; Political and
Ethical Consumption; Rituals

Further Readings
Fischler, Claude. L’homnivore: le goût, la cuisine et la corps.
Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto:
Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in
an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2009.
Ingold, Tim. “From Trust to Domination: An Alternative
History of Human-Animal Relations.” In Animals and
Human Society: Challenging Perspectives, edited by
Aubrey Manning and James Serpell, 1–22. London:
Routledge, 1994.
Kjærnes, Unni, Bettina Bock, Emma Roe, and Joek Roex.
Consumption, Distribution and Production of Farm
Animal Welfare: Opinions and Practices within the
Supply Chain. Welfare Quality Reports No. 7. Cardiff,
UK: Cardiff University, 2008.
Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping:
Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Warde, Alan. “Consumption and Theories of
Practice.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 2
(2005): 131–153.

Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism

CONSUMER PROTEST:
ANTICAPITALISM
People often deploy their consumer choices to make
their voices heard for a number of global political,
humanitarian, or ecological issues. Against traditional critical views of consumption as an alternative to political rebellion, the sphere of consumption
can constitute itself as a space for forms of political
action. For example, as early as the late-eighteenth
century, English women used their consumer power
to support abolitionism, notes Kate Davies. Later,
at the turn of the twentieth century, the National
Consumer Leagues appeared in the United States
and were mostly concerned with using manifestations and boycotts on the part of consumers to exert
indirect pressure on specific enterprises denounced as
both producers and employers. Founded by Florence
Kelley and inspired by the Progressive movement,
social justice was their utmost purpose, that is, they
published “white lists” of manufacturers who treated
their workers fairly. They anticipated the sequence
of mobilizations against the rising cost of living that
sprang up around World War I in many Western
countries often led by housewives organizations. The
French Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs, for example, was
influenced by its American counterpart and was likewise created for the ethical education of consumers,
with the aim of bringing about changes in working
conditions by developing a sense of responsibility in
buyers for the treatment of workers, portraying consumers as citizens who had the “right to intervene in
capitalism” (Chessel 2006). Broadly speaking, those
movements were successful in inspiring changes in
legislation regarding work or price control, and they
effectively offered women a possibility to speak out
and act in the public sphere; in their capacity as consumers, women claimed the responsibility and right
to intervene in masculine territories such as work,
trade unionism, and local and national politics.
Early examples of consumer protest were consolidated in the postwar period with the adoption
by various international bodies of consumer rights.
Such a blend of consumerism is largely internal to
existing market relations and concerned with valuefor-money and information transparency. However,
still today this is clearly not the only way for
consumers to associate. Especially after the World

299

Trade Organization (WTO) 1999 protests in Seattle,
the political investment of the consumer has become
more explicitly geared against capitalism as we
know it.
Global capitalism has tended to raise local hackles,
provoking resistance in many different forms, including fundamentalist ones. As globalization proceeds,
it is especially large multinationals that have become
the targets of growing critical attention, within
environmentalist organizations and the alter-global
movement. Economic globalization has highlighted
a number of external diseconomies that derive from
market expansion as currently managed (such as pollution, the inequality between consumers, the widening gap between North and South, food scares, etc.).
In introducing innovations that alter the routines of
consumption and expand the geographical range of
social group interaction, globalization creates a space
to bring into question the naturalized boundaries of
the market, giving way to a number of grassroots
movements that have organized not only boycotts
of particular products, but also powerful symbolic
protests.
The spread of McDonald’s on the world scale, for
example, has stimulated numerous hotbeds of resistance that have often taken on global dimensions but
press for local control of resources. In particular, since
1985, the London-based group of the international
environmental movement Greenpeace has promoted
an anti-McDonald’s campaign, a boycott day that
is held every autumn in a growing number of countries. The growing success of this initiative is also
due to the massive public resonance of the libel case
that McDonald’s brought against two Greenpeace
activists for their distribution of protest leaflets. The
leaflet maintained that the American giant exploited
children with its advertising and its employees with
low pay, promoted unhealthy eating, damaged the
environment through encouraging the deforestation
of Amazonian lands to produce low-cost forage, and
treated animals in inhumane fashion. The so-called
McLibel case, still the longest running case in English
legal history (from 1994 to 1997) was a public relations disaster for McDonald’s, which, despite its skilful lawyers, was unable to win on all items (Vidal
1997).
Internationally, protests against McDonald’s have
generally been nonviolent but none the less emblematic: for example, in France, McDonald’s were filled

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Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism

with apples, occupied by farmers with chickens,
ducks, and geese, covered with dung, and so on. Some
of these actions were guided by the farmer and tradeunionist Joseph Bové, who reached international
fame destroying a barrel of his precious Roquefort
cheese in front of a McDonald’s during the antiglobalization protest in Seattle 1999. Bové’s actions
can be seen as part of the French tradition that has
given a patriotic cast to the development of agricultural policy and ties gastronomy to the safeguarding
of the national territory. Yet it transcends the particular to promote local and sustainable agriculture
at the international level. In the logic of Bové’s protest, production and consumption are not separated:
both are political questions since the counterpart to
exploited workers are said to be the consumers, for
whom it is ever harder to find genuine products.
Traditional farming and the defense of local
specificity is often implicated in anticapitalist protest movements that address consumers and marshal
their power in defense of biodiversity and territory.
This is the case of Navdanya (“nine crops”), a
movement founded in India in 1987 by economist
and social ecologist Vandana Shiva. In Europe, Italy
has given birth to Slow Food, an association specifically dedicated to the safeguarding of typical local
produce. As such, Slow Food acts as a cultural intermediary that both campaigns for local, small-scale,
sustainable, and quality-driven agriculture as against
heavily industrialized capital-driven agriculture, and
as an economic intermediary effectively promoting
certain commodities as high value. Similar initiatives, as well as the increasing diffusion of fair trade
or green products, are clearly interfacing with the
market logic: they appear to negotiate with capitalism from within, trying to include in the picture a
host of diverse issues, such as pleasure, sustainability,
and frugality. The purchase of alternative products,
such as ethical finance, organic food, artisanal local
products, or fair trade goods, has been branded as
“positive political consumerism” (Micheletti et al.
2004) or “buycotting” (Friedman 1999), as opposed
to the boycotting of global brands and the flourishing of symbolic initiatives against multinational
corporations and the ethical and ecological effects
of their economic practices, themselves branded as
respectively “negative” and “discursive” political
consumerism.
The latter represent more blatant forms of anticapitalist protest. Among them are counter-publicity

and a number of subadvertising organizations, such
as Adbusters. Based in Canada, Adbusters publishes
an anticonsumerist magazine and has created ironic
and desecrating campaigns against McDonald’s,
Calvin Klein, Benetton, and other global brands.
The target of similar symbolic campaigns may be
the product itself (coming clean on its process of
production or stressing its various externalities from
environmental effects to costs in terms of human
or animal rights), the advertising imaginary that
surrounds it or, more widely, consumer culture as
a way of life. Overall, according to Jo Littler, they
promote an imagery of brand subversion that is the
counterpart of the pervasiveness of branding and
that deploys irony, pastiche, and the carnivalesque
to contest the lifestyles associated with global brands
that often encode sexism, racism, homophobia, disrespect for environment, and so on. Adbusters also
launched a global anticonsumerist initiative, such
as the Buying Nothing Day (BND). This is a day
of boycotts, events, and abstention from purchase,
which is now celebrated in over 50 countries around
the world on the day after Thanksgiving Day in the
United States and Canada and the last Saturday of
November in Europe.
BND is important on at least two accounts: first,
the form of protest. Relying on Internet connections as well networking as host of local environmental, consumer, and development associations,
BND exemplifies a blend of technology, globalization, and localization, which has been considered
an important feature of new social movements and
which characterizes anticonsumerist, anticapitalist
protest. Besides, its protest techniques are located in
symbolic subversion: the basic idea is to play with
culture and try to get the message across through
surrealistic actions that unveil the commercially led
nature of global cultural imaginary production. The
second reason BND is important is the content of
protest. The themes articulated in the protest illustrate current anticonsumerist and anticapitalist narratives. BND campaigners ask each individual to be
“a consumer-hero” rather than a “consumer-zero”
by “standing up against the pressure to buy.” This
is presented as a “simple idea”: “challenging” consumer culture by “switch(ing) off from shopping
for one day” with the hope that this will provide a
“lasting experience” and a moment for redressing
our lifestyles considering that consumer spending is,
contrary to standard capitalist wisdom, the root of

Consumer Protest: Environment

global disaster. Concerns over public issues, such as
environmental consequences, fairness, and the distribution of wealth, as well as over more personal
issues—such as how to spend one’s own leisure time
to increase happiness and sociability—are at the core
of similar anticonsumerist initiatives, which attribute
to the consumer an uttermost political function and
power.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Alternative Consumption; Consumer Protest:
Environment; Consumer Rights and the Law; Fair
Trade; Globalization; McDonaldization; Political and
Ethical Consumption; Social Movements

Further Readings
Chessel, M.-E. “Women and the Ethics of Consumption in
France at the Turn of the Century.” In The Making of
the Consumer, edited by Frank Trentmann, 81–98.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Davies, Kate. “A Moral Purchase: Femininity, Commerce,
Abolition, 1788–1792.” In Women and the Public
Sphere: Writing and Representation, 1660–1800, edited
by Elizabeth Eger and Charlotte Grant, 133–162.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Friedman, Monroe. Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change
through the Marketplace and the Media. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Glickman, Lawrence B. “Born to Shop? Consumer History
and American History.” In Consumer Society in
American History: A Reader, edited by Lawrence B.
Glickman, 1–16. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1997.
Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in
an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2009.
Littler, Jo. “Beyond the Boycott: Anti-consumerism,
Cultural Change and the Limits of Reflexivity.” Cultural
Studies 19, no. 2 (2005): 227–252.
Micheletti, Michele, Andres Follesdal, and Dietlind Stolle,
eds. Politics, Products and Markets: Exploring Political
Consumerism Past and Present. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2004.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory,
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption,
Pleasure and Politics: Slow-Food and the PoliticoAesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 10, no. 2 (2010): 1–31.
Vidal, John. McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial. New York:
New York Press, 1997.

301

Website
Adbusters. www.adbusters.org.

CONSUMER PROTEST:
ENVIRONMENT
Consumers are increasingly aware of what choices
are available to them and the impact that their
choices can have, both environmentally and socially,
and are ever more cognizant of the “ethical” dimension in their consumer purchasing habits. As such,
awareness-raising campaigns—through various
forms of either direct or indirect actions—are seen to
have had a measurable impact on consumer behavior. This is particularly the case in relation to raising
awareness about the environmental impact of both
the production and consumption of goods, which
has often involved diverse and imaginative forms of
consumer protest and wider sorts of activism. This
activism is often directed in two principal ways: first,
it is directed at raising awareness among individual
consumers, in the hope that they may be persuaded
to change the ways in which they shop, either permanently or for a designated period of time, or in
relation to a particular product or company; and
second, it is directed at changing the practices of
businesses and multinationals by raising awareness
about the environmental impact of the production
and trade of goods and services and subsequently
increasing the pressure for far greater corporate
social responsibility. The successes and failures of
consumer activism and various forms of consumer
protest in achieving these ends has been the subject of recent debate and analysis (Glickman 2009;
Hilton 2009; Kendall, Gill, and Cheney 2007). To
get a better sense of what’s involved, it is useful to
briefly survey some of the main forms of consumer
protest that have been informed by concerns for the
environment.
Perhaps the most renowned form of consumer
protest is the phenomenon of the boycott. Monroe
Friedman has defined a boycott as attempts “by
one or more parties to achieve certain objectives by
urging individual consumers to refrain from making selected purchases in the marketplace” (1995,
198–199). And, as Matthew Hilton has shown in
his 2009 landmark work, consumers have protested
against the abuses of the market by boycotting

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Consumer Protest: Environment

certain products and services and, in so doing,
have challenged the very meaning of consumerism
by raising awareness of how it increasingly shapes
our social, cultural, and political life, as well as the
more obvious area of our economic well-being. In
essence, then, a boycott involves the act—or rather
nonact—of refraining from purchasing certain
goods and services from a particular organization or sector of the marketplace, typically as an
expression of disaffection for the practices of those
involved in their production or provision. Any
given boycott can last for an indefinite length of
time, although they tend to be unitary in the sense
that they concern a single issue or problem, and the
boycott will cease once this has been addressed by
those targeted. That said, consumer boycotts are
becoming increasingly more organized—especially
with the advent of enhanced communications technology—and are beginning to focus on longer-term
changes in the buying patterns of consumers to have
a greater impact and thus more change of success
in meeting the global challenge of climate change
and protecting the environment. Useful examples of
consumer protests via boycotts today can be found
at the Ethical Consumer website on the Current
Consumer Boycotts page.
A further development in consumer protests is the
more recent phenomenon of the “buycott,” whereby
individual consumers are encouraged not to buy anything at all, rather than simply to cease from buying
a particular good or a specific brand. Buy Nothing
Day, for example, was first organized in 1992 and
has subsequently been promoted as an international
day of protest against global consumerism and typically falls each year in late November. This approach
to consumer protest has been criticized, however, as
by being focused on a single day of abstinence, it can
only ever have a very limited impact and does little to
dissuade consumers from heading to stores the following day.
A final contribution to consumer protest in
this area is the contribution that can be made by
so-called positive buying, which is essentially individual consumers making decisions at the point of
purchase that reflect a commitment to ethical and
environmental goals. This is seen as a more positive
form of consumer protest precisely because, rather
than boycotting or buycotting a product or company
of which one disapproves, it is a way of supporting more progressive companies that reflect shared

values and norms in terms of the identified aims of
the protesters and activists.
This is becoming far from straightforward, however. As mentioned earlier, although boycotts, buycotts, and so-called positive buying are targeted at
changing individual consuming habits, they are also
necessarily engaged in seeking to alter the behavior
of businesses and multinational companies, either via
a negative or positive association. It is in this push
for greater corporate social responsibility—broadly
understood as businesses proactively taking responsibility for the impact of their own practices on the
environment and a variety of human stakeholders
(e.g., consumers, employees), while at the same time
both encouraging community growth and protecting
the public sphere from narrowly private interests—
that some companies have started to market brands
that, although still a part of their operations, do not
explicitly display reference to the parent company
on labels or packaging. Some recent examples of
this include Innocent Smoothies (Coca-Cola), Green
& Blacks chocolates (Cadbury Schweppes), Pret
a Manger cafés (McDonald’s), and The Body Shop
products (L’Oreal). Activist organizations such as
Ethical Consumer provide freely available information
on which multinational companies parent own which
particular brands and products, in the hope of helping
to guide individual consumers through an increasingly
complex and fluid marketplace. Indeed, the process
of so-called greenwashing has become so widespread
in recent times that social analysts and commentators
are just beginning to move away from the terms green
consumption or ethical consumption in favor of a
broader form of responsible consumption.
Mark Davis
See also Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Consumer
Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest: Water;
Consuming the Environment; Eco-Labeling;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Political and Ethical Consumption;
Social Movements

Further Readings
Friedman, Monroe. “On Promoting a Sustainable Future
through Consumer Activism.” Journal of Social Issues
51, no. 4 (1995): 197–215.
Glickman, Lawrence B. Buying Power: A History of
Consumer Activism in America. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009.

Consumer Protest: Water
Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in
an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2009.
Kendall, Brenden E., Rebecca Gill, and George Cheney.
“Consumer Activism and Corporate Social
Responsibility: How Strong a Connection?” In The
Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility, edited
by Steven K. May, George Cheney, and Juliet Roper,
241–265. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Website
Ethical Consumer. www.ethicalconsumer.org.

CONSUMER PROTEST: WATER
Humans consume water in many ways. In addition
to meeting essential daily needs, such as drinking,
cleansing, cooking, or producing food, water is also
consumed in leisure activities, such as fishing and
other water-related sports, or through the enjoyment of urban waterscapes. In this general sense,
human beings have always consumed water. More
narrowly, the vending and consumption of drinkable water has also been long practiced by humans,
as suggested by historical records of private water
vending in societies as dissimilar as the Aztecs and
the Arabs. However, in the context of this entry,
we are only concerned with the emergence of the
water consumer as a social category since the expansion of domestic urban water services from the lateeighteenth century onward. The emergence of a
consumer culture in relation to basic urban services,
such as water supply and sewerage, contributed to
the rising awareness among the population about the
material implications of the access to these services
(e.g., for living standards), as well as about the social
and political considerations associated with their
organization and control. Thus, networked water
consumption in urban centers opened new spaces for
citizen participation, often in the form of social protest, as water consumers became increasingly aware
of the potential political importance of their actions.
It is worth highlighting that water consumption
has not received much attention within the field of
consumption research until recently, which may be
explained perhaps by the fact that although water
consumption is a permanent and universal human
necessity, like breathing, it tends to be largely

303

inconspicuous. In this connection, it is important to
remark that the concept of “consumer” in relation to
domestic water use has to be qualified, perhaps with
the exception of bottled water consumption. This is
relevant because one of the key characteristics associated with modern consumers, the capacity to make
informed consumption choices between alternative
products, has rarely been available to water users.
This has been the case mainly for two reasons: first,
humans cannot avoid consuming water; at best they
can control the volumes and the quality of the water
they consume. Second, the provision of water services has historically taken the form of a monopoly,
whether publicly or privately owned and managed,
which means that choice of provider has not been
an option available to consumers. In fact, modern
domestic water users have always been, for the most
part, captive consumers, which has often prompted
bitter social confrontations.

Early Development
The emergence and expansion of the water consumer
as a social identity is part and parcel of the development of capitalist forms of production and circulation of public services as commodities, including
water supply and later also water-based sanitation
services. England, especially, and also France were
the pioneering examples of this development.
However, the commodification of domestic water
services and the creation of a consumer base for
water-based commodities have been punctuated by
recurrent social and political confrontations. Historically, these confrontations have flared up around a
number of critical issues, including disputes over the
ownership of water sources and infrastructures and
over the funding for developing water services, resistance to compulsory household connections, and
struggles over issues of service access, affordability,
and quality. More important, political confrontations
around the status of essential water services (if it is
legitimate to treat these services as commodities, or
they should be considered a social or public good
or a citizenship right) have been a central feature
of their development. With hindsight, the process
of commodification of domestic water services has
never been fully accomplished, has faced significant
setbacks not least because of recurrent social protest
and resistance, and its future development is rather
uncertain.

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Consumer Protest: Water

The best known modern examples of the commodification of domestic water services date from
eighteenth-century London, where a number of small
private undertakings to deliver fresh water to wealthy
neighborhoods were set. By the mid-nineteenth century, the private delivery of water supply was well
established in British cities and was under way
in France, the United States, and other industrial
countries. However, the expansion of commodified
water services often faced the lack of interest of the
potential consumers when not their open opposition. Thus, in the name of public health (but also for
financial reasons), governments made the connection
to networked domestic water services compulsory,
which prompted much resistance among citizens
who had alternative means of water supply, such as
wells or other sources. Also, users who resisted (or
were unable to afford) paying for the water delivered
were prosecuted under new laws that criminalized
the use of water without a contract with the private
provider: in the process of creating water consumers,
the system also created water thieves, according to
Colin Ward. Water theft has been one of the expressions of popular resistance to the commodification of
essential water services ever since.
As a pattern, this early development of commodified domestic water services was characterized by
the lack of regulation of the private providers, which
were granted monopoly control over their service
areas. Also, the tariffs were usually high while the
quality of the services was irregular and often inadequate (i.e., low pressure and flow, intermittence
and shortages, water quality problems, high levels of
leakage), a situation that worsened as the nineteenth
century progressed. This was compounded by the
unforeseen outcomes of the introduction of waterbased sanitation since the early nineteenth century,
which accelerated the pollution of water sources and
also prompted recurring social unrest. Moreover, the
most significant problem was that even in the latenineteenth century, only a relatively small minority
was connected to the water services, and, strictly
speaking, only a fraction of them could be formally
considered water consumers, noted Frank Trentmann
and Vanessa Taylor. This situation was intertwined
with the increasing social inequalities and spatial
segregation characterizing the development of urban
areas in the nineteenth century, including the spread
of inequality and injustice in the access to water services. As a result, by the turn of the century, most

domestic water and sanitation services in England,
France, the United States, and other leading capitalist
countries had been subject to strict regulation and
public control or directly placed in public hands.
The eventual municipalization, and later nationalization, of essential water services did not substantially change the agonistic aspects associated
with water consumption. First, the full universalization of access in developed countries was only
achieved after World War II, but even then, the
essential attribute of captive clients characterizing
water consumers remained unchanged. During the
twentieth century, most water services continued
to be delivered by monopoly providers, and for the
most part, these remained unaccountable to citizens
and consumers. Moreover, with rare and short-lived
exceptions, full universal coverage for water services was not achieved outside developed countries
until today. Despite the significant progress made
since the late-nineteenth century, the main causes
of water-related social conflict continue to be essentially the same.

The Pattern of Contemporary Water Protests
There is a wealth of literature documenting the contemporary occurrence of water protests. In developing countries, a major reason fueling water protests
continues to be the struggle by would-be water users
to gain access to publicly provided water services,
which encompasses a large part of the world population: around 17 percent lack access to a safe water
supply, and 40 percent have no adequate sanitation.
For the large proportion of the unserved population,
water is often provided by mostly unregulated water
vendors or directly taken from uncontrolled, frequently unsafe water sources. These are major causes
of water conflict worldwide. However, water protests
are also often carried out by users who have access to
networked water services but are affected by a range
of problems, including poor quality (intermittence,
interruptions, unsafe water, etc.), unfair pricing
and unaffordable tariffs, lack of accountability and
power abuses by the providers, and so on. The protests take different forms, from peaceful demands to
the authorities and public demonstrations, through
civil disobedience (e.g., nonpayment of water bills),
to open violence including water theft, the destruction of property, and the loss of human life. Owing,
among other issues, to their historical role in relation

Consumer Regulation

to domestic water use, women are key actors in these
different forms of water protest.
Since the 1980s, governments in both developed
and developing countries have introduced radical
reforms in water and sanitation services oriented at
transferring the responsibility for management, and
often also the ownership, of these services to private
companies. Although water privatization has often
been promoted as a way to empower consumers,
the introduction of privatization does not change
the essential characteristic of water users as captive
clients. Privatization has become a major source
of water protest in all continents, and in countries
as dissimilar as the United States and Bolivia. The
main reasons behind the protests range from the
open opposition to privatization of public water
services to complaints about the lack of compliance with contractual arrangements, poor or lack
of regulatory control, or problems with the quality,
affordability, and accountability of privately provided services. A major bone of contention, as in
the nineteenth century, concerns the status of the
services: should water services be fully commodified or should they be delivered as a social or public good, a citizenship right, disengaged from the
market?
Given that the world is facing a worsening water
crisis with direct consequences for the provision of
essential water services, water protests are likely to
play a major role in the twenty-first century. A crucial
task for social scientists will be to better understand
the politics of water consumption, and particularly
the interweaving between the formation of consumer
identities and the development of substantive citizenship in relation to the governance and management
of water and water-related services.
José Esteban Castro
See also Citizenship; Commodification; Consumer
Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest:
Environment; Consumer Rights and the Law;
Infrastructures and Utilities; Public Goods

Further Readings
Barraqué, Bernard, ed. Urban Water Conflicts: An
Analysis on the Origins and Nature of Water-Related
Unrest and Conflicts in the Urban Setting. Paris:
International Hydrological Programme of the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization, 2006.

305

Castro, José Esteban. Water, Power, and Citizenship: Social
Struggle in the Basin of Mexico. Houndmills, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Ghosh, Nandita, ed. “Women and the Politics of Water: An
Introduction.” Special issue, International Feminist
Journal of Politics 9, no. 4 (2007): 443–454.
Goubert, Jean Pierre. The Conquest of Water: The Advent
of Health in the Industrial Age. Cambridge: Polity,
1986.
Swyngedouw, Erik. “Dispossessing H2O: The Contested
Terrain of Water Privatization.” Capitalism Nature
Socialism 16, no. 1 (2005): 81–98.
Trentmann, Frank, and Vanessa Taylor. “From Users to
Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century
London.” In The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge,
Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by
Frank Trentmann, 53–73. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Ward, Colin. Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social
Responsibility. London: Cassell, 1997.

CONSUMER REGULATION
Long-standing debates about the power of consumers, in relation to production, social distinctions, and
global inequalities, are in many ways also debates
about consumer regulation, about how people
in their capacity as consumers are being formed,
framed, influenced by, and influencing social institutions and processes. But, increasingly, regulation is
used more narrowly, taken to represent mechanisms
that intentionally steer people’s actions in certain
directions. Such regulatory interventions are about
disciplining and exercising power over people, making them more efficient and responsible as members
of society. But they are also about welfare, protection, justice, and, closely linked to that, social order.
The history of consumer regulation is a history where
people’s loyalty and active support alternate with
considerable creativity and resistance. The definition
and understanding of consumer regulation depends
not only on how we understand the concept of
regulation but also on what is meant by “consumption” and “a consumer.” Theoretical and political
approaches to regulation may have highly variable
views on the interrelationships between regulatory
agents and consumers.
Regulation impacts on and represents an integrated part of consumer culture, the expectations,
meanings, and habits of consumption. Some even

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Consumer Regulation

claim that consumption only exists as regulation. In
some sense, that is a useful starting point. Because
what we do in everyday life is not to “consume.”
We buy, drive, fill up, and maintain a car, and we
shop for food, cook meals, eat meals, and dispose
of food. Or we use collective transportation and eat
out instead. Such activities are formed as and within
social practices. Practices represent dependencies and
power relations, as expressed in social, cultural, and
economic distinctions, as well as in imbalances of
power and knowledge in systems of provision. To
regulate consumption means to influence concrete
practices and the objects involved. Consumer regulation is closely associated with the construction of the
consuming subject; an unwary yet rational figure to
be protected.
Yet to capture the specificities and power relations
of consumer regulation, regulation and practices
of consumption should be kept apart. John Searle
makes a useful distinction between regulative and
constitutive rules. Regulative rules regulate already
existing action via different explicit rules, laws, and
sanctions, whereas constitutive rules “create the
very possibility of certain activities” (Searle 1995,
28). Constitutive rules are the “rules of the game,”
sets of dispositions that develop through collective
agreement and acceptance. People are typically not
conscious of these rules, and they may also have false
beliefs about them. This distinction between constitutive and regulative rules is a good opening for
analyzing how practices regulate actions and, at the
same time, that regulative rules are imposed on practices and become institutionalized. A discussion of
consumer regulation is a discussion of the interrelationship between regulatory efforts and consumption
practices: how regulative rules may be transformed
into the constitutive rules of daily practices, how
constitutive rules form taken-for-granted frames for
regulatory intervention, and how resistance and creativity emerge against and in-between the rules.

Consumer Regulation in Social Science
Regulation has not been subject to much attention
in consumer research during the last decades. Until
the 1980s, frequent references were made to policy
making, first of all in the forms of state legislation
and consumer education, often conceptualized in
terms of specific consumer rights. Numerous studies
addressed the use of legislation to protect consumers

in terms of welfare and safety. Others were concerned with consumers’ knowledge and competence, for example, with regard to nutrition and the
understanding of product labels. There has been an
American tradition of analyzing consumer regulation as a matter of legislative protection of consumers’ health and safety, although this concept does not
have any particular meaning in European societies.
In the mid-1980s, an abrupt drop in the interest in consumer regulation and consumer politics
reflected neoliberal waves and skepticism toward
state involvement. Attention was redirected toward
commercial issues, on the one hand, and consumer
culture, on the other. The academic interest in regulation continued, but not as part of the general consumer research agenda. Political economy, agro-food
studies, and regulation studies in political science and
institutional economics, for example, contributed
to the understanding of shifting forms of market
regulation during an era of liberalization and globalization. Focus was on the shift from state oriented
“government” to multicentered “governance” and
market-based regulation. A proliferation of studies
of “consumer choice” within psychology and marketing research contributed to a dominant move
toward individualistic and cognitive approaches to
people’s more or less rational purchases. Visions of
consumers were mostly schematic and undersocialized, consumers being either victimized, as in various
critical theories, or individual “choosers” with sovereign powers, as in neoclassical economics.
The new millennium has seen growing interest in
regulation and politics in relation to consumption
and consumers. This is evident in several disciplines
and areas of research, such as social and economic
history, studies of political and ethical consumerism
(in philosophy, political science, sociology, etc.), and
Michel Foucault–inspired discussions about selfregulation. There seems to be a move beyond an
individual/system dichotomy, instead seeing regulation as part of the dynamics of social practices. A key
question is what roles and capacities are assigned to
consumers as social actors. But the debate is not at
all clear, and the conceptualization of regulation and
regulatory change is confusing. While some address
modes or systems of provision and the junction
between providers and consumers, others discuss
consumer power more generally. The following text
outlines some of the ongoing debates, without going
very far in trying to bridge or reconcile them.

Consumer Regulation

Regulation in the Age of Neoliberalism
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a consensus
emerged that so-called command-and-control economies should be avoided or at least supplemented.
Privatization of ownership and production and globalization of trade developed parallel to the deregulation and re-regulation of social distribution systems,
safety regulation, and a shifting emphasis toward the
responsibilities of individuals. While the so-called
rollback liberalism focused on privatization and
deregulation, a new phase of rollout neoliberalization has emerged in which the state and other social
agents aim at facilitating social change to take place
via market-based processes. Regulatory changes
from government to governance are captured in concepts such as deliberation, agencification, decentered
regulation, (market) self-regulation, and stakeholderism. The changes do not imply that the role of the
state has become insignificant or that regulatory
interventions are generally reduced (perhaps more to
the contrary), but they represent a break with welfare
state market regulation and paternalistic care. Those
to be regulated were increasingly seen as knowledgeable, responsible, and capable actors.
Deregulation in association with globalization
has been at the focus of attention. The conventional
wisdom was that trade liberalization and agreements to promote free trade invariably undermined
national health, safety, and environmental standards.
This was, however, challenged by David Vogel, who
claimed that liberal trade policies often produce precisely the opposite effect: that of strengthening regulatory standards, captured in the concept “trading up.”
A strong global ideological movement has developed
that stresses the role of markets not only in creating
welfare, but also in solving problems with the side
effects (externalities) of economic development. This
is a form of soft market intervention demanded by a
range of social actors, including those who are supposed to comply with them. Product labeling (e.g.,
energy labels, food standards) is part of new systems
of rule making, closely linked to extensive efforts of
standardization and auditing. Standardization deals
with technical objects or systems, but increasingly
also social and environmental matters. Through
standardization and labeling, norms of good conduct
are being made explicit, written, and codified. As
such, these processes are therefore part of a gigantic rationalization project with large significance for

307

consumer regulation and culture. They increase our
freedoms as well as our dependencies. In between
freedom and dependency, we often find intense focus
on accountability and credibility.

Self-Governance and Consumer Choice
Growing attention is directed toward the regulation
of individuals qua consumers. State-centered policies
emphasizing legislation, budgets, and educational
campaigns usually saw consumption as an effect
and consumers primarily in terms of their adoption
of regulation. In contemporary regulation, people,
as consumers, are more often seen as social actors,
with expectations of responsibility taking, freedom
of action, and active participation. The reframing
of social and political issues as consumer choice
and lifestyle politics has affected traditional issues,
like alcohol and nutrition, as well as new issues of
ethical or political consumerism, such as marine
resources, child labor, and farm animal welfare.
Moreover, deregulating markets formerly regulated
by law and other state measures, such as the markets
for financial services, energy, housing, and telecommunications, imply significant changes in consumer
regulation. This shift in the role of consumers in regulation raises new and fundamental questions about
power, interests, and legitimacy.
The focus on lifestyle choices as a private matter and market freedom and consumer choice as
dominant values represents an ideology of moral
management of the self. This is a break with what
Foucault characterized as the pastoral authority of
the traditional welfare state. The turn toward indirect regulation, emphasizing the consumer-market
relationship, consumer freedom, and responsibility,
can be regarded as a disguise for the dissemination of a neoliberal ideology of market power. The
liberal view is that diversity and choice mean less
dependency on any one producer and thus represent consumer freedom and empowerment. But this
empowerment has also been problematized and criticized. For example, Frank Trentmann contends that
the contemporary rise of consumerist politics in part
reflects imploding politicizations of consumption
and a corresponding consumerization of politics.
Putting politics into consumption can serve to focus
on the individual at the expense of the collective and
on immediate delivery at the expense of the broader
parameters of provisioning.

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Consumer Regulation

But this is not only about market actions. With
reference to Foucault, Nikolas Rose suggests that
new and very broad forms of regulation and authority have developed, characterized as government
(a different use of the concept than in market regulation studies), including “all endeavors to shape,
guide, direct the conduct of others, and the ways in
which one might be urged and educated to bridle
one’s own passions, to control one’s own instincts, to
govern oneself” (1999, 3). The notion of governmentality implies a certain relationship of government
to other forms of power, in particular to sovereignty
and discipline. Sovereignty is exercised through the
juridical and executive arms of the state over subjects. Discipline represents power over and through
the individual, obtained through institutions such as
schools, hospitals, and manufacturing enterprises.
Power as government, on the other hand, sees living
individuals as resources to be fostered, to be used,
and to be optimized. Government is defined as a
distinctively cognitive process, a government of the
mind, which is meant to support rather than counteract individual freedom. People are, via various
forms of information, to be morally convinced that
they themselves need to take on responsibilities—for
example, obesity as well as climate change.
Government (in this sense) gives the state a less
hegemonic role. The challenge of liberal political
rationalities is committed to the twin projects of
respecting the autonomy of certain “private” zones
and shaping their conduct in ways conducive to collective and individual well-being. This takes place
through procedures for shaping and nurturing those
domains that were to provide its counterweight
and limit—“governance at a distance” (similar to
regulation studies). Consumer actions are seen as
voluntary and private, but, at the same time, they
are to be shaped to become so-called responsible.
What is implied by being free and responsible is subject to considerable attention and controversy. The
Foucault-inspired nondifferentiated understanding
of power, from which there is no escape, has been
criticized. When, in Rose’s words, “the power is
in our freedom,” what is the space for resistance?
How should we, for example, understand obesity?
Is it a regulatory failure? Or is it a matter of limited
individual power to change the situation? Or is it an
expression of resistance? Even so, it is important to
be aware of forms of power that are not overt and
explicit; in fact, the most efficient ones are those that
are not recognized.

This is pointing to important dynamics between
power and freedom. We need to question broadly
who is regulating whom and by which means in
order for people as consumers to make the right socalled choices. For this to be a matter of freedom,
that is, to represent some autonomy, we must also
discuss how that freedom is exercised. While selfregulation may represent power over the self, that
does not necessarily imply power over others. The
relative impacts of these two aspects of individualized responsibilities, freedom from and freedom to,
need to be explored critically and empirically. Rather
than dismissing or assuming consumer agency, we
need to problematize it, to ask questions about the
potentials for people as consumers to be creative
and to fight back.

Uncertainty, Distrust, and Resistance
Individualized responsibilities may thus be taken to
represent liberation from the repressive power of former times. However, many, like Ulrich Beck, claim
that shifts in responsibilities associated with individualization, deregulation, and globalization may lead
to uncertainty and powerlessness. People are unprepared for or possess insufficient powers to take on
responsibilities and, as part of that, risk. Food is a
good example, where labor within the household is
taken over by large, complicated, sometimes global
corporations. Imbalances of power and information may be enormous and people’s direct control
has become substantially reduced. Health, safety,
and environmental problems have been reframed as
risks, often as represented by unintended side effects
of the production of material welfare. There has been
a shift of attention from consumer regulation to risk
regulation, from consumer protection to individual
uncertainty and distrust.
A new politics of consumption has also emerged,
including political and ethical consumerism, as well
as collective actions and participation in alternative
provisioning. As much as signifying individualized
and privatized uncertainties, distrust and activism
may represent politicization and participation and
thus agency. Changes have given rise to the creation
of new sites of resistance and the spread of globalization also involves the expansion of consumers’
information networks, which can lead to the forging
of new political alliances and agendas. Some have
argued that this is typically part of neoliberal forms
of regulation, and people are becoming coproducers

Consumer Regulation

309

of regulation. Governmentality, a moral management
of the self, is not only represented by commercially
framed choices, but even includes alternative movements and communitarian initiatives.

and paternalist regulation of food in Norway, with
much more passive consumers, becomes understandable in view of its specific history and current
political context.

Contextualizing Consumer Regulation

Future Directions in Research

Consumer choice as regulation requires that the right
kinds of options are available in the shop and there
must be relevant information about them. This is not
a neutral question about the number of extensively
labeled items on the shelves. It represents a highly
structured process with strong commercial and political interests involved. Above all, this is a matter of
power and its expression in institutional arrangements. In that way, self-regulation by commercialized choices coincides with and is dependent on other
regulatory processes.
Individualized consumer choice cannot be
detached from its socioeconomic basis on the consumer side or the effects that consumption has on
others. Regulation by choice presumes sufficient
purchasing power and abundant supplies. This raises
questions of the distribution of material welfare and
social justice. Responsible market choices are by
their very nature exclusive, and consumer activism
has been criticized for its middle-class character. On
a larger scale, whether demand for cheaper products in competitive, global markets means that more
or less poverty is an issue without simple answers;
whether more “ethical” and “sustainable” purchases for sneakers and coffee can be a leverage to
social development; or whether it is instead mainly a
way to reduce competition, to the benefit of retailers
and middlemen, are all questioned.
The nation-state may no longer be the sole or
main source of regulation of consumption, but
that does not mean that regulatory change is uniform or detached from its specific context. Julie
Guthman emphasizes the importance of observing disjunctures between neoliberal rhetoric and
“actually existing neo-liberalisms.” Changes are
highly variable across countries/regions and objects
of consumption. Provisioning structures, consumer
cultures, and regulatory traditions are not static,
and new solutions are framed by and emerge from
old ones. The neoliberal framing of new regulation
of food in California can be understood on the basis
of its social, political, and economic development.
Its extensive consumer activism fits into the same
picture. Likewise, the state-oriented, protectionist,

Consumer regulation is important as part of a changing consumer culture. There are many tensions and
even contradictions in the emphasis on self-responsibility and the power of consumer choice. People face
huge imbalances of power, combined with increasing dependencies. The power of corporate and state
actors may for consumers represent discipline, perhaps abuses of power (including exploitation of consumer loyalty). But regulatory intervention can also
provide predictability, protection, and systems to deal
with malfeasance, efficiency, and dynamics that open
for consumer agency. On the other hand, the continued importance of legislative and other consumer
protection measures should not be overlooked. Nor
should the significance of collective action.
Many contributions on consumer regulation are
very general, considering neither the specificities of
regulation and consumption practices nor the institutional field in which regulatory initiatives emerge.
This represents theoretical as well as methodological
challenges. More needs to be done in terms of conceptualizing different forms of consumer regulation
and their interlinkages with consumption practices
and people as consumers. Power and resistance are
key issues. Studies are called for of contemporary
consumer regulation as distinct mechanisms and as
part of consumer culture. This is all the more urgent
in view of the rapid changes that are taking place in
response to climate change and the global financial
crisis that began in 2008.
Unni Kjærnes
See also Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer
Sovereignty; Governmentality; Individualization;
Inequalities; Political Economy; Systems of Provision;
Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim.
Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its
Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002.
Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-Standards,
Product Labelling and Green Consumerism. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Daunting, Martin, and Matthew Hilton. The Politics of
Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in
Europe and America. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” Ideology and
Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21.
Guthman, Julie. “The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food
Labels as Neoliberal Governance.” Antipode 39, no. 3
(2007): 456–578.
Hunt, Alan. Governing Morals: A Social History of
Moral Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Kjærnes, Unni, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde. Trust in
Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Levi-Faur, David, and Jacint Jordana. “The Rise of
Regulatory Capitalism: The Global Diffusion of a
New Order.” The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 598 (2005): 200–217.
Micheletti, Michele, Andreas Follesdal, and Dietlind Stolle.
Politics, Products, and Markets: Exploring Political
Consumerism Past and Present. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 2004.
Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. London:
Penguin Press, 1995.
Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas Van Vliet.
Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of
Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2004.
Trentmann, Frank. The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Vogel, David. Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental
Regulation in a Global Economy. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping
Changed American Culture. New York: Routledge,
2004.

CONSUMER REVOLUTION IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
Consumer revolution in eighteenth-century Britain
refers to an explanatory device historians have used
to elucidate shifts in production, retail practices, and
attitudes toward consumption that produced a “consumer revolution” in Britain at that time.

Explanatory Device
The consumer revolution is a phenomenon of historical interpretation that has some basis in reality,
but most historians now agree that its significance
has been highly exaggerated. The concept of the
consumer revolution came about because of failed
explanations for the older debate about why the
Industrial Revolution came to Britain first; the idea
of consumer demand became a key explanation for
the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The seminal work that identified a revolution in consumption
practices originating in the eighteenth century is The
Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization
of Eighteenth-Century England (1982). The book
includes eight chapters about commercialization
and the economy, politics, and society by editors
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb on
topics as diverse as shaving, childhood, leisure, and
Wedgewood pottery. In the book, McKendrick calls
for scholars to turn away from studying changes in
production and focus instead on shifts in consumption, which were a necessary complement to the
Industrial Revolution. McKendrick argues that it
was England’s closely stratified society that led to the
consumer revolution; people strove for, and could
attain, vertical social mobility, which led to emulative spending (social mobility). Objects that were
previously only available to the rich were now within
reach of the middle class because of a rising real family income throughout the eighteenth century. This,
McKendrick maintained, caused a shift in consumer
patterns in the eighteenth century, which he has
coined the consumer revolution.

Conceptual Outline of the
Consumer Revolution
Historians have elucidated four major themes in
the historiography of the consumer revolution.
(1) The eighteenth century was a period of product
innovation where an increased quantity and variety of objects were made in specialist workshops.
(2) Consumption moved from the aristocracy to
the middling and laboring ranks of English society.
(3) There was a change in the distribution of goods
from less formal market stalls to permanent shops.
(4) The idea of luxury was reconceived so that it no
longer had negative connotations of excess and vice
and instead represented the increasing gentility of the
English populace and fortunes of the British nation.

Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Historians now acknowledge that the so-called
revolution in consumption had a very long gestation period, which began in the seventeenth century.
Sumptuary legislation was done away with in 1604,
and by the 1690s, contemporaries began to remark on
the changing consumption patterns of the middling
rank, evidenced by the rejection of woolen fabrics for
more varied clothing choices, including cottons and
calicos, that offered more versatility in terms of color.
Cultural historian Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace used
concepts of emulation and conspicuous consumption to explain the rising demand for linen, china,
books, clocks, and furniture outside the ranks of the
aristocracy in the 1720s. These items were available
to a wider range of people because of changes in
the method of production. From the late-sixteenth
century through the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of rural workshops made fashionable objects
for the consuming public. At this time also, there was
an increasing international trade in luxury goods.
Historians also note changes in retail practices
that encouraged heightened consumption, especially
for the aristocratic and middle classes. There was
a proliferation of shops that increasingly replaced
older forms of spending, such as outdoor markets,
fairs, and peddlers (though the laboring classes continued to consume in these venues). Shops engaged in
techniques of display that increased the desirability
of goods and allowed people to project their hopes
and dreams onto objects in a way that they did not
when things were acquired primarily for their use
value. An increasingly active provincial press brought
advertisements that delineated fashion trends to the
far-flung areas of England. McKendrick argues that
these changing commercial techniques helped to shift
buying patterns away from purchases of necessity
that might be bought once in a lifetime toward purchases of fashion, which were replaced with changing
trends. Also, the verb “to shop” was coined in the
eighteenth century, demonstrating the importance of
this new leisure activity. Those from the lower orders
reallocated family resources so that they could buy,
barter, and exchange goods in the vast network of
markets, peddlers, and fairs that made secondhand
goods available throughout England.
Although it is based primarily on conjecture,
historians charting the consumer revolution note a
new attitude toward consumption that emerged in
the middling and working ranks. It is argued that
the lower ranks no longer wanted primitively made

311

objects and clothing and sought out foodstuffs from
beyond local markets. By the eighteenth century,
servants rejected livery, ancient uniforms of service,
preferring to wear clothing that was handed down
from master to servant or bought or traded as secondhand items. Objects such as cloth stockings,
caps, buttons, and cutlery were now made professionally in local workshops, and sugar, tobacco, coffee, and tea were imported from overseas. Historians
argue that these new consumption practices mark a
transition in the values of early modern people. They
suggest that an increase in conspicuous consumption
at and below the middling rank acted as a challenge
to the hierarchical system, which had once endorsed
sumptuary laws. People increasingly sought to convey their individuality through the objects that they
purchased, to create a sense of group solidarity via
their consumption patterns, and to challenge the
hierarchical status quo.
Historians of luxury such as Maxine Berg,
Christopher J. Berry, and John Sekora argue that
in order for the consumer revolution to take hold,
a change in attitude toward luxury had to prevail.
What it meant for the population to be buying goods
that had previously been thought of as opulent or
luxury items was a source of heated debate in the
eighteenth century. Berg, a leading scholar of luxury,
suggests that before the eighteenth century, the term
luxury took on negative connotations: it was associated with the sin of excess and the debauchery of
the very rich. Discussions of lavishness in this earlier
period often reflected fears about the staying power
of social hierarchies. By the eighteenth century,
sumptuous objects such as silk, porcelain, mahogany,
sugar, tea, and chocolate, which were once considered luxuries of the rich, began to be available to the
plebian classes. Berg argues that luxury goods helped
the upper ranks to create new forms of civility, which
were conveyed by eating and socializing in new ways.
As a result of the increased availability of opulent
goods and the new trend toward civility, moralists,
economists, and novelists debated whether luxury
goods were signs of extravagance and self-indulgence
that would corrupt the populace, or if they were an
improving force, which acted as an instrument and
indication of progress in Britain. Social commentator Bernard Mandeville’s book, The Fable of the
Bees (1714), represented a turning point in debates
about luxury. Mandeville agreed with earlier interpretations that saw the negative aspects of luxury as

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Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain

encouraging vanity and envy, but more important, he
argued that the pursuit of luxury by the wealthy was
beneficial because it provided work for the poor.
Later in the century, economist Adam Smith’s An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations (1776) put forward the argument that
extravagant consumption was not a question of
morality; rather increased consumption would benefit all classes by providing jobs for workers, and a
reason for people to save so that they might be able
to afford extra comforts. It was not until the later
1820s, however, that Mandeville’s and Smith’s ideas
were taken up by a larger intellectual community.
British political economists such as Archibald Alison,
J. R. McCulloch, and Nassau Senior suggested that
the intensifying global exchange of goods, better
availability of luxuries to all classes, increases in
wages, and the decrease in family size were all signs
of the evolution and progress of the British people
that would benefit the nation as a whole.

New Trends in Historiography
As is the case with most historical works that
proclaim a decided break from previous trends,
McKendrick’s thesis that a consumer society was
born in the eighteenth century was soon questioned
and qualified by various historians. Jean-Christophe
Agnew, for example, suggests that while the
introduction of The Birth of a Consumer Society
encourages scholars to look beyond the production
side of the revolution, the essays contained within
the volume are still focused on the supply side—
looking at producers, stylists, and critics rather than
at patterns of consumption or the lives of ordinary
consumers. One essay in the volume, for example,
focuses on Josiah Wedgwood as a promotional
wizard who manipulated consumer desires to create
new demand for his ceramics. Here we get the story
of Wedgwood, the entrepreneur, who pulled the
strings of demand, not his consumers who bought
the products.
Other historians hit the heart of McKendrick’s
thesis by studying the wage increases of the eighteenth century. They found that for the first half of
the century, real wages increased for both the working and middle class, but this trend was cut short
by 1750, when accelerated inflation halted further
wage increases until 1815. This evidence led Jan de
Vries to argue that consumer demand grew, even as

real wage increases became stagnant, because households actively reallocated labor resources so that they
might afford new goods. This is a significant argument because it suggests that agrarian workers and
urban laborers were actively making choices in terms
of consumption. Writing about Europe in general,
rather than Britain in particular, de Vries argues that
there was an “industrious revolution” evidenced by
a reallocation of the productive resources of households: longer hours were worked at the expense of
leisure, women and children’s work was reallocated
to maintaining the household and men’s labor to
goods production and farming that received monetary remuneration. This allowed families who had
once put all their efforts into subsistence farming to
be able to buy consumer items.
Writing before de Vries, Beverly Lemire makes
another important qualification to McKendrick’s
thesis, arguing that those far below the middle were
an important part of the changing attitude toward
consumption. Lemire shows that even the humble
of English society desired the new consumer goods.
She looks at the informal trade of clothing among
women hawkers, peddlers, dealers, and tradeswomen
in the difficult economic period of the second half of
the eighteenth century. Lemire finds that financial
restrictions did not stop laborers from wanting to
display the material symbols of respectability, and
they were able to do this through secondhand trade.
Lemire’s work also makes consumption practices
particularly relevant to women by looking at consumer objects, such as clothing, that were important
to women and by looking at women’s participation
in the circulation of these goods. The scholars who
write in response to McKendrick agree that while
there were various changes in consumption patterns
during the early modern period, to call this a consumer revolution is exaggerating the point.
Another important trend in the historiography
takes for granted the idea that there was a consumer
revolution using the new discourse about luxury
and consumption to discuss the place of women,
the female body, and femininity. E. J. Clery and
Kowaleski-Wallace argue that women embody
British anxiety surrounding the consumer revolution, which either represented excitement about
the transforming possibilities of consumption or
revealed deep concern about the corruptive power
of new luxury goods. Women were either praised for
bringing new social refinement to the nation with

Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain

their consumption for the tea table, of carriages and
elegant dresses, or they were condemned for their
voracious appetite for pretty things, which drained
their men folk of resources, ultimately emasculating them. This body of work focuses on the cultural
discourses surrounding consumption and interprets
how anxieties about the consumer revolution play
out over the bodies of women.
The most recent historiographic trends have
moved away from qualifying the existence of a consumer revolution and have begun to take stock of
the material culture that came out of the eighteenth
century and look at whether or not consumption
affected all regions equally. Maxine Berg and Mark
Blackwell call for scholars to move from a discussion
of consumerism in general to looking at the specifics
of the goods that were bought, used, and enjoyed
by the eighteenth-century populace. Focusing on literature, Blackwell’s The Secret Life of Things (2007)
seeks to find how narratives of the period helped to
form new object-subject relationships. Going along
with the idea that objects helped people to represent
themselves, the essays in this edited volume take on
the task of teasing out how people identified with
(in)animate objects, such as lapdogs, hair, crystals,
corkscrews, and diamonds.
Berg’s latest book on luxury similarly focuses
directly on the new objects of the period. Luxury
and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain (2005)
outlines the characteristics of the products made in
the period, their variety and diversity, how they were
manufactured and in what amounts, how they were
bought and the money people paid for them, and
most important, why there was demand and desire
for these goods up and down the social scale. The
edited volume of Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory
takes on the different, but equally important, task of
pushing McKendrick’s thesis out of London, the economic and trading center, to see how the consumer
culture in northeast England differed. Authors of this
volume question how much regionalism and regional
identity affected consumption. They find that certain
goods represented prosperity in the northeast that
did not take on this connotation elsewhere, that the
northeast had different patterns of consumption
when it came to books and chinaware, and that there
was a greater discrepancy in ownership of goods in
the rural and urban contexts than elsewhere.
Following on these recent publications, future
directions for research could expand on questions of

313

regional diversity by studying consumption patterns
in Scotland and Ireland. Drawing on the work of Berg
and Blackwell, scholars might focus on the material culture of certain underresearched goods such
as foodstuffs. Following research done by de Vries,
more work must be done on consumption among the
poor (perhaps focusing on the gin craze). Lemire has
looked at women’s place in networks of consumption, and there is room also to look at men, the hidden consumers and distributors of goods. And finally,
in opposition to the research about luxury goods that
were coming into England, scholars might research
the British export market to continental Europe.
Ariel Beaujot
See also Advertising; Fashion; History; Leisure; Luxury
and Luxuries; Shopping; Social Class; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings
Agnew, Jean-Christophe. “Coming up for Air: Consumer
Culture in Historical Perspective.” In Consumption and
the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy
Porter, 19–39. London: Routledge, 1993.
Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century
Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Berg, Maxine, and Helen Clifford, eds. Consumers and
Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual
and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Berry, Helen, and Jeremy Gregory, eds. Creating and
Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the
World of Goods. London: Routledge, 1993.
Clery, E. J. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century
England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer
Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the
Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Edger, Elizabeth, and Maxine Berg, eds. Luxury in the
Eighteenth Century: Debate, Desires and Delectable
Goods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects:
Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth
Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Lemire, Beverly. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and
the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.

314

Consumer Rights and the Law

Lemire, Beverly. Dress, Culture and Commerce: The
English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800.
London: Macmillan, 1997.
Lemire, Beverly. “Second-Hand Beaux and ‘Red-Armed
Belles’: Conflict and the Creation of Fashions in
England, c. 1660–1800.” Continuity and Change [Great
Britain] 15, no. 3 (2000): 391–417.
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds. The
Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of
Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982.
Roberts, M. J. D. “The Concept of Luxury in British
Political Economy: Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall.”
History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 1 (1998): 23–47.
Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought,
Eden to Smollett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977.
Shammas, Carole. The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England
and America. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History: The
Global Transformation of Desire. London: Routledge,
2006.
Steele, Valerie. “Appearance and Identity.” In Men and
Women: Dressing the Part, edited by Claudia Brush
Kindwell and Valerie Steele, 6–21. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects: The
Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern
England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

CONSUMER RIGHTS

AND THE

LAW

The concept of law for the “protection” of the consumer raises one immediate question: who is the
consumer that law seeks to protect? What is the particular character of the consumer, and which interests
may be associated with this individual that require
legal protection? This simple question, however,
immediately confronts us with a philosophical debate
on consumerism and a myriad of evaluations of the
value or nonvalue of the figure of the consumer. To
take but one infamous paring of the postwar period,
we can compare and contrast the rational consumer
who is a hero to the free market with the nightmare
vision of a property-less individual, who is dedicated
to “sacred” wealth accumulation, but who never
achieves “true” ownership since the consumerism of
advanced capitalism is a chimera, furnishing us only
with goods that have no lasting or socially transcendent value (Arendt 1998, 61).

Seen in this complex light, the legal theory of
the consumer is perhaps better addressed through
the more pragmatic lens of the question of how—
encountering the consumer—the law has applied theoretical constructions of consumption. Nonetheless,
this approach raises its own problems. On the one
hand, the figure of the consumer is not a monolith,
but is instead only one of many roles played by any
one human agent—as worker, producer, or economic
agent—always with varied personal aspirations and
views of the value of consumption in mind. Equally,
the law is never simply law, but is also highly differentiated, breaking down into distinct areas of contract, regulatory, labor, and competition law, each
with its own contradictory policy goals in relation
to the value of consumption. The notion of a coherent “law of the consumer” will necessarily remain
elusive as different human agents interact with distinctly programmed bodies of law, experiencing the
law either as a weapon with which to pursue preferred patterns of consumption or as a constraint on
economic behavior.
However, one constant may be identified. For all
that law is also prone to manipulation by extralegal
forces of politics and economics, and for all of the
fact that—when viewed as an autonomous social
institution—it also faces considerable challenges of
coordinating its various social steering mechanisms,
law is nonetheless always concerned to maintain
its internal normative integrity. Law is not simply a
steering mechanism, but also aspires to normative
status as a “good” mechanism. Applying this statement to consumption, law’s encounters with the consumer are thus also about the legal effort to translate
the “fact” of consumption into a normative “good”
of consumption: complex and flawed though they
might be, legal encounters with the consumer are
indelibly marked by an aspiration to establish a
regulatory framework that appropriately reflects the
social, political, ethical, and legal mores of the society to which it applies.
The following traces out a model of legal encounters with the consumer, identifying three ideal types
of legal consumer—the sovereign consumer, the citizen consumer, and the enabled consumer. The sovereign consumer and citizen consumer are children
of national legal orders. The notion of the enabled
consumer, however, has only recently been given a
degree of concrete expression within supranational
and global legal orders.

Consumer Rights and the Law

The Sovereign Consumer and the
Freedom to Consume
The notion of consumerism—closely associated
with the economic and political system of the United
States as it seeks to influence the global order—has
a modern air to it, seeming to encompass an unbridled commitment to freedom of consumption above
all other social interests. In other words, theory is
currently given to thinking about modern consumption in terms of utility and rational wealth maximization; or, as a series of individual acts that herald
a final atomizing phase within the story of liberal
individualism, whereby consumers are selfish beings.
Nonetheless, seen through the eyes of law, a different
and older story may be told.
Consumerism—or, in its positive formulation, the
idea that the act of consumption possesses its own
egalitarian force—also has deep historical roots.
More particularly, it is also to be found within nineteenth century (European) notions of contractual
justice and equality that, although unable to recognize consumers as a distinct legal class, nonetheless
assumed that contractual partners were fit and able
to determine their own destinies. This contractual conception of consumption furnishes our first
glimpse of an abiding encounter between law and the
consumer, which is governed by a happy coincidence
between law’s ancient mission to preserve its own
(pre-political) legitimacy through the maintenance of
formal legal rationality and the economic and social
rationales that underpinned then-emerging European
nation-states.
As Max Weber teaches us, modern Western law
was to be distinguished from its natural forebears by
virtue of its refusal to promote any one vision of the
legitimate nature of human organization. Instead, the
legitimacy of law derived from its neutral mission to
provide a formal framework of norms within which
all human agents were assumed to be willing and
able to act of their own volition. The cornerstone of
this legal legitimation theory was formed by a private
law doctrine of contractual privacy, which precluded
any legal intervention within economic exchange
relationships motivated by interventionist efforts to
secure the particular status of any one contractual
party (as consumer or others). The inspirational
power underlying a legal refusal to recognize the
consumer as a distinct legal class lay in the belief that
once a formal legal framework had been established

315

that would apply equally to all, regardless of status,
the individual autonomy of all citizens would be
ensured, leaving them free to pursue the productive
economic activity that they favored.
By the same token, formal rationality was to find
much favor within emerging nation-states dedicated
both to the destruction of the status-based relationships, which had seemingly retarded the economic
and social development of their feudal forebears, as
well as to the promulgation of the new and integrative powers of the national economy. Classical economic theory, the growing political preference for
bourgeois patterns of social organization, as well as
the national imperative for economic development,
acted in concert to support and sustain a contractual
autonomy, which assumed that individual economic
sovereignty both legitimated law and founded an
egalitarian society. A legally secured freedom to act
within the market would sustain and be sustained
by national solidarity and would further unleash the
creative forces of talented citizens in service of the
political and economic consolidation of the nation.
The inspirational, egalitarian nature of contractual sovereignty explains why traces of formal equality can still be found in most Western legal orders.
Most strikingly, however, the sovereign consumer
now finds its most powerful contemporary expression within the consumerism that is attributed to
emerging world trade orders. Alternatively, the inspirational roots of a freedom to consume still live on
within a modern rhetoric of consumer choice that
is now underpinned by a legal framework of individual legal rights. Seen in this light, consumerism
is not simply an expression of cultural rootlessness,
a meaningless consumerism within which the urge
and ability to purchase unravels any deep-seated cultural perceptions about the nature of socially valued
goods, but is instead an echo of the self-determining
egalitarianism that marked the birth of the modern
Western state.
To the consumerist legal order, the notion of rights
is determinative: evident weaknesses in formal legal
rationality—abuse of power within contractual
relations—can be compensated for by the recognition
in higher (constitutional) law that all must be treated
equally, regardless of race, religion, or national origin. By the same token, modern neoclassical economic theory, together with the self-determining
and socially creative purchasing power of once disregarded minorities—women, blacks, gays, and the

316

Consumer Rights and the Law

disabled—imbue the consumerist economy with an
egalitarianism all of its own. Within this scenario,
valued goods are no longer simply the product of the
societies from which they spring. In stark contrast to
a nightmare vision of consumerist poverty, they are
not, and must not be shaped by a (prejudiced) culturally determined vision of what a “good life” should
be. Instead, they are an immediate market response
to the needs and self-expressed identities of sovereign
consumers.

The Citizen Consumer and Freedom
from Harm
Although the notion of the sovereign consumer is
thought to be most closely identified with the U.S.
legal arena, ample evidence for the complexity of
legal encounters with the consumer can likewise
be derived from history and from the fact that the
United States is also the cradle of a notion of consumer protection, which often places the status of the
sovereign consumer in doubt. It was thus President
John F. Kennedy, who, in the wake of the thalidomide crisis (thalidomide is a drug that was licensed
in Canada during the 1950s that caused limb abnormalities in newborns of women who has taken it),
began to encourage lawyers to review their age-old
refusal to regard consumers as a distinct class requiring legal protection. Consumers were no longer to be
seen as isolated purchasers of goods but were instead
to be viewed as people who may be directly or indirectly affected by various aspects of consumption.
Thalidomide exposed the myth that the modern industrial economy might simply be viewed as
a forum for egalitarian economic exchange. By
the 1960s, economic exchange was characterized
by a large-scale imbalance in the relative bargaining powers of producers and consumers of goods:
thalidomide revealed a wide-ranging disjunction
between the profit motive driving modern production and the desire of consumers for safe goods. The
time had come for the reevaluation of the place of
the consumer within national society and for reconsideration of the notion that unfettered exchange
could per se sustain a “just” society. Kennedy directly
addressed the dilemma of the conflicting interests of
modern consumers. Certainly, consumers possessed
an interest in plentiful and cheap goods; however, as
producers, workers, family members, and citizens,
they also maintained a simultaneous interest in the

production of safe goods produced with due respect
for the legitimate concerns of society.
Public outrage coalesced into a demand for regulatory intervention. Accordingly, explicit legal recognition was at last given to the notion of the consumer.
More strikingly, however, within European welfare
states, the shift in emphasis from an isolated freedom
to consume to an integrated conception whereby the
state would act to ensure freedom from harm (Bollier
and Claybrook 1986, 31) also formed a new legal
encounter with the citizen consumer. Consumption
would not be viewed as an autonomous act. Instead,
consumption would be regulated in the light of the
shared concerns of the citizens of the nation-state.
The state would intervene widely within economic
exchange to balance the character of the consumer
against that of the worker, producer, or family member.
The egalitarianism of redistributive European
postwar welfare states was, in large part, facilitated
by Keynesian theories of economic organization. At
the same time, however, it also necessitated a reevaluation of the legitimate bases of national law. Whereas
formal law derived its own legitimacy from its ability to impose one universal framework of norms on
society, welfare state law now demanded that law
should cede to purposive political direction, to treat
different groups within society in different ways. The
consumer would henceforth be recognized as a distinct class of citizen in need of particular protection;
at the same time, the interests of consumers would
also be balanced against the interests of the entire
population.
Legal encounters with the citizen consumer are
consequently also marked by a high degree of what
Weber termed legal materialization. The citizen consumer entails a series of positive values, which cannot
be legitimated by formal dedication to contractual
autonomy, but which must find their approbation
in democratic discourse and the subjection of law to
the political direction of the national welfare state.
This democratization of the process of the legal identification of a normative good of consumption was
undoubtedly of major benefit to the populations
of postwar Western economies. Nonetheless, legal
materialization and democratization of consumption
also brought with it its own complex contradictions.
Above all, legal materialization heightened the social
steering difficulties faced by national legal orders. As
legal autonomy ceded to political direction, disjunction between the policies pursued by partial segments

Consumer Rights and the Law

of the legal order only intensified (competition law
vs. labor law) to give rise, in its turn, to irrationality or incoherence in each national framework for
consumption. Equally, as national regulatory frameworks fell victim to their own contradictions, distinct
national regulations began to form an immutable
barrier to consumption across national boundaries.
Regional and global trade was foreshortened and,
as much as the emergence of the figure of the citizen consumer heralded a democratic effort to determine a normative good of consumption, it also bore
with it the seeds of its own destruction. Increasing
and economically stagnating differentiation between
national economies inexorably led to demands for
economic liberalization within the ambit of regional
organizations of economic integration such as the
European Union (EU) and of global legal-economic
orders, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Enabled Consumer
Consideration of the final ideal-type encounter
between law and the consumer is set within the context of the novel legal orders established by supranational and global economic orders. As intimated,
such orders are influenced by the concept of the
sovereign consumer, with the utility-maximizing
individual economic agent being a perfect liberalizing complement to the establishment of global free
trade. De-socialized, or de-cultured, individuals may
also be given a more positive, egalitarian character
where they are conceived of as postnational global
actors, expressing their identity through their own
acts of consumption. In view of their undoubted contribution to the creation of a global civil society, it is
little wonder that both EU and WTO law support,
at a global level, sovereign consumers through measures that evaluate the legitimacy of national regulation that might restrict consumer choice, and does
so through reference to the rationalizing criteria of
economic theory and hard science. As a result, barriers to trade, and to the activities of the sovereign
consumer, are swept aside as outmoded national
claims, and consumer protection comes to be understood through modern economies theories that seek
the least restrictive modes of regulation (see, e.g.,
Everson and Joerges 2007).
Yet, postnational legal orders are not only host
to sovereign consumers. Instead, the tension that
now exists between the functional utilization of

317

consumption preferences in service of the creation of
the global economy on the one hand, and demands
by global consumers that they be represented within
the de-politicized global market on the other, are
beginning to contribute to a new theoretical and
legal paradigm of consumption: that of the enabled
consumer. Thus, for example, with the commitment
made by the European Commission in its 2007 to
2013 consumer action program to a partnership
between industry and consumers, whereby consumers will be directly represented within market
regulation, postnational law is beginning to directly
democratize the market and thus to give shape to a
once-esoteric concern of legal theory.
Historically, the notion of the enabled consumer
is only to be found within the writings of legal theorists, and then only fleetingly (see, e.g., Joerges 1986,
142–163). Until very recently, the concept was not
a product of politics or economics, but was instead
a manifestation of a legal preoccupation with the
coherence of law. As brief discussion of the sovereign
consumer and citizen consumer clearly demonstrate,
Weber was correct to comment that law would forever be caught on the horns of a dilemma. Formal
rationality within law, and with it the notion of a sovereign consumer, might draw its legitimating powers
for apolitical notions of contractual autonomy, but it
would always falter in the face of demands that social
values be incorporated within it: what is the price of
my freedom to consume if I am thus exposed to the
dangers of unfettered economic exchange? Equally,
material rationality within law, for all its democratic
pedigree, is also subject to its own limitations: the
notion that law can be directed by one (national)
democratic will to furnish one (national) vision of the
normative good of consumption is an illusion, subject always to distorting irrationality as law struggles
to translate conflicting political goals within its limited and fragmented social steering capacity.
To lawyers engaged in the eternal waltz between
formal and material conceptions of law, the struggle
to identify the legitimate bases of law is an existential one, and, within the specific context of legal
encounters, with the act of consumption leads to a
conclusion that it can never claim to have identified
one “legitimate” ideal-type consumer. The process
of legal transformation of the act of consumption
into a normative good is not one that can be performed through recourse to a panacea of sovereign
purchasing power; nor can it be secured by means

318

Consumer Socialization

of subordination of law to one set of consumption values. Instead, the only sustainable source of
legitimacy that might be identified for law during
its encounters with the consumer is procedural in
nature. Law should not attempt to predetermine the
normative good of consumption. It can only ever act
to attempt to ensure that the social, economic, and
political parameters within which each individual
act of consumption occurs are continually drawn up
with due regard for every interest on which the act of
consumption impacts.
Procedural law is the law of political discourse;
an open-ended law that founds its legitimacy in the
fact that substantive values are not the product of
law, but rather the product of the political discourse
that law facilitates. Seen in this light, nascent forms
of postnational law that are not content simply to
invest all their regulatory faith in a notion of the
sovereign consumer, and instead attempt to reincorporate the political influence of the national citizen
consumer within a postnational market, giving the
consumer representative voice within market regulation, may yet prove to be able to fulfill law’s ancient
mission of creating a normative good of consumption. In other words, although still in their infancy,
the enabled consumers of global consumption may
yet be in a position to confound pessimistic evaluations of impoverished consumption, playing a politically relevant role within the global market. They
may yet contribute to the creation of a global civil
society that can shape consumption in support of its
own emerging values.
Michelle Everson
See also Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy
(European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan);
Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Policy
(World Trade Organization); Consumer Regulation;
Consumer Sovereignty; Global Institutions

Further Readings
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Bollier, David, and Joan Claybrook. Freedom from Harm.
Washington, DC: Public Citizen Project, 1986.
Everson, Michelle, and Christian Joerges. “Consumer
Citizenship in Postnational Constellations?” In
Citizenship and Consumption, edited by Kate Soper and
Frank Trentmann, 154–171. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.

Joerges, Christian. “Quality Regulation in Consumer
Goods Markets: Theoretical Concepts and Practical
Examples.” In Contract and Organization, edited by
Terence Daintith and Gunther Teubner, 142–163. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1986.
Kennedy, John F. Public Papers of the Presidents of the
United States: John F. Kennedy, Containing the Public
Messages, Speeches and Statements of the President, Jan.
1–Dec. 31, 1962. Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1962.
Soper, Kate, and Frank Trentmann, eds. Citizenship and
Consumption. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008.
Weber, Max. Rechtssoziologie. Edited by Johannes
Winkelmann. 2nd ed. Neuwied, Germany: Hermann
Luchterhand Verlag, 1967.

CONSUMER SOCIALIZATION
Consumer socialization is the process whereby one
acquires the skills to consume, as well as the values
associated with being a consumer. This can involve
identification with the role of consumer in consumption society or a critical awareness of the problematic
nature of being a consumer and of consumption society more generally. The socialization process is not
necessarily limited to learning how to buy, but can
also include how not to buy, how to limit consumption, or how to shop for a variety of purposes, such
as economic value, status and distinction, or ecological sustainability.
In one of the earliest studies, David Riesman and
Howard Roseborough distinguished different contexts
for socializing children into consumer behavior: home
for goal-directed, peers for expressive, and school for
adaptive elements of consumption. Scott Ward’s commonly cited definition of consumer socialization narrowed a general definition of socialization by O. G.
Brim to “processes by which young people acquire
skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their function as consumers in the marketplace” (1974, 2).
Ward focused on consumer socialization in childhood,
though acknowledging it can be a lifelong process.
Many studies, including Ward’s, have relied on
Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, as
Deborah Roedder John notes in a review of twentyfive years of research on childhood consumer socialization. A cognitive framework, though useful, may
undervalue stages of emotional development and

Consumer Socialization

identity formation. In a broad review of consumer
socialization studies, Karin Ekström has noted that
the marketplace is too narrow a focus, and that
consumer socialization needs to be understood in a
variety of consumption and interaction contexts, life
events, and socializing agents (including commodities
and consumption zones), as well as through more
varied theories and methods.
Although increasing attention has focused on how
children are socialized into the role of consumer, it
is important to remember how the “consumer,” as
a role to be socialized into, is a relatively recent phenomenon. By the end of the nineteenth century, the
term consumption was increasingly used to mean the
buying of goods, shedding its earlier connotations of
destruction and sickness, of tuberculosis. Thorstein
Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption in
his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, signaling the newer sense of the term, even while ironically drawing attention to the older sense with his
parallel term conspicuous waste.
The course of the twentieth century saw the
change from production-centered to consumptioncentered societies. The mid-twentieth century not
only saw the rise of the consumer, but also the rise
of the use of the term consumer itself. As Raymond
Williams (1985) noted, it was during this time period,
predominantly in America but spreading quickly,
that the term passed from a more specialized sense
in political economy to general use, and increasingly
displaced the term customer with its more personalized sense of regular continuing relationship.
Postwar prosperity in the United States was instrumental in helping to shift spending from more frugal
habits still in place from the Great Depression and
World War II to a greater acceptance of consumption
as a way of life. But prosperity alone was not enough,
and intense marketing efforts were required to transform habits of frugality into spendthrift ways. Key to
the advent of consumer culture was the diffusion of
commercial television.
In 1950, only 9 percent of American households had a television. By 1960, almost nine out
of ten households had televisions. By 1972, half of
American households had a color TV (Jordan 1996,
798). Television functioned as the major apparatus
of socializing people into the role of consumers, as
a new landscape of consumption began to emerge in
the 1950s with the development of franchised businesses and shopping malls. The socializing effects of

319

commercial television on children became a focus
of consumer socialization research in the United
States in the 1970s, and by 1978, the Federal Trade
Commission attempted but failed to ban advertising
directed at children under eight years old. Shopping
malls spread globally, not only as destinations for
consumption, but as socializing spaces in their own
right, where people learned to spend time as well as
money.
Some consider that consumer socialization simply
means acquiring skills to function with competence in
the marketplace. Though not without merit, this meager definition does not address what “competence”
means in the context of a marketplace aggressively
marketing the message of further consumption. Still,
skills are clearly required to negotiate the profusion
of choices created by products marketed to appear
differentiated from each other, no matter how similar
they might actually be. Electronic devices such as computers or cell phones change so rapidly that consumers must virtually learn anew each time they make a
purchase. Children need to acquire skills of relative
costs of purchases. But again, these skills exist within
an already actively socializing environment of marketing signs; of advertisements, commercials, product
placements, all of which attempt to instill desire for
products, usually with the message that purchase itself
promotes competent skills and competent identities.
In this sense, consumer socialization is not simply
the utilitarian acquisition of skills to meet some given
economic conditions of the marketplace. It is also a
problematic process of acculturation to norms and
values promulgated by markets and marketers that
may be at odds with the requirements of the socialization of identity. Consumer socialization in this
sense raises the question of socialization more generally: to what end are socialization processes directed?
The socialization of children involves the development of cognitive and emotional abilities, moral
values learned from family, school, peers, and the
broader community, and identities involving gender,
class, racial, and ethnic components. The process is
presumably directed ultimately toward the development of autonomous adults, citizens capable of
participating in the various facets of their society,
including consumption. Consumer socialization
is, in this sense, an aspect of more general societal
socialization, given that consumption is a significant
part of the culture. But it becomes problematic when
consumption, a means of life, becomes a goal of life:

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Consumer Socialization

the end of development becomes not autonomous
citizens, but dependent consumers, a much more limited conception of identity than that of citizen, and
a self that is dependent on continued consumption
rather than on self-determination.
Marketing to children has radically increased
over the past generation, from $100 million in 1983
in the United States to almost $17 billion by 2007
(“Commercializing Childhood” 2008). Marketers
have progressively targeted children for deliberate
socialization into consumerism, from inculcating
brands and product identification, to identifying
with products as “cool,” to nagging their parents
(Cook 2004).
Young children are targeted through one of the
most basic channels of general socialization: play.
Through television and computer advertising, typically linked with cartoon characters, children learn
to play through commercialized media and to desire
commodities representing further play activities,
namely toys, dolls, and so forth. As Juliet Schor notes,
the United States consumes 45 percent of global toy
production, despite having only 4.5 percent of the
world’s population (Schor 2004, 27).
A recent Kaiser Foundation study found that fully
61 percent of American babies one year or younger
view TV or videos every day for at least an hour on
average. Eighty-three percent of children under the
age of six watch about two hours of combined screen
media per day. Parents enthusiastically support the
socializing effect of television, placing TVs in young
children’s rooms so that family members can view
their own shows, as more than 50 percent reported
(Rideout and Hamel 2006). This exposure to commercial, socializing media is occurring during the crucial bonding with and separation from the mother,
that developmental phase from between ages one
and a half to three, wherein the bases for empathy
and autonomy are established, potentially interfering
with the biosocial requirements of the self. And it is
reaching even further back to birth, intruding on the
most basic development of the infant in establishing
borders between itself and world (Halton 2008).
Christmas and gift giving also function not only
as major means of socializing children into the rites
and values of materialism but as instruments of commodifying globalization, well beyond the bounds of
Christian religious symbolism. As Junko Kimura and
Russell Belk note, young couples in Japan exchange

expensive Christmas gifts and stay in expensive
hotels. Such examples illustrate how rational capitalism connects with nonrational ritual conduct to
foster consumer socialization.
Eugene Halton
See also Broadcast Media; Childhood; Conspicuous
Consumption; Consumer Education; De-Skilling,
Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Diffusion Studies and
Trickle Down; Gifts and Reciprocity; Mimesis

Further Readings
“Commercializing Childhood, the Corporate Takeover of
Kids’ Lives: An Interview with Susan Linn.”
Multinational Monitor 30, no. 1 (2008). http://www
.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2008/072008/
interview-linn.html.
Cook, Daniel. The Commodification of Childhood.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Ekström, Karin M. “Consumer Socialization Revisited.” In
Research in Consumer Behavior, vol. 10, edited by
Russell W. Belk, 71–98. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006.
Halton, Eugene. The Great Brain Suck: And Other
American Epiphanies. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008.
John, Deborah Roedder. “Consumer Socialization of
Children: A Retrospective Look at Twenty-Five Years of
Research.” The Journal of Consumer Research 26, no. 3
(December 1999): 183–213.
Jordan, Winthrop. The Americans. Boston: McDougal
Littell, 1996.
Kimura, Junko, and Russell W. Belk. “Christmas in Japan:
Globalization versus Localization.” Consumption,
Markets and Culture 8, no. 3 (September 2005): 325–338.
Rideout, Victoria, and Elizabeth Hamel. “The Media
Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants,
Toddlers, Preschoolers and Their Parents.” Menlo Park,
CA: Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, 2006. http://www.kff.
org/entmedia/upload/7500.pdf.
Riesman, David, and Howard Roseborough. “Careers and
Consumer Behavior.” In Consumer Behavior. Vol. 2,
The Life Cycle and Consumer Behavior, edited by
Lincoln Clark, 1–18. New York: New York University
Press, 1955.
Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy. New York: Scribner, 2004.
Ward, Scott. “Consumer Socialization.” Journal of
Consumer Research 1 (September 1974): 1–14.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture
and Society, Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985.

Consumer Society

CONSUMER SOCIETY
The term consumer society is commonly used to distinguish contemporary affluent societies from traditional agricultural or modern industrial societies,
to emphasize the role of consumption as a factor in
social structure and as an element of lifestyle.

History and Meaning of the Term
The concept of the consumer society has been commonly used since the early decades of the twentieth century, originally in the United States, where
the wealth of mass-produced consumer goods first
became apparent. It designates the importance of
consumption in everyday life, but it has also had
ideological connotations, meaning that capitalist
economies are overwhelmingly efficient in providing
commodities at affordable prices to ordinary consumers. In social science discourses, it has suffered
from ill fame. As a theoretical vision of advanced
capitalism, it has an air of ideological complacency.
This usage of the term was most apparent in the
cold war period. Critics have argued that contrasted
to “class society,” the notion of consumer society
depicts consumers as a uniform albeit indeterminate
group of people with similar interests instead of conflicting classes. It hints at general affluence and suggests that consumption, primarily of commodities,
is the most important content of life and support of
identity, but does not account for inequalities and
other determinants of social structure, notably production and the labor market. On the other hand,
the reality of consumer society has been the object of
moral, economic, political, and general ideological
criticism for giving priority to material values at the
expense of spiritual, cultural, and social interests.

321

industry-based consumer society in twentieth-century North America and Europe was a phenomenon of the masses and encompassed the structural
foundations of industrial society. Although in retrospect the change was dramatic, bewilderment and
disbelief about whether any improvement in “living
standard” was actually taking place continued for
a long time. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out,
the change was vertiginous seen backwards from
the present, and even in the life course of one single
generation, the improvements in nutrition, comfort,
and the conduct of everyday life were concrete and
noticeable.
However, in the course of day-to-day living the
change took place gradually, in small steps and one
detail at a time. Young people had difficulty in making the distinction between the change in their own
individual life from childhood to adults and the
change that was taking place in their environment.
The new technology of everyday life was revolutionary for their parents, who had recently returned to
peace from the conditions of war, but was taken for
granted by their children. The individual home in
an apartment house near the city center, electricity,
central heating, running water, refrigerator, washing machine, radio, and finally television were for
the young an ordinary bundle of necessities, and the
quaint country life of their grandparents without
them seemed strange and distant. The individual car
added to the spatial scope of the life sphere of individuals already immensely expanded by other means
of transportation earlier in the century. It changed
urban structures, made possible the growth of major
cities, helped to concentrate production and distribution of commodities, and thus propelled the growth
of consumption possibilities further. All this happened fast, but from an individual’s perspective, the
change was piecemeal.

Historical Context
The twentieth century produced in advanced
Western countries a phenomenal growth in consumption possibilities that has no parallel in human
history, not relatively speaking and certainly not in
absolute terms. Often this phase is called the new
consumer society. The earlier consumer booms of
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in England
and still in nineteenth century Europe were limited to small elites, but the development of the new

The Consumer Society and Social Structure
In retrospect, this change was so drastic that it has
been given a number of dramatic names, such as the
golden era, the three glorious decades, or the second
French revolution. It changed the makeup and technology of everyday life and reformatted both social
structures and people’s way of thinking of themselves and of others. It brought to ordinary people a
quantity and diversity of goods, pleasures, and uses

322

Consumer Society

of time that either had never existed before or had
been accessible for only a few. Above all, it placed
into the center of common men’s and women’s life
a problem that among previous generations had to
be faced by very few people: choice. Choice was no
longer about puny details of everyday life, such as
clothing, housing, and food—these had also been of
limited selection still in the immediate postwar years.
Now choice began to involve lifestyle as a whole.
And this also changed the conception of time: past,
present, and future. The beliefs that were taken for
granted in the postwar “reconstruction period” in
Europe—belief in progress, the ideal of the universal
citizenship, and trust in the national welfare state—
began to fall in doubt as the possibility and necessity
of choice became apparent and pressing.
The obligation to choose imposed itself not only
in the area of consumption: lifestyle had far-reaching
consequences for the life cycle of the person and the
family, because the rise of the new consumer society could not have happened without enormous
structural reorganization of the economies and the
populations of rapidly industrializing countries,
including the Soviet Union and affiliated states.
These implied massive urbanization, great social
mobility, and increase of secondary and gradually
also higher education. Mobility in space involved
massive migrations of people from less industrialized to more advanced countries but also within
countries and between home and work space. Also
commodities moved, which meant increasing plant
size in industry and a far greater variety of available
goods in most major local markets. Finally, ideas and
information—culture—became increasingly mobile
and global as a consequence of new communication
technology.
As a consequence, the traditional class distinctions
of early industrial societies became blurred. For this
reason, the new consumer society is often associated
with the rise of the new middle class. The expansion
of educated office workers or service job takers first
occurred in the United States already in the 1950s,
followed by Western European states a decade or
two later.
The idea of the consumer society gained new prestige from the work of the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, who argued that consumption, taste, and
lifestyle are important factors in the reproduction of
class structure. Elites recognize themselves by their
commonly shared taste. They use taste as “cultural

capital,” which accumulates and can be transformed
to other forms of capital: economic and social.
In Britain, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies looked at consumption from the opposite
perspective, studying how the working class reproduces itself through its choices and consumption
patterns.

Critics
Critics of the consumer society have argued that
mass-production of consumer goods does not in fact
serve the real needs of people, who could live comfortably with less if they did not have to work so hard
to consume. Consumption is artificially stimulated by
advertising and marketing, by lowering the durability of goods, and by useless innovations. The most
important American critics have been Daniel Bell,
C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard. The influential book Monopoly Capital by Paul Baran and Paul
Sweezy argued that capitalism always produces more
than it can consume. The quasi-monopolistic structure of American industry makes it possible to maintain artificially high price levels, which produces even
more surpluses. These must be somehow destroyed,
and one way is to make consumers spend more, save
less, and even go into debt. In Europe, criticism of the
consumer society arose in the new wave of Marxism
in the 1970s. Theorists such as the German Wolfang
Fritz Haug argued that the commodity form itself
destroys the use values of goods by wrapping and
masking them as attractive and appealing, although in
reality there is nothing useful inside. Another Marxist
criticism has been that although the quantity and
quality of commodities available to common workers
has grown enormously, the demands of the industrial
working life have also increased the needs of workers. Therefore a reproduction deficit—a growing gap
between needs and means for their satisfaction—is
created. In recent years, the most fervent criticism of
the consumer society has come from the frontlines of
the ecological movement.

The Consumer Society and the
Semiotic Turn in Sociology
The sociology of consumption has grown as a consequence of the consumer society. It has contributed
to policy issues and consumer awareness but it was
also in a key position in what is called the semiotic
turn in the social sciences. From the 1960s onward,

Consumer Sovereignty

researchers have paid attention to the symbolic
dimensions of consumption. French sociologist Jean
Baudrillard was influential in pointing out that we
must replace the political economy of production by
the political economy of the sign. Meaning and interpretation in social science became a recognized perspective largely through the debates on the consumer
society.
Pekka Sulkunen
See also Americanization; Automobiles; Capitalism;
Commercialization; Commodities; Globalization;
Marxist Theories; Mass Production and Consumption

Further Readings
Baran, Paul, and Paul Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay
in the American Economic and Social Order. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1966.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Galbraith, Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Harmondsworth,
UK: Pelican Books, 1962.
Gronow, Jukka. The Sociology of Taste. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Kritik der Warenästhetik [Critique
of commodity aesthetics]. Frankfurt am Main,
Germany: Suhrkamp, 1971.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short
Twentieth Century. London: Abacus, 1994.
McKenzie, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth
of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of
Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982.
Sulkunen, Pekka. The Saturated Society: Governing Risk
and Lifestyle in Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 2009.
Sulkunen, Pekka, John Holmwood, Hilary Radner, and
Gerhard Schulze, eds. Constructing the New Consumer
Society. London: Macmillan, 1987.

CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY
Consumer sovereignty is a fundamental principle
used in economics and political science denoting
the freedom of the individual to choose how his or
her needs and wants are fulfilled. In a sociopolitical
perspective, the concept emphasizes the role of the
consumer as a market “sovereign” as regards the
production of goods and services. In its broadest
sense, it refers to the assumed power of consumers

323

in free market economies to decide which goods and
services—and in which qualities and quantities—
are actually offered. A free market is defined as one
where there is no collective control over the production or distribution of goods.
The origin of the concept of consumer sovereignty
can be found in the classic liberalism of Adam Smith.
In his seminal work The Wealth of Nations (1776),
Smith explicitly developed the notion that the needs
of the people can be best met in free markets if the
supply of goods is steered by demand. The term consumer sovereignty itself was, however, only coined
one and a half centuries later. William H. Hutt
(“The Concept of Consumers’ Sovereignty,” 1940,
66) defined it as “the controlling power exercised
by free individuals, in choosing between ends, over
the custodians of the community’s resources, when
the resources by which those ends can be served are
scarce.” In economics, it was mainly the Austrian
school of Friedrich Wieser, Carl Menger, and
Ludwig von Mises that explicitly discussed the concept. In Western consumer culture, the idea became
closely connected with freedom of choice and
powerful consumers as the rulers of the markets.
Ideologically, it supported the rise of a materialistic
culture of consumption (Kasser and Kanner 2004).
While the concept today is used in societal discourse and mainstream economics as a descriptive
and largely unquestioned assumption, it is also a
normative leitbild (i.e., model) for how consumers
should behave in market economies to create or
maintain fully functioning markets. The sanctioning
power of the sovereign consumer lies in his or her
purchase power and influence on the reputation of
the supplier and its products. In political economy,
these two sanction mechanisms of the demand side
to force suppliers to correct quality losses have been
referred to by Albert Hirschmann as “exit” and
“voice.” The consumer has a double role to play:
he is both a market actor (e.g., when the consumer
switches his energy supplier and herewith “exits” as
a customer) and a subpolitical “consumer-citizen”
(e.g., when the consumer joins a boycott, complains
to an airline, or to the insurance ombudsperson, or
actively spreads negative word-of-mouth about a
bad service received in a repair shop).
The semantics of sovereignty are rich and purposeful: in a historical-political sense, a sovereign is
an absolute ruler, often a king or a prince who only
obeys his own rules. In a cognitive-psychological

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Consumer Sovereignty

sense, to act in a sovereign manner also connotes
to be self-determined and hence independent from
any unwanted external influences such as peer group
pressure, public opinion and mass media influence,
governmental paternalism, or marketing activities.
Herewith, the only criteria of consumer choice are
the consumers’ own (preferences), which the consumer is assumed to know.
The notion of sovereignty carries different symbolic meanings in different consumer cultures. For
the former communist countries in Europe with
a history of centrally planned economy and very
limited consumer choices, consumer sovereignty
embraces the promise of individual freedom, of the
power of the masses, of emancipation, equality,
and vertical mobility, as well as potential access to
an unprecedented abundance of products and services. Similar hopes are pinned on the free market
in transformation countries, the BRICS countries
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa),
and the “tiger” states worldwide (e.g., Hong Kong,
Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). This glamour has long ceased in mature postmodern welfare
societies of the West where the pitfalls of materialism
and the McDonaldization of societies (the spread of
rationalized and homogenous forms of consumption
across the globe) are acknowledged as the downside
of globalized consumerism. Lessons from the history
of consumption show that the economic sphere and
the cultures of consumption are closely interlinked
with the respective political systems. For instance,
women’s emancipation and liberalization have gone
hand in hand with women gaining market power
and gaining incomes.

Limits to Consumer Sovereignty
Consumer sovereignty is the core value of welfare
economics and underlies the most central goals
guiding economic policy in Western industrialized
advanced nations. However, limits to consumer sovereignty arise from both the macrolevel of the market
and its institutions as well as from the microlevel of
individual consumers.
On the macrolevel, there is the problem of “market failures.” When a market failure occurs, the
overall result of the individual choices of sovereign
consumers pursuing their personal self-interest is
not efficient but rather suboptimal from a societal
perspective. In this case, societal welfare can be

improved by governmental intervention or collaborative actions of market actors. Market failures
typically arise from one of the following: first, noncompetitive markets (e.g., natural monopolies in
network-based markets such as energy markets);
second, costs that are externalized on the natural
environment and/or on society instead of being
internalized in the product prices (e.g., carbon
dioxide [CO2] emissions arising from production
and consumption), and third, the nature of certain
goods, mainly public goods and common-pool
resources (e.g., fish stocks in the oceans that get
overfished) that are prone to overuse, or credence
goods (e.g., the long-term effectiveness of a medical treatment) that lead to informational asymmetry
between supply and demand. More fundamentally,
the underlying cause of market failure is often a
problem of property rights. The existence of such
market failures legitimizes governmental intervention in a particular market. Institutional economics
and the economics of information have extensively
dealt with these problems and have suggested solutions to correct these market failures.
On the microlevel, there is the “problem” of the
consumer who does not always react as suggested
by the ideal type of the rational and sovereign consumer. As has been shown by economic psychology
and, more recently, by behavioral economics (e.g.,
Thaler and Sunstein 2008), consumers are actually
quite imperfect economic actors: they are “humans,”
and not flawless and rational economic actors. This
limits the prognostic power of policy models built on
the notion of independent, rational, fully informed,
preference-led actors. Empirical research—mainly
based on experiments and behavioral decision
research—has shown that in many consumer decisions, people systematically go wrong (e.g., they
systematically discount future gains and overvalue
risks), make decisions based on simplistic—but
stable—biases and heuristics or rules of thumb (such
as anchoring, availability, and representativeness),
and, instead of being fully informed decision makers, are less well-disciplined in their goal striving than
they themselves expect, are often weak in resisting
temptations and deferring gratification, are stuck in
(bad) habits, and are much less sophisticated in their
decision making than is suggested by mainstream
economics. Moreover, their capabilities to search for
and process information as well as their ability to
understand complex (financial) products are rather

Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies

limited. If this is true, how can they be the “absolute
rulers” of markets?
Research into the limits of consumer decision
making and the following up of these decisions has
cast doubt on the usefulness of the concept of consumer sovereignty as understood by mainstream
economics and neoliberal politics. Increasingly,
politicians and economists have called for an empirically based understanding of the concept. Based on
empirical evidence, behavioral economics proposes
to design policy strategies (e.g., to fight obesity, to
reduce CO2 emissions, to increase pension savings)
by acknowledging these systematic human shortcomings while, at the same time, consumers are empowered through information, education, and advice, and
hence enabled to be free, competent, and motivated
to act as sovereign consumers. Instead of assuming
an unrealistic view of consumers as omnipotent decisionmakers, the idea of “libertarian paternalism”
is to engage in thoughtful choice architecture that
maintains or increases freedom of choice. The paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate
for policymakers to try to steer people’s behavior in
directions that make their life (and that of others)
better—as judged by themselves; the term libertarian
means liberty-preserving. Nudges are suggested as
aspects of choice architecture that alter consumers’ behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their
relative prices. Examples are default options, such
as healthy food offered in school cafeterias and
opt-out saving schemes. Such policies cost little
or nothing and do not impose burdens on taxpayers. Moreover, they all have an opt-out option and
hence fully preserve liberty.
For most liberal economists and politicians, consumer sovereignty—here often reduced to “freedom
of choice”—is an untouchable mantra of market
economies. The basic policy approach following this
mantra is to provide people as many choices as possible, and then let them choose the one they prefer. In
neoliberal thought, the best consumer policy is a good
competition policy with as little governmental intervention or nudging as possible. However, this is only
true if one assumes that most consumers, most of the
time, make choices in their best interest. In fact, consumers are not experts in all walks of life, and they are
not necessarily the best choosers (as detailed earlier).
This is why people actively rely on others (experts,
consultants, salespeople, magazines, advertisement) in

325

their choices. It is an illusion that it is possible to avoid
influencing people’s choices—the question is really,
who is in the driver’s seat and who is setting the influential contexts? Moreover, competition and choice
alone do not necessarily lead to functioning markets.
To the contrary, consumer research has shown that
overchoice—in particular, of complex goods such as
investment decisions—can be confusing and irritating for consumers, leading to shortened cognitive
processes and suboptimal choices. Yet, despite conceptual shortcomings and lacking empirical evidence,
the ideal of the sovereign consumer enjoys continued
significance in studies of consumption.
Lucia A. Reisch
See also Bounded Rationality; Citizenship; Consumer
(Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Demand; Consumer
Regulation; Economics; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption; McDonaldization

Further Readings
Hirschmann, Albert. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to
Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Hutt, William H. Economists and the Public. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990. First published 1936.
Kasser, Tim, and Allen D. Kanner, eds. Psychology and
Consumer Culture. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 2004.
Keat, Russell, Nigel Whiteley, and Nicholas Abercrombie.
The Authority of the Consumer. New York: Routledge,
2003. First published 1994.
Penz, G. Peter. Consumer Sovereignty and Human Interests.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. First
published 1986.
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving
Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

CONSUMER TESTING AND
PROTECTION AGENCIES
The consumer testing movement is concerned with
the testing of branded goods and services to advise
purchasers of their relative value for money. It began
in the United States in 1927, when a civil servant for
the Labor Bureau, Stuart Chase, and an engineer,
F. J. Schlink, published Your Money’s Worth, a

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Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies

critique of the exploitation of the consumer in the
modern marketplace. This led to the establishment
of Consumers’ Research, which began publishing its Bulletin in 1929, though it was soon taken
over in 1936 by Consumers Union (and its magazine, Consumer Reports) following a dispute over
labor relations among Consumers’ Research staff.
Both organizations were a product of a burgeoning consumer culture, though one in which affluent—if nervous—shoppers sought more guidance
in consumption. The scientific testing of commodities, together with the identification of “best buys,”
offered a means by which consumers could maintain
their distance from modern commercial values and
sales techniques.
Following sustained economic growth in the
post–World War II period, consumer testing took
off across Europe too. In France, in 1951, the Union
Fédéral des Consommateurs (UFC) was formed and
began publishing its testing magazine, Que Choisir, in December 1961. In Germany, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbände (Alliance of
Consumer Associations) was established in 1953. In
the same year, Consumentenbond began publishing
Consumentengids in the Netherlands, and following its establishment in 1956, the United Kingdom’s
Consumers’ Association launched Which? in 1957.
The privately owned testing bodies proved tremendously popular. By the end of the 1960s, sales
of Consumer Reports approached 2 million, sales of
Which? topped half a million, and Consumentengids
was calculated to reach one in every ten Dutch
households. Most impressive were the Scandinavian
countries: although their consumer magazines were
published by the state rather than private testing organizations, subscriptions ran into hundreds
of thousands, such that Norway could claim the
greatest number of sales relative to households in
the world.
Many commentators have assumed that this form
of consumer organizing was an essentially Western
phenomenon. Indeed, some have suggested that
rather than offering a critique of the capitalist marketplace, consumer testing agencies actually served
to reinforce the tendency toward acquisitive individualism found within affluent societies. However,
consumer testing constituted just one part of a wider
movement of consumer activism that owed as much
to the developing as the developed world. As early
as 1956, the Indian Association of Consumers was

created, predating many equivalent organizations
in Europe, though the real takeoff came across
Southeast Asia. Throughout the 1960s, consumer
groups appeared across Singapore, Indonesia, the
Philippines, and Malaysia, most prominently with
the Consumers’ Association of Penang in 1969.
In 1960, the Western consumer groups had come
together to create the International Organization
of Consumers Unions (IOCU, now Consumers
International). By 1970, IOCU’s membership consisted of consumer groups across Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, if only into the richest nations of
these areas. By 1990, however, IOCU could claim to
be truly global and today is represented in over one
hundred countries. Much of its expansion had been
overseen by Anwar Fazal, a product of the Malaysian
consumer movement and president of IOCU from
1978 to 1984, though other developing world activists have subsequently directed the global consumer
movement from Indonesia, Brazil, and Kenya.
Undoubtedly, the major political impact of
these organizations has been on the development
of consumer protection regimes at the national
level. Certain differences are apparent. The social
democratic tradition of the Scandinavian countries
has meant more state intervention has been evident. Sweden, for instance, had a state Consumer
Council (Statens Konsumentråd) from 1957. It also
pioneered consumer information labeling through
its Institute for Informative Labelling (1951), and it
developed the world’s first consumer ombudsman
as well as a Market Court in 1971. In contrast, in
Germany and Austria, a more corporatist set of
consumer-producer mechanisms was adopted. In
Japan, the consumer had to fit in with a strong
state and the existence of great producer political
power at the center. France and the United States
have regarded the consumer as a political entity; the
United States has sought, as with Britain, marketbased solutions to their grievances (e.g., legal redress
mechanisms), while France, though sporadically
and through much experimentation, has mobilized
public sector, statist mechanisms to protect the consumer (e.g., the development the an extensive legal
code and consumer affairs ministry).
But the important point to note is that states did
respond to the popularity of consumer organizing.
In Germany, there were just 25 new laws relating to
consumer protection from 1945 to 1970, but there
were a further 338 adopted by 1978. In France, there

Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies

were similarly just 37 laws and ministerial decrees
before 1970, a total that grew to 94 by 1978. In the
United States, and in large part due to the activism of
Ralph Nader, a flurry of consumer protection laws
appeared in the late 1960s relating to the automobile industry, product safety, package labeling, and a
whole host of other trade practices.
Moreover, pressure has been exerted at the
regional and global level as well as the national level.
Consumer protection has been enshrined within the
European Union since 1975, and much of the early
work of IOCU was targeted toward establishing a
consumer protection system at the United Nations
(UN). This finally came into being in 1985, with
the passing of the UN Guidelines on Consumer
Protection, a document that has acted as a model
law for consumer protection legislation in dozens of
countries over the last quarter century.
The sheer size, scale, growth, and spread of organized consumerism calls into question the nature
of consumer agency. Agency, here, has been exercised more at the formal political level than that of
individual lifestyles. And this agency has not been
directed solely at the defense of individual economic
interests. As organized consumerism has spread
around the world, it has taken on board not only
the agendas of the affluent, but those of the poor and
disadvantaged too. As IOCU obtained its dynamism
and momentum from the developing world, it led
to new campaigns and initiatives that tied organized
consumerism in with a whole host of other international nongovernmental organizations concerned
with economic and social development. Through
its establishment of networks concerned with pesticides, infant milk, and pharmaceuticals, it was able
to lobby for and obtain, for example, international
protocols regulating the sale of breast milk substitutes and procedures for warning consumers around
the world of dangerous drugs.
However, the success of the consumer movement
has been limited by both its philosophy of consumerism and the opposition it has incurred, particularly
from organized business and antiregulatory groups.
The consumer movement has been largely predicated
on a notion of rights. In March 1962, President John
F. Kennedy set out four of these rights in his consumer
address: to safety, to be informed, to choose, and to
be heard. As developing world consumer activists
became more prominent, the list of rights expanded
to include not only further liberal individualistic

327

rights, such as the right to redress and the right to
consumer education, but the more declaratory statements concerned with economic and social justice:
by the end of the 1970s, the consumer movement
was campaigning also for the right to a healthy environment and the right to basic needs. Such rights
committed the consumer movement to far more than
that of offering guidance over best buys.
Yet the problem with a rights-based perspective
is that it essentially creates a shopping list of rights
from which actors can pick and choose as they see
fit. This became particularly acute by the 1980s,
when other groups began to speak for the consumer.
Organized business had long opposed the regulatory
impulse of consumer protection. Concerted attacks
were made on the U.S. consumer movement from
its very inception: Consumers Union had to fend
off repeated accusations of communist infiltration
by those who wished to see it hauled up before the
House Committee on Un-American Activities.
In the 1970s, Ralph Nader became a particular
target of the antiregulatory movement, backed up by
a revitalized political right and an organized business
lobby in Washington. The economic problems of the
1970s meant regulation was seen to be too expensive
and a campaign for a federal consumer protection
agency was defeated. Once Ronald Reagan came
into power, similar arguments were used in the international arena. In many ways, the UN Guidelines on
Consumer Protection were the last hurrah of organized consumerism. IOCU’s efforts to obtain a Code
of Conduct on Transnational Corporations was
spectacularly defeated. Not only did the U.S. administration oppose any such regulation of global business by the UN, but the Uruguay Round of Trade
Negotiations brought into existence a system of
global governance (the World Trade Organization)
that was especially unreceptive to the arguments of
proregulatory groups such as IOCU.
Finally, the modern marketplace has changed
such that consumers do not look to the consumer
testing movement in quite the same way. Although
consumer testing is still popular, the consequences
of shoddy and dangerous goods are either not so
pronounced or are now covered by a range of government agencies. So pervasive has the concept of
consumer protection become that it perhaps no longer needs a social movement to promote it. Indeed,
consumers have turned their attention elsewhere, and
it is to fair trade and ethical and green consumerism

328

Consuming the Environment

that that a new generation of affluent shopper now
directs its energy.
Matthew Hilton
See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer
Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (United
States); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and
the Law; Consumer Sovereignty; Political and Ethical
Consumption; Fair Trade

Further Readings
Glickman, Lawrence B. Buying Power: A History of
Consumer Activism in America. Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2009.
Hilton, Matthew. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century
Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in
an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2008.
Mayer, Robert N. The Consumer Movement: Guardians of
the Marketplace. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1989.
Trumbull, Gunnar. Consumer Capitalism: Politics, Product
Markets and Firm Strategy in France and Germany.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

CONSUMING NATURE
See Consuming the Environment; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption

CONSUMING

THE

ENVIRONMENT

It is commonly asserted by environmentalists that
nature is being consumed by a vast array of cultural practices to the point that its very existence is
under threat. This entry discusses this proposition
in the light of analysis on the changing relationship
between nature, consumption, and culture.
One commonplace understanding of the relationship can be seen in the kind of millennial arguments
proposed by Bill McKibben and his claims that
we have now reached “the end of nature” (1989).
McKibben claims that human activity, driven by the
technological-industrial complex, has now altered
whatever we once thought nature was. Wilderness

no longer exists in a pristine state, anywhere; forests and farmland has become thoroughly domesticated; marine and terrestrial environments have
become polluted; even the climate appears to be
altered, possibly irrevocably, as we face the threats
of climate change. Nature is here confronted by an
array of human-imposed threats, from acid rain to
global warming, from the extinction of species to the
destruction of the rainforest. A new variant emerges
with the advent of new genetic and nanotechnologies, with their ability to alter and re-work DNA
into new forms of life, evoking images of the “postnatural” and indeed, the “post-human” (Hayles
1999, McKibben 2003).
Within this frame, nature, including human
nature, is literally being consumed by culture and,
in particular, by modernity’s rapacious capacity for
depletion, exhaustion, improvement, and remaking.
Consumption is pitted against nature, driven by selfpropelling logics of industrialism, materialism, and
visions of economic progress. Closely aligned to such
a discourse is a second story line of how the remains
of nature are being consumed by and through representational practices. Denuded of any genuine authenticity and external referent, nature in this discourse
becomes merely a sign, commodified and preserved
by consumer culture, often Disneyfied, devoid of any
legitimacy, according to Alexander Wilson. Research
within this mode of thinking has examined the implosion of nature into artifice, and how this is achieved
through myriad practices of commodification,
fetishization, spectacular consumption, management,
packaging, engineering, and other forms of mediation.
An analysis of social practices of consumption is
a particularly significant social pattern here. As the
various entries in this encyclopedia testify, practices
of consumption have had profound impacts on the
structuring and self-definition of modern societies.
Such changes include the following: first, a huge
increase in the range of goods and services that are
currently available, as markets and tastes have been
significantly internationalized. Second, the increasing
semiotization of products so that sign—rather than
use value—becomes the key element in consumption. Third, the breaking down of some “traditionalized” institutions and structures so that consumer
tastes become more fluid and open. And fourth, the
increasing importance of consumption patterns to
the forming of identity and hence some shift from
producer power to consumer power.

Consuming the Environment

Zygmunt Bauman has argued that such changes
amount to a structural shift in society as consumer
conduct comes increasingly to provide the cognitive and moral focus of everyday life. The pleasure
principle becomes a dominant and structuring idiom.
Pleasure seeking becomes a duty since the consumption of goods and services has become the structural
basis of Western societies. Social integration thus
takes place less through the principles of normalization, confinement, and disciplinary power, as
described by Michel Foucault or indeed by Bauman
in the case of the Holocaust. Instead, it takes place
through the “seduction” of the marketplace, through
the mix of feelings and emotions generated by seeing, holding, hearing, testing, smelling, and moving
through the extraordinary array of goods and services, places and environments, that characterize
contemporary consumerism organized around a particular “culture of nature.”
There is little doubt that some of these patterns
of contemporary consumerism have had disastrous
consequences for the environment. This is reflected
in holes in the ozone layer, global warming, acid
rain, nuclear power accidents, and the destruction of
many local environments. Taken to its extreme, consumerism can also involve obtaining or purchasing
new parts for the human body, or possibly in the near
future, purchasing products for the enhancement of
out-of-date or out-of-fashion bodies, a process that
undermines a clear sense of the natural body inside
as opposed to the unnatural body outside. And, as
highlighted previously, such Western consumerism
in which nature seems to have been turned into a
mere artifact of consumer choice has become a core
element in the critique of modernity by the environmental movement. But there is a further paradox
here. This paradox is that the very development of
consumerism has itself helped to generate the current critique of environmental degradation and the
cultural focus on nature. The remainder of this entry
examines elements of this paradox.

Consumerism and Environmental Reflexivity
Environmentalism can be represented as presupposing a certain kind of consumerism. This is because
one element of consumerism is a heightened reflexivity about the places and environments, the goods and
services that are “consumed,” either literally, through
a social encounter, or through visual consumption.

329

As people reflect on such consumption, they develop
not only a duty to consume but also certain rights,
including the rights of the citizen as a consumer. Such
rights include the belief that people are entitled to
certain qualities of the environment, of air, water,
sound, and scenery, and that these should extend into
the future and to other populations. Contemporary
Western societies have begun to shift the basis of citizenship from political rights to consumer rights, and
within the bundle of the latter, environmental rights,
especially linked to conceptions of nature as spectacle and recreation, are increasingly significant (for
extensions of this argument, see Macnaghten and
Urry 1998; Urry 2002).
In their own research, Phil Macnaghten and John
Urry have witnessed the growth of reflexivity as
people confront the impacts of consumption practices in relation to other peoples (many of whom live
in faraway places) and in relation to the long-term
implications for future generations. Across numerous
research encounters aimed at understanding the factors that shape environmental sensibilities, especially
older and more socially mobile participants tended
to express guilt that their own styles of consumption may have contributed, inadvertently, toward the
worsening environment. As one woman perceptively
said in a relatively recent research encounter:
Female rural professional: In fact you always thought
it was a good thing to be a consumer. That’s what
they told us, keeping everyone in jobs. And now we
realize it’s a double-edged sword.

Over the past two decades, there have been institutional attempts to mobilize such sentiment across an
array of practices and initiatives aimed at developing
greener, more ethical, and more sustainable forms of
consumption. These range from the green consumer
movement, to the consumer boycott movement,
to the antiglobalization movement, to industry-led
programs of corporate social responsibility, and to
the success of a range of consumer products that are
chosen for being fair trade (food products), organic
(food products), locally produced (food products),
humane (personal products and food products, such
as free-range eggs), energy efficient (appliances and
household products such as lightbulbs), and natural
(personal and household cleaning products). Perhaps
not surprisingly, such trends toward an enhanced
environmental consciousness can be identified in
attitude surveys that routinely draw out the fact that

330

Consuming the Environment

public attitudes toward environmental action are
broadly positive, and that this appears to be true of
both well-researched regions and the global context
more generally.
However, although an enhanced reflexivity may
have helped constitute the environmentally conscious
consumer, it can also be demonstrated that a more
reflexive relationship with the environment may be
generating a more complex and more contested politics of the environment. To understand this dynamic,
one first needs to understand the specific historical
contingencies through which modern environmentalism became constituted.

The Social Invention of Nature
as Environment
The contemporary configuration of nature as “the
environment” in political and civic life is of relatively recent origin. The environment, as a set of
diverse problems, had to be gathered up and presented as all symptomatic of a wider overarching
global environmental crisis, according to Bronislaw
Szerszynski. Beginning around 1962 with Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring, the so-called prophets of
doom helped formulate a language of the environment radically different from previous and largely
disaggregated concerns over nature, where the environmental threat came to be regarded as of global
proportions and as linked to dominant values of
modernization and technological progress, notes
John McCormick.
What emerged from such processes was a dominant story line of the “fragile earth” under stress
from human action and in need of care and protection from an imagined global community. Wolfgang
Sachs calls this discourse of the environment as
environmentalism framed through the “astronaut’s
perspective”; of the environment conceived as a
physical and global entity, maintained by a variety of
biogeochemical processes rather than as a collection
of states and cultures. What remains central to this
perspective is the belief that we share the same global
environment, that it comprises a set stock of issues,
and that these are all symptoms of the same malaise,
namely human society’s overexploitation and abuse
of the natural world. The story line of the fragile
and vulnerable earth has remained dominant in contemporary institutional framings of environmental
policy and can be identified across a huge array of

sustainable development discourses emanating from
the mass media, environmental organizations, government bodies, and corporations.
Implicated in framing such a discourse are a wide
variety of organizations and actors, including the
global media, who have been of major importance
to how people understand and make sense of environmental issues. Their role has been one not only
of communicating and disseminating environmental
information to the public, but also of actively constructing and even constituting the contemporary
environmental agenda, partly in conjunction with
environmental nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs). This includes the complex interplay of narratives, story lines, images, icons, and metaphors
through which environmental issues and events gain
meaning. Indeed, throughout especially the 1980s
and 1990s, environmental NGOs became increasingly adept at packaging powerful images for the
national and international media. Reflexive to media
requirement for novelty, drama, and human interest, pressure groups and par excellence Greenpeace,
brought the global environment up close. Specifically,
Andrew Ross describes a dominant genre of meaning
in which the media have tended to frame environmental issues:
In recent years we have become accustomed to
seeing images of a dying planet, variously exhibited
in grisly poses of ecological depletion and circulated
by all sectors of genocidal atrocities. The clichés of
the standard environmental movement are well
known to all of us: on the one hand, belching
smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical sludge,
fish floating belly up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and
Mexico City, and clear-cut forests; on the other
hand, the redeeming repertoire of pastoral imagery,
pristine, green, and unspoiled by human habitation,
crowned by the ultimate global spectacle, the fragile,
vulnerable ball of spaceship earth. (1994, 171)

Consuming Personal Natures
In 2003, Macnaghten examined how people
responded to the global iconography of the environment and whether a scope for an embryonic and
more reflexive politics of the environment could
be identified. This research examined how people
in fact responded when they were presented with a
variety of global icons of “the natural environment.”
Images included a number of physical threats such as

Consuming the Environment

deforestation, oil pollution, and dolphins caught in
drift nets, juxtaposed with images of “pristine” and
“independent” nature, including those of whales,
tigers, and bears in the wild. At the bottom of the
board was a further set of images of the globe with
captions including, “It’s in our hands” and “Handle
with care and it will last forever.” To what extent
were such images able to perform a global nature in
which people could unite as a shared imagined global
community? To what extent did people feel part of
the same global environment? Indeed, how did people respond when presented with such icons?
The findings include the following: global icons of
the natural environment had initial emotive appeal
but tended to remain distant and abstract. People
recognized such iconic images and their implied relationship to global threats—such as global warming,
ozone depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity,
and resource depletion, and so on—but tended to
perceive such threats as a problem “out there,”
detached from everyday life, making it easy for them
to turn off. This was not due to a lack of knowledge of the scope and extent of global environmental
issues. Indeed, the reality of an impending global
environmental crisis appeared to have become commonplace for the research participants, providing a
backdrop to a generic pessimism that pervaded discussions about the future.
Added to this was the sense that little could be
achieved—either at the level of the individual or
through existing avenues for collective action—to
mitigate such threats. This perception of a fundamental lack of agency in the face of global
environmental threats permeated all the groups.
Individual action was seen as largely ineffective and
at best symbolic, both due to the global scale of the
problems and to the perception of powerful commercial interests intractably embedded in systems
of self-interest antithetical to global sustainability.
However, what appeared distinctive in these discussions were the strategies adopted. In different ways,
people were now reflexively choosing not to dwell
on global environmental threats, as a pragmatic
response to apparently intractable problems, and to
maintain a positive outlook on life.
An added complexity was that people themselves
felt implicated in global environmental problems.
Although, on occasion, this led to a sense of the need
for shared action, more commonly this led to feelings
of resignation and detachment. For many people,

331

there were no easy answers; there was no longer a
clear good guy and bad guy, nobody to blame and
no one beyond blame. Constrained by everyday
pressures of work and parenting, people accepted
their own partial guilt as consumers, as motorists, as
employees of business, and so on. All people could
do was their (little) bit, thinking more about (manageable) local issues than (unmanageable) global
ones.
So far, this entry has suggested that the idea of
a global environmental agenda appears distant and
abstract, and unlikely to engage people in their dayto-day activities. This does not imply that people
are no longer engaged or interested in environmental issues but that the reflexive character of public
concerns toward environmental issues may be subtly
altering. Thus, issues such as whales, the Amazon,
and acid rain, that were prevalent in the 1970s and
1980s, have, according to Michael Jacobs, migrated
toward issues that impinge more directly and more
immediately on “me,” my body, my family, and my
future—such as allergies, traffic, bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE), and genetically modified
foods. Jacobs suggests that this shift in orientation,
directly associated with sociological trends toward
individualization, consumerism, and globalization,
changes how the environment is experienced and
how people are likely to collectively respond to environmental initiatives and campaigns.
Macnaghten and Urry found that the environment is experienced most intensely when it is part
of the personal realm of everyday life. The local
and personal environment tends to “hit home”
and matter more. Indeed, it is often through personal, rather than mediated, encounters that
people become involved in environmental matters.
Nevertheless, this does not imply a straightforward
move from mediated to unmediated encounters
with the environment. The personal dimension to
environmental risk is often itself more or less completely indebted to mediation. Rather, it suggests a
move toward a media situation in which concerns
for the “distant other” connect to everyday proximate concerns, notes Luc Boltanski. People may
want to be a small part of the imagined community
concerned about the plight of the Amazon rainforest, international whaling, the burning of fossil
fuels, and so on, but such concern appears fleeting
and short-lived if it remains dislocated from everyday life concerns.

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Consumption and Time Use

It has been suggested here that the environment
is commonly experienced, not as a set of physical
issues, but tangled up as part of social life in which
matters of consumption play an ever-widening role.
The “human” and “relational” aspects of the environment are often what are resonant. The environment becomes meaningful when it engages with life,
inhibiting or facilitating the development of ongoing
human relationships, whether in the context of the
family, friends, or communities of interest. In this
sphere, consumption will continue to play a role as
a vital and enduring space through which ethical
choices are determined in the pursuit of a fairer, more
sustainable and better world.
Phil Macnaghten
See also Body, The; Commodification; Consumer Protest:
Environment; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Happiness; Political and
Ethical Consumption; Risk Society; Social Movements

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and
Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Jacobs, Michael. Environmental Modernisation: The New
Labour Agenda. London: Fabian Society, 1999.
Macnaghten, Phil. “Embodying the Environment in
Everyday Life Practices.” Sociological Review 51, no. 1
(2003): 63–84.
Macnaghten, Phil, and Urry, John. Contested Natures.
London: Sage, 1998.
McCormick, John. The Global Environmental Movement.
Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1995.
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Viking,
1998. First published 1989.
McKibben, Bill. Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End
of Human Nature. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Ross, Andrew. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life:
Nature’s Debt to Society. London: Verso, 1994.
Sachs, Wolfgang. “Sustainable Development and the Crisis of
Nature: On the Political Anatomy of an Oxymoron.” In
Living with Nature, edited by Frank Fischer and Maarten
A. Hajer, 23–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Strathern, Marilyn. After Nature: English Kinship in the
Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw. “Uncommon Ground: Moral
Discourse, Foundationalism and the Environmental
Movement.” PhD diss., Lancaster University, 1993.
Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage,
2002.
Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American
Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1992.

CONSUMPTION

AND

TIME USE

Consumption is related to time in multifarious,
complex ways. Obviously, consumption takes time,
whether it is watching a movie, buying groceries, or
driving your new car. However, consumption can also
save time, such as when the new car replaces your
cheaper but slower bicycle. Consumption and time
are also connected because of the time it takes to earn
the money required for consumption. Working longer hours and earning more money per hour both
allow more consumption. At the same time, longer
working hours leave less time for consumption, and
a higher salary implies more forgone earning for
each hour spent consuming rather than producing.
Consumption and production are closely intertwined,
and balancing them is just as much a matter of time as
it is of money. Changing patterns of time use change
are both the cause and the consequence of changing
patterns in consumption.
Consumption, both cultural and material, has
long been known to be strongly based on class. It
is argued that a shift occurred in the social functions that consumption fulfills. Where Fordist production yielded standardized goods for the masses,
post-Fordist production for affluent buyers became
increasingly differentiated. Producers anticipate consumers’ potential desires, allowing consumers to find
symbolic significance and self-expression through
consumer practices (called “sign value” by Jean
Baudrillard). Material and cultural consumption
have become more central in people’s lives, to the
point that some argue we live in a consumer culture
and that the place in the consumption process gains
importance as an identity marker next to, or even
instead of, the place in the production process. The
symbolic significance of consumption shifted emphasis, consumption being interpreted more from a general cultural or psychological perspective than from a
class perspective.

Consumption and Time Use

People increasingly aspire to levels of consumption that do not seem to match their financial means.
In turn, these desires prompt them to invest more
time in acquiring those means. So the freedom to
consume comes at a price, which consists of the long
hours of work required to be able to do the desired
spending. Especially upper-middle-class people were
at risk to become dissatisfied with their income levels. Juliet Schor formulated a logic behind the rising
aspirations of consumers. An increasing inequality in
income and wealth was highlighted by vastly rising
levels of affluence among the top 20 percent of the
income distribution, visible in ostentatious spending
on luxury goods. The social group one compares
oneself to and that informs one’s consumer desires,
changed from one’s own, often socioeconomically
homogeneous, neighborhood to better paid colleagues and enviable media personalities. These
vertical rather than horizontal points of reference
fueled consumer aspirations. Apart from booming
consumer debts, working hours increased to fulfill
the increased desires, a logic Schor called “the cycle
of work and spend.”
Once trapped in the cycle of work and spend, it is
difficult to get out. Elaborating the pioneering work
by Gary S. Becker, “the acceleration of consumption” was further explained by Staffan B. Linder in
terms of the increasing productivity of both work
and leisure. People will choose an extra hour of leisure instead of an extra hour of paid work only if the
value of the former exceeds the value of the latter.
Therefore, an increase in the productivity of work,
which also raises hourly wages, calls for an increase
in productivity of leisure, to make it more rewarding
and to keep the work-leisure balance in equilibrium.
Leisure productivity is typically enhanced by investing more money per leisure hour in commodities
such as media devices or cars, and in services such as
tickets to the theater or a theme park, which allow for
efficient and more or less guaranteed “quality time.”
As productivity of both work and leisure increases,
less time for idling remains, time itself becoming an
increasingly scarce resource. So rising affluence has
not led to more leisure time, as was believed would
be the case half a century ago.
Becker, Linder, Schor, and others argue that people’s material needs are most unlikely to remain stable when productivity increases. They point out that
consumption becomes more intense, involves higher
pecuniary investments, and leaves less consumption

333

time per item or activity. This also has consequences
for cultural consumption, the increasingly eclectic
character of which has given rise to the use of terms
such as cultural omnivore or voracious cultural consumer (i.e., people whose cultural consumption is
not guided by former distinctions between good and
bad taste).
Clearly, Thorstein Veblen’s picture of the leisure
class, in which the money-rich were also time-rich,
spending this time on conspicuous consumption, does
not hold for the present leisure class, which needs to
put in many hours of work to achieve the desired
level of consumption. For them, being money-rich
implies being time-poor. This not only affects work
and consumption, but also challenges time to spend
with family or friends, especially among women,
typically burdened by the larger share of child care
and household chores.

Data and Analysis
Recognizing the importance of time use for understanding consumption brings time use data into
the picture. Time use data are not all that different
from other survey data. They too are obtained by
asking a random sample of a population to cooperate by responding to a survey. The resulting data
are to be treated as any other survey data: the possibility of skewed (non)response needs to be taken
into account, and generalizations to the population
at large are subject to tests of statistical significance.
In three respects, however, time use data are different indeed: (1) in the way they are recorded, (2) in
the way they relate to the respondent’s daily life, and
(3) in the ways they open up for analysis.
When inquisitive about people’s consumption—or
more generally, about their daily lives—and when set
to map that by way of a survey (rather than, e.g.,
participative observation), roughly two inroads can
be taken. One is to ask people questions about their
activities, for instance, how often they engage in
sports per week or how long they watch television on
an average day. Alternatively, and this is the core of
time use surveys, one can ask them to keep track of
their activities in some sort of diary for some time, be
it a day, some days, or a full week. Whether people
report in their own words or by naming entries from
an accompanying list of activities what results is a
data-set that, with more or less precision, mirrors
some period of their daily life.

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Consumption and Time Use

Those data are believed to have some merits in
terms of precision, being a recording that is more
than mere estimation, depending less on memory
and being less prone to desirability effects. As to the
latter: each day holds twenty-four hours for everyone, which reduces the chance that people unconsciously overreport activities they desired to do more
than those that they actually did. Of course, such
time use data reveal more about everyday activities
than about activities undertaken infrequently, such as
attending operas or weddings.
The resulting data open up a number of possibilities for analysis. The most straightforward one
is to calculate the total time spent per activity per
day or week. Combing these with information from
an accompanying questionnaire allows for observations such as “women are involved in unpaid work
much longer than men” or “teenagers these days
spend more time behind the computer than in front
of the television” (all these exemplary statements are
actually true for the Netherlands). In the case that
time use data for various years are available, longitudinal observations can be made, such as “people
spend more time these days on fun shopping than
they did ten years ago.” Once total time per activity
is calculated, time use data are in no way different
from other types of data.
Things can become a bit more complicated, however, when the focus of analysis shifts to the timing
rather than the duration of activities. But even then,
a bit of logical thinking is more important than highbrow statistics. On the basis of the timing of activities, another set of observations can be made, such
as “people these days still largely work in nine-to-five
jobs.” By comparing successive days, observations
on the routines in daily life can be made, such as
“for many people, Monday still largely resembles
Tuesday.”
Based on additional observations that can—but
need not—be part of a time use registration, other
fields of research may be addressed too. When location of activities is known, time use data are applicable in mobility studies. When it is known in whose
company an activity was undertaken, patterns of
social life can be studied. When secondary activities
are known in addition to primary activities, the issue
of multiple tasking can be addressed.
Over time, in many countries, a particular design
for conducting time use studies was adopted, each
clever of course, but often far from compatible.

Toward the end of the last century, harmonized
European time use surveys (HETUS) were developed that, if adopted widely, yield compatible data
and enhance comparative analyses, at least within
Europe. To date, some fifteen countries have adopted
this HETUS design, though with considerable differentiation in the year of measurement.
The next section presents some data from the
longest time series of time use data in Europe: those
in the Netherlands, where such data have been collected every five years since 1975 (Van den Broek
and Breedveld 2004). Time use data are not gathered
with a focus on any particular research question, but
have a broad scope. They are therefore applicable to
address a broad spectrum of issues. Typically, when
deeply interested in one particular issue, one will find
some information in time use data, but at the same
time, probably not all the details one might have
hoped to find.
This also applies to the issue of consumption. Yes,
time use data inform about consumption in some
respects. But no, not all one might want to know
about consumption can be learned from time use
data. The following topics were chosen to reflect the
potential of time use data in general, as well as in relation to consumption in particular. In the discussion
that follows, the merits and shortcomings of time use
data for studying consumption are addressed.

Trends: Time Use and Consumption in the
Netherlands, 1975 to 2005
The Dutch time use data encompass a full week.
That amounts to 168 hours, or, in terms of the data,
672 reports about main activity per quarter-hour.
In the course of a week, people engage in numerous
and diverse activities. Largely as one wishes, these
can be analyzed and presented at various degrees of
aggregation or specificity. The most general level of
aggregation is the categorization of all those activities into three broad categories: obligations, personal
time, and leisure time. This categorization proves to
be an informative one, as it shows that the Dutch
became more industrious over the 1975 to 2005
period, to the detriment of the volume of their leisure
time (Table 1). In spite of earlier predictions about
the ascent of a leisure society, these trends are much
in line with the theorizing mentioned earlier.
Looking into the time use data a bit more specifically, by disaggregating obligations into paid work,

Consumption and Time Use

Table 1

335

Trends in Obligations, Personal Time, and Leisure Time in the Netherlands, 1975–2005, Hours per Week,
Population Age 12 and Older

Obligations
Personal time
Leisure time

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

40.7
76.3
47.9

40.8
76.8
47.0

40.7
75.3
49.0

42.0
75.5
47.2

42.6
75.0
47.3

43.9
76.6
44.8

44.3
76.2
44.7

Note: Account does not fully sum up to the weekly 168 hours. Some activities are hard to ascribe to any of the three
categories, some time is unreported time, and filling out the time use diary itself is reported too. Together, this amounts to
1.5 to 2 hours per week.
Source: Andries van den Broek and Koen Breedveld, eds. 2004, 132.

Table 2

Trends in Paid Work in the Netherlands, by Gender, 1975–2005, Hours per Week and Percentages,
Population Aged 20 to 65

Paid work of working, hours
Paid work in week, %
Paid work in week, %, male
Paid work in week, %, female

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

36.2
48
77
17

35.4
47
71
22

35.3
48
68
25

35.3
53
72
32

35.4
56
76
36

34.3
63
80
47

35.6
65
76
53

Source: Andries van den Broek and Koen Breedveld, eds. 2004, 14.

care tasks, and education, and by focusing on the
“potential labor force” only (people age 20–64), it
becomes clear that the growth of obligations is in fact
a growth of the weekly amount of paid work done.
Diving into the data a bit deeper, by calculating which proportions of the potential labor force
were involved in paid work over that week, one can
observe that the rise in paid work is not caused by
the lengthening of the average work week of those
working, but by a growth of the proportion of the
potential labor force that had in fact done paid work
in that week. And a further disaggregation by gender
reveals that this is completely caused by the growing
labor market participation of women (Table 2). As a
result, Dutch society, where the bread-winner model
was dominant, witnessed the ascent of the dualearner household. Increasingly, both spouses work.
As a result, more households than before fare better
in terms of discretionary money, but fare less well in
terms of discretionary time.
Here, already, general time use data start to relate
to the issue of consumption, in this case to Schor’s
work-and-spend cycle. Superficially, these trends substantiate the existence of such a cycle. Yet, especially

in the Dutch case, there is a competing explanation
for these trends. In the Netherlands, women have
been discouraged to do paid work. Women were
expected to become stay-at-home mothers rather
than pursue a professional career. Fifty years ago,
women in the civil service were terminated the day
they got married.
With some delay compared to other countries,
by the 1970s, women in the Netherlands voiced the
desire for more opportunities to develop and sustain
themselves. Picking up on this, government policy
started stimulating female labor market participation. Though initially no doubt inspired by the desire
to enhance economic independence of women, the
increase in their earning and spending capacity nicely
fitted the logic of the rise of consumer culture. So
what was the effect of the decline in leisure time
on the way leisure is spent? Was leisure of all kinds
affected in equal measure? Distinguishing eight kinds
of leisure activities, the answer clearly is no, apart
from a reduction in leisure time, there also was a
reprioritization within leisure (Table 3).
Despite the cut in leisure time, four kinds of leisure were on the rise: use of electronic media, going

336

Table 3

Consumption and Time Use

Ways in Which Leisure Is Spent in the Netherlands, 1975–2005, Hours per Week, Population
Age 12 and Older

Reading print media
Audio, TV, PC, Internet
Social contacts
Civil society
Going out
Sports and exercise
Other hobbies
Mobility

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

6.1
12.4
12.7
2.0
2.4
1.5
8.2
2.6

5.7
12.1
12.5
2.0
2.2
1.5
8.7
2.3

5.3
13.6
11.5
2.2
2.4
2.1
9.0
2.9

5.1
13.7
11.4
2.1
2.6
1.8
7.7
2.9

4.6
14.2
10.9
2.2
2.6
2.1
7.5
3.2

3.9
14.8
10.1
1.8
2.5
1.8
6.8
3.0

3.8
15.1
9.1
1.8
2.7
2.6
6.1
3.5

Source: Andries van den Broek and Koen Breedveld, eds. 2004, 134.

out, sports, and traveling time for leisure purposes
(mobility). With the exception of sports, these all are
capital-intensive ways of spending leisure (though
extended TV watching and computer use reduce the
costs per hour). On the other hand, reading, social
contacts, and other hobbies were cut down on more
than can be explained by the general decline in leisure
alone. Lacking precise details on costs of leisure activities, this nonetheless seems in line with a shift from
time-intensive to commodity-intensive ways of spending leisure. Besides, household expenditure figures
substantiate the growing capital-intensity of leisure.

Conclusion
General time use data as presented in this entry
inform about consumption, even without going into
the timing of consumption, the extent to which it is
a social activity, the ascent of shopping for fun, or
the shifts within media use. On the other hand, the
general nature of time use data implies they cannot
be put to use in answering every detailed question
relevant to any given issue, such as, in this case, consumption. There is no known time use survey where
the accompanying questionnaire asks about the symbolic meaning of consumption, about things purchased, or about money spent. Then again, nothing
inherent to time use studies should stop a design along
such lines from being developed. Those interested in
studying consumption from the angle of time use
might want to scrutinize the possibilities of existing
time use data for more detailed analysis as well as
think about building additional elements into new
time use surveys. Clearly, time use data offer unique

possibilities for the study of consumption, especially
the purchase and use of commodities as an integral
part of people’s everyday practices, which is where
and how most consumption takes place. Among the
issues to be researched in the future are questions as
to how and whether consumption affects working
hours and leisure patterns, how it changes the nature
of socializing in leisure time, and perhaps most fundamentally, how consumption, and the related need
to earn, affect social cohesion and human happiness.
Andries van den Broek and Koen van Eijck
See also Comparing Consumer Cultures; Convenience;
Harried Leisure Class; Leisure; Linder, Staffan
Burenstam; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings
Becker, Gary S. “A Theory of the Allocation of Time.” The
Economic Journal 75, (1965): 493–517.
Bittman, Michael, and Judy Wajcman. “The Rush Hour:
The Character of Leisure Time and Gender Equity.”
Social Forces 79 (2000): 165–189.
Bocock, Robert. Consumption. London: Routledge, 1993.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Campbell, Colin. “The Sociology of Consumption.” In
Acknowledging Consumption, edited by Daniel Miller,
96–126. London: Routledge, 1995.
Linder, Staffan B. The Harried Leisure Class. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970.
Rosa, Hartmut, and William E. Scheuerman. High-Speed
Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity.
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008.

Consumption in Postsocialist China
Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge:
Polity, 1997.
Sullivan, Oriel, and Jonathan Gershuny. “Inconspicuous
Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal
Market Economy.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4
(2004): 79–100.
Sullivan, Oriel, and Tally Katz-Gerro. “The Omnivore
Thesis Revisited: Voracious Cultural Consumers.”
European Sociological Review 23 (2007): 123–137.
van den Broek, Andries, and Koen Breedveld, eds. Trends
in Time: The Use and Organization of Time in the
Netherlands, 1975–2000. The Hague, The Netherlands:
Social and Cultural Planning Office, 2004.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Theory of Institutions. New York: Mentor,
1953.

CONSUMPTION IN
POSTSOCIALIST CHINA
Between the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and
China’s entry to the World Trade Organization
(WTO) in 2001, the Chinese economy shifted
decisively from socialist autarky to a globally connected, consumer-oriented political economy. In
1992, the government ended rationing for grains,
cloth, and other basic consumer items, and in 1993,
the National People’s Congress passed the first
Consumer Protection Law. In 1995, the six-day work
week disappeared for city workers, and the weekend became a pivot for commercial and social life. In
1993, China had its first public Internet connection,
Yahoo! entered the China market in 1999, and by
2008, China had more Internet users than any other
country in the world.
At the start of the twenty-first century, most of
China’s 350 million households had experienced
more than two decades of rising disposable incomes
and 250 million people had moved out of abject poverty. Agricultural employment peaked in 1995, and
by 2007, the majority of the population worked in
service and industrial jobs, many producing or distributing consumer goods. A postsocialist consumer
revolution had decisively reshaped the material

337

culture, social life, and patterns of inequality across
the entire nation of more than 1.3 billion people.

Material Culture
In 2002, the National People’s Congress designated
expansion of consumer demand as the nation’s
long-term strategic goal, and in 2004, the Central
Economic Work Conference formally endorsed a
transition to consumption-driven growth. By 2007,
China was the world’s top producer of cement, the
top producer of carbon emissions, the top destination for inward foreign direct investment (FDI),
and also the leading market for platinum jewelry
and cell phones. By 2007, Li Ning, a three-time
gold medalist at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles
who had created his own line of signature sportswear that included a line of sports shoes endorsed by
Shaquille O’Neal, was wealthier than Tiger Woods.
An economy that for three decades (1949–1979)
had been defined by the ideals of ascetic socialism
had become a twenty-first-century pillar of global
consumer capitalism. International luxury brands
looked to Chinese consumers for future growth, as
did such mass retailers such as Proctor & Gamble
and Amway. By 2005, there was cell phone service
in all but the most remote mountain villages, and
78 percent of rural households owned a cell phone.
In the final years of the Mao era (1949–1979),
state-owned or collectively owned stores controlled
retail sales, and customers were supplicants, often
forced to accept shoddy goods and limited choices.
Rural households relied almost entirely on family
labor, local products, and recycled goods to clothe
their families and furnish their homes. Few ever purchased anything beyond the limited items stocked
by the commune marketing and supply co-op. By
the turn of the twenty-first century, multinational
retailers like Carrefour and Walmart had aggressively moved to dominate retail sales in markets far
beyond the largest coastal cities, and by 2010, China
had four of the largest ten shopping complexes in
the world, including the two largest. However, the
growth was not only in high-end commerce. Rather,
as in the commercial revolution in Shanghai during
the 1920s, expansion of the luxury market stimulated
retail sales and innovation among low-cost domestic
businesses. In coastal metropolises and small county
towns, peddlers displaying wares on curbside tarps

338

Consumption in Postsocialist China

and handcarts crowded sidewalks within a few feet
of upscale department stores.
Commercial advertising, which had been virtually
unknown between 1956 and 1980, not only
reemerged with great vitality but quickly migrated
beyond print media and television. By the twentyfirst century, facades in many commercial districts
incorporated enormous digital screens to broadcast a
constant stream of products to pedestrians or anyone
in a passing vehicle. In 1997, Jason Jiang developed
the idea to place video monitors broadcasting advertising in buses, subways, and the elevators of residential buildings. In 2005, his firm Focus Media went
public on the NASDAQ. Postsocialist consumption
was driving the economy and the images of this commercial juggernaut were ubiquitous.

Social Life
In the years of high socialism (1956–1978), government policy deliberately restricted the social and
temporal reach of consumer-driven socializing. The
government banned temple fairs and severely punished any who dared host the elaborate funerals
and weddings that traditionally had provided the
occasion for lavish spending and public feasting. By
attacking all local associational activity not directly
under the control of the Communist Party, the government not only ended religious pilgrimages and
opera troupes, but also eliminated the semiformal
groups that drew together neighbors and friends who
shared an interest in calligraphy or martial arts. As a
result, in villages and in towns, public socializing was
restricted to gatherings directly sponsored by local
officials or traveling troupes staffed by the People’s
Liberation Army.
In urban areas, most families lived in enterprise
compounds within a short walk of their workplace,
and turned to company stores, cafeterias, and recreation halls for most consumer goods and services. As
in villages, urban social life similarly revolved around
official priorities. Individuals participated because
they had no other options.
The consumer revolution of postsocialist China
dramatically expanded the physical locations for
socializing and created a new distance between
work time and personal time. After 1985, there
was an explosive growth of leisure venues, restaurants, and new forms of entertainment. At the high
end were multinational restaurant chains, bowling

alleys, and even golf courses. But numerically, the
greatest expansion came at the local level, where
individual entrepreneurs set up pool tables on river
banks, opened beer gardens on basketball courts,
and turned warehouses into dance halls. All but the
most destitute could routinely turn to commercial
venues for their entertainment, and young adults and
adolescents in particular became target customers.
As a result, these consumer investments created the
material and aspirational parameters of a postsocialist youth culture as decisively as the top-down political mobilizations during Mao’s Cultural Revolution
(1966–1969) had created the youthful Red Guards
and their communal attacks on all things bourgeois.
During the high socialist years (1956–1978), the
bureaucratic party-state created an intense public
social life with no competition from nongovernment
or market actors. With the return of private commerce and investment into production of consumer
goods and services, forms of socializing became
ever-more commercial and diverse. Moreover, within
these new spaces of unofficial sociability at dance
halls, bowling alleys, temple fairs, Internet bars, and
health clubs, participants nurtured ties of friendship
and trust beyond the direct control of either employers or officials. The result is a heterogeneous and
robust social sphere and public life that is more than
the obvious veneer of commercial consumerism.

Inequality and Mass Consumption
Between 1985 and 1995, China experienced the
most rapid increase in income inequality ever tracked
by the World Bank. By 2002, China’s national Gini
coefficient that calibrates the degree of income
inequality was comparable to that of Mexico or
Indonesia. Under the planned socialist economy
(1956–1978) there had also been a wide gap in living standards between urban and rural China, and
between villagers living in lowlands with irrigated
fields and those eking out an existence in dry mountain villages. However, because few rural residents
traveled beyond their home town or local community, the differences in standards of living were often
invisible to local residents.
The impact of increasing income inequality after
1985, however, did not automatically confine lowwage workers and farm families to the positions
of envious onlookers in the postsocialist consumer
revolution. Between 1978 and 2006, real per capita

Consumption in Postsocialist China

disposable household incomes in both cities and
villages increased by a factor of 6.7 and the Engels
coefficient that estimates the relative share of food
purchases in total household budgets documents
a steady increase in discretionary consumer purchases. For example, in 1978, urban families spent
57.5 percent of their income on food, and rural
families spent 67.7 percent. By 2000, the Engels
ratio had fallen to 39.4 percent in cities and to
49.1 percent in the countryside. By 2007, the percentage had fallen still lower to 35.8 percent for
urban households and 43 percent for rural households. Income inequality increased during the 1980s
and 1990s, but because the double-digit macrolevel
growth significantly raised the purchasing power
of 90 percent of households, poverty fell and real
incomes substantially increased. Moreover, while
the urban-rural income gap continued to increase
after 2002, national surveys in 2005 documented
declining income gaps among rural residents and
relatively stable inequalities among urban residents.
One observes real and relative gains in terms of
ownership of consumer durables that had once been
luxuries even for urban households. For example, in
1985, 48 percent of urban families owned washing
machines and only 7 percent a refrigerator; by 2007,
46 percent of rural households owned a washing
machine and 26 percent a refrigerator. In 1985, electric fans were prized possessions in cities and towns.
By 2000, there were 123 fans per 100 rural households and 168 in urban homes. By 2007, the statistical yearbooks had stopped recording the number of
fans and only documented the urban-rural disparity
in ownership of air conditioning units: 8.5 for every
100 rural households versus 95 for every 100 urban
homes. Of course, not all washing machines and
refrigerators are equal in quality or price. However,
the routinization of these purchases across income
groups clearly documents the centrality of consumer
desire and competition for consumers within the
Chinese postsocialist economy.
Income inequality increased after 1985 not
because millions fell into poverty, but because those
in well-endowed villages close to cities benefited from
market reform far more than those living in the hinterlands, and because international firms competed
for highly skilled professionals by paying first-world
wages. Over time, the glaring disparities in living
standards may fuel attitudes of dispossession and
exclusion. When pedicab drivers (and passengers)

339

are edged off the street by chauffeur-driven cars, and
guards at exclusive housing estates turn back unlicensed service personnel or anyone in shabby dress,
comparisons to one’s earlier even greater poverty will
not compensate for the knowledge that you and your
family will never buy a car or eat in the restaurants
you pass every day as you wait for the bus.
In the year of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, however, anger at income inequality did not emerge as
politically destabilizing. In part, citizens did not
mobilize around issues of income inequality because
average incomes had risen through 2007 and because
the national leadership of President Hu Jintao and
Premier Wen Jiabao succeeded in using national
revenues to fund inland infrastructure, reduce
school fees, eliminate taxes on farmers, and create
a national, if meager, rural health insurance plan.
In a postsocialist China, the Communist leadership
proclaimed consumers and the service economy as
drivers of economic growth at the same time as they
maintained political monopolies that legitimated and
enabled substantial redistribution.

Debates Over Consumerism and Consumer
Culture Within China
As the postsocialist economy evolved, so did debates
about its broader cultural and political significance.
Given the conventional hostility of communist ideology to the bourgeoisie and the Marxist emphasis
on the primacy of production, Communist Party
spokespeople and media not surprisingly attacked
the negative side of a consumer-driven economy and
associated consumer culture.
One strand of this discussion focused on consumerism as the defining element of cultural and moral
degradation in the contemporary global era. Articles
in People’s Daily (the premier national newspaper
and organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party) repeatedly linked consumerism to
materialism, hedonism, and worship of money, and
took particular interest in the consumer behavior of
young adults born after 1980.
In academic journals, there was more varied
debate. On one hand were those who emphasized
the negative dimension, viewing the rise of consumer
culture as a fetishistic escape. Jean Baudrillard is a
key reference for these intellectual critics, as is George
Ritzer’s argument about the disenchantment of consumerism. But there was an equally strong strand

340

Consumption in Postsocialist China

that identified the consumer as an agent of change.
Some celebrated the activism of homeowners who
challenged alliances between developers and local
governments; others lauded consumer activist Wang
Hai, who had gained national fame and subsequently
a national hotline and website (http://www.wanghai
.net) by pursuing the clause of the 1993 Consumer
Rights Law that granted compensation worth twice
the initial purchase price to any consumer who could
demonstrate the sale of a shoddy product.

and approaching that of Germany. Calibrated
in the metric used by the World Bank to capture
comparable real standards of living, China’s GDP in
2006 reached 10.21 trillion purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars, thereby placing its economy second
in the world after the United States. In 2007, the
combined stock market capitalization in China’s two
stock exchanges surpassed its GDP. The postsocialist
economy is deeply embedded in the flows of global
trade and capitalism; postsocialist consumerism has
been hard wired into the foundational institutions.

Future Directions
The Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) grew
tenfold between 1978 and 2007. It doubled first
between 1978 and 1987 and again between 1987
and 1996. Thus, one future direction of scholarship
is to track and document how macroeconomic gains
track onto consumption patterns among households
of different income deciles. To track the incomes of
more than 1.3 billion people is essential to understanding the historical contours of postsocialist
consumption. However, it is not easy. The task is particularly challenging not only because households of
similar incomes vary significantly in their purchases,
but because the more than 140 million people who
migrated from villages to cities between 1985 and
2005 are often omitted from officially released statistics. Only when scholars complete household-level
surveys on a national scale that capture and track the
changes in consumer behavior and spending can they
accurately compare and contrast Chinese consumer
behavior with that of other times and places.
The second future direction relates to safety of
consumer products. In 2008, Chinese consumers
learned that for years milk powder had been adulterated with the chemical melamine. In earlier years,
cases of tainted cough syrup, poisoned pet food, and
toys with lead paint had primarily created unease
and fear of Chinese consumer products in overseas
markets. The strong reaction within China to the
milk powder scandal therefore signaled a new maturity and assertiveness among domestic customers.
There is already strong legislation in China; the issue
remains how to have effective implementation. Food
safety issues precipitated advances in consumer protection in Europe, North America, and Japan. Will
China now follow suit?
In 2006, China’s nominal GDP exceeded
2.5 trillion U.S. dollars, larger than that of France

Deborah S. Davis
See also Comparing Consumer Cultures; Consumer
Culture in East Asia; Consumer Policy (China);
Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern
Europe; Engel’s Law; Globalization; Mass Production
and Consumption

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and
Structures. London: Sage, 1998.
Bergsten, C. Fred, Bates Gill, Nicholas Lardy, and Derek
Mitchell. China: The Balance Sheet. New York: Public
Affairs, 2006.
Croll, Elisabeth. China’s New Consumers. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Davis, Deborah, ed. The Consumer Revolution in Urban
China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Davis, Deborah. “Urban Consumer Culture.” The China
Quarterly 183 (September 2005): 677–694.
Davis, Deborah. “Urban Chinese Homeowners as CitizenConsumers.” In The Ambivalent Consumer, edited by
Sheldon Garon and Patricia Maclachlan, 281–299.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Davis, Deborah, and Wang Feng, eds. Creating Wealth and
Poverty in Post-Socialist China. Palo Alta, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009.
Donald, Stephanie Hemelrik, and Robert Benewick. The
State of China Atlas: Mapping the World’s Fastest
Growing Economy. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005.
Garon, Sheldon, and Patricia L. Maclachlan. The
Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in
East Asia and the West. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006.
Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the
Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East
Asia Monograph, 2003.
Goodman, David S., ed. The New Rich in China. London:
Routledge, 2008.

Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe
Hanser, Amy. Service Encounters. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2008.
Hockx, Michel, and Julia Straus. Culture in the Contemporary
PRC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
National Bureau of Statistics of China. China Statistical
Yearbook 2007. Beijing China Statistics Press, 2007.
http://stats.gov.cn.
Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury
Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993.
Watson, James L. Golden Arches East. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997.
Yan, Yunxiang. The Flow of Gifts. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
Yan, Yunxiang. Private Life under Socialism. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Zhang, Li, and Aihwa Ong. Privatizing China. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2008.
Zheng, Tiantian. Red Lights: The Life of Sex Workers in Urban
China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Zheng, Yongnian. Technological Empowerment. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

CONSUMPTION IN POSTSOCIALIST
SOCIETIES: EASTERN EUROPE
Consumption in postsocialist Eastern European societies comprises specific consumption practices, meanings, and symbols that are characteristic of countries
whose social, political, economic, and cultural space
has been rapidly transformed from a socialist planned
economy to a capitalist market economy. This is often
characterized by consumerism and a high prominence
of consumption-related lifestyles and from totalitarian
political regime to democracy. The beginning of the
period of transformation is usually considered to be
1989, although the dismantling process of the socialist
bloc started at different times in different countries.
This entry covers countries either formerly
belonging to the Soviet Union (such as Armenia,
Estonia, Georgia, Latvia) or its sphere of influence
in Eastern Europe (such as the Czech Republic,
Hungary, Poland). Postsocialist consumer culture
can also refer to various parts of the world that are
in transition from socialism, such as China, but this
is not covered in this entry. It must be noted that
due to the sociocultural and economic variety of the
former Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe, no uniform

341

description can be given for the whole development
of its consumer culture. However, several trends, phenomena, and key processes are common to this area.
These can be outlined based on a synthesis of studies
on postsocialist consumption conducted in various
disciplines—anthropology, ethnology, sociology of
consumption, cultural studies—since the beginning
of the 1990s. The bulk of these studies use data from
the former socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, the Baltic
states, as well as Russia and Ukraine.
The understanding of postsocialist consumer culture primarily focuses on the contrast between consumer culture behind the so-called iron curtain and
the West (primarily Western and North—European
countries and the United States) as well as developments after the fall of the iron curtain, which are often
understood as “re-Westernization,” a term launched
in the middle of 1990s by a group of Scandinavian
and Baltic researchers led by Marju Lauristin. One
of the central notions here is “transition culture”—
particularly influentially theorized by Michael
Kennedy—as the movement from dictatorship to
democracy and from planned economy to market
economy. While transition tends to overemphasize
the movement from one situation to another, transformation—another important concept in the previously mentioned approaches—focuses more on the
complexity and unfinished, ever-changing character of
the processes in these societies, which in turn influence
how people consume goods and make meaning about
them, that is, construct a particular consumer culture.

Socialist Heritage
State provision systems and the resulting retail trade
in different countries of the Soviet Union (e.g., in the
Baltics as opposed to Russia) or the Eastern European
countries (e.g., East Germany) were fairly different.
Also, times of relative affluence (e.g., late 1960s) were
replaced by times of stagnation and a sharpening
shortage (early 1980s), thus a very black-and-white
contrast between the “then” and “today” can be at
times misleading; however, for analytical purposes and
general understanding, various common features can
be outlined, although countries and times differed.
The socialist time was characterized by shortage
of goods “dictatorship over needs,” according to
Ferenc Feher and colleagues, and a forced homogeneity of lifestyle. Many of today’s portrayals of
the consumption of the 1960s to the 1980s show

342

Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe

it through the prism of desire for freedom and consumer sovereignty, which embodied a mundane form
of civic freedom.
To find ways of bypassing the inefficient system
of provision, various forms of soft, mundane resistance were developed by people under socialism, one
of its most vivid forms being what has been called
the “second economy” or “informal economy” of
mutual, social, capital-based relationships of underhanded deals of provisioning and reciprocal information exchange on the availability of goods. In this, the
logics of economic and symbolic exchange sometimes
clashed and sometimes existed peacefully side by side.
In spite of all its deficiencies, the socialist consumer culture is often represented in the accounts
of primarily the elderly as a time of solidarity and a
more respectful relationship between consumers and
things, subjects and objects. Since there was no market economy–based cycle of fashions and quick obsolescence of things, there was less waste and “colourful
cheap trash,” as noted by sociologists of media and
consumption Margit Keller and Triin Vihalemm in a
study based on young people’s essays comparing consumption in the Soviet Union and in the independent
Estonia at the end of 1990s. Thus, people were either
consciously or unconsciously “sustainable” in their
everyday consumption practices, and today’s consumer culture is, to a certain extent, shaped by sometimes nostalgic recollections of the socialist times.

Stages of Development of the Postsocialist
Consumer Culture
In each of the countries of the region in focus, the
path of development has been different due to different political and economic models applied. No
periodization of the change in postsocialist consumer culture can be made that applies equally to
all these countries, but since the development has
been particularly contrasting in the Baltic countries
(from the Soviet system to relatively affluent and fastdeveloping European Union members), its example is
primarily used to illustrate the change. In the following list, the periods are presented together with key
words that characterize that stage of development:
1. 1988–1991: Breaking away from the old system, first private firms, the first influx of Western
goods, the start of foreign travel, and a major inflow
of Western tourists

2. 1991–1994: Radical reforms, rapid marketization of the economy, slowly rising living standards, primary satisfaction of the “thirst” for
Western goods and lifestyles, proliferation of forgeries of international brands
3. 1995–1998: Economic stabilization, certain
“maturation” of the consumer culture, aesthetization, postmaterialization of commercial signs
(e.g., advertising)
4. 1999–2004: Preparations for the European
Union (EU)—accession and joining of the EU for
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic,
Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland; the growth
of living standard and consumption levels; a fast
increase of new shopping outlets, especially shopping malls and supermarket chains; rapid development of marketing communications (branding);
and the emergence of recreational shopping as a
new cultural form
5. 2005–2008: EU postaccession period—
economic boom between 2005–2007 resulting in
rising levels of consumerism (i.e., consumption oriented to lifestyle and self-expression), real-estate
boom, and others
6. 2008– : Economic decline starting from
2008; appearance of new issues on the agenda of
consumer culture such as sustainable consumption,
intensifying debates on the consumer habits of children and youth influenced by rapidly developing
marketing to children and young people; an increasing influence of the global financial crisis in 2008
causes a revision of consumer habits
It has been pointed out that with the accession
into the EU, which constitutes a symbolic point of
re-Westernization or readmission into Europe, for
many postsocialist countries the so-called transition
is over, which is replaced by a more complex transformation. That involves multilayered and intertwined changes in various fields of life (e.g., politics,
economy, cultural sphere), instead of the more linear
movement toward a Western standard of life implied
by the notion of transition.

Statistical Comparisons Among Countries
A statistical portrait of the region’s consumption can
be drawn based on some key indicators provided by

Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe

Eurostat for the twenty-seven member states of the
EU. For example, the actual individual consumption
(AIC) information provided by Eurostat, which is
juxtaposed with the gross domestic product (GDP)
per capita, gives an overview of the statistical picture of consumption and economic situation of the
postsocialist bloc (for details, see Svennebye 2008).
The average for both indices is 100, which gives a
point of comparison: for example, according to the
2006 data, the Czech GDP per capita volume index
was 79 and AIC was 70, and the respective Slovenian
data were 88 and 80. The Baltic country of Estonia
with its 69 and 65, as well as Slovakia and Hungary,
were also in the upper half of the average of 100.
At the same time, the former socialist bloc’s distance
from the most affluent European countries is still
large. The respective figures for Luxembourg were
280 and 173, and Norway 186 and 130, respectively.
Postsocialist countries such as Serbia (GDP volume
index 33 and AIC 36) or Albania (21 and 23) lag
furthest behind.
Consumption expenditure in 2006 at constant
prices compared to 1995 (index value 100) is also
revealing. In Latvia and Estonia expenditure grew
most, that is, it more than doubled; whereas, for
example, in Germany, the corresponding growth was
only slightly more than 10 percent. The same trend
of rapid increase is also illustrated by the fast motorization rate demonstrated in the Eurostat statistics:
in Poland, the number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants
grew from 195 to 314 from 1995 to 2004; and in
Lithuania, from 198 to 384; whereas by comparison
in Denmark the increase was from 321 to 354 only.
The New Economics Foundation, an independent
think-and-do tank, has composed the Happy Planet
Index, which comprises indicators of life satisfaction derived from various European data-sets (e.g.,
Eurobarometer and European Social Survey), life
expectancy and carbon footprint measures that represent planetary resource consumption. In Europe,
particularly postsocialist countries, have a low Happy
Planet Index; meaning high carbon footprint, low
life expectancy, and low life satisfaction. From the
bottom 10 of this list of 30 countries, Estonia is the
30th, Bulgaria is 28th, Hungary is 26th, Lithuania
is 25th, the Czech Republic is 24th, and Slovakia
is the 23rd. Only Slovenia (the 8th) and Latvia (the
10th) are doing considerably better. Thus, a pattern
emerges by which many postsocialist consumer cultures can be characterized: climbing consumption

343

levels (at least until the economic crisis that became
especially severe in late 2008 and 2009); increasingly
sophisticated commercial environments in terms of
retail space or intensity of advertising and branding
coupled with heavy resource consumption, especially
by industry; and relatively low quality-of-life indicators. The latter can be at least partly explained by the
cultural trauma experienced by the peoples of these
countries, in which a relatively sharp and painful
adaptation to the norms as well as opportunities of
the new, Western-style consumer culture has played
a significant role.

Clash Between Generations
Various studies on the consumption of the region
touch on tensions, as well as coexistence and interweaving of the so-called old and new values and symbols. For example, the well-known Polish sociologist
Piotr Sztompka has argued that the cultural context
of transition is ambivalent: the symbols, values, and
identities brought about by new cultural flows exist
in parallel with old traditions, narratives, and values.
Members of society who are faced with the challenge
of coping with the ambivalence of a new situation
may refer both to old and new cultural resources.
Different social groups may pick up diverse symbols
and narratives. In particular, Sztompka emphasizes
differences between generations in a transition culture. This applies also in the context of consumer
culture where the older generations (people over
fifty years of age at the beginning of the twenty-first
century) whose youth fell in the socialist years often
feel nostalgia for the socialist time. This is contrasted
with today’s excessive materialism, show-off mentality based on commodities, and social stratification in
which wealth and the ability to consume according
to Western standards are key indicators. The elderly
are often faced with coping difficulties in which their
cultural trauma (i.e., the disappearing relevance of old
symbols, resources, and skills) still plays its role. If the
shortage of goods during the socialist times was often
experienced as a collective failure, the new scarcities
and deficiencies of the new Western consumer culture
are conceptualized as private failures, that is, lack of
money and lower experienced social status.
At the same time, the younger generations (especially those born after the collapse of the socialist
bloc), express the highest levels of adaptation to
the new consumerist lifestyles, as well as the least

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Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe

coping difficulties. The so-called children of freedom
or postrevolutionary generations have been the most
receptive to new cultural flows of self-expressive consumerism and the sign system of commercially produced and branded goods and services, according to
a U.S. scholar Juliet Schor, who is known for her critique of the influence of consumer society on children.

Sustainability and Consumerism
as Indicators of Lifestyle

Index

A study conducted by Veronika Kalmus and colleagues in Estonia creates a typology of the postsocialist consumer, which cannot be fully generalized
to all postsocialist consumer cultures but can serve
as an illustration. It may be hypothesized that similar
consumer types exist in all the postsocialist Eastern
European countries, although proportions and
sociodemographic portraits of types differ. The typology is based on a representative survey (n = 1,475),
and the data were gathered in 2005. With cluster
analysis, four consumer types were created: the saving
type, the green consumerist type, the indifferent type,
and the lavish type. Indices (i.e., aggregate variables
consisting of several single variables) of consumerism
(orientation toward higher level of spending and selfexpression through consumption) and sustainable
consumption (environmentally conscious consumption practices) were used.
Figure 1 reveals that the largest proportion of
the Estonian population belongs to either the saving
5.00
4.50
4.00
3.50
3.00
2.50
2.00
1.50
1.00
0.50
0.00

Consumerism
Sustainable consumption

Saving
41%

Figure 1

Indifferent
Green
28%
consumerist
17%

Lavish
14%

Levels of Consumerism and Sustainable
Consumption (Index Means) in Consumer
Types in Estonia (Data from 2005)

Source: Data from Kalmus et al. 2009, 53–74.

type, for whom consumerism plays an insignificant
role and who are also environmentally conscious
and thrifty in the financial sense. These people are
mostly over forty-five years of age and more often
men than women. Another large group is the indifferent type, whose relationship both with the expressive dimensions of consumerism and sustainability
is passive. These are mostly elderly people (over
sixty-four years of age) and most often males. The
green consumerists embody new values of Western
consumerism as well as greenness. They are often
younger (twenty to forty-four years of age), females,
and relatively wealthy. The so-called lavish type,
who are consumerist in their orientation but not
sustainable, are mostly the youngest people (fifteen
to nineteen years of age). Gender distribution in this
type is even.
While the indifferent and saving types most notably draw on older behavioral patterns and symbols,
as well as being not as active participants in today’s
consumer culture due to both economic and psychological reasons, the lavish and green consumerist types
can be called new. Both value material consumption
as a vehicle for self-expression, either combined with
greenness or not.

Conclusion
In the new member states of the EU, consumption growth rates have been fast, indicating a wish
to make up for the lagging behind of the previous
decades. At the same time, it can be assumed that in
the postsocialist countries, the individual consumer’s
behavioral patterns are influenced by the socialist
past. Many people, especially the older generations,
are sustainable in a pragmatic sense, by inertia and
habit, whereas the new conscious environmental attitude of green consumption is still slow to take root
both among the young and old.
A major future challenge for research on consumption in this region is to conduct comparative
quantitative and qualitative studies between the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe and different
postsocialist regions of the world. To date, the bulk
of studies have focused on a single country. It may be
assumed that the socialist past will continue to have
its impact on the consumers of this region for generations to come, be it in the memories of the people
still living or in stories and maybe even legends and
myths about the past. New issues to be focused on by

Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War

scholars of consumption are, for example, marketing targeted at, and the new consumer culture constructed by, youth and children—ranging from their
media use to food consumption, which are highly
debated and problematic areas; themes related to
sustainable consumption by households; as well as
issues of political and ethical consumption.
Margit Keller
See also Americanization; Consumer Culture in the USSR;
Consumer Expenditure Surveys; Consumer Sovereignty;
Consumption in Postsocialist China; Consumption
Patterns and Trends; Socialism and Consumption

Further Readings
Åslund, Anders. Building Capitalism: The Transformation
of the Former Soviet Bloc. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Practical Reason: On the Theory of
Action. Cambridge: Polity, 1998.
Eurostat. Motorisation Rate. Dataset. 2008. http://epp
.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=
1&language=en&pcode=tsdpc340&plugin=0.
Feher, Ferenc, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus.
Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet
Societies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
Fehérváry, Krisztina. “American Kitchens, Luxury
Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in
Postsocialist Hungary.” Ethnos 67 (2002): 369–400.
Kalmus, Veronika, Margit Keller, and Maie Kiisel. “Emerging
Consumer Types in a Transition Culture: Consumption
Patterns of Generational and Ethnic Groups in Estonia.”
Journal of Baltic Studies 40 (2009): 53–74.
Keller, Margit, and Triin Vihalemm. “Coping with
Consumer Culture: Elderly Urban Consumers in PostSoviet Estonia.” Trames 9 (2005): 69–91.
Kennedy, Michael. Cultural Formations of PostCommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation and
War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Lauristin, Marju, and Peeter Vihalemm. “Political Agenda
during Different Periods of Estonian Transformation:
External and Internal Factors.” Journal of Baltic Studies
1 (2009): 1–28.
Lauristin, Marju, Peeter Vihalemm, Karl E. Rosengren, and
Lennart Weibull, eds. Return to the Western World:
Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian PostCommunist Transition. Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University
Press, 1997.
Schor, Juliet. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and
the New Consumer Culture. New York: Scribner,
2004.

345

Svennebye, Lars. “GDP per Capita, Consumption per
Capita and Comparative Price Levels in Europe.”
Statistics in Focus: Economy and Finance (March 2008).
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/
KS-SF-08-003/EN/KS-SF-08-003-EN.PDF.
Sztompka, Piotr. “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of
Postcommunist Societies.” In Cultural Trauma and
Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron
Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Niel J. Smelser, and Piotr
Sztompka, 155–195. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004.
Thompson, Sam, Saamah Abdallah, Nic Marks, Andrew
Simms, and Victoria Johnson. “The European Happy
Planet Index: An Index of Carbon Efficiency and WellBeing in the EU.” New Economics Foundation, July 16,
2007. http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/
european-happy-planet-index.
Veenis, Milena. “Consumption in East Germany: The
Seduction and Betrayal of Things.” Journal of Material
Culture 4 (1999): 79–112.
Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism and What Comes
Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

CONSUMPTION IN THE UNITED
STATES: COLONIAL TIMES TO
THE COLD WAR
Twenty-first-century Americans live in a consumer
society, wherein people purchase objects and use
them to define themselves and redefine relationships.
Artifacts such as cars, clothing, and electronics speak
to a person’s ideas about self and community, conveying authority, belonging, or rebellion. The artifacts
or objects around us—sometimes called material
culture—give identity to young and old, male and
female, married and single, black and white, telling
others who we are and how we want to be treated.
Clues about the meaning of objects abound in
American popular culture. Slogans like “born to
shop” and “shop ’til you drop” speak to Americans’
basic love of material life. Another adage—“the
clothes make the man”—suggests that objects belong
to a complex nonverbal system allowing people to
communicate with each other. People use artifacts to
create, manage, and display images. Marketing and
merchandising executives at companies that make
and sell the goods know that people understand and
define themselves through their possessions. They

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Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War

acknowledge that shoppers in Walmart differ from
the customers in Saks Fifth Avenue, who seek the
lowest prices or top quality, respectively.
Regardless of where they shop, Americans today
enjoy relatively comfortable and lavish lifestyles. The
per capita consumption rate in the United States is the
highest among industrial economies. The American
standard of living often inspires envy around the
globe, with many third-world countries striving for
equal measure. Yet the activities that define consumer
society—purchasing goods and using them to make
identity statements—are not a part of an inevitable
or natural order. Many cultures barter for necessities,
and some societies accumulate very little. American
consumerism, with its emphasis on abundance for
all, issued from a unique set of circumstances, shaped
by multiple forces and actors beginning in colonial
times and coming to a head during the cold war.

Periodization
Americans were not the first to relish their possessions, and they certainly will not be the last. Earlier
agricultural and industrial societies displayed a
rudimentary consumerist mentality, going back several hundred years. There had always been a small
minority atop society with consumerist tendencies,
but these elites spent their money on goods that conveyed prestige, rather than on fashions or fads. The
endless creation of novelties and the constant production and promotion of the “new and different”
are the marks of a full-blown consumer society.
Historians debate the appearance of the first true
consumer societies, but the consensus focuses on mideighteenth-century northwestern Europe, including
the British colonies in North America. Before then,
only the crème de la crème of certain European societies showed consumerist behavior, such as the wealthy
banker-princes of Renaissance Florence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, consumerist impulses
emerged in regions with commercial economies and
access to international trade, which introduced exotic
products such as sugar, coffee, tea, silk, and porcelain. Holland was an important consumer society in
the 1600s, but Georgian Britain of the 1700s is often
acknowledged as the world’s first true consumer
society. Born of industrialism, colonialism, and world
commerce, Britain’s prosperous middle class had sufficient discretionary income to build fancy houses,
buy Staffordshire china, and wear waistcoats of

embroidered French silk. For the first time in modern
Europe, people other than those at the very top of
society could indulge their fancies and follow cultural
trends that were in fashion.
These trends extended to the British American
colonies, where consumers living on Southern plantations and in port cities from Boston, Massachusetts,
to Alexandria, Virginia, shopped for the “baubles
of Britain.” Consumption figured into debates over
independence, as patriots lobbied for the right to
operate their own factories and engage in international trade free from British constraints. After the
American Revolution (1774–1783), the nation
turned to new concerns, including suffrage, westward expansion, industrialization, and the abolition
of slavery. To establish a national identity, Americans
modified manners and traditions inherited from
the British to create unique standards of behavior.
Whereas the English social traditions limited a person’s upward mobility, Americans learned to define
and reinvent themselves, using their possessions to
display their affiliation with the middle class. British
traditions such as tea drinking continued to be popular customs in the new nation, but the ranked social
hierarchy inherited from the parent began to break
down. The large number of immigrants, combined
with greater opportunities for mobility, gave birth to
a distinctly American “new” middle class that began
to adopt its own symbols of accomplishment, notably, the single-family home on the urban periphery,
the “white-collar” look for men who worked in
offices, and fashionable calico dresses in the newest
colors for women. The relationship between possessions and middle-class identity became the hallmark
of American consumption.
After the Civil War (1861–1865), American consumer society and industrial society matured hand in
hand. The process of industrialization rendered deep
social and cultural changes, creating a new social
order. A larger percentage of the population could
afford a comfortable lifestyle. Neither rich nor poor,
these folks sat on the middle rungs of the social ladder, collectively wielding immense purchasing power
and cultural influence. Their beliefs, values, and
desires became embedded in a system of production
and consumption that still prospers. Americans from
all walks of life—whether coal miners or insurance
brokers—aimed to belong to the middle class.
In the Victorian era (1865–1900), industry and
commerce expanded, and new types of retailers

Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War

appeared: department stores, mail-order houses,
and five-and-tens. Economic growth enabled some
people to shop for a wider selection of factory-made
goods. A standard “consumer identity kit” evolved
to symbolize middle-class respectability: the singlefamily home, cozy furnishings, and fashionable
clothes. Those who could afford it saved up to buy
their own homes, and put together fancy parlors
filled with knickknacks, overstuffed furniture, and
lace curtains. People loved fashion and splurged on
the latest Paris and London styles, which were often
made in the United States.
During the modern era (1900–1945), more and
more people were able to become part of consumer
society. New cultural concepts, such as “personality”
and the “self,” eroded lingering resistance to getting
and spending. It was now more socially acceptable
to envy and covet. Phrases like “keeping up with
the Joneses,” “the standard of living,” “spending
power,” and the “American Dream” entered the
language, connecting material comfort to upward
mobility. Entrepreneurs brought to market products
Americans never knew they needed and wanted.
Illustrated magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and
Saturday Evening Post introduced full-page color
advertising. Brands like Quaker Oats, Kodak, Ford,
and Marlboro transformed the consumer experience.
For the first time, throwaway goods entered the lexicon of American consumption.
In the cold war era (1945–1990), mass consumption expanded its boundaries beyond middle-class
America to a much broader swath of the population
and began fragmenting in the process. In the prosperity that followed World War II, typical middle- and
working-class Americans had steady incomes and
relatively high earnings, allowing them to enjoy the
American Dream. As factory workers entered the
middle class, their tastes for two-tone Buicks and
Cape Cod cottages had an impact on mainstream
design. Synthetic fibers helped create a market for
stylish casual clothing. An explosion in consumer
electronics (televisions, hi-fi stereos, and computers) led to an even bigger explosion in marketable
content (records, cable, and software). New retailing
formats, including national chain stores and big-box
retailers, took advantage of the relaxed regulations
on prices to offer deep discounts on everything from
laundry detergent to designer sportswear. Most
important as the new century approached, niche
marketing to teens, yuppies, urban blacks, Hispanics,

347

single people, gays, and other newly affluent groups
supplanted the very concept of the “mass market.”
Today, most Americans describe themselves as
middle class, regardless of ethnicity, income, occupation, race, marital status, sexual orientation, or religion. Many strive for the symbols of respectability:
the single-family home, an automobile, nice clothing, favorite music, and leisure time. This product
ensemble, or identity kit, has stood at the core of
American consumer society since the mid-1800s.
Many Americans, including recent immigrants and
single people, see the accouterments of a middleclass lifestyle as signs of success. Stores such as
Walmart, IKEA, and Macy’s cater to those wants.
Debates about the political economy often focus on
the “haves” and the “have-nots,” proposing how
more Americans might be included in the culture of
abundance. Discussions about globalization often
consider how international trade, outsourcing, and
immigration might erode it.

Object Lesson: The Horse and Buggy
The horse-drawn buggy or carriage highlights the
functional and culture roles of artifacts in American
society, suggesting how different types of objects
resonated with consumers during different historical epochs. All categories of artifacts go through a
life cycle, enjoying novelty, maturity, and commodity stages. Meaningful objects come and go, carried by cultural tides that ebb and flow. The objects
valued by our Victorian ancestors are not necessarily the ones that we covet, and vice versa. Few millennial newlyweds collect 200-piece china dinner
services, as did the 1890s bride; and no Victorian
consumer had a Motorola television console, or an
Apple iPad. The life cycle of the horse-drawn carriage shows how an object’s popularity changed in
reaction to social, cultural, and economic forces.
New technologies made the horse and carriage
obsolete, but they never entirely disappeared. Over
time, consumers have given new meanings to the
horse and buggy.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
carriage was a luxury vehicle and a status symbol
for wealthy people. Horse-drawn carriages had long
offered mobility and autonomy to people of high
economic status. Victorian Americans who could
afford personal vehicles—these well-off folks were
called the “carriage trade”—did not have to traipse

348

Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War

through dirty streets or rub shoulders on public
trolleys. Victorian carriage owners displayed their
wealth by promenading around parks and Main
Streets on Sunday afternoons. They hired servants to
drive their carriages, and paid neighborhood stables
to feed the horses, look after their health, and keep
the equipment in repair. As shown by Edith Wharton
novels, such as The Age of Innocence and The House
of Mirth, the New Yorker who stepped out of a personal carriage impressed those on the sidewalk with
his or her importance. People who didn’t own carriages could hire a hackney, or hack, much as we rent
taxicabs, or take public conveyances. Horses and
carts were often owned by people of lesser means
who earned their livelihoods by hauling produce
and other goods around, or collecting rags for recycling by the paper mills.
The automobile, introduced to America around
the turn of the twentieth century, pushed carriages off
the streets. This happened gradually over the course
of several decades. Wealthy people upgraded to chauffeured cars, while men from the professional classes
preferred to drive rather than rent a hack, ride the
train, or take the trolley. The father of the American
automotive industry, Henry Ford, targeted farmers
and factory workers as customers for the world’s first
mass-market car, the Model T. Other auto companies
followed, disseminating affordable personal transportation to a wider range of income groups. General
Motors led the pack, creating “a car for every purse
and purpose” and introducing the famous “ladder
of consumption,” whereby people were encouraged
to trade in and buy up as their incomes and tastes
matured. In the 1920s, one out of four households
owned cars, and more hoped to buy them. The carriage became a relic of the past; the term horse and
buggy, synonymous with old-fashioned.
After World War II, consumer preferences shifted
again, giving new meanings to cars and carriages.
Changes to the landscape, living standards, and
credit practices allowed more people to purchase
automobiles. By 2000, nine out of ten American
households had cars. Near ubiquity changed the
automobile’s status and meaning. Some people coveted luxury vehicles such as the Cadillac, the BMW,
or the Lexus, but many consumers began to think
about the car as a basic necessity, or commodity.
Japanese manufacturers had anticipated the shift
away from showy to utilitarian vehicles, marketing
automobiles for their reliability rather than styling

beginning in the 1970s. All the major manufacturers responded with simpler shapes, plainer colors,
and more technological buzz for the buck as the car
ceased to be a status symbol and assumed a new role
as basic transportation.
By this time, the horse-drawn vehicle had entered
a new phase in its life cycle, becoming a curiosity and
a desirable collectible for wealthy carriage enthusiasts. In the post–World War II years, horse-drawn
vehicles were occasionally seen on city streets with
the ragman, the country farmer, and the peanut vendor. Today, the horse-and-buggy is a tourist attraction, relegated to romantic drives in Central Park
in New York, sightseeing around the Liberty Bell in
Philadelphia, and carriage parades at county fairs
and point-to-point races.
Over the past two centuries, the horse-drawn
carriage had gone full circle, moving from a status
symbol for the upper class to obsolescence in modern times to a collectible antique. This cycle typifies
the rise and fall of many consumer products in the
American economy. As goods entered the marketplace, consumers tested them out to decide whether
they fit into daily routines. Objects survived as long
as they had a function, whether practical or symbolic.
Replacements better satisfied technical or emotional
needs. Technology and aesthetics engaged in an eternal dance, and obsolescence was the final outcome.

Dissonant Voices
As Americans shifted some of their attention away
from the family, community, politics, and religion to
the marketplace, anxious observers worried about
the impact of this dramatic change. Critiques of
American materialism date back to the colonial era,
but those written beginning in the Victorian period
tackled the social transformations that accompanied
industrialization and urbanization. In 1899, sociologist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the
Leisure Class, a stinging indictment of American
capitalism. Veblen focused on newly wealthy people
who liked to show off their social status through their
possessions. He criticized their fancy clothes, ornate
carriages, and ostentatious mansions. Veblen considered these expenditures of energy and resources as
wasteful and described them with the catchy phrase,
conspicuous consumption.
Good ideas captured in snappy expressions often
take on lives of their own. Conspicuous consumption

Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War

was no exception. Dozens of twentieth-century social
critics followed Veblen, their eyes fixed on flagrant
displays of wealth and their sharp wits ready to attack
all sorts of indulgences. Conspicuous consumption
worked its way into the American language as shorthand for reckless materialism up and down the social
ladder. These discussions circulated through popular
culture during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which
were key decades for the expansion, contraction, and
reinvigoration of consumer culture. Journalist Vance
Packard’s 1960 bestseller, The Waste Makers, questioned the American auto industry’s annual model
change. Packard suggested that tail fins, chrome trim,
and brilliant colors were a misapplication of manpower and materials. Packard contended that outrageous designs and seductive advertising campaigns
roped Americans into buying cars, appliances, and
other goods that they did not really need. He called
this business strategy “planned obsolescence.” In
common parlance, it added up to conspicuous consumption by the American middle class.
More recently, a new generation of critics has
turned their attention to the environmental impact of
consumerism. They wonder about the sustainability
of consumer culture in the context of global warming and worry about things like pollution and toxic
waste. They question America’s throwaway culture
and its love affair with gas-guzzling sport utility
vehicles (SUVs), McMansions (oversized, pretentious
homes), and gourmet kitchens with marble counter
tops. Among these jeremiads, journalist Thomas
Frank, economist Juliet B. Schor, sociologist Stuart
Ewen, and historian Gary S. Cross ask whether endless advertising and high levels of consumption are
really necessary. These pundits garner a good deal
of attention in college classrooms, raising important questions about ecology, the environment, and
sustainability.
Not all analysts have believed that consumerism is
socially sinister or environmentally unsound. Many
thoughtful observers saw consumption as a powerful
economic force that could reduce the gap between
rich and poor, or satisfy basic human needs for pleasure and community. A pioneer thinker in this regard
was the economist Simon N. Patten. In The New
Basis of Civilization (1907), Patten argued that industrialization had transformed America into a nation of
abundance and that working people should be financially empowered to participate. Consumerism had
the potential to diminish the material inequalities

349

that had plagued humankind since time immemorial, eradicating poverty, darkness, and discomfort.
In our time, libertarian Virginia I. Postrel, who has
written for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and The
Atlantic, is a vocal opponent of anticonsumption
jeremiads. Postrel asks Americans to reflect deeply
on the pros and cons of consumer culture, emphasizing the importance of style and glamour as cultural
forces that give meaning to people’s personal lives.
Similarly, sociologist Sharon Zukin believes that
consumption is a pleasurable experience that helps
people understand themselves and their communities. “We dream of shopping for beauty, truth and
perfection,” Zukin writes in Point of Purchase, “and
if we do not shop for a perfect society, at least we
shop for a perfect self” (2004, 268).
While the democratization of consumption was
a noble dream, not everyone had easy access to it.
People on the fringes of American society found that
believing and getting were two different things. Some
battled for the ability to be consumers. Social historians like Lizabeth Cohen and Lawrence B. Glickman
have shown that generations of factory workers put
the living wage and middle-class comforts at the top
of their union agendas. Others, born in rural America,
were slow to get modern conveniences because of a
simple accident of geography or skepticism. When
innovations finally reached the hinterlands, many
country folk opened their arms. Most farm families
enthusiastically adopted new consumer technologies, including the telephone and automobile, which
lessened the isolation of country life, but pockets of
resistance to electrification retarded the spread of
consumer durables like refrigerators. For still others, the market basket remained out of reach until
very recently. Racism, ethnic prejudice, and sexism
relegated certain groups, including many blacks and
poor white women, to the economic margins. Latetwentieth-century gains in civil rights combined with
globalization lowered some of the bars, and millions
of people living on modest incomes ultimately began
shopping at big-box discounters to buy a better life.
The role of the intellectual in society is to
ask tough, sometimes uncomfortable questions.
Ordinary citizens, however, have the right to decide
whether or not to listen. Over the past 200 years,
many Americans have ignored the critics of consumer society and shopped to their hearts’ content.
Like Patten and Postrel, many believed material
comfort to be an essential right of every American

350

Consumption Patterns and Trends

citizen. Politicians and citizens have variably called
this idea “the pursuit of happiness,” the “freedom
from want,” and the “American Dream.” Social scientists have described it as the basic human need for
food, clothing, and shelter.
Consumerism has always been seen as a mixed
blessing. The majority bought more and better goods,
and a few dissented. American enterprise came under
fire for encouraging people to buy, but many people
welcomed the new products that made life warmer,
cleaner, and generally easier.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk
See also Affluent Society; Cold War; Conspicuous
Consumption; Consumer Revolution in EighteenthCentury Britain; Patten, Simon Nelson; Planned
Obsolescence; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. American Consumer Society,
1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. Wheeling, IL:
Harlan-Davidson, 2009.
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York:
Knopf, 2003.
Cross, Gary S. An All-Consuming Century: Why
Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000.
Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and
the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,
Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Glickman, Lawrence B. A Living Wage: American Workers
and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997.
Packard, Vance. The Waste Makers. New York: D. McKay,
1960.
Patten, Simon N. The New Basis of Civilization. New
York: Macmillan, 1907.
Postrel, Virginia I. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of
Aesthetic Consciousness Is Remaking Commerce, Culture,
and Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New
York: Macmillan, 1899.
Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed
American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.

CONSUMPTION PATTERNS
AND TRENDS
The economic notions of consumption patterns refer
to expenditure patterns of income groups across or
within categories of products, such as food, clothing,
and discretionary items. Sociocultural and political
extensions of the consumption pattern idea probe the
class, cultural, and symbolic dimensions of organization of consumption.
Although there are significant sociohistorical
studies of how society organizes consumption—that
is, of patterns of consumption (see, e.g., Braudel
1992; Campbell 1987; Slater 1999)—studies of
contemporary consumption patterns from sociocultural perspectives are relatively sparse. This is to a
great extent because the long perspective of history,
often very necessary to understand the patterning of
consumption, is unavailable to social and cultural
scholars looking at consumption phenomena as they
happen. Of course, a whole industry of consultants
exists to identify unfolding consumption trends (see,
e.g., Naisbitt 1988; Popcorn 1992), but the consulting reports have very instrumental goals and lack
analytical and interpretive depth. As a result, contemporaneous consumption patterns receive mostly
economic treatments—focusing on immediately
measurable factors, such as expenditure patterns.
Macrolevel, contemporary analyses of consumption
patterns from social, cultural, and political perspectives are, however, important to understand the role
of consumption in our lives. Such analyses are particularly valuable for those seeking major transformations in the ways production and consumption
activities are organized and controlled.

Economics and Consumption Patterns
The term consumption pattern has been used to
mean different things across history and disciplines.
In economics, it has been mostly used to characterize a household’s allocation of expenditures across
different consumption categories, such as food, housing, clothing, and transportation. This definition has
also been used in the marketing literature.
Allocation of household consumption expenditures has been of interest in economics since
Ernst Engel detected that as a household’s income
increased, the proportion spent on food decreased.

Consumption Patterns and Trends

This tendency is now known as Engel’s law and it
has been well supported by empirical findings. Later,
this law has been found to also apply to categories
of housing and clothing, both in terms of absolute
amounts and in terms of income elasticity—which
indicates that the portion of incremental income
spent on food, housing, and clothing decreases with
each increase in income.
The term consumption pattern can also be found
being used to define differences in households’ use of
products within the same consumption category. For
example, when William T. Tucker found that people
drank more gin and vodka on the West Coast of the
United States, more Scotch on the East Coast, and
more bourbon in the southern states, this variation
was expressed in terms of differing consumption
patterns. According to this usage, consumption of
more red meat in certain households in comparison
to poultry consumption in others, or preference for
sports utility vehicles in some parts of a country versus sedans in other parts would be considered variations in consumption patterns.
There are principal differences in these two usages
of the term. Whereas the first usage relates to relationships among consumption categories, the second
usage refers to differences within a consumption category. The two, however, may well be complementary,
as consumption of different products within the consumption categories will probably affect the allocation of household budgets among them. Differences
in the cost of habitual products in each consumption
category, differences in the usage rates they necessitate, and the like, will impact on the portions of
household budgets that go to each category. These
two definitions of consumption patterns, therefore,
need not be considered as compartmentalized and
mutually exclusive.

Brand Choice and Category Choice
Furthermore, consumption choices in each category
occur at different levels. Differentiated versions of a
product under the same brand name constitute one
level. One may choose a two-door Chevrolet instead
of a four-door version. Brand choice is another level.
One may choose a Chevrolet versus a Toyota, for
example. Another level of choice is among products
in the same category. For example, in the category of
housing, one may choose between an independent
free-standing house or villa, a townhouse, and an

351

apartment unit in a large apartment building; or in
transportation, one may choose a motorcycle versus
an automobile. Yet another level of choice is among
the different modes that respond to needs in the same
consumption category. An example is the choice of a
public transportation means (e.g., a bus) versus the
private mode of transportation (e.g., a private car).
These choices across different levels have changed,
not only with household income or with other household characteristics or with geography, but also across
history and across cultures. What people choose and
how they choose to allocate their budgets for household consumption are, thus, influenced by various
factors. In the end, these influences reflect on households’ preferences regarding how they wish to live
their lives and what type of consumption will support
these ways of life. Consumption patterns, therefore,
reflect choices that people make for a way of life.

Consumption Patterns and Ways of Life
In trying to understand how options for a way of
life are reflected in consumption, A. Fuat Fırat and
Nikhilesh Dholakia proposed that consumption
choices people make mirror preferences along dimensions that represent culturally significant values. They
found four dimensions that stood out at the time that
modernity matured. These were called the social
relationship dimension, the domain of availability
dimension, the human involvement dimension, and
the level of participation dimension. They suggest
that alternatives available in consumption categories
(at different levels of consumption choices previously
discussed) that represent a particular pattern across
these dimensions become preferred because they fit
the way of life that is sought at a time in history, in a
culture.
In their analysis, Fırat and Dholakia observe that
the two extremes of the social relationship dimension
are individual and collective. The domain of availability dimension ranges from public to private, and
the human involvement dimension stretches between
active and passive. For the level of participation
dimension, the two ends are represented by participatory versus alienated consumption. As the twentieth century neared its end, a pattern of individual,
private, alienated, passive consumption had diffused
strongly—especially in modern capitalist societies
where people had discretionary incomes. Fırat and
Dholakia argue that this was an understandable

352

Consumption Patterns and Trends

consequence of dependence on economic market
growth. In a modern industrial economy, individual
rather than shared consumption of products that are
privately rather than publicly owned will help the
market (and therefore the capital of the enterprises
that serve the market) to grow as each individual, for
example, separately consumes his or her iPod that
he or she owns, instead of iPods being shared—this
means more iPods would be sold in the market.
Similarly, as products are introduced into the market
that substitute human activity, for example in washing dishes or clothes, more exchanges are created in
the market by having these products (e.g., washing
machines) in each household rather than in a common and shared washing facility. Finally, in an industrial economy, mass production capabilities are aided
when the products can be standardized through
alienation of each consumer from the process of
designing the products and the production process.
The alienated worker-consumer, quite simply, seeks
ways of overcoming alienation in the sphere of
consumption.

Transmodern Transformations
In the second half of the twentieth century, a period
that many now consider as late or high modernity,
this particular consumption pattern had diffused
widely and globally—in actual buying terms or in
aspirational terms (for those whose incomes were
constrained)—in all market economies. As a result,
products such as the automobile, the refrigerator, the
television set, and the dishwasher were the ones that
had the highest ownership ratios in households. They
all shared in representing the individual-privatepassive-alienated pattern. As modernity has reached
its peak and a new cultural epoch may be dawning,
however, and with developments in especially communications technologies, this pattern of consumption may also be beginning a transformation.
One obvious transformation in the dominant
pattern of consumption is increased participation
by consumers in the production, assemblage, and,
in some cases, designing of the commodities they
acquire. New technologies of the web have increased
the possibilities for consumers to become interactive
with the organizations that offer these commodities.
Such technologies of “mass customization,” “cocreation,” and “co-production” seem to grow, with
more and more consumers opting to become engaged
in the shaping of some of the final products that they

acquire from organizations. Clearly, not every consumer who uses these technologies is interested in
using them for all of his or her acquisitions. Thus, for
most products that consumers acquire, still largely
for individual-private consumption, consumers are
still alienated from the designing, production, and
assemblage processes. Yet, the trend toward alienation may be waning in contemporary consumption.
While the trends toward individual and private
consumption are continuing, a trend similar to the
one away from alienation is observable in the trend
away from passive consumption. Because of interactive technologies and growing health and fitness
consciousness, many consumers are becoming less
passive in their consumption practices with some
products.
Both the trends observed during the growth of
modernity and trends as a new epoch approaches
exhibit strong influences of culture and of the diffusion of ideas regarding the meaning of life. In modern culture, these influences were primarily mediated
through the structure of available alternatives in society, which was largely the outcome of necessities and
technologies of production to expand the market and
grow the capitalist economy. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century the market centeredness of our
economy can still be observed. Indeed, the seemingly
consumerist orientation of consumer participation
and co-creation processes is often nothing more than
a new way for capitalist enterprises to appropriate
consumers’ labor with minimal or no compensation,
as noted by Detlev Zwick, Samuel Bonsu, and Aron
Darmody, or a way to “manufacture” digital representations of consumers that are prescreened to be
eager and ready consumers of what the enterprise
has to offer, as noted by Zwick and Dholakia.
However, strong cultural trends that move
human desires and interest away from material accumulation and toward seeking richness
of experiences and toward the symbolic, as well
as cooperative and sharing trends, especially in
the technologies of communication, can also be
observed. These trends confirm the current significance of the media in the conveyance of influence
on consumption patterns and they signal the potential for substantive transformations in the nature of
consumption patterns.
Nikhilesh Dholakia and A. Fuat Fırat
See also Branding; Consumer Demand; Consumer
Expenditure Surveys; Engel’s Law; Individualization;

Content Analysis
Information Technology; Measuring Standards of
Living; Prosumption

Further Readings
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century: The Structure of Everyday Life. Vol. 1.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Burk, Marguerite. “Ramifications of the Relationship
between Income and Food.” Journal of Farm
Economics 44 (February 1962): 115–125.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. London: Blackwell, 1987.
Eilensteine, Donald, and James P. Cunningham. “Projected
Consumption Patterns for a Stationary Population.”
Population Studies 26 (July 1972): 223–231.
Fırat, A. Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “Consumption
Patterns and Macromarketing: A Radical Perspective.”
European Journal of Marketing 11, no. 4 (1977):
291–298.
Fırat, A. Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “Consumption
Choices at the Macro Level.” Journal of
Macromarketing 2 (Fall 1982): 6–15.
Fırat, A. Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. Consuming People:
From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Houthakker, Hendrik S. “An International Comparison of
Household Expenditure Patterns, Commemorating the
Centenary of Engel’s Law.” Econometrica 25 (October
1957): 81–95.
Naisbitt, John. Megatrends: Ten New Directions
Transforming Our Lives. New York: Grand Central
Publishing, 1988.
Popcorn, Faith. The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the
Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. New
York: Doubleday, 1992.
Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. London:
Polity, 1999.
Tucker, William T. The Social Context of Economic
Behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1964.
Webster, Frederick E. Social Aspects of Marketing.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974.
Zwick, Detlev, Samuel K. Bonsu, and Aron Darmody.
“Putting Consumers to Work: ‘Co-Creation’ and New
Marketing Govern-Mentality.” Journal of Consumer
Culture 8, no. 2 (2008): 163–196.
Zwick, Detlev, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “Strategic
Database Marketing: Customer Profiling as New
Product Development.” In Marketing Management: A
Cultural Perspective, edited by Lisa Peñalosa, Nil
Toulouse, Luca Massimiliano Visconti, chapter 27.
London: Routledge, 2011.

353

CONTENT ANALYSIS
Content analysis is a methodologically explicit way
of analyzing texts, involving quantitative and qualitative procedures. Klaus Krippendorff defines content analysis as “a research technique for making
replicable and valid inferences from data to their
context” (1980, 21). Ole R. Holsti notes that it typically requires an adherence to explicit selection and
coding procedures to ensure reliability and validity.
The technique was initially developed as an application of natural science methods to the analysis of an
emerging mass media after World War I, specifically
in terms of the “accuracy” of messages. German
radio broadcasts during World War II were analyzed for the detection of hidden content. Since the
1940s, it has been most commonly used in mass
communication research and latterly cultural studies, investigating a broader range of “texts” including photographs, movies, diaries and journals,
music, television, film, letters, law cases, manifestos,
and advertisements. Also important, both existing
print texts and anything that can be converted
to printed form are available for content analysis, and this would also include interview data or
field notes. It concerns the empirical identification
of patterns and relationships in a sample of texts.
The technique has been used across disciplines,
including sociology, politics, feminist studies, and
law, history, and policy studies. In studies of consumer culture, the technique has been used to analyze media representations of consumption and the
emergence of discourses of consumer culture.
Although it may involve quantitative and qualitative procedures, and combinations of both, the
distinctions and applicability of each are subject to
some debate. The more common procedure has been
quantitative, partly as content analysis has historically restricted its scope to the content of the text as
opposed to its wider context or its possible interpretations. It is also conceived in some applications as an
“objective” means of identifying previously selected
characteristics of texts that are regarded as “manifest.” Manifest content is that that appears obvious
or at least unambiguous in its meaning. Qualitative
procedures are used when connections between the
symbolic characteristics of texts and the cultural
context of which they are part are to be drawn. The
focus remains on identifying the characteristics in a
valid and reliable manner, but may refer more often

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Content Analysis

to the “latent” content of the text. Latent content
is that which is thought primarily symbolic, or that
has underlying meanings in wider context. Content
analysis is usually conducted as follows.

Selection
Content analysis usually works with large data sets,
such as a complete run of a particular magazine or
newspaper, a complete set of interview transcripts,
and so on. The selection process may be an outcome
of a specific research hypothesis or a limit placed on
the scale of the data set to be used (e.g., between specific dates). Different sampling methods may then be
employed but must be consistently applied in line with
the requirement for the reliability of the measures and
the validity of the findings. Sampling may be random (using a random number table), stratified (using
groupings in the data set), systematic (using intervals in the data), or cluster (using random groups).
Whatever the procedure, the sample must be “sufficiently exhaustive to account for each variation of
message content” (Berg 2004, 240). In other words,
the sample must be large enough to cover all variation
of text content, rather than that which simply confirms the hypothesis. Though these approaches vary,
there must be systematicness in the established rules
for examination before analysis begins.

Codes and Coding
Once the selection of texts has been made, a set of
categories must be established for coding the texts.
In traditionally quantitative procedures, the structure
of the categories employed is deemed descriptive and
objective in that they are thought to correspond to
what is actually in the text. In some qualitative procedures, the categories for coding may be interpretively
defined in relation to relevant theoretical issues. Both
involve processes of deciding what the unit of analysis is (words, themes, characters, paragraphs, items,
concepts, and so on) to which the coding procedures
of locating, marking, and tallying will be applied.
Coding categories must be exhaustive, exclusive, and
have some analytical power in revealing interesting
patterns, absences, or perhaps counterintuitive historical trends. Codes may involve looking at whether
specific facts, phrases, images, and words are missing from texts as well as what and which are present. Codes must be unambiguous to be replicable by
other researchers.

Analysis
The selected texts are coded—each text may have
many codes attached to it—with the codes subsequently being quantified. Quantities of codes across
the sample may be counted using absolute or relative
frequency counts (how many times a specific word
appears, as a percentage). This may be extended
quantitatively using associations, cross-tabulations,
and correlations to measure possible relationships
between different codes in the sample (between, say,
“sustainable” and “consumption”). In a qualitative
approach, relationships might be drawn between
explicit codes and externally derived themes that
relate to theoretical concerns or from the literature
base being drawn on by researchers (which might
relate to “class,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “sustainability,” etc.).
As the quantification of codes provides largely
descriptive data, these results are often triangulated
with other methods, such as case studies or discourse
analysis, in an effort to complement interpretation.
Many exemplary applications of content analysis
have used such complementary methods. For example, Edward Epstein examined responses to AIDS in
the United States using a content analysis of newspaper articles, augmenting this with interviews and
discourse analysis. Similarly, where feminist critiques
of quantitative content analysis have been skeptical of the objectivity of selection and coding, they
have employed content analysis as a complementary
interpretive technique that explicitly acknowledges
a feminist standpoint. More subtly, Catherine A.
Lutz and Jane L. Collins’s (1993) coding procedures
in their book, Reading National Geographic, are
shaped by both broader contextual understandings
of their selection (600 photographs in National
Geographic) and by thematic interpretations of categorical relations.

Consumer Culture Analyses
The most suitable application of content analysis for
studies of consumer culture concerns historically specific, cross-cultural, and comparative trajectories of
advertising, marketing, and related visual and textual
materials. For example, Martin Hand and Elizabeth
Shove conducted a content analysis using a systematic
selection of household magazines over a hundredyear period, coding to identify changes in how

Convenience

355

kitchens are “orchestrated” within the confines of
the texts. This was interpreted in relation to shifts in
anticipated orientations to consumption practices in
the home tied to technological conventions. Similar
content analyses of consumer culture have also been
used to explore “sex” as a commodity in movie
trailers (Oliver and Kalyanaraman 2006), the evolution of comic strips in relation to consumer culture
(Gordon 1998), the distinctive “national” promises
of consumer culture in print advertisements (Tse,
Belk, and Zhou 1998), all of which use explicit codes
for tracking valid instances and generating specific
accounts of socioeconomic and cultural change as it
is represented in textual form.
However, it is arguably the case that most applications have been far less formalized or methodologically explicit in this field and the boundaries between
content and narrative or discourse analysis are far
from clear. This has to do with broader shifts in the
social sciences toward contextualized understandings of content, and of how analyses of consumer
culture have, on the whole, wanted to elaborate on
the “readerley” context of the text as opposed to an
exclusively quantitative approach. For example, in
an exemplary study of the commodification of childhood, Daniel Thomas Cook conducts an analysis of
changes in the representation and constitution of a
figure of the “child consumer” through the imagery and terminology of advertising. It is precisely
the relationships between these texts and the wider
processes of manufacturing and marketization—a
set of relations that remains outside of the scope of
conventional content analysis—that provides the
explanatory power. In other words, the application of content analysis to consumer culture usually
involves either semiotics (as in Leiss et al. 1990) or
discourse analysis (as in Cook 2004) as a complementary method.

the Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture,
1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1998.
Hand, Martin, and Elizabeth Shove. “Orchestrating
Concepts: Kitchen Dynamics and Regime Change in
Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home 1922–2002.”
Home Cultures 1, no. 3 (2004): 235–257.
Holsti, Ole R. Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and
Humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969.
Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to
Its Methodology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1980.
Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline
Bottreill. Social Communication in Advertising: Persons,
Products and Images of Well-Being. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Manning, Peter K., and Betsy Cullum-Swan. “Narrative,
Content and Semiotic Analysis.” In Collecting and
Interpreting Qualitative Materials, edited by Norman
K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 246–276. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
Neuendorf, Kimberly A. The Content Analysis Guidebook.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001.
Oliver, Mary Beth, and Siriam Kalyanaraman. “Using Sex
to Sell Movies: A Content Analysis of Movie Trailers.”
In Sex in Consumer Culture: The Erotic Content of
Media and Marketing, edited by Tom Reichert and
Jacqueline Lambiase,13–30. London: Routledge, 2006.
Reinharz, Shulamit. Feminist Methods in Social Research.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Tse, David K., Russell W. Belk, and Nan Zhou. “Becoming
a Consumer Society: A Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural
Content Analysis of Print Ads from Hong Kong, the
People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan.” The Journal
of Consumer Research 15, no. 4 (1989): 457–472.

Martin Hand

The term convenience denotes an idea that increasingly suffuses contemporary consciousness. In
January 1998, there were 280,337 different webpages
that mentioned convenience, by November 2010; this
figure has reached 62.7 million. The rising significance of convenience reflects three key processes in
the development of contemporary consumer cultures:
the further embedding of individualized orientations
toward everyday life; the growing importance of
time pressure; and the acceleration of rationalization,
calculation, and commodification in personal life.

See also Advertising; Childhood; Comics; Discourse
Analysis; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Semiotics; Sex

Further Readings
Berg, Bruce L. Qualitative Research Methods for the
Social Sciences. 5th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2004.
Cook, Dan. The Commodification of Childhood:
The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of

CONVENIENCE

356

Convenience

The term convenience is not a new one, it has
been used in English since the fifteenth century, though
the early usages are now obsolete and current applications of the term have their origins no earlier than
the seventeenth century. Three meanings derive from
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first
refers to something that is suitable or well adapted to
the performance of an action or attainment of some
satisfaction. This continues to be an important sense
referring to utensils. A second meaning concerns the
avoidance of personal trouble in particular practices,
and also to material advantage and personal comfort
deriving there from. From this emanate phrases such
as “marriage of convenience” and “at one’s convenience.” A third sense refers to an opportune occasion or an opportunity, as in the phrase “at your
earliest convenience.” All three meanings continue
to operate in contemporary discourse.
The Oxford English Dictionary records no significant new applications of the term convenience
between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s,
when another usage emerged in the United States.
The terms “convenience food” and “convenience
store” indicated that arrangements or commodities might be “designed for convenience or used
when convenient.” In 1968, the British newspaper
the Guardian (December 6, 1968) reported, “No
one would deny the drudgery, the time-wasting, the
monotony, that has been removed by convenience
foods.” As Warde (1999) notes, this more recent
twentieth-century addition to the meaning of the
term relates to notions of saving, or more properly
reordering, time.
Increasingly, convenience acts as a reason for
purchasing a plethora of goods and services and for
decisions about the organization of everyday life.
There has been a perceptible change in emphasis
during the twentieth century on different attributes
of convenience. Houses and hotels used to be advertised as having “all mod cons,” meaning all modern conveniences (electricity, running hot and cold
water, and an indoor lavatory). Such conveniences
were oriented toward comfort—keeping warm, not
having to go outside in the cold to find coal—but
also toward saving labor. A whole set of convenience
devices has emerged in this form. Washing machines
involve less physical labor, prevent chapped hands,
require less than constant attention (the operator
can do something else while clothes get clean), and
take less time overall than handwashing or using a

tub and washboard. Other labor-saving devices are
convenient because they require less cleaning: especially the electric fire, the self-cleaning oven, ceramic
cooktops, and so forth. As Shove (2003) notes, such
convenience devices, sensu stricto, reduce labor input
and reduce labor time attached to a given activity,
but they do not necessarily save time.
Since the 1960s variant emerged, convenience has
increasingly come to take on an additional form: an
appeal to a new way of conceptualizing the manipulation and use of time. First identified by Elizabeth
Shove and Dale Southerton in 2000 in their analysis
of the domestic freezer, the contemporary application of convenience refers to the capacity of goods
and services to reorder the temporal sequences of
everyday practices. The contemporary value of the
freezer, for example, not only rests in its food storage
functions. Its capacity to preserve, to literally freeze
in time, pre-prepared foods allows for the reordering
of the practices of food procurement, preparation,
and consumption such that one activity no longer
needs to follow, sequentially, the other. In a similar
case, Roger Silverstone shows the widespread diffusion of the television video recorder had the effect of
changing the temporal rhythms of households, which
had previously been ordered around the scheduling
of television programs. The video recorder permitted the storing of programs that could be watched
at times that suit individual household members,
reordering household temporal rhythms in the
process. Other time reordering goods and services
include e-mail, telephone answering/messaging services, automatic functions on devices (such as media
recording or ovens), and e-commerce.
The first implication of convenience for understanding contemporary consumer cultures is that it
points to the further individualization and privatization of everyday problems. Convenience usually
refers to the practical purposes of private individuals. It implies consideration of technical and service-based alternatives for the conduct of everyday
practices that refer less to economies of money and
more to economizing of time and toil. Convenience
is a concept referring to the practical purposive
activities of private individuals vis-à-vis their material
reproduction and fulfillment of social commitments.
As Southerton (2003) demonstrates, the appeal of
such alternatives can be found within contemporary
concerns about harriedness. Associated with Schor’s
(1992) work-spend cycles and with fears of missing

Convenience

out on consumer experiences through the inefficient
organization of personal time, convenience goods
and services promise solutions to time pressure by
providing the capacity to control and order one’s personal schedule. The irony is that the consumption of
more goods and services is presented as the solution
to a problem that is widely understood to result from
increasing levels of consumption.
Further irony is found by considering the second
implication of convenience: individualized solutions
to personal schedules only act to create senses of time
pressure in the first place. According to Southerton’s
(2003) research in England, harriedness was not
entirely a consequence of working and consuming
more. Rather, time pressure emerged from the challenge of coordinating practices and people within
one’s personal schedule. In a society where convenience permits the temporal reordering of practices
and more individualized personal schedules, coordinating time to spend together with those that matter
most becomes increasingly difficult. Like the American
working mothers that Craig Thompson (1996) discussed, who struggled through daily life juggling
domestic tasks, child care, and work, Southerton’s
respondents went to great lengths to coordinate their
personal schedules with others. This involved the
scheduling of “hot spots” (periods of intense work
and domestic activities) so as to create temporal space
for “cold spots” of quality time—which, like “convenience,” is a phrase that has taken on particular
meaning and significance since the 1960s.
Through their capacity to create individualized
personal schedules, convenience goods and services
exacerbate the problem they seek to solve: time pressure emanates from the lack of collective alignment
between schedules. This theory comes into sharp
focus when the collective temporal rhythms of daily
life in interwar Britain are compared with the individualized schedules of the contemporary period.
Southerton’s sociohistorical research (2009) showed
that in 1937, personal schedules were collectively
aligned: work times, meal times, and times of leisure
(such as listening to the radio or going to the pub)
were conducted at the same time by the vast majority of people. As a result, coordinating practices and
moments of togetherness were not as problematic.
Southerton concludes by arguing that contemporary
feelings of harriedness are a consequence of the erosion of the collective temporal schedules that once
coordinated everyday lives.

357

The third implication of convenience is that it indicates the acceleration of rationalization, calculation,
and commodification in personal lives. In her influential book The Time Bind: When Work Becomes
Home and Home Becomes Work (1997), Arlie
Russell Hochschild argued that as hours of paid work
increase (what she calls the first shift), time for domestic matters (the second shift) are squeezed, and time
devoted to emotional and interpersonal relationships
become experienced as a “third shift.” Convenience
goods and services, which break down practices into
their component parts and re-sequence those components to maximize temporal efficiency, take on
particular significance. Washing clothes, for example,
is collapsed into components of washing, drying, and
ironing, each component being separate from the others. Even time spent with family and friends comes to
be experienced as a “third shift,” subject to planning
and calculation. For Hochschild, this rationalization
and calculation of personal life corrodes the quality
of time that people spend together.
Convenience is a much-vaunted value. Its prominence is indicative of a major consideration within the
organization of everyday life as a means to express
personal autonomy and pursue personal objectives.
Greater rationalization of the life world and commercialization of daily life occurs as people deploy
new mechanical devices and commercial services
to achieve a reduction in labor time devoted to the
tasks of reproduction, and new planning devices to
develop greater control over the sequencing of activities. At least part of the sense of being harried is the
promise that personal fulfillment will be achieved by
cramming ever more activities into a day, a year, or a
lifetime. Reducing the volume of time devoted to heteronomous personal tasks and achieving greater control over the sequencing of activities lie at the heart of
the appeal to contemporary convenience. The associated frame of mind is one that suggests that there are
always more and more important things to be done
and that it is a duty to fill time as variously and creatively as possible. This attitude has proved a primary
conduit for the further commodification of everyday
life as these aspirations have found a response from
commercial manufacturing and service industries.
While rationalization and commodification are
critical considerations, the concept of convenience
has become increasingly important for investigating
the relationship between time, temporalities, and
consumer cultures. It has opened a range of enquiries

358

Convention Theory

into the temporal rhythms and organization of daily
life, with implications for shedding new light on
understandings of patterns of mobility, personal relationships, and environmental sustainability.
Dale Southerton
See also Commodification; Consumption and Time Use;
Domestic Technologies; Harried Leisure Class;
Individualization; Rationalization; Time-Use Diaries;
Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings
Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The
Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Shove, Elizabeth. “Everyday Practice and the Consumption
and Production of Time.” In Time, Consumption and
Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, edited
by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard
Wilk, 17–34.Oxford: Berg, 2009.
Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the
Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience: A Story of
Normalization.” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3
(2000): 301–319.
Silverstone, Roger. “Time, Information and Communication
Technologies and the Household.” Time and Society 2,
no. 3 (1993): 283–311.
Southerton, Dale. “‘Squeezing Time’: Allocating Practices,
Co-ordinating Networks and Scheduling Society.” Time
and Society 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–25.
Southerton, Dale. “Analysing the Temporal Organisation
of Daily Life: Social Constraints, Practices and Their
Allocation.” Sociology 40, no. 3 (2006): 435–454.
Southerton, Dale. “Temporal Rhythms: Comparing Daily
Lives of 1937 with Those of 2000 in the UK.” In Time,
Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality
and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Shove, Frank
Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 49–63. Oxford:
Berg, 2009.
Thompson, Craig. “Caring Consumers: Gendered
Consumption Meanings and the Juggling Lifestyle.”
Journal of Consumer Research 22 (1996): 388–407.
Warde, Alan. “Convenience Food: Space and Timing.”
British Food Journal 101, no. 7 (1999): 518–527.

CONVENTION THEORY
French convention theory focuses on the quality characteristics of information and the need for common

understandings and not just rules and norms as the
basis of social action. It defends the plurality of publicly justifiable actions based on a limited number of
coherent systems of values that are culturally specific.
French convention theory is both an economic and
a sociological theory. In economics, it emerged in dialogue with the North American game theory approach
to conventions (David K. Lewis: Convention: A
Philosophical Study, 1969) and the “new microeconomic” theories of information, uncertainty and
bounded rationality (George A. Akerlof: “The Market
for Lemons,” 1970). In sociology, it marked a shift
away from the classical concepts of social groups and
classes and a turn to the way action is understood and
justified in concrete situations, aligning itself with the
pragmatist tradition. Differently from earlier French
schools of thought associated with one particular
leading figure, convention theory is itself plural with
a collegiate of leading proponents—Luc Boltanski,
Laurent Thévenot, André Orléan, Olivier Favereau,
François Eymard-Duvernay, Robert Salais—each
developing a specific approach to the way conventions are to be understood.

Key Elements
The key elements of convention theory were established in the 1980s on the basis of research into
the special features of the wage-labor relation. The
uncertainties surrounding the implementation of
labor agreements were analyzed through the notion
of the “incomplete contract,” where features of the
world relevant for the implementation of the contract are not available at the time the agreement is
signed (for an overview, see Jean Tirole: “Incomplete
Contracts: Where Do We Stand?” 1999, 741–781).
A specific contribution of convention theory was to
argue that the notion of incomplete contracts applies
equally to the exchange of products in situations
where key information on the characteristics of the
product is not transmitted by the price mechanism or
evident in the product itself.
Where convention theory takes its distance from
the new microeconomics is in its insistence on the
qualitative nature of information. In addition,
therefore, to problems related to uncertainty and
unequal access to information, convention theory
argues that the same information can be subject to
very different evaluations. Rather than focusing on
quality as an attribute of the product, convention

Convention Theory

theory sees quality as the result of a process of
qualification involving the negotiation of an agreement on the criteria that define the product’s quality. These criteria are embodied in specific practices
and procedures that create objective references for
this process of qualification and prevent the notion
of quality from being reduced to an abstract idea
or a subjective attribution. Here convention theory
converges with the actor-network tradition of analysis in French (Michel Callon and Bruno Latour)
and Anglo-Saxon (United States, England, and the
Scandinavian countries, and specifically John Law)
social science where objects—regulations, technologies, production practices, and standards—become
the organizing principles of collective action in the
form of sociotechnical networks.

Founding Documents
Two publications have established themselves as
the founding documents of French convention theory. The first was a collective endeavor resulting in
the publication of a special issue (volume 40, number 2) of the Revue Économique in 1989 titled the
“Economy of Conventions” edited by Orléan. The
second took the form of a book written by Boltanski
and Thévenot first published by Presses Universitaires
de France (PUF) in 1987 as Les Économies de la
Grandeur (Economies of Worth) and then again by
Gallimard in 1991 with the title De la Justification
(On Justification) by which their work has become
known. The special issue of the Revue Économique
also became published as a book in 1994 with the
title Analyse Économique des Conventions (PUF)
and has been subsequently republished.
The special issue of the Revue Économique
reveals the very close relationship between convention theory and French regulation theory, which also
has the wage-labor relation as its central concern,
seen in this case as the key to interpreting macrosocietal dynamics. Two of regulation theory’s leading
proponents, Robert Boyer and Michel Aglietta, who
contributed to the special issue, draw particular attention to the factors influencing persistence and change
in conventions. One such factor, presented by Mark
Granovetter, are social networks; and Granovetter’s
social network critique of transaction cost approaches
to economic organizations and institutions has been
subsequently adopted in tandem with convention
theory for the analysis of quality markets.

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The special issue explores the conditions for
ensuring collective action in economic activity, with
a central focus on the firm and interfirm relations
in which different patterns of coordination can
be identified whereby the market cedes to client
and partnership relations. In this way, EymardDuvernay develops a typology of firms and coordination based on the different qualities of the
products in question. Subsequently, Robert Salais
and Michael Storper, in their book Les Mondes de
la Production (1993), which was later published
in English as The Worlds of Production (1997),
present a systematic analysis of four radically distinct production dynamics based on the different
qualities of inputs/means of production and final
products. The result is a typology contrasting the
industrial, market, innovation, and interpersonal
worlds. This work was influential in presenting the
French convention perspective to the Anglo-Saxon
social science community. Within these approaches,
consumption, however, remains little explored and
maintains a shadowy presence as an effect of these
different market dynamics.
Boltanski and Thévenot’s book mentioned previously, De la Justification, has a similar focus on the
different logics governing firm behavior. Its concern,
however, is not with the implications of the different
qualities of products for economic coordination but
rather with the way in which different styles of social
action have been historically sanctioned. Within
Western culture, and particularly within the realm
of political philosophy, the authors identify the
consolidation of six value systems, which, following Augustine, they call “cities.” By this they mean
coherent patterns of social behavior that, although
quite distinct and potentially in conflict, have all
established their legitimacy in Western society. David
Starke, whose work “For a Sociology of Worth” has
also been important in introducing French convention theory into the Anglo-Saxon world, calls these
cities “orders of worth.” All have as their baseline
a respect for common humanity but are organized
in terms of very different values implying different
forms of recognition and recompense. An industrial
order of worth gives pride of place to technical competence and efficiency, whereas a market order looks
first to price and consumer satisfaction. Reputation
and opinion can provide the basis for attributing
values and establishing hierarchies, but creativity
and inspiration resting on inner convictions have

360

Convention Theory

equally their place. A domestic order of worth values practices and competences acquired and passed
on through experience. A civic order, for its part,
insists on the centrality of defending public goods
and citizen rights.
Within the Western tradition, therefore, justifiable forms of collective action are plural but at the
same time limited in number. Subsequent to the publication of De la Justification, a green order, based
on ecological values, was proposed both by Bruno
Latour and Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot.
Boltanski, in a later work with Eve Chiapello (Le
Nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme 1999), argues for the
emergence of a network order of worth as economic
activity is increasingly organized around collective
action oriented to the accomplishment of short-term
projects requiring a wide range of heterogeneous
competences.
The second part of De la Justification is dedicated to an analysis of the way each of these orders
of worth can be identified in the practices of modern firms and, as in the case of the special issue,
there is little explicit discussion of consumption.
Nevertheless, the relevance of De la Justification for
a discussion of contemporary dynamics in consumption is quite different from that of the contributions
to the special issue, and each represents a specific
way in which consumption has been considered
within the convention tradition.

Consumption and the Convention Tradition
On the one hand, research programs along the lines of
Eymard-Duvernay, Salais, and Storper have emerged
that consider how the different qualities of the product imply different organizations of the market and
consumption practices. Callon and colleagues, and
Frank Cochoy have paid particular attention to the
ways quality markets require a whole social technology for the appropriate positioning of the consumer.
A recent contribution by Lucien Karpik, L´Économie
des Singularités (2007), who, while close to, marks
his distance from convention theory, develops a
systematic account of the way in which a range of
special quality markets—wines, films, literature,
music—develop systems of judgment that organize
the consumer’s relation to the different markets.
Consumption, in this approach, is analyzed from the
perspective of the particular qualities of the products.
The implications of the analysis developed in
De la Justification and later in Le Nouvel Ésprit

du Capitalisme are quite different. Here, the different values seen to organize economic activity in the
firm are first and foremost historically embedded
values of social action that have established their
legitimacy in Western society. The economic is not
cordoned off from the social, and consumption is
not an effect of the characteristics of the product and
the organization of production. This is particularly
important to the extent that the legitimate orders of
worth are not reduced to the two dominant sets of
values governing economic life—the industrial and
the market orders—or the emerging network order.
The construction of reputation and the consolidation of opinion also constitute a legitimate basis of
evaluation. Orders of worth include both a respect
for tradition/craft and for the inspired activity that
often places this in question. More important, they
include civic values, which reject the immunity of
economic from social values, and the emerging green
order, which questions the economy in the name of
nature.
The significance of this distinction (and complementarity) between the approaches of the special
issue and De la Justification became more evident
in the analysis developed in Le Nouvel Ésprit du
Capitalisme. Here, the conflict provoked by the
emergence of new social and aesthetic movements
in the second half of the twentieth century is seen to
lead to a shifting of the boundaries between the firm
and society, with the former increasingly internalizing elements of the social and aesthetic critique.
Patterns of consumption, therefore, must be situated
within this dual process by which societal values
invade and/or become co-opted in business practices.
A key moment in the diffusion of French convention theory was the collaborative work developed
with researchers from INRA, the French National
Institute for Agricultural Research, on new quality
agricultural markets, particularly organics, and craft
products based on geographical indications. This
collaboration led to the publication of La Grande
Transformation de l’Agriculture (1995). Here, a
whole range of markets (organics, geographical indications) and their systems of certification were analyzed, drawing on the insights of the different orders
of worth, with particular importance given to the
domestic and civic justifications of these markets. Of
central concern here was the way consumption practices increasingly depend on the elaboration of new
mechanisms for generating trust and transmitting
information and guarantees appropriate to notions

Convention Theory

of quality associated as much with the conditions of
production as with the product itself.
From the second half of the 1990s, convention
theory was increasingly adopted in Anglo-Saxon
social science for the analysis of quality markets,
particularly agrofood markets. Often in tandem
with social network and/or actor-network theory,
convention theory has been drawn on to explore the
negotiations that justify contesting proposals for the
institutionalization and regulation of new quality
markets. It has also been employed in the exploration of new producer-consumer relations, particularly in the case of short circuit markets. Here, the
dynamic of the domestic order of worth is conflated
with the interpersonal world, elaborated by Salais
and Storper as a component of their “worlds of
production” typology. Of particular importance has
been the use of convention theory in discussions of
the convergence between the role of consumer and
that of citizen. In this context, alternative networks
and social movements embracing production and
consumption for the promotion of fair trade, organics, and social and environmental justice have been
analyzed through the lens of domestic and civil, in
conflict with industrial, orders of worth.
More broadly, the current dynamics of consumption have been analyzed as a confrontation between
two emerging conventions. One of these, production
oriented, focuses on the increasing capacity to break
down products into their component parts, which is
justified in terms of the benefits of more precise and
efficient targeting. The other has emerged from the
various consumer and civic movements and can be
characterized as having a logic of identity legitimated
in terms of an appeal to naturalness, proximity,
authenticity. It is argued that traditional conventions
governing consumption have been eroded by the shift
to a service economy where consumption is separated
both from production and from the home and is
increasingly confronted with credence goods whose
qualities escape direct confirmation. The result is a
more volatile consumer environment in which confidence is strongly influenced by the predominance of
a reputation or opinion order of worth where values
are filtered through mass communication media.

Future Directions
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the
leading contributors to convention theory have
had their works translated or have published in the

361

Anglo-Saxon press, which has greatly increased the
accessibility of their ideas to an English-speaking public and academic community. A major international
seminar in 2003 in Paris, whose papers were subsequently published, was also a key moment of dialogue with theoretical approaches outside of France,
particularly in the domain of economic sociology. A
more recent development has been the introduction
of convention theory to Germany. At the invitation
of Hans Joas, the German pragmatist philosopher
Boltanski presented a series of lectures that were
published as De la Critique (2009), and Rainer DiazBone has been responsible for a series of publications
on convention theory. These developments converge
with the current concerns of German economic sociology with the moral order of markets, as evident in
the recent work of Jens Beckert.
It can be expected, therefore, that convention theory will continue to make an important contribution
to understanding consumption as issues of quality
become increasingly central to economic organization. Two distinct but complementary contributions
of convention theory have been highlighted. The
first, which can be identified with the line of analysis
developed in the special issue of Revue Économique,
focuses on the new forms of coordination necessary
for the functioning of quality markets. In terms of
consumption, the central contributions here have
been on the new institutionality needed to underpin quality consumer markets and the plurality of
legitimate criteria of consumer evaluation. The second implies a questioning of the boundaries between
markets and society and the distinctions between
consumer and citizen. Qualities are understood
as values, implying a generalized moralization of
economy activity. In this context, convention theory,
particularly in Le Nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme,
connects with discussions of consumer dynamics in
terms of social movements.
John Wilkinson
See also Actor-Network Theory; Economic Sociology;
Economics; Social Network Analysis; Social Networks;
Sociology; Sociotechnical Systems

Further Readings
Allaire, Gilles. “Quality in Economics: A Cognitive
Perspective.” In Qualities of Food, edited by Mark
Harvey, Andrew McMeekin, and Alan Warde, 61–93.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.

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Conversation Analysis

Barham, Elizabeth. “Towards a Theory of Values-Based
Labeling.” Agriculture and Human Values 19 (2002):
349–360.
Beckert, Jens. Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations
of Economic Efficiency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002.
Busch, Larry. “The Moral Economy of Grades and
Standards.” Journal of Rural Studies 16 (2000): 273–283.
Callon, Michel, Cécile Meadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa.
“L’Économie des Qualités” [The economy of qualities].
Economy and Society 31, no. 2 (2000): 194–217.
Cochoy, Frank. Une Sociologie de Packaging ou l’âne de
Buridan face au Marché [A sociology of packaging, or
Buridan's ass in the face of the market]. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2002.
Lafaye, Claudette, and Laurent Thévenot. “Une
Justification Écologique? Conflits dans l’Aménagement
de la Nature” [An ecological justification? Conflicts in
the development of nature]. Revue Française de
Sociologie 34, no. 4 (1993): 495–524.
Latour, Bruno. “To Modernize or to Ecologize? That Is the
Question.” In Remaking Reality: Nature at the
Millennium, edited by Noel Castree and Bruce Braun,
221–242. London: Routledge, 1998.
Morgan, Kevin, Terry Marsden, and John Murdoch. The
Worlds of Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Raynolds, Laura, T. “Re-embedding Global Agriculture: The
International Organic and Fair Trade Movements.”
Agriculture and Human Values 17, no. 3 (2000): 297–309.
Renard, Marie-Christine. “The Interstices of Globalization:
The Example of Fair Coffee.” Sociologia Ruralis 39,
no. 40 (2002): 484–499.
Sylvander, Bertil. “Le role de la certification dans les
changements de regime de coordination: l’agriculture
biologique, de réseau a l’industrie” [The role of
certification in the changes of coordination regime:
Organic farming, the network industry]. Revue
d’Économie Industrielle 80 (1997): 47–66.
Wilkinson, John. “A New Paradigm for Economic Analysis.”
Economy and Society 26, no. 3 (1997): 335–339.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Conversation analysis (CA) is a sociological
approach used to investigate the culturally methodic
character of “talk-in-interaction,” which has had
cross-disciplinary influence in linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Harvey Sacks, together
with his colleagues Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail
Jefferson, developed CA in a series of lectures in

the 1960s (now collected in Sacks 1992). His aim
was to develop a thoroughly naturalistic, empirical social science, that is, one that dealt with social
events as they actually occurred—and not as captured in or portrayed by sociologically staged interviews, surveys, questionnaires, or documents (the
traditional ways in which social science gets access
to the social world).
The development of CA was, at least initially,
strongly influenced by Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, the sociological study of the practical
methods that members of society have to accomplish
their everyday activities. Ethnomethodology drew on
the work of Alfred Schutz who remarked that the
social world that the sociologist encounters and tries
to describe has already been described and interpreted by society’s members. For ethnomethodology,
the central question therefore was not: what are the
best sociological methods to find out about the social
world? But rather: how do members of society themselves find out about their world (in a practical, ordinary manner as part of their conduct of the society’s
everyday affairs)?
One of the challenges in the development of ethnomethodology was to access these “seen but unnoticed,” taken-for-granted “ethno-methods.” Sacks’s
way of dealing with this issue was to rely on (audio)
recordings of talk-in-interaction. This allowed for
the capture of verbal activities as they occur in real
time, and, through repeated listenings, the possibility of studying the gathered materials in ever-closer
detail—a feature that has been likened to the slowmotion instant replay of sports events. In that sense,
CA is perhaps one of the few examples in social
science where technological developments (the availability of cheap and portable tape recorders) led to
methodological innovations.
CA researchers typically produce detailed transcripts of the materials that they are investigating.
The transcription conventions of CA have been
developed by Sacks’s collaborator Gail Jefferson and
are designed to strike a balance between capturing
the way that participants actually talk (highlighting prolonged sounds, stressed syllables, or overlap
between speakers) and overburdening the transcript
with so much detail that it becomes unreadable. The
purpose of transcribing is twofold. First, during the
analysis, the very process of transcribing forces
the researcher to pay detailed attention to the materials. Second, after the analysis has been written

Conversation Analysis

down, the inclusion of transcripts in reports allows
readers to check whether what the researcher is saying about the materials is actually the case, thereby
inviting readers to launch and document their own,
alternative analysis. Technological developments (in
particular, digitization of audio and visual materials)
have lead to an increasing availability of sound, or
even video, samples themselves.
Although CA started with a focus on conversation, this was simply a result of the fact that talk
could be easily recorded, replayed repeatedly, transcribed, and made available to other researchers. In
this sense, the name “conversation analysis” was
misleading for Sacks’s project since the interest was
not in conversation per se, but rather in the culturally methodic character of social action and interaction, with conversation being only a convenient, but
highly productive, case. The name “conversation
analysis” was not then meant to designate a new
sociological technique (to study conversation), but
rather to point to a topic: the study of the conversational analyses employed by conversationalists
themselves (i.e., their real-time understandings of
“why that now?”).
Early work in CA focused on the ways in which
conversationalists accomplish the fact that typically
“one person talks at a time.” The result was the
landmark publication “A Simplest Systematics for
the Organization of Turn-taking in Conversation”
(Sacks et al. 1974), in which a formal system was laid
out through which participants collaboratively locate
transition points and determine who speaks next.
The most important methodological innovation lay
in the fact that Sacks and colleagues not only demonstrated that the system could be used to describe the
turn-taking of conversation, but that the system is
locally and interactionally managed by participants
themselves, who, for example, notice, interpret, and
correct violations of it. To demonstrate this, Sacks
and colleagues took advantage of the “interactional”
character of conversation: what participants do or
say next depends crucially on their understanding of
what another participant has said previously—and
furthermore displays how those prior utterances
have been interpreted. The fact that participants analyze each other’s conduct—and display their analysis
of previous turns—was used as a proof procedure for
the sociological analysis.
Although the original focus was on ordinary
conversation, or talk-in-interaction, CA has since

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developed in two rather different directions. On the
one hand, there has been an interest in the institutional character of talk, that is, the ways in which
participants’ turns of talk enact institutional affairs
(Heritage 2005). Researchers have, for example,
investigated how lawyers structure legal interrogation, how doctors deliver good and bad news, or
how journalists aggressively question politicians
while simultaneously displaying their political neutrality. On the other hand, researchers have tried to
extend CA to analyze nonverbal (visual, multimodal)
aspects of interaction (Hindmarsh and Heath 2007),
for example, the organization of gaze in relation to
turns of talk, the timing of gestures in relation to the
verbal utterances to which they are tied, or the various ways in which technology can structure work
practices.
There seem to be two ways in which CA could
fruitfully be used to study consumption or consumer
culture, namely, through investigating talk about
consumption and through researching the various
acts of consumption. First, one could argue that
consumer culture is, to a large part, realized through
talk, since people do not just “do” consumption, but
also talk “about” consumption. Such talk has not
been the explicit focus of CA, but one can find examples in various studies in which conversationalists
display and use their knowledge of consumer goods.
A good example is Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s
2006 study of conversation among adolescent girls,
in which one can find instances of girls talking about
shopping, going to a restaurant, or playing tennis—
and how such talk (about what kinds of things you
have bought or places you have been to) can be used
to accomplish status differentiation.
Second, CA can be used to study the sequential
organization of various consumer activities. An
obvious case is the buying and selling of various
goods. Christian Heath and Paul Luff investigate
how auctioneers seek to encourage competitive bidding by establishing two bidders and no more than
two bidders at any one time (a “run”), while Clark
and colleagues study how salesmen work verbally
at beginning a rapport with their customers. Other
studies have looked at the selling strategies of market pitchers (Pinch and Clark 1986), the categorization work in calls to a travel agency (Mazeland,
Huisman, and Schasfoort 1995), or the work of
telenegotiated mediation in business-to-business
encounters (Firth 1995).

364

Cool Hunters

In sum, by paying detailed attention to the
sequential organization of talk and embodied
conduct, CA provides detailed access to the interactional accomplishment of various activities,
including various aspects of consumption and consumer culture.
Christian Greiffenhagen
See also Content Analysis; Discourse; Discourse Analysis;
Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture

Further Readings
Clark, Colin, Paul Drew, and Trevor Pinch. “Managing
Prospect Affiliation and Rapport in Real-life Sales
Encounters.” Discourse Studies 5, no. 1 (2003): 5–31.
Firth, Alan. “Telenegotiation and Sense-Making in the
‘Virtual Marketplace.’” In The Discourse of Business
Negotiation, edited by Konrad Ehlich and Johannes
Wagner, 127–149. Berlin: Mouton, 1995.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls:
Games of Stances, Status, and Exclusion. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006.
Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. “Ordering Competition:
The Interactional Accomplishment of the Sale of Art
and Antiques at Auction.” British Journal of Sociology
58, no. 1 (2007): 63–85.
Heritage, John. “Conversation Analysis and Institutional
Talk.” In Handbook of Language and Social
Interaction, edited by Kristine L. Fitch and Robert E.
Sanders, 103–147. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005.
Hindmarsh, Jon, and Christian Heath. “Video-Based
Studies of Work Practice.” Sociology Compass 1, no. 1
(2007): 156–173.
Mazeland, Harrie, Marian Huisman, and Marca
Schasfoort. “Negotiating Categories in Travel Agency
Calls.” In The Discourse of Negotiation: Studies of
Language in the Workplace, edited by Alan Firth,
271–291. Oxford: Pergamon, 1995.
Pinch, Trevor, and Colin Clark. “The Hard Sell: ‘Patter
Merchanting’ and the Strategic (Re)production and
Local Management of Economic Reasoning in the
Routines of Market Pitchers.” Sociology 20, no. 2
(1986): 169–191.
Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Edited by Gail
Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson.
“A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turntaking in Conversation.” Language 50, no. 4 (1974):
696–735.

COOL HUNTERS
Cool-hunting is the practice of surveying advanced
and innovative consumer groups for ideas about
upcoming trends. Cool-hunting originates in the
fashion industry where, already in the early 1970s,
a number of fashion houses (most famously perhaps
Fiorucci) set up research offices that were charged
with the task of surveying a rapidly developing street
culture and translating its stylistic and lifestyle innovations into products that could be commercialized.
Employees at the Fiorucci style office were paid to
keep abreast of popular culture, and enjoyed yearly
paid vacations to exotic places on condition that they
brought home research reports. Such isolated examples of trend research offices developed into trend
research firms during the second half of the 1970s.
These firms supplied books and style sheets, listing
the colors and patterns that were set to dominate
next season’s collections.
During the 1980s, trend research or cool-hunting
spread outside of the domain of the fashion industry.
This was in part a response to the perceived inadequacy of traditional methods of qualitative and
mainly quantitative market research. It was also a
reaction to the perceived increase in the mobility and
complexity of consumer demand, resulting from the
continuous mediatization of consumption and the
pluralization of lifestyles. Cool-hunting was perceived as necessary outside of fashion—in particular for technology and home electronics—because
consumers of these goods began, in a certain sense,
to behave like fashion consumers.
Cool-hunting firms provide a number of services
that are based on a continuous surveillance of the
social. Their focus is mainly, but not exclusively, on
the youth market (considered the vanguard of the
consumer market as a whole), and the services that
they provide include information on macro (general)
and micro (market or product specific) trends; “brand
trackers” that evaluate the standing of brands with
respect to consumer awareness and “cool factor”
trend analysis and lifestyle investigations. They also
perform market research on particular brands and
services and offer their services as consultants in product development, brand renewal, public relations, or
corporate brainstorming sessions. Their major clients
are media companies, cosmetics and fashion companies, publishers, communications and electronics,

Cool Hunters

advertising agencies, and big brands. While some coolhunting firms also use traditional forms of market
research, such as focus groups and ethnographic studies, the main source of the information they provide is
a network of trendsetters and “cool” consumers.
Who are these cool consumers? What distinguishes the (mostly) young people employed by
cool hunters is that they make up a group of expert
consumers. They are the people who impersonate a
trend before it materializes and actively take charge
of producing new consumer trends by, for example,
combining existing garments in a creative fashion or
even making their own clothes.
Unlike the economic and social elites who have
traditionally been understood as the leaders of consumer taste, the people approached by cool hunters
have a particular expertise in the field of consumption that need not be connected to a more general
elite status or even to high standing or competence
in other fields. Cool hunters are interested in the
people who possess an expertise in predicting or even
anticipating fads and fashions, who have a motivation to constantly stay at the top of the field. These
may be extraordinary creative and gifted individuals,
but their edge consists mainly in their ability (and
motivation) to interpret the position of others. Cool
consumers are what they are because they are the
first to articulate and materialize what everybody
subsequently recognizes as general knowledge. They
thus provide a way of appropriating the socialized
productivity of the particular field in its entirety.
But what is it cool consumers produce? What
is “coolness”? The significance of the term cool
probably goes back to the Yoruba concept of Itutu,
combining, in Dick Pountain and David Robins’s
definition, “meanings of conciliation and gentleness of character, the ability to diffuse fights and
disputes, of generosity and grace” (2000, 36). It has
been preserved in the culture of American plantation
slaves where it has come to signify a certain challenge
or defiance. Indeed, the genealogy of cool includes
such antecedents as the British aristocratic reserve,
and the spezzatura of Italian courtiers, as well as the
antiestablishment attitude of the twentieth-century
avant-garde and counterculture. Overall, cool should
be translated as a kind of achieved defiance. It is an
attitude of opposition that one produces and assembles in front of a challenge. In this sense, coolness
refers to the capacity on the part of consumers in
their collective production of meaning, in their mass

365

intellectuality, to produce private forms of resistance
or evasion in relation to the power of marketing and
other institutions of consumer culture.
As in the case of the appropriation of style, capturing cool is a matter of incorporating and profiting
from the resistance that consumers spontaneously
produce. (Indeed, the antithesis of cool is understood
to be commodification: One ceases to be cool at the
moment in which one’s style becomes appropriated
as part of the mainstream. Conversely, continued
coolness builds on a continuous capacity for stylistic
resistance.) Cool-hunting is one of the institutional
mechanisms by means of which consumer resistance
becomes a form of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through which the market rejuvenates
itself. If in the early twentieth century, innovation in
consumer tastes and trends was the business of the
bourgeoisie and their children, today it is the business of the consumer proletariat in its natural state
of alienation and defiance. It is the fact that some
consumers do not identify with the prevailing norms
of consumer culture that makes their agency valuable
as labor power.
There are mainly two present trends within the
cool-hunting industry. First, the phenomenon of coolhunting is becoming increasingly generalized. While
cool-hunting traditionally concentrated on vanguard
groups, such as young people or members of the
counterculture or urban creative scenes, increased
market pressure and the consequent need to find more
precise niches for products has spurred a growing
interest in the productive and innovative practices of
ordinary consumers, and important subgroups such as
the elderly. In response to this need, many cool-hunting
agencies now practice what is known as “business
anthropology,” in which traditional anthropological
methods are put to work in understanding the deep
meanings of goods in the everyday life of ordinary
consumers. The value added of such business anthropology firms consists mainly in their ability to appropriate ordinary, everyday knowledge and package it in
formats that can be managed by the complex organizations of large multinationals. Second, the diffusion
of networked information and communication technologies has added new possibilities for cool-hunting.
Data mining and mathematical text analysis provide
an alternative (or complement) to ethnographic methods and networks of informers. These methods provide cheap, fast, and reliable information on what the
recent trends are in people’s online habits. In addition,

366

Cosmetic Surgery

new platforms that integrate consumers more strongly
with a particular brand, such as user-led innovation
initiatives or corporate-initiated brand communities,
provide ways to harvest consumer opinions and innovations directly online, without having to resort to
informer networks.
Adam Arvidsson
See also Cultural Intermediaries; Diffusion Studies and
Trickle Down; Fashion; Fashion Forecasters; Lifestyle;
Methods of Market Research; Prosumption; Style

Further Readings
Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media
Culture. London: Routledge, 2006.
Frontline. The Merchants of Cool: A Report on the
Creators and Marketers of Popular Culture for
Teenagers. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/
shows/cool.
Pountain, Dick, and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy
of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

COSMETIC SURGERY
Cosmetic surgery, also called plastic surgery or aesthetic surgery, refers to surgical operations changing,
transforming, reconstructing, and shaping the physical human body, and adding or removing body parts
for aesthetic purposes. Cosmetic surgery includes
operations on the face (such as face-lift and rhinoplasty) and operations on other parts of the body
(such as breast augmentation or reduction, liposuction, and abdominoplasty), all conducted under
anesthesia. The most common procedures include
rhinoplasty, which is usually known as a nose job,
as well as breast augmentation or reduction. A
subgroup of aesthetic medical procedures, called
minimally invasive procedures (such as injection of
botulinum toxin or injecting filler materials around
lips), are also widely employed.
From a medical perspective, what we know today
as cosmetic surgery dates to antiquity. The Sushruta
Samhita, written approximately 600 BCE, has the
oldest known account of nose reconstruction performed in India and Egypt. Procedures have been
improved by the introduction of anesthesia and
antiseptic techniques in the latter part of the nineteenth century. After World War II, the branch of
aesthetic and reconstructive surgery has begun to

specialize and organize. At the same time, public
demand has increased as surgical techniques became
more refined and advanced. Today, technology for
cosmetic surgery is highly sophisticated. Along with
the expertise of the surgeon, critical points for consideration with regard to cosmetic surgery include
the professional liability of the doctor, appropriate
“patient selection” criteria, and informed consent of
patients.
Patient selection becomes especially important as
patients might be overly concerned with “magical”
results of the surgery and expect that the surgery
itself will change the problems in their lives, such as a
marriage problem or problems at work. Also, some
patients are obsessive about how they look, called
body dysmorphic disorder, which affects the way
they perceive their bodies and surgical results. Some
patients are never satisfied, because they always perceive some flaws on their bodies.
Looking at cosmetic surgery as a method of making physical appearance more attractive makes it a
method of beautification, which itself is a very old
concept. History is full of stories and examples of
ancient people who were highly interested in beauty
and changed their physical appearances in different ways. Some examples include molding of skulls
among Mayan society, making girls’ and women’s
feet very small through painful processes in China,
or wearing rings on the neck to make it look longer
in Thailand. More decorative and less demanding
tools include makeup, hair styling, as well as dieting
and exercising, but they are considered less significant since permanent decorative forms are associated with more enduring constructs, such as gender,
group affiliations, and cultural norms. Cosmetic
surgery, in its current form, is a concept applicable
to modern societies.
When cosmetic surgery is considered as a method
of beautification, the distinction between reconstructive and aesthetic surgery becomes more problematic.
Reconstructive surgery can be used following traumas, injuries, infections, tumors, birth defects, or
developmental problems. Aesthetic surgery, on the
other hand, can be perceived as elective; and aesthetic surgery patients can be perceived as not really
sick. Accordingly, one of the labels for cosmetic
surgery in modern societies is that it is unnecessary,
nonmedical, and that it is a sign of vanity. The goal
in cosmetic surgery is mostly perceived as making the
patient’s appearance closer to the current ideal.

Cosmetics

This notion also makes the line between medicine
and beautification less distinct. Michel Foucault has
described the interplay between the “medical gaze”
and the material it examined and fabricated. According to this account, new medical insights have contributed to the creation of a body in close interaction with
social patterns, making cosmetic surgery a practice of
constructing an identity, that is, a technology of self.
There can be a variety of motivations of cosmetic
surgery patients, such as a perceived “need” to look
better or approximate a “normal” appearance, easing
the transition from different stages in life, as well as
a passage from one group or social class to another.
Some patients are considered more rebellious, as their
basic motivation is individual expression in the form
of “positive liberty” (Gilman 1999) through freely
customizing the body. Faced with a greater number
of different images in more entertaining and effective ways in the global world and as the image of an
ideal body has been presented in consumer culture
as desirable in modern societies, consumers may
now compare their bodies and use cosmetic surgery
to approximate the “ideal” in a reflexive identity
project, making it the individual’s responsibility to
carefully observe his or her own body and go to the
doctor if there is a “problem.”
Berna Tarı
See also Adornment; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Cosmetics;
Cyborgs; Gender; Hair Care/Hairdressing; Health Care;
Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings
Askegaard, Søren, Martine Cartel Gertsen, and Roy Langer.
“The Body Consumed: Reflexivity and Cosmetic Surgery.”
Psychology and Marketing 19, no. 10 (2002): 793–812.
Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture.”
Theory, Culture, and Society 1 (1982): 18–33.
Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In
Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin,
Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, 16–49. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Gilman, Sander L. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural
History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999.
Howson, Alexandra. The Body in Society: An Introduction.
Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
Rees, Thomas D. “Introduction: Concepts of Beauty.” In
Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, edited by Thomas D. Rees and
Gregory S. LaTrenta, 1–2. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders,
1994.

367

Sanders, Clinton R. “Marks of Mischief: Becoming and
Being Tattooed.” Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography 16, no. 4 (1988): 395–431.
Sayre, Shay. “Facelift Forensics: A Personal Narrative of
Aesthetic Cosmetic Surgery.” Advances in Consumer
Research 24 (1999): 178–183.
Schouten, John W. “Selves in Transition: Symbolic
Consumption in Personal Rites of Passage and Identity
Construction.” Journal of Consumer Research
17 (1991): 412–425.
Sullivan, Deborah A. Cosmetic Surgery: The Cutting Edge
of Commercial Medicine in America. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Tarı, Berna. “Exploring Local and Global Ideals of Beauty
in Turkey: Discourses and Practices of Plastic Surgery
Patients and Physicians.” PhD diss., Ankara, Turkey,
Bilkent University, 2008.
Thompson, Craig J., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman.
“Understanding the Socialized Body: A Poststructuralist
Analysis of Consumers’ Self-Conceptions, Body Images,
and Self-Care Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research
22 (September 1995): 139–153.

COSMETICS
Cosmetics are products used to temporarily modify
the body surface for decorative or transformative
purposes, normally in determined social situations
or by members of specific groups. In contemporary
consumer societies, cosmetics are mass-produced and
mass-distributed goods applied especially by women
to embellish their body and enhance their attractiveness. They include skin-care creams, lotions,
perfumes, hair colors, deodorants, and makeup items
such as powders, blush, lipsticks, eye shadow, mascara, eye liners, nail polish, and concealers.
The temporary beautifying of the body through
dyes, ornaments, or perfumes, and permanent modifications through piercing, tattooing, or scarification
are practices performed in all cultures. More particularly, cosmetic modification has been known since
the distant past: archaeological evidence is found
from prehistoric times, in ancient Egypt, Greek, and
Roman societies, where men and women used elaborate moisturizing creams and oils to counteract the
dryness and aging of the skin, pigments for adorning
their eyes, but also cosmetics containing poisonous
mercury and lead-based makeup to lighten their
faces. In Western as well as in non-Western stratified

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Cosmetics

societies, makeup has been used to distinguish classes
and occupations, like other body appearance modifications. In medieval Europe, for example, the use of
cosmetics was restricted to the upper classes, and for
centuries, Japanese geishas have used white powder
to lighten their skin.
Throughout its long history, cosmetics and particularly face painting have stood up to strong opposition.
From the early fathers of the church, such as Tertullian,
to Elizabethan Puritans, and intellectuals such as
Thomas More and Arthur Schopenhauer, adversaries
of cosmetics lined up a battery of arguments rooted
in the idea that they were women’s disgraceful affectation. Some arguments were theoretical, and viewed
cosmetics as the trappings of the art of dissimulation
considered as “typically feminine,” or the incentives
for a luxurious lifestyle. Other arguments were more
practical, pointing out that spending hours in front of
a mirror subtracted time from the household or distracted women from pleasing their husbands. During
the nineteenth century, the use of makeup was practiced primarily by actors and prostitutes, and moralists
or political authorities publicly declared it improper
and vulgar. Thus, for an American or English woman
at that time, being a lady meant forswearing visible
cosmetics, since the painted face was a sign of deception, of an inauthentic or immoral self. In the nascent
consumer culture, the cult of sentimentality and sincerity still advocated moral cosmetics, like soaps, exercise, and temperance, and idealized the natural face.
Underlying this discourse there was often an effort to
confirm the fixity and naturalness of social hierarchies
by assuring that external manifestations corresponded
to the inner self.
New relationships between cosmetics and female
identity were established by the beginning of twentieth century. The middle classes were busily engaged
in purchasing goods, sustained by the growing belief
that individuality was a purchasable style. In the
increasingly consumer context, the use of cosmetics, like of other commodities, gradually became the
salient marker of new social identities. A commercial culture of “you-tooism” democratized beauty,
suggesting that it could be achieved by all women,
if only they used the correct products. At first, face
powders were the most popular; then rouge, lipstick,
and eyebrow pencils were added to the list of acceptable beauty products.
The proliferation of cosmetics in the consumer market coincided with women’s new relationship with the

public sphere: their expanding but contested participation in economic, political, and social activities that
were previously conceived as masculine. Workplace
or leisure activities were presented as occasions
where young women could perform their femininity
through manufactured beauty and succeed. Cosmetics
achieved respectability and modernity, enabling them
to embody emergent social categories, such as saleswomen, secretaries, entertainers, or consumers. The
social organization of sexual relationships and dating
equally reinforced the importance of social mobility
through the aware management of physical appearance. Moreover, the beauty business has represented a
new arena for success and competition for a number
of female entrepreneurs, who founded salons, beauty
schools, correspondence courses, and mail-order companies using the patterns of women’s social life: visiting, conversation, and their presence in shops, clubs,
and theaters. Some of them became multinational
corporations that currently dominate the multimillion
dollar market of cosmetics, such as Elizabeth Arden,
Helena Rubinstein, and Estée Lauder.
By the interwar period, using makeup became a
bourgeois way as middle- and working-class women
confirmed or embraced commercialized femininity in
their everyday lives. The effect has since then been to
represent womanhood as a kind of merchandise, to
symbolically emphasize women’s lack of entitlement
to be in the public sphere without a mask, to feel discomfort if their faces are unpainted in a wide range
of social situations, and to transmit white ideals to
non-white women—outcomes that are still contested
by feminists. Nevertheless, the emerging commercialized beauty culture also led to the renegotiation
of traditional hierarchies among women, opening
the path to economic opportunities and new social
definitions. In an effort to look like the attractive
divas they saw in the magazines and in the movies,
for example, American and European wage-earning
women of the 1930s increasingly began to differentiate their lifestyles from those of younger schoolgirls
and of their mothers. Cosmetics became the battleground of intergenerational conflicts, since they were
perceived by parents as the signal that their daughters
wanted to be treated as socially and sexually mature
and by girls as a means to emancipate from the family. Nonetheless, cosmetics succeeded in combining
attractiveness and respectability in a new ideal of
femininity. It is emblematic that the image of Rosie
the Riveter, created by U.S. propaganda to recruit

Cosmopolitanism

women into the workplace during World War II as
men were mobilized for the war, is a woman dressed
in a factory uniform, flexing her bicep, but wearing
mascara, lipstick, and nail polish.
Since the second postwar period, the cosmetics
industry has flourished and its growth is still unrelenting. The imaginary mobilized by manufacturers
has changed, from the ultrasophistication of the
1950s to the sexual innuendo of the 1960s, from the
ostentation of the 1980s to the experimentation of
the 1990s. Beauty culturists and cosmetics manufacturers have been promising personal and social transformation, and have evolved a language that presents
makeup as an integral component of womanhood.
Advertisers suggest that cosmetics are a crucial aspect
of feminine self-realization, which induces an anxiety
in the relationship between appearance and identity.
The beauty ideal sold together with skin-lighteners,
creams, and colored powders often reinforce traditional class, age, and race hierarchies, but cosmetic
manufacturers, in contrast, depict this makeover as
the first step toward expressing oneself, achieving
upward mobility, and gaining personal popularity.
The use of makeup has continued to be contested
from a variety of sources, including authors and public interest groups. Animal rights activists, for example, pressure cosmetic companies to stop testing on
animals and campaign vigorously, even recommending boycotts. This advocacy has been effective, as
many manufacturers committed themselves to stop
testing their products on animals and some countries
banned the sale of animal-tested cosmetics. But the
main criticism of the use of cosmetics in everyday
life is put forward by feminists and focuses on the
very heart of the modern legitimizing discourse about
cosmetics: making-up is a highly stylized activity that
leaves little room for self-expression. As Sandra Lee
Bartky wrote, “painting the face is not like painting
a picture; at best, it might be described as painting
the same picture over and over again with minor
variations” (1990, 71). The most dangerous message
underlying this disciplining practice is, according to
some feminists and social theorists, that a woman’s
face, if unpainted, is defective, thus reinforcing
women’s lack of self-confidence.
Rossella Ghigi
See also Adornment; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Cosmetic
Surgery; Femininity; Gender; Hair Care/Hairdressing;
Self-Reflexivity

369

Further Readings
Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination. New
York: Routledge, 1990.
Corson, Richard. Fashions in Makeup. London: Peter
Owen Publishers, 2004.
Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar. New York: Metropolitan
Books, 1998.
Scranton Philip, ed. Beauty and Business. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto and
Windus, 1990.

COSMOPOLITANISM
Cosmopolitanism, which is becoming an important
notion for the understanding of taste and the circulation of commodities, has according to most social
theorists its origins in Greek philosophy. The concept
refers to ways of knowing the world and the forms
of belonging this knowledge generates. The term
is comprised of kòsmos (our socially constructed
world) and polìtis (the citizen of a pòlis or ancient
Greek city-state, the civic organization that exerted
influence on European politics). The term resonates
with Aristotle’s conception of the human as zõon
politikòn, a being that exists in relation to others in
a polity. It has been suggested that Aristotelian texts
are in fact Arab readings of Aristotle subsequently
reimported in the West to revive its intellectual traditions. The Stoic teachings, according to which both
the polis and the cosmopolis preserve the common
good, acted as stepping-stones to early Christian
understandings of the cosmopolitan as the “citizen”
of God’s Kingdom. Christian exclusivism is evident in
Augustine’s Neoplatonic cosmopolitanism that presupposes the love of God, in contrast to the love of
the self that nonbelievers maintain. In short, Christian
teachings erased non-European (non-Christian) contributions to European civilization at large.
Modern European theorizations of cosmopolitanism are attributed to Enlightenment philosopher
Immanuel Kant, who produced the first abstraction
of the cosmopolitan subject. But Kant’s kosmopolìtis
missed the exclusivist Hellenistic understandings
of citizenship and polity. The “world citizen” of
the Hellenic orator Socrates, to whom the concept
is often attributed, was supposed to speak Greek,
think Greek, and act as a Greek (Panegyricus, par.
50) in the context of the Alexandrian empire. Those

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Cosmopolitanism

who did not conform to Socratian expectations were
nonhumans (barbarians). Feminist theorists critiqued
Kant’s cosmopolitan subject as a predominately
male political (and sociocultural) actor in Europe
and beyond. Mindful of the Christian legacy, critical
political perspectives used the term to debate the role
of the nation-state (the particular) in global geopolitics, emphasizing the significance of a cosmopolitan
outlook for the future of global citizenship, justice,
and democracy.
In more recent years, the concept’s relation to the
institutional structures of the nation-state began to
wane. Cultural theorists examine how our learning
habits and practices shape our multiple identities as
consumers and producers or how pedagogical experience is used to situate citizens in the world at large
and vis-à-vis other viewing (including non-European)
positions. The post-Kantian philosophical trajectory
of the concept suggests that any “cosmopolitan”
respect for human diversity that promotes solidarity
on a global scale cannot be achieved solely through
formalized agreement (as in Kant’s interstate legal
agreement to maintain global peace, or Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s “social contract” to achieve social togetherness), because it also demands the development of
moral sensitivity for specific cultural contexts. The
coexistence of the specific (culture, nation, tribe, etc.)
with the universal highlights both the inescapable
tensions within cosmopolitanism as a condition of
being, and its creative-productive nature as a state of
becoming part of a human whole.
Particular readings of Kantian philosophy render
the concept relevant to the sociology of globalization,
production, and consumption. Literal meanings of
kòsmos (from kosmõ, meaning “to make beautiful”)
introduce an aesthetic-cultural dimension to the concept. Pedagogy, aesthetics, and politics converge to
suggest a method of knowing through visual enactment and bodily performance. This model of cosmopolitan aesthetics, which finds application in creative
industries (e.g., film industries such as Bollywood
and Hollywood, mega-events such as the Olympic
Games and expos), selectively borrows from the
Kantian sensus communis, the moral universe of
human solidarity, and the literal meaning of kosmopolítis as the subject that inhabits the space of the
aesthetic. Theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony
Giddens, Scott Lash, and John Urry, talk about “aesthetic reflexivity” as constitutive of contemporary
knowledge economies to refer to a contemplative

form of learning that transforms human beings into
agents who monitor the social world rather than
accepting a predetermined place in it. Formalized aesthetics (from aésthesis or sense) is the philosophical
principles of art, but its banal understanding refers
to ideas of beauty that we acquire through sensory
experience.
While this banal form of cosmopolitanism forms
a response to a progressive geographical decontextualization of the concept, it is linked to everyday
practices: it refers to clashes, dialogues, and fusions
of ideas that occur every time people (e.g., diasporic
families), objects (e.g., consumer products), and ideas
(e.g., broadcast narratives) are on the move. The technological history of mobilities (e.g., the history of the
train, the car, the telephone, the mobile phone) serves
as an essential link between material cultures and
universalized human experience (e.g., travel or migrations). It proffers a way to examine, for example,
the commodification of travel as a leisure activity or
travel’s role in the global capitalist arena (e.g., business travel). It may also be used as a heuristic tool to
examine how capitalist networks exploit the interplay
of virtual (cinematic, Internet) with terrestrial forms
of travel. Mediations of travel through the Internet
(advertising of tourist destinations, marketing vacation packages) or even the electronic enactment of leisure routines (e.g., computer games, interactive sites,
and blogospheres sustained by global communities of
travel or movie fans) are concrete examples of such
cosmopolitan belonging too.
Air travel also captures this mode, as it affords to
travelers a god’s eye view, a view of the earth from
above. This detached form of knowledge renders
viewers (travelers) an omniscient gaze (e.g., looking at
countries, towns, villages) while separating them from
what they see. Other examples of technocultural links
are traced in the cosmopolitanization of music styles
that “belonged” to particular cultural geographies
before becoming part of global cultures: thus, when
we visit music stores we find salsa or belly-dancing
CDs in the “world music” section. These genres have
been moved out of their context (of assigned gender
roles, racial politics) to form part of a subculture
that crosses state boundaries. Alternatively, music or
dance fusions (e.g., hip-hop or rap) may eventually
become appropriated by specific ethnic subcultures
(e.g., Afro-Caribbean groups). Although in these
examples the particular and the universal maintain
bilateral communications, they all remain part of

Counterfeited Goods

creative industries that operate as transnational or
global agents.
For cultural theorists, tangible and intangible
artifacts that borrow from different cultures also
serve as manifestations of cosmopolitan belonging. The Louvre’s Pyramid, I. M. Pei’s architectural
invention, fused the classicist style of the Second
Empire (rooted in French imperialism) with Eastern
structures to produce a postmodern complex. This
served as a statement of France’s overcoming of its
colonial past. Such attempts are viewed with skepticism among theorists that advocate a political and
moral understanding of cosmopolitanism, highlighting that the argument conflates material fusions
with political planning and international economic
inequalities. Thus, Pei’s Pyramid has been a controversial project since its announcement in 1985 as
one of President Francois Mitterrand’s most ambitious grand projets that countered France’s colonial
legacy the very moment national politics worked
toward sustaining the racist structures on which the
modern state was created (e.g., policies targeting
labor migrants from former colonies). Such criticisms bring the mechanics of global labor markets
to the fore, tying cosmopolitanism to the legacy of
racism, slavery, and colonialism.
The history of the concept, replete with paradoxes
of exclusion—of other cultures and polities, of
phenomenologically established (based on gender, race, disability) “difference”—in a supposedly
inclusive agenda, continues to affect its application.
A more conciliatory approach acknowledges both
arguments as complementary rather than competitive
trends. In this intermediary approach, global interconnectedness is not manifest only across institutions
and cultures but also within them. This informs, for
example, Arjun Appadurai’s conception of global
cultural flows or “scapes” (of images, ideas, products,
etc.) or Beck’s replacement of abstract cosmopolitanism with a processual cosmopolitanization that advocates the communication of the local or regional with
the global. Such hybrid theory can facilitate research
into migration and consumption or global risks such
as terrorism or pollution, generating more effective
links between them. If we accept that the politics of
cosmopolitanism are part of the history of globalization and its auxiliary oppressive agendas (colonialism,
racism, sexism), we may also discern in the sociology
of cosmopolitanism and its diverse history (flows of
ideas from East to West, South to North, rurality to

371

metropolis) the seeds of an emancipatory agenda that
can forge inclusive policies.
Rodanthi Tzanelli
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Cultural
Flows; Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; Globalization;
Information Society; Migration; National Cultures

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–24.
Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies.”
Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 1 (2002): 17–44.
Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive
Modernization. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins. Cosmopolitics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Hebdige, Dick. “Fax to the Future.” Marxism Today 34,
no. 1 (1990): 18–23.
Held, David. Democracy and the Global Order.
Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space.
London: Sage, 1994.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry. “Visuality, Mobility
and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar.”
British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1 (2006): 113–131.
Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.

COUNTERFEITED GOODS
Historically, counterfeit goods—goods that are made
to imitate designer or high-end goods—have been used
to artificially raise one’s social standing. To be seen,
by others, to be in possession of a Gucci handbag,
a Warhol silkscreen, or an Armani Collezioni jacket
(three areas in which counterfeit goods are currently
rife) is understood to evidence wealth and good taste
and an informed appreciation of quality, artistry, tradition, and craftsmanship. Thus, when the goods are
understood to have been counterfeited, and so bought
“on the cheap,” the owners’ taste is revealed to be
only deceptively intimated, as is their wealth, and
with an appreciation of tradition and craftsmanship
revealed to be little more than a sham. The ready
availability of such “knock off” goods, via Internet
sites or from the vendors in street markets (so that
buying a fake Louis Vuitton belt for a few dollars or

372

Counterfeited Goods

euros while on vacation is almost de rigueur) means
that the designer look, if not the authentic designer
item itself, is attainable for all. Thus, the goods are
no longer the exclusive preserve of those with the
social cachet and finance to gain entry to the inner
sanctums of the most upscale shops.
However, any social faux pas that arises from the
use of counterfeited goods has come to be undermined by the nature and origins of the authentic
goods: when the “real thing” itself is seen to be of
a problematic status, the denigration of the fake
version would seem to be made in bad faith. In
her 2008 book Deluxe, Dana Thomas argued that
the quality and craftsmanship of luxurious goods
has waned as newly wealthy middle classes began
to seek out an array of affordable, designer-branded
status symbols for their domestic spheres. In their full
capitalization on this newly emergent market, manufacturers moved further toward mass production,
even to the point of many designer items assembled
in sweat shops of developing worlds—indeed in the
very same areas, possibly by the very same hands,
where their counterfeit versions also originate. This
capitalization arose through an acceptance of a new
market regime for designer brands: a paradigm of
straight supply and demand over exclusivity and
limited editions, with the typical suppression of
manufacturing costs, and with the brand name, and
upholding the status of the brand name, as now secondary to generating profit.
Two problems have arisen with respect to this
market-driven democratization. First, the imperatives of lowered overheads via cheaper labor overwhelmed traditional, old-world craftsmanship:
hand-tooled gave way to the factory line, and ethical
questions of child labor (see Pilger’s investigation
into such developing world assembly lines, for
example, in The New Rulers of the World) undid
ideas of taste and quality. Second, following Jean
Baudrillard’s account of simulacrum, where the
brand name itself is understood to have supplanted
the product descriptors and, as discussed by Naomi
Klein, where it is understood that it is the brand
rather than the item that is sold, the dissolution of
designer brand name exclusivity has proven to have
been near fatal.
The designer brand had been understood to denote
an authenticity: that the name manufacturer’s quality control has always trumped the expediencies of
mass production, so that the particular designer’s

vision has remained untainted and is manifest in this
bought item. This is not so much a matter of highquality materials and assembly but of the authenticity
of high quality—predicated on an acceptance or blind
faith in questionable attributes. The craftsmanship
and the artistry of design are visible, but the notion
of the tradition in which the product can be placed is
obscure, or open to dispute.

Counterfeited Goods and Question
of Authenticity
Authenticity, if understood in the sense of aura, as
described by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
(where the item is possessed of the touch of
inspiration—traditionally divine but, for the secular
age, via the artisan hands that impart a uniqueness
to the item), has always been endangered during an
age of mass reproduction. Why pay extra for the
aura that, as a metaphysical attribute, remains akin
to the Emperor’s New Clothes—or where the lack
of such aura, authenticity, and uniqueness is only
apparent to those in the know or on closer inspection? That is, the idea of wearing the deceiving imitations of a designer-branded product, even where
the imitations are evidently without the official
imprint of the assumed maker, now barely represents a cause of embarrassment. In addition, on the
crest of the wave of the market democratization of
designer goods, a preference for certain brands (such
as Burberry), certain goods (such as cognac), and a
tasteless overuse of designer jewelry (“bling” or, in
the American vernacular, “pimping”—to achieve the
look of classless ostentation, as if a cash-rich pimp)
by those understood not to be in the select circles of
the wealthy classes, along with the use of celebrities
of questionable provenance in advertising campaigns,
has seemingly damaged the exclusivity and aura of
the designer brand.
Early intimations of trouble for designer-branded
goods were apparent in Versace and Dolce & Gabbana collections by the mid-1990s, and the attempts
to strike a balance between exclusive and “street”—
a rearguard action to accommodate this shift. The
balance, however, was not achieved.
The increasing criminalization of counterfeit
goods can be understood in this context too, and
as a last resort in the battle to preserve authenticity.
One could add that the activity of counterfeiting

Counterfeited Goods

has also lost a glamour that once arose from the
interplay of playboys, experts, and criminals; with
globalization, counterfeiting becomes a matter of
the work desperately eked out by the precariat—
immigrants without documents, whose trading
in counterfeit goods is entirely at the behest of a
hungry family—or teenagers with little idea and
care for the ethical underpinnings of copyright law,
illegally downloading entertainment media for free
from the Internet.

Counterfeited Goods in the Digital Era
This latter concern represents the newest front in the
battle over counterfeited goods. The replacement of
analogue technology by digital technology—one of
the motors of globalization in the sense of the creation of a global village, a borderless information
society with the Internet, termed the information
superhighway in the mid to late 1990s—has given
rise to new forms of counterfeiting. In terms of illegal downloads and software piracy, the counterfeit
copy is identical to, and as functional as, the original. Indeed, the very materiality of the original item
is rendered irrelevant; whether the song contained
on an iPod has been legally downloaded or illegally
“ripped” makes no difference to the user.
With the high-profile legal battles set in motion
by such ungoverned communal use, often as test
cases toward establishing institutional possession
of goods-as-pure-data (as with Pirate Bay in 2009),
a number of new market paradigms have arisen,
remaining often—as yet—un-subsumed or unresolved. First, the downloaders or duplicators may
not be profiting in cash terms from their actions,
only taking something they have not paid for (and
possibly of negligible financial value) entirely for
their own use, and without denying the product to
its original purchaser. In the case of music, this action
may lead to substantial payments to the owner or
creator of the song if the downloaders then feel
sufficiently inspired to purchase a whole album, or
albums—and then to attend live concerts, buy further related goods, and so forth. Record companies
are wary of stunting this process, which underlies
their very existence.
Second, although the industry has a record of
using disinformation and scare tactics in respect
to the front against counterfeiting, recent attempts
at a solution focus on quality. For example, recent

373

industry responses to the increased circulation of
counterfeited films have pointed out the superior
image and sound quality of bought originals.
Third, the copyrighted information may not
belong to the company that exerts intellectual property
rights over it in the first place; as Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri note, indigenous knowledge developed
across generations (concerning, for their example, the
medical uses of plants) is not something that can be
said to belong to any one person or institution.
Fourth, those who exert copyright often remain
in breach of antitrust laws through the attempted
monopolization of the market (as is the case with
the protracted legal battles between the European
Commission and Microsoft in the 2000s) and have
historically overpriced underperforming or errorridden goods. In these instances, it is the gravitational
pull and discernment of the counterfeiters that has
exerted full market pressures to the betterment of the
sold product.
In the final analysis, counterfeiting seems to be
a function of the market and for the market: a survival of the fittest in the marketplace itself, for which
old modes of distribution are recalibrated toward
new forms of consumption of immaterial goods for
the global age. Counterfeiting restores functionality
as the role of goods and, with a postmodern twist,
it begins to cast the original as the inferior to the
reworked item.
Benjamin Halligan
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Authenticity;
Branding; Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Electronic
Video Gaming; Informal Economy; Simulacrum;
Smuggling and Black Markets

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso,
2005.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by
Hannah Arendt, 217–242. New York: Schocken Books,
1969. First published 1935.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. London:
Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2001.
Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso,
2003.
Thomas, Dana. Deluxe: How Fashion Lost Its Lustre.
London: Penguin, 2008.

374

Craft Consumer

CRAFT CONSUMER
Craft consumer refers to a person who obtains
objects made by skilled artisans. Until the nineteenth
century, crafts were ordinarily made for practical or
ceremonial use by part-time or full-time specialists.
Although some crafts were traded or sold in markets,
most were either exchanged through kin networks
or appropriated by the state. In the past two centuries, crafts have increasingly been made explicitly
for sale. Many commercial crafts are more or less
identical to those produced for use in daily life. Most,
however, have been altered substantially to attract
potential buyers. Some “tourist crafts” created solely
for market purposes may be only tangentially related
to local cultural traditions. Nonetheless, the search
for “authenticity” that motivates many purchases of
crafts is an important aspect of consumer culture.
The distinction between “crafts” and “arts” is
not entirely straightforward. Artists are sometimes
said to emphasize concepts, while craft workers
place more importance on physical materials and the
skill and execution through which a vision is made
concrete. Because the potential financial rewards for
objects considered to be art are much higher than
for those considered to be crafts, classification in one
category or the other by tastemakers has significant
material consequences. Naive observers may not
be able to easily distinguish between craft and art
objects. The difference may only become evident
by noting the venues in which particular objects are
exhibited and sold. Objects labeled as crafts at one
time can later be regarded as art; the reverse also
happens. Despite these definitional issues, certain
types of objects are typically thought of as art (e.g.,
paintings, sculpture), while other types are usually
regarded as crafts (e.g., jewelry, furniture).
The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s led to
the development of a significant market for crafts.
Prior to that time, almost all objects used in daily life
were made slowly by skilled artisans. The Industrial
Revolution allowed the rapid mass production
of identical, machine-made objects. Social elites in
Europe and the United States came to value individually fashioned, technically proficient objects that
were the product of many hours of work. Because
of the time and skill required to make such crafts,
these objects were usually more expensive than comparable machine-made pieces. Furthermore, craft

objects could often be readily identified as the work
of particular famous artisans. Members of the upper
class could demonstrate their wealth and sophistication by purchasing finely made crafts esteemed by
tastemakers who were their social peers.
The market for crafts in recent years has increasingly included objects made in places far from the
homes of buyers. The artisans making such crafts
may be quite different culturally from the crafts’
eventual owners. Consumers in industrial countries
buying “ethnic” crafts from distant places are usually
motivated in part by their admiration for the skill and
aesthetic sensibility of their makers. Many also have a
romantic desire to connect emotionally with artisans
who work with their hands and seem close to nature.
By buying an ethnic craft, consumers can show a
certain amount of alienation from the machine-made
objects of the Industrial Age. The display of ethnic
crafts in a consumer’s house suggests (perhaps incorrectly) that trips abroad have been taken, with the
implied socioeconomic status associated with international travel. Such displays of crafts also indicate their
owners’ sophisticated taste for exotic objects.
The market for crafts comprises countless niches.
Pieces vary, for example, in their type, price, place
of origin, color, and style. The extent of such variation makes it impossible to provide broad generalizations about the motivations for craft purchases.
There are different reasons why a consumer might
be attracted to a locally made wooden desk in an
antique store, a cheap handmade bracelet in a flea
market, a Guatemalan blouse found on a trip to a
Mayan village, and an expensive set of Italian dishes
in a department store. Nonetheless, the prestige
associated with owning a scarce, wonderfully crafted
object is clearly an important motivation for the
purchase of expensive crafts. Buyers of cheaper, less
spectacular crafts are more likely to be influenced by
their preferences for home decor and their desire to
own something different from their neighbors.
Customers for crafts usually have inchoate ideas
about authenticity. Many scholars disdain authenticity as a criterion for evaluating craft objects. They
regard authenticity as a folk category that people
in particular times and places use to judge cultural
productions. Nevertheless, perceived authenticity is
a key criterion that many buyers of crafts use when
considering purchases. Characteristics that sellers
of crafts use in their attempts to convey authenticity include conformity with traditional designs,

Craft Consumer

handcrafting, and specificity about the makers of
particular pieces. Writers have often observed that
“traditions” change and that customs and objects
said to be of longstanding cultural significance may
actually be recent inventions. Only a small number of
consumers know much about these studies detailing
changes in the forms of allegedly traditional crafts
over time. Most merely want to be sure that objects
they buy are “real” in some ill-defined sense.
Consumers’ concerns about authenticity pose
problems for sellers of the many crafts that have
been either significantly altered over time or recently
invented. The molas made by the San Blas Cuna of
Panama illustrate how crafts can be transformed.
These rectangular panels of reverse appliqué are worn
by Cuna women on the front and back of locally
made blouses. The imported cloth is commercially
manufactured. Long blouses painted with abstract
designs similar to those found in indigenous body
painting first appeared among the Cuna in the early
nineteenth century. The designs found on molas have
changed markedly over the years. At first geometric patterns predominated; later designs included (in
approximate order of development) fantastic representations, realistic depictions of plants and animals,
human figures, and utensils. Now, all of these designs
and others are produced for sale to tourists. Many
molas are also made for local use in both everyday
life and ceremonial occasions.
Wood carvings from the Mexican state of
Oaxaca, in contrast, are an invented craft of the
twentieth century. Although artisans in the area have
long made wooden masks and toys, the origins of the
current craft can be traced to activities of Manuel
Jiménez (1919–2005) and American and Mexican
merchants in the city of Oaxaca. Jiménez began to
carve wooden figures as a boy to pass time while
tending animals. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
owners of craft shops in Oaxaca bought some of his
carvings and sold them to prominent folk art collectors. Tourists and collectors started to visit Jiménez’s
workshop in the 1970s. By 1990, most families in
Jiménez’s community and another Oaxacan village
were making brightly painted carvings for sale to
tourists and international wholesalers. At the outset
of the wood carving trade, most pieces were clearly
related to aspects of rural Oaxacan culture, depicting, for example, farmers, ox teams, devils, angels,
and Day of the Dead skeletons. By the peak of a
wood carving boom in the mid-1990s, an astonishing

375

variety of high-end and low-end pieces were sold to
casual tourists, dealers, and collectors. Animal carvings dominated the trade. The most commonly made
pieces were cats, frogs, armadillos, and dogs.
The commercial success of objects such as Cuna
molas and Oaxacan wood carvings might seem to
contradict the desire for authenticity that is said to
motivate buyers of crafts. Merchants use diverse
strategies in their efforts to convince potential customers that such pieces fit in with local culture and
are in some sense authentic. They emphasize the simplicity of tool kits and the remoteness of the areas
where artisans live. Attempts are sometimes made
to relate crafts to religious ceremonies and mystical
beliefs. Even when such discourse fails to convince
particular consumers that crafts are authentic, it can
be effective in appealing to their romantic, antimodernistic sentiments.
Writers about buyers of crafts sometimes classify
customers into two categories. “Product-oriented”
shoppers want to learn how particular crafts are
made and place a high value on technical proficiency and aesthetics. “Process-oriented” shoppers
want to know the cultural and historical significance
of a craft and enjoy learning about the lives of particular artisans. Because sellers try to appeal to both
product-oriented and process-oriented shoppers,
their advertisements must stress diverse aspects of
crafts and their creators.
In recent years, some researchers have attempted
to describe the sociological and psychological characteristics of buyers of particular kinds of crafts.
Several scholars, for example, use the phrase cultural
creatives to describe people attracted to ethnic and
tourist crafts. Cultural creatives are said to be open
to world cultures and attentive to global issues. In
the United States, this group supposedly comprises
a quarter of the adults in the United States. Cultural
creatives are reported to be 60 percent female and
mostly college-educated. Although such findings
seem plausible, they must be regarded as only the
most preliminary explorations of a complex topic.
The market for crafts in the contemporary world
can be understood with respect to consumers’ reaction to industrial mass production. By seeking out
handmade, labor-intensive objects, some consumers
are showing their appreciation of an individuality
and artisanry that is often absent from machinemade products. Their craft purchases in many cases
also allow them to acquire prestige by demonstrating

376

Craft Production

that they have the money and taste to buy expensive,
finely made objects.
Michael Chibnik
See also Authenticity; Counterfeited Goods; Craft
Production; Globalization; Inventing Tradition;
Material Culture; Prosumption

Further Readings
Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
Chibnik, Michael. Crafting Tradition: The Making and
Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2003.
García Canclini, Néstor. Transforming Modernity: Popular
Culture in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of
Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Phillips, Ruth, and Christopher Steiner, eds. Unpacking
Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial
Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Ray, Paul, and Sherry Anderson. The Cultural Creatives:
How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. New
York: Harmony Books, 2000.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature,
the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993.
Tice, Karin. Kuna Crafts, Gender, and the Global
Economy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

CRAFT PRODUCTION
The concept of craft production refers to work
processes resulting in products where the design
and manufacture are conducted by the same person
more or less concurrently. The arts and crafts movement in the United Kingdom in the mid- and latenineteenth century appears as the first explicit use
of the notion of crafts and craftsmanship as a social
critique. These notions served John Ruskin and
William Morris in their critique of industrial production. Scholars such as C. Wright Mills and recently
Richard Sennett have refined this critique of the
authority of the machine in commanding human
actors and addressed the appreciation of skills,
engagement with work, and commitment to good

quality as general phenomena of human activity.
Sennett views crafts as a merger of design and making and ultimately as a critique of duality of the mind
and the body, according to which creative thinking
is abstract and takes place without interference or
active contribution of our physical being. The human
actor that Sennett’s analysis purports is an integrated
body-mind engaged with materials in acts of making.
The concept of craft production is informed by
the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and manifest
in the so-called practice turn (Schatzki et al. 2001).
Crafts theorizing also resonates with the work of
Nigel Thrift on performance and precognitive, tacit
intelligence of the body-mind. Thrift’s idea of performance indicates an emergent form of production that
counters the idea of separate mind and body by suggesting that our ways of being in the physical space
are always iterative and responsive. In his argument,
precognitive bodily responses lay beyond, or before,
management and control. Hence, they also constitute
an alternative form of production. In organization and
management studies, the scholars of organizational
aesthetics such as Antonio Strati have made use of the
notions of tacit and bodily knowledge and drawn on
and further developed the idea of craftsmanship.
Craft production can also be understood as a
particular set of products and production processes.
In a narrow sense, craft production makes use of
nonfabricated, “natural” materials such as clay,
wood, and natural fibers. In a similar way, the acts
of blacksmithing, weaving, and pottery making are
central to the notion of crafts. Hence, craft products
are frequently considered as traditional, authentic,
and local, as opposed to industrial production. This
selection of natural materials has also contributed to
an understanding of crafts as being environmentally
sustainable, in addition to a socially preferable form
of organizing work.
Contemporary accounts tend to emphasize that
craft production is sacred. Engagements with crafts
are thought to provide authenticity, orientation, and
order in a chaotic modern world. Craft production is
thus also a ritual to be attended as a practitioner or
admired and consumed as part of an audience. In the
same vein, handicrafts are spectacular objects to be
gazed at and seized in exotic destinations.
To uncoil these notions one can first note that
because of their claimed authenticity, crafts form
an important part of the tourist industry. Craft
products are materializations of culture, and thus

Craft Production

handicraft souvenirs enable cultural sampling. Craft
items participate in a commerce of tourist arts that
is important both for local producers as well as the
tourist industry (Grabourn 1984). Given the importance of handicrafts in tourism, developers of new
resorts and destinations are involved in establishing
a craft “industry” (e.g., Moreno and Littrell 2001).
Tourism thus constitutes processes in which the role
and understanding of local, traditional crafts changes
through both commodification and the establishment of new meanings. Paradoxically, however,
handicraft products are also increasingly traded in
the anonymizing international market. The objects
of this international trade are curiously faceless and
anonymous commodities that nevertheless bear
marks of craftsmanship.
Apart from consuming the crafts of exotic cultures, displays of tradition and heritage are also performed locally. Heritage can be convincingly remade
by emphasizing the continuum of used materials
and methods. The replicas of historic seagoing vessels serve a prime example (Laurier 1998). Though
they are not original as physical objects, these projections make use of old designs, aim to evoke feelings
of authenticity, and enable traveling through time.
Such objects and performances of craftsmanship thus
become part of commercial activities not as souvenirs
but rather as stages of various role games.
Craft hobbies and household production constitute a rather different and more active engagement
with craft production. Many acts of nonmarket time,
such as cooking and various forms of maintenance
are craftlike pursuits, as they require both a broad
range of skills, manual labor, and problem solving.
On the other hand, craft hobbies exemplify a more
explicit pursuit of doing crafts and finding a different orientation to that of work life. Gardening, knitting, and do-it-yourself activities stand for a creative
craft work in leisure. Equally, the various courses on
craft skills that underlie these hobbies are significant
modes and elements of craft production.
Crafts can be understood as a contingent part
of the art world. As a form of artistic production,
craft items are considered both useful and expressive.
Craft production and consumption are thus subject
to processes that have been found to structure the
art world. Following the prominent figure of Pierre
Bourdieu in art sociology, one can ask the question,
what counts as crafts? How do craft items function in society? How are taste and class displayed

377

in public through craft products, and how are craft
products used at home? In his article “Arts and
Crafts,” Howard S. Becker considers explicitly the
interplay between arts and crafts. While both artists
and craftspeople, or artisans, seek to master particular techniques of making, Becker suggests that artists
stand apart from craftspeople because of their expressive pursuits and concerns. Hence, while a craftsperson may take pride in controlling a technique to
be able to repeat the minute details of consecutive
products, artists reject simple mastering of skill and
virtuoso for the sake of repetition. Uniqueness, and
the singularity of objects, is understood differently
in arts and in crafts. Equally, although usefulness is
a self-evident starting point for crafts, apparent uselessness is a means to twist the same techniques and
materials to support artistic and expressive pursuits.
Yet, as Becker also notes, distinctions between craft
and art are contingent. Ceramists, textile artists, and
more lately carpenters are examples of the blurring
between art and everyday objects. A more conceptual statement of the intertwining of arts and crafts
is the design dictum “form follows function,” which
has informed much of modern design since the arts
and crafts movement.
Craft items as embodiments of culture and vessels
of artistic expression are understood as singular and
unique as opposed to standardized and uniform
industrial products. This singularity of crafts can be
conceived in different ways. Most obviously, these
handmade products bear the signatures of their makers and the marks of skill. However, craft products
are also thought to reflect the personality of their
makers and carry traces of preconscious and prerepresentational tacit forms of intelligence. To quote
the website of the World Craft Council, “crafts are
produced from the heart and mind of an artisan,
whose hands personify it, exalt it, as a work of art.
Touch it, feel it, turn it in your hand and you can feel
the pulse of an Artisan who made it” (Obeyesekere
1996). Furthermore, following Sennett, one can argue
that crafts are never flawless and perfect in a standardized sense, but rather irregular and thus contain
the idea of their human maker as an active learner.
What are the contemporary academic uses of the
notion of craft production? Sennett attempts to place
the romantic and nostalgic sentiment associated
with craftsmanship to serve the analysis of work life
and addresses, for example, the craft of open source
software development. In his work, the concept is

378

Credit

relevant for, first, understanding human relations
with technology; and second, for understanding
the puzzle of excelling skills with repetition and yet
maintaining a curious problem-solving mind. On the
other hand, craft production is a concept that opens
up new avenues to understand consumption and
everyday life. Much of consumption can be viewed
as skilled activity and analyzed with the notion of
craft production. Finally, craft production constitutes
new ideas about the singularization of objects and
value-creation in global economy.
Mikko Jalas
See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Authenticity; Craft
Consumer; Decommodification; Leisure; Material
Culture; Prosumption; Souvenirs; Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Becker, Howard S. “Arts and Crafts.” The American
Journal of Sociology 83, no. 4 (1978): 862–889.
Grabourn, Nelson. “The Evolution of Tourist Art.” Annals
of Tourism Research 11 (1984): 393–419.
Laurier, Eric. “Replication and Restoration: Ways of
Making Maritime History.” Journal of Material Culture
3, no. 1 (1998): 21–50.
Mills, C. Wright. The American White Collar: The
American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1951.
Moreno, Josephine, and Mary Ann Littrell. “Negotiating
Tradition: Tourism Retailers in Guatemala.” Annals of
Tourism Research 28, no. 3 (2001): 658–685.
Obeyesekere, Siva. World Craft Council. 1996. http://www
.worldcraftscouncil.org/history.html.
Schatzki, Theodore, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von
Savigny, eds. The Practice Turn in Contemporary
Theory. London: Routledge, 2001.
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008.
Strati, Antonio. Organization and Aesthetics. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999.
Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory. London:
Routledge, 2008.

CREDIT
Borrowing and lending are as widespread and old
as human societies, but credit is a phenomenon of
the modern world. In early European economies, a
unique form of credit took shape, initially drafted

for the powerful: the church used credit to fund the
Crusades, state politicians amassed public debt to
fund wars as well as imperial and domestic projects, and merchant and industrial classes embraced
credit to expand their business empires. These early
credit networks layered onto the many financial
innovations of the early modern period, such as the
accounting procedures and checks popularized by
Italian merchants in the thirteenth century, banking and stock relations devised in fifteenth-century
Holland, and British financial networks woven by
mercantile expansion in the sixteenth century. Yet,
most important for consumer culture was how
twentieth-century retailers popularized, built on,
and transformed these early credit systems to service
the mass consumer market.

Modern Credit Expansion
Changed attitudes toward lending accompanied
modern credit expansion, signaled by the replacement of the morally tainted term usury, Latin for the
charging of interest on a loan, with credit. Modern
writers, such as merchant Daniel Defoe, shaped the
meaning of credit, embracing it, albeit ambivalently,
and insisting interest was an acceptable and necessary agent of economic growth. Debtor’s prison
for Defoe, who spent time there, was overly harsh
treatment for honest businessmen experiencing
a streak of bad investment luck. Building on this
positive redefinition of credit, legal reformer Jeremy
Bentham crafted arguments that abolished antiusury canonical law in 1694, establishing the free,
rational individual’s right to draft credit contracts.
Credit emerged in a context of intensive capital
exchange—more a phenomenon of affluence than
poverty—advanced legal, technological, and institutional networks. Modern notions of money marketing, secularism, and individualism also empowered
credit networks.
Although corner shop accounts, the traveling salesperson, and visiting the pawn shop had long saved
families from ruin, twentieth-century credit networks
drew consumers and producers into fateful institutionalized union. The corporate model dominated
credit networks that had once been diversely organized by cooperatives, workers’ collectives, and credit
unions. Automobile manufacturers were some of the
first to understand that by smoothing consumers’
purchasing patterns, credit extended, regularized,

Credit

and heightened the speed of mass-production cycles.
Western Europe became a branch plant for U.S. cars,
and U.S. style credit, which expanded as domestic
businesses replicated the credit practices and governments promoted credit believing it might stimulate
national economies. In the 1960s, U.S. financial
institutions, such as Visa, built powerful revolving
credit monopolies that linked banks, retailers, and
consumers. In 1983, two-thirds of Visa cards circulated domestically, yet, a decade later, U.S. consumers accounted for less than half of the total number
of Visa cards in circulation. By 2000, Visa cards
circulated throughout Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific,
Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa,
and the Middle East.
The extension of credit to previously untapped
markets fueled the phenomenal growth and profit
of the credit sector since the late-twentieth century.
New lending formulas and management of financial
risks by charging higher rates contributed to credit
expansion at the same time as it systematically
ensured that the poor and young pay more for credit
than the wealthy and established. As credit networks
became ubiquitous, those who paid in cash were
disadvantaged, because retailers bury in the price
of goods the 2 to 3 percent levy credit networks
demanded on each credit transaction. In the 1980s
and 1990s, several governments’ liberalization of
financial markets and relaxation of credit restrictions,
along with significant sums of capital looking for
investment opportunities, increased the sums available
for household lending. Between 2000 and 2008, U.S.
household lending increased from US$7.1 trillion to
US$15.3 trillion; the United Kingdom from US$1 trillion to US$3 trillion; Germany from US$1.4 trillion
to US$2.1 trillion; and France from US$486 billion to
US$1.3 trillion (Economists Intelligence Unit 2009).
The combined U.S. and European consumer debt
load reached $4.4 trillion. From Turkey to India to
China, consumer credit and consumer debt increased
globally (Worthington, Stewart, and Lu 2007).
Still, it is impossible to adequately explain consumer credit as simply a by-product of Americanization or modernization, because ample evidence
demonstrates how unique historical circumstances,
laws, and customs shape distinctive contexts of credit
use. For example, some sectors of Islamic faith communities denounce credit, leading to its limited use
in Pakistan and Egypt, as well as the formation of
Islamic credit alternatives by major U.K. and U.S.

379

banks to service their Muslim customers. Patriarchal
laws and custom prevented British women from
engaging in some forms of credit until 1935. Credit is
frequently restricted in families, as many parents refuse
to charge interest on loans to their children. Further,
despite growth, levels of credit use and consumer debt
remain limited in France and Germany, explained
partially by high levels of state subsidies, countervailing beliefs to the marketplace, as well as an enduring cultural pride, particularly in the middle class,
toward the values of prudence, thrift, and saving.
Credit use is more prevalent in market-friendly
countries, such as the United States and the United
Kingdom. Mortgages, a key form of consumer credit,
are highly popular because these instruments have
allowed some of those of limited means to get out
from under the dictates of a landlord, generate wealth,
and, through property inheritance, provide future
generations a leg up. In this sense, U.S. consumer
debt plays a role in the American Dream. Campaigns
supporting the democratization of credit and social
movements acting against its selective restriction are
justified by the belief that it is a consumer’s right to
invest in his or her future and immediately enjoy the
fruits of the market. Credit discrimination is tackled in regulation, appeals to human rights, and the
formation of smaller, controlled lending circles, like
women’s collectives in Africa.
Some assert that modern credit contracts
changed the character of modern cultures by fostering abstract, individualized, and impersonal ways
of relating that distorted people’s sense of value
and supported their alienation from one another.
Authors distinguished credit from the more personal, communal, and morally laden obligations
of traditional lending circles. Still others reject the
idea that credit networks are universally impersonalizing, or inherently alienating, arguing instead that
credit can be put to many ends, including social integration. For example, cultures distinguish different
types of money and lending situations: loan sharking, blood money, and pocket money.

Problems Associated With Consumer Credit
A variety of economic, social, and personal problems
accompanied consumer credit expansion. Credit
facilitated new types of criminal activity. Credit card
records are a powerful map of consumers’ activities, thus credit fraud, identity theft, and concerns

380

Credit

about privacy remain ongoing concerns. Mistrust in
lending circles—brought on by such issues as fear
that borrowers will not pay back their debts, the
overvaluing or depreciation of goods purchased on
credit, and increased interest rates and demands for
repayment—is associated with a menagerie of problems. Imprudent lending and trading of risky mortgage bonds around the globe brought high and low
finance together as never before, producing a decade
of capital expansion and, in 2007, an international
recession. Credit retraction resulted in job loss, asset
stripping, and economic stagnation. In the United
States and the United Kingdom, bankruptcy laws,
originally devised to forgive farmers at the mercy of
nature of their debts, by the twenty-first century forgave the bad loans of banks and financial houses to
prevent economies from failing.
Yet, in advanced consumer cultures, where up to
70 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) is
attributable to retail and service consumption, and
where politicians encourage people to view spending as their patriotic duty, bankruptcy laws show less
forgiveness to many individuals who sought relief
from their unmanageable debts. High personal debt
is correlated with variety of physical and mental
illnesses, as well as addictions (Dittmar 2007). Debt
also plays a role in the breakdown of social and
family relations (Price, Price, and McKenry 2010).
The human cost of debt stimulates criticism against
predatory lending, and much contemporary research
has set out to expose the aggressive sales practices,
deceptive marketing claims, poor credit checks, and
deceptive advertisements that prey on consumer’s
desires instead of offering financial information.
Others focus on credit’s contribution to consumerism. Some point to a broad scale shift in cultural
values, consumer attitudes, and elevated aspirations.
The twentieth century is recognized as a moment
when traditional fears of debt and the value of thrift
were bypassed by appeals to hedonistic lifestyle that
embraced a have-it-all, have-it-now attitude. Popular
culture discourses shamed the indebted consumer
by constructing a contemporary folk devil, the
out-of-control shopaholic, typically women, who,
with a fist full of credit cards, drive themselves
and their families to ruin. Credit is also thought to
encourage impatient and unsatisfied individuals,
who are unable to wait to acquire goods, which is
exactly what a consumer culture predicated on the
high turnover of goods requires.

Credit from this perspective feeds elevated aspirations and stokes individual pleasure seeking and the
pursuit of novelty over functionality, long-term maintenance, and thoughtful use and meaningful interaction with objects. Along with criticism, campaigns
for more financial education in schools, counseling
services, and financial advice seek to address credit
problems and consumerism. Some call for the medical interventions for treating debt-ridden shopaholics.
Still others insist that treating individual consumers
neglects the systemic problems associated with credit
systems and consumer culture. Despite growing personal debt loads, the vast majority of consumers continue to show a remarkable capacity to pay back their
debts, despite great hardship. In a consumer economy
where consumption is the central engine of growth,
people appear to dutifully work hard and consume
hard into the future by taking on credit.
Jacqueline Botterill
See also Affluent Society; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies;
Consumer Society; Consumption Patterns and Trends;
Debt; Islam; Money; Network Society; Thrift

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity,
2007.
Black, Donald W. “Compulsive Buying: A Review.” The
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 57, no. 8 (1996): 50–54.
Botterill, Jaqueline. Consumer Culture and Personal
Finance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Calder, Lendol. Financing the American Dream: A Cultural
History of Consumer Credit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001.
Davies, Glyn. A History of Money from Ancient Times to
the Present Day. 3rd. ed. Cardiff, UK: University of
Wales Press, 2002.
Dittmar, Helga. Consumer Culture, Identity and
Well-Being. London: Routledge, 2007.
Economists Intelligence Unit. “Plastic Implosion.” Country
Monitor 17, no. 28 (2009): 5.
Finn, Margot. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in
English Culture, 1740–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Kaynak, Erdener, and Talha Harcar. “Consumers’ Attitudes
and Intentions towards Credit Card Usage in an
Advanced Developing Country.” Journal of Financial
Services Marketing 6, no. 1 (2001): 24–39.

Cultural Capital
Manning, Robert. Credit Card Nation: The Consequences
of America’s Addiction to Credit. New York: Basic
Books, 2001.
Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture
of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern
England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
O’Connell, Sean. Credit and Community: Working-Class
Debt in the UK since 1880. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Olney, Martha. Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit,
and Consumer Durables in the 1920s. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Price, Sharon, Christine A. Price, and Patrick C. McKenry.
Families and Change: Coping with Stressful Events and
Transitions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010.
Ritzer, George. Expressing America: A Critique of the
Global Credit Card Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine
Forge Press, 1995.
Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. 3rd ed. London:
Routledge, 2004.
Sullivan, Ceri. The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early
Modern Writing. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2002.
Tucker, David. The Decline of Thrift in America: Our Cultural
Shift from Saving to Spending. New York: Praeger, 1990.
Worthington, Steve, David Stewart, and Xiongwen Lu.
“The Adoption and Usage of Credit Cards by UrbanAffluent Consumers in China.” International Journal of
Bank Marketing 25, no. 4 (2007): 238–252.
Zelizer, Viviana A. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin
Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

CULTURAL CAPITAL
The analysis of consumer culture is premised on both
the top-down understanding of the emergence and
effects of large-scale systems for the production and
market-mediated dissemination of cultural objects,
performances, and experiences and the bottom-up theorizing of the process through which people select and
appropriate particular offerings (while, by implication,
excluding others) as part of their own active attempt
to build a “lifestyle.” The concept of cultural capital
has recently come to acquire a central place in our
understanding of lifestyle choices in consumer societies (Holt 1998) by allowing us to, on the one hand,
better conceptualize the usually hard-to-appreciate
systematicity to be found in otherwise seemingly
arbitrary choices across putatively disconnected

381

consumption domains and, on the other hand, allowing us to link these choice styles to the consumer’s
socialization history and current social position.
The term cultural capital was introduced by Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to better understand patterns of inequality—such as educational
inheritance, or the differential ability of the sons and
daughters of educated parents to be judged as better
students by their teachers—in educational outcomes
in French schools. Bourdieu and Passeron suggested
that educational institutions are “imprinted” with the
styles of thought and classification as well as habitual
orientations toward institutionally validated cultural
goods and experiences of the status groups that exercises control over them (e.g., higher-education professionals). Cultural capital differences among pupils thus
partly explained differential educational trajectories
for students originating from different class fractions.
In their original statement, the acquisition of a set
of tacit competences in culturally privileged households lead to an unconscious, undirected, but ultimately systematic development of an organized set
of expectations, styles of appreciation, and systems
of practical action in recurrent status-marked situations that Bourdieu (1984) later came to refer to as
the class habitus. This class habitus is an enduring
(but dynamic) cognitive structure that produces
thoughts, reactions (aesthetic, cognitive, and moral),
and choices (e.g., what to buy, what to major in, who
to marry) that are in tune with and attempts (within
constraints) to re-create the environment during
which it developed. The habitus does this by making
“choices” that are consonant with its conditions of
development, because it is essentially a set of practical dispositions that unconsciously construe and
expect the future to be similar in shape and pattern
to the past, unless subject to a process of radical
disconfirmation (for instance, by way of systematic
exposure to a series of countervailing experiences).
The thought styles and habitual cultural practices
that are rewarded in formal school settings, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, are similar to those
that are more likely to be promoted and imparted in
middle-class households and are qualitatively distinct
from those that are implicitly transmitted in workingclass households. Bourdieu’s mature formulation
of this process came to differ from other arguments
as to the impact of socialization on educational
outcomes (e.g., those provided by Basil Bernstein)
in construing parental socialization as less driven

382

Cultural Capital

by an unintentional process of “code” transmission
mediated by linguistic forms and more by an implicit,
embodied, unconscious immersion in an entire social,
symbolic, and material environment (mainly composed of parental practices, but also material objects,
built environments, as well as specific sensory and
cultural experiences).
Empirical studies of the effects of cultural capital on educational outcomes that have followed
Bourdieu’s lead have usually operationalized cultural
capital using parent’s and children’s rates of engagement in legitimate cultural practices (e.g., reading
of “serious” literature, going to a museum). These
studies have shown that indeed seemingly extrainstitutional (vis-à-vis formal schooling) patterns of
cultural practice in the realm of symbolic goods consumption impact intra-institutional outcomes in the
educational system. These range from better grades
for children who engage in legitimate arts consumption (DiMaggio 1982) to better chances of making a
given educational transition for children of culturally
privileged parents (Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997).

Conceptualizing Cultural Capital
The concept of cultural capital has enjoyed a much
more flexible and generalized applicability beyond
the study of educational outcomes in contemporary
sociological theory and empirical research. This has
been mainly due to the impact of Bourdieu’s classic
study Distinction, where the notion of cultural
capital was extended to explain differential rates
of engagement in the (institutionally legitimated)
arts. Released from its functional linkage to a narrow set of outcomes in the early work coauthored
with Passeron, cultural capital now came to denote
a generalized, transposable disposition to apply the
artistic “scheme” (e.g., the Kantian notion that aesthetic form should be privileged over content) to
cultural products hailing from symbol-producing
art worlds of different degrees of institutional legitimation (Bourdieu 1984, 3). This is what Bourdieu
referred to as the “aesthetic disposition.”
The key argument in Distinction is that the aesthetic disposition functions as cultural capital in latemodern societies, because it is the most institutionally
legitimated (e.g., through its reinforcement by educational institutions) form of appropriation of aesthetic
goods, although it is not the only existing mode
of reception. Bourdieu concluded that it was this

differential capacity to apply aestheticizing cognitive
schemes to the different symbolic goods produced by
the symbol-production fields of the more legitimate
(and sometimes the popular) arts that served as the
primary differentiating factor among art-consuming
audiences in late-modern societies. This was also
the key to understanding the cultural advantage of
the more educated segments of the dominant class.
Those portions of the population who have the most
habitual command of the practical schemes of aesthetic appreciation that yield cultural capital would
therefore be more likely to be knowledgeable about
and be heavily engaged in the arts. This is precisely
what Bourdieu finds in his empirical analysis and
what has been confirmed by scores of studies that
have followed in its wake.

The Three Modes of Existence of
Cultural Capital
In an influential essay, Bourdieu (1986) argued that
cultural capital can exist in three analytically distinct
states: in its embodied state, cultural capital consists of an implicit set of cognitive-emotive schemes
of perception, appreciation, and action relevant to
the manner in which institutionally legitimated cultural objects and aesthetic experiences are experienced, appropriated, and thus “consumed.” A more
explicit aspect of embodied cultural capital may be
manifested in the capacity to verbally express the aesthetic qualities of a given cultural object. Bourdieu
was clear, nevertheless, in underscoring the fact that
the relative ability to “redescribe” implicit aesthetic
experiences into explicit verbal statements differed
according to the mode of acquisition of cultural
capital. Those who have acquired the bulk of their
cultural capital in the informal family environment
(in contrast to those whose main source of cultural
capital is the formal educational system) are predicted to be relatively less likely to explicitly verbalize
and schematize their aesthetic experiences, while at
the same time being more likely to make the “right’
aesthetic choices.
Cultural capital may also exist in what Bourdieu
referred to as an institutionalized state, which refers
to the possession on the part of the bearer of concrete (and institutionally defined and legitimated)
markers of cultural distinction and status rank
(such as educational qualifications in contemporary
societies). More specific forms of institutionalized

Cultural Capital

cultural capital appear in the form of the occupancy
of objectified posts of cultural authority that assign
the bearer the symbolic power to make “distinctions
that make a difference” within fields of symbolic
production (e.g., curator, critic). Naturally, due to
the reinforcing and socializing effects of educational
institutions, we should empirically expect to observe
a rough match between indicators of institutionalized
cultural capital and the implicit aptitudes constitutive
of its embodied form.
Finally, Bourdieu suggests that cultural capital
may also appear in an objectified state, in the form of
the “direct” possession or appropriation (e.g., ownership through market mechanisms) of institutionally
defined art objects. For Bourdieu, while the direct
appropriation of cultural goods can be a potential
signal of cultural capital, in late-modern societies, sole
direct ownership of objectified cultural capital in the
absence of a demonstrable ability to indirectly appropriate those products (through the application of the
contextually defined “correct” schemes of perception
and appreciation) had come to be devalued (e.g.,
conspicuous displays of objectified cultural wealth).
In fact, for Bourdieu, the two different fractions of
the dominant class are partitioned mainly according
to this division between indirect (embodied, associated with patronage of nonprofit arts dissemination
institutions) and direct (objectified, associated with
involvement in a literal market for symbolic goods
associated with the monetary purchase of prestigious
art objects). These constituted two opposing principles of engagement with cultural works (possibly
reconciled in the figure of newly mobile professionals
endowed with both embodied cultural capital and
the ability to purchase art objects).
In spite of the importance of this tripartite
distinction between the different forms of cultural
capital, most empirical research that has attempted
to put Bourdieu’s framework to the test usually relies
on relatively incomplete measures of cultural capital that seldom attempt to disentangle the relative
impact of these different forms of cultural capital on
the outcomes of interest.

Cultural Capital: Proficiency Versus
Boundary Definitions
A key interest on the part of sociologists in the notion
of cultural capital is the fact that various strands of
theory predict that it should be systematically linked

383

with a host of outcomes, especially those having
some impact on a person’s ability to reproduce his
or her position in the system of status and stratification. However, the way in which we conceive the
effects of cultural capital are clearly dependent on the
way in which we define the concept in the first place.
In the Anglo-American literature, there are two primary definitions of cultural capital that inform contemporary theory and research. One, partially based
on Bourdieu’s (1986) influential formulation, defines
cultural capital as an aptitude or a skill acquired in
the combined realms of the upper-middle-class family and the school system.
For instance, Paul DiMaggio conceives of cultural capital as “proficiency in the consumption
of and discourse about generally prestigious—that
is institutionally screened and validated—cultural
goods” (1991, 134). From this point of view, and
following Bourdieu’s (1984) rejection of Thorstein
Veblen’s (1899) account of emulation through
conspicuous consumption in his book, The Theory
of the Leisure Class, theories of consciously guided
“distinction,” whatever benefits accrue to the individual as a consequence of possessing cultural capital appear as an unintended consequence produced
by cross-institutional linkages in society-wide cultural definitions of value and worth (i.e., between
symbol-producing art worlds, higher education
institutions, and high-status professional fields). It
follows that with transformations in institutional
conceptions of what constitutes aesthetic value,
certain forms of cultural capital may lose their
legitimacy and be replaced by others (Peterson and
Kern 1996).
The other major conceptualization of cultural
capital in current theory and research on the subject
is concerned with addressing what are perceived to
be ambiguities in the Bourdieu-inspired definition of
cultural capital as skill or proficiency. Instead, from
the boundaries point of view (Lamont and Lareau
1988, 164) cultural capital is defined as “the institutionalized repertoire of high status signals” useful for
purposes of marking and drawing symbolic boundaries in a given social context. This definition of social
capital attempts to recover what is perceived to be
its origin in a theory by Max Weber of status group
closure. From this perspective, whatever counts as
cultural capital are those symbolic resources that are
actively mobilized by members of groups or class
fractions to establish their difference from other

384

Cultural Flows

groups and thus to devalue the cultural resources and
symbolic practices of outsiders.
Omar Lizardo
See also Aesthetics; Conspicuous Consumption; Habitus;
Lifestyle; Social Class; Social Distinction; Status;
Symbolic Capital; Taste

Further Readings
Aschaffenburg, Karen, and Ineke Maas. “Cultural and
Educational Careers: The Dynamics of Social
Reproduction.” American Sociological Review
62 (1997): 573–587.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of
Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education,
edited by John Richardson, 241–258. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1986.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction
in Education, Society and Culture. Beverly Hills,
CA: Sage, 1977.
DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success: The
Impact of Status Culture Participation on the Grades of
U.S. High School Students.” American Sociological
Review 47 (1982): 189–201.
DiMaggio, Paul. “Social Structure Institutions and Cultural
Goods: The Case of the United States.” In Social
Theory for a Changing Society, edited by Pierre
Bourdieu and James Coleman, 133–155. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1991.
Holt, D. B. “Does Cultural Capital Structure American
Consumption?” Journal of Consumer Research
25 (1998): 1–25.
Lamont, Michèle, and Annette Lareau. “Cultural Capital:
Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical
Developments.” Sociological Theory 6 (1988):
153–168.
Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing
Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American
Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907.

CULTURAL FLOWS
Cultural flows refer to multidirectional movements
and reallocations of human beings, artifacts, and
ideas within the ill-defined sphere of “culture” in its
global, national, and regional dimensions. The term
was widely applied in consumer culture, especially

in relation to production/consumption processes
and products. Mobilized by transformationalist globalization theorists, the concept suggests that migrations and mobilities generate ever-changing cultural
formations, erasing imagined boundaries and territorial borders through which nation-states legitimate their power.
Transformationalists express suspicion toward
traditional identifications of globalization with cultural standardization (e.g., one-dimensional “Americanization” of world cultures), arguing instead that
cultural flows diffuse identities, generating new
possibilities for intercultural dialogues. Unlike other
branches of globalization theory (e.g., world systems
theory), transformationalism does not establish culture as a single system of collective values and practices. Instead, it highlights the multiplicity of cultural
trajectories through time and space, and the power
individuals and collectivities have to create, destroy,
and reinvent cultures. Cultural flows facilitate
human creativity both in organized or institutionalized (in nation-states, factories, cultural industries)
and nonorganized forms (through travel, migration,
and consumption). Producing and consuming culturally specific goods and ideas become interconnected:
consumers assign new meanings to them, a process
that transforms them into symbolic producers and
grants them with some agency and belonging to a
consumer community.
Most world societies have always been in (peaceful or violent) contact with each other. The twentiethcentury revolution in communications and transport
has only intensified this phenomenon, according to
David Held. However, cultural flows remain unevenly
distributed across the world: urban areas are more
benefited by flows of goods than rural peripheries, as
they tend to be the destinations of business or labor
migrants or production centers for commodities. The
developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere
(e.g., Britain, the United States) and Asia (e.g., China,
India) possess more military and technological power
to control whole regions of the world, as opposed
to impoverished countries (e.g., on the African
continent), which are cast as political satellites or
subaltern cultural formations.
The concept of cultural flows is associated with
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Disjuncture
and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”
Appadurai suggests that we reconsider the binary
oppositions colonial history bequeathed us: global

Cultural Flows

versus local, South versus North, or metropolitan
versus rural. Instead, we should try to understand
how “flows” or “scapes” sweep through the globe,
carrying capital, images, people, information, technologies, and ideas. As these flows travel through
national boundaries, they form different combinations and interdependencies, mutate, and split cultural imaginations into nation and state. Institutional
barriers collapse, and people join imagined communities that live beyond the place they were born and
raised (e.g., communities of interest, such as those
that maintain Internet blogs or diasporic groups that
live outside their homeland).
Refuting the canon of push-and-pull factors of
traditional migration theory (e.g., lack of jobs in one
country and abundance in another are solely responsible for migrations), Appadurai develops a thesis
with an eye to Scott Lash and John Urry’s disorganized capitalism hypothesis, that is, to split global
cultural flows into ethnoscapes (human migrations), technoscapes (configurations of technology),
financescapes (global business networks), ideoscapes
(concatenations of images), and mediascapes (cultural industry networks). He claims that global
flows occur through and in the growing disjunctures
between scapes.
For example, the Olympic Games organize financescapes (global, regional, and international business
networks flock to invest in the host city), mediascapes
(the games have opening and closing ceremonies that
showcase national cultures), but also ideoscapes
(images of the host city and nation, their history and
customs circulate globally to attract tourists), and
ethnoscapes (human migrations of business networks
and localities that are removed from parts of the city
to make space for Olympic venues). Financescapes
are at war (in disjunction) with ethnoscapes: global
social movement networks often protest against the
violation of human rights that take place during the
games (housing problems, migration management);
in turn, ideoscapes clash with ethnoscapes, as city
brands and narratives are tarnished by demonstrations and negative press reporting.
Cultural flows result in hybridity that regulates
fusions of tangible or intangible categories initially
considered separate entities. The concept invites us
to shed light on the symbolic process through which
goods are produced in local, national, and transnational markets. Like scapes, it refers to fusions, different understandings and material reproductions

385

of national cultures by different groups (producers
and consumers). For example, Olympic legacies
are read through the host city and nation’s history.
The Athens 2004 ceremonies claimed the Olympic
Games as part of Greek-European national heritage,
whereas their Beijing 2008 counterpart stressed how
Chinese civilization with its groundbreaking inventions (calligraphy, paper, the compass) preceded the
European-Hellenic civilization. Their global audiences and consumers of their paraphernalia (e.g.,
mascots), however, developed their own understanding of the ceremonies and their products.
Similar to the cultural flows debate is the idea of
“traveling cultures,” a term coined by James Clifford
to communicate an understanding of the practice of
“doing anthropology.” For Clifford, the anthropological field is not a neatly framed area but an open
one that observers (outsiders) and the observed
(insiders) create together. Culture is a grand travel:
people leave home and return, enacting interconnected cosmopolitanisms through encounters with
others. Other sociologists adapted Clifford’s thesis
to explore ideas of (embodied, actual, and virtual)
travel and tourism. For example, it has been suggested that tourism involves flaneurism, a cosmopolitan outlook that enables travelers to consume the
world from afar (an aircraft or the Internet) or from
the standpoint of physical proximity (e.g., buying
souvenirs or photographing monuments). Just like
anthropologists, tourists and travelers may remain
outside native cultures, but their very presence
or banal interactions with locals introduce social
change. Their traveling is a form of mobility that sustains ties between the global and the local, producing
what sociologist Ronald Robertson has termed glocalization. Glocalization is also actualized by production companies that manufacture consumer goods
for global markets: these products travel and flow
through the globe.
Consider, for example, the geographical and cultural journey of the Barbie doll as an idea (intangible)
and a marketable (tangible) product: inspired by a
German toy doll in the mid-1950s, it was produced
in the United States, became a globally traded brand,
was appropriated in various national contexts (today,
eBay sells “Sumatra Barbie dolls” in ethnic outfits),
but is manufactured in China. The predecessor of
Barbie, Bild Lilli, was based on a popular German
character implicitly connected with the femme fatale
cinematic genre: Lilli was a working girl that knew

386

Cultural Fragmentation

what she wanted and was not above using men to get
it. The sociopolitical connection with the film noir
tradition that emerged in the turbulent interwar years
when a number of economic changes threatened the
social structure (especially ideals about the family
and gender roles) provides a distinctive European
context that was lost during Lilli’s relocation to the
United States as the “blonde” girl (connotations
between blondness and stupidity were prominent in
Hollywood cinema).
The production and distribution process transcended state boundaries, whereas the idea itself is a
cultural synthesis in constant flux. In the 2000s, the
much cheaper version of Fulla replaced the legendary American toy in the Arab world, regranting it
with its original sociohistorical context. Distributed
by the Emirates-based NewBoy Design Studio,
Fulla clashes with the blonde, skinny archetype (it
is both dark-skinned and veiled, to appeal to the
upper-class Muslim consumers). This happened
just as Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion
of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, often called
the religious police, had banned “the Jewish doll,”
whose “revealing clothes and shameful postures,
accessories, and tools were a symbol of decadence to
the perverted West.” A hybrid toy thus became the
battleground of both anti-Western cultural values
and nationalist rivalries, simultaneously uncovering
the postcolonial (both anti-Western and anti-Semitic)
context in which these values are played out.
Likewise, salsa music, a genre inextricably linked
with one of the last surviving communist regimes,
was originally invented by Cuban immigrants in
Miami in the 1920s through fusions of African and
Latin American genres. However, as a contemporary
subcultural (musical and dance) trend, it is divested
of its political background.
Cultural flows enable the enrichment of culturally
specific ideas and goods. This process does not entail a
monocultural synthesis akin to the thesis that foretells
the Americanization of the globe and the subsequent
erasure of cultural particularity. Rather, it facilitates
fusions of ideas by both the producers of goods and
their consumers. As cultural flows enable the mobility, interaction, and clashes of diverse scapes, they are
a manifestation of globalization dynamics.
Rodanthi Tzanelli
See also Americanization; Cosmopolitanism; Diaspora;
Disorganized Capitalism; Flaneur/euse; Globalization;
Information Society; Migration

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the
Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2,
no. 2 (1990): 1–24.
Clifford, James. “Travelling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies,
edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula
A. Treichler, 96–116. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Held, David, ed. A Globalizing World? London: Routledge,
2000.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. The End of Organised
Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987.
Pieterse, Nederveen Jan. “Globalization as Hybridization.”
In Global Modernities, edited by Mike Featherstone,
Scott Lash, and Ronald Robertson, 45–68. London:
Sage, 1997.
Pieterse, Nederveen Jan. Globalization and Culture.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Robertson, Ronald. Globalization. London: Sage, 1992.

CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION
The concept of cultural fragmentation implies the disintegration of “singular” cultures and the formation
of numerous diverse cultures, be they associated with
particular ethnicities, religions, concepts of nationhood or people groups, or those associated with particular forms of lifestyle, values, or commodification.
The notion of cultural fragmentation has been
linked with processes of globalization and is particularly associated with the ascendency of postmodernism as a condition of society. The connection between
globalization and postmodernism and its relationship
to cultural fragmentation is a complex one because
of processes of globalization that create both homogeneity and heterogeneity. Some commentators argue
globalization has produced increasing homogeneity
(the serial repetition of processes and places, such as
shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, retail chains,
global consumer and pop cultures, Internet socialities) and that this threatens diverse cultural practices.
Others argue the postmodern period has been associated with increased fragmentation and diversity with
regard to social life, lifestyles, and identity choices.
Cultural fragmentation is also strongly linked to
globalization through processes of commodification.
The commodification of everyday life in a globalizing
world has meant that more and more goods and services become subject to market relations of exchange.
This has resulted in increased visibility and access to

Cultural Fragmentation

commodities for many people. The marketing and
portrayal of the symbolic and representative qualities
and images of things, services, and lifestyle practices
conjures up particular imaginative visions of people
and places, visions that construct differences between
“self” and other. Regardless of whether people are
able to possess such commodities, greater exposure
to a range of both commercial and noncommercial
images of people, places, and things presents individuals with increased possibilities for different lifestyle
orientations and for constructions of identity. The
rise of post-Fordist or flexible regimes of accumulation are also seen as important, enabling firms to
produce short runs or batches of commodities that
can be marketed to niche consumers. Niche products
further encourage the development of fragmentation
as new consumer cultures emerge around particular
commodities and orientations (such as green consumerist movements, food cultures, brand followers
and “tribes,” music and film genres).
Processes of cultural fragmentation have not
only been facilitated by an increase in the scale and
diversity of commodities, which can be used to shape
individual and collective identities in the form of consumer cultures. Of particular significance in facilitating processes of cultural fragmentation has also been
the role of new technologies, especially in media and
communications. These have resulted in the creation
of information-rich societies and increased exposure
for individuals and groups to images of alternative
ways of living and being. Exposure to media images
and information, both in traditional print and visual
media, has been extended through the use of new
forms of billboard and advertising technologies, the
rise of the Internet, and mobile phones and mobile
computing technologies (including the development
of web 2.0 tools, allowing new and varied forms of
social networking).
Music, television, and film industries had also
expanded over the course of the twentieth century,
broadening the range of experiences and tastes an
individual may be exposed to in his or her lifetime.
These industries may, in turn, facilitate the development of their own forms of consumer culture and
preferences (e.g., through fan clubs, fashion, and merchandising). New social networks and practices may
be associated with these diverse consumer cultures,
further fragmenting collective identities. Internet and
social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter,
Flicker, and Blogger, also allow individuals to personalize their interests, limiting their exposure to

387

ideas, information, and relationships that specifically
interest them and reducing the spaces in which they
may encounter the views and perspectives of others.
Although such personalization may be seen as a form
of cultural fragmentation, it may actually enable the
formation and aggregation of communities of interest across distant spaces that previously may have
been formed in physical proximity.
The fragmentation of cultures associated with globalization is believed by some to have brought about
an overall decline in civic responsibility and behavior
(civil fragmentation), particularly in Western countries. With globalization, economic differences are
said to become starker, further contributing to the
widening of cultural differences between rich and
poor. The exacerbation of economic and material
differences may be expressed politically, with the
wealthy remaining politically engaged and vociferous, and the economically disadvantaged feeling
insecure and alienated from the political process.
Cultural fragmentation has also been connected
with the rise in alternative political identifications,
such as those based on indigeneity, regional location, diaspora, and immigrant status, with greater
mobility of people, and an ability to construct political affiliations across new spaces. Migration and
mobility have also resulted in a more diverse range
of communities within the boundaries of nation
states. A consequence of numerous people groups
and identifications within nation-states may be a
lack of shared visions of sovereignty and nationhood
and potentially also competing and multiple claims
for rights and entitlements that may extend beyond
state boundaries. Thus, groups may embrace and
exert their own values much more strongly, with a
result that cultural distinctions (such as those based
on political persuasion, religion, particularly social
practices) become more rather than less politicized.
Consequently, there is a concern that globalization
in combination with processes of cultural fragmentation have implications for the capacity of states to
govern with a rupturing of the relationships between
sovereignty, territory, and state power.
Some caution is, however, needed in considering
the application of the notion of cultural fragmentation. The concept should be critiqued because it
implicitly relies on assumptions of earlier periods
in which cultures were more sedentary, fixed, and
relatively unchanging. While the speed and direction
of cultural change may have increased dramatically
over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first

388

Cultural Intermediaries

centuries, it would be incorrect to suggest that forms
of fragmentation did not exist in earlier periods.
Cultures have always been formed in contexts in
which individual and collective identities are diverse
and subject to change. Likewise, the belief that
cultural fragmentation is a consequence of global
economic and cultural homogenizing forces denies
the ways in which the local and global are shaped
relationally, with each scale an important part of the
production of the other. As the previous discussion
has illustrated, processes of cultural fragmentation
(such as the development of multiple niche markets
and consumer cultures) can actually result in formation of new cultures and new communities of interest
and practice across dispersed spaces. Consequently,
while globalization may produce difference, diversity,
and new exclusions, it may simultaneously result in
the development of new socialities and spatialities of
inclusion, integration, and interconnection.
Nevertheless, the global diffusion and creation
of different lifestyle and consumer choices and the
increasingly complex networks of association that
shape identities in a postmodern globalizing world
provide challenges to the notions of cultural connection and cultural change based on collective standpoints. Much of the concern arising over issues of
cultural fragmentation is based on the belief that
increased diversity and distinctiveness are removing “common ground,” a concept that enables the
meaningful exchange of information. There is also
a concern that as individual identity choices and cultural interests proliferate, there will be a decline in
shared visions, vocabulary, experiences, and common
reference points. Under conditions of cultural fragmentation, it becomes more difficult for individuals
and organizations to communicate and connect with
broad populations. However, it also means that the
individual or groups may potentially ignore, filter,
or suppress ideas, topics, and information that do
not align to their particular worldview or orientation. Cultural fragmentation also poses challenges
for the ways in which private and public (common)
spaces are constituted and potential possibilities for
social action as people are able to filter out views that
may not be aligned to their own and can choose to
engage with a much smaller social network than may
previously have been the case, reducing the possibility for wide engagement in the public sphere. More
in-depth studies are necessary to unpack the ways in
which fragmentation and integration are culturally

and economically co-constituted in a globalizing
world and the consequences of this for specific people and place relationships.
Juliana Mansvelt
See also Cosmopolitanism; Cultural Flows; Diaspora;
Geography; Globalization; Neo-Tribes; Post-Fordism;
Social Networks

Further Readings
Cornwell, T. Bettina, and Judy Drennan. “Cross-Cultural
Consumer/Consumption Research: Dealing with Issues
Emerging from Globalization and Fragmentation.”
Journal of Macromarketing 24 (2004): 108–121.
Elliot, Richard. “Addictive Consumption: Function and
Fragmentation in Postmodernity.” Journal of Consumer
Policy 17 (1994): 159–179.
Fırat, A. Fuat. “Globalization of Fragmentation: A
Framework for Understanding Contemporary Global
Markets.” Journal of International Marketing 5, no. 2
(1997): 77–86.
Friedman, Jonathan. Cultural Identity and Global Process.
London: Sage, 1994.
Friedman, Jonathan. “Globalizing Languages: Ideologies
and Realities of the Contemporary Global System.”
American Anthropologist 105, no. 4 (2003): 744–752.
Grove, D. John. “Global Cultural Fragmentation: A
Bourdieuan Perspective.” Globalizations 4, no. 2
(2007): 157–169.
Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996.
Janmaat, Jan Germen. “Socio-Economic Inequality and
Cultural Fragmentation in Western Societies.”
Comparative Sociology 7 (2008): 179–214.
Martinelli, Alberto. “Global Order or Divided World?
Introduction.” Current Sociology 51, no. 2 (2003):
95–100.

CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES
The notion of cultural intermediary has been of use
to recent research and thinking on consumer culture
because it has enabled explorations of how the emergence and reproduction of the latter is hard-wired to
broader sets of sociocultural transformations, including transformations to the class structure and to largescale shifts in the relationship between consumption
and production. Mobilized initially by French

Cultural Intermediaries

contemporary social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, the
concept of cultural intermediary refers to those sets
of occupations and workers involved in the production and circulation of symbolic goods and services
in the context of an expanding cultural economy in
postwar Western societies. Bourdieu included in this
category the “producers of cultural programmes on
TV and radio or the critics of ‘quality’ newspapers
and magazines and all the writer-journalists and journalist-writers” (Bourdieu 1984, 325) as well as those
working in design, marketing, public relations, advertising, packaging, and sales promotion (Nixon and
du Gay 2002). Crucially, however, the notion of cultural intermediary was mobilized not simply to capture a quantitative growth in the number of symbolic
occupations and workers; it was also operationalized
to capture the sociological significance of this expansion in terms of transformations to the class structure.
Specifically, cultural intermediary was a term
mobilized by Bourdieu to capture how the growth in
symbolic occupations and working activities related
to the emergence of a service class or new middle
class, a class fraction whose tastes, classificatory
schemes, dispositions, lifestyles, and working practices often clashed with those of the established middle class. The positions of power and control in the
mass media occupied by members of this group moreover allowed the assembly and circulation of cultural
products (advertising, television, film) that embodied
such tastes and values. Bourdieu characterized the
latter as involving the creation of a whole range of
“half-way genres” (1984, 326) that sat somewhere in
between “legitimate” and mass culture, genres that
divulged aspects of “legitimate” culture to those who
had been historically excluded from its consumption.
The emergence of cultural intermediaries therefore
marked not just an expansion of the culture industries and a major and enduring transformation of
the class structure but also the emergence of what
has been termed postmodern culture, a culture in
which established taste and value hierarchies were
challenged by halfway hybrid genres produced in the
main by a new culturally “mediating” class fraction.
Moreover, according to Scott Lash, through the production of this culture, this new class fraction not
only shaped tastes and challenged the authority of
established taste makers but also pursued its own
legitimacy and power.
While Bourdieu’s comments on cultural intermediaries were brief and not particularly well elaborated

389

either empirically or theoretically, nonetheless they
are of substantial significance, not least because
they captured simultaneously economic and cultural
change, or changes in both the spheres of production and consumption. This is of importance because
social scientific accounts of social life tended toward
and often still tend toward a radical separation of
economy and culture. Hence, accounts of production tend to bracket questions and issues of culture
and vice versa. Bourdieu’s account of cultural intermediaries (and his corpus more generally) challenges
this separation and is widely acknowledged to have
provided a pivotal account of the interlinkages and
interrelationships between cultural and economic
practices. Hence, as well as providing key theoretical resources for the elaboration of the characteristics
of postmodern consumer culture (especially the class
dynamics of the latter), Bourdieu’s understanding of
cultural intermediaries has helped to pave the way for
the recent resurgence of interest in cultural economy.
Yet while this is true, there have also been recent
calls for refinements to the notion of cultural intermediary. For example, Sean Nixon and Paul du Gay
have claimed that Bourdieu’s understanding is far too
broad-ranging and all-inclusive in regard to occupational groups, cultures, and forms of expertise. Thus
in Bourdieu’s formulation, differences between the
social composition of cultural intermediary occupations (e.g., between broadcasters, journalists, advertising executives, and designers) tend to be collapsed
into one another when a far more differentiated
account of these occupations is required. Nixon
and du Gay claim that to achieve the latter, careful
empirical investigation is required, research that will
not only be able to establish the place and role of
intermediaries in the occupational structure, but also
the role such groups play in social and cultural life,
particularly in processes of social change.
In addition to more empirical qualification, it
has also been suggested that Bourdieu’s notion of
cultural intermediary also requires greater historical specificity. Liz McFall, for example, has questioned the “newness” of cultural intermediary
positions. Drawing on a historical-sociological
analysis documenting the practices of early advertising producers, McFall claims that many of the roles
and functions attributed to contemporary cultural
intermediaries (especially in terms of lifestyles, connections, and competencies) can also be observed
for “older” occupational groups. Immersion in a

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Cultural Intermediaries

specific taste culture was, for example, characteristic of early advertising producers and, in the early
nineteenth century, “there were clear occupational
links between those involved in the production of
advertising and literary, newspaper and publishing circles” (McFall 2002, 546), links that shaped
advertising styles and forms. McFall claims that such
historical parallels between early creative practitioners and late-twentieth-century creative staff mean
that we should approach the idea that the cultural
intermediary is a relatively new structural position
with some caution.
Further points of refinement to the cultural
intermediary concept have been called for by Keith
Negus, who has questioned the extent that it can
bridge the gap between production and consumption
in a context of what he sees as an enduring distance
between these two spheres. Negus concedes that in
some instances, production and consumption may
be linked by sets of mediating workers and activities,
but more often this is not the case. Fashion designers
and advertisers are, for example, far removed from
and have little involvement in or knowledge of the
production and manufacturing activities at issue in
the production of clothes.
Indeed, Negus points out that such gaps between
production and consumption (particularly in regard
to knowledge) are ironically often the very result
of the symbolic worlds that cultural intermediaries are involved in producing and circulating since
such symbolic goods (e.g., advertisements) conceal
the laboring activities, divisions of labor, and exploitative practices at stake in the production of many
consumer goods. At the level of ideology therefore,
rather than transcend the production-consumption
or economy-culture divide, the activities of cultural
intermediaries shore up their enduring separation.
Negus also questions the extent to which the
activities and lifestyles of cultural intermediaries pose
a challenge to traditional elites and dominant classes.
Indeed, far from being avant-garde, the tastes and
cultural habits of the workers occupying cultural
intermediary positions concern the “judgements of
a small, relatively elite educated, middle class, white
male fraction” (Negus 2002, 512; see also Moor
2008). While the practices of this fraction may,
to some extent, defy conventional divisions (e.g.,
between work and leisure), nonetheless Negus maintains that these workers have used their access to the
cultural industries to maintain a series of rather more

traditional and enduring divisions and social boundaries, particularly in regard to class, class distinction,
and gender.
Despite these important critiques and calls for
empirical and theoretical qualification, recent
research suggests that the notion of the cultural intermediary should by no means be abandoned, particularly in a context where the activities of certain
intermediary groups appear to involve not simply
practices that make links between the spheres of production and consumption, but active shaping of the
material processes and practices of production. Liz
Moor’s 2008 research on branding consultancies and
agencies, for example, demonstrates that this intermediary group plays a decisive role in shaping the
physical spaces and materials of consumer culture,
as well as the range of goods and services that large
companies produce. Such research therefore suggests
not only that certain intermediary groups are increasingly powerful but also that tracking and substantively elaborating the activities of these groups is now
vital for understanding the dynamics of production.
Lisa Adkins
See also Cool Hunters; Cultural Capital; Cultural Studies;
Culture Industries; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Postmodernism; Production of Culture; Taste

Further Readings
Adkins, Lisa. “Community and Economy: A
Retraditionalisation of Gender?” Theory, Culture and
Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 119–141.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Cultural Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice.
London: Routledge, 1984.
Featherstone, Mike. Postmodernism and Consumer
Culture. London: Sage, 1991.
Featherstone, Mike. “Postmodernism and the
Aestheticization of Everyday Life.” In Modernity and
Identity, edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman,
265–290. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Lash, Scott. Sociology of Post Modernism. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Lury, Celia. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy.
London: Routledge, 2004.
McFall, Liz. “What about the Old Cultural Intermediaries?
An Historical Review of Advertising Producers.”
Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 532–552.
McRobbie, Angela. “Clubs to Companies: Notes on the
Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative
Worlds.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 516–531.

Cultural Omnivores
Moor, Liz. “Branding Consultants as Cultural
Intermediaries.” The Sociological Review 56, no. 3
(2008): 408–428.
Negus, Keith. “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and
the Enduring Distance between Production and
Consumption.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002):
501–515.
Nixon, Sean, and Paul du Gay. “Who Needs Cultural
Intermediaries?” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002):
495–500.
Wright, David. “Mediating Production and Consumption:
Cultural Capital and ‘Cultural Workers.’” The British
Journal of Sociology 56, no. 1 (2005): 105–121.

CULTURAL OMNIVORES
The notion of cultural omnivore (and cultural
omnivorousness) has been introduced in current
sociological debate on the relationship between
social stratification and cultural consumption (the
latter more than lifestyles in general, as in the case of
Pierre Bourdieu) by the late U.S. sociologist Richard
A. Peterson, in a series of articles published since the
early 1990s. The broad hypothesis advanced in these
writings—always moving from empirical research’s
findings related to the U.S. situation—is that in contemporary societies, the homology argument set forth
by Bourdieu in Distinction (1984) appears to have
lost its validity, not because cultural consumption
is becoming ever more individualized and therefore
detached from social stratification’s conditioning (as
argued by postmodern social theorists), but because
a new kind of relationship between social structure
and consumption is emerging. Rather than cultural
stratification mapping immediately onto social stratification, the cultural consumption of individuals in
higher social strata differs from that of individuals in lower strata as it is greater and much wider
in its range—comprising not only more high-brow
culture but also more middle-brow and more lowbrow culture as well. Thus, the crucial contrast, says
Peterson and colleagues, is not the traditional one
of “snob versus slob” but the previously unknown
and recently emerged contrast of cultural omnivore
versus cultural univore.
What has been received as the omnivore thesis
contends that there is a sector of the population of
Western countries—located somewhere at the top of
the social hierarchy—who appreciate and participate

391

in a greater variety of forms of culture than previously, and that this broad engagement undermines
snobbery while reflecting, very probably, emerging values of tolerance and cosmopolitanism. This
argument has been tested so many times since its
earlier expositions—with data from, for example,
the United States, the United Kingdom, France,
Russia, the Netherlands, and China, among others
(see Peterson 2005 for an overview)—and debated so
much, both speculatively and on empirical grounds,
that it can now be considered a crucial component
within the ever-growing “industry” of sociological
research on cultural consumption and social taste.
This was an area that, only a few years ago, was
left either to purely philosophical speculation or to
the abstract empiricism of purely statistical descriptions. Of course, Bourdieu in his book Distinction
had drawn attention to the theoretical dimensions
and the analytical potentials of the topic. But with
his insights, Peterson has contributed a great deal to
the revitalization of the field, first by offering what
looks like a truly sociological alternative hypothesis
to Bourdieu’s theory of the social (i.e., class) determinants of cultural taste, and second, by showing
that much sociological work could still be done in
this area, with the aid of both a large mass of official data (updated since Bourdieu’s work in this
area) and of the whole range of research methods.
The notion of the omnivore has also fostered new
conceptual imagery, as evident in the notion of the
voracious consumer set forth by Oriel Sullivan and
Tally Katz-Gerro.
As for every argument, its novelty is not absolute.
It was partly anticipated by empirical research findings on leisure in the 1960s, and it holds similarities
with Paul DiMaggio’s influential rereadings of the
changing links between art and social classification.
Peterson (2000) himself has acknowledged that his
research on cultural consumption is a sort of expansion of his earlier work on cultural production,
involving a movement into the territory of what he
has called autoproduction. He has thus stressed an
important issue also focused on by British cultural
studies scholars, namely the view that every act of
consumption is also an act of meaning creation and
therefore of symbolic production. Besides the focus
on the formal production of culture, which is at the
center of the original approach, Peterson added a
focus on the world of informal cultural production in everyday life contexts, opening up the older

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Cultural Omnivores

perspective to new and broader research horizons.
Indeed, if one works in a truly genealogical fashion,
anthropology appears to be the original source of
inspiration for Peterson’s insights on cultural consumption. From the work of Ruth Benedict and thus
from Franz Boas—he first took the idea of “pattern
of culture,” which then gave way to the notion of
“patterns of cultural choice” (Peterson 1983), this
conception was then further developed—through
the analysis of rich empirical materials gathered
by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, for
whom he was acting as a consultant—into a rereading and a critique of the homology model of cultural
stratification theorized by Bourdieu.
As a sort of middle ground between the previously advanced homology and individualization
arguments, the omnivore hypothesis has capitalized
on both their impact and increasingly noted gaps or
faults to impose itself as a kind of must-reference
argument in recent debates on the topic. This success is partly due also to a certain ambivalence, constitutive of the argument, which makes it appealing
to more audiences. As Tak Wing Chan and John H.
Goldthorpe note on the one hand, omnivores may
look like essentially tolerant individuals who show
an openness to cultural styles other than that into
which they were initially socialized. This would be
a variation of the individualization argument. On
the other hand, according to Jordi López Sintas and
Ercilia García Álvarez, omnivores may be expressing a truly new aesthetic that, even if more inclusive
and cosmopolitan than that of earlier cultural elites,
is anyway still “distinctive” when set against the
more limited cultural tastes of the univores. In this
case, then, the omnivore-versus-univore argument
looks like a slight revision of the homology argument. The mapping of cultural onto social stratification is understood in a more sophisticated way,
but cultural consumption is still seen as crucial in
drawing symbolic boundaries and in fostering and
reproducing status competition. Indeed, a strong
methodological critique of the general hypothesis
has been advanced by French sociologist Bernard
Lahire in his book La Culture des Individus (The
Culture of Individuals, 2004) who sees in it not
only a not-so-substantial revision of Bourdieu’s
argument, which leaves intact the notion of a social
determination of tastes, but also the effect of an
unnoticed confusion between two different analytic
levels, namely, the group level and the individual

level. In short, for Lahire, Peterson takes variations
at the level of collectives as variations at the level of
individuals without really investigating inside the
individual and his or her (intraindividual and situational) variations.
It is apparent from these critiques and faithful to
Peterson’s work style that his proposal was just an initial insight, puzzling enough to inspire fresh research,
and to solicit refinement, especially from an interpretative perspective, to better distinguish among different types of cultural “openness” and to elaborate on
the many different meanings attributed to cultural
consumption by situated and practicing agents.
Marco Santoro
See also Cosmopolitanism; Cultural Studies;
Individualization; Lifestyle; Production of Culture;
Social Class; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings
Chan, Tak Wing, and John H. Goldthorpe. “Social
Stratification and Cultural Consumption: Music in
England.” European Sociological Review 23, no. 1
(2007): 1–19.
DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.” American
Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440–455.
Ollivier, Michele. “Modes of Openness to Cultural
Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical, and
Indifferent.” Poetics 36, nos. 2–3 (2008): 120–147.
Peterson, Richard A. “Patterns of Cultural Choice: A
Prolegomenon.” American Behavioral Scientist 26, no. 4
(1983): 422–438.
Peterson, Richard A. “Two Ways Culture Is Produced.”
Poetics 28, nos. 2/3 (2000): 225–233.
Peterson, Richard A. “Problems in Comparative Research:
The Example of Omnivorousness.” Poetics 33, nos. 5/6
(2005): 257–282.
Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing
Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American
Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907.
Sintas, Jordi López, and Ercilia García Álvarez.
“Omnivores Show Up Again: The Segmentation of
Cultural Consumers in Spanish Social Space.” European
Sociological Review 18 (2002): 353–368.
Sullivan, Oriel, and Tally Katz-Gerro. “The Omnivore Thesis
Revisited: Voracious Cultural Consumers.” European
Sociological Review 23, no. 2 (2007): 123–137.
Warde, Alan, David Wright, and Modesto Gayo-Cal.
“Understanding Cultural Omnivorousness: Or, the
Myth of the Omnivore.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2
(2007): 143–164.

Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES
Cultural studies can be roughly identified as a transdisciplinary intellectual field focused on the relationships between culture, society, and identity. “Culture”
here is conceived of in a very broad way, including the
arts (both high and popular ones) as well as beliefs,
discourses, and communicative practices. Media
entertainment and popular culture are possibly the
most common and most typical foci of interest of cultural studies practitioners, especially because of their
relative exclusion from traditional curricula, but it is
the whole field of cultural practices that appeals to
cultural studies followers. Literary and film criticism,
sociology, history, anthropology, communication
research, geography, and even political theory are the
main disciplinary venues from which its practitioners
usually come, and from which they draw their tools,
mixing them in often-innovative ways.
What makes this instable mix still identifiable
as a field, albeit one with blurred and ever-changing
boundaries, is a focus on the linkages between culture
and power or politics. Indeed, cultural studies can
be defined as a project that explicitly tries to bridge
gaps between traditional disciplines to get a better,
more encompassing understanding, its theorizing
and critiquing of culture intended as a crucial terrain
of political and ideological contestation. The political
dimension of cultural production and consumption
is the main object of cultural studies as an intellectual
endeavor, where the commitment to emancipation
and democracy has been a driving assumption in the
field from its inception in postwar Britain. From this
perspective, cultural studies is best understood not just
as an academic discipline or a special approach to the
study of culture, but as a political-intellectual project
with a final objective to construct a better (i.e., more
equal and democratic) society moving from an engaged
analysis of the cultural dimensions of social life.
What cultural studies practitioners usually do
is take an element of culture and explore, analyze,
and interpret the varied ways in which it is received,
internalized, interpreted, re-created, or represented
by different social groupings, variously qualified and
identified in terms of class, age, gender, ethnicity,
race, sexuality, and so on. One of the typical stakes in
this intellectual strategy is to show how any of these
cultural representations could be interpreted and used
in ways that may be counter to the original producer’s

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or creator’s intent, usually well-positioned in the social
and political structure. This “cultural populism”
inscribed in the original project of cultural studies has
been one of its strengths, but also, at the same time,
one of its weakness, especially when stretched to the
point of making any use or consumption of a cultural
item into a potentially subversive act of micropolitics.
The political implications of the approach, as well
as their potential ambivalence, are indeed apparent:
although it can be read as a subversive endeavor from
the perspective of dominant agencies as it helps to
deconstruct their wished representations by revealing
their power intentions, at the same time it could be a
powerful tool in the hands of an agency wishing to
construct its product (be it a commodity, an image,
or an agenda) so that it is received and therefore consumed by the proper population segments.
As a critical approach, cultural studies owes much
to debates in and around Marxism, and especially in
the New Left, which has been the original matrix of
the political-intellectual movement from which the
field emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in
the United Kingdom. As a transnational and transdisciplinary field since its inception period and increasingly over the years, cultural studies has drawn on
different and only rarely interweaving intellectual
traditions, both from the humanities and the social
sciences. European Marxism and the Frankfurt
school’s critical theory, French semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism, and the Chicago school
of American sociology, among others, have all provided conceptual and methodological insights for
cultural studies theorists and practitioners to investigate the connections between culture and society
and problematize preexistent ideas on a variety of
issues: from ideology to identity, from the mass culture industry to subcultures, from deviance to media,
from sports to the organization and uses of space,
from body to consumption, from sexuality to the
public sphere. It is from the original blending of these
various legacies that cultural studies developed in the
1970s, to expand during the 1980s and 1990s into
a truly global one, as a patchwork of traditions and
stories whose linkages—when they are still apparent—are intellectual, personal, and institutional.

The British Tradition
In their work, cultural studies scholars have generally and explicitly striven to strike a balance between

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Cultural Studies

empirical research and theoretical reflection. In this
regard, the history of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) and its directors’ and scholars’ research careers are paradigmatic.
Founded in 1964 at the University of Birmingham
in the United Kingdom, CCCS has long been and
still probably is the main reference for scholars working in the cultural studies tradition. Cultural studies’ intellectual genealogies conventionally start with
three British authors: Raymond Williams, Richard
Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson, the former two literary
critics, the latter a historian, united in challenging the
received wisdom in the humanities as they were cultivated and taught in postwar England. Among their
points, the claim that high culture, as evaluated and
transmitted in formal education, was just one expression of culture, which should be taken in the more
anthropological sense of a way of life—“culture is
ordinary,” as Williams titled one of his seminal early
essays—and understood as embedded in a broader
social, political, and institutional context.
For example, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), subsequently recognized as one of the founding texts of
cultural studies, Hoggart tried to make sense of the
changing culture of the working class through a close
reading of pubs and family life, as well as popular
songs and literature, capitalizing on both his critical
skills as a literary critic and his personal experience
of that culture as a child. While not so personally
grounded, both Williams’s Culture and Society
(1958) and Thompson’s The Making of the English
Working Class (1963) addressed problems of historical change in cultural life, approaching them from
the point of view of literary consciousness in the
first case, and of the same ordinary people’s reflexive
awareness and creativity in the second one. In their
work, Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson acted as
critical analysts of cultural experiences taken in their
lived form, moving from the humanities in which
they had been educated into an appreciation of cultural and social reality.
Even if the early beginnings of cultural studies
could be identified in debates occurring in a few journals and clubs of the New Left already in the 1950s,
its institutionalization as an intellectual project began
at the University of Birmingham in 1964, where
Hoggart founded the CCCS as a graduate research
institute under his direction and with the collaboration as secretary of a young scholar, Stuart Hall.
CCCS scholars produced a number of classics in the

field, including Resistance through Rituals (Jefferson
and Hall 1976), Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978),
Women Take Issue (CCCS 1979), and The Empire
Strikes Back (CCCS 1982).
To appreciate the kind of work done at the CCCS,
it is helpful to understand that social life experienced
a formidable change in the postwar decades, with
implications for both social structure and lifestyles.
In particular, the rise of youth as a new social category and market target gave popular expressions of
culture an unknown power as source of both profit
for cultural industries and pleasures for people. New
cultural forms and media technologies—such as television, rock and roll, and later, MTV, the shopping
mall, music videos, and theme parks—were being
produced and consumed in ever more social circles.
These changes asked for new ways of thinking and
analyzing culture that could better link the new
genres and technologies to their audience’s lives as
well as to society and politics at large, especially with
respect to their impact on democratic practices and
on social inequalities.
Intellectual work at CCCS was therefore mainly
devoted to exploring new ways to deal with contemporary culture intended at large, therefore not
only as books or art works but also as films, songs,
TV shows, soap operas, magazines, and even clothes
and cultural commodities in general. To accomplish
the task, students and teachers turned from traditional
humanistic practices like the close reading of texts
and critical assessment of artistic value to methods
and concepts taken from the social sciences—including ethnography, interviews, and labeling theory—
and from the newly formed discipline of semiotics,
and to various strands of European Marxist theory,
especially Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci—
ideas that are subject to intense debate and various
appropriation inside CCCS as well as in its intellectual surroundings. From both Althusser and Gramsci
cultural studies, practitioners drew instruments to
deal with the political dimensions of cultural life: in
the first case, through the theory of the ideological
state apparatuses (ISAs) and the notion of interpellation, and in the second case through the seminal
concepts of hegemony and resistance.
As a whole, it is possible to identify (at least) four
major streams in Hall’s work—possibly the most
influential of the thinkers associated with the CCCS.
Moving from a critical autoreflection on Marxist
materialism informed by semiotics, structuralism,

Cultural Studies

and post-structuralism, Hall’s work has provided
(1) specific textual analyses of the ideological messages of media contents, with a particular focus on
the visual dimension; (2) wider interpretation of
the potentially active role and symbolic resistance
expressed through the practices of media audiences
and minority or so-called deviant social groups,
articulated within conceptually organic models of the
processes of production, circulation, and consumption of cultural objects; (3) insightfully deconstructive
analyses of race, ethnicity, and gender subjectivities
and identities, often aimed at the organizations of
wider political efforts around them; (4) broader
accounts of the political developments related to the
rise of the new conservatism in the United Kingdom,
theorized as symbolic struggles for cultural hegemony on the definition of “popular” cultures/classes
and, consequentially, of social hierarchies of power.
Hall and the CCCS scholars criticized the work
of the Frankfurt school, highlighting the intrinsic
limits of their conceptualization of the merely passive role of the audience and their exclusive analytical focus on production rather than consumption
processes. Most important, the exponents of the
Frankfurt school a priori negatively judged the popular culture and its role on the everyday life of laypeople. To overcome these constraints, CCCS scholars
took on the Marxist work developed by Althusser in
France and, most notably, Gramsci in Italy. Althusser
has offered a partial reformulation of Karl Marx’s
traditional and rigid opposition between the (determinant) material-economic base and the (determined) cultural-ideological superstructure through
the concepts of “relative autonomy” (of other social
domains besides the economic one) and of “ideology
as practice” (rather than as mere reflection), embedded in a number of ideological state apparatuses
(such religious, scholastic, familiar, journalistic, and
so on, interpreted as sites of domain in society). But
it was Gramsci’s study of the culture of the popular
classes in Italy and his elaboration of the concept of
cultural hegemony that proved most fertile for CCCS
scholars’ construction of a new Marxist-oriented
conceptual and methodological tool-kit. Gramsci’s
cultural hegemony referred to the struggle for class
domination: according to his view, the dominant
class had power not only because of its economic
force but also through its ability to acquire consensus
over the subaltern classes expressed by its moral and
intellectual—that is, cultural—leadership.

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While the “discovery” and reinterpretation of the
works of Althusser and, above all, Gramsci (which
brought Hall [1980] to state in an influential essay
the existence of “two paradigms” of cultural studies) allowed British cultural studies to overcome the
limits of the Frankfurt school’s critical theory, it was
semiotics that let them take distance from the evaluative approach of traditional aesthetics and literary
criticism, in order not to judge the value of texts but
rather to understand the processes through which the
meaning of texts are dynamically and often conflictually constructed and differently interpreted.
Since, as an intellectual and political project,
cultural studies aimed (and aims) at interpreting
and eventually intervening in the dynamics through
which texts, discourses, and cultural objects and
practices are produced, diffused, displayed, and consumed in the everyday life of social groups as well
as in different social institutions, the contribution of
the semiotic analysis of those texts, discourses, cultural objects, and practices was crucial. A renowned
example of the relevance of the semiotic investigation
of the process of signification (or meaning-making) is
the work on photography by Roland Barthes, particularly the analytical distinctions drawn between the
denotative and connotative dimensions of the photographic messages—which has been later taken on
by Hall, particularly in his work on photojournalism
and on visual culture and in his critical reflections on
the concept of representation—as well as the suggestion of the existence of a dimension of pleasure in the
reading of texts, the so-called pleasure of the text—
later empirically applied and theoretically refined in
particular by John Fiske and on the basis of the more
psychoanalytically oriented and very influential critical visual analysis developed by Laura Mulvey.
On the basis of these different conceptual insights
and intellectual traditions, over the years, cultural
studies has proved particularly powerful in the
analysis of both media and subcultures. These works
usually aimed at unveiling the ideological stances
inscribed in the verbal and visual texts and in the
institutional discourses diffused by the media and
culture industry, as well as at highlighting the potential power of media audiences and subcultural social
groups to eventually react, resist, and rearticulate the
meaning of different texts through their own contextual practices of reading, viewing, and consumption. In this context, Hall developed a conceptual
model that has become extremely influential over

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Cultural Studies

the years, especially but not exclusively in the field
of media studies. The encoding/decoding model conceived the communicative process of transmission of
the media message inscribed in a specific text as a
dynamic relationship between the producer(s) and
the consumer(s), which give the latter three possible
forms of reading of and reaction to that specific text.
The first position is called “dominant-hegemonic,”
since the viewer is operating inside the so-called
dominant code: he or she decodes the message in
the exact terms of the reference code in which it was
encoded by the producer; it is hegemonic because
it conveys an idea of legitimacy of this viewpoint,
which appears to reflect the “natural” social order.
The second position, which is called “negotiated,”
contains a mixture of dominant and oppositional elements: it generally recognizes the legitimacy of the
hegemonic code and of the dominant definitions but
at the same time, it elaborates its own positions at the
more specific, situated, local level. Finally, the third
position, which is called “oppositional,” implies the
receiver perfectly understands the message and recognizes its hegemonic code but decodes it in a completely contrary way within an alternative frame of
reference. It is quite evident how much this influential theoretical tripartition is influenced by Gramsci
and Barthes but also, more implicitly, by particular
research streams within the American sociology of
media, most notably the theories on the uses and
gratifications of the media audience developed by the
founders and heirs of the so-called Columbia school,
particularly by Elihu Katz between the late 1950s
and the early 1970s.
In this context, another wider and well-known
intellectual tradition of critical thought that had an
explicitly crucial influence on the empirical research
and theoretical analysis of British cultural studies
was post-structuralism. As the name suggests, this
intellectual movement aimed to take distance from
structuralism, at the same time maintaining and critically rearticulating a number of its basic assumptions.
On the basis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics
and Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, since the
1950s, structuralism had radically marked European
(particularly French and Italian) philosophy, especially through, most significantly, Barthes’ semiotics, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Althusser’s
political theory. On the basis of a crucial focus on
language and an explicit antihumanistic intellectual
posture, structuralists developed explanatory models

of the organization of language and the construction of meaning founded on conceptually rigid (and
static) binary oppositions.
Post-structuralists, such as Jacques Derrida and,
less explicitly, Michel Foucault, instead, underlined
the dynamicity and instability of the linguistic systems
and the social order. While structuralism aims to constructively unveil and identify the hidden structures
of the social and cultural order, post-structuralism,
especially through Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, aims to underline the potentially available different readings and interpretations of the same linguistic
concept by showing that a variety of basic linguistic
oppositions (such as good/evil, friend/enemy, man/
woman) do not constitute universal linguistic structures, but have instead variable meanings and therefore represent a crucial field of political struggle, since
any attempts to naturalize the linguistic categories
and the moral hierarchies of the social order can hide
a strategy of control and a will to power.
Contrary to the basic assumptions of structuralism, for example, Foucault did not claim that
the meaning of semantic elements and structures
is determined a priori to (therefore, quite independently by) their articulation. On this basis, a number of theoretical insights articulated by Foucault
have proved relevant for the project of British cultural studies: in particular, Foucault’s conception of
discourse as a constructive mediation between linguistic text and practice and of discoursive formation as a complex of linguistic events that bring to
light and give meaning to a specific object (such as, in
his renowned analysis, the official declarations, laws,
conflictual definitions, and social practices that, in
a given society and historical period, define what is
and how to deal with madness).
Besides the analyses of media contents and
institutional discourses, CCCS scholars adopted
post-structuralist elements and, most evidently,
Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and resistance in
their analyses of popular cultural forms and subcultural practices. Youth subcultures became a particularly interesting object of study in the 1970s because
their members collectively and often explicitly constructed countercultural or oppositional social and
cultural identities on the basis of new styles elaborated through a rearticulation of the meanings and
uses of cultural commodities.
By empirically researching British subcultures and
at the same time critically and creatively drawing

Cultural Studies

on Gramsci and Althusser, CCCS scholars focused
their attention on the conjunctural nature of ideological formations and their relative autonomy from
class determinism. Contrary to the assumptions of
the Frankfurt school, according to this perspective,
people are not merely conceived as passive receivers
who are controlled and manipulated by dominant
discoursive formations, but as potentially active
actors who strive to more or less creatively assert
themselves in the face of power by overcoming the
determinations that could constrain them and benefiting from and amplifying the available spaces
of opportunities, often by strategies of productive
consumption through which a given cultural object
(such as a TV show, a guitar, a safety pin, but also,
for example, the spaces within a shopping mall) is
attributed a different use and a new meaning.
The classic subcultural theories developed by the
CCCS in the 1970s on the basis of empirical research
on material conditions and cultures of British postwar working-class youth (such as teddy boys, mods,
skinheads, hippies, bikers) represent a crucial point of
reference in the literature on popular culture, youth
deviance, and music subcultures. In this context, the
most important work published by the CCCS was
Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post War Britain (Hall and Jefferson 1976). Many
of the scholars of the CCCS within this book later
produced some of the most widely quoted authorial
works on youth subcultures, such as Profane Culture
by Paul Willis (1978), Subculture: The Meaning of
Style by Dick Hebdige (1979), and Feminism and
Youth Culture by Angela McRobbie (1990).
As a whole, CCCS’s viewpoint conceived the
cultural universes of the new British working-class
youth as collective and symbolic forms of resistance against the material and social subordination
of their class—in this way, implicitly and critically
resonating also with the research carried out in the
same period in France by Pierre Bourdieu in his
book Distinction, as Sarah Thornton, in particular,
has later highlighted.
British cultural studies, however, was marked
by a crucial difference from the mainstream sociological research on the relationships between social
classes and aesthetic tastes: CCCS scholars conceived
popular culture as a relatively autonomous sphere
of action, keeping it distinct from elite culture and
mass culture. In fact, this kind of research took seriously the potential active role (that is, in sociological

397

terms, the question of the agency) of media audiences
and marginal social groups by investigating the practices of and the possibilities for resistance, symbolic
struggle, political position, and even social-historical
change. Subcultures allowed them to set themselves
free, at least symbolically, from the hegemony of the
dominant culture.
In this regard, this influential stream of research
within cultural studies at CCCS was explicitly
inspired by some elements of American sociology,
especially of the so-called Chicago school tradition of
symbolic interactionism, which helped give the work
of the scholars at the CCCS a recognizably (micro)
sociological gaze, not only by focusing on marginal
social groups and by developing social studies of
music and arts—drawing in particular on the work of
Chicagoan sociologist Howard Becker—but also by
often adopting and developing ethnographic methods
of participant observation on the field of research.
On the basis of the empirical research and theoretical reflections on youth subcultures, a few scholars working within the CCCS at Birmingham in the
1970s and 1980s later focused their attention in
greater detail on the politically connoted processes
of construction of race and gender and their multiple interweaving aspects. The arguably most-widely
quoted and influential authors originally associated
with the CCCS in these fields are Paul Gilroy and
Angela McRobbie. Gilroy wrote the preface to the
collective book, The Empire Strikes Back (1982),
the first one to introduce the issue of race among the
research themes of the CCCS group, and later developed his analysis of black contemporary cultures in
There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987) and
in the internationally acclaimed The Black Atlantic
(1993), by showing the empirical fruitfulness of the
materialistic conception of culture developed by the
British cultural studies scholars. Gilroy (1987) investigates the U.K. cultural politics of both racism and
nationalism, conceived not as distinct ideologies but
as complementary articulations of the same culturalpolitical structure.
Following the traditional research issues of the
CCCS, Gilroy has paid particular attention to the
role of intellectual and artistic movements and cultural forms of production and consumption in the
construction of (political) identities. Black music
cultures, conceived as (post)modern expressions of
the culture of slavery (particularly in the cases of
reggae and hip-hop), are attributed a potentially

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political role in the diffusion of critical visions of
global capitalism by black diasporic communities.
Gilroy (1993) articulates in greater depth the concept
of black diasporic cultures: the idea of the existence
of a historically transnational cultural-political formation called Black Atlantic is conceptualized as an
alternative to the idea of the nation-state, and it constitutes the basis of the production and circulation of
contemporary black cultures.
Similarly, on a different but complementary
level of analysis, McRobbie’s influential work on
gender began during her postgraduate studies at the
CCCS. With her chapter within the collective book
Resistance through Rituals, she first criticized her
colleagues’ work on subcultures for a lack of attention to the issues of gender, and she underlined the
urgency to explore the distinctive articulation of
young women’s cultural practices of production
and consumption as they were expressed through
such cultural objects as romances, popular music,
and above all teenage magazines. Both Gilroy’s and
McRobbie’s works—especially their emphasis on
the critical relevance of taking race and gender into
careful account in the politically oriented research of
their colleagues and successors—over the years had
a significant impact in the field of cultural studies at
the international level.

Cultural Studies as a Global Project
As indicated, cultural studies scholars were, since the
early 1970s, sensitive to intellectual stimuli coming
from other countries, and especially from France,
where a structuralist semiotician such as Roland
Barthes was already investigating in the 1950s how
apparently minor cultural forms, such as wrestling
or magazines’ images, encoded structures of power
and worked like veritable popular “mythologies.”
Even if a truly French tradition of cultural studies
has really never coalesced, post-structuralist thinking
has, in a certain way, both fostered cultural studies
elsewhere and offered a sort of local surrogate, especially thanks to exceptionally original scholars such
as philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, an
early student of consumer society and of virtual reality; philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, possibly the most influential thinker of the link between
knowledge and power; and sociologist Bourdieu,
who has been drawing on both anthropology and
sociology to analyze how culture, and legitimate
high culture in particular, impact on both social

stratification and socialization (which Bourdieu theorizes as habitus formation). In France and Italy, a
veritable tradition of cultural studies has emerged
only slowly and with some resistance, but the seeds
that produced cultural studies in Britain were well
represented through not only the Gramsci heritage
(even stronger in Italy in the political sphere than
in the academy) but also through the influential
work on cultural and media criticism by the semiotician Umberto Eco and a local tradition of radical
thought developed in the 1970s that is well represented by internationally reputed scholars such as
Paolo Virno and Toni Negri (the latter a coauthor of
the influential Empire, with Michael Hardt, 2000),
and by media theorists and activists such as Franco
Berardi (aka Bifo).
While CCCS was forming as a “school” in
Britain, in Germany, philosopher and sociologist
Jurgen Habermas was drawing on the Frankfurt tradition of critical social theory to make sense of what
he famously called the “public sphere”—conceiving
it as a third domain between the marketplace and
the state, not reducible to family and the private life.
With his insistence that communication is an aspect
of social reality irreducible to economic interests,
Habermas was developing a cultural interpretation
of political life destined to much fortune in the
Anglo-American world, especially in the United
States, where Habermas’s highly theoretical work
has inspired more empirical, usually historical, analysis of the effects of newspapers and other media on
civil society (see e.g., Calhoun 1992).
The impact of cultural studies on the U.S. academic field has been massive since the early 1990s,
also thanks to a few successful public initiatives, as
huge international conferences soon transformed
into books (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992).
If the field of communication research has been the
first to be impacted, the influence of cultural studies has been rising since the 1990s in anthropology,
American studies, literary criticism, and sociology,
and also through the mediation of postmodernism
and post-structuralist criticism. However, in the
United States, more than in the United Kingdom and
possibly Europe, cultural studies has found its institutional home more in the humanities departments
rather than in social sciences circles, making for a still
perceptible difference in methods and styles between
the two streams of work. A similar story can be
noted for Australia, where cultural studies entered
early in the 1980s mainly through communication

Cultural Studies

scholars (also coming from Britain), variously influenced sociology and even anthropology (including
the study of native cultures), and institutionalized
itself in humanities departments as a blend of communication research and political theory.
What has made cultural studies a successful intellectual movement since the 1990s is, however, its
expansion and diffusion and progressive institutionalization in places other than the Western culture. An
important spring in this direction was the publication,
in 1978, of the book Orientalism by the PalestinianAmerican literary critic Edward Said, which has been
recognized as the founding text of the newly emerging field of postcolonial studies, a special branch or
declination of the cultural studies project aimed at
reading and unmasking the hidden political meanings
of texts (mainly literary but also scientific) and practices devoted to the representation of non-Western
cultures, typically with a colonial past.
Postcolonial studies are possibly the most influential offspring of the original British cultural studies and one of the most effervescent and exciting
research fields in contemporary humanities—while
it has yet to have an impact on the social sciences
(with the exception of anthropology). One of the
effects of the rise of postcolonial studies has been
the discovering, or the revival, of scholars coming from peripheral countries, usually not white,
or even of not-white scholars from metropolitan
countries. This is the case of W. E. B. Du Bois, a
mulatto historian and social scientist who, in the
early twentieth century, became one of the leaders
of the civil rights movement in the United States,
and whose The Souls of Black Folks (1901) is considered a masterpiece and a founding text of African
American cultural studies.
Latin America cultural studies was, at least in part,
foreshadowed by autochthonous intellectual programs strongly linked to local circumstances, such
as those of José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru. It found
its pioneers in the early work on media and on popular culture by scholars such as Armand Mattelart in
Chile, and Néstor García Canclini in Argentina and
then Mexico. However, the most influential experience occurred in India, where a whole tradition of
Gramscian historical studies devoted to the analysis
of colonialism and popular politics coalesced in the
1980s around Ranajit Guha, forming what is currently known worldwide as subaltern studies.
What these and other experiences (for an overview on others, see Miller 2006) show is the strong

399

appeal an intellectual movement born in apparently
very local circumstances, as were those of the postwar Britain, could still have in other, very distant
shores in times marked by the emergence of a new
geopolitical order and grounded on increasing rates
of mobility, an increasing blurring of borders, and
new constellations of technology and capital.
Notwithstanding the unquestionable intellectual
innovations produced by cultural studies and the
fertile internal variety of theoretical, conceptual,
and methodological streams of research developed
over the years (such as black cultural studies, feminist cultural studies, visual cultural studies, and the
already mentioned postcolonial studies), nowadays
the future of cultural studies looks fragmented and
uncertain. It is possible to briefly identify two main
domains of critical debate on the contemporary
status of cultural studies as a transnational intellectual field. On the one hand, the fundamental
and original commitment to interdisciplinarity
turns out to imply that the research and profiles of
cultural studies scholars cannot always easily and
comfortably fit within the structured disciplinary
walls of traditional academic institutions that continue to strongly organize intellectual practices. On
the other hand, the often explicitly declared aim
to produce a better understanding of the cultural
dynamics of power of a given society and to eventually open up possibilities for social change can
risk making cultural studies scholars appear (sometimes arguably too) highly politically committed,
with the danger of mixing or even interchanging
scholarly research and political engagement, to the
detriment of both.
Marco Santoro and Marco Solaroli
See also Communication Studies; Discourse; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Post-Structuralism; Production of
Culture; Semiotics; Subculture; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Baldwin, Elaine, Brian Longhurst, Scott McCracken, Miles
Ogborn, and Greg Smith. Introducing Cultural Studies.
Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2004.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1972.
Becker, Howard S. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of
Deviance. New York: Free Press, 1963.
Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.
Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

400

Cultural Turn

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston:
Unwin & Hyman, 1989.
Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural
Studies: A Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler,
eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds.
Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988.
Hall, Stuart. “The Determination of News Photographs.”
In The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social
Problems and the Mass Media, edited by Stanley Cohen
and Jock Young, 226–243. London: Constable, 1973.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media
Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (1980): 57–72.
Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations
and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997.
Hall, Stuart, and Jessica Evans, eds. Visual Culture: The
Reader. London: Sage, 1999.
Miller, Toby, ed. A Companion to Cultural Studies. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
Ryan, Michael. Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2010.
Stratton, Jon, and Ien Ang. “On the Impossibility of a
Global Cultural Studies: ‘British’ Cultural Studies in an
‘International’ Frame.” In Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley
and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 361–391. London: Routledge,
1996.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and
Subcultural Capital. London: Polity, 1995.

CULTURAL TURN
The phrase cultural turn is commonly evoked in academic discourse to refer to a series of interrelated
developments in the humanities and the social sciences
that have occurred since the 1960s that have more or
less radically changed the shape, aims, and practice,
and possibly even audiences, of the humanities and
social sciences. Most noted among these developments have been the emergence and global spread of
a new intellectual formation called cultural studies,

the impact of philosophical debates as (post)structuralism and postmodernism on both the humanities
and the social sciences, and the constitution of new
specialties inside traditional disciplines, or even new
ways of conceiving of them, such as cultural history,
cultural geography, the sociology of culture, or cultural sociology. As an intellectual movement, a few
key authors can be identified as crucial in producing
and fostering the cultural turn. Among them are the
French: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu; the British: Raymond
Williams and E. P. Thompson; and the American:
Hayden White, Marshall Sahlins, Frederic Jameson,
and especially Clifford Geertz—whose Interpretation
of Cultures (1973) has been a foundational reference
for many practitioners and followers of the cultural
turn in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology,
history, and communication. A shift from production to consumption issues—or from creation to
reception—has been pivotal in many, albeit not all,
of these various developments. This is especially true
for cultural studies and cultural history, as well as literary criticism, less for sociology, where the cultural
turn occurred originally, at least in the United States,
through a focus precisely on cultural production.
According to David Chaney, among others, the
expression cultural turn puns indeed on the “linguistic turn”—a movement in the philosophy of
the human sciences that started at the beginning
of the twentieth century and reached maturity
around the 1960s. The general thrust of this earlier
turn is that words and vocabularies play a constitutive part in the production of objects and not simply
in its description and reporting. Far from being in the
objects, as their intimate essences, the meanings of
the objects (i.e., what the objects are) are contingent
on the vocabularies we use to define and identify
them. In short, objects, even facts, are not independent of our descriptions of them.
The consequences of this linguistic turn for the
practices of the human and social sciences are clearly
major. However, even if there are important links
between language and culture that account for some
convergence or at least familiarity between the two
“turns,” there are also important distinctions that
make the cultural turn something different from a
growth of interest and significance in the study of
language and its epistemological implications, and
something other than an extension to both social
and human sciences of development in linguistics

Cultural Turn

(e.g., Ferdinand de Saussure, V. N. Volosinov) and
in linguistically grounded philosophical investigations (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin). First,
even if a crucial ingredient of culture, language is not
coterminous with it. Second, it is the same notion
of language to be “problematized” (a favorite word
and activity in this whole field) by proponents and
followers of the turn—for example, by reconceptualizing it as text or discourse.
More than language or linguistic games, but
also more than discourse or text, it is “culture” at
the heart of the cultural turn, and the complexity
of the word—one of the two or three more complex
of the English vocabulary according to Raymond
Williams—that accounts for the variety of meanings
and aims attributed to the phrase cultural turn in various disciplines and by different authors. Nowadays,
a cultural turn is claimed to have occurred or to be
occurring across such diversified fields of inquiry as
historiography and anthropology, sociology, international relations and development studies, economics
and management studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, demography, psychology, and even humanistic
disciplines like literary criticism, musicology, and art
history—where the study of “culture” is apparently
constitutive and already granted.
This turn to culture has also been prominent in
the expanding field of globalization and cosmopolitan studies and in contemporary political studies,
including those on the state, citizenship, and national
identity. It is not difficult to imagine how different
the implications could be, as well as the objectives
and even the meanings of this supposedly unique
“turn to culture” when we discover it occurred in
disciplines as diverse and as differently implicated
with the cultural world as those just noted. However,
these peculiarities apart, it is still possible to identify
commonalities that make the cultural turn something
more than a useful label or banner.
Although the term culture is notoriously vague
and complex, some definition is indeed both
requested and possible: this is one of the same stakes
of the cultural turn, according to whose proponents
we might define culture as more than the traditional
reference to intellectual or aesthetic pursuit and even
language (i.e., as the whole social process whereby
people communicate meanings, make sense of their
world, construct their identities, and define, interpret,
and transmit their beliefs and values). Far broader
than the arts or education—traditional referents of

401

the humanistic conception of culture as spiritual
perfection—culture is now coterminous with the
entire field and processes of symbolic interaction,
communication, and expression through which
(both professional and common) people define and
present, or perform, themselves. As this definition
suggests, the cultural turn has been and still is more
than simply asserting that “culture matters” or that
culture should be brought “back in”—though certainly it entailed both of them, and in certain cases,
it has been identified with these more limited claims.
Indeed, more than simply a return to culture as a useful conceptual category or a belief in its analytic and
maybe historical relevance, the notion of cultural turn
more aptly identifies an intellectual movement constructed around a series of recurrent authors, texts,
conceptual tenets, and epistemological principles.
Generally speaking, the expression cultural turn
therefore describes a move toward meanings and
symbols as constitutive forces against the primacy
previously granted to supposedly “harder” factors,
such as social structure, demography, politics, or
economics intended as spheres of raw power and
practical or material interest. This move occurred
over a prolonged time and with different timelines
and intensities according to disciplines and fields
of inquiry since at least the 1960s, becoming massive along the 1980s and 1990s. This general move
apart, the shift toward culture occurred in somewhat different ways in different places and times,
sometimes configuring a truly paradigmatic shift,
sometimes a narrower change in topics and foci,
making the trope of a unified cultural turn something like a simplification and reification of a plurality of historically grounded cognitive and intellectual
processes with different timings, reasons, actors, and
even outcomes. Indeed, we can say that the insiders’ reactions to these simplification and reification
are part and parcel of the same “turn,” fostering
it while contributing to its clarification and better
identification.
In part, the cultural turn has been an effect
and an accompanying movement in the realm of
thinking of a few transformations occurring in the
spheres of economics and politics since the 1970s,
with the growing (also from an economic point of
view) importance of leisure activities, cultural goods,
and cultural industries; the rise of creative labor,
advertisements and branding as strategic features
of the economy (the so-called aestheticization of

402

Culture Industries

production); the growing personalization and spectacularization of democratic politics; the rise of identity politics and identity movements in civil society;
the spectacular rise of electronic media including
the Internet. The idea that symbols and images have
now expanded their role and influence in economic
life and that they have become relatively autonomous is often associated with the claim that the
economy itself and the (material) commodities that
flow through it are now largely constituted through
and by symbolic processes. Some followers of the
cultural turn envision an implosion of the economic
and the cultural spheres, suggesting that any clear
distinction between the two is no longer meaningful.
One central implication of this assumed implosion
has been, as anticipated, the increasing attention
devoted to consumption processes, conceived of as
spaces and practices where individual members of
contemporary societies actively and reflexively build
and shape ever more differentiated, fluid, fragmented,
and hybrid identities. This same mechanism also
highlights the increasing role of signification in political life. The implied consequences include a dissolving
of the relatively fixed identities (on nation and class
bases) that characterized earlier modernity.
However, it would be naive to reduce the cultural
turn, as an epistemological or paradigmatic shift, to
a simple reflex of these mundane changes. Indeed,
the turn has been in many ways a re-turn, as culture figures prominently in the work of the classics
of the social thought, such as Karl Marx, Émile
Durkheim, George Simmel, and Max Weber, as well
as of pioneers of cultural studies, such as Antonio
Gramsci. More than this, the cultural turn exceeds
in its reasons and implications the task of accounting
for these contemporary changes in the fields of economic and politics, implying a reconfiguration of the
whole project of the social sciences, and a rethinking
of their central categories, from culture to economics, from society to the same “social” (Friedland and
Mohr 2004). Last but not least, the intellectual side
of the cultural turn doesn’t merely reflect a supposedly more real side in the sphere of economy and
politics but contributes to its constitution as well as
its management.
Marco Santoro
See also Cultural Studies; Culture Industries; Identity;
Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism; Production of
Culture; Semiotics; Sociology

Further Readings
Bonnell, Victoria, and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural
Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Chaney, David. The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on
Contemporary Cultural History. London: Routledge,
1994.
Friedland, Roger, and John Mohr, eds. Culture Matters:
Cultural Sociology in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on
the Postmodern 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Ray, Larry, and Andrew Sayer, eds. Culture and Economy
after the Cultural Turn. London: Sage, 1999.
Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge:
Polity, 1997.
Steinmetz, George, ed. State/Culture: State Formation after
the Cultural Turn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1999.

CULTURE INDUSTRIES
Broadly defined, the notion of culture industries
refers to the production, circulation, distribution,
and promotion of cultural texts, including those
by the music, film, publishing, television, Internet,
advertising, and marketing industries. Such industries
necessarily assemble a range of agents, including creative artists, producers, journalists, animators, designers, printers, editors, archivists, engineers, technicians,
promoters, managers, audiences, fans, consumers,
and users. For contemporary capitalist economies,
the activities of such agents are understood to be
increasingly significant, particularly because it has
been widely observed that in economic life there is an
expanded role for culture and creative industries (that
the capitalist economy is becoming a cultural economy) and because culture has emerged as a significant
site of capitalist innovation and value creation. Yet
while the role of the culture and creative industries in
contemporary capitalism has been much debated, particularly for the role they might play in economic as

Culture Industries

well as urban renewal in advanced neoliberal economies, nonetheless, to understand the significance of the
concept of the culture industries, including what is at
stake in its mobilization and mutations in its usage, we
must turn first to the critical theory of the Frankfurt
school, and in particular to the writings of Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory
Based on their observations in the United States
in the 1940s, and published in The Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1979), Adorno and Horkheimer laid
out a radical critique of the rapidly emerging mass
entertainment industry, a critique that linked together
the production of standardized cultural goods, the
development of mass culture, and a particular form
of social domination. In this critique, Adorno and
Horkheimer posited that at stake in the development
of the mass entertainment industry was a bringing
together of previously differentiated art and commercial worlds, a dedifferentiation in which, rather
than functioning as an autonomous sphere, culture is
produced much like any other commodity, according
to the principles of industrial production.
As Adorno and Horkheimer saw it, this merging
of cultural and commercial worlds—or the emergence of the culture industry—had a number of deleterious effects. First, instead of being unique and
elevated, culture becomes debased and impoverished by its commodification and commercialization, not least because in this process, it becomes
standardized and reproducible. Put differently, in
this process, culture loses its aura or singularity.
Hollywood movies, for example, follow a particular script even when plots, characters, and actors
are different. Similarly, popular songs follow a standard set of musical and lyrical conventions even as
they may appear novel.
Second, and as this suggests, the commercialization of culture creates a mass culture that is an
undifferentiated and standardized culture, in which
basic competence rather than connoisseurship is
demanded from audiences for the consumption of
cultural goods. In such a culture, pleasure rather than
self-improvement is the consumption rationale.
Third, this undemanding culture gives rise to
and creates a passive mass audience, an audience
whose passivity enables their subsumption into the
capitalist machine. More particularly, the passive

403

and acquiescent audience that mass culture fosters
uncritically accepts the status quo of capitalist society and the conditions of their own existence. For
Adorno and Horkheimer, therefore, the culture
industry not only produced an impoverished culture
stripped of singularity, originality, and authenticity,
but also worked to deceive the masses and obstruct
emancipation from capitalist processes. As Adorno
succinctly put it, the culture industry “impedes the
development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves”
(Adorno 1991, 92; Oswell 2006, 83).

Contestations to Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Theory
The cultural pessimism and disdain of mass culture
exhibited by Adorno and Horkheimer has, however,
has been widely contested. It is well rehearsed, for
example, that their critique of the culture industry resonates with a Kantian understanding of culture, one
in which creative practice is understood to be singular
and irreducible and associated with both freedom and
critique. As Adorno and Horkheimer see it, the commodification and commercialization of culture strips
creative practices of such potentialities, hence their
opposition to the culture industry. Yet, in wanting to
keep the idea of the specialness of creative practice
in place, Adorno and Horkheimer fail to recognize
how such a stance is bound up in taste distinctions
and, in particular, with the making of the distinction between high and low culture, a distinction central to the dynamics of class formation, as noted by
Pierre Bourdieu. Thus, in their objection to the commercialization and massification of culture and their
disdain of the popular, Adorno and Horkheimer not
only reveal a nostalgia for preindustrial forms of culture production but also enact a cultural elitism in
which they assume that autonomous art is both more
valuable and meaningful than commercial popular culture. Significantly, however, the very changes
in culture production described by Adorno and
Horkheimer make such a distinction and hence elitist
stance increasingly difficult to maintain.
Consider, for example, Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the very same processes at issue in
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique. Like his contemporaries, Benjamin observed that a range of technologies was enabling the reproduction of culture
on a mass scale. Yet while Adorno and Horkheimer

404

Culture Industries

lament that this process destroyed the specialness
and authenticity of creative works, Benjamin understood the de-auratization of art as more complex
and contradictory. Specifically, rather than bemoan
the detachment of the work of art from tradition,
Benjamin saw that this process opened up exciting
new possibilities. Film, for example, not only liquidated “the traditional value of cultural heritage”
(Benjamin 1968, 221) but also shifted the organization of human sense perception.
Thus, with apparently superhuman vision and a
disregard for scale, the camera provides close-ups
of any object, an innovation that reordered human
perceptions of space and distance. In short, Benjamin
elaborated how the technological changes at issue in
the mass reproduction of culture involved innovative interventions into human nature. But as well as
this, and in his elaboration of the de-auratization of
art and particularly his refusal to demonize mass culture, Benjamin’s analysis hinted at crucial shifts in
taste hierarchies. Specifically, in his discussion of the
detachment of aura from cultural works, Benjamin’s
analysis underscores how the developments he
describes involve a challenge to the distinction
between high and low culture, not least because in
an era of reproducibility, claims toward authenticity are increasingly stripped of meaning and efficacy.
Although writers such as Bourdieu have maintained
the distinction between high and low culture is very
much in place and remains central to class distinction, others have insisted that its destabilization and
dedifferentiation relates to the emergence of new
taste hierarchies and class formations.
Scott Lash (1990), for example, has argued that
the audience for cultural goods that challenge distinctions between the authentic and the popular is
a new postindustrial middle class, a class fraction
whose tastes, habits, and classificatory schemes are
distinct from more established bourgeois groups.
Specifically, while the latter embrace and celebrate
the elitism and hierarchy of the modernist distinction
between high culture and popular culture, the new
middle classes reject this split and instead celebrate
dedifferentiation—especially the dedifferentiation of
the authentic and inauthentic—and seek to consume
goods that perform this dedifferentiation.
Indeed, this classificatory scheme is at the center of the new middle class’s struggle with older
elite groups, a struggle that Lash suggests not only
involves an attempt to distinguish the new elite
groups from the old, but also involves an attempt to

impose the (postmodern) cultural tastes of the new
middle classes as hegemonic for the whole of society. In short, Lash understands contemporary postmodern culture as providing the signs, symbols, and
resources for the development of a specific class habitus for the making of both the identity of a new elite
group and for the making of distinctions between
this new bourgeoisie and other groups. Lash’s analysis is significant not only because it shows how the
consumption of cultural goods continues to be linked
to class formation, but also that it exists even in a
context of dynamic change. It also gives a sense of
the complexity of the issues at stake in culture production, a complexity that tends to be flattened out
in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the culture
industry, particularly as this pertains to issues of
consumption.

Culture Industry Versus Culture Industries
The demand for appreciation of the complexity of
the issues inhering in the production, circulation, and
consumption of cultural goods is also found in the
call that the singular and universalizing notion of the
culture industry be abandoned in favor of the plural
notion of culture industries. David Hesmondhalgh,
for example, makes a strong case for the latter on
a number of grounds. First, the notion of culture
industries enables a recognition that culture production is by no means a unified field and does not follow a singular logic. The broadcasting industry, for
example, is organized very differently from the press
industry, and so on. Second, and following Benjamin,
the notion of culture industries allows recognition of
the ambivalence attached to the process of the commercialization of culture, including a recognition
that the process of commodification involves innovation as well as a logic of standardization. Finally, the
notion of culture industries connotes that far from a
smooth, seamless process, the extension of capitalist relations into the realm of culture is often messy,
uneven, and contested.
One only has to reflect briefly on controversies
and struggles regarding new media, and especially
the use of web 2.0 applications and the harvesting
of data generated by the use of such applications to
confirm this to be the case. The social networking
site Facebook, for example, caused controversy in
2007 when it began to raise revenue by developing
advertising informed by user activities and preferences. As Nicholas Gane and David Beer make clear,

Culture Industries

at issue in the disquiet over this practice was an
objection to the commodification of information, a
process of some significance if we concede that cultural practice is increasingly informational. Thus, in
the contemporary information-based culture industries, we readily witness the types of contestation and
struggle in regard to the extraction of economic value
from cultural practice that Hesmondhalgh posits as
paradigmatic of cultural production.
While Hesmondhalgh wishes us to understand
that complexity, ambivalence, and contestation are
at the heart of the culture industries, in a study of
what they term the “global culture industry,” Scott
Lash and Celia Lury have added further to specifying
the dynamics of contemporary culture production.
Engaging directly with Adorno and Horkheimer,
Lash and Lury suggest that the global culture industry differs from the culture industry observed by
these writers in that “globalization has given culture
industry a fundamentally different mode of operation” (Lash and Lury 2007, 3). More specifically, in
the culture industry of Adorno and Horkheimer (and
we might also add in the postmodern culture industry), culture was superstructural, that is, operated as
(and domination and resistance took place through)
representation and symbols.
In the contemporary period, however, culture
is no longer superstructural. Cultural entities are
everywhere, “as information, as communications,
as branded products, as financial services, as media
products, as transport and leisure services” (Lash
and Lury 2007, 4). As a consequence of this ubiquity, culture comes to dominate the economy and the
everyday and no longer functions as a superstructure, that is, as ideology or as representation. Instead
of representation, Lash and Lury maintain that in the
emergent global culture industry, culture is a thing.
In this context of the collapse of the superstructure,
“goods become informational, work becomes affective, property becomes intellectual and the economy
more generally becomes cultural” (2007, 7).
In short, in the emergent global culture, industry
culture materializes. Brands, for example, become
brand environments, as witnessed in the case of
Apple Stores or in British Airways’ Terminal Five at
London’s Heathrow airport. Thus, while in Adorno
and Horkheimer’s account, culture industry operated in the space of the symbolic, the global culture
industry operates in the space of the real. The significance of this theorization of the transformation
of the culture industry is legion, not only because it

405

revitalizes the culture industry concept for the present, but also because it demands that we think of culture and power in radically new ways. Specifically,
it demands that for the contemporary culture industry, power should be understood to operate in a
posthegemonic mode. Equally significant, however,
is that the historicization of the culture industry
laid out in this entry allows us to see that far from
being simply wrong or misplaced, Adorno and
Horkheimer’s understanding of the culture industry
was both relevant for a particular time and is generative of continuing debate.
Lisa Adkins
See also Commercialization; Cultural Studies; Cultural Turn;
Lifestyle; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Postmodernism; Production of Culture; Social Distinction

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on
Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991.
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane, 1979.
Banks, Mark. The Politics of Cultural Work. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave, 2007.
Banks, Mark, and Justin O’Connor. “After the Creative
Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Policy
15, no. 4 (2009): 365–373.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by
Hannah Arendt, 217–242. New York: Schocken Books,
1969. First published 1955.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Gane, Nicholas, and David Beer. New Media. Oxford:
Berg, 2008.
Hartley, John, ed. Creative Industries. Oxford: Blackwell,
2005.
Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. London:
Sage, 2007.
Lash, Scott. Sociology of Postmodernism. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002.
Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry.
Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
Miege, Bernard. “The Logics at Work in the New Cultural
Industries.” Media, Culture and Society 9 (1987):
273–289.
Oswell, David. Culture and Society: An Introduction to
Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2006.
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001.

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Culture Jamming

CULTURE JAMMING
Culture jamming is a form of consumer activism,
undertaken by individuals or groups, that attempts
to contest the ostensible predominance of commercially oriented, consumerist culture by exposing its
contradictions and shortcomings. Culture jamming
is conceptually inspired by the technique of electronically interfering with (i.e., “jamming”) radio
or television broadcast signals for military or political purposes, and it comprises a variety of strategies and tactics. These include altering corporate
or other institutional messages, products, and/or
identities; parodying or satirizing corporate or other
institutional communications, artifacts, and images;
and otherwise appropriating or mimicking corporate or other institutional references or frames, usually in critique.
Credit for coining the term is generally given to
the San Francisco–based performance/activist group
Negativland, who first used it in a 1984 live radio
broadcast later issued in recorded form. Other early
practitioners include filmmakers Kalle Lasn and
Bill Schmalz, whose 1989 protest of a Canadian
pro-logging industry public relations campaign led
to the founding of Adbusters magazine, an influential journal for reporting culture jamming activity.
Culture jamming is also known as “semiological” or
“meme,” the latter in reference to the definition of
meme as a unit of information (an image, an idea,
an object, etc.) that serves to reproduce culture in the
same way a gene serves to reproduce an organism.
Interrupting and redirecting the system of cultural
reproduction is one of culture jamming’s main objectives. A primary method for accomplishing this is
détournement (turning around, rerouting, or hijacking), an artistic technique of appropriating, deconstructing, and re-presenting images and texts that
was initially used by the postwar French avant-garde
movement known as the Situationist International.
Culture jamming is often directed against major
brands, trademarked products, and advertisements
as perceived symbols of increasing corporate control
over all aspects of contemporary life, confronting the
ideological and material apparatus of the “society
of the spectacle” against which the Situationists also
arrayed themselves (Debord 1967/1995).
Other terms used to describe these tactics are
subvertising (a blend of the words subvert and

advertising) and hacktivism (a blend of hack and activism). The former refers to spoofs or parodies of logos,
trademarks, advertisements, consumer products, and
such made by either altering existing materials or
by creating new ones. The latter refers to the more
general practice of using digital tools (as in computer hacking) for subversion or to pursue political
ends. These methods have been greatly aided by
the availability of desktop publishing software and
other creative capabilities made possible by the proliferation of personal computers at relatively modest
prices when compared to traditional, more capitalintensive forms of media production, such as print or
broadcast media. It is perhaps predictable, then, that
culture jamming, properly called, first emerged in
proximity to the high-tech enclaves of Silicon Valley
in California and the corporate headquarters of
Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest. Examples of culture jamming can now be found around the world.
Image-intensive online social networking sites, such
as YouTube and Flickr, have also greatly expanded
the reach of culture jamming practice.
The activist group Billboard Liberation Front
(BLF) is one of the best-known examples of subvertising. Based in San Francisco, BLF has intervened
in corporate marketing communications campaigns
since 1977. Its first project was to alter the billboard
message of a cigarette brand from “I’m realistic.
I smoke Fact” to “I’m real sick. I smoke Fact.”
BLF produced new letters in a type font, character
size, and color to mimic the original text and glued
them over existing printed copy, making it virtually impossible to perceive that the message was not
the one intended by the advertiser. The intervention meant to point out that no tobacco cigarette
is healthy, not even those marketed as “low tar” or
“low nicotine.”
Another well-known example is the hacktivism
of Jonah Peretti. Responding to an online promotion from Nike in early 2001 offering to customize
its products with a personalized message, Peretti
ordered a pair of shoes with the word sweatshop on
them. The goal was to use the company’s own product to protest the unfair labor practices of its suppliers. A series of e-mail exchanges ensued when the
company declined to supply the product as ordered.
These communications circulated broadly on the
Internet and ultimately found their way into the
mainstream media, arguably drawing far more attention to the intervention and the issue of Nike’s labor

Culture-Ideology of Consumerism

policies than would have been possible if Peretti had
simply worn the shoes in public.
As a social phenomenon, culture jamming is
related to and very often an adjunct of new social
movements, such as animal rights, ecological sustainability, anti-sweatshop/fair trade, global justice, DIY
(do-it-yourself), and voluntary simplicity/downshifting. Like those groups, culture jamming is an outgrowth of so-called postwar counterculture. And also
like those groups, culture jamming embodies certain
disaffection with earlier countercultural social movements, such as those advocating antiwar, civil rights,
and feminist positions, in part due to their perceived
lack of success in realizing long-term social change.
Culture jamming, according to Adbusters’ founder
Kalle Lasn, is politically “neither left nor right,
but straight ahead” (cited in Bordwell 2002, 251).
Culture jamming is not necessarily against capitalism
per se, but the consumer excessiveness it is believed to
foster and for not taking into account economic externalities, such as environmental despoliation and global
social inequality. As it relates to overconsumption,
culture jamming can be situated into a broad tradition of antimaterialism in Western culture, which
extends from early Christian asceticism, is sifted
through mid-eighteenth-century Romanticism, and
persists today in anxiety over contemporary definitions of the “good life.”
In helping to further the causes of various new
social movements, culture jamming has been an effective method for raising awareness and fostering critical deliberation on issues of common concern. It has
played and will likely continue to play an active role in
the development of what has come to be termed transnational civil society, the sphere of social action that
lies between the purely private domain of economics
and the more public arena of politics. Culture jamming
is one of the preferred media strategies of the global
justice movement, and in particular pro-environment
and anti-sweatshop constituencies regularly use
détournements of transnational corporate and other
supra-state institutional identities in their campaigns to
ameliorate the perceived inequities of globalization as
it has unfolded under neoliberalism. It has direct relevance for deconstructing what Leslie Sklair terms the
culture-ideology of consumerism, which many hold as
a primary site for reproducing the asymmetrical relations of power within the global system.
Some advocates see culture jamming as an end in
itself, an avenue of escape from consumer society in

407

general, essentially extending countercultural narratives of personal liberation. Yet so-called countercultural liberation has been shown to often create
new avenues for consumption, redirecting consumer
resistance into new niche marketing opportunities. In
providing an incentive for producers to respond to
socially responsible demands of consumers, culture
jamming may serve to correct certain market failures
of currently existing consumer society rather than
open the door to a new paradigm. Even this more
modest goal suggests that culture jamming will
remain a dynamic social and cultural force for the
foreseeable future.
Vince Carducci
See also Advertising; Commercialization; Consumer
Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest:
Environment; Cultural Turn; Culture-Ideology of
Consumerism

Further Readings
Bordwell, M. “Jamming Culture: Adbusters’ Hip Media
Campaign against Consumerism.” In Confronting
Consumption, edited by Thomas Princen, Michael F.
Maniotes, and Ken Conca, 237–253. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002.
Carducci, Vince. “Culture Jamming: A Sociological
Perspective.” Journal of Consumer Culture 6, no. 1
(2006): 116–138.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York:
Zone, 1995. First published 1967.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
New York: Picador-USA, 2000.
Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New
York: Eagle Brook, 1999.
Sklair, Leslie. Globalization: Capitalism and Its
Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002

CULTURE-IDEOLOGY
CONSUMERISM

OF

The culture-ideology of consumerism is a central
concept in the theory of capitalist globalization proposed by Leslie Sklair. It refers to the transformation
of above-subsistence consumption from a sectional
preference of the rich to a globalizing phenomenon.
Its emergence can be explained in terms of two central
factors, factors that are historically unprecedented.

408

Culture-Ideology of Consumerism

First, capitalism entered a qualitatively new globalizing phase in the 1950s. As the electronic revolution
got under way, significant changes began to occur
in the productivity of capitalist factories, systems of
extraction and processing of raw materials, product
design, marketing, and distribution of goods and services. This golden age of capitalism, driven largely by
new types of globally integrated transnational corporations and organized politically by an embryonic
transnational capitalist class, took root in the United
States, but soon spread to Japan and Western Europe
and other parts of the first world, to the newly industrializing countries, and to some cities and enclaves
in the third world. Second, the technical and social
relations that structured the mass media all over the
world made it very easy for new consumerist lifestyles to become the dominant motif for these media,
which became in time extraordinarily efficient vehicles for the broadcasting of the culture-ideology of
consumerism globally.
In the second half of the twentieth century,
and for the first time in human history, the dominant economic system, an increasingly globalizing
capitalism, was sufficiently productive to provide a
basic package of material possessions and services
to almost everyone in the first world and to privileged groups elsewhere. Capitalism, particularly in
its neoliberal phase from the 1980s, promised that
eventually everyone else in the world would get rich
as long as they followed the precepts of the so-called
free market. The rapidly globalizing system of mass
media was also geared up to tell everyone what
was available and, crucially, to persuade people that
this culture-ideology of consumerism was what a
happy and satisfying life was all about. In a powerful empirical study of the increasing hours and more
intensive nature of work in the United States since
the 1950s, Juliet Schor demonstrated how capitalist consumerism led North Americans (and other
groups elsewhere) into a Faustian bargain whereby
those who can find relatively well-paying employment work longer and longer hours so that they can
afford to buy more and more consumer goods and
services or, at least, qualify for loans to do so.
The culture-ideology of consumerism would not
have been possible without two great twentiethcentury inventions, namely the shopping mall and
the credit card. Malls in the first world have attracted
substantial research attention, less so elsewhere.
Third-world malls until quite recently catered mainly

to the needs and wants of the expatriate well-to-do,
but now the success of the culture-ideology of consumerism can be observed all over the world in these
malls, where increasing numbers of those in relatively
well-paid work and their families flock to buy, usually with credit cards, thus locking themselves into
the financial system of capitalist globalization.
The ideas of Americanization and cultural and
media imperialism are important elements in any
discussion of the culture-ideology of consumerism.
Through Hollywood and the globalization of the
movies, via Madison Avenue, from where captains
of consciousness created the modern advertising and
marketing industry (see Ewen 1976), to the more geographically diffuse but ideologically monolithic television networks, and the mainstream of the Internet, the
consumerist elites of the corporate world have assumed
leadership of the culture-ideology of consumerism in
the interests of capitalist globalization. The universal
availability of the mass media has been rapidly achieved
through relatively cheap hardware (first radios, then
TVs, and now computers with online facilities) that
now totally penetrates the first world, almost totally
penetrate cities elsewhere, and is beginning to penetrate
deeply into the countryside, even in the poorest places.
Thus, the potential of global exposure to global communication, the dream of every merchant in history,
has arrived. The socialization process by which people
learn what to want, which used to occur mainly in
the home and the school, is increasingly taking place
through what the theorists of the Frankfurt school had
so acutely termed the culture industry.
The financial crisis that broke in 2008 was
widely believed to have been triggered by the bursting of the bubble of rising house prices, exacerbated
by what was labeled a subprime mortgage collapse.
Home ownership, particularly in the United States,
but increasingly all over the world, is a central aspect
of the culture-ideology of consumerism, involving
not only the debt incurred in buying a home but the
further debt involved in furnishing, servicing, and
improving it. The centrality of the culture-ideology of
consumerism and the contradiction it holds for capitalist globalization are both tellingly expressed in the
“solution” that governments of the so-called Group of
Eight (G8) have offered for the financial crisis, namely
lending taxpayers’ money to the banks so that people
can borrow more and thus get further into debt. The
transnational capitalist class is thus locked into an
ongoing crisis of overproduction, the only response

Cyborgs

to which is an increasingly shrill and self-defeating
culture-ideology of consumerism.
The net effect of the culture-ideology of consumerism appears to be the creation of twin crises of
capitalist globalization—namely class polarization
and ecological unsustainability—that threaten to
destabilize the global capitalist system as a whole.
These crises feed off each other, and they are both
unintended and extremely unwelcome consequences
of the culture-ideology of consumerism as it has colonized the world under conditions of capitalist globalization. In its Human Development Report that
heralded the new millennium, the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) pointed out:
“Economic growth cannot be accelerated enough
to overcome the handicap of too much income
directed to the rich. Income does not trickle down;
it only circulates among elite groups” (UNDP 2000,
43). In these stark words, a central myth of capitalist globalization is destroyed: not prosperity for all,
but increasing class polarization. In their analysis of
the ecological consequences of such a system, Robin
Leichenko and Karen O’Brien develop the concept of
double exposures, as some regions, sectors, ecosystems, and social groups are exposed simultaneously
to adverse impacts from climate change and economic
globalization. This fruitfully combines the analysis of
the crises of class polarization and ecological unsustainability (though they do not use these terms). The
implications of an unrestrained culture-ideology of
consumerism for the ecological future of the planet
are plain for all to see, and it appears increasingly
unlikely that this dilemma can be resolved while the
conditions of capitalist globalization prevail.
Leslie Sklair
See also Advertising; Consumer Sovereignty; Credit;
Globalization; Hollywood; Internet; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Spaces of Shopping; Transnational
Capitalism

Further Readings
Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and
the Social Roots of Consumer Culture. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Leichenko, Robin, and Karen O’Brien. Environmental
Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

409

Sklair, Leslie. Sociology of the Global System. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Sklair, Leslie. Globalization: Capitalism and Its
Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
United Nations Development Programme. Human
Development Report. New York: United Nations
Development Programme, 2000.

CYBORGS
A cyborg is an organism that is part flesh, part artificial, and a popular character of science fiction.
Well-known examples are Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
flesh-covered robot Terminator, the Frankenstein
creature, and the androids of Blade Runner. The
cyborg has often been used as a metaphor to point
to potential risks involved in letting machines take
over human functions. They have visually embodied
the unknown future and have been used to symbolize
transformations of different kinds. Intrigued by such
transformatory characteristics, cultural theorists have
turned to the symbolic values of the cyborg figure.
The uncertainties surrounding this figure have been
used to question concepts of human and nonhuman.
The cyborg—caught in between culture and nature—
doesn’t necessarily have to deal with the social orders
of our time and carries a potential to reconceptualize social relations and identities, it has been argued.
Neither completely technological nor completely
organic, cyborgs disrupt distinctions between natural
and technologically enhanced bodies. In consumer
culture theory, the cyborg has been used both as an
abstract concept for questioning identity and difference and in more applied ways. The body’s interplay
with information technologies and machines, such
as in online games, the appearance of virtual bodies,
or use of cell phones have been theorized as prostheses or formations of new kinds of human bodies. Cyborg theory can also be used to theoretically
understand consumers’ physical relationship with
consumer goods, such as fashion and food, and offer
new ways of approaching processes such as branding
and digital forms of marketing.
Used as a critical concept, cyborg is generally
associated with Donna Haraway and her 1991 text
“A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway’s text was in part
written as response to strands of feminism where
technology was problematized as building on masculine and patriarchal values. Even though she, too,

410

Cyborgs

recognized such value constructions, she wanted to
give an alternative view. The development of information technology has made us all into cyborgs,
she argues, we are all human, and not natural, creations. All identity categories such as gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity or race, are too, in Haraway’s
view, human and not natural creations. As a concept,
cyborg points to the shifting power relations that are
involved in identity constructions and has become
a metaphor for feminists who question distinctions
between nature and culture, sex and gender, and
male and female. Above all, the concept has been
used to illustrate the ways in which advanced technological developments have blurred the boundaries
between “natural” human bodies and “artificial,”
“manufactured,” or “machinelike” human bodies.
Cyborgs are, according to Haraway, hybrid entities
with no natural origin or identity
The human body is, in this view, a material entity
as well as a discursive process. Also associated with
the concept cyborg is N. Katherine Hayles, who in
her book How We Became Post Human provides a
critical account of the ways in which science has made
human subjectivity synonymous with a disembodied
mind. In the age of DNA, computers, and artificial
intelligence, the body is seen as excess “meat,” she
argues. Information is becoming disembodied as the
“bodies” that once carried it vanish into virtuality.
Consciousness has become separated from the body, a
condition she calls posthuman. Hayles investigates the
cultural processes that have made a posthuman condition possible and questions the separation of matter
and information. Similar to Haraway, Hayles also
shows how becoming posthuman can be liberating.
Haraway’s use of the cyborg has been criticized
for being too optimistic. Anne Balsamo has, for
instance, pointed out that even if it may be possible
to refashion gender within cyberculture, technology
is ideologically shaped by gender interests, and conventional gendered patterns of power and authority
are generally reinforced. Even if artificial materials
offer possibilities to re-create gender, this doesn’t
necessarily happen. Although some dualisms and differences may be disrupted through new technologies,
others may simultaneously be reinforced.
New forms of consumer culture that appear on
the Internet have been studied as versions of cyborg
formations. In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by
David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, cyberspace,
which is given a broad definition, is analyzed as a

cultural phenomenon. The ways in which humans
interact with and within emerging cybercultural
formations are discussed, and the topics range from
car crashes, cyberpunk, science fiction, human interaction with computers, cybertechnologies, viruses,
cybersex, cyberbodies, and post-cyberbodies. Other
ways of theorizing consumption are offered by
Magnus Mörck, who has shown how paper cut-out
dolls have gotten renewed interest over the Internet.
The dolls work as transgressive objects in themselves;
similar to cyborgs, they don’t follow doll conventions
regarding gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. They also
rely on and interconnect with information technology to come into being.
Also in the fields of branding, marketing, and consumer behavior, the cyborg has been used as metaphor for the ways consumers behave online, as well
as how brands market themselves on the Internet
and the interplay between technology, brands, and
consumers. Consumers interact with high-technological products, networks commodities, and to the economic priorities of the market. Cyborgs have been
used to theorize visual representations of the technological body, the future body, and body parts in market communications. A concept similar to cyborg,
and that has been used in studies of consumption of
social media, is Bruno Latour’s “hybrids.”

Cyborg Fashion
Anne Farren and Andrew Hutchinson have discussed
technical aspects and challenges with nanotechnology and smart textiles in clothing and how future
fabric can be made of living tissue that gets activated
by the body’s own processes or nanomechanical
technologies with garments that “think.” They make
a distinction between “garment cyborgs,” which
characterizes the relationship people today have with
garments or cell phones, and “flesh cyborgs,” where
technology is actually inside the body and united
with flesh. For example, the space suit can be understood as a cyborg construction.
The mutual fascination of fashion and technology with each other has also been discussed. From
a slightly different angle, the relationship between
experiencing nature and high-tech boots with GPS
has been discussed by Mike Michael. It has been
pointed out how the cyborg has become an aesthetic
category that has influenced fashion and popular
culture. Marie O’Mahoney argues that we must be

Cycles of Production and Consumption

very careful not to confuse the practical problems presented to and by a cyborg as a real, living thing, on
one hand, and the stylistic, symbolic value it has as a
kind of totem on the other hand. Jennifer Craik has
discussed how borders between body and technology are constantly challenged in the development of
the full body “fast skin” swimsuit, made of high-tech
fabric that can enhance the body’s physical performances. Technological innovations have the potential
to challenge and transform ideas of body, dress, and
gender. Fabric, flesh, and skin are brought together
in new constellations, blurring borders between
what’s natural and what’s technologically recrafted.
Approaching clothes worn on bodies as cyborg technologies can give new light on how garments constitute our understandings of nature, gender, and bodies.
The projection of the body’s function onto garments
blurs distinctions between nature and culture.

Cyborgs and Food
Another area of consumer culture where the human
body’s interaction with other substances has been
theorized is within food culture. Eating is an important bodily practice. Similar to fashion and information technology, food can also be approached for
its ways of creating hybrid entities or interconnecting with humans or questioning the nature-culture
divide. In the book Consuming Geographies by
David Bell and Gill Valentine, food consumption is
explored, as well as the ways in which eating contributes to the construction of identity and bodies. Rick
Dophijn has, in the book Foodscapes, examined
how food moves in structures, how it changes them,
and how it is changed by them. He examines how
food is produced by these structures and how these
structures are produced by food. Further, Elspeth
Probyn has discussed food anxieties in ways that
resemble cyborg thinking. In Carnal Appetites, she
studies food through a perspective where the body
and the material are in focus: how we eat is turned
into culture, identity, and ourselves. Probyn uses
what she calls the materiality of eating, sex, and bodies to rethink the ethics of bodies. She discusses how
definitions of food or nonfood, human or nonhuman, material or symbolic, and public or private are
constructed through social practices and power relations, and how ambivalence and uncertainty about
such boundaries are a common cause of anxiety.
Magdalena Petersson McIntyre

411

See also Adornment; Body, The; Cosmetic Surgery;
Embodiment; Gender; Information Technology;
Mobile Phones; Postmodernism

Further Readings
Balsamo, Ann. Technologies of the Gendered Body:
Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996.
Bell, David, and Barbara Kennedy. The Cybercultures
Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. Consuming Geographies:
We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge, 1997.
Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to
Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Dophijn, Rick. Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of
Consumption. Delft, The Netherlands: Eburon, 2004.
Farren, Anne, and Andrew Hutchison. “Cyborgs, New
Technology, and the Body: The Changing Nature of
Garments.” Fashion Theory 8, no. 4 (2004): 461–476.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Michael, Mike. Reconnecting Culture, Technology and
Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Mörck, Magnus. “Modeling Small Scale Utopias.” In Little
Monsters: (De)coupling Assemblages of Consumption,
edited by Helen Brembeck, Karin M. Ekström, and
Magnus Mörck, 29–50. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007.
O’Mahoney, Marie. Sportstech. London: Thames and
Hudson, 2002.
Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food, Sex, Identities.
London: Routledge, 2000.

CYCLES OF PRODUCTION
AND CONSUMPTION
Systems of production and consumption are often
analyzed in a static way, the interactions and dynamics of the two often being overlooked. The way
humans produce goods and services tends to be analyzed separately from the way they consume the same
goods and services, except for some relatively simple interactions premised on the basis of consumer
demand. More recent accounts have shown that
such production and consumption systems can better be described as dynamic equilibriums, in which
gradual developments or sudden shocks can lead to
tipping points changing the practices of consumption
and production (Tukker et al. 2008). Commuting,

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Cycles of Production and Consumption

for example, has for a long time depended on cars,
buses, and rail-based transport, but deregulation and
the advent of low-cost aviation carriers has transformed a transport mode only accessible to the jet set
until the 1980s into an option available to all layers
of Western societies.
Against this background, this entry shows various
ways to look at such “cycles” of production and consumption. The first, and simplest, is the traditional
static view of a cycle of economic production and
consumption, describing the physical flows of products and monetary flows in a system of production
and consumption. The second view is more oriented
toward overall trends in cycles of production and
consumption—how do consumption and production
gradually change in character? How is there a shift in
value creation? The third view again takes a different
approach and uses the word cycle to express literally cyclical changes in patterns of production and
consumption in time. This can be done mainly from
consumption (changing consumer behavior), business (changes within or across industrial sectors), and
economic (macroeconomic changes) perspectives.

The Traditional Economic Cycle of
Production and Consumption
The first way of describing cycles of production and
consumption can be found in traditional macroeconomic descriptions of society and is often referred to
as the “circular flow of income” (see, e.g., Mankiw
and Taylor 2006). In its most simple form, society
can be described as a two-sector model of firms (producers) and households (consumers). Figure 1 provides a visual representation of this approach. Firms
produce goods and services that are delivered and
paid for by households, causing a monetary flow that
is a reverse of the physical flow. In turn, households
provide labor and capital (so-called factors of production) to firms, for which they are paid in the form
of wages, rent, and dividends. The monetary flows
have to be in balance and the value of the factors of
production used per unit of time in principle has to
meet the value of the products and services produced
per unit of time.
Somewhat more sophisticated representations
include three other main sectors: the finance sector,
the government sector, and a “rest of world” sector.
The finance sector borrows savings (from households) and lends it to parties investing capital (firms).

This money hence “leaks” from the primary cycle,
since it is not used anymore to purchase consumer
products and services. Yet, the finance sector again
puts this money back in the loop in the form of loans,
which then are used for the purchase of other (capital) goods and services. The government sector levies taxes on households and firms and hence creates
another leakage, but at the same time shuttles this
money back in the form of government expenditure
(wages for government workers, payment for public
services and public infrastructure). Finally, a rest-ofworld sector can be introduced (i.e., other countries
from which goods and services are imported and to
which domestically produced goods and services are
exported). The imports need to be paid for and form
a leakage in the monetary flow, whereas exports
form a leakage in the physical flow of products and
services (but add to the monetary flow). Figure 1
also gives a stylized representation of the five-sector
model. The five-sector model is in (monetary)
equilibrium when savings (S) plus taxes (T) plus
imports (M) equals investment (I) plus government spending (G) and exports (X), or, in formula:
S + T + M = I + G + X.

Societal Megatrends and Shifts in the
Mode of Value Creation
Societal megatrends influence the cycles in the production-consumption system depicted in the former
section: what products and services are put on the
market, how they are consumed, and what creates
the highest added value. For instance, one could
argue that the (mega)trends of globalization, informatization, move toward a network economy, lean
and just-in-time production, concentration on core
businesses, the shift to dual-income families, more
single-person households, time pressure on citizens,
and individualization inherently will lead to a greater
demand for product-services rather than products.
Customers simply do not have the time, the skills, or
do not want to devote resources to integrate all kinds
of products and services from individual suppliers
to an integrated solution for their needs. They will
prefer suppliers that can provide an integrated fulfillment of needs (Tukker and Tischner 2006).
This message is probably most eloquently given
in The Experience Economy (1999), written by
B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. Pine and
Gilmore argue that over time, the characteristics of

Cycles of Production and Consumption

413

Two-Sector Model
Income (Y)
Resources
Households

Firms
Output (O)

Expenditure (E)
Five-Sector Model
Income (Y)

Resources
Households

Firms

Expenditure (E)

Saving (S)

Taxation (T)

Imports (M)

Government Sector

Overseas Sector

Government
Spending (G)

Exports (X)

Output

Income

Consumption

1

2000

2000

2000

0

2

2000

2000

1800

200

3

1800

1800

1800

180

Period

Figure 1

Investment (I)

Financial Sector

Injections

Leakages

Output (O)

Saving

A Two- and Five-Sector Model of the Production-Consumption System

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Ari89.

economic supplies have shifted from commodities
or materials to products and further to services and
finally to experiences. As depicted in Table 1, each
of these economies leads to its own basis for competition. The key message of Pine and Gilmore is
that society is shifting to an experience economy.

In an affluent (Western) society, consumers generally can take basic Maslowian needs such as food,
shelter, and safety for granted, and will be more
geared toward the realization of higher needs, such
as affiliation, love, esteem, and self-realization. The
trick then becomes to satisfy needs on these higher

414

Cycles of Production and Consumption

Table 1

Shifts in Dominant Types of Economic Offerings

Type of
Economic Offering

Commodities

Goods

Services

Experiences

Economy
Economic function
Nature of offering
Key characteristics
Delivery

Agrarian
Extract
Fungible
Natural
Bulk

Manufacturing
Make
Tangible
Standardized
Per piece

Service
Deliver
Intangible
Customized
Made on demand

Seller
Buyer
Factors influencing
demand

Trader
Market
Characteristics

Manufacturer
User
Features

Provider
Client
Benefits

Experience
Stage
Memorable
Personal
Shown during a
specific period
Stager
Guest
Sensations

Source: Adapted from B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore 1999, 6.

levels in conjunction to the offer of a material artifact: “turning ordinary products into extraordinary
experiences.” By creating such intangible added
value, the provider makes the client willing to pay
more than would be justified on the basis of “rational” calculation.

The Consumer Hype Cycle
Gartner, a U.S. marketing firm based in Stamford,
Connecticut, has developed a so-called consumer
hype cycle to predict the attitude of consumers
vis-à-vis particularly new electrical and electronic
goods. The generic form of the hype cycle (Fenn,
Raskino, and Gammage 2009) is depicted in Figure
2. The figure basically plots the visibility of a new
technology or product over time and argues, in
essence, that consumer attitude goes through five
distinct phases, each with different options for business to react on it. The timing of such phases may
depend on the product or technology at stake.
1. The first phase is the so-called Technology
Trigger. A new technology or product is announced,
gradually gets more and more attention, and generates significant press or interest. People start to
develop expectations of what the product could
mean and do, leading to the next phase in the
hype cycle.
2. The second phase is the Peak of Inflated
Expectations. The expectations and media attention
has resulted in a frenzy of publicity. The enthusiasm

and expectations around the new product or technology are inflated to fully unrealistic proportions. Sure,
there will be successful applications and uses, but
typically the product or technology ends up being a
(sometimes bitter) failure, certainly against the high
expectations initially raised.
3. The third phase is the Trough of Disillusionment. The discrepancy between the early expectations and actual performance has become so high
that consumers start to reject the new technology in
full. They now swing to the other end of the spectrum and end up with a fully negative assessment.
Where the press and other communication means
first helped to create the hype, they now abandon
the topic, or only show negative messages about it.
4. The fourth phase is the Slope of Enlightenment. Where most consumers still have a negative
attitude toward the topic, and media attention has
reached a low, some people start to understand the
practical value and benefits of the subject. Slowly
and steadily, a growing group of consumers gets
a more realistic idea of what the product or topic
truly can mean for them, and gradually the product
or issue gains more ground.
5. Finally, the fifth phase is the Plateau of
Productivity. The benefits of the technology now
become widely applied and realistic performance
characteristics become widely known. As a consequence, it becomes widely accepted. The technology
usually also matures, and certain initial disappointing

Cycles of Production and Consumption

415

Visibility
Legal File Sharing/Legitimate P2P
Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld
Mobile TV Broadcasting
HD Optical Disc Players
PC-Based Media Center

Fixed-Mobile
Converged Voice Service
Ultramobile Devices
Network DVR
Portable Personality
Terrestrial Digital Radio
(HD Radio)
OLED TVs
Microprojectors

IPTV
Mobile TV Streaming
Online Game Consoles

Digital TV
(Cable and
Satellite)
Household Wi-Fi
Bluetooth in Automobiles
Residential VolP
Consumer Telematics
Mobile Video on Demand
HDTV Displays
Digital Video Recorders
Interactive TV
Video Chat Over IP
As of July 2007

Widgets

Media Distribution via
Game Consoles

Technology
Trigger

Video on Demand
Digital Terrestrial TV
Wireline Home Networking
(Dedicated Ethernet Wiring)
Portable Media Players

Wireline Home
Networking
(Coaxial and
Power Line)
Broadband Video
on Demand
Next-Generation Satellite

Peak of
Trough of
Inflated
Disillusionment
Expectations
Time

Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of
Productivity

Years to mainstream adoption:
less than 2 years

Figure 2

2 to 5 years

5 to 10 years

more than 10 years

obsolute before plateau

Technology Hype Cycle

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Jeremykemp@en.wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg.

drawbacks are mitigated. Whether the visibility of
the technology or product again becomes as high as
in the second hype stage depends on its applicability
(niche or mainstream market).

speak of a full disillusionment in that case, a mild
form of the hype cycle seems to be applicable there
as well.

Business or Industry Life Cycles
Note that while Gartner’s hype cycle was mainly
developed for electronic products, other authors
suggest it has a more generic value. A hype cycle
may not only be triggered by technical innovations,
but it can also activate a new product launch, a
shift in consumer interest, or any other event that
generates significant press, interest, hopes, and
expectations. Also those issues or events can go
through trigger, inflated expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, and plateau phases. Indeed,
one could even argue that the election of a new
charismatic president, such as Barack Obama in
the United States, goes through these phases, losing some of his popularity after being around six
months in office. Though we certainly cannot

A dynamic parameter often used to describe phases
in the development of business systems (and hence
what brings competitive advantage) is the industry
life cycle. This life cycle is generally assumed to comprise four phases: introduction/emergence, growth,
maturity, and decline. Each of these phases has its
own characteristics when it comes to type of markets, size of markets, and emphasis of the innovation
effort. Figure 3 gives the level of sales and Figure 4
gives the emphasis in innovation processes for each
stage in the life cycle (see e.g., Grant 2002):
1. Introduction/emergence. In this stage, the
market is small and penetration is low. The products
produced by the industry are just doing their job,

Industry or Product Sales

416

Cycles of Production and Consumption

product rises. The shift from stage 1 to 2 also marks
a shift from radical to more incremental innovation
of products.

Introduction

Growth

Maturity

Decline

Time

Figure 3

The Industry Life Cycle

Rate of Innovation

Product Innovation

Strategic
Innovation

4. Finally, the industry enters the decline stage
once it cannot keep up with challenges posed by
new industries that produce substitutes with superior
functionality, performance, and price.

Process Innovation

Time

Figure 4

3. In the maturity stage, market saturation slows
sales growth to a virtual standstill—the sales volume in the market peaks. New demand becomes a
replacement demand and companies start to compete
on costs rather than functionality or quality. This
usually shifts the emphasis from product innovation
to large-scale manufacturing and process innovation.
Another tactic of companies is to bet on brand differentiation and feature differentiation to beat competition. The overall profit margins on the product
decline since companies have only two main choices
to deal with competition: cost leadership or (more
costly) brand and feature differentiation.

Innovation per Industry Life Cycle Stage

quality is low, and prices are high. This, in relation
to the newness of the product type, leads to a slow
growth rate. Design and technology can be heterogeneous. The effort of the industry is mainly focused
on improving product quality and improving its
functionality—which in this stage is a main source of
competitive advantage. Sometimes there is even little
competition; potentially competitive manufacturers
“wait and see” if the first mover is able to create a
market and then try to catch up, hoping to avoid the
trial and error that the first mover had to do.
2. In the growth stage, market penetration
accelerates and the product technology becomes
more standardized. In relation, prices are becoming lower and the product type enters the mass
markets. Profitability starts to rise, but this usually
draws more competitors in to try their luck on this
market too, which eventually puts more pressure
on prices. Public awareness and confidence in the

So, industry life cycles usually start with an
emphasis on product innovation, and later on shift
toward process innovation. In the stages between
3 and 4, however, when both product and process innovations no longer give an advantage, the
only viable alternative seems to be what has been
termed strategic innovation. This involves activities
such as redefining markets and market segments,
embracing new customer groups, adding products
and services that perform new but related functions, reconfiguration of the sequence of activities
in a new format, and so on. Reconciling multiple
(opposing) performance goals is often the key to
strategic innovation. Charles Baden-Fuller and
John M. Stopford have done extensive research into
this issue. They concluded that maturity is more a
state of mind than an industry characteristic that
binds a firm; that an entrepreneurial, learning, and
experimental culture is key; that strategic innovation needs to be endorsed by top management and
needs the creation of suitable boundary conditions;
and, as with all creativity, one has to be selective in
choosing its new territory.
A rejuvenating strategic innovation approach
requires entrepreneurship and out-of-the box thinking.
These are capabilities that might have been neglected
and even become extinct in stage 3, when all focus
had to be on cost reduction by up-scaling, volume

Cycles of Production and Consumption

growth, detailed planning, forgoing costly (since
production-disrupting) experimentation, and so on.
The length of business cycles depends very much
on the type of product and business. The car has
been around over a century, and despite all the problems in the automotive industry, congestion, fuel consumption, and so on, it is likely that carlike transport
means will still be around for a considerable time to
come. Many industries in the consumer electronics
sphere, however, show a much higher dynamism.
Companies such as Philips and Sony have existed
for a long time, but the products they sell now, the
way they produce these products, and the business
models applied are, in many cases, incomparable to
those of just twenty or thirty years ago. Examples
include turntables and tape decks being replaced by
compact disk players in the 1980s and 1990s and
then by MP3-players, and video recorders making
way for DVD followed by hard disk recorders.

Kondratieff Cycles
Nikolai D. Kondratieff, a Russian economist, was
the first to suggest that the economy in the (capitalist) world shows cycles of about forty to sixty years in
length, in which periods between high and relatively
slow growth would alternate. Joseph Schumpeter,
when developing his theory of creative destruction,
proposed to call these long cycles Kondratieff waves,
compared to the shorter cycles, such as Kuznets waves.
Explanations of why such cycles exist use innovations,
capital investment processes, war, and capitalist crises
as the main explanatory variables. The explanation
based on innovations suggests that each cycle starts
with fundamental innovations, which allow fundamental technical and business revolutions, creating
new sources of wealth and destructing old sources of
wealth. The result is a cycle of four stages:
1. The first stage is one of expansion and growth
(the “Spring” stage). The novel innovations and the
following technical and business revolutions create
a major social shift in wealth and wealth accumulation. Upheavals and displacements in society are the
consequence, and work and the role of participants
in society are redefined.
2. The second stage is one of stagflation (the
“Summer” stage). Society is used to the affluence
of the previous growth stage, changing the attitude
toward work in society. The result is inefficiencies.

417

3. The third stage is one of deflationary growth
(the “Fall” stage). Growth comes to a standstill and a
plateau is reached. The popular mood changes too. It
changes toward stability, normalcy, and isolationism.
4. Finally, the fourth depression stage kicks in
(the “Winter” stage). This stage includes the integration of social shifts and changes into the social
fabric of society. It is supported by the shifts in
innovation and technology.
The theory of Kondratieff cycles is not unanimously accepted. Critics point to the fact that different scholars tend to suggest different start and
end dates for the cycles. The theory can hardly be
“proven” with the mass of economic statistics available, and that seem to allow for different explanations for upturns and downturns in the economy. It
is also suggested that many of the downturns in the
cycles are related to human error and could have been
avoided. Overall, the theory seems much less accepted
by traditional economic scholars than by innovationbased and evolutionary economic scholars, the latter
forming the most important “alternative” scientific
paradigm in economic sciences. Having said this,
most scholars studying economic cycles tend to agree
that, since the Industrial Revolution, about five waves
can be recognized, as depicted in Figure 5:
First Industrial Revolution—1771. This period saw
the breakthrough of cotton-based technologies,
such as spinning and weaving.
Second Industrial Revolution—1829. In this
period, steam power was widely introduced for
both industrial production and for transport, in the
form of railways.
Third Industrial Revolution—1875. In this period,
steel and electricity became important new
innovations in production.
The period from 1908. Here, the automotive sector
took off, mass production was introduced, and oil
became the basis of energy supply and the chemical
industry.
The period from 1971. In this period, information
and communication technology took off, with a
tremendous impact on many other sectors and
business practices in general.

To some extent, there are parallels between the
Kondratieff cycles and the shifts in mode of value

418

Cycles of Production and Consumption

steam engine
cotton

P

R

railway
steel

D

electrical engineering
chemistry

petrochemicals
automobiles

information
technology

E

1. Kondratieff

2. Kondratieff

3. Kondratieff

4. Kondratieff

5. Kondratieff

1800

1850

1900

1950

1990

P: prosperity
R: recession
D: depression
E: improvement

Figure 5

Kondratieff Waves

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Rursus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kondratieff_Wave.svg.

creation proposed by Pine and Gilmore (see earlier).
Pine and Gilmore are, however, mainly interested
in how societal megatrends and technical breakthroughs influence the type of products and services
that create the most value on the market, where
Kondratieff used the phenomenon of breakthroughs
of clusters of new technologies to explain alternating
periods of economic growth and downturn.

Conclusion
The static and dynamic aspects of production and
consumption can be analyzed via various perspectives that differ according to emphasis on the type,
the extent of the dynamics, the time horizon applied,
and the emphasis on production or consumption (see
Table 2). The traditional economic view looks at the
interaction between consumption and production in
a single year. Macrotheories looking at the shift in
value creation span centuries, and by their focus on
value creation, they inherently look at production
as well as consumption. Consumer hype cycle studies inherently put the consumer side central, taking
rather short time spans into account. Business cycle
analyses typically emphasize the production side,
where the rise and fall of industries typically takes
decades. Finally, the approach of Kondratieff cycles
has much in common with theories looking at shifts

in value creation, but emphasizes the factors driving
change (technology) rather than the implication
(what is the basis for value creation).
There are many synergies between approaches.
Consumer hype cycles and business cycles can best
be understood in the context of the long-term dynamism reflected by the theories on Kondratieff cycles
(big technical innovations creating societal change)
and the related shifts in basis of value creation. And
the apparently static nature of the economic “bookkeeping” approach of the economic productionconsumption cycle becomes much more dynamic if
one starts to gather and analyze the time series of economic data on production and consumption. Indeed,
it is such economic data that show which consumer
hypes arise and die out, or that show that the source
of added value in production shifted gradually from
industrial production to services, and that by now in
many Western cities, the so-called creative industries
form important creators of wealth. This all fits perfectly with the analyses of Pine and Gilmore on shifts
in value creation and the Kondratieff waves.
Future developments in this field are likely to
see conceptual integration between theory and
perspectives. It also seems likely that economic
data provided by the first approach in Table 2 will
be more and more used to underpin and interrogate the other approaches. Quantitative insights,

Cycles of Production and Consumption

Table 2

1
2
3
4
5

419

Characteristics per View on Production and Consumption Cycles
Focus on Product or
Consumption

Type

Static or Dynamic

Time Horizon

Economic productionconsumption cycle
Shifts in value creation
Consumer hype cycle
Business cycle
Kondratieff cycles

(Largely) static

Usually a single year Integrated

Dynamic
Dynamic
Dynamic
Dynamic

Decades to centuries
Years
Decades
Decades (to
centuries)

particularly in scenario assessments and econometric modeling, to further explore the dynamics identified in theories 2 through 5 in Table 2 are already
being developed.
Arnold Tukker
See also Air and Rail Travel; Automobiles; Economic
Sociology; Globalization; Information Society;
Innovation Studies; Maslow, Abraham; Post-Fordism;
Price and Price Mechanisms

Further Readings
Baden-Fuller, Charles, and John M. Stopford. Rejuvenating
the Mature Business: The Competitive Challenge. New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Fenn, Jackie, Mark Raskino, and Brian Gammage.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009.
Stamford, CT: Gartner, 2009. http://www.gartner.com/
DisplayDocument?id=1108412.

Integrated
Consumption
Production
Integrated

Grant, Robert M. Contemporary Strategy Analysis:
Concepts, Techniques, Applications. 4th ed. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002.
Mankiw, N. Gregory, and Mark P. Taylor. Economics.
London: Thomson Learning, 2006.
Pine, B. Joseph, II, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience
Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Business Cycles: A Theoretical,
Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist
Process. Abridged and introduction by Rendigs Fels.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. First published 1939.
Tukker, Arnold, Martin Charter, Maj Munch Andersen,
Eivind Sto, and Carlo Vezzoli. System Innovation for
Sustainability I: Radical Changes to Sustainable
Consumption and Production. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf,
2008.
Tukker, Arnold, and Ursula Tischner. New Business for Old
Europe: Product Service Development, Competitiveness
and Sustainability. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, 2006.

D
keen cultivation of the “aristocratic art of giving
offence,” he caused every gentlemen of his time to
turn to him for the answers to what he made to seem,
in his milieu, the important questions of conduct—
questions of taste, fashion, and propriety. (Smith
1974, 727)

DANDYISM
Dandyism is the act of presenting oneself as a member of high society, especially through one’s attire.
In an 1863 essay, Charles Baudelaire identified the
passion that drove the dandy to perfection with the
“burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties.”
The “eyes of a dandy” are “in love with distinction” (499). Classical dandies had an exceptionally
developed sense for distinctions, which they eagerly
displayed in public, in regular meeting places for
the urban high society such as the afternoon promenades on the city boulevards and parks, the literary
saloons, the clubs and balls, the opera and theater,
and so on. The dandy was the ultimate trendsetter
in all matters of taste and etiquette, above all in his
personal attire.
To Baudelaire, and many others, George “Beau”
Brummell was the prototype of a dandy, admired
and copied by many young men. Brummell did not
come from high nobility but from its upper servant
class. The milieu in which he grew up, however, was
rich, leisured, and exclusive enough. His career as
a dandy in English high society during the Regency
period (1811–1820) was quite remarkable and well
known all over Europe. In his sociological study,
Thomas Spence Smith characterized Beau Brummell
as follows:

The dandy is the extreme representative of cultural refinement. A dandy runs the risk of crossing
the narrow border that separates him from a fop,
a man who makes a fool of himself by being overconcerned with his appearance and clothes. A
dandy, however, makes his whole life a highly
styled object of art. As Baudelaire observed, dandies lived in a time when the society of estates,
with its strict social hierarchies, gradually gave
way to greater social mobility and equality:
“Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and
aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fail”
(Baudelaire 1964, 28).
Brummell lived concretely in times of social
turmoil during the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars. A gentleman born in the outskirts
of the noble society but particularly keen to the issues
of social, cultural, and economic change, as well as
the new possibilities they opened up, could establish
a kind of new aristocracy of taste as a final gesture of
decadence and great heroism.
The social esteem a dandy enjoyed in high society
was based on a presumption of his having substantial
economic resources and a life of leisure. However,
his lifestyle determined his social position, primarily
through the wide attention it garnered, and not vice

By a deliberate display of unproductiveness and
waste; by a life of idle worldliness, methodical
refinement, and luxurious consumption; and by the
421

422

Dandyism

versa. Just as the position of a courtier at Versailles
was defined by his ability to distinguish himself from
his peers and emulate the taste and style of the king,
so, too, could a dandy distinguish himself above his
peers by the skilful manipulation of the signs of excellence. According to the values of the ancient regime,
the dandy was a pretender, his taste and lifestyle more
refined than his social origins actually entitled him
to. Through his refined style, he, in fact, defended the
aristocratic privilege of leisure against the new bourgeois standards of achievement through work. He
was a symbol of the real distinction between classes.
The dandy was thus the last defender of the aristocratic pathos of distance against the general leveling
out of social distinctions.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, the surest sign of
the legitimacy of taste is self-assurance. The social
“bluff” of pretending to be something finer than one
in fact is succeeds if it is done with enough confidence. In the dandy’s case, the self-assurance was
connected to an “aristocratic” offensiveness that,
often with great wit, turned down all challenging
gestures and remarks.
Together with its opposite figure, the Bohemian
of the artistic vanguard circles of mid-nineteenthcentury Europe, the dandy is a great cultural hero
of early modernity. The dandy’s entire appearance
differed drastically from the Bohemian, but the
targets of their critical gestures were basically similar. Brummell and other famous dandies, like Lord
Byron, have had many followers among young men
of culture. The young aspiring Russian poets Sergey
Yesenin and Anatolii Mariengolf walked the streets
of Moscow in the middle of the civil war dressed in
the classical outfit of a dandy: cylinder hat and the
tail coat. These, as well as many similar later dandies
often closely associated with artistic and intellectual
circles of their times, are examples, in Baudelaire’s
understanding, of the “metaphysical phase” of dandyism. The dandy’s mere existence challenged the
responsible and down-to-the-earth petit bourgeoisie
and the members of the middle class by elevating
aesthetics to a living religion. The classical dandies
were men. Dandyism is often associated with the
male gender, whose general sartorial appearance during the nineteenth century, under the demands set by
the new urban professions and increasing bureaucratization of the state apparatus, became more
uniform-like; the dandy’s exaggerated “aristocratic”
refinement and distinctiveness effectively contrasted

with this trend. In this context, a dandy could even
give a slightly feminine impression. Female dandies are, however, not totally unknown. They were
sometimes referred to as dandysettes. Nevertheless,
a male is definitely the dominating cultural model of
dandyism.
With the disappearance of the social conditions
and opportunities that emerged at the crossing point
of old and new regimes, the later generations of dandies often give the impression of a historical anachronism or present a poor mimicry of their historical
originals. If, as many claim, the traditional cultural
signs of excellence have in modernity started to live
a life of their own, at least partly disconnected from
their social origins, this could open up a possibility
for the great majority of people to style their own
lives according to their individual tastes, not to
become cultural heroes like Brummell but perhaps
“little dandies,” presuming that their aspirations
could find some positive response among their social
milieus. A dandy’s general attitude to his surrounding
social world was open indifference or even a slight
hostility to others. Such a predominately intellectual
attitude was, according to Georg Simmel, typical of
modern life in the metropolis in general. Brummell
lived totally at the attention of his audience. His
image was a public possession. His self-image was
absorbed in his public image. Like the flaneur, he was
a figure whose existence depended on the new public
urban milieu and audience. As the audience changed
or the scene shifted, a dandy’s identity became unsettled because he was completely “outer directed”
(Smith 1974, 732). In the opinion of some modern
cultural critics, such a situation could easily face not
only exceptional individuals living in exceptional
times but also, increasingly, the members of the great
middle class in modern society.
Jukka Gronow
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Cool Hunters;
Fashion; Flaneur/euse; Neo-Tribes; Social Distinction;
Style; Taste; Urban Cultures

Further Readings
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée. The Anatomy of
Dandyism. Translated by D. B. Wyndham Lewis.
London: Peter Davis, 1928.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other
Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. New York: Da
Capo Press, 1964.

Databases and Consumers
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1983.
Gronow, Captain Rees. The Reminiscences and
Recollections of Captain Gronow, Being Anecdotes of
the Camp, Clubs, and Society 1810–1860. New York:
Viking Press, 1964.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The
Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by
K. Wolf, 409–424. Chicago: Free Press, 1950.
Smith, Thomas Spence. “Aestheticism and Social Structure:
Style and Social Network in the Dandy Life.” American
Review of Sociology 39 (1974): 725–743.

DATABASES

AND

CONSUMERS

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, datadriven marketing is ubiquitous and shaping business practice in a growing number of markets. The
decreasing cost of information technology, datastorage systems, and data analytical services permits
seamless and systematic consumer surveillance as
well as increasingly sophisticated production of consumer representations. By capturing consumer activities in a ubiquitous fashion and in minute detail,
databases become repositories of complex consumer
lives by turning behavior into abstract aggregates of
individualized and individualizing data points. Once
consumption has been dematerialized and made
available as coded, standardized, and manipulable
data, there are no more limits to the construction
of difference, to classification, and to social sorting,
notes David Lyon. The electronic customer list allows
visualizing of consumption, or rather consumer life
phenomena, at the microscopic level. Customer databases reorganize the gaze of marketers and the way
marketing practice configures and controls spaces of
operation, production, and economic valorization.

Inscribing Consumption: The Foucauldian
Perspective
For marketers, databases are central agents in the
expansion and refinement of strategies of marketing
control based on the observation of consumer populations. With 360-degree surveillance, customer
databases operate like a market super-Panopticon,
according to Mark Poster. Poster approaches

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databases and profiling machines from a poststructuralist perspective, calling attention to the
discursive effects of databases in a Foucauldian
sense. Foucault’s understanding of discourse and
language is of special relevance to a study of customer databases because of the relation Foucault
draws between language and the constitution of the
subject. Mainly drawing from his genealogical work,
Foucault develops a theory of the human being as a
subject that is configured, and given cultural significance, in the first instance through language. From
this perspective, a new language introduces a new
way of constituting cultural objects (such as human
beings and customers) and social relationships
(such as markets). As Poster argues, computerized
databases constitute such a new language, altering
the way individuals are constituted as subjects and
mobilized as identities.
Importantly, a new language changes not only
how the consumer subject is constituted but also
how this subject can be known. From a Foucauldian
perspective, the creation of knowledge is the creation of cultural objects, and both are functions of
linguistic power. In other words, a new system of
representation—be it writing, statistics, or digital
information flows—articulates newly ordered spaces
of knowledge in which the object of representation
(e.g., the consumer) becomes observable, measurable, quantifiable, in short known. The customer
subject emerges as a known and knowable object on
which the marketer can now act strategically.

Modulating Consumption: The Deleuzian
Perspective
Although the recoding of consumer behavior into
discrete and virtual “data doubles” and the inscription of digital identities is intrinsic to databases,
there is more to the panoptic power of the customer
database. Extending Poster’s Foucauldian focus on
the linguistic fabrication and multiplication of data
subjects, Greg Elmer observed that the panopticism
imposed onto consumers by information machines
is much more concerned with “the collection of personal information to discriminate individuals into
previously categorized consumer lifestyle groups or
‘profiles’” (2004, 41). Hence Elmer puts the spotlight of contemporary market-surveillance strategies
squarely on the reproductive (or cybernetic) aspect
of electronic panopticism. Because data subjects

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Databases and Consumers

are “always already discriminated and profiled”
(41), the contemporary mode of data collection and
analysis must be understood as a dynamic process
where—with each new interaction between the system and consumers—existing surveillance and profiling systems and personal information continuously
inform each other. This mutability of both the surveillance apparatus and the data subject requires a
departure from Foucault’s architectural and optical conception of disciplinary power focused on
enclosures, molds, and fixed castings, according to
Gilles Deleuze. Elmer proposes instead to draw on
Deleuze’s notion of modulation to more successfully
conceptualize how control and power operate in
and through technological surveillance networks of
contemporary information economies. This retheorization of disciplinary forms of control as modular
represents more than a semantic change: modulation
stresses simulation, movement, and flexibility rather
than surveillance, enclosure, and documentation. To
be sure, simulation relies on surveillance but only as
far as documentation, expression, and spatial organization of collective life mapped within the electronic
Panopticon provide the foundation for circular,
recursive, and self-reproducing strategies of power
aimed at forecasting future positions “in an increasingly dispersed and automated infoscape” (44).
Theorizing electronic surveillance and database
technologies with Deleuze in terms of cybernetic
feedback loops contrasts fruitfully with Foucauldian
analyses because it recognizes the need for database
marketers to actively solicit consumers for information, hence conceptualizing the building, mining,
updating, and distributing of the customer database
as a systematic modulation of the consumer population. In other words, the customer database’s simulational gaze is focused on the reflexive generation and
projection onto consumers of a digital code through
the continuous reconfiguration of relationships and
associations between always changing data points.
By recognizing the feedback loop between data
collection and analysis, a Deleuzian modulation of
information theory is superior to the Foucauldian
approach in explaining how panoptic profiling
machines operate to control and homogenize everyday consumption behavior in advanced capitalist
societies. Despite accentuating the crucial interaction
between consumers (qua response to solicitation)
and technologies of surveillance (qua continuous
soliciting and modular simulation), however, the

cybernetic aspect of Elmer’s theoretical position
still maintains the conceptual separation between
the sphere of consumption and production. In his
detailed case studies, for example, Elmer links the
solicitation, storage, and retrieval of personal consumer information to the planning and implementation of standard marketing tactics, mainly targeted
advertising and event marketing, through which
companies hope to improve consumer responses to
their product offerings.

Manufacturing Consumption: The Flexible
Production Perspective
Recent investigations of the role of customer databases in the shaping of contemporary consumer
capitalism build on the foundational work of Poster,
Elmer, and others but shift the focus of analysis from
the technology’s panoptic operations to their productive function within post-Fordist regimes of flexible
accumulation. Drawing on recent retheorizations
of Marx and typically placed under the headings of
information capitalism, postindustrial capitalism,
and post-Fordism, conceptualizations of the database as a technology of production foregrounds the
expanded economic significance and strategic possibilities of market panopticism in the age of information. Instead of a homogenization of consumption,
this approach suggests that the economic strength of
panoptic surveillance rests with its ability to detect,
valorize, and monetize consumer heterogeneity. In
particular, the database’s capacity to spot creative,
nonconforming, and unexpected forms of consumer
life has not been lost to marketing executives. Indeed,
given the need of growth-dependent, contemporary
capitalism to reproduce at an ever-increasing pace
to meet new consumer needs, too much consumer
homogeneity would constitute a serious challenge for
contemporary strategies of accumulation.
Analyses of customer databases from a Deleuzian
and a Foucauldian perspective are united in their failure to notice that with progressing automation of data
collection, analysis, and organization, surveillancebased simulation no longer represents merely a means
to discipline or control consumption but to manufacture consumers. In other words, the modular simulation of the consumer population becomes the site
for direct economic value creation, while the ambition to control consumers, still important to modern
marketers, is increasingly giving way to the possibility

de Certeau, Michel

of manufacturing customers as valuable information
commodities themselves in need of marketing.
Theorizing “profiling technologies” such as the
customer database in terms of production requires a
reassessment of how technologies derive their unique
power. In particular, while the dominant focus in the
current literature on surveillance and simulation technologies has been on spatial politics of consumption
“that attempts to locate and map the circulation of
information, data, power and control” (Elmer 2004,
46), a production of customers’ perspective proposes
that the importance of the database for the exploitation of markets and the creation of economic value
is derived less from its panoptic capacity than from
its ability to produce modular (flexible and reflexive) consumer simulations in rapid or, better even,
real time. The recent gains in speed and flexibility
of production processes, premised on the unfolding
of increasingly powerful data-mining techniques, is
hence central for an understanding of how the customer database leads to a reversal of Fordist organizations of production and consumption.
It is important to recall that databases are made
up of symbols in data fields. They embody a specific
mode of representing the world. As Poster puts it,
“One does not eat them, handle them, or kick them,
at least one hopes not. Databases are configurations
of language; the theoretical stance that engages them
must take at least this ontological fact into account”
(1995, 278). Poster, of course, has in mind a poststructuralist analysis when he points to the database
as a repository for linguistic power. Yet theories
approaching information and communication technologies via an analysis of the informatization of
production also benefit from this insight because it
speaks directly to some of the fundamental features
of a post-Fordist economic system: the nature of the
technological base, the nature of commodities, and
time–space compression.

Conclusion
Under a post-Fordist regime of capitalist accumulation, the flexible production of information has come
to dominate value creation and surplus-extraction
strategies. The ability of the customer database to
capture what Adam Arvidsson calls “the communicative action of life in all its walks” (2004, 467)
effectively turns increasingly complex and mutable consumer practices into value. In other words,

425

ubiquitous information gathering transforms the
mobile, creative, and unpredictable consumer—from
the fickle object to be controlled by marketers—into a
productive and economically important force working for marketers. Hence, we need to conceive of customer databases as the factories of the twenty-first
century because they seamlessly fuse communication
and production into a highly flexible manufacturing
system that is perfectly adapted to the rules of postFordist regimes of accumulation and control.
Nikhilesh Dholakia and Detlev Zwick
See also Communications Studies; Electronic Point of
Sale (EPOS); Governmentality; Lifestyle Typologies;
Markets and Marketing; Methodologies for Studying
Consumer Culture; Post-Structuralism

Further Readings
Arvidsson, Adam. “On the ‘Pre-History of the Panoptic
Sort’: Mobility in Market Research.” Surveillance &
Society 1, no. 4 (2004): 456–474.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”
October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.
Elmer, Greg. Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal
Information Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge and the
Discourse on Language. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The
Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology
51, no. 4 (2000): 605–622.
Lyon, David. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday
Life. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001.
Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Poster, Mark. “Databases as Discourse, or Electronic
Interpellations.” In Detraditionalization, edited by Paul
Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris, 277–293. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995.
Zwick, Detlev, and Janice Denegri Knott. “Manufacturing
Customers: The Database as New Means of
Production.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9, no. 2
(2009): 221–247.

DE

CERTEAU, MICHEL

(1925–1986)
Michel de Certeau was born in Chambéry in France
in 1925 and lived until 1986. At university he studied classics and philosophy but later trained as, and

426

de Certeau, Michel

became, a Jesuit priest. He continued his academic
interests, mainly in theology, but after the political
unrest of 1968, de Certeau shifted his interests more
toward issues of society. De Certeau went on to teach
at several universities, including Geneva and San
Diego, and published on a wide variety of subjects,
such as history, religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, but it is his work on everyday life that has been
fundamental in establishing his academic legacy.
De Certeau suggests that individuals have little
control over many aspects of their lives; however,
everyday life is extremely complex and multifaceted
and allows some room for maneuver and individuality. For example, de Certeau suggests that when an
individual reads a text, though the words on a page
are set (in black and white), the reader frequently provides his or her own meanings and interpretations.
He is not suggesting that texts are open to any
number of endless readings but rather that texts are
like a city, which, though they provide only certain
avenues (a “map”), individuals can find their own
paths (or “tours”) through. This is an example of
how individuals “make do” (faire-avec) with the
resources that society gives them.
De Certeau’s idea of “making do” is a theme that
has frequently been used by many other writers as an
example of social resistance. It is possible to see some
overt examples of social resistance in the work of de
Certeau. For instance, a much-cited example is that
of la perruque (or “the wig”), which is “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer”
(1984, 25). This is the way in which workers can
use time and facilities at work to their own advantage, such as producing objects for themselves. And
it is evident that these kinds of social resistance have
informed the work of authors such as John Fiske and
Henry Jenkins in their application of de Certeau to
contemporary forms of consumption and the opportunities for resistance that they suggest these can
afford.
This has often led to the work of de Certeau being
dismissed as excessively optimistic. However, de
Certeau is “not nearly so frivolous as some of his
followers” (Buchanan 2000, 87), and this dismissal
also somewhat misses de Certeau’s key point. Focus
on obvious and visible forms of resistance overlooks
the importance of more common and mundane practices, which are more prominent and significant in the
work of de Certeau, according to Ben Highmore—
for example, a worker at a machine whose body

sometimes involuntarily convulses, unintentionally
indicating that he is not himself part of the machine,
but rather human, and individual still. By no means
an act of overt resistance, but a clear sign that the
person is different to, and not, a machine.
In theorizing everyday practices, de Certeau
employs the concepts of strategies and tactics.
Strategies for de Certeau are similar to Pierre
Bourdieu’s discussion of habitus; hence, these are
linked to places and the appropriate manners specific
to that particular location. However, in contrast to
Bourdieu, de Certeau sees no “single logic,” as there
will always be room for multiple actions and practices (Gardiner 2000, 170). These multiple actions
de Certeau refers to as tactics, which involve the
disguises, deceptions, bluffs, stubbornness, and personalization of experiences that take place within
everyday life.
However, de Certeau is not suggesting that tactics
exist in opposition to or outside of strategies but rather
are a constituent part of these. Though de Certeau
may frequently employ the language of binaries, such
as strategies and tactics, he does so to illustrate the
nonbinary nature of these concepts and the futility of
drawing clear distinctions between them. For instance,
de Certeau illustrates how the supposed oppositions
of consumption and production collapse in on each
other, as consumption itself can be seen as involving
processes of cultural production.
Garry Crawford
See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Habitus; Resistance; Theories
of Practice

Further Readings
Buchanan, Ian. Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist.
London: Sage, 2000.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. The
Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2, Living and Cooking.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Gardiner, Michael E. Critiques of Everyday Life. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An
Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers. London: Routledge,
1992.

Debt

DEBT
Debt is something that is owed. Commonly, debt
relates to assets owed, but the term might also refer to
obligations, goods, services, and other commitments
not requiring or involving money (financial) transactions. Likewise, a debtor is someone who owes
something to another. Debt and indebtedness are the
natural consequences of credit, such as loans, mortgages, or credit cards. A basic loan is the simplest form
of debt. It consists of an agreement to lend a principal
amount for a determined period of time, to be repaid
by a certain date. In general, the creditor in return
receives interest from the debtor. When accounting
debt as a matter affecting the national economy, one
distinguishes between household debt (i.e., debt held
by households), national or public debt (i.e., the debt
held by governmental institutions), and business debt
(i.e., debt held by the business). Financial debt is the
debt held by the finance sector. The total national debt
equals the sum of all those kinds of debt, excluding
financial debt. These different kinds of debt can be
enumerated into debt/gross domestic product ratios.
Such ratios help assess and evaluate the dispatch of
fluctuations in indebtedness and the amount of debt
due. Valuable instruments for evaluating the growth
and decline of economy in any country, such ratios
also constitute an important tool when making comparisons among different countries.

Etymology and Historical Origins
The word debt originates from the French word
dette, which in turn is derived from the Latin word
debitum. From the perspective of Western history
of law, the earliest accounts of debt can be traced
to Mesopotamia as early as 1600 BC. According to
Niall Ferguson, archaeological excavations in the
ancient city of Sippar revealed a clay tablet with
inscriptions in cuneiform writing, indicating that
the owner of the clay tablet was in possession of a
recognizance of debt, in terms of a ratified amount
of grain due at the time of the next harvest. However,
the earliest surviving piece of wordings of an Act on
debt originates from the so-called Twelve Tables,
constituting the first code of law by the Romans in
450 BC. The statutes of debt, which were captured
by inscriptions on Table III, declare that a debt that
is not repaid in due time after the announcement of

427

a court order gives the creditor the right to arrest
the debtor. After sixty days in custody, the case is
returned to court, and if the debt is not then paid, the
debtor can be sold abroad as a slave or simply killed.
Whereas Roman law, at its first stage, exerted
extreme penalties for payment default to the debtor
(subsequent reformulations of the Roman law
improved the situation of debtor, though), the Middle
Ages brought about a radically different perspective
in Europe. According to the Catholic Church, moneylending and income from interest were considered
manifestations of greed and usury, therefore appertaining to the seven deadly sins, and as such were
seriously condemned. For example, if a moneylender
(i.e., banker), before his own ultimate death, did not
refund all the interest he had charged his debtors, he
could not expect to be buried in consecrated ground.
Interestingly, Islam forbids lending with interest even
today.

Indebtedness and Overindebtedness in
Modern Market Economies
Today, in most market economy–orientated countries, the credit market has been deregulated, which
likely has contributed to dynamics and vitality of the
global economy at large. Deregulation of the credit
market also implies that credit is offered to, and easily accessible to, most citizens. From a consumer
perspective, this in turn has led to the majority of
citizens in such countries being more or less indebted.
Nearly all liberalized market economies also seem
to produce a certain amount of debt-and-payment
problems due to the continuous fluctuations and
ruptures characterizing such systems. As shown by
David Caplowitz, modern households are then at
great risk for debt-payment problems by their broad
exposure to market forces.
In the aftermath of market deregulation, there has
been a massive growth in the number of households
worldwide that have ended up unable to handle their
financial obligations—recently labeled overindebtedness. This means that the available income, for an
extended period of time, is not sufficient to cover the
costs of household credits and expenses. For example, in the European Union, 20 million people are
estimated to be overindebted.
It is well substantiated in international research
that debt-and-payment problems have severe consequences for individuals and their families as well as

428

Decommodification

for society. On the individual level, effects like loss
of property, reduced living standards, severe stress,
and health problems are among the most prominent
ones. According to Christian Poppe, the main causes
of overindebtedness are income fluctuations, which
reduces one’s ability to handle bills; growing expenditures such as inflation, fluctuating interest rates, or
overconsumption; system-level changes such as taxsystem revisions or adjustment of framework conditions for entrepreneurs and small businesses; the
development of new credit products such as credit
cards or Internet- or cell phone–based credit; the
effect of life events such as divorce, illness, or accidents; and financial illiteracy, that is, poor economic
knowledge and lack of financial skills.
Dieter Korczak states that overindebtedness
can lead to five different ways of exclusion: access
exclusion where a bank account is refused; price
exclusion where people only gain access to financial products at prices they cannot afford; condition exclusion where the conditions attached to the
financial products make them inappropriate to the
need of people with debts; self exclusion where people withdraw from social and financial life because
of fear, shame, disappointment, or resignation; and
social exclusion where people are excluded from
social life by creditor’s sanctions. For example, in
many countries, overindebted individuals cannot
have any kind of credit, subscribe to a telephone or
Internet contract, sign up for life insurance, or rent
a car. More seriously, though, is that overindebted
individuals are rarely accepted as tenants and are
frequently turned down when applying for a job.
One of the most fateful consequences in terms of
hardship incurred to the debtor are the effects of
debt collection and law enforcement. These measures easily bring a gradual degradation of human
dignity and loss of control over one’s own life. Since
this degradation process usually unfolds itself in a
predetermined, stepwise procedure regulated by
law, it was named “the debtor’s career” by British
scholar Paul Rock.
As the scope and distribution of debt-and-payment
problems has increased in the United States and most
European countries during the last decades, governments in many countries have established different
regimes of debt-relief programs or debt-settlement
procedures. In the United States, the Fresh Start
Doctrine of the American consumer bankruptcy legislation allows honest but unfortunate debtors to be

discharged of their debt burdens quite rapidly, while
in most European countries there is an emphasis on a
lifelong responsibility for debts.
Richard Ahlström
See also Credit; Economics; Income; Money; Moral
Economy; New Right; Seduced and Repressed; Store
Loyalty Cards

Further Readings
Ahlström, Richard. “Overindebtedness Affects Health:
What Are the Costs to Society?” Money Matters, the
Consumer Debt Net Newsletter 3 (1998): 18–22.
Caplovitz, David. Consumers in Trouble: A Study of
Debtors in Default. New York: Free Press, 1974.
Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History
of the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.
Korczak, Dieter. “The Money Advice and Budgeting Service
Ireland. A Service to Help People with Financial
Problems and to Tackle Over-Indebtedness. Synthesis
Report.” Peer Review and Assessment in Social
Inclusion Programme (2004). http://www.peer-reviewsocial-inclusion.eu/peer-reviews/2004/money-advice-andbudgeting-service/04_IE_synth_en_050225.pdf.
Le Goff, Jacques. Your Money or Your Life: Economy and
Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: Zone Books,
1990.
Niemi-Kiesiläinen, Johanna, Iain Ramsay, and William C.
Whitford, eds. Consumer Bankruptcy in Global
Perspective. Oxford: Hart, 2003.
Poppe, Christian. Into the Debt Quagmire: How Defaulters
Cope with Severe Debt Problems. PhD diss., Faculty of
Social Sciences, University of Oslo, 2008.
Rock, Paul. Making People Pay. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1973.

DECOMMODIFICATION
In current theories of consumption, consumer practices
are often described as processes of decommodification or decommoditization. The notion of decommodification indicates the active work—symbolic
and practical—that people as consumers do on goods
to make them effective, meaningful, and usable in
everyday relations, thus partially removing them from
the cash nexus. It denotes the fact that consumer
practices amount to a relatively autonomous sphere
of action and cannot be directly reduced to production or exchange relations.

Decommodification

In late capitalist societies, consumption is seen as
related to the purchase, use, and disposal of commodities. Commodities are goods that are sold on
the market at a price; they have often been produced
for sale, but they may exit the circuits of monetary
exchange, for example, through gift-giving relations.
Commodities are thus goods that undergo what in
Marxist terms is a commodification process. In turn,
the word commodification denotes a particular social
construction of things: it is the social process through
which things are produced, used, and exchanged
as commodities. Whatever its connotations in both
scientific and ordinary language, the commodification process is often described as enlarging, with
more and more aspects of life being produced and
exchanged as commodities—from natural resources
such as water, which is increasingly consumed in
small, pricy bottles, to leisure time increasingly channeled through market relations such as in theme
parks and tourist villages. Indeed, ordinary consumer
practices entail some form of commodity appropriation that, partly, removes objects from their original
economic meanings and relations to insert them in
the circuits of daily life. As Igor Kopytoff has emphasized, even while being reducible to a single scale
of value on the market (i.e., price), once acquired,
commodities enter different social spheres and take
on other values. Considered from the point of view
of consumption, and thus from their symbolically
rich contexts of use, commodities are irreducible
to the logic of production and monetary exchange.
They “represent very complex social forms and distributions of knowledge” of at least two sorts: “the
knowledge (technical, social, aesthetic, and so forth)
that goes into the production of the commodity; and
the knowledge that goes into appropriately consuming the commodity” (Appadurai 1986, 41).
Corresponding with the inexhaustible commodification of goods and services, each of us relentlessly
tries to preserve personal identities and relations
from the logic of the market and price, and we
often end up adjusting the second to the first. This
adumbrates a dialectical configuration. According
to Mary Douglas, even in consumer capitalist societies, the consumption of goods is predicated on a
variety of logics related to context and personal relations, partly removed from the cash nexus. Douglas
Holt notes that the production of goods for its part
addresses consumption, with the phenomenon of
branding adumbrating the power of personal(ized)

429

attachments in the mass market and being predicated
on the attempt to orient consumers in their practices
of decommodification. Thus, Roberta Sassatelli
suggests that one of the key paradoxes of our society
is that we actually depend on commodities to complete our daily lives, yet we find it necessary to
decommoditize—that is, personalize, finish with
meaning, and translate in daily practices that are
only loosely related to market relations—objects and
services if we want our activities to have meaning for
us as human beings. If the consumer society is that
in which daily needs are satisfied in a capitalist way
through the acquisition of commodities, it is also that
in which each consumer has to constantly engage in
reevaluating these objects beyond their price to stabilize meanings and social relations.
A similar notion of decommodification is rooted
in the work of a number of authors such as Michel
de Certeau, Paul Willis, and Daniel Miller. Miller
stresses that material culture cannot be intended
as a collection of objects to be judged as good and
authentic or bad and false, as the Frankfurt school
would have it. Material culture is instead a process
that implies a “dual” movement: objects are not
quite culture until they have been both produced
and consumed, both placed outside subjects by
production and internalized by subjects in their use
and consumption. Miller thus maintains that
consumption can be considered a form of sublation
or assimilation—that is, “the movement by which
society re-appropriates its own external form” and
the way in which a subject “assimilates its own culture and uses it to develop itself as a social subject”
(1987, 17). Conceived as “reappropriation,” consumption contains the potential to realize the human
being whom Marx attributed solely to work. The
term reappropriation implies the capacity to make an
object properly for and of oneself. Goods that, like
commodities, are anonymous, identical, or fungible
at the moment of purchase can be recontextualized in
numerous different ways by consumers, so that practices of consumption tend to generate diversity rather
than homogenization. Still, reappropriation also
implies feedback effects on identity: by absorbing
or appropriating, the subject expands and modifies
himself or herself. It is in this process of renegotiation
of one’s identity that a space opens up in which the
advertising industry intervenes, trying to manage
and modify our needs. This view resonated with de
Certeau’s portrayal of consumers as bricoleurs: they

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Decommodification

operate in the gaps and the contradictions of dominant, mass-produced consumer culture. Consumers
indeed “assimilate” goods, not necessarily in the
sense that they become similar to that which they
consume, rather that they make goods similar to
themselves, they appropriate and reappropriate
goods, and to do so they often use “tactics,” and it
is these “ingenious ways in which the weak make use
of the strong [which] thus lend a political dimension
to everyday practices” (1984, xvii).
Concentrating on subcultural and everyday cultures of consumption, Willis has taken seriously
the aesthetic qualities of popular and mass culture,
exploring the symbolic as an ordinary practice of
consumption accomplished by common people
rather than a system of signs predetermined by
capitalist relations. While the latter determine the
conditions of the process of commodification, the
meanings of commodities are in many ways reconstructed by people qua consumers in everyday life.
Although the commodity form may have alienating
effects on consumption,
commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in
a particular way, developed and repossessed to
express something deeply, and thereby to change
somewhat the very feelings which are their product.
And all this can happen under the very nose of the
dominant class—and with their products. (1978, 6)

Still, as suggested by Jean Baudrillard, capitalism
is fueled by its very critique, which it internalizes and
transforms through the market logic. Yet, as Willis
proposes, “messages are not so much ‘sent’ or
‘received’ as ‘made’ in reception”—and a “grounded
aesthetics” testifies to subversive, undisciplined renderings of commercial culture. Once removed from
the market, especially insofar as consumed by marginal or subcultural groups, commodities are arranged
as part of a “profane creativity” that may be the only
“way to radical cultural change” (1990, 135).
These approaches are motivated by the need to
take what consumers do seriously, stressing their
active role in the cultural process. They show that
consumption should not be dismissed as merely the
end point of the process of capitalist production, or
as its logical consequence, but should be seen as a
meaningful sphere of action with subversive as well
as integrative potential. Still, they can be read as running the risk of placing a disproportionate emphasis
on ordinary, symbolically rich cultural practices as

opposed to structural economic realities, opening the
way to heroic visions of consumption.
According to Sassatelli, to capture the kind
of practical and symbolic work that occurs with
decommodification while keeping an eye on the
broader frame of commoditization that sustains it,
we may conceive decommodification as a practice
of reframing that displaces goods and meanings,
places them in new contexts, translates their properties, and filters some of them while transforming
others. Decommodification thus adds layers or laminates the original practical and symbolic values of
a good. It happens in contexts of consumption that
are themselves more or less commercialized (from
the home to the fitness gym) and that offer conventions by which a commodity is partially removed
from its commercial imagery and value, and transformed into something patterned on and against
the original commercial imagery but experienced
to be something else. As a geometrical translation,
decommodification does not substitute the original
framework, without which reframing would indeed
be meaningless, but it blocks its relevance and systematically transforms it so that participants in the
activity produce new meanings by engaging with
old ones. Decommodification is thus provided by
different contexts, spatially and temporally defined,
within which people, as individuals and members of
small groups defined by their idiocultures or subcultures, transform commodities but do not overturn
the commoditization process as such. Contexts of
consumption indeed exist as relatively separated
fields of practice against the background of commoditization. These contexts are made through
rituals and practices of embodiment, marking, sharing, sacralization, and so forth, that personalize
commodities, code them through lived experiences,
socialize them via social gatherings of various kinds,
restrict their possibility of being exchanged on the
market, attach them to specific settings, and so forth.
Different contexts of consumption may add different layers or laminations to the commodity or the
practice, and going back to commoditization may
always occur. What is more, they may be more or
less conducive to reflexive and resistant practice.
Precisely because they are relatively separated from
production and exchange, these contexts may not,
even when marshalling resistant, reflexive practices,
produce the desired macroeffects on the structure
of the market and commercialization. Practices of

Delocalization

decommodification may actually be subsumed and
appropriated again by the commercial system, which
may put them to work in directions divergent from
the intention of their initiators.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Appropriation; Bricolage; Commodification;
Identity; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Material
Culture; Self-Reflexivity; Subculture

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the
Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, edited by Arjun
Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and
Structures. London: Sage, 1998. First published 1970.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. First
published 1979.
Douglas, Mary. “Wants.” In Risk and Blame: Essays in
Cultural Theory, 149–154. London: Routledge, 1992.
Holt, Douglas B. “Why Do Brands Cause Troubles? A
Dialectical Theory of Culture and Branding.” Journal of
Consumer Research 29, no. 1 (2002): 70–96.
Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things:
Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, edited by
Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory,
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge, 1978.
Willis, Paul. Common Culture. Milton Keynes, UK: Open
University Press, 1990.

DELOCALIZATION
Delocalization is the belief that there is an ongoing
process whereby the process of making things local
is being reversed. For example, it is the view that
the goods and services associated with consumption
are becoming less local and are increasingly externally sourced. The delocalization process, however,
can refer to economic, financial, cultural, or political
matters. In recent decades, globalization as a term

431

has perhaps begun to replace the concept of delocalization. However, the scaling up of economic,
financial, cultural, or political processes from the
local is not always to the global level. Delocalization,
therefore, is a wider concept than globalization, and
this captures how delocalization might also involve
regionalization, at both the intranational and global
regional levels.
In recent decades, the thesis of delocalization
has received widespread support. With the recent
and rapid intensification of interregional and international trade and investment (economic delocalization) and the emergence of hypermobile and
homeless capital (financial delocalization), a seamless and borderless world is asserted to be coming to
fruition in which there is a diminution of the sovereignty of local, regional, and national states and their
ability to regulate either national or international
capital (political delocalization). The outcome is a
loss of local cultures (cultural delocalization) due to
the advent of a homogenous global culture founded
on “Westernized” or “Americanized” cultural values. However, this rhetoric of economic, financial,
political, and cultural delocalization has perhaps run
ahead of the lived practice.

Economic Delocalization
It is often assumed that the rapid and recent intensification of trade and investment and the advent of
global corporations have led to a delocalization of
economies. Whether this is occurring to the extent
often supposed, however, is open to question. Not
only do the vast majority of businesses conduct
most of their trade locally rather than interregionally or internationally, but even among the world’s
one hundred largest transnational corporations, few
have abandoned their country of origin and are now
transnational, placeless, and boundaryless organizations operating in a worldwide space freed from the
old national hurdles and restrictions. Most, according to Peter Dicken, retain the overwhelming majority of their assets and employment, as well as control,
within their home country. The extent of economic
delocalization, in consequence, is perhaps greatly
exaggerated.

Financial Delocalization
The near-total delocalization of finance is widely
believed. With an ever-greater share of the equity

432

Delocalization

market in funds managed by large financial institutions such as pension funds, life insurance, hedge
funds, and open- and closed-ended mutual funds,
fund-manager capitalism is widely viewed as having led to a near-total delocalization of finance with
hypermobile and homeless capital circulating a borderless globe in search of investment. However, even
if some funds operate globally and there is greater
rapid-fire trading, faster fund switching, and the disembedding of capital ownership from place and individuals, fund-manager capitalism is not operating in
a seamless world with hypermobile and homeless
capital. Most funds are geographically ring-fenced,
assets are not and cannot be speedily moved around
the world, and this money concretely belongs to
specific individuals living in particular places. There
is thus little evidence that the apogee of financial
delocalization—a seamless world of hypermobile
and homeless capital—has been achieved. Cultures
resistant to financial delocalization, moreover, are
spreading and expressed in moves to relocalize money,
ranging from community-development finance initiatives such as credit unions to experiments with local
currency systems such as local exchange and trading
schemes, time banks, and hours systems.

Political Delocalization
Political delocalization refers to the process whereby
what was previously locally determined is now determined at the regional, national, or international level.
The result is a reconfiguration in the power, jurisdiction, authority, and legitimacy of local states. Political
delocalization, however, is perhaps more a prescription than description of the situation, and one that if
adopted limits political possibilities. Although there
may have been some “hollowing out” of the local
state, the local, regional, and national state remains a
significant force which remains capable of intervening
in, and shaping, economic, political, and cultural life.

Cultural Delocalization
Cultural delocalization refers to the notion that we
live in a world where local cultures are disappearing as standardized global products created by global
corporations take hold. Much of what now passes
for this global culture—Coca-Cola, McDonald’s,
Levi’s, Disney, MTV, or Hollywood—emanates
from the United States. There is, of course, little
doubt that in a bid to construct a global capitalist
culture, there has been a colonizing of hearts and

minds, and the export of cultural traits and products from advanced economies and their worldwide
adoption (“Westernization,” “Americanization,”
“McDonaldization,” “modernization”); in other
words, in such modernization theory, Western culture is globalized alongside Western capitalism. This
does not mean, however, that people are becoming
increasingly similar across the world in terms of consumption, lifestyle, behavior, and aspirations. Many
cultural forms remain deeply national, regional, and
even local. Indeed, instead of imagining global culture as replacing local and national cultures, Mike
Featherstone views global culture as a “third culture” developing alongside local and national cultures. Cultural delocalization, therefore, in the form
of a hollowing out of local cultures and their replacement by a uniform global commodity culture, is far
from the lived practice.

Future Issues
The discourses of economic, financial, political, and
cultural delocalization are arguably seeking not just
to reflect, but also to shape, lived practice. In recent
years, therefore, counternarratives have begun to
emerge that tell different stories about the processes
currently underway (e.g., Cameron and Palan 2003).
Indeed, a discourse celebrating the virtues of localization has emerged with campaigns to “buy local,”
encourage local ownership, pursue import substitution, and encourage local production and consumption. Given the concerns about climate change, this
localization discourse seems likely to become more
influential in future years. As Colin Hines explains,
localization “is not trying to put the clock back. . . . It
is not against trade, it just wants trade where possible
to be local. The shorter the gap between producer
and consumer, the better the chance for the latter to
control the former”(2000, x). This counternarrative
is valuable, therefore, because it opens up the future
to alternative possibilities beyond delocalization and
globalization.
Colin C. Williams
See also Capitalism; Coca-Cola; Globalization;
McDonaldization; Modernization Theory; Spaces and
Places; Transnational Capitalism; World-Systems
Analysis

Further Readings
Cameron, Angus, and Ronan Palan. The Imagined
Economies of Globalization. London: Sage, 2003.

Dematerialization
Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic
Map in the 21st Century. 4th ed. London: Sage, 2003.
Featherstone, Mike. Undoing Culture: Globalization,
Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage, 1995.
Hines, Colin. Localization: A Global Manifesto. London:
Earthscan, 2000.

DEMATERIALIZATION
Dematerialization can be taken variously as meaning less materials used in objects, a less materialistic outlook on consumption, or the virtualization of
communication and interaction. Designer and technology advocate R. Buckminster Fuller began using
the term ephemeralization in the early 1930s to mean
getting more out of less, or as he once put it, “more
and more with less and less until eventually you can
do everything with nothing” (1938, 252). In Fuller’s
view, technological progress could over time achieve
a higher standard of living for people while reducing
the amount of resources consumed per person. His
geodesic dome buildings, for example, used much
less materials than equivalent-sized traditional structures did.
Yet Fuller’s advocacy of technological solutions
neglected the ways that techniques are embedded
in human purposes that are not determined by efficiency, so that a higher standard of living, for example, may reflect cultural and psychological desires
and purposes unrelated to needs or efficient social
functioning. A higher standard of living could mean
everyone driving fuel-efficient autos, where individual use of oil per vehicle is reduced, while net societal
use of oil is increased and other means of efficient
transport ignored.
The concept of dematerialization in the sense of
whether societies are undergoing changes toward
physically lighter materials in the end products
of industrial production was proposed in 1989 by
Robert Herman, Siamak A. Ardekani, and Jesse
H. Ausubel. One could point to lighter automobiles,
radios, or any number of other artifacts as examples.
A study of dematerialization in 1996 by Iddo
K. Wernick and colleagues concluded that although
ratios of primary materials to products did appear to
be declining, and also possibly waste materials, such
efficiency was offset by consumption demands. In
the authors’ words, “As consumers, we profess one
thing (that less is more) and often do another (buy,
accrete, and expand). We see no significant signs of

433

net dematerialization at the level of the consumer or
saturation of individual material wants.” Hence, the
question of dematerialization as a consumption issue
goes to the heart of modern consumption materialism as a system of wants and desires: something basically mental rather than material.
Considering material culture and technoculture in
this light raises questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well, where
smaller is not necessarily simpler, and where smaller
may not even be less. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies,
promising identities, and providing a cornucopia of
commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in
ever-proliferating material devices and in the ideas
they communicate about how what one has affects
what one is and can be.
Though Ralph Waldo Emerson said more than a
century and a half ago that “things are in the saddle,
and ride mankind,” the ride has only galloped ever
quicker. Material technoculture is riding today with
something like the speed of Intel cofounder Gordon
E. Moore’s well-known law that the number of
transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Since he pointed out
the trend in 1965, it not only has continued but also
manifests today in virtually all of the capabilities of
electronic devices, such as speed, memory, decreasing
size of device, or increasing pixels in digital cameras.
Dematerialization in this sense involves not
only smaller or lighter physical properties, or even
increased information in similar or smaller formats,
but also the whole development of forms of virtualized electronic interaction, of what Vilém Flusser
called “the non-thing” (1999, 85). E-mail is dematerialized correspondence in relation to postal or “snail
mail,” not requiring paper, postage, or physical
movement of a physical letter. Computer and related
screens make possible electronic encodings of a range
of written and other media. They can contain a book
or images, obviating the need for paper, or sound,
potentially reducing the need for separate music players. They can provide multimedia tours, maps, and
games, compressing multiple information devices
into one. Ironically, however, the early dream of a
paperless office has not happened: dematerialization
can result in net proliferation. Hence dematerialization is not necessarily the opposite of materialism but
may be a facet of it.
Virtual space also raises important questions for
dematerialized human interaction. Clearly, there are

434

Dematerialization

advantages to being able to communicate instantly,
globally, and at little or no cost. But what are the
disadvantages? Do the benefits of electronic devices
and the information they provide also contribute systemically to forms of alienation, promising to pour
information in while simultaneously devitalizing
experience? Do they function as “soft propaganda,”
not simply in the content of communications they
make possible but in the forms of communication
they enable or disable?
Consider as dematerialized interaction the everincreasing enscreening of experience, especially for
young children, who face not only increased quantity
of enscreened experience but also increased enscreened
quality of experience. How do these emerging conditions relate to the requirements and capabilities of the
live interpreting human creature and its interactions?
What is the value of face-to-face communication and
immediate circumstance in everyday life, both in early
socialization and in adult interaction? From the traditional view of face-to-face interaction, dematerialized
interaction can be seen as the loss of face, as well as
the loss of place. Consider the irony of the popularity
of such websites as Facebook and MySpace, which
are faceless and placeless electronic images. Eugene
Halton has characterized the tendency to displace
primary face-to-face relations, and secondary personto-person role relations, by person-machine mediated
virtual interaction as tertiary relations.
Global financial transactions exemplify the possibilities of electronic communication to dematerialize interaction, so that various markets, once
literal places for trading, such as Wall Street, became
increasingly delocalized. Spot currency traders conduct computer transactions involving enormous
amounts of money in time frames of around two
seconds. Karin Knorr Cetina has viewed global
financial markets as “scopic systems,” which she
has characterized as synthetic situations, in contrast
to traditional interactionist assumptions of a situation as an actual face-to-face encounter. But as the
crash of financial markets in 2008 exhibited, evermore abstracted virtual interactions and exchanges,
combined with virtualized financial instruments such
as derivatives, illustrate not only how dematerialized
interactions can exemplify capitalist materialism but
also how they can lead to a dematerialization in a
more literal sense of one’s mortgage-defaulted house,
shrunken retirement funds, loss of job, and even
viable shopping malls.

Lewis Mumford used the term dematerialization
in 1970 to characterize what Arnold Toynbee had
earlier called etherialization, namely, the progressive
simplification and efficient organization of something. Mumford then proposed a broader meaning
of etherealization:
For that part of the process which Toynbee indicates
I prefer to use the term “de-materialization.”
Following the mode of etherealization, the tangible
visible world is translated progressively into symbols
and reorganized in the mind; . . . so here I purpose
only to describe how a once fully embodied culture
becomes de-materialized, and thus opens the way
for a new constellation of formative ideas, which
themselves come into existence partly by reaction
against the dominant culture. (1970, 427)

Mumford depicted culture as involving an
active dialectic of materialization and etherialization. If etherialization is a dematerializing of a
once fully embodied culture, opening the potential
emergence of new ideas, materialization goes the
reverse route, bodying forth from subjective feelings and intuitions toward realized manifestations.
In this sense, both dematerialization and materialization mean something more than technology or
materialism for Mumford; they are ways he
attempted to show the active human presence as
formative to human culture, and human culture as
not reducible to technical determinism or materialism. In this sense, his ideas resonate with those of
other proponents of dematerialized alternatives to
consumption.
E. F. Schumacher, in his 1973 book Small Is
Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, argued
for appropriate and sustainable consumption, against
the idea of unlimited growth, whether of individual
consumption or gross domestic product. He wrote,
The keynote of Buddhist economics is simplicity
and non-violence. . . . For the modern economist
this is very difficult to understand. He is used to
measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of
annual consumption, assuming all the time that a
man who consumes more is “better off” than a man
who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would
consider this approach excessively irrational: since
consumption is merely a means to human wellbeing, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of
well-being with the minimum of consumption.

Department Stores

Duane Elgin developed the implications of
Schumacher’s ideas in his 1981 book Voluntary
Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly
Simple, Inwardly Rich, and launched a movement
to reduce materialistic, consumption-oriented lifestyles. Voluntary simplicity involves limiting one’s
consumption, but it also can include limiting the
kind and quantity of work one does. “Downshifters”
are those who work less hours or change to a job
that pays less but is more rewarding, as ways of
orienting to the nonmaterial aspects of life.
Eugene Halton
See also Commodities; Consumer Socialization;
Downshifting; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Information Technology;
Materialism and Postmaterialism; Needs and Wants;
Reuse/Recycling

Further Readings
Elgin, Duane. Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life
That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. New York:
William Morrow, 1981.
Flusser, Vilém. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of
Design. Translated by Anthony Mathews. London:
Reaktion Books, 1999.
Fuller, R. Buckminster. Nine Chains to the Moon. New
York: Anchor Books, 1971. First published 1938.
Halton, Eugene. The Great Brain Suck: And Other
American Epiphanies. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008
Herman, Robert, Siamak A. Ardekani, and Jesse H.
Ausubel. “Dematerialization.” In Technology and
Environment, edited by Jesse H. Ausubel and Hedy E.
Sladovich, 50–69. Washington, DC: National Academy
Press, 1989. http://phe.rockefeller.edu/dematerialization
(accessed March 23, 2009).
Knorr Cetina, Karin. “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism
for a Global World.” Symbolic Interaction 32, no. 1
(Winter 2009): 61–87.
Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 2, The
Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1970.
Schumacher, E. F. “Buddhist Economics.” In Small Is
Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York:
Harper & Row, 1973. http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/
buddhist_economics/english.html (accessed June 3,
2009).
Wernick, Iddo K., Robert Herman, Shekhar Govind, and
Jesse H. Ausubel. “Materialization and
Dematerialization: Measures and Trends.” Daedalus

435

125 (Summer 1996): 171–198. http://phe.rockefeller
.edu/Daedalus/Demat/#end2 (accessed March 23,
2009).

DEPARTMENT STORES
Department stores can be characterized as innovative forms of retailing established in the nineteenth
century. The basic business idea was to sell a broad
range of goods with low profit margins and high
turnover in purposely built multistory buildings.
Goods were displayed and sold for fixed and ticketed prices, as opposed to the traditional practice
of bargaining and selling from behind the counter.
Whereas, in older shops, entry implied an obligation
of purchase, department stores invited the public to
look around regardless of the intention of buying.
The classic department stores of the late-nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries have been extensively
studied beyond the field of business history and
became a kind of historical laboratory for the analysis of the early consumer society. The stores came to
symbolize the beginnings of modern consumer culture
with its ethos of self-indulgence, dreamlike aesthetics,
and elaborate commodity displays, changing gender
relations and blurring class hierarchies. Moreover, the
monumental architecture of these stores illustrated
the rapid transformation of urban environments.
Historians describe the Parisian grands magasins of
the mid-nineteenth century, especially the Bon Marché
and the Magasin du Louvre, as the first department
stores. Both were founded in the 1850s and expanded
in earnest from the late 1860s. Other stores and other
cities followed, and by 1900, monumental buildings were raised in the largest cities of Europe, the
United States, Japan, and Australia. While dry goods,
accessories, and clothes, both ready-to-wear and
couture, often dominated in the European stores, the
American department stores, such as Wanamaker’s,
Marshall Field, or Macy’s, offered a complete range
of goods including food, furniture, vehicles, and even
pets. Also, customer service developed considerably
in the United States. Returns, refunds, professionally
administrated credit, and store cards were introduced.
In 1909, American businessman Gordon Selfridge
launched the concept of the “American department
store” in Europe by building his store in London.
By this time, the largest stores both in Europe and

436

Department Stores

in the United States had grown into huge enterprises occupying entire blocks in the city centers
and providing work for up to ten thousand employees. The uniformed sales staff was educated in sales
techniques and represented the cultivated image of
the store.
Although every store has its own history, the
developments of department stores around the world
were similar to each other as transnational contacts
between the companies frequently occurred.

New Spaces of Shopping: Dreams
and Rationality
Department stores have famously been called the
“cathedrals of commerce” by Émile Zola and
“cathedrals of consumption” by Geoffrey Crossick
and Serge Jaumain. Department stores often provided various events (e.g., concerts, exhibitions, fashion shows) and public conveniences (e.g., luxurious
reading rooms) and thus are attributed with introducing a new way to shop. The stores were designed
to attract customers to enter and to stay as long as
possible.
Walking around in the stores was meant to be
entertainment in itself. The stores combined modern
technology and new commercial aesthetics to create
an enchanted environment of dreams and desires.
The windows were made of large plate glass with
high transparency—a technical innovation in the
second half of the nineteenth century. Displays often
consisted of a scene or a decorative installation of colors and shapes, not a crowded selection of merchandise, as was usual before. Inside, the displays could
be even more spectacular. The typical rotunda, the
glass-roofed court in the center of the store, offered
a magnificent scene for seasonal transformation of
the interior. Thus, the department store introduced
the practice of selling by association. The excessive
use of electric lights, modern ventilation systems,
telephones, and pneumatic tubes for communication created a rationally managed and comfortable
environment for both the public and employees.
Technological novelties, such as escalators, not only
facilitated mobility within the store but also functioned to stun the public as a kind of enchantment of
modernity and rationality.
Shopping was redefined as entertainment based on
a desiring mood. At the same time, the department
store offered new possibilities for rational consumer

choices: finding everything at the same place could
save time, prices were moderate, and comparisons
could be made easily.
The purpose of the commodity displays was to
entice the public into losing self-control and buying on impulse; quite understandably, this attracted
shoplifters as well. In fact, the emergence of shoplifting is often associated with department stores. The
middle-class lady stands out as the typical shoplifter
of the nineteenth century, superseded by the figure of
the youngster in the twentieth. During the early days
of department stores, gendered explanations about
kleptomania and the female psyche flourished, while
contemporary interpretations point out women’s
lack of financial autonomy and the subversive tactics
of the weak in capitalist society. Department stores
sought to limit shoplifting by means of glass showcases, detectives, strategic placement of mirrors, and
strict instructions to the employees regarding how
to observe customers. Contemporary techniques are
more advanced, but the problem remains: how to
control the consumer’s behavior and give the impression of freedom at the same time.

Sociability and Class
Department stores established a transformed mode of
sociability and a new experience of the public realm,
claims sociologist Richard Sennett. Free entrance,
fixed-price systems, and commodity displays made
impersonal encounters, passivity, and anonymity into
norms. By browsing and shopping, the consumer had
no reason to engage in longer interactions with the
salespeople. The latter were instructed not to intrude.
These changes, however, also opened the way for a
new kind of personal and active experience of shopping. Consumers were free and also enticed to invest
in objects with personal meanings. Social class did
not determine where and what to buy as much as
it had before—although there were still economical
limits.
The main public of the department store was
the broadly defined middle class. An extensive
range of goods was offered for prices accessible to
a large public, and historians therefore often talk
about the “democratization of luxury,” to use the
words of nineteenth-century French author Émile
Zola. The fact that department stores also offered
a range of services, entertainment, and facilities that
could be enjoyed by anyone for free supports this

Design

interpretation. On the other hand, new means of differentiation were introduced. Different departments
were often hierarchically situated within the stores,
with a bargain department, or bargain basement, on
the lowest level. The more expensive the goods, the
higher they were placed in the building. In addition,
middle-class style and manner was not only shaped
and sold by the stores but also expected from the
customers.

Gender
Was the department store an emancipating or segregating environment for women, and in what way?
The research field is divided. The history of department stores provides empirical support for both
interpretations. On the one hand, department stores
opened the way for women into modernity by offering new public places, and new opportunities for
pleasures and for unsupervised social encounters.
Child-care facilities for shoppers were set up in most
department stores. Restaurants, tearooms, and reading rooms at the stores were frequented by women
for private, professional, and political meetings.
As opposed to other public meeting places around
1900, male company was not required. Some stores
established a fruitful cooperation with the women’s
movement in the early years of the twentieth century
by allowing the suffragettes to use the premises for
meetings and propaganda, while advertisements and
reports from the stores were strategically placed in
feminist periodicals.
On the other hand, some historians and cultural
scientists claim that the department store reinforced
male dominance as well as a sexualized and objectifying model of womanhood, and cemented the construct of separate spheres. Women were depicted as
frivolous and irrational shoppers in sales literature,
for example. The layout and decorations of most
stores were strongly gendered. The furnishing of the
ladies’ departments was similar to that of a bourgeois
home. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s departments—and not
only those that sold garments and accessories—were
manifestly separated. The placement of the different
departments was permeated by the idea that women
would give into the temptation of spending money
and time, whereas men were more instrumental in
their purchases. That, despite the fact that the stores
otherwise made use of and recognized women’s
expertise in consumer issues, for example, by hiring

437

women as buyers, departmental heads, or expert
shoppers.
Department stores were revolutionary in creating
a new culture of retailing as well as in exploring the
economic value of culture. Events like arts-and-crafts
exhibitions and more mundane festivities contributed to turning the stores into tourist attractions
and cultural institutions not unlike museums. By the
1930s, however, the charm and novelty of department stores started to decline. Other innovations in
retail attracted attention, such as chain stores, selfservice, and, later on, superstores, shopping malls,
and concept stores. Today’s department stores are
often monuments of the past as much as the early
stores were monuments of modernity.
Orsi Husz
See also Credit; Desire; Gender; History; Mass
Production and Consumption; Public Sphere; Spaces
of Shopping

Further Readings
Crossick, Geoffrey, and Serge Jaumain, eds. Cathedrals
of Consumption: The European Department Store,
1850–1939. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.
Husz, Orsi. Drömmars värde. Varuhus och lotteri i svensk
konsumtionskultur 1897–1939 [The value of dreams:
Department store and lotteries in Swedish consumer
culture]. Hedemora, Sweden: Gidlunds, 2004.
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the
Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1993.
Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and
the Department Store 1869–1920. London: Allen and
Unwin, 1981.
Rappaport, Erika Diane. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in
the Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
Reekie, Gail. Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department
Store. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1993.
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York:
Knopf, 1977.
Zola, Émile. Au bonheur des dames [The ladies’ delight].
Paris: Gallimard, 1980. First published 1883.

DESIGN
Design is the process of giving form, style, and visual
appeal to the many objects used by consumers

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Design

in their daily lives. All types of mechanical and
electronic devices, from Airbus planes and Toyota
automobiles to GE appliances, Apple iPhones, and
Sony HDTVs, bear the mark of design professionals, such as engineers, industrial designers, and corporate colorists. Branded goods, from the General
Mills cornflakes stocked by the supermarket to the
Clairol hair dye sold by the discount store, come in
paper containers designed by packaging experts and
graphic artists. Whether it is purchased on Main
Street or at the suburban mall, clothing is also a
designed product, created by specialists in fashion
design and merchandising.
Design is as old as civilization itself, and the ability to design objects that are both useful and beautiful distinguishes humans from other animals. When
ancient artisans made and decorated the first knives
from iron and the first glass vessels from melted
sand, they were exerting the human skill in design. In
the ensuing centuries, craftsmen refined those skills
as they made goods for local and regional consumption, from woolen fabrics for clothing to wooden
utensils for food. In the small craft workshops of
the medieval era, the fabricator and designer were
often the same person. The guild system evolved as
a gatekeeper, overseeing entry into the various crafts
and monitoring quality control. Design elements,
such as the quality and quantity of decoration, distinguished one workshop from another, giving birth
to competition. As global trade expanded during the
Renaissance, artisanal workshops grew in size, job
specialization was introduced, and design emerged as
a job that was distinct from fabrication.
Fittingly, the word design entered the English
language in 1588, just as Europe inched toward
the industrial era. The Oxford English Dictionary
defines design as a plan or scheme devised by a
person for something that is to be made, including
objects in the “applied” or “industrial arts.”
Design blossomed as an occupation during the
British Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s, the
golden era of applied arts. The heightened demand
for fashion goods like belt buckles and colorful teapots led English entrepreneurs to build the world’s
first factories. They introduced the assembly line and
separated design from production. Talented workers who combined practical knowledge of manufacturing with an artistic eye became among the most
highly revered and best-paid employees. Factories in
Europe and North America relied on these artistic

workers to keep tabs on consumer tastes and to add
value to the product. These factory designers often
combined on-the-job experience with formal training in drawing and color theory at design schools
in England, France, Germany, and the United States
that were created to train designers for the industrial
arts. Most designers were men, although women
were sometimes employed as designers for textiles,
pottery, and clothing. The terms designer, decorator,
or artist referred to a design department employee
who worked under the guidance of the factory’s chief
designer or art director.
The factory designer flourished during the
Victorian era, when falling prices and the rise of
the new middle class created a market for highly
embellished household goods and personal fashion
accessories. In the United States, consumers benefitted from the deflationary economy, as those with discretionary income could buy more for their dollars.
A burgeoning consumer culture, fostered by masscirculation magazines, advice books, and downtown
shopping streets lined with retail stores, encouraged
the acquisition of durable goods that hallmarked
middle-class status. New industries and industrial
districts dedicated to furniture, ready-to-wear, jewelry, and crockery sprung up across the Midwest and
Northeast, from Philadelphia and St. Louis. Every
factory needed staff designers to copy high-style
goods imported from Paris, Vienna, or London in
ways that suited American tastes and pocketbooks.
The term industrial design came into common
parlance in the United States during the interwar
years, particularly during the Great Depression of the
1930s. It referred to a new profession—the consultant designer—whose members defined themselves
as counterpoints to designers in the applied arts tradition. Pointing to the economic crisis, a coterie of
ambitious young designers blamed in-house designers for the slump, pointing to the proliferation of oldfashioned products that wouldn’t sell. Their mantra
was “streamlining,” an aerodynamic style based on
the engineering principle of efficiency and, in some
instances, from eugenic thought. Taking cues from
architects, engineers, and advertising agencies, industrial designers like Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry
Dreyfuss, and Raymond Loewy all opened consulting businesses in major cities and secured major clients like the Pennsylvania Railroad; Sears, Roebuck
and Company; and General Motors Corporation.
Streamlining enjoyed its heyday at the 1939

Design

New York World’s Fair, where GM’s “Highways and
Horizons” building, featuring the “Futurama” by
consultant designer Norma Belle Geddes, depicted
the imagined City of 1960, replete with sanitized
skyscrapers, spaghetti-strand superhighways, and
plenty of room for all the cars.
After World War II, the design profession contributed to the burgeoning consumer culture, particularly
in North America. Major U.S. companies like GM
continued to employ prominent in-house designers like
Harley Earl, hiring consultants for additional input
or for special projects. As the industrial-arts tradition
waned, the label “industrial designer” came to describe
both in-house designers and consultants. Practitioners
coalesced around professional associations, such as
the American Society of Industrial Designers and the
Industrial Designers Society of America, to share concerns and advance common interests.
In the post–World War II era, design came under
the scrutiny of cultural critics concerned with profligate consumption, economic waste, and human
health and safety. In his 1960 best seller, The Waste
Makers, journalist Vance Packard lashed out against
Detroit’s emphasis on stylistic extravagance—cars
with large tailfins, dripping chrome, and bright
colors—at the expense of improvements to engineering. Five years later, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any
Speed exposed the design flaws of GM’s Chevrolet
Corvair, a sporty roadster with a rear engine that was
deadly in accidents. Once celebrated as the harbinger
of a new order, design in Detroit became the whipping post for postwar consumer culture and its highprofile enabler, product design.
The history of design has drawn considerable
attention from practitioners, historians, and museum
curators. In the public mind, “design” is often associated with the sleek style associated with Germany’s
famous Bauhaus movement of the 1920s, or the
Scandinavian minimalism embodied in IKEA’s products. This type of design is collectively known as
modernism, referring to its early twentieth-century
genesis. Concerned to improve the living conditions
of the common man, many of the leading proponents of modernism were also driven by the moral
imperative to improve the tastes of the masses. Major
figures in this strand of design included Bauhaus
founder Walter Gropius, and William Morris and
Charles Locke Eastlake, two nineteenth-century
British design reformers. Due to its groundbreaking
aesthetics and admirable social goals, design in the

439

modern style is often the subject of museum exhibitions. However, many different styles remain popular with the consuming public, whose preferences
depend on factors such as income, social status, peer
group, race, ethnicity, neighborhood, and life cycle.
One of the major sociological questions about
design is about the locus of power. Do designers
dictate what consumers will buy, or is there more
give-and-take? The design process often takes place
at the sites of production, but the best designers
necessarily reach out into the larger society and culture to “imagine the consumer.” Successful design
occurs when designers mesh manufacturing, marketing, and merchandising capabilities with the needs
of the marketplace. In the Victorian era, designers
learned about tastes by watching people at the point
of purchase, while the new industrial designers of the
modern period learned to collaborate with department store buyers, merchandise managers, and market researchers, who had their fingers on the pulse
of demand. Design failures occurred when there was
a lack of communication between producers and
consumers or a general inattentiveness to trends in
the marketplace. Sometimes there was a misfire in
the design process, and producers simply missed the
mark in trying to anticipate changing demand.
Another resurgent issue in design revolves around
human ecology and the environment. Mid-twentiethcentury activists like Buckminster Fuller raised
important questions about the sustainability of consumer culture in relation to the built environment.
More recent concerns about global climate change
have revived an interest in sustainable design.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk
See also Craft Production; Dematerialization; Department
Stores; Fashion Forecasters; Fashion Industry; Material
Culture; Style

Further Readings
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Design and
Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Cogdell, Christina. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America
in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004.
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society from
Wedgwood to IBM. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Heskett, John. Industrial Design. London: Thames &
Hudson, 1985.

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Desire

Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial
Design in America, 1925–1939. 2nd ed. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001.
Meikle, Jeffrey L. Design in the USA. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Sparke, Penny. Introduction to Design and Culture:
1900 to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge,
2004.
Woodham, Jonathan M. Twentieth-Century Design. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

DESIRE
Desire refers to the experience of a lack. The concept of desire is one of the best with which to begin
an inquiry into the complexity of conceptualizing
human behavior. The persistence and the evolution
of treatises regarding what desire refers to is enlightening for consumption research and provides a good
example of how and why conceptual rigor matters
for the field. Indeed, the way that anyone, including academic researchers, understand and interpret
desires reflects, at least in part, the desires of that
person—for example, whether that relates to viewing desires as a shallow reflection of capitalist-driven
consumer cultures or as the freedom of individuals to
express themselves through their consumption.
Many an economist or manager would like for
sociologists or psychologists not only to define the
concept clearly but also to identify exactly what it
should refer to—a problem they often believe they
could deal with better, provided they were given a
precise and clear foundation. Such a wish emanates
from their desire, and the lack of recognition of this
fact reveals a clear misunderstanding of the specificity of human behavior. With this misunderstanding,
humans are treated almost as if they were plants:
identify the seed and you will know what is most
likely to occur and how to deal with it. Such an
approach to social behavior flourished within economic development theory when economists and
sociologists dreamed they could identify the seed
that needed irrigation or the engine that needed fuel.
However, the complexity of social existence is irreducible to such simplicity and, as we shall see, even
when pointing to a core concept—as Georg Friedrich
Hegel pointed to the rule of desire in our world—
theorists of social behavior end up stirring a wide
range of factors.

It has been evident for ages that human beings
differ radically not only from plants but also from
other animals. For instance, Plato in The Republic
(380 BC) indicated that humans can desire contradictory objects (e.g., one can be thirsty and not
want to drink). In his Dissertation on the Origin and
Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind (1755),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked that “a pigeon
would be starved to death by the side of a dish of the
choicest meats, and a cat on a heap of fruit or grain.”
Thus, it is not the satisfaction of needs that should
be of interest for consumer research. For humans,
there is not a single need that is not subject to a whole
series of questions. Water quenches thirsts, but there
are many ways humans deal with thirst, hunger, and
the like. Most often, human beings are caught in
dilemmas of the following kind: I wish to eat this
cake and want to stay fit; I would love to buy this but
I also want that and cannot afford both; I would love
to do this but I don’t want to upset my spouse; I wish
I just could do this but I can’t help wondering why.
Consequently, what matters is not so much the
expression of the need but its interpretation, that is
to say, how need translates through a whole system
of symbolic representations and social relations that
humans use to make sense of whatever they do in
various ways. There is not at single need that remains
untouched by sensemaking. Humans never experience a need in a pure (or natural) form but always
in a symbolic and cultural context. This is why and
how desire comes about. It can be said that desire
originates from the fact that humans are compelled
to relate to what drives them to do this or that.
Contrary to other animals, humans just cannot help
thinking about it, and they do so at the intrinsically
linked individual and collective levels. Desire, then,
is the form that needs take once the symbolic order
is established. Whereas needs link us to the order
of things, desire binds us with the rest of humanity.
Thus, any endeavor to reduce desire into something
more natural and simple is bound to miss the whole
point. This is indeed a core issue for consumer science: we should not seek the power of nature but the
nature of power. We should try to look beyond needs
and wants and study desire in process and context.

Desire in Western Philosophy
According to Baruch Spinoza, desire is the essence
of man and the expression of an infinite overflow

Desire

of power that nothing can put an end to (Ethica in
Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, 1663). Desire
has no means or end but only God. Spinoza considers, therefore, that consumption and things are only
distractions. Though his interpretation and solution
thus remain within the scope of religion, Spinoza
has made a forceful difference in intellectual (modern) thought by claiming that there is no a priori
determination of the Good and that no object can
be said to be good in itself. Until his time, most of
the debates concerning how to deal with desire had
to do with control. Plato had inaugurated the great
philosophical debate about the conflict between reason and passion, considering desire a kind of blind
force with no aim that needs to be guided by reason.
From Empedocles (490–430 BC) to Saint Augustine
(354–430), desire was considered the expression of
the power that unites mankind with the metaphysical, but that was naturally unbounded and polymorphic and therefore needed to be moderated and
tamed.
Still, the diversity and multiplicity of its forms of
expression and its obvious tendency toward excess
were then considered to be neither deviant nor
wrong but had to be understood from within the
cosmic order of things. Desire was ontologically valued. According to Aristotle—who also saw desire as
the expression of a processing power and the sign of
the divine in man—desire can be sublimated in the
search for reason and beauty (Nicomachean Ethics,
350 BC). Ranking the possible uses of desire toward
sublimation, he ends up proposing a code of ethics.
Thus, Aristotle not only introduced an understanding of the specificity of mankind as a being of desire
long before Spinoza but also opened the door for a
condemnation of all nonsublimated expressions of
desire.
Yet, it was Christianity that turned desire into
the expression of evil. Many words in Greek had
expressed the variety of aspects of the phenomenon;
now desire clearly meant diversion from God—in
Latin, desiderium etymologically refers to a fall from
the sky and the stars, to a disaster. For the Greeks,
desire had to do with mankind’s relation to pleasures
and the Good; with Christianity, desire is what recalls
man to his imperfection, and the best thing about it
is that it reveals the strong bond between man and
evil. Admittedly, following Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas, Christianity maintains that there is a bond
of love between God and humanity understood as

441

the noble form of desire—the desire of the divine.
However, the earthly forms of desire are related to sin
and to the expression of the Fall, of a lack. Reason
is no longer of any help. On the contrary, in the
Christian myth, the Fall originates from man daring
to doubt. So, only faith can help, and to trust in God
means submission, not reflection. Nevertheless, the
idea that from this lack man can rise and get strong
has centuries later translated into other theories, such
as that of Hegel considering the strength of the negative as the prime mover of consciousness and history,
or that of Jean-Paul Sartre pointing out nothingness
as the force of being. This dilemma is still present
in the cultural debate and the individual minds of
our time: should we give in to or restrain our urge to
consume? This is even truer when what is consumed
is perceived and presented as luxurious, as identity
seeking, as sublimation.
Between the time of the emergence of the
Christian ideology of the lack and the time of the
postmodern ethos of letting go, Western society went
through radical changes. The growth of modern
society corresponded with new answers given to the
question regarding how desire should be dealt with
within society, and coping with the organization of
earthly powers clearly infected by some of the most
problematic aspects of multifaceted desire. As long
as politics belonged indisputably to a hereditary class
and the economy relied mainly on landed property,
desire could still be presented to people as being
related to sin.
Yet, the intellectual and political edifice of
Christianity fell as a result of the assaults of experimental science and the successful application of
methodologies of technical and political reasoning
to any question. The Renaissance revived the notion
of man as a creative entity, and the Enlightenment
promoted merit against lineage. Desire could then be
seen as a potential for social development. After all,
human desires had also resulted in architectural and
technical wonders, some of them not only in praise
of God. Following the development of political principles, which in themselves became a political force,
the emergence of political economy introduced a
radically new vision of desire as a logic of passions
and interests that could be liberated for the benefit
of all in society. Two thinkers can be said to have
synthesized the evolution from the ethics of theology to the philosophy of politics and then to political economy: with Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513),

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Desire

politics no longer belongs to ethics—it no longer is
in spite of men’s passions but because of them that
one has to think of proper ways to rule society—and
with Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776),
the desires of the many give life to the market, which
is the institution that is supposed to turn all passions
and interests into social harmony.

Relation of Consumption to Desire
Consumption related to desire was still confined to
the higher order of society. Nevertheless, the changes
were significant. Courts during the Renaissance
in Italy turned the court into a sort of competitive
parade scene using luxury as a means of government
(Braudel 1973, 307). Likewise, Elizabeth I in the
sixteenth century used expenditure as a systematic
policy, manipulating the desires of her subjects who
held high status, forcing the nobility to spend conspicuously in order to centralize power and tame
the elite. Thus, in Elizabethan England, noblemen began to spend extravagantly, with great
enthusiasm and on a new scale, undertaking the
additional expense of a London residence, spending time and money away from the community
where each was the highest-ranking member, entertaining one another in London close to the queen,
and soon enslaving themselves to a new order of
centralized competitive consumption, thus provoking radical changes in their localities where envy
and awe often ended up being replaced by confusion and contempt (McCracken 1988,10–16).
In France, a century later, Pierre de Boisguilbert
developed the theoretical foundation of laissezfaire, studied the behavior of economic agents, and
served the interest of the French king, Louis XIV.
He advised the king to free the movement of goods
in order to promote a greater selfishness that would
strengthen his central power (Faccarello 1999).
This illustrates the different ways desires of varying groups in society are captured with a new societal dynamic. The drive of hunger is not at all what
motivated the developments. This dynamic of consumption was induced by a plurality of intertwined
logics of action, including not only the social competition among Elizabethan nobility, or the ambition of the Sun King, but also technical progress, the
growth of world trade, and more. At the beginning
of this new dynamic, common men experienced
only the death of local hospitality and the exclusion

from trickle-down consumption. Their everyday lot
was still to work hard and consume little. The issue
of letting desire loose was not a concern for them.
Even among those who could more freely dedicate
their activities to market growth, many members
of the bourgeoisie adopted an attitude of asceticism
reducing their role to facilitation of accumulation
(Weber 1920).
Nevertheless, a reversal had taken place. For
a growing part of the population, desires were
turned loose as they escaped the confines of tradition to enter other settings. Soon economic growth
would require the effort of everyman not only to
produce but also to consume, and a uniform logic
of consumption animated by desire would trickle
down to almost all groups within society at the
global level. Again, this was not the result of a single
logic. Industrialization resulted in the movement
of large groups of the population, and traditional
bonds were severed. This constituted the overture
to a reorganization of work and free-time relations
where the division of labor, urbanization, and newgroup membership meant an increasing difference
in the definition of roles and a greater anonymity in
daily life. Workers were uprooted from local traditions that lost in importance as the market gained
influence. Rise in economic growth, productivity,
and workers’ demands made it possible for many to
dedicate longer periods of time to something other
than production. A greater part of life had to revolve
around consumption. The dream of consumption
captured a growing part of people’s daily existence,
and commodities acquired greater and greater social
value. Of course, tastes changed, but a more radical
change occurred when actions and thoughts increasingly became related to the exchange of goods and
to consumption. Now, desire could be expressed in
new ways, and it is not so much the spreading of
luxury within the population that is significant here
but that of hedonism. Whereas, formally, priests had
told their flock to restrain their desires, advertisers
would soon do their utmost to kindle every single
desire. As the new pattern of consumption unfolded,
many a mind became concerned more than ever with
consumption as a channel of desire rather than as a
mean of quenching anything, be it a need or a desire.
In relation to this overwhelming importance and
complexity of consumption within society and for
every human being, it became even more evident that
desires can never be quenched, as one cannot take

Desire

a desire to an end state. It became obvious that it is
desire that takes you for a ride.
For a long time, most consumption researchers
attached to the marketing field tried to identify the
motivation for consumption and the forms of need
satisfaction and were fundamentally unable to take
the role of desire into consideration. Their conceptual frameworks did not permit it. They could make
distinctions between needs, wants, and demands.
They were mainly interested in “preferences” and
“customer satisfaction,” and they mostly expected
to serve marketing purposes. It was with the initial
awareness that entered the new field, provided by
studies in philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis,
when the insatiable and social nature of desire was
truly perceived and revealed within the various forms
of modern consumption. It became evident that
desire flows in all forms of consumption.

Modern Debate
In the modern debate about desire, Jacques Lacan
and René Girard made significant contributions with
major implications for consumer science. They provided explanations and models. Girard clarified how
desire relies on mimetic social relations, and Lacan
established why it is inaccessible to consciousness
and impossible to appease. Works by both of these
scholars further develop Hegel’s work, which emphasized the role of desire in the struggle for recognition.
Lacan also builds further on Sigmund Freud’s
work. His focus is mostly on the first phase of the
struggle where the newborn establishes communication with its surroundings. Lacan pointed out that,
from the beginning of its existence, whatever an
infant needs has to be expressed through the symbolic order and is dependent on the relation to a parent. Demand has to be expressed through a language
and a cultural code. The symbolic order, which can
be defined as what makes the wording of a demand
possible and necessary, rends the original need relationship. The symbolic order presses itself almost as
a hatchet, creating a gap that has to be filled: desire
emerges. “Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference
that results from the subtraction of the first from the
second, the phenomena of their splitting (Spaltung)”
(Lacan 2001, 318).
Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which
demand becomes separated from need: this margin

443

being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal
of which can be unconditional only in regard to the
Other, under the form of the possible defect, which
need may introduce into it, of having no universal
satisfaction (what is called “anxiety”). (344)

In other words, it is from the distance between
the need and the human subject’s relationship to
his needs that desire emerges, and this relationship
has to be expressed in a cultural code, not a natural one. In this relationship the other (i.e., those
who are not oneself) play a significant role. Desires
operate through the other, through the promises
and rewards of society, through culture. It is not to
be “satisfied,” it is just to be “moved” or “agitated.” Two other prominent theoreticians of the
theory of desire, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
express it in this way: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the
subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks
a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless
there is repression” (1983, 26).
Girard built further not only on Hegel’s emphasizing the role of desire in the struggle for recognition
but also on Hegel’s underlining of the fact that all
people rely on the mirror image that the other can
provide for him or her. As Sartre expressed it, “The
inspired intuition of Hegel is . . . to have me depend
on the other in my own being. I am, he says, a being
by itself that is by itself only through someone else”
(1943, 293). Adding to this, Girard builds on Alexis
de Tocqueville’s classical analysis of the advance of
individualism. He explains that desire should not be
considered something linked to an individual as it is
always mimetic. We can only desire something that
others desire. No person, no object has in oneself
the qualities that are required to be desirable. Those
qualities are developed in the relation. The relation is
always somewhat triangular. Girard calls the model a
person imitates the mediator. It operates between the
subject and the object and plays a much more important role than either. It does not have to be a positive
model; still, the model/rival has to be surpassed. It
has always been so in all kinds of societies. However,
in democracies, anyone is entitled to seek anything
for himself, whereas in aristocratic societies or caste
societies, the mediator was so highly placed over the
masses that it remained unrivaled. In contrast, the
number of mediators is so large today that mimetic
desire becomes more competitive, conflicting,

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Desire

obsessive, and exhausting. In such a perspective,
desire is not so much liberated as knocked around in
a never-ending headlong flight.
Part of this endless flight drives along a cultural
project where consumption—and desire—plays a
significant role. Mary Douglas explains that the consumer has a cultural project: “Everything he chooses
to do or to buy is part of a project to choose other
people to be with who will help him make the kind
of society he thinks he will like the best” (1996, 113).
Thus, it seems absurd to reduce desire to wants
and needs. It cannot be reached or met; it is just
in the air. It is always in flood, but it has neither a
source nor a mouth. Desire has more in common
with sound, of which melodies are bound to make
use, than with seeds that must grow and need to
be watered. It can never be fulfilled. It is insatiable.
Desires are always related to other desires and thus
always socially expressed. They rely much more on
the condition of the social bond than on the evolution of supply and demand. Even when consumers
do express a cultural project, it is not the expression
of their will but the result of many interactions, most
of which are unconscious.
Asking consumers about their desire does not
seem to make sense, as desires are not accessible
through individual questionnaires or introspection.
When asked about their desires, people might answer
about their wishes, needs, wants, or aspirations but
never about what drives them, as it is the desire of
others. Furthermore, people have very different cultural and intellectual backgrounds to relate to when
they are asked about their desires. The question
translates in various ways into many different but
always superficial understandings. Working scientifically with desire in consumption research therefore requires an interdisciplinary and interpretative
approach, an approach that has more in common
with the works of the great pioneers of sociology,
such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber.
It is not so much the fanning out of desire that
matters (the way it spreads out in different consumption styles for instance). It is the funneling of
desire into consumption and identity management
that makes the concept of desire relevant for today’s
consumer research. As desire relates to a fundamental anthropological aspect of humanity, it is most
likely to remain a driving force. Still, the way it participates in the social bond clearly evolves, and the
consumption researchers who have been studying

its evolution in history are now interested in further
developments.
For some decades now, in societies where consumption has long been considered the driving force
of the economy, the mastery of nature and the mastery of social development have no longer been perceived as necessarily linked to each other. This might
have consequences for the way humanity relates to
the force of desire. There may well come a day when
the funneling of desire to productive consumption
will be brought into question, no longer with reference to the dogma of religions but to the quality of
the relation mankind has with its environment.
Dominique Bouchet
See also Christianity; Consumer Behavior; Consumer
Society; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Happiness;
Hedonism; Needs and Wants; Social and Economic
Development

Further Readings
Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life
1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Œdipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrénia. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Douglas, Mary. Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good
Taste. London: Sage, 1996.
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of
Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.
New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Faccarello, Gilbert. The Foundations of Laissez-faire: The
Economics of Pierre de Boisguilbert. London: Routledge,
1999.
Girard, René. The René Girard Reader. Edited by James G.
Williams. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Translated by Ala
Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1977.
McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods
and Activities. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Être et le Néant. Essai d’Ontologie
Phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943.
Simmel, Georg. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings.
Edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London:
Sage, 1997.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons with an
introduction by Anthony Giddens. London: Routledge,
1992. German original 1920.

De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling

DE-SKILLING, RE-SKILLING,
AND UP-SKILLING
Skill is a property, the capability to accomplish something, which requires practical knowledge and ability
and is acquired with practice. De-skilling, re-skilling,
and up-skilling are each processes through which the
skill demanded of practitioners by specific activities,
tasks, or situations is changed or redistributed. A process of de-skilling involves something demanding less
skill of the people accomplishing it. For example, the
replacement of handlooms with mechanized looms
in the early nineteenth-century British textile industry demanded less-skilled human labor to accomplish
the production of woven cloths. Re-skilling generally
refers to processes through which someone develops new skills. Its dominant use has been to describe
processes through which workers made redundant
from one skilled trade, such as in manufacturing,
are re-skilled to be competent practitioners of a new
trade, such as working in a service sector occupation. Up-skilling is the equipping of someone with
the capability to take on something that can be seen
as more demanding than what he or she currently
accomplishes. It has most visibly been applied to
grand plans for up-skilling a workforce, or a nations’
youth, or a class of workers to face the challenges
and opportunities of a new technological age or of a
dawning knowledge-based economy, and so on.
It is immediately clear from these examples of dominant usage and meaning that ideas of de-skilling,
re-skilling, and up-skilling have been forged and
applied in relation to production and labor processes.
However, with recognition over recent decades that
skill resides in the activities, tasks, and situations of
consumption as well as those of production, these
terms take on analytical relevance to directly understanding the dynamics of consumption. In what follows, this entry first considers the roots of these terms
in debates over labor, capital, and technology, which
stretch back to the nineteenth century, before finally
turning to applications of the terms to understanding
processes of contemporary consumer culture.
While the processes described by the three different
terms of the title can be retrospectively identified over
centuries, of the three terms, de-skilling has the longest history of use and meaning. In academic debate,
its origins are particularly identified with Harry
Braverman’s de-skilling thesis. Braverman contested

445

accounts of labor process theory that saw twentiethcentury processes of deindustrialization and the rise
of the service economy as a process of the elevation
of work away from routinized manual labor toward
white-collar occupations. Drawing on Karl Marx’s
understandings of the appropriation of surplus labor
and the alienation that ensues under capitalism,
Braverman argued that the twentieth century saw the
continued degradation of both manual and whitecollar work. By reducing the need for skilled craftspeople, reducing individual responsibility and scope
for action within labor processes, twentieth-century
capitalism functioned to extend into new realms of
economic activity the processes of proletarianization
identified by Marx in the nineteenth century.
Threads of Braverman’s arguments continue into
contemporary debates over the managerial imperative of both capital and state. For example, George
Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis contends that the
rational management control, standardization, and
efficiency characteristic of the archetypal fast-food
outlet was increasingly characteristic of a broadening range of social phenomena. The effects of
contemporary “audit culture” in both private and
public work situations can similarly be criticized as
deprofessionalizing and de-skilling occupations like
teaching or social work, as knowledge, skills, judgment, and creativity are separated from practitioners
into generic codes of practice in ways which facilitate
managerial monitoring and control in the interests
of maintaining particular models of quality or value.
Through such processes, de-skilling can be argued to
be part of the continued degradation of work into
the twenty-first century.
As de-skilling has been part of the history of
relations between labor, technology, and capital, it
has been inseparable from processes taking place in
realms of consumption. The temporal and spatial
separation of work from home and of production
from consumption that characterized the emergence
of industrial society entailed innumerable processes
through which domestic activities were de-skilled. In
preindustrial societies, many products and services
consumed in a home are the product of the skilled
work of people in the home or neighborhood. In
progressively separating out production from the
home into factories, workshops, and offices, industrialization removed skilled labor from people in
their homes and invested it in specialized workers
and machines to produce products and services to

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De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling

be sold to workers. This narrative is well established
in relation to craft production, with methods that
involved one person undertaking all of the stages of
production from raw materials to finished commodity displaced by the specialization and centralization
of industry. It is also true, however, for the processes
that went on in the home where skilled labor resulted
not in finished products for sale but things and
services consumed by the same household that produced them.
These processes, and the role of de-skilling within
them, are inseparable from processes of re-skilling and
up-skilling. On the one hand, as workers, people paid
to produce goods and services can be said to be upskilled in relation to the relevant specialized production
processes. On the other hand, as consumers, people
could be said to be re-skilled, and perhaps up-skilled,
to competently secure and use the goods and services
they need through increasingly complex markets and
chains of supply, leading to higher standards of living.
However, for many critical commentators through history, the up-skilling of people as creative consumers
navigating ever-more diverse opportunities for their
gratification is as empty and alienating as the de-skilled
work for which it provides escape and compensation.
For critical commentators on late-nineteenth-century
economy and society such as Thorstein Veblen or
William Morris, consumption of mass-produced products of industrial capitalism was potentially as alienating as the labor of producing them.
Within the social sciences, consumption was long
not considered a realm of skill; rather, it was the passive underside of production, consumers as the dupes
of the market. The revalorization of consumption
that followed from the cultural turn of the 1980s provided the conceptual grounds for analytically grasping
the skills involved in consumption. This recognition
of skill in the consumption of mass-produced goods
is illustrated by Colin Campbell’s argument for the
recognition of the “craft consumer” characterized by
the skilled appropriation and combination of massproduced products to create something new.
The dimensions of debate as to whether a particular dynamic in consumption is one of de-skilling,
re-skilling, or up-skilling can be exemplified in relation to accomplishing the provision of food for a
family. As in so many other fields of consumption,
convenience and laborsaving technologies can be
located in a narrative of de-skilling. The combination
of supermarkets, ready-made meals, freezers, and

microwaves can clearly render obsolete the complex
skills involved in sourcing basic ingredients from
different specialized retailers and managing storage,
preparation, and their transformation into meals.
Skills, as knowledge and practical ability necessary
to accomplish something (here getting food on the
table night after night), have been redistributed, with
the system of provision behind convenience foods
removing the needs for particular skills and knowledge from the consumer and embedding them instead
into systems of production, specialist workers, and
the products themselves. At the same time, this shift
entails consumers re-skilling to navigate the spaces
and choices of the supermarket; manage the freezer;
assess the meanings of “use by”; master the microwave; and, possibly, decide into which bins to put the
different components of packaging and food waste.
Arguing that one system involves more, and somehow more worthwhile, skills on the part of the food
provider can only be done from a particular normative position that requires articulation and defense.
At the same time, so far as one system enables food
providers to accomplish the task of feeding the family with less time commitment, it may possibly free
them up to up-skill in another field.
The debate over skill and consumption mirrors
the debate Braverman joined over production—what
to one commentator looks like up-skilling, as individuals become equipped to undertake new tasks,
looks to another commentator like down-skilling, as
it entails individuals losing what, from a given value
position, looks like more personally and socially
valuable skills. Whether an overall process of change
in skills and activities is a process of de-skilling or
of up-skilling depends on the value position from
which the process is considered and the particular
aspects of the process that are given analytical precedence. Nevertheless, they stand as useful analytical
instruments for understanding the dynamics between
labor, capital, technology, and consumption.
Matthew Watson
See also Alienation; Appropriation; Convenience; Craft
Consumer; Craft Production; Cultural Turn; Marx,
Karl; McDonaldization

Further Readings
Braverman, Harry, and Paul M. Sweezy. Labor and
Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1974.

Diaspora
Campbell, Colin. “The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft and
Consumption in a Postmodern Society.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 5, no. 1 (2005): 23–42.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The
Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth
to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Ritzer, George. The Mcdonaldization of Society: An
Investigation into the Changing Character of
Contemporary Social Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine
Forge Press, 1996.
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008.
Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack
Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg,
2007.

DIASPORA
The term diaspora, deriving from the Greek speir
(“to sow,” “to scatter”), refers to a people dispersed
by whatever cause to one or more foreign destinations who may never be fully assimilated in their
host countries and may harbor thoughts of return.
The term interprets, as well as the people who are
dispersed, the land across which dispersal occurs.
Along with related terms addressing complex flows
of goods and people, diversity and multilocality, the
category of diaspora can cause conceptual confusion
between what are different experiences and practices
as, for example, the diaspora caused by the compelling desire to move and that prompted by a voluntary migration. However, at its simplest diaspora
points to the forms of hybrid consumer cultures that
emerge as different ethnic cultures mix and interact,
as demonstrated by varieties of cuisines and clothing
found within societies across the globe.
Although scholars have pointed out that the verb
diasperein was used to describe the Greek colonization
of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean (800–600 BC),
it is now widely accepted that the origin of the
term can be found in the translation of the Hebrew
scripts by Alexandrian Greek-speaking Jews in the
third century BC. They adopted the term in order
to interpret Jewish exile outside Palestine, after the
destruction of Solomon’s temple in 586 BC by the
Babylonian empire. Residing outside the Holy Land
was understood as a transitory, however miserable,
sojourn; it was an intermediate stage, pending until
the final divine gathering in Jerusalem. The concept

447

of diaspora was thus born out of an interpretation of
history with respect to God’s saving grace, favoring
the development of a Jewish theology of exile and
religious and ethnic identity. In the first century AD,
Christians adopted the term to their eschatology,
whereby the early church was depicted as a pilgrim
and dispersed community. More than a millennium
later, once Christianity became the established dominant religion, the term came into usage again, as, in
the course of Reformation and Counter-Reformation,
Protestant minorities had to live in Catholic environments, and vice versa, as Catholic minorities were
“dispersed” in Protestant cultures.
The modern disciplinary application of the term
to non-Jewish and non-Christian people was first
undertaken within African studies as early as 1965,
when George Shepperson spoke of the enforced expatriation of sub-Saharan Africans through the colonial
slave trade as the African diaspora, accompanied by
a longing to return to the homeland. Later, African
diaspora subsumed the global dispersion of Africans
throughout history and the consequent emergence of
a cultural identity based on origin and social condition. As the term took off, it also became applied
within social sciences; in 1976, John Armstrong’s
Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas investigated
migrant groups with regard to their socioeconomic
position and the range of tolerance and repression
they faced in multiethnic states. Diaspora came to
be understood in its social and political relations to
homeland and the hosting nation-state and culture.
The Jewish and the African exiles represent two
cases of prototypical diaspora, along with those suffered by Armenians and the Irish. The late-nineteenthcentury massacres and forced mass displacement of
Armenians by the Turks during 1915–1916 and the
migration of the Irish from 1845 to 1852 following the famine are examples of “victim diasporas”
(Cohen 2008), whereby the forcibly dispersed group
conceives its scattering as arising from a trauma central to a historical experience of victimhood.
However, the extension of scholarly discourse
on dispersion to diaspora came only in the late
1980s, culminating in the publication of Diaspora:
A Journal of Transnational Studies, edited by
Armenian scholar Kachig Tölölyan. The first issue
included the path-breaking article “Diaspora in
Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,”
by William Safran who, while specifying that members of a diaspora retain an idealized memory of their

448

Diaspora

original homeland, to which they continue to relate
in various ways, observed that many other peoples
had suffered similar events: Cubans and Mexicans
in the United States, Pakistanis in Britain, Turks in
Germany, or Poles in the North America. The term
diaspora thus started to cover the experiences of a
multitude of ethnic groups, and even of social formations not defined exclusively by ethnicity and religion, such as expatriates, refugees and guest workers.
Diaspora studies, thus established, included research
on the labor or proletarian diaspora of Indians and
the Chinese; on the imperial diaspora of the British
and other colonial powers; on the trade diaspora of
the Lebanese and the Chinese; and on the “new”
victim diasporas of Palestinians, Serbs, and Croats.
Diaspora was deployed as a metaphor to describe a
vast array of people who either applied the term to
themselves or had the label conferred on them, up to
the contemporary use of diaspora to describe intellectuals, engineers, scientists, and football players.
Once so many other cases sheltered under the
increasing diasporic umbrella, several methodological problems emerged, primarily the need to draw
inferences from the Jewish tradition and to be sensitive to the inevitable dilutions of meaning produced
by the parallel debate on diaspora within ethnography, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. Here,
the refashioning of the idea of diaspora provided
conceptual means to understand revived forms of
transnational movements and global migration,
of emerging identities and oscillating patterns of
settlement and integration. In particular, the seminal writings of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and James
Clifford contributed to the contemporary relevance
of the term by deconstructing some of the building
blocks demarcating the diasporic, such as homeland,
ethnic-religious community, and nationalism, and by
theorizing different formations of deterritorialized
diasporas (Cohen 2008). Hall’s example is the people
of the Caribbean, whose identity is not a simple transposition of the African one to the New World, since
the trauma of slavery and the admixture of other
migrants built into the Caribbean people a sense of
hybridity and difference. Hall thus invites a move
away from the imperializing notion of diasporic
people as scattered communities whose identity,
defined by essence, purity, and authenticity, can only
be measured in relation to some sacred homeland,
in order to look at their experience as based on heterogeneity and diversity. A similar concept of hybrid

diasporic identities is advanced by Gilroy, in The
Black Atlantic, where he describes the formation of
the double consciousness of the African diaspora as
a complex cultural and social intermingling between
the heritage of Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
In exploring diaspora as a historical and theoretical
formation, Clifford adds to such a reevaluation of
“diaspora as hybridity” a criticism of the concepts of
acculturation and assimilation that had dominated
the study of Jewish, African, and other diasporas.
His idea, quickly embraced and expanded by other
critics, was to rethink dispersion and proximity in
an era of hypermobility, which not only divides and
disperses people and activities that once occupied a
contiguous space but also collapses and reinscribes
spaces of dispersal thanks to new information and
communication technologies, whereby diasporas are
often re-created through artifacts and practices of
glocalization. The study of such deterritorialized diasporas implies interrogating the ways through which
a nation-state or a religion prescribes forms of identification and the peoples in the diaspora respond to
such demands, not only restoring or maintaining a
homeland but also imagining it anew, as in the case
of the Kurds or the Sikhs.
A way to escape such a risk as that of using the
term diaspora too superficially, or as associated
merely with postmodernity, without either dismissing the potentiality of hybrid cultures or celebrating
them uncritically, is to look at the transformations
of diasporic identities in consumer culture, that is,
to investigate how diaspora is effectively lived and
reinterpreted in processes of cultural production
such as popular music, dance, food, and fashion.
A peculiar and effective example is hip-hop music,
which, emerging as an hybrid product of American
black culture, has become a mainstream and itself a
diasporic effect which transcends ethnic, linguistic,
and geographical boundaries, not only giving voice
to members of global “connective marginalities” but
also constituting a lucrative market of music and
associated paraphernalia.
The study of the economies, practices, and spaces
of contemporary commercial culture may indeed
challenge the dualistic thinking that separates production from consumption, the local from the global,
not only showing how the market is embedded in
a range of transcultural processes but also how
the thinking of and about diasporas can gain clarity when facing the actual outcomes of the circuits

Diderot Effect

and network of existing contemporary transnational
commodity cultures. The dangers of the “hype of
hybridity,” which had triggered the criticism of many
black and postcolonial scholars warning against the
risks of “ethnicity becoming spice,” may be corrected
by looking at the complex processes which transcultural products undergo in order to confirm, translate,
adapt, or invent their authenticity, as suggested by
Peter Jackson. By examining the existing research
on the general revival of ethnic fashion among
middle-class urban-educated consumers in India and
throughout the diaspora, Jackson describes the ways
many traditional items of clothing, the veil or the sari,
have been substantially reworked by Asian women
in the diaspora to create new local interpretations
of their cultural identity, showing a sophisticated
command of the symbolic and political economies in
which they are located. Parallel to the Western explosion of the Asian chic, a cultural creativity that flows
in the other direction has emerged, brought about
by women that continuously reformulate their ethnic
traditions through the filters of their class and local
cultures. And while 9/11 has partly drawn the discussion on diaspora into the security agenda and many
diasporic communities are still showing a continuing or newly asserted attachment to places of origin,
in ways which are still to be fully investigated, the
activities of those cultural intermediaries that generated new interpretations of ethnicities, new consumer styles, and material economies also and still
need to be further interrogated in order to explore
“the politically contested middle ground where cultural cannibalism and economic exploitation rub
shoulders with the emergence of more critical forms
of multiculturalism” (Jackson 2002, 16).
Cristina Demaria
See also Acculturation; Colonialism; Ethnicity/Race;
Globalization; Identity; Migration; Multiculturalism;
Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Current Anthropology 9,
no. 3 (1994): 302–338.
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. New
York: Routledge, 2008.
Dufoix, Stéphane, Diasporas. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

449

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J.
Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1990.
Jackson, Peter. “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the
Cultural and the Economic.” Progress in Human
Geography 26, no. 3 (2002): 3–18
Motley, Carol M., and Geraldine R. Henderson. “The
Global Hip-Hop Diaspora: Understanding the Culture.”
Journal of Business Research 61 (2008): 243–253.
Safran, William. “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myths of
Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991):
83–99.

DIDEROT EFFECT
The Diderot effect is a term used to describe the
impact of acquiring a good so superior in quality and
style to one that is currently owned by a consumer
that this good immediately renders the current item,
along with all others used in the same context as
the item, unacceptable. The term has its roots in an
essay written by the French Enlightenment scholar
Denis Diderot in 1769 and first published in 1772.
In this essay, which Diderot never shared during
his lifetime, the author ruminates on the fact that a
new scarlet dressing gown has spurred him to completely transform his shabbily furnished study into a
room with objects that are more congruent in taste
and style with this luxurious new gift. In this essay,
Diderot anthropomorphizes, or attributes human
qualities to, the robe, a technique Susan Fournier
observes consumers often use when they describe
their relationships with goods or services. For example, Diderot describes the new gown as a “scarlet
intruder” (1956, 311) and bemoans how he was
“master of my old dressing gown, but . . . slave to
my new one” (310).
Diderot identifies several immediate outcomes
associated with acquiring this gown besides removing other shabby items because they do not meet the
luxurious standards of the new robe. For example,
Diderot recounts how he disguises or covers up
some of the other goods he chooses to retain to
downplay their shabby appearance. Diderot also
describes his deliberate decision to leave a well-worn
braided carpet on the floor of his study, even though
its condition is in stark contrast to all of his other,
newer, higher-quality items. Of this combination of

450

Diderot Effect

new opulence and more careworn items, Diderot
laments, “Now the harmony is destroyed. Now there
is no more consistency, no more unity, and no more
beauty” (311). He describes how this choice is motivated by his desire to not fall privy to the seductions
of a luxury-laden lifestyle and to remain grounded to
his original sense of self. Furthermore, Diderot also
specifically mentions “consumption emotions” that
emerge as he considers the acquisition of this new
robe—including regret, guilt, disgust, and desire.
Related to these emotions, Diderot warns the reader
to not develop a “fatal taste for luxury” (312), to
not neglect other aspects of one’s life (such as family
obligations) in the pursuit of a lavish lifestyle, and to
avoid being trapped by the pride and entitlement that
may result from owning fine things.
In his seminal book on culture and consumption, Grant McCracken discusses the Diderot effect
in detail. McCracken asserts that it can impact the
behavior of a consumer in essentially three different
ways. First, as Diderot himself demonstrated, the
effect can spur a consumer’s desire to replace other
goods that coexist with the new item—or those in the
“consumption constellation” in which that good is
embedded—to restore harmony and balance across
the dimensions of taste, style, and opulence within
the set. However, McCracken notes, the more common outcome of the Diderot effect is that consumers
typically reject any good that would upset an existing
constellation of items. This action reflects a consumer’s awareness that adding this new item to a set will
destabilize the coherence that currently exists within
a constellation of goods. Furthermore, as these goods
reflect the consumer’s lifestyle, a consumer’s identity
is also impacted by the imbalance that might occur
from acquiring a good that is “above” the others in a
mosaic of possession. Thus, McCracken asserts, the
consumer anticipates the lack of coherence (and possible chaos) that can result when accepting an item
that is not “in line” with others in terms of cultural
capital. McCracken observes that if Diderot himself
had “been ruled by the conventional operation [of
the effect] . . . he would never have worn the new
dressing gown” (1988, 123).
Finally, McCracken observes that the most radical implementation of the Diderot effect occurs when
the consumer deliberately seeks out such “disruptive
goods” (126) and experiments with them in order
to contemplate a new identity or new sense of self.
McCracken notes that when consumers take this

approach, they “hope that this revolt will transform
the material world and the self, giving entirely new
symbolic properties to both” (127). This variant of
the Diderot effect reflects the postmodern concept of
bricolage, in which the consumer essentially selects
any goods or services he or she desires from the environment to foster a new sense of self without considering whether these goods and services typically
are regarded as “belonging together” to reflect any
particular identity or social class.
McCracken also makes a key observation about
the Diderot effect—one that is evident in the original
essay—specifically, that it typically emerges when a
consumer acquires goods that possess more cultural
capital than the previous variant. Then, once consumers “trade up” for one good, they desire higherstatus goods to replace others in their possession,
creating what McCracken describes as an upward
spiral effect. As such, there is never a time when all
of the goods that consumers can possess are equal
in stature or style, as they are constantly replacing
older versions with newer, superior ones. Thus, “the
consumer is locked into an ever-ascending spiral of
consumption” (127).
McCracken also discusses a concept that is related
to the Diderot effect—that of the Diderot unity. This
term refers to consistent sets of goods that consumers attempt to acquire in order to inhabit and reflect
a particular lifestyle. McCracken argues that the
Diderot effect is the mechanism by which Diderot
unities become realized. McCracken argues that the
importance of Diderot unities rests in their ability to
illuminate how culture valorizes specific groups of
goods over others and associates them with desired
lifestyles that typically reflect affluence and continual upward mobility. Furthermore, goods that
are imbued with high levels of social and symbolic
meanings acquire their connotations through two
main forces: mass-mediated images and “innovative groups . . . such as hippies, yuppies and punks”
(120–121).
Teresa Davis and Gary Gregory explore the relevance of Diderot unities to the lives of actual consumers, examining whether impulse purchases in
particular lead to the creation of a new “consumption constellation” of goods (and, therefore, a new
Diderot unity). The authors find that certain consumers are motivated by an emotional impulse to acquire
the initial “departure good” (or item that would
lead them to depart from their old consumption

Dieting

constellation in their desire for a new Diderot unity).
In addition, however, other aspects of consumers’
lives—notably, life-cycle transitions such as graduation from college or transitioning to an empty-nest
household—also spur consumers’ desires to replace
existing sets of goods (and the consumer identities
that they reflect) with “new and improved” ones.
To date, the work by Davis and Gregory is the
only empirical research in consumer behavior to
actually test the relevance of the Diderot effect on
actual purchasing behavior. And while Diderot’s
essay was written hundreds of years before the term
consumer culture became prevalent, it reflects many
of the themes that consumer-culture scholars find
compelling. For example, Diderot’s essay illuminates
such topics as the symbolic nature of consumer
culture, the nature of desire, pride and greed, issues
pertaining to taste and aesthetics, the consumption
of sumptuous luxury goods, and goods as indicators
of social mobility. Finally, Diderot reveals in the last
paragraph of his essay that all of the luxury goods
he has received are gifts. Nevertheless, even though
he has not paid for these items, they still make him
aware that he could fall privy to the tendency to
become an elitist consumer and to shun the goods
he has owned for so long in favor of more luxurious
variants.
As such, the relevance of the Diderot effect to
modern consumer culture might be located more
in the sphere of consumer welfare. Simply put, the
term has found its way into many consumer-oriented
blogs, websites, and other discussions where the
dangers of getting caught in the “upward spiral” of
acquisition that McCracken discusses are set forth.
For example, some discussions revolve around the
debt incurred if the Diderot effect takes over one’s
life or the diminishment of a life defined by material
goods rather than spiritual aspects. As a result, the
Diderot effect has now become somewhat synonymous with the cycle of desire that Russell W. Belk,
Guliz Ger, and Søren Askegaard discuss in their
article “The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry
into Consumer Passion.” They note that the passion
and desire for consumer goods often runs counter
to mechanisms for rational thought and self-control
and that acting on desire can result in negative outcomes such as the experience of guilt and sin, and
even addiction. Regardless of whether it influences
an individual consumer in these ways, it is fascinating
that an essay that predates the creation of easy credit,

451

the proliferation of luxury consumer goods, and the
mass-mediated message systems that transport these
goods and their cultivated brand images around the
globe resonates with so many concerns about consumption that are highly salient in consumer-oriented
cultures today.
Cele C. Otnes
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Conspicuous
Consumption; Luxury and Luxuries; Social Class;
Social Distinction; Status

Further Readings
Belk, Russell W., Guliz Ger, and Søren Askegaard. “The
Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer
Passion.” Journal of Consumer Research 30 (December
2003): 326–351.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
Brown, Stephen. “Marketing Science in a Postmodern
World: Introduction to the Special Issue.” European
Journal of Marketing 31, nos. 3–4 (1997): 167–182.
Davis, Teresa, and Gary Gregory. “Creating Diderot
Unities: Quest for Possible Selves?” Journal of
Consumer Marketing 20, no. 1 (2003): 44–54.
Diderot, Denis. “Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing
Gown.” In Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works,
translated by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen,
309–317. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing
Company, 2001. First published 1772.
Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer
Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988.
Solomon, Michael. “Mapping Product Constellations: A
Social Categorization Approach to Consumption
Symbolism.” Psychology and Marketing 5, no. 3 (1988):
233–258.

DIETING
Dieting refers to social practices with the goal of losing weight, such as decreasing food intake, increasing exercise, “watching” what one eats, and sharing
food as well as discourse practices that socialize individuals into gender-appropriate body images and
weight-loss norms.

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Dieting

The practice of dieting is commonplace in Western
countries and is increasingly becoming a global issue.
In the United States, a 2006 study by Edward Weiss
and colleagues found that 34 percent of men and
48 percent of women had tried to lose weight during the previous year. The most common weight-loss
practices reported were food restrictions, followed
by exercising, eating less fat, and switching to lowercalorie foods. Marita McCabe and Lina Ricciardelli
report that dieting is far more prevalent among
women than among men as adolescent boys and
men typically endorse an ideal male body that is both
lean and muscular. As a result, men who are dissatisfied with their bodies are less concerned with dieting
and more concerned with sculpting their muscles and
toning their bodies.
Media images are a pervasive component of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Mimi Nichter
estimates that Americans view between 400 and 600
advertisements daily, many of which use ultra-thin
models to sell products. These ideal models lead
individuals to think of their own identity in terms of
ideal body shapes and foster dissatisfaction with self.
Mass-media messages encourage people to achieve
the thin body ideal through dieting and self-control
while flooding the public with advertisements for
junk foods, fast foods, and soda.
The social meaning of body weight and shape
and the need to diet has shifted throughout history.
During the mid-nineteenth century, corpulence symbolized economic prosperity in the United States,
whereas by the end of the nineteenth century, social
power was more closely connected to the ability to
control labor resources than it was to material wealth
or body size. At the beginning of the twentieth century, health and body-image norms became institutionalized through the medical practice of measuring,
weighing, and documenting individuals’ body size
and weight. By the mid-1900s, insurance companies were using biomedical standards of height and
weight to assess morbidity risk in individuals. This
practice further institutionalized a normative standard for body weight as well as the ranking of individuals according to their adherence to this standard.
Women have been judged at the site of the body
for many years. Fashion and media of the 1920s
promoted a slender image of the female body and a
postwar shift in attitude from conservative to carefree, prompting women to replace the outward constraint of the corset with the internal constraint of

dieting and slimming. Movies and fashion magazines
began encouraging girls to constantly “try on new
identities” through clothing, makeup, and hairstyles.
Whereas dieting efforts of girls in the 1920s tended
to be intermittent, by the 1960s, dieting efforts of
girls were more consistent. As fashionable clothing
for women continued to become more revealing,
baring a woman’s midriff and thighs, women’s obsession with dieting continued.
In the 1980s, diet and fitness industries expanded
along with mass-media advertisements to sell slimming products. Increasingly, the locus of control
and management of the body focused more on the
consumer, who was considered responsible for his
or her own body weight. As a result, overweight
bodies increasingly came to represent laziness, weakness, and a lack of impulse control, while thin, toned
bodies indexed discipline and willpower. Anthony
Giddens reminds us that underpinning the increasing
focus on the slim, controlled body is an emphasis on
the body’s perceived malleability. In effect, Giddens
notes, “we have become responsible for the design of
our own bodies” (1991, 102).
Michel Foucault asserts that discipline in modern
society occurs partially through the institutionalized
establishment of norms so that individuals are measured and judged by their ability to adhere to those
norms. Discipline occurs specifically at the site of the
body as social norms become internalized by individuals who self-regulate their behavior. Feminists have
adapted Foucault’s theoretical concept of disciplined
bodies to examine the ways in which modern gendered body practices, such as bodily comportment,
dieting, and a range of beauty rituals, operate as
forms of institutionalized social control for women.
In the world of beauty, advertised messages offer
hope after undermining self-confidence. Beauty and
thinness have become symbols of moral self-worth,
as well as commodities purchased at a cost. One of
the hidden costs of buying into beauty work, including dieting, is that individuals come to feel that they
are required to transform their appearance to meet
an elusive cultural ideal. Advertisers create the illusion of a community of consumption whose membership requirement is possession of popular brands,
products, and styles. Edward Weiss and colleagues
estimate that expenditures on dieting products in the
United States are as high as $50 billion per year.
Dieting as a social practice is problematic to define
as individuals may define and enact this behavior in

Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down

a range of ways. Adolescent girls, for example, have
been found to be reluctant to label a weight-loss
attempt as a diet, a word that implies formal weight
programs such as Weight Watchers. Some girls
and women resist the word diet because it implies
being controlled. In contrast to dieting, many young
women report that they “watch what they eat,” a
positive behavior that affords them greater freedom, partially because it includes eating healthfully
in addition to or instead of eating less. “Watching”
made girls feel better about themselves because they
tended to be more successful at it than at dieting,
reports Mimi Nichter. Similarly, Nicole Taylor found
that teenaged girls share food as a means of “watching” what they ate. Sharing food helped them control
the amount of food they ate and made them feel less
guilty about eating fattening foods.
To date, much of the literature on slimming and
dieting appears in the fields of psychology and
public health. While these studies provide valuable quantitative data on the prevalence of dieting
behaviors among women and men, they fail to
provide an understanding of the social contexts in
which dieting takes place and the lived experience
of those who choose to engage or not engage in
these practices. The dieting/nondieting dichotomy
commonly described in the public-health literature
is simplistic because it fails to capture the range of
behaviors—both positive and negative—that individuals engage in their attempts to lose weight.
Given the current obesity epidemic combined
with global advertising displaying ultra-thin models, it will be important to continue to conduct
research on issues of consumption, body image,
and dieting.
Mimi Nichter and Nicole Taylor
See also Anorexia; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Consumer
Illnesses and Maladies; Food Consumption; Gender
Advertising; Gender and the Media; Obesity

Further Readings
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western
Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by A.
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991.

453

Grogan, Sarah, and Helen Richards. “Body Image: Focus
Groups with Boys and Men.” Men and Masculinities
4 (2002): 219–232.
Huff, Joyce. “A ‘Horror of Corpulence’: Interrogating
Bantingism and Mid-Nineteenth Century Fat-Phobia.”
In Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression,
edited by J. E. Braziel and K. LeBesco, 39–59. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001.
McCabe, Marita P., and Lina A. Ricciardelli. “Weight and
Shape Concerns of Body and Men.” In Handbook of
Eating Disorders and Obesity, edited by J. Kevin
Thompson, 606–634. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 2004.
McLaren, Margaret. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied
Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2002.
Nichter, Mimi. Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say
About Dieting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000.
Taylor, Nicole. “‘Guys, She’s Humongous’: Gender and
Weight Based Teasing in Adolescence.” Journal of
Adolescent Research 26, no. 2 (March 2011): 1–22.
First published online May 17, 2010. http://jar.sagepub
.com/content/26/2/178.full.pdf.
Taylor, Nicole. “Negotiating Popular Obesity Discourses in
Adolescence: School Food, Personal Responsibility, and
Gendered Food Consumption Behaviors.” Food,
Culture & Society (in press).
Weiss, Edward C., Deborah Galuska, Laura Kahn, and
Mary Serdula. “Weight-Control Practices among U.S.
Adults, 2001–2002.” American Journal of Preventative
Medicine 31, no. 1 (2006): 18–24.

DIFFUSION STUDIES
TRICKLE DOWN

AND

Diffusion studies investigate the process of how an
innovation spreads through a social system. The
framework called diffusion of innovations theory
was studied first by rural sociologists including Bryce
Ryan and George Beal to understand the diffusion of
high-yielding hybrid seed corn, chemical fertilizers,
and weed sprays. Questions were asked about why
some farmers embraced these obviously beneficial
innovations while others shied away from it.
Whenever individuals adopt or reject an innovation or consume a product, this behavior at some
level leads to personal change, and if enough number
of individuals adopts an innovation, it certainly leads

454

Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down

to changes in the larger culture. Thus, the theory
also helps explains cultural shifts shedding light on
present-day consumerism and the development of
mass culture. Diffusion studies underwent a pathbreaking insight when Everett M. Rogers, in his 1962
book Diffusion of Innovations, reviewed existing
studies analyzing the diffusion process of all kinds of
innovations that included agricultural innovations,
educational innovations, medical innovations, and
marketing innovations. He found several similarities
in the way diffusion of innovations across fields happened. The theory is one of the most influential social
scientific theories that primarily explains the process
of social change. Rogers’s intention was to understand the adoption of new behaviors with the main
premise that innovations diffuse over time according
to individuals’ stages.
Having reviewed over five hundred empirical studies in the early 1960s, Rogers characterized diffusion
as a process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the
members of a social system. An innovation is an idea,
practice, or object perceived as new by an individual
or an organization or culture. Earliest research in diffusion studies can be traced to the work of Gabriel
Tarde, a French sociologist and legal scholar. Tarde’s
ideas were further investigated by anthropologists
such as Clark Wissler, who studied the diffusion of
the horse among the Plains Indians. Wissler’s analysis
concluded that the introduction of the horse led the
Indians to wage continual warfare with neighboring
tribes.
Diffusion studies garnered paradigmatic academic
status after multiple studies conducted by Bryce
Ryan and Neal Gross and others to analyze the
diffusion of hybrid seed corn among Iowa farmers.
While the innovation led to increased corn yields
of 20 percent per acre, the state agricultural officials
wondered why such an obviously advantageous agricultural technology required a dozen years to achieve
widespread use. Ryan and Gross highlighted the difficulties in adopting this innovation, claiming that
the average farmer needed seven years to progress
from initial awareness of the innovation to full-scale
adoption. Adopting the hybrid corn seed meant
crucial decisions that involved purchasing expensive
hybrid corn from the seed corn company at a price
per bushel—a change that involved discontinuance
of their previous cultural practice in which healthy
ears of corn were used as seed for the following year.

Thus, it involved changing not only personal behavior but also, at some level, family and communal
cultural practices.
The 1950s saw an explosion in diffusion studies
particularly by rural sociologists. Further, the diffusion approach was adopted by other social sciences,
including marketing, political science, and education.
By this time, Rogers argued for a general model of
diffusion, and the field became even more popular
across disciplines after the landmark study conducted
by James S. Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert
Menzel that examined the diffusion of tetracycline
among physicians. The drug study helped illuminate
the nature of interpersonal diffusion networks, suggesting the role that opinion leaders play in the take
off of the diffusion curve.
Rogers posited five stages through which an individual passes in the adoption of innovations: awareness, knowledge and interest, decision, trial, and
adoption/rejection. Populations were divided in different groups according to their propensity to incorporate innovations and timing in actually adopting
them. The first venturesome individuals to adopt an
innovation were characterized as innovators who
took enormous risks. This small group is usually
followed by the early adopters who act as models
to emulate and generate a climate of acceptance and
an appetite for change. Further, as other individuals
embrace the innovation, they tend to form the early
majority. Finally, those who are slow to adopt are
termed laggards. From a mass-culture-shift standpoint, this latter category was assumed to describe
the vast majority of the population in the world.
An important aspect of diffusion theory underlines that for most members of a social system, the
innovation decision depends heavily on the innovation decisions of the other members of the system.
In fact, empirically, it can be observed that the successful spread of an innovation follows an S-shaped
curve (see Figure 1). After about 10 to 25 percent of
system members adopt an innovation, there is relatively rapid adoption by the remaining members and
then a period in which the holdouts finally adopt.
Rogers outlined that the innovation decision is
made through a cost-benefit analysis where the major
obstacle is uncertainty. Individuals tend to adopt an
innovation if they believe that it will, all things considered, enhance their utility. Thus, they must believe
that the innovation may yield some relative advantage to the idea it supersedes. Also, in consideration

Adopters

Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down

Time

Figure 1

The Diffusion of Innovations

Source: Adapted from Rogers 2003, 23.

of costs, again, individuals determine to what degree
the innovation would disrupt other functioning facets of their daily life. Is it compatible with existing
habits and values? Is it hard to use? The newness and
unfamiliarity of an innovation infuse the cost-benefit
analysis with a large dose of uncertainty.
As the majority of individuals in a social system
are on average risk averse, the uncertainty will often
result in a postponement of the decision until further
evidence can be gathered. However, each individual’s
innovation decision is largely framed by personal
characteristics, and this diversity helps in facilitating diffusion. As mentioned earlier, diffusion scholars divide this bell-shaped curve to characterize five
categories of system member innovativeness, where
innovativeness is defined as the degree to which an
individual is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas
than other members of a system.
A key aspect of the diffusion is its emphasis on
interpersonal networks (Rogers, Singhal, and Quilan
2009). The first step in this process involves spreading awareness and knowledge about the innovation
using mass-communication channels such as television and radio and, in the present day, using socialnetworking sites and the Internet. Present research
also outlines that the time it takes to diffuse an
innovation has substantially reduced with the new
mass-mediated communication channels. Thus, until
recently, the Internet was the fastest diffused innovation as it took only a decade to reach the S-curve;
however, more recently, the rapid diffusion of the
social-networking site Facebook has taken only less
than five years to reach the S-curve.
Diffusion research has persevered and continues to grow as the number of diffusion studies has
increased steeply in past decades. By 2003, Rogers

455

estimated some 5,200 diffusion publications, increasing at a rate of 120 to 125 articles per year. Recently,
the number of diffusion publications has grown
to over six thousand articles in 2008 (Singhal and
Quinlan 2008). One of the criticisms of diffusion
studies is its heavy reliance on expert-driven, topdown approaches, which inherently overlook local
solutions (Papa, Singhal, and Papa 2006; Singhal and
Dearing, 2006).
Further, it is pointed out that the diffusion of
innovations generally causes wider socioeconomic
gaps within a social system. This increased inequality
occurs because innovators and early adopters have
favorable attitudes toward new ideas and are more
likely to search actively for innovations. Professional
change agents concentrate their client contacts on
innovators and early adopters in hope that the opinion leaders among these adopting categories will
then pass along the new ideas they have learned to
their followers. However, most interpersonal network links connect individuals who are similar in
their adopter category and socioeconomic status,
thus innovations generally trickle across rather than
trickle down in the interpersonal communication
networks of a system.
Since the mid to late 1970s, Rogers has incorporated changes in the theoretical model and argued
for a bottom-up, community-centered approach to
diffusion of innovations (Rogers and Kincaid 1981).
Communication, in the changed model, was no longer focused on mere persuasion of people but was
now understood as a process by which participants
create and share information about an innovation
in order to reach a mutual understanding. Thus, at
present, diffusion of innovations is pragmatically
used to undertake strategic use of communication for
social change.
Avinash Thombre
See also Communication Studies; Consumer Behavior;
Consumer Demand; Economics; Innovation Studies;
Mass Production and Consumption; Mimesis; Taste

Further Readings
Coleman, James S., Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel.
Medical Innovation: Diffusion of a Medical Drug
among Doctors. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
Papa, Michael J., Arvind Singhal, and Wendy. H. Papa.
Organizing for Social Change: A Dialectic Journey of
Theory and Praxis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006.

456

Dining Out

Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th ed.
New York: Free Press, 2003.
Rogers, Everett M., and D. Lawrence Kincaid.
Communication Networks: A New Paradigm for
Research. New York: Free Press, 1981.
Rogers, Everett M., Arvind Singhal, and Margaret M.
Quinlan. “Diffusion of Innovations.” In An Integrated
Approach to Communication Theory and Research, 2nd
ed., edited by Don Stacks and Michael Salwen,
418–434. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Ryan, Bryce, and Neal C. Gross. “The Diffusion of Hybrid
Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities.” Rural Sociology
8 (1943): 15–24.
Singhal, Arvind, and James W. Dearing. Communication of
Innovations: A Journey with Ev Rogers. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006.
Singhal, Arvind, and Margaret M. Quilan. “Diffusion of
Innovations and Political Communication.” Encyclopedia
of Political Communication, edited by Lynda Lee Kaid,
182–186. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.

DINING OUT
Dining out is a nuanced term; while many refer to it
as frequenting a commercial establishment, namely, a
restaurant, it can also be associated with eating out at
a wedding reception, a school cafeteria, or the local
coffee shop. Most individuals, however, define dining out as a separation from the domestic sphere, or
home, and food being prepared by others with some
sort of monetary payment involved. Whichever of
these locations a person decides to eat at, the act of
dining in the public sphere provides an effective case
study of consumption in that it presents the commodification of individual desires. Current estimates
suggest that in the United States, over 30 percent of
all meals are consumed away from home, amounting to about 40 percent of food budgets. Restaurants
sell not only food but also lifestyles and the packaging of human emotions as they provide a space
in which people can publicly express their personal
tastes and realize their private wishes. Today, restaurants have become platforms for new ideas, fashions,
and, at times, political actions. Their proprietors,
owners, and chefs may become celebrities because of
their prominence. Eateries are ideal spots to examine conspicuous consumption and, as David Beriss
and David Sutton argue, are arenas of “total social
phenomena” in that they convey many symbols of
postmodern life. The places where people dine out

can provide insight into numerous aspects of cultural
life as well as mirror historical shifts—such as the
lack of French cuisine in the United States during the
Prohibition era because many of its dishes required
alcohol. Simply put, “restaurants matter,” according
to Beriss and Sutton.

History
The first places to “eat out” were in fact other people’s homes. This can most clearly be seen in the
rituals of courtly banquets. With the onset of modernization and increased geographical mobility, the
need for places to eat outside the home became
prevalent. Inns and local households designed to service travelers provided food along with basic lodging. Some of the earliest examples of places where
food was consumed outside the home for pleasure,
rather than necessity, were found in China during
the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). However, dining out for gratification had a slow start in Europe.
Coffeehouses of the early seventeenth century were
the first examples within Europe of places where
those outside of the gentry went for the pleasure of
eating outside of the home. In France, the café was a
site for food and drink for all people, yet in England,
the coffeehouse was mostly frequented by workers
and businessmen. Street vendors also were among
some of the first places to dine out, providing simple
foods, such as fish and chips, for the English working
class. Despite the places where food was consumed,
the restaurant as we know it today is largely a French
invention.
The word restaurant originally was not a place to
eat but, as Rebecca L. Spang discovered, a thing to
eat—a medical bouillon originating in the fifteenth
century that was made to order for ailing patrons,
that is, a restorative. Restaurants sprang up in France
in the early eighteenth century, particularly in urban
centers such as Paris, for individuals who were in
poor health to display and share their frailty. Thus,
restaurants from early on became places that emphasized atmosphere over food. With the advent of the
Enlightenment, restaurants began to transform their
selection of foods from just medical drinks to finer
ones, such as cheeses and fruits, and by the end of the
eighteenth century restaurants had become an institution in French public life. Stephen Mennell, Anne
Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo have argued
that the restaurant was a product of the French
Revolution—former chefs of the aristocrats created

Dining Out

dining rooms and in turn opened up haute cuisine for
all that could afford it. The restaurant of postrevolutionary France became the center of literary and
artistic debate and also began to take on the French
cultural personality. Guidebooks of the period created an imaginary France where all of one’s desires
could be fulfilled within the restaurant. American
and British visitors defined dining out as particularly
French. Tourists wrote in their diaries and in letters
to friends not necessarily about the food but rather
about the atmosphere of the French eatery.
From its origins in France the modern-day restaurant has evolved into an extensive commodified
market. However, not all people dine out in the
same way, and today’s hospitality industry provides a wealth of choices of where one can obtain
a meal. Researchers have created varying typologies to classify the places where we choose to dine.
Joanne Finkelstein outlines several types of American
restaurants, organizing them by cost and prestige,
including the “fête spéciale” restaurant, the “amusement” restaurant, and the “convenience” restaurant.
Meanwhile, Alan Warde and Lydia Martens use
three criteria: the primary intention of a customer,
mode of the food presentation, and style of food
preparation. The creation of these restaurant typologies speaks to the numerous factors that influence
consumption habits. Age, gender, and socioeconomic
status interact to affect the choice of where one dines.
For example, recent research has argued for a theory
of social “omnivorousness” among diners of higher
social class and urban dwellers. It is suggested that
these individuals frequent a wider range of eateries (both those typically characterized as high class
and low-class ones) to demonstrate their “cultural
competency.”

Theories
But why do people eat out? Many individuals argue
that dining out saves time and sometimes money;
however, consuming meals outside of the home is
not always time saving. A common rationalization is that of gratification—eating out is an enjoyable leisure activity. However, sociological theory
attempting to understand food consumption in the
public sphere takes an approach away from such
explanations. Pierre Bourdieu theorized that aesthetic choices, such as what kind of food one eats
and which restaurant one dines at, indicate class
and cultural capital. Restaurants can be locations in

457

which status is claimed and displayed. Restaurants
become tools for people to indicate their sophistication in public spaces. In an important sense, you
are where you eat. Eating is an inherently social
activity and consuming food outside of the home is
the epitome of such an exercise. In early England,
for example, street vendors served as sites of gossip, and the contemporary restaurant is an extension
of such sociability. Finkelstein argued that when a
consumer chooses to dine out, he or she is seeking
to develop a particular self-image. Theorists of consumption suggest that restaurant goers seek to see
and, more importantly, to be seen, although such
an argument is relevant only to the highest class or
most “trendy” restaurants and likely overstates the
case. In addition, eateries commodify diners’ emotions not only through the food but also via décor
and atmosphere. However, the relationship guests
have with the ambiance and menu at the restaurant
of their selection, Finkelstein writes, is an example of
“uncivilized society.” In this view, patrons partake
of a disciplined exercise in manners. Thus, a visitor
to a restaurant must simultaneously seek to fulfill
private desires while upholding social rules. Within
this “uncivil society,” restaurants can also be seen as
sites of discipline in which customers may be manipulated by servers and punished for any resistance.
Hence, explanations of dining out simply for gratification or cost-benefit trade-offs are only part of the
story of how we can theorize why people choose the
places to eat that they do.

Research
While the study of food and consumption has long
been marginalized by those in academia, an emergence of scholarly work on eating habits has taken
place in quantitative and qualitative studies alike.
Still, few works have attempted to theorize why
people dine out, namely, those of Finkelstein and
of Warde and Martins, and even fewer have studied the interactions that take place within the restaurants consumers select. However, as the hospitality
industry grows and more attention is given to food as
consumption, it is hoped that academics will realize
the importance that eating food in the public sphere
has in expressing attitudes toward consumption and
that further research will explain these unique sites of
conspicuous consumption.
Daphne Demetry and Gary Alan Fine

458

Discount Stores

See also Civilizing Processes; Coffee Shops; Food
Consumption; History of Food; Leisure; Public Sphere;
Pubs and Wine Bars; Social Distinction

Further Readings
Beardsworth, Alan, and Teresa Keil. Sociology of the Menu:
An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Beriss, David, and David E. Sutton. The Restaurants Book:
Ethnographies of Where We Eat. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Fine, Gary Alan. Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant
Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Finkelstein, Joanne. Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern
Manners. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. “Democracy versus
Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet
Food Writing.” American Journal of Sociology 113
(2007): 165–204.
Mennell, Stephen, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van
Otterloo. The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet, and
Culture. London: Sage, 1992.
Shelton, Allen. “A Theater for Eating, Looking, and
Thinking: The Restaurant as Symbolic Stage.”
Sociological Spectrum 10 (1990): 507–526.
Spang, Rebecca L. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris
and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000.
Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out: Social
Differentiation, Consumption, and Pleasure. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.

DISCOUNT STORES
Discount stores, unusually, are defined neither by
their size (supercenter, hypermarket) nor by types
of goods sold (grocer). Instead, for discount stores
to exist, there must be some full-price norm against
which to benchmark them. Retail definitions are
notoriously imprecise: Eurostat defines a discount
store as a retailing establishment selling a range of
rapid-turnover, cut-price goods and with virtually no
floor service at all. We infer that discounters trade
from fixed retail units and employ few—mainly parttime—staff. They thus create work for the type of
consumer that they also serve. Discount stores range
across both food and nonfood formats and exist

in major economies with advanced retail systems.
Discounting naturally appeals to (diverse) notions of
thrift (see Miller 1998, 61).

Origins
The “wheel” model proposes that retailers enter
at the low-cost end of the price spectrum and later
trade up to become mainstream themselves. After
the Industrial Revolution, low-entry-point retailers
on both sides of the Atlantic chose similar discount
formats. In the United Kingdom, Marks and Spencer
began life with Russian émigré Michael Marks’s
Penny Bazaar and his slogan, “Don’t ask the price,
it’s a penny.” Marks was offering easy, comfortable shopping to a mass market: some illiterate and
innumerate. U.K. market traders who, like charity/
thrift shops, are rivals to discounters now offer a
fixed-price scoop of produce, inviting the same lowengagement customer relationship. In the United
States, from 1878, F. W. Woolworth led the five-anddime revolution where, again, neither customer nor
salesperson needed advanced interpersonal skills.

Nonfood Discounting
Several formats have evolved from F. W. Woolworth’s
generalist product range and low-margin goods.
These, when combined with its choice of expensive town center locations, finally saw its closure in
the United Kingdom in 2009 (in the United States,
it earlier transformed into Foot Locker). The dominant name in discount is Walmart, which started
with a single nonfood discount outlet in Arkansas.
Curiously, rivals Target and K-Mart (formerly
Kresge, now Sears) also commenced operations in
1962. In recent years, and with its adoption of the
supercenter format selling food, Walmart has largely
moved away from straightforward discounting.
Unlike Marks and Spencer, however, Walmart never
deserted its “everyday low price” image and lowcost operating base: many see this as pressuring staff,
suppliers, and the environment. Numerous aspects
of Walmart operations, notably sourcing low-cost
consumer goods from China—it is China’s fifth largest export market—attract attention. Its preparedness to dally with antitrust regulations has rendered
it constantly controversial. Researchers have noted
its antipathy toward trade unions and that a significant percentage of its U.S. workforce does not have
healthcare coverage. Sustainability and fair-trade

Discourse

lobbyists persistently challenge the high cost of low
price. The issue of sourcing is one that has troubled
many other discount chains. Fordist economics
drives outsourcing to low-labor-cost counties as a
route to price-cutting. Lobbyists are constantly seeking instances of poor working conditions and several fashion chains (including UK Primark, rivals to
New Look and Matalan) have been forced to revise
their ethical statements. With cut-price clothing on
sale in supermarkets, debates are now surfacing over
the suitability of allegedly oversexualized clothing for
children. Growing inequality and the rise of a significant underclass in the United Kingdom as in the
United States has fueled the recent rise of Poundland
and Poundstretcher. In the United States, Dollar
General and Dollar Tree (in Canada, Dollarama) are
the inheritors of the five-and-dime tradition.

Food Discounting
U.S. supermarkets introduced a price emphasis to
food retailing during the Depression years. Postwar,
many major retail economies saw food retailing
become more focused on the increasingly wealthy
and mobile majority. In the United Kingdom, a few
food stores, notably Kwik-Save, remained devoted to
the smaller discount format and to more traditional
shopping locations that otherwise risked becoming
food deserts. In 1989, Kwik-Save was seen as cash
rich and had a market capitalization two-thirds that
of mainstream U.K. retailer ASDA. By 1998, KwikSave had been taken over by rival Somerfield and
the identity was later lost. At much the same time,
Walmart bought ASDA—with its larger format
stores—and has expanded the chain. Several factors
explain these contrasted fortunes: one is that discount pricing is open to retailers other than discounters. Mainstream rivals offer up to four price ranges,
the lowest of which is “discount.” With a U.K. public
increasingly educated to shop at the four main grocery chains that hold nearly 80 percent of the total
food market, the power of big purchasers is brought
to bear. Kwik-Save dominantly retailed branded
goods—though not always the leading brand. In the
mid-1970s, its proportion of own-branded goods
was—like ASDA—in single figures. Today, the four
main U.K. grocery chains have over 50 percent of
their grocery range in own-brand. Monopsonistic
buying power and control of shelf space make the
big four U.K. retailers hard to compete with: a power

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that challenges notions of consumer sovereignty.
Further competition for Kwik-Save arrived with
German discounters entering the United Kingdom
in the 1990s. This drove postrecession growth to
10 percent per annum and is being repeated in the
post-2008 downturn. The combination of the 1990s
recession and reports of high U.K. profit margins
attracted chains such as ALDI and Lidl. Interestingly,
such retailers also dominantly retailed own-label
products and were therefore able to further undercut Kwik-Save prices. With the less-affluent shopper
now attuned to the message that low-cost equated
to own-label, Kwik-Save was fatally undermined,
according to Leigh Sparks. We should not leave the
German discounters without noting that their smallsized, centrally located format is unlikely to cause
problems in countries where planning and environmental issues are important. Also, German shopping
hours were traditionally more restricted while their
product ranges are a good mix for German shopping
habits in a country where food specialists still thrive.
Alan Hallsworth
See also Consumer Co-Operatives; Consumption Patterns
and Trends; Convenience; Fashion; Lifestyle;
Shopping; Supermarkets; Walmart

Further Readings
Eurostat. Retailing in the Single European Market.
Luxembourg: Author, 1993.
Graff, Tom, and Ashton Dub. “Spatial Diffusion of WalMart: Contagious and Reverse Hierarchical Elements.”
Professional Geographer 46, no. 1 (1994): 19–29.
Miller, Danny. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity,
1998
Sparks, Leigh. “Spatial-Structural Relationships in Retail
Corporate Growth: A Case Study of Kwik-Save.”
Service Industries Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 25–84.

DISCOURSE
The term discourse refers to a series of utterances
or statements connected through their institutional
context, the form of language used, and its meaning
or significance. It may refer to a single text, such as
a formal discussion in writing, or it may refer to a
group of related texts by various authors. It may also
refer to spoken discussion or debate. The analysis of

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Discourse

discourse is associated with different traditions of
contemporary thought, but all emphasize the use of
language to sustain and express a society’s culture.
In one tradition, the term grows out of linguistics,
particularly sociolinguistics, and refers to the analysis
of language—spoken or written—in units larger than
a sentence. Grammar and syntax are focused on the
sentence, while phonology, morphology, and semantics focus on the form and meaning of individual
words. When linguists address the structural properties of discourse, how any one sentence is formed
is related to previous sentences and its impact on
subsequent sentences and the overall meaning of the
discourse. Whether in a sustained speech, a continuous text, or a conversational exchange, the linguistic
features—the length of sentences, the complexity of
subclauses, the range of vocabulary, for example—
contribute to the meaning of the discourse. An
analysis of discourse in this linguistic style will also
consider how the type of language used is directed to
particular listeners or readers. There is considerable
overlap between the study of pragmatics in linguistics, the ethnography of talk, conversation analysis,
and the analysis of speech as discourse.
A second tradition treats discourse as a cultural
form and derives from the work of structuralist and
poststructuralist writers including Roland Barthes,
Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Here the
emphasis shifts from the linguistic properties of the
discourse to its structural properties as meaning and
as knowledge. Claims to know are made in what
Foucault calls “statements,” and their cumulative
effect in discourse is to produce a “positivity,” a
series of positive statements on a particular topic that
might also be thought of as a discipline or subject
(e.g., political economy, biology, or philology). The
series of statements in a discourse does not derive
from a single source because an author will refer to,
incorporate, and modify earlier statements by others,
using their concepts and ideas even when disagreeing with them. Any possible origin of knowledge
becomes culturally significant only once it is given a
linguistic form of presentation as speech or writing
through which it can be shared and responded to.
Even knowledge that is heavily dependent on mathematics, diagrams, or images needs to be uttered or
expressed in a discursive—that is, linguistic—form.
One of the major consequences of Foucault’s conceptualization of discourse is that he shows its role in the

operation of power in society and the institutional
processes that sustain it. To be able to make statements that are heard, incorporated, and responded
to is to be able to enter the circuits of power. To
have no voice—to be rebutted, silenced, excluded, or
ridiculed—is to be deprived of influence on the
content of discourse and, ultimately, on its material
effects on bodies.
A third tradition is critical discourse analysis
(CDA). This draws on the critique of power entailed
in Foucault’s approach to discourse but addresses the
sociolinguistic features of contemporary discourse
rather than historical discursive formations. CDA
considers the political and powerful effects of linguistic forms and specifically addresses how language
operates as ideology, in media texts and institutional
contexts. To identify the effects of power, the analysis is of the content of speech or text, the practices
through which the speech or text was produced, and
the sociocultural and institutional context of its production. For example, a speaker in a conversational
setting may exert authority by interrupting or speaking over another speaker, or may implicitly claim
authority through his or her subject position (e.g.,
as doctor, judge, or bank manager). CDA can draw
out the ideological implications of the ways in which
different discursive conventions are brought together,
as when political analysis on television is conducted
as a friendly chat and presented as entertainment.
A fourth tradition is discursive psychology, which
draws on all three earlier traditions but addresses
discursive constructions as actions—such as accounting or describing—that realize the cognitive interests
or social stakes of actors. Particular ways of saying
things—devices or repertoires—may appear to be
neutral cognitive practices, such as remembering
or reporting, but can, in practice, achieve powerful
effects.
Discourse contributes to consumer culture in two
ways. First, it plays a role in enhancing or promoting particular commodities through advertisements,
commentaries, reviews, and discussion. For some
consumers, there is, however, as much pleasure to
be gained from reading or talking about their consumption (of, e.g., fashion or electronic goods) as
from their possession or use of the goods. So, second,
discourse itself may be what is consumed. To study
a particular area of consumer culture—that of photography, for example—a researcher may choose to

Discourse Analysis

study the discourse; how practices are described in
advertisements, magazine articles, instruction manuals; and how the field is referred to in newspapers,
television programs, books, and Internet sites. The
discussions and talk of photographers, both professional and amateur and those who use photographs
such as customers and picture editors, may also be
analyzed discursively to contribute to an understanding of the field. It could be argued that the discourse
of institutions such as schools, universities, churches,
political parties, and pressure groups is also “consumed,” even where there is no direct exchange of
money for an identifiable commodity. Discourse
always involves the transmission of values and ideas
that may be about commodities but will at the same
time also be about aspects of the culture at large. It is
through discourse that truths are established, actions
legitimated, beliefs sustained, morals approved of,
and consensus reached.
Tim Dant
See also Barthes, Roland; Communications Studies;
Content Analysis; Culture-Ideology of Consumerism;
Discourse Analysis; Ethnography; Political Economy

Further Readings
Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London:
Longman, 1989.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock,
1970.
Potter, Jonathan, and Derek Edwards. Discursive
Psychology. London: Sage, 1992.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis is a general term for analyzing
written or spoken use of a language. Developed by
Zellig Harris in 1952, discourse analysis first looked
at formal equivalence relations among sentences of
a discourse, where equivalent units of information
appear together. Discourse in linguistics is defined as
“language in use” or “socially situated text and talk.”
In other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology,
psychology, communication studies, and marketing,
discourse is seen as a system of power and knowledge
situated in a specific time and space. Discourse analysis in consumer culture refers to an analysis of oral

461

and written speech of consumers (and producers)
in order to understand related meanings, cultures,
and practices in making theoretical explanations.
The outcome of discourse analysis might be a different reading of the same text and an awareness of
powerful and weak points of a particular statement,
research method, or interpretation.
Although discourse analysis is a methodological
orientation, it does not provide a particular method
of collecting or analyzing data but rather provides
a method of approaching a research question. In
consumer-behavior studies, as well as in many
other disciplines, it is characterized by deconstructive reading and interpretation of written or oral
texts, assuming that every text is conditioned in a
discourse. A careful and sensitive reading of a text
would unravel tight systematic structures and reveal
what runs counter to apparent meanings, and thus
demonstrate subtle and sometimes hidden meanings. Discourse analysis reads beyond the text per
se and tries to understand the underlying conditions
behind the problem by extending the perspective of
inquiry.
Discourse analysis focuses on language use in the
form of sentences, phrases, and words that are used
in communicating with others. These sentences,
which constitute both spoken and written text, are
assumed to affect relationships among people and
be affected by participants who use them. In other
words, discourse analysis focuses on relationships
between linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior. It
draws from the idea that particular phrases in
language are specific to particular situations. The
primary purpose is to focus on this relationship
between language and the contexts in which it is
used, as well as understand how language becomes
meaningful to participants at that specific context.
For instance, when an instructor says “class is
full,” a university student may easily understand
that it means all students who take the course are
present when the class starts, while another person
may think that the classroom is full of people, or
a nonnative English speaker may not even capture
the meaning of this sentence. Discourse analysis, in
its simplest sense, tries to understand this relationship between sentences and people who use those
sentences.
Related to the concept of discourse, the notion
of pragmatics involves what people mean by those

462

Discourse Analysis

sentences in the real world. For example, the phrase
“class is full” may actually mean “we do not need to
take attendance” or “we can start the class” rather
than just a statement of the fact that all students are
present. Another related method is called conversation analysis, which looks at casual conversations
and focuses on pauses, overlaps, and voice changes
in trying to understand the meanings in a particular
situation. Conversation analysts are often reluctant
to utilize predetermined categories and thus follow
an inductive approach in their analyses. In this way,
one can understand a culture more deeply, which
arises from the idea that the same sentence can mean
different things in different cultures. This is referred
to as ethnomethodology, which gives utmost importance to the observability of social activities in everyday life so that the researcher fully grasps knowledge
of what is happening in a social setting.
Discourse analysis can be more descriptive and
noncritical from one perspective, or more focused on
social problems and critical from another. The second form of discourse analysis permits the researcher
to understand inequalities and divisions in the society. According to the critical perspective, language
cannot be viewed in isolation from the society, as it
is interwoven with particular social organizations.
For instance, Michel Foucault claimed that a person’s
identity is not fixed, but rather, identity is a way of
talking about the self and communicating with others, which is a discourse. This view uses a social
constructionist orientation, a view that assumes the
domination of a particular group on the creation
of a concept or practice. Regularities that produce
and reproduce these discourses are called discursive
formations, which relate to large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history.
Other scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and Pierre
Bourdieu examine ideologies and power relations
involved in discourse.
The concept of intertextuality reflects the view
that all texts are in relationship to other texts.
Therefore, concepts and meanings drawn from one
text can be shaped by using another text. It can be
in the form of a simultaneous or subsequent reading
of different texts, or it can be the researcher’s previous readings of different texts. On the other hand,
written and spoken forms of the same language are
manifested in different ways. Although they may use
the same grammatical system, they may encode different meanings.

In its narrow definition, discourse analysis ignores
nonverbal text, such as audible and visual forms of
communication. However, it has been argued that
language is just one of the many forms of signs.
Linguistics, therefore, can be seen as a subdiscipline
of semiotics, the science of sign systems, where visual
text is as important as verbal text. In other words,
social practices have both discursive and nondiscursive elements. However, in marketing literature,
discourse analysis is also used to analyze advertisements. It is argued that the language of the print
media is different from the visual language of television, film, and videos. Several researchers argue that
through a discourse analysis of advertisements, the
researcher can trace the production process and cues
in the process of interpretation. From this perspective, advertising is conceptualized as an institutional
practice constructed through language. Discourse
analysis can be applied in advertising in order to
trace how arguments are built within texts and variations across different texts.
More specifically, in consumer behavior, the term
discourse refers to either oral or written speech, such
as texts in the media, marketplace discourses, and
even consumers’ everyday speech in oral (e.g., interviews) and written (e.g., journal entries) form. In a
consumer-behavior study, researchers may search
texts, such as the Internet or discussion groups, by
using specific keywords. From different texts, themes
and concepts can be developed through several iterations. The purpose of making these iterations is to
identify and interpret commonalities, differences,
linkages, and patterns throughout different texts.
From this analysis, different “discourses” on a theoretical issue can be developed, which may further
provide insights into broader social and cultural
concepts.
In consumer studies, through discourse analysis,
it is possible to generate textual material through indepth ethnographic or phenomenological interviews.
Interviews are usually recorded and then transcribed
word by word, often including researcher notes
about changes in voices, silences, and other interpretations that might aid in the analysis of textual
data. Interviews are conducted around certain topics, sometimes accompanied by projective questions
when the topic is sensitive or difficult to articulate
by informants. Analysis is carried out involving an
iterative, part-to-whole reading of verbatim interview transcripts, allowing a holistic understanding of

Disney

textual data within and across different interviews.
Experienced researchers are likely to notice deviations from norms and often-internalized social practices, or different or conflicting meanings brought by
informants.
Since discourse analysis does not rely on particular ways of collecting or analyzing data, reliability
and validity of research conducted through discourse
analysis would mostly depend on the researcher’s
own background and knowledge. Some discourse
analysts propose four criteria of reliability and validity for discourse analysis: revealing the coherence
of the discourse, using participants’ orientation in
explaining phenomena, generation of new problems,
and the fruitfulness of the analysis to cope with
new types of discourse. Discourse analysis from a
consumer-culture perspective may not presume a
need for reliability or validity because each interpretation is unique to a specific culture by its definition.
Just as there are culturally different ways of doing
things, especially including shopping and other consumer behavior, the ways of using language is also
different, even for the same language.
Berna Tari
See also Communication Studies; Consumer Interviews;
Content Analysis; Conversation Analysis; Discourse;
Ethnography; Markets and Marketing; Methodologies
for Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings
Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change.
Cambridge: Polity, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
Harris, Zellig. “Discourse Analysis.” Language 28, no. 1
(January–March 1952): 1–30.
Paltridge, Brian. Discourse Analysis: An Introduction.
London: Continuum, 2006.
Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Wetherell. Discourse and
Social Psychology. London: Sage, 1987.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics.
Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.
Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court,
1983.
Thompson, Craig J. “Marketplace Mythology and
Discourses of Power.” Journal of Consumer Research
31, no. 1 (June 2004): 162–180.
Thompson, Craig J., and Diana L. Haytko. “Speaking of
Fashion: Consumers’ Uses of Fashion Discourses and

463

the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural
Meanings.” Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. 1
(June 1997): 15–42.

DISNEY
Although referring to the entertainment conglomerate founded by Walt Disney, in cultural terms, Disney
and Disneyfication have come to represent immersive ways of structuring consumption experiences.
Walt Disney, the founder of the Disney entertainment
empire, was born in 1901 and died in 1966. Disney
and Disneyfication have shaped consumer culture—
especially in the entertainment arena—in major and
often defining ways.

Historical Disney Milestones
The entire list of culture-shaping events from Disney
enterprises could be rather long. Even a short list,
however, should include the following milestones:
• 1928: first two Mickey Mouse short films
released
• 1937: other key characters—Donald Duck,
Pluto, Goofy, and so forth—introduced; also,
first animated feature film Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs released
• 1950: Disney television special launched
• 1955: Disneyland opens in Anaheim, California
• 1971: Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom opens
in Orlando, Florida
• 1982: EPCOT Center opens in Orlando
• 1983: Tokyo Disneyland opens
• 1987: first Disney Store opens
• 1992: Euro Disney (now renamed Disneyland
Paris) opens
• 1996: Capital Cities/ABC acquired
• 1998: Disney Cruise Line sets sail
• 2006: Apple and Pixar cofounder Steve Jobs
becomes largest Disney shareholder because of
acquisition of Pixar by Disney

Disneyfication
The cultural-economic success of Disney, especially
of the theme parks, triggered emulative processes of
Disneyfication. This is the process of non-Disney contexts employing the operational principles of Disney

464

Disney

parks to achieve cultural appeal and economic
success similar to Disney’s. Nikhilesh Dholakia and
Jonathan Schroeder outline the basic building blocks
of Disneyfication: spectacles, themes, dreams (fantasies), and adventures. The key is the “intensification and management of experience” via playfulness,
acceleration, integration, and classification. Ersatz
elements of nostalgia, atavistic imagery, and folklore
are employed liberally to achieve instant identification by and engagement of consumers.
Disney environments have expanded to create
diverse immersive and interpretive consumer spaces,
from museums to retail shops—and also virtual
worlds. EPCOT Center in Orlando, combining
futuristic pavilions with crafted national simulacra
in the World Showcase Section, is an example of the
prototypical visionary, fantastic, and novel Disney
context (Beard 1982). Disney’s emphasis on creating and panoptically managing risk-free, clean, and
sanitized immersive spaces is reassuring to consumers and reinforces the power of vision, fantasy, and
novelty.
The theming used in Disney parks is presentational rather than representational. Rather than simply replicating what is in the “outside” world, they
either present something completely new and unique
(e.g., newly developed technologies showcased in
pavilions, such as Innovations at EPCOT Center)
or they transform something that already exists into
ersatz but relatable forms (e.g., the sanitized and simplified version of American history found in the U.S.
pavilion of the World Showcase Section at EPCOT
Center, excluding the unpleasant narratives of slavery and civil war). Disney parks offer fun infused
with manufactured meaning; they are contexts that
offer “edutainment.”
Disney Parks are, to use Michel Foucault’s term,
a heterotopia. They are real sites but they represent the society in a distorted way to emphasize
the simplified and sanitized ideals of a culture. As
heterotopic spaces, Disney parks make the magic
real. In other words, they create the feelings of
magical authenticity. Imagineering, which emphasizes the key roles of both imagining and engineering in creating effective designs, is pioneering
Disney-invented process for realizing this magic.
Disney parks are museums of idealized pasts and
futures (King 1981). Linking to noble and desirable
ideals makes Disney settings attractive to many

companies for showcasing their brands and corporate social-responsibility programs.

Disneyfication as Transmodern
Consumption Ethos
Modern thought privileged the real and considered
that the real existed outside of, and independent of,
humans. In modernity, people sought to take control of nature, which was the source of all that they
encountered that was not of their making. Modernity
constructed and changed human existence to an
unprecedented degree. As modern society progressively intervened in what nature offered, humanity
became increasingly surrounded by the products of
its own making, which not only mediated the impact
of nature on people but also incrementally began to
change nature. Most significantly, people’s relationship with nature changed—transforming their understanding of reality.
Consequently, there is a growing and tacit understanding that most of what people encounter as their
reality is humanly created. Our urban and rural
environments, our way of life, what is proper and
can be done without legal or social ramifications are
all our own making. As a result, in late modernity,
people increasingly feel the license to indeed imagine
and construct their world. The distinction between
fantasy and reality thus diminishes. In places like
Las Vegas, Disney World’s towns of Celebration
and Boardwalk, and EPCOT Center, designers of
the human environment go forth boldly to create
new worlds, unfettered by whatever “reality” they
encountered heretofore and limited only by their
imagination and technology.
The environments we now inhabit, therefore,
increasingly simulate the designs of the dreammaker extraordinaire, the Disney enterprises,
instead of our fantasies simulating what we know
of “reality.” That is why cities like Phoenix and Las
Vegas, grown out of the desert, are, to those who
still hold on to the old distinctions, “unreal.” To
the new generations that understand the illusion of
such distinctions, these new realities are just another
experience (Fırat 2001). This is the Disneyfication of
our existence.
Nikhilesh Dholakia, A. Fuat Fırat, and
Ebru Ulusoy Akgun

Disorganized Capitalism
See also American Dream; Branding; Commercialization;
Desire; Leisure; Mass Tourism; Spaces and Places;
Spectacles

Further Readings
Beard, Richard R. Walt Disney’s Epcot Center: Creating the
New World of Tomorrow. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1982.
Dholakia, Nikhilesh, and Jonathan Schroeder. “Disney:
Delights and Doubts.” Journal of Research for
Consumers 2 (2001). http://www.jrconsumers.com/
academic_articles/issue_2.
Fırat, A. Fuat. “The Meanings and Messages of Las Vegas:
The Present of Our Future.” M@n@gement 4, no. 3
(2001): 101–120.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1
(1986): 22–27.
King, M. J. “Disneyland and Walt Disney World:
Traditional Values in Futuristic Form.” Journal of
Popular Culture 15, no. 1 (1981): 116–140.

DISORGANIZED CAPITALISM
Organized capitalism originates in Marxist political sociology. Capitalism as an organizing social
principle refers to the role market forces play in our
contemporary world. Market forces favor the concentration of the modes of production in the hands
of a minority, may work against government control,
and become the underlying cause of social inequalities. With the revolutionization of production to
achieve savings in labor time comes a restructuring of
human relations across time and space and the rise of
a working class that is destined to overturn the status
quo and dissolve class boundaries. Marxist theory
found various implementations in centrally planned
economies of communist and socialist countries that
worked against capitalist principles to restrict, if not
abolish, private ownership and lay the foundations
of a classless society. Organized capitalism inspired
cross-national research, focusing on the changes economic development introduces in social and political structures. Coming under the label of dependency
theory or world-system theory, such cross-national
analyses compose part of globalization studies.
The concept sprang from the political writings
of Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other political

465

figures of the left, but also from economic theorists
such Rudolf Hilferding and social historians such
as Jürgen Kocka, who noted the emergence of some
socioeconomic and political changes from the mid1870s. These involved the centralization of industrial,
banking, and commercial capital and an increasing
interconnection of banks and industry that revolutionized consumption practices. A bureaucratization of control placed the state at the center of large
monopolies or collective organizations and favored
the growth of a managerial hierarchy. These changes
produced their own nemesis—they contributed, for
example, to the growth of collective organizations
in the labor market, including trade unions and
employers’ associations.
Multiethnic administrative complexes (empires)
contributed to the development and increasing control of new overseas markets. For Marxists,
colonialism’s organizing principle was capitalism,
as it encouraged the exploitation of human beings
and resources of countries of settlement, leading to
a reorganization of their economies that favored the
colonial machine rather than native cultures. This
led to sociocultural restructuring with global repercussions, with migrations to (of travelers, traders,
administrators, and missionaries who wanted to
learn about, govern, and civilize “natives”) and
from colonial peripheries (slaves from Africa to
Americas to produce sugar for European consumption). Organized capitalism produced an administrative machine whose primary aim was not to
safeguard “order” but to promote the national
good even at the expense of imperial peripheries
(e.g., Indian raw cotton would be sent to English
factories for cloth manufacturing, only to be sold
back to India, generating economic crisis in the
Indian colonies). Simultaneous ideological changes
relating to the glorification of science and technology displaced humans from the center of universally
shared values, promoting ideological hierarchies
(e.g., racism) that haunt developed and developing
societies to date. Organized capitalism bolstered
the cultural-ideological configurations known as
modernism and nationalism: the principal causes of
global conflict are often associated with imperialist
competition that transmuted in colonial centers into
the sort of rampant nationalist feeling that produces
authoritarian regimes (German Nazism and Italian
Fascism). These changes intensified between 1882

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Disorganized Capitalism

and 1945 (the era of both world wars), leading to an
even tighter organization of capitalism.
Organized capitalism is rooted in Western structures of experience—notably, of countries such as
Britain or France (two former colonial powers) or
the United States (one of the world superpowers)
that either once comprised or eventually developed
into components of the “world system.” The revision
of this thesis by Scott Lash and John Urry in 1987
followed the same model, building a disorganized
capitalism argument on Marxian premises. Their
work developed around five country cases (Germany,
Sweden, Britain, France, and the United States) to
claim that that the principles that fostered organization are now unraveling the capitalist system: nowadays, world markets cannot be controlled by a single
center, dispersing thus into multiple capitalist bases
that challenge the state monopolies of the modern
era. The continued expansion of blue-collar workers replaced the idea of working class–led revolutions
in nation-states with transnational service class–led
changes. This service class resembles the colonial
service class (upper-caste native administrators nominated as executive organs of colonial orders by a
colonial apparatus that had no cultural or racial ties
with the colonized): the Indian professional of middleclass origins but immigrant parentage is the service
class subject par excellence. These changes did not
eradicate sociocultural hierarchies: the working-class
subject of the past has now been replaced by what is
known as the dehypostacized, accented voice of call
centers or the working-class Bangladeshi or Nigerian
workers of local supermarkets. Changes in production and distribution regimes form thus a continuum
with the consumption experience.
Paramount to these societal changes has been the
technocultural revolution that led to business expansion and constant outsourcing of human capacity in
poorer countries. The negative aspects of this shift
have been similar to those of the colonial era: the
racialization and feminization of poverty that for the
first time equated social with geographical distance
or, alternatively, the feminization of flexible work
with little or less recognition (e.g., technology-aided
work at home reserved for stay-at-home mothers
or even disabled workers). The moment Internet
banking (a de facto positional good out of reach for
segments of the world population) connects people
from different continents, it sets them apart in more
than one way. Educational attainment has also
driven this change, making upward social mobility

possible for some disadvantaged segments of society:
the proliferation of universities democratized (but
also marketized) education for the middle classes,
transforming the category of “middle class” into a
battleground for the acquisition of more social capital (knowledge for better jobs and social recognition)
by ethnic minorities and women.
Although Lash and Urry’s theoretical model
mainly develops on ideal types drawn from the
European experience (notably, Germany is used as
an example of both bureaucratic and political organization), it has been successfully applied to nonEuropean cases. The mobilization of a non-European
example (the United States) was pertinent at a time
of global political transformations, making Lash and
Urry’s thesis prophetic: two years after its publication, the 1989 revolutions precipitated the collapse
of the Soviet regime and its replacement by open
market values, providing us with the case of bureaucratic and economic disorganization par excellence.
The recent military and economic growth of former
global “pariahs,” such as China, a direct product
of post-Maoist policies of “reform and opening” to
counter political isolation, support political defense
and embrace the principles of market competition,
gestures toward the idea of emerging economic and
political multipolarity. It also highlights an oversight
in the original thesis—namely, the importance of military power in capitalist organization. Germany and
China, as well as other former colonized countries
such as Pakistan, are excellent examples of this phenomenon: all these countries used military-strategic
policy as both a way to secure national independence
and a stepping-stone to imperialist expansion.
A less-developed aspect of the disorganized capitalism thesis pointed to the relationship between capitalism and modernity. Whereas all the changes Lash
and Urry explored were facets of modernization
(the process of industrialization marks these epochal
shifts), “modernity” as such comprises a variety of
experiential structures sidelined in the book. Their
astute reading of Marshall Berman’s much-quoted
Marxist dictum “all that is solid melts into air”
as both a longing and fear for the ephemerality of
urban life was not followed up in later chapters.
Viewed in conjunction with Ulrich Beck’s “cosmopolitan manifesto,” this comment could open up
possibilities to explore how urban–rural clashes of
mentality are played out on the global plateau. This
was rectified in Lash and Urry’s Economies of Sign
and Space that opened up their thesis to numerous

Division of Labor

other possibilities of application in as diverse sectors of world economy as tourism, film, and other
cultural industries. There, Lash and Urry expanded
their comparative examination of postindustrial
economies (United Kingdom and the United States,
new Germany and Japan) to provide more in-depth
analysis of social inequalities and changing experiences of time, space, culture, travel, the environment, and globalization. The analysis followed the
original disorganized capitalism thesis, presenting social change as the product of a single social
force (service class) that shapes the new knowledge
economies. To this they develop the argument that
the emergence of flexible social actors and organizations creates the growth of a widespread aesthetic
reflexivity, which generates a proactive and creative
reading of social life in the spheres of both production and consumption.
Rodanthi Tzanelli
See also Capitalism; Colonialism; Consumer Policy
(China); Consumer Policy (European Union);
Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Policy (United
States); Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization);
Culture Industries; Globalization; Marx, Karl; Political
Economy; Postmodernism

Further Readings
Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of
the Second Age of Modernity.” British Journal of
Sociology 51 (2000): 79–105.
Bermann, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.
Hilferding, Rudolf. “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State
Economy?” Modern Review 1 (1947): 266–271.
Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1981. First published 1910.
Kautsky, Karl. “Finance-Capital and Crises.” Social
Democrat 15 (1911): 326.
Kocka, Jürgen. Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society.
Oxford: Berghahn, 1999.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. The End of Organized
Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space.
London: Sage, 1994.
Lenin, Vladimir I. “The Development of Capitalism in
Russia: The Process of the Formation of a Home
Market for Large-Scale Industry.” In Collected Works.
Vol. 3, 21–608. Moscow: Progress, 1964.
Loomba, Annia. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London:
Routledge, 2005.

467

Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

DISPOSAL

OF

GOODS

See Reuse/Recycling; Waste

DIVISION

OF

LABOR

Since Plato’s Republic (ca. 830 BC), the division of
labor has occupied an important space in social and
political thought. However, it was given its decisive
modern formulation in Adam Smith’s The Wealth
of Nations (1776). The story here is as follows:
prior to the Industrial Revolution, the predominant
unit of production was the family, and each family
was responsible for producing the vast majority of
what it consumed. With the advent of the Industrial
Revolution, however, the factory became the primary
unit of production, and individual workers specialized in distinct and discrete productive tasks. Smith
suggested that this brought about increases in productivity and efficiency. To illustrate: imagine two
workers who are both producing bread and beer for
themselves. If one were to specialize in the production of bread and the other in the production of beer,
it is likely that they will become better at producing the commodity in which they have specialized
such that more bread and more beer are produced.
Consequently, they could both enjoy increased consumption of both commodities. From an economist’s perspective, specialization creates specialists
who are in a position to get better at their respective
tasks through learning and repetition just as they can
acquire the technologies that help improve productivity for a particular task. Indeed, it is much more
cost effective to purchase the equipment required for
one specialized task than it is to try to purchase several sets of equipment in an attempt to be a jackof-all-trades. Similarly, no time is lost or wasted by
having to move between tasks or learn new ones, just
as there is no need to waste time or effort on tasks for
which one has no aptitude. By contrast, economists
recognize several problems with the division of labor,
including the monotony and boredom that results
from occupational specialization and the reductions
in productivity that this might bring about. Similarly,

468

Division of Labor

there is the possibility of being left with a highly
skilled but very inflexible workforce. Finally, the shift
from family to factory as the primary productive unit
might involve a move toward an impersonal and
rigid working environment dominated by the “tyranny of the clock” and industrial rhythms of work.
In addition to the economic division of labor, it
is important to recognize that a social division of
labor arises as a result of occupational specialization. On the one hand, a situation in which the
family or household is no longer the primary unit
of production will necessarily bring about the fragmentation of social life into different institutions.
For example, it means that the family becomes distinct from the workplace, which is distinct from the
state, which is distinct from the economy, and so
on. More importantly, it is not difficult to see that
an occupational division of labor will bring about
occupational hierarchies and, in turn, various forms
of social stratification. Most notably, social class has
traditionally been defined in relation to the position
of individuals within occupational hierarchies, and
it is well understood that a good deal of inequality exists across social classes. It follows that the
division of labor produces and reproduces social
inequalities. Furthermore, these inequalities are not
limited to differences in social class. Sociologists
have also focused on ethnic divisions alongside
the ways in which gender inequalities are manifest
in the relative positions of men and women in the
occupational structure and gendered differences in
access to the higher positions within this structure.
On the topic of gender, it is important to note that
inequalities exist in terms of the domestic division
of labor, especially in light of more women entering
the workplace. Finally, in the context of globalization, there is a spatial (international and national)
division of labor through which further inequalities
can be found. For example, low-waged, low-status,
and even dangerous work tends to be located in lessdeveloped countries and disadvantaged or marginal
regions within affluent societies. Occupational specialization raises questions about what a socially just
division of labor might look like. Most commonly, it
is thought that this would resemble a meritocracy in
which one’s specialism is determined by one’s ability
and aptitude. However, from Karl Marx onward, it
has been suggested that it is not a level playing field
insofar as powerful groups in society can exploit the
division of labor to ensure that they remain in their

position of privilege. For example, a wealthy family
whose social class is a reflection of its relatively high
position within an occupational hierarchy is likely
to be in a position to ensure that the children get a
good education that will equip them for roles in similar positions. Similarly, their children are likely to be
equipped with the social skills required—manners,
speech, and disposition—to make a good impression
and secure a privileged post. Furthermore, it is likely
that those in privileged positions are well connected
to other people in privileged positions and that these
connections will help their children into similar
positions.
The division of labor requires and results in interdependence and mutual reliance. In terms of economics, the division of labor makes trade necessary.
It follows that in a global economic system, the parts
are connected to the whole in a complex string of
webs. For example, the accountant is dependent on
the baker for her bread who is in turn dependent on
yeast and flour producers for raw ingredients, just as
they are all dependent on retailers and distributors
to ensure the supply and availability of commodities. Similarly, the accountant is dependent on any
number of other agents for the range of goods and
services she consumes just as others are dependent on
the accountant to balance their books and file their
tax returns. Of course, in a situation where everybody is dependent on everybody else, there exists
the possibility for the unequal exercise of power. For
example, a large retailer might demand that its suppliers sell to them at a lower price by threatening to
find another supplier. The supplier, whose livelihood
depends on the retailer purchasing its produce, may
not have enough market influence to respond by,
for example, threatening to supply to the retailer’s
key rival. More positively, Émile Durkheim has suggested that the division of labor and mutual interdependency form the basis of solidarity in modern
societies. Using the metaphor of the human body—in
which the organs are all different to one another but
work together for the good of the body as whole—
he suggests that modern societies are characterized
by organic solidarity. Organic solidarity, argues
Durkheim, fosters an awareness of individuality but
also an awareness of mutual interdependence and
the idea that society is something greater than the
sum of its parts. Viewed as such, the division of labor
performs a vital social and moral function. However,
it is worth noting that Durkheim recognized that the

Do-It-Yourself

division of labor could fail, especially when it is not
matched by a framework of moral regulation or if
social inequalities prevent a level playing field when
it comes to occupational specialization.
Finally, the division of labor is a useful tool for
thinking about consumption and consumer culture.
For a start, occupational specialization and the
move from family to factory create a situation in
which nobody has to produce all of the things that
are consumed. Similarly, the increases in productivity and production mean that there is more available
for consumption and, arguably, this creates increases
in welfare. The division of labor and the system of
interdependency that it brings about makes trade
and exchange necessary. Consequently, in order to
consume, individuals have to enter into this system,
and it is under these conditions that consumer culture can flourish. Interestingly enough, resistance to
the consumer culture and the division of labor can
be found in advocates of self-sufficiency. These range
from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to more recent
interest in downshifting and voluntary simplicity.
Against the claim that the division of labor allows
for increased consumption and increased welfare, it
is well known that social inequalities are manifest
in patterns of consumption. Similarly, the relationship between the division of labor and consumption
can be thought of as one of alienation insofar as it
distances workers from the fruits of their labor. For
example, if one is performing a specialized task in
a production line, it is entirely probable that one
will never see the finished product, less still have the
chance to enjoy it. Indeed, perhaps one of the most
perverse consequences of the division of labor is that
a low-paid worker could be producing a high-price
commodity that she will never be able to afford or
consume.
David Evans
See also Alienation; Domestic Division of Labor;
Downshifting; Households; Inequalities; Moral
Economy; Social Class; Surplus Value

Further Readings
Bottero, Wendy. Stratification: Social division and
Inequality. London: Routledge, 2005.
Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society.
New York: Free Press, 1964. First published 1893.
Newman, Katherine. No Shame in My Game: The Working
Poor in the Inner City. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

469

Smith, Adam. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press,
1976. First published 1776.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Garden City, NY: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1973. First published 1854.

DO-IT-YOURSELF
Do-it-yourself refers to people providing for themselves services that they could be expected to pay
a professional to provide. While a vast range of
activities can be undertaken under the label of do-ityourself (DIY), the term emerged as a recognizable
cultural phenomenon in relation to home maintenance and repair, and that remains its core field of
reference and is the main focus of this entry.
Throughout history and across cultures, householders have of course done home maintenance and
improvement, and even construction, themselves. Yet
DIY and the use of the term to refer to a more or less
bounded field of meanings and activities is both culturally specific and historically recent. Understanding
the emergence of the term helps to further illuminate
the position of DIY within both consumer culture
and the progress of advanced capitalism.
To begin with, what makes the execution of
a particular task DIY is the expectation that the
practitioner might have paid someone else to do it.
The emergence of DIY can be seen as a reflection of
ongoing processes of professionalization and specialization of paid work in the division of labor. Beyond
this basic definitional point, the rise of DIY can be
seen to result from its role as a recreation from, or
even resistance to, the ongoing evacuation of craft
skills and manual production from paid employment, particularly for the urban and suburban middle classes. Indeed, the sorts of activities that might
now be recognized as DIY, at least in its more skilled
expressions, were valorized by artisanal ideals inherited from the Arts and Crafts movement and its valorization of skilled productive manual labor. Home
maintenance and improvement provided a recreational release from a working life largely evacuated
of productive skilled manual labor, at least for the
burgeoning middle classes of suburban white-collar
workers who provided the seedbed for the growth
of DIY.
DIY has always been understood overwhelmingly as a male pursuit and, despite rapidly widening

470

Do-It-Yourself

female participation, it remains so today. For Steven
Gelber, the rise of DIY is inseparable from the dynamics of gender and household divisions of labor in the
twentieth century. In postwar America, household
maintenance and improvement enabled suburban
husbands to respond to growing expectations that
they should be actively involved in the home without compromising masculine identities. The requirements of the work could legitimate the carving out
of space in the home for a bench or workshop, and
allow men to claim time in the domestic economy,
enabling them to retain separation from the routines
of daily reproduction while rewarding the household
with the material products of their skilled labor as a
contribution within the domestic division of labor.
By the 1950s, undertaking home maintenance and
improvement was an established element of typical
suburban masculinity, in the United States at least.
However, it was the 1970s that saw the stabilization of DIY as an idea and as a consumer market.
Before the 1970s, securing the wherewithal for a
DIY project meant visiting potentially intimidating
places like builders’ yards or plumbers’ merchants.
From the late 1960s, dedicated DIY retailers began
to be established, like B&Q in the United Kingdom
or Castorama in France (both in 1969), designed to
be accessible one-stop shops for the DIYer.
The 1970s also saw a proliferation of DIY magazines and manuals, providing not only the competence but also inspiration and legitimation of DIY as
a normal thing to do. Television also responded to
and fueled the growth of DIY, most visibly from the
1990s with the emergence of home-makeover shows
and programs based around finding profitable ways
to increase the value of home as an investment. From
the same period, the Internet has become a means of
sharing of know-how and ideas.
Another important element has been the increasingly rapid rate of development in tools and materials. Central to the story of DIY has been the power
drill, which became accessible to enthusiastic and
relatively affluent DIYers in the 1950s. As the DIY
market took shape, drills were increasingly engineered to lower tolerances, making them adequate
for occasional amateur use while being at a more
accessible price, while the globalization of production meant that by the end of the twentieth century,
power drills were available so cheaply as to be a
viable purchase for even the most occasional user.
Clearly, a DIYer with a power drill has a greater

range of capabilities than one without, shifting the
boundary between what can be taken on as DIY and
what a professional is needed for. This boundary
is similarly shifted by innovations in materials. For
example, push-fit plastic fittings make a wider range
of plumbing jobs accessible to someone without the
skill needed to solder joints in copper piping. The
practice of DIY therefore generates market demands,
leading to innovations in products, retail, and media
that serve in turn to progressively normalize and
potentially extend the practice of DIY, according to
Elizabeth Shove and colleagues.
DIY provides a means to a range of ends, from
increasing property value through judicious changes,
to moving a house toward an ideal vision of home.
While DIY can be undertaken in pursuit of such
grand designs, it is more often a means to continually
adapt the physical and aesthetic space of the home
to the shifting needs and purposes of the household.
This is evident in the clustering of DIY activity in a
home over time as major changes, such as initially
moving in, the start of parenthood, children leaving
home, or elderly parents arriving, can each be the
impetus for DIY remodeling of the home.
However, focusing on the purposes served
through the end result is to miss what is interesting
about DIY. The physical changes made in pursuit of
exchange value, aesthetic style, social aspiration, or
the changing needs of the household could usually
be just as well served by paying a professional. This
leaves open the question of why people DIY. Part of
the answer of course is that sometimes householders
cannot afford to pay someone to do the job for them.
However, according to Colin C. Williams, statistical evidence shows that ability to pay does not adequately account for the decision to DIY. To grapple
directly with DIY, it is necessary to tangle with the
actual doing of DIY.
Such a focus serves to emphasize the active bringing together of human body and its capacities of
physical and mental engagement with the fabric of
the building, mediated through tools and materials.
As such, DIY can serve in the appropriation of a
property, gaining the particular sense of ownership
and belonging that comes from mixing one’s own
labor with the house, notes Daniel Miller. It emphasizes also a distinctive property of DIY as a field of
consumption. Like certain other fields, for example,
cooking or hobbies like needlecraft, DIY involves the
purchase of commodities whose use depends on their

Domestic Division of Labor

transformation and their being skillfully brought
together with other commodities and materials,
generally with the ambition of creating something
that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is in these
processes that DIY contests classification as either
consumption or production. These characteristics
align DIY with Colin Campbell’s account of craft
consumption.
DIY refuses to fit within the key conceptual divisions. It is clearly a field of consumption, generally
depending on the practitioner acquiring and using
a range of tools, materials, and fixings, along with
ideas and aspirations, much of which resources are
provided by a multibillion-dollar manufacturing and
retail industry. Yet DIY is also clearly production,
making physical changes to a property that can often
result in some sort of added value, whether in the use
or in the exchange value of the property. DIY can
clearly be hard physical work, undertaken reluctantly
to serve inescapable obligations. Yet it also fits in to
some practitioners’ lives as a form of leisure, bringing rewards through skilled manual engagement
with materials, producing things or changes through
processes with qualities of craft activity. Through the
specific ways in which it challenges divisions, such
as those between consumption and production, leisure and work, DIY provides a challenging lens on
debates around consumption.
Matthew Watson
See also Appropriation; Capitalism; Craft Consumer;
Craft Production; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and
Up-Skilling; Division of Labor; Leisure

Further Readings
Campbell, Colin. “The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft and
Consumption in a Postmodern Society.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 5, no. 1 (2005): 23–42.
Clarke, Alison. “The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration.” In
Home Possessions, edited by D. Miller, 23–46. Oxford:
Berg, 2001.
Gelber, Steven. “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing
and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity.” American
Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997): 66–112.
Goldstein, Carolyn. Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in
Twentieth-Century America. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1998.
Miller, Daniel. “Consumption and Its Consequences.” In
Consumption and Everyday Life, edited by H. Mackay,
13–64. London: Sage and the Open University, 1997.

471

Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack
Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg,
2007.
Watson, Matthew, and Elizabeth Shove. “Product,
Competence, Project and Practice.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 8, no. 1 (2008): 69–89.
Williams, Colin C. “A Lifestyle Choice? Evaluating the
Motives of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Consumers.”
International Journal of Retail & Distribution
Management 32, no. 5 (2004): 270–278.

DOMESTIC DIVISION

OF

LABOR

Domestic labor refers to the unpaid caring and
housework tasks undertaken within households to
provide for the needs of family and other household members. Activities in Western societies typically encompass a range of tasks such as cooking,
cleaning, laundry, gardening, pet care, and household
repairs, in addition to child care and obtaining goods
and services. This work is often referred to as committed time in the literature on time use. Domestic
labor is an important component of gender-identity
formation with much research arguing that the performance of housework produces gender, at the same
time as accomplishing domestic activities. It may
also be argued that domestic labor is an increasingly
important component of consumer identity, particularly as it encompasses outsourcing of some domestic work to certain groups or classes, purchasing of
goods and services, and the maintenance of home
and lifestyles, all of which act to produce and affirm
social identities and class distinctions.
The activities defined as domestic labor are not
static across time. A number of forces shape the
nature and content of domestic labor, including
changes in the nature and location of paid work,
technological changes in household appliances,
changes in family structure and size, changes in the
architecture and décor of the family home, changes
in patterns and styles of food consumption and clothing, as well as changes in the definitions and meaning
of care work, in particular parenting. Historically,
the tasks commonly associated with housework in
the West only emerged after industrialization as family life was increasingly separated from industrial
production. Prior to industrialization, many of the
goods and services essential to the maintenance of
family life were produced within households. The

472

Domestic Division of Labor

development of a wage economy led to the increasing separation of home and paid work and a redefinition of the activities carried out in households as
unproductive labor. As industrialization developed,
work came to be defined as activities done by men
outside the household in return for a wage, while the
home and family were increasingly defined as women’s sphere, a private, nonproductive world separate
from the public world of commerce and industry.
The nature of domestic labor was further transformed in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries by the domestic-economy movement with
its emphasis on scientific training and the desire to
teach women, particularly working-class women and
the domestic servant class, the principles of hygienic
cleaning and cooking. For middle-class women,
domestic-economy experts promoted housework
as a new profession, combining a range of managerial, creative, and scientific skills. New tasks, such as
compiling schedules, timetables, and record keeping,
were created to make housework more efficient but
actually resulted in an increase in the amount of time
spent on housework. Additionally, the architecture of
the home was revised to accommodate the new image
of the kitchen as a laboratory where the woman of
the house spent a great deal of her time. The introduction of gas, and later electricity, to many private
homes in the early part of the twentieth century led to
a number of other architectural changes in the family
home. Space had now to be made in the kitchen for
the refrigerator, stove, and hot-water service. Some
years later, the washing machine and vacuum cleaner
became essential household appliances, promoted as
both laborsaving appliances and essential consumer
goods for the middle-class household.
As many feminists and historians have noted,
however, it is debatable whether these technological
changes led to a lightening of women’s loads. The
introduction of domestic machines such as the washing machine and vacuum cleaner went hand-in-hand
with new standards of cleanliness and may have led to
an increase in women’s time on domestic work. The
idea of a spring clean disappeared and was replaced
with the necessity of daily dusting and vacuuming.
Rather than a weekly wash day, daily clothes washing
became a necessity that in turn increased the amount
of time spent folding and ironing clothes.
One of the forms of labor that has emerged since
the mid-twentieth century as an integral and everexpanding component of domestic labor is shopping.

This includes both purchasing goods for immediate
consumption, such as groceries and other household
goods, as well as consumption as a means of identity
formation and a symbolic indicator of lifestyle, class
position, and status. Some research in this area has
focused on the architecture of the home, such as the
kitchen, showing how the consumption of particular
housing styles, décor, and appliances is associated
with symbolic mechanisms of identity formation
and class or individually derived lifestyles. Others
have focused on the consumption of expensive leisure goods by high-income earners as symbols of a
desired, but unattainable, lifestyle. In work-rich but
time-poor households, Oriel Sullivan and Jonathan
Gershuny show how expensive leisure equipment, in
contrast to other kinds of expensive items bought for
conspicuous display, form an important component
of an imaginary future lifestyle when more time is
available to pursue leisure activities.
Parenting is an also an area of domestic work
that has changed considerably over time, requiring
increasing amounts of time and showing clear differences in style and nature across social class. Despite
the decline in fertility levels in much of the Western
world, evidence suggests that both men and women
are investing greater amounts of time in child care,
with women in full-time employment spending as
much time with their children as nonemployed mothers, usually by giving up leisure. Like other aspects of
domestic work, child-care labor is gendered in important ways, with men typically spending more time
playing with children and taking them to sporting
activities, while women spend more time on routine
physical care. Research suggests that perceptions of
good fathering have changed over time, with fathering no longer perceived solely in terms of the provision of economic support but increasingly including
the social, emotional, and physical care of children,
while, similarly, notions of good mothering increasingly combine perceptions of women as a good earner
as well as someone who provides quality emotional,
physical, and educational care to their children.
Some of the most recent research on the domestic division of labor has examined within-individual
variation over time. As individuals move through
different life-course stages such as marriage and parenthood, and as households are formed and reconstituted over time as a result of separation, divorce,
and remarriage, the amount of domestic labor to
be performed varies, and the factors contributing

Domestic Services

to men and women’s levels of involvement also
vary. For example, research has shown that remarried men and women have more equal divisions of
labor than those in their first marriages, while other
work has shown that cohabiting couples have more
egalitarian divisions of labor than married couples.
Similarly, there is evidence that the domestic division
of labor is more traditional in households with children and also that the timing and age of children is
important in shaping men’s level of involvement in
domestic work. Moreover, the pathway individuals
take as they move through the life course may influence domestic divisions of labor, with some research
suggesting that married couples who have cohabited
prior to marriage have more egalitarian domestic
arrangements than those who marry directly without
a period of cohabitation.
Feminist researchers have long been concerned
with the gendering of domestic labor. This concern
stems from the view that women’s responsibility for
the bulk of unpaid child care and housework lies
at the heart of gender inequality in modern societies. Many researchers, policymakers, and activists
have argued that women’s responsibility for unpaid
labor and caring work underlies broader patterns
of gender inequality. The widespread entry of married women into paid market work from the 1970s
onward was expected to herald an associated change
in men’s levels of involvement in unpaid and caring
work. But there are mixed views about just how
much the observed changes have led to greater equality in domestic divisions of labor and whether we
are witnessing the emergence of new areas of gender
inequality, particularly in access to leisure. Many
studies of Western societies report that women are
still responsible for about 70 percent of domestic
labor and that women have much less free time than
men, particularly when they have young children.
Janeen Baxter
See also Architecture; Domestic Services; Domestic
Technologies; Emotional Labor; Industrial Society;
Lifestyle; Shopping

Further Readings
Baxter, Janeen. “To Marry or Not to Marry: Marital Status
and the Household Division of Labor.” Journal of
Family Issues 26 (2005): 300–321.
Baxter, Janeen, Belinda Hewitt, and Michele Haynes. “Life
Course Transitions and Housework: Marriage,

473

Parenthood and Time on Housework.” Journal of
Marriage and Family 70 (2008): 259–272.
Coltrane, Scott. Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework, and
Gender Equity. New York: Oxford University Press,
1996.
Cowan, Ruth. More Work for Mother. New York: Basic
Books, 1984.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own
Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women.
London: Pluto, 1979.
Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and
Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003.
Reiger, Kerreen. The Disenchantment of the Home.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Southerton, Dale. “Consuming Kitchens: Taste, Context
and Identity Formation.” Journal of Consumer Culture
1 (2001): 179–203.
Sullivan, Oriel. “The Division of Housework among
‘Remarried’ Couples.” Journal of Family Issues
18 (1997): 205–224.
Sullivan, Oriel, and Jonathan Gershuny. “Inconspicuous
Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal
Market Economy.” Journal of Consumer Culture
4 (2004): 79–100.

DOMESTIC SERVICES
In recent decades, there has emerged an assumption that in commercial consumer cultures, domestic services have become increasingly commodified.
Domestic services refers to household work tasks
that allow the social reproduction of members of
the household. Routine domestic services range
from everyday housework tasks (e.g., housecleaning,
laundry, ironing, cooking, and washing up) through
household administration and gardening to caring
activities (e.g., child care, elder care, and pet care).
Nonroutine domestic services, meanwhile, range
from house-maintenance tasks (e.g., outdoor painting, plastering, decorating, and mending broken windows and appliances) to home improvement activities
(e.g., installing double glazing, insulation, putting in a
bathroom suite, building an extension or loft conversion, putting in central heating, and carpentry).
Each and every one of these domestic services
can be conducted using various sources of labor. For
example, it cannot be asserted that cooking is always
conducted as unpaid domestic work, and window

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Domestic Services

cleaning by formal employees. Cooking, for instance,
can be conducted as unpaid domestic work (e.g.,
where one cooks for oneself or one’s family), unpaid
community work (e.g., where one cooks for neighbors or friends on an unpaid basis), paid informal
work (e.g., where one cooks in a restaurant on an
off-the-books basis for “informal” payments that
are not declared to the government for tax, benefit,
or labor-law purposes), or formal employment (e.g.,
where one is a formally employed chef either registered self-employed or paid on a pay-as-you-earn
basis). Different domestic services, therefore, do not
belong to different types of work. Instead, all domestic services can be undertaken using each and every
form of work.
Four basic types of work, therefore, can be used
to provide domestic services. They are
• self-provisioning, which is unpaid work
undertaken by household members for themselves
and other members of their household;
• unpaid community work, which is work
provided on an unpaid basis by and for the
extended family, social or neighborhood
networks, and more formal voluntary and
community groups, and ranges from kinship
exchange through friendship/neighborly
reciprocal exchanges to one-way volunteering for
voluntary organizations;
• paid informal work, where legal goods and
services are exchanged for money, but these
exchanges are unregistered by, or hidden from,
the state for tax, social security, or labor-law
purposes; and
• paid formal employment, which is paid work
that is declared to the state for tax, social
security and labor law purposes.

Domestic Services in Historical Perspective
A widespread belief is that over the long run of history,
the provision of domestic services has steadily shifted
from the informal economy (e.g., self-provisioning,
paid informal work) into the formal economy. Indeed,
this is the assumption underpinning the view that
households are outsourcing ever-greater amounts
of their domestic service provision to the formal
economy.
Examining the household in historical perspective,
a major historical shift has taken place away from

household production for domestic consumption to
a situation in which household members work for
employers in exchange for wages. Household members have increasingly secured the livelihood of themselves and their codependents by selling their labor
as a commodity within the labor market rather than
by producing goods that satisfy their own immediate needs. This development is itself part of the wider
separation of people from the means of production.
Unable to produce their own goods for immediate
consumption, modern workers (or their “breadwinners”) must sell their labor in exchange for cash to
purchase goods on consumer markets. Goods, which
had been made in the home or by local craftsmen for
barter and only occasionally for market exchange,
were gradually replaced by goods production en masse
in factories. This led to a separation of home and
production. Those who had previously made goods
for their own use started to use their wages to purchase factory-made items. The transfer of domesticservice provision (rather than goods production) out
of the sphere of self-provisioning and into the formal
economy, however, has been rather slower. Indeed,
and unlike goods production, the vast majority of
domestic services are perhaps still met through selfprovisioning. Whether domestic services will follow
the same path as goods production from the home to
the formal economy is therefore open to question.

Contemporary Debates Regarding
Domestic Services
A long-standing belief has been that over the long
run of history, there would be a steady formalization of the domestic services sphere and that an evergreater proportion of all domestic services would be
provided by those in formal jobs. In recent years,
however, this has started to be questioned, not least
because there is little evidence that there has been an
outsourcing of domestic services to the formal economy. Most studies of how people spend their working time based on time-use diaries have revealed that
self-provisioning remains rife in cotemporary societies. Even if self-sufficiency, by which is meant a total
reliance on self-provisioning, is therefore today rare,
self-reliance, by which is meant the use of self-provisioning as one of a plurality of economic practices,
remains a ubiquitous strategy throughout the world.
It is also a practice that, if anything, is growing relative to the formal economy. Most time-budget studies

Domestic Services

reveal no reduction in the time spent on unpaid work
relative to paid work in the advanced economies over
the past half century. Instead, quite the opposite is the
case. There has been an informalization, not formalization, of working time in many Western nations.
There is therefore a growing desire to understand
not only the different sources of labor used to provide
domestic services and how this varies across populations and temporally but also how this impacts the
gender divisions of domestic labor. On the latter
issue, in particular, it is now widely recognized that
when domestic services are conducted using selfprovisioning, women remain responsible for the vast
bulk of such work and that although men might help
out to a slightly greater extent than in the past, men
largely still do not take responsibility for organizing such work. In dual-earner heterosexual-couple
households, for example, women remain responsible
for producing the shopping lists for the supermarket
or remembering that birthday and anniversary cards
need to be bought. Where such women have managed to reduce their domestic workload, it is largely
not due to men doing more. Rather, it is because
women are outsourcing the work to other women.
The outcome has been a debate over the implications
of this trend. The widely held view has been that it is
creating low-paid, low-skilled, and exploitative jobs
and re-creating the master-servant relationship. This
is currently exemplified in the tendency for relatively
affluent women to employ women who are less well
off to conduct their domestic services, rather than
forcing men to do a greater share of the domestic
workload.
This tendency toward a commodification of
domestic services has been further compounded
throughout the Western world by many governments actively encouraging households to outsource
their domestic services to formal service providers.
In many European countries, for example, service
vouchers have been introduced that enable households to purchase formal domestic services that are
subsidized by the state.

Domestic Services: The Future
In the future, it is likely that the further encroachment
of commercial businesses into the realm of domestic
services will be put under greater scrutiny, not least
in terms of the quality of jobs being created and the
implications of such a trend on gender inequalities.

475

At the same time, nevertheless, how commercial business can increase their market share of the domesticservices sector will be actively investigated, not least
how the numerous barriers to the further commodification of the domestic services sector can be combated. For example, households do not outsource
simply because of cost constraints or opposition to
employing others to do their “dirty work.” Other reasons relate not so much to household circumstances
but to formal services. Ease of access to formal service providers, the availability of formal enterprises,
their reliability, the quality of their end product, and
trust issues are all reasons for not using commercial
domestic services and for turning toward other forms
of provision. How these might be tackled will be a
fertile area for future research not only for those seeking to facilitate a commercialization of the domestic
services sector but also for those seeking to understand the blockages to commodification in contemporary societies and therefore cultures of resistance to
commodification.
Whether the quality of jobs in this potentially
expanding domestic-services sector can be improved
in terms of both pay and conditions is another issue
that will become increasingly important. Until now,
it has been perhaps simply accepted as inevitable and
immutable that jobs in the domestic services sphere
are low paid and of poor quality. How they might
be upgraded will be an important issue for the future
not just due to the increasing proportion of workers who might earn a living in this sphere but also
for tackling gender inequalities in the formal labor
market.
Colin C. Williams
See also Commodification; Division of Labor; Domestic
Division of Labor; Emotional Labor; Informalization;
Outsourcing; Self-Service Economy; Service Industry

Further Readings
Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, Nicholas Faraclas, and
Claudia von Werlhof, eds. There Is an Alternative:
Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate
Globalization. London: Zed, 2001.
Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, and Marie Mies. The
Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized
Economy. London: Zed, 1999.
Gershuny, Jonathan. After Industrial Society: The Emerging
Self-Service Economy. London: Macmillan, 1978.

476

Domestic Technologies

Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in
Post-Industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Doméstica: Immigrant
Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of
Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
Oakley, Anne. The Sociology of Housework. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1974.
Pahl, Raymond. Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell,
1984.
Williams, Colin C. Re-Thinking the Future of Work:
Directions and Visions, Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007.
Windebank, Jan. “Dual-Earner Couples in Britain and
France: Gender Divisions of Domestic Labour and
Parenting Work in Different Welfare States.” Work,
Employment & Society 15 (2001): 269–290.

DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGIES
Domestic technologies encompass a vast array of
tools, devices, and machines that are commonly
used within the home. Such technologies are often
categorized under headings including domestic appliances (e.g., vacuum cleaners and food processors),
white goods (e.g., washing machines, dishwashers,
and refrigerators), brown goods (e.g., ovens and
microwaves), and entertainment items (e.g., televisions, DVD players, VCRs, PCs, and laptops) but are
often used for multiple purposes—and are increasingly integrated into what has been referred to as the
“SMART” home. Domestic technologies are both
practically and symbolically significant to the emergence of consumer culture—practical in the sense of
shifting patterns of time use to facilitate the growth
of leisure, and symbolic of the household as a critical
unit of consumption.
In the social sciences, there has been a long history of research that has attempted to examine and
document the development of domestic technologies.
This has included the evolution of specific technologies through time (see Shove and Southerton 2002),
patterns of adoption and use (e.g., Rogers 1962), and
how technologies are appropriated within everyday
household and family life (Cowan 1985) as well as
reflect—and perpetuate—the insistently gendered
character of domestic life and division of labor
(Wajcman 2007a).

Given the widespread diffusion of many domestic
technologies in Western societies, it has often been
assumed that such objects have led to the automation of various domestic tasks and activities and have
consequently decreased the amount of time individuals spend conducting household work. However,
empirical evidence supporting this claim is far from
conclusive. For example, Michael Bittman and colleagues, in their analysis of the Australian 1997 Time
Use Survey, argued that domestic technologies seldom reduce the time that women (who historically
have the foremost responsibility for carrying out
domestic work) spend conducting domestic labor
and, paradoxically, in some instances, the use of such
objects actually increases the time conducting household chores and activities. Their findings suggest that
even though technologies such as washing machines
have reduced the time required to launder clothing,
we are washing our clothes much more regularly
than we did in the past. In Bittman and colleagues’
words, “Appliances are used to increase output and
not to save labour time” (2004, 413).
In addition to emphasizing the symbolic importance of domestic technologies in terms of ownership
and display, studies have also revealed the inherent
gendered nature of domestic tools, machines, and
devices and how they are entangled in the sociospatial relations of families and households. Indeed, the
purchase and use of such objects have as such been
acknowledged as being powerful household practices
that are entrenched in the subjective construction and
politics of households. Domestic technologies that
are routinely used in unpaid domestic work (such
as cooking, cleaning, and child care) often evoke
strong feminine connotations, whereas those that
are used for economically valued producing activities
(such as do-it-yourself) are more likely to symbolize more masculine ideals and traits. Consequently,
the consumption of domestic technologies can have
a significant role in the constitution of masculine and
feminine subjectivities as well as the gendering of
domestic space.
Furthermore, while domestic technologies are
used by men (e.g., vacuum cleaners, microwaves),
they are generally not considered “men’s machines.”
Jennifer Scanlon, for example, argues that the use
of items such as barbeque equipment and carving
knives enables men to take part in household cultures
without compromising their masculine identities.
Gender symbolism has, therefore, been suggested

Douglas, Mary

by Judy Wajcman (2000) as a means to instill technologies as a male-orientated domain, embodied in
metaphors, symbols, and values that evoke strong
male connotations. Consequently, some technologies
(vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc.) are more
likely designed to perpetuate feminine values such as
user-friendliness and care, whereas more high-tech
machines are used outside the home.
Given the proliferation and multifaceted uses
of information and communications technologies within the home in recent years, it has become
recognized that the boundaries of the home have
become increasingly blurred as a consequence of the
gradual permeability of information, presence flow,
and behavior that have long been associated with
the “outside” world. In particular, it is often claimed
that the Internet and related technologies (facilitated
by home PCs, laptops, and mobile technologies)
have served to increase the integration between the
spheres of home, leisure, work, and other spaces
(through home working, online shopping, gaming,
etc.). However, little attention has been focused on
how such technologies could potentially displace,
reorganize, and fracture time to “fit in” with the
plethora of routines and rituals conducted within the
household as well as the responsibilities which fell
under the remit of domestic commitments outside of
the home (see Dijst, Kwan, and Schwanen 2009).
Jonathan Elms
See also Appropriation; Consumption and Time Use;
Do-It-Yourself; Domestic Division of Labor;
Households; Information Technology

Further Readings
Bittman, Michael, James M. Rice, and Judy Wajcman.
“Appliances and Their Impact: The Ownership of
Domestic Technology and Time Spent on Household
Work.” The British Journal of Sociology 5, no. 3
(2004): 401–423.
Cowan, R. Schwartz. “How the Refrigerator Got Its
Hum.” In Social Shaping of Technology, edited by
Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcam. Buckingham,
UK: Open University Press, 1994
Dijst, Martin, Mei-Po Kwan, and Tim Schwanen. “Guest
Editorial: Decomposing, Transforming, and
Contextualising (E)-Shopping.” Environment and
Planning B: Planning and Design 36 (2009): 195–203.
Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. Glencoe,
IL: Free Press, 1962.

477

Scanlon, Jennifer. The Gender and Consumer Culture
Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Shapiro, Stuart. “Places and Spaces: The Historical
Interaction of Technology, Home and Privacy.”
Information Society 14 (1998): 275–284.
Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the
Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience—Narratives of
Normalization.” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3
(2002): 301–319.
Wajcman, Judy. “Reflections on Gender and Technology
Studies: In What State Is the Art?” Social Studies of
Sciences 30, no. 3 (2000): 447–464.
Wajcman, Judy. “From Women and Technology to Gendered
Technoscience.” Information, Communication & Society
10, no. 3 (2007a): 287–298.
Wajcman, Judy. “ICTs and Inequality: Net Gains for
Women?” In Oxford Handbook of Information and
Communication Technologies, edited by Robin Mansell,
Chrisanthi Avgerou, Danny Quah, and Roger
Silverstone, 581–600. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007b.

DOUGLAS, MARY (1921–2007)
Mary Douglas, one of the most celebrated social
anthropologists of her time, was born in 1921 and
died in 2007. She was the author of more than a
dozen books. Her first book, Purity and Danger: An
Analysis of Pollution and Taboo, published in 1966,
established her reputation. Among her other books
are Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology
(1970), Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology
(1975), The World of Goods: An Anthropological
Theory of Consumption (1979), written with Baron
Isherwood, and Risk and Culture (1980), written
with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky.
She received her PhD in anthropology from
Oxford University, where she was a student of the
distinguished anthropologist E. E. Evans-Prichard.
Douglas taught at the University of London from
1952 to 1978, was a resident scholar at the Russell
Sage Foundation in New York for a few years, and
then taught at Northwestern University (1981–1985)
and Princeton University (1985–1988). She wrote on
a wide variety of topics, from rituals, religions, and
taboos in preliterate cultures to behavior in contemporary consumer cultures.
Douglas has a discussion in her book Natural
Symbols that led to the development of grid-group

478

Douglas, Mary

theory, the topic of most significance to those interested in consumer cultures. Douglas applied gridgroup theory in a seminal article, “In Defence of
Shopping,” which appeared originally in her collection of essays Objects and Objections, published by
the Toronto Semiotic Circle, and later in Pasi Falk
and Colin Cambell’s edited book, The Shopping
Experience.
Grid-group theory suggests that individuals face
two questions in establishing an identity: “Who am I?”
and “What should I do?” They arrive at their identities by becoming members of groups—Douglas calls
them lifestyles—with either strong boundaries that
contain them tightly or with weak boundaries that
allow them to pass in and out of the group with ease.
They answer the second question by becoming members of groups that have either few rules or numerous
and varied rules and prescriptions.
This generates four, and only four, lifestyles, which
are shown here:
Group (Boundaries)
Strong boundaries
Weak boundaries
Strong boundaries
Weak boundaries
Grid (Prescriptions)
Numerous prescriptions
Numerous prescriptions
Few prescriptions
Few prescriptions
Lifestyle
Hierarchical (Elitists)
Fatalist (Isolates)
Egalitarian (Enclavists)
Individualists

Douglas offers an important insight about these
four cultural types in her article on shopping:
None of these four lifestyles (individualist,
hierarchical, enclavist, isolated) is new to students of
consumer behaviour. What may be new and
unacceptable is the point that these are the only four
distinctive lifestyles to be taken into account, and the
other point, that each is set up in competition with
the others. Mutual hostility is the force that accounts
for their stability. (1997, 19)

These groups are important, Douglas suggests,
because they shape our consumer choices.
It is our cultural alignments, she explains, that are
the strongest predictors of our consumer preferences.
When we are wandering around shopping centers or
doing any shopping, we are actualizing the lifestyle
to which we are attached and rejecting the kinds of
choices made by members of other lifestyles. She writes,
We have to make a radical shift away from thinking
about consumption as a manifestation of individual
choices. Culture itself is the result of a myriad
of individual choices, not primarily between commodities but between kinds of relationships. The
basic choice a rational individual has to make is the
choice about what kind of society to live in.
According to that choice, the rest follows. Artefacts
are selected to demonstrate that choice. Food is
eaten, clothes are worn, cinema, books, music,
holidays, all the rest are choices that conform with
the initial choice for a form or society. (17)

When she writes the word society, she is referring to lifestyles. Her thesis flies in the face of those
who argue that it is individual taste that shapes our
consumer behavior. What seems to be individual
taste, her argument suggests, is based on unconscious imperatives located in the lifestyle to which
people belong. What is more interesting, according
to her theory, cultural bias shapes our behavior.
“Shopping,” she writes, “is agonistic, a struggle
not to define what one is, but what one is not”
(30), which means that shopping is, since we are
rejecting other lifestyles, ultimately an act of cultural defiance.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Collective Identity; Consumer (Freedom of)
Choice; Identity; Lifestyle; Material Culture; Rituals;
Shopping; Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’til You Drop: Consumer
Behavior and American Culture. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in
Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Douglas, Mary. “In Defence of Shopping.” In The
Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin
Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage, 1997.

Downshifting

DOWNSHIFTING
Downshifting is a concept that spread in the United
States during the 1990s, starting with the Amy
Salzman’s book Down-Shifting: Reinventing Success
on a Slower Track. Downshifting involves focusing
less on paid work in order to have time to do more of
the things one wants to do while cutting out unnecessary expenditure. But it does not mean going to the
extremes and deviating too far from common behavior or attempting self-sufficiency. The concept is also
used in England, Australia, and other industrialized
countries, for example, in Sweden, where it quickly
won acceptance in 2008.
The term is derived from the process of changing
gears in a car to drive more slowly. It can be defined
as making a voluntary, long-term change in one’s lifestyle that involves accepting significantly less income
and consumption. Downshifting often has to do with
practical changes that reflect a relatively low level of
orientation toward work and consumption.
Ideas about an ascetic or simple life, coupled with
frugality and limited aspirations, are well known
in most major religions, as well as in literature. An
example is the still popular book Walden (1855) by
Henry David Thoreau, which describes a simple life
in the forest far from urban stress.
Media often use downshifting and the term voluntary simplicity as exchangeable concepts. The latter
term was spread through the 1980s through a book
by Duane Elgin titled Voluntary Simplicity: Towards
a Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich.
The subtitle of the book has become a slogan for
the American simplicity movement. However, these
concepts can be seen as separate categories. One difference is that the simplifier may have lived simple
all her life, while the downshifter per definition must
have made a significant change. Another major difference is that the simplifier, but not the downshifter,
is driven by a coherent and articulated philosophy
that includes a concern for environmental issues. This
goes beyond just buying environmentally friendly
products by also focusing on the moral imperative of
a low level of consumption.
The concept of downshifting has gained importance
in a context of long working hours and frequent overtime work. Reports on stress, time pressure, consumerism, rat race, and problems of maintaining a balance

479

between work and private life are quite common.
Many also find Western societies too materialistic and
focused on money and consumption. Downshifting is
a reaction to our work-oriented consumer culture and
an antithesis of the yuppies of the 1980s. Downshifters
often suggest that the marginal utility from consumption is declining when consumption levels are increasing. Downshifting has become a concept that catches
the dream of a lifestyle with more time and balance.
A popular joke in books on downshifting is that the
problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you
are still a rat.
Is downshifting widely practiced or is it just a
common dream? The most cited academic survey on downshifting, Juliet Schor’s The Overspent
American, states that 19 percent of the U.S. respondents declared that they voluntarily had made a longterm lifestyle change in the last five years—other
than taking a regularly scheduled retirement—which
had resulted in making less money. Similarly, Clive
Hamilton found the numbers to be around 25 percent
in telephone surveys in Great Britain and Australia.
Voluntary downward earning mobility has also
been analyzed by Rachel Dwyer using longitudinal
data (1983–1992) from the United States. She shows
that almost 10 percent of the employees below the
age of sixty had voluntarily changed to a job with
at least 10 percent less pay during the last ten years.
Dwyer concludes that a significant number of workers are trading extrinsic values of the job such as pay
and status for intrinsic values such as flexibility and
a reduced amount of working hours. Some were
motivated to take a job with lower pay in order to
get greater autonomy through self-employment or a
move to another geographic location. But the most
common reason to accept reduced income was that
the new job demanded fewer working hours. Several
quantitative studies support the efficiency of downshifting through a strong association between shorter
hours and lower feelings of time pressure.
It is often proposed that downshifters usually are
professionals with high incomes and therefore can
more easily make do with a cut in pay. But the study
by Dwyer found that the pay from the last job was
only about 30 percent higher for downshifters compared with individuals changing to a job with similar
or higher pay. Schor also found that the majority of
the downshifters don’t have high incomes and thus
calls her analysis The Downshifter Next Door.

480

Durkheim, Émile

The amount of websites and self-help books
on downshifting are almost overwhelming. Jörgen
Larsson and Christer Sanne’s content analysis of
some of these books claims that two of the core suggestions were to lower the aspirations of career success and of “having it all.” Surveys on work-hour
preferences reveal a widespread wish for shorter
hours even when it involves a cut in pay. But even if
the focus on downshifting seems to be increasing in
many Western countries, it isn’t something that large
portions of the population practice. The advice from
the downshifting literature—to focus less on career
and money, and more on relationships and balance
in life—are well in line with the research on what
enhances life satisfaction. Implementing this singlehandedly, lacking the support of one’s partners,
friends, and colleagues, along with supporting societal structures, entails major obstacles.
One obstacle is that most workplaces are organized around full-time jobs that do not admit cuts
in working hours. In most sectors, there is also a
full-time norm, and it might be viewed as disloyal
toward both the employer and colleagues to work
less. Another problem is that even if shorter hours
are agreed on formally, the reduction of tasks and
responsibilities might not follow automatically. The
lack of good part-time jobs might also make it more
difficult to find a job where one uses one’s skills and
abilities to the fullest. This is not only increasing the
risk of getting a less interesting job and of getting
a job that pays less per hour, according to Robert
H. Frank. These problems, note Peter Meiksins and
Peter Whalley, are reasons for many downshifters to
try the route of becoming self-employed.
Another obstacle is that work and consumption
are central for shaping our identity, both through
being a professional in a certain field of work and
through the consumption possibilities that the salary entails. With a lower focus on work and consumption, the downshifter has fewer possibilities of
signaling status and shaping a positive identity. An
illustration of these problems is Amitai Etzioni’s
report that some downshifters are wearing one
expensive or stylistic item in order to distinguish
from the poor—something that can be described as
conspicuous nonconsumption, paraphrasing what
Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption
more than a century ago.
Due to these obstacles, downshifting is hardly a
solution for relieving the problems of long hours and

time pressures experienced by everyone today; it is
rather a private adaptation in absence of a general
solution. However, if a sufficient amount of pioneers
would overcome these obstacles, it would change
norms related to work and consumption, which
would make it easier for others aspiring to downshift.
Jörgen Larsson
See also Affluent Society; Dematerialization;
Environmental Social Science and Sustainable
Consumption; Life(style) Politics; Lifestyle;
Materialism and Postmaterialism; Needs and Wants;
Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings
Dwyer, Rachel. “Downward Earnings Mobility after
Voluntary Employer Exits.” Work and Occupations 31,
no. 1 (2004): 111–139.
Elgin, Duane. Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life
That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. New York:
Quill, 1981.
Etzioni, Amitai. “Voluntary Simplicity: Characterization,
Select Psychological Implications, and Societal
Consequences.” Journal of Economic Psychology
19 (1998): 619–643.
Frank, Robert H. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to
Satisfy in an Era of Excess. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Larsson, Jörgen, and Christer Sanne. “Self Help Books on
Avoiding Time Shortage.” Time & Society 14, nos. 2–3
(2005): 213–230.
Lippe, Tanya van der. “Dutch Workers and Time Pressure:
Household and Workplace Characteristics.” Work,
Employment and Society 21, no. 4 (2007): 693–711.
Meiksins, Peter, and Peter Whalley. Putting Work in Its
Place: A Quiet Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2002.
Salzman, Amy. Down-Shifting: Reinventing Success on a
Slower Track. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Veblen, Thorstein. A Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Penguin Books, 1994. First published 1899.

DURKHEIM, ÉMILE (1858–1917)
Émile Durkheim, the father of French sociology and
one of the greatest sociologists of the nineteenth
century, was born in 1858 and died in 1917. Durkheim
planned to become a rabbi since his father was a rabbi

Durkheim, Émile

and came from a long line of rabbis, but in his adolescence, Durkheim abandoned the idea due to his interest
in the new social science of sociology. He held the first
chair of sociology in France and did a great deal to
establish sociology as an empirical discipline.
He wrote a number of seminal books such as
Suicide, The Division of Labor in Society, Moral
Education, and The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life. Durkheim was interested in what he called
“social facts,” which he defined in The Rules of
Sociological Method as “every way of acting, fixed
or not, capable of exercising on the individual an
external constraint” (1950, 2). What happened, he
maintained, is that normally individuals internalize
moral rules, which they get from society, and these
moral rules guide their conduct.
Durkheim made a distinction between what he
called mechanical and organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people’s differences are minimized and
the focus is on what is good for all. The family would
be a good example of mechanical solidarity. Organic
solidarity, the opposite of mechanical solidarity, is
characterized by a focus on differences among people.
In a differentiated society, people focus on themselves
and their goals and aspirations, and not on the common good. The corporation would be a good example
of an institution characterized by organic solidarity.
When problems arise in societies and moral rules
are no longer seen as valid, you get what he called
“anomie.” It refers to a lack of accepted rules of
conduct in society that individuals can use to guide
their behavior. Durkheim showed that suicide was
connected to anomie, and the more integrated individuals are within organizations and the less anomic
they are, the less likely they are to commit suicide.
One cause of anomie, he suggested, was affluence.
He argued that in anomic societies, affluent people
are deceived into thinking that society is irrelevant.
Anomie, he wrote, deceives us into believing that
we depend on ourselves only, which leads to a corrosive individualism. “The less one has the less he
is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely,” he wrote in Suicide (1951, 254).
In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life, Durkheim analyzes the complicated relationship
that exists between individuals and society. He writes,
Man is a double. There are two beings in him: an
individual being which has its foundation in the
organism and the circle of whose activities is

481

therefore strictly limited, and a social being which
represents the highest reality in the intellectual and
moral order that we can know by observation—I
mean society. . . . In so far as he belongs to society,
the individual transcends himself, both when he
thinks and when he acts. (1965, 29)

We have a double nature, then. We are individuals
who live in society, and society lives in us as the values, rules of behavior, and moral codes that we learn
as members of society.
For Durkheim, a problem arises when our focus on
our “needs” or desires becomes too strong. Affluence
leads people to insatiable desires and the formation
of what we now call consumer cultures. It is society
that must help individuals learn to limit their desires,
Durkheim argues. In language that reminds one of
Max Weber’s analysis of Calvinist Protestantism and
capitalism, Durkheim writes about human appetites
that escape from a sense of limitation:
The appetites thus awakened are freed from any
limiting authority. By sanctifying these appetites, . . .
this deification of material well being has placed
them above human law . . . from the top to the
bottom of the scale covetous desires are around
without it being known where they might level out.
(Thompson 1985, 111)

This materialism and focus on insatiable individual desires leads to anomie and a chaotic loss of a
moral center in society.
It is the creation, by social institutions such as
advertising, of a belief in large numbers of people in
modern societies—with rare exceptions—that they
must consume endlessly to show that they are successful and worthy of love and admiration, among
other things, that has created the modern consumer
society, with all its pleasures and problems.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Advertising; Affluent Society; Anomie; Division
of Labor; Individualization; Materialism and
Postmaterialism; Sociology; Weber, Max

Further Readings
Berger, Arthur Asa. Durkheim Is Dead: Sherlock Holmes Is
Introduced to Sociological Theory. Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press, 2003.
Durkheim, Émile. The Rules of Sociological Method.
Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1950.

482

Durkheim, Émile

Durkheim, Émile. Suicide. Translated by John A Spaulding.
New York: Free Press, 1951.
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free
Press, 1965.

Thompson, Kenneth, ed. Readings from Émile Durkheim.
London: Routledge, 1985.

E
German “Blue Angel” from 1978 is the first ecolabel of this sort, and in the next ten to fifteen years
followed a lot of both national and regional labels:
the U.S. Green Seal (1989), the Japanese Eco-mark
(1989), the Nordic Swan (1989), and the European
Flower (1993). In 1994, the nonprofit organization
Global Ecolabelling Network was established, and in
2009, more than twenty eco-labeling programs from
all over the world were members. Energy-consuming
appliances have their own label systems like the EU
Energy Arrows (1992), which, contrary to other
eco-labels, is mandatory for all appliances put on the
market in the European Union, or the U.S. Energy
Star (1993). Both focus on energy consumption during the use phase rather than the production of the
products. Finally, there are also stewardship labels
related to forest and marine use, focusing on how
to prevent the “tragedy of the commons,” meaning
exploitation and destruction of common natural ecosystems we all are dependent on. Also, here the initiative and the third-party control often lies with NGOs
like Forest Stewardship Council, an international
organization established in 1993 representing social,
environmental, and business interests in forestry.
Development of eco-labels took place concurrently
with more general shifts in environmental policy
that went from focusing on pollution prevention to
cleaner production and then to focus on sustainable
consumption. This shift represents an acknowledgement of the fact that it is not enough to focus on how
things are produced; the consumption itself, including the amount of consumed items, their use, and
their disposal, is of equal environmental importance.
Concurrently with this shift of focus, a regulatory shift

EATING DISORDERS
See Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Illnesses
and Maladies

ECO-LABELING
Eco-labeling refers to the procedure for labeling
products intended to inform consumers whether the
product lives up to specified environmental standards.
The standards are defined by a third party, often a
nonprofit organization including both public authorities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
that also controls and certifies the products. The ecolabel is a tool to help concerned consumers choose the
most environmentally sound products available.
There are different types of consumer products,
and there are also different kinds of eco-labels.
The oldest is the Demeter label established by the
Steiner movement in the 1920s for food produced
by biodynamic farming methods. In the 1970s,
organic farming flourished in many Western countries as a social-ecological movement and different
national NGOs initiated national labels. In 1972,
some of these movements joined the International
Federation of Organic Agriculture (IFOA), and in
the early 1990s, IFOA played a strong role in establishing EU regulation on organic farming and labeling. Another type of eco-label focuses on products
like cleansing agents, papers, and so on, gradually
expanding to include ever more product types. The
483

484

E-Commerce

occurs from command and control toward voluntary
agreements, also called “from government to governance.” Eco-labeling is part of the new environmental
policy instruments, together with other types of voluntary agreements, eco-taxis, and tradable permits,
which have been described as market-based, costeffective, flexible, and consumer-driven instruments.
Eco-labeling should also be seen in relation to
developments in consumer culture and consumer
politics. Political consumerism is not a new phenomenon, though it has become ever more widespread
together with trends such as globalization of production, individualization in late-modern society, and
risk handling in everyday life. Political consumption
includes both boycotts and “buycotts,” and for the
latter, the consumer needs information, such as ecolabels, when choosing between different products
to determine which of them is the better according
to political, moral, or environmental arguments.
Eco-labels can also be regarded like other aspects of
consumer culture where different types of consumers buy different products as expressions of different
tastes and lifestyles. Thus, buying eco-labeled products can be a political or moral statement as well as
a lifestyle message to other consumers. Consumer
studies show that certain consumer groups (middleaged, well-educated, leftist women) have a higher
tendency to buy eco-labeled products than others.
There are different kinds of considerations and
discussions regarding eco-labels. First, the question
to what extent eco-labeling will actually support a
sustainable society. Within the environmental political
thought known as ecological modernization, there is
firm belief in the problem-solving capacity of modern
techniques and institutions. Eco-labels are seen as part
of this, and it is believed that enlightened consumers
will chose eco-products and thereby support the most
eco-friendly producers and concurrently create winwin scenarios between economic and environmental
development. Dating back to the radical environmental movement in the 1970s, other environmental viewpoints are more skeptical. They put forward “limits
to growth” and “small is beautiful,” and in this
scenario, eco-labels are of minor relevance, as local
self-sufficiency is seen as the way toward a sustainable
future, and obviously eco-labels are of little relevance
if the goal is to consume less. Quite another relevant
question is whether it is actually fair to put all responsibility for the environment on the shoulders of the
consumer to make the choice in the supermarket with
a cart in an already hectic everyday life.

Another type of consideration regarding ecolabels is the question of what should be considered
more or less environmental. Many eco-labels use
scientific lifecycle analysis to answer this question,
though the fact that most labels are certified by
organizations with joint representations from different relevant actors indicates that there are different
opinions and that questions of sustainability cannot
be answered objectively. This is also a question of not
complicating the labels too much and thus confusing
the consumers more than enlightening them. Thus,
different labels emphasize different aspects. Organic
food labels do not consider energy consumption, and
energy labels omit reduction of harmful materials.
Furthermore, there are relevant questions, such as
whether some product types—for instance, cars—are
just too unsustainable to be labeled at all.
Kirsten Gram-Hanssen
See also Carbon Trading; Consumer Protest:
Environment; Environmental Footprinting;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Life(style) Politics; Moral Economy;
Political and Ethical Consumption

Further Readings
Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-Standards,
Product Labelling and Green Consumerism. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping:
Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Micheletti, Michele, Andreas Follesdal, and Dietland Stolle.
Politics, Products and Markets: Exploring Political
Consumerism Past and Present. Piscataway, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2004.

Website
Global Ecolabelling Network. http://www
.globalecolabelling.net/index.html.

E-COMMERCE
E-commerce is a term that refers to electronically
mediated financial transactions between two parties,
and these commercial interchanges can be between
organizations, individuals, or a combination of both.
In 1989, the networks forming the backbone of the
Internet became accessible to business and commercial
users. The liberalization of the Internet networks

E-Commerce

(originally designed for military, then educational and
research use only) to allow commercial transactions
led to rapid and exponential growth of the number
of Internet users and commercially orientated websites. During this period, the term e-commerce came
into popular usage as a result of the commercialization of computer networks forming the Internet
and the growing number of firms that rushed to sell
online. Business trading rapidly expanded as commercial organizations across the United States, and
then Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world entered
into financial exchanges via the Internet. The rate
of adoption of e-commerce websites has continued
to grow to the present day, and in many nations over
90 percent of firms have websites. Not all websites
are e-commerce enabled, however, as more consumers and firms move online; more websites include
transactional facilities.
Growth in commercial online trading has given
rise to a proliferation of new phrases, acronyms, and
terms—for instance, e-commerce, business-to-business
e-commerce (B2B); business-to-government e-commerce
(B2G); business-to-consumer e-commerce (B2C);
consumer-to-consumer e-commerce (C2C). The parties involved in the exchange provide details of the context in which the e-commerce transaction takes place
and indicate where it takes place in the supply chain;
for instance, B2C transactions are between retail suppliers and the end consumer of the product or service.
Buy-side e-commerce is an interaction between buyers and sellers in the supply chain and generally refers
to the procurement of supplies and resources needed
by an organization such as product constituents,
components, materials, plant equipment, and business services. In certain settings, e-commerce transactions can be considered part of the wider process of
e-procurement. E-procurement is defined to include
specification of goods and services, notification of suppliers, tendering procedures, evaluation of tenders and
agreement, and acceptance of contract signatures plus
fulfillment processing (Muffato and Payaro 2004).
Sell-side e-commerce refers to commercial interactions, in other words, financial exchanges between sellers and their customers. However, there are various
types of websites that not only facilitate e-commerce
but also support the development of sell-side
e-commerce. According to Dave Chaffey, there are
four dominant types of sell-side e-commerce websites:
1. Transactional e-commerce site. This takes
place in a commercial website setting and allows

485

the purchasing of online products and services like
those offered by Amazon.com, dell.com, and buy.
com. Firms engaging in this type of e-commerce are
able to benefit from the sale of products and services, for instance, insurance products. These types
of websites also offer other support services and
provide information for consumers who might
want to purchase products via physical stores,
mail-order catalogues, or other offline methods of
purchasing. This type of sell-side e-commerce is
typically used by retailers, travel companies, retail
banks, and car-insurance providers.
In parts of the world where this type of e-commerce
is well established, “online shopping is moving rapidly
from a minority hobby, to an everyday part of most
peoples’ lives and a quiet revolution is taking place
which is empowering consumers and shifting the balance of power in the supply chain towards the consumers” (Doherty and Ellis-Chadwick, 2010).
2. Services-oriented relationship-building website. This type of site provides information that will
help build customer relationships and acts as a precursor to the actual purchase. These types of sites do
not typically offer goods for sale online, as the primary objective is to develop relationships and engage
the interest of potential customers, but rather play
an important role in the development of transactions. They provide information through the web
and encourage potential customers to sign up for
e-newsletters, which can then inform purchase decisions—for instance, Motley Fool, which is, according to its own website, a website that “champions
shareholder values and advocates tirelessly for the
individual investor.” The main contribution to
e-commerce is by encouraging offline sales and
generating inquiries or leads from potential customers. These sites can add value for existing customers
who can glean additional information about the
products and services of interest.
3. Brand-building site. These types of sites are
used to present an online experience of the brand;
they are usually developed to enhance the brand presence of manufacturers (e.g., Nestle, Kraft, DANONE,
and PepsiCo) and exclusive fashion and leading fragrance houses (e.g., Prada, Gucci, Ted Baker,
Channel). This type of website seeks to present the
brand experience rather than sell products. However,
some fashion brands are beginning to offer transactional capacity within their website (e.g., Gucci.com,

486

Econometrics

Versace.com). Nevertheless, the key contribution to
e-commerce is to support the brand and to educate
website visitors to the meaning of the brand and its
values.
4. Portal or media site. This type of site provides
access to other e-commerce sites and in doing so
also provides “wrap-around” services in the form of
information, news, updates, offers, and promotions. The term portal refers to a gateway. Portal
sites contribute to e-commerce revenue through
advertising, commission-based sales, and sale of
customer data (lists).
Since the early 1990s, e-commerce has developed significantly in terms of the range of firms and
organizations engaging in online transactions, and
technology innovations have extended the reach. For
instance, wireless devices, such as mobile phones,
netbooks, and other peripheral devices, now enable
e-commerce transactions to be conducted in remote
locations. This development is frequently referred
to as mobile commerce or m-commerce, and mobile
access appears to attract more individuals and firms
because of flexible access to the Internet (Sumita and
Yoshii 2010). However, while mobile computing is
bringing e-commerce closer to more individuals, the
perceived risk of security breaches to data and information continues to act as a barrier to the development of e-commerce, especially in the B2C context
(McCole, Ramsey, and Williams 2010).
E-commerce is sometimes confused with the term
e-business. Originally, IBM marketing staff coined
this phrase in 1997 to promote the sale of its business-computer-solution services and used advertising
slogans like e-business solutions to transform key
business processes through the use of Internet technologies. What IBM was offering were solutions for
organizational processes that include research and
development, marketing, manufacturing, inbound
and outbound logistics, and buy- and sell-side
(e-commerce) transactions with suppliers and customers. In other words, e-business is all encompassing, and it is now widely accepted that e-commerce
is part of a wide range of applications and activities
which come under the heading e-business.
Fiona Ellis-Chadwick
See also Branding; Collecting and Collectibles;
Globalization; Information Technology; Innovation
Studies; Internet; Network Society; Spaces of Shopping

Further Readings
Chaffey, Dave. E-Business and E-Commerce Management.
4th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2009.
Chaffey, Dave, Fiona E. Ellis-Chadwick, Kevin Johnston,
and Richard Mayer. Internet Marketing: Strategy,
Implementation and Practice. 4th ed. Harlow, UK: FT
Prentice Hall, 2009.
Doherty, Neil F., and Fiona E. Ellis-Chadwick. “Internet
Retailing: The Past, the Present and the Future.”
International Journal of Retail and Distribution
Management 38, nos. 11–12 (2010): 943–965.
McCole, Patrick, Elaine Ramsey, and John Williams. “Trust
Considerations on Attitudes towards Online Purchasing:
The Moderating Effect of Privacy and Security
Concerns.” Journal of Business Research 63, nos. 9–10
(September–October 2010): 1018–1024.
Muffato, Moreno, and Andrea Payaro. “Implementation of
E-Procurement and E-Fulfilment Processes: A
Comparison of Case in the Motor Cycle Industry.”
International Journal of Production Economics 89
(2004): 339–351.
Sumita, Ushio, and Jun Yoshii. “Enhancement of
E-commerce via Mobile Accesses to the Internet.”
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 9,
no. 3 (May–June 2010): 217–227.

Website
The Motley Fool. http://www.fool.co.uk/help/aboutus.aspx
(accessed December 2010).

ECONOMETRICS
According to Douglas Harper, the word econometrics is derived from two Greek words: oikonomia,
meaning the study of the management of a household or administration, and metriks, which means
measurement. This decomposition shows that econometrics at its core involves “measuring” economic
variables, like income, consumption, and so on, to
discover relationships among them. In spite of this
rather unambiguous role of econometrics, author
Peter Kennedy laments about the fact that there is
no universally agreed-on definition of econometrics.
The lack of a general definition for econometrics may
stem from the fact that the discipline of econometrics
is an “amalgam of economic theory, mathematical
economics, economic statistics and mathematical
statistics” (Gujarati 2003, 2). In spite of this difficulty of not having an all-encompassing definition, a

Econometrics

reasonable approximation that adequately captures
the various facets of econometrics would be to define
econometrics as “the application of mathematical statistics to economic data to lend empirical support to
the models constructed by mathematical economics
and to obtain numerical results” (Titner 1968, 74).
This definition can be especially appreciated while
considering the role that econometrics has played
in consumer research. For almost a hundred years,
statistical techniques like linear regression have been
used on agricultural data to estimate demand and
supply curves and to test certain hypotheses postulated by economic theory. Moreover, a lot of the contemporary research in the field of consumer behavior
is quantitative in character and involves direct application of advanced econometric techniques that have
been developed exclusively to address some of the
issues arising from consumer research.

History of Econometrics
David C. Colander and Harry Landreth give a fascinating account of the development of econometrics starting from the early work of William Stanley
Jevons. According to these scholars, the earliest contributions to econometrics were made by Jevons who
proposed, in a first systematic, data-oriented or statistical (albeit unscientific) attempt to explain business cycles, that these cycles were actuated by sun
spots. One of the earliest proponents of proper statistical research within economics was Henry L. Moore
in the early 1900s. Using the methodology developed
by statisticians like Francis Galton, Karl Pearson,
and others, Moore tried to use statistical methods to
decipher the relationship between wages and labor
productivity. Moore also made the first (unsuccessful) attempt to calculate a demand curve and measure business cycles, thus making contributions to
both macro- and microeconometrics. Moore’s work
was refined and developed by Henry Schultz who
corrected Moore’s method to accurately estimate a
demand curve. Schultz also propounded the distinction between dependent and independent variables
and noted that this distinction should be informed
by theory.
There were fundamental contributions to the data
collection and organization by Simon Kuznets and
by Wassily Leontief during the 1920s and 1930s.
These contributions led to fundamental advances
in macroeconometrics during the 1920s and 1930s

487

spearheaded by Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch
and by Jan Tinbergen. Importantly, Frisch coined the
term econometrics and made several fundamental
contributions to the field. Frisch contributed, among
other things, to what is today known as production
theory and also to the theory and techniques of
the linear regression model. He also founded the
Econometric Society, devoted to the advancement of
economic theory and econometrics. Tinbergen, along
with Frisch, developed the first comprehensive largescale macro models that were used to successfully inform
and direct public policy. Frisch was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Economics in 1969 along with Tinbergen.
At about this time, fellow Norwegian economist
Trygve Haavelmo introduced probability theory into
econometrics, thereby formalizing the theoretical foundations of econometrics. Haavelmo won the Nobel
Prize for econometrics in 1989. Haavelmo’s approach
was adopted by the Cowles Commission for Research
in Economics. Using the Haavelmo paradigm, several
researchers in the Cowles Commission went on to
make many significant contributions to both theoretical and applied econometrics including, among other
things, the Monte Carlo method of simulation.
Mainly spurred by the contributions from the Cowles
Foundation and the formalization by Haavelmo, the
new field of what is now called applied macroeconomics boomed in the 1930s. In the 1950s, this field was
enriched by contributions from stalwart economists like
Lawrence Klein who, along with his student Arthur
Goldberger, pioneered the use of simultaneous equation econometric models of the U.S. economy. Klein
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1980.
Significant advances in computer technology and
the development of new statistical methods of analysis and the increased availability of newer forms of
data (e.g., panel data) in the late 1980s spurred new
developments in econometrics. The field of microeconometrics, in particular, benefited enormously
from all these new developments in technology and
data collection. In this field, the pioneers were James
Heckman and Daniel McFadden.
Heckman is noted for the development of the
Heckit models that have been successfully used for
econometric analysis that allow for self-selection of
economic agents into, for example, training programs. McFadden is the pioneer of discrete choice
analysis where the outcome of interest is not a
continuous quantity but discrete (such as occupational choice). For their contributions in the field of

488

Econometrics

microeconometrics, Heckman and McFadden were
both awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000.
Other notable contributors to the field of econometrics include Robert Engle and Clive Granger, who
were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. Both these
authors have contributed to the study of time-series
analysis. Engle made fundamental contributions
to the modeling of financial time-series data by
inventing the ARCH (Autoregressive Conditional
Heteroscedasticity) model, while Granger pioneered
cointegration analysis (which studies long-term
stochastic relation of two or more time series) and
invented Granger causality (which helps make causal
inference in a time-series context).

Objectives of Econometrics
While economic theory can pose and answer interesting questions, it can only outline broad qualitative
relations between economic variables. However, interest can focus on not only whether the variables are
related but also to what extent. To take an example
from Damodar Gujarati, economic theory postulates
a negative relationship between the price of a good,
say, bread, and the quantity of bread demanded at any
point in time. But the theory, by itself, cannot give us
any numerical idea of the strength of the relationship
between the price and the quantity of bread. Here,
econometrics can be used to estimate a demand curve
that gives an idea about the magnitude of the numerical relationship between price and quantity. Apart
from ascertaining these quantitative effects, econometrics can be used to test hypotheses (e.g., whether
bread prices are the same in different stores of one
retailer) and in prediction (e.g., given a certain level of
income what is the forecasted level of consumption).
There is one essential feature in all econometric
relationships that must be kept in mind. All econometric models are not exact or deterministic, like
mathematical relation, but only approximate. For
the price-quantity example earlier, the relationship
between price and quantity is never precisely determined since other things affect the quantity of bread
(e.g., income) and also because there is a certain
inherent randomness in human nature (in this case,
for the consumption of a certain quantity of bread).
This fundamental uncertainty leads to all relations
being stochastic. The uncertainty is formally captured in all econometric models by the disturbance
term. The uncertainty leads to some amount of error

in all forecasting, hypotheses testing, and so on.
However, one can put bounds on these errors under
some reasonable assumptions.

Regression Analysis
Regression analysis has an important role in econometrics, since most of the theoretical and applied
econometrics is based on it. The basic idea of regression analysis is to model the relationship between one
variable Y, called the dependent variable, and one or
more variables X, called explanatory (or independent)
variables. Although regression analysis can be used
for different purposes, it is most typically employed
to investigate how change in one explanatory variable
affects the dependent variable, while the other explanatory variables are held fixed. Besides estimating the
relationship between Y and X based on some observed
or experimental data set, one can also use regression
analysis to test statistical significance of explanatory
variables (hypothesis testing). For example, in economics, it is frequently used to estimate and test the impact
of price change on a product’s demand when other
important factors (such as income) are kept constant.
In econometrics (and statistics), a large number
of different regression models have been developed
based on the type of the dependent variable (continuous, binary, etc.) and the functional form defining the
relationship between Y and X. Despite the various
models and techniques to estimate them, most of the
quantitative work done in econometrics and more
generally in social sciences is still based on the linear
regression model. In the case of one explanatory variable, the linear regression model can be written as
Y = α + βX + ε, where α and β are unknown parameters and ε is the error term that includes all other
factors affecting Y. The parameters α and β can be
estimated from data on Y and X using the method
called ordinary least squares.
Although there are many reasons behind the success of the linear regression model in econometrics,
maybe the most important ones are its (1) simplicity
and (2) applicability to a wide variety of situations.
Regarding the latter, one can use it also to estimate
relatively general nonlinear relationships, because the
model only requires that the model is linear in parameters. In addition, although linear regression model
has been mainly designed for applications where Y
is continuous, it can be used at least for explanatory
purposes also when Y is binary or count variable.

Economic Indicators

Econometrics in Consumer Behavior Research
One of the first application areas for econometrics
and for regression analysis in particular was agricultural and resource markets (Bessley et al. 2010).
Already during the 1910s and 1920s, linear regression was used to study demand and supply of food
and agricultural products (e.g., grain) as well as to
investigate quality factors affecting prices of various
agricultural commodities (e.g., vegetables). It is worth
emphasizing that these early econometric applications on consumption and prices of agricultural commodities established the groundwork for applied
econometrics also in other areas in economics.
The role of econometrics for economic research
on consumer behavior has been important since the
1920s. One indication of this is the fact that several
different econometric models and techniques have
been developed to address a number of empirical
challenges that consumption data sets typically create. Among others, econometricians have developed
various limited (or qualitative) dependent-variable
models, which arise when a dependent variable in a
regression model is restricted in some way. Examples
include the models developed for the cases where
the dependent variable (1) is discrete unordered (e.g.,
brand choice), (2) is discrete ordered (e.g., Likert scale
variable in questionnaire), or (3) has values lying
within a certain range (e.g., cigarette consumption).
Another important methodological contribution
tailored for economic applications of consumer
behavior was the development of demand systems
that meets the constraints of microeconomic theory
(Unnvehr et al. 2010). The demand system models
have been used extensively in food demand applications but also quite often in other areas such as in
alcohol and energy consumption studies. Another
contribution related to demand models was the socalled revealed preference approach to test whether
individual or collective behavior is rational. More
recently, quite a lot of work has been done to develop
modern econometric methods suitable for applications employing either scanner data from one retailer
or home-scanner data collected by some market
research firm. In addition, many recent studies have
investigated the appearance of measurement errors in
consumption data set and the methods that can deal
with them or reduce their impact.
During recent years, a major amount of applied
econometric work has concentrated on accounting

489

for heterogeneity in consumer preferences as well
as studying the impacts of information and quality
attributes on consumer behavior. Nowadays, these
studies are quite often based on either scanner data
or experimental data. However, it seems that future
empirical research on this area will increasingly use
different types of data in the same study. In addition,
improvements both in data quality and in econometric methods will allow one to study causal relationships in more credible ways.
Mika Kortelainen and Jibonayan Raychaudhuri
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Demand;
Consumption Patterns and Trends; Economic
Indicators; Economics; Households; Methodologies for
Studying Consumer Culture; Multivariate Analysis

Further Readings
Angrist, Joshua, and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. Mostly Harmless
Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Bessler, David A., Jeffrey H. Dorfman, Matthew T. Tolt,
and Jeffrey T. LaFrance. “Econometric Developments in
Agricultural and Resource Economics: The First 100
Years.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92,
no. 2 (2010): 571–589.
Colander, David C., and Harry Landreth. History of Economic
Thought. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Epstein, R. J. A History of Econometrics. Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1987.
Gujarati, Damodar. Basic Econometrics. 4th ed. Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 2003.
Kennedy, Peter. A Guide to Econometrics. 5th ed.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Titner, Gerhard. Methodology of Mathematical Economics and
Econometrics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Unnvehr, Laurian, James Eales, Helen Jensen, Jayson Lusk,
Jill McCluskey, and Jean Kinsey. “Food and Consumer
Economics.” American Journal of Agricultural
Economics 92, no. 2 (2010): 506–521.
Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. Introductory Econometrics: A
Modern Approach. 4th ed. Mason, OH: Thompson
Learning, 2009.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS
The earliest economic indicators were developed
during the 1930s in response to U.S. policymakers’
demand for economic data that could be used to

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Economic Indicators

inform and direct policy to cure the nation of the
massive depression prevailing at that time (generally
known as the Great Depression). Chapter 1 of the
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income
and Product Account (USBEA NIPA) Handbook
gives a concise history of the process of development
of these indicators during that period. In response
to the need for economy-wide indicators, Simon
Kuznets and his staff at the National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER) and the U.S. Department
of Commerce developed several indicators to estimate the national income of the United States. These
indicators were later “consolidated” into one single
indicator called the gross national product (GNP)
during the 1940s as U.S. entry into World War II
made a detailed measure of the wartime economy a
necessity for wartime planning. In 1991, the USBEA
began to use gross domestic product (GDP) instead
of GNP as the single measure of U.S. production
(therefore, GNP is not discussed here). Since then,
according to the U.S. government’s guide to the
NIPA, GDP and its components have become the
single most important measure of production in all
major economies of the world. Indeed, as the USBEA
NIPA Handbook claims, GDP, along with its component indicators, now also forms the mainstay of
modern macroeconomic analysis of the economy.
The most important component of GDP is undoubtedly consumption. Fluctuations in consumption can
cause recession or even depression and is reflected in
a dip in GDP figures. Therefore, consumption and
GDP are intimately related. This entry discusses GDP
and its “constituent” indicators that form a substantive core within the class of all economic indicators.
It also discusses several issues that are involved in
calculating these indicators.

Gross Domestic Product
Noted economic analyst and forecasting guru Bernard
Baumohl has called GDP “the mother of all economic
indicators” (2005, 100). GDP, simply, is defined as the
money value of all goods and services produced in the
economy in a given year. That is, as Baumohl (100) so
vividly puts it, if we add up the “total price tag” on all
“hammers, cars, new homes, baby cribs, videogames,
medical fees, books, toothpaste, hot dogs, haircuts,
eyeglasses, yachts, kites, and computers” (100), and
so on, produced during a year, the total value that
we would get for this sum is the GDP. Clearly, the

higher this number the better the economy is doing,
since more output is better. Also, total GDP equals
total national income (see later for why this is so). So
as GDP increases, so does the total national income,
which is good for a country.
There is one important caveat with regard to the
conclusion that the higher the GDP, the higher the
output, which necessitates a correction in the way
GDP is computed. Normally, GDP is calculated as the
value of goods and services produced in a year using
the current or prevailing prices for that year. If the
quantity of goods produced in the economy remain
the same and if only prices rise, then the product of
prices and quantities (or the values) of these goods
and services and hence the sum of these values (i.e.,
GDP) increases as well. But this increase in total value
does not really mean that the economy is producing
any more output in real terms than it was producing
before the prices rose. Therefore, if only prices rise,
then this price rise might artificially inflate the value
of GDP at an unchanged level of output. To make
the measure of GDP reflect the “real” or material
value of what is only actually physically produced
during the current year, economists usually measure
GDP at constant prices, that is, in terms of prices
that prevail in a certain “base” year. With unchanged
prices that are pegged to a certain year, the only way
for GDP to increase is through an increase in the
quantity or output. This price-change corrected measure of GDP is known as real GDP (at a certain year’s
prices), and this corrected measure gives a measure
of actual output production in the economy. In practice, to correctly measure real changes in production,
GDP deflators are constructed, which are in essence
price indices that can be used to “deflate” money or
“nominal” GDP figures to obtain real GDP figures.
In a similar vein, we have real counterparts to many
value or nominal indicators in economics (e.g., disposable income). In recent years, chain indices have
been developed to convert nominal GDP to real
GDP. These chained indices have the advantage that
they give us the percentage changes in quantities and
prices that are not tied to the choice of a specific year
as a base year. These indices also help avoid several
biases and distortions in the real GDP figures.

Gross National Income
As mentioned earlier, GDP is important because the
other side of the GDP coin is gross national income

Economic Indicators

(GNI). As Baumohl puts it, looking at GNI is a way
of figuring “where all the monies generated in the
production of GDP end up” (2005, 110). The value
of all the goods and services produced by all sectors
of the economy is also the value of the income generated in the economy. This is so because according
to the neoclassical paradigm in economics, whatever
the different factors of production, like labor and
capital, are paid is just their (partial) contribution in
the market value of their product. Therefore, it follows that the sum of their incomes must be equal to
the total value of the product. Thus, for the economy
as a whole, the sum of the remuneration going to,
say, for example, labor and capital (i.e., wages and
profits) must equal the contribution of these factors in the production process for the economy as a
whole. Extending this result to all factors of production, we have the result that the sum of all national
income is equal to the value of total production of
GDP. Therefore, another way of measuring GDP is
to measure the total income in the economy. The
value of national income thus calculated is also
known as the national income (NI). Usually, the
money values of GDP and NI (or GNI) are the same
and the only discrepancy that sometimes crops up
between them is because of accounting or measurement errors. This income measure of GDP or NI can
be subdivided into several important components or
constituent indicators as outlined next.
According to the USBEA’s guide to NIPA, NI can
conceptually be divided into the following major
components: employee compensation (including
supplements to wages and salaries), net operating
surplus, taxes and subsidies, and a term for the statistical discrepancy, as mentioned earlier. John Sloman
provides detailed definitions and examples of these
components of NI. The first three components try to
measure factor contributions in the national income,
that is, they are indicators for the contribution of
each factor of production in the national income.
Employee compensation, as the term indicates, is the
sum total of all employees’ wages and salaries and
also includes the contributions from salaries for pension, insurance funds, and so on. Net operating surplus is (approximately) the total profit that accrues
to corporate business owners after subtracting labor
costs but before adjusting the costs of business
financing. Taxes include national excise taxes, state
level duties, and sales taxes (or VAT) and license and
property taxes. Subsidies include monetary grants to

491

business enterprises. The sum of these three components are clumped together as total factor income,
which, as the name indicates, is an indicator for the
income of all factors of production combined and
hence equal to the total GDP.

Calculation Issues
There are several aspects regarding the calculation of
GDP that deserve mention. These apply equally well
to the other indicators discussed here. First, GDP
calculates only the value of the final goods and services. For example, consider a table made of wood.
The retail price at which this table is sold to a consumer is included in the GDP. However, in calculating the final GDP value, the value of the wood or
timber that made the table is not added to the GDP
figures to avoid falsely inflating the GDP figure by
“double counting” the value of the wood that made
up the table as well as the value of the table itself.
Therefore, final GDP figures leave out the values
of intermediate goods or inputs in production and
consider only the value of “final” goods. GDP also
excludes remittances, transfer payments (e.g., pensions), and so on. In other words, as Sloman puts it,
GDP actually calculates the sum of “value added” by
the factors of production (like labor and capital) in
different stages of the production process (2004, 388).
Second, the raw GDP estimates are actually “gross”
estimates in the sense that they do not take into account
the depreciation of capital, that is, these raw GDP figures do not adjust for the fact that the capital machinery and goods used in the production process tend to
get worn out in production, and this loss or capital
consumption must be accounted for in the final estimates of GDP. In other words, no allowance is made
in the raw GDP figures for replacement, repair, and
servicing expenses. If we adjust for the depreciation
in GDP by subtracting the figure for capital wear and
tear from the gross GDP figures, what we get is the
net national product (NNP) that is the net production in the economy in a year.
A concept closely related but not identical to GDP
is GNP. GNP refers to the market value of the final
goods and services produced by labor and capital
that is provided by a country’s nationals. Anything
produced inside a country’s physical boundaries is
GDP. However, some of the firms and factories inside
a nation’s boundaries are actually owned by foreigners. The production in these firms and factories that

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Economic Indicators

are within a country’s territorial borders but have
foreign ownership count as a part of that country’s
GDP but not its GNP. On the other hand, factories
and firms owned by the country’s nationals but that
have been set up in a foreign country count as part of
GNP of the country but is not a part of its GDP.
While discussing the definitions of some of the
indicators outlined in the previous pages, a question
that naturally comes to mind is how these indicators
are in practice calculated. To be specific, let us take
the calculation of GDP, for example. The definition
of GDP makes it clear that the calculation of the
economy-wide GDP figures is a stupendous task.
Baumohl gives a detailed picture of the complexity
involved in the computation of GDP. To calculate
GDP, the government accounting bureaus survey
a large number of firms and government agencies.
These bureaus collect detailed information on the
sales revenue (which in value is equal to the income
of the factors involved in production) from firms in
manufacturing, service industries, and also companies
in the construction sector. Information is collected
basically on retail sales at the retail level, revenue
accruing through the sale (or resale) of houses, and
so on. Information is also collected from government
departments for government expenditures on important sectors of the economy like health, education,
and the military. Of course, there are several other
components and sources from where the figures are
collected so that each sector of the economy is well
covered. All these figures are thereafter put together
to get a single figure for the value of all goods sold
or the GDP. Since the figures for GDP come from
several sources, it is not surprising that all of this
information is not available precisely at the same
time when the official figure for GDP is released. As
a result, there are periodic revisions of the GDP based
on the figures that come in later. Similar approaches
are used to compute other indicators.
This illustration of the method of collecting data
from various sources to obtain GDP estimates would
seem to suggest that there are several components to
GDP that allow us to see how much contribution there
is to GDP from any sector. In general, the main sectoral components of GDP are personal consumption
expenditure, private investment expenditure, government expenditure, and investment and net exports.
The meaning of these components should be clear
from their names. Baumohl gives a detailed and accurate description of these components. Consumption

expenditure is the total amount of spending by
consumers on all durable and nondurable goods
and services. This is the major component of GDP
and is usually a fall in this component of GDP that
mainly drives a real fall in GDP or what in economic
jargon is called a recession. The second component
is actual investment by businessmen and can be further divided into two components, one of which is
business fixed investment and the other is the change
in private inventories. Business fixed investment is
itself divided into two components, one of which is
nonresidential spending and the other is residential
spending. Nonresidential spending comprises expenditure on “office goods,” like printers, machines, fax
machines, and so on, whereas residential spending
is money spent, say, on building apartments, condominiums, and so on. Change in inventories refers to
the stocks of goods that are produced but not sold in
a given year. Recall that GDP gives the final value of
all output produced, but not everything that is produced is sold. GDP can therefore also be thought of
as comprising a portion that is sold and a portion
that is placed in inventory or stock. Inventories are
carried over to the next year and must be adjusted
for while looking at output for the next year. The
third component is expenditure by government at
the federal, state, or local level. These include defense
spending, expenditure on infrastructure (like bridges,
roads, etc.), expenditure on police, and on maintaining parks and public libraries. The final component
is the difference between what a country (produces
itself and) exports and what it (does not produce
itself but) imports. Since exports are goods that a
country produces (albeit those goods that are not
domestically consumed but sold to foreigners), they
have to be added to the list of items that the country
produces. The reverse logic works for imports. We
adjust the GDP figures for the fact that people buy
foreign goods that were not produced in their home
country but manufactured in another country.

Balance of Payments
In the context of imports and exports, a few words
about the concepts related to the balance of payments are necessary. The balance of payments (or
BOP for short) is an indicator that records the sum
of all transactions between a country and the rest of
the world in a given year. The BOP gives us a number
that is the net of the amount of foreign currency that

Economic Indicators

flows into the country and the amount of domestic
currency that flows out or is paid out of the country. The BOP for an economy keeps track of both
the net flow of physical goods, services, and income
payments (comprising wages, interest payments, etc.)
and also the funds for (direct and portfolio) investments and loans into and out of a country. The BOP
has three components: the capital account, the current account, and the financial account.
Sloman gives a detailed picture of the BOP and its
components. The current account is an indicator that
gives the country’s total net spending on goods and
services. It is the sum of a number of components:
the balance of trade in goods, the balance of trade in
services, factor income flows, and the current transfers of money. The balance of trade in goods is just
the earnings on exports minus the expenditures made
for imports. The balance of trade in services is the
equivalent indicator for trade in services. Similarly,
factor income flows capture the net income (comprising wages, interest, and profits) flows in and out
of a country. Cash transfers refer to net monetary
remittances between the home country and the rest
of the world by private individuals as well as money
transfers by the government or by international organizations in and out of the country. If, on balance,
the current account shows a positive figure, that is,
if the sum of all the three components is on balance
positive, then we say that the current account of a
country is in surplus; otherwise, if the net balance is
negative, then we say that the account is in deficit.
The capital account records the net flow of funds
in and out of a country associated with the net (i.e.,
domestic minus foreign) acquisition of assets. The
capital account comprises components like the remittances to their home country by migrant labor, government grants for foreign projects, and so on.
The financial account of the balance of payments
comprises several components like foreign direct
investment (FDI; defined as the net flow of long-term
investments in “real assets” like building, machinery,
and equipment), portfolio investment (i.e., investment in stocks, bonds, or company shares, or what
collectively are called paper assets), and the flows to
and from the reserve account of a nation’s central
bank). Overall, therefore, the BOP captures both
the real and the financial aspects of a country’s net
expenditure.
Ideally, the BOP must balance to zero when all
components are included. A deficit on the current

493

account must be counterbalanced by a surplus on the
capital account. This balance holds because when,
for example, a country imports more than it exports
(current account deficit), it has to finance the deficit,
that is, pay for these “additional” imports somehow,
from other sources, say, by borrowing loans from foreigners (which is counted as a surplus in the capital
or financial account). Of course, individual components of the BOP, say, one of the components of the
current account, might well be in deficit. In recent
times, a recurring source of worry is the huge trade
deficit (a component of the current account) that
the United States and the United Kingdom have with
the rest of the world. There is long-standing debate
as to whether the imbalances in these individual
components of the BOP are by themselves a cause for
concern and how governments should be correcting
them. Also it must be pointed out that, in reality, the
BOP is never exactly balanced, and one might often
have to use an adjusting term item to correct for any
errors. This necessitates a third component of the
BOP: a balancing item for any errors or omissions
that compensates for these differences and balances
the overall BOP current and capital accounts.

Other Indicators
Although GDP can serve as an indicator of the material
well-being of an economy, there are several drawbacks
that GDP has as an indicator of overall well-being. The
use of GDP as the single and only indicator of “success” has come under scrutiny in recent years. While,
as Jon Gertner points out, it is true that the GDP is
“a figure that compresses the immensity of a national
economy into a single data point of surpassing density” and that GDP is often positively correlated with
the standard of living, one must be cognizant that
more goods and services does not always translate
into more welfare and happiness. In fact, this was one
of the worries that Kuznets, the Nobel prize–winning
American economist who developed this indicator,
had about GDP as an indicator of overall well-being.
When Kuznets developed indicators to measure
NI, he intended it to function as a first attempt to
make sense of the overall direction toward which the
economy was moving. There were no indicators of
a nation’s overall economic activity (and economic
health) at that time that could justifiably address the
questions and concerns of policymakers regarding
the overall direction of the economy. At that time,

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Economic Psychology

GDP was developed as a “first pass” indicator for
overall economic activity and health. However, in
recent years, as Jon Gertner has highlighted in his
article, it has increasingly been pointed out that
GDP does not take into account the quality of life
(e.g., the amount of leisure enjoyed by an individual),
the quality of products available to consumers, the
noninternalized effects of production externalities like
pollution, effects on the environment, resource depletion, the value of nonmarket items (like household
work), the black market economy, and so on. Several
other indicators have been developed that try to close
this lacunae between measuring material well-being
and overall well-being. Some of these other indicators that serve to capture the effects of well-being,
and probably more relevant from a sustainable viewpoint, are the genuine progress indicator (GPI), gross
national happiness (GNH), and sustainable national
income (SNI). However, perhaps, the best-known
alternative to GDP as an measure of well-being is the
human development index (HDI) developed by the
United Nations that combines a nation’s GDP and
its adult literacy and life-expectancy statistics into a
single index. The HDI has emerged as a universally
accepted overall indicator of well-being, although this
measure is far from perfect.
Jibonayan Raychaudhuri
See also Consumption Patterns and Trends; Economics;
Measuring Standards of Living; Measuring the
Environmental Impact of Consumption; Well-Being

Further Readings
Baumohl, Bernard. The Secrets of Economic Indicators:
Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and
Investment Opportunities. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT
Press, 2005.
Gertner, Jon. “The Rise and Fall of the GDP.” The New
York Times, May 10, 2010. http://www.nytimes.
com/2010/05/16/magazine/16GDP-t.html?_r=1.
Sloman, John. Economics. London: Penguin, 2004.
United Nations Development Programme. Human
Development Report 1999. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (USBEA).
Concepts and Methods of the United States National
Income and Product Assets. National Income and
Product Account Handbook. Chapters 1–5.
Washington, DC: United States Bureau of Economic
Analysis, 2009.

ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY
Economic psychology is the study of phenomena
common to the disciplines of economics and psychology. Perhaps because economic psychology has such
a potentially enormous and rather poorly defined
domain, while the term is frequently used in Europe,
it is not much used in the United States. In the United
States, the subject area exists. Indeed, it is flourishing. However, the study is embraced by the slightly
narrower overlapping areas of judgment and decision making, behavioral economics, and consumer
research. Industrial and organizational psychology,
which mainly studies psychological processes in the
employee, is frequently taken as outside the area,
although there are a number of common threads.
The disciplines of economics and psychology
overlap in a host of different ways, but economic
psychology has mostly been concerned with understanding the psychological and behavioral processes
that underlie—and, at least at the individual level,
appear to produce—economic behavior and phenomena. The majority of the economic phenomena
studied to date have related to the consumer market,
but there has also been attention paid to the capital
and labor markets. There has also been considerable
research into the psychology of government actions
in the economy. Some psychological aspects of
government-provided services are described in more
detail subsequently. In general, economic psychology
has always been closely linked to the psychology of
the consumer, and even where economic psychology
appears to depart somewhat from the traditional
concerns of consumer psychology, the research has
important implications for our understanding of
consumption. Some explicit examples of this are discussed in later sections.
Traditionally, economics has been mainly oriented toward producing mathematical theories,
while psychology has focused more on developing
experimental and other empirical methods. Thus,
to some extent, economic psychology has entailed
using methods developed within psychology to test
theories developed by economists. However, it would
be a vast oversimplification to define economic
psychology as an attempt to put together economic
theoretical sophistication with psychological methodological expertise. Economics has long had its own
traditions of empirical data gathering, and recent

Economic Psychology

years have seen both more data gathered and the
development of new empirical techniques, such as
the growth of experimental economics. On the other
hand, there is also a long history of psychological
theorizing, and even of mathematical theories of psychology. In consequence, cross-fertilization between
economics and psychology has sometimes been at
the more purely methodological or theoretical levels. For example, the economist Bruno Frey’s book
Not Just for the Money: An Economic Theory of
Personal Motivation (1997) takes a theory that was
originally developed in psychology of how personal
motivation can be undermined by extrinsic rewards
and shows how this theory can be used to encourage
blood donation or raise a community’s environmental consciousness. As a second and different example,
both psychology and economics have long been
concerned with what it means to measure concepts
such as utility, and work on mathematical theories of
measurement can be found and cross-referenced in
both psychological and economic journals.

History
The history of economic psychology can be dated at
least as far back as Aristotle’s definition of money as a
measure of human need (Nicomachean Ethics, 1133
a, b). Adam Smith and other eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury writers frequently mixed psychological and
economic theorizing. The first use of the term economic
psychology may have been in the title of Gabrielle
Tarde’s book La Psychologie Economique (1902).
In the twentieth century, George Katona provided
an early model for how psychological methods
might be useful in economic forecasting and theorizing. In the 1940s, he and colleagues at the University
of Michigan developed and began the regular survey
series known as the Index of Consumer Sentiment.
The index, which is essentially a measure of the
expectations that consumers have, correctly predicted that 1949 would be a prosperous year in the
United States when more conventional economic
indices did not. Ever since that time, the index has
been used as a leading indicator of economic activity
in countries all around the world.
Two psychologists have won or shared the Nobel
Prize in economics: Herbert Simon in 1978, “for his
pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations,” and Daniel
Kahneman in 2002, for integrating “insights from

495

psychology into economics, especially concerning
human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.” It is no accident that both men’s work centers
on decision making: decision making in various economic environments has been and remains the most
important single strand in economic psychology.
Interest in economic psychology, however named
or defined, has increased enormously in recent years.
There is a Journal of Economic Psychology, first
published in 1981 under the editorship of Fred van
Raaij. Some indication of the interdisciplinary nature
of this journal as well as the disciplinary relationships of economic psychology is given by a recent
survey of the journals that have been cited by its
authors. After the Journal of Economic Psychology
itself, over the first twenty-five years of publication,
the most frequent citations were to the Journal of
Consumer Research, the Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, the American Economic Review,
and the Journal of Marketing Research, as noted by
Erich Kirchler and Erik Hölzl.
Other journals are of more recent origin. For
example, the online journal Judgment and Decision
Making was founded in 2006 as the journal of
the U.S.-based Society of Judgment and Decision
Making. The rise of experimental economics as a specialized field within economics has been marked with
the introduction of the specialist journal Experimental
Economics. Nor has publication been confined to
specialist journals, as a good deal of this interdisciplinary work can be found in the more mainstream
economics, management, or psychological journals.

Current Research
Books that summarize recent research in the area
appear periodically. Three recent examples are those
edited by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and
Matthew Rabin; Alan Lewis; and Shlomo Maital.
Kirchler and Hölzl sorted the articles published in
the first twenty-five years of the Journal of Economic
Psychology into sixteen categories. The six top categories, in descending order of frequency, were consumer behavior, individual decision making, financial
behavior and investment, cooperation and competition, tax, and consumer expectations.
As in any area, the specific topics that interest
researchers have varied over time. In economic psychology, the variation results partly from developments
within the research field itself and partly from what is

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Economic Psychology

happening in the world’s economies. The recent development of neuroeconomics is an example of the former. Neuroeconomics is concerned with assessing the
relationship between the operation of different parts
of the brain and people’s actual economic behavior
or thinking. The use of magnetic resonance imaging
to track the course of decision making has shown
particularly rapid growth. As an example of the
influence of the world’s economies, the inflation that
was common in advanced industrialized economies
in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by a wave
of research into inflation that died down somewhat
as inflation rates themselves decreased. The adoption
of a single currency, the euro, by many countries of
the European Union during 1999–2002 was preceded by studies of people’s expectations of the new
currency and followed by studies of their perception
of it and memory for past prices. Interestingly, in
some countries, particularly Germany, there was a
widespread perception that many sellers took advantage of the change to raise their prices even though
the official statistics showed no marked increase in
the consumer price index. The possible causes of this
misperception have been researched in a number of
articles (e.g., Mussweiler and Strack 2004).
An obvious question for the present reader to ask
is, what does the field of economic psychology have
to offer me that I cannot readily find within the field
of consumer research? At least two answers can be
given to this question. First, economic psychology
and consumer psychology have long been interwoven, and it is often difficult to separate them. Second,
some of the topics studied within economic psychology both overlap with consumer research and offer
a somewhat broader (if also sometimes shallower)
perspective. There are a number of examples of such
topics. For instance, children are socialized into an
understanding of the wider economy as well as into a
consumer culture. Social norms appear to be important in whether or not people evade taxes, or how
they behave in the workplace, just as they are in consumption. By way of illustration, we now examine
in a little more detail two phenomena that seem to
offer the potential to broaden our understanding of
consumption by taking a broader perspective.

Saving and Investment
Although the capital market has been less frequently
studied by psychologists than the consumer or labor

markets, it has not been completely neglected. It has
long been obvious that psychological factors are
important in the stock market and that stock prices
do not simply reflect a purely economic reality (e.g.,
Wärneryd 2001). Some of Katona’s work was concerned with the psychology of saving. On a slightly
different tack, in recent years, there has been an
upsurge of interest in why and how people save that
has been partly motivated by concern in a number of
countries about low savings rates and the impending
retirement of an aging work force.
Some results have started to emerge from the
research. A number of these can be summarized in
the general finding that many people do not have
well-thought-out rational savings or investment
plans. So, for example, Brigitte Madrian and Dennis
Shea studied the choices made by people investing in
U.S. 401(k) retirement plans and found that many
people simply opted for a company’s default plan.
When, for unrelated reasons, the default plan was
changed, new employees opted for the new default
plan. Such results suggest the importance of inertia
rather than rational planning (although it is not at all
clear how a twenty- or thirty-year-old might rationally choose among the various options). Karl-Erik
Wärneryd’s study of Swedish stockholders indicates
that most of them are relatively passive and tend to
hold their stocks rather than trade them frequently.
It is possible that their passivity provides a stabilizing
influence on the market. At least in New Zealand,
the recently concluded housing boom seems to have
been partly motivated by investors having greater
trust in housing than in other forms of investment
(Braithwaite and Kemp 2006). Finally, we should
note that both saving and stock-market investment
are characterized by large individual differences, and
it is possible to cluster out types of savers or investors.
Aspects of this work have implications for understanding consumption. At the simplest theoretical
level, saving and consumption may be seen as mutually exclusive, so a decision that an individual makes
to save is simultaneously a decision not to consume,
or at least not immediately. However, there are
other and less obvious ways in which savings and
consumption decisions are linked. For example, a
decision to opt for sustainable or green consumption
may be linked to a decision to invest in companies
that emphasize sustainable and nonpolluting production. People who invest in companies that sell
over the Internet also tend to buy over the Internet

Economic Psychology

themselves, according to Katrina Hunter and Simon
Kemp. At a more theoretical level, Wärneryd has
used Icek Ajzen and Martin Fishbein’s theory of reasoned action to explain and understand saving just as
it has been used to explain and understand consumption. One might note also that it is not always true
that saving and consumption are mutually exclusive.
For example, buying a house may be regarded both
as a form of saving and as a consumption decision.
The 2008–2010 global financial crisis illustrates that
people may go into debt or become bankrupt in consequence of their investment decisions, taking out a
subprime mortgage, for example, just as readily as in
consequence of their consumption decisions. Overall,
then, saving and consumption are closely linked, and
studying the one is likely to yield insight into the other.

Government-Provided Services
Governments influence consumption in a vast variety
of ways. For example, they often seek to protect consumers by insisting that information be provided or
by banning some products altogether. Government
tax policies restrict and sometimes steer consumption. They may restrict access to imported products
through their trade policies. All of these can and have
been subject to psychological analysis to a greater or
lesser extent. This section focuses on something a little different: the services that governments provide to
people. The provision of such services often bypasses
the usual consumer market, as in many countries
services such as education, imprisoning criminals,
medical treatment, and defense are either free or
offered at less than the cost of providing them.
The lack of a market implies difficulty in knowing
what government services should be provided and to
what level. Thus, there is a strong motivation to find
nonmarket means of valuing government services
so as to effectively decide whether the community
would be better off with a reduction in waiting times
for surgery, a new squadron of fighter aircraft, or
increased old-age pensions. Or maybe people would
be better off if the government did none of these and
cut taxes instead?
A variety of ways to assess such benefits have
been developed. Different medical treatments
have often been compared using measures such as
quality-adjusted life years. The overall success of
societies might be compared using measures of
subjective well-being. Survey methods have been

497

used to compare the value (or perhaps desirability)
of increased spending on health versus education.
Overall, it is probably fair to say that none of these
measures has proven completely satisfactory, but at
the same time, they have uncovered the consistent
anomaly that, in general, most people in democratic
societies would like to devote more resources to both
health and education than actually occurs.
Resolution of the anomaly is not as straightforward as it might appear at first sight. People
generally have a poor idea of the pattern of government spending, and overall their understanding of
government-provided goods is not as sophisticated
as their understanding of market-supplied goods.
On the other hand, there is little public enthusiasm
anywhere (including the United States) for turning
the provision of most government services over to
the market and, in the case of health services, strong
opposition toward adopting a market system in the
event of shortages (see Kemp 2002).
Again, the research in this area has implications
for consumer psychology. In the first place, it serves
as a reminder that a good proportion of the goods
and services people consume, including many that
people hold to be of key importance, are not provided by the market system at all and thus are subject
to rather different influences and constraints. Second,
although our ability to value goods and services outside of the market system is still quite primitive, such
valuation methods may prove useful in the future
not only for valuing government-provided goods
but also, for example, for informing other suppliers
about which goods might or might not be worth
developing and bringing to market.

Future of Economic Psychology
The last dozen years have seen a growth in both
research and applications that have integrated economic and psychological theories and methods. In
particular, psychological methods and ideas now
appear to be more welcome within mainstream economics. It seems extremely likely that such integration will persist and increase over at least the next
dozen years. An indication of this is given by the
increased interest at both the academic and popular levels in psychological explanations of the 2008–
2010 financial and economic crisis.
That said, it is not clear what direction or directions this increased integration will take. On a minor

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point, for example, it may well be that the umbrella
term economic psychology, never widespread in the
United States, will fall into disuse. A more interesting question is whether the integrated subdiscipline
will continue to flourish in a wide range of disciplines
(especially economics, management, and psychology) or whether it will be increasingly bound to one
of them. The perception of some scholars is that, in
recent years, economists have generally learned more
from psychologists than psychologists have from
economists. (For example, the economists’ powerful tool of marginal analysis is still rarely used in
psychology.) Extrapolation of this trend would see
the subdiscipline gradually merge into the disciplines
of management and economics and disappear from
psychology departments.
It is also likely that the different topics studied by
economic psychologists (or psychological economists)
will continue to vary from time to time. As an obvious example, at present, there is great interest in the
psychological aspects of the collapse of the financial
sector. The next few years are likely to see a growth of
research in the psychology of recession and a resurgence of work on unemployment. Of course, these
and other developments will have important implications for consumer psychology and for changes to
consumer culture.
Simon Kemp
See also Consumer Behavior; Economic Sociology;
Economics; Experimental Economics; Markets and
Marketing; Psychology; Public Goods; Well-Being

Further Readings
Braithwaite, Faye, and Simon Kemp. “Safe as Houses:
Investor Confidence in New Zealand.” New Zealand
Economic Papers 41, no. 2 (2007): 225–236.
Camerer, Colin, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin,
eds. Advances in Behavioural Economics. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.
Hunter, Katrina, and Simon Kemp. “The Personality of
E-Commerce Investors.” Journal of Economic
Psychology 25, no. 4 (2004): 529–543.
Katona, George. Psychological Economics. New York:
Elsevier, 1975.
Kemp, Simon. Public Goods and Private Wants: A
Psychological Approach to Government Spending.
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002.
Kirchler, Erich, and Erik Hölzl. “Twenty-Five Years of the
Journal of Economic Psychology (1981–2005): A Report

on the Development of an Interdisciplinary Field of
Research.” Journal of Economic Psychology 27, no. 6
(2006): 793–804.
Lewis, Alan, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology
and Economic Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Madrian, Brigitte, and Dennis Shea. “The Power of
Suggestion: Inertia in 401(K) Participation and Savings
Behaviour.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4
(2001): 1149–1187.
Maital, Shlomo, ed. Recent Advances in Behavioral
Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007.
Mussweiler, Thomas, and Fritz Strack. “The Euro in the
Common European Market: A Single Currency
Increases the Comparability of Prices.” Journal of
Economic Psychology 25, no. 5 (2004): 557–563.
Wärneryd, Karl-Erik. The Psychology of Saving.
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999.
Wärneryd, Karl-Erik. Stock-Market Psychology: How
People Value and Trade Stocks. Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar, 2001.

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
Economic sociology, or new economic sociology, is
defined as the sociological approach applied to the
economy. This broad definition raises two questions: what is the sociological approach and what
is the economy? Sociology is usually defined as the
science of society or of the social, and economy
(derived from the Greek notion of “household”) as
the management of scarce resources. Economic sociology then becomes the study of the social dimension of the management of scarce resources. This not
entirely successful definition, furthermore, suggests
that whenever a sociologist studies what is called the
economy, he or she is doing economic sociology.
New economic sociology was developed in the late
1980s in the United States, primarily at top-ranked
universities, and it is today a well-established field
also in Europe. This subdiscipline of sociology is, for
example, manifested in several readers, encyclopedia, theme issues, and The Handbook of Economic
Sociology. Richard Swedberg is the person who has
written most extensively on economic sociology—
writings that have substantially contributed to the
constitution of the field. Classical economic sociology
can be found in the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber,
Georg Simmel, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim,

Economic Sociology

and Bronislaw Malinowski. Economic sociology has
focused on the production side of the economy, stressing the role of coordination in firms and markets.
Markets are a large field of economic sociological
research; most studies deal with business-to-business
markets and producers, some with labor markets,
and fewer with consumer markets. Economic sociologists have shown less interest in the work done
by sociologists who have studied the economy of
consumption. The way economic sociologists have
regarded, and made use of, the findings of sociology
of consumption, however, is not much different from
how consumer sociologists have treated the works of
economic sociology. Both sides have to a large extent
neglected the other and not made due use of each
others’ findings, and it is hard to see that anyone has
gained by this division of labor and the current situation of mutual neglect.
The main contribution of economic sociology to
the field of consumption is to show the relevance of
production, and the implicit suggestion is that this
matters also for consumption. In this way, economic
sociology adds ideas of how producers organize their
activities and affect markets and forms of sale, issues
that are underdeveloped in consumption studies. To
combine the study of production and consumption
also opens up the possibility for a better understanding of the economy at large.

History
The history of economic sociology is as old as the
discipline of sociology. Though it was August Comte
who launched the notion of sociology in 1839, it was
the work of the founding fathers Marx, Durkheim,
Simmel, and Weber, about sixty to eighty years later,
that gave the notion its current meaning. They not
only constituted sociology but also made substantial
contributions to economic sociology.
Marx made the first major contribution to what
today is called economic sociology by analyzing the
quickly changing society in relation to the dynamics
of capitalism. Marx was, on the one hand, astonished
by the economic development that was created by
capitalism, but it was also clear to him, on the other
hand, that great inequalities were produced. Marx’s
historically rooted analysis clearly stresses the production perspective by tracing the causes of exploitation and transfer of wealth from workers who are not
fully paid for their effort in the factories back to the

499

capitalists. According to Marx, the material conditions that determine the social relations—including
man himself—are formed in the economy. Despite
this focus on production, Marx also brings in the role
of consumption and commodities, though this is not
central in his analysis. Marx observes that capitalism, with its specialization, has separated production
from consumption. Consumption of commodities
under capitalism, along with religion, has a coveringup function, so that peoples’ expectations, interest,
and focus are taken away from what really matters,
namely, ownership and the corresponding possibility to extract profit. Marxist analysis has had a great
impact on sociology, and the writings of Werner
Sombart, Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter on capitalism should be understood in the light of Marx’s texts.
Marx’s work represents a broad social science
approach. This is true also of economist Alfred
Marshall, who even more strongly integrated the
analysis of production and consumption. Marshall,
in his discussion of preferences—or wants, as he
calls them—stresses that these emerge in processes
in which people are engaged in activities, of which
production is central. Though he only points to this
interdependence of supply and demand at a general
level, few have attempted to follow this idea, though
it is at least acknowledged by sociologist Talcott
Parsons and economist Gary Becker. Another major
contribution of Marshall is that he stresses how people consume, not only to meet their own utility function (which by definition only refers to utility that is
independent of others’ utility) but also, for example,
to build houses to gain social recognition.
The work of sociologist Durkheim is also to be
understood in relation to the growing body that
economists have generated. His work Division of
Labor in Society makes two important contributions
to a sociological understanding of economic activities. One is that economic contracts to be made need
a noncontractual baseline of trust and order. The
second major idea is that the economy also brings
about order in society as the division of labor creates
interdependencies among people in society.
Another well-known economist who put consumption on the map is Thorstein Veblen. Veblen
addresses the issue of “conspicuous consumption”
from a sociological perspective. He noticed, more
explicitly than Marshall, that consumption could be
understood not merely as atomistic utility maximation but only as a social act: wealth is displayed for

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its own sake, and not to generate profit. Veblen, as
most other economists, has tended to see such consumption as irrational. Simmel was the first sociologist who addressed the issue of consumption in a way
that resembles contemporary analyses. He shows
how consumption of, for example, fashion garments
is to be analyzed in the light of two central social
forces, the one of belonging to a group and the other
of becoming unique. Simmel, furthermore, analyzes
the role of money and value in markets and society.
This is still a classical text for sociologists studying
value endowments of goods in social processes, as
well as for those studying money.
Weber is the most important classical economic
sociologist. His main contribution is the discussion
of how modern capitalism, or what he calls rational
capitalism, emerged in the sixteenth century. Though
various forms of capitalism have existed for thousands of years, it is only with the separation of the
value spheres, so that the economy became a sphere
of its own, that one can talk of rational capitalism,
with capital accumulation as its sole goal. Earlier
forms of capitalism, such as robbery capitalism, did
not have capital accumulation as an underlying cultural value. How did this form of capitalism emerge?
In contrast to Marx’s explanation, which boils down
to technology, Weber makes a comparative study in
which he says that the material conditions of capitalism were present in more than one place. The reason
why it was developed only in the West is that interpretations of religious texts ethically justified capital
accumulations. Later, and due to the force of competitions, this logic of capital accumulation continued,
though the ethical base was gradually replaced by
capitalistic values: capital accumulation for its own
sake or for the display of wealth (as we have just
seen). Marx makes an analysis of social classes based
on ownership and, more profoundly, based on market relations. Weber sees consumption as an important dimension for stratification in society. Weber
adds, however, the idea of status groups, which are
defined in terms of what they are and their ways of
life, that is, a form of consumption.
Pareto, as most of the thinkers discussed so far,
made contributions to several areas, including economic sociology. It was Pareto who made the distinction between economics and sociology by defining
the former as the study of logical actions and the
latter as the study of nonlogical actions. According
to Pareto, economic sociology is made up of those

actions that cannot be justified by empirical or by
logical means-ends relations. Furthermore, Pareto,
like Marshall, meant that actors’ motives are much
broader than what many contemporary economists
have claimed and include social distinctions and
honors. Pareto did not discuss consumption extensively, but his apparatus of sentiments and residuals
as “irrational” reasons for human activities is clearly
in line with the general view of associating consumption with irrationality.
Parsons may be seen as the last of the classical economic sociologists, but he contributed to the division
of labor by integrating Pareto’s distinction between
economics and sociology. In addition to Parsons,
Karl Polanyi’s historical analysis of the emergent
market society and Schumpeter’s study of capitalism
are important contributions to economic sociology.
Anthropologists, in contrast to sociologists, continued to study the economy. The economic sociological
work of Malinowski on the Kula-ring and Marcel
Mauss on gift exchange are important contributions,
not the least since both show how “consumption”
and “production,” if applicable at all, are embedded
in a larger whole.
We must understand the aforementioned scholars’ works in the light of their time. The first thing
to remember is that they wrote in a time when academic disciplines were in formation and in which
the research questions were not yet determined by
disciplinary boundaries. The “Battle of Methods”
in economics between historically oriented scholars
and those favoring the universal method of marginal
utility took part in the German-speaking academia.
At this time, not only economics but also social economy (Sozialökonomie), political economics, and economic sociology were used as attempts to define how
and what should be studied. The central question,
around which research revolved, was the emergent
capitalism and the associated changes of society. To
revisit classical economic sociologists—in the broad
sense of the term—may be a way of rediscovering
questions and approaches that have become covered
up by later normal science research.
For some reasons, sociologists turned away from
the economy after World War II. Naturally, some
studied labor market and the effects of welfare states
and the like, but hardly any sociologists focused on
the economy proper and tried to develop sociological theory and knowledge of the economy. It is for
this reason, and the long pause of sociological work

Economic Sociology

on the economy, that we talk of the new economic
sociology, as the movement that got started in the
mid-1980s.

New Economic Sociology
The U.S.-driven new economic sociology was essentially formed against the dominating theory of the
economy—neoclassical economics—and network
theory played a central role from the start. Economic
sociology can to a certain extent be seen as an “add
on” approach, which adds sociological flesh to
the insights, findings, and theories used by economists. Mark Granovetter’s important manifesto of
economic sociology, “Economic Action and Social
Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” addresses
the issue of the degree of embeddedness of actors in
the contemporary economy. This network approach
put emphasis on an idea that sociologists share,
namely, that actors’ behavior must be understood in
relation to the context and, more specifically, in relation to the social relations in which they are embedded. New economic sociology also shares the idea of
the economy as a social construction, according to
Swedberg, which sets it apart from neoclassical economics, which stresses the natural—and law-based—
development of economic institutions.
The new economic sociology is composed of
three broad approaches: network analysis, organizational analysis, and the cultural (value) approach.
Granovetter’s work represents the dominating network approach, which has both a theoretical and
a methodological side. Granovetter’s book Getting
a Job shows that to get a job it is important for a
job seeker to have many so-called weak ties, each of
which is tied to a separate network of information. In
this sense, the person gets information from different
networks, which increases the number of job openings that he or she is informed about. There are plenty
of studies on markets that show the role of social
relations, often in the form of networks in markets.
Organizational analysis may be linked to network
analysis, especially if a network method is used to
analyze the internal relations of a firm. Network
approaches have also been used to show how actors
gain positions in markets. Population ecology has
been used by economic sociologists for analyzing
organizations (firms), but then in the form of markets or industries. Some have gone further and also
studied more of the “inside” of firms.

501

To focus on culture is often seen as the third
approach in new economic sociology. The general idea
is that culture should be used to analyze and explain
economic phenomena. Viviana Zelizer is the mostknown proponent of this approach, which ought
to be understood partly as a critique of the network
approach. The network school emerged at the sociology department at Harvard University in the early
years of the 1970s, where the people around Harrison
White strongly rejected the value approach of Parsons.
Though the network approach stresses the role of
social structure, and few would deny the importance
of social structure, this often comes with the downside
of not including values. Zelizer has studied the relation
between sacred and economic values and shown how
the one can be turned into the other. It also shows how
consumption is framed in markets.
In addition to these three approaches that constitute the core of new economic sociology, one should
mention the works of Niklas Luhmann and above all
Pierre Bourdieu, both of whom have studied the relation between the economy and neighboring fields.
Bourdieu has in several texts, especially in the book
Distinction, analyzed the role of consumption and
how it is connected with social structure.
Research on markets has gradually become a central field of the research in economic sociology. Most
sociological works draw on White’s producer market
model, which assumes that a market is ordered as
a result of producers who watch and orient to their
consumers. An array of producers is carved out as
a result of the interaction in markets, and some can
sell their commodities for more money than others.
However, consumers are treated as an anonymous
mass in his model. In more recent works, attempts
have been made to integrate the two sides of the
market—production and consumption—in studies
on fashion market.

Future Developments
Economic sociology, both classical and new, has
increased our understanding of the economy.
Economic sociology has grown into a stable field that
continues to attract more sociologists and addresses
central research topics. Several important institutions have been studied, such as market, money, and
organization, often with innovative methods and
approaches, such as network theory. There are nonetheless a number of issues that need further attention

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if a more complete and coherent understanding of
the economy is to emerge. One fundamental problem concerns the relation between structure and
value, two issues that seldom have been integrated in
empirical and theoretical analyses. Thus, despite the
fact that people grow up as consumers, which takes
many years—a time that also is increasing in developed countries—before people make a “productive
contribution” to the economy, most theories follow
Marx and define and understand people essentially
as producers.
The two fields of production and consumption,
which were clearly integrated in the economic writings of economists like Marshall and Sombart, are
still largely treated as separate by economic sociologist and sociologists of consumption. Bridging this
gap must be a central task for both parties.
Patrik Aspers
See also Commodities; Economics; Markets and
Marketing; Political Economy; Social Distinction; Social
Networks; Sociology; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Aspers, Patrik. Orderly Fashion: A Sociology of Markets.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2010.
Burt, Ronald. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of
Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992.
Fligstein, Neil. The Transformation of Corporate Control.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Granovetter, Mark. Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and
Careers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1974.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific:
An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the
Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London:
Routledge, 1922.
Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action. New York:
Free Press, 1968.
Parsons, Talcott, and Neil Smelser. Economy and Society.
Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon,
1957.
Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
Smelser, Neil, and Richard Swedberg. The Handbook of
Economic Sociology. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
Swedberg, Richard. “Economic Sociology: Past and
Present.” Current Sociology 35 (1987): 1–122.

Swedberg, Richard. “New Economic Sociology: What
Has Been Accomplished, What Is Ahead?” Acta
Sociologica 40 (1997): 161–182.
Swedberg, Richard. Principles of Economic Sociology.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
White, Harrison. “Where Do Markets Come From?” The
American Journal of Sociology 87 (1981): 517–547.
White, Harrison. Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic
Models of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002.
Zelizer, Viviana. “The Price and Value of Children: The
Case of Children’s Insurance.” The American Journal of
Sociology 86 (1981): 1036–1056.

ECONOMICS
Most economic literature assumes that consumers
are rational, that is to say, that they choose optimal
combinations of goods. To model this core paradigm,
we have to identify the constraints on consumers and
find ways to characterize the best choice given these
constraints. The classic paradigm focuses on the
case where there is only one constraint, namely, the
budget. The consumer has a budget, that is, a certain amount of money to spend, and thus can buy
any combination of goods whose total cost does
not exceed the budget. Usually the prices of goods
are taken as given and cannot be changed by the
consumer and are not influenced by an individual
consumer’s choice. In this way, the total cost of any
combination of goods is simply the sum of the costs
of all goods bought where the cost of a good is the
quantity of that good bought multiplied by the unit
price of that good. Taking the budget and prices as
given, the consumer is left choosing the quantities
of the various goods—so much bread or rice, so
much meat, so much clothing, and so on. The feasible set facing the consumer is the set of all those
combinations of quantities that satisfy the budget
constraint. Clearly, this set depends on the budget
and the prices. At the end of the day, the consumer’s
budget is determined by his or her wealth. Typically,
individual consumers are assumed to have no control or influence on prices; rather, prices are determined by the market. In other words, it is aggregate
demand and aggregate supply, rather than individual
consumers, that determine prices. This immediately
suggests that two key determinants of an individual
consumer’s choice are that individual’s wealth and

Economics

the market prices of goods. That is not to say that
every consumer with the same wealth and facing the
same prices will choose the same bundle of goods;
the model allows consumers to have different preferences and thus to choose different bundles when facing the same budget constraint. So wealth and prices
do not determine choice but they do influence choice.
A consumer can only choose a feasible option, an
option that satisfies all constraints. Just what is chosen given the set of feasible options depends on the
consumer’s preferences.
To progress this viewpoint, it is necessary to clarify
how economists understand preferences and optimal
choice. On the one hand, consumers are assumed to
have strict preferences; for example, you may think
one brand of cola to be better than another. Here,
“better” is an assessment of one good against the
other, ignoring differences in prices, as opposed to
the view that a preferred item will always be bought.
If one option is strictly preferred over another, we can
say the first dominates the second. At the same time,
individuals may be indifferent between some goods;
some may consider all forms of long grain rice to be
the same and are thus indifferent between brands.
A consumer is understood to have a weak preference
of one choice over another if the consumer either
prefers the first choice to the second or is indifferent
between the two choices. That is to say, weak preference allows indifference.
Three important assumptions about preferences
are standard. First, it is assumed that consumers have
a complete set of preferences; that is to say, given any
pair of choices, the consumer has a weak preference
of one over the other. Faced with a menu of possible
meals, all with the same price, the consumer can state
a weak preference over all pairs of meals; sea bass is
better than salmon, salmon is better than lamb, and
so on. A second assumption is that the preferences are
transitive. For example, in the case of the menu, given
a preference of sea bass over salmon and a preference of salmon over lamb, transitivity would imply a
preference of sea bass over lamb. A third assumption
may seem odd, but it is necessary to maintain a logical framework. It is reasoned that a consumer does
not strictly prefer an option over itself. Sea bass is
not strictly preferred to sea bass! Essentially, the consumer is assumed to be indifferent between any option
and that same option. This assumption of reflexivity
combined with transitivity can be summed up as by
saying the consumer has consistent preferences.

503

With these assumptions, we can define an optimal
choice in one of two ways. A feasible choice is optimal if the consumer has a weak preference for that
choice over all other feasible choices; for example, in
the case of the menu, sea base is optimal if the individual weakly prefers sea bass to all other options
on the menu. Alternatively, we can say a feasible
option is optimal if there is no other feasible choice
that dominates that option. Sea bass is optimal if
there is no other meal the consumer strictly prefers
to sea bass. The first definition stresses that the optimal choice is at least as good as all other possibilities,
while the second stresses that the optimal choice is
not dominated by other possibilities. With complete consistent preferences, the two definitions are
equivalent. Transitivity is important here. If the menu
has only the three meals mentioned and yet the individual prefers sea bass to salmon, prefers salmon to
lamb, and prefers lamb to sea bass, then all options
are dominated and there is no optimal choice. We
would find it difficult to argue the individual’s choice
was determined by their preferences.
So in this model, a consumer has a complete and
consistent set of preferences that identifies the optimal
choice of goods given the budget constraint. It is the
combination of the individual’s wealth, market prices,
and preferences that determine the individual’s choice.
All the individual influences on choice over and
above wealth, such as being a vegetarian or health
conscious or a gourmet, are subsumed into the individual’s preferences. There is nothing in this model
that contradicts the proposition that preferences are
socially determined. Indeed, in applied work, economists often stress the need to look at the “demographics” of the individuals. Yet it is fair to say that
economists often focus on the role of wealth and prices
and take variations in preferences as given. In applications of this model, it is assumed that an individual’s
preferences are fixed over the period under study.

Utility
For the most part, economists use the idea of utility to summarize preferences. For each logically possible basket of goods, a number is assigned, which is
the consumer’s utility derived from that basket. The
important property of these numbers is that if the
consumer strictly prefers one option to another, then
the utility assigned to the first option is greater than
the utility assigned to the second option. Furthermore,

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Economics

if the consumer is indifferent between two options,
then they are assigned the same utility. Assuming that
preferences are such that utilities can be assigned, an
optimal choice can be redefined as being the feasible
option that has the highest utility. Sea bass is optimal
if the utility assigned to sea bass is greater than or
equal to the utilities assigned to all other meals on the
menu. Rationality in the classic model is reduced to
saying that the consumer maximizes utility subject
to the budget constraint. The specific choice of the
numerical value of utilities is not important; it is only
their relative values. For example, in the case of the
three meals (sea bass, salmon, and lamb), the utilities
may be ten, eight, and six, respectively, or they may
be five, four, and three, respectively. In both cases, the
consumer’s preferences over the three meals implied
by the utilities is the same, namely, sea bass is better than salmon, which in turn is better than lamb.
It is the consumer’s preferences that are important,
not the specific numerical value of utilities. From
this perspective, the use of utilities is a useful device
rather than a fundamental idea.

more expensive lamb cutlets may reflect the difference
in price more than my preferences. Nevertheless, the
interplay between preferences, prices, and wealth can
be exploited. For example, if I choose sea bass even
though salmon is cheaper, I not only reveal that sea
bass dominates salmon but also reveal information
about how much more money I am willing to pay for
sea bass. The price difference between sea bass and
salmon gives a monetary measure of the strength of
preferences and my ability to pay for the better option.
Insofar as we can estimate a consumer’s willingness to
pay, we have a monetary measure of how much better
off the consumer is with the preferred option.
Second, a revealed preference perspective may
seek to observe a number of choices with the aim of
seeing if those choices are consistent with the rationalist model. Such experiments are part of modern
economics, and, not surprisingly, people do fall short
of meeting the demands of having a complete and
consistent set of preferences in the context of relatively complex decisions. This is an issue returned to
in the final section on behavioral economics.

Revealed Preferences

Marginalism

While complete and consistent preferences are the
theoretical basis of the rationalist model of consumer
choice, there is an interesting alternative perspective
that starts with the following question: what do the
actual choices of a consumer reveal about his or her
preferences? An economist building on the rationalist
model can offer the following answer: a consumer
choosing an option reveals a weak preference for
that option over all alternatives that do not cost more
than the chosen option. If I choose sea bass from the
menu, I am revealing that sea bass is my optimal
choice and thus weakly dominates all other options
that cost no more than the sea bass. If I choose sea
bass when salmon is cheaper, then, given the rationalist assumption, sea bass must dominate salmon;
if this were not true, I would buy salmon and walk
away with more money.
This perspective raises two key issues. While preferences are seen to be independent of wealth and prices,
it is clear that my choice of sea bass depends not only
on my preferences but also on my wealth and the prices
of the various options on the menu. Actual choices
are contingent on prices and the consumer’s wealth as
well as preferences. Hence, choices do not necessarily
reveal preferences. My choice of sea bass and not the

Consider doing your weekly shop at your chosen food
store. As you wander around, you place additional
items into your basket. The rationalist model implies
that you only add items that offer you a net gain. By
buying the item, you will gain some direct utility from
its consumption, but at the same time, you give up
the money needed to pay for the item. Your net gain
from the purchase is the direct utility from consuming
the item minus the opportunity cost, namely, the utility that could have been obtained by using the money
in some other way. It is useful to talk about the utility of money here, but it has to be stressed that this
is the indirect utility of money, namely, the utility a
consumer gains from items bought with that money.
With this terminology, the net gain is the direct utility of the item minus the (indirect) utility of the item’s
price. As you move around the store and add items to
your basket, you are reducing the amount of money
you will have after leaving the store. Each reduction
in your residual budget will reduce your opportunities for future purchases and increase the opportunity
cost; each item added increases the marginal utility of
money. While the prices in the store do not change as
you move through it, the more you buy, the higher the
opportunity cost of items becomes. A rational choice

Economics

of a basket of goods implies that the last item added
to the basket has near to zero net gain—the marginal
direct gain from the marginal item just about matches
its marginal indirect loss. If the marginal net gain is significantly positive, you are not fully realizing the gains
from your visit to the store, while if the marginal net
gain is negative, some of your items will yield a net loss.
An important conclusion from the rationalist model is
that the price of the marginal item is a monetary measure of the gain to the consumer from that item.

Wealth and Substitution
Continuing the food store example, for each potential purchase, the consumer has to balance the direct
gains against indirect losses. Those losses reflect the
consumer’s marginal utility of money, which in turn
will reflect the consumer’s wealth. Typically, marginal utility of money decreases as wealth increases.
In this way, the simple approach used in the food
store example automatically accommodates differences in the wealth of different consumers. The
wealthier individuals will have a lower marginal utility of money and a smaller opportunity cost for each
purchase. Such individuals will be willing and able
to pay more. In 2008, the world economy suffered a
major setback as the financial system was near collapse and governments had to provide vast amounts
of support. For most people, their estimated personal wealth fell significantly, this being particularly
true for those who lost their jobs or had unsustainable mortgages on their homes. For these individuals,
the marginal utility of money rose significantly, and
thus the opportunity cost of all purchases increased.
In the case of food, individuals moved to cheaper
brands, if not cheaper stores, even where prices had
not changed. Such shifts in consumption due to
changes in perceived wealth and no change in prices
are called wealth effects. Also, in the early twentyfirst century, there have been periods when the world
harvest of core food crops was greatly reduced, leading to significant increases in food prices. For poorer
people, such prices changes can greatly reduce their
real wealth. When we think about the impact of
price changes, we need to be aware that a change
in price more or less implies a change in consumer’s
real wealth. If the price of wheat goes up, then all
food items that are directly or indirectly dependent
on wheat will see their prices rising. The opportunity
cost of buying those items goes up, and consumers

505

will be less willing to buy them and will tend to substitute away from those goods toward alternatives
that are less dependent on wheat.
There are two effects here: the relative prices of
wheat dependent products rise, inducing consumers
to substitute alternatives, and consumer’s real wealth
falls. The impact of a price change is seen to be a
combination of a substitution effect and a wealth
effect. The wealth effect is the change that would have
occurred if the consumer had suffered the same fall
in real wealth but had not experienced the change in
relative price. In a complementary manner, the substitution effect is the change that would have occurred
if the consumer had experienced the change in relative prices but no change in real wealth. Substitution
effects are seen to be predicable—consumers will
tend to move away from those goods whose relative
price increase, toward those goods whose relative
price has fallen. Wealth effects are not so clear. It is
useful to talk of normal goods, namely, those goods
that a consumer buys more when wealth increases.
For normal goods, a price rise leads to a negative
substitution effect, as the consumer moves toward
the relatively cheaper goods and to a negative wealth
effect as real wealth has fallen. Overall, the price rise
leads to a fall in the quantity demanded—the socalled law of demand. If a good is inferior, that is to
say, the consumer buys less as wealth increases, then
the impact of a price rise is less clear. The substitution effect is still negative, but now the wealth effect
is positive. There is the theoretical possibility of a
Giffen good, that is, a good whose demand increases
when its price rises.

Work and Leisure
The basic paradigm outlined thus far can be modified to model an individual’s choice of working hours.
The first step is to focus on the individual’s choice of
leisure hours, with the understanding that time not
spent at leisure is time spent at work. The advantage of this focus is that leisure can be considered
another good—the greater the hours spent at leisure,
the better off is the individual. The second step is to
modify the budget constraint. The simplest case is
where the individual’s only source of money is earnings from work. Hence, to buy consumption goods,
such as food and clothing, the individual must work.
Given the market hourly rate of pay, the more hours
the individual spends at work, the more goods the

506

Economics

individual can buy. Spending an extra hour at work
yields the utility gain from the goods bought with the
earnings but reduces the utility gained from leisure.
The rationalist perspective leads to the conclusion that
the individual will push hours of work up to the point
where the marginal (indirect) utility gain from the
additional hour’s pay is equal to the marginal utility
loss from reduced leisure. In this way, the basic paradigm becomes much richer and capable of addressing
broader lifestyle choices. For most individuals, their
most important asset is their ability to work. Those
individuals who possess skills with greater market
value will be offered greater hourly earnings, and
their lifetime earnings will be higher. The market value
of those lifetime earnings is, for most of us, the main
determinant of our wealth and thus a major determinant of choice of consumption goods.
A number of important observations are raised
by this approach. Insofar as skills can be acquired
through training and education, individuals have to
decide how much of their time to invest in acquiring
such skills. Leisure and consumption soon become
complements rather than substitutes. To get the best
from our consumption goods requires us to have the
leisure time to savor them. It is not surprising that
those individuals who can command higher wages
do not necessarily work longer hours. Some individuals have a great deal of unearned income arising
from the ownership of land or financial assets such as
bonds and shares. If this income is sufficiently large,
the net gain from work may be negative, and they
will choose not to work in the traditional sense of the
term, but it is likely they will have to spend some time
managing their wealth. At the other extreme, some
of the poorest individuals in developed economies
may find themselves in a benefit trap. The reduction
in benefits arising from moving from being unemployed to being employed may exceed the earnings
from work, in which case they will rationally choose
not to work.

Intertemporal Choice
One of the opportunity costs of consuming goods
such as food today is the reduced ability to purchase goods in the future (unless it is an investment
good that retains or increases its monetary value
over time); either we reduce our savings or we borrow money. The marginal (indirect) utility of money
reflects our future as much as our present. Even our

most basic purchases reflect an implicit choice about
ongoing lifestyles and thus reflect our preferences
over lifelong consumption streams and our fundamental wealth, not current earnings. Intertemporal
preferences take account of these observations. On
the one hand, there is evidence that individuals discount future utility; that is to say, their preferences
favor consumption streams with more consumption
today. On the other hand, individuals have more or
less access to capital markets where they can lend or
borrow money, where savings earn interest and debt
incurs an interest payment.
Three important examples illustrate the issues
raised by intertemporal preferences. First is the possibility of investing time in education and training with
the aim of increasing future earnings. Apart from the
loss of leisure time, such training implies lost earnings
as well as course fees. Funding such investment can
be problematic, particularly for children coming from
poorer families. In a perfect capital market, individuals should be able to use their future enhanced earnings as collateral to underwrite a loan. In practice,
this is not always possible. Second, purchasing high
monetary value goods often requires forms of credit.
For example, buying a home usually involves taking
a substantial loan from a bank. In part, this loan will
be set against future earnings but typically will take
the form of a mortgage where the home acts as collateral for the loan. When all goes well, we exchange
a stream of payments to the bank for a stream of
services offered by the home and, at the end of the
loan, a valuable asset. When it goes badly, as it did
for many in the recent financial crisis, we can lose
our homes and make significant losses. Finally, pension schemes for retirement represent long-term saving plans typically financed by deductions from our
earnings.
These three examples not only draw attention to
consumer decisions being part of a choice of lifelong
consumption streams but also stresses the underlying
life cycle: when we are young, we invest in skills; when
possible, we invest in homes and pension schemes;
finally, when we are old, we draw on our pensions.
All of this is more or less financed by our earnings. All
involve risks.

Uncertainty and Risk
As has been made clear by the near collapse of the
financial system in 2008, life is full of uncertainty

Economics

and risk. Some risks are limited in their impact; a
minor injury usually impacts only the individual
and, perhaps, his or her immediate family. Some
risks such as damaging weather, pandemics, and
unstable financial systems impact many individuals.
A rational consumer has to evaluate potential risks
and take appropriate action to help reduce their
impact. A key assumption economists often adopt is
that, by and large, people are risk averse. Consider
a simple example. You are offered the following
gamble: you get $200 if the toss of a fair coin comes
down heads but you get nothing if it comes down
tails. How much will you pay to play this game?
The expected value of the game is $100: half the
time it pays out $200 and half the time it pays out
nothing, so on average it pays out $100. Would you
pay $100 to play this game? A risk-averse individual
would pay less than $100; the difference between
$100 and the price the individual would pay is a
measure of that individual’s degree of risk aversion.
Essentially, risk-averse individuals prefer certainty
to uncertainty and would be willing to pay a premium to reduce uncertainty; at the same time, such
individuals would require a premium to take on a
risk. Not surprisingly, risk-averse individuals will
pay insurance companies to reduce risks and expect
companies to reward them for carrying some of the
company’s risks by buying their shares. Furthermore,
such individuals would contribute, through taxation, to government schemes designed to offer some
form of insurance in situations private companies
are reluctant to cover—for example, pandemics and
failing financial systems!
Given that an individual’s wealth is a major influence on even his or her basic purchases and that for
most individuals their main asset is their “human
capital,” namely, their ability to earn income from
work, in an uncertain world, the stream of income
we can expect to earn is itself uncertain. For riskaverse individuals, the greater the uncertainty, the
smaller their real wealth. To clarify, consider two
potential jobs, both offering to pay the same average salary, but one is riskier; for example, the riskier
job may pay a lower basic salary but offer higher
bonuses if all goes well with the work. The riskaverse individual would prefer the less-risky job and
would only consider the riskier job if it offered a
higher average salary. In effect, the individual would
consider the riskier job as offering a lower wealth—
essentially, the individual would need to seek out

507

forms of insurance against the additional risks, for
example, keeping savings in a low-interest instantaccess form to cover periods of low earnings. One
of the impacts of recessions, including those arising
from the recent financial crisis, is to increase the
sense of uncertainty, particularly with respect to a
fear of redundancy. That in itself will decrease many
people’s perceived wealth and lead to a reduction in
expenditure even though their current income has
not changed.

Welfare and Political Economy
Economics has always been concerned with government economic policies. The first task is to
understand how individuals will respond to policies; the second task is to decide if a policy is good
or bad. The rationalist approach to the consumer
is the dominant model for predicting responses to
policies, but it can also form the basis of a normative framework to assess the impact of policies on a
nation’s welfare.
Utilitarianism is the oldest form of normative
analysis or welfare economics. Put crudely, in utilitarianism, a policy is good if it increases the total utility of the citizens. Note that a policy may be judged
to be good even if it makes some worse off and some
better off; to be good, the gains must outweigh the
losses. Many economists reject the idea that utilities
of different individuals can be compared, which is
an essential requirement if we are to talk about total
utility. Without comparability, we are left with the
relatively weak concept of Pareto efficiency. A policy
is said to be a Pareto improvement if no one is made
worse off and at least one person is made better off.
For new welfare economists, a Pareto improving
policy is good. A government’s overall policy framework is Pareto efficient if there are no Pareto improving policies it can implement. The problem with this
framework is that it remains silent on any policy that
makes some better off and some worse off. It does
not allow us to conclude whether the policy is good
or bad. However, few policies are Pareto improvements, and new welfare economics defers judgment
on many important policies to politics.
Noble laureate Amartya Sen has tried to develop
a third approach that rejects utilitarianism but
allows us to make comparisons across individuals
and thus allows discussion of inequality and justice.
While Sen’s work has abstract appeal, particularly

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Economics

to the more philosophical minded, it is a relatively
complex framework to use in practice. When it
comes to the crunch, economists often revert to
utilitarian-like cost-benefit analysis in which we put
a monetary value on the costs and the benefits of the
policy and conclude it is a good policy if the benefits
are greater than the costs. An individual’s willingness
to pay is used to attribute a monetary value to a person’s utility or well-being. Recall the simple example
of a consumer in the store. The argument was that
items will be added to the individual’s basket if the
net gain is positive. This idea can be rephrased using
the individual’s demand price, namely, the maximum amount of money the individual is willing
to pay for the item. If the demand price is greater
than the item’s actual price, then the item should be
purchased. The difference between the individual’s
demand price and the actual price is consumer surplus and is a monetary measure of the individual’s
gain from purchasing the good. When evaluating
the impact of a policy, economists often revert to a
calculation of the changes in consumer surplus that
would arise from the policy.

Market Failure
One of the most ambitious applications of this
cost-benefit analysis is the Stern Review on global
warming. This report commissioned by the U.K.
government compared the costs and benefits of a
“business as usual” approach to global warming
with the costs and benefits of introducing policies,
such as a global carbon tax, which would reduce the
level of greenhouse gas emissions. The Review concluded that the net payoff from such interventionist policies would be positive and significant. Indeed,
the Review suggested that global warming was an
extreme example of market failure arising from the
presence of externalities. When an individual burns
petrol in a car or uses gas to heat a home, he or she
gains direct personal benefits but also imposes an
external cost on future generations by adding to the
level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Without
intervention, market prices reflect only private costs
and not those external costs, and individual rational
choices will reflect the lower price. At the heart of the
debate that followed the Review’s publication was
the choice of discount rate, some arguing it was too
low and some arguing it was too high. While not
free from criticism, the broad recommendation for

intervention reflects the views of many economists.
It is worth stressing here that the classical analysis of market failures, such as those arising from
externalities, is based on the assumption that individuals act rationally.

Coase and Asymmetric Information
Modern analysis of market failure traces the problem to our limited capacity to construct contractual
arrangements that would lead to socially efficient
outcomes. This approach can be traced back to the
work of Ronald Coase and his emphasis on transaction costs, which in turn are based on the premise
that there are bounds to our ability to live up to the
rationalist ideal. Many issues arise from asymmetric
information; for example, the seller of a secondhand
car has more information about the state of the car
than the buyer. In this situation, there is a danger of
the “bad” cars driving out the “good” cars as the
willingness to pay is sufficiently reduced by the presence of bad cars that sellers of good cars are unwilling to sell. To the extent this happens, we clearly
have market failure. This ongoing and all-pervasive
program of research on asymmetric information
maintains the assumption of individual rationality
albeit with modified assumptions about information.

Behavioral Economics
A much more radical program of research is behavioral economics, which questions the assumption of
rationality and aims to build an alternative psychological framework. This is relatively early days for this
program, so there is no unified framework at hand.
One key idea is that preferences depend on a reference point against which alternatives are judged. An
option is given a value akin to a utility value, but the
value is based on a comparison of the option to the
reference point. Values exhibit loss aversion. Consider
a loss of $100 and a gain of $100. The reference point
is taken to be the status quo, namely, one’s current
wealth. Loss aversion implies that the loss, in value
terms, from losing $100 is greater than the gain, in
value terms, from winning $100. For example, the
value of losing $100 may be –12, so that in value
terms, the loss is 12, while the value of gaining $100
may be +10, so that in value terms the gain is 10. The
value loss is greater than the value gain. Furthermore,
it is assumed the marginal gains are decreasing as the

Economics

gain increases and, more importantly, the marginal
losses decrease as the loss increases. For example, the
value of gaining $200 may be +15, so in value terms,
the gain from the second $100 is only 5 and not 10.
Likewise, the value of a loss of $200 may be –18, so
that in value terms, the loss is 18 and the loss in value
terms of the second $100 is 6 and not 12.
So in what ways does this differ from the standard economic approach? First, note that preferences are relative to the reference point, which, in
this example, is the individual’s wealth when the
decision is made; in the standard model, the assumption is that preferences are independent of wealth
and prices. Second, the diminishing marginal loss in
value terms runs counter to the standard assumption
of risk aversion. If values were utilities, then marginal loss in value terms would increase as the loss
increases. Consider the following standard illustration presented in a seminal paper by Amos Tversky
and Daniel Kahneman in 1981.
Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for
($125)[$15] and a calculator for ($15)[$125]. The
calculator salesman informs you that the calculator
you wish to buy is on sale for ($10)[$120] at the
other branch of the store located 20 minutes drive
away. Would you make the trip to the other store?

Read this with the numbers in parenthesis: $125
for the jacket, $15 for the calculator, or $10 for the
calculator at the other branch. Now read this with
the numbers in brackets, that is, $15, $125, and
$120. A standard utility analysis compares paying
$140 for the two items without additional traveling with the alternative of paying $135 dollars with
additional traveling. This suggests that it makes no
difference if you are saving $5 on a $15 calculator
or saving $5 on a $125 calculator. Yet most people
say they would travel to save $5 on the $15 calculator but not travel if the calculator costs $125. How
does the value analysis work? Part of the framework
suggests a piecemeal approach and focuses on the
decision where to buy the calculator. Assume the loss
in value terms of paying $10 is –3, and the matching
value losses for $15, $120, and $125 are –4, –11,
and –11.2, respectively. These numbers are consistent
with the assumption of diminishing marginal losses
in value terms. The reduction in loss due to paying $5 less is 1 if the calculator costs $15, while the
reduction is only 0.2 if the price is $125. This would
be consistent with the responses reported previously

509

if the loss in value terms arising from the extra traveling lies between 0.2 and 1.
One important application is Richard Thaler’s
recommendation on savings. In the United States, the
tax-advantaged 401(k) retirement savings schemes
can be presented to employees in two ways: either
they have to opt in to the scheme or they have to
opt out. Evidence suggests that significantly more
employees take up the scheme when they are
required to opt out. Traditional analysis suggests that
a rational employee would make the same decision
regardless of how the decision is framed. Value analysis suggests that the reference point is the default
contract offered and is thus different in the two cases.
When we are asked to opt in, we have to agree to
lose the donations, but if we are asked to opt out,
we look at the gain from not making the donations.
Given loss aversion we are less likely to opt in than
we are not to opt out.
Finally, we can note that Nouriel Roubini, who
predicted in detail the recent financial meltdown,
has offered a recent analysis to explain why such
crises are predictable—that analysis is in part
founded on the work of behavioral economists such
as Robert Shiller.
Chris R. Birchenhall
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Behavior;
Consumer Demand; Economic Indicators; Economic
Psychology; Experimental Economics; Markets and
Marketing; Price and Price Mechanisms

Further Readings
Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. Animal Spirits.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Areily, Dan. Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper
Collins, 2008.
Bernheim, B. Douglas, and Micheal D. Whinston.
Microeconomics. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Camerer, Colin F., George Loewenstein, and Matthew
Rabin. Advances in Behavioral Economics. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Deaton, Angus, and John Muellbauer. Economics and
Consumer Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980.
Roubini, Nouriel, and Stephen Mihm. Crisis Economics: A
Crash Course in the Future of Finance. New York:
Penguin, 2010.
Sen, Amartya. The Standard of Living. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.

510

Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS)

Stern, Nicholas. The Economics of Climate Change (The
Stern Review). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.

ELECTRONIC POINT
SALE (EPOS)

OF

Electronic point of sale (EPOS), also called more
simply point of sale (POS), is a system that performs
all the tasks at checkout and provides transactional
data. The POS data can be shared and can be used
to aid vendors in tracking merchandise on consignment, defined by Michael Levy and Barton Weitz as
items not paid for by the retailer until they are sold.
Checkout is the location where transactions
occur usually involving the exchange of funds (cash,
credit, debit, or checks) for products or services
received. POS provides data when a transaction
occurs using specially designed hardware and software. The EPOS can be thought of as an updated,
data-rich version of the cash register. Data are useful for sales tracking, financial transfers, and inventory control. For example, a store or restaurant can
see immediately whether or not a coupon offer or
other promotion is popular and can change advertising and promotion to produce better results.
Research studies on POS systems show that they
provide agility, better alignment, and improved performance. For example, Celik Parkan studied eight
Hong Kong drug stores and found significantly
improved performance after they added POS systems.
POS terminals can stand alone or be connected to
store headquarters or to greater systems that track,
for example, all grocery store sales of a particular
cereal in a single day. Stores may collaborate with a
marketing research firm conducting these types of
mass-market analyses. In this case, the sale registers
are connected to a server or multiple servers that may
be referred to as a central control units or master controllers. Not only can data be reported but they can
also be stored so that, at the end of the month or year,
sales can be compared to the previous month or year.
In a typical retail situation, an EPOS would
include a computer, monitor, cash drawer, credit-card
processor, receipt printer, a touch screen, customer
display, a place for customer signature, and a barcode scanner. Sometimes a customer signature is not
required, especially if the sale amount is small as, for

example, in a fast-food or quick-serve restaurant or,
increasingly, in grocery and specialty shops. In the
future, the need for a customer signature will likely
be less frequent in more venues. This need for an
actual signature is referred to in the business as signage. Customers prefer not having to sign because it is
more convenient and it saves time at the transaction.
Stores like it because it moves customers along more
efficiently.
EPOS systems decrease the amount of time spent
in sales transactions and, hence, increases customer
satisfaction and efficiency of orders. Retailers save
on labor costs in shelf stocking and accounting.
Managers can see what is selling so it helps them
allocate labor, service, and products. Thus, this
affects scheduling as well as the ordering and stocking of products.
The earliest EPOS systems came from IBM in the
1970s and were used in department stores and restaurants. The first barcode scanners were introduced
in 1974 by an Ohio supermarket. Later, many companies began producing EPOS systems, including
Microsoft, Apple, NCR Corporation, and Epson. As
more companies entered the market, there was more
competition for features such as appearance, ease of
use, initial cost and upkeep, functionality, speed, consistency, and reliability. The initial cost to a store is
substantial, and any decisions to change systems are
also costly. At the National Retail Federation annual
meeting held in New York City, many companies
exhibit the newest systems and try to persuade stores
to buy their system or components of it. Over time,
standards have been set that have made updating systems less difficult, and different brands of POS terminals and computers can be substituted for each other.
As Barry Berman and Joel Evans point out,
Among the recent advances in scanning technology
are hand-held scanners: wearable, hands-free scanners;
and miniaturized data transceivers. . . . One scanning
option is self-scanning, whereby the consumer himself
or herself scans items being purchased at a checkout
counter, pays by credit or debit cards, and bags items.
(2010, 368–369)

This technology can be seen in grocery stores and home
supply stores. Retailers draw on extensive knowledge
to help make informed decisions in an ever-changing
market. EPOS increases their knowledge.
POS is related to category management, a standard practice in drug store chains, supermarkets,

Electronic Video Gaming

convenience stores, and mass merchandisers that is
spreading to smaller retailers. Levy and Weitz define
category management as the process of managing
a retail business with the objective of maximizing
sales—and hence profits—in a category. In this type
of management, a retailer is like a category manager.
A particular store chain may call them captains or
advisors. This person leverages detailed knowledge
about POS information as well as other knowledge
about consumers and consumer trends. This information is used to create specific modulars that may
have different stores or facings to meet specific needs
in the market, for example, snow boots in St. Paul
but not in Miami. That is an obvious example, but
a preference for a certain type of candy or sandwich
may not be so obvious by location.
So, the category manager impacts the role of
supplier. He or she takes a new approach to optimizing store layout and attempts to maximize the
gross margin dollars produced per unit of space.
Sometimes, this results in competitive stores looking
very much the same inside, and a consumer might
notice that two drugstores across the street from each
other may be running the same specials. If they wait
long enough, they will see the same deals from Store
X as from Store Y. In summary, POS is important
to retail in terms of operations, data sharing, and
productivity/performance.
Elizabeth Goldsmith
See also Consumer Demand; Department Stores; Information
Technology; Markets and Marketing; Self-Service
Economy; Shopping; Store Loyalty Cards; Supermarkets

Further Readings
Berman, Barry, and Joel R. Evans. Retail Management.
11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2010.
Boddy, David, and Robert Paton. “Maintaining Alignment
over the Long Term: Lessons from the Evolution of an
Electronic Point of Sale System.” Journal of Information
Technology 20 (2005): 141–151.
Christopher, Martin. “The Agile Supply Chain: Competing
in Volatile Markets.” Industrial Marketing Management
29, no. 1 (2000): 37–44.
Levy, Michael, and Barton Weitz. Retailing Management.
7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
Parkan, Celik. “Measuring the Effect of a New Point of
Sale System on the Performance of Drug Store
Operations.” Computers & Operative Research 30,
no. 5 (2003): 729–744.

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ELECTRONIC VIDEO GAMING
Video gaming is a popular activity in contemporary society. Over 25 million gaming devices and
more than 335 million computer and video games
have been sold in the United Kingdom in the last
ten years. The combined video and computer game
sales in the United States was over $10.5 billion in
2009, and 67 percent of American households own
some form of video game entertainment hardware.
Gaming involves a variety of technologies, spaces,
and practices of consumption that are increasingly
social. Early research on gaming was driven by concerns about the consequences of exposure to violent
game content and the encouragement of aggressive
behavior. This focus has expanded in recent years,
and gaming has been increasingly researched from
a number of different theoretical and thematic perspectives by academics from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., psychology, sociology,
film and cultural studies, computing). Despite the
broadening of academic interest in this area, there
has been a lack of research on the meanings and
motivations associated with gaming, its place within
everyday practices of consumption, and its relation
to identity. This is consistent with research on media
consumption and ethnographies of technology that
highlights the importance of understanding technologies through the value and meaning associated with
their consumption within everyday communities and
practices. Recent research has begun to examine the
situated aspects of playing video games within everyday contexts, their facilitation of social cohesion
between peer groups, and its relationship with other
leisure practices.
An important focus of such research has been the
gendered consumption and social practices associated with video gaming. Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter
claim that the lack of female participation and representation in gaming is consistent with broader gender
dynamics of leisure and consumption, and the reinforcement and reproduction of established gender
roles. Researchers such as Marsha Kinder have identified female representations within game content
as sexualized and stereotypical, contributing to the
perception that gaming embodies masculine activities
and culture, and excluding females through the promotion of the idea of female technological inferiority
and the gendering of technological artifacts.

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Electronic Video Gaming

However, Bryce and Rutter have criticized such
approaches for taking a passive view of the meanings
constructed around representations of masculinity and
femininity in games, assuming a direct causal relationship between female (and male) representations and
their consumption. This contrasts with research examining gender differences in the productive consumption of texts and computer games that demonstrates
possibilities for a variety of gendered readings.
Research has also examined the gender dynamics
of gaming in public and private, as well as domestic and online, spaces. Constraints and possibilities
for female participation in these contexts have been
examined by Angela McRobbie and by Bryce and
Rutter, who suggest that they are highly gendered.
Domestic gaming spaces and technologies, for
example, show evidence of males assuming the role
of “expert,” undermining female skills and controlling access. Online gaming environments provide
opportunities to reduce constraints on female participation consistent with female participation in other
leisure activities previously perceived to be “male”
(e.g., football/soccer). This can be understood within
a context of resistance to the constraints placed
on female leisure in contemporary society and can
potentially alter the gender dynamics of gaming.
The role of consumption in the development of
identity has not specifically addressed gaming as a set
of practices and the social networks through which
identity is expressed and developed. The embodiment
of the ideal self and expression of identity through
character creation in online gaming environments,
and the extent to which this reproduces or resists
existing gender stereotypes, are important areas for
developing understanding of the gender dynamics of
video gaming. This can also contribute to wider theoretical understanding of the relationship between
gender, identity and consumption.
Innovation in gaming technologies (e.g., new game
controllers, mobile gaming, social networking), and
their influence on practices of consumption, is another
area for future research. Bryce and Rutter claim that
the increasing convergence associated with technological
change increases the social nature of gaming, encourages female participation, and changes societal perceptions of gaming as a masculine activity. Research in this
area can also inform theoretical understanding of wider
relationships between technology and consumption.
Another future area for research on video gaming
is the relationship between producers and consumers.

Henry Jenkins has highlighted the importance of the
modification and production of gaming products and
services by end consumers (e.g., mods, maps, skins,
and new game-level creation). These new products
are distributed through gaming communities and
demonstrate the increasingly blurred boundaries
between commercial and noncommercial production
and consumption in gaming. Understanding the role
of user-generated content within gaming communities, and its impact on concepts of copyright, ownership, and commercial exploitation, can also inform
wider perspectives on the relationship between production and consumption in online spaces.
Jo Bryce
See also Bricolage; Ethnography; Gender and the Media;
Home Computer; Internet; Leisure Studies; Virtual
Communities; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Bryce, Jo, and Jason Rutter. “Gendered Gaming in
Gendered Spaces.” In Handbook of Computer Game
Studies, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein,
301–310. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Crawford, Garry. “The Cult of Champ Man: The Culture
and Pleasures of Championship Manager/Football
Manager Gamers.” Information, Communication &
Society 9, no. 4 (2006): 496–514.
Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association
(ELSA). Facts and Figures, 2008. http://www.
askaboutgames.com/?c=/pages/factsFigures.jsp (accessed
January 23, 2008).
Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Essential
Factors about the Computer and Video Game Industry.
ESA, 2010. http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_
Essential_Facts_2010.PDF (accessed September 2010).
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.
Kinder, Marsha. “Contextualising Video Game Violence:
From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 to Mortal
Kombat 2.” In Interacting with Video, edited by Patricia
M. Greenfield and Rodney R. Cocking, 25–37.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996.
Lunt, Peter, and Sonia Livingstone. Mass Consumption and
Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience.
Buckingham UK: Open University Press, 1992.
McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From
Jackie to Just Seventeen. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Schott, Gareth R., and Kirsty R. Horrel. “Girl Gamers and
Their Relationship with the Gaming Culture.”
Convergence 6 (2000): 36–53.

Elias, Norbert
Yates, Simeon J., and Karen Littleton. “Understanding
Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach.”
Information, Communication and Society 2 (1999):
566–583.

ELIAS, NORBERT (1897–1990)
Norbert Elias was a German-Jewish sociologist born
in Breslau, Silesia (then Germany, today Poland).
After studying philosophy in Breslau and a temporary involvement in Zionism, Elias turned to sociology, first in Heidelberg and then in Frankfurt, where
he completed his Habilitation in 1933; a re-worked
version, translated as The Court Society, was not
published before 1969. Like so many others, he left
Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power.
After two years in Paris, he went to England in 1935,
where he completed his magnum opus, The Civilizing
Process. Years of internment on the Isle of Man and
years of work in adult education and group therapy
were followed by his first academic post in England at
the University of Leicester (1954–1962). Long overdue official recognition of his work and person took
place in the 1970s, when a fruitful reception climate
shaped by the crisis of academic Marxism renewed
interest in a longue durée history of body and psyche.
Elias’s contribution to the study of consumer culture is manifold but was never intended to be labeled
as such. Four lines of departure for the fruitful application of his insights can be located, as discussed next.
Deriving from the central conclusion of Elias’s
research on the European transformation of upperclass habits and affect structure from the wild, rather
unrefined feudal past to the more inhibited, pacified,
and refined ways of behavior of a courtly aristocracy
in the eighteenth century, we might obtain a more realistic picture of the gains and losses also experienced
by the majority of people living in the contemporary,
postindustrial consumer society, compared with
extreme positions that hold it to be either a hedonist
paradise or a late-capitalist hell in disguise. Although
Elias was accused by adherents to the Frankfurt
school (e.g., Buck-Morss 1978) of neglecting both
exploitation in the workplace and permissiveness
in the sphere of modern mass consumption, he was
aware of the huge difference between courtly faceto-face communication and bourgeois transaction
guided by the dynamics of money, profession, and
commodities. In his later sketch of “informalization”

513

processes occurring in the twentieth century (developed in collaboration with the Dutch sociologist
Cas Wouters), Elias took into account the higher
visibility and ease of the expression of emotions corresponding to a more liberal attitude to sex, authority, and pleasure in consumption by adopting the
formula “controlled de-controlling of emotions.”
In particular, Elias has contributed to a better
understanding of the dynamics of status competition,
distinction, extravagance, and lavishness, of assimilation and demarcation, practiced between members of
ruling classes and aspiring upwardly mobile people of
bourgeois origin. Elias’s concept of “habitus” can be
compared to that of Pierre Bourdieu, but while the
latter concentrated on style and taste, the former dealt
with the “affective household” of a person as a whole.
Elias developed a historical sociology of sports and
leisure. He called the corresponding process one of
sportization, English counterpart to French courtization. The Quest for Excitement aims at the acting out
of civilizational tensions by way of sporting activities
and, mimetically, by watching violence-controlled team
competition. This balanced expression of affects takes
place in largely unexciting mass societies and forces
people to a complex self-steering process between the
risk of boredom and the risk of physical harm, which is
often prevented by sticking to rules of “fairness.”
And, finally, his understanding of the development of the human capacity to use “symbols,”
whose storage and transmission—as “knowledge”—
to further generations is indispensable for the rise of
human “culture,” integrates speech, thinking, and
knowledge as three aspects of one process. Elias
tried to overcome the legacy of a European tradition
of dualist philosophy (mind/body, reason/emotion,
etc.). He attributed this tendency both to structuralism and phenomenology. Elias also opposed the
neo-Marxist critique of capitalist culture, as in the
work of Theodor W. Adorno or Herbert Marcuse,
because of its economic reductionism. His objections
would certainly also include French postmodernism
or the cultural studies of British provenience, and, as
a remote child of mind/body dualism, the very idea
of a pure sociology of the body.
Helmut Kuzmics
See also Civilizing Processes; Emotions; Habitus;
Informalization; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Semiotics; Sex; Social Class; Social Distinction;
Sports; Status

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Elites

Further Readings
Buck-Morss, Susan. “Review of The Civilization Process,
by Norbert Elias.” Telos 37 (1978): 181–198.
Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund
Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Elias, Norbert. The Symbol Theory. Edited with an
introduction by Richard Kilminster. London: Sage, 1991.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by
Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning. Quest for Excitement:
Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986.

ELITES
The term elite emerged in the seventeenth century to
describe commodities that were particularly prized,
and the usage was later extended to designate those
groups that occupy the top rung of the social ladder. Interestingly, through this dual linguistic origin,
we can already detect a significant connection
between the theme of consumption and that of the
upper ranks of society. It was not until the latenineteenth century, however, that the term was established as a scientific concept, chiefly as a result of
the work of two Italian scholars: Vilfredo Pareto and
Gaetano Mosca. According to these two fathers of
elite theory, at the top of every society inevitably lies
a small minority that holds power, controls the key
resources, and makes the major decisions. Since then,
the concept of elite(s) has been used in various disciplines but not necessarily in reference to this (rather
controversial) perspective. Some social scientists find
the concept particularly useful insofar as it potentially subsumes all sorts of upper groups. Admittedly,
such breadth is also liable to be viewed as a problem
because bringing together members from disparate
sectors often entails a certain degree of imprecision.
As a matter of fact, configurations can be, objectively
and subjectively, quite different from one context
to another. For instance, we may be dealing with a
monolithic elite or with a plurality of subgroups controlling various fields—hence, some hesitations over
the use of the singular or the plural—and eliteness
may prove to be related to various criteria of social
influence (ancestry, economic wealth, knowledge,
etc.). It should be added that the concept is strongly
rejected by many “progressive” researchers because

of its elitist or snobbish denotation. However, it is
quite possible to consider elites simply as an appropriate object of scholarly attention without any evaluative implications whatsoever.

Elite Distinction and Consumption
While the birth date of consumer society is contested,
most authors concur that, originally, consumption
was essentially related to intra-elite competition. For
aristocrats—or bourgeois aiming to live “nobly”—
it was an investment of sorts with a view to bearing
out their social worth. Consumption was principally
directed to categories of expenditure such as household, adornment, and military equipment, but also to
art and liturgical apparatus, for instance. This intraelite competition was often affected by the adoption
of sumptuary laws aimed at bringing manifestations
of social eminence under control. Although other
purposes may be distinguished (notably moralizing
and protectionist ones), sumptuary exclusivity should
mainly be understood as a defensive reaction by established elites concerned with preserving an exclusive
access to prestige goods ostensibly “materializing”
their higher position. In this respect, it appears that
such legislation has been enacted particularly when
conventional markers of social superiority were challenged from below. A classic example is found in the
symbolic rivalry between the nobility and the rising
merchant class in Western Europe, throughout those
centuries witnessing the long transition from social
structuration through hereditary statuses to new logics
based on socioeconomic achievements. The significant
role played by acquisition practices in intra-elite competition during those past centuries was especially crucial within court societies. Of importance here are the
contributions of Werner Sombart and Norbert Elias.
In his book on Luxury and Capitalism, Sombart analyzed how lecherous kings and courtiers used desirable
femininity and erotic conquests as a central emblem
of distinction. According to Sombart, by showering
presents on their mistresses, elites led to intensification
on the demand for luxuries. On his side, in his famous
work on The Court Society, Elias insisted on the
imperative pressure for competitive display between
courtiers eager to defend their prestige around the
figure of the king. Although they have been extended
by more systematic historical explorations, these pioneering reflections on the links between elite distinction
and consumption can still be regarded as fundamental.

Elites

The subsequent expansion of the consumer society (increasingly involving middle classes) during
the eighteenth century, and the transition to a mass
market in the two following ones, had a profound
impact on the ways in which consumption was experienced by the dominant groups. As a result of the
broader availability of goods to ever-larger sections
of the population, distinction through commodities
was no longer essentially a struggle for respectability
within their own milieu but also vis-à-vis a growing
number of challenging outsiders. Many products
that had been the prerogative of the all-powerful
and the wealthiest families for generations tended to
be abandoned by them because standardized (often
luxurious-seeming) ones deprived the originals of
their symbolic value. Historians have demonstrated
that the luxury goods of one generation may become
the “standard items” of the next and the “necessities”
of the third (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982).
As they move from being rare to being commonplace, many commodities thus lose their high-status
connotation—as has happened with cars during the
last one hundred years, even though the most prestigious models remain unattainable for the greater
part of the population. Another important factor
affecting the image of elites has been the development
of more anonymous contexts. The familiar social
world and lasting appraisals among members of
small communities often gave way to the impersonal,
momentary, and often doubtful evaluations between
urbanites. In large cities, external appearance rarely
confirms an already known status but pertains to a
constant reassertion of self. Not only are social actors
consistently led to come across unknown strangers
(and to be scrutinized by them) but one is also likely
to meet significant others on an irregular basis, which
calls for the maintenance of a consistent, valorizing
image. Other important dynamics of change include,
for instance, the outcome of more individualistic
societies, the democratizing aspects of consumerism,
a succession of revolutions into casualness, and the
advent of pluralistic postmodern logics entailing an
unprecedented diversification of products and styles.

Theoretical Models and Contributions
The few background evolutions presented in this brief
overview are by no means exhaustive. However, they
are consequential for what concerns us here. Studies
of elites tend to concentrate on standard questions

515

such as formation, domination, reproduction, circulation, or (in)compatibility with democracy. When
considered in relation with the theme of consumption, what is at stake are more symbolic dimensions
and notably the subject of elitist distinction. Students
interested in this field have many classical, as well
as more recent, models of interpretations at their
disposal. Several founders of the discipline of sociology whose contributions appeared between 1880
and 1920 have devoted some attention to that subject within a context of enormous changes. With
few exceptions, individual theoreticians or schools
of thought tackled it, however, as a rather subsidiary
theme—their primary preoccupation being to provide
explanatory schemes consonant with their own grand
theory. Valuable contributions include, among others,
Thorstein Veblen’s seminal writings on conspicuous
consumption, invidious distinction, and pecuniary
emulation and canons of taste, or Gabriel de Tarde’s
pioneering analysis in terms of imitation, which opens
a whole field of study on elites as paragons. One may
also mention Georg Simmel, who underlined the tension between a desire to communicate upper-echelons
membership—which entails representing the standard of that group—and the pretension of having a
personal style. Max Weber also provided important
reflections about elites’ styles of life and social closure
strategies and, of course, introduced the fundamental
distinction between status and class.
Regarding major subsequent contributions, one
should make reference to American functionalist approaches on social standing and achievement
through commodity consumption—within communities supposedly sharing the same belief in the
potential for upward mobility—or Goffmanian views
in terms of presentation of self and impression management. Pierre Bourdieu’s model tackling the field of
consumption in relation with taste and the manifestation of cultural capital as well as sociopsychological
perspectives on social comparisons equally prove to
be landmark works. Furthermore, socioeconomic
perspectives are important for the study of elites and
consumption in several respects. James Duesenberry,
Harvey Leibenstein, and Fred Hirsch elaborated
important frameworks in terms of demonstration
effect, snob effect, and positional goods, respectively,
which seriously challenged orthodox thinking in
economics by showing how consumption patterns
depend heavily on how spending compares with that
of significant others, and how it becomes increasingly

516

Elites

social and symbolic as incomes rise. Last but not
least, the rich marketing literature emphasizes the
importance of brand choice in relation to elitist image.
All these theoretical models (one could have mentioned Jean Baudrillard or analysts of postmodernity
as well) have generated insights. However, most of
them have usually developed overwhelming universalistic ambitions and, from a comparative perspective, they prove more or less operational according
to the contexts studied. Many illustrations could
be given to discuss the (in)applicability of tools of
analysis. Let us take two examples. The Veblenian
concept of conspicuous consumption has been used
retrospectively by historians to refer to various
periods such as the end of the Middle Ages; the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; and
even antiquity. It is also currently employed when it
comes to interpreting the contemporary attitudes of
Asian new elite consumers, for instance. It may be
considered that this concept, elaborated with regard
to the specific Northern American context at the end
of the nineteenth century, is relevant in the case of
“upstart” societies where social superiority must be
put on display. Yet, the enormous cultural differences
between the societies and periods considered should
not be neglected, and one should beware of universalistic generalizations and extrapolations.
The second example concerns what is usually
referred to as trickle-down mechanisms, which have
been studied by sociologists such as Herbert Spencer,
Tarde, Veblen, Simmel, and later by some American
functionalists (who, so said in passing, took no notice
at all of one another). What is meant by this is the
tendency for commodities to pass down through the
status hierarchy. In the course of their descent, they
lose their ability to express superior position and may
come to be considered as dispensable by the upper
groups, which are driven to continually adopt new
signs to differentiate themselves. We are touching on
the topic of fashion (which also used to be a Western
elitist phenomenon originally). Once again, it matters to develop a complex view here. Even among
fashion-conscious societies, one meets elites who resolutely play the card of “distinction through antiquity.” The desire to own ancient commodities may be
accorded preeminent importance insofar as it serves
to legitimize them by anchoring their social worth
in the past. Clearly, such a conservative code is especially frequent among well-established elites eager to
demonstrate their long-standing status. Nevertheless,

it can also be found among more recent ones who,
rather than acquiring the latest products available
on the market (that might betray the fact that they
have “arrived” in fairly recent times), instead prefer
to invest in ancient things. Moreover, in those cases,
where there is no possibility of satisfactory novelty
or sophistication, elites may have no other alternative than a retreat to previous manners when being
imitated. Consider gloves. During the eighteenth
century, in France, they were seldom worn in public, being perceived as connoting rusticity, and it was
compulsory to take them off in the presence of important others. Later on, an inverted code of politeness
prevailed, and members of the elite were supposed
to keep gloves most of the time. Being displeased
by the downward diffusion of this standard to the
rising classes, some members of the highest circles
had no other option than to give up such items and
thus return to the eighteenth-century situation. What
should be concluded is that it is imperative to contrast the varying degrees of social prestige accorded
to the “old” and the “new” depending on the actual
perceptions of the elites under consideration.
More generally speaking, while there is much to
admire in many classical models of interpretation, it
is nevertheless advisable to consider them along with
the patterns of meanings that give them significance.
It is not a difficult task to show how many theorizations tend to be typical products of the societies
in which they originated. For example, according to
Veblen, conspicuousness is an absolute necessity for
the social groups at the apex of societies—which was
probably obvious in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. This indeed remains valid in some
parts of the United States, as a 2006 study by Jeremy
Schulz of the meaning and uses of the Hummer
H2—a massive and expensive sport-utility vehicle—
in California demonstrates. However, while there are
contexts where the assertion of superiority is durably related to visible signs of wealth, there are other
contexts where, especially for elites enjoying a wellestablished superiority, a relative understatement
of outward forms of superiority is often expected.
Working on the Parisian bourgeoisie, Bourdieu
developed a different conception of social distinction,
denoting the seemingly natural superiority arguably
manifested in the dominant class. Therefore, within
his analytical framework, distinction is understood
as the opposite of conspicuous display—whereas
social climbers, driven by their feelings of anxiety,

Elites

feel the need to boast, which reveals their underlying
lack of confidence. Bourdieu’s attempt to concentrate
attention on more elusive aspects such as the sphere
of the judgment of taste and cultivated dispositions
is certainly a fertile research direction. It runs the
risk, however, of neglecting ostentatious features
that remain at the heart of elite distinction practices
through consumption in many societies (from contemporary Russia to the Middle and the Far East, as
well as many African or Latin American countries).
Consequently, the point is not to consider whether
some social theoreticians are more convincing than
others; it is rather to understand that their statements
often make sense within the respective contexts they
have studied (e.g., Bourdieu’s France of the 1970s)
but not necessarily everywhere.

Contemporary Elite Consumption
This becomes even more obvious when one pays attention to elite consumption in the contemporary world.
Undeniably, the current globalization process widens
horizons more than ever before. As far as status
markers are concerned, this involves a growing
awareness of the commodities produced in many different countries as well as an increasing acuteness of
comparison. Social groups in the highest echelons of
societies may show an interest in a variety of commodities that perhaps help give them the impression
that they belong to international elite circles beyond
their respective origins. Nevertheless, the question
remains as to how the possible introduction of globalized merchandises is actually perceived, understood, and evaluated. Elites may prove more sensitive
to quantity or to quality, and to styles of consumption manifested at various levels, from countries near
and far, via all sorts of intermediaries, and directly
as well as virtually through the media. Non-Western
elites may willingly resort to some imported status
symbols (prestige cars, yachts, helicopters, etc.) but
are likely to reject the ones liable to threaten their
own identity (e.g., certain clothes, food, alcohol,
beauty treatments, and even living in a condominium). There are also clear processes of adoption/
adaptation. For instance, Chinese elites frequently
consume global luxury brands by adapting them to
their own tastes—for example, mixing fine whiskies
and green tea. Similarly, wealthy Malayans particularly appear to fancy Harley Davidsons but without
any “Hells Angels” American connotations.

517

Although rich and well-informed members of the
elites may potentially acquire whatever they desire,
it is not insignificant to underline that priorities in
terms of consumption vary considerably from one
society to another, possibly because social actors
particularly try to project a desirable image to others
through certain attributes (impressive dwelling, luxurious eating, the most perfect body, exclusive club
membership, education in prestigious universities for
children, prestige cars, elegant clothing, latest gadgets, to name a few) whereas others are, interestingly,
deemed secondary. This may be related to deeply
engrained cultural dispositions as well as to functionalist dimensions (a well-equipped home is quite
understandably a main concern in a cold environment, a good car is a logical priority in Los Angeles,
and so on). One should also mention a variety of
attitudes regarding elitist obligations (such as lavish
entertainments) and the modern quest for private
comfort. Here, self-perceptions and cross-cultural
judgments of which consumption goods should be
considered must-haves, or not, are particularly relevant to study. It would certainly be misleading to
interpret these dissimilarities from a purely teleological point of view, seeing them as related to more or
less advanced or “backward” societies, or to postulate a limited number of mono-causal readings of
structural determination.
Jean-Pascal Daloz
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Cultural Capital;
Luxury and Luxuries; Positional Goods;
Postmodernism; Social Distinction; Status; Taste

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Daloz, Jean-Pascal. The Sociology of Elite Distinction:
From Theoretical to Comparative Perspectives.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010.
Duesenberry, James. Income, Saving and the Theory of
Consumer Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1949.
Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1969.
Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art
in Italy 1300–1600. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993.
Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1977.

518

Embodiment

Leibenstein, Harvey. “Bandwagon, Snob and Veblen Effects
in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand.” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 64 (1950): 183–207.
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The
Birth of a Consumer Society. London: Europa
Publications, 1982.
Schulz, Jeremy. “Vehicle of the Self: The Social and Cultural
Work of the H2 Hummer.” Journal of Consumer
Culture 6, no. 1 (2006): 57–86.
Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” The American Journal of
Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 541–558. First published 1904.
Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published 1913.
Tarde (Gabriel de). The Laws of Imitation. Gloucester, UK:
P. Smith, 1962. First published 1890.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Dover Publications, 1994. First published 1899.
Welch, Evelyn S. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer
Cultures in Italy 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005.

EMBODIMENT
Consumption is an embodied practice. It is shaped
by habits, desires, tastes, and an embodied knowhow that informs both selection and use of items
purchased. To consume is to physically do something: to purchase or use what one has purchased.
And in some cases, most obviously regarding food
and drink, it involves taking foreign objects and substances into one’s own body.
Sociological work on and interest in embodiment
has a long history that can be traced back to the
origin of the discipline. However, the contemporary
concern for embodiment within the discipline can be
dated to the mid-1980s. Bryan Turner’s Body and
Society was an early landmark study in what has
proved to be a growth area for social research. This
growth was consolidated, in the mid-1990s, with the
launch of the Body and Society journal. The area
remains diverse, however, and lacks the coherence
and shared focus that are apparent in certain other
social scientific research areas.
One of the key arguments of much of the work
in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that sociology
prior to this point had adopted a disembodied view
of the social actor. Sociologists were said to have tacitly accepted the—by this time largely discredited—
philosophical view that mind and body are separate

entities or “substances,” a view famously advocated
by Descartes in the early 1600s but with a genealogy
dating back to Plato, and to have both accepted that
an actor’s mind is her essence (again echoing Descartes)
and focused on this aspect of agency to the detriment of
a proper consideration of embodiment.
This claim is, at the very least, overstated. There
is good reason to believe that sociology, from its
inception, has managed to circumvent the problem
of dualism, and there are many examples, from Karl
Marx and Émile Durkheim through to the present, of
sociologists addressing themselves to bodily themes.
The concern to re-embody sociology has generated
various interesting and important research agendas,
however, and there is good reason to believe that a
disembodied model of the actor has found its way
into studies of consumption by means of the economics discipline. Though neoclassical economics has
its origins in the work of empiricist and utilitarian
authors, for whom bodies, their pleasures, and pains
were central, the embrace of highly abstract (mathematical) rational choice models in economics has
led to a rather disembodied image of the consumer.
The concept of taste is sometimes used in sociology in a way equivalent to what economists call
preference. Our tastes are our purchasing and design
preferences. The more literal meaning refers to our
embodied sense of taste, however, as indeed the
related notion of “aesthetics” references our ability
to physically experience the world and objects within
it (a denotation more obvious in relation to the
“anesthetics” that remove this capacity). Empiricist
aesthetic theories, such as that of David Hume,
worked with this link. Beauty, for Hume, is that
which brings pleasure to our senses, and our tastes
therefore have a direct embodied component. In the
work of Immanuel Kant, however, this connection
was broken or at least challenged. Recognition of
beauty, for Kant, entails that we rise above our basic
physical pleasures and engage our rationality. Beauty
may still strike the eye or the ear but it is a cultivated,
even “rational,” eye or ear.
Within sociology, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has
reworked this idea further, suggesting that Kant’s
is a bourgeois aesthetic. The claim that immediate
pleasures are somehow base and inferior to acquired
tastes and to that which is rationally judged beautiful, Bourdieu argues, is a strategy that allows
middle-class consumers to distinguish their tastes
and preferences, elevating them above those of the

Emotional Labor

working classes. It universalizes bourgeois taste,
making it a standard against which other tastes are
(negatively) evaluated. In this way, it both lends legitimacy to bourgeois dominance and suppresses, as
crude and inappropriate, the physical impulses that
find expression in working class cultures.
Bourgeois taste remains embodied, however. The
acquisition of tastes, whether mediated by reason or
not, involves bodily transformation. This is perhaps
most obvious in the case of alcoholic drinks (e.g.,
wine), which children typically find horrible but later
learn to like—a transformed physical response—and
which some adults learn to distinguish quite finely.
Bourdieu and also Howard Becker apply the same
logic to the visual appreciation of art works, which
one can learn to “read” as one learns to read a language. The body is modified through the acquisition of
a technique, a particular way of looking and visually
dissecting. And Becker extends this further, beyond
bourgeois taste and into the subcultural worlds of jazz
and marijuana consumption. Needless to say, learning
to like such stimulation is but a step to acquiring a
desire for it. Art and jazz lovers are passionate about
their object. They feel drawn, physically, to it.
The other side of this, of course, is that we can
acquire a sense of disgust. Having given up taking
sugar in our tea, for example, we might find the taste
of sweetened tea sickly sweet. And having acquired
a “taste” for “good” wine, we may find the brands
that first introduced us to it cheap and nasty.
Consumption also involves “body techniques”’
(Mauss 1979) and a range of largely unreflective
(embodied) habits, however. The use of the knife
and fork in eating, as compared to chopsticks or
hands, is one example, as is the ability to walk on
high-heeled shoes and even to tie one’s shoelaces.
These techniques affect what we purchase because
the decision to purchase ordinarily entails a decision
about what one is able to do with the purchase: people who cannot drive (an embodied skill) presumably
do not buy cars. Beyond technique, moreover, where
we shop and what we are likely to spot are affected
by embodied know-how and a sense of ease: we
often shop in the shops we are familiar with, whose
layout we have a “feel” for. In short, to end where this
entry began, consumption is an embodied practice.
Nick Crossley
See also Aesthetics; Art and Cultural Worlds; Body, The;
Bourdieu, Pierre; Dieting; Habitus; Kant, Immanuel; Taste

519

Further Readings
Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.
Becker, Howard. Outsiders. New York: Free Press, 1991.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge, 1984.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production.
Cambridge: Polity, 1993.
Crossley, Nick. “Merleau-Ponty, the Elusive Body and Carnal
Sociology.” Body and Society 1, no. 1 (1995): 43–63.
Crossley, Nick. The Social Body. London: Sage, 2001.
Crossley, Nick. “Researching Embodiment by Way of
‘Body Techniques.’” In Embodying Sociology:
Retrospect, Progress, and Prospects, edited by Chris
Shilling, 80–94. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Hertz, Robert. Death and the Right Hand. New York: Free
Press, 1960.
Mauss, M. “Body Techniques.” In Sociology and
Psychology: Essays, 95–123. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1979.
Turner, Bryan. Body and Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

EMOTIONAL LABOR
In a consumer culture, people consume not only products but also services provided by individuals and
companies. Just as these consumers want particular
goods to meet their needs and desires, they also expect
these services to be provided in a way that makes
them feel good about consuming or, at least, does not
interfere with their consumption. Companies rely on
their employees’ abilities to provide services with a
smile, regardless of their own feelings. When workers suppress or produce emotions to do their job, this
process is called emotional labor.
Put another way, consumers (and employers)
expect employees to fulfill certain social roles that
carry with them emotional obligations. This is a
required but unpaid part of their work. For example,
a news anchor must remain emotionally neutral during tragedy, a telemarketer must be genuinely pleasant to an angry customer, a Disney employee must
always put on a show of fun and never be seen to be
unhappy, and a debt collector must quickly summon
anger. Thus, an important, often invisible part of the
work that face-to-face and voice-to-voice workers
provide is to hold back (“manage”) or to create emotions to put forward a suitable physical or emotional
appearance to a customer. In short, emotional labor
elicits the appropriate response from the consumer,

520

Emotional Labor

creating value for the consumer, profit for employers,
but no extra wages for the employee.
Emotional labor exists mainly in the industrialized
countries with a large service economy such as the
United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and
Australia. It is especially widespread in the United
States, where nearly three-quarters of all jobs are
located in the service sector.
The term emotional labor was coined by Arlie
Hochschild in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart.
Hochschild was strongly influenced by Erving
Goffman’s idea of “impression management,”
the social acting that all people do to display their
desired image to others. Hochschild applied impression management to emotions. She showed that part
of the desired image that employees such as flight
attendants and bill collectors must present to customers is a “managed heart”: a proper emotional
appearance, regardless of what they really feel. This
presentation requires two types of acting: “surface
acting,” which obligates workers to strongly suppress feelings to provide the appropriate appearance,
and “deep acting,” which requires them to summon
the necessary emotion that they then come to feel.

Case Studies and Contemporary Applications
Studies in sociology and business have developed
Hochschild’s ideas. They have identified a number of
occupations where emotional labor is required (e.g.,
caregivers, casino employees, counter attendants, engineers, fantasy occupations such as Disney workers,
flight attendants, lawyers, manicurists, nurses, paralegals, prostitutes, etc.). They have illustrated how emotional labor is done to retain customers, to make them
feel good or right, to increase their satisfaction, and to
enhance their experience. For example, Jeffrey J. Sallaz
details his shift as a dealer at a $5 blackjack table
where the players tip only occasionally. He shows how
he uses humor and facial expressions to establish rapport and to create an atmosphere of fun with his customers to gain and retain customers and to earn tips:
Soon the table is in an uproar and they are offering
token bets practically every hand. In fact, when my
shift ends, the woman at third base hands me a
$5 chip and tells me with a big, genuine smile, “You
were fun!” (2002, 414)

Studies have also revealed that the emotional
labor workers must do differs between jobs and even

within the same job. Though most service occupations require an ongoing display of positive emotions,
some (e.g., debt collectors, police officers, prison
guards) require negative, neutral, or changing emotions. For example, according to Robert I. Sutton,
debt collectors may respond differently to delinquent
accounts depending on how long the accounts are
overdue. A collector who works on bills that are
thirty days overdue on Monday, ninety days overdue
on Tuesday, and six months overdue on Wednesday
must exhibit a wide variety of emotions because different kinds of delinquent accounts requires different
amounts of coaxing, sympathy, and anger.
Societal gender norms, roles, and the gendered
nature of institutions strongly influence consumer
and organizational expectations around emotional
labor. Ronnie J. Steinberg and Deborah M. Figart
found that in the United States, women are more
likely to be hired by a service organization because
it is believed that they are more emotive—that they
smile more frequently and display more warmth
than men. Men, on the other hand, are expected
to do emotional work associated with aggressiveness and competition. Failure to present the proper
gendered emotional response in the proper setting
creates problems for employees. For instance, masculine norms of aggression require litigators to do the
emotional labor of intimidation. But women attorneys face a gendered dilemma: a woman who uses
the ideal litigator tactic of aggression will be seen as
inappropriate, but a woman who does not use this
tactic will be seen as ineffective, notes Jennifer Pierce.
Beyond gender, consumers’ and workers’ race
and class statuses can also impact emotional labor
expectations. In a study of immigrant female Korean
manicurists, Miliann Kang shows how women
manicurists who serve other women are expected
to do emotional labor and even physical work differently based on their clients’ race and class. That
is, they are expected by white professional women
to provide emotional and physical pampering.
Black working class women instead expect them to
minimize pampering and “focus on the appearance,
originality, and durability of the nails themselves”
(2003, 835). White and black middle-class women,
on the other hand, expect a routine, hassle-free manicure that provides them a good value.
Large-scale changes such as women’s increasing
participation in the paid labor force, aging populations, declining governmental safety nets, and an

Emotional Labor

increasing supply of globally mobile labor has
also produced a growth of industries that demand
emotional labor and a growing supply of workers
to fill this demand. Arlie Hochschild and Barbara
Ehrenreich explore this “global heart transplant” in
their 2003 book Global Women. They illustrate the
care demands that drive a steady supply of migrant
women primarily from developing countries such
as Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines to the
United States. These nannies, maids, and sex workers leave their children behind to care and provide
friendship and love for children and adults in the
United States.

Implications and Future Research
How, then, should emotional labor be viewed?
On the one hand, researchers have critiqued it for
exploiting workers. They have showed that it is
unrecognized, unpaid, and dehumanizing. They have
associated it with worker alienation, low job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and worker burnout. Conversely, some have taken a more pragmatic
approach, addressing emotional labor as a necessary
part of organizational performance that benefits
both customer and employee. J. Andrew Morris and
Daniel C. Feldman note that emotional labor helps
gain loyal customers, increases customer satisfaction,
improves both customer and employee enthusiasm,
and potentially builds employee discipline and professionalism. Some studies have combined both critique and pragmatism. That is, several researchers
have attempted to measure the extent to which people do surface and deep emotional labor, to explore
how these types differ empirically, and to assess their
effects. An interesting study in occupational psychology by Céleste M. Brotheridge and Raymond T.
Lee assessed both types of emotional labor in service and nonservice jobs through development and
application of an emotional labor scale. It found that
surface acting appeared to impact employees more
negatively than deep acting. Finally, it is possible that
jobs requiring emotional labor might actually provide spaces for communication between groups who
normally do not interact socially. Kang posits that
some sites of emotional labor (e.g., the nail salon)
might actually provide a space where women could
“rewrite” the unspoken rules around emotional
labor to genuinely interact with women of different
ethnic and class backgrounds.

521

The study of emotional labor continues to expand
in accordance with the recognition that emotions
sell products in an increasingly globalized and technologically advanced marketplace. New questions
emerge about emotional labor and consumer and
employee experiences. For instance, a number of
changes have taken place in recent years. Automated
phone lines regularly replace human operators with
prerecorded technology. Casinos employ virtual
women to deal poker hands. Students routinely
take classes or complete whole programs of study
from online instructors whom they will never see. If
consumers expect emotionally pleasing experiences
along with the goods they receive, then how will
unfeeling machines deliver a comparably satisfying
product? Do consumers expect less emotional labor
as machine-assisted transactions increase? Questions
also arise about the real human workers who perform emotional labor in increasingly competitive
service-oriented economies. That is, as service-work
economies continue to look for satisfied customers
and increased market share, will employers expect
their real human workers to rely more heavily on
emotional appeal to sell services? Will employee performance be monitored more strictly for such appeal
with an increased presence of instant feedback systems to monitor customer transaction satisfaction?
Will employers recognize emotional labor as real
work and reward it with increased pay?
Susan L. Wortmann and Jie Gao
See also Alienation; Beauty Myth; Commodification;
Domestic Division of Labor; Emotions; Gender; Hair
Care/Hairdressing; Service Industry

Further Readings
Brotheridge, Céleste M., and Raymond T. Lee.
“Development and Validation of an Emotional Labor
Scale.” Journal of Occupational and Organizational
Psychology 76, no. 3 (2003): 365–379.
Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart: Commercialization
of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983.
Hochschild, Arlie, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Global Women:
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy.
New York: Metropolitan Owl Books, 2004.
Kang, Miliann. “The Managed Hand: The
Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean
Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons.” Gender and Society 17,
no. 6 (2003): 820–839.

522

Emotions

Morris, J. Andrew, and Daniel C. Feldman. “The
Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of
Emotional Labor.” Academy of Management Review
21, no. 4 (1996): 986–1010.
Pierce, Jennifer. Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in
Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.
Sallaz, Jeffrey J. “The House Rules: Autonomy and
Interests among Service Workers in the Contemporary
Casino Industry.” Work and Occupations 29, no. 4
(2002): 394–427.
Steinberg, Ronnie J., and Deborah M. Figart. “Emotion
Labor since the Managed Heart.” Annuls of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 561
(1999): 8–26.
Sutton, Robert I. “Maintaining Norms about Expressed
Emotions: The Case of Bill Collectors.” Administrative
Science Quarterly 36 (1991): 245–268.

EMOTIONS
To study consumer culture means to study emotions.
If we simply assume the existence of eight basic emotions, such as fear, anger, joy, sadness, acceptance,
disgust, expectation, and surprise, we will see immediately that each act and experience of consumption
will presuppose or trigger at least one of these. Joy
will or should be a permanent companion of consumption; sadness might arise if we are disappointed
by the act. If we add shame to this list, we gain insight
into a central aspect of consumption, namely, its
social character and the effect that consuming has on
respect and self-respect. It was a development within
American sociology that led to the formulation and
formation of an explicit sociology of emotions, but
it has since then also spread to Europe (see Barbalet
1998; Flam 2002). Its most central goal was to correct and complement implicit or explicit assumptions
about rational actions and actors by giving emotions their due after their neglect perceived to be a
major shortcoming of mainstream sociology. Finally,
not every culture is a “consumer culture,” although
people in all ages and spaces “consume.” What is
meant here is a culture with a quite specific attitude
toward consumption, a relatively stable but changing
system of man-made goods, meanings, and habitualized emotional dispositions which are transferred
from one generation to the next. This entry deals,
first, with the (pre)history of consumer culture and

explanations of its emotional aspects; second, with
the mass-consumption societies of the twentieth
century and the various voices articulating support,
benevolent understanding, or ferocious critique of
their emotional consequences; and third, with emotions and their neglected role in the study of contemporary consumption under a more general aspect.

From Courtly Lavishness and
Puritan Asceticism to the Romantic
Ethic of Modern Consumption
Among those trying to explain the roots of modern
capitalism, two different lines of argumentation can
be found out. There is a dominant tradition that
links them to Western urban, mercantile, and artisan
strata, but the idea to seek them in the aristocratic
environment of courts and palaces has also never
disappeared. As Jean-Christophe Agnew outlined,
the answers to the question of the birth of consumer
societies have moved from the eighteenth to the fifteenth century, while the temporal location of their
final arrival as a mass-consumer society has shifted
to the middle of the twentieth, not earlier. Norbert
Elias showed that the rich courts of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries represented the centers of command and consumption of the aristocratically dominated societies of the ancien régime, turning thus into
centers of taste refinement at the expense of growing
inhibitions on the expression of emotion and under
the demand of postulates to behave in a nonviolent
manner (pacification). These three dimensions were
joined by the art of observing the behavior of others
(psychologization) and conscious self-control (courtly
rationality—rationalization). Nonworking people of
high, aristocratic rank were forced to a wasteful and
often ruinous status competition. Pierre Bourdieu’s
concept of “distinction” is anticipated here. Chandra
Mukerji’s highly influential study has also shown that
luxury consumption antedates the advent of industrial
capitalism by centuries by pointing to the Elizabethan
court of the sixteenth century. Aristocratic models
were imitated by the rising bourgeoisie; the aristocracy answered with strategies securing distinction. In
the second stage of this process, people of working,
bourgeois origin started to develop their own lines of
demarcation, their own imperatives and standards,
until both codes merged, while the elaborate courtly
standard for refined behavior (so central for the “good
society” on the basis of personal contact) gave way to

Emotions

an “affective household,” shaped by the demands of
work and profession in the sphere of work and education. How these might have looked like has been
told by Max Weber in his now equally famous and
often-criticized narrative on the Protestant ethic and
English Puritanism: gregariousness, luxury, bad language, even sleeping longer than six or seven hours
was to be eschewed. The result was the breaking of
the spontaneity of life and enjoyment, engendering
melancholy and moroseness. Constant reflection was
called for, watchfulness an imperative. Work was the
royal road to ecstasy. Sexuality—unless for reproductive purposes—was condemned. God did not condone seigneurial ostentation (or the gentleman’s focus
on standing and rank). All forms of enjoyment were
to be shunned—whether these were football, lyric
poetry, singing, the theater, nudity, fashion, or simply
idle speech.
Colin Campbell’s much-appreciated study,
The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern
Consumerism, pointed to England as the birthplace
of attitudes prior to and favorable for the rise of
mass consumption. As Agnew stated, the dichotomy
between an ascetic Puritanism, hostile to the expression of feeling, and a feeling-centered Romanticism
has to be abandoned since the explosion of wants
and needs, their anticipation in daydreams, and their
frustration in reality created the space for sentimentality. This was the correlate of what Campbell called
affective self-indulgence. The canon was first practiced by a leisured class, at a great distance from the
“common people.” But in the end, the corresponding
codes were merged, as had been in the case of the
fusion between aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie.

Mass-Consumption Societies of the Twentieth
Century and Their Emotional Consequences
The main message of critical social science about
the consumer culture of the twentieth century was
communicated in stories of betrayal and treason,
not of priests but of manipulating agents or the system of (late) capitalism. It was Georg Simmel in his
Philosophy of Money who drew a more neutral, perhaps slightly cynical, portrait of the emotions associated with the use of money—the indulgence of money.
Besides his point that money allows both for individualization and more dispassion, he developed models of
character (or “habitus”) of people in their dealing with
money by stressing the role of emotions: according

523

to the weight the person gives either to “having” or
to spending, he described the psychology of avarice,
wastefulness, asceticism, cynicism, and extravagance.
In the case of avarice, people enjoy the potentiality of
money and, with it, the “power” it lends. In the case
of the squanderer, things are the other way around: he
or she can only experience emotions if money turns
into the liquid form of allowing immediate sensual
pleasures—and even the feeling of power occurs in
the moment of free choice of a commodity or service. Much of what was written by Frankfurt theorists like Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor
W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, and what was
later adopted by authors like Christopher Lasch, can
be seen as an attempt to fill in the psychological void
in Simmel by introducing Freud and to use it for a
description of the transition from avarice to wastefulness linked to two ideal-typical stages of industrial
capitalism. The heroic, bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century has been transformed into an orally
dependent creature, with fantasies of oral grandiosity and simultaneous massive anxieties, sucking at
the nipples of an expanding welfare bureaucracy and
crippled by a private, corporate bureaucracy equally
unfit to provide anything but unfulfilled dreams and
promises. Important corrections of too-linear assumptions about this process were made by a number of
American historians, who stressed the hesitant entry
of immigrant workers and their families into the new
world of goods, sticking often to their old ways rather
than accommodating to the new. It was also shown
that the impact of televised dreams on the experienced reality of American workers was more complex
than is usually assumed: the dream producers had to
make concessions to a harder reality, and TV consumers were more than passive victims of persuasion.
But Warren Susman’s essays on America in the 1930s
and 1940s—during the worst economic crisis ever—
have also shed light on the essentially conservative
and tranquillizing influence the new consumer culture
had on workers by creating feelings of belonging as
part of a new American way of life.

Emotions and Their Neglected Role in the
Study of Contemporary Consumption
One of the major insights produced by a sociologyof-emotions perspective leads to the revision of the
idea of the consumer as a rational, utility-maximizing,
sovereign being. People depend on all forms of advice

524

Emotions

literature; this is also true for everyday decisions such
as where better to spend the holidays or where and
what to buy, in matters of fashion, and so on. They
are often well informed about the goods themselves
but are in desperate need for confirmation and reassurance. What they lack is help in emotional terms.
The average attitude toward money and commodities is anything but self-confidential and rational;
indeed, people are often irrational or emotional, not
very dominant but often rather insecure in their handling of money. They might be ashamed and envious
if they are not able to keep up with their neighbors
as soon as the experts of advertisement manage to
persuade them of certain new needs. Indeed, one of
the central emotions here is envy.
“Orality” is the basic metaphor for Pasi Falk’s
notion of the consuming body. It is not at all clear
what kind of emotions really correspond to this new
kind of “hedonism.” If we take the single act of consumption as our analytical point of departure (thus
neglecting its socially embedded character), we should
at least distinguish between the end stage of consumption (skiing, listening to pop music) and the other links
in the whole action chain of consumption, notes Fred
Hirsch. Many consumer goods (e.g., a motor saw)
are rather embedded in a culture of work and not of
orgiastic frenzy. The same goes for the rising expenditure on health and a healthy body, according to Chris
Shilling, and the effort to secure a healthy or morally
acceptable diet. Bulimia and anorexia can be seen as
examples of the failure of some individuals to come
to terms with the growing need for self-regulation
according to shifting social norms of appearance; a
similar interpretation might also shed light on the
phenomenon of compulsive and addictive shopaholics. It may well be that it is less “fun” than fear
of rejection or envy that is the motive behind many
consumer activities. It should not be forgotten that
progress in medicine, reduction of infant mortality,
broadened access to higher education, and changes in
patterns of authority relations between superiors and
inferiors, men and women, and parents and children
toward what Cas Wouters describes as greater “informality” and a “controlled de-controlling of emotions,” accompanied or permitted the explosion of
wants held responsible for the visibly different emotional climate of a mass-consumer culture compared
with their thrifty predecessors. Simmel’s categories
of wastefulness and extravagance have been shown
as being empirically helpful for the understanding

of American young urban professionals (yuppies) in
their consuming behavior. For some people, money
may serve as a means to express their love of another
person they are caring for (paternal or marital love, as
in the case of a life-insurance policy).

Summary
The conceptual reorientation toward a sociology-ofemotions perspective on consumer culture is, as has
hopefully been shown, fruitful. The history of consumption reveals that emotions linked to refined
forms of consumption had already developed long
before industrial capitalism; aristocratic wastefulness
had to merge with bourgeois sentimentality to create
that social space that led to the explosion of wants and
needs we are familiar with today. Emotions of avarice,
wastefulness, asceticism, cynicism, and extravagance
have accompanied the rise of a mass-consumer culture since its beginnings. The “heroic bourgeois subject” with its ability to defer gratification has often
been seen, in critical perspective, as giving way to
“oral grandiosity,” self-indulgence, and superficiality,
but a more detailed empirical analysis of the transition to mass-consumer society has shown that we
easily underrate the autonomy of consumers from the
working class and also the resistance of social habitus.
Much of what looks like pure hedonist consumption
can be related to the emotions of envy, shame, or fear.
These emotions are probably as often the background
of rising expenditures for a healthy and beautiful body
as the pleasure to enjoy the fruits of these consuming
efforts. Finally, a sociology-of-emotions perspective
helps us to see the mythical element in all assumptions
of a rational, autonomous, and utility-maximizing
consumer behavior. To keep the explanatory promise
of introducing emotions means more empirical work,
though. We are still in the beginnings.
Helmut Kuzmics
See also Alienation; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies;
Elias, Norbert; Emotional Labor; Happiness;
Informalization; Luxury and Luxuries; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School)

Further Readings
Agnew, Jean Christophe. “Coming Up for Air: Consumer
Culture in Historical Perspective.” In Consumption and
the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy
Porter, 19–39. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1994.

Energy Consumption
Barbalet, Jack. Emotion, Social Theory, and Social
Structure: A Macro-sociological Approach. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Flam, Helena. Soziologie der Emotionen: eine Einführung
[Sociology of emotions: An introduction]. Konstanz,
Germany: UVK, 2002.
Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976.
Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of
Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983.
Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage,
1993.
Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation
of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Pantheon, 1984
Wouters, Cas. Informalization: Manners and Emotions
since 1890. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Energy consumption refers to the consumption of
energy, in the form of raw biomass, processed fuels,
or electricity, to provide heat, cooling, light, motive
power, and other services that support and enhance
human activity. Energy consumption did not really
become a subject of academic or policy interest until
after the so-called oil shocks of the 1970s. Prior to
the 1970s, access to energy was considered to be infinite, and growth in the consumption of energy was
taken for granted. Energy planning was a forecasting
activity in which future demand was based on recent
growth trends. The task was to bring enough production on line to meet the projected demand. The
environmental side effects of energy use were not
an issue in energy planning. The theory and policies
concerning energy consumption at mid-twentieth
century were either positive or indifferent to growth.
The oil shocks of the 1970s shook up bedrock
assumptions about energy. The so-called Arab oil
embargo shut down energy supplies in Europe and
the United States overnight. By the time Jimmy Carter
took office as U.S. president in 1977, he declared the
“saving” of energy as “the moral equivalent of war”

525

and created the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct it. The idea of energy conservation was born,
and scrutiny was given to the ways that energy is
consumed. The first theories to be brought to bear on
how to reduce energy consumption came from technologists and economists. The technologists saw the
problem as one of technical inefficiency. The solution lay in increasing the efficiency of the multitude
of energy-using technologies that by the 1970s had
saturated everyday life. A policy effort was put in
place to increase research and development on technical efficiency of things like cars, refrigerators, food
appliances, home heating systems, and light fixtures.
On the policy side, new laws and regulations were
put in place to force manufacturers to increase the
energy efficiency of their products.
Economists saw the problem of reducing energy
consumption in terms of economic efficiency. From
this perspective, the effort to save energy should aim
at improving the economic efficiency of markets,
both energy markets and markets for energy using
products. Consumers in this model were assumed to
be autonomous economic actors; consumption was
reduced to weighing of the economic benefits and
costs of choice alternatives (utility maximization).
Social, cultural, and material considerations and
constraints were ignored. These economic and technical perspectives together constituted a powerful discourse that would dominate the theory and policy of
energy consumption for decades. The methodologically individualistic view of consumption yielded a
policy portfolio consisting mainly of price incentives:
information and motivational campaigns intended to
get individual consumers to conserve energy.
By the mid-1980s, there was a growing body of
evidence that techno-economic models were not
living up to their predictions. Energy consumption
was continuing to grow in spite of efficiency gains.
This allowed for the entry of noneconomic social
science into the theory and practice of energy consumption, first in the United States in the mid-1980s,
then in Europe by the end of the decade. A number of empirical studies conducted by sociologists,
anthropologists, and social psychologists cast doubt
on the assumptions of reductionist economic models.
Their findings showed that people were concerned
about prices and costs but that economics were only
one of many considerations. People consume energy
to create a solid, cozy home; to make a statement
about their home and family; to conform to ideas

526

Energy Consumption

about how a normal family should consume; and so
on. In spite of these new insights, energy conservation research agendas were stubbornly resistant to
incorporating a broader social view of consumption
and sociotechnical change. However, the specter
of climate change brought a new set of pressures
to the theory and policies of energy conservation:
80 percent of climate gas emissions can be attributed
to energy production and consumption. There was a
grudging recognition that while changes to nonfossil energy sources will make a contribution to emission reductions, national commitments to reducing
climate gas emissions would not be achieved without
significant reductions in energy consumption. The
mandate to reduce energy-related emissions by as
much as 20 to 25 percent over a couple of decades
opened for new thinking and innovations on the
techno-economic and individualist theories which
had dominated energy consumption for decades.
One of the important theoretical innovations of
recent years has been to situate energy consumption within broader studies of consumption. This
makes good sense because in the rich Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, energy is not consumed directly but rather in
conjunction with the consumption of products, technologies, and services such as electric lighting, clean
clothes, travel, refrigeration, and entertainment.
This theoretical move opened energy consumption
to increasing attention from sociology, anthropology, institutional economics, cultural studies, and
the social science of technology. Theories of energy
consumption now engage with many of the central
issues of social and technological inquiry.
One important strand of theory that has been
brought to bear on energy consumption is derived
from Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, later developed and extended by social scientists such as Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu.
From this perspective, consumption is about more
than materiality and material needs: people consume
to satisfy some inner, symbolic need or to make
a social statement about themselves. Thus, a car is
consumed not only because it is a vehicle for getting
efficiently and quickly from point A to B but also
because it is representative of the owner’s identity.
From this perspective, a corporate executive would
not be likely to acquire and use a Volkswagen Beetle,
even if she were interested in saving energy or minimizing environmental impacts. On the other hand,

the car cannot be “flashier” than those of her superiors. She has to be careful to locate the choice of car at
her appropriate status level in the corporate hierarchy.
Symbolic and performative theories have been useful in understanding some forms of consumption of
some kinds of things; however, signs, symbols, and
performance have less explanatory power for many
kinds of energy consumption, including the energyusing household appliances, such as refrigerators,
washing machines, water heaters, and so on. Elizabeth
Shove has used the term inconspicuous consumption
to characterize how household appliances are consumed. Consumption of these appliances takes place
inside homes, where the designs and layouts of modern
kitchens and washing areas create spaces in which the
appropriate appliance is to fit. Another related point
is that many aspects of consumption of cleanliness,
food, and thermal comfort are routinized and done
without much reflection over alternatives. Bourdieu’s
theory of practice has relevance for understanding
how energy consumption can only be understood in
relation to the routinized ways it fits into home practices. Another relevant new line of consumption theorizing involves examining the ways that energy-using
technologies are agentive in energy consumption,
not simply in improving efficiency, as the technology
positivists would have it, but in structuring consumption in ways that often increase the energy intensity of
practices such as food preparation, thermal heating
and cooling, mobility, and so on (see Bijer and Law
2004; Southerton, Chappels, and Vliet 2004).
The geographical focus of energy consumption,
confined mainly to Europe, North America, and a few
Asian countries until recently, has broadened in the
past decade to encompass consumption in the middle
classes and elites of rapidly developing economies
in Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. This shift has
brought with it the need for a theoretical lens that is
capable of capturing the ways that local practices and
global forces interact to produce new forms for energy
consumption. Globalizing markets and transnational
capital are bringing new products and ideas to places
like China and India, where energy consumption is
growing rapidly. The experience thus far is that these
forces do not wipe over and homogenize consumption but are nonetheless responsible for dramatic
changes in domains such as food, cleaning, mobility,
and thermal comfort (Wilhite 2008). Movement of
people through the transnationalization of work is
also affecting the way that millions of people in Asia,

Africa, and Latin America consume goods and energy.
The consumption of energy using technologies such
as air conditioners and televisions in these places may
have a social biography that begins in one part of the
world and ends up in another (see Appadurai 1996).
This complex journey is implicated in, and influenced
by, social contexts such as those of the extended family, gender roles, notions of cleanliness, and so on.
Understanding these changing contexts is essential to
understanding how and why people in these emerging
economies acquire new goods and how they become
normalized in local consumption practices.
Harold Wilhite
See also Automobiles; Consumer Demand; Consumer
Regulation; Eco-Labeling; Environmental Footprinting;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Infrastructures and Utilities;
Sociotechnical Systems

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso,
1996. First published 1968.
Bijker, Wiebe, and John Law, eds. Shaping Technology/
Building Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement
of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience: The
Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappels, and Bas Van Vliet,
eds. Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of
Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar, 2004.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan,
1899.
Wilhite, Harold. Consumption and the Transformation of
Everyday Life: A View from South India. Basingstroke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

ENGEL’S LAW
Engel’s law is the name that has been given to a robust
relationship between income levels and expenditure
on food first discovered by the German statistician

527

Level of Income

Engel’s Law

Quantity Demanded

Figure 1

Engel curve

Ernst Engel. In its most basic form, Engel’s law
states that, other things being equal, the share of the
household budget spent on food will rise as household income falls. Conversely, as household income
rises, a smaller relative share of the household budget
will be spent on food, even as expenditure on food
increases in absolute terms.
Engel’s law can be expressed graphically as a
curve where the level of household income is measured on the y axis and the quantity demanded of
food is measured on the x axis such that it takes the
form of a positively sloped curve with an increasing
gradient as household income rises to higher levels
(see Figure 1).
The shape of the curve implies that the income
elasticity of demand for food (a coefficient measuring
the responsiveness of demand to changes in income)
is between one and zero, which is the range for all
so-called “normal” goods such as food and other
necessities. “Inferior” goods, by contrast, are ones
that have an inverse (negative) relationship between
changes in levels of income and quantity demanded
of those goods; consumption of them falls as income
levels rise and households switch expenditure from
these goods to higher quality substitutes. Inferior
goods thus have an income elasticity of demand
that is less than zero. Luxury goods, on the other
hand, reveal a positive relationship with changing
levels of income (i.e., income elasticity of demand
is greater than one) so that as incomes rise, proportionally greater quantities of these goods are desired.
Engel’s law (and the associated curve) implies that

528

Engel’s Law

the relationship between the level of income and
expenditure on food is dynamic: initially, increases
in the level of income yield increases in the quantity
demanded of food, but this relationship weakens as
income levels rise to the point where large increases
in household income yield little or no additional
demand for food. In other words, at lower levels
of income, demand for food is like demand for a
luxury good until a point is reached at higher levels
of income when it becomes an inferior good. At that
point, any additional expenditure on food is substituted by expenditure on luxury goods. It should be
noted that the foregoing discussion has been simplified for the sake of clarity and that other characteristics of households also determine consumption
patterns, notably the composition of the household
(number, age, and gender), seasonal effects, and price
discrepancies, among other things. Moreover, there is
considerable variation within the income elasticity of
demand of food: some are inferior goods (cabbage)
while others are luxuries (caviar).
What became known as Engel’s law was first
observed by Engel while analyzing the household budgets of Belgian workers in the 1850s. Engel was influenced in this by his teacher Frédéric LePlay with whom
he had studied in Paris in the late 1840s and who had
pioneered an inductive method of social inquiry stressing the importance of direct field investigation and
studying the family unit. Another important influence
on Engel was the Belgian astronomer and statistician
Adolfe Quetelet with whom Engel developed contacts
after leaving Paris. Quetelet had applied the mean values used in astronomy to suicide, which he showed
occurring with uncanny regularity in large population
groups and which he believed suggested an underlying
causal factor. Applying these empirical and statistical
techniques, Engel set out to investigate the standard
of living of workers aided by the work of Belgian
journalist and statistician Édouard Ducpétiaux, who
had collected detailed information from some two
hundred Belgian worker budgets. Engel discovered
that lower worker incomes had corresponding budgets that devoted a larger proportion of that income
to food than those of workers with higher incomes.
Engel subsequently tested the validity of his observations by extending his study of consumption to his
native Saxony, where he had been appointed head of
the Royal Statistical Bureau in 1854. In 1857, he published an article titled “The Consumption-Production
Relationships in the Kingdom of Saxony” in which

he confirmed his Belgian observations and formally
stated his budget law, as Engel’s law was first known.
Engel came to believe that the proportion of household budget spent on food was the most accurate
measure of the material standard of living.
Today, Engel’s law enjoys the status of being one
of the first functional economic relationships ever
discovered using quantitative techniques, and as such,
its discovery marks the beginnings of the subfield of
econometrics. It was not until the early-twentieth century, however, that Engel’s law was fully integrated into
economic theory and that the mathematical models of
the Engel curve were adequately developed to allow
for statistical testing and estimation of the shape of
the Engel curve for different goods. Of all empirical
relationships tested in economics, Engels’s law is probably the most robust and widely accepted. The relationship has also been extended—with less success—to
other necessities such as clothing, fuel, and housing.
A variant of the law was devised for housing rents
by Engel’s contemporary, Berlin statistician Heinrich
Schwabe, and is sometimes known as Schwabe’s law.
Nevertheless, the link between levels of household
income and expenditure on housing is less robust than
that between household income and food.
Beyond its obvious value to the discipline of economics as a basic component of the theory of demand
and price, Engel’s law has had a number of important implications for public finance and economic
policy. Since the late-nineteenth century, the insights
of Engel’s law have motivated social reformers to
seek to reduce or eliminate excise, sales, and valueadded taxes on food and other necessities, since
the burden of these indirect taxes fall more heavily
on lower income groups (i.e., they are regressive in
nature). Head and poll taxes were criticized on similar grounds. Instead, reformers proposed graduated
(progressive) income taxes whose rates fall for lower
and rise for higher income groups. Similar arguments
were also extended to housing, providing a rationale
for limiting rent increases and preventing speculation
in the property market through regulation and special
taxes, especially within the segment of housing with
lower income tenants.
Engel’s law also has implications for economic
development. It asserts a declining budget share for
food as incomes rise, suggesting that agriculture will
contribute a declining share to national income as an
economy grows and develops. That is, Engel’s law
predicts the relative decline of the agricultural sector

Enlightenment

over time and the outmigration of labor and capital from farming to industry and services as income
levels rise. The upshot of this for economic development is that a developing country that pursues a
policy of protecting farming from these adjustments
in the interest of balancing growth between rural
and urban areas will face falling per capita income
and thus rising levels of poverty. The basic relationship between rising income levels and falling relative
demand for food embodied in Engel’s law also means
that greater agricultural productivity will tend to
hasten agriculture’s relative decline vis-à-vis industry
and services, other things being equal. This has been
confirmed by the strong decline of agriculture as a
component of national income and the dramatic fall
of employment in this sector seen in all economically
developed countries.
Erik Grimmer-Solem
See also Consumer Demand; Income; Inequalities;
Measuring Standards of Living; Needs and Wants;
Preference Formation; Social and Economic
Development

Further Readings
Engel, Ernst. “Die vorherrschenden Gewerbezweige in den
Gerichtsämtern mit Beziehung auf die Productions- und
Consumptionsverhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen”
[The predominant industries of the court offices with
reference to the production and consumption conditions
in the Kingdom of Saxony]. Zeitschrift des Statistischen
Büreaus des Königlich Sächsischen Ministerium des
Innern 3 (1857): 129–182.
Engel, Ernst. Die Lebenskosten belgischer Arbeiter-Familien
früher und jetzt: Ermittelt aus FamilienHaushaltrechnungen und vergleichend zusammengestellt
[The cost of living of Belgian workers’ families then and
now: Determined from family accounts and collected for
comparison]. Dresden, Germany: C. Heinrich, 1895.
Hacking, Ian. “Prussian Numbers 1860–1882.” In The
Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1, edited by Lorenz
Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger,
377–394. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Houthakker, H. S. “An International Comparison of
Household Expenditure Patterns, Commemorating the
Centenary of Engel’s Law.” Econometrica 25, no. 4
(October 1957): 532–551.
Houthakker, H. S. “Engel Curve” and “Engel’s Law.” In
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, vol. 2, edited
by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman,
142–144. London: Macmillan, 1987.

529

Laitner, John. “Structural Change and Economic Growth.”
The Review of Economic Studies 67, no. 3 (July 2000):
545–561.
Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking
1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Zimmerman, Carle E. “Ernst Engel’s Law of Expenditures
for Food.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 47,
no. 1 (November 1932): 78–101.

ENLIGHTENMENT
There are many ways to define the Enlightenment,
and identifying a distinct set of characteristically
Enlightenment ideas is notoriously difficult. Though
dispute exists over the boundaries of what might
properly claim inclusion in the Enlightenment, its core
identity is relatively uncontested. The Enlightenment
was a movement devoted to rational meliorism. It was
committed to the notion that collective application of
reason could improve the conditions of life. Distinctive
styles of consumption and debate on consumption
formed an important part of that movement.
The histories of consumption and the Enlightenment intersect in two domains. New sites of consumption, in particular the coffeehouse and the salon, as
well as new objects of consumption, such as journals
and newspapers, offered the material ground for the
Enlightenment as a social movement. Consumption
was also the object of sustained intellectual attention.
The ubiquity of consumption in the late-seventeenth
and early-eighteenth centuries provoked the luxury
debate. Consumption was one of the central pillars
around which political economists and social theorists
constructed their account of the new commercial civilization they saw being built around them. The two
threads, material and intellectual, came together at
the end of the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of new
kinds of objects—colonial consumption goods, such as
sugar, as well as capital goods, such as the machines so
lovingly described and illustrated in the supplementary
volumes of the Encyclopédie—created a new idea of
“the improvement of humanity.” Everyday life could
be transformed, it was argued, not through moral and
political reform alone, but through the dissemination
and use of things. This technological ideal was not
universally endorsed. “The system of the moderns”
was condemned in principle by Rousseau and for its
reliance on slavery and exploitation in the Histoire des
Deux-Indes, Diderot and Raynal’s best-selling critique

530

Enlightenment

of the commercial empires that sustained commercial
society and “polished manners.” By the late-eighteenth
century, the debate on consumption formed one element of the wider cultural crisis of European states
that foreshadowed the French Revolution.

Sites of Consumption
The Enlightenment started in London and Amsterdam
in the middle of the seventeenth century, but it
quickly became a trans-European and then transAtlantic phenomenon. The coherence of the world
of the Enlightenment was maintained and sustained
by the circulation and consumption of print. The
spread of the Enlightenment can be traced against
the dissemination of print media. In England, about
6,000 book titles were published in the 1620s; by
the 1710s, that number had climbed to around
21,000; and by the close of the century, it had
reached over 56,000. Across Europe, the scale of the
market for books was transformed and so was its
nature. Whole new genres of “enlightened” literature appeared. Between 1715 and 1789, 2,525 new
titles in political economy, the archetypical enlightened genre, were published in Paris alone. A new
kind of reading public was fashioned from the consumption of books. Religious literature still poured
from the presses in the eighteenth century but it was
swamped by the new genres such as novels, encyclopedias, natural history compendia, and works
on economic reform, not to mention philosophy.
According to Roger Chartier, half of all books published in Paris in the late-seventeenth century were
religious in content; by the 1720s, that had reduced
to a third, to a quarter in the 1750s, and one-tenth
by 1790. The world of the Enlightenment mapped
most closely onto the circulation and consumption
of its most characteristic book: the Encyclopédie.
Edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, it was originally
published by a syndicate around André-François
Le Breton in seventeen volumes of text and eleven
volumes of plate from 1751 to 1772. The first edition was a successful business venture, realizing as
much as 2,500,000 livres in profit, and the later
octavo editions turned it into a huge cultural phenomenon as well. By 1789, as many as 24,000 copies of this work were in circulation (Darnton 1979).
One easy way to identify the membership of the late
Enlightenment is through the subscriptions to the
various editions of this work.

Book readership constituted the world of the
Enlightenment, but communication, a more interactive ideal, rather than reading, was at its heart.
Periodical and ephemeral literature, especially newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, allowed for a far
more active mode of consumption than reading
alone could provide. England produced the first daily
newspaper, the Daily Courant, which began publication in 1702. England enjoyed the most robust
periodical press in Europe. In 1746, London had six
daily newspapers, six tri-weeklies, and six weeklies,
according to James Van Horn Melton. The country
did not monopolize this kind of publishing. The
paradigmatic journal of opinion was the Nouvelles
extraordinaires de divers endroits, more commonly
known as the Gazette de Leyde, founded in 1680 by
the Huguenot refugee Jean de la Font. The Gazette
enjoyed its heyday as the journal of enlightened
European opinion under the editorship of Jean Luzac
after 1750. European outrage at the great causes
célèbres of Calas and the Chevalier de la Barre was
orchestrated through the pages of the gazette.
Journals and pamphlets literature tried to approximate to the immediacy and flexibility of conversation,
particularly to the experience of the coffeehouse. The
Tatler advertised that it would bring the news from
the coffeehouses of London and in its early numbers
gave the bylines as Will’s, Garraway’s, White’s, and
the other prominent London coffeehouses. London
was the European capital of coffee. The first coffeehouse in Europe west of Venice opened in Oxford in
1650; by 1700, there were more than two thousand
coffeehouses in London. Coffeehouses were exotic,
derived from the sociability of the Middle East, and
transformative, since they expressly organized themselves around conversation rather than social status;
as an anonymous poet described it,
Gentry, tradesmen all are welcome hither
And may without affront sit down together.
Print culture and the coffeehouse were curiously
symbiotic since one of the attractions of coffeehouses
was that they provided newspapers for their patrons.
The coffeehouse united the new urban culture of consumption with new patterns of intellectual sociability. Robert Hooke, one of the founders of the Royal
Society, used the coffeehouse as a neutral site where
he could negotiate the construction of new scientific
instruments with artisans such as Thomas Tompion.

Enlightenment

Coffeehouses put new commodities, new ideas, and
new objects into circulation.
The other classic site of Enlightenment sociability was even more conspicuously a site of consumption. The salon was a French institution in which a
female patron united the socially prominent with the
culturally elevated. The prototype was the salon of
Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Madame
de Lambert, who began her Tuesday gatherings in
her apartments on the Rue de Richelieu in 1710. The
salon initially referred to the new intimate rooms for
receptions that replaced the older, larger, great halls.
Salons were sumptuously furnished, designed to display the personal taste of the salonnière through the
best of the emerging Paris luxury trade. Madame de
Lambert’s salon was designed and built by Robert de
Cotte, one of the most prominent architects of the
late-seventeenth century. The intensity of the connection between intellectual life and luxury consumption
even created an archetype. Claudine-Alexandrine
Guérin de Tencin offered velvet breeches as a New
Year’s gift to the literary men who frequented her
salon so that they could be properly attired in polite
society. The more rough and ready writers who
lacked a patron and could not afford fashionable velvet breeches, or culottes, were termed sans-culottes.
This joke about consumption and culture was to
lend a name to the most radical wing of French
revolutionaries.

Luxury Debate
Enlightenment and consumption were implicated
from the first, but the term consumption was not central to debate in the early Enlightenment. It did exist
in its modern form but as such was usually confined
to discussions of trade. Consumption was viewed
as a problem and a threat to productivity in works
such as those of Thomas Mun, who prescribed that
“we soberly refrain from excessive consumption of
forreign wares” as the key to England’s trade policy (1664, 127). Daniel Defoe used the idea of consumption in a new way. In his notes advising Robert
Harley on the best policy the British cabinet should
adopt toward Scotland, he argued that it should
encourage “consumption of provisions” as a means
of stimulating the economy, raising the value of land
and so integrating the Scottish gentry. Defoe was
idiosyncratic, though. Most thinkers saw consumption as waste, a threat to the ability of the nation to

531

mobilize resources. They developed their ideas about
the increasing social importance of things within the
register of the luxury debate.
Luxury was a specific term in early-modern moral
and political thought. Luxury was a moral failing, the
capacity of the mind to affix value to objects outside
the self and so lose moral autonomy. It was a central
term in the neo-stoic lexicon that was central to languages of moral and political value. The criticism of
luxury was given a new impetus by the opposition to
Louis XIV, who was understood to have promoted
luxury as a tool of domination. François de Fénélon’s
Telemachus, of 1699, reforged the classical connection
between luxury and political corruption. Absolute
power was the twin of luxury: “As arbitrary power is
the bane of kings, so luxury poisons a whole nation.
. . . Wealth is the sole pursuit” (297). Luxury and
femininity were associated in a cluster of metaphors
of softness and hybridity that contrasted with definite,
masculine individuality. Men were ideally characterized by self-command, and to lose that self-command
to luxury was a form of feminization. These underlying assumptions created difficulties for female writers
and thinkers. Mary Astell, arguing for female educational institutions in 1697, reassured her readers that
in making their living arrangements the members,
“I doubt not will make choice of what is most plain
and decent, what nature not luxury requires” (57).
What Christopher Berry refers to as the “demoralization of luxury” in the eighteenth century would be
paralleled by the assertion of women in intellectual life,
primarily as natural historians, novelists and salonnières.
The most important moment in the inversion
of the value of luxury was Bernard Mandeville’s
Fable of the Bees. First published in 1705 as The
Grumbling Hive, the 1714 re-edition caused sensation. Mandeville embraced luxury as the condition
of prosperity:
Fraud, Luxury and Pride must live,
While we the Benefits receive:
Hunger’s a dreadful plague, no doubt,
Yet who digests or thrives without? (1:36)
Mandeville did not revolutionize the meaning of
luxury, he just abandoned the ambition to impose
a rigorous ethic on human behavior, remarking that
“most writers are always teaching men what they
should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with
telling them what they really are” (39). The transvaluation of luxury into a positive good was performed

532

Enlightenment

by French thinkers in the 1730s. Voltaire, JeanFrançois Melon, and Charles-Louis de Secondat,
Baron de Montesquieu, extrapolated a new ethic
from their reflections on the English experiment on a
commercial society. Melon defined a new consumption ethic: “Luxury, is an extraordinary sumptuousness, proceeding from the riches and security of a
government. It will be always found attendant, upon
every well-governed society. Whoever finds himself
possessed of great plenty, will be desirous to enjoy
it” (1738, 174). From posing a threat to the integrity
of the society, luxury, and so consumption, had been
transformed into the mark of civilization.
Scottish natural philosophers offered a systematic
account of modern life organized around consumption. David Hume dramatized the argument in favor
of luxury in his essay “Of Commerce” when he
observed that once a community had acquired the
necessities of life through the efforts of “husbandmen and manufacturers,” the superfluous hands
“apply themselves to the finer arts, which are commonly denominated the arts of luxury.” He considered whether these hands might be better employed
strengthening the power of the state in armies and
navies and came to the conclusion that they would
be wasted if directed in this way. Indeed, such a
militarization of society would be nothing more than
a modern form of barbarism. Luxury was morally
preferable to martial virtue in modern conditions.
Flourishing consumption encourages trade and peace
and even, in the event of war, sustains the wealth
by which the community can protect itself. Luxury
promoted peace but allowed for the successful prosecution of defensive war if necessary. Hume’s friend
Adam Smith came to the same conclusion and generated a principle that “consumption is the sole end
and purpose of all production; and the interest of
the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as
it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” He went on to remark that “the maxim is
so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to
attempt to prove it” (1776, 660).
A central thread of Enlightenment thought
concerned itself with consumption, in particular
increased consumption, as the defining characteristic of a modern society. Thinkers such as Voltaire,
Melon, and Hume redefined human happiness as
the rational enjoyment of the goods of the world. A
new discussion of underdevelopment concentrated
on strategies that could stimulate increased consumption areas of Europe that had not enjoyed the

Industrious Revolution. Yet the relationship between
the Enlightenment and consumption is not exhausted
by the creation of the intellectual capacities to understand the nature of a modern commercial society.
The terms of modern debate on consumption were
also set by the response to and criticism of this new
understanding of modern life.
The terms for this renewed discussion were set
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his “Discourse on
the Origins of Inequality” (1754), he argued that
a society devoted to the production and consumption of goods necessarily generated radical inequality. Scottish political philosophers generally argued
that this was irrelevant since every individual’s situation improved in a commercial society; the rising
tide lifted all boats. Rousseau’s innovation was to
abandon the critique of luxury in favor of a more
systematic critique of property. He argued that radical inequality could only be sustained if property, a
relationship to things, was elevated to a moral quality. The politics of the maintenance of inequality and
property would eliminate the other virtues, render
humans indistinguishable from things, and so create the conditions for despotism. This criticism was
made credible for contemporaries by the intensification of slavery and its centrality to the production
of the commodities such as sugar and coffee, most
associated with the pleasures of a commercial society.
Paradoxically, one of the most effective elements of
the abolitionist politics would be the mobilization of
consumer boycotts, one of the first examples of an
explicit politics of consumption. Boycotts of sugar
and rum were first mounted in England in 1791. The
politics of consumption were also deployed in ranges
of Wedgwood pottery produced carrying the abolitionist slogan, “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Relation to Contemporary Debate
The Enlightenment generated the categories of
modern life. Consideration of the implications of a
commercial society had to address the issue of consumption. Neo-stoic moral theories provided the
initial vocabulary through which the implications
of widened consumption could be understood. By
1750, new norms generated from political economy
and political theory were being used to address
consumption. The terms of this eighteenth-century
debate, polarized between issues of development and
equality, remain central to contemporary debate.
James Livesey

Entrepreneurs
See also Civilizing Processes; History; Industrial Society;
Luxury and Luxuries; Modernization Theory; Political
Economy; Print Media; Social and Economic
Development

Further Readings
Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the
Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest.
London: Richard Wilkin, 1697.
Berry, Christopher. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and
Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French
Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A
Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979.
de Fénélon, François. 1699. Telemachus, Son of Ulysses.
Translated by Patrick Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer
Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the
Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.
Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices,
Public Benefits. 2 vols. Edited by F. B. Kaye. Indianapolis,
IN: Liberty Fund, 1988. First published 1924.
Melon, Jean-François. A Political Essay on Commerce.
Translated by David Bindon. Dublin, Ireland: P.
Crampton, 1738.
Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in
Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Mun, Thomas. England’s Treasure by Forreign Trade.
London, 1664.
Robertson, John. The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland
and Naples 1680–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund, 1981.

ENTREPRENEURS
An entrepreneur is someone who owns an economic
activity, producing goods or services to be traded
on the market. To this end, he coordinates production factors and assumes the risks involved in running a business venture. The aim of entrepreneurial
action is to maximize profits by using a particular

533

combination of production factors—which can in
turn be acquired on the market—whereby goods
are produced and then placed on the outlet markets.
Thus, the classic definition of entrepreneur emphasizes instrumental, tangible, and concrete action.
This, in any case, is also the etymological meaning
of the term, which comes from the French entreprendre: to do something. However, entrepreneurship should not be considered just a supply-side
matter. Within a complex and diversified economy,
entrepreneurial choices are also increasingly shaped
by consumer needs, which express themselves in a
heterogeneous commodities demand. Thus, entrepreneurship is a good point of view to analyze the
mutual tension between economic action and consumption pattern.
Introduced to the scientific debate by Richard
Cantillon in the first half of the eighteenth century,
the concept of the entrepreneur gained general currency among economists thanks to the work of John
Stuart Mill and later entered the lexicon of many
other disciplines: sociology, psychology, economic
history, and economic anthropology. Two of the
seminal figures in the literature on entrepreneurship
are Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber. Schumpeter
underscores the central role of the entrepreneur in
processes of innovation: he introduces new combinations of production factors, employs previously
unknown raw materials, and reshapes the organization of work. By combining existing resources in
an innovative way, the entrepreneur shakes up the
existing economic equilibrium and implements new
production functions. A series of psychological elements that make up the entrepreneurial personality
stand at the root of these innovative processes: strong
will, creativity, intuitiveness.
Weber, for his part, considers the entrepreneur as
part of his analysis of the interrelationship between
the development of capitalism and the Calvinist
ethos. In his view, Protestant asceticism made an
aptitude for business—once stigmatized—socially
acceptable and introduced new orientations in
economic life. In this setting, modern capitalism’s
entrepreneur is quite different from the economic
actors of the past: he acts rationally toward an
end, systematically works to maximize profit, and
foregoes self-indulgence for a life of frugality and
temperance, the better to pursue the process of
accumulation.
The work of these two authors suggests the complexity of the topic, which provides fertile ground for

534

Entrepreneurs

a number of lines of thought: from entrepreneurship
as a case of exceptionality stemming from specific
individual traits to studying the sociocultural variables in the context that impact the development of
acquisitive market behavior; from the processes that
are decisive for entrepreneurial success to identifying
the social groups that are particularly important in
fueling entrepreneurship; from decision-making processes to the entrepreneur as risk bearer.
Broadly speaking, studies of entrepreneurs tend
to be arrayed along a continuum, whose endpoints
are the micro-view approach, which investigates
the psychological and sociological characteristics
of entrepreneurs, and—on the opposite end—the
macro-view approach, which investigates the context
in which entrepreneurs act. In recent years, a multilevel approach has gained ground, which brings these
two extremes together with the aid of action theory.
The entrepreneur is thus seen as an actor possessed of
cognitive rationality (i.e., he defines the situation and
makes his choices on the basis of reasons he thinks
to be good) who acts in a context of constraints and
opportunities arising out of the relational structures
in which it is set and the more general characteristics
of the economic and social organization.
Recently, this approach has given new impetus
to studies of entrepreneurship, clearing the ground
of the difficulties that had made it something of a
quagmire that sociologists and economists—apart
from the classic thinkers mentioned earlier—were
loath to approach. The topic of entrepreneurship
was long absent from the sociological and economic
mainstream, which—as William Baumol remarked—
was like expunging the Prince of Denmark from the
discussion of Hamlet. It is perhaps paradoxical, but
understandable nonetheless: for economists, entrepreneurial action could not be reduced to Walras’s theory
of equilibrium and the model of pure economic
rationality. For sociologists, the risk was that of being
caught up in the study of intra-individual variables,
casting about for some way of getting a grip on the
mysterious character of the entrepreneur, and thus
infringing on the psychologist’s territory. As a result,
sociologists and economists alike have concentrated
more on the enterprise than on the entrepreneur. By
contrast, the paradigm of action offers more solid
guidance, centering analysis on actors who not only
have cognitive brilliance but are also able to mobilize
the social resources in the networks to which they
belong. This is the perspective taken by adherents of

the new economic sociology, who see entrepreneurship as a socially embedded, process-based phenomenon. The entrepreneur’s conduct, according to Mark
Granovetter, is thus that of a social actor who can
change existing social structures and find innovative
ways of bridging social networks that would otherwise not be in contact with one another. Attention
thus focuses on the figure of the entrepreneur as the
decisive actor in development processes.
Theoretically reinvigorated, the debate revolving
around entrepreneurship has lately found two promising areas of empirical application: the presence of
widespread entrepreneurship in localized settings,
with clusters of small and medium enterprises, and
the growing number of entrepreneurial activities
among immigrant groups.
In the full flood of Fordism, the driving role was
taken by the large, vertically integrated firm, which
produced standardized goods for the mass market,
where production was all important and there was
little concern for product differentiation: the technical/production apparatus, in other words, dictated
both the rate and content of consumption. Now, as
we know, this model has disappeared, superseded
by forms of lean manufacturing. Accordingly, studies focusing chiefly on the internal structure of the
entrepreneurial class and the relationships between
entrepreneurs and managers have given way to investigations that seek to analyze the processes whereby
entrepreneurship is formed. Some, for instance,
address the rise of new styles of consumption: we
are now seeing diversified demand for higher-quality
goods by consumers who are less homogeneous and
whose needs are no longer uniform. In response, entrepreneurs whose businesses turn out small production
runs can show an ability to react quickly in organizing
flexible, high-quality production, occupying market
niches that provide growing space for small enterprises, which may be located near each other. With
these premises, any analysis of entrepreneurial action
must not only bear in mind the resources provided by
social structures but also consider the actors’ ability
to perceive latent, fast-changing, and niche demand.
In this connection, studies of entrepreneurship can
benefit from analytical approaches that scrutinize the
complex links between production and consumption,
notes Roberta Sassatelli.
A second main topic is that of so-called ethnic
entrepreneurship. The self-employment rate is growing in many different contexts and among a number

Environmental Footprinting

of different foreign-born groups. Immigrant entrepreneurs often own small businesses that offer ethnic
products such as handicrafts from their home countries, traditional foodstuffs, and so forth. Sociological
studies of ethnic entrepreneurship, such as that of
Luca Storti, have shown that the economic destinies
of immigrants, given their limited language skills and
the difficulties in having their academic qualifications
recognized in their host county, are heavily dependent on whatever social capital they can draw from
their relational networks. In general, immigrants
have relatively homogenous networks, from which
they derive bonding social capital resources that are
chiefly useful for raising start-up money and finding
employees. Though there are significant differences
among the case studies examined, the empirical literature on immigrant entrepreneurs has highlighted
the importance of bounded solidarity and enforceable trust to immigrants’ business success. These are
forms of social capital that promote bonds of trust
between customers, suppliers, employers, employees,
and consumers, reducing transaction costs and keeping the market closed.
Studies of immigrant entrepreneurism have also
opened up new prospects for consumption research.
In particular, investigations have addressed the
ambivalences entailed in the consumption of ethnic
cuisine. On the one hand, immigrant entrepreneurs
purvey ethnic food to their fellow countrymen, for
whom it is a way of remaining anchored to their
origins and traditions. On the other hand, in reproducing their cuisine in another place, immigrant
entrepreneurs often introduce variations, thus triggering a process of adaptation and hybridization.
In so doing, they attract customers from outside
their ethnic group, who are drawn to foreign foods
and exotic forms of consumption, and thus become
important agents of change in the eating habits of
the host society. This spurs processes of creolization,
blurring the boundaries between ethnic foods and
those of the host country. This process involves both
consumers and producers. The former are increasingly likely to choose ethnic foods when they eat out,
thus fueling demand, according to Alan Warde and
Lydia Martens; the latter introduce Schumpeterian
innovations, putting previously unknown ethnic
food products on the market. As previously mentioned, this process often involves cultural hybridization, with immigrant restaurateurs also acting as
cultural entrepreneurs.

535

Looking forward, there is reason to be optimistic
about the future growth of studies of entrepreneurs.
The two areas of research examined in this entry provide new input and prospects for wide-ranging analyses, where the classic issues of entrepreneurism can
be cross-fertilized by ideas deriving from consumer
topics. In particular, the study of entrepreneurs lends
itself to integrated approaches to analysis, where a
focus on the social context is flanked by a thorough
reconstruction of the course taken by each actor.
Here, multidimensional investigations, open to multidisciplinary input and based on a solid empirical
foundation, will indeed be welcome.
Luca Storti
See also Cycles of Production and Consumption;
Economic Sociology; Economics; Food Consumption;
Individualization; Innovation Studies; Protestant Ethic;
Weber, Max

Further Readings
Baumol, William. “Entrepreneurship in Economic Theory.”
The American Economic Review 58 (1968): 64–71.
Granovetter, Mark. “A Theoretical Agenda for Economic
Sociology.” In The New Economic Sociology, edited by
Mauro Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, and
Marshall Meyer, 35–60. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 2002.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory,
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Storti, Luca. Imprese per la gola. Una ricerca sugli
imprenditori della gastronomia italiana in Germania
[Ethnic food enterprises: A research on Italian immigrant
entrepreneurs in Germany]. Rome: Carocci, 2007.
Swedberg, Richard. Entrepreneurship: The Social Science
View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out: Social
Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.

ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINTING
Ecological or environmental footprinting has its
roots in an integrated response to two questions,
both of which have arisen from a growing awareness that current patterns and scales of consumer culture are destructive of underpinning natural systems.
First, what are the implications of a given level of
consumption in terms of its environmental impact?

536

Environmental Footprinting

Second, where should the environmental limits to
that consumption lie? The following is an introduction to footprinting concepts, from their beginning to
the present day.
Sustainability is fundamentally about environmental limits. It is not, as is often suggested in government and business documents, about balancing
social, environmental, and economic impacts. Such
trade-offs are required, but they are not central to
a meaningful definition of sustainability. The need
for trade-offs reflects shortcomings in our patterns
of economic organization, technology, and other
factors in terms of their sustainability performance.
Although there are a wide variety of approaches to
defining and measuring sustainability, ignoring the
key notion of critical environmental limits or thresholds, breach of which leads to our current state of
unsustainability, reduces the concept of sustainability
to rhetoric, according to Paul Upham.
As originally conceived, environmental or ecological footprinting is based on this fundamental
premise that there are environmental limits to consumption and that if these are not respected, adverse
consequences will follow sooner or later. The term
footprinting was initially developed and the concept
given a quantitative dimension in the early 1990s,
building on the idea of environmental “carrying
capacity.” The concept has been applied to individuals and populations, including the world as a whole.
Notable sources on environmental footprinting in
this sense are the Stockholm Environment Institute
and the Global Footprint Network.
The calculation method for limits-based footprinting involves associating indicators of economic activity with corresponding environmental indicators.
That is, a specific level of environmental “impact”
(or, more usually, a proxy for impact, such as emissions) is associated with each monetary unit (e.g.,
dollars) spent. The level and type of impact varies
according to the type and quantity of consumption.
Methodological advances have related national environmental accounts data to national material flows
and household expenditure at local authority ward
level, improving our ability to see where and how
consumption impact is distributed (see Wiedman and
Barrett 2005).
The final stage of limits-based environmental footprinting involves relating consumption to environmental limits to provide an indication of how close
(or how far in excess) this consumption is relative to

those limits. This stage is not always undertaken but
nonetheless gives the footprint measure its name, as
it relates consumption to the amount of biologically
productive land and sea area required to produce the
resources consumed and to absorb the wastes generated by production and consumption processes. The
footprint is thus a measure of consumption in terms
of biologically productive area, this being assumed
to be the primary environmental limit, given our one
planet. The theoretically available area is usually
allocated to the planet’s population on an equal per
capita basis. This forms the denominator of a fraction
in which the numerator is the area actually occupied
by the individual’s, region’s, or nation’s consumption.
For industrialized nations and their population, the
numerator usually exceeds the theoretical allocation.
Calculated thus, humanity’s footprint first exceeded
earth’s total “biocapacity” in the 1980s (see WWF
2008); this overshoot has been increasing since then
and is only possible by some countries consuming
other countries’ entitlements.
Recently, the term environmental footprint has
been used separately from the notion of environmental limits, simply to denote environmental
impact. This usage has increased in the context of
product and service assessment. More recently still,
the term footprint has been used in relation to only
the greenhouse gas emissions associated with products, summarily referred to as their carbon footprint.
Methodologically, these all involve environmental
life-cycle analysis (LCA).
While national, regional, and per capita footprinting tends to use national accounts of flows of
goods in and out of countries, economic sectors, and
sometimes households, and then relates these to relatively coarse national environmental accounts, LCA
requires the assembly of process-specific databases
of a much higher level of resolution. Such databases
may be purchased along with proprietary LCA software, or, if existing databases are unsuitable, new
databases may be assembled. The latter may be the
case if a process is novel or if a company wants to
use data that are wholly specific to its own brand,
for example, to support competitive advertising of its
“green” credentials or to support an application for
an eco-label.
A product or service has environmental impacts
that are distributed over time and space. Essentially,
LCA is a method of detailing and summing these
impacts and their precursors (the resource inputs

Environmental Footprinting

and waste outputs) that occur over the full life cycle.
Some LCA software can also aggregate this information as a single index of impact, though this needs
to be interpreted with knowledge of how the index
is constructed.
In the 1990s, disagreements around some aspects
of LCA prompted the international Society of
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC)
to undertake an extensive “consensus” process that
defined a protocol for LCA. This has informed international standards on LCA: ISO 14040 through
14044. Critical to SETAC’s work and the ISO standards was the separation of LCA into several stages,
with impact assessment being the final stage. It is this
final stage at which there is most methodological
diversity and difference (see UNEP/SETAC, 2009),
and this is also the stage into which the areareferenced aspect of environmental footprinting falls.
The main stages of LCA are defining the aim and
the system boundary (the latter can substantially
influence the results); inventory analysis, which consists of a compilation of all material inputs to and
outputs from the product system, arranged as a
process flow sheet representing the stages of extraction/cultivation, manufacture, recycling, and so on;
impact assessment, a stage that may be omitted but
that models the environmental impacts of the foregoing consumption of resources and emission of wastes;
and interpretation, which may include some form of
sensitivity analysis and is the stage at which impact
hot-spots in the life cycle and the environmental merits of alternative, substitutable products may be considered. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
is a good source for more detail.
Environmental or ecological footprinting originally
referred to a method of environmental assessment
in which the impacts of consumption are viewed in
terms of the amount of biologically productive space
occupied during cultivation, manufacture, or disposal. More recently, the term has also been applied
to other forms of environmental assessment, including product and process life-cycle assessment. Carbon
footprinting is a recent innovation in this context.
The concept of the footprint has achieved widespread
appeal and resonance and is in many ways a successful metaphor. However, the extent to which the
footprint can help bring about real behavioral change
is debatable and connects with the much-debated
role of consumer-facing labeling schemes. Growing
awareness of environmental problems has not tended

537

to feed through to personally relevant attitudes. In
the United Kingdom, for example, surveys indicate
that few people think about energy consumption
or environmental impact when buying appliances,
when buying and preparing food, or when traveling. Nonetheless, environmental footprinting at all
levels can be expected to continue as an active area
of research and education; reducing one’s ecological
footprint remains a potent symbol for many.
Paul Upham
See also Carbon Trading; Consumer Education;
Consumer Regulation; Consumption Patterns and
Trends; Eco-Labeling; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption; Measuring the
Environmental Impact of Consumption

Further Readings
Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-standards,
Product Labelling and Green Consumerism.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Brook Lyndhurst. Public Understanding of Sustainable
Energy Consumption in the Home. Final Report to the
Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.
London: DEFRA, 2007.
European Commission. “An Overview of the EU Eco-label
Scheme.” Brussels, Belgium: Author, 2008. http://ec.
europa.eu/environment/ecolabel/whats_eco/ov_concept_
en.htm.
Fava, James, Allan A. Jensen, Lars Lindfors, Steven Pomper,
Bea De Smet, John Warren, and Bruce Vigon, eds. Life
Cycle Assessment Data Quality: A Conceptual
Framework. Pensacola, FL: SETAC, 1994.
Giorgi, S., D. Fell, A. Austin, and C. Wilkins. EV0402:
Public Understanding of Links between Climate Change
and (i) Food and (ii) Energy Use: Final Report. A Report
to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs. London: Brook Lyndhurst & Defra, 2009.
King, Suzanne, Mark Dyball, Tara Webster, Angela Sharpe,
Alan Worley, Jennifer DeWitt, Greg Marsden, Helen
Harwatt, Mary Kimble, and Ann Jopson. Exploring
Public Attitudes to Climate Change and Travel Choices:
Deliberative Research. Final Report for Department for
Transport, People Science & Policy Ltd & ITS. Leeds,
UK: DfT, 2009. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/
scienceresearch/social/climatechange/
attitudestoclimatechange.pdf.
Klöpffer, Walter. “Life Cycle Assessment: From the
Beginning to the Current State.” Environmental Science
and Pollution Research International 4, no. 4 (1997):
223–228.

538

Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

Rees, William E., and Mathis Wackernagel. “Ecological
Footprints and an Appropriated Carrying Capacity:
Measuring the Natural Capital Requirements of the
Human Economy.” In Investing in Natural Capital: The
Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability, edited by
Ann Marie Jansson, Carl Folke, Robert Costanza, Monica
Hammer, 362–390. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994.
United Nations Environmental Programme/SETAC (UNEP/
SETAC). Summary of Life Cycle Impact Assessment
Methods. Osaka, Japan: UNEP/SETAC, 2009. http://
jp1.estis.net/includes/file.asp?site=lcinit&file=B322F28AC1F0–4E21–8B14–982328A311D2.
Upham, Paul. “A Comparison of Sustainability Theory with
UK and European Airports Policy and Practice.” Journal
of Environmental Management 63, no. 3 (2001): 237–248.
Upham, Paul, Leonie Dendler, and Mercedes Bleda. “Carbon
Labelling of Grocery Products: Public Perceptions and
Potential Emissions Reductions.” Journal of Cleaner
Production 19, no. 4 (2011): 348–355.
Wiedman, T., and J. Barrett. The Use of Input-Output
Analysis in REAP to Allocate Ecological Footprints and
Material Flows to Final Consumption Categories
(Stockholm Environment Institute Report 2). York, UK:
University of York, 2005. http://resource-accounting.org
.uk/reports.
World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Living Planet Report 2008.
Gland, Switzerland: Author, 2008. http://www.panda.org/
about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report.

Websites
Global Footprint Network. http://www.footprintnetwork
.org/en/index.php/GFN.
Stockholm Environment Institute. http://resourceaccounting.org.uk.
US Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/
NRMRL/lcaccess/lca101.html.

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL SCIENCES
AND SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION
Although consumption is recognized as bringing pleasure, comfort, and convenience, environmental side
effects can cast dark shadows over consumption, turning it into an overall negative phenomenon. Confronting
consumption for many social analysts (e.g., Princen,
Maniates, and Conca 2002) means developing a critical
analysis of the “treadmill of consumption” as implied
in the capitalist foundation of our modern productionconsumption organization. Among the myriad goods

and services delivered to citizen-consumers to help
organize their everyday lives, the car and the hamburger stand out as the negative icons of modern consumer culture. Together with plastic throwaway bags
and coffee cups, long-distance flying, and the use of
air conditioners and Jacuzzis, they are used by environmental scientists to develop their critical discourse
of unsustainable consumption, the dark side of our
consumption pleasures. By consuming these products, citizens especially of Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries help
reproduce a political and economic system that at the
global level combines serious environmental deterioration with increased inequalities between social classes,
countries, and regions, rendering (distant) people and
ecosystems into seemingly powerless victims of our
global consumption culture.
The main contribution of environmental social
sciences refers to exposing, discussing, and criticizing
the dark side of consumption. Up until now, most
social scientific analyses of (un)sustainable consumption focus on identifying and diagnosing the root
causes of the environmental impacts of consumption. They aim at gaining a better understanding
of the drivers behind consumption growth and the
increased environmental impacts of modern lifestyles. Among the wide variety of causes discussed in
the literature are the “work and spend” culture and
its exclusive focus on materialist values, as analyzed
by Juliet Schor; the global spread of the car system as
documented by John Urry, in particular; the concentration of power in the hands of transnational food
retail chains; the lock-in effects of cheap-oil-based
energy systems; the lack of awareness and information from the side of individual citizen-consumers;
and the inherent tendency of social groups to use
goods for distinction and social positioning.
Because of the almost exclusive focus on the
shadow side of consumption and on the drivers
behind the enhanced environmental footprints of our
daily lives, the environmental social sciences literature does not deliver many insights when it comes to
analyzing solutions to environmental problems. Most
of the time, a penetrating analysis of the problem is
followed by a general conclusion that we need to
consume less or that a fundamental transformation
of the present system of production and consumption
is asked for. When compared to the extensive and
deep-digging analyses of environmental deterioration
and decay, there is only a modest amount of work

Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

done on positive environmental change, on processes
of environmental improvements as, for example, the
reduction of the footprints of our households, the
improvement of the environmental performance of
food retailers, the dematerialization of consumption,
or the greening of lifestyles and everyday-life consumption practices.
In this entry, some of the major themes and theories
within the environmental social sciences are presented,
discussing the societal roots of environmental risks
and decay, on the one hand, and the development of
(policy) approaches toward the proper management
of these risks and problems by governments, companies, households, and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), on the other. It is argued
that both environmental deterioration and environmental management or control need to be studied as
societal phenomena, using a multidisciplinary, policyrelevant, and global perspective. Throughout the
entry, the central focus is on consumption as a crucial topic within the broader environmental agenda.
A selective overview of the different schools and
discipline-bound theoretical perspectives in environmental studies are presented, arguing that this field is
of recent origin and still very much under construction. This area of environmental studies is shown to
mirror some of the conceptual issues and dilemmas
characteristic of the general social sciences disciplines.
For each school or perspective, its relevance for the
study of sustainable consumption is indicated in
a general way, with respect to both theoretical and
empirical contributions made in the past. In conclusion, a few key themes and issues crucial for the future
study of (un)sustainable consumption are mentioned.

Environmental Social Sciences as an
Emerging Field of Study
The origin of environmental studies in their present form can be found in the 1970s, when the 1972
United Nations conference in Stockholm and the
publication of the Club of Rome Report “Limits to
Growth” initiated a first wave of environmental concern, particularly in OECD societies. This first round
of environmental debate was triggered by the findings of the natural sciences. Ecology, biology, and
chemistry, and their application to the study of water,
air, and soil degradation, shaped the agenda of environmental policies in the 1970s and 1980s in a direct
way and to a considerable extent. When compared

539

to the natural and bio-ecological sciences, the social
sciences were late and hesitant in showing an academic interest in environmental problems.
When talking about environmental studies as an
emerging field of academic teaching and research,
a distinction can be made between environmental economics, on the one hand, and the other social
sciences—history, sociology, political sciences, social
geography, social psychology, and anthropology, in
particular—on the other. Although environmental
economics share with the other social sciences an
interest in the study of human behavior and institutions, their disciplinary outlook and history can
be said to be different, resulting in divergent methodologies and a research tradition that—generally
speaking—has a stronger orientation on applied,
quantitative research and a stronger focus on the
policy implementation of scientific work. Also, when
it comes to studying consumption and consumer
behavior, environmental economics are characterized by a specific kind of model that is different from
the behavioral models used in, for example, social
psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Because of
these differences, this entry limits itself to the other
social sciences, paying attention in particular to developments in environmental sociology and making short
excursions into the neighboring fields when relevant.
Partly building on the classical tradition of human
ecology studies from the Chicago School in the 1920s
and 1930s, some scholars in the United States in the
second half of the 1970s started to develop a distinct
social scientific approach to the interrelation between
societies and their physical environment. Because mainstream sociology, history, and anthropology showed a
“theoretical blindness” for environmental problems,
these scientists argued for the need of a paradigm shift
toward a “new” version of the social sciences that
would show greater conceptual sensitivity to ecological and physical factors when explaining behavior and
social change. The human-centered human exemptionalist paradigm (HEP) should give way to the new
environmental paradigm (NEP) in the study of human
societies. Following these front-runners, and mainly
inspired by the works of biologists like Rachel Carson,
Paul Ehrlich, and Barry Commoner, social scientists in
the United States, Japan, and Europe also started to
argue for the recognition of the intricate connections
between human and nonhuman actors and factors
as existing in the Darwinian web of life. Echoing the
Club of Rome, they furthermore contended that limits

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Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

should be put to the industrial output, to population
growth, and to the ever-intensifying use of energy and
material resources. So, from their inception, environmental studies were concerned with limits and with
the search for radical alternatives to the existing social
(and scientific) order. A further characteristic of this
field—next to its more or less outspoken “normative”
character—is the openness to interdisciplinary cooperation, especially with ecologists and natural scientists.

Five Streams of Thinking Within
Environmental Social Sciences
In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of environmental
social sciences developed into a full-grown, globally
organized network of researchers with a recognizable
research agenda and some specified social roles. With
the field expanding in depth and in geographical
scope, the number of recognizable schools or theoretical perspectives also increased. Even when environmental economics are left aside, it is impossible
to cover all streams of thinking that emerged in this
period. Five perspectives are presented that contribute to the understanding of sustainable development
and sustainable consumption in a specific way.
The Neo-Marxist Perspective
Neo-Marxist environmental sociology and political
sciences have concentrated their studies and analyses around the treadmill of production (ToP) (e.g.,
Schnaiberg 1980) and the second contradiction of
capital as put forward by James O’Connor. Both
lines of study focus especially on the continuity of the
capitalist character of modern production and consumption systems, which are consistent in jeopardizing the environmental sustenance base that supports
these systems. Studies and analyses in this tradition
consequently point at the difficulties—or, in fact,
impossibilities—of transforming the current systems
of production and consumption, due to the inherent structural capitalist character of these systems.
Although it is acknowledged that changes might occur
in environmental policies, in environmental consciousness, in levels of support for environmental NGOs,
and in new environmental technologies and management systems, it is argued that these changes do
not affect the fundamental patterns of accumulation
and exploitation. The material basis of production
and consumption remains intact. There is, according

to these studies, a direct and fundamental relation
between the industrial-capitalist mode of production,
on the one hand, and ongoing environmental deterioration, on the other. As long as technologies and
policies do not affect and alter the industrial-capitalist
character of production-consumption systems in modern societies, there will not be any lasting and significant improvement in environmental consequences.
With respect to consumption studies, the edited
volume of Thomas Princen, Maniates, and Conca
might serve as a good example of a study that is organized from within the neo-Marxist tradition and that
received considerable attention in the field. In this
book, the theme of the impossibility of effective environmental reform and the need for radical change
are prominent discussion topics. In his theory on the
logic of sufficiency, Princen offers the downscaling
of consumption and a fundamental restructuring of
present-day consumption culture as an alternative.
Arguing for a radical break with the existing organization of production and consumption is, however,
not exclusive for the (neo-)Marxist school of thinking. Anticonsumerism in its different formulations—
from voluntary simplicity to cultural jamming—goes
against the dominant consumption culture as well,
looking for radically different lifestyles and localized systems of production and consumption. The
plea for radical change in this culturalist perspective,
however, tends to go without the kind of structural
analyses of the socioeconomic structures of capitalist
societies as offered by the neo-Marxist authors.
The Ecological Modernization of Production and
Consumption
The ecological modernization school of thought has
been developed partly in reaction to the overall pessimistic (in terms of possibilities to overcome environmental crises) and structuralist outlook characterizing
the neo-Marxist perspective. Instead of the impossibilities for environmental reform, this school analyzes
and emphasizes the processes of environmental management and reform that have been set in motion since
the 1970s. To understand the character of this process
of reform, ecological modernization theory developed
concepts and understandings on what it calls the
emergence of ecological rationalities, interests, and
perspectives relevant for the (re)organization of both
production and consumption along more sustainable lines. Ecological modernization theorists orient

Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

themselves toward analyzing environment-informed
changes in social practices (e.g., leisure, buying food,
transporting) and institutional developments (in markets, state institutions, scientific institutions, etc.). It
is emphasized that sociotechnological innovations are
the crucial starting points for the emergence of more
sustainable practices, with pioneering businesses and
environmental NGOs playing an important role in
environmental governance next to state organizations.
Starting its theoretical work especially on industrial
production in northwest European countries, this
school has expanded its empirical studies toward
Asia and the United States. Most of the work in the
ecological modernization tradition is firmly rooted
in sociological theories, especially Anthony Giddens’s
structuration theory, reflexive modernization theories, consumer sociology, and globalization theories.
Political scientists especially have worked on a related
theory of political modernization, drawing more on
political science and policy science theories.
When consumption is discussed by ecological
modernization authors, the focus is very much on
the eco-improvements that are possible within cycles
and networks of production and consumption. It
is argued that—when properly mobilized and
organized—citizen-consumers, consumer groups,
and their organized representation by environmental
NGOs and consumer organizations must be regarded
in principle as important change agents to help realize
a more sustainable organization of production and
consumption. Emerging forms of consumer empowerment, green provisioning by companies, sustainable lifestyles, the introduction of product service
system, the development and use of (eco-)labeling
and certification practices, and the globalization of
green consumption are some examples of consumption topics discussed in this tradition. Not all authors
within this school, however, share this interest in
consumption studies or show great confidence in the
effect of consumer empowerment and in policies for
the greening of lifestyles and consumption patterns.
Risk (Society) Studies
The theme of (the perception of) environmental
risks is prominent in many social sciences disciplines,
receiving different emphases in social psychology,
anthropology, and sociology, in particular. Within
social psychology, the individual perception of and
strategies for dealing with risks take center stage. It is

541

shown that risk perception does not simply follow scientific “rational” ways of reasoning and that perceptions differ between individuals and between experts,
policymakers, and lay actors, in particular. Within
anthropology, the work of Mary Douglas on the different ways in which societies and their dominant
cultures deal with risks has been especially influential
and has enhanced our awareness of the time-space
specific nature of our contemporary ways of dealing
with (environmental) risks. What counts as an acceptable risk for an individual is not just determined by
individual factors but depends as well on the ways in
which risks are culturally framed and discussed.
Within sociology, Ulrich Beck’s thesis on the emerging Risk Society has become one of the most discussed
topics. Together with Giddens, Beck developed a
theory on the special significance of environmental
risks in late-modern societies. Within the theory of
the risk society, the emergence of new types of environmental risks (notably so-called high-consequence
risks like global warming) are analyzed, together
with the changes in the scientific and policy institutions of late modernity dealing with these new risks.
Furthermore, it is shown that lay perceptions of risks
have substantially changed since the mid-1980s, when
the Chernobyl nuclear disaster marked the beginning of a period of “reflexive modernization.” Brian
Wynne and his colleagues in a number of empirical
studies illustrate the changing role of science, scientists, and scientific evidence in dealing with risks. After
the “disenchantment of science,” we have to work
with broader—also nonscientific—rationalities while
giving more attention to the role and significance of
lay actors in constructing risk regimes. In environmental sociology, in particular, Steven Yearley and other
authors working in the school of social constructivism contributed much to a better understanding of
the ways in which environmental risks are recognized,
framed, and actively developed into social problems
by different groups and stakeholders in society.
With respect to consumption studies, risk (society)
studies have contributed especially to a better understanding of the ways in which laypeople can or cannot detect and deal with the environmental risks that
come along with our modern lifestyles and patterns
of consumption. Beck’s statement that nobody is as
blind as those who—after Chernobyl—continue to
trust their eyes refers to the crucial roles that science
and scientists play in the assessment of environmental dangers and related health risks. At the empirical

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Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

level, it was shown that, worldwide, ever more people
are becoming aware of environmental risks, that they
are aware of risks as risks (i.e., human-made risks), and
that the connection between environmental risks and
human health risks turns out to be functional for raising risk awareness from the side of citizen-consumers.
The cases of enhanced exposure to UV-B radiation—
due to the enlarged hole in the ozone layer—and the
supposed positive health effects of organic foodstuff
can be offered as illustrations of the important role of
the human health factor in the increased perception
of environmental risks. At the theoretical level, one
of the key contributions made by authors from the
risk-society school has been the debate they initiated
on the concept of trust as being the flipside of anxiety
and risk. The concept of trust—so they argue—gains
importance especially in situations when production
and consumption chains and networks are organized
over more distant levels of time-space.
Due to globalization, the connections between
production and consumption—between “upstream”
and “downstream” actors and dynamics of chains
and networks—can no longer be properly understood without the key concepts of risks and trust.
For example, when studying and designing policies
for environmental labeling, branding, and certification, the (lack of) trust invested in the technologies,
peoples, and networks behind the labels turns out to
be of decisive importance for bridging the information and communication gap between providers and
consumers. Also, when it comes to studying the “ethics” of sustainable consumption, the crucial issues
are about the ways in which distant practices and
agents can become (re)connected in a transparent
and effective way. Finally, the relationship between
consumption, risks, and individualization has been
brought up as an important characteristic of reflexive
modernity. Along with Giddens and Beck, Zygmunt
Bauman has also pointed to the fact that late-modern
consumers are confronted with the fact not just of
being empowered and offered more green choice but
also of being made individually responsible for environment and health risks that used to be dealt with
by collective arrangements and institutions.
Cultural Value Change and
Environmental Attitudes
The schools discussed so far share the conviction
that environmental degradation and risk management

have to be studied in close connection to the institutions for production and consumption and their
capitalist-industrial characteristics. In their focus on
socioeconomic production structures, less attention
is paid to the role of individual human agents and
their values, motivations, and interests with respect
to sustainability. The relationship between individual
behaviors, lifestyles, and interests, on the one hand,
and structural, institutional developments, on the
other, has been the subject of heated debates in the
environmental social sciences as well as in general
social sciences over the past decennia. Parallel and
partly in reaction to structuralist theories, a separate
body of literature emerged focusing on the environmental values and behaviors of individual human
agents. Not surprisingly, social psychologists took
the lead in this, while sociologists in the empirical
tradition of environmental attitude survey research
and polls took their fair share.
Most of the research on environmental attitudes
was—and still is—aimed at demonstrating the
increased environmental awareness and its distribution among the general public. Standardized instruments have been developed for measuring people’s
self-judgment of their eco-awareness and their willingness to pay and to take part in environmental
actions and demonstrations, among other things. A
broad range of environmental behaviors is included
in these studies, with energy, waste, packaging, and
mobility being among the most popular topics of
research. Nowadays, the regular monitoring of the
levels of environmental awareness from the side of
the populace is organized in a professional way and
at worldwide levels. In general, this research was able
to show that levels of environmental awareness are
very high in many OECD countries while increasing
also on a worldwide scale.
Among the theories most often used to underpin
this kind of empirical research are the value-change
theory of Ronald Inglehart, stating that there is a
shift from “materialist” toward “nonmaterialist”
values going on in societies with increased levels of
economic development, and the equivalent theory of
Abraham Maslow on the hierarchy of human needs
whereby material needs are first, followed by nonmaterial needs during later phases of development.
When it comes to relating value change to the prediction of future environmental behaviors—an issue
of great importance to policymakers—the attitudebehavior model as introduced by Martin Fishbein

Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

and Icek Ajzen in the field of social psychology has
been by far the most influential model. The behavior of individuals was predicted from their attitude
toward the environment, this attitude being composed of both a cognitive (what does environmentalfriendly behavior deliver for me as an individual?)
and a social-normative (what do the neighbors think
of me when pursuing this behavior?) component.
Value-change and attitude-behavior studies are
significant for understanding sustainable consumption. This research tradition has shaped the agenda
of consumption research over the past decennia to a
considerable extent. If we come to know more about
people’s need structures, about their individual norms
and motivation with respect to sustainable development, we learn more about the legitimacy and potential effectiveness of certain environmental policies
and policy instruments. If we better understand how
people go through the process of conscious decision
making with respect to a great number of environmental relevant products (cars, phosphate-free detergents,
plastic shopping bags, etc.) and courses of conduct
(closing the curtains to save energy, washing at lower
temperatures, etc.), we are able to develop the relevant
products, services, and information campaigns to effectuate this potential for change. Finally, research in this
tradition has investigated mechanisms of “spillover” of
environmental behaviors from one domain (e.g., separate waste collection) to other domains of action (e.g.,
waste prevention or the saving of water and energy).
Social Practices, Everyday Life, and Sustainable
Consumption
Because of its roots in social psychology, the attitude-behavior model does not pay significant attention to the interplay between individual behaviors and
social structures. If social structures are brought into
play at all, it is as a constraint (a limiting determinant)
to individual behavior choice primarily. According to
its critics, this neglect of social structure in the attitudebehavior model might help explain why this model
did not live up to its promises, for instance, why it
turned out to be rather difficult to predict environmental behaviors from people’s attitudes only. To meet
some of these weaknesses, an alternative theoretical
perspective was developed within environmental sociology to organize research on lifestyles and behaviors
of individuals in such a way that proper attention is
paid to the contextual factors that shape the routinized

543

courses of behavior individual human agents are
involved in. This social practices or practice perspective is derived from structuration theories as developed by Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu in sociology,
with recent inputs also being derived from the works
of Theodore Schatzki and Alan Warde, in particular.
A basic characteristic of the practice perspective is
the combined emphasis on individual and contextual
factors as being constitutive for routine consumption
practices that groups of individuals adhere to in daily
life. Using everyday-life practices such as cooking,
washing, gardening, dining out, commuting, or showering as cases, Elizabeth Shove was able to show how
innovations in social practices can only be properly
understood by analyzing the interplay between the
norms and values of the practitioners (what counts as
convenient, clean, comfortable, and green for people),
technologies (washing machines, detergents, cooking utensils, showers), and the sociomaterial infrastructures that are fueling the social practices with
material flows of energy, water, and green products.
Because of its explicit focus on the interplay between
sociotechnical systems and everyday-life behavioral
routines, this perspective borrows elements from the
sociology of technology and so-called actor-network
theories (ANT) as developed by Bruno Latour,
Michael Callon, and others. To discuss the process of
the greening of social practices in more detail, some
authors combine the social practices approach with
the theory of the ecological modernization of production and consumption in an explicit way.
Being developed to understand the dynamics of
change in the consumption practices that ordinary
people are involved in, the social practices approach is
aimed at delivering relevant knowledge for sustainable
consumption practices and policies as emerging both
at the national and international levels. Although the
practice model inspired research projects on the politics
of sustainable consumption in several countries, the
number of empirical studies in this tradition is still low
when compared to the attitude-behavior paradigm.

The Research Agenda for
Sustainable Consumption
This section discusses a selected number of topics
and controversies judged to be relevant for the future
study of sustainable consumption within the environmental social sciences. Five key future directions
are indicated.

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Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

First, while the field of environment and climate
change is dominated by the natural sciences and biology/ecology, most analyses of the “sustainability”
part of sustainable consumption are technocratic in
character. The crucial contribution for social sciences
to this field refers to bringing in the symbolic and
social dimension of sustainable consumption. How
does sustainable consumption connect to images of
the good life, to a fair distribution of life chances, to
existing views and standards of comfort, cleanliness,
convenience, and well-being in general?
Second, the neo-Marxist tradition and the anticonsumerism movement have produced many counterimages of the good life and human well-being,
whereas until recent times, environmental NGOs have
also been associated primarily with de-growth policies and reduced levels of consumption. Investigating
alternative lifestyles and modes of production and
consumption for their positive contents and dynamics
can and should contribute to developing more attractive images of the “green life” and green identities that
might perhaps appeal to the broader public as well.
Third, alternative visions of the good life as
developed outside and in opposition to the existing consumer culture have to be complemented
with alternative visions developed for and in relation to the existing (capitalist, industrial) modes of
production and consumption. In respect of this, a
Brundtland way of thinking about sustainable consumption, combining increased levels of development and well-being with reduced environmental
impacts of consumption, both in the north and in the
south, is needed. The theory of ecological modernization of consumption and production is targeted
at analyzing and helping design future lifestyles and
patterns of consumption that show a radical break
with the existing situation regarding the environmental impacts and risks attached to them.
Fourth, major changes or transitions in the existing
organization of production and consumption will only
come about when different groups of stakeholders
operating at different levels of scale become involved
in and show commitment to the process. Following up
on the social psychology research tradition, the role of
citizen-consumers as important change agents has to
be recognized, however, without lapsing into the traditional individualist accounts of environmental change.
The powers, rights, and responsibilities of consumers
have to be analyzed and assessed in relation to the
power of providers—companies and environmental

NGOs, in particular—for reducing the environmental impacts of consumption. The practice perspective
seems to present a theoretical perspective that goes
beyond the actor-structure divide as existing in the
field of sustainable consumption as well.
Finally, because of the globalization of production,
the greening of consumption also has to be studied
from a postnationalist perspective. Taking a global
perspective to consumption is crucial in part because
of the emerging “new consumers” outside the OECD
and in Asia in particular. Taking a global perspective is important for understanding what sustainable
consumption is about in the first place. The perspective of environmental networks and flows as recently
developed within sociology in particular can be used
to organize cross-border scientific work in both theoretical and empirical respects.
Gert Spaargaren and Arthur P. J. Mol
See also Citizenship; Consumer Protest: Environment;
Consuming the Environment; Lifestyle; Materialism
and Postmaterialism; Modernization Theory; Political
and Ethical Consumption; Risk Society

Further Readings
Catton, William R., and Riley E. Dunlap. “Environmental
Sociology: A New Paradigm.” The American Sociologist
13 (1978): 41–49.
Dauvergne Peter. The Shadows of Consumption.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Huber, Joseph. New Technologies and Environmental
Innovation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004.
Jackson, Tim, ed. The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable
Consumption. London: Earthscan, 2006.
Mol, Arthur P. J., David A. Sonnenfeld, and Gert
Spaargaren, eds. The Ecological Modernization Reader:
Environmental Reform in Theory and Practice. London:
Routledge, 2009.
Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds.
Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002.
Schnaiberg, Allan. The Environment: From Surplus to
Scarcity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience.
Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Spaargaren, Gert, Arthur P. J. Mol, and Frederick H. Buttel,
eds. Governing Environmental Flows: Global Challenges
to Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Stern, Paul C., Thomas Dietz, Linda Kalof, and Gregory
Guagnano. “Values, Beliefs, and Pro-environmental
Action: Attitude Formation toward Emergent Attitude

Ethnicity/Race
Objects.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25
(1995): 1611–1636.
Van Vliet, Bas, Heather Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove.
Infrastructures of Consumption: Environmental
Innovation in the Utility Industries. London: Earthscan,
2005.

ETHNICITY/RACE
Race refers to categories defined by phenotypes, physical or visual markers, that have been afforded significance over time. In contrast, ethnicity refers to groups
defined by their shared history, cultural beliefs, rituals, and practices. Both race and ethnicity are socially
constructed categories that serve as a basis of group
membership. In terms of differences, racial categories
are less malleable over time, and race, unlike ethnicity, is often defined externally, leaving less room for
subjective conceptualizations. For convenience, race
and ethnicity are used interchangeably in this entry.
The divergence of racial minorities’ preferences and
practices from that of the majority groups’ is often
explained as evidence of a subculture, their taste and
traditions being rooted in cultural practices different
from that of the majority group. But to fully account
for the myriad ways that race and ethnic group membership produce both differences in taste and preferences and similarities in patterns of consumption,
a more dynamic explanation is needed. This entry
extends the discussion of the impact of class and culture on consumption to include a discussion of the
consequences of racial alienation, segregation, and
discrimination. Currently, three theoretical frameworks
exist to account for the function consumption serves
for racial minorities: consumption as a response to
alienation, as a form of resistance, and a means to demonstrate one’s social identity. Ethnographic evidence is
cited to illustrate the impact of race on consumption,
using the experience of African American consumers
as a case study. Additionally, areas worthy of future
research and evidence from the experiences of other
racial groups are discussed in the concluding section.

Impact of Class, Culture, and
Race on Consumption
In many ways, racial and ethnic minorities’ preferences
as consumers and the symbolic value they attribute to
particular goods reflect prevailing mores and values

545

operating on a societal level. However, national contexts differ in the level of ethnic diversity, the degree
to which they require minorities to assimilate, and the
pervasiveness of racial stigma and inequality. Societies
also vary markedly in the degree that they encourage
consumption and emphasize values such as materialism and individualism. Often, racial and ethnic
minorities have to engage multiple meaning systems
and orientations, using goods to negotiate interactions
with both in-group and out-group members. Cultural,
class-based, and racial dynamics together affect how
members of racial and ethnic minority groups engage
in consumption. Consequently, racial and ethnic
minorities’ orientations toward consumption may
diverge from the dominant culture in important ways.
For racial minorities, consumption practices are a
means of affirming and reinforcing group boundaries. As Viviana Zelizer asserts, distinct cultural sensibilities are expressed through consumption and are
often grounded in an ethnic identity. The celebration
of unique aspects of a group’s culture is often intricately tied to the consumption of particular goods, as
goods are integral to the performance of social rituals
that distinguish a group. For racial minorities, the
social meaning goods convey may even carry a “double meaning,” notes Dick Hedbidge. Additionally,
scholars have argued that internal status hierarchies
within groups are often maintained through distinct group practices and that social status is gained
“not through adherence to monolithic consumption
norms but through displays of localized cultural
capital” (Arnould and Thompson 2005, 874).
In addition to helping minorities to maintain
distinct cultural orientations, patterns of consumption reflect class relations. The impact of class on
consumption has been extensively theorized in the
sociological literature. It is argued that consumers
use goods to draw class boundaries and use goods in
interactions to determine social status. Furthermore,
according to Pierre Bourdieu, consumption constitutes a class-based practice that facilitates the reproduction of economic inequality.
To the extent that racial minorities share material
aspirations with the dominant culture, their desires
and preferences are similar. Yet as members of racial
and ethnic minority groups are often disproportionately located at the lower end of a society’s socioeconomic spectrum, their access to economic resources
affects their consumption. Thorstein Veblen argues
that low-status groups emulate the elite in their tastes

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Ethnicity/Race

and preferences. For Veblen, “standards of worth” and
norms of “reputability” are determined by the “leisure class” and are then diffused “down through the
social structure to the lowest strata” (1915, 57). Yet
many scholars have criticized the top-down explanation of consumer tastes, as marginalized groups have
also played a prominent role in shaping popular tastes
and consumer preferences. For example, despite their
low-status position, poor African American youth are
instrumental in determining what constitutes popular
culture in the United States. Furthermore, tastes are
not static, and, as they evolve, preferences and practices that are initially seen as divergent over time may
become mainstream, irrespective of the class origins of
their original producers or creators.
Pattern of consumption among racial and ethnic
minorities also reflect their past and present experiences of racial inequality and alienation. Racial segregation, stigma, and discrimination together result
in feelings of exclusion and racial alienation, which
impact racial minorities’ consumer preferences, practices, and motivations. Sentiments of racial alienation
range along a continuum from feeling incorporated
and entitled to societal resources to feeling completely excluded from such benefits, according to
Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings. Feelings of
racial alienation are integral to a shared system of
beliefs maintained by members of minority groups,
helping to forge ties between group members. In
their research, Bobo and Hutchings find that improving one’s class status does not necessary eliminate
feelings of racial alienation. For example, the level
of racial alienation increases as African Americans’
incomes rise. The collective experience of societal
maltreatment is more determinative of the level of
racial alienation that exists for any particular group
than individual-level factors, such as personal background and social position.
Racial alienation is rooted in historical conditions that have stratified groups and produced racial
inequality. Historically, in the United States, prohibitions were placed on where and when minorities
could engage in consumption. African Americans
were subject to inferior treatment and often targeted
for exploitation in retail and commercial settings. As
such, much of the activism of civil rights movement
focused on the fair treatment of consumers and gaining access to public places such as restaurants.
Exclusionary policies and discriminatory practices have direct and indirect consequences for racial

minorities’ consumption. For instance, past conditions may have a durable effect on the practices and
patterns of consumption exhibited by minorities
today, even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 that outlawed legal barriers to free participation in consumption. Robert Weems suggests that in
the 1940s and 1950s, blacks preferred to stay home
and listen to the radio and refrained from going
out where they might face discrimination. Even as
discrimination in the market has lessened, practices,
such as partaking in leisure at home to avert discrimination, may have become ingrained in the lives
of blacks. In fact, research by Jeffrey Humphreys
suggests that African Americans spend less money
dining outside the home compared to nonblacks.
Combined with past experiences, present discrimination serves to broaden racial divergence in consumption. For instance, racial segregation, in terms
of neighborhoods and friendship networks, produces
social worlds in which different values and cultural orientations prevail, and as a result, patterns
of consumption differ. Immigrants often reside in
ethnic enclaves, and such residential patterns have
been shown to impact consumption. For instance,
Mexican immigrants who live in ethnic enclaves tend
to have similar consumption patterns as those in
Mexico. Their consumption is more likely to be tied
to the “maintenance of their culture and family ties”
(Wilson 2007, 70). However, because minorities live
in segregated communities does not mean that they
form the basis of a market segment or exhibit homogenous taste and orientations. Yet there are clear differences in consumption among racial groups, which
is attributable to differences in class, culture, and the
experience of racial discrimination and alienation.

Theoretical Frameworks
While the literature on how race affects consumption is sparse, three theoretical frameworks exist to
account for minorities’ consumption: consumption
as a means to defuse alienation, as a tool of resistance, and as an instrument to display one’s social
identity. These theories posit that consumption is not
only a means of gaining social status, but, for minorities, it is also used to respond to social exclusion.
The first theoretical proposition suggests that
racial minorities engage in consumption in an attempt
to overcome alienation. Consumption becomes both
a response to their stigmatized position and a way

Ethnicity/Race

to avert stereotypes. According to this perspective,
minorities attempt to buy “respect” and “dignity”
(Weems 1998, 27) and “consume conspicuously as a
way of compensating for the humiliation and disappointments they incur” (Austin 1994, 156) because
of their low status position. Minorities appear
immaculate and wear expensive clothes to reduce the
impact of negative stereotypes to such an extent that
they are more willing to invest in visible markers of
social status than similarly positioned whites.
The second theoretical proposition, consumption
as resistance, suggests that minorities’ consumption can be interpreted as a form of resistance to
dominant society and mainstream cultural norms.
Scholars, such as Dick Hebdige, argue that subordinate groups use goods subversively. The consumption
as resistance framework suggests the opposite of the
consumption as alienation perspective, which argues
that minorities use goods to demonstrate their adherence to mainstream values and norms. In contrast, it
asserts that minorities consciously use consumption
to symbolically protest social stigma and poor treatment based on race or ethnicity.
Last, the third proposition, consumption as social
identity, contends that social identities are fashioned
through consumption. For minorities, consumption
is used “to express and transform their collective
identity and to acquire social membership, i.e., to
signify and claim that they are full and equal members in their society” (Lamont and Molnár 2001,
31). Additionally, consumption helps to distinguish
a group’s characteristics and values. Members of stigmatized groups engage in an internal identification
process, using goods to identify with other in-group
members, as well as an external identification process, using goods to demonstrate their shared values
and membership in the larger society.
Each of the aforementioned approaches has also
been criticized for being underdeveloped, as minorities’ experiences in the market and as consumers
is not fully accounted for. Regina Austin criticizes
the consumption as alienation perspective, arguing that it (1) over emphasizes and interrupts racial
minorities’ actions as a response to whites, (2) fails
to address internal differentiation and conflict within
racial groups along class lines, and (3) ignores the
importance of consumption in individual’s conception of the “good life.” Michelle Lamont and Virag
Molnár’s criticism of this approach parallels the
third critique made by Austin; they maintain that

547

the consumption as alienation approach “downplays the subjective meaning that consumers attach
to their consumption practices” and assumes that
consumption results from repression (2001, 34).
Austin criticizes the consumption as resistance perspective for overemphasizing the idea of symbolic
protest. Lamont and Molnár similarly argue the consumption as resistance perspective projects consumers as being too powerful, overestimating their ability
to challenge dominant narratives.
While the aforementioned theoretical propositions
are presented as separate and competing frames, consumers likely use consumption in a variety of ways,
demonstrating evidence for each of the approaches.
While none of the approaches has been thoroughly
tested, examples from a wide range of ethnographic
accounts illustrate their usefulness. In the following
section, the experiences of African American consumers are reviewed to demonstrate that these frames
are used in the everyday lives of racial and ethnic
minorities. While the experiences of other groups
may parallel that of African Americans, the examples
presented here also illustrate how local conditions
and factors unique to specific groups structure patterns of consumption, creating divergence.

African American Consumers as a Case Study
Ethnographic accounts examining the everyday lives
of African Americans provide compelling evidence for
the consumption as alienation, resistance, and social
identity frameworks, as well as areas worthy of theoretical elaboration. The case of African Americans is
a suitable example because, as Lizabeth Cohen has
noted, even while African Americans have historically
been restricted from full participation in economic
life, they nonetheless have remained active consumers. By examining patterns of consumption exhibited
by African Americans, insight can be gained with
regard to how race, class, and consumption interact.
According to the consumption as alienation
approach, racial minorities consciously display material goods with the goal of averting discrimination.
In her account of the black middle class, Karyn Lacy,
in Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the
New Black Middle Class (2007), illustrates the myriad ways middle-class blacks create public identities
based on their class standing in an effort to avoid
racial discrimination. To limit negative and alienating experiences in public settings, particularly while

548

Ethnicity/Race

shopping, she finds that members of the black middle
class put their class status on display. Her respondents “dress with care” and are always mindful of
their self-presentation because they anticipate they
will be treated badly and have “unpleasant” shopping experiences if they are not dressed formally
or donning expensive brands. Through their clothing, they demonstrate their “respectability to white
strangers” and “signal that they ‘belong’ in the
store” (76). In public settings, indicators of social
status, such as one’s level of education, are not easily
detected, heightening the role of consumption. While
whites may similarly “portray distinct identities as a
way of signaling social position” (39), Lacy argues
that because of the stigma of race, “blacks who have
‘made it’ must work harder, more deliberately, and
more consistently to make their middle-class status
known to others” (3). Lacy’s work evidences that
blacks use consumption to respond to stereotypes,
specifically the stereotype that all blacks are poor.
Additional accounts provide evidence of how
African Americans use consumption to actively contest their stigmatized position in society. For poor
blacks, consumption provides a means to prove
“themselves to be worthy” (Austin 1994, 154).
Carl Nightingale asserts this idea, arguing that the
poor ghetto youth he studied, as a consequence of
social stigma and alienation, use conspicuous consumption to demonstrate to others they can achieve
the American dream. He finds that the young boys
fervently use consumption as a means of gaining a
sense of self-worth. Similarly, the young mothers
depicted in Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street
(1999) use consumption and goods to achieve social
status, adorning their babies in expensive clothing
and footwear. As he states, “The teenage mother
derives status from her baby; hence her preoccupation with the impression that the baby makes and her
willingness to spend inordinately large sums toward
that end” (165). Similarly, Mary Pattillo-McCoy
reveals in Black Picket Fences (1999) that one of her
respondents, Neisha, perceives other women in her
neighborhood as her social inferiors if they either
choose or cannot afford to dress their babies in the
latest fashions. These young, poor black women
use consumption in ways that do not conform to
mainstream projections of what is appropriate, yet
they consciously display goods as a means of coping
with marginalization and of attaining social honor
in communities in which there is little to go around.

The second theoretical perspective, consumption
as resistance, asserts that blacks use consumption
to resist dominant cultural norms, and by doing so,
consumption can be used as a means of both pleasure
and protest. The work of Elizabeth Chin, examining
how poor, urban black children engage in consumption, lends support to the consumption as resistance
framework. She finds that the children she observed
use consumption for expressive and social purposes.
For them, consumption is “a sphere of creative play”
and also a “realm in which they can construct critical
assessments of the world around them” (2001, 178).
For the children in her study, consumption becomes a
means of both resisting and reinterpreting the world
around them.
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, in their classical work Black Metropolis, first published in 1945,
provide additional evidence for this perspective.
They suggest that blacks place a premium on “enjoying life” irrespective of their economic position, and
they go on to argue that “having a good time” also
functions as an “escape from the tensions of contact
with white people. Absorption in ‘pleasure’ is, in part
at least, a kind of adjustment to their separate, subordinate status in American life” (1993, 387). In her
work, Pattillo-McCoy provides evidence that African
Americans use consumption to “have a good time.”
She states that young people in Groveland, the community she studies, use “fashions to resist and reinterpret their racially marginalized position” all the
while “having fun” (1999, 148). She demonstrates
the ways in which young people take mainstream
brands and radically change them, such that their
style demonstrates “a blatant use of popular fashion
for locally significant ends” (163). Pattillo-McCoy
provides support for the claim that consumption for
African Americans can be liberating and used creatively to subvert dominate culture and taste. Her
work also demonstrates the importance of the local
context in shaping the meaning attributed to material
goods and how people use those material goods.
Similarly, one of Lacy’s most interesting findings is
that middle-class African Americans see themselves
as responsible consumers, but “responsible spending
doesn’t mean doing without luxuries” (2007, 133).
While Lacy does not spell out what set of goods
are encompassed in African American’s conception of the good life, she does suggest that African
Americans are more likely to indulge themselves
with creature comforts that are associated with a

Ethnicity/Race

middle-class lifestyle. While they believe in spending responsibly, middle-class African Americans also
consume because they believe that having certain
material goods makes their lives more enjoyable.
Interestingly, the middle-class African Americans
in her study state that they are less concerned with
frugality than their middle-class white counterparts
but do not see themselves as invested in material
things as lower-class African Americans. In fact, they
actively criticize African Americans who they believe
are living beyond their means or not earning a living
legitimately. Lacy’s work evidences just how members of racial groups maintain perceptions of internal
differences that exist, particularly along class lines.
Lamont and Molnár provide evidence for the
third theoretical proposition, that consumption is a
means for demonstrating social identity. They find
that African American marketing executives promote consumption as a means of expression of group
membership and collective identity. It becomes a part
of what makes African American culture distinct. But
these executives also assert that African Americans
should and do use consumption to demonstrate their
allegiance to “mainstream” middle-class values. They
argue that through consumption, African Americans
“affirm and gain recognition of their full membership in U.S. society” (2001, 36). Yet, as Lamont and
Molnár argue, it is problematic that consumption is
defined as a means of gaining entry into American
society, as they state of the exclusiveness inherent in
such a criteria: “Equating social membership with
buying power makes it largely unreachable for a
large number of whites and blacks alike” (42).
In many ways, blacks’ protest of discrimination
in the sphere of consumption was tied to claims of
national identity and rights associated with American
citizenship, lending support for the consumption as
social identity perspective. Historically, minorities
have used the sphere of consumption collectively
and individually to fight for greater racial equality in
the United States. In her account of the rise of the
“consumer republic,” Cohen describes the various
collective strategies African Americans employed to
assert their citizenship. During the civil rights movement, African American communities used their purchasing power for political ends, boycotting stores,
movie theaters, and other public venues in protest of
racial prejudice. Cohen describes African Americans’
political activity as part of a larger ideological shift in
which consumption became associated with national

549

prosperity and equal citizenship. Equal access to consumer goods is associated with a middle-class lifestyle,
which was seen as essential to maintaining democracy. African Americans’ struggle for the right to shop
was necessary, as the ability of all citizens to spend
freely was rendered vital to American prosperity.
In addition to providing support for the aforementioned frames, ethnographic accounts indicate where
there is room for improvement in the understanding
of minorities’ consumption. Such research suggests
additional ways minorities use consumption and it
also raises important concerns, such as the detrimental role consumption plays. Four areas for theoretical elaboration should be noted. First, minorities may
refuse to engage in consumption, and when and why
they forfeit spending is of equal importance. Second,
it is imperative to note which groups or social spaces
shape and inform minorities consumer’s decisions
and why. Third, future research must account for the
structural conditions that racial and ethnic minorities
face, which shapes both their consumption and the
social significance of goods they purchase. Lastly, the
negative consequences of consumption are worthy of
thorough examination.
Continuing with the case study of the African
American experience, historically, African Americans
have refused to spend their money in places where
they have been discriminated against. In her research,
Jennifer Lee finds that African Americans often
employ strategies of avoidance in which they refused
to “patronize businesses that do not treat them fairly”
(2000, 371). Their refusal to shop or spend money,
though not organized on a collective level, has implications for other decisions they make. For instance, some
middle-class blacks in Lee’s study remark that discriminatory retail experiences in nonblack neighborhoods
was a “chief reason why they prefer living in predominantly black communities” (371). While discrimination “narrows blacks’ choices with regard to where
to consume and hinders their ability to enter into
efficient commercial transactions,” it might also result
in blacks simply refusing to make certain purchases
(Austin 1994, 150). Whether African Americans, or
other minorities, withdraw from the market because
of individual experiences of discrimination or because
of inferior goods and services, it is important to note
why consumers use this strategy, how frequently they
do so, and how effective it is. Furthermore, how does
the decision to withdraw from the market in one
sphere shape preferences and choices in other spheres?

550

Ethnicity/Race

Theoretical elaboration is also needed to understand to what degree racial and ethnic minorities’
preferences are shaped by the consumption of similarly situated in-group members, high-status in-group
members, or whites of equal or higher status. Austin
suggests that status hierarchies within the black community have a significant impact on how and why
African Americans consume. She asserts that “blacks
in general do not pay that much attention to white
people” (163). Pattillo-McCoy provides a more
nuanced perspective, arguing that African Americans’
actions are not geared toward any one group but that
they buy certain goods to send a message simultaneously to those who are both socially proximate and
distant. As she states of African Americans who own
Cadillacs, “The driver buys it to signify first to himor herself, then to friends, and finally to ‘the white
man,’ that he or she has made it” (1999, 148). In her
research on Korean and Chinese second-generation
immigrants, Lisa Sun-Hee Park similarly notes that
her respondents’ consumer choices often reflected a
desire to “prove their ‘Americanness’” or to appear
like a “normal American family” (2005, 2–3). But
their consumption was also important within their
families and the broader immigrant community, as it
demonstrated upward mobility and social advancement. While such evidence suggests that racial minorities’ consumption is affected both by in-group and
out-group values, without further investigation, there
is no way to know which group most significantly
shapes patterns of consumption exhibited by racial
and ethnic minorities.
The degree to which consumption can be detrimental is a question worthy of further investigation.
If consumption is crucial in demonstrating upward
mobility, racial minorities may be induced to consume
when it is not in their long-term financial interests to
do so. As Pattillo-McCoy notes, African Americans
use “material goods to level the playing field, buying
things they often cannot afford in order to give others
the impression that they can” (1999, 147). Drake and
Cayton similarly found that the lives of Bronzille’s
residents were organized around “getting ahead”
(1993, 388). “Getting ahead” entails a commitment
to economic advancement, of which the consumption
of certain goods is emblematic. As they state,
In its simplest terms this means progressively moving
from low-paid to higher-paid jobs, acquiring a more
comfortable home, laying up something for sickness

and old age, and trying to make sure that the children
will start out at a higher economic and cultural level
than their parents. Individuals symbolized their progress by the way they spend their money—for clothes,
real estate, automobiles, donations, entertaining. (388)

Consumption serves as a means of demonstrating upward mobility within the black community;
even when limited (legitimate) opportunities exist,
this desire to consume remains, sometimes producing
deleterious consequences. The works of Drake and
Cayton, Anderson, and Pattillo-McCoy all reveal
the harmful role consumption can play. Drake and
Cayton argue that “maintaining a ‘front’ and ‘showing off’ become very important substitutes for getting
ahead in the economic sense” (1993, 389). For those
with little other opportunities, like the young women
who make up Anderson’s “Baby Club,” consumption can reinforce counterproductive social norms.
Pattillo-McCoy provides an account of a young man
named Tyson, who at the age of sixteen was lured
into selling drugs by the fast money he could earn
and then use to consume. As she notes, “Tyson felt
he was a man because he could use his drug profits
to buy whatever he wanted. And the first things he
wanted were clothes and shoes” (1999, 159).

Experiences of Other Racial and
Ethnic Groups
Similarities exist across racial and ethnic groups
in how material goods are used simultaneously to
maintain group boundaries, to structure social relations with fellow in-group members, and to gain
social acceptance among out-group members.
Research on Korean and Chinese second-generation
immigrants has revealed that a premium is placed
on the consumption of high-status goods because
of the social status such goods convey within the
group. Additionally, material goods are used to
demonstrate social citizenship and membership.
Similarly, Sathi Dasgupta found that among Indian
immigrants consumption of high-status goods is perceived as instrumental in their efforts to gain acceptance in American society. The work of Raj Mehta
and Russell W. Belk on Indian immigrant families
also illustrates the importance of consumption and
the use of goods to preserve one’s ethnic heritage.
Families studied reflected a desire both to adapt to
their new context and to preserve various aspects of

Ethnicity/Race

their culture of origin. Research on racial and ethnic
groups presents clear evidence for the social identity framework, though more research is needed to
determine the applicability of the consumption as a
response to alienation and consumption as a form
of resistance frameworks to the experiences of ethnic
immigrants in the context of the United States and
more broadly.

Conclusion
Sociological theories of consumption posit that on
an aggregate level, consumption is a means by which
people demonstrate their social status and group
membership. On a microlevel, objects and goods
are acquired because they maintain symbolic value,
which people use to “construct identities and relations with others who inhabit a similar symbolic universe” (DiMaggio 1994, 44). The preferences and
decisions of racial and ethnic minorities as consumers are shaped by their experience of alienation, their
resistance, and their desire for leisure and entertainment. But consumption also plays an important role
in the construction of racial and class-based identities.
Minorities’ conception of consumption is a product
of pervasive cultural repertoires, but it also is a product of their social and economic context and the particular set of conditions they face as a consequence of
stigma and discrimination. Experiences of differential treatment along racial and ethnic lines, combined
with differences in class and culture, result in minorities’ distinct practices, preferences, and motivations
with regard to consumption.
Cassi L. Pittman
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Ghettos; Identity;
Leisure; Resistance; Social Distinction; Social
Exclusion; Subculture

Further Readings
Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence,
and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1999.
Arnould, Eric J., and Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer Culture
Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research.” Journal of
Consumer Research 31, no. 4 (2005): 868–882.
Austin, Regina. “‘A Nation of Thieves’: Securing Black
People’s Right to Shop and to Sell in White America.”
Utah Law Review 1 (1994): 147–177.
Bobo, Lawrence, and Vincent L. Hutching. “Perceptions of
Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of

551

Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context.”
American Sociological Review 61, no. 6 (1996): 951–962.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004.
Chin, Elizabeth. Purchasing Power: Black Kids and
American Consumer Culture. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic the Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York:
Vintage Books, 2004.
Corrigan, Peter. The Sociology of Consumption: An
Introduction. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
Dasgupta, Sathi S. On the Trail of an Uncertain Dream:
Indian Immigrant Experience in America. New York:
AMS, 1989.
DiMaggio, Paul. “Culture and Economy.” In The
Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J.
Smelser and Richard Swedberg, 27–57. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994.
Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis:
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture the Meaning of Style. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Humphreys, Jeffrey M. The Multicultural Economy, 2008:
Minority Buying Power in the New Century. Athens,
GA: Selig Center for Economic Growth, Terry College
of Business, University of Georgia, 2008.
Lacy, Karyn R. Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in
the New Black Middle Class. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007.
Lamont, Michele, and Virag Molnar. “How Blacks Use
Consumption to Shape their Collective Identity:
Evidence from Marketing Specialists.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 1, no. 1 (2001): 31–45.
Lee, Jennifer. “From Civil Relations to Racial Conflict:
Merchant-Customer Interactions in Urban America.”
American Sociological Review 67, no. 1 (2002): 77–98.
Mehta, Raj, and Russell W. Belk. “Artifacts, Identity, and
Transition: Favorite Possessions of Indians and Indian
Immigrants to the United States.” Journal of Consumer
Research 17, no. 4 (1991): 398–411.
Nightingale, Carl. On the Edge: A History of Poor Black
Children and Their American Dreams. New York: Basic
Books, 1993.
Park, Lisa Sun-Hee. Consuming Citizenship: Children of
Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Asian America).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Pattillo-McCoy, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and
Peril among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999.

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Ethnography

Veblen, Thorstein. Conspicuous Consumption. New York:
Penguin Books, 2006. First published 1915.
Weems, Robert E. Desegregating the Dollar: African
American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. New
York: New York University Press, 1998.
Wilson, R. T. “Acculturation and Discrimination in the
Global Market Place: The Case of Hispanics in the
U.S.” Journal of International Consumer Marketing 20,
no. 1 (2007): 67–78.
Zelizer, Viviana. “Culture and Consumption.” In The
Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J.
Smelser and Richard Swedberg, 331–354. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.

ETHNOGRAPHY
Ethnography is the description, interpretation, and
analysis of a culture or social group, or of particular
social practices, processes, or problems, through field
research in naturally occurring settings. Ethnography
is the core research practice of social and cultural
anthropology and is commonly used in sociology and
cultural studies, as well as in studies of science and
technology, health, education, crime, and, increasingly, in consumer research, design, and product
development. The method of participant observation
is central to the practice of ethnography.
In anthropology, conventionally, ethnographic
fieldwork is a long-term, comprehensive social
immersion, usually in a culture alien to that of the
researcher. This is contrasted with sociological ethnography, which usually involves more bounded periods of fieldwork and relatively discrete cultural forms
and often takes place in the researcher’s own society.
Within ethnography, participant observation is
commonly supplemented with interviewing, as well
as other research methods including, but not limited
to, textual analysis and the interpretation of visual
representations and material artifacts. However, the
practice of ethnography cannot be reduced to particular research methods, or even a single methodological position. As John Brewer notes, different
theoretical and philosophical frameworks compete
over what ethnography is and how it should be
practiced, due to their commitment to different
understandings of the nature of society (ontology)
and the nature of knowledge (epistemology). While
sociologists are far from reaching consensus, British
sociologists Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, and Sara

Delemont have described the “ethnographic imagination” as implying a commitment to the interpretation
of social action, an understanding of social organization, an analysis of the realization of macrolevel processes in local social contexts, and a recognition of
the complexity and multiplicity of cultural meanings
in observed social action (2003, 113–115).

The History of Ethnography
Ethnography began in the 1890s in anthropology
and sociology. Classical ethnography was based
on a natural science model of social research. The
anthropological ethnographic monograph developed
as a distinctive genre of writing with a claim to scientific veracity, as distinct from, for example, travel
writing or journalism, as well as accounts of ethnographic fieldwork that foregrounded the experience
of the author, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes
Tropiques (1955). Canonical ethnographic monographs, such as Argonauts of the Western Pacific
by Bronisław Malinowski (1922), Coming of Age
in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928), or The Nuer
by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940), as well as Franz
Boas’s works on the Kwakiutl of the Pacific North
West from 1895 onward, offered total overviews of
geographically bounded cultures while also serving
as vehicles for advancing general anthropological
understanding.
In sociology, the major early current was found in
the Chicago School of ethnography. Between 1917
and 1942, numerous ethnographies were produced,
chiefly by students of Robert E. Park and Ernest W.
Burgess, that portrayed the diverse social worlds of
mainly urban, everyday life and the symbolic interactions of specific communities and groups, often
the marginalized and deviant (see Deegan 2001).
The Chicago style of fieldwork was to have lasting
influence. The inheritors of the tradition in the 1950s
and 1960s, such as Howard Becker, Anselm Strauss,
Blanche Greer, and Leonard Schatzman, addressed
the tendency to a lack of methodological reflection
among the early ethnographers by producing major
methodological works.

The Reflexive Turn
Classical ethnography assumed a largely unproblematic stance to issues of representation and methodology. The “postmodern,” “literary,” or “reflexive
turn” in ethnography from the mid-1980s onward

Ethnography

was influenced by post-structuralism, postcolonialist
theory, and feminist critiques. James Clifford and
George Marcus’s 1986 edited collection Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography was
hugely influential in disseminating ideas of the reflexive turn. The reflexive turn saw a rejection of natural science as an appropriate model for ethnographic
inquiry, a questioning of the legitimacy of ethnography’s claims to a privileged perspective (“the crisis of
legitimacy”) and of the realist assumption that the
language of ethnographic writing was a transparent
medium (“the crisis of representation”).
The response to these perceived crises is often discussed in terms of a commitment to “reflexivity” and
“new ethnography.” Reflexivity implies a sensitivity
on the part of the ethnographer to his or her own
social, cultural, and historical location (and its values
and interests), to the ethical and political context in
which the production of ethnographic knowledge
takes place, and to a foregrounding of the power
relations implicit in ethnographic research and
writing. Against conventional, realist ethnography,
George Marcus has characterized new ethnography,
such as Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism,
and the Wild Man (1987), as drawing on the experimentation of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. Others
sympathetic to the interdisciplinary critiques of the
reflexive turn (such as Atkinson et al. 2003) have
cautioned innovators not to forget the rich resources
of ethnographic history.
Pierre Bourdieu has criticized the postmodern turn
in ethnography as narcissistic and an abandonment
of ethnography’s commitment to scientific objectivity. For Bourdieu, reflexivity means a rigorous
commitment to explicating the objective social and
cultural position of the ethnographer, rather than a
focus on the ethnographer’s subjective experience of
fieldwork or experiments with ethnographic writing.
While for anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz
ethnography becomes simply one discourse among
other discourses, a dialogue between ethnographer
and subject aimed at mutual understanding, for others, such as the Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy,
the dialogue is also one between theory and data,
with the aim of revealing how macroprinciples such
as commodification shape and are shaped by everyday worlds of social interaction. The reflexive turn,
then, has led both to ethnography conceived as interpretation and ethnography conceived as political and
cultural critique.

553

Contemporary Ethnography
The traditional ethnographic field as a static locale is
increasingly challenged by global mobility, communications technology, and the transnational contexts of
research subjects. The ethnographer has become more
active in determining the field of study, notes Vered
Amit. Contemporary ethnographers are presented
with the problem of articulating the microperspective of ethnography with the macroperspective of
larger systems (such as capitalist modes of production
and consumption) and showing their interconnections over time. George Marcus suggests this may be
approached through literally studying multiple locales
(multisite ethnography), through a sensitivity to how
macroprocesses are articulated in the local ethnographic context, or through new objects of study, such
as life histories, objects, markets, or even metaphors.

Ethnographies of Consumption and
Consumer Culture
The rich, contextualized understandings of ethnography, its attention to the messy complexity of
everyday practices and articulation of macro- with
microprocesses, provide fertile ground for the study
of consumption and consumer culture. Moreover, as
Mary Douglas notes, ethnographic tradition assumes
that material artifacts communicate social meanings
and that goods make and maintain social relationships, above and beyond simply the display of status.
Contemporary ethnographers of consumer culture have explored subjects as diverse as the role
of personal stereos in everyday life (Michael Bull’s
Sounding Out the City, 2000), to the role of commodified “bridal photography” in Taiwanese weddings (Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride, 2003).
British anthropologist Daniel Miller has made
several notable contributions to the area, such as
Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (1994), a
study of how mass consumption in Trinidad expresses
key contradictions of modernity, and Capitalism: An
Ethnographic Approach (1997), a study of Trinidadian
consumer businesses that provides a perspective of
capitalist practices as deeply locally contextualized.
This perspective challenges the stereotype of passive,
ideologically manipulated consumers, a theme Miller
further develops in A Theory of Shopping (1998).
Through an ethnography of women’s everyday shopping in London, Miller argues that, far from being the
status competition of conspicuous consumption or the

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Ethnology/Folklore Studies

atomized, alienated pursuit of commodified identities,
women’s mundane shopping is a medium through
which an affective world of social and family relationships is enacted. Crucially, Miller shows that the act
of purchase is only a minor element in a network of
social and moral meaning in everyday life in which the
purchased commodity gains significance.
Dan Welch
See also Anthropology; Autoethnography; Bourdieu,
Pierre; Cultural Studies; Douglas, Mary; Multisited
Ethnography; Postcolonial Theory; Postmodernism;
Post-Structuralism; Sociology

Further Readings
Amit, Vered, ed. Constructing the Field: Ethnographic
Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Atkinson, Paul, Amanda Coffey, and Sara Delamont. Key
Themes in Qualitative Research: Continuities and
Change. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Participant Objectivation.” The Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 2 (June
2003): 281–294.
Brewer, John D. Ethnography. Buckingham, UK: Open
University Press, 2000.
Burawoy, Michael, Alice Burton, Ann Arnett Ferguson, and
Kathryn J. Fox, eds. Ethnography Unbound: Power and
Resistance in the Modern Metropolis. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Deegan, Mary Jo. “The Chicago School of Ethnography.” In
Handbook of Ethnography, edited by Paul A. Atkinson,
Amanda Jane Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and
Ly H. Lofland, 11–25. London: Sage, 2001.
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of
Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.
London: Routledge 1979.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Marcus, George E. Ethnography through Thick and Thin.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

ETHNOLOGY/FOLKLORE STUDIES
What kinds of contributions have European ethnology and folklore made to the general study of

consumption? European ethnology is a branch of
general anthropology that developed in Europe during the end of the nineteenth century. While many
European nations with strong colonial traditions or
imperial ambitions created a global kind of anthropology, small nations like the Scandinavian ones
turned to discover “their primitives within,” either
in the form of peasant folklore studies or as a more
general ethnology of the nation. During the twentieth century, the discipline became more focused on
studying contemporary everyday life within a mainly
national or European framework. Today, departments of European ethnology combine a fieldworkoriented tradition with links both to cultural history
and cultural studies.
The strong ethnographic tradition has often meant
a focus on the ways in which consumption is embedded in material contexts, daily routines and rituals,
and emotionalities and sensibilities. The focus is on
situated practices, and this also means that there is
a constant attempt to bring theoretical perspectives
into dialogue with concrete empirical materials. The
phenomenological tradition is strong, as well as the
use of actor-network theory. In terms of methods,
there is a constant experimentation with different
ethnographic techniques and, in the case of folklore,
studies of narrativity and genre analysis.
Three main ethnological perspectives are presented:
first, a strategy that uses a historical and contrastive perspective to problematize current notions of
consumption; second, an interest in the materialities
of consumption and the ways in which all senses are
involved in consumer activities, from do-it-yourself
(DIY) projects to the ways people experiment with their
wardrobe in front of the mirror; and finally, an interest
in detailed ethnographies of aspects of consumer life
that may at first sight seem too trivial or mundane to
merit attention, like everyday skills and routines.

Consumer Life Histories
As European ethnologists and folklorists set out to
document a vanishing peasant culture, they developed
folk life archives all over Europe, in university departments and museums, collections of answers to questionnaires, interviews, oral histories, and field reports.
Many of these archives still collect material but now
often with a focus on everyday life in contemporary
society. Thus, they often contain rich materials on different aspects of consumption. Today, the collections

Ethnology/Folklore Studies

on preindustrial patterns of consumption and householding present interesting resources for comparative
analysis, but this entry deals with one special category, collections of life histories of consumption, that
has proved a fruitful analytical tool.
When people narrate their lives as consumers during the twentieth century, there is often a focus on
processes of learning and de-learning. The interviews
often start with the early memories of learning how
to construct a list of Christmas wishes, becoming a
collector of Barbie dolls or Smurf figures, or negotiating pocket money. These childhood memories
often have a certain freshness; they are memories of
the first confrontations with novel styles and scenes
of consumption. They often express the exhilarating
feeling of entering a world of abundance and desire.
For older generations with a rural background, these
memories may deal with the first trip to the market
or the advent of the mail-order catalogue. Many
recollect the ways in which catalogue reading at the
kitchen table became a family ritual but also how
it turned into a favorite pastime for children. For
later generations of consumers, new entrances to the
world of goods developed. Here, the early memories
may deal with the first visit to a department store or
a real supermarket.
Consumption as a laboratory for experimentation
and identity formation comes out even more strongly
when people talk about their teenage years. There
are memories of the endless hours spent in front of
the mirror, trying out styles, clothes, and poses to
find forms of self-expression. Teenage memories also
emphasize the degree to which the battle with parents and the attempts to secure adult freedom are
enacted within the field of consumption. Another
dominating theme in teenage consumer life has to do
with learning the fine social distinctions, questions of
gender and class become visible here.
During later stages of life, homemaking is a central metaphor for narrating consumer life, and there
is an important generational change here. The idea
of home improvement as a family project, uniting
wife, husband, and children, became important for
the working class during the postwar boom years in
manners that would have been unthinkable in 1900
or 1930. Home became a place where one actively
tried out different sides of the self, an important site
of cultural production.
A new space for creativity and anesthetization
emerged, an opportunity to develop talents and

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interests among people who had previously lacked
the time, money, and energy to invest in their own
home. The life histories illustrate how this family project
called the home is never finished. People are busy redecorating, fixing, planning, daydreaming, producing
new sofa cushions, putting in new floors, ripping out
old ones, changing wallpaper, driving to the hardware
store, leafing through furniture catalogues, moving
things around, and moving the family on.
What are the lessons of this material? The focus
on learning gives us a chance to understand how
consumer competences are developed. Narratives of
one’s life as a home builder, car owner, or teenage
consumer highlight the ways people have over the
years acquired skills that later have often been naturalized into habits, reflexes, and routines and thus
become hard to notice.
The slow naturalization of these skills comes out,
for example, in the material on life with media technologies, from the telephone to the television. Pioneer
radio listening or television viewing was surrounded
by an almost sacred aura. People remember the
solemn atmosphere and the intense concentration in
early radio listening, or the ways in which you dressed
up for television evenings, hushing both grandma and
the kids. Both the radio and the television set were
given a prominent position in the best room, rather
like home altars. Gradually, the media became routine, people learned how to listen with half an ear to
the radio or how to have the television on as a background screen for conversation, zapping between
channels. Typical of this gradual mastery of new home
technologies is also the capacity to do several things
at the same time: read a paper while listening to the
radio, have a meal while watching the television news,
and so on. There is a long history of multitasking here.
Another element concerns the moral dimension
of consumption. The material often underlines the
ways in which most discussions about consumption
tend to have a moral element. Narrating one’s life can
take the form of an argument about a “now” versus
a “then.” For some, it becomes important to stress
how one learned how to make do with little, and this
is often meant as an indirect critique of the youngsters
of today “who get everything for nothing” and who
never learn to forsake desires or think twice about
consumption. Such moral lessons can also be condensed into situations or objects, which also may take
on rather stable narrative forms, turning into genres of
nostalgia or dystopia.

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Ethnology/Folklore Studies

A third lesson is how a personal history of consumption is organized around watershed ideas or
turning points in life. A new consumer habit or commodity comes to symbolize an important change. The
first bathroom with running hot water, the first ride
in the family car, and the first family holiday stand
out as utopias that suddenly have come within reach.
There are striking gender differences here. In life histories of many women of earlier generations, it is the
memories of the move to the first modern apartment
that stand out. In many cases, the expression used
is “it was like a dream” or “just like paradise.” It is
remembered as taking a step into the future, being a
modern family on the move.

Materializing Consumption
Narratives like these offer an antidote to much of the
cultural analysis of consumption of the 1980s and
1990s, which had a focus on semiotics, meanings,
symbols—commodities as “texts,” focusing much
less on the everyday blood, sweat, and tears of consumption. For European ethnology with an old interest in the materialities and practicalities of everyday
life, consumer studies have had more of a hands-on
perspective. The interest in looking at all the senses at
work—not just the visual dimension—means following people using and fixing objects, growing tired of
them, discarding them, or rediscovering them.
This focus has also meant a growing interest in the
analysis of consumer routines and habits. Open the
door to any home, and what will you be stumbling
over? Furniture and personal belongings, of course,
but you will also get entangled in all the routines
organizing domestic consumption inside. The home
is above all a web of rules, routines, and rhythms, of
silent agreements and ingrained reflexes about “the
ways we do things here.” One learns how to survive
a stressful morning, store the food in the fridge, sort
the laundry, and much, much more.
This kind of construction work goes on everywhere but in different forms. There are studies of
how families organize their homes, creating patterns
of division of labor and running into conflict about
consumer priorities. It is in the trivial everyday consumer routines that homes are made, challenged,
transformed, or broken.
The same perspectives have been brought fruitfully
to the studies of migration and transnational mobility.
Maja Povrzanovic has argued that rather than getting

trapped in discourses about ethnicity, it is fruitful to
look at the ways different kinds of migrants come to
share common experiences, through consumer practices and life with objects. How does one handle two
worlds of consumption, moving between nations?
This theme is also elaborated in a special issue of
Ethnologia Europaea (2007) on double homes and
double lives.
Questions of identification, of course, also surface
in the consumer habits of migrants. What once were
just everyday practices in terms of food, clothing,
or socializing take on a new and symbolic charge
in exile from the home country. Hilje van der Horst
has looked at the ways in which seemingly mundane phenomena, the different uses and attitudes to
lace in home decoration, mirrors identity conflicts
among different generations of Turkish immigrants
in the Netherlands.

Worlds of Shopping
The ethnological combination of an eye for materiality, historical contrasts, and detailed ethnographies
can be illustrated by studies on the making of the
modern shopper.
In her studies of the shopping experience in Berlin
around 1900, German ethnologist Gudrun König
follows the ways in which new ideas about the aesthetics and display of consumer goods in department
stores and exhibitions are confronted with the moral
landscape of taste and ideas about gender, class, and
good and bad consumers. Here we get a detailed
view of the landscapes of commerce and new politics
of shopping. This is a thick description of a special
era that sets out to problematize later conceptions
of consumer patterns. Today’s discourses about the
experience economy—shopping as a skill, taste as a
battleground—were also there in Berlin of the early
twentieth century, although in different forms.
Swedish ethnologist Cecilia Fredriksson deals
with a later period, the development of discount
department stores from the 1930s to the 1960s. She
shows how this consumer space also became a free
zone. Women could walk along the counters and
seem busy with shopping, when they actually just
wanted a moment of daydreaming in private. This
was a safe public space where no one questioned
another’s right to be there but also a place where
new consumer skills were learned. One was allowed
to handle goods and feel modernity materializing in

Ethnology/Folklore Studies

commodity assemblages, smells, textures, and sounds,
from the exciting ride with an escalator to the first
taste of soft ice cream.
The department store thus organized new ways
of exposing the world of goods and new styles of
shopping that still are with us. In a study of shopping
behavior in malls and department stores, Swedish
ethnologist Erik Ottoson has explored how this
dreamlike condition of drifting between counters
and special offers, vaguely searching for something,
still is working. He follows people in their wanderings, watching them handle stuff, try on clothes, or
compare colors. His contrastive, analytical approach
consists of comparing shoppers in a mall, dumpster
divers on their nightly raids, and visitors to flea markets. What kinds of different moods and modes of
interaction with commodities are developed here?
These three researchers share an eye for the detail,
anchoring general arguments about desire, discipline, or market relations in concrete ethnographic
situations—the movement of bodies, the flow of
daydreams, the workings of all the senses.

Consuming Experiences
With the new focus on consumer life in what came
to be called the experience economy in the 1990s,
the ethnological contributions to this field first of
all focused on a comparative critical comparison
of contemporary experience economies and those
of earlier eras, like the three researchers previously
discussed, but also a more detailed ethnographic
approach to what selling, packaging, or having an
experience really meant. Norwegian ethnologist
Kirsti Hjemdahl has explored how children experience a theme park, and Olav Christensen has studied
how snowboarders create a community of excitement. A number of studies discuss what happens
when traditional industries reinvent themselves in
terms of producing experiences. Håkan Jönsson has
looked at dairy producers trying to repackage milk
products as “a unique experience,” Tom O’Dell has
explored how a dying spa world of the twentieth
century became a new global industry in the twentyfirst, while Robert Willim has studied the recycling
of old factory buildings into “Industrial cool,”
turning them into events (see their case studies in
Löfgren and Willim 2005). Other ethnologists have
been interested in the ways in which life-cycle rituals like baptisms, weddings, and burials have been

557

commercialized in new ways within the framework
of “the experience market.”

Conclusion
A research tradition using history as a contrastive perspective, with an interest in detailed ethnographies and
the sensualities of the material world of consumption,
is what European ethnology brings to the multidisciplinary fields of consumer studies. A longer historical
perspective helps to show how patterns and forms of
consumption develop, are learned and unlearned, are
transformed, or disappear. Many kinds of everyday
consumption have become so natural that people do
not even think of them in terms of consumption any
longer. In the same way, moving back to periods when
today’s well-established ideas about consumption,
fashions, or desires were novel and fresh will help us
to understand these processes of institutionalization
and habituation. When new patterns of consumption
emerge, there is an openness surrounding them: How
should one behave in a department store? What happens during a fashion show? What can a telephone be
used for? Sooner or later, this newness is transformed
into something self-evident.
Unlike anthropologists who went out to search for
more exotic worlds, where the problem was getting
into new and strange cultures, European ethnologists
have often been faced with the task of getting out of
their all-too-familiar cultural settings, and this task
has produced a number of distancing strategies and
tactics of cultural analysis that help to problematize
seemingly trivial worlds of consumption.
Orvar Löfgren
See also Anthropology; Craft Consumer; Cultural
Studies; Domestic Technologies; Ethnography;
Material Culture; Methodologies for Studying
Consumer Culture; Shopping

Further Readings
Brembeck, Helene, Karin M. Ekström, and Magnus Mörck,
eds. Little Monsters: (De)coupling Assemblages of
Consumption. Berlin: LitVerlag, 2007.
Christensen, Olav. “The Playing Collective: Snowboarding,
Youth Culture and the Desire for Excitement.”
Ethnologia Scandinavica 29 (1999): 106–119.
Craith, Máiréad Nic, Ullrich Kockel, and Reinhard Johler,
eds. Everyday Culture in Europe: Approaches and
Methodologies. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

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European Union

Fredriksson, Cecilia. “The Making of a Swedish
Department Store Culture.” In The Shopping
Experience, edited by Colin Campbell and Paasi Falk,
111–135. London: Sage, 1998.
Hjemdahl Mathiesen, Kirsti. “When Theme Parks
Happen.” In Being There: New Perspectives on
Phenomenology and the Analysis of Culture, edited by
Jonas Frykman and Nils Gilje, 149–168. Lund, Sweden:
Nordic Academic Press, 2003.
Horst, Hilje van der. “Turkish Lace: Constructing
Modernities and Authenticities.” Ethnologia Europaea
36, no. 1 (2007): 32–44.
Löfgren, Orvar. “Excessive Living.” Culture and
Organization 13, no. 2 (June 2007): 131–144.
Löfgren, Orvar, and Richard Wilk, eds. Off the Edge:
Experiments in Cultural Analysis. Copenhagen, Denmark:
Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006. Published as special
issue of Ethnologia Europaea 35, no. 1–2 (2007).
Löfgren, Orvar, and Robert Willim, eds. Magic, Culture
and the New Economy, Oxford: Berg, 2005.
O’Dell, Tom, and Peter Billing. Experiencescapes: Tourism,
Culture and Economy. Copenhagen, Denmark:
Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003.
Otto, Lene, and Lykke Pedersen. “Life Stories and Objects
of Memories.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 28 (1998):
77–92.
Provrzanovic, Maja. “Beyond Culture and Identity. Places,
Practices, Experiences.” Ethnologia Europaea 38, no. 1
(2008): 13–22.
Rogan, Bjarne. “Things with a History—and Other
Possessions: Some Notes on Public and Private Aspects
of Possession among Elderly People.” Ethnologia
Scandinavica 28 (1998): 93–107.

EUROPEAN UNION
The European Union has become the foremost transnational organization in terms of binding rights
and shared obligations. Starting with the European
Community of Coal and Steel in 1952 as a means
of preventing France and Germany from ever going
to a war with each other again, and the Roman
Treaty of 1958 with six founding states, it eventually
expanded to include twenty-seven member states.
And its expansion is not over. A remarkable set of
rights has been consigned to the community along
this development. The European Union is much
more than a coordinator of the actions of its member
states; it is an actor in its own right. Its powers are
greatest in the economic sphere as it can enforce the

working of the Single European Market. The continuing dismantling of all sorts of trade barriers has
significant impact on the development of European
consumption and culture. In addition, the European
Union has accrued power in other consumption relevant policy fields, for instance, in consumer protection and, to lesser extent, in culture and tourism.
This entry discusses the direct relevance of the
European Union and the European Union as a
geographic-societal configuration for consumer culture. First, though, it considers the European approximation to mass consumption. This entry is confined
to behavioral patterns of leisure and consumption.
Aspects like consumption as an attempt to create a
meaningful life or the aestheticization and branding
of commodities are discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia. Consumption and leisure patterns differ in
many respects between women and men, between
age groups, and between classes and status groups.
These differences are also covered in other entries of
this encyclopedia.

Europeanization and Americanization
The global emergence of consumer culture is often
premised on Americanization. Yet Europe has its own
distinctive, even if somewhat belated, patterns and
processes related to consumption. It was not until
the late 1950s that consumption became widespread
among the general population in Europe. Critique of
destructive effects of consumer capitalism had started
long before World War II, however. Often, the United
States served as a proxy of admiration and contempt.
While conservatives complained that European ways
of life would be swamped by American culture, the
political left feared consumerism as a distraction to
class consciousness. Later, German intellectuals—
for instance, of the Frankfurt School—who had fled
Hitler warmly welcomed the safety granted by their
American host country but nevertheless warned of
totalitarian aspects of the American mass consumption and culture. In the 1960s, French structuralists
like Pierre Bourdieu or Jean Baudrillard emphasized
the emptiness consumption is predicated on and its
dubious role in the constructing or articulating of
identity. In the British context, there was a debate on
the intensification of moral regulation and the commercialization of working-class leisure.
This rough sketch of the theorizing about consumption only serves to illustrate that critique of

European Union

mass consumption used to be a more regular feature of the European than the American intellectual
debate. This time-honored transatlantic difference
has been replaced by a common focus on the history of consumption. Hartmut Kaelble, for instance,
makes the case that European consumption patterns
are still distinctive. He mentions a certain European
style of goods, European preferences for longer holidays, or a larger amount spent for food and clothes
as examples of these peculiarities. Consumer icons
like the automobile had been invented in Europe, and
the standardization of consumer products, department stores, fast-food restaurants, or packaged foods
had been developed equally in Europe and North
America. Two world wars derailed Europe on its way
to becoming a consumer society earlier, however.
Victoria de Grazia presents a different story according to which the “American Market Empire” triumphantly and peacefully swept away Europe’s bourgeois
commercial civilization. Reminiscent of Werner
Sombart’s thesis about the absence of socialism in
the United States, de Grazia maintains that there was
no consumerism in Europe before twentieth-century
American consumer culture pressed up against the
old continent’s diversity in norms of consumption.
American inventions, from the chain store and supermarket to Hollywood cinema, successfully operate on
the double register of regulation and freedom, of disenchanting the world with procedures and re-enchanting
it with small pleasures. Only as Europe became as
much a consumer society as the United States is the
“Market Empire” losing its lure and impetus.
This debate, as to what extent European consumption is or should be Americanized, has repercussions
in the debate on the future of Europe. It is about the
proper role of the European Union in maintaining
and solidifying a specific European pattern. The issue
of Europe’s culture already came up during negotiations at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
between 1986 and 1993. The European Union, under
the leadership of France, insisted on audiovisual products to be treated as cultural exceptions from open
market rules. Yet both the Commission (the executive
body of the European Union) and the member states
are split on the issue of international service trade liberalization, and, as a consequence, the protection of
culture in the face of homogenizing markets fails to
propel European differentiation and identity.
Transatlantic disputes also emerged on the heels
of different consumer perceptions of food safety as

559

well. European consumers, less so in the north than
in the south, are more wary of the use of hormones
in livestock production, chlorine bath treatment
of poultry, or genetically modified organisms than
their American counterparts. Defying the EU’s own
approval, EU environment ministers allowed Austria,
France, Hungary, and Greece to keep their bans on
genetically modified maize produced by U.S. agrochemical giant Monsanto. In its recent adjudication
ruling of March 2008, the World Trade Organization
found fault with the EU ban on the import of hormone
beef and permitted the United States and Canada to
maintain sanctions worth tens of millions of dollars
a year on European products from Roquefort cheese
to mustard. These trans-Atlantic rows are likely
to continue.

Prerogatives of European Union
The effects of Europeanization on consumption
are particularly visible in the fields of deregulating
transportation services and utilities. Initiatives of this
kind stimulated the emergence of new institutions,
like companies acting single-market-wide and interest representatives in the lobbying of the European
Union, including a few consumer organizations, but
also of change in the patterns of consumer behavior.
Thus, as Stefan Immerfall and Barbara Wasner conclude, the initiative for the information society not
only had technical consequences like the diffusion of
access to broadband networks but also changed the
information seeking, entertainment, and leisure-time
spending patterns of Europeans.
In telecommunication services, prices dropped
and a wider choice has been established. Consumers
are faced with decisions of which service plan
and which company to choose where once a state
monopoly was. Electronic communication markets
were fully opened by the European Union in 1998.
Since then, the consumption of these services by
European households and individuals has considerably evolved. Practically all Europeans have access
to a telephone now, be it a mobile phone, a fixed-line
phone, or both. This has changed the lives of young
people in particular. According to a recent survey in
Germany, younger respondents find mobile phone
and Internet access to be more important than owning a car. In other fields, like railway transportation
and the provision of electricity and gas, better consumer conditions could not be achieved until now

560

European Union

because monitoring fair network access to all suppliers turned out to be more difficult.
The European Union holds a more direct relevance
for consumer culture as well. The European Union
runs its own consumer policy and handles multinational trade negotiations during which consumer
issues regularly crop up as contentious cultural issues.
In the beginning of the European integration, consumer protection did not play a major part. It found
consideration only in the common agricultural policy
in the Treaty of Rome. Things started to change in the
1980s and 1990s as the promotion of market integration began to affect consumers. The goal was to
iron out different technical standards, contradictory
administrative procedures for the shipment of goods,
variations in the national rates of excise duties and
taxes, and the bias of national governments in favor of
local firms, especially when awarding public contracts.
With the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, consumer protection was firmly established as a formal European
Commission legislative competence. The Euro currency, introduced in 2001 and used by seventeen of
the twenty-seven members of the European Union,
was also intended to drive consumer prices down.
Despite the Lisbon Strategy launched in 2000,
aimed at making Europe “the most competitive and
dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world,”
there still are enormous differences in the availability
of computers and Internet services in European households: 83 percent of the households in Denmark and
the Netherlands have at least one computer, twice to
four times the numbers in Greece (36%), Hungary
(36%), Romania (29%), and Bulgaria (20%). Things
are more even with regard to television: 92 percent
of European households have at least one standard
television (cf. Eurobarometer 274, 2007: 99f). The
MEDIA 2007 program is designed to ensure that
the latest developments on the information and
communication technology markets are introduced
and taken up by the players of the European audiovisual sector such as digital distribution and video
on demand. The Commission has adopted antitrust
decisions about joint selling of football broadcasting
rights, involving the UEFA Champions League, the
German Bundesliga, and the Football Association
Premier League. The subsidizing of public media is
also a bone of contention between the Commission
and national governments.
In leisure activities, sports is one field where the
European Commission comes into action. At present,

the European Union has no explicit prerogative in the
area of sports. Its sports-related activities are based
on the interaction between sports and other competences, such as competition and the internal market.
This is a recurring strategy taken by the Commission
to enlarge its competencies. In 2007, the European
Commission published a White Paper emphasizing
sports as a means to enhance public health through
physical activity. The strengthening of cooperation
between health, education, and sports sectors aims
at defining and implementing coherent strategies
to reduce obesity and other health risks and is also
meant to promote volunteering and active citizenship. Another important part of the societal role of
sports is the fight against doping. The commission
recommends trade in illicit doping substances to be
treated in the same manner as trade in illicit drugs
throughout the European Union.
Another field of EU activities is culture. In 1993,
the enactment of the Treaty of Maastricht gave rise to
a new article in which cultural cooperation became a
recognized aim of EU action, with an accompanying legal basis. As a result, an initial range of pilot
programs and subsequent sectoral programs was
launched. Three full cultural programs followed up
the pilot programs: “Kaleidoscope” (encourage artistic and cultural creation and cooperation), “Ariane”
(support books and reading), and “Raphael”
(cultural heritage). In 1999, “Culture 2000” was
established for seven years. It differed from earlier
financial instruments in that it provided grants to cultural cooperation projects in all artistic and cultural
fields. The objective was to promote cultural diversity and, at the same time, shared cultural heritage.
In 2007, the European Commission added another
strategy aiming to promote cross-border mobility of
those working in the cultural sector to encourage the
transnational circulation of cultural and artistic output and to foster intercultural dialogue.
As the European Union moves away from direct
regulation and operates more and more with the
method of open coordination, product politics also
turns away from standardization. This method of
open coordination is applied in the fields of—among
others—information society, research and development, and tourism. So in terms of consumer culture,
the European Union gives way again for regional
traditions and regional products find more consideration. Starting in 1993, regional products can be
protected by labels like “protected designation of

European Union

origin (PDO),” “protected geographical indication
(PGI),” or “traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG).”
Each logo varies in the strictness of specifications
that products must meet, but, according to European
Commission Directorate-General for Agriculture and
Rural Development, all share the common goal of
furthering authenticity and sustainability. These measures are branded as “EU quality systems in a global
context.” Paradoxically, according to Michaela
DeSoucey, the delineation of particular foods as
nationally owned may encourage cultural politics
that demarcate national at the expense of European
boundaries and identities.

Consumption Patterns Across Europe
Besides having a direct impact on consumer conditions, the European Union as an area of almost
500 million citizens is also a context of consumer
behavior. This concerns questions and developments
regarding geographical and social patterns of leisure and leisure-related consumption in Europe and
the ongoing diversity of consumer cultures. In their
2010 comprehensive overview of leisure and consumption patterns in Europe, Jukka Gronow and
Dale Southerton present a mixed picture. On the
one hand, they find evidence that practices of leisure
and consumption are converging across national
borders, most notably in the diminishing share of
expenditure on food and clothing, in the opposite
tendency of increasing shares of expenditure spent
on transportation and housing and in the expansion
of time allocated to leisure activities. More free time
seems to be accompanied by increasing time pressure and a pushed pace of life, at least among the
full-time employees. In this respect, EU societies are
moving closer to the U.S. time regime, notes Manfred
Garhammer. Furthermore, according to Robert
Putnam, it looks as if there is also a general tendency
of less time spent on many forms of socializing.
On the other hand, different models of consumption and leisure in Europe seem to persist, such as
a relatively high spending on recreation and culture
in northwestern and northern Europe, whereas the
opposite is true for eastern and southern Europe. For
example, household expenditure (as a percentage of
totals) for food and beverages is highest in Romania,
Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Latvia. This is less the result
of high prices than small incomes. In these countries,
household expenditure for housing, water, electricity,

561

and so on, is comparatively high, too. So there is only
a little amount of household income left for the consumption of other goods and services.
But socioeconomic conditions cannot fully
account for these differences because, independent
of the general standards of living, people in Spain,
Italy, Portugal, and Greece, as well as in the United
Kingdom and Ireland, use a lot more of their money
on eating and drinking out. In terms of consumption
of popular culture in Europe, national specificities
also prevail, for instance, in music preferences or in
the second most popular sport (football, also known
as soccer in the United States, being number one all
over Europe). If there are unifying features, they are
in the form of popular international cultural products, mostly from the United States. Usually more
than half of all the movies attended in the European
Union come from the United States (Fligstein 2008).
Not all homogenizing trends are simply market
driven, though. With regard to American comedy
series, Giselinde Kuipers demonstrated that they are
imported in large numbers not because they are more
popular than homegrown ones but because of the
self-styled cosmopolitan ethos of the television professionals in charge. A similar economic bias applies
to the European integration process at large, which
seems to carry on relentlessly notwithstanding a considerable split between elites and citizens.

The Future of Consumer Culture in Europe
The cornerstone of the European Union is bringing
down barriers between the member states. Internal
borders have ceased, at least within the Schengen
area (of which Ireland and the United Kingdom are
not a part). As e-commerce is becoming more and
more important, the Commission is set to bring forward new regulations concerning the legal certainty
of Internet transactions. In the course of this development, people’s willingness and opportunity to buy in
other member states have multiplied. The European
Consumer—in contrast to the European citizen—has
become a real actor.
The most “Europeanized” consumers in this sense
live in Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and
Finland. In these countries, the level of cross-border
and distance shopping is higher than anywhere else
in the European Union. Protected Geographical
Indications and Designations of Origin (introduced
by EU) turned out to be a highly efficient marketing

562

European Union

tool. The future of consumer culture in Europe is
characterized by a high variety of goods and services,
whereby regional goods stand a good chance to succeed in the internal market.
In all likelihood, Europe will never become a
homogenous block akin to the United States with
regard to consumer behavior. Its compromise between
global and local trends tends to foster regional types
of consumer cultures. National and regional peculiarities will remain, but, at the same time, processes of
convergence continue. Europe is following a distinct
philosophy of more leisure time and of spreading work
among more people, argue Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di
Tella, and Robert MacCulloch. Yet economic stagnation, deteriorating public finances, and competition
from low-wage countries in the enlarged European
Union and in Asia has increased convergence between
European countries and the United States.
The European Union is designed to improve the living conditions of European citizens. The raison d’être
is to reach a positive economic development in the
whole European Union and especially in the poorer
countries. Historic experiences showed, however,
that EU programs do not always bring the intended
outcomes. In Spain or Ireland, the EU membership
sparked rapid economic development, whereas the
Greek economy did not develop that dynamically.
But even the poster children of economic liberalization are now in the clutches of financial turmoil. At a
time when the American attractiveness as a harbinger
of consumerism wanes, the European Union is not in
a place to offer a plausible alternative.
Stefan Immerfall and Barbara Wasner
See also Americanization; Consumer (Freedom of)
Choice; Consumer Policy (European Union);
Consumer Regulation; Global Institutions;
Globalization; Leisure; National Cultures

Fligstein, Neil. Euroclash: The EU, European Identity, and
the Future of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008.
Garhammer, Manfred. Wie Europäer ihre Zeit nutzen.
Zeitstrukturen und Zeitkulturen im Zeichen der
Globalisierung [How Europeans spend their time: Time
structures and time cultures in a globalizing world].
Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1999.
Gronow, Jukka, and Dale Southerton. “Leisure and
Consumption in Europe.” In Handbook of European
Societies, edited by Stefan Immerfall and Göran
Therborn, 355–384. New York: Springer, 2010.
Immerfall, Stefan, Klaus Boehnke, and Dirk Baier.
“Identity.” In Handbook of European Societies, edited
by Stefan Immerfall and Göran Therborn, 325–353.
New York: Springer, 2010.
Immerfall, Stefan, and Barbara Wasner. Freizeit [Free time].
Stuttgart, Germany: UTB, 2011.
Kaelble, Harmut. Sozialgeschichte Europas. 1945 bis zur
Gegenwart [Social history of Europe: 1945 to the
present]. München, Germany: C. H. Beck, 2007.
Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Jacob Ostberg. “Coffee Grounds
and the Global Cup: Glocal Consumer Culture in
Scandinavia.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 10,
no. 2 (2007): 175–187.
Kuipers, Giselinde. “Cultural Globalization as the
Emergence of a Transnational Cultural Field:
Transnational Television and National Media
Landscapes in Four European Countries.” American
Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 5 (2011).
McGovern, Charles, and Matthias Judt, eds. Getting and
Spending: European and American Consumer Societies
in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Putnam, Robert D., ed. Democracies in Flux: The
Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Ward, David, ed. The European Union and the Culture
Industries: Regulation and the Public Interest. Farnham,
UK: Ashgate, 2008.

Further Readings
Alesina, Alberto, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch.
“Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and
Americans Different?” Journal of Public Economies 88,
nos. 9–10 (2004): 2009–2042.
de Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance
through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2005.
DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions
and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.”
American Sociological Review 75, no. 3 (2010): 432–455.

Data Sources
Eurobarometer 213. (2004). The Citizens of the European
Union and Sport. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/
archives/ebs/ebs_213_summ_en.pdf.
Eurobarometer 246/Wave 64.3. (2006). Health and Food.
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_publication/eb_food_en
.pdf.
Eurobarometer 274. (2007). E-communications Household
Survey. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/
ebs_249_en.pdf.

Experimental Economics
Eurobarometer 298. (2008). Consumer Protection in the
Internal Market. http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/strategy/
docs/durobar_298_report_en.pdf.
European Commission. (2007). Competition—Sports.
http://ec.europa.eu/omm/competition/sectors/sports/
overview_en.html (last updated August 21, 2007).
European Commission. (2007). European Agenda for
Culture in a Globalizing World (COM 242 final).
European Commission. (2007). European Policy for
Quality Agricultural Products (Directorate-General for
Agriculture and Rural Development Fact Sheet). http://
ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/fact/quality/2007_en.pdf.
European Commission. (2008). Air Transport Portal of the
European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/transport/
air_portal/internal_market/competition_en.html (last
updated November 4, 2008).
European Commission. (2008). Culture—at a Glance.
http://ec.europa.eu/culture/glance/glance557_en.htm (last
updated September 3, 2008).
Eurostat. (2007). Cultural Statistics. Eurostat Pocketbooks.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the
European Communities. http://beheer.ecceonline.eu/I_
API/downloadAttachment.aspx?strTicket=9c8d2db3af8
729f5a304acce4aaf922b; 15.01.2009.
Eurostat. (2008). Living Conditions in Europe. Luxemburg:
Office for the Official Publications of the European
Communities.

EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS
Experimental economics refers to the method of controlled experimentation applied to the investigation
of economic phenomena. It is used to investigate
(1) individual decision making, (2) the coordination
of economic actors via market mechanisms, and
(3) cooperation of economic agents in nonmarket
environments. Experiments have helped in the study
of consumption phenomena by shedding light on
consumer preference structure, for instance, regarding time preferences, endowment effects, and contributions to public goods.
For long, it was accepted that economists cannot
test their theories in laboratories. This has changed
with contributions in game and decision theory that
brought their hypotheses into the laboratory for testing. The first contribution in experimental economics
was made by Edward Chamberlin in 1948. In 2002,
Vernon Smith received the Nobel Prize “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in
empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of

563

alternative market mechanisms.” Equally recognized
was Daniel Kahneman “for having integrated insights
from psychological research into economic science,
especially concerning human judgment and decisionmaking under uncertainty.” Hypotheses tested in
economic experiments are often derived from game
and decision science or in the cooperation between
economists and psychologists. Results coming from
economic experiments have been integrated into game
theory, decision science, and behavioral economics.
A good overview of the method is given in Douglas
Davis and Charles Holt’s Experimental Economics.
The experimental method uses controlled environments for the investigation. Economic experiments tend to simplify the decision-making context
and ways of interaction of economic agents to a
large degree to identify structure-giving elements and
causal relationships. Most often, economic experiments are conducted in computer labs. In experiments with interaction among experimental subjects,
actors are anonymized. Individual decisions are
transferred to the group, for instance, in form of individual bids they are willing to pay or for which they
are willing to offer a good, and in experiments with
feedback between several rounds, results are communicated to subjects, for instance, in form of resulting
market prices.
Economic experiments have brought many
insights that have been included in the advancement
of economic theory. Important areas include the following: (1) role and efficiency of alternative market
mechanism (Smith 1982); (2) altruistic behavior,
human reciprocity, and inequity aversion as analyzed, for instance, in ultimatum and dictator games
(Guth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze 1982) that
analyze the level of cooperation between economic
agents; (3) the rationality of economic decision making under uncertainty and the influence of loss aversion and endowment effects (Tversky and Kahneman
1991); (4) the rationality of economic decision making regarding intertemporal choice (Loewenstein and
Prelec 1992); and (5) evaluation of goods and services
in auction experiments measuring willingness to pay
(Bohm 1972).
The experimental setup requires the definition
of hypotheses to be tested, along with experimental subjects (students, consumers, business persons,
etc.) and variations in the experimental conditions.
Economic experiments work by posing economic
(monetary) incentives in the decisions to be made.

564

Experimental Economics

By defining these incentives, the experimenter can
generate and test hypotheses on economic behavior.
The framework of an experiment can be described in
terms of the environment (initial commodity endowment, information, and knowledge), the institution
(form of interaction, bids or offers, and rules for
exchange) and behavior. Elements of the environment and institutions are control variables, and the
observed behavior is hence interpreted as a function
of the environment and the institution. Rewards for
experimental subjects are explicitly linked to their
decisions during the experiments. For the internal
validity of an experiment, allowing the establishment of causal relationships, it is necessary that the
reward schedule cannot be influenced by subjective costs or benefits regarding the participation in
the experiment.
In experimental analysis of the role of economic
institutions, for instance, a market or auction setup,
uncontrolled heterogeneity among economic subjects is reduced by using induced values determining the individual payoffs for the experiment. For
instance, in an auction, the rewards that an experimental subject receives results as the difference
between a value function provided by the experimenter and the price that the subject has to pay.
Such a design allows economists to test the theoretic
price predictions for different auction formats (first
price, second price, etc.). On the other hand, the true
preference revealing property of the second price
auction and variants thereof can be employed in
economic experiments to measure willingness to pay
values. These experiments try to measure subjects’
homegrown values to evaluate, for instance, differences in willingness to pay and willingness to accept
values, valuations of new products or technology,
measurement of the value of information, and so
on. In these applications, the experimental method
complements survey methods in willingness to pay
and employ notably variants of the nth-price auctions or the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method.
Experimental economics has established its own
journals, such as the Experimental Economics (published by Springer), but contributions to experimental
economics can be found in many journals. These are
mostly concerned with the economic field to which
the experimental method has been applied.
Across different types of economic experiments,
the level of control exerted by the experimenter
can vary a lot. The literature distinguishes between

laboratory, field, and natural experiments. The laboratory experiment provides the maximum level of
control to the environment and institution. In field
experiments, the experimental setup is brought into
an environment in which decisions usually take
place. For instance, experiments with sports cards
are set up in a sports-card-trading environment. Field
experiments are designed to assess the external validity of experiments, and results seem to suggest that
the competitive environment matters more in the
field than in the lab. Natural experiments are those
that result from different policies in natural social
settings. An example would be a smoking ban introduced in some states and not in others. Such a policy
hence provides a natural division into treatment
and control groups. Natural experiments are generally not counted within the method of experimental
economics because the experimenter cannot control
their design.
Jutta Roosen
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Sovereignty;
Economic Psychology; Economics; Goal-Directed
Consumption; Markets and Marketing; Psychology;
Smith, Adam

Further Readings
Bohm, Peter. “Estimating Demand for Public Goods: An
Experiment.” European Economic Review 3 (1972):
111–130.
Chamberlin, Edward H. “An Experimental Imperfect
Market.” Journal of Political Economy 56 (1948):
95–108.
Davis, Douglas D., and Charles A. Holt. Experimental
Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993.
Guth, Werner, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze.
“An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining.”
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation 3, no.
4 (1982): 367–388.
Loewenstein, George, and Drazen Prelec. “Anomalies
in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and an
Interpretation.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107
(1992): 573–597.
Smith, Vernon L. “Microeconomic Systems as an
Experimental Science.” American Economic Review 72,
no. 5 (1982): 923–955.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Loss Aversion in
Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model.”
Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, no. 4 (1991):
1039–1061.

Externalities

EXTERNALITIES
The concept of externalities is instructive for the study
of consumption and consumers insofar as it considers the public consequences of private consumption.
Conventional microeconomic theory suggests that in
a freely operating market, prices are a reflection of
costs and benefits and so they act as signals for economic decision makers—be they individuals, firms, or
nation-states. Consequently, the market will ensure
an efficient allocation of resources insofar as the
appropriate quantities of goods and services will be
produced (and consumed) in terms of overall costs
and benefits to society. Externalities represent a market failure through which the actions of one economic
agent affect the welfare of another and for which no
price or opportunity for compensation exists. The
result of this market failure is that either too much or
too little of a particular good or service is produced
and consumed. Essentially, externalities can be understood in terms of a divergence between the private and
social costs of an economic action. To illustrate, an
individual who chooses to smoke a cigarette around a
nonsmoking partner uses up a scarce resource—clean
air. The price of the cigarette reflects private cost to
the smoker and does not take into account the clean
air used up and the effects on the nonsmoker who
does not want to breathe in the dirty air. Since there
is no market for clean air, there is no price, and so
the private cost of the cigarette is less than the social
cost. When judged against the criteria of maximizing
the welfare of society as a whole, the cigarettes in this
example can be seen to be overproduced and overconsumed by virtue of an artificially low price that
fails to take the externalities into account.
While externalities can arise in any economic activity, they are particularly useful for studying consumption insofar as they provide a way of thinking about the
public impacts of private consumption. Externalities
are most commonly thought of in terms of negative
spillovers. Popular examples revolve around the air and
water pollution brought about by industrial production; for example, a factory that pollutes a nearby river
kills the fishes in it and so damages the livelihood of a
local fisherman. From the point of view of consumption, negative externalities are often thought about in
terms of environmental impacts. For example, when
purchasing a vacation that involves a long-distance
flight or filling one’s car up with gasoline, the price

565

does not reflect the true cost of the activity in terms of
the carbon emitted and environmental damage done in
terms of contribution to climate change. More generally, it could be argued that global consumer culture is
characterized by overconsumption insofar as the prices
of consumer goods are too low on the grounds that
they do not reflect environmental externalities (such
as pollution, waste, resource depletion, and carbon
emissions) as well as social externalities (such as the
exploitation of workers in less-developed countries
and the artificially low wages that keep prices down).
Of course, not all consumption externalities are environmental. Many examples can be found in everyday
life, such as playing one’s personal stereo at excessive
volumes in public spaces and so bringing about discomfort and annoyance to others.
By contrast, externalities can be positive. For
example, if an individual decides to keep a nice front
lawn and an attractive-looking house, this will most
likely be of benefit not only to them but also to others
living in the area who might stop to enjoy the flowers that have been planted. It might even bring about
a rise in property prices, benefiting those trying to
sell their house. Similarly, if a member of a household purchases a DVD that she wishes to watch and
it just so happens that her housemates also want to
watch it, they can reap the benefit of her consumption
without having to pay for it themselves. In this case,
the person who purchased the DVD could be said to
have paid too much for it. There are also network
externalities in which an individual’s consumption
can benefit others to whom they are linked in social
and technical networks. For example, an individual
who purchases a cell phone may well bring about
a positive spillover insofar as his or her friends and
family members will suddenly find another use for
their cell phones. Positive externalities can be said to
contribute to the public good insofar as other people
reap benefits that they do not pay for, while consumption by the individual does not detract from the ability of others to consume and enjoy the resource.
In terms of finding solutions to externalities, especially negative ones, it has been suggested that a system of taxes and subsidies should be introduced to
redress the balance such that private costs and benefits
are equal to social costs and benefits. For example,
in the case of environmental externalities, it would be
suggested that the price of air travel be increased to
reflect the “true” cost of emitting high levels of carbon,
which in turn would cause a reduction in air travel

566

Externalities

and carbon emission. Similarly, it has been suggested
that—to avoid government intervention—the parties
concerned simply compensate each other financially
for the externalities incurred. Looking at the examples used here, this would involve the factory paying
money to the fisherman and the girl’s housemates paying for a share of the DVD. There are many problems
with these suggestions. First, externalities are hard to
quantify in monetary terms, and it would be nearly
impossible to identify who the winners and losers are
when trying to set up a system of compensation—not
to mention the transaction costs. Finally, there is no
escaping the possibility that economic action, especially consumption, cannot be understood simply in
terms of individual consumers rationally calculating
the costs and benefits of a given course of action.
David Evans

See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Sovereignty;
Economics; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Luxury Taxes; Markets and
Marketing; Price and Price Mechanisms; Public Goods;
Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Cornes, Richard, and Todd Sandler. The Theory of
Externalities: Public Goods and Club Goods.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Katz, Michael, and Carl Shapiro. “Network Externalities,
Competition, and Compatibility.” American Economic
Review 75, no. 3 (1985): 424–440.
Pigou, Arthur Cecil. The Economics of Welfare. London:
Macmillan, 1920.
Schor, Juliet. “Prices and Quantities: Unsustainable
Consumption and the Global Economy.” Ecological
Economics 55 (2005): 309–320.

Editorial Board
Editor
Dale Southerton
University of Manchester

Advisory Board
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania

Frank Trentmann
Birkbeck College

Karin Ekström
University of Borås

Alan Warde
University of Manchester

Peter Jackson
University of Sheffield

Rick Wilk
Indiana University

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Encyclopedia of consumer culture / edited by Dale Southerton.

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1. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—Encyclopedias.
2. Consumers—Encyclopedias.
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11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

567
623
695
753
821

K
L
M
N
O

827
833
883
1023
1049

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

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

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

viii

List of Entries

Coca-Cola
Coffee
Coffee Shops
Cognitive Structures
Cold War
Collecting and Collectibles
Collective Consumption
Collective Identity
Colonialism
Comics
Commercialization
Commodification
Commodities
Commodity Fetishism. See Body Shop, The;
Commodification; Commodities; Marxist
Theories; Obsession; Philosophy; Reification;
Simulacrum
Communication Studies
Companies as Consumers
Comparing Consumer Cultures
Confectionery
Conspicuous Consumption
Consumer Anxiety
Consumer Apathy
Consumer Behavior
Consumer (Freedom of) Choice
Consumer Co-Operatives
Consumer Culture in Africa
Consumer Culture in East Asia
Consumer Culture in Latin America
Consumer Culture in the USSR
Consumer Demand
Consumer Dissatisfaction
Consumer Durables
Consumer Education
Consumer Expenditure Surveys
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies
Consumer Interviews
Consumer Moods
Consumer Nationalism
Consumer Policy (China)
Consumer Policy (European Union)
Consumer Policy (Japan)
Consumer Policy (United States)
Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)
Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare
Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism
Consumer Protest: Environment
Consumer Protest: Water
Consumer Regulation

Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Consumer Rights and the Law
Consumer Socialization
Consumer Society
Consumer Sovereignty
Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies
Consuming Nature. See Consuming the
Environment; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption
Consuming the Environment
Consumption and Time Use
Consumption in Postsocialist China
Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern
Europe
Consumption in the United States: Colonial
Times to the Cold War
Consumption Patterns and Trends
Content Analysis
Convenience
Convention Theory
Conversation Analysis
Cool Hunters
Cosmetic Surgery
Cosmetics
Cosmopolitanism
Counterfeited Goods
Craft Consumer
Craft Production
Credit
Cultural Capital
Cultural Flows
Cultural Fragmentation
Cultural Intermediaries
Cultural Omnivores
Cultural Studies
Cultural Turn
Culture Industries
Culture Jamming
Culture-Ideology of Consumerism
Cyborgs
Cycles of Production and Consumption
Dandyism
Databases and Consumers
de Certeau, Michel
Debt
Decommodification
Delocalization
Dematerialization
Department Stores

List of Entries

Design
Desire
De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling
Diaspora
Diderot Effect
Dieting
Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down
Dining Out
Discount Stores
Discourse
Discourse Analysis
Disney
Disorganized Capitalism
Disposal of Goods. See Reuse/Recycling; Waste
Division of Labor
Do-It-Yourself
Domestic Division of Labor
Domestic Services
Domestic Technologies
Douglas, Mary
Downshifting
Durkheim, Émile
Eating Disorders. See Addiction; Anorexia;
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies
Eco-Labeling
E-Commerce
Econometrics
Economic Indicators
Economic Psychology
Economic Sociology
Economics
Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS)
Electronic Video Gaming
Elias, Norbert
Elites
Embodiment
Emotional Labor
Emotions
Energy Consumption
Engel’s Law
Enlightenment
Entrepreneurs
Environmental Footprinting
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption
Ethnicity/Race
Ethnography
Ethnology/Folklore Studies
European Union

Experimental Economics
Externalities
Fair Trade
False Consciousness/False Needs
Families
Family Meal
Famine
Fans
Fascism. See Consumer Nationalism; Italian
Fascism and Fashion
Fashion
Fashion Forecasters
Fashion Industry
Femininity
Feminism and Women's Magazines
Feminist Movement
Financial Services. See Credit; Debt; Network
Society
Fine Arts
Flaneur/euse
Focus Groups
Food Consumption
Food Scares
Franchising
Freud, Sigmund
Friendship
Galbraith, John Kenneth
Gambling
Gardening
Gender
Gender Advertising
Gender and the Media
Gendering of Public and Private Space
Generation
Geography
Ghettos
Gifts and Reciprocity
Glastonbury/Woodstock
Global Cities
Global Institutions
Globalization
Glocalization
Goal-Directed Consumption
Goffman, Erving
Governmentality
Gramsci, Antonio
Grand Tour
Great Depression (U.S.)

ix

x

List of Entries

Habits. See Habitus; Rituals; Routines and
Habits; Theories of Practice
Habitus
Hair Care/Hairdressing
Happiness
Harried Leisure Class
Health and Fitness. See Alternative Consumption;
Body, The; Health Care; Leisure; Obesity;
Recreation; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being
Health Care
Hedonism
Hegemony
Hierarchy of Needs
Higher Education
Hinduism
Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods
Historical Analysis
History
History of Food
Hobbyists and Amateurs
Hollywood
Home. See Appropriation; Architecture;
Do-It-Yourself; Ethnology/Folklore Studies;
Gardening; Gender; Gendering of Public and
Private Space; Households; Souvenirs
Home Computer
Homogenization Versus Hybridization. See
Americanization; Delocalization; Diaspora;
Globalization; Glocalization; Japan as a
Consumer Culture; Multiculturalism; Tourism
Studies
Homosexuality. See Pink Pounds/Dollars; Queer
Theory; Sexuality
Horkheimer, Max
Household Budgets
Households
Hyperreality
Identity
Imaginative Hedonism
Implicit Attitudes. See Attitude Surveys;
Psychology
Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions
Income
Individualization
Industrial Society
Inequalities
Informal Economy
Informalization
Information Society

Information Technology
Informational Capital
Infrastructures and Utilities
Inheritance
Innovation Studies
Internet
Interpellation
Inventing Tradition
Islam
Italian Fascism and Fashion
Japan as a Consumer Culture
Jeans
Kant, Immanuel
Keynes, John Maynard
Keynesian Demand Management
Kyrk, Hazel
Labor Markets
Lasch, Christopher
Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix
Lefebvre, Henri
Leisure
Leisure Studies
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
Licensing of Clothing Brands
Life Course
Life(style) Politics
Lifestyle
Lifestyle Typologies
Likert Scales
Liminality
Linder, Staffan Burenstam
Locality
Longitudinal Studies
Luxury and Luxuries
Luxury Taxes
Lyotard, Jean-François
Mandeville, Bernard
Marcuse, Herbert
Marketing Diversity. See Markets and Marketing
Marketing Social Change. See Markets and
Marketing
Markets and Marketing
Marshall, Alfred
Marx, Karl
Marxist Theories
Masculinity

List of Entries

Maslow, Abraham
Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)
Mass Observation
Mass Production and Consumption
Mass Tourism
Material Culture
Materialism and Postmaterialism
Mauss, Marcel
McDonaldization
McLuhan, Marshall
Mead, George Herbert
Measuring Satisfaction
Measuring Standards of Living
Measuring the Environmental Impact of
Consumption
Media Convergence and Monopoly
Medieval Consumption
Memorials
Memory
Men’s Magazines
Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture
Methods of Market Research
Metropole
Metrosexual
Migration
Mimesis
Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age
Mobile Phones
Modernization Theory
Money
Moral Economy
Moral Geography
Moralities
Mortgages. See Credit; Debt; Economics
Motivation Research
Multiculturalism
Multiple Correspondence Analysis
Multisited Ethnography
Multivariate Analysis
Museums. See Collecting and Collectibles
Narcissism
National Cultures
Needs and Wants
Neo-Tribes
Network Society
Neuromarketing
New Right
Nostalgia
Novelty

xi

Obesity
Object Biographies
Obsession
Opinion Leaders
Opinion Polls
Opium Trade
Ordinary Consumption
Organ and Blood Donations
Organic Food
Orientalism
Othering
Outsourcing
Packaging
Participant Observation. See Anthropology;
Autoethnography; Ethnography;
Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Methods of Market Research;
Multisited Ethnography
Patten, Simon Nelson
Performing Arts/Performance Arts
Personals/Personal Ads
Philanthropy
Philosophy
Photography and Video
Pink Pounds/Dollars
Planned Obsolescence
Pleasure. See Dining Out; Emotions; Happiness;
Quality of Life; Seaside Resorts; Tamed
Hedonism
Political and Ethical Consumption
Political Economy
Political Science
Popular Culture. See Mass Culture (Frankfurt
School); Popular Music
Popular Music
Porcelain
Positional Goods
Possession. See Appropriation; Collecting and
Collectibles; Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable
Possessions; Material Culture; Positional
Goods
Postcolonial Theory
Post-Fordism
Postindustrial Society
Postmodernism
Post-Structuralism
Potlatch
Poverty
Preference Formation

xii

List of Entries

Price and Price Mechanisms
Print Media
Product Loss Leaders
Product Placements
Production of Culture
Promotional Culture
Prosumption
Protestant Ethic
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Public Goods
Public Sphere
Pubs and Wine Bars
Quality of Life
Queer Theory
Radio
Rationalization
Rationing
Reality TV
Reception Theory
Recreation
Reification
Religion. See Christianity; Desire; Hinduism;
Islam; Protestant Ethic; Sacred and Profane
Renewable Resources
Resistance
Responsible Consumption
Retirement
Retro
Reuse/Recycling
Risk Society
Rituals
Romantic Love
Rostow, Walt Whitman
Routines and Habits
Sacred and Profane
Satiation
Scarcity
Science and Technology Studies. See ActorNetwork Theory; Electronic Video Gaming;
Information Technology; Innovation Studies;
Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age;
Network Society; Social Shaping of
Technology; Sociotechnical Systems
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Seaside Resorts
Second Life

Secondhand Goods. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea
Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material
Culture; Reuse/Recycling; State Provisioning
Seduced and Repressed
Self-Interest
Self-Presentation
Self-Provisioning. See De-Skilling, Re-Skilling,
and Up-Skilling; Do-It-Yourself; Outsourcing;
Self-Service Economy; Systems of Provision
Self-Reflexivity
Self-Service Economy
Semiotics
Senses
Service Industry
Sex
Sex Tourism
Sexuality
Shopping
Silverstone, Roger
Simmel, Georg
Simulacrum
Single-Person Households
Slow Food Movement
Smith, Adam
Smuggling and Black Markets
Sneakers/Trainers
Soap Operas and Telenovelas
Sociability
Social and Economic Development
Social Capital. See Civil Society; Informational
Capital; Network Society; Sociability; Social
Movements; Social Networks; Sociology
Social Class
Social Distinction
Social Exclusion
Social Mobility. See Social Class; Status
Social Movements
Social Network Analysis
Social Networks
Social Norms. See Acculturation; Anthropology;
Sociology
Social Shaping of Technology
Socialism and Consumption
Sociality. See Sociability
Sociodemographic Trends. See Age and Aging;
Consumption Patterns and Trends; SinglePerson Households
Sociology
Sociotechnical Systems
Sombart, Werner

List of Entries

Souvenirs
Spaces and Places
Spaces of Shopping
Spas
Spatial Analysis
Spectacles
Spices
Sports
State Provisioning
Status
Store Loyalty Cards
Structuralism
Style
Subaltern
Subculture
Suburbia
Subversion
Sugar
Sumptuary Laws
Supermarkets
Supermodels
Surplus Value
Surrealism
Surveys
Symbolic Capital
Symbolic Value
Symbolic Violence
Systems of Provision
Taboo
Tamed Hedonism
Taste
Tea
Techniques of Persuasion. See Advertising; Channels
of Desire; Desire; Markets and Marketing
Teenage Magazines
Telephones
Television
Temporalities. See Consumption and Time Use;
Convenience; Harried Leisure Class; Linder,
Staffan Burenstam; Time-Use Diaries;
Work-and-Spend Cycle
Textiles
Textual Poachers
Theories of Practice
Theory of Planned Behavior
Thrift
Time-Use Diaries

Tobacco
Totemism
Tourism Studies
Tourist Gaze
Toys
Trade Standards
Trademarks
Transaction Data. See Electronic Point of Sale
(EPOS); Store Loyalty Cards
Transgression. See Carnivals; Liminality;
Obsession; Queer Theory; Resistance;
Sexuality; Subversion
Transnational Capitalism
Trust
T-Shirts
Tupperware
Typologies of Shoppers
Urban Cultures
Urbanization
Value: Exchange and Use Value
Veblen, Thorstein Bunde
Vegetarianism. See Consumer Protest: Animal
Welfare; Food Consumption; Organic Food
Virtual Communities
Visual Culture
Voluntary Associations
Voting Behaviors
Walkmans and iPods
Walmart
Waste
Weber, Max
Weddings
Welfare State. See Collective Consumption;
Consumer Regulation; State Provisioning;
Systems of Provision; Well-Being
Well-Being
Wine
Women’s Magazines
Work-and-Spend Cycle
World Exhibitions
World-Systems Analysis
Youth Culture
Zoos and Wildlife Parks

xiii

F
understanding of an independently certified product is usually dated to 1988. In that year, the Max
Havelaar Foundation certified the first Fair Trade
coffee in the Netherlands. CAFOD, Christian Aid,
Oxfam, Traidcraft, and the World Development
Movement formed the Fairtrade Foundation (FTF)
in the United Kingdom, and the North American
equivalent TransFair was set up in 1998. The development of fair trade in other affluent consumer cultures, such as France, Belgium, and Italy, followed.
The Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) was set up in 1997 as the primary
international body. It sets both minimum standards
that draw inspiration from the International Labour
Organization and improvement aims for producers.
However, fairly traded products that do not bear the
cost of certification and alternative approaches to
fair trade (see Nicholls and Opel 2005) are available
on the market. Other independent certifiers include
Rainforest Alliance and various industry initiatives
that have subsequently been formed.
In relation to the United Kingdom, Alex Nicholls
and Charlotte Opel identify three phases of development: (1) from the early 1970s, a focus on the
process of developing a sustainable fair trading
model to connect producers in the Global South with
affluent consumers; (2) from the late 1990s, a focus
on developing and marketing products to make
them attractive to a wider range of consumers; and
(3) from the early twenty-first century, focusing on the
place. In this most recent phase, the aims have been
to develop strong localized support through recognized “Fair Trade Towns” and through educational

FAIR TRADE
Fair Trade is the most widely recognized “ethical”
product certification developed from the alternative
trading initiatives of the 1970s. These initiatives can
be seen as one of the responses to the globalization
of markets and, particularly, the inequalities between
nations that developed during the colonial histories
of trade. The initial aims of fair trade organizations
were to give stability and development possibility
to small farmers in the Global South during volatile
market fluctuations. These organizations also hoped
their intervention would raise the profile of trade and
poverty issues in relatively affluent consumer cultures.
Fair trade organizations currently have two
prime tools through which they intervene in the free
market. They place a floor on the commodity price
they pay to small farmers to ensure these producers are not denied a living income from their crop
if the commodity price declines to an unsustainable
low in the market. Second, they pay an additional
“social premium” to allow the producers to develop
their community by, for example, building a school
or clinic. To democratically allocate this additional
income, fair trade organizations generally require
producers to form a local commercial cooperative.
To be certified as Fair Trade producers, the cooperative has to comply with these requirements and pay
for certification.
While the practice of fair trade might have a long
history in development, particularly through alternative trading organizations (ATO), the contemporary
567

568

Fair Trade

and other organizations. In brief, “Fair Trade Town”
status can be gained by a town when a range of fair
trade products are readily available in the locality
including workplaces and community organizations,
the local council passes a resolution supporting fair
trade, and there is a local steering group that seeks
to develop and raise awareness of fair trade through
media coverage and other events. By contrast,
Terrence Witkowski sees the U.S. fair trade market as
less well developed than those in Europe.
Although the principles of fair trade are established through the FLO, standards are periodically
reviewed and revised; thus, in a dynamic global market economy where activist, consumer, and producer
concepts of what constitutes an ethical approach to
trade are developing, it might be unwise to think
of the concept as static. For example, according to
Nicholls and Opel, early fair trade was dominated
by activist organizations in affluent countries.
More recent initiatives, such as the Day Chocolate
Company, have worked through partnership and
inclusion of producer cooperatives in governance.
It has been argued that this process needs to be
taken further to achieve equitable trade not least by
relocating manufacturing capacity to the country of
origin.
Fair trade is acknowledged as a fast-growing segment of the market, but it still represents a small
percentage of the market. The FLO reports that in
2007, more than 2.3 billion euros were spent worldwide on Fair Trade–certified products. The FLO
identified fifteen product categories including coffee,
chocolate, and bananas, as well as sports balls, wine,
and flowers. One might consider the importance of
fair trade through the number of products on the
market: 1,300 in 2005, up from 150 products two
years earlier. Whereas supporters of fair trade see this
growth as evidence of the new market possibilities,
Mark Sidwell argues that diversification is evidence
of its inability to penetrate the market. Alternatively,
it might be argued that the most significant measure
of success would be the debate about “free,” “fair,”
and “unfair” trade that the movement has instigated.
Ethical debates about consumption, such as
fair trade, can be formulated in many different
ways: philosophically (Nicholls and Opel 2005;
Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005), in economic
theory (Sidwell 2008), and in practice by consumers
(Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005). While fair

trade has often been accepted as an unquestioned
good, it can also be critiqued. For example, fair trade
addresses trade between the developing Global South
and the postindustrial Global North at a time when
environmental concerns might be seen as eclipsing
labor and trade issues. For most fair trade products,
this means high environmental transport costs versus the prosocial value of helping developing farmers, although the relatively low footprint of the poor
producers can be argued to offset the environmental
costs of travel. Tensions therefore emerge between
ethical concerns about the environment and global
inequality.
A second debate centers on the fair trade aim of
bringing together producers and consumers in a citizens’ movement for change. Research suggests that
ethical consumers refer to vaguely expressed ideas
of being part of a collective group and that fair trade
provides a vehicle for mobilization with broader
political debates. In such cases, whether individual
choice in consumption as guided by the principles
of fair trade consumption can generate a citizenship
culture remains an open question.
From a political perspective, the fair trade movement has been criticized for high spending on brand
promotion (Sidwell 2008) linked to campaigning.
However, Nicholls and Opel argue that product
development and marketing are necessary to expand
a brand market beyond its core constituency. In
this case, one might question the legitimacy of such
action. Traditionally in political theory, pressuregroup legitimacy has rested on the level of support
its cause attracts and the distribution of power such
pluralism implies. However, in the case of the FLO,
questions of legitimacy become acute as fair trade
enters mainstream commercial markets alongside the
FLO’s campaign and civil regulatory roles.
The final major criticism presented here comes
from free-market advocates who suggest fair trade
to be a price-fixing regime. However, because proponents of fair trade might be seen as moving toward
equitrade and its critics are also disposed toward this
approach (Sidwell 2008), there may not be as much
ground between the two as their respective rhetoric
suggests. Whereas fair trade has sought to source
raw materials ethically, equitrade aims to locate the
manufacturing of products in the country of origin
of the raw materials. Unlike fair trade, equitrade provides for the bulk of a product’s profit to remain in

False Consciousness/False Needs

the relatively poor economy of its origins, without
further market intervention.
Fair trade has grown sufficiently and, as a result,
its future has become the subject of debate. A number of writers who have considered how it might be
expanded (e.g., Nicholls and Opel) are also considering
what position it might occupy in global markets. Some
argue that fair trade initiatives will be necessary even if
their social clauses in their present form become part
of all global trading agreements. This might be the case
because the fair trade movement exhibits dual goals:
development and propaganda. The “propaganda”
encompasses both raising issues within the developing
global market, the importance of which fair trade critics have often ignored, and advocacy of an alternative
trading system. This raises the hypothetical question
of where an expanding alternative market is headed.
If the primary constraint of fair trade to contribute to
development is the number of consumers willing to
pay a premium, its possibilities as an alternative to the
free trade market are limited. To expand sales arguably requires partnerships with large corporations
against which fair trade was meant to represent an
alternative. This issue within the growth of fair trade
is referred to as mainstreaming by Nicholls and Opel.
The evolving engagement with corporate entities and
the multifaceted relationships this engenders is likely
to form the core of future debate.
Terry Newholm
See also Alternative Consumption; Colonialism;
Consumer Sovereignty; Eco-Labeling; Globalization;
Markets and Marketing; Political and Ethical
Consumption; Postcolonial Theory

Further Readings
Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw. The
Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005.
Low, William, and Eileen Devenport. “Mainstreaming Fair
Trade: Adoption, Assimilation, Appropriation.” Journal
of Strategic Marketing 14, no. 4 (2006): 315–327.
Nicholls, Alex, and Charlotte Opel. Fair Trade: Market
Driven Ethical Consumption. Los Angeles: Sage, 2005.
Sidwell, Mark. Unfair Trade. London: Adam Smith
Institute, 2008.
Witkowski, Terrence H. “Fair Trade Marketing: An
Alternative System for Globalization and Development.”
Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 13 (Fall
2005): 22–33.

569

Website
Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International. http://
www.fairtrade.net.

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS/FALSE
NEEDS
False consciousness is a concept that developed in
Marxist theory, in conjunction with ideology, to
denote working-class people’s inability to understand
the economic and social conditions of their exploitation, especially insofar as they have been deceived
by the forces of religion and nationalism. The concept of false needs emerged in the mid-twentieth century among scholars associated with the Frankfurt
School in response to the consumer culture’s use of
advertising and marketing to manufacture desire
and demand. The common thread linking both is the
idea that oppressed peoples have been distracted by
cultural and ideological processes that prevent them
from understanding the sources of their oppression
and from organizing to effect a social revolution.
Both concepts have frequently been criticized by cultural theorists, including neo-Marxists, on account
of their assumptions about what constitutes true
consciousness and true needs.
The phrase false consciousness was never used by
Karl Marx himself. It was Friedrich Engels who first
used it in a letter to Franz Mehring, written in 1893,
in which he declared, “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed,
but with a false consciousness. The real motives
impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it
would not be an ideological process at all” (quoted
in Eagleton 1991, 89). False consciousness was thus
related to a notion of ideology that Marx and Engels
developed in The German Ideology, in which distortions of thought are produced by material conditions and social contradictions. Insofar as ideologies
appear to be independent of material reality and
disguise the contradictions in society, they serve to
reproduce and legitimate the interests of the ruling
class.
Marxists gave more consideration to questions of
consciousness and ideology in the period between the
two world wars, in large part as a consequence of the
failure of revolutionary working-class movements

570

False Consciousness/False Needs

and the rise of fascism. Georg Lukács theorized the
phenomenon of reification in relation to class consciousness, explaining how capitalist society could
appear to have a life of its own such that its conditions seem to be natural, eternal, and inevitable.
Reified consciousness is “false” not simply because
one believes in mistaken ideas or erroneous illusions,
but also because it fails to grasp the totality of social
relations, the processes of historical change, and the
potential for revolutionary agency. Reification is thus
characterized by fragmentation or, more precisely,
by a mixture of specialization, mechanization, and
quantification that Lukács illuminated by linking
Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism with Max
Weber’s account of rationalization. Lukács wrote
that “the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is
objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and it is neither
arbitrary, subjective or psychological” (1971, 54). As
bourgeois thought is certain to be limited by reification, Lukács theorized that only the proletariat, in a
situation of revolutionary praxis, would be equipped
to comprehend the whole of social relationships
and the historical process of dialectical movement
through class struggle.
During the interwar period, other Marxists
offered complementary theoretical concepts to
explain the distortions and limitations of consciousness under capitalism, such as Antonio Gramsci’s
notion of hegemony and Henri Lefebvre’s critique of
mystification. In the postwar years, critical theorists
turned their focus to the consumer culture and its
manufacture of false needs. In their famous essay on
the culture industry, Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno argued that radio, film, and other media of
entertainment had colonized leisure time with the
same capitalist logic of exchange value that defines
labor time. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized that
workers, because of their experiences of alienation
and boredom at work, do in some sense “need” distraction and fantasy in their leisure time. However,
they maintained that the culture industry never delivers on its promises but instead cheats its audience
out of pleasure and only produces the same kind of
standardized conformity and monotonous uniformity that characterizes the workplace.
Herbert Marcuse, another member of the
Frankfurt School who took refuge in the United
States, presented a critique of “false needs” at the

beginning of One-Dimensional Man, his influential
book that found an audience within the New Left
during the 1960s. Marcuse defined false needs as
“those which are superimposed upon the individual
by particular social interests in his repression: the
needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery,
and injustice” (1964, 5). The satisfaction of these
false needs can be immediately gratifying to individuals, but they perpetuate a process of social and
psychological repression that ultimately encloses
both affluent consumers and those who toil to satisfy
them. No matter how deeply people may feel their
needs or be gratified by their satisfaction, Marcuse
maintained that needs are subject to external social
forces whose dominant interests demand repression,
including repression that misrepresents itself as comfort, tolerance, and even liberation. Marcuse took
aim at the consumer culture in writing, “Most of the
prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and
consume in accordance with the advertisements, to
love and hate what others love and hate, belong to
this category of false needs” (5).
The concepts of false consciousness and false needs
have since fallen out of intellectual fashion and are
rarely invoked anymore because of the assumptions
they carry about the critic’s authority to define true
consciousness or true needs. Marcuse, for instance,
believed that needs could be studied objectively
and historically to determine universally applicable
standards. Given the ways that post-structuralist
and postmodern theory have opposed the notions of
objectivity, universality, and intellectual authority, it
is hardly surprising that such ideas have fallen out of
favor.
Ryan Moore
See also Alienation; Cultural Studies; Culture Industries;
Culture-Ideology of Consumerism; Hegemony;
Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Social Class

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on
Mass Culture. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York:
Verso, 1991.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon,
1964.

Families
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology.
New York: International Publishers, 1972. First
published 1932.

FAMILIES
Family is one of the central organizing units of consumption. Within the context of the family, we make
collective and individual choices, express social and
emotional bonds, draw from and resist the pressures
of consumer culture, and learn how to be consumers through fundamental socialization processes.
However, questions on what family means and on
how to define family are increasingly relevant in contemporary society and continually challenge existing
theories of consumption. Demographic and sociocultural shifts around the world have made traditional definitions of family a distant memory. Recent
U.S. Census numbers indicate that single persons
constitute over 30 percent of the households in the
United States. Though divorce rates are low in most
Latin American (predominantly Catholic) countries
and in Muslim countries, they have grown rapidly
in general, especially when compared to the rapidly
declining marriage rates. In Europe, more than in
the United States, marriage is seen as increasingly
unnecessary, and the incidence of children being born
outside of marriage has reached over 50 percent in
countries such as Iceland and Sweden and is projected to reach that level in France, Denmark, and
the United Kingdom in the near future (Petre 2006).
Family units are steadily shrinking in size, and singleparent and single-person households are growing
at far more rapid rates than the traditional parentswith-children households.
As often noted in U.S. and European contexts,
the “deterioration” of family has emerged as a regular focus of increasingly anxious public debate. The
debate centers on the meaning and nature of family.
This entry examines various ways of defining family,
including cross-cultural differences reflected in public
policies; identifies and critiques the treatment of family
in consumer research; outlines methodological issues in
family studies; and presents future research directions.

Alternative Views on Family
Among the various ways to define family, three dimensions have been suggested that aid in characterizing

571

family: structural, psychosocial, and transactional.
Structural definitions of family are based on the presence or absence of certain family members, whether it
is an intact nuclear family, three or four generations
under one roof, a same-sex couple, a single parent
with children, a step-family, or a single person with
a network of relationships. Psychosocial definitions
relate to the accomplishment of certain tasks, such as
maintaining a household. Finally, transactional definitions are based on behaviors that generate emotional
ties and a sense of identity through interaction. For
example, households, particularly African American
households, often include individuals informally
adopted as a “family” member (i.e., “fictive kin”).
Another way to characterize families is using a
temporal dimension. We tend to distinguish between
members who make up our current families—formed
either through procreation or voluntary selection—
and members who are a part of our families of origin.
Family transitions such as deaths, marriages, births,
christenings, medical emergencies, divorce, and family
reunions may see a short-term reconstitution of ties in
the extended family. While many of these reunions
may be short-lived, they also may cue the extended
family, reminding us of our lineage and a larger relational body with shared values. Thus, blood ties, as
often represented by the family of origin, may yield a
longer-lasting—though not necessarily proximal—set
of relationships.
Family may also be defined based on agents of
socialization. Whether one subscribes to nature or
nurture perspectives, there is some agreement that
parental interactions during youth provide individuals with sets of purchasing heuristics (“Want not,
waste not,” “You get what you pay for,” “Penny
wise, dollar foolish,” etc.). Even if we are currently
isolated from our families of origin, a phenomenon
becoming more common in the developed world,
we are affected by our backgrounds in terms of life
expectations.
Clearly, countries differ in their definitions of
family in the sense that they include wider (i.e.,
ancestors) or narrower circles of people and, therefore, vary with regard to the role expectations of
family members. Assuming public policy is designed
to reflect generalized cultural values, family public
policies have implications for the social recognition given to the notion of family as defined by the
individuals who comprise a given society. Table 1
offers a comparison of family public policies in six

Table 1

Cross-Country Comparison of Family Public Policies

Country

Marriage/Divorce

Child Support

United States

Divorce is easily
accessible; cohabitation
increasingly common;
common-law marriage
accepted; marriage
restricted to
heterosexual couples
(with some state-level
exceptions)

Usually required from
nonresident spouse;
enforcement is state by
state

No comprehensive
program for paternal
leave; employers are
responsible for their
own policies

Generally not familyfriendly, excluding
recent legislation
(Working Families Tax
Relief Act of 2004)

Family viewed as
sacred; lack of
interference from the
government in private
matters whenever
possible (Kennedy
2000)

United Kingdom

Divorce is easily
accessible; cohabitation
increasingly common;
marriage restricted to
heterosexual couples

Payment scheme
structured on residence,
number of children, and
weekly income;
nonresident stepchildren
receive support

26 weeks paid
maternity leave; 2
weeks paid paternity
leave (Budd and
Mumford 2004)

Family-friendly tax
policies (i.e.,
independent taxation)
(Stephens and WardBatts 2004)

Family viewed as
sacred; lack of
interference from the
government in private
matters whenever
possible

Sweden

High frequency of
Strong child support
cohabitation (2003
enforcement
Cohabitation Act);
(Economist 1995)
registration of same-sex
couples; divorce is
easily accessible

Most family-friendly
Large tax burdens
policies (Vogt and
Zwingel 2003); strong
incentives for paternity
leave; flexible work
policies for both
parents; 450 days
parental leave paid by
social security

Germany

Divorce is legal but less Active pursuit of child
common than in other support payments
(Gottschall and Bird
countries
2003)

Parental leave offered
for both parents (Federal
Child Care Benefit Act
of 1986), but few fathers
take advantage of the
option (Vogt and
Zwingel 2003)

Parental Leave

Tax

Favor two-parent
households with a
single earner (incomesplitting policies)
(Trzcinski 2000)

Sanctity of the Family

Family structure has
changed greatly in last
half century, due in
part to family law

Law has tended to
support traditional
family roles (Gottschall
and Bird 2003)

China

Encourages late
marriage and childbirth
(UNESCAP 2004);
divorce rates are
beginning to increase
with more relaxed
requirements and
procedures (FlorCruz
2010)

Noncustodial parents
90 days paid maternity Income tax policies
are partly responsible
leave paid by the
consider family
for educational and
employer
composition
living expenses for the
child; amounts and
duration are negotiated
between the parties
(Marriage Law of the
People’s Republic of
China, amended April
28, 2001)

India

Policies vary greatly by Many women (40%)
region; divorce rates
take children to work;
are typically low
40% of Indian children
drop out of primary
school (National
Family Health Survey
1995)

Standard maternity
leave policy is 12
weeks leave paid by
social security
(UNESCAP 2004)

Less than 3% of the
population pays
income taxes (rate is a
function of income)
(BBC 2005)

One-child policy is the
ultimate intrusion;
otherwise there is little
family intrusion

Sanctity is ensured by
traditions more than by
law

Sources: Compiled from BBC. “Taxing Text Warns Diwali Shoppers.” October 28, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4385028.stm; Budd, John W.,
and Karen Mumford. “Trade Unions and Family-Friendly Policies in Britain.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 57, no. 2 (2004): 204–223; The
Economist. “The Family: Home Sweet Home.” September 7, 1995: 25–26, 29; FlorCruz, Jaime. “Divorce Rate Rises in China.” CNN World, June 18,
2010. http://articles.cnn.com/2010-06-18/world/china.divorces_1_divorce-rate-marriage-law-couples?_s=PM:WORLD; Gottschall, Karin, and Katherine
Bird. “Family Leave Policies and Labor Market Segmentation in Germany: Reinventing or Reform of the Male Breadwinner Model?” Review of Policy
Research 20, no. 1 (2003): 115–135; Kennedy, Jane. “Family Law in 2000 and Beyond.” Second European Congress on Family Law, 2000: www.dca.gov
.uk/speeches/2000/jk240500.htm; Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, November 14, 2003. http://www.nyconsulate.prchina.org/eng/lsqz/laws/
t42222.htm; National Family Health Survey, India (1995). MCH and Family Planning, India 1992–1993. Mumbai: International Institute for Population
Sciences; Petre, Jonathan. “Majority of Births Will Soon Be Out of Wedlock.” Telegraph, February 21, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
uknews/1511038/Majority-of-births-will-soon-be-out-of-wedlock.html; Stephens, Melvin Jr., and Jennifer Ward-Batts. “The Impact of Separate Taxation of
the Intra-Household Allocations of Assets: Evidence from the UK.” Journal of Public Economics 88, no. 9–10 (2004): 1989–2008; Trzcinski, Eileen.
“Family Policy in Germany: A Feminist Dilemma?” Feminist Economics 6, no. 1 (2000): 21–45; United Nations Economic and Social Commission on Asia
and the Pacific (UNESCAP). Data on “Asia-Pacific in Figures, 2004.” http://www.unescap.org/stat/data/apif/index.asp, accessed May 2009; Vogt, Andrea,
and Susanne Zwingel. “Asking Fathers and Employers to Volunteer: A (De)Tour of Reconciliation Policy in Germany?” Review of Policy Research 20,
no. 3 (2003): 459–479.

574

Families

countries: the United States, the United Kingdom,
Sweden, Germany, India, and China. These general
comparisons are drawn from a collection of publicly
available articles, census data, and legislation related
to family.
At this point in history, the United States seems
to be fixated on defining family in a relatively noninclusive manner, which seems to suggest that some
individuals’ perceptions of sense of family are not
always taken into consideration in policy definitions. Most legal definitions are similar in substance
to that of the U.S. Census Bureau: “A family is a
group of two or more people (not necessarily including a householder) residing together, and related by
birth, marriage, or adoption.” Westlaw cites court
cases yielding broader perspectives. In a case involving Texas homestead law, “family includes individuals related by consanguinity [blood] or affinity”
(2004, 429). A Missouri case defines family as “a
collective body of persons . . . who have reciprocal,
natural, or moral duties to support and care for one
another” (446).
As the preceding discussion highlights, the “family” construct may not lend itself to concrete conceptual or operational definitions. Despite this, how
researchers define family has substantial implications
for consumer research, not only with regard to thinking beyond household boundaries and traditional
blood or legal ties to investigate family consumption,
but also in moving the field out of a narrow focus on
structural relationships (e.g., family life cycle models) that fail to capture the dynamic arrangements of
contemporary families. Kathleen M. Galvin, Carma
L. Bylund, and Bernard J. Brommel define family
rather abstractly as
networks of people who share their lives over long
periods of time bound by ties of marriage, blood, or
commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider
themselves as family and who share a significant
history and anticipated future of functioning in a
family relationship. (2004, 6)

This definition recognizes that the family is
socially constructed and culturally contingent and
acknowledges the perspective that consumers do and
perhaps should define their own notion of “family.”
This is especially important when collecting family
data, as researchers’ applying their own conceptions
of how family is defined may be limiting for participants. At the same time, the Galvin, Bylund, and

Brommel definition acknowledges the extended temporal horizon, a perspective some consumers might
not acknowledge due to past dysfunctions.

Family in Consumer Research
Much family consumer research focuses on how
families make decisions. Specifically, these studies
emphasize how individuals influence other family
members, allocate resources within a family, represent family members as aspects of their extended
selves, or change their individual decision-making
practices when considering other family members.
Despite “family” being a collective construct, previous research on family decision making overwhelmingly has focused on individual attempts to influence
decision outcomes, as evidenced already. However,
the practices and discourses that typify families’
daily experiences often reflect “we” aspirations that
emerge in contextualized investigations of family
activity, according to Jennifer Chang Coupland.
Recent consumer research on family identity draws
more directly on the intimate practices of family life
(e.g., Epp and Price 2008). This work highlights the
contextualized practices of “being a family”—such
as narratives, rituals, social dramas, everyday interactions, and intergenerational exchanges—that
enlist symbolic marketplace resources. For example,
the performance of family mealtime rituals granted
agency to an object though its storied biography (Epp
and Price 2010), facilitated the social reproduction of
family identity across generations (Moisio, Arnould,
and Price 2005), and accommodated disabled family
members’ special needs to maintain collective identity
(Mason and Pavia 2006). Studies of intimate family
life have tended to focus on these rituals, but examination of interactions among family members has illuminated prototypes of gift giving, commodity exchange,
and sharing (Belk 2010). To illustrate, the transfer of
wealth across generations both solidifies and challenges family meanings through indexical accounts
that support relational goals (Bradford 2009).
Other family consumer research has focused on
the changing roles of both parents and their children
amid sociocultural shifts. Children, essentially invisible in theories of consumer culture according to
Daniel T. Cook, are encountering decision making
at an earlier age and taking on greater roles in family purchases, as responsibilities of family members
become more complex. For example, in single-parent

Families

households, children are uniquely positioned to
be equal participants in family decisions. Parental
gender roles are also in a state of flux, with men
redefining fatherhood ideals as a result of increased
household-management responsibilities. For example, Gokcen Coskuner-Balli and Craig Thompson’s
2009 study of stay-at-home dads uncovered the scarcity of appropriate marketplace resources that stems
from maternally oriented discourses of parenthood,
prompting fathers to engage in collective consumption strategies that help them to legitimize unconventional gender identities.

Methodological Challenges and
Breakthroughs
The dominant method for studying family consumption behavior has been survey research. However,
researchers have employed other methods such as
participant observation, depth interviews, longitudinal case studies, and netnographies. These alternative methods offer greater access to families’ intimate
lives to move past the sometimes isolated and decontextualized nature of survey data.
Across disciplines, analysis of collective constructs rarely moves beyond dyads, despite calls for
group-level data in family research. Collecting and
analyzing data from multiple family members, not
to mention the family as a whole, remains a challenge in family consumption research as well. The
lack of research that moves beyond the dyadic level is
alarming, given the importance of the family as a collectivity and the need to understand diverse perspectives of family members. Further, to study collective
phenomena (i.e., co-constructed goals, decisions, and
practices), it is essential that data are obtained from
multiple family members.
One potential new method for studying family
consumption behavior is using collective narratives.
Collective narrative methods can be supplemented
using follow-up interviews with smaller groupings of
family members or with prompting from journals,
diaries, photographs, memory boxes, or other social
artifacts. Unlike other methods for studying collective constructs, such as relying on family members as
key informants or grouping together individual perspectives from data generated separately, the collective narrative approach produces interactional data.
Thus, this method allows researchers direct access to
co-construction processes, in situ.

575

Future Research Directions
Much work remains in consumer research on the
role possessions play in the formation, preservation,
and reconstitution of family. Special objects such
as family china and recipe books help the family
members develop their collective narrative, create a
shared sense of family identity, and preserve identity
across generations. Inevitably, the family unit is disrupted by uncontrollable events (natural disasters,
burglary) or family changes (death, divorce). During
these times, consumer decision making is impaired,
and some possessions serve as painful reminders
while others serve to move the family from a state
of vulnerability (powerlessness) to a newly reconstituted unit. Possessions may facilitate or constrain the
movement of family identity over time, as shown by
Amber M. Epp and Linda L. Price (2010), and the
processes and conditions for that movement present
exciting opportunities for research.
Also, Marjorie L. DeVault notes that researchers
may think of children as elements in a family structure and struggle to recognize a balance between
their independent agency and their important connections with parents. These tensions are especially
evident as we consider that collective time together
as a family often is displaced by demands of individual family members and the pulls of everyday life.
Pressures from the 2008–2009 economic downturn
in the United States and elsewhere make tradeoffs
between agency and connectedness especially salient,
as dual-earner families with escalating work hours
strive to keep their families afloat. Certainly, some,
such as Arlie Russell Hochschild, argue that the proliferation of consumer culture directly contributes to
families’ feelings of being time poor. The wealth of
options both enables and constrains families, affording them agency to consume in new ways while
amplifying the pressure to participate. Questions
such as how children and parents “learn” to consume from each other in changing consumer cultural
climates remain unanswered. Further, investigations
of consumer socialization processes should not occur
without a consideration of changing cultural norms,
gender roles, family forms, and parental consumption orientations.
Many trends have led to increases in the separation
of family members in time and space. Rising divorce
rates across cultures separate parents and children,
and advances in technology, communication, and

576

Family Meal

transportation have facilitated the movement of
people across borders to seek better economic opportunities. Separation and migration further weaken
intergenerational ties amid societal pressures for
tie maintenance. Zlatko Skrbis notes that transnational families are like “a rubber band, which can be
stretched and not broken, always pulling back to its
original form, drawing members back into the fold
of the geographically dispersed family” (2008, 242).
Unfortunately, the rubber ages quickly, every stretch
putting stress on its structure and eventually causing
it to break. There may be a ray of hope for these families with the emergence of social networking technologies that reduce the cost and difficulty of connecting
over long distances. The devices that facilitate these
connections take on critical meanings for separated
but intact families, and family consumption researchers could be at the forefront of investigating this phenomenon. However, we still have much to learn about
when and how family practices can be maintained
across distances.
Amber M. Epp, James W. Gentry,
Robert L. Harrison, and Stacey Menzel Baker
See also Childhood; Consumer Socialization; Emotions;
Family Meal; Identity; Life Course; Markets and
Marketing; Postmodernism; Rituals

Further Readings
Belk, Russell. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Research
36 (February 2010): 715–734.
Bradford, Tonya Williams. “Intergenerationally Gifted
Asset Dispositions.” Journal of Consumer Research
36 (June 2009): 93–111.
Cook, Daniel T. “The Missing Child in Consumption Theory.”
Journal of Consumer Culture 8, no. 2 (2008): 219–242.
Coskuner-Balli, Gokcen, and Craig Thompson.
“Legitimatizing an Emergent Social Identity through
Marketplace Performances.” Advances in Consumer
Research 36 (2009): 135–138.
Coupland, Jennifer Chang. “Invisible Brands: An
Ethnography of Households and the Brands in Their
Kitchen Pantries.” Journal of Consumer Research
32 (June 2005): 106–118.
DeVault, Marjorie L. “Families and Children: Together,
Apart.” American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 10
(2003): 1296–1305.
Epp, Amber M. “Yours, Mine, and Ours: How Families
Manage Collective, Relational, and Individual Identity
Goals in Consumption.” PhD diss., University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, 2008. Available http://
digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3297655.

Epp, Amber M., and Linda L. Price. “Family Identity:
A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption
Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (June
2008): 50–70.
Epp, Amber M., and Linda L. Price. “The Storied Life of
Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network
Transformation.” Journal of Consumer Research 36
(February 2010): 820–837.
Galvin, Kathleen M., Carma L. Bylund, and Bernard J.
Brommel. Family Communication: Cohesion and
Change. 6th ed. New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2004.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. “On the Edge of the Time Bind:
Time and Market Culture.” Social Research 72
(Summer 2005): 339–354.
Mason, Marlys, and T. L. Pavia. "When the Family System
Includes Disability: Adaptation in the Marketplace,
Roles and Identity." Journal of Marketing Management
22 (2006): 1009–1030.
Moisio, Risto, Eric J. Arnould, and Linda L. Price.
“Between Mothers and Markets.” Journal of Consumer
Culture 4, no. 3 (2005): 361–384.
Petre, J. “Majority of Births Will Soon Be out of Wedlock.”
The Telegraph, February 21, 2006. http://www.telegraph
.co.uk/news/uknews/1511038/Majority-of-births-willsoon-be-out-of-wedlock.html.
Skrbis, Zlatko. “Transnational Families: Theorising
Migration, Emotions and Belonging.” Journal of
Intercultural Studies 29, no. 3 (2008): 231–246.
U.S. Census Board. “America’s Families and Living
Arrangements: Detailed Tables.” 2006 Statistical
Abstracts. U.S. Census Information: Families:
Definitions. http://www.census.gov/population/www/
socdemo/hh-fam.html (accessed November 18, 2008).
Westlaw. Words and Phrases: Permanent Edition (Updated
by Cumulative Annual Pocket Parts), 427–478.
Thomson Reuters, 2004.

FAMILY MEAL
“The family meal” conjures an image readily recognizable in the West of a man, a woman, and two
or three children seated around a table to eat. It is
an image kept alive by steady coverage in the mass
media over the second half of the twentieth century.
It is also an image of propriety: an orderly family keeping life in order, a virtue endorsed in both
mass media coverage and research reporting that, by
and large, people aspire to domestic arrangements
whereby the family members regularly forgather to
share whatever in their social milieu counts as a meal.

Family Meal

“The family meal” is an expression with wide
currency in English. Without primary research, however, dating its origin is not straightforward. It is not
listed in either Webster’s Dictionary or the Oxford
English Dictionary. Jane Austen, did, though, have
Mrs. Bennett in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice
talk of “family dinners.” These dinners consisted
of a single course (though it would have comprised
many more dishes than the modern reader would
expect) as distinct from meals comprising two or
more and to which guests were also invited. All the
same, perhaps as if anticipating his marrying into
the family, Mrs. Bennett reminds Mr. Bingley that
he had “promised to take a family dinner” with
them. Usage through much of the twentieth century
appears extensive, seeming to need no explanation
by social commentators, pundits, or journalists. An
early reference appeared in the New York Times on
January 6, 1921, and by the end of the century, the
expression could be widely found on the Internet
and in newspapers as far apart as Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
A theme of such public coverage is that family
meals are disappearing, replaced by people eating
alone, taking frequent snacks rather than regular
meals, at a desk or on a sofa instead of at the table.
Sometimes part of a broader discussion of changes
in modern life—in 1950s America with the advent
of TV and TV dinners, in the “death of the British
Sunday” in the 1990s when new legislation allowed
shops to open seven days a week—family meals are
said to be on the wane. As significantly, this trend is
presented not as reason for celebration—such themes
as liberation from a chore, old-fashioned habit, or
outdated formality tend to be muted, ignored, or
simply absent—but as cause for concern, disapproval, and anxiety. Added to pundits’ urging the
intrinsic virtues of a slower pace, or chefs’ reminders
to appreciate both the food and the activity of eating
together, are media reports of investigations revealing associations between infrequent family meals and
health or social problems (e.g., poorer nutritional
intake, higher likelihood of childhood obesity, eating disorders, and illegal drug use and alcohol abuse
among the young). The associated anxiety about
the quality of daily life is exemplified by a July 30,
2006, headline of the UK’s Independent on Sunday,
“Families drift apart if they don’t eat together.”
The theme is also echoed across western Europe, in
Belgium as much as in Norway. The expression family meal is not, however, always readily translatable.

577

For example, the only direct equivalent in Finnish is
said to be obsolete, while a subtle distinction can be
made in French between le repas en famille, a meal
with, or in, the family, and le repas de famille, an
abstract notion with more formal connotations conveying a sense of obligation on members to attend.
All the same, in both Finland and France, the idea of
a family meal and the type of domestic arrangement
associated with it is both recognized and valued.
Influential social scientists—including Claude
Fischler in France, Sidney Mintz in the United States,
and Pasi Falk in Finland—have also assumed that the
family meal is in decline. Whether they too regard this
trend with similar disfavor is not always so clear. It is
notable, however, that the claim that family meals are
disappearing has received minimal investigation until
recently. For a social phenomenon that is not only so
widely talked about but also so loudly lamented, it
seems to have been comparatively sparsely studied.
What is there about the idea of the family meal that
leads commentators—and, more strikingly, academic
social scientists—to accept unsupported assertions
apparently without question?

Research Approaches
Various strands of enquiry can be identified. Some
have been pursued, but much remains to be developed. A prime task has to be testing the allegation
that the family meal has declined. But following
up mass media reports to identify the evidence on
which their claims are based often points in the direction of commercial market research conducted for
companies such as those manufacturing indigestion remedies or ready-made meals. Commonly,
these studies’ designs are cross-sectional—a single
“snapshot” rather than comparisons between different periods. Three such studies of the mid-1990s
reported that approximately half the respondents
ate with their family daily or almost daily (Murcott
1997). Comparison with academic research for the
Nordic countries in 1997 records a slightly higher
average frequency (Kjaernes 2001). A survey in
three British cities undertaken only two years earlier recorded that on the previous day, 75 percent of
respondents had eaten an evening meal at home at
which all household members were present (Warde
and Martens 2000). Understanding such variations is
problem enough. Technical differences between studies—in particular, the operational definition of family
meal itself—have to be accommodated in order that

578

Family Meal

intelligible comparisons can be made. As great a difficulty is determining how to assess whatever rate is
reported: does it mean the family meal is waxing or
waning? Without time-trend data, interpretations are
doomed to remain inconclusive.
Relevant data sets have been hard to locate—if
they exist. Studies of considerable ingenuity—and
technical complexity—have analyzed time-diary
data that, despite their limitations, are better than
nothing. Suggesting that meal patterns and domestic
arrangements remain resilient in the face of other
social changes, neither Shu-Li Cheng and colleagues’
work in Britain nor Inge Mestdag’s in Belgium finds
unequivocal overall support for the demise of the
family meal. As ingenious is the adoption of a historical approach as an alternative to finding timetrend data. Peter Jackson and colleagues reanalyzed
British oral history material, a data set comprising
four hundred life-history interviews that were conducted in the 1970s, covering memories of childhood, schooling, and the daily round during the first
decade of the twentieth century. Here too is found
little clear-cut evidence for the decline of the family meal. Instead, the study reveals a similarity with
many, much more recent qualitative studies that
record people’s treating “eating as a family” as an
ideal that has to be tempered by realistic acknowledgment of competing employment and leisure
timetables.
A quite separate research genre is that which
assumes the relevance of family meals as a variable
when investigating the correlates of social and health
problems. An internationally well-publicized instance
is work based at the National Center on Addiction
and Substance Abuse, University of Columbia, New
York, which from the mid-1990s has run repeated
surveys reporting an inverse correlation between
the frequency of family meals and teenagers’ risk of
tobacco, alcohol abuse, or illegal drug use. A similar correlation with disordered eating has also been
found (e.g., Neumark-Sztainer 2004). However, this
approach raises methodological questions, including the extent to which measures of family meal
frequency are proxy for more fundamental characteristics such as family cohesion or socioeconomic
disadvantage.
A final issue for future work concerns the longevity of concern at the demise of the family meal.
Sociologists heard it in Muncie, Indiana, during the

1920s (Lynd and Lynd 1929). This leads to a different conceptual perspective for research. Coupling this
persistence with an apparent disregard for empirical evidence supports the suggestion that alarm at
the decline of the family meal represents no more
than a necessary myth of past social orderliness to
help make collective sense of current social changes.
Indeed, for Jackson, Olive, and Smith, the use of
questionable historical evidence associated with the
longevity of this concern amounts to a contemporary moral panic. This, finally, returns to the as yet
unanswered question, why would such a panic fasten
onto the family meal?
Anne Murcott
See also Anorexia; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies;
Convenience; Dieting; Families; Food Consumption;
Food Scares; Sociability

Further Readings
Cheng, Shu-Li, Wendy Olsen, Dale Southerton, and Alan
Warde. “The Changing Practice of Eating: Evidence
from UK Time Diaries, 1975 and 2000.” The British
Journal of Sociology 58, no. 1 (2007): 39–61.
Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. London: Sage, 1994.
Fischler, Claude. “Gastro-nomie et gastro-anomie.”
Communications 31 (1979): 189–210.
Jackson, Peter, Sarah Olive, and Graham Smith. “Myths of
the Family Meal: Re-reading Edwardian Life Histories.”
In Changing Families, Changing Food, edited by Peter
Jackson, 131–145. Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2009.
Kjaernes, Unni, ed. Eating Patterns: A Day in the Lives of
Nordic Peoples. Lysaker, Norway: National Institute for
Consumer Research, 2001.
Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown.
London: Constable, 1929.
Mestdag, Inge. “Destructuration of the Belgian Meal
Pattern?” PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2007.
Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking,
1985.
Murcott, Anne. “Family Meals—a Thing of the Past?” In
Food Health and Identity, edited by Pat Caplain, 32–49.
London: Routledge, 1997.
Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne. “Are Family Meal Patterns
Associated with Disordered Eating Behaviors among
Adolescents?” Journal of Adolescent Health 35 (2004):
350–359.
Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Famine

FAMINE
Famine can be described as the extensive and protracted scarcity of food, resulting in severe undernourishment and mass starvation. The twentieth
century saw more people die as a result of famine
than at any other time in recorded history. Despite
the fact that the current era looks unlikely to surpass
this milestone, it is expected to have the objectionable distinction that the majority of its famines will
be man-made. Equally, however, many argue that in
no preceding century has famine been more avertable. As a result, various observers assert that it is
now social, not technological or natural, obstacles
that impede famine prevention.

The Historical and Geographical Parameters
Famine has been recorded as far back as the third
millennium BCE. Past famines are often known
and remembered by particular names, some of
which offer unique insights into the catastrophes:
the French la famine de l’avenement (the Famine
of the Accession of Louis XIV) in 1662; Ireland’s
bliain an áir (“the year of the slaughter”) in 1740–
1741; the South African Madhlatule (“eat what
you can and say nothing”) famine of the 1800s;
and the 1930s’ Holodomor (“death by hunger”) in
the Ukraine are some of the more indelible examples (O Gráda 2009).
The historical and geographical legacy of famine
is diverse. Yet, when thinking of famine, developing
countries—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa—are
invariably the first to come to mind. Records, however, provide a more balanced impression. Europe,
for instance, has a long history of famine, so much so
that some historians argue that mass hunger defined
Europe in the Middle Ages. The Great European
Famine of 1315–1317, attributed to unremitting
rains, driving winds, and subsequent crop failures, is argued to have caused the deaths of up to
30 percent of the continent’s population. Likewise,
the Irish Potato Famine of 1841–1852, attributed
to the Phytophthora infestans oomycete fungus
and perhaps northern Europe’s most notorious
example of chronic undernourishment, ruined crops
and reduced the population of Ireland by almost
3 million—a third died of starvation and associated

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illnesses; the rest fled. Of particular infamy is the
aforesaid “terror-famine” (Holodomor) of 1932–1933
in which prohibitively high grain quotas were set for
the Ukrainian peasantry by the Russian leader Joseph
Stalin. The goals of this program were to rebuild the
Soviet state through undermining the social fabric of
Ukrainian national resistance and resulted in the loss
of an estimated minimum of 12 million people.

Famine and Poverty
Like pre-twentieth-century famines in Europe, widespread food shortages in Africa, Asia, and South
America were typically driven by climate and natural disasters and exacerbated by underdevelopment
and a high dependence on subsistence farming.
European colonialism significantly altered the trajectories of many low-income countries and with it
the circumstance of famine. Colonial power often
rested on ownership and access to land. Frequently,
when patterns of land ownership changed following the arrival of colonial powers, majority groups
within rural communities were marginalized for the
benefit of a minority ruling elite. Consequently, it
was repeatedly low- or no-income smallholder communities or landless laborers that became the worst
affected in times of food shortage.
For the most part, former colonial states have done
little to readdress property inequalities. A national
elite habitually assumed power on independence and
thus created little change in the configuration of land
ownership. Equally, however, Ethiopia, a nation with
a history relatively free of colonial interference, has
witnessed some of the most devastating and memorable famines in living memory. Attributed to drought,
civil war, and poverty, and worsened by pervasive land
confiscation by the social and political elite under the
government of Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, the
Ethiopian famine of 1984–1985 played a large role in
cementing the country’s association with starvation in
the minds of the Westerners.

Famine and Markets
The prices, supply, and demand of food have commanded unsurprisingly sizable consideration from
observers seeking accurate early warning systems for
famine prevention. Consequently, the analysis of the
role of markets in the food and agriculture system
plays an increasing role.

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Famine

In an efficient market, traders must respond
swiftly and accurately to changing consumer demand
signals, and writers identify two ways in which traders can significantly shape the likelihood of famine:
the first is through hindering the accrual of food
by certain low-income consumer groups because of
their lack of capital—known as effective demand
failure; the second, commonly labeled market failure,
is where a market is unable to match the demand for
food.
Indeed, reliance on markets creates a vulnerability to price shifts, and theorists such as critical
geographer Stephen Devereux (1993) assert that
while assets and income can have a considerable
effect on a person’s exposure to famine, it is the value
of resources on the market that dictates the severity of a situation. As a commercialized commodity,
food is largely mediated by those seeking to maximize returns. As such, the needs of the hungry are
frequently marginalized. Nonetheless, in an era of
increasingly converging markets, price differentials
are becoming smaller, and incentives for producers
and traders to stockpile food are argued to be simultaneously lessened.

Famine in Theory
Arguably the most notable theorist to write on famine was Anglican clergyman Thomas Malthus who,
in his Essay on the Principle of Population, calculated that unhindered population expansion would
increase geometrically (i.e., 2, 4, 8, 16, 32) while
natural resources could only increase arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10). That is to say, Malthus predicted that the unconstrained growth of a population
would ultimately exceed its ability to support itself,
and nature (in the form of famine) would inevitably intervene to normalize the supply and demand of
food. While Malthus’s theories remain popular with
scholars, there have been several strong critiques of
his work in recent years. The fact that Malthus was
writing before the rapid urbanization of the post–
Industrial Revolution years—when many susceptible
communities moved away from increasingly precarious rural occupation—is often cited, as well as the
massive developments in infrastructure and scientific
advances in crop breeding that the demographer
failed to foresee.
Nobel Prize–winner Amartya Sen revolutionized the theorizing of famine in his book Poverty

and Famines (1981). Here, Sen asserted that one’s
entitlement to food derived from four sources: labor,
production, trade, and gifts. He argued that famine
was not caused by the availability of food in a particular place or time, but by the accessibility of those
resources. However, entitlement failure, as he put it,
only occurs in particular groups, even in times of natural food scarcity, and wealthier communities or city
dwellers are infrequently affected. Sen’s approach can
be seen to echo those that highlight market failures
and poverty as causes of famine and draw attention
to those without purchasing power—the poor—as
the first casualties of such disasters.

The Methodological Issues
One of the more problematical aspects of exploring
famines of the past is that it is often the case that
the more abortive the economy (and therefore more
prone to catastrophe), the less likely it is to record
documentary evidence. Consequently, there is a
temptation for researchers to speculate on the rate
of recurrence and prevalence of famines in particular regions and eras from the relatively few records
available. Naturally, the limitations of such research
are many.
The quality of the data employed to map presentday famines, however, is no less open to broad conjecture. For example, the embellishment or reduction
of the incidence and severity of hunger by different
interest groups may be guided by ulterior motives.
Because acute starvation must be identified as such
before institutional responses are triggered, to categorize a situation as “famine” is likely to result
in the provision of international aid—which may
come as welcome relief for local governments—and
has considerable implications for national policy.
Conversely, the extent of undernourishment reported
in particular minority groups or states can be politically motivated by governments that are conscious of
their domestic reputation in the international arena
and have something to gain by denying the degree of
malnutrition.

The Future of Famine
Writers have tried, and failed, to predict the future of
famine. Whether hopeful, such as Wallace Aykroyd,
author of The Conquest of Famine (1974), or pessimistic, such as Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s or David
Arnold in the 1980s, observers seem powerless to

Fans

calculate the course of mass hunger. There are, however, some trends that can be foreseen for the immediate future: modern famines are infinitely more
complex than those of past centuries; causes range
from global environmental change to externally
administered structural adjustment policies, and all
contribute to the disruption of food production.
Today, the severity, scope, and mortality rate of
famines are significantly less than in previous
decades. This, in some measure, can be attributed to
scientific agricultural advances, early warning systems, and the development of international humanitarian assistance. Conversely, this is also the reason
that many theorists agree that in essence, all presentday famines are social constructs.
Paul H. Johnson
See also Consumer Demand; Consuming the
Environment; Food Consumption; History of Food;
Inequalities; Poverty; Social and Economic
Development

Further Readings
Curtis, Donald, Michael Hubbard, and Andrew Shepherd.
Preventing Famine: Policies and Prospects for Africa.
New York: Routledge, 1988.
De Waal, Alexander. Famine Crimes: Politics and the
Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997.
Devereux, Stephen. Theories of Famine. New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Devereux, Stephen. “Famine.” In The Companion to
Development Studies, edited by Vandana Desai and
Robert B. Potter, 176–180. London: Hodder Education,
2008.
O Gráda, Cormac. Famine: A Short History. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Russell, Sharman A. Hunger: An Unnatural History.
New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Young, Elizabeth M. World Hunger. New York: Routledge,
1997.

FANS
Defining and understanding fans and fan culture
offers important insight into contemporary consumer
patterns. Fan studies has provided extensive analysis of particular patterns of audience consumption
and production, and has examined the relationship

581

between these. Moreover, it is argued that given
increasing media and consumption differentiation
and narrowcasting, mainstream consumer patterns
are becoming increasingly “fan-like.”
However, defining what is meant by the term fan
can prove quite difficult. Most people have a general,
and largely shared, understanding of what a fan is,
notes Matt Hills. A fan is generally seen as someone with a strong interest in, maybe even loyalty to,
a particular sport, team, celebrity, television show,
band, and so on. However, even this simple definition
raises more questions than it answers. For instance,
what makes someone a fan? Does this involve a
minimum level of interest, dedication, or loyalty?
And if so, what are these? Also, what is the relationship between fans, audiences, and consumers? Are
they the same, and if not, what are the distinctions
and lines of differentiation here? These kinds of questions, and more, have perplexed scholars for many
years. Hence, beyond everyday or generic definitions,
defining what is meant by the term fan, in a way that
can be operationalized and that sets a subject area for
study, proves quite problematic. As Hills suggests,
“Fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked
over analytically” (2002, xi). Being a fan is not just
a label or category; it is also tied into individual and
group identities and social performances, which are
rarely set or coherent. Hence, the problem of defining what a fan is has led many writers on fans, such
as Garry Crawford, to avoid defining precisely what
they mean by this term.
The foundations of fan studies can probably
be found in the work of academics at the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, or the
Birmingham School), such as Dick Hebdige, who
associated music, fashion, and cultural styles with
certain youth subcultures, such as mods, punks, and
teddy boys. Though writers such as Hebdige did not
specifically identify these as fan groups, it is evident
that most (if not all) of these groups had some shared
music and cultural tastes, such as mods, who shared
a passion for specific genres of ska, beat, and soulinfluenced music. However, what was significant
in forming and defining these groups for Hebdige
and his colleagues was not simply music or other
cultural tastes, but rather class position. This theory
sees subcultures as the direct result of working-class
young (usually) men’s failure in, and disconnection
with, wider society, which sees them develop their
own counterculture as a means of achieving in-group

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Fans

acceptance and status. Hence, for Hebdige and other
similar writers on subculture, the distinction between
these groups and wider society can clearly be seen
along social class divides. Another important feature
of subcultures is how they use popular culture as a
form of social resistance. In particular, Hebdige suggests that members of subcultures engage in a process
of bricolage, whereby they draw on consumer goods
but redefine and combine these to develop a distinct
style that marks them out from the general public
and identifies them as members of a subversive and
potentially troublesome group.
Similar distinctions can be seen in the work of
certain writers in the 1980s and early 1990s on fan
culture, most notably the work of John Fiske and
Henry Jenkins. Though the theoretical inspiration
for both Fiske and Jenkins is the work of Michel de
Certeau, and not the neo-Marxist theory that formed
the basis for CCCS scholars, they likewise emphasize
creativity and social resistance as a clear indicator of
how fans are distinct from more general audiences.
For instance, Jenkins (1992) argues that while general audiences are happy to simply consume popular culture texts, such as television shows, fans will
engage with them in a more active and creative way,
such as “poaching” from media texts. The idea of
“textual poaching” is drawn from de Certeau, but
here Jenkins specifically uses this concept to describe
the ways fans will often take characters, scenarios,
or narratives from existing texts (such as a television
show or film) and use them to produce their own
texts, such as fan art, poetry, stories, performances,
and so on.
Similar, and clear, distinctions between fans and
(other) consumers are evident in the writings of
certain sports scholars, in particular the work of
Anthony King and Richard Giulianotti, to name
but two. For these writers, there is a clear divide
between “traditional fans” (most often white
working-class men) of sport and “new consumers” (usually middle class, often “family” based)
of sport—a divide that can be illustrated in King’s
1998 discussion of the (working-class white male)
“lads” and (the middle-class family-based) new
consumer fans of the Manchester United football
club. Though here social class is often employed
to highlight distinctions between different types
of audiences, the most commonly evoked divide
again revolves around levels and types of fan
activity—where traditional fans are seen to be participatory, such as actively creating the atmosphere

within sports stadiums by singing and chanting,
while new consumers are seen as passive.
However, Crawford argues that distinctions
between traditional and new fans are often based on
wholly subjective and romanticized ideas of authenticity and what it means to be a “real” fan, which frequently sees the celebration of one form of fan culture
over another. As Lawrence Grossberg writes, “While
we may all agree that there is a difference between
the fan and the consumer, we are unlikely to understand the difference if we simply celebrate the former
category and dismiss the latter one” (1992, 52).
Hence, several authors, such as Crawford and
Cornel Sandvoss, suggest that a useful way forward
is to understand fans not as distinct from, but rather
as a subgroup of, consumers. In particular, Sandvoss
is one of the few scholars to offer a clear definition
of what a fan is—it is defined by consumption and
characterized by “the regular, emotionally involved
consumption of a given popular narrative or text”
(2005, 8). As Sandvoss clearly declares, “Fans are
consumers” (17). Hence, what defines fans for
Sandvoss is not necessarily their social class or levels
of creativity but rather their regular consumption of
a particular subject or text.
In particular, Hills suggests that a consideration of
fans’ consumption is particularly significant, as fans
will frequently use consumer goods as resources in
their social performances—what he terms performative consumption. This he relates to two different
forms of fandom: “iconic” and “textual” fandom.
Hills sees iconic fans as interested in particular individuals, such as music or film stars, while textual
fans follow more multifaceted subjects, the obvious
example being fans of football, or similar sports,
clubs. Iconic fans recognize themselves as distinct
from the icons they follow and use elements of the
associated iconography (such as dressing like a
pop star) to say something about themselves, as a
“platform for their own personality” (2002: 165).
In contrast, textual fans see themselves as part of
the text they follow, such as the way football fans
use “we” when referring to the team they support,
claiming, for instance, “We won on Saturday.” Here,
their consumption is about reinforcing belonging to
a particular group, but again, they are using it in a
way that demonstrates and performs something they
want to say about themselves.
However, Jenkins (2006) has argued that given
the growth of niche, as opposed to mass, consumption, and the proliferation of media channels and

Fashion

outputs catering to increasingly “narrow” rather
than “broad” caste markets—coupled with the rise
of new, more participatory, technologies, such as the
Internet—specific and participatory consumer and
audience patterns become increasingly the norm,
with the result that more and more of us become fanlike in our consumption.
Garry Crawford
See also Belonging; Bricolage; Cultural Studies; Identity;
Popular Music; Sports; Subculture; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Crawford, Garry. Consuming Sport: Sport, Fans and
Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Giulianotti, Richard. “Supporters, Followers, Fans, and
Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in
Football.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 26, no. 1
(2002): 25–46.
Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The
Affective Sensibility of Fandom.” In The Adoring
Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by
L. A. Lewis, 50–68. London: Routledge, 1992.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Methuen, 1979.
Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers. London: Routledge, 1992.
Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring
Participatory Culture. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.
King, Anthony. The End of the Terraces. Leicester, UK:
Leicester University, 1998.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption.
Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

FASCISM
See Consumer Nationalism; Italian Fascism
and Fashion

FASHION
The term fashionable refers to behavior adopted generally and uniformly by groups of people in a certain period of time and in a particular field of action.

583

Such behavior is characterized by its broad diffusion
within the group, which is also explicitly aware of its
transitory nature: what is in fashion is bound soon
to go out of fashion. Fashion concerns not only the
clothing of the body but also the consumption of
objects (e.g., furniture) and ideas. The term is used to
denote behaviors and preferences in different areas of
action, thought, and moral belief, as well as in music,
art, leisure, science, religion, or politics.
In the majority of the European languages, the
term used to refer to fashion (mode in French, Mode
in German, moda in Italian, moda in Spanish) has a
broader meaning that also includes similar phenomena like fads. From this perspective, a phenomenon
that is in vogue has three main distinguishing characteristics. First, it is the most frequent behavior among
those observable in a particular sphere of action (and
it therefore corresponds to a specific statistical measure termed mode). But this is not enough: according
to Rolf Meyersohn and Elihu Katz, only when there
exists widespread awareness of the fashionability of
a certain phenomenon, and when it is labeled “fashionable,” can one speak of fashion in the social sense.
Hence, fashion is a conscious and reflexive form of
behavior. Finally, a phenomenon possessing the two
previous features is considered fashionable when it is
perceived as new compared with previous phenomena similar to it and of predictably brief duration.
More specifically, the term fashion is today normally used to refer to the modern custom of dressing in accordance with norms laid down by fashion
designers and by clothes manufacturing firms and
that are disseminated through a system of specialized media such as fashion shows and magazines. As
Yuniya Kawamura argues in her book Fashionology
(2005), fashion can be considered a particular social
institution, with its own norms and organizations.
This is the topic addressed here.

Fashion and the Modern World
Some scholars maintain that fashion, as a form of
regulation of collective behavior, is characteristic of
all human cultures. Jennifer Craik in her book The
Face of Fashion (1994), for example, argues that the
fashion impulse exists in all cultures and embodies
the achievement of distinctiveness in dress through
clothing codes and symbols, whose aim is to express
belonging to a group and at the same time the individual’s desire to assert his or her personality. The
predominant view, however, is that there is a strict

584

Fashion

connection between fashion as we know it today
and the modern world, and that fashion as an institution has been essentially Eurocentric and capitalist. Numerous researchers date the birth of the first
fashionable behavior to the second half the fourteenth century, when it was concomitant with the
rapid growth of trade and economic enterprises in
many parts of Europe. That period, in fact, saw radical change in the relationship between the individual
and society. There arose the idea that value doesn’t
always reside in the immutability of social structures
inherited from the past, because the individual personality—autonomous and responsible for its own
choices—can have value in itself. To be appreciated,
therefore, was the capacity to design and to direct
one’s own life, that is, the capacity to differentiate
oneself from others by making autonomous choices.
The appearance of the first short-lived fashions in the
princely courts of the fourteenth century expressed
the need to represent this new value attributed to the
individual’s autonomy through the manner in which
the body was clothed. Thereafter, fashion developed
as individuality became progressively valorized in
the social structure, the more that society became
flexible. In societies where the social structure was
rigid and where individuals had almost no chance of
changing their social position, there was neither the
requirement nor the need to express one’s belonging and identity through dress. Today, however, now
that the social structure has become flexible and individual mobility is high, belongings are always uncertain and modifiable, and identities are provisional
and negotiable. The modifiability of dress can thus
become an important instrument of social relations,
notes Elizabeth Rouse.
This happened in evident manner in Europe after
the birth of modern society, when the radical social
submovements generated by industrialization and
mass urbanization disrupted the traditional conservatism of the ancien régime. It is customary to date
the birth of fashion in the modern sense to the midnineteenth century, and 1857 is conventionally
regarded as marking the beginning of a cycle—called
the hundred years of fashion—that concluded after
World War II. In 1857, in fact, Charles F. Worth
opened in Paris an haute couture fashion house where
clients could choose the style of their dresses from a
book of models designed by the couturier. This signaled the tailor’s emancipation from skilled artisanship to acquire the status of a quasi-artist creating

fashions and styles that he imposed on his customers. Just one hundred years later, in the second half
of the twentieth century, fashionable clothing was
produced also by industrial clothing manufacture as
ready-to-wear items. The hundred years of fashion
therefore comprised forms of fashion production and
consumption that spread through Western societies
in concomitance with the most significant processes
of modernization, with the development of industrial
capitalism, and—at the level of social organization—
with the consolidation, expansion, and proliferation
of cities and metropolises. In the same period, “progress” was the dominant value and the engine driving
the development of European and North American
societies. At the end of nineteenth century, the first
attempts were made to explain the phenomenon.
Analysts considered fashion an exemplary source
for understanding the changes engendered by the
Industrial Revolution and by the urban organization of life. In particular, fashion was viewed as a
means to demonstrate the social status possessed or
achieved, and as an indicator particularly suited to a
society characterized by high social mobility. In the
societies then consolidating their capitalist industrial
economies, in fact, social stratification increasingly
depended on the roles that people performed in the
world of work, and increasingly less on privileges
deriving from land ownership and possessed by birth
and family membership. The social status of people
could therefore change substantially during their
life courses, and this required signs that made such
change outwardly visible.
Two studies exerted the greatest influence on subsequent theories about fashion, and to a large extent
they furnished the language usually employed when
discussing fashion phenomena: those by the German
Georg Simmel and by the American Thorstein
Veblen. Simmel is often considered a precursor of
the trickle-down theory, and Veblen the originator
of the theory that consumption goods act as status
symbols.
Simmel defined fashion as the product of two
deep-lying and coexisting tendencies in people’s
behavior: the tendency to imitate others so as to
become equal with them, and the tendency to differentiate oneself so as to become individually unique.
Fashion is imitation of a given model, and in this way
it satisfies the need to obtain social endorsement of
one’s choices. It creates a universal form of which
each person’s behavior is merely an example, an

Fashion

individual variant. At the same time, however, it also
satisfies the need for uniqueness, for distinction, and
through the search for differentiation, it produces
social change.
According to Simmel, in our society, fashions are
always class fashions created by the upper classes
and abandoned as soon as the lower classes begin to
appropriate them. The lower classes, for their part,
seek to elevate themselves by imitating the upper
classes, and fashion is a sphere in which this external imitation is easily accomplished. The dynamics
of imitation and distinction therefore produce a
constant change of styles brought about by this eternal “pursuit” among the social classes. Considered
from this point of view, Simmel’s theory anticipated
trickle-down theories, an approach first expressly
formulated by L. A. Fallers in 1954 to describe the
fashion system in the United States after World War
II. The haute couture system, it is argued, creates tendencies and styles that spread downward through the
pyramid of social stratification owing to the industrial manufacture of cheap clothes imitating the style
of the exclusive collections of the best-established
fashion designers.
However, Simmel considers the dynamic of imitation and distinction to be a social mechanism used
by people in their everyday lives, even in societies
without a hierarchically ordered stratification of
classes. It therefore performs a broader function. It
allows, according to Simmel, the identification and
general recognition of the members of a particular
social circle who have something in common and
want to be considered a distinct group. However, in
societies with low levels of change and mobility, fashions mark differences among people to a much more
enduring and stable extent than in urban industrial
societies because the lower classes have scant possibility to improve their positions by imitating the
customs of the affluent classes.
If we consider the dynamic tension between equality and differentiation as a general process typifying
all social groups, then Simmel’s analysis anticipated
the theories on fashion advanced in the second half
of the twentieth century that emphasized its semiotic
and communicative function. Such theories spread
when the middle classes achieved full social legitimacy on the conclusion of the century of fashion. In
that period, the social groups that sought to identify
themselves internally, and to distinguish themselves
from each other, began to construct themselves

585

around variables—such as gender and age—other
than class. For example, the youth fashions that
spread through industrial societies from the 1950s
onward were indicative of the desire by a new social
category—young people—to assert its autonomy
from adults. Although Simmel could not have foreseen this development, his analysis furnished a conceptual basis for subsequent theories on fashion that
highlighted its communicative function.
Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the
Leisure Class in 1899. He described in this book
the wearing of fashionable dress and accessories as
a means whereby the members of modern society
could demonstrate the honorable and respectable
nature of the social positions that they occupy, or
to which they aspire. Also Veblen identified two
interconnected mechanisms at the basis of fashion:
conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.
The former is the practice of acquiring and then soon
discarding costly goods with high aesthetic value, for
purposes evidently different from the satisfaction of
primary wants. The latter is a lifestyle that is comfortable, easy, without effort and stress, and with much
free time. Both categories refer to freedom from want
and (at least theoretical) endless supply.
On this view, fashion breaks with the habitus of
the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Following fashion
is not only to display one’s material wealth and freedom from want, something that has always been
legitimate in aristocratic societies; it is also to waste
things, a practice always considered intrinsically
ugly in societies where scarcity predominated. In the
past, people’s desire for ornamentation and social
approval of their beautiful possessions was always
accompanied by the rejection of waste. Beautiful and
expensive things made of valuable materials were
cherished and were kept in good condition even
by those with an endless supply. By contrast, in the
modern age, the possession of beautiful objects and a
constant search for newer ones come together.
This has happened because, since the advent of
industrial society, the requirement and custom of
exhibiting leisure consumption has spread to new
bourgeois social strata obliged to demonstrate the
legitimacy of their social privileges. In an attempt
to emulate the upper classes, the newly affluent
flaunt their leisure, seeking confirmation of their
status with clothes from the latest fashion collections. The objects manifesting the most conspicuous
leisure are therefore the newest ones, and they thus

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Fashion

become status symbols. This, however, requires the
periodic discarding of objects that have gone out
of fashion. Consequently, according to Veblen, the
distinctive feature of modern fashion is that it considers wastage necessary for the incessant acquisition of ever more beautiful and newer objects and
clothes—which are thus endowed with greater aesthetic and social merit. As Erving Goffman pointed
out in 1951, status symbols embody the social value
attributed to the corresponding social positions and
are used by people to indicate the position that they
wish to occupy: members of a declining class rely
more and more on symbols of their lost status, while
members of rising groups adopt symbols that signal
their expectations.
Fashion is therefore a phenomenon typical of
modernity, for only modern society produces the
social conditions that make it possible: social mobility, relatively evenly distributed wealth, constant
innovation. As Howard Blumer put it, “fashion is
always modern” because, by definition, it seeks to
keep abreast of the times.

Fashion and Urban Society
Certain conditions are therefore necessary for the
variability of attire to become an important element in the construction of social identity. First, the
society must be internally stratified; that is, it must
have geography sufficiently complex to force all of
its members to constantly reconstruct it to find their
standings. Second, the society must be flexible; that
is, it must allow shifts of status, changes of position,
and social mobility (both individual and collective).
Finally, the society must be sufficiently broad and
complex for everyday encounters to be largely with
unknown others, that is, with people who at first
sight do not occupy a definite position in the social
geography. This only happens in manifest manner in
the cities, where the physical separation of the social
strata is constantly suppressed by spatial compression. In urban contexts, unlike rural ones, individuals constantly interact with other individuals whose
origin, status, and expectations they do not know,
and vice versa. It is therefore in an urban context that
clothing performs a key function in the regulation of
human interactions. Fashion in its turn is an intrinsically urban phenomenon in that it is produced and
consumed in cities. In recent decades, certain metropolises in the world—primarily Paris—have been

called the capitals of fashion because they concentrate almost all the activities that give rise to innovation in clothing styles.
Throughout the century of fashion, Paris was
regarded as the world capital of fashion. At least four
things have been meant by this expression over time,
according to David Gilbert. First, Paris was the propeller center for a culture of design. It was there that
the first couturiers started to create new models and
styles in clothing, fabrics, and decorations. Fashion in
the modern sense of the term was therefore born in
Paris. Second, it was in Paris that arose the first modern network of fashion operators active in the various
segments of the production chain (designers, small
manufacturers, shopkeepers, consumers), each of
which relied on the presence of the others to conduct
its business efficiently. Furthermore, Paris was called
the capital of fashion because of its sophisticated cultures of consumption. During the nineteenth century,
in fact, there developed in Paris new spaces devoted
to commerce: the galeries and arcades in which shop
windows displayed goods to passersby. These were
narrow streets connecting city blocks and usually
covered with glass and iron, or they were galleries
internal to buildings with an overall effect similar
to that of contemporary shopping centers. As many
scholars and writers have noted (see, e.g., Benjamin
2002), these urban spaces encouraged people to
promenade and to linger, so that they experienced
a new way to move around the city as they used its
spaces to stroll, look, see, and be seen. Shopping, leisure, and meeting friends and acquaintances became
activities that merged together, thus favoring the mass
enactment on the urban stage of sociability—which
naturally also required the wearing of fashionable
dress in the city’s spaces. While in modern Europe
such practices mainly involved bourgeois men, who
discussed politics, art, and culture in clubs and cafés,
with the creation of galleries, arcades, and department stores, women also began to lead more public
lives. Cafés and department stores provided bourgeois women with nondomestic but protected places
where they could meet their friends without forgoing
decorum and discretion. Lower-class women became
easily acquainted with new fashions and trends by
their practice of window-shopping. Finally, Paris has
always been regarded as a capital of fashion by the
media. Specialized magazines, newspapers, television programs, and films have long represented Paris
in this way, emphasizing the creativeness of French

Fashion

couturiers, the compactness of the French creative
and productive system, and the distinctiveness of
the French commercial system. By so doing, they
have also contributed to making the label of fashion
capital even stronger, until it is now a brand used to
boost the sale of the products themselves.
In the second half of the twentieth century, other
cities began to assume leading roles in the global fashion system. London, New York, and Milan became
fashion capitals by virtue of their specialization in
particular sectors. In the 1960s, some English fashion designers, most notably Mary Quant, Barbara
Hulanicki (Biba), and Vivienne Westwood, occupied
the international stage by creating collections that
were decidedly innovative with respect to the highly
traditional English dress codes of the time. They
decreed the success of a fashion that drew its inspiration from street styles. These were often firms born
from small boutiques located in lower-class districts
of London with large numbers of alternative businesses that attracted a new category of consumers
consisting of young people. Since the 1960s, London
has always distinguished itself as a showcase for
avant-garde fashion targeted on a progressive market and supported by a training system that tends
to interpret fashion as a form of art rather than as
a business. In the 1970s, New York also became
a capital of fashion, when sportswear—in which
the American garment industry had specialized for
decades—became embedded into the international
prêt-à-porter system. The success of New York fashion has been due both to the solid industrial structure of its creative and productive process and to the
location of the garment district in central Manhattan
close to the city’s main streets of theaters, shops,
museums, and nightclubs—all of which are activities
that animate urban cultural life and furnish inspiration. The fourth capital of fashion in the last quarter
of the twentieth century is considered to be Milan,
where a closely integrated prêt-à-porter system developed during the 1970s. Northern Italy, in fact, had
a solid system of textiles and clothing firms, while
Milan already enjoyed a cultural climate boosted by
the international success of Italian industrial design.
Moreover, readily available in Milan were most of the
services necessary for the production and marketing
of a fashion collection: photographers, public relations firms, advertising agencies, and so on, as well
as innovative sales outlets. Milan imposed itself on
the international scene as the capital of prêt-à-porter,

587

this being a specific form of fashion with high creative content but produced on an industrial scale for
a bourgeois public with traditional tastes.
With the beginning of the twenty-first century,
new players came to the fore internationally. They
organized fashion events and supported the creativeness of young talents with training systems, as well
as with awards or incentives. Most of these countries had consolidated textiles industries, most notably Brazil and India. But also countries like China
and Turkey—to which production had been relocated by European firms since the 1990s because of
their lower labor costs—began to develop their own
firms’ systems and to organize trade fairs, which
attracted international attention. The typically urban
dimension of fashion has therefore expanded over
time, and it has changed with respect to the past. No
longer do the European or North American cities
alone occupy important roles in the world fashion
system: South American and Asian cities also organize specialized events. In the twenty-first century,
fashion is always more an urban phenomenon,
increasingly globalized, and fashion capitals are
more interconnected.

Fashion as Language
As said, fashion long performed a prime function in
class or generational dynamics, but its function in
society rapidly changed during the last decades of
the twentieth century. The slackening of class as a
constraint on people’s lives also had consequences
for their vestimentary behavior, according to Diana
Crane. Class membership became less important for
a person’s self-image. It was replaced by a lifestyle—
that is, a coherent system of consumption manifesting a particular set of values, life choices, and social
relations. This entailed that the consumption of cultural goods, such as fashionable clothing, became an
essential factor in the construction of social identity.
But lifestyles exhibit a variety and a changeability not
comparable with those of social classes. Moreover,
they are much more ephemeral forms of belonging,
which can be abandoned with a certain rapidity and
at low psychological and relational costs. The current
cultural landscape is consequently highly fragmented
and fluid, and it cannot be framed within stable categories or typologies. Previously unknown choices
are available to the individual, and consumption has
become—because of its intrinsically casual nature

588

Fashion

(what has been bought can also be thrown away)—
the main vehicle of such choices. Overall, this concerns the democratization of fashion, a process that
in only a few decades has enormously expanded
the public of consumers interested in the style of the
clothes that they wear and made them more aware
and independent in their purchasing choices.
The repercussion in the fashion sphere of these
social transformations has been a more widespread
awareness of the communicative function of dress.
The use made of clothes, makeup, hairstyles, and
accessories is increasingly less an adjustment to the
styles of a particular social group and increasingly
more a way to facilitate and govern interactions
with others in everyday life—a life by now so varied and multifaceted that class membership can no
longer guarantee success in the many situations that
it presents. Numerous authors in the second half of
the twentieth century spoke of the role played by
clothing in people’s construction of their identities by
enabling them to conjugate normative social pressure
with individual expressive needs. The “uniforms”
that distinguished fashionable and unfashionable
dress until the 1980s have now been replaced by the
free and diversified clothing choices whereby people,
as they select among the innumerable offers on the
market, construct the self-image that they deem best
suited to the situation. Clothing thus serves as a
linguistic code with which to facilitate and manage
interactions with others.
However, this should not induce too strict an
analogy between clothing and verbal language.
Of course, as a prosthesis of the body, clothing is
necessarily a medium of communication. Roland
Barthes already pointed this out when he proposed
application to clothing of the distinction between
langue and parole, between the socially institutionalized rules that govern the use of language and the
individual speech acts through which language is
deployed according to the circumstances. The act of
clothing oneself is thus driven by a set of norms that
allow certain choices and disallow others, and that
bind choices to particular meanings (e.g., in Western
culture, skirt means “woman,” tie means “man”).
Barthes called this system of norms costume. But costume is only an abstract until individuals in flesh and
blood decide to wear it, and by so doing interpret, so
to speak, those dress norms, giving them constantly
new and different concrete forms. This is what
Barthes called clothing. Nevertheless, vestimentary

language can be considered such only by analogy. As
Fred Davis has argued, there are three main features
that distinguish the clothing-fashion code from traditional linguistic codes. First, the meaning of a certain
choice of clothes may change markedly according the context: the occasion, the place, the people
interacting, their moods. Second, it differs according to the social membership and the culture of the
person making the choice (or observing it): white is
indexical of weddings in Western culture, but it is a
funereal color in Islamic culture. Third, the language
of clothing, with the exception of uniforms, is characterized by undercoding: because no choice of dress
is encoded unambiguously, it induces the interlocutor to make highly arbitrary interpretations. But, as
well as these three features, which concern clothing
as such, fashion introduces a further distinction with
respect to formalized languages. It does so because of
the constant change distinctive of it. The compulsion
to change, in fact, makes it impossible to identify the
stable signifier/signified pairs that constitute the basis
of linguistic codes in the strict sense.

The Consumption of Fashion
Since its origin in the nineteenth century, modern
fashion has had a preponderant role in the development of the consumption society. This has mainly
been due to the positional function that clothing
already had performed at the beginnings of modern society, just after the end of the Middle Ages.
It had been considered a visible indicator of a person’s social status, and in the course of history, it
had often been subject to laws—so-called sumptuary
laws—intended to regulate civic conducts concerning who could wear what under what circumstances.
In the modern age, with the development of international trade, with geographical discoveries, and
with the colonial expansion of the main European
nations, new consumption goods were deemed valuable because they were rare, exotic, and expensive
when they appeared on Europe’s markets. Among
them were new fabrics and new dyes from the Far
East, accompanied by knowledge and information
about new shapes and styles of clothing. The advent
of a new affluent class—that of merchants—had
given dress codes an unsteadiness that was seen as
a threat against the established social order and as
the advance of a new culture and order founded
on new consumption regimes. Nor were the lower

Fashion

classes extraneous to these changes. Historical studies document that French peasants at the end of the
seventeenth century, or English laborers or house
servants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
were closely interested in clothes and fashion accessories and that their interest was satisfied by local
tailors who kept abreast of the latest styles. When,
at the end of the nineteenth century, Simmel and
Veblen, among others, described the role of fashion
in the birth of the new societies of industrial capitalism, they recognized that economic transition to the
industrial capitalism was consolidating a tendency
already distinctive of mercantile capitalism in certain
European countries during previous centuries.
However, at approximately the end of the nineteenth century, there arose the consumer society and
its corresponding behavior termed consumerism—
often negatively connoted because it was considered
symptomatic of the alienation of people who are
“identifying with products through the qualities they
promote and buying goods in the hope of acquiring
the social value ascribed to them” (Craik 2009, 147).
In fact, of all consumption goods, clothes most enable
people to fulfill two apparently contradictory desires:
(1) incorporate and exhibit the social expectations
corresponding to their socioeconomic status, gender,
and age, and (2) manifest their personal preferences
and aspirations, while also enacting the type of person
that they want to be or become. For example, clothes
serve to make one appear older or younger; have a
more feminine or masculine, or indeed androgynous,
appearance; resemble a busy professional or a lazy
fop; display rejection of the dictates of mass culture;
or exhibit the insignia of successful social integration.
It is for this reason that the fashion industry is at
the center of the controversy on the social effects of its
products. The fashion industry, with its creations and
brands, touts a wide range of identity models catering to the most diverse expressive desires. However,
because this offer is made by an industrial—and
therefore standardized—manufacturing system, it
reaches the public via intense marketing campaigns
intended to persuade consumers that one particular
product is the best. It thus reduces consumers’ margins of autonomous expressiveness in their choices of
which clothes to purchase and use. Consequently, the
consumption of fashion can be read from two opposite points of view. On the one hand, it can be taken
to be indicative of individual preferences. In this
case, fashions are considered to be the expressions

589

of different social strata hierarchically ordered in
a pyramid. The base of this pyramid consists of
the lower classes, which are more numerous, with
low purchasing power, and whose consumption is
geared to accessing increasingly broad categories of
goods. On moving up the pyramid, one first finds
the middle classes, followed by the upper class and
the aristocracy. These classes are increasingly less
numerous, with greater spending capacity, and with
expectations of distinction more sophisticated than
those of the lower classes. On the other hand, fashion consumption can be viewed as a response to the
clothing supply by firms, which design their collections by combining particular levels of quality with
particular levels of stylistic content.
Brands are performing an important role in all
this process. Fashion brands provide consumers with
a sort of guarantee as to identity. Clothing can act as
a mask that covers the self, or as an encoded external
means to cope with uncertainties about who one is
and to protect oneself against the judgments of others. Brands, in fact, furnish a normative template on
the basis of which people can shape their image and
behavior. People attribute reliability to brands and
accept their power to influence their identities. There
is, however, another type of relationship between
consumers and brands. The increasing individualization of Western cultures induces some people to
be suspicious of brands. This individualization is
accompanied by the absence (or at least the weakness) of social evaluation standards (values, norms,
priorities, etc.). In this situation, there are many who
do not rely on the power of brands but instead, fearful of being reduced to mere brand wearers, prefer
to exercise their personal critical thought and seek
to find undercodified garments (the little black dress,
denim, unbranded clothing) to deal with their lack of
self-confidence and the uncertainty caused by others’
judgments.

The Fashion Consumer
The end consumer is someone who buys his or her
items of clothing exercising the power to choose and
decide how to spend the money allocated to clothing
in the spending basket. He or she is characterized by
a mix of sociocultural features that makes him or her
so demanding that companies can no longer count
on being able to impose a predefined style on consumers, notes Mike Easey.

590

Fashion

However, companies develop (create and industrialize) their collections according to a representation of some sort of model consumer with his or
her tastes, spending power, leisure activities, work,
relational networks, and so on. In the contemporary
fashion system, strategic planning departments shape
the model consumer on the basis of accumulated selling and marketing experiences, as well as by means of
sociocultural analysis and market research. They represent the consumer as seeking a product that comprises quality, price, and design. These three properties
are today sought even by fast fashion collections, but
consumers seek a suitable combination of all three of
these properties even if they are big spenders. Today’s
consumers have a highly differentiated conception
of quality that covers not only material aspects, such
as fabrics, tailoring, and duration, but also immaterial features of the shopping experience, such as the
product’s image performance, salespeople’s attitudes,
and post-sales assistance. They can decide how much
they are willing to spend on each of these aspects, and
this decision may vary from one occasion to the next.
Independently of their spending capacity, consumers
repeatedly change market level for their purchasing.
Furthermore, as fashion designers draw their
sketches, they have in mind an image of the model
wearer of their creations. Often, the woman or
man that they imagine is the model on the catwalk,
a person whose body is quite different from those
of normal people: collections for fashion shows are
designed for 1.85-meter-tall girls, weighing 42 kilos
(6 ft., 93 lbs.)—not exactly the average woman.
Apart from the anthropological and ethical concerns
raised by the exaggerated thinness of female models’ bodies, the gap between their bodies and those
of real people introduces a specific dimension into
the strategic modeling of the consumer in the fashion industry. That is the process in which consumers
are involved when they compare the model’s image
with their own body’s image, a process that companies try to anticipate. This is what fashion designers
and marketing and advertising professionals call the
dream aura of fashion items and brands: the creation
of a desirable image to which consumers must be
attracted, and which is different from their empirical bodies; according to Colin Campbell, it induces
consumers to desire something new, to buy, use, dismiss, and desire again. To conclude, the modeling by
most companies of a specific target of consumers,
even if located in the middle and lowbrow levels of

the market, has produced a circle. Different strata
of consumers become more and more demanding
while firms compete fiercely to capture their preferences. They do that by giving products and brands
an increasingly differentiated immaterial content
that makes consumers even more well trained in the
choosing process. Thus, the consumer has been portrayed since the end of the 1980s as somebody able
to choose whatever he or she likes among fashion
items. This is probably the accomplishment of the
democratization of fashion, since it has become a
mainstream form of agency for most social strata.
Fashion houses have sought to respond to this
situation by extending as far as possible the imaginary worlds offered to consumers. They have done
so by multiplying the brands and lines located at
every level of the consumption pyramid, from the
level of mass market to that of luxury global brands.
As a consequence, one witnesses today something
like a semiotic saturation: each fashion brand tells its
own story (through images, advertisements, words)
to convince people of the novelty, beauty, youthfulness, and uniqueness of the world of meanings that it
suggests. However, because of the enormous number
of brands, the specificities and qualifying differences
of most brands are not really perceivable by people,
who are increasingly accustomed to selecting and
mixing different fashion items to perform the image
that they believe best suited to them.
This phenomenon has two main consequences.
The first is perceptual saturation. There are too many
distinctions and too many resemblances among the
brands and items displayed in shop windows, as well
as in magazines, on web pages, and on advertisement
hoardings. None of this facilitates the task of choosing
among meanings and goods. The second consequence
is that sophisticated consumers no longer believe in
the claims and promises of the most important, globally supplied, and advertised brands. Sophisticated
consumers include a fraction of demanding consumers: those with quite strong purchasing power and
who possess an elaborated cultural capital and a
complex accumulated shopping experience. They
occupy the highest levels of the social distinction ladder and seek to find new fields of distinction.
Emanuela Mora
See also Branding; Clothing Consumption; Conspicuous
Consumption; Department Stores; Diffusion Studies
and Trickle Down; Identity; Moralities; Taste

Fashion Forecasters

Further Readings
Barnes, Liz, and Gaynor Lea-Greenwood. “Fast Fashion.”
Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 10,
no. 3 (2006): 329–344.
Barthes, Roland. “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement.
Quelques observations méthodologiques.” Les Annales
3 (1957): 430–441.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by R. Tiedemann.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Blumer, Howard. “Fashion.” In International Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, edited by D. L. Sills,
341–345. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Centuries. Vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The
Limits of the Possible. London: Collins, 1981.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
1987.
Craik, Jennifer. Fashion: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg,
2009.
Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class,
Gender and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000.
Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Easey, Mike. Fashion Marketing. Oxford: Blackwell
Science, 2002.
Fallers, Lloyd A. “A Note on the ‘Trickle Effect.’” The
Public Opinion Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1954): 314–321.
Flügel, John Carl. The Psychology of Clothes. London:
Hogart Press, 1930.
Gilbert, David. “From Paris to Shanghai. The Changing
Geography of Fashion’s World Cities.” In Fashion’s
World Cities, edited by C. Breward and D. Gilbert,
3–32. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Goffman, Erving. “Symbols of Class Status.” The British
Journal of Sociology 2, no. 4 (1951): 294–304.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing
Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994.
Meyersohn, Rolf, and Elihu Katz. “Notes on a Natural
History of Fads.” The American Journal of Sociology
62, no. 6 (1957): 594–601.
Rouse, Elizabeth. Understanding Fashion. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999.
Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology
62, no. 6 (1957): 541–558. First published 1904.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1899.
Wilson Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and
Modernity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003.

591

FASHION FORECASTERS
Fashion forecasters are professionals who predict
colors, fabrics, silhouettes, and design details that are
relevant to the zeitgeist. Fashion refers to the prevailing style or custom. The term can be applied to many
forms of expression (architecture, art, home furnishings) but is most commonly associated with mode of
dress. By nature, fashion is dynamic; it reflects the
ideas, events, and people in society that influence us.
It responds to our behavior and reflects our mood.
Forecasters help those in fashion identify emerging
trends on their way up the fashion curve. They help
to guide the element of change that makes fashion a
big business in today’s global marketplace; newness
induces people to buy.
Fashion theory suggests that fashion trends may
trickle down, trickle up, or trickle across. Trends
that are derived from fashion runways, adopted in
the luxury market, and then adapted for the mass
market are said to trickle down. Trends that emanate
from the streets and are imitated by designers, celebrities, and those in the higher socioeconomic segment
are said to trickle up. (The popularity of denim and
the youth movement in the late 1960s are examples.)
The trickle-across theory suggests that the accelerating ability of the mass market to interpret fashion at
any price point gives rise to fashions that are adopted
simultaneously—in any given fashion season, consumers at any price point may select from a range
of styles that satisfy their personal taste. Fast fashion
purveyors, such as H&M and Zara, have perpetuated trickle-across fashion.
Fashion forecasters track trends that trickle down,
up, and across. They look for cultural elements that
make certain colors, fabrics, silhouettes, or details relevant. The growth of Starbucks is credited with making brown a cool color. An interest in sustainability
creates buzz about green. With a long-term interest
in sustainability, green as a fashion color may morph
into new shades of green, or blues and blue-greens
that represent the water and the sky. A reference to
a particular country or culture may be popularized
through a native handicraft used as fabrication or
trim (e.g., batik fabrics) or through a silhouette or
detail from that culture’s native dress; references may
be expressed in either a historic or traditional mode
(e.g., Japanese kimono) or in a modern-day context.
Forecasters can suggest applications for new textile

592

Fashion Industry

technology that speeds up the commercialization
process such as in adaptations of techno-fabrics used
in the Olympics. Consumers of fashion may not consciously think about the symbolism of their fashion
choices, but subliminally they understand their relevance and respond to a somewhat consistent message across the marketplace.
To make these connections, forecasters must have
keen powers of observation and the ability to connect the dots. One headline catches their attention; a
casual conversation reinforces the message; a television show deals with a similar topic. A trend forecaster identifies the issues, people, and places that
their customers are thinking about. This ability helps
forecasters to make fashion relevant in a way that
draws in consumers and motivates them to buy.
The field of fashion forecasting emerged in
the late 1960s. Today, fashion forecasters may be
employed by large retail product developers that
want to ensure that the trends projected throughout
their stores convey a consistent message. Others are
employed by service bureaus that sell their forecasts
to fabric manufacturers, wholesale brand product
developers, and private brand retail product developers. Fashion forecasting services may sell products
that are comprehensive in scope or products that specialize in color, fabric, or silhouettes and details. Like
fashion brands, each forecasting product is designed
to appeal to a particular segment of the market. The
product may be delivered in the form of glossy books
with color and fabric samples as well as images of
directional runway looks; as daily or weekly e-mails
with images and observations from around the globe;
or as an interactive, dynamic website. Fashion forecasters may work as much as two years in advance
of the season if working with the textile sector or
about nine months in advance if working primarily
with the retail sector. Color projections are made the
earliest, then fabric, and then silhouette and detail
predictions—the same order in which design decisions are made.
A forecaster’s approach is typically geared to the
target market. Those that specialize in the young
adult market are frequently web-based and may be
nicknamed “cool hunters” or “buzz agents.” They
focus their research on trickle-up and trickle-across
trends using agents stationed globally, who take
photographs of what they see on the streets. They
pay attention to blogs and respond to pop culture.

More traditional fashion forecasters scour the fashion centers of New York, Paris, London, and Milan;
they cover the designer runway shows and monitor
what’s happening on the street. These services may
have a web presence but often distribute hard-copy
forecasts to their clients as well. In either case, they
interpret the plethora of trend options, focusing on
the ones that will resonate with specific groups of
customers.
Some observers believe that fashion forecasting
services in the United States are somewhat more
derivative—relying heavily on interpreting what
they see in stores around the globe and on designer
runways—whereas European fashion forecasters rely
more on primary research and relate their predictions
to what’s happening in the world around us rather
than what’s happening on the runways.
Sandra Keiser
See also Branding; Clothing Consumption; Cool Hunters;
Design; Desire; Fashion; Fashion Industry; Licensing of
Clothing Brands

Further Readings
Brannon, Evelyn L. Fashion Forecasting. New York:
Fairchild Publications, 2005.
Keiser, Sandra, and Myrna Garner. Beyond Design: The
Synergy of Apparel Product Development. New York:
Fairchild Publications, 2007.
Seivewright, Simon. Research and Design. Lausanne,
Switzerland: AVA Publishing, 2007.
Waters, Robyn. The Trendmaster’s Guide: Get a Jump on
What Your Customer Wants Next. New York: Penguin
Group, 2005.

FASHION INDUSTRY
Fashion has psychological, social, and cultural dimensions. It is an important link between individual and
collective life. One can see the popular culture, political positions, intellectual ideas, and religious and
cultural prescriptions expressed in the appearance of
an individual. Georg Simmel suggests that fashion is
synonymous with modernity, existing in sufficiently
democratic societies where there is, through the possibility of class mobility, the danger of absorption
and even the obliteration of established hierarchies.
Fashion has its roots in the desire to imitate others

Fashion Industry

and to follow socially established guidelines, and the
need to differentiate oneself from others—to be an
individual. Simmel argues that when these antagonistic principles are mediated by fashion, they exist
in a dialectical relationship to one another. Though
Simmel acknowledges that a counterinfluence can
operate, in his model, the fashion cycle is driven
largely by the elite who, when emulated by the lower
classes, saw the need to innovate so as to maintain a
distinctive appearance. Today these two fundamental principles are still in operation, but with fashion
becoming a major global industry, the playing field
has expanded to include all types of innovators:
brands, designers, celebrities, youth culture, trendsetters drawn from all social realms (from the underclass to the elite), journalists, marketers, forecasters,
and consumers themselves (who can be divided into
market segments each with different preferences).
Indeed, today individuals can use hypermodern fashion to express the multiple individual and collective
identities that they switch on and off depending on
the context.

History
To give a short history of the fashion industry, one
might say that the couturier came into existence out
of the necessity to create signs of distinction for those
who wanted to display their dominant status. As
more people entered the middle class and as technology and industry advanced to allow clothing to be
manufactured at lower prices, manufacturers provided fashionable clothing to a wider audience. By
the early twentieth century, industrial clothing manufacture gave way to more fashionable mass-produced
ready-to-wear clothing industry. As the twentieth
century progressed, fashion became a major cultural
force. While American fashion has to an extent followed its own more democratic trajectory, by the
1960s, Paris was no longer the only acknowledged
arbiter of fashion, nor was the sole referent the upperclass woman for whom the couturier designed. In
the past, creation was synonymous with luxury and
with the vision of a couturier, and fashion was largely
confined to the upper echelons of society. Industrial
clothing intended for the masses lacked the aesthetic
properties, and the immediacy, that would qualify it
as fashion. One could argue that the fashion designer,
as opposed to the more exclusive couturier, came into

593

existence when enough people had the means to purchase markers of elite status, and as Jean Baudrillard
says, signs began to become detached from their reference points, that is, a fundamental reality or a definite
order. Whereas in the past fashion was principally
a means of conveying one’s social status (authority,
wealth, gender) and the social expectations around
these statuses, as signs became commodified, individuals could more freely use these signs for their own
purposes: to display real or imagined social status; to
express ideals, an oppositional stance, sexual desirability, spirituality, and personality. These attributes
can be split into many subcategories. Yves Saint
Laurent expresses a different type of sexuality than
Abercrombie and Fitch. These archetypes themselves
change within firms, and over time, and certainly
from one season to the next—or with the release of a
new line of clothing. This happens just as the mythologies of a culture (let us say, on what constitutes sexual attractiveness) become less cohesive—unhinged
as they are from a central logic or common morality. Consumers too are able to creatively construct an
appearance, further diluting any message that a given
designer may intend to convey.
In the decades leading up to the turn of the
twenty-first century, the structure of the fashion
industry—the way styles are created and the processes by which they are produced, distributed, and
marketed—experienced major change. As fashion in
the 1970s became more synonymous with democracy—adding youth and rebellion to its essence,
whereas before it was guided more so by norms of
social status—it also became synonymous with business, setting the stage for branding and marketing.
In the later 1970s, ready-to-wear fashion turned
toward combining fashionably designed clothing—
what became known as designer fashion—with the
capabilities of a powerful and large manufacturing industry. This process began after World War
II when competitive manufacturers began to outsource work to low-waged factories in Asia and
Latin America. Complex global commodity chains
requiring subcontractors in a variety of locations
enabled industrial fashion to produce a large volume of clothing at reasonable prices and to thus
allow firms themselves to allocate more attention to
fashion design and marketing. Driven by economic
interest and consumer demand, a division between
design, marketing, and sales in developed countries

594

Fashion Industry

and production and sourcing in less-developed areas
of the world began in the 1980s.

Fashion in Contemporary Society
The significance of fashion as a global force in contemporary society has increased to such an extent,
encompassing—or one might say infiltrating—more
and more domains in the popular culture and in
culture and society more generally: entertainment,
tourism, leisure, media, art, education, publishing,
politics, technology, business, architecture, sports,
advertising, and ecology. From couture fashion, limited runs, and the ability to customize items oneself,
to fast fashion and knockoffs, and to fashion with a
moral dimension—sweatshop free and eco-friendly—
one can say that fashion has entered a new age, the
age of hypermodernity. Hypermodernity is driven by
a consumer-based logic of change and excess. It has
the capacity to absorb the past and recycle it according to an individualistic dynamic and to embody
the spirit of the present, notes Gilles Lipovetsky.
Hypermodern fashion can be distinguished from all
other fashion, namely, ready-to-wear before about
the 1980s and traditional haute couture, based on
several characteristics:
1. The absolute endpoints between luxury and
mass-produced fashion have been abolished.
2. A multiplicity of styles and a subsequent lack
of coherence replaces the ideal of allegiance to
a single trend in the fashion system as a whole.
3. Hypermodern fashion signals a rapidity of
change or shorter cycles.
4. There are more choices, and they are accessible
at a variety of price points.
5. Fashion is responsive to the consumer in both
design and presentation.
6. Brand extension and diversification.

With the advancement of mass production, its
greater flexibility, and the democratization of desire
vis-à-vis the adoption of a consumer capitalist ethos
of continuous improvement of material and aesthetic
conditions, there is no longer an absence of style.
In hypermodern fashion, strict boundaries are dissolved and ideas are taken from the always-expanding fashion world at large. Collaborations exist
between “high” and “low” fashion, and consumers

themselves are mixing the two. Mass culture and
high culture in fashion also converge. Fashion makes
itself more accessible through marketing and communication strategies aimed at reaching more people
and providing customers with a unique experience
of the brand. The couturiers are not imitated as they
were in the past; rather the zeitgeist of fashion—
styles and trends in the popular culture; celebrities,
music, film, and designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Tom
Ford, John Galliano, who themselves are stars and
as such become part of the fashion zeitgeist—are a
source of inspiration.
It is the drive for newness than animates fashion,
anchored in a society that takes this as its starting
point. Dany Jacobs argues that innovation occurs
in response to a particular sociocultural context in
which people are made ready to accept certain kinds
of changes. While couture continues to play an
important role, and the model described previously
is still operational, it is today one of many models. It
has been compromised considerably and is no longer
the primary force inspiring innovation in fashion. In
the time of hypermodern fashion, couture fashion,
as Amy Spindler (1996) puts it, is “only an engine
to drive other business at couture houses: ready-towear apparel, perfumes and makeup licensees.” Yet
it is not, as she explains, the only force. In fact, the
“old names have been revived . . . not with couture,
but with hip ready-to-wear, like Prada and Gucci,
. . . houses that have made clear that publicity that
comes from the huge attendance at the ready to wear
shows is enough.” Diana Crane highlights how the
mythology of fashion says otherwise:
However, although luxury fashion designers are still
presented in the media as setting fashion each season,
there is often little consensus about the direction in
which fashion is moving; instead designers produce a
large number of “propositions”—a grab bag of
ideas. Industrial fashion adopts some trends from
luxury fashion but also conforms to the “bottom-up”
model, coopting innovations from working class and
other subcultures which it sells to more privileged
groups. (2000, 161)

The cycle of change in fashion has accelerated
with the ability to design, produce, and distribute
goods quickly. Alongside an increase in the speed
in production and distribution channels is a permanent renewal with regular creation of new models.
Fast fashion firms, on average, offer new items

Fashion Industry

every six to ten weeks. There has been a move from
a twice-yearly seasonal model in haute couture to
an expanded seasonal model in ready-to-wear that
spans four or five seasons, and a variable model in
hyperfashion. H&M can have lower-cost versions of
clothing seen on the runway in as little as two weeks,
notes Robert Murphy, as can Zara with its own factories. An American Apparel marketer explains, in
an interview with Veronica Manlow, that the firm
“may execute 40 campaigns in a season.” It is possible with the factories on the premises in Los Angeles,
and running on a twenty-four-hour basis, to design
something on a Friday and have it out in small quantities to stores on Monday morning. For overseas
factories, the fast turnaround time, coupled with an
unpredictable economy, can lower wages and make
working conditions less favorable.
Hyperfashion is not only fast but also accessible.
As of late 2010, H&M has 2,000 stores in thirtyeight markets. One hears often of the well-known
international “fast fast” retailers like H&M and
Zara, but hyperfashion reaches every corner of the
globe and every budget. The accessibility of actual
fashion is shadowed by its all-encompassing presence
not only in the form of paid advertising on television, radio, billboards, print ads, and in new media,
in product placements, and at events, but also within
the popular culture in all forms of media, both commercial and consumer initiated.
Responsiveness to the consumer is an important
feature of hyperfashion. Zara conceives of fashion as
a process that reflects both the consumer and trends
that are present in the fashion world. Meeting this
demand is of course not possible without some form
of copying. While fashion is changing at breakneck
speed, it also involves a contradictory process coexisting within the fashion system where some fashion
largely remains the same. Van den Bosch of H&M
says that despite its ability to react quickly with new
styles, speed is “not really so important.” It is more
important, she says, to “understand the long-term
trends. Silhouettes don’t change so fast.” Sales figures
are analyzed “to know what’s right for our consumer” (Murphy 2008).
Brands extend themselves in new areas (home,
children’s, accessories), reproducing features of their
own identity. The Ralph Lauren home collection
embodies the “timeless, and truly American” style.
This expansion process reaches far and wide, outside
of the traditional boundaries of apparel, accessories,

595

and fragrance. Ralph Lauren opens a restaurant in
Chicago with antique furniture, fixtures, and memorabilia that evoke not only the aura of his brand but
also that of his retail stores. Acquiring other brands
is a way to keep a separate identity yet to expand and
gain market share for the firm.
Brands also diversify within themselves, spanning
luxury to mass levels of fashion. H&M, like many
firms, has a pyramid system with “ultrafashionable”
looks at the top, moderate-level fashion in the middle, and basic looks at the bottom. The fast fashion
at the top changes all the time and possesses an aura
of luxury in that it is scarce and exclusive. Yet, as
Murphy explains, basic sales drive volume. H&M
makes most of its money at this level.
Each fashion firm has four main tasks to accomplish: (1) creation of an image, (2) translation of an
image into a product, (3) presentation of the product, and (4) selling of the product. The image must
encapsulate social representations: attitudes and
norms present in the culture that can resonate with
a targeted audience. The image a brand creates and
expresses through products must reflect the identity
of the brand—what it stands for. Ideally, these products will be sold at various price points and will be
positioned to appeal to a variety of markets. Stores
today have become an important anchor of brand
identity, expressing through their architecture, interior design, art, and location a desired image and
experience. To accomplish these tasks, the fashion
system relies on strategic management, complex
commodity chains, and interplay between competing interests of designers, managers, consumers,
investors, suppliers, retailers, and merchandisers. If
mapped out, the hyperfashion system takes on a form
akin to a complex network, with interconnected
nodes. It is no longer the hierarchical structure, as
one might argue, that it became during the reign of
haute couture when to some extent the client lost initiative and the “free play of personal difference” that
had previously characterized fashion (Lipovetsky
1994, 64, 75). Today this initiative has been returned
to the individual, though it is linked to the economy
and to technology and is animated considerably by
new marketing and communication strategies.
The yearning for a personal style and an engagement with the popular culture by a large public
interested in fashion is bridged by designers and
by the corporate concept of a lifestyle vis-à-vis the
brand and its carefully manufactured image. Firms

596

Femininity

sell concepts around which people can identify themselves. What brands do to make sense of the situation
where disorder prevails and order is elusive and at
best temporary is to construct order. Brands create
narratives or mythologies around which they define
themselves. Stories allow one to establish linkages
and to generate concepts that give coherence to the
brand and provide a means by which its message and
its messengers—the products—can be understood
and made sensible. Amid this boundlessness of fashion, then, is its opposite: a move to rehabilitate and
to create anew more direct, sometimes unequivocal,
signifiers. The luxury brands become the new ambassadors of elite status, their products emblems of
belonging in an otherwise inconclusive social order.
When fashion achieves distinction, through links to
status/prestige, it does so now through the heritage
of the brands themselves—brands signifying themselves—or when it creates fantasy, desire, or, quite
the opposite, a sort of practicality through a variety
of modifications—so long as this prestige, fantasy,
or practicality resonates with enough people—there
exists an impetus for it to be copied. Arbiters of fashion copy one another in the hypermodern context
where clothing designed by top brands is sometimes
not structurally or aesthetically different from lower
priced or more casual fashions. Fantasy takes on a
new meaning in the absence of governing systems
that demand clarity and conformity. Fantasy occurs
around attributions of a certain lifestyle that a brand
provides access to. Firms are purveyors of aspirational desires through the mythologies they create.
When a certain measure of clarity is attained, for
example, by Ralph Lauren, whose clothes connote
elements of an upper-class New England lifestyle,
many others—for instance, Tommy Hilfiger, J. Crew,
or Nautica—will play off this aesthetic that has
proven to have an appeal with consumers. Polo shirts
will be copied, as will other elements of this lifestyle.
These brands will make it their own by taking it in
new and different directions: Hilfiger appealing to a
younger audience and making the look more playful—indeed more democratic—abstracting, reappropriating, and inventing elements that resonate with
their own vision and objectives. Each brand claims
authenticity in the vision and the lifestyle it presents. That these mythologies are unreal—or, more
accurately, hyperreal—makes them no less crucial.
Such visions, whether deep or superficial, fact or fiction, are real and meaningful in their effect on the

collective representations in a culture, the economy,
labor, and the environment.
Veronica Manlow
See also Branding; Cool Hunters; Culture Industries;
Design; Fashion; Simmel, Georg; Style; Taste

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death.
Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage
Publications, 2000.
Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Jacobs, Dany. Adding Values: The Cultural Side of
Innovation. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Veenman
Publishers, 2007.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing
Modern Democracy. Translated by Katherine Porter.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. Hypermodern Times. Translated by
Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
Manlow, Veronica. Designing Clothes: Culture and
Organization of the Fashion Industry. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009.
Murphy, Robert. “Fashion’s Faster Face: New Creative
Director to Drive H&M’s Growth.” Women’s Wear
Daily, March 25, 2008. http://www.highbeam.com/
doc/1G1-177190044.html (accessed February 1, 2009).
Rubinstein, Ruth P. Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages
in American Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1995.
Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” International Quarterly 10,
no. 1 (October 1904): 130–155. Reprinted in American
Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (May 1957): 541–558.
Spindler, Amy. “Investing in Haute Couture’s Lower-Brow
Future.” The New York Times, January 22, 1996.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E1D
61E39F931A15752C0A960958260 (accessed January
29, 2009).

FEMININITY
Femininity refers to a set of attitudes, characteristics,
and behaviors that are considered typical of or appropriate to the female sex in a given culture. These traits
are generally labeled as opposite and complementary
to others attributed to the male sex within broader
dichotomic conceptualizations. Nonetheless, the
meanings of femininity and masculinity vary greatly

Femininity

from one society to another, within any society over
time, within each individual over time, and among
different individuals in one group at one point in
time. It is fair to say that in Western culture, femininity has been traditionally associated with qualities such as nurturing, understanding, submission,
sensitivity, creativity, intuition, and passion, whereas
aggressiveness, rationality, dominance, competitiveness, and objectivity have been conversely attributed
to the typical or the appropriate way of being a man
or a boy. This difference has been ascribed to both
innate and sociocultural causes, although the importance attributed to the former has decreased over
time: socialization and environmental conditioning
are now considered to be the most significant triggers of different qualities, attitudes, and behaviors
in women and men. More precisely, since the 1970s,
social theorists have generally referred to sex when
alluding to men and women’s biological attributes
(thus making reference to biological femaleness and
maleness) and to gender when describing their culturally defined characteristics or the social organization of their lives (thus making reference to femininity
and masculinity). The main conceptual tool at the
core of the relation between these two dimensions is
the sex-role theory, which defines gender as a set of
cultural roles transmitted to individuals according to
their biological sex.
It was initially supposed that sex roles were
unconsciously absorbed by individuals during
childhood, were reproduced in their interests and
behaviors, and remained consistent throughout their
life span. Femininity and masculinity were defined
as two opposite poles, and any deviation from the
path they delineated was considered inadequate
psychosexual development. Research has investigated in more detail the way in which individuals
are conditioned by gender stereotypes, revealing that
individuals’ actual behavior in everyday life may
differ greatly from the dominant gender standards.
Anthropologists have questioned the universality of
attributes of femininity and masculinity, and feminist
scholars have shown to what extent qualities traditionally defined as ideally feminine have been devalued in comparison with masculine ones.
Consumer-related research did not explicitly
devote analyses on gender identity until the 1960s.
But from the beginning of consumption studies, practices supposed to derive from typically
feminine attitudes have played an important role

597

in theorization and historical accounts. The development of capitalism during the second half of the
eighteenth century and the growth in the availability
and variety of commodities were understood by contemporary social theorists in a gendered perspective:
the production/consumption divide was supposed to
correspond to the organization of gender difference
in the bourgeois family. On the one hand, production has been valued as a sober, rational, and useful
activity, associated with masculinity (whose complementarity of, if not superiority over, femininity was
therefore celebrated, albeit in a rather circuitous
manner). On the other hand, consumption—shopping, refined taste, and display of luxury goods—
came to stand for waste, extravagance, triviality,
and insatiability, and was identified as a field for the
accomplishment of femininity. The way Émile Zola
describes women’s supposed triviality and frivolity
in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des
Dames, 1883) is insightful. Recounting the development of modern department stores in Paris, he
depicts women shoppers entering after the seasonal
displays have been completed as a crowd driven by
an irresistible desire to throw themselves into luxury
and be lost. The same suggestions can be found in
the first social theorizations about the leisured-class
mode of consumption. Thorstein Veblen (1899)
describes upper-middle-class women as a subsidiary
leisured class, whose task was to perform vicarious
leisure and consumption activities in the name of
the household and its male head. In his account of
the life of the wealthier classes, conspicuous waste
was the sole economic function of the woman,
since her expenditure and leisure would redound to
the credit of her master rather than to her own credit.
The more expensive and unproductive the women
were, the more they made a show of leisure, the more
effectively they contributed to the reputation of the
male head of the household. Upper-class woman’s
femininity was therefore constructed, according to
Veblen, as the alienation from useful work: the lady’s
sphere was within the household, which she should
“beautify” and of which she should be the “chief
ornament.” This was reflected even in “feminine”
dress, which testified the wearer’s exemption from or
incapacity of all productive employment.
The association between femininity and fashion
was also maintained by Georg Simmel, who suggested in Fashion (1904) that standardization and
diversification performed by fashion enabled women

598

Femininity

to express themselves through a shared language and
to promote their individual prominence, which was
denied to them in other fields. Other historians and
sociologists of consumption have gathered evidence
of the role of female wages in the expansion of consumer culture but have concluded that women saw
themselves first and foremost as consumers within
a family and household. It has also been noted that
during periods of war in the twentieth century,
women gained a degree of autonomy when taking
over men’s roles in paid employment; nonetheless,
it has also been stressed that in the postwar period,
they were turned into passive consumers and reimprisoned in the domestic sphere.
Femininity has therefore been constructed around
the notions of domesticity, motherhood, and consumption by both consumer culture and its critics for
a long time. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
(1963) is one of the best-known assessments of the
consequences of these assumptions. The “problem
that has no name,” which opened her book, focused
on the sense of dissatisfaction experienced by suburban housewives for the lack of career opportunities and the restrictions of the role she was forced to
play. The female consumer was therefore depicted
as passive, dependent, and naive: her sole function
was to satisfy the false needs inspired by advertising.
Feminist critics of beauty practices in the 1970s and
1980s similarly argued that it was necessary to fight
the fashion system and femininity-marking consumption practices, sometimes in the name of a return to a
“natural femaleness” or “true needs” preceding social
and cultural elaboration. African American feminists
have highlighted the ways in which fashion, consumption, and beauty practices made white feminine
beauty the universal standard of femininity. Other
feminist accounts have seen femininity as a form of
interior colonization (e.g., Millett 1970) and argued
that in “becoming feminine” (even through consumption), women were alienated from their body, infantilized, and left with no dignity or self-esteem.
More recently, these accounts have been reassessed. It has been shown that they underestimated
the complexity of the consumer culture, in depicting women as victims, rather than considering how
they might have transformed and resisted the dominant notions of femininity. The portrait of the naive
housewife, who fulfills her femininity in consumption, ignores the large number of married women
who continued to occupy part-time and low-paid

jobs in the postwar period, as well as the fact that
being a full-time housewife and mother was desirable
though unattainable for many working-class women.
More generally, everyday fashion and beauty practices have been studied as they construct, produce, or
perform a feminine self through complex decisions,
skills, creativity, pleasure, and pain. It has also been
noted that the analysis that discriminated between
rational and impulsive consumers reproduced gendered imaginaries.
Similarly, those goods and those products of
popular culture directed at women—from cosmetics
to soap operas, romantic fiction, and magazines—
which have been traditionally treated as ephemeral
and trivial, are now being taken seriously. Since they
are supposed to respond to women’s needs, they
contribute to building a shared notion of what femininity is. This does not mean, however, that women
themselves are not able to create their own image
by appropriating them: the images of femininity that
shape material culture are not automatically reproduced when objects are consumed.
Recent research has explored gendered ways to
consume goods and femininity-constructing practices of consumption. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen
Furlough provide a wide-ranging collection of historical essays on the interrelations of modern consumption practices and changing gender roles in the
United States and Europe. By focusing on the way
sexualized metaphors applied to the advertising and
the consumption of goods stand for elusive social
relations, the authors highlight the myriad conflicts
over power that are included in politics of consumption and illustrate the transformative powers of
capitalist-driven consumption in constantly reshaping notions of authentic womanliness. Femininity is
thus shown as the result of women’s appropriation
of objects and negotiation with the symbolic imaginary around them. Adrian Forty similarly describes
how differential product designs could communicate ideals of femininity and masculinity supposed
to correspond to biological sex differences, whereas
Emma Casey and Lydia Martens analyze domestic
cultures as sites where socioeconomic relations are
daily produced and reproduced, exploring the complex universe of meanings underpinning women’s
consumption practices and their negotiations of
parameters of normative femininity.
This set of studies suggests, on the whole, that
femininity is a social construction that shapes

Feminism and Women’s Magazines

practices of consumption just as it is constructed
by such practices in turn. Many contemporary
researchers on consumer cultures and lifestyles have
criticized the traditional, static, and one-dimensional
conceptualization of the dichotomy of femininity/
masculinity, suggesting that there is a multiplicity of
established ways to be “feminine” or “masculine”
according to social class, age, culture, race, ethnic
group, sexual orientation, and so on. Such researchers, like other social theorists, refer to “femininities” and “masculinities” in the plural and stress the
diversity within both female and male behaviors and
across them. Consumerism has provided opportunities for the expression of gender differences, but
also for creating new meanings of social identities (as
recent lesbian and gay studies on consumption have
proved). Despite abstract, monolithic conceptualizations, empirical research has shown femininity to be
a contested concept.
Rossella Ghigi
See also Beauty Myth; Cosmetics; Feminism and
Women’s Magazines; Feminist Movement; Gender;
Masculinity; Simmel, Georg; Women’s Magazines

Further Readings
Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. London: Paladin, 1984.
Casey, Emma, and Lydia Martens, eds. Gender and
Consumption. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
de Grazia, Victoria, with Ellen Furlough, eds. The Sex of
Things. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire. New York: Pantheon,
1986.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton,
1963.
Hollows, Joanne. Feminism, Femininity and Popular
Culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
2000.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S
MAGAZINES
From their beginning more than three centuries ago,
women’s magazines have provided a public arena
for debates and discourses about women’s role in

599

society. Their popularity is due not only to their
offering a space for public discussion of women’s
concerns, but also for providing their readership with
suggestions for and guidelines on everyday life issues,
such as improving private relationships, beautifying
the body, managing the household, spending leisure time, and buying and using commodities in the
proper way. Many historical and cultural accounts
have emphasized this medium’s responsibility in
contributing to the rise of women’s consciousness of
their identity as women, and in exciting the feeling
of belonging to a group with specific interests and
needs. They have been defined as the only products
of pop culture that take women’s concerns seriously,
change with women’s reality, and are mostly written by women, for women, about women’s issues.
Nevertheless, their female identity-marking topics
have long been, and often still are, the target of a
condemnation by feminist theorists and movement,
accusing them of justifying patriarchal structures
and beliefs.
This kind of criticism has been mostly addressed
toward mass-distributed women’s magazines in the
industrial era. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the changing mode of production contributed
to the modification of the roles of men and women in
and out of the household. The public world became
the domain of production and of men, while the
private world of the house was gradually associated
with domesticity, intimate affections, and women. At
the same time, a sizable middle class who worked
hard and increased their wealth was set apart from
both the aristocracy and the new working class;
therefore, new kinds of consumption and taste
patterns were established. These changes strongly
affected periodicals’ potential readership. Up to this
point, such periodicals were addressed to upper-class
women interested in fashion, literature, and leisure
time; they also presented articles on public affairs
and national and international news, which were
gradually replaced by fashion and clothing. But a
number of periodicals for women living in cities and
confined to the domestic domain soon came to light
and rapidly reached a mass distribution. What these
magazines bolstered now was an ideal of femininity
that fit with the new arrangement of gender roles: the
model of respectable wife who did not work outside
the home and was financially supported by a breadwinning husband was replaced by the middle-class
woman occupied with supervising the running of the

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Feminism and Women’s Magazines

home and the education of her children. Women’s
function became identified with being the retreat for
the master of the household, and women’s magazines
both reflected and reproduced this ideal by praising
so-called feminine domestic virtues. Clothes and
home decor became the sign of both a husband’s status and a woman’s own accomplishments. According
to many feminist accounts, this ideology contributed
to gender inequalities in and out of the domestic
sphere, as it legitimated the organization of the family in capitalist societies and reproduced women’s
economic dependence on men.
One of the best-known criticisms of magazine’s
ideology as reinforcing women’s oppression is Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In this classic
text, Friedan examines women’s magazines from
before and after World War II. She notes that, even
if devoted to traditional concerns as beauty and
love, women’s magazines in the 1930s presented an
incipient feminism in stories featuring confident and
independent heroines involved in careers, encouraging women as citizens to participate in local politics,
and advocating social facilities. These topics were
replaced in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s
by the ideal of a woman whose only ambitions were
marriage and motherhood. So the New Woman was
substituted by the Happy Housewife Heroine and, in
Friedan’s account, readers were socialized to see the
world according to these new priorities. Magazines’
success is commonly recognized as their ability to
convincingly present advice on all aspects of domestic life in an entertaining way, but if these magazines
have the power to keep women within their home,
Friedan says, they cannot prevent the good housekeepers from feeling nothingness and from asking
the silent question, “Is that all there is?”
Other feminist accounts claim that, by the early
1950s, increasing financing by beauty and fashion
industries and advertising transformed the message
of women’s magazines. Consumption gave a new
form to an old ideology of femininity, based on a
woman being defined as a chooser and a consumer;
according to other authors, this shift in women’s
magazines was the presage of feminism’s rupture
with consumption.
This trend was not effectively challenged until
radical feminism reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the escalation of ideas about gender equalities and
sexual liberation, a number of new mass-distributed
magazines began to suggest that femininity could

successfully combine independence and devotion,
brain and beauty, and sex and love, and gave voice
to political and social expectations. Some periodicals
explicitly rejected puritan lifestyles or masculine attitudes at work; others advocated sexual and economic
equality with men; others encouraged women to succeed in their careers for themselves and not through
men. Their appeal was often based in their treating
these topics with humor and irony, conveying more
an optimistic joie de vivre than discontent or anger.
According to feminist analysts, though, these
commercial magazines did not seriously defy
the gendered nature of social relations. Moreover,
while some forms of feminism were generally tolerated and supported, the combination of feminism
and socialism or political movements was less common in mass-distributed women’s periodicals. At the
same time, many activist groups considered the periodical a useful medium for spreading feminist and
political messages and created new magazines that
were explicitly feminist.
More specifically, magazines dedicated to improving women’s role in the public sphere and social condition already existed. In the United States, they date
at least from the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s
rights in 1848, and some mainstream periodicals had
printed feminist texts even earlier. Some magazines,
such as The Lily (1849–1856) or Woman’s Journal
(1870–1917), advocated for women’s suffrage and
dress reform, equity for working-class women, and
divorce reform; others, dedicated to black women’s
social conditions, had come into light at the end of
the century. But the readership remained small. Only
in the 1960s and 1970s did explicitly feminist magazines become popular and gain a relatively large
following. Inspired by the second wave of feminist
movements, they tried to undermine the taken-forgranted patriarchal assumptions about femininity
and women’s lives (e.g., heterosexuality and emotional bonding, motherhood and sexualization of
the female body, gender discrimination in the workplace and women’s passivity) and aimed at raising
consciousness in their readership through women’s
narratives.
However, from the mid-1980s onward, the growing financial independence of middle-class women in
their twenties and thirties led commercial women’s
magazines to reshape the mainstream representations
of successful women. A quite unrealistic model of
superwoman perfectly performing in the private as

Feminist Movement

well as the public domain invaded popular women’s
magazines. Feminist cultural analysts recognized that
magazines also promoted a new view of household
management as a trade requiring skill and intelligence, helped women to develop these skills, and
supported the sharing of duties within the family. But
still, it was argued, they reinforced women’s domestic
responsibility without opening other career paths for
women, failing to define womanhood in less essentialist ways. As any other market-driven medium,
women’s commercial magazines treated the reader
essentially as consumer; therefore, they could not be
radically or genuinely liberating.
This feminist interpretation softened as it was
influenced by studies on pop culture, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism. It
was acknowledged that readers’ pleasure played an
important role both in consuming and in perceiving
these magazines, whose text was no less polysemic
than other media. Readers’ role as producers of
local and specific meanings rather than ideologically
manipulated as cultural dupes of the magazines’
content was stressed. First feminist analyses, it was
argued, were based on elitist and inaccurate stereotypes that assume that women readers are not capable of assessing the value of the text.
Nonetheless, most research still considers women’s magazines as problematic from a feminist point
of view. They are seen as cultural products contributing to the reinforcement of gender inequalities
as they promote oppressive images of femininity
consistent with dominant interests: women still are
depicted in a few stereotyped models, fundamentally as bodies or as nurturers. Even the simple gaze
between the woman pictured in the magazine and
the woman reading it creates a feminine complicity
as it has been historically defined by men, so that this
relation among women passes effectively though the
symbolic consent of absent men. In other words, it
has been argued that the constant unspoken assumption between the magazine and its readership is that
women are men’s women, even as they try to be their
own. More recently, feminist researchers have found
that magazine representations of thinness can be
complicit in promoting body dissatisfaction and eating disorders, especially among girls. The magazines
constantly remind them to keep their figure while
often, at the same time, inviting them to consume
sugary and fatty food. It has also been suggested
that the vast majority of women’s magazine covers

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contain messages pertaining to physical appearance,
which is not the case of magazines targeted to a male
audience: instructing women to be a body for others,
they suggest that a woman’s personal relationships
are just a function of her physical appearance. In
sum, feminist evaluation of women’s magazines has
changed over time, and it is not possible to define
a unique perspective of analysis today. When more
involved in cultural studies, feminist research tends to
consider magazines’ messages as positive and potentially empowering for young women; in most other
cases, it still warns against magazines’ potentially
alienating power, as they are able to counter women
not only with one another, but also with themselves.
Rossella Ghigi
See also Audience Research; Childhood; Femininity;
Feminist Movement; Gender and the Media;
Gendering of Public and Private Space; Print Media;
Women’s Magazines

Further Readings
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1963.
McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women’s Magazines. London:
Macmillan, 1993.
McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture. London:
Macmillan, 1991.
Tuchman, Gaye, Daniels Arlene Kaplan, and Benèt James,
eds. Heart and Home. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978.
Winship, Janice. Inside Women’s Magazines. London:
Pandora Press, 1987.

FEMINIST MOVEMENT
The feminist movement is a social movement that
calls for equal rights and dignity between men and
women. In the course of its history, it has given rise
to several different forms in practice and theoretical
thought, which is why the term feminisms, in the
plural, is generally preferred: there are socialist, psychoanalytic, liberal, third-world, postcolonial, multiracial, theological, libertarian, antipornography, and
other feminist currents.
The feminist movement has radically changed both
society and family and individual relationships, laying
the foundations for equal opportunities in education
and the workplace for millions of women together

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Feminist Movement

with social mobility, which had historically excluded
women. It has changed women’s social, sentimental, sexual, and reproductive lives, stressing desire,
the choice of self-determination, and the subjective
awareness of their bodies and existence, combating
male hetero-determination for them. If formal equality of rights has been attained by the feminist movement in the Western world, much needs to be done on
the practical side: even today, one of the most common causes of death in women is violence by men.

Waves
Three waves are normally distinguished in the course
of feminist history. The first wave (1848–1918) coincides with the suffragette movement, a phenomenon
seen to have three factions: the liberal-bourgeois, the
conservative-religious, and the socialist wing inspired
by Friedrich Engels’s study The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State (1884). The second
wave (1960–1980) coincides with the civil rights
movements and the criticism of the patriarchal,
capitalist power structure. The third wave, of poststructuralist inspiration (from 1990), focalizes on the
reaction to the backlash of the 1980s.
Hubertine Auclair used the term feminism around
1882, although some women in Great Britain had
previously referred to this concept. In France, women
fought for new family rights during the Revolution:
in the wake of the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen, Olympe de Gouges wrote
the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the
Female Citizen, in which she pointed out the contradiction in the so-called universality of rights of
the French Revolution. In England, in 1792, writer
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the
Rights of Woman; in 1837, utopian socialist Charles
Fourier used the term féminisme, specifying how the
woman’s role was an indication of the progress of
every society.
The first date of the feminist movement may be
considered to be the Women’s Rights Convention in
1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Another fundamental date is March 8, 1857, when hundreds of women
textile workers in New York went on strike in protest against their own working conditions and those
of minors, and were suppressed by the police. There
are conflicting theories about the origins of March 8
as an important date within the feminist movement:

another version indicates March 8, 1911, as the date
on which about a hundred women workers lost their
lives in a factory fire.
This date was proposed as International Women’s
Day by Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin during the Women’s Conference of the International
Socialist Women in Copenhagen (1910). It was also
on this occasion that the universal right to vote was
called for. March 8 was celebrated for the first time
in the United States in 1909, the year in which the
“Revolt of Twenty-Thousand” began, a strike that
ended in 1910 when workers won the right to establish rules concerning working hours and wages.
In 1869, philosopher John Stuart Mill published
The Subjection of Women, one of the milestones in
feminist thought. His wife, Harriet Taylor, inspired
his thought on emancipation and collaborated with
him in the theory. In France, between 1872 and 1881,
a movement for the universal right to divorce was
born. In 1889, the International Socialist Congress in
Paris accepted the principle of women’s right to work
and equal pay. In 1903, the Women’s Trade Union
League was born in the United States. The suffragette
movement for the right to vote began in England at
the same time; the English suffragettes were opposed
to the American suffragettes, who represented a
more moderate wing that arose in 1848.
In 1917, there was a great women’s demonstration in St. Petersburg against war, an event that lay
at the root of the October Revolution, whose provisional government was the first to concede the vote
to women together with several other social rights.
Women obtained the vote in the United States in 1920.
The second wave of feminism originated in
the United States in the 1960s and focused on the
human body, bringing it to the fore on the political
scene. This feminism, with techniques such as selfawareness and slogans like “personal is political,”
challenged the exercise of power in Western society,
which was based on hierarchy and gender discrimination. In 1953, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième
sexe (The Second Sex), which she wrote after a
trip to the United States, was published; the book
had an enormous influence on radical feminism
in the United States, and on feminism in France in
1968. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine
Mystique, in which she denounced the role of wife
and mother to which women were relegated in U.S.
culture (the reformist current). In 1966, Friedan

Feminist Movement

founded the National Organization for Women with
Aileen Hernandez and Pauli Murray. In 1969, Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics was published, an analysis
that unveiled the relationships of power between the
sexes in patriarchal culture, whereby even Marxism
did not seem to be an adequate solution since the sex
revolution was subordinated to that of the classes.
The radical Women’s Liberation Movement and
African American and minority women’s activism
were operating during the 1960s.
In 1970, both Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic
of Sex, which attributed the prevention of women’s
full emancipation to society’s confining women to the
primary role of reproduction, and Robin Morgan’s
Sisterhood Is Powerful, which placed the emphasis
on sisterhood as a political practice, were published;
these texts expressed the requests of the movement
in those years, which had been shown in documents
like No More Miss America in 1968, Notes from the
First Year in 1968, and Redstockings Manifesto in
1969. At the same time, feminist newspapers, such as
the Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement or
the magazine Ms., close to radical feminism, began
to circulate in many cities.
Chicano feminism (Cherrie Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldúa) and African American feminism (Frances
Beal and Angela Davis) presented a different outlook from white feminism and unmasked the latter’s
“essentialist” inspiration (philosophically founded,
that is, on an originary, static identity of womanhood
that preexisted the social role).
These nonwhite feminists aimed to obtain leadership roles, pointing out the restrictiveness of the concept of sisterhood with white and WASP feminists,
and highlighting the multiple discrimination they
themselves underwent, of sex, race, and class: these
concepts would converge in the theory of womanism.
Throughout the Western world from the 1960s to
the 1980s, women struggled to obtain rights such as
abortion, divorce, and equality in the family; the first
antiviolence and advisory centers were founded; and
many women practiced self-help. During this phase,
the lesbian feminist component (Adrienne Rich) was
strong, sharing the practices of the separatist struggle.
The latter movement was closely linked to the student movements of 1968, to the activism of minority groups and to decolonialization, which were all
battles against the oppressive imperialist-capitalist
system. In 1975, the United Nations announced the

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International Women’s Year and convened the first
World Women’s Conference in Mexico City.

Theories and Studies
There are numerous theories and studies relating to
feminism. Here only the main ones are discussed.
In the 1970s, gender studies became detached from
women’s studies. Born within the field of cultural
studies, gender studies started out from the premises
of the post-structuralist philosophical current, from
French deconstructionism and from gay and lesbian
studies, and are characterized by a multidisciplinary
approach. For gender studies, there is a difference
between sex and gender: while sex can be taken as an
anatomical fact, gender is the outcome of a cultural
superstructure and has to be analyzed as such. One
of the first definitions of gender is to be found in the
work of the anthropologist Gayle Rubin (The Traffic
in Women, 1975).
In opposition to this view, the concept of sexual
difference developed in the 1980s in France, starting with works of Luce Irigaray (Speculum, 1975;
Ethique de la différence sexuelle, 1984). Taking
Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Martin
Heidegger’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies as
starting points, Irigaray reappraises the feminine as
a positive, civilizing instance, not from the point of
view of oppression and deprivation. In particular, the
role of the mother is central in the line of transmitting knowledge defined as “matrilinear.”
In the 1990s, the theory of gender gave rise in the
United States to postmodern feminism and queer
studies, which enquire into the identity of gender
excluded from the acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender), focusing on a sexual orientation that is not normative. According to theorist
Judith Butler, gender is too narrow a concept, and it
is better to speak of its construction and deconstruction: gender is not a descriptive but a performative
category (Gender Trouble, 1990).
After the 1990s, on the level of social policies,
there has been a backlash compared to many of the
conquests that women took to be consolidated; this
situation has led to the emergence of new cultural
phenomena such as Raunch Culture, a lifestyle
in which women voluntarily offer themselves as
erotic objects to gain power and strength by adopting the patriarchal stereotypes of femininity. These

604

Fine Arts

phenomena are characterized as postfeminism,
which assumes equality has already been attained
and so proposes lifestyles that are apparently liberated yet commercialized. Such lifestyles are embodied
through media products such as Sex and the City or
Bridget Jones’s Diary: women whose economic independence permits them to buy consumer goods and
whose sisterhood is expressed in the rites of shopping and sexual freedom experienced apparently as a
form of transgression. However, this lifestyle, too, is
a form of “consumption.”
Furthermore, despite their apparent independence, these women capitulate to the myth of a
Prince Charming at hand if needed to become a
pater familias, the sole anchor capable of providing emotional stability to characters imprisoned by
the merely aesthetic strength of a winning fictional
image of themselves. The outcome is that this image
becomes the symbol of flexibility and opportunity in
today’s metropolis, but comes close to disintegrating before the mirror of imperfection and old age, a
nightmare postponed by the overwhelming number
of women resorting to plastic surgery.
As of 2011, many states have still not signed
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which
was adopted in 1980 even by many third-world states.
To many, this means that the feminist movement, a
long and pacific revolution, still has a long way to go.
Chiara Cretella
See also Femininity; Feminism and Women’s Magazines;
Gender; Inequalities; Queer Theory; Sexuality; Social
Exclusion; Social Movements

Further Readings
Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights
Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1959.
Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of
Feminism and the Future of Women. New York:
Ballantine Books, 2002.
McElroy, Wendy. Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism
in the 21st Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.

FINANCIAL SERVICES
See Credit; Debt; Network Society

FINE ARTS
Fine arts may be defined as activities, or results of
activities, involved in a type of human expression
in which the application of skill and creativity to
the structuring of formal qualities (such as colors,
shapes, movements, sounds, etc.) results in an aesthetic whole. Examples range from the Paleolithic
Lascaux cave paintings to Michelangelo’s marble
sculptures. Any definition of fine arts is likely to be
subject to debate, given the difficulties involved in
establishing a clear and objective category for this
form of human behavior. Throughout history, scholars and philosophers have provided a wide variety
of approaches to the topic, ranging from Aristotle’s
view of art as imitation, to the Kantian emphasis on
the genius of the artist and the disinterested pleasure
of the viewer, to Leo Tolstoy’s view of art as communication, Clive Bell’s formalism, John Dewey’s
account of art as experience, George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, and so on. Perhaps the usefulness of a definition of art depends on the context
in which it is adopted. In the current consumerculture context, a consumer-focused perspective
seems most appropriate. In other words, art is that
which consumers characterize as such. Indeed,
Henrik Hagtvedt and Vanessa M. Patrick (2008)
argue that consumers possess a general schema for
art, evolved through the millennia of human prehistory and reinforced through more recent cultural
developments. Based on these notions, these authors
define art as works embodying human expression,
characterized primarily by the manner of their creation or execution, irrespective of the presence or
absence of concepts, ideas, messages, or functions
underlying them, conveyed by them, or achieved by
them. Further, emphasis is placed on the creativity
and skill applied to this manner in the effort to make
something special (see also Dissanayake 1995).
There are, of course, many items marketed as art
that fall outside such a definition, especially as regards
some contemporary art. Typically, consumers do not
spontaneously recognize or categorize such works as
art. Indeed, the consideration afforded to them usually depends on a context, such as placement in a
museum or gallery. Further, a definition with roots
in human evolution implies a global relevance,
while other definitions tend to be more restricted in
terms of historical, geographical, and cultural scope.

Fine Arts

Every known society, since the dawn of humankind,
appears to have engaged in activities that consumers
from various corners of the world could recognize
as artistic behavior. With many contemporary works
appearing in today’s highly developed marketplaces,
it is often difficult to discern the extent to which their
prominence is due to market forces rather than to a
universal heritage of artistic behavior.
The notion of fine arts as a distinct category
of human behavior is itself relatively recent, and
the distinction between art and craft was virtually
nonexistent throughout much of history. Since the
Middle Ages, however, several classification schemes
have been put forward for the arts. For instance,
in the mid-eighteenth century, Charles Batteux presented an influential classification of fine arts that
included painting, sculpture, music, dance, and
poetry. These disciplines were distinguished by having beauty, or aesthetic pleasure, rather than utility,
as their goal. Indeed, they flowed from a common
source, that is, the imitation of beauty in nature. In
general, the inclusion of specific disciplines in a given
classification scheme depends on the definition of
fine arts on which it is based.

Fine Arts and Marketing: Implications for
Consumers Today
There are at least two areas in which fine arts and
marketing intersect. The first of these pertains to the
marketing of fine arts to consumers. Estimates of the
global art market vary, depending on the parameters
adopted. Today these estimates are often in the tens
of billions of U.S. dollars per year. Major outlets for
fine arts include museums, galleries, theaters, concert
halls, and even the Internet.
Authors commenting on the art market are often
referring specifically to the market for visual arts
such as painting and sculpture. Major sales channels
for visual arts include galleries, auction houses, and
art fairs. The latter two have grown in prominence in
recent years. The visual art market is divided into primary and secondary markets. The primary market
consists of artworks offered for sale for the first time.
The secondary market consists of any subsequent
sales of these works. Galleries have traditionally
been the main sales channel for the primary market,
but today auction houses, as well as art fairs, have
also entered this market. Indeed, the highest prices
are often reached at auction, accompanied by media

605

attention. Some dealers voice concerns over the
unpredictable and frequently sensational nature of
art auctions and would prefer more control over the
reputations and careers of individual artists.
In general, one might argue that subjective opinions are characteristic of the art market, which has
proven particularly difficult to accurately describe
(Thompson 2008; Velthuis 2007). One reason for
this might be that fine arts, and especially visual
art, constitute an extreme example of conspicuous
consumption. The items sold are typically rare, and
often unique, in nature, and the prices obtained
often have little to do with objective measures of
quality or utility. There has also been some debate
concerning the role of publicly funded museums in
this market. For instance, there does not appear to
be a clear consensus as to whether museums should
purchase artworks based on some measure of quality
or merely on the publicity that the work in question
generates or the prices that the work itself or similar
types of work have obtained elsewhere. This is an
especially pertinent question given that a small handful of wealthy private collectors may make or break
the careers of individual artists and effectively mold
much of the art market according to their personal
preferences. This is not only an interesting observation from a marketing and economic perspective, but
it also has public policy and consumer welfare implications and underscores the importance of transparent and democratic procedures for the allocation of
taxpayer money to public support of the arts.
The second area in which fine arts and marketing
intersect pertains to the use of art in the marketing
of other products. Throughout history, art has been
used for various purposes such as selling religion,
promoting image and prestige, and enhancing positions of power. Today the use of art in such promotional endeavors is possibly more prevalent than ever.
This is not only because art is affordable and available to a larger number of people now than it was
in earlier times but also because the popular use of
images is facilitated by modern media and channels
of distribution. Notably, art is now often used in the
marketing of ordinary consumer products.
Research conducted by the authors has demonstrated the phenomenon of Art Infusion, in which
the presence of visual art has a favorable influence on the evaluation of consumer products via a
content-independent spillover of luxury perceptions
(Hagtvedt and Patrick 2008). This in no way implies

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Flaneur/euse

that luxury is the most important aspect of art, but
that the production of artworks involves a quest for
excellence, or an endeavor to make something special
or extraordinary, and that these notions are related
to, among other variables, the concept of luxury. In
connection with consumer products, this concept
tends to engender favorable evaluations. In related
research, the authors have also demonstrated that
when a brand is associated with art, this results in
more favorable brand extension evaluations. Indeed,
exposure to art even appears to stimulate increased
cognitive flexibility. However, further research is
needed to expand on these preliminary results.

Gaut, Berys, and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds. The
Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. 2nd ed. New York:
Routledge, 2007.
Hagtvedt, Henrik, and Vanessa M. Patrick. “Art Infusion:
The Influence of Visual Art on the Perception and
Evaluation of Consumer Products.” Journal of
Marketing Research 45 (June 2008): 379–389.
Tansey, Richard G., and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner’s Art
through the Ages. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The
Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Velthuis, Olav. Talking Prices. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007.

Future Research Directions
Little scientific research has been conducted to elucidate the role of fine arts in the context of consumer
culture, and thus opportunities abound for future
investigation in this domain. There are several subareas that such investigation may focus on. One such
area pertains to general psychological responses to art.
For instance, what are the characteristics of artworks
that engender favorable consumer responses? What
are the short-term and long-term emotional consequences of exposure to art? In what ways, if any, do
the creation and appreciation of art increase consumer
well-being? Another subarea of inquiry pertains to
human universals versus intercultural differences. For
instance, are there formal qualities in artworks that
give rise to the same emotional, evaluative, or behavioral responses around the world? Are there others
that differ between cultures? Yet another subarea pertains to the use of art for managerial purposes. How
might artworks most effectively be associated with a
brand? Which types of art give rise to the most favorable responses? Are there specific product types that
benefit more than others from an association with
art? These are but a few of the myriad questions that
remain to be investigated about fine arts.
Henrik Hagtvedt and Vanessa M. Patrick
See also Aesthetics; Art and Cultural Worlds; Collecting
and Collectibles; Culture Industries; Performing Arts/
Performance Arts; Production of Culture; Taste; Visual
Culture

Further Readings
Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes
from and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1995.

FLANEUR/EUSE
The flaneur is a key figure for understanding consumption, as he is linked with the experience of the
phantasmagoria of the modern city and its commodities, leisure places, marketplaces, and shop displays.
The French word flanerie denotes the activity of
ambling and strolling through the city without a
specific purpose, if not that of observing and experiencing the city itself, its people, and its events. The
person (typically male) who engages in this idling
activity, the flaneur (or flaneuse, if female), is a figure who derives delight and pleasure from the life of
the city streets, moving among the urban crowd with
the watchful and critic eye of the artist. He is typically a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through
the arcades of the nineteenth-century Paris—at least
in his first conceptualization. He is a shopper with no
intentions to buy, considering and treating the people
who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own
pleasure. This ambiguous city stroller and observer
has become the epitome of the individual living in
the metropolis, and a referent for understanding the
urban condition and modernity.
The French poet Charles Baudelaire is the creator
of this figure. For Baudelaire, the shock experience is
at the center of the artistic work, and the city dweller,
jostled by the city crowd, must remain ever vigilant.
A plethora of stimuli bombard him, and the artist/
flaneur surrenders to this intoxication that is an
“intoxication of the commodity around which surges
the stream of customers” (Benjamin 1983, 55). Thus,
Baudelaire is the figure who gives voice to the shock
and intoxication of modernity; he is the “lyric poet

Flaneur/euse

of the metropolis” (Gilloch 1996, 134). According to
David Harvey,
Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between
the stances of flâneur and dandy, disengaged and
cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the
people who enters into the life of his subjects with
passion on the other. (2003, 14)

In Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire,
flanerie stands for the production of meaning in
modernity, in its typical observer-participant dialectic. Benjamin’s flaneur is the urban idler who not
only “reads” the city but also produces metropolitan
texts. He enters the urban environment in a manner
both detached and personal, transforming the city’s
exterior designs into an interior monologue, gazing on the entire scene and at the same time getting
lost in the labyrinth. Much of Benjamin’s research
into the flaneur was inspired by the work of Georg
Simmel, who notes that the relationships between
members of a large city are more deeply influenced
by the activity of the eye than of the ear. Thus,
the figure of the flaneur is close to that of the artist, the detective, and the sociologist. For Benjamin,
flanerie and the flaneur express the commodity culture of the nineteenth century.
The commodity is the modern embodiment of the
allegorical. With its emphasis upon exchange- and
exhibition-value, the commodity is devoid of
substance. Its fate within the cycle of production
and the contingencies of fashion is to become out of
date, old-fashioned, obsolete. (Gilloch 1996, 136)

The allegoric figure of the flaneur is closely interwoven with the fetishization of the commodity, as
the arcades themselves where the strolling activity of
the flaneur takes place.
The arcades were passageways through neighborhoods that had been covered with a glass roof
and braced by marble panels so as to create a sort of
interior/exterior for vending purposes. Within these
arcades, the flaneur is capable of finding a remedy
for the ever-threatening ennui. The flaneur is completely at home in this cross between interior/exterior
worlds because his own personal interior/exterior
boundaries are also ambiguous. The physical placement of the traditional flaneur in a setting that is an
interior/exterior or an exterior/interior is essential to
its significance in sociological analysis. The flaneur’s
dual interior/exterior nature, his ability to be both

607

active and intellectual, to be reading the past of the
city while existing entirely in the present, and his
manner of coloring the landscape with a bit of his
own psyche places the flaneur at the center point of a
whirlwind of contradictions.
Nevertheless, if this metropolitan performance is a
metaphor for understanding the affect that high capitalism and the era of modernity had on Parisians during the eighteenth century, it is to be understood as
the desperate and useless attempt to fill the emptiness
derived from the commodification of modern society.
For Benjamin, the technological advancement from
the gas lamp to the electric light, along with the introduction of other factors (such as the development of
Parisian grand boulevards and department stores in
the latter half of the nineteenth century), were part
of the technological rationalizing process that caused
the demise of the flaneur. The flaneur disappeared as
the commercial world slowly deserted the interior/
exteriors of arcades for the carpeted, artificially lit
department stores that were to replace them.
The contemporary shopping malls are the result
of this technological advancement: since the days
of the Parisian arcades, the brightly lit and digitally
surveilled panoptic malls of the postmodern era have
continued to further sterilize the interior/exterior dialectic. The contemporary malls mark the continuing
extraction of some of the key elements associated
with flanerie: disguising, loitering, and gazing. The
panoptic design of the global postmodern mall has
continued to privatize these characteristic properties of flanerie for the security staff that safeguard
the mall. The result is that the general public is
stripped from these “privileges” in an attempt to
create more secure, calculative, and efficient public
space. According to Zygmunt Bauman, the contemporary flaneur wanders in the modern malls and in
the various “Disneylands” of contemporary life in
a way that may be considered “aimless,” even while
unconsciously affirming the designs of consumer
society, but other authors respond that postmodern
flaneurs enact performances whose winking irony
contains the possibility of agency, if not resistance
(Woodward, Emmison, and Smith 2000).
Andrew F. Wood compares the flaneur to the
post-tourist, arguing that both
adopt a stance that conveys recognition, even
celebration, of the artificiality of the performance.
Both also transform the totalizing spectacle of

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Focus Groups

contemporary life into objects, snapshots, glances,
and souvenirs, often in unintended ways—
“dragging” new meanings upon established ones,
superimposing personal meanings upon institutional
ones. (2005, 322)

Setting the new scene of the flanerie from the
nineteenth-century “true” Paris to the twenty-firstcentury “fake” Paris in Las Vegas, Wood argues that
“the post-tourist flâneur does not condemn places
that are artificial but rather revels in the performance
of the inauthenticity” (326).
Within a broader analysis of the commodified
social space, the flaneur can be seen as
an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude
towards knowledge and its social context. It is an
image of movement through the social space of
modernity. . . . The flâneur is a multilayered
palimpsest that enables us to move from real
products of modernity, like commodification and
leisured patriarchy, through the practical organization
of space and its negotiation by inhabitants of a city,
to a critical appreciation of the state of modernity
and its erosion into the post. . . . It is an alternative
“vision,” though one more optimistic than that
founded on “power-knowledge.” The wry and
sardonic potential built reflexively into the flâneur
enables resistance to the commodity form and also
penetration into its mode of justification, precisely
through its unerring scrutiny. (Jenks 1995, 148–149)

The interior/exterior dialectic of the flanerie is
related with another issue, that is, the flaneur’s role
within the structure of patriarchy. Feminist critics
have read in the figure of the traditional flaneur a
gendered archetype, as it defines modernity as an
exclusively masculine experience. Janet Wolff, for
example, has argued that there is no female counterpart of the flaneur, describing the impossibility of
the flaneuse as the modern separation of the public
sphere and the private sphere confined women to the
private, allowing men to move in the city’s crowd.
Other scholars have linked the flaneur to other marginal figures, such as the prostitute (Buck-Morss
1986) and the choraster (Wearing and Wearing
1996).
Federico Boni
See also Commodification; Feminist Movement;
Postmodernism; Shopping; Spaces and Places; Spaces
of Shopping; Tourist Gaze; Urban Cultures

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Desert Spectacular.” In The Flâneur,
edited by Keith Tester, 138–157. London: Routledge,
1994.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the
Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983. First
published 1969.
Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and
the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German
Critique 39 (1986): 99–140.
Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin
and the City. Cambridge: Polity, 1996.
Harvey, David. Paris: Capital of Modernity. New York:
Routledge, 2003.
Jenks, Chris. “Watching Your Step: The History and
Practice of the Flâneur.” In Visual Culture, edited by
Chris Jenks, 142–160. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Wearing, Betsy, and Stephen Wearing. “Refocusing the
Tourist Experience: The Flâneur and the Choraster.”
Leisure Studies 15 (1996): 229–243.
Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the
Literature of Modernity.” Theory Culture and Society
2 (1985): 37–46.
Wood, Andrew F. “‘What Happens [in Vegas]’: Performing
the Post-Tourist Flâneur in ‘New York’ and ‘Paris.’”
Text and Performance Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2005):
315–333.
Woodward, Ian, Michel Emmison, and Philip Smith.
“Consumerism, Disorientation and Postmodern Space:
A Modest Test of an Immodest Theory.” British Journal
of Sociology 51 (2000): 339–354.

FOCUS GROUPS
The focus group, or focused group interview, is a
frequently used research method across the social
sciences. One of many types of interview, the focus
group contrasts with individual or dyadic interviews
by involving a small group of interviewees—typically between four and eight people—among whom
a focused discussion is generated and led by a trained
moderator. Lasting from one to two hours, and often
including specific prompts to discussion (objects,
images, even group tasks), the purpose is to sustain
an interaction among members of the group on the
topic in focus, rather than to engage in a dyadic
question-and-answer exchange between interviewer
and interviewees. The focus group is particularly
useful when researchers seek to discover the various

Focus Groups

ways in which people make sense of a social phenomenon through shared discussion.
Focus groups are also widely employed by commercial consumer researchers for a variety of purposes, including product testing and development.
The similarly widespread use of focus groups by
political parties and government agencies to gauge
public opinion has led to criticism of the method for
superficiality and manipulability. However, academic
interest in focus groups has been revived following
the qualitative, reflexive turn in critical social science,
the method being valued for generating a dynamic
and complex social situation that, when sensitively
interpreted, affords the creative exploration of the
socially constructed and discursive nature of shared
beliefs and understandings of the social world.
Recently, both academic and commercial uses of the
focus group method have developed an online or
virtual counterpart, this offering some new advantages as disadvantages over traditional face-to-face
methods.
As a social science method, focus groups were
originally adapted by Columbia University sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton as a source
of new ideas and hypotheses and as a means of
checking the validity of their interpretation of other
kinds of data. For example, they used focus groups to
interpret data gathered from people pressing buttons
to indicate positive and negative emotional reactions
to radio programs: after listening and responding to
a program, the moderator led a discussion in which
participants’ responses were reflected back to them
so that they could give their reasons for their individual and collective responses—an early example of
today’s emphasis on reflexive methods that seek to
empower and respect respondents as participants in
the research process.
The social situation of the focused interview,
while “artificial” in some ways, may be understood
as simulating everyday situations (including sharing stories and examples and involving disputes or
embarrassments) through which groups co-construct
meaningful interpretations of the material in focus
reflecting the way that public discourse develops
through conversation and discussion. For example,
Burgess, Harrison, and Maiteny used focus group
discussions in their exploration of local responses
to environmental threat “to replicate, insofar as is
possible through a research design, the domestic and
other social settings in which people live” (1991,

609

502). Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone (1992) used
focus groups to explore the ordinary significance of
goods, shopping, credit, saving, and debt during the
life course.
As with other qualitative methods, focus groups
can be used to explore new research possibilities,
to generate hypotheses for subsequent quantitative
examination, or to resolve puzzles emergent from
other methods of data collection. Consequently,
sometimes a small number of groups will be used
to scope a new research domain or delineate key
issues. Alternatively, a more structured approach to
sampling may be adopted: for example, one may
construct a design for twelve groups, keeping each
group demographically homogenous and producing a fully crossed design by age (× 3—for example,
18–35 years, 35–55 years, 55+), gender (× 2—male
and female) and social class (× 2—working, middle),
thus permitting some tentative conclusions about
variation in the key issues by categories of the population. In yet other studies, far more groups may be
conducted so as to make claims from the sample
to the population (e.g., Kitzinger 1993). However,
the key value of focus groups is their mapping of the
diversity of publicly generated discussion. One rule
of thumb, therefore, is to conduct further groups
until they begin to repeat each other, indicating that
the main “stories” have been told.
The focus group procedure is flexible and can be
varied meaningfully. For example, group membership can vary in whether the group members are
already acquainted or strangers, whether they are
similar on some sociodemographic or experiential
classification (e.g., all young women, all Star Wars
fans) or deliberately dissimilar (thus encouraging a
less collaborative, more debating or dilemmatic style
of discussion). Other parameters include whether
the moderator is strongly directive or “goes with
the flow” (here a “funnel” approach is often taken,
warming up with an open-ended discussion in which
the researcher tries not to guide the discussion with
prior conceptions and gradually introduces topics of
concern to the researcher), where the meeting is held
(typically, this is a friendly living room, with tea and
cookies), whether it is audio or video recorded, how
it is transcribed and analyzed, and so on.
The role of the moderator requires considerable
skill: since group discussions can be intense and fast
paced, there is a tendency for individuals to agree
with each other because of the public nature of the

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discussion (introducing social desirability biases), particular individuals may dominate the discussion, and
participants may not be sufficiently attuned to the collective, dialogic purposes of the method. Transcripts
are often difficult to interpret because of the free flow
of conversation, varying volumes of voices, interruptions, and so on; in addition to the moderator, a note
taker is useful to keep track of speakers.
Ideally, focus groups generate material that
includes both depth and detail, while also encompassing the range of meanings available. By contrast
to quantitative methods, which are evaluated in terms
of generalizability, reliability, and validity, qualitative
researchers instead point to the criteria of credibility
(researcher expertise, clear and appropriate use of
methods), dependability (consistency and repeatability of findings), transferability (relevance beyond the
sample/situation studied), confirmability (consistency
with other findings, auditability by other experts),
and member checking (i.e., checking of findings with
respondents).
Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt
See also Audience Research; Consumer Interviews;
Credit; Debt; Life Course; Methodologies for Studying
Consumer Culture

Further Readings
Burgess, Jacquelin, Carolyn Harrison, and Paul Maiteny.
“Contested Meanings: The Consumption of News
about Nature Conservation.” Media, Culture & Society
13 (1991): 499–519.
Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Fourth Generation
Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989.
Kitzinger, Jenny. “Understanding AIDS: Researching
Audience Perceptions of Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndrome.” In Getting the Message: News, Truth and
Power, edited by John Eldridge, 271–304. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Krueger, Richard A. Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for
Applied Research. London: Sage, 1988.
Lunt, Peter K., and Sonia M. Livingstone. Mass
Consumption and Personal Identity. Buckingham, UK:
Open University Press, 1992.
Lunt, Peter K., and Sonia M. Livingstone. “Rethinking the
Focus Group in Media and Communications Research.”
Journal of Communication 46, no. 2 (1996): 79–98.
Merton, Robert K. “The Focussed Interview and Focus
Groups: Continuities and Discontinuities.” Public
Opinion Quarterly 51 (1987): 550–566.

Morgan, David L. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988.
Morrison, David E. The Search for an Understanding:
Administrative Communications Research and Focus
Groups in Practice. Luton, UK: University of Luton
Press, 2000.
Stewart, David W., and Prem N. Shamdasani. Focus
Groups: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2007.

FOOD CONSUMPTION
What people eat, and the practices and rituals associated with eating, have been a source of fascination
and serious intellectual inquiry for centuries. We
know that societies, and groups within any society,
developed different ways of feeding themselves and
that the explanation for their variation is complex,
found in a mixture of natural-environmental, developmental, economic, religious, social, and cultural
factors. Food has to be acquired, incorporated, and
appreciated. We can only eat what we have access
to. We are only likely to incorporate what we find
acceptable; that which is acceptable food is highly
variable—rats, dogs, and insects are, for example,
mostly avoided in Britain and the United States. And
within the category of the acceptable, some items are
more appealing than others; many children prefer
chocolate to cabbage. How the mix of these considerations comes to form the basis of the dietary regimes
of social groups in modern societies is traced by historical, sociological, and anthropological accounts of
regional and national food habits that demonstrate
the complexity, variability, and contextual dependence of consumption, both in content and cultural
meaning.

Effects of Consumer Culture on Food
Consumption
Recognition of variation—within and between societies—raises some pertinent questions about the
effects of consumer culture. Stepping over many
thorny issues regarding the specification of the concept—like its coherence, its date of origin, and its
causal powers—this entry proposes that consumer
culture has intensified, propelled by globalization,
commodification, and the stylization of everyday
life. Globalization, commodification, and lifestyle
segmentation are among the key processes that have

Food Consumption

changed the nature of food consumption and that
have come to determine the specific character of eating in the twenty-first century in the richest societies. As Arjun Appadurai observed, globalization
entailed increasingly rapid circulation of products,
money, people, ideas, and images, tending thereby
to spread cultural knowledge and options across a
wider geographical canvass. Foodstuffs, chefs, and
cuisines traverse continents. Commodification of
food, partly cause and partly consequence of globalization, has promoted the circulation of commercial
products and entrenched the idea that it is better to
buy things than to make them at home. The march
of the ideology of consumer sovereignty, and the
associated glorification of consumer choice, has reinforced dispositions that Zygmunt Bauman referred
to as “the consumer attitude.” Segmentation, the
modern technique of the market research industry to
target products at specific groups of people, exploits
the potential of the aestheticization of everyday life,
a prominent tendency of the later twentieth century,
according to Celia Lury. Lifestyles, the symbolic
aspects of social divisions around consumption, are
highlighted. The consequences of these three processes are contentious. Does it, as is anticipated by
some theories of globalization, presage convergence
of eating habits across countries, or will it encourage
eclectic diversity? Will it lead to uniformity of behavior within societies, to greater differentiation, or to
anarchic individualism?
Eating tells us a lot about social patterns, rhythms,
and relations. It is worthy of study for many reasons,
not least its current political visibility through food
scares and the “crisis” of obesity, but also because it
is a fine test bed for analytic consideration of social
change. Eating more than once daily is normal, and
indeed a prime practical objective, for almost all
human beings. In many societies, its achievement has
proved extremely difficult. The reasons why getting
one’s next meal might be precarious vary enormously
over human history, not just because the problems
facing hunter-gatherer societies differed from those
with settled agriculture. Seasonal availability and
annual variation, with years of plenty and years of
dearth, were always expected. Interruptions of supply through natural disasters, wars, profiteering, and
ineffective political management have often resulted
in populations, or sections of populations, having
access to insufficient food. Such eventualities have

611

strongly affected social relations—witness the impact
of food riots, migration consequent on famine, and
colonial expansion. In capitalist societies, obtaining enough food has often occupied most hours of
a laborer’s day and a large proportion of a household’s financial resources. On the face of it, many of
these problems have been eliminated in societies with
highly developed capitalist economies and mature
consumer cultures. In rich societies like the United
Kingdom and the United States, where few starve, the
proportion of the average household budget devoted
to food is small (little more than 10 percent), and
regional, seasonal, and annual variation in supply
have long been minimized. Food supply has probably never been more secure than during the last fifty
years in Europe and America. Yet food and eating
remain sources of considerable popular and institutional anxiety. These anxieties differ from those of
the past, and it is interesting to explore how much
can be attributed to aspects of consumer culture.

Public Anxieties
The social science of food and eating remains fragmented and is much stronger in its understanding
of production than consumption. Recent developments in food studies have been driven less by the
logic of theoretical inquiry than by a mission to
respond to public anxieties. The anxieties are formulated by experts and pundits, circulate in the
media, arouse controversy, and become part (though
often a rather vague part) of popular understanding.
These anxieties may be put into four categories—
physical, social and moral, symbolic, and economic.
The first concerns hazards associated with modern industrial foodstuffs, including their denatured
properties. Fears about foodstuffs and raw materials attributed to the system of industrial manufacture of food—additives, chemical fertilizers, hygiene
and safety, new breeding techniques, and the nutritional properties of partially or wholly pre-prepared
items—fuel anxiety about what to avoid. The nature,
perceptions, and evaluations of risk are widely investigated, and the malign effects of profit seeking in
the industrial food chain are frequently invoked
(e.g., Nestle 2006). Second, there are worries about
the destructuring of meal arrangements. The meal,
central to sociological accounts of eating, has been
thought to be under assault since the 1960s from the

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individualizing potential of convenience foods and
the informalization of manners and personal relationships. Symbolized by the—not new—panic about the
decline of the family meal, the question is how to eat,
raising practical and moral issues associated with the
maintenance of valued social relationships. A third
anxiety reflects uncertainty about the ideal structure
and content of the diet. It envisages a crisis of meaning arising from escalating and potentially unmanageable choice among wide varieties of available
foods. Once there is no compulsion to eat from a
single, established, nationally validated or traditional
menu, then the practical and aesthetic rationale for
selection becomes, it is argued, highly troubling. The
question arising is, “What should we eat?” Finally,
and a version of the perennial economic issue, is the
estimation of what food is worth. Popular anxieties probably focus less than in the past on fraud or
malfeasance of commercial actors, and rather more
on manipulation by means of sophisticated selling
techniques, monopoly power, the ethics of fair trade,
and the environmental consequences of global transportation of food, all of which make shopping a difficult, contentious, and quasi-political practice. How
these four types of anxiety should be explained, and
how seriously they should be taken, are subject to
considerable scholarly controversy.
What Not to Eat
Social groups, and subsequently national populations, learned to avoid poisonous plants and creatures, and individuals rejected items to which they
are allergic. But in addition, many edible foodstuffs
have typically been avoided on cultural grounds, particularly in observance of religious doctrine. Religious
prohibitions persist, excluding entirely from the diet
some items, usually meats, but religious faiths also
insist on regulating the slaughter of animals, food
preparation, food combinations, and periodic fasting.
Individual tastes also account for refusal, especially if
a wide variety of products are available, with suspicion of novel foods and expressions of disgust commonplace. However, distinctive of the contemporary
world is widespread concern with the properties of
foodstuffs deriving from mass-production and manufacturing processes. Even where more traditional
problems of intentional adulteration, unhygienic
handling practices, and the selling of decomposing
produce have been eliminated—and supermarket

chains mostly achieve this—many problems remain.
Dramatic instances like the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—perceived popularly
as caused by feeding herbivores with reprocessed
animal remains—are symptomatic of food scares
associated with industrialized and denatured production. Concerns are multiple: genetic modification is
treated with huge suspicion in Europe; chemicals
added to products to lengthen shelf life and enhance
flavor portend harm; and most ironic, modern foodstuffs considered particularly tasty contain excessive
amounts of fat, sugar, and salt, which are strong
contributory factors in coronary disease, obesity, and
diabetes—the illnesses of affluence. Most people, if
asked, express concern about most of these issues.
Western Europeans have limited trust in the food
they eat, and even less in the agents responsible for
ensuring safety, health, and satisfaction, as Unni
Kjaernes, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde note.
Some hazards may be direct threats to the health
of consumers, many of whom have been persuaded
by government campaigns that they ought to take
proper precautions to pursue nutritionally adequate
dietary regimes, but in many instances, as with considerations of animal welfare and more general fears
about environmental degradation, discomfort and
dissatisfaction with the food supply system is great.
That such considerations fail to result in significant
changes to people’s diets is intriguing.
How to Eat
Eating is a profoundly social activity. Overwhelmingly, people prefer to eat with others; the
opportunities that meals offer for sociability are
recognized universally. How people eat together,
and the rules regarding the sharing of food, is historically highly variable. Norbert Elias’s account,
one of the most famous of all accounts, sees modern
practices as a product of “the civilising process” in
Europe dating from the fifteenth century; manners
became more refined, forks were introduced, and so
on. Eating has, however, always been both a highly
ordered practice and an ordering process. Meals
are forms of intricate social organization, and their
rhythms and patterns shape most daily routines. The
meal is central to the conventions surrounding eating, and meal patterns, meal formats, meal times,
and meal etiquettes exhibit systematic similarities
and differences. At various levels—society, class or

Food Consumption

ethnic group, and household—norms exist about
eating regarding who should eat together, where, at
what time of the day, what should be eaten and in
what sequence, who should prepare and serve food,
and how routines should vary to deal with special
occasions. Some societies have more rigid rules than
others, and the extent to which observance is uniform throughout a population also varies.
Norms are not always observed in practice, and
people therefore often feel uncomfortable because
they break the rules. In the last few decades, a
tendency has been discerned for meals to lose
their structured characteristics. Anxiety is partly
practical—meals make possible the monitoring
of food intake and thus the nutritional balance
of any individual’s diet—but is also moral. The
decline of the family meal in the United States and
parts of Europe has engendered moral panic. As
Jean-Claude Kaufmann records, the family meal
assumed importance in the nineteenth century. In
France, an invention of bourgeois families, its diffusion was spurred by fears about the maintenance
of social control over an apparently ill-disciplined
urban working class. Rigid rules applied: formal table manners, three meals a day, restrictions
on children talking, deference to the male head
of household, and so on. Such practices taught
personal and bodily discipline and symbolized
patriarchal dominance within the nuclear family.
Subsequently, the presence of household members
at the table became a symbol of family integrity. In
households without servants, the provision of family meals also cemented bonds between mothers,
husbands, and children, being conceived as expressions of care and love. Tendencies for family meals
to become more informal, to become more irregular
because of clashes with other activities, to succumb
to competition from other easily accessible commercial alternatives, and so on, have fueled moral
panic about their decline. Social scientific research
into meal “destructuration” has not dispelled
controversy, but on balance it confirms significant
change—but neither as radical nor as disruptive of
social relationships as pessimists claim.
What to Eat
To eat a varied diet is, in historical perspective,
a privilege associated with wealth and place of residence. Growth in the variety of foodstuffs accessible

613

to the mass of Western populations is one of the
most distinctive developments of recent decades.
The integrated transnational regimes of the industrialized food corporations source fresh produce
globally, much of which is counterseasonal, but
much other of which not long ago would have been
considered highly exotic. While the latter certainly
has impact on domestic cookery, it is even more in
evidence in convenient ready-made meals and in restaurants, cafés, and take-away shops. The growth
in the habit of eating out, which Francois Ascher,
for example, considers the epitome of postmodern
consumer culture because it instantiates personal or
individual choice at the heart of the meal, introduces
people to a range of possibilities without precedent.
One possible consequence is the creation of uncertainty about what is good to eat. Thus, Claude
Fischler diagnosed the situation as one of collective
anomie—of not knowing which norms to apply
in food choice. Jean-Pierre Poulain, by contrast,
interprets the situation more as an emergent pluralism, dispensing with the uniformity of diet and any
singular authoritative view of the best way to eat.
A third alternative may be enhancement of opportunities to adopt new practices or to cultivate more
eclectic tastes.
For centuries, it was left to gastronomy—a minority pursuit popularly condemned as pretentious—to
apply aesthetic criteria to food and thereby determine what constituted excellent food. For a couple
of centuries or more, France was the arbiter of
gastronomic judgment, and French cuisine was synonymous in the West with gastronomic excellence:
among restaurants, those serving French cuisine
are generally still the most expensive. However, the
vast majority of people, at least outside France, discriminated instead on the basis of the level of skill
of women cooking for the family and of personal
preferences for dishes included in a loosely framed
national repertoire of recipes. As late as the 1960s,
Britons, who were probably not untypical, demonstrated widely shared preferences for a comparatively
narrow selection of foods that apparently were not
much subjected to reflection or aesthetic standards,
according to Panikos Panayi. Subsequently, symbolic
aspects of food associated with national and regional
provenance came under greater scrutiny: Panayi says
that foods were given nationalities. This was partly
the result of ever-increasing migration of populations, the effect of which was to import alternative

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ways of eating and, through small business ventures,
diffuse foreign tastes (e.g., Gabaccia 1998). Eatingout establishments purveying unfamiliar cuisines
were especially important. Then the taste for “foreign” cuisine became able to play a part in the dance
of social distinction: professional and managerial
classes favored different cuisines to the working class
and tended to express a liking for a wider range of
cuisines, in accordance with the predictions of the
cultural omnivorousness thesis (Warde, Olsen, and
Martens 1999). It also inspired greater reflection on
the characteristics of the traditional local or native
cuisine. In Britain, for example, the principal guide to
fine dining, The Good Food Guide, set about defining modern British cooking (Warde 2009).
Restaurant guides are just one of the literary
sources that circulate ideas about what it is good to
eat. Bauman argued that one feature of consumer culture was that it created much anxiety because what
one consumed was taken by others to be meaningful and expressive of self-identity, such that making
inappropriate choices would be a source of embarrassment and shame; simultaneously, it contained the
means to alleviate that anxiety because of the presence of many institutions offering advice about good
taste. What have come to be described as the institutions of cultural intermediation—advertising, marketing, periodicals, and television programs devoted
to the fashioning of lifestyles—operate feverishly in
the field of food. Restaurant guides, recipe books of
celebrated chefs, and food, wine, and cooking programs on television offer many clues about what is
good to eat. Typically, they do not offer authoritative
instructions about what one ought or must do—as,
for example, older etiquette books did—but offer
commentary on the merits of different options, to
leave decisions to the reader. Ideologically, choice is
paramount; in practice, it is subtly engineered.
How Much to Pay
In consumer societies, almost all food is purchased; self-provisioning is minimal. The supply system is elaborate and complex, governed by multiple
economic calculations—about what can be sold, at
what profit, and, if not at a profit, with what subsidy.
Shopping for food is a significant and regular activity
for many. One principle of market exchange is caveat
emptor—buyer beware! Shopping is thus an accomplishment; obtaining good food representing good

value—as shoppers see it—can be tricky. Partly, as
noted previously, goodness is increasingly considered
a matter of safety, nutrition, and health, particularly
in northern Europe. In other places, taste, flavor,
and quality are more esteemed; southern Europeans
are most likely to say that the quality of food has
declined recently.
Many institutions exist to provide quality assurance, from state sanitary departments to labeling
schemes like PDO (protected designation of origin).
Markets are capable of delivering excellent, traditionally made products—at a premium price—alongside
mass-manufactured items. In the same vein, the
range of prices at which restaurants sell meals is
vast; while the pleasures of eating out are denied to
few, quality is price sensitive. Perhaps the key consequence of the diffusion of a culture of consumption is
not that consumer goods and services are made available to, and are accessed by, the mass of the population, but that quality varies. Market segmentation
techniques—which orchestrate the delivery of products of different qualities, whether within stores, as in
British supermarkets, or between supplier enterprises
like restaurants—are used to differentiate populations and match suitable people to products appropriate to them. Commodification services lifestyles.
Everyone can eat beef nowadays, but some beef is
purer, tastier, better sourced, and more expensive.
Alan Warde
See also Civilizing Processes; Commodification;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Family Meal; Food Scares; History of
Food; Risk Society; Slow Food Movement; Social
Distinction; Taste

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Ascher, Francois. Le Mangeur Hypermoderne: une figure de
l’individu éclectique [The hypermodern eater: A figure
of the eclectic individual]. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open
University Press, 1988.
Capatti Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine:
A Cultural History. Translated by Áine O’Healy. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Counihan, Carole. Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family
and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence. New York:
Routledge, 2004.

Food Scares
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell,
2000. First published 1939.
Fischler, Claude. “Food Habits, Social Change and the
Nature/Culture Dilemma.” Social Science Information
19 (1980): 937–953.
Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and
the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998.
Kaufmann, Jean-Claude. Casseroles, Amour et Crises: Ce
Que Cuisinier Veut Dire [Food preparation, love and
crises: What cooking means]. Paris: Hachette, 2005.
Kjaernes, Unni, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde. Trust in
Food: An Institutional and Comparative Analysis.
Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2007.
Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 1996.
Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste
in England and France from the Middle Ages to the
Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
Nestle, Marion. What to Eat. New York: North Point
Press, 2006.
Panayi, Panikos. Spicing Up Britain: London: the
Multicultural History of British Food. London:
Reaktion Books, 2008.
Poulain, Jean-Pierre. Sociologies de l’Alimentation: les
Mangeurs et l’Espace Social Alimentaire [Sociologies of
food: Eaters and the social space of food]. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2002.
Warde, Alan. “Imagining British Cuisine: Representations
of Culinary Identity in the Good Food Guide.” Food,
Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (2009): 149–171.
Warde, Alan, Wendy Olsen, and Lydia Martens.
“Consumption and the Problem of Variety: Cultural
Omnivorousness, Social Distinction and Dining Out.”
Sociology 33, no. 1 (1999): 105–127.
Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village:
Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.

FOOD SCARES
While there is no standard definition of the term, a
food scare is generally said to occur when a confirmed
outbreak of foodborne illness leads to a marked and
relatively sudden fall in consumer demand for a
given food product and pressure is placed on public
or private authorities to solve the problem, to provide consumer advice in the short term, and to ensure
that policy and control measures are in place to prevent future occurrences. The scale of such a scare is
often, but not always, influenced by the seriousness

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of the health threat, the numbers potentially affected,
and the likelihood that blame can be attributed to
malpractice, mistakes, or omissions on the part of
responsible parties. Each of these factors also contributes to the newsworthiness of media reports
regarding events of this kind. An “outbreak” of
foodborne illness is said to occur when more than
one person develops severe symptoms, leading to
hospitalization or death, calling for identification of
the food source, and confirmation of the diagnosis.
Examples of major scares are the outbreak of cholera
that affected the fish industry in Peru in 1991, the
confirmation in 1996 that variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease (vCJD) is contracted by consuming beef products infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE, or mad cow disease), and the 2006 outbreak
of E. coli O157:H7 in the United States, traced to
bagged spinach. Social scientists examine food scares
from a number of policy perspectives, including consumer, health, environmental, and food policies, with
particular emphasis on the regulation and control of
food safety.

Food Sources and Contaminants
Historically, anxieties about food have focused on
insufficient supply, inferior products, swindling,
fraudulent weight, and adulteration by human
agency, including the possible presence of poisons.
Infectious foodborne diseases have only been recognized as such since the middle of the nineteenth
century. John Snow, the founding father of epidemiology, traced outbreaks of cholera in London in the
1850s to one common source—a public water pump
that had been contaminated by an underground
cesspool. Although it had been known that disease
flourishes under conditions of poor sanitation, Snow
argued that this does not arise by a process of spontaneous generation. This view, known as the germ
theory of disease, was confirmed by the experiments
of Louis Pasteur, the founding father of microbiology. Pasteur’s work demonstrated the presence and
effects of bacteria, viruses, and parasites in food and
beverages. The process of boiling and cooling by
which bacteria are removed from milk later became
known as that of “pasteurization.” Laboratories
responsible for testing food products for the presence of contaminants were first established in industrialized countries in the 1880s. Political recognition
of food safety as a policy issue calling for regulation

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Food Scares

spread throughout the second half of the twentieth
century.
Apart from contaminated water, raw milk
products, and prepared foods containing multiple
ingredients, such as salads, sandwiches, and pâtés,
common sources of foodborne diseases are seafood,
eggs, fruit, vegetables, soft drinks, beef, pork, and
poultry. Some food contaminants are chemical toxins, including dioxins and heavy metals, as well as
pesticides, residues of veterinary medicines, additives,
and allergenic or carcinogenic substances that are
prohibited by the regulations of a particular country or are found to be present in foods in prohibited
quantities. Others are microbiological contaminants,
transmitted to humans by means of bacteria, viruses,
parasites, fungi, or, as in the case of vCJD, by prions.

The Incidence of Foodborne Disease
More than 200 infectious or toxic human diseases
are foodborne, and 80 percent of all outbreaks of
these diseases are traced to foods produced outside
of private households (Nestle 2003). Some foodborne diseases, such as cholera, more commonly
occur in developing countries, while other bacterial infections—including varieties of Salmonella,
Campylobacter, and Listeria—occur and recur in all
parts of the globe. Most cases of illness arising from
contaminated foods occur sporadically, yield mild
symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea, and are never
reported. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the
population in industrialized countries suffer some
form of foodborne illness each year. An annual 76
million cases, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000
deaths due to food contamination are reported,
for example, from the United States (WHO 2007).
Despite increasing emphasis of food safety problems
at national and international levels, it is estimated
that both the severity and the incidence of foodborne
threats to public health have been increasing since
the 1990s (WHO 2007).
Increased severity is attributed to the emergence
of new strains of bacteria, which are resistant to antibiotic treatment. These are seen as a response to the
widespread and increasing use of antibiotics in animal
production to promote rapid growth, rather than for
therapeutic reasons. The increasing incidence of outbreaks is attributed to a wider number of changes in
food production, including the spread of factory farming methods, the increasing size and centralization of
production units, and the rapid globalization of food

processing and trade. Outbreaks that were once contained within a local community are now more likely
to take place on a national or international scale, giving rise to the increasing incidence of food scares.

Consequences and Conflicts of Interest
Quite apart from consequences for individual consumers and their families, the incidence of foodborne
illness places a heavy economic burden on societies
as measured by medical costs and lost productivity.
A food scare affects the interests of stakeholders in
the food sector in different ways. Consumer rights
to safe food are affected by any threat to public
health involving the risk of illness or death due to
contamination. The short-term economic interests
of farmers, food manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and food-service businesses can be affected by
falling demand, by measures designed to contain
the problem—including the culling of sick herds,
destruction of fresh produce, or product recalls from
the market—and sometimes by legal consequences.
Negative economic effects of a scare on a particular
sector, such as the fishing or beef industries, can also
lead to extensive unemployment within that sector.
This occurs, for example, when attempts to limit the
problem take the form of imposing trade bans on
imports of a particular product from a given country
or region. Other parties directly involved in a food
scare are health professionals involved in diagnosis and treatment, scientists involved in the assessment of food risks, politicians and public authorities
involved in risk management, and journalists and
nongovernmental organizations involved in elucidating the character of given risks and disseminating
information to the public.
Political conflict at local, national, or international
levels thus arises between the need to protect public health and consumer interests, on the one hand,
and the need to protect productivity, trade, and the
economic interests of producers, distributors, and
employees within a particular sector, on the other.
This is sometimes reflected in responses to a food
scare on the part of politicians and regulators; poor
management of the BSE scare in the United Kingdom
is often cited as a case in point. The regulation and
control of foodborne disease has changed focus in
recent decades. The former emphasis on a productbased policy, based on testing and controlling end
products, has increasingly given way to a risk-based
policy, focused on the introduction of standards,

Franchising

quality assurance schemes, and the identification
and control of hazards at all points in the food chain
from primary production to consumption. The capital needed to comply with such standards may favor
large companies at the expense of small businesses
and global trade at the expense of local trade, thus
helping to sustain rather than to counteract some
of the causes of the rising incidence of foodborne
diseases.

Some Areas of Consumer Research
Among the issues recently and currently investigated
by consumer scientists are the following: reasons why
consumer assessments of food risks differ from those
of experts, reasons why consumers respond relatively
rapidly to food safety threats but not to dietary recommendations, the conditions under which market
recovery does or does not take place following a food
scare, the impacts of such scares on consumer trust in
the mainstream food industry and in emerging food
technologies, and ways in which consumer interests
are affected by food safety regulations. It has been
pointed out, for example, that consumers pose a
much wider range of moral issues in their assessments of risk than those under consideration by
experts (Hansen et al. 2003), that growing consumer
interest in alternative systems of food provisioning
may reflect growing distrust in the mainstream food
industry (Murdoch and Miele 1999), and that foodsafety regulations tend to undermine biodiversity
insofar as they favor the interests of large-scale producers (DeLind and Howard 2008).
Katherine O’Doherty Jensen
See also Consumer Anxiety; Consumer Regulation;
Consuming the Environment; Dieting; Food
Consumption; Political and Ethical Consumption; Risk
Society; Trust

Further Readings
Busch, Lawrence. “Grades and Standards in the Social
Construction of Safe Food.” In The Politics of Food,
edited by Marianne Elisabeth Lien and Brigitte Nerlich,
163–178. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
DeLind, Laura B., and Philip H. Howard. “Safe at Any
Scale? Food Scares, Food Regulation, and Scaled
Alternatives.” Journal of Agriculture and Human Values
25 (2008): 301–317.
Hansen, Janus, Lotte Holm, Lynn Frewer, Paul Robinson,
and Peter Sandøe. “Beyond the Knowledge Deficit:

617

Recent Research into Lay and Expert Attitudes to Food
Risks.” Appetite 41 (2003): 111–121.
Knowles, Tim, Richard Moody, and Morven G.
McEachern. “European Food Scares and Their Impact
on EU Food Policy.” British Food Journal 109, no. 1
(2007): 43–67.
Lang, Tim, and Michael Heasman. Food Wars: The Global
Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets. London:
Earthscan, 2005.
Miller, David, and Jacquie Reilly. “Making an Issue of
Food Safety: The Media, Pressure Groups, and the
Public Sphere.” In Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition
as Social Problems, edited by Donna Maurer and Jeffery
Sobal, 305–336. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.
Murdoch, Jonathan, and Mara Miele. “‘Back to Nature’:
Changing Worlds of Production in the Food Sector.”
Sociologia Ruralis 39, no. 4 (1999): 465–483.
Nestle, Marion. Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology and
Bioterrorism. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003.
Scholliers, Peter. “Defining Food Risks and Food Anxieties
throughout History.” Appetite 51 (2008): 3–6.
WHO (World Health Organization). “Food Safety and
Foodborne Illness.” Fact Sheet No. 237 (March 2007).
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs237/en
(accessed January 2010).

FRANCHISING
Franchising, where independent businesses operate
under a shared trademark using a common production process, is an organizational form used primarily by service businesses. Franchising carries a large
and growing proportion of retail trade and services,
particularly in the United States. Franchising is also
commonly used as a method of international entrepreneurship; a recent survey identified over one
million franchisees worldwide. To the consumer,
franchising has transformed the service sector.
Franchising has provided a method and methodology to create chains of service organizations, replacing independent businesses, and reproducing a
consumption experience over time and space. In this
entry, franchising as a business method is described,
followed by its effects on consumers. The American
experience is the primary focus.

Franchising as a Business Method
Franchising as a business method works as follows.
A franchise is a legal contract between the owner

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Franchising

of a production process and a trademark (the franchisor, such as McDonald’s) and a local businessman (franchisee) to sell products or services under
the franchisor’s trademark employing a production
process developed by the franchisor. When a franchise contract is signed, the franchisee pays a lump
sum, a franchise fee. After signing the contract, the
franchisor gives the franchisee services needed to
open the unit, including training and blueprints for
the production process and, in some cases, support
for site selection or construction management. The
franchisee typically makes all necessary investments
in land, building, and equipment to open the particular site.
After opening, the franchisor provides periodic
inspection of the franchise (to ensure that operating
standards are being followed), access to trademarks,
and marketing services (such as advertising and new
product development). In return for these services,
the franchisee pays a royalty on sales (typically ranging between 1 percent and 10 percent) and a royalty
for marketing expenses (from 0 percent to 6 percent),
commonly called the advertising fee. The franchisor
is compensated for the trademark and its management; generally, franchisees do not sell products of
the franchisor (although exceptions exist). The franchise chain is composed of units franchised to local
operators and units owned by the franchisor. Both
types operate the same production process and sell
under the same trademark, but most franchise chains
are primarily composed of franchised units.
As an organizational form, franchising has a large
and visible presence in consumer industries such as
restaurants, lodging, auto repair, real estate, hair
styling, and specialty retailing, where it has captured
typically 30 percent to 40 percent of sales (Michael
1996). Business services where franchising is prominent include temporary employment, commercial
cleaning, printing and copying, tax preparation, and
accounting services. Recent areas of growth include
home health care, business signage, and child development and education. Moreover, franchising’s share
of sales ranges from 71 percent of the printing and
copying market to 0.5 percent of the accounting market. But the wide range of shares indicates the importance of industry-specific factors in the choice of
organizational form. Product differentiation in these
service and trading businesses is large, grounded in
the physical dispersion and localized monopolies of
units and in the heterogeneity of customers’ tastes.

Effects on Consumers
From the standpoint of consumers, franchising has
provided a method and methodology to generate
chains of retail service providers. Each point of service is deliberately designed to be identical to all others. Hence, in a practical sense, McDonald’s serves
not the best hamburger but the same hamburger all
around the United States and the world. The goal of
identical service experiences at multiple geographies
over time presents interesting questions for consumers and researchers. At the level of consumer behavior, how does the consumer combine consumption
experiences over time and space into a brand preference? In practical terms, how does a good experience
in one city translate into a choice on the next business trip? Such a question has not been examined in
the context of franchising.
The desire to eliminate risk by standardizing the
consumption experience through franchising has
transformed cities, towns, and highways. In the
United States, each highway exit presents a familiar
set of choices among gas stations, motels, and restaurants. Historically, these companies followed the
expansion of the U.S. interstate highway system and
the growth of suburbs. Using their initial position,
the more successful expanded into cities and more
and more rural areas to develop a network of service points. The result has been a transformation of
the American roadside. Consumers seem to prefer a
common experience united in time and space, united
in multiple experiences over time and space, rather
than adventurously eating at an independent restaurant. Or, in the words of a memorable Holiday Inn
ad, “The best surprise is no surprise.”
The rise of franchising has also permeated popular culture. The shared consumption experience represented by several franchise chains has seeped into
the common experience of Americans. For example,
Dunkin’ Donuts, early in its existence, decided to
offer free coffee and donuts to policemen in uniform. Civic pride no doubt motivated the decision,
but the policemen offered low-cost security as well.
Second, the ubiquity of the fast-food hamburger and
its advertising has entered popular culture; a Wendy’s
hamburger commercial with the tagline “Where’s the
beef?” became a line in a presidential debate.
The franchise chain is uniquely American, and
as such it has become a symbol of the emergence
of one common consumption culture around the

Freud, Sigmund

world (sometimes called McDonaldization). As one
example, due to its targeted advertising to children,
the McDonald’s character Ronald McDonald is routinely named as one of the most widely recognized
characters in the world. And the cost of the signature sandwich of McDonald’s, the Big Mac, is used
by Economist magazine to suggest the relative cost
of living around the world. Research has suggested
that franchising is more successful when cultural distance is high, thus confirming that franchise chains
are viewed as an American consumption experience
abroad.
Many critics decry the effect of the standardization of consumer experiences. To such critics, the loss
of roadside restaurants and independent businesses
destroys variation and creates a bland uniformity.
The effort to standardize also brings a manufacturing culture to service: specialized machinery to prepare food, marketing research to choose flavors and
promotions, and mass processing of meat into frozen patties for shipment. On the other hand, rising
incomes brings with it demands for a new and better
quality of service that franchising provides.
Continued growth in the services sector, the desire
for independence and business ownership, and consumer demand for a shared consumption experience
combine to suggest franchising will continue to shape
consumers and culture in the twenty-first century.
Steven C. Michael
See also Branding; Coffee Shops; Department Stores;
Markets and Marketing; McDonaldization; Service
Industry; Spaces of Shopping; Trademarks

Further Readings
Barber, Benjamin R. “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The Atlantic
269, no. 3 (1992): 53–59.
Jakle, John A., Jefferson S. Rogers, and Keith A. Sculle. The
Motel in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. The Gas Station in
America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994.
Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside
Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. New York:
Bantam Books, 1986.
Luxenberg, Stan. Roadside Empires: How the Chains
Franchised America. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.

619

Michael, Steven C. “To Franchise or Not to Franchise: An
Analysis of Decision Rights and Organizational Form
Shares.” Journal of Business Venturing 11, no. 1 (1996):
57–71.
Michael, Steven C. “Determinants of the Rate of
Franchising among Nations.” Management
International Review 43, no. 3 (2003): 267–290.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the
All-American Meal. New York: Perennial, 2002.
Watson, James L. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East
Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

FREUD, SIGMUND (1856–1939)
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian Jew who, forced
into exile by the Nazis, ended his days in London.
Recognized as a genius in his own time, his ideas
were subsequently dismissed, although they are experiencing a revival today.
The fascination with, and trouble brought by,
consumption intertwine Freud’s life and work, from
his early eulogy to the magical powers of cocaine,
to his enduring addiction to tobacco that led to
debilitating mouth cancer. In The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900), he illustrates the distorting power
of the psyche by citing an apparently simple act of
nonconsumption. A butcher’s wife describes a dream
that appears to controvert Freud’s thesis that dreams
are wish fulfillments. She reports dreaming that she
cannot hold a dinner party because it is Sunday, the
shops are shut, and she has no smoked salmon. In
tracing the associations linked to the dream, Freud
discovers that in real life, the dreamer has also
denied herself caviar, which she likes very much and
which her husband has offered to buy for her. He
also learns that the dreamer’s female friend, whom
her husband says he doesn’t fancy because she is too
thin, likes smoked salmon. Freud presents two explanations. The first is that the failed dinner party realizes the butcher’s wife’s unconscious wish to prevent
her friend (and rival) from eating the salmon, thus
gaining weight and becoming more attractive to the
dreamer’s husband. His second explanation is more
provocative. In denying her own desire for caviar in
real life, the butcher’s wife identifies with her female
friend.
The story of the failed dinner party highlights
Freud’s concept of a restless mind that even today
retains its provocative power to challenge the

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relatively narrow view of the consumer as developed
by marketing science. His explanation describes a
person who is subject to unconscious processes of
condensation (identification of the butcher’s wife
with her friend) and displacement (the manifest
meaning of the dream implies that she is denying a
wish rather than fulfilling one). It illustrates too the
repression of desires that are troubling to consciousness and the consequent role of phantasy (spelled
with a “ph” to differentiate it from conscious fantasy) in expressing itself in the dreamwork. Finally,
it highlights the profoundly intersubjective nature of
human identity construction. Although Freud was to
rework his conception of the ego in his later works,
this remains an entity based on the symbolic consumption of otherness by means of the identification,
or ingestion of images of, the other; or consisting of
little more than a composite of the residues of previous identifications. Freud reworked his central concepts while retaining the notion of tension around
a central dichotomy: first, between the action of the
ego and sexual instincts, and later, between eros and
the death instinct.
Reading Freud, one is drawn closer to the Socratic
dialogues of the Symposium than to the method of
modern science. It is thus unsurprising that he decided
that psychoanalysis should not be viewed as a science. His legacy is perhaps more faithfully preserved
in the work of Norbert Elias, Alfred Hitchcock,
and J. G. Ballard than in that of Edward Bernays
and Ernest Dichter, who out his ideas to work in the
interest of government and business, respectively.
John Desmond
See also Collective Identity; Desire; Elias, Norbert;
Identity; Othering; Psychoanalysis; Psychology;
Symbolic Value

Further Readings
Freud, Sigmund. “Distortion in Dreams.” In The
Interpretation of Dreams, edited by Angela Richards,
248–276. London: Penguin, 1977. First published 1900.
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In On
Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited
by Angela Richards, 275–338. London: Penguin, 1991.
First published 1920.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Ego and the Id.” In On
Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited
by Albert Dickson, 351–379. London, Penguin, 1991.
First published 1923.

Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” In On
Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited
by Angela Richards, 58–99. London: Penguin, 1991.
First published 1914.
Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality.” In On Sexuality, edited by Angela Richards,
33–155. London: Penguin, 1991. First published 1905.

FRIENDSHIP
We are all to a greater or lesser degree influenced by
the opinions of others. Apart, possibly, from hermits
and those psychologically inhibited from any social
contact, we all seek to belong to a group or groups
of significant others. By accepting advice or information from key influentials, we are more likely to
receive approval. Conformity is rewarding: by conforming to the norms of the group or of significant
others, we are more likely to be valued as a friend or
colleague. Such conformity and its implied meaningful association with others make friendships particularly important for understanding consumer cultures.
Friendships influence what and how people consume
in terms of communicating and moderating acceptable forms of consumer behavior.
The classical studies that developed these ideas
are Personal Influence by E. Katz and P. Lazarsfeld
(1955) and Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms
by G. C. Homans (1961). These books reviewed
many primary small-group studies: the former
emphasized the two-step flow of communication,
whereby the impact of, say, TV advertising is mediated through opinion leaders who interpret the message for the individual consumer.
In contemporary marketing circles, the notion of
“word of mouth” is central: people are strongly influenced by what they hear from those around them.
However, it is not always recognized that while consumer behavior is, indeed, crucially influenced in this
way, some people’s suggestions are listened to more
carefully than others. It is here that the importance
of friendship becomes significant. Communication
is more effective for an individual when it aids her
in rising in the esteem of her friends. Individuals
conform in their consumer behavior and thus gain
acceptance and friendship in return.
This leads us to a further fundamental sociological fact, namely, friendship homophily. Consumers
are more comfortable with “people like us,” and

Friendship

personal influence in consumer behavior rarely
crosses from one social stratum to another.
The recognition of the significance of the two-step
flow of communication, the unpacking of what constitutes rewarding behavior and the reality of friendship homophily, are all basic to an understanding of
consumer behavior influenced by word of mouth. It
also leads to the crucial importance of understanding the microsocial worlds in which all individuals are embedded. This clearly involves a range of
people—family members, work mates, fellow members of clubs and associations, neighbors, and so on,
as well as, crucially, the friends whose opinions and
advice not only are attractive but also increase the
esteem and acceptance of the individuals subscribing
to them.
Recent research unpacking these microsocial
worlds throws light on a complex issue: Liz Spencer
and Ray Pahl construct the personal communities of
their respondents in response to a question seeking
to discover who were the most important people in
their lives at the present time. While it was certainly
the case that many recognized the importance of
their family and partners, it did not always follow
that all family members held privileged positions.
Some siblings, for example, could also be recognized
as “best friends,” whereas others were of minimal
significance, often based on bad feelings that had
developed over the years. People were quite ready
to nominate friends as being the most important
and significant people in their lives. Unlike parents
or children, friends are consciously chosen, and
this choice carries with it a concern to work on the
friendship to make it mutually satisfying and sustaining. Friends are more likely to be of broadly the same
age and social situation so that their opinions and
attitudes are likely to weigh more than those of a different generation or those who have not shared the
same degree of social mobility. Given this, the more
we understand about the nature of contemporary
friendship, the better we can understand the wordof-mouth impact on consumer behavior.
The word friend is an umbrella term covering
a wide range of actual relationships with different
functions and degrees of emotional involvement. The
idea of a “best friend” might seem to be generally
acceptable, being close to Aristotle’s notion encompassing a special kind of communication—another
self. However, some reject the phrase as carrying
connotations of schoolgirl crushes. Likewise, at the

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other extreme, some refer to quite shallow acquaintances as “friends” when the use of the label may not
be reciprocated or when it is really being used as an
index of popularity. Hence, even if it were possible to
define a hierarchy of friendship salience, the labels for
the different forms of friendship would be unlikely
to acquire general acceptance. Furthermore, there
may be distinct hierarchies along different dimensions. Thus, Aristotle’s “friends of utility”—who
provide specific functions, such as sharing the school
run—may not also serve as Aristotle’s third type as
“friends of pleasure.” So-called fun friends are a distinct category often (but not, of course, always) kept
separate from the other types. This range of different
types of friends may be seen as composing a “friendship repertoire.” Obviously, there can be overlap
between different types (see the detailed discussion
of these distinctions in Spencer and Pahl’s Rethinking
Friendship), and some types will be more significant
than others; this remains an issue for further research.
Despite what was said previously about the
importance of friendship homophily, it is clear that
spatial and social mobility encourages the development of sets of social relationships as people move
through different microsocial worlds in their life
course. One consequence of this is that some friends
with different social trajectories will be living in different parts of the country and will have different
styles of consumption—more lavish than the other
friend could afford, or embarrassingly less affluent,
“tasteful,” or whatever.
Given these difficulties, most market research
tends to assume that people sort and sift themselves
into geographical areas in which styles of consumption are broadly similar and postcodes are taken
as surrogate variables for the other, more complex,
sociological ones.
However, it does not follow that the consumption
of a similar house or car implies similar domestic
and recreational patterns in a variety of other areas.
Friends with special interests may be more significant
than neighbors or even best friends or soul mates.
The person who helps one survive a divorce is not
necessarily equally important in determining a distinctive style of consumption.
We are thus faced with a dilemma: word of
mouth is a crucial determinant of consumer behavior, and friends are more significant than strangers,
but as stated previously, it is not clear which friends
are the most salient. This issue cannot be resolved

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through the study of social networks, since we are
concerned with qualitative, not quantitative, significances. Certainly, there have been studies of community influentials by political scientists, but it does
not follow that such significant opinion formers are
necessarily friends, or that those who influence local
community decisions also influence consumption.
If the effect of friendship on consumer culture is
complex, so, too, is the reverse. A useful review is
provided by Robert E. Lane. He argues that “a priority for friendship over commodities is a promising
route to happiness, an effective protection against
depression, and a step towards a more benign environment” (1994, 529). From this perspective, consumer culture may be seen as damaging to friendship.
However, if people compartmentalize their behavior,
market relationships need not contaminate friendships; however, if time spent in consumption takes
away time spent with friends, consumer culture could
become detrimental to an individual’s ultimate happiness. Time-budget studies do not appear to support
this. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest
that as pressure on time increases from other sources,
those most short of time depend more on significant
others to make their appropriate consumer choices.
A further significant point is that much consumption by its nature is social—eating and drinking
outside the home, attending sports and art activities,
and so on. The consumption that draws people into
the company of friends and acquaintances may thus
be held to be “better” for happiness than goods and
services consumed individually. This is an important
point, since it suggests that consumer culture that
is collectively focused is better for individuals and
society than that which is focused primarily on the
individual. Rather than seeing friendship and consumer culture to be, as it were, pulling against each
other, it may be more appropriate to recognize how
the encouragement of conviviality and the sharing of

collective experiences is a positive part of consumer
culture.
From this point of view, the worldwide financial
and economic difficulties that began in 2008 could
lead to a growth of happiness if people recognize the
advantages of collective consumption. Centers providing cheap meals for the poor and elderly or the
pooling or sharing of consumer goods could encourage greater solidarity and friendly relations. The
implications for friendship of a changing culture of
consumption at a time of recession are a promising
and increasingly urgent topic for research.
R. E. Pahl
See also Belonging; Collective Identity; Economic
Sociology; Food Consumption; Happiness; Social
Networks; Sociology; Taste

Further Readings
Antonucci, Toni C., and Hiroko Akiyama. “Convoys of
Social Relations.” In Handbook of Aging and the
Family, edited by Rosemary Blieszner and Victoria
Hilkevitch Bedford, 355–371. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1955.
Burrows, Roger, and Nicholas Gane. “Geodemographics,
Software and Class.” Sociology 40, no. 5 (2006):
793–812.
Cooper, John M. “Aristotle on Friendship.” In Essays on
Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by Amelie Rorty, 301–339.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Lane, Robert E. “The Road Not Taken: Friendship,
Consumerism and Happiness.” Critical Review 8, no. 4
(1994): 521–594.
McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook.
“Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.”
Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415–444.
Spencer, Liz, and Ray Pahl. Rethinking Friendship: Hidden
Solidarities Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006.

G
being an important public intellectual, Galbraith was
an academic celebrity. In his popular writings and
public appearances, he was an unrelenting advocate
of both liberal values and a critical version of economics. He wrote and narrated a thirteen-part television
series on modern life and economic thought called
The Age of Uncertainty. He also wrote a series of
novels, which were broadly biographical (such as
A Tenured Professor, 1990), and a book on Indian
painting, which derived from his time as U.S. ambassador to India, and he was a contributor to newspapers and magazines as diverse as The New York
Times and Playboy. Because of this diverse array of
interests, Galbraith divided the opinions of those in
his profession. Though he was elected president of
the American Economic Association (1972) and was
a professor of economics at Harvard University for
nearly three decades, his interest in challenging economic orthodoxy and applying economic thinking to
burning social and political questions often distanced
him from some of the technical and mathematical
czars of his discipline.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Galbraith studied agriculture at the Ontario Agricultural College before
moving to take up graduate studies in the field of
agricultural economics at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1932. After completion of his PhD,
he took up an instructorship at Harvard University
in 1936. At the start of World War II, he worked in
the Office of Price Administration. From 1948, he
became professor of economics at Harvard University,
where he divided his time between his residence in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, during nonterm time,
what he called his “unfarmed farm” near Newfane,

GALBRAITH, JOHN KENNETH
(1908–2006)
John Kenneth Galbraith was the most important
public economist of the decades after World War II
and up until the 1970s. He wrote over forty books, of
which a number—perhaps most notably The Affluent
Society (1958)—are regarded as being among the
most widely read books ever written by modern economists. Galbraith’s most famous and accessible works
have since become recognized as fostering changes in
social values and being important precursors to current social attitudes toward the side effects of economic production and growth, consumerism, the
power of corporations, and the influence of advertising. His most important works were characterized
by a maverick style, clarity of thought and expression, and the capacity to generate memorable, incisive
concepts that formed the basis of his reputation as
a slayer of the myths of modern economic thought.
Many have compared his incisive style of critique to
the noted sociologist Thorstein Veblen, author of The
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Galbraith himself
admitted to being a fan of Veblen’s famous work.
In an era of rapid social change and economic
growth, Galbraith led an extraordinary life and was
renowned for his wit, work ethic, and eloquence. He
was a long-time and popular professor of economics
at Harvard University, was an advisor to numerous
U.S. presidents, served as U.S. ambassador to India,
was an influential public intellectual in the United
States, and also wrote a handful of novels. Along with
623

624

Gambling

Vermont. Retiring from Harvard in 1975, he continued to write many popular books, critical and liberal
in tone, intellectually sound and easily understandable in style, which continued to endear him to the
public and sections of the economics profession. In
2000, Galbraith received the Medal of Freedom from
President Clinton. His final book, The Economics of
Innocent Fraud, was published in 2004 when he was
aged ninety-five.
His most important works sought to challenge the
traditional principles of mainstream economic theory
and also confronted many important aspects of what
he called “the conventional wisdom” of capitalist societies. Alongside his economic works, Galbraith wrote
many books that popularized and made accessible
the history of economic theory and that reflected on
contemporary social and political issues of industrial
society such as overproduction, advertising, and corporate power. His book The Affluent Society (1958)
remains one of the biggest-selling works in the history of modern economics and is widely known for
introducing a slew of terms that entered the popular
vocabulary, including the book’s title. In The Affluent
Society, Galbraith highlights the rather perverse situation achieved by Western economies that had solved
the “problem of production” but were beset by a
deteriorating standard of public wealth. The irony of
the affluent society was that increasing private wealth
did not build up a stock of public affluence but only
encouraged the expression of new consumer wants
whose necessity was marginal to the public good.
Among his other important books in economics were
American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing
Power (1956) and The Great Crash 1929 (1955),
but perhaps his most ambitious and widely respected
work was The New Industrial State (1967). In this
work, Galbraith shows how corporations in modern
capitalism attempt to control markets and strengthen
their own position by types of planning, incorporation
of technological structures of production, and vertical
integration. His major charge was that this rendered
classical models of economic competition unrealistic.
Ian Woodward
See also Advertising; Affluent Society; Capitalism;
Commercialization; Externalities; Happiness; Needs and
Wants; Public Goods; Satiation; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash 1929. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. American Capitalism: The
Concept of Countervailing Power. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1956.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. A Tenured Professor. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Economics of Innocent
Fraud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

GAMBLING
Since the late-twentieth century, commercial gambling
has become increasingly popular as a mass form of
leisure and consumption, albeit one that is often controversial and subject to criticism.
In the past fifty years, gambling has undergone a
profound transformation. For much of its history, it
was regarded as economically marginal and politically
corrupt and was criticized by organized religions as an
immoral vice. Games of chance (with the occasional
exception of lotteries) were viewed as wasteful and
often deviant, and legislation was designed to strictly
limit their consumption, particularly among lower
socioeconomic groups. Despite this, gambling was
nevertheless popular and was often carried out illegally.
From around the mid-twentieth century, however,
a gradual shift from prohibition to regulation saw a
more pragmatic approach to gambling, which encouraged the development of gambling as a form of mass
consumption. Since the 1980s, in particular, socioeconomic and cultural changes have meant that the
gambling industry has undergone a period of dramatic
liberalization and deregulation. Economic policies of
neoliberalism have encouraged a reduction of state
intervention in both public and private life and a reluctance on the part of policymakers to regulate markets
or to impose high levels of taxation on populations.
Such policies have encouraged alternative forms of
revenue generation, of which taxing the profits of
commercial gambling is an attractive option. At the
same time, shifts in the fabric of social life, including
increasing secularization, rising relative affluence, the
availability of credit, and the spread of consumerism,
began to undermine arguments about the “immorality” of gambling and created a cultural climate that
was conducive to the proliferation of gambling as a
mainstream leisure activity.

Gambling

A loosening of legal restrictions on promotion and
expansion has resulted in the massive proliferation
of commercial gambling as a global enterprise with
a central place in Western economies. Governments
around the world have legalized lotteries, casinos,
and sports betting, as well as machine-based gambling such as slots and video lottery terminals (VLTs)
as sources of vast profit for both state and commercial
enterprise. At the same time, new technologies such
as the Internet have launched gambling into cyberspace, breaking down national boundaries and posing complex regulatory challenges. Games of chance
have also been increasingly incorporated into mass
tourist and leisure industries. For the latter, casinos in
particular are increasingly seen as part of the whole
tourist experience, built into resorts and attached
to leisure complexes along with cinemas, bars, and
restaurants. In the case of Las Vegas, for example,
gambling itself is the central focus and makes the city
into a destination in its own right. These trends have
led to the incorporation of gambling into the world
economy and the movement of gamblers across fluid
national boundaries.
By the start of the twenty-first century, gambling
has moved center stage to become a global player
in the economies of North America, Europe, and
Australasia. Today, the gambling industry runs as
a billion-dollar enterprise, selling hope, excitement,
and thrills to ever-larger numbers of consumers.
The commercial strategies of market research,
advertising, and branding have been used to develop
a variety of products and opportunities to gamble,
while frequent innovations ensure a regular supply of new and specialized gambling opportunities.
Modern consumers have a variety of products and
experiences to choose from: it is now possible to
gamble on a wide range of occasions, from taking a
day trip to a casino or a family vacation in Las Vegas,
to passing a few hours on a slot machine or buying
into the dream of a big win with a weekly lottery
ticket. Today, games of chance are commodified as
heterogeneous products, offering a diverse range of
choices for ever-increasing numbers of consumers.
The success of commercial gambling has resulted
in the normalization of the activity and an increasing
perception of the gambling industry as a mainstream,
legitimate business selling a commodity—which in
this case, just happens to be chance—as if it were
any other. Likewise, gamblers appear now as regular
consumers—as hedonists, escapists, or risk takers, no
longer immoral, criminal degenerates.

625

The recent shift in the status of commercial gambling has to be seen in the context of the general
transformation of Western societies from industrial,
production-based economies toward those organized
around consumption and the provision of services.
This trend, often described as “post” or “late” modern, is characterized by the elevation of consumption
as an organizing feature of social life, with an elective
affinity to neoliberal ideologies of freedom, choice,
and consumer sovereignty. As Zygmunt Bauman
puts it, we have moved from a “production ethic”
to a “consumption ethic,” characterized by the values of self-fulfillment, hedonism, and desire. Here,
consumption has a crucial role in the creation and
realization of both individual and social identities,
with consumers using the acquisition and display of
commodities to mediate social relationships and to
construct what Anthony Giddens calls a coherent
“narrative of the self”: the ongoing story we use to
make sense of who we are.
In this climate, the expansion of gambling taps
into a wider “consumerist” ethos within culture as
a whole. Not only are games of chance a product of
consumer culture but they also express some of its
most fundamental characteristics, such as the values
of risk taking, instant gratification, self-fulfillment,
and conspicuous consumption. As such, gambling can
be described as a leisure activity with a high degree of
what Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital,”
in that it embodies and expresses many of the dominant cultural values of the time.
A variety of motivations for gambling exist, and
these are as diverse as the types of games themselves.
Winning money is a commonly cited theme, but
there are other reasons, too, including the excitement
and entertainment generated by this form of risk
taking, the sociable aspects that emanate from
spending time with family and friends in gambling
venues, and the provision of an escape from daily
roles and routines.
In particular, gambling is an important form of
consumption for the creation of identity. Games of
chance allow the creation of alternative roles and
personas—the opportunity to present an idealized
version of the self to others. Through the display
of skill and knowledge in games such as poker,
gamblers can win respect and admiration from
their peers. Risk taking in high-stakes games demonstrates character and status while facing up to
opponents and taking on the system can be a way
of “testing the self” in tense situations. Meanwhile,

626

Gardening

the elements of fantasy, dreaming, and imagination
involved in games of chance such as lotteries allows
for the projection of alternatives lives and identities:
the transformation of the self through escapist fantasies of winning.
Despite the proliferation and normalization of
gambling, the activity continues to be controversial
in public discourse. There is disagreement between
those who argue that it is a legitimate commercial
business that creates employment, wealth, and urban
regeneration, and those who regard it as a harmful
social activity that contributes to debt, poverty, and
family breakdown. Much of the research into the
issue has adopted a psychological-medical perspective and has tended to focus on pathological gamblers
as individuals suffering from irrational cognitions,
poor impulse control, and possibly neurophysiological dysfunction. A range of treatment interventions
is designed to counsel and treat such players. And
so, although gambling has increasingly come to be
regarded as a legitimate form of consumption and
mass leisure activity, criticism and controversy continue on psychological-medical grounds today.
Gerda Reith
See also Addiction; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies;
Desire; Hedonism; Identity; Leisure; Moralities;
Postmodernism

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open
University Press, 1988.
Dixon, David. From Prohibition to Regulation:
Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self Identity: Self
and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge:
Polity, 1991.
Goffman, Erving. Where the Action Is: Three Essays.
London: Allen Lane, 1969.
McMillen, Jan, ed. Gambling Cultures: Studies in History
and Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1996.
Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western
Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.
Reith, Gerda, ed. Gambling: Who Wins? Who Loses?
New York: Prometheus Books, 2002.
Reith, Gerda. “Gambling and the Contradictions of
Consumption: A Genealogy of the ‘Pathological
Subject.’” American Behavioral Scientist 51, no. 1
(2007): 33–56.

GARDENING
There have been many studies of gardens, but few
have drawn on theories of consumer culture. Garden
research has traditionally involved the archival examination of larger parks and gardens according to the
various stylistic movements associated with them
through time (e.g., Symes 2006). Here, historical accuracy has generally been prized over conceptual insight,
and concepts of consumer culture have accordingly
remained largely outside the frame. Recent work
has come closer to the experience of modern domestic gardens by examining the various ways in which
people enjoy being in them (e.g., Bhatti 2006). Here,
an interest in cultures of pleasurable plant experience
has shown how they provide an escape from wider
pressures in a way that also necessarily downplays
how gardens can also serve as expressions of consumer taste. Yet domestic gardens actually provide an
interesting case regarding the extent to which certain
notions of consumer culture are imposed upon the
items housed within them, and broader theories of
consumption can benefit from a trip into the garden.
This entry substantiates this claim with particular reference to the contemporary United Kingdom, where
there are still many domestic gardens and where the
popular imagination still commonly portrays the
inhabitants as a nation of keen gardeners.
Some of the worries associated with the rise of
certain consumer cultures relate to the ways in which
they encourage people to buy more than they otherwise need and more than is sustainable for them to
acquire. The underlying premise here, as described
by Martyn Lee, is that processes of marketing and
fashion have largely been successful in encouraging
societies to covet changing arrays of goods where the
implication is that consumers will then soon discard
them in favor of more culturally attractive equivalents. This framework of thinking inadvertently
helps sustain an idea of the good itself as relatively
inert. Because cultural obsolescence was understood
as taking place long before any physical equivalent,
the agency of the purchased item in terms of what
it might practically do was often left out in the
conceptual cold. The assumption was the attribute
of social desirability alighted only momentarily on
items whose physicality was relatively unimportant.
The aim was to understand how this desirability was
manufactured in the media rather than to explore

Gardening

how publics handled the capabilities of the goods
they bought after the moment of purchase.
Within gardens, it instinctively feels difficult to
make this assumption, and this is why gardens are
instructive here. This is because the biological propensities of the plants often found in them mean that owners must often wait for the aesthetic attributes they
desire and tend to their plants to ensure they arrive.
As such, one of the most interesting challenges that
gardens present to the expansion of consumer cultures
relates to the relatively obvious fact that gardens often
contain living things. The question that naturally follows is about the extent to which consumer cultures
encouraging people to buy fashionable goods with
little thought of how they must interact with them
afterward have penetrated this environment. How
easily are the things found in gardens transformed into
the docile medium for the immediate forms of cultural
communication through observed ownership often
associated with the rise of consumer societies?
In the United Kingdom, this question attracted
some attention in the early 2000s when a certain
television format was pushing its way outside.
Previously, there had been an explosion of programs
where designers showed people how to reorganize
indoor rooms at home into arrangements deemed
more immediately stylish or expressive of aesthetic
tastes. These makeover shows then started to spread
outdoors, and this led to some animated discussion
about whether this instant gratification was appropriate in the garden. For some, it was anathema to
the practiced appeal of growing plants over time,
where the pleasure was all about gradually encouraging specimens to be successful. For others, they
beneficially encouraged the public to think about
how they could use these spaces better. For academics interested in consumption, they were instructive
because they indicated a faltering expansion of particular consumer cultures. Were gardens becoming
all about immediate expressions of aesthetic taste
instead of an ongoing engagement with living creatures? The answer would reveal the changing degree
to which particular ways of conceptualizing consumption adhered to this context.
Yet we must tread carefully when examining consumer culture and gardening. This is because people
often like to characterize themselves as “gardeners”
who actively know about plants, instead of crude
“consumers” who merely buy an attractive garden.
In this way, gardens were as much about the process

627

of producing as the quality of the product and a form
of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984), not necessarily about the display of wealth. In surveys, people
were claiming to be keen gardeners in surprisingly
high numbers. Yet the amount of domestic space
devoted to plants, along with the use and replacement of tools, was in decline. This was an interesting
situation, and at the time, garden professionals were
themselves struggling with theoretical ideas about
whether the garden should be understood as housing
reliable consumer goods.
Within many commercial garden centers, for
example, plants increasingly came accompanied by
a guarantee. This phenomenon is interesting because
it testifies to the spread of certain consumer frameworks. Surely, a plant is a living thing, and those
who bought plants would understand their successful survival in the garden would depend on factors
that could never all be anticipated by the salesman.
Indeed, this pleasurable unpredictability is often
deemed the essence of owning plants in terms of waiting and hoping for them to grow. Yet it seemed that
trying to inculcate this kind of enjoyment was proving
too risky for those who must shift units and increase
sales. The assumption was that modern consumers
had no desire to deal with plant unpredictability and
therefore needed guarantees. Garden center managers personally preferred to think of gardens as places
where people learned to love nurturing plants. Yet,
because they felt their market was moving, they were
responding in ways that impeded this possibility. Put
differently, because they believed a certain consumption culture was on the rise, they inadvertently helped
make this so.
Dilemmas such as these deserve attention because
gardens have been belatedly recognized as significant
for a number of wider issues. Domestic gardens, and
what happens in them, are important for agendas
ranging from social well-being and wildlife preservation to water conservation and senses of community.
The extent to which particular ideas about expected
consumption and predictable goods have infiltrated
these places is therefore of more than theoretical
significance, and further studies might follow these
processes elsewhere. Though the Japanese garden is
clearly quite different from the American lawn, both
are liable to be influenced by aspects of consumer culture, and the outcomes are of some consequence. The
jury is out over whether future domestic gardens will
be forcefully organized or lovingly grown. Whether

628

Gender

we will continue to talk about “gardening” or just
“gardens” is itself undecided. Ideas from consumption studies should be useful here because they help us
understand the contextual dynamics involved.
The case of the contemporary garden also has a
wider point to make to scholars in this field. The difficulties associated with placing plants in categories
of docile material culture tell us we should be careful not to ignore the physical properties of the goods
that we buy. Ideas about communicating to each
other with the aid of seemingly passive objects stem
from a previous academic preoccupation with social
representation. Yet doing so is only ever falteringly
done in practice. What does the good physically do?
How must we interact with it? Do we have the time
or inclination to do so? These issues have often been
conceptually downplayed. Yet they are important in
fully understanding acquisition. The domestic garden therefore reminds us to refrain from buying too
wholeheartedly into particular concepts of consumption before exploring how people handle the various
goods they buy and how they plan to live with them
once they all get home.
Russell Hitchings
See also Actor-Network Theory; Comparing Consumer
Cultures; Consuming the Environment; Desire;
Fashion; Happiness; Leisure; Taste

Further Readings
Bhatti, Mark. “‘When I’m in My Garden I Can Create My
Own Paradise’: Homes and Gardens in Later Life.”
Sociological Review 54, no. 2 (2006): 318–341.
Bhatti, Mark, and Andrew Church. “Cultivating Nature:
Homes and Gardens in Late Modernity.” Sociology 35,
no. 2 (2001): 365–383.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Hitchings, Russell. “Approaching Life in the London
Garden Centre: Providing Products and Acquiring
Entities.” Environment and Planning A 39, no. 2
(2007): 242–259.
Hitchings, Russell. “How Awkward Encounters Could
Influence the Future Form of Many Gardens.”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32,
no. 3 (2008): 363–376.
Lee, Martyn. Consumer Culture Reborn. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the
Freezer: A Narrative of Normalisation.” Journal of
Material Culture 5, no. 3 (2000): 301–319.

Symes, Michael. A Glossary of Garden History. Oxford:
Shire Books, 2006.

GENDER
Gender emerged as a major area of interest in the
social sciences in the 1970s. Not that differences
between men and women had previously passed
unnoticed; since the Enlightenment, this entailed an
attention to the cultural and social conditions of women’s disadvantage. Yet the very genealogy of the notion
of gender in the social sciences is linked to the consolidation of feminist thought and the increased awareness that the differences between men and women are
sustained by social institutions, reinforced by cultural
frames, and encrusted with power relations. The term
gender not only corresponds to the need to stress the
social construction of difference but also points to the
fundamentally relational nature of social identities
coded by gender difference: via the notion of gender,
accent is placed on the fact that what is essential is
not so much masculinity or femininity but their varied arrangements and relations. Masculinity and femininity are indeed reciprocally constituted by a system
of relations of conflict and co-operation, force and
consent, repulsion and desire. Gradually, social scientists have come to understand that gender is not yet
another social dimension of difference to be added on
top of other social boundaries (class, ethnicity, generation, etc.) but rather constitutes a deep-seated master identity in everyday life that intersects—sustains
or contradicts—all other social identities and roles.
While it certainly emerged from the desire to explore
the differences between men and women, the notion
of gender has in time problematized the very male/
female dichotomy. This has occurred by revealing the
implicit and yet normatively sustained associations
between gender, sex, and sexuality on which a rigid
dichotomy is grounded. Thus gender scholars have
pointed to the various dimensions of gender identities: their relations to sexuality, on the one hand, and
to sex and sex categorization, on the other. Studies
on sexual identities divergent from the heterosexual
norm have helped problematize dichotomous frames
and arrangements, with gay and lesbian studies as well
as queer theory becoming increasingly visible. Finally,
the notion of gender has helped open up the unity of
the two terms in the dichotomy, pointing to the various “genderisms” (Goffman 1977) that make up the
categories of “man” and “woman,” acknowledging

Gender

how varied, multilayered, and contradictory ordinary
gender identities are.
While it has come to characterize a very lively,
often interdisciplinary, area of study, the notion of
gender has appeared far from given during its fairly
short career in the social sciences. When feminist
thought initially provided a systematic context for
exploring gender, it endorsed a medically derived distinction between sex and gender. Gender was defined
as those symbolic differences that are built on the
biological dissimilarities apparent in the two sexes.
Early socialist feminists were striving to redress the
gender blindness of much classical sociology by conceptualizing the interdependence of capitalism and
patriarchy, but in doing so, they tended to naturalize
the male/female dichotomy at a biological level. Since
the late 1980s, though, an important part of feminist
theory has turned to a more radically constructivist
approach, one wherein culture and everyday practices, including consumption, have become increasingly important. A turn to culture is partly a result of
the influence of post-structuralism thought, identified
with the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Jacques Lacan, and others. Contemporary gender
studies have developed a criticism of the earlier gender/sex division that inscribed sex in a dehistoricized
biological difference. Together with a politics stressing the diversity among women, gender has become
understood not as a cultural representation of a biological given but as the process that produces in the
body the possibility of two distinct sexes.

Gender and the Emergence
of Consumer Culture
While some classic feminist works such as Gayle
Rubin’s The Traffic in Women (1975) proposed to
treat the “sex/gender system” as a whole, others such
as Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971) tried to
open up the system by identifying different underlying structural dimensions, such as production, reproduction, socialization, and sexuality. Contemporary
gender theory, such as that proposed by Raewyn
W. Connell (2002), tends to follow the latter, more
analytical path. Connell identifies four dimensions:
“power relations” as structured by patriarchy, “relations of production” as structured by gender division
of labor, “emotional relations” including sexuality,
and “symbolic relations” including the cultural associations that, for example, link gender codes to dress
codes. To the scholar of consumption, this fourfold

629

identification of gender relations is wanting, insofar
as consumption appears downplayed. Here consumption is largely rendered through relations that
are deemed symbolic or cultural rather than recognized as an institutionalized practice. Indeed, studies
of consumption within the humanities and the social
sciences have shown not only that gender is a crucial dimension of consumption, but also, conversely,
that gender codes, rituals, and identities are realized
through both consumer cultures and practices. The
existing literature has documented the coextensiveness of gender and consumption in at least four
dimensions: (1) places—with, for example, the historical emergence of the bourgeois home as a private site of comfort consumption and the department
store and the shopping mall as public sites of leisured
consumption; (2) media and mediation—with processes such as the gendered consumption of cultural
products, on the one hand, and the representation of
gender codes in advertising and popular culture, on
the other hand; (3) bodies—with a gender-differentiated investment in commercially mediated products
and services for the presentation, care, and transformation of the body having effects on how we perceive gendered bodies themselves; and (4) material
culture—with the growing awareness that the gendering of goods along the circuit of the commodity
greatly contributes to fixing or altering the gender
order and operates from the cradle to the grave.
While there are some studies on the particular
gendering of consumption in non-Western countries,
such as those of Timothy Burke and Laurel Kendall,
the historical unfolding of Western consumer culture
through gender inequality is well documented. The
separation between consumption and production
that has come to characterize capitalism went hand
in hand with a new gendered configuration of the
private/public divide. From early modernity, femininity has been associated with consumption conceived
as a leisured, private activity even when conducted
in public. Indeed, consumption has often been
constructed—to reinforce the complementarities of
the sexes—as a mirror of the sphere of production, a
private rather than public space, feminine rather than
masculine, hedonistic rather than ascetic, and, finally,
frivolous rather than serious. As argued by Anthony
Giddens in his book Modernity and Self Identity
(1991), as modernity advanced, the changing gender
order and the changing configuration of both the
public sphere and the sphere of intimacy have been
associated with the advance of commercialization.

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Gender

Matthew Hilton suggests that consumption has been
viewed as a negative expression of the triumph of the
modern market, which weakens men, turning them
into useless citizens incapable of defending their
own country or participating in politics, while making women superficial and idle, unfit as wives and
mothers. Mica Nava demonstrated that the concerns
generated by the growth of the female presence on
the public scene at the turn of the nineteenth century have led to an assimilation between women and
the “mob,” with women portrayed as an irrational,
sexually aggressive, and voracious mass taking the
public sphere of the department store by storm.
Classic contributions to the early reflection on the
development and nature of modern Western consumer culture, such as Werner Sombart’s, Thorstein
Veblen’s, and Georg Simmel’s, considered the particular position of women. In his celebrated essay
on fashion, Simmel casts the association between
women and fashion in an historic-cultural perspective: the historical weakness of their social position
oriented women toward “comparatively great uniformity,” and fashion was instrumental in enabling
them to express themselves through a shared language, becoming the “valve” through their craving
for “individual prominence” found a space which
was denied them in other fields. Sombart takes a further step back in history. Using art and literature from
medieval Europe and again the Italian Renaissance,
he suggests that there was a link between the “secularisation of love”—its slow but progressive emancipation from religious institutions and rules—the
uses of goods and riches that foresaw luxury, and
a general hedonistic-aesthetic attitude to things. As
love became gradually more justifiable in and of
itself as an “earthly enjoyment” of beauty and the
“emancipation of the flesh,” and so consequently (in
a society still markedly male dominated) there developed a new “hedonistic-aesthetic conception of the
woman and of love for a woman” (1967, 37), then
the doors to all sensory pleasures and their tireless
refinement had been opened. In this view, the development of consumer society was driven not only
by men risking huge amounts of capital to arm the
large commercial transoceanic trading vessels of the
colonies, but also by a specific category of women:
the “courtesans.” These women were not simply lovers but “intelligent and beautiful” ladies who incarnated a new femininity centered on the command
of elegant entertainment and sensuous luxury and

reached the upper-bourgeois strata and from there
gradually spread in society. Veblen’s Theory of the
Leisure Class is even more explicit in stressing power
as a dimension of gender relations within the domain
of consumption. Veblen was first to suggest that the
production/consumption divide that characterizes the
development of the modern economy corresponds
to the harmonization by difference of the sexes in
the bourgeois family: the sphere of consumption—
conceived of as shops, luxury goods, refined tastes,
display, and opulence—was reserved for women,
confined to the role of consumer within the family
and always subject to work as themselves a status
symbol for their husband; the sphere of production,
with its sobriety, was instead restricted to the male
head of the family. Considering the urban industrialized U.S. communities of the late-nineteenth century,
Veblen maintains that the display of riches that had
previously manifested itself in employing vast numbers of servants was now transformed into a division
of labor within the family. With the development of
the bourgeois family, the duties of consumption were
to be fulfilled by wives, whereas it fell upon men to
bring home as much money as possible. Women of
the upper-middle classes became a “subsidiary leisure
class,” whose delicate office was the performance of
“vicarious” leisure and consumption, in the name of
the household and its male head.

The Home, Gender, and Consumption
The home has typically been constructed as a private
context where one doesn’t work but consumes. As
documented by Adrian Forty, from the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the home came to be understood as a comfortable refuge from the pressures of
work, a place where men could express themselves,
comforted by a caring wife who had—above all
else—a decorative function. Forty suggests that the
house came to be seen as a place of nonwork because
of the aesthetic qualities of the goods that were fast
becoming a part of the domestic environment. In
the design of objects, every reference to work and to
instrumentality was abolished, even if an object was
entirely functional. This is the case with the domestic sewing machines that spread widely between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that literally
brought work into the home. To be widely accepted,
sewing machines had to be designed in such a way
as to remove any industrial connotation. This is why

Gender

Singer, one of the most well-known brands, produced
light domestic machines that were small, extremely
refined, and “artistically” decorated to make them a
beautiful ornament for the boudoir. Only in this way
could they remain in tune with the homely atmosphere and seem appropriately feminine.
Although difficult to pin down, housework practices are an integral part of the domestic environment
and are deeply intertwined with domestic consumption, its routines and pleasures, and its gendered structure. In her work on gender, material culture, and the
home in the United Kingdom and Spain, Sarah Pink
provides a complex picture of how gender order is
negotiated and reproduced. Strikingly different from
Spanish kitchens, even the tiniest English kitchen is a
“room to be lived in,” personalized with ornaments,
photographs, and drawings. Also, while foods tend
to be placed out of sight in Spain, in England, food
and drink are used as “expressive objects.” Such
different spatialities prefigure ways of organizing
homework. In Pink’s study, English women rejected
the idea of following a housewifely domestic routine,
insisting that their own spur for doing housework
was a more embodied, emotional need: when in the
mood, they found cleaning “therapeutic.” Spanish
women displayed a different attitude to routine, seeing structured routine as positive, bringing “natural
balance” between different areas of their life. All
in all, in this study, all women differed from men
because they refused traditional housewife identities but saw housework as part of their alternative
embodied femininity, whereas men tried hard to use
traditional masculinity to reframe their housework
practices as “hard work.”
Despite men’s increasing involvement in housework, in today’s Western societies, much of what
passes for consumption is still in fact mediated by
the unpaid work of women and, increasingly, by
their paid domestic services. In her seminal study
on contemporary American families, the feminist
Marjorie DeVault showed the amount of preparation work that women do as housewives, or as
those who effectively fill that role even despite their
professional careers, so that what was bought as a
necessity for the family can effectively be consumed.
She also showed the huge capacity for negotiation
and conflict management that they frequently bring
to bear so that the needs of all household members
come to be accommodated in some way. Women’s
role in servicing and facilitating home consumption

631

is still evident today even in the smallest habits: an
evening spent as a family watching television will
often involve women, mothers, and wives getting up
to replenish their younger and older spectators with
something to drink or snack on; they will rush to the
kitchen in a commercial break to finish washing the
dishes, or they will watch distractedly while writing
the shopping list for the weekly visit to supermarket,
and so on. Likewise, a weekend at home will often
entail some do-it-yourself, cleaning, or decorating—
practices that continuously reframe the spatiality of
the home.
Housework distribution and framing is slowly
changing, although there is a marked diversity and
unevenness of change across professional groups and
nations. In particular, especially among the uppermiddle and upper strata of the U.S. and European
population, there seems to be a trend for the commercialization of care and home services. Clearly, there
is a structural and global dimension to the gendered
commercialization of care, as stressed by Arlie Russell
Hochschild. Care (for children, the old, the sick) is
not rewarded as much as market success, yet it is
necessary and is being increasingly transformed into
paid work, bringing commercialization into intimate
life. Care jobs in the home are typically carried out by
female immigrants, who are often portrayed as essentially more “caring” than Western women. Western
professional women are thus portrayed as pressured
for time, oriented toward their kids’ achievement, and
incapable of being relaxed, patient, and joyful. While
the global fluxes of care workers clearly have mixed
effects (on adults and children, in both developed
and third-world countries), these discourses testify to
what extent the commercialization of domestic work,
emotions, and intimate life is a contested issue. In particular, in spite of the fact that nannies are clearly paid
to love and that, as a result, they may have acquired
considerable expertise in doing so, their capacity for
love is constructed as the natural outcome of some
precommercial cultural endowment, opposed to commercial culture. As Viviana Zelizer points out, this
may reinforce sharp dualities that are inadequate in
describing rather more blurred social relations (within
both the market and the family) and cultural traditions (both Western and non-Western), preserving
an ideology of pure loving parenthood that has gone
hand in hand with the transformation of the nuclear
family into a key unit of consumption in contemporary Western culture.

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Gender

The Media and Gender
The commercialization of feelings concurs with the
spread of cultural goods putting emotions and bodily
processes that had been privatized (such as eroticism,
love, and intimacy) back onto the front stage. As mass
culture and commodities, books and television have
opened up a space for the public display of intimacy,
sexuality, and gender relations and have brought it
back, right inside the home. The home is increasingly
described as a place of “cultural” consumption: the
TV, stereo, computer, and DVD player/recorder sit
alongside more traditional bookshelves, stamp collections, prints, photograph albums, and so on. The
different domestic practices of cultural consumption
are all, each in their own way, profoundly influenced
by the gendered structure of the social institution of
the family. For example, in the London families that
David Morley interviewed, two distinct modes of
watching TV presented themselves: a female and a
male one. Domestic responsibilities and a women’s
self-perception as the guardians of the well-being of
the family meant that they rarely watched television
in full concentration, including their favorite programs. The way television is consumed in the home
thus reinforces the perception that for women, even
for those who are in full-time paid employment, the
home remains a place of work, whereas for men, it
essentially remains a place of rest and detachment
from the responsibilities of work. Indeed, other
forms of typically female cultural consumption are to
be seen against the background of the gender structure of household work. Joke Hermes, for example,
shows that part of attractiveness of women’s magazines are not found in the meanings they convey but
in the way in which they could be read: above all,
they are “easy” to read, not only because they are
simply written but also because they are in “bitesize” formats that can be easily abandoned and then
taken up again during household chores.
As consumers of popular literary genres, women
have often been portrayed as weak subjects, passive,
other-directed, and isolated. This portrayal has been
challenged by a number of studies. For example,
even the readers of pulp romances studied by Janice
Radway are configured as interpretative communities linked to a particular bookshop that worked as
a cultural catalyst and a meeting place. The women
studied by Radway describe reading as a “special
gift” that they allow themselves from time to time.

To understand their experience of consumption,
Radway had to consider the gender asymmetry still
characterizing Western families. While men are supported emotionally by women, women often have to
find for themselves relaxation and reassurance: reading pulp romances is an important contribution to
emotional reproduction for many of them, offering
a respite from the demands made on them as loving wives and mothers. It is precisely in the difference
from ordinary life that reading has its significance:
finding time for oneself in a moment when the home
is quiet, in a particular room, is not only a form of
escape from everyday responsibility but also a space
where one’s own personal needs are granted validity.
Radway emphasizes how difficult it is to determine
whether these pleasures are effectively instruments
of liberation and social change or whether, instead,
they reproduce the structures of gender inequality. Certainly, female reading practices, and reading
groups in particular, have the potential to construct
a space for public awareness inside the private space
of the home and, conversely, provide a platform for
allegedly private issues to find public resonance. This
is part of what Elizabeth Long has noticed in her
study of women’s reading groups in Houston, Texas.
Historically, women’s reading groups catalyzed
organizational, literary, and “sisterly” practices that
gave them the confidence to reimagine themselves,
transforming a literary movement into a movement
for social reform, a development that they attributed
directly to the influence of the books they studied as
well as to the ways that self-organization acquainted
them with the skills of the public sphere. While
continuing a tradition of exclusivity along class and
racial lines, contemporary reading groups in Houston
also encourage members toward a critical appraisal
of the social order: books became both the language
through which women narrate their own experience and the catalyst for serious conversation, full
of innovative understanding and personal insights,
encouraging social relationships and social and political participation.

Gender and Shopping
The ambivalence of consumption as to gender relations is highlighted by the history of the emergence
of modern shopping. From early to late modernity,
shopping places were the public counterpart to the
bourgeois home in the gendered architecture of

Gender

consumer culture: elegant shops, department stores,
and finally malls have all been considered women’s
cathedrals for consumption. Indeed, already in the
eighteenth century, elegant shops were important
places for the development of a modern culture of
consumption heralding a new recreational attitude
to purchasing (which is now taken for granted in the
phrase “going shopping”). They also became a public space in which women were well accepted and
over which they were said to “reign.” Recent literature on both England and France has shown that the
development of elegant shopping places at the heart
of urban environments favored the public visibility
and personal autonomy of middle-class women, otherwise confined in the domestic sphere as mothers
and wives. To go shopping became a new feminine
form of sociability, and with this developed a sense of
purchasing power as a political instrument. As Kate
Davies reveals, as early as the late-eighteenth century,
English women used their purchasing power to support abolitionism; other examples include the emergence of the National Consumer Leagues just before
the turn of the twentieth century in the United States
and the Progressive Movement. Such movements
were broadly successful in inspiring real changes
in legislation regarding work or price control, and
they effectively offered women a possibility to speak
out and act in the public sphere: in their capacity
as “consumers,” women claimed the responsibility
and right to intervene in masculine territories such as
work, trade unionism, and local and national politics. The allure of shopping also has perverse effects,
which appear direr for women: for instance, just like
today’s compulsive shopping, so in the nineteenth
century, kleptomania was construed as a social problem mostly concerning middle-class women.
In today’s societies, shopping is an assorted activity, differently coded according to the specific retail
site and the shopper’s social identity. While both men
and women are involved in shopping, shopping takes
on different meanings according to gender. Research
has shown that men increasingly participate in leisure shopping and that a leisured involvement in
fashion shopping indeed marks new forms. Colin
Campbell’s Shopping, Pleasure and the Sex Wars
(1997) has shown that shopping remains a gender
battlefield for dominant masculinities and femininities. Indeed, in Campbell’s study, women were more
enthusiastic about shopping, and men appeared

633

more annoyed and distant. But these different expressions were sustained by different shopping practices
(women in this study associated shopping more often
with fashion and men with technology) and different
definitions of efficiency and cost-benefit computation
(women tended to consider the time spent wandering around shops as necessary and important, men
instead aimed to minimize shopping time, giving
their own time a higher value). Through these two
different conflicting approaches to shopping, both
gender relations and shopping were reciprocally
defined: thus, as champions of dominant masculinity,
men appeared to women as simply poor shoppers,
while women were described by men as irrational
shoppers. In particular, the dominant association
between leisure and shopping emerged as contested
and qualified by gender. Women described shopping
using frames of meanings borrowed from discourses
on leisure (sociability, fantasy). Men, on their part,
more often resorted to frames borrowed from work
(efficiency, rationality), to the point that they sometimes denied that their practices could actually be
described as shopping.

Gender, Fashion, and Clothing
The enduring relevance of gender dichotomies and
their subversion is also a key theme of the studies
about fashion and consumption. While early feminism had rejected women’s pursuit of fashion as a
dominated activity, the ambivalence of fashion for
women has been underscored by Elisabeth Wilson
in her book Adorned in Dreams (1985). Wilson
noticed that women have also used fashion to appropriate gender codes different from those traditionally associated to femininity and that dress can also
be a source of rebellion and a catalyst for reformist groups, including feminists. For example, at the
end of the nineteenth century, women started to wear
bloomers both to ride bicycles and to make a statement about their right to full citizenship. Much later,
especially in the last three decades of the twentieth
century, working women used male dress codes to
appropriate those expressive qualities normally
attributed to men and to become accepted as competent work colleagues. This has required a complex
negotiation of male and female connotations: the
selective adoption of male codes that convey authoritative images at work, so-called power dressing, has
been a way in which women have eased their access

634

Gender

to professional environments, maintaining some femininity but also restricting sexual connotations. The
structured jacket in somber colors is thus combined
with skirts and high heels, creating an unstable hybrid
between masculine connotations (authority/detachedness) and feminine ones (sexuality/emotiveness) that
women are sometimes able to work in their favor,
but that force them to be constantly more self-aware
than their male colleagues. Of course, this is open to
different interpretations: Susan Bordo, in her book
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and
the Body (1993), prefers a different accent, maintaining that at work women mix male dress with female
accessories to recall their decorative role and to
appear as less dangerous in the career market.
There is evidence, thus, that binary gender coding is still dominant. Even when we consider fairly
casual, ordinary, and apparently unisex fashion items
such as jeans, sexualization along dichotomous lines
is very evident. Roberta Sassatelli shows that jeans
are indeed a heavily sexualized item, especially for
women. These dynamics are quite heavily gendered:
jeans minimize defects and stress appreciated body
parts, but men are more concerned with expressing
bulk and strength, women with concealment and
containment. Women’s concern with concealment
is turned upside down once a woman feels her
favorite jeans have helped her to achieve the appropriate curvy slenderness, and she willingly deploys
them as a seduction device. In a move that grants
women agency only within the terms of an eroticized
male gaze, the successful deployment of seduction is
the ultimate guarantee that an appropriately feminine figure in jeans has been achieved. Femininity
itself is revealed as the ability to create a sexualized
image that draws the gaze to one’s own body.
Research and debate on fashion bring us closer to
another dimension of the interlocking between consumption and gender that has to do with body practices and representation. As Jon Stratton points out,
commodities and their commercial representations
are deeply implicated in the construction of ideals
of the desirable body. In his Gender Advertisements
(1979), Erving Goffman showed that advertising images display gender identities providing a
“hyper-ritualized” image of everyday male/female
relationships as symbolized by body demeanor,
gestures, glances, and so on. During the 1960s and
early 1970s, men were still represented as taller, in
dominant positions, with attitudes of aggression and

power; meanwhile, women were smaller, in positions
of humility, with submissive attitudes. Even the relationship with objects appears unequal: women caress
and lightly touch objects; men hold or grasp. In some
cases, women simply look at an object being used by
a man standing at their side. Clearly, in conveying
information about commodities, images such as these
also suggest the correct gender-specific way of desiring and using them. As such, they appear to stabilize
hierarchical distinctions between men and women.
On the other hand, advertising has always been host
to subversive gender images, and Goffman’s study
itself reports various examples of “subversion” of the
standard gender codes.
It is especially from the late 1970s onward that
advertising rode on the back of the wave of progressive and protest movements such as feminism. While
the display of gender dichotomies still holds, today
advertising increasingly proposes innovative images:
“new men” and “new lads,” on the one hand, and,
on the other, new femininities—women who play
sports, who keep up with men and overtake them;
strong women deeply engaged with their work;
sexually active women; aggressive women who fight
between themselves; and so on. Female emancipation
made it necessary for advertising people to package
different and nontraditional visions of femininity
and to construct women as independent and strong
consumers. As Sean Nixon documents in his book
Advertising Cultures (2003), during the 1990s, new
gender cultures within advertising agencies themselves have contributed to the development of new
visions of masculinity. The “new lad” and the “new
man” portrayed by much recent British commercial
advertising are respectively characterized by an openness to pleasures previously marked as taboo for men
and by a partial loosening of the binary codes that
regulate the relationships between the sexes as well as
heterosexual and homosexual masculinities. All in all,
alongside hegemonic masculinity and femininity, ads
have thus conveyed nontraditional images of gender
to the wider public, even if only to attract attention
of a distracted spectator or to bestow the thrill of the
forbidden onto a brand. These may be subversive,
often marginal images, showing deviant masculinity
and femininity, playing with sexual ambiguity, homosexuality, drag imagery, and camp culture.
Despite these cultural trends, feminist research
insists that the burden of the body is heavier on
women: new forms of sexism are seen as bourgeoning

Gender

when young women claim their commoditized,
eroticized bodies as capital to gain the favors of otherwise powerful men. These attitudes may be seen
as a populist, postfeminist reaction to what feminist scholar Sandra Bartky, in her book Femininity
and Domination (1990), called the fashion-beauty
complex, suggesting that production, marketing,
retail, and information companies work together to
regulate feminine identity. Thus, pressure to conform
to gender ideals goes beyond just advertisements.
Department stores, for example, are spatially segregated by gender, clearly defining for customers which
items should be purchased for men and which for
women. Genres in popular culture have been gendered, so that romantic stories aim at women while
action plots aim at a primarily male audience. For
Bartky, the fact that it’s women who suffer and spend
more time, effort, and thought to conform to body
ideals that are ever-more elusive suggests that they
support the fashion-beauty complex and grant the
financial success of the beauty industry.

635

Taking a material culture angle, we may say
that there are “masculine” and “feminine” objects,
objects appropriated for one or the other sex according to the degree to which they convey femininity or
masculinity. Indeed, the meaning of objects—from
the most hidden and private to the more obviously
technological—is shaped by gender, sexuality, the
life course, and so on. Take, for example, Hillel
Schwartz’s study of hearing aids. During the nineteenth century, hearing trumpets were used only by
men even if deafness was also found among women;
instead, during the twentieth century, hearing aids,
which had become far less visible, were used by both
men and women. However, the virtues of the two
sexes and the defects that the hearing aids were seen
to correct were gender specific. Through using these
objects, advertisements maintained, women could
once again become “good listeners,” whereas men
would “be more able to interact”; women would
be able to recuperate “closeness with their husband
and family,” while men could confront their “lack of
authority” or the trials and tribulations of “work.”

Gender and Material Culture
Coming to the last dimension identified, there is
enough evidence to maintain that material culture is
also deeply gendered. Gender relations, like class, have
important effects on preferences for different commodities. Men and women still consume different things.
For example, Deborah Lupton’s Food, Body and the
Self (1996) shows that meat is seen as a male food
(associated with hunting, force, violence, wilderness,
etc.) and is, at the same time, actively chosen, refused,
or distributed within the family to signal gender
reciprocal boundaries. Likewise, we know very well
that toys are strongly gendered and that often, as in the
case of Barbie dolls, they can be instruments of socialization of particular visions of gender relations, femininity, and masculinity. Not only do men and women
consume things in intertwined but different ways;
through the accomplishment of such differences, masculinity and femininity are continuously constructed,
altered, and reproduced. This is illustrated by Alison
Clark’s book Tupperware (1997), which showed that
the diffusion of home appliances and plastic ware in
postwar Italy, France, and Great Britain promoted a
new vision of femininity defined by a search of autonomy and self-realization that contrasted with traditional
visions of the housewife while anchoring women’s to
traditionally female roles within the family.

Conclusion
Many of the studies on gender and consumption
have come to show that we cannot fully understand
them without referring to the complex intersecting
of gender with other dimensions of social identities.
Intersectionality—and in particular the interplay
between gender, class, and ethnicity—is becoming a
feature of much recent literature on gender and consumption. Fashion choices of both men and women
have been shown to be largely coded by their class
belonging. Ethnicity greatly influences how boys and
girls are socialized to shopping and consumption.
Ideals of respectable comfort and refined practical
gentility that stand at the root of modern homemaking are not only implicated in the construction of
gender identities but are also important features of
the emerging middle-class cultural identity. All in all,
studies about gender and consumption have shown
that gender is a social construction that shapes practices of consumption while being constructed by such
practices. The study of gender as an underlying, master identity and an ongoing doing that is realized in
consumption calls for a greater awareness of intersectionality and ambivalence. Today research on gender
and consumption appears to move toward the opening of gender as an analytical category: looking into

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Gender Advertising

the details of practice and representation researchers
could show that certain attributes of masculinity or
femininity may be resisted at a level and endorsed at
another, that new gender codes are developing along
with the continuous relevance of old dichotomies,
and that these codes are rendered differently across
different practical domains, allowing for simultaneous change and stability in society’s gender order.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Femininity; Feminist Movement; Gender
Advertising; Gender and the Media; Gendering of
Public and Private Space; Sexuality; Women’s
Magazines

Further Readings
Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Luxury Women:
Commodification and Cleanliness in Modern
Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Connell, Raewyn W. Gender. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Davies, Kate. “A Moral Purchase: Femininity, Commerce,
Abolition, 1788–1792.” In Women and the Public
Sphere: Writing and Representation, 1660–1800, edited
by E. Eger and C. Grant, 133–162. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
DeVault, Marjorie. Feeding the Family. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991.
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desires. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1986.
Goffman, Erving. “The Arrangement between the Sexes.”
Theory and Society 4 (1977): 301–332.
Hermes, Joke. Reading Women’s Magazines. Cambridge:
Polity, 1995.
Hilton, Matthew. “The Female Consumer and the Politics
of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain.” The
Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 103–128.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Commercialization of
Intimate Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003.
Kendall, Laurel, ed. Under Construction: The Gendering of
Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of
Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of
Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2003.
Morley, David. Television, Audience and Cultural Studies.
London: Routledge, 1992.
Nava, Mica. “Women, the City and the Department Store.”
In The Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and
Colin Campbell, 56–91. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1997.

Pink, Sarah. Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and
Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy
and Popular Literature. London: Verso, 1987.
Sassatelli, Roberta. “Indigo Bodies: Fashion, Mirror Work
and Sexual Identity in Milan.” In Global Denim, edited
by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, 127–144.
Oxford: Berg, 2011.
Schwartz, Hillel. “Hearing Aids: Sweet Nothing or an Ear
for an Ear.” In The Gendered Object, edited by
P. Kirkham, 43–59. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1996.
Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In On Individuality and Social
Forms, 294–323. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1971. First published 1904.
Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published 1913.
Stratton, Jon. The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and
the Erotics of Consumption. Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2000.
Zelizer, Viviana. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.

GENDER ADVERTISING
Gender and advertising focuses on the way in which
women, and more recently men, are represented in
paid-for commercial messages designed to encourage consumers to purchase the product being promoted. In the Anglo-American world, the topic has
been viewed as important in respect of morality since
the end of the nineteenth century, when some advertisers were accused of using images of scantily clad
women to sell unrelated products. From the 1960s,
an additional concern was the way in which restricting the image of women in advertising to that of sex
object or housewife limited the aspirations of women
by presenting them with a limited range of roles with
which to identify. More recently, concerns over the
representation of women have been joined by concerns over the representation of men.

The Representation of Women
The earliest forceful critique of the advertising industry as contributing in a major way to the oppression
of women came from Betty Friedan, who in the early
1960s set out to investigate what she called “the
problem that has no name,” the ennui pervading
the lives of many American women in the wake of

Gender Advertising

World War II. For Friedan, one of the main causes of
this dissatisfaction was advertising, which, instead of
showing women how new labor-saving devices (or
even premade pie mix) could give them the free time
to become astronomers or astronauts, offered them
only the possibility of being better wives and mothers. This critique provided the backbone of feminist
attacks on advertising throughout the 1960s and
1970s, when women were fighting for the right to
access jobs that had been the traditional preserve of
men and seeking equal pay for equal work.
Two further influential critiques of the representation of women in advertising were published in the
late 1970s. Erving Goffman used content analysis to
demonstrate that the problem was not only sex-role
stereotyping but also the way in which the composition of ads (for example, the relative size of male and
female figures and their relationship to one another)
presented women in terms of deference and subordination, and in a manner he described as “childlike.”
Judith Williamson turned to semiotics (a technique
used to decode the meaning of ads), allied to psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and Marxism,
to uncover what she saw as the “root meaning” of
a number of ads—concluding once again that ads
presented women as limited to the roles of either
sex object or domestic drudge. This work was considered important, as research—for example, that
carried out in the United Kingdom in 1990 by the
Advertising Standards Authority—indicated (as both
Friedan and Williamson had argued) that advertising
played an important role in establishing unrealistic
views of the way women should look and behave.
In recent years, the once-powerful second wave
feminism critique has been replaced by a renewed
focus on gender difference, popularized by John Gray
in a series of books under the generic title Mars and
Venus. This focus has been supplemented by a widely
held belief that most (if not all) of the goals of feminism have been achieved and that women now live
in a “postfeminist” era in which feminism (although
rarely going by that name) and femininity are no longer incompatible. In terms of gender and advertising,
this has disarmed the critique of advertising that uses
highly sexualized images of women—alleging that
such images are now produced with a knowing edge,
with women exploiting their own sexual power rather
than being exploited. Perhaps the best-known example of this type of advertising is the Wonderbra campaign that ran in the mid-1990s. The most famous of

637

these showed the model Eva Herzigova in black lacy
underwear looking down at her bra-enhanced cleavage alongside text that read, in huge capital letters,
“HELLO BOYS!” Numerous critics have claimed
that what made this ad (and others in the same series)
different from what had gone before was the multiple
ways in which the ad could be read by the viewer. In
particular, they argued that the ads convey the possibility that it is up to women to choose to become
sexually desirable, thus shifting the location of power
from the bearer to the object of the look.
Since the 1990s, the world of advertising has
showcased a much broader range of roles for
women. Rosalind Gill has argued that the traditional
image of “wife-mother-housewife” is being replaced
by images of sexually assertive, confident, and ambitious women who exert their “freedom” through
consumption. Certainly, it is no longer unusual to
see women represented in advertising as occupying a
range of powerful roles in public life. Indeed, it could
be argued that whereas, in the past, women’s role in
public life was underplayed, the world of advertising now showcases a postfeminist utopia in which
women have rather more power and influence (for
example, in the boardroom) than can be supported
by a consideration of the evidence.

The Representation of Men
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the emergence of masculinity studies resulted in a focus on
the changing representation of men in advertising.
In 1985, a 1950s-themed ad for Levi Jeans, known
as “Launderette,” featured Nick Kamen stripping
down to his boxer shorts to the strains of Marvin
Gaye’s “I Heard It through the Grapevine.” This ad
is regarded widely as emblematic of a new focus on
the male body as a site of erotic contemplation—men
no longer just looked; they were also to be looked at.
Advertising still used sex to sell—but there was growing gender equality in that men, as well as women,
were now being presented as sex objects. Indeed, by
the early 1990s, some critics were claiming that the
new stereotype was that of “girls on top” and that
men were now the target of advertising’s humor.
One of the many ads cited as evidence of this
trend was an ad for Coca-Cola known as “11 o’clock
appointment,” which showed various female office
workers and executives awaiting the appearance of
the “body beautiful”—a handsome young laborer,

638

Gender and the Media

without a shirt, drinking his can of Diet Coke. Yet
other critics have given a more complex reading of
this ad—noting that the class and power dynamics
contained within the ad are not straightforward, with
the man’s lack of awareness of being looked at, and
the overall comic tone of the ad, undermining the possibility that this man is being portrayed as a sex object
in the same way that women have been traditionally
portrayed. Whatever reading is adopted, it is clear that
the increased sexualization of the male body in advertising has not been at the expense of the objectification
of women. The best that can be said is that both men
and women are now equally subject to objectification.

Future Directions
The belief that sexual objectification can be seen as a
positive choice has disarmed much of the traditional
critique surrounding gender and advertising. Yet
there remains concern that the bodies being objectified are those of young, slim, toned (and predominantly white) individuals. As a counter to this, some
brands have begun to focus on “real” bodies. Nike’s
“Get Real” campaign and Dove’s “Real Women”
have sought to appeal to women by using a broader
range of models, but it remains to be seen whether
this trend will continue.
As the range of representations of women has
grown, so too has the range of representations
of men. Studies following on from the work of
Goffman indicated that men were also subject to sexrole stereotyping. Today, it is not unusual to see men
represented as caring partners and loving fathers as
well—but it remains the case that men are rarely seen
as responsible for tasks associated with day-to-day
household maintenance such as cooking, cleaning,
and shopping. If it is the case that gender representation in advertising contributes to expectations of
appropriate gender behavior, then this should remain
a cause of concern.
Dee Amy-Chinn
See also Advertising; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Domestic
Division of Labor; Feminism and Women’s Magazines;
Gender and the Media; Semiotics; Sexuality

Further Readings
Advertising Standards Authority. Herself Reappraised: The
Treatment of Women in Advertising. London: Author,
1990.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin,
1963.
Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity,
2007.
Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. London:
Macmillan Press, 1979.
Nixon, Sean. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and
Contemporary Consumption. London: University
College London Press, 1996.
Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology
and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Marion
Boyers, 1978.

GENDER

AND THE

MEDIA

The Industrial Revolution in Europe and later the
United States resulted in the separation of home and
work, splitting the production and consumption processes with production moving outside the home
and consumption remaining primarily in the home.
Industrialization resulted in the mass production of
household goods, many of which were previously
produced inside the home by women or by the
family unit. The concomitant movement of work from
farm to factory and residence from rural to urban also
contributed to the shift in women’s primary role as
producer of household goods to that of consumer
decision maker for the family unit, creating separate
spheres of influence for men and women. Particularly
among the middle and upper classes, women’s role
turned from that of producer of goods and services
to consumption manager for the household.

Media and the Female Consumer
Mass production requires mass consumption; mass
consumption requires mass media to generate mass
consumer demand for mass-produced goods. The
history of mass media parallels the history of industrialization as innovations in technology made books,
newspapers, magazines, and later radio and other
media technologies widely available for purchase.
Early media targeting women, including nineteenthcentury women’s magazines, played a significant role
in the primary definition of women as consumers
in the industrializing economies of Europe and the
United States. For example, the origins of the Ladies’
Home Journal can be traced to a women’s column
in Tribune and Farmer that reprinted articles from

Gender and the Media

other publications and offered housekeeping advice
to the wives of its male subscribers. Publications such
as the Ladies’ Home Journal assisted women with
the transition from producer to consumer, guiding
women to take seriously the immense responsibility
of selecting goods for their families. Women needed
to be taught how to shop, to make smart purchasing
decisions, and to use these produced appropriately.
Women’s role as consumption managers was well
established by World War I. By the 1920s, estimates
suggest that women purchased more than 80 percent
of goods consumed within the household. As early
advertising and consumer researchers learned that
women were largely responsible for household purchasing, they developed more effective ways to reach
female consumers, drawing on emerging psychological research on women. Roland Marchand describes
advertisers’ view of “consumer citizens,” the “emotional, feminized mass” of consumers who could be
most effectively reached at the emotional rather than
rational level. Advertising and marketing campaigns
emphasized women’s purchasing as their most important contribution to the family and household. Soap
operas, sponsored by companies such as Procter and
Gamble, targeted housewives with their story content
and advertising, first on the radio and later television.
As a target market for product advertising, women
have been a driving force in determining a substantial
amount of media content, from magazines and radio
to television and the Internet.
Throughout the twentieth century, the mass
media has used a variety of symbols of femininity
and femaleness that would appeal to women as
mothers, housewives, citizens, and, most importantly, consumers. The newly enfranchised woman
of the 1920s was used to sell women a variety of
products, including cosmetics, clothing, and automobiles. The new woman was an educated, savvy
consumer whose independence and freedom was
symbolized in the media by the automobile rather
than the voting booth, notes E. Michele Ramsey.
Media during World War II defined women’s purchasing decisions as a significant contribution to the
war effort, fighting on the “second front line” at
home in their kitchens, according to Mei-ling Yang.
The postwar world promised American housewives
a consumer’s paradise for women filled with technologies to virtually eliminate the arduous nature of
housework. The wartime glorification of women’s
role as housewife praised women for their service

639

to family and country, but postwar reality failed to
liberate American women from their kitchens and
laundry rooms. Postwar media messages portrayed
housewives as “domestic managers” using new
appliances and gadgets to increase the efficiency of,
but not freeing women entirely from, housework.
Media symbols of femininity and femaleness have
centered on two themes defining women as consumers in the private sphere and within the public sphere:
the mother/wife at home and the liberated woman
in the public world of business and leisure. These
themes are often intertwined, as with the “Super
Mom” image of the 1980s, which portrayed women
juggling both home and work responsibilities.

Hearth and Home
First, media consistently ties women’s roles within
the home to their roles as consumers. Images of
women interacting with their husbands and children
or engaged in housework dominate these appeals. A
classic example is Donna Stone, the lead character
in the 1950s sitcom The Donna Reed Show, whose
daily life consisted of cooking, cleaning, and solving
the emotional troubles of her husband, children, and
friends. The emphasis media place on women’s family
responsibilities continues today. Market fragmentation has resulted in an increase in niche advertising
in recent decades, with uneven results, according
to Maria Bailey and Bonnie Ulman. In their book,
Trillion-Dollar Mom$, Bailey and Ulman criticize the
niche focus, reminding industry professionals of the
unending potential of the “Mom Market,” a $1.6
trillion spending demographic. To reach them, the
authors endorse the use of the same themes dominant in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
appeals to the female consumer: body image, food,
time and time saving, family enrichment, family
health, and the needs of her children. The book’s message is reminiscent of Vance Packard’s advice in his
1957 The Hidden Persuaders for producing ad copy
which targeted consumers’ “eight hidden needs.”

Commodity Feminism
Women’s roles outside of the home, within the economic and political realm, are likewise connected to
their roles as consumers. Women’s responsibilities as
citizens were characterized by the media in terms of
their consumption decades before enfranchisement.
Women’s suffrage, World War II, and second wave

640

Gendering of Public and Private Space

feminism provided new imagery for advertisers and
marketers already defining women’s political function primarily in terms of their purchasing power:
selling political liberation and economic independence through the consumption of goods and services. Robert Goldman is credited with coining the
term commodity feminism to refer to the use of feminist ideologies and images in commercial media to
sell products. Goldman asserts that this phenomenon
developed in the 1980s, but there is evidence that
the connection between consumption and women’s
empowerment has a much longer history. In the
1970s, for example, the Virginia Slims cigarette slogan “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” and its associated print ad campaign showed modern, professional
women smoking adjacent to black-and-white images
of women illustrating women’s oppressed past.
Liberation was not just about the freedom to vote
or a career opportunity; it was about the freedom to
purchase and to consume.
Women’s growing economic independence is still
defined as a freedom to consume, where political
empowerment is equated with consumer empowerment. Images of high-powered female executives
sell clothing, cosmetics, perfume, and luxury items.
Simultaneously, the “girl power” movement for teen
and preteen girls has been appropriated in part to
define empowerment through commodity consumption, notes Sarah Banet-Weiser. These images exist
alongside more traditional messages for women
regarding their primary responsibility to home and
family. Women continue to be defined first and foremost as consumers by the media. Women are consumers when they are home with family, engaged
in housework, driving their sport utility vehicles to
soccer practice, making deals in the business world,
caught in a romantic embrace, or spending a night on
the town. Political and economic advances for women
continue to be settings and props for selling products
to women in advertising and commercial media.
Tawnya Adkins Covert
See also Advertising; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice;
Domestic Division of Labor; Feminism and Women’s
Magazines; Feminist Movement; Gender; Gender
Advertising; Identity

Further Readings
Bailey, Maria T., and Bonnie W. Ulman. Trillion-Dollar
Mom$: Marketing to a New Generation of Mothers.
Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2005.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “Girls Rule! Gender, Feminism, and
Nickelodeon.” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 21, no. 2 (2004): 119–139.
Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
Fox, Bonnie J. “Selling the Mechanized Household:
70 Years of Ads in Ladies Home Journal.” Gender and
Society 4, no. 1 (1990): 25–40.
Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream:
Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985.
Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: The
David McKay Company, 1957.
Ramsey, E. Michele. “Driven from the Public Sphere: The
Conflation of Women’s Liberation and Driving in
Advertising from 1910 to 1920.” Women’s Studies in
Communication 29, no. 1 (2006): 88–112.
Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home
Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1995.
Waller, Mary E. Popular Women’s Magazines, 1890–1917.
PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987.
Yang, Mei-ling. “Creating the Kitchen Patriot: Media
Promotion of Food Rationing and Nutrition Campaigns
on the American Home Front during World War II.”
American Journalism 22, no. 3 (2005): 55–75.

GENDERING OF PUBLIC
PRIVATE SPACE

AND

Gendering of public and private spaces refers to the
superimposition of gender meanings on the distinction between public and private space. The meanings
of the public/private distinction have changed over
time and within various cultures, and the very publicness and privateness of places are conditional and
contingent. In Western political thought, especially
in those societies that have inherited the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment, institutions
like the state, the market, workplaces, and, more
generally, all spaces of discussion or implementation
of government politics or of the principles of living
together fall into the category of the public sphere;
the household and the family, and more generally the
realm of intimate relations, are considered as the private sphere. The two terms of this dichotomy have
historically been identified with qualities attributed
to men and women, respectively. The public domain

Gendering of Public and Private Space

is considered as the intrinsic domain for rationality,
justice, objectivity, meritocracy, austerity, universalism, and competition, which have been traditionally considered as proper male qualities; the private
domain has been identified as the site for irrationality, intimacy, emotions, sexuality, and particularistic
attitudes, traditionally regarded as typically feminine.
From another perspective, women have been socially
constructed as naturally suited for the private sphere
and unsuited for public activity, and men have been
considered as public citizens par excellence: their role
as fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers were not to
be taken into public life.
The public/private dichotomy has been the justification for creating separated social spaces for men
and women. This division has been further fueled in
industrial capitalism and liberal economies, as the scale
of manufacturing increased during the late-eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in Europe. The industrial
production and distribution of goods could no longer
be organized around a family life based on the shared
work of wives and husbands (in artisans’ shops, merchants’ businesses, or agriculture) and was taken out
of the household, in a world of public affairs apart
from the domain now identified as “domestic.” This
reorganization of labor, and the social and economic
stratification and specialization that followed, pushed
men and women into a gendered segregation of
roles: men in the role of unique breadwinner devoted
to the paid work and the public life; women in the
role of main homemakers devoted to the managing
of the household and child caring. Therefore, each
of them was assigned to a distinct space, both material and symbolic. The bourgeois public sphere that
emerged across Europe in various locations, including coffeehouses, literary salons, and philanthropic
and professional associations, where people could
gather and discuss matters of common concern, as in
Jürgen Habermas’s historical account, developed also
through the exclusion of women (and lower strata of
society) from both the public spaces and access to literacy. Economic production soon became formalized
as a male-dominated labor market, and public institutions systematically excluded or oppressed women,
often with legal interdictions. Access to economic and
administrative institutions for women was mediated
by male husbands, fathers, or brothers. Legal restrictions to public visibility or speaking, to suffrage, to
autonomous commercial activities, and to property
ownerships confirmed that public spaces were far
from being inclusive. Spatial architectures themselves

641

have served as expressions of women’s distance from a
male public and limited mobility. The phenomenological experience of the flaneur is extremely gendered as
it was an opportunity effectively limited to men: the
lack of female public lavatories and resting places in
the streets during much of the nineteenth century in
the name of middle-class decorum and women’s static
nature is evidence of the exclusive nature of modern
public space.
At the same time, the bourgeois ideal of womanhood was based on a specific model of domesticity
that was in turn regarded as a private matter: the
concerns that attended the domestic sphere were
considered beyond political intervention and not
worthy of public discussion. The family management was consequently dehistoricized, and women
were assigned to their allegedly natural functions.
Conversely, women themselves were seen as comparatively passive, dependent, emotional, nurturing,
and therefore constructed as unsuited for any competition and rationality-driven dimension.
The cult of domesticity thus became an intrinsic
part of the ideal of both womanhood and bourgeois
private life by the mid-nineteenth century. Farmers’
wives continued as active economic partners on their
families’ holdings, and urban working-class wives
were also expected to contribute to their households’
incomes. But European urban bourgeois women
were assigned to the role of ladies and housewives
without any role in income-producing activities, and
this gradually became an ideal for middle-class culture in Europe and the United States. Women were
to be devoted full-time to social engagements and
childrearing, possibly with the help of servants, and
segregated into their houses. They were assigned to
the role of nurturer and household manager, whose
main task was to transform home into the refuge for
the male breadwinner coming home in the evening
and the most harmonious and well-ordered place for
the children to grow up. The creation and maintenance of class boundaries depended on the styles of
household management and family life, and the role
of women in transforming a private space in a classidentity marker became crucial. Specific aspects of
housekeeping were assumed as indicators of respectability: spick-and-span floors and furniture, spotless
and ironed clothes, clean tablecloths and household
linen, strictly scheduled activities for the family
members, and ornaments that could prove the housewife’s good taste became the sign of women’s being
fit for the role of nurturers and caregivers. Also, the

642

Gendering of Public and Private Space

spotlessness and propriety of rooms such as the parlor and the kitchen were the occasion for the good
bourgeois housewife to demonstrate her skills. At the
same time, women’s unpaid work was to be occulted:
the bourgeois house was not to display signs of their
domestic work. The home was to be identified as a
space where production was banned and consumption was flaunted. This was true also in the design
and aesthetic qualities of goods placed in the domestic environment: manufacturers designed domesticity into their machines in the nineteenth century by
eliminating references to mechanization and instrumentality, as in the case of sewing machines. More
broadly, the private space was constructed as a sphere
of consumption opposed to work, and the bourgeois
housewife had the task to display this opposition. The
distinction between production and consumption was
used to reinforce the ideal of complementarity of genders in bourgeois family, as Thorstein Veblen noted,
since production and consumption were assigned to
separate, gendered social spaces.
The lady was primarily responsible for the family’s good taste in consumption and use of goods. The
overall presentation of the household through the
women’s organization of the domestic space helped
build the moral boundaries of bourgeois families,
thus distinguishing them from both the aristocratic
and the working class. The successful fulfillment of
class imperatives relied on women’s ability to manage private spaces. Consequently, the cult of true
domestic womanhood was both a consequence of
the rise of bourgeoisie and a vital component in the
reproduction of bourgeoisie collective identity.
The process of gendering public and private
spaces was therefore fed by both men’s power prerogatives in public roles and the cult of domestic
life. It subsided in times of crisis and war, due to
governments’ tendency to identify women as symbols of national unity and the necessity of women
substituting for mobilized men in waged workplaces.
But it reemerged in the United States and Europe during the interwar period and then in the 1950s, after
the end of World War II, when women were asked
to return into their homes to give jobs to returning
soldiers. In this period, improvements in technology
and increasing real incomes allowed working-class as
well as middle-class women to share the cult of gendered domesticity. The media played a crucial role in
reinforcing the idea of separate tasks in separate spaces,
by cherishing the ideal of the female homemaker and

consumer and the male breadwinner and producer.
The consequences of this ideology have been longlasting. Even if women’s participation in the labor
market has increased, gender occupational segregation and concentration of women in social and care
jobs is still considered by many authors more an
extension of women’s private role than a transgression of the old public/private space distinction.
Recently, a number of historical accounts have
nonetheless reconsidered the extent of the effective
process of gendering of public and private space in
capitalist economy. It has been stated that the assumption that capitalist man “needed a hostage” in the
home has been more useful as an analytical tool
rather than empirical evidence: the idea that men’s
and women’s agricultural work in precapitalist societies was interchangeable has not been sufficiently
proved; bourgeois men often worked in or near their
homes, while women’s duties brought often them into
the public sphere; and practices in the private sphere
have been the occasion for nurturing a sense of gendergroup solidarity. From this perspective, the gendering
of spaces should be read essentially as a powerful ideology barring women from most occupations, protecting men from household work, and keeping private
experiences out of the public and political debate, more
than a detailed description of practices and events. The
distinction between a public and a private sphere has
been the target of many feminist movements, under
the slogan “the personal is political.” Because of these
pressures, the gendered boundaries between public and
private spaces have been called into question. There
have been political efforts, through legislation, cultural
movements, and affirmative actions, to bridge the gender gap in the participation and positioning in the labor
force, to promote women’s political participation, and
to encourage men’s participation in child caring and
domestic work.
Rossella Ghigi
See also Civil Society; Domestic Division of Labor;
Flaneur/euse; Gender; Geography; Households;
Identity; Spaces and Places

Further Readings
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes.
London: Hutchinson, 1987.
Landes, Joan. Feminism, the Public and the Private.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 2007.

Generation
Vickery, Amanda. “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A
Review of the Categories and Chronology of English
Women’s History.” The Historical Journal 36, no. 2
(1993): 383–414.

GENERATION
Generation in social sciences is usually regarded as
equivalent to birth cohort or age cohort, a group of
individuals born in the same time period. A concept
of generation is thus contextualized both within the
historical time and within the company of coevals.
It is nowadays widely accepted that a birth cohort
comes to have social significance as a generation by
creating a distinctive cultural or political identity.
Therefore, a common way of explaining age differences in social and cultural contexts is to define
age-related distinctive features as generational characteristics. For consumer cultures, generation is an
important concept, because generational identities
typically manifest themselves in attitudes and practices related to consumption. Particularly when
comparing the attitudes and practices of young and
elderly people, one usually refers to generational differences. However, there are some empirical problems in these interpretations.
Maybe the most well-known theorist interested in
social generations was Karl Mannheim. In his essay
“The Problem of Generations,” Mannheim emphasized the social and political role of generations in
historical change. According to Mannheim, each generation experiences certain social and cultural events
from a distinct viewpoint. Generations are held
together by their joint experiences of (traumatic) historical events, and collective identities of generations
are formed by these experiences. Mannheim stressed
the importance of the events that occurred in youth.
The more dramatic and traumatic the events in the
youth period were, the stronger and more persistent
was the generational identity shaped by the events.
Mannheim also argued that generations radicalize
by traumatic experiences and thus get the strength to
change society with new political and cultural visions.
Following the ideas of Mannheim, warfare such
as world wars, revolutions, dictatorships, and massacres should be especially important for the formation of generational consciousness. Also, nationalist
movements are thought to have connections to social
and political generations. Since historical periods

643

and events vary significantly, all generations are not
equally active and do not necessarily act strategically
to bring about change. June Edmunds and Bryan S.
Turner see a certain pattern of activity among successive generations. An active generation (generation for
itself) is likely to be followed by a passive one (generation in itself) that inherits changes produced by the
predecessor. In Western societies, this succession is
said to be particularly obvious for the postwar “babyboomer generation,” which is regarded as a “strategic” generation in many ways, and the succeeding
“Generation X,” which is said to be less fortunate
and more passive (Edmunds and Turner 2005, 562).
Ronald Inglehart distinguishes successive generations according to their material values: materialistic and postmaterialistic. The degree of materialism
depends on whether the generation has grown up
fighting for scarce material resources or not. Inglehart,
too, emphasizes the baby boomer generation in particular. The values of baby boomers are nonmaterialistic, whereas the parents of the baby boomers who
experienced the war had more materialistic values.
Pierre Bourdieu saw the contradictions between generations also important in cultural transformations.
According to Bourdieu, intergenerational competition over social, economic, and cultural resources
produces significant social change. Thus, according
to many theorists, there is necessarily a “generation gap,” or at least there are very different values
between the generations.
One important question, however, is how generational activity should be defined, if it is assumed that
the generational succession necessarily includes alteration of activity levels of the generations. Another
question that also arises is whether a generation really
needs collective consciousness and traumatic memories to become an active generation. Furthermore, can
only politically active generations with contrasting
values to the previous generation bring about social
change? Consumer cultures and everyday practices
of generations may result in significant changes in
people’s lifestyles, too, with changes related to new
technology as a recent example.
The notion of generation gap is also problematic.
Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone argue that the attitudes of older generations toward the behavior of
younger generations are to a great extent a result of
the “golden age” view of history, which tends to have
a ring of nostalgia when talking about the past. The
impression “in my day” usually refers to the person’s

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Generation

youth or young adulthood as the “good old days.”
The shift from the golden age to the present results
often in an apocalyptic vision of a loss of values and
standards. However, generations have traditionally
adopted the values of previous generations. This is
particularly obvious in the transmission of political
or religious values, according to Joseph DeMartini.
This, however, is not necessarily in contrast with generational consciousness.

Generations, Values, and Consumer Cultures
As described previously, generations are commonly
thought to be carrying the sociohistorical world
of their youth with them throughout their lives.
Therefore, generations are usually named after the
occasions that had impact on their generational consciousness when they were coming of age. Another
naming strategy refers to the demographic, social,
and political conditions of their birth. The names of
the generations vary somewhat in different countries
and in different contexts.
The generation born before the 1920s is usually
called the war and depression generation, since it
experienced two world wars. The generation born
between 1920 and 1940 is often called the great transformation generation, sometimes also war generation
or postwar generation after their youth experiences.
The values of the generations born before the 1940s
are usually regarded as very traditional. Being young
during periods of scarce economic resources, their
attitudes toward consumption are thrifty but materialistic in the sense of the importance of financial
security. The members of the war generations are also
claimed to be more team oriented and patriotic than
those of other generations, since they had to fight a
common enemy (e.g., Schewe and Meredith 2005).
In Western societies, the main focus of the research
on generations has been on the baby boomer generation. The baby boomers were born after World War II,
mostly between 1945 and 1955. The generation is
also sometimes called the sixties generation, after
the period of their youth. Mainly in the 1960s, the
generation experienced many historical and social
shifts, such as a worldwide economic boom, the rise
of mass consumption, the creation of the welfare
state, the rise of popular culture, sexual liberation,
and increasing equality between gender and races, as
well as nonmaterial values and political activism. The
generation thus achieved a reputation as a radical,

liberal, and particularly “youthful” group of people.
Moreover, the collective identity of the generation is
regarded as very strong. Whether this is true or not,
the baby boomer generation is still the most affluent
and powerful age group in many Western societies,
even at the edge of retirement age.
As being the “first teenagers,” the baby boomers have also caused a collective rejuvenation of
consumer cultures and lifestyles in most Western
societies. As baby boomers entered middle age, they
brought with them many of the values and tastes of
their youth and reconstructed what it meant to be
middle-aged in the process. Concepts such as cognitive or subjective age replaced the biological age
in this rejuvenation process. Mike Featherstone and
Mike Hepworth define subjective age as being determined by one’s individual physical feelings, appearance, and satisfaction with life. In empirical studies,
baby boomers express subjective feelings of being
younger than their years. They generally identify
themselves with younger generations and distance
themselves from the older ones. This is manifested
in their consumption and leisure time, which conspicuously aim at youthfulness, note Simon Biggs
and colleagues.
The subjective rejuvenation of the baby boomers
has often been interpreted as “capturing” youth from
the next generation The next cohort, born mainly in
the 1960s and early 1970s, was regarded as the incalculable, passive, and fragmented youth generation in
the 1980s and early 1990s. As the period of 1980s
was rather stable in Western countries, lacking great
historical events until the collapse of Soviet Union,
the 1980s generation was seen as lacking strong collective values. As a consequence, they were also seen
as lacking generational identity as well as interest in
politics and social changes. In the United States, the
1980s generation was named Generation X after
Douglas Coupland’s novel.
Generation X has received negative publicity more
than other generations, representing the yuppies of the
1980s, but also having received a reputation of becoming culturally and socially trapped between the baby
boomers and the younger age cohorts. The members
of Generation X are also seen as the latchkey generation of distant parents, the neo-helpless children of
welfare states, who more than previous generations
value the quality of personal life and put it ahead of
work life. The members of the generation are also
regarded as individualistic rather than team players.

Generation

As consumers, the members of Generation X are
seen as individualistic and skeptical and are also said
to feel alienated by marketers, according to Charles
Schewe and Geoffrey Meredith. In youth, Generation
X was presupposed to grow up early, at least mentally, to meet the requirements of (post)modern
society. Along with the collective rejuvenation of the
baby boomers, the boundaries between the boomers
and Generation X became blurred, notes Terhi-Anna
Wilska. Edmunds and Turner report that following
the footsteps of the baby boomers, the 1980s generation became specifically focused on health and lifestyle
issues. The generation was the most concerned about
HIV/AIDS and also started to promote vegetarianism
and favor organic food.
The development of new media created new
opportunities for civic commitment as well as new
ways of forming social communities. Generation X is
capable of using the new information and communication technologies (ICT), but the generation did not
grow up with ICT from early childhood as did those
born in the late 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1990s,
this young generation was called the Net generation,
N Generation, or E-generation because the advent of
the Internet is the defining event for them, and electronic media is the most natural way of communication for them, according to Don Tapscott. Sometimes
the generation is also called Generation Y (succeeding Generation X), mainly by marketing researchers.
The N Generation lives in the e-universe, including social communities such as chat rooms, social
networks, and online games. E-commerce is everyday practice, as well as real consumption in virtual
worlds. Schewe and Meredith report that as consumers, the members of the N Generation are described
as expressive, brand conscious, and more aware of
trends and fashion than previous generations. The
N Generation is also regarded as the most consumption-oriented and materialistic generation in history.
However, since the consumer culture and social
world of the N (Y) Generation is more global than
that of previous generations, the members of the
generation are also more aware of global problems.
The generation is usually regarded as more idealistic,
socially networked, and social-cause oriented than
Generation X. It is possible that social communities
and cultures formed within new technology have created a wider social and cultural gap between N (Y)
Generation and Generation X than the gap between
Generation X and the baby boomers.

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Explaining Generation-Specific
Consumption Patterns
Generations have different consumer cultures.
However, turning age differences in specific consumption patterns directly into generational differences contains conceptual and methodological
problems. One cannot say straightforwardly whether
certain distinctive features in consumption, lifestyles,
or attitudes of certain age groups are likely to continue throughout life, even when it seems likely.
Especially in respect of consumption, this question
is problematic, since the consumption resources and
attitudes toward consumption of different generations have undergone great transformation during
the past decades. However, turning age differences
in consumption into generational characteristics is
very common, particularly in marketing research and
market segmentation. This easily leads to fallacies.
When explaining generational differences in consumption patterns, the first potential fallacy is generational fallacy: the properties of certain age groups
are thought to be permanent, but instead they change
with aging. For instance, the alleged nonmaterialistic
values of the baby boomer generation may be a fallacy, because the current consumption and lifestyles
of the cohort do not support this assumption. A
researcher may also explain the behavior of different
age groups simply by age or life-course stage, believing that attitudes, behavior, and ideas change when
moving through successive life-course stages. If the
behavior does not change, it is a generational feature,
and there is an age-course fallacy in the interpretation, according to Wilska. For instance, vegetarianism is often seen as typical of young age. However,
vegetarianism has remained particularly typical of
Generations X and N (Y), and they even transfer the
habit to their young children. It is possible to control
generational and life-course fallacies by collecting
panel data and analyzing a certain age group over
years. The researcher can thereby explain whether
the properties under examination change over a lifetime or not.
Explaining generation-specific consumption
empirically is not easy, as described previously.
Although generations have distinct values and attitudes, and certain consumption patterns seem to be
obviously generation related, there is not much clear
empirical evidence of it. Among the few undoubtedly generation-specific preferences are aesthetic

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Generation

preferences and taste formation. For example, music
tastes are formed in a certain sensitivity period of
teenage and early adulthood and remain unchanged
throughout life. To some extent, this applies to preferences for fashion and apparel as well, note Morris
Holbrook and Robert Schindler. The use of mobile
phones and ICT are proved to have clear generationrelated differences, too. The “digital divide” between
older and younger generations is obvious, which
means that younger generations can use ICT more
effectively than older ones. Marketing researchers
also regard brand loyalty and brand preferences as
generational attributes.
Generational effect is obvious also in the management of personal finances. Particularly attitudes
toward personal finances, especially toward debt
and credit, are found to be the most distinctive differences between consumers of different generations.
Also, eating habits and consumption of food vary
between generations, as found by Alan Warde. In
addition to values shaped by collective experiences,
each generation grows up in a different economic
and market environment, which includes the supply
of goods and services and legitimate everyday practices. Recently, the environments have become more
global, and the changes in the environments are more
rapid. Therefore, it will be probably even more difficult than before to explain consumption patterns as
generational differences in the future.

Generations and Consumer
Cultures in the Future
Due to the globalization process, consumer cultures
of the future will probably reflect more and more the
values of societies outside the Western world. As historical events and their consequences vary in different countries, generations and their values also vary
considerably in different cultures. In newly developed
countries such as Russia, China, India, and Brazil,
historical and political events have created very different generational identities from those of the Western
world. Therefore, generational consumer cultures
also have different dynamics in these countries. In
Russia and China, for instance, young generations
have much more spending power and distinctly different consumer cultures than previous generations.
The importance of these countries as consumer societies will grow in the future. This will change the traditional hierarchies of consumer generations. Western

societies will become more multicultural, too, which
is likely to make the national generational identities
more fragmented in the future.
New media makes generational experiences more
global, despite fragmentation in local cultures. As
Edmunds and Turner note, new media is able to
transmit traumatic events globally in real time and
thus provide a basis for the creation of new global
generational consciousness. Therefore, generational
identities that used to be local turn into global at
least for some issues. However, since economic and
cultural differences between countries persist, it is
unlikely that generations will represent the same
values and identities everywhere. What will happen,
though, is that young generations’ values will be created with more knowledge and information. Young
generations will probably distance themselves from
previous generations even more than before. Thus,
generational characteristics will remain significant
factors when explaining the consumption cultures of
different age groups also in the future. However, it is
likely that the new generations will derive their collective consciousness from communication practices,
lifestyles, and new social networks rather than from
contrasting values or traumatic memories.
Terhi-Anna Wilska
See also Age and Aging; Collective Identity; Information
Society; Leisure; Longitudinal Studies; Social
Movements; Voting Behaviors; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Biggs, Simon, Chris Phillipson, Rebecca Leach, and AnneMarie Money. “The Mature Imaginations and
Consumption Strategies: Age and Generation in the
Development of a United Kingdom Baby Boomer
Identity.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
2, no. 2 (2007): 31–59.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Sociology in Question. London: Sage,
1990.
DeMartini, Joseph. “Generational Relationships and Social
Participation.” Sociological Inquiry 62, no. 4 (1992):
450–463.
Edmunds, June, and Bryan S. Turner. “Global Generations:
Social Change in the Twentieth Century.” The British
Journal of Sociology 56, no. 4 (2005): 559–577.
Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “Images of
Ageing.” In Ageing in Society: An Introduction to Social
Gerontology, edited by John Bond, Peter G. Coleman,
and Sheila Peace, 304–332. London: Sage, 1993.

Geography
Holbrook, Morris, and Robert Schindler. “Age, Taste and
Attitude toward the Past as Predictor of Consumers’
Aesthetic Tastes for Cultural Products.” Journal of
Marketing Research 31, no. 3 (1994): 412–422.
Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values
and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Jones, Ian R., Martin Hyde, Christina R. Victor, Richard D.
Wiggins, Chris Gilleard, and Paul Higgs. Ageing in a
Consumer Society: From Passive to Active Consumption
in Britain. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.
Lunt, Peter, and Sonia Livingstone. Mass Consumption and
Personal Identity. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University
Press, 2002.
Mannheim, Karl. “The Problem of Generations.” In Essays
on the Sociology of Knowledge, 276–320. London:
Routledge & Keegan, Paul, 1952.
Schewe, Charles D., and Geoffrey Meredith. “Segmenting
Global Markets by Generational Cohorts: Determining
Motivations by Age.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour
4, no. 1 (2005): 51–63.
Tapscott, Don. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net
Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary
Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London: Sage,
1997.
Wilska, Terhi-Anna. Survival with Dignity? The
Consumption of Young Adults during Economic
Depression: A Comparative Study of Finland and
Britain 1990–1994. Turku, Finland: Publications of the
Turku School of Economics and Business
Administration, Series A-3, 1999.

GEOGRAPHY
Geographers have been concerned with understanding
the spaces through which consumption is manifest,
but also the ways in which spaces, social relationships, and things coalesce to make meaningful places.
Thus, underpinning much geographical research on
consumer culture is the belief that consumption is
spatially constituted and expressed and that social
relationships, geographical imaginations, and social
spaces are also actively created through consumption.

Geographies of Consumption: Intellectual
and Disciplinary Contours
During the 1970s and 1980s, geographical consumption research involved description, mapping, and

647

modeling of consumption behavior in areas such as
food, energy, health care, public and private housing,
and leisure and recreation. In the 1990s, geographies
of consumption expanded rapidly. The intensification
of many processes related to consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the uneven
effects of globalization and trade, the commodification of new spaces and practices in both urban and
rural landscapes, the mediation of commercial culture
and material, and disparities within and between firstand third-world nations, prompted greater attention
to relationships between consumption, people, and
place. Associated with this was the development of
a range of post-positivist theoretical approaches that
informed concerns about the politicization of commodity provision, differing access to goods and services, and questions about the role of consumption in
the uneven development of place over time. Despite
a long heritage of work on collective consumption
(e.g., in areas of housing, health, education, transportation), attention now turned to the ways in which
consumption was actively constructed through a
variety of institutional agents such as firms, states,
and industries and to the role and place of consumers
and consumer practice in such analysis.
Robert Sack’s Place, Modernity and the Consumer’s World and sociologist John Urry’s Consuming
Places highlighted the ways in which individuals constructed much of their everyday experience in relation to consumer landscapes and how place, space,
and scale made a difference to how consumption was
expressed and experienced. Consumption research
in geography developed alongside Neil Wrigley
and Michelle Lowe’s “new retail geographies,”
which were concerned with examining the power
of retail capital and significance of changing retail
practices in structuring consumption. Connecting
retailing with political, economic, and cultural processes was also exemplified by Peter Jackson and
colleagues’ work on commercial cultures, which
sought to understand how the market and processes
of commerce were embedded in a variety of cultural processes by tracing the connections between
economies, practices, and spaces. In addition, Alex
Hughes and Suzanne Reimer’s research on commodity chains and networks revealed how the connections between things, people, and places were
formed through a range of regulatory regimes and
institutional and individual practices such as agrocommodity production, manufacturing, marketing,

648

Geography

distribution, and retailing. The significance of leisure
and tourism activity in contemporary social change
also led to Aitchison and colleagues’ volume of
geographical work on leisure/tourism practices and
spaces with insights for consumption. Geographers
interested in rurality noted the way in which some
rural spaces were being remade and reimaged
through consumption practice, but significantly
more attention was accorded to process of change in
urban areas perhaps because, as Mark Jayne argues,
it is in the morphology of cities that its expression of
consumer culture is most explicit and has been most
spectacularly mediated.
Geographical research on consumption has continued to expand into the 2000s and now examines
a huge diversity of spaces and relationships. A key
emphasis is on how people and entities are caught
up in transnational networks and how consumption
is actively (but not always knowingly) assembled,
reproduced, and expressed in and across different
contexts. Geographers have sought to interrogate
narratives of consumer culture and globalization
associated with the theorized emergence of a postmodern condition linked to post-Fordism that
assume increased homogeneity consumer practices
and places, the erasure of social and spatial difference, and consumerism linked to narcissistic selfactualization and representation. While not denying
the potential effects of such changes, geographers
have revealed oppositional tendencies (such processes leading to heterogeneity across space) and
have examined the tensions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies in contemporary consumer culture and its
manifestation in place. Work has continued on how
practices and objects of consumption and their meanings “travel,” occupying different social and spatial
“moments” and being transformed over time and
across place. Underpinning much of the emergent
research has been the realization that the cultures
and practices of everyday life and places matter not
only to spatiality (the spatial patterning of human
and physical environments and relations) but also to
subjectivity and to sociality as it is shaped through
relationships that may be both near and distant.
Although the bulk of the research on geographies
of consumption has been conducted within human
geography, more recently, there has been increased
attention to how consumption and environment are
connected and to the interactions between human
and physical processes. In the last two decades,

pressing concerns such as climate change, pollution,
land degradation, erosion, waste disposal, and sustainable consumption have been researched. There
have been calls for research that integrates knowledges from both human and physical geographies
to redesign systems of production and consumption
and promote social and ecological justice.
Geographies of consumption did not develop in
a vacuum, nor is the evolution of research as linear as the narrative presented here would suggest.
Traditions of positivist quantitative scholarship continue to exist alongside post-positivist approaches
and a wide range of theoretical perspectives emanating from both within and outside the discipline have
been and continue to be employed. Geographies of
consumption are a shifting and dynamic field with
contributions from geographers whose expertise is
in a wide range of specializations including leisure,
tourism, urban geographies, historical geographies,
retail geographies, development studies, rural studies, agricultural and economic geographies, cultural
and social geographies, political geography, historical
geography, technology, media, and health. Published
academic research on consumption still tends to be
dominated by work emanating from within AngloAmerican geography, though research from a variety
of contexts outside this “core” is becoming more
visible. Geographies of consumption have also been
invigorated by research collaborations with scholars
from other social science and humanities disciplines,
particularly from those employing critical perspectives in sociology, history, and anthropology. The
diversity of approaches, subjects, and interdisciplinary exchanges does nevertheless make any concept of
consumption geography as a bounded, unified, and
systematic disciplinary subdivision of human geography indefensible.

Political Economic Perspectives
Geographers studying consumption have generally
tended to eschew perspectives derived from conventional economics, which suggest that consumption
is the premise of consumers making rational calculations based on the utility of a good. Accordingly,
most do not see consumption as an autonomous and
unproblematic set of practices that reflect relations
of demand and supply in a marketplace. Although
work on the spatial distribution and analysis of consumption was more prevalent in the second half

Geography

of the twentieth century as geographers sought to
“map” social and spatial behaviors and phenomena
(such as leisure/tourism activities, firm and retailing
forms, shopping practice), since the 1980s, much
more emphasis has been given to understanding
how consumption practices and places are formed
and created. This research was and continues to be
informed by more critical theoretical perspectives
that seek to critique existing structures, practices,
and geographies with the purpose of revealing, challenging, and transforming societal norms, discourses,
and relationships that may produce forms of exploitation or oppression.
Critical perspectives located in political-economic
understandings influenced by Marxist theory illuminate the importance of economic power in the rise of
the consumer society but tend to position consumption as an outcome of production. Consumer culture
is consequently related to the process of alienation,
whereby workers exchange their labor power for
money to buy commodities but become disconnected from the products of their own labor. Political
economic processes have been influential, enabling
geographers to relate historical and contemporary
shifts in production to changes in what, how, and
where things are consumed and to the structures and
mechanisms through which such processes are organized. Political economic perspectives informed by
Marxian theory have provided a lens through which
to interpret the spatial separation of production and
consumption that accompanied industrialization in
many nations. They have also informed understandings of how postwar processes of globalization connecting producers, transnational corporations, and
consumers through increasingly complex commodity
chains/networks. This has helped scholars interpret
the spatial extent and form of new divisions of labor,
uneven trade relations, and shifting governance of
these relations by states and firms.
Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism
has been drawn on by geographers to reflect on the
ways in which consumer culture is constructed both
materially and symbolically in specific commodified
spaces. Commodity fetishism involves changing the
relationship between people through processes of
market exchange such that commodities appear to
be independent of the people who make them yet
are imbued with human characteristics. A consequence of this is that not only are the commodities
themselves presented as magical, emotive objects

649

offering individuals multiple possibilities for creating symbolic and moral meaning, but places themselves also become consumable, imaginative, and
moral landscapes. The concept of commodity fetishism has influenced geographical interpretations of
spaces designed to enchant consumers and facilitate
consumerism in both contemporary and historical
setting landscapes such as world fairs, department
stores, shopping malls, tourist sites, and theme parks.
Analysis of these spaces has also been informed by
the post-structuralist writings of Jean Baudrillard and
Jean-Francois Lyotard and by semiotics, whereby
consumer landscapes were viewed as texts through
which the intended meanings of the creators and
designers of these environments could be read.
In emphasizing institutional power and governance and relationships between state and economy
as they are expressed through a range of structures
and mechanisms (such as policy documents, legislation, alliances, and contracts), political economy
perspectives have also provided insights into the
role of the state regulation in influencing consumption practices and patterns particularly with the
transition from welfare states to neoliberal forms
of governance. They have also been employed to
theorize shifts from collective to individual forms
of consumption, the differentiation of mass markets
as part of niche production and consumption, and
to understand the role of production, labor, and
trade practices in the uneven development of place.
Political economic approaches have highlighted the
role of new technologies and the growth of media
and advertising industries in exposing consumers to
a greater range of commodities and more diverse
opportunities for identity formation than was previously the case. More recently, such as in the work of
Kersty Hobson, insights from political economic perspectives have been directed toward environmental
concerns through the field of political ecology, with
the aim of connecting consumers and institutional
actions to more sustainable outcomes.

The Cultural Politics of Consumption and
Interpretative Methodologies
The implicit positioning of consumption as a consequence of economic relations of production in
political economic approaches has been critiqued by
a number of geographers who believe that this has
resulted in an unhelpful separation between economy

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Geography

and culture and between consumption and production. The focus on the production and design of spectacular sites of consumerism (such as the mall, the
department store, and the theme park) to the detriment of more mundane landscapes of consumption
(including homes, main streets, sites of secondhand
provision, and the Internet) was also seen as a consequence of a productionist emphasis. Furthermore,
feminist geographers suggested that consumer behavior and practices were often uncritically “read” off
these spectacular landscapes, arguing that such readings were masculinist, ignoring relations of gender
and other dimensions of social and material difference (such as age, class, sexuality, and ethnicity) and
the diversity of ways in which these spaces are made
meaningful and constructed by consumers.
Partly as a response to critiques of productionist theorizations of consumption, ethnographic
and interpretative studies were being conducted by
geographers keen to explore the cultural politics of
consumption. This “ethnographic turn” involved
examining how consumption was actively made
through consumption practices and with the consumer actively (albeit not always in conditions or
circumstances of one’s choosing) contributing to the
production of consumer spaces and to differing social
relations and subjectivities. This work gave greater
significance to the geographies of everyday life, to
the mundane, even banal practices that individuals
engaged in (such as grocery shopping, eating and
socializing, surfing the net), what they did with commodities (collecting, using, caring, storing, divesting),
and to what initially were called alternative spaces of
consumption—that is, flea markets, charity shops,
and car trunk fairs. It was notable that in the case
of the latter, that second and third cycles of production and consumption were of interest with a view
to broadening work beyond middle-class consumers
and sites of consumption.
In paying attention to cultural politics, the ways in
which relations of domination and subordination are
constructed in everyday life—in families, friendships,
and households—historically informed geographical
research highlighted the ways in which consumption
is morally inflected and constituted, revealing how the
personal and the political intersect through a number of scales and times. Informed by feminist, poststructural, postcolonial, and queer perspectives, this
research demonstrated how commodities and material culture have an important role in structuring the

everyday lives and spaces of people both individually
and collectively and how creating meaning through
consumption requires both material and identity work.
Gender-based theories of performativity have shown
how bodies themselves are more than just surfaces for
the inscription and representation of particular identities (young, old, fat, male, etc.) but are themselves
powerful sites for the repetition and performances of
consumption that are gendered, aged, and raced.

Relational Approaches and the
Rematerialization of Human Geography
As mentioned previously, post-structuralist approaches associated with the cultural turn facilitated
the development of new research techniques such as
discourse and semiotic analysis that focused on textual readings and interpretations of more abstract
spaces and processes. While not dismissing the important insights gained by these perspectives, a number of
geographers working on consumption have also been
cognizant of calls for a “rematerialization” of human
geography, resulting in renewed emphasis on the way
that “concrete” or “material” objects, bodies, and
environments influence the construction of the places
and practices of everyday life. Consequently, geographers have actively sought to engage with objects and
place of material culture in their research, recognizing that commodities also create social life and place
through noncommodified moments (as in gift giving,
or in rituals of use and disposal). The application
of other post-structuralist approaches such as actornetwork theory has reinvigorated work on the material dimensions of consumption by emphasizing the
ways in which human and nonhuman things are connected through complex and shifting relations that
are held together across space by a variety of actants.
Similarly, theories of governmentality have provided
insights into how everyday practices like shopping
and using domestic appliances and home furnishing
are subject to and productive of a politics of power
through the organized processes, ideas, and techniques through which subjects are governed. The concept of governmentality has provided insight into the
ways in which individuals are differentially shaped
as consumer citizens, particularly with regard to the
contestation or adherence to neoliberal prescriptions
that position consumers as autonomous, rational,
risk-minimizing individuals making decisions acting
responsibly in the marketplace.

Geography

Within human geography, Harald Bathelt and
Johannes Gluckler’s notion of “relational geographies” has had greater currency in recent years
prompting understandings of subjectivities, practices,
and places as an expression of a myriad of social, economic, institutional, and political practices operating
across a variety of scales and spaces. In emphasizing
the active role of agents (rather than more abstract
notions of space such as regions or nations), relational
geographers suggest that places are grounded in relations that may be simultaneously local and global.
For example, buying a branded name commodity
produced by a corporation that markets and produces
on a global scale may be both a local relationship
(shopping locally, purchasing in a store, orienting to
a peer group culture) and simultaneously part of the
constitution of the making of global commercial culture (allegiance to symbolic power of a global brand,
part of flows of capital globally through financial
systems, and a connection to workers and others in
distant places). These relationships may be formal (as
in contracts, legislation, through recognized systems
monetary exchange) or informal (such as alliances, cooperations, exchanges, or affiliations built on trust or
belief) but can extend well beyond (or be distant from)
the “place” in which agents “act.” Consequently,
places (such as the mall or the home) are not viewed
as containers for social action, or as homogeneous
explanatory variables in themselves, but are seen as
created through practice, shaped and made meaningful in multiple ways and in different locations in
the context of interdependent relationships between
other places. Relational approaches emphasize the
complex relationships that bind people, things, and
institutions together. For example, researchers, such as
Nick Clarke and colleagues, have revealed the ways in
which spaces and narratives of sustainability, ethical
consumption, fair trade, and alternative consumption
are not simply about the behaviors and orientations of
individual consumers but are shaped through complex
associations of people, sociotechnical relations, institutions, and groups across places, which are more fractured and diversely politicized than would first appear.

The Spatiality and Connectedness of
Production and Consumption
Geographies can be understood as the spatial expression of social and physical processes that together
make the places we inhabit. Space is a more abstract

651

concept than place, which is generally understood
as more intimate (though not necessarily any more
“real”). Geographers have also paid considerable attention to the concept of scale, which can
be thought of as levels of spatiality that have been
constructed to understand how consumption might
be expressed differentially across space (e.g., body,
region, and nation). A concern with space, and matters of spatiality in the production and expression of
consumption, has meant that geographers have contributed substantially to the understanding of spatial
expression of consumer culture. This contribution
has involved studying not only commodified spaces
but also commodity flows and disparities in consumption between and within nation-states. There
has been detailed interpretive research on the numerous expressions of consumption in places as diverse
as homes, streets, airports, workplaces, markets, cities, and nations with scholars concerned to reflect
on the ways in which consumption processes are
produced and manifest differentially and unevenly
across space and time.
Studying “unevenness” has not simply involved
description of difference but also a concern with how
geographical unevenness is connected and at times
caused by such differences and connected to a politics of consumption that operates through and across
places and scales. This has involved considering how,
for example, material consumption in first-world contexts might be linked to poverty in others through the
existence of particular forms of geopolitical relationships, trade relations, labor relations, and production,
financial, and media systems. It has also involved
work on home spaces and their wider connections.
For example, studies of gentrification have shown that
changes in inner-city living are not simply a matter of
supply and demand or regulation of housing stock,
but of the material qualities of houses, the desirability
of forms of urban living and material lifestyles, and of
the properties and possibilities of the material culture
through which gentrification proceeds.
An enduring theme in consumption geographies has been the interdependency of production
and consumption processes. Work on commodity
chains, networks, and to a lesser extent systems of
provision has been instrumental in highlighting
these connections. In commodity chain research, the
metaphor of the “chain” involves linear connections
with “links” representing discrete, but interrelated,
activities involved in the design, production, and

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Geography

marketing of a product. Commodity chains emphasize organizational connections and the power of
institutional agents such as manufacturers, buyers,
and distributors to influence and maintain flows of
materials, peoples, and knowledges across the chain.
Early commodity chain research was particularly
influential in making visible the politics of and the
connections between transnational production in
primarily third-world spaces and the consumption of
goods by consumers in the “West.” Many social and
environmental justice movements and organizations
draw on the chain metaphor to reveal the “commodity fetish” emphasizing connections between producers and consumers to evoke consumer activism.
Geographers’ interest in chains has been not only
on the relationships between commodity processes
and institutional actors linking production and consumption, but also on the spaces and environments
in which commodities and their meanings are produced. However, this research has also been criticized
because the consumption tends to be viewed as an
outcome of production process with consumer practice an unproblematic starting point for an evaluation of commodity chain linkages.
Rather than emphasizing institutional connections
and governance of production, systems of provision
approaches emphasize the material and symbolic
transformations of commodities, highlighting how
chains for different commodities are constituted
and expressed very differently, a consequence of the
composition of the “systems” of production, circulation distribution, and consumption in which they are
located. However, the recognition that simple chain
metaphors cannot easily encapsulate the social and
spatial complexity of many production-consumption
relationships in a globalizing world, and that the politics of consumption is multiply produced, has meant
that the distinction between the global commodity chain and systems of provision approaches has
become increasingly blurred. Both approaches have
been and continue to be useful for understanding
how commodities, people, and places form networks
of relations that operate across a range of scales and
for examining the political, social, and environmental expressions of chain formation in contemporary
and historical contexts. The term commodity network appears to be more commonly used now, with
the expression no longer informed just by political
economic approaches but also by actor-network
theorists who emphasize the way in which people,

things, and places are held together, sustained, and
transformed through complex and shifting webs of
interdependence.
Literature on circuits of culture/consumption has
also informed geographical research on consumption.
As a nonlinear approach, commodity transformations
and the social, spatial, and political practices through
which they are shaped are seen as different moments
that may be contingently rather than necessarily
related. Nonlinear circuit approaches have been used,
for example, to examine relationships surrounding
magazine consumption and to look at second(hand)
cycles of production and consumption, food and
culinary narratives, and the shaping of “ethical consumption.” The concept of displacement has been
a useful geographical metaphor for understanding
how consumption transforms place and space, dislocating and shifting meanings of established places.
The substantial amount of work on transnational
cultures and geographies demonstrates the complex
ways in which commodities and their meanings circulate and are transformed, that is, how they have
both social and spatial lives. Much of this work has
been directed toward understanding the material and
symbolic shaping of food and clothing cultures and
has highlighted the relational nature of commodity
connections demonstrating how the global and local
are mutually constituted and how commodity differences and meanings themselves are shaped, displaced,
and expressed in different contexts. Work on transnationalism has demonstrated how consumers become
enrolled in and a part of the performance of particular
networks, communities, relationships, and lifestyles.

Sites and Spaces of Consumption
Geographers have been and continue to be concerned with understanding the significance and
expression of particular sites of consumption, and
how these places and spaces themselves form part of
consumer culture. As mentioned earlier, geographers
have studied the commodified spaces (themed shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, department stores,
chain stores, theme parks, casinos) that are most
often cited as evidence of the growing visibility of
consumerism in contemporary landscapes. Scholars
have suggested the theming of environments as places
of “elsewhereness,” and the inclusion of visual/aural
forms of activity in such spaces (such as video, live
entertainment, leisure activities) not only facilitates

Geography

consumption but also provides a point of difference
for consumers, a means of re-enchanting and enlivening relatively homogenous spaces, and promoting
consumption and a point of difference for consumers. Attention has also been directed to the ways in
which consumer practice is part of the production of
these sites with consumers acceding to, and at times
contesting, the dominant representations contained
within them. Work on “the mall” and other spectacular commodified spaces has demonstrated how
consumer identities and practices are actively shaped
through the operation of surveillance and through
the regulation and representation of appropriate
ways of consuming. Privately owned shopping malls,
for example, frequently masquerade as “public
spaces” yet are often policed, and controlled spaces
may be sites of social exclusion.
However, spaces of spectacular or themed consumption have continued to evolve alongside other
forms of consumption, many of which may be
more mundane (outdoor/indoor markets, discount
warehouses, car trunk fairs, grocery stores, discount
stores, supermarkets, auctions, fairs, and secondhand
shops). Geographers studying these sites have also
sought to highlight the ways in which consumption is a social, moral, material, emotive, and bodily
experience—recognizing the theatricality, performance, unpredictability, skill, thrift, pleasure, and
challenges of engaging in consumption and drawing
further attention to the ways in which places may
be representative of and perpetuate structural social
inequalities. Much of this work emphasizes the practice rather than the representation of consumption,
reinforcing the necessity of understanding consumers’ spaces with reference to those who occupy and
produce these spaces. Attention to the practices of
consumers demonstrated the multiplicity of roles that
could be held by people (as buyers, voyeurs, and entrepreneurs), blurring distinctions between consumers
and producers and the relationships between firsthand
and secondhand spaces and practices of consumption. Similarly, studies of the Internet as a site of consumption have also contributed to a more relational
understanding of how production and consumption
connects with the realization that the distinction
between real and virtual space is difficult to sustain.
Inherent in many contemporary geographical
approaches to the study of consumption is the notion
that space is not a container in which consumption
practices occur but is itself produced. As well as

653

examining how people acquire, use, and divest themselves of material things in places, geographers have
shown how the materiality and spatiality of places in
turn influences the sorts of accommodations people
make—how they live, feel, and identify with each
other, and the sorts of relationships they engage in
as a consequence of this. Much of this work has centered on household practices such as eating, using
new technologies, home furnishing, renovation, and
decoration. These studies have illustrated the role
of material things in configuring social and spatial
relationships, and how relationships between people
and things can both contribute to and be a reflection
of wider public discourses and moral imaginings of
such things as family, sexuality, gender, home, community, citizenship, nation, and identity.

Consumer Practice, Embodiment,
and Material Culture
Geographical attention to a wide range of consumption practices has extended knowledge of consumers
beyond their behaviors to reflect on how consumption practices are related to the shaping identity and
sociality. Studies of consumption practice have tended
to refute notions of consumer culture as self-focused
and hedonistic while still acknowledging the possibilities for and the ways in which people create multiple
narratives of their self through engaging in consumption. Although they recognize that a wide range of
commodities are available to people, which have a
role in both creating and expressing one’s identities,
geographers have focused more on how consumption
is made meaningful through processes of embodiment and performance and the ways in which consumption practice is spatialized. Nicky Gregson and
Louise Crewe’s research on charity shops as part of
their study of Second-Hand Cultures, for example,
revealed the ways in which geographies of the body
are mapped, with people less willing to buy or sell
used shoes or underwear because of their personal and
intimate associations with bodily discourses. Research
situated in everyday spaces (homes, shops, cafés,
workplaces) and involving studies of consumption as
practiced (eating, shopping, socializing, dressing, gardening, home renovating) has shown how commodity
purchase, use, and disposal is not anxiety or identity
ridden but involves the negotiation and maintenance
of social relationships and the narration or contestation of morally inflected subject positions (e.g.,

654

Geography

“good” parents, moral consumers, “caring” family
members). This research has also demonstrated that
thinking, feeling, and acting need not be constrained
by discourse (e.g., emotions can be externalized onto
material objects such as photos, bumper stickers, and
household objects), and it has also problematized a
traditional separation between production- (often
conceived of in terms of identities based in relation to
one’s work or job) and consumption-based identities.
Detailed ethnographic studies have challenged the
notion of “the universal and passive consumer,” noting the multiple ways in which people engage in consumption and by examining the “work,” skills, and
performances by which they do so. Bypassing unhelpful debates about consumers as sovereign or duped,
geographers have examined how consumption practices intersect with relations and discourses of gender,
sexuality, age, race, and class. This has contributed to
an understanding of how people are constructed as
consuming subjects, for example, as citizen-consumers,
green consumers, active retirees, and so on, and also
contributed to knowledge about how people come to
be caught up in complex social and spatial networks.
Research on ethical consumption has shown, for
example, how consumers’ choices and identities related
to fair trade purchases are made possible by a diverse
range of organizations involved in trading, marketing,
campaigning, and educating.
Attention to the bodies of individuals as they
engage in consumption provides ways of recognizing how power relations emerge through bodily
performances. Bodies are disciplined and objectified
through consumption, and geographical work has
contributed to understanding how people (and bodies) can become out of place (such as drug users in
retail spaces, “fat” bodies in clothing stores). The
emphasis on the role of bodily practices, movements,
and tactile and aural practices (such as dance or play)
that are not necessarily subject to discourse by which
human beings meaningfully engage with and performance of consumption has also challenged the visual
bias of discursive and representational understandings of consuming subjects.
The “material turn” in social and cultural geography has seen much more attention accorded to the
social lives of things and to how things are accommodated in and become active elements in the
reproduction of everyday life. For example, Andrew
Gorman-Murray notes how the maintenance of
domestic materiality by gay men and lesbians provides a means of reconciling multiple dimensions of

the self. A recognition that consumption practice is
much broader than the purchase of commodities has
been reflected in work on shopping, browsing, rituals and practices of commodity consumption (e.g.,
eating, listening to music, dressing), use (assembling,
mixing, storing, sorting, collecting, cleaning, repairing, sharing), and disposal (recycling, reuse, diverting to waste streams). In research on both places of
employment and the home, scholars have shown
how the changing material capacities of things and
technologies imply particular distributions of competence transforming home spaces and the skills,
knowledges, and imaginations of those involved.
Attention to maintenance, to instances of disrepair,
and to wasting, ridding, and disposal has provided
insights into how individual practices are connected
to wider politics and organization of society.

Contributions, Tensions, and Directions
Geographers’ insights into the production of diverse
spaces of consumption and into situated practices
and consumer subjectivities have been and continue
to be counterweight to generalized descriptions and
universality implied in views of globalization as
homogeneity.
A primary contribution of geographers has been
in endeavoring to overcome unhelpful binaries in
consumption, to consider the ways in which economy and culture, symbolic and material aspects of
consuming, production and consumption, micro and
global scales, and the personal and the political intersect in and across particular time and place contexts.
They have illustrated how spaces are not simply a
context in which consumption occurs or consumer
culture is shaped, but instead how space both materially and symbolically has a significant role in how
consumption practices and power relations are manifest. Geographers have also provided critical insights
into the social and spatial lives of commodities— how
they move, are transformed, and are made meaningful in place, thereby reinforcing the necessity of a view
of consumption as more than just an act of purchase.
Geographical studies have also demonstrated the
unevenness of consumption across place and time,
and the moralities implicit in consumption practice
with much recent work concerned with how ethical consumption is being shaped. However, there has
been less attention given to the ways in which interpretations of politics and power might inform actions
designed to alleviate or ameliorate undesirable

Geography

environmental or social consequences. While a range
of consumers and consuming practices have been
studied, the consumption practices of those who
struggle to survive materially and the “super rich”
have had relatively less emphasis.
A recurring theme in the literature on geographies
of consumption has been how best to understand the
connections between production and consumption
without reifying differences between these spheres
or without privileging one over the other. While this
remains a challenge, it seems the growing engagement with relational geographies has possibilities for
understanding production and consumption relationships and for reconciling research emanating from
economic and cultural geographies. In focusing on
consumer culture as a social process, insights into
consumption geographies have largely emerged from
within human geographies, but greater attention to
the role of the material and nonhuman in society and
space also provides possibilities for thinking about
how knowledge derived from research in physical
geography might be integrated and how these knowledges might be applied. Nevertheless, geographical
research continues to make a significant contribution to documenting, explaining, and interpreting the
form, constitution, and imagining of consumption
and consumer culture, and to examining flows and
assemblages of people, things, and knowledges as
they are situated across time and space.
Juliana Mansvelt
See also Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Commodities;
Cultural Turn; Gendering of Public and Private Space;
Globalization; Identity; Inequalities; Moral Geography;
Spaces and Places

Further Readings
Aitchison, Cara, Nicola E. MacLeod, and Stephen J. Shaw.
Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural
Geographies. London: Routledge, 2000.
Bathelt, Harald, and Johannes Gluckler. “Toward a
Relational Economic Geography.” Journal of Economic
Geography 3, no. 2 (2003): 117–144.
Clarke, David. B., Marcus A. Doel, and Kate M. L.
Housinaux, eds. The Consumption Reader. London:
Routledge, 2003.
Clarke, Nick, Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass.
“The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in
the United Kingdom.” Politics & Society 35 (2007): 583.
Fine, Ben. The World of Consumption: The Material and
Cultural Revisited. London: Routledge, 2002.

655

Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Reconciling Self: Gay Men and
Lesbians Using Domestic Materiality for Identity
Management.” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 3
(2008): 283–301.
Goss, Jon. “Once-Upon-a-Time in the Commodity World:
An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America.” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 89, no. 1 (1999):
45–75.
Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. “Out of Order:
Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory,
Culture and Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25.
Gregson, Nicky. Living with Things. Ridding,
Accommodation, Dwelling. Wantage, UK: Sean
Kingston Publishing, 2007.
Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. Second-Hand Cultures:
Materializing Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Hetherington, Kevin. “Secondhandedness: Consumption,
Disposal and Absent Presence.” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004):
157–173.
Hobson, Kersty. “Researching ‘Sustainable Consumption’
in Asia-Pacific Cities.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 45, no. 2
(2004): 279–288.
Hughes, Alex, and Suzanne Reimer, eds. Geographies of
Commodity Chains. London: Routledge, 2004.
Jackson, Peter. “Rematerializing Social and Cultural
Geography.” Social and Cultural Geography 1, no. 1
(2000): 9–14.
Jackson, Peter, and Claire Dwyer, eds. Transnational
Spaces. London: Routledge, 2004.
Jackson, Peter, Michelle Lowe, Daniel Miller, and Frank
Mort, eds. Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices,
Spaces. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Jayne, Mark. Cities and Consumption. Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2006.
Mansvelt, Juliana. Geographies of Consumption. London:
Sage, 2005.
Sack, Robert David. Place, Modernity, and the Consumer’s
World: A Relational Framework for Geographical
Analysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992.
Slater, Don. “Cultures of Consumption.” In Handbook of
Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson, Mona
Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift, 147–163,
London: Sage, 2003.
Urry, John, ed. Consuming Places. London: Routledge,
1995.
Wolch, Jennifer. “Green Urban Worlds.” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 97, no. 2 (2007):
373–384.
Wrigley, Neil, and Michelle Lowe, eds. Retailing,
Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail
Geography. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1996.

656

Ghettos

GHETTOS
The ghetto is a constrained area occupied almost
exclusively by members of an ostracized group, generally black, and within which nearly all members of
that group are constrained to live. Black ghettos are
doubly exclusive: nearly all blacks are in it; nearly all
in it are black. The process of ghetto formation has
important implications for consumption in terms of
unequal access to housing and other vital services such
as education.
In South Africa, under its apartheid regime, racial
and ethnic segregation was rigorously legislated.
Cities were zoned to separate each racial group. Black
townships, such as Johannesburg’s Soweto, were
established distant from the city in which the Africans
worked to not blight white urban expansion in their
direction.
The term ghetto originated in medieval Venice,
where it applied to the Jewish quarter to which
Jews were obliged to return by nightfall. However,
it became a generic name for such areas in medieval
towns. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland,
they were referred to as shtetls, though these were
small Jewish market towns.

Difference Between Ghettos
and Ethnic Enclaves
There are major differences between ethnic enclaves
and ghettos. The key examples are the differences
between the African American ghetto and the
European immigrant ethnic enclaves within U.S. cities. Robert Park, cofounder and influential leader of
the Chicago School of Sociology, saw the black ghetto
as just another example of the generic ethnic enclaves
like Little Italy. However, Thomas Philpott demonstrated that for Chicago in the 1930s, the black
ghetto differed in kind from Park’s ethnic “ghettos.”
Black ghettos were homogeneously black; they were
doubly concentrated: 93 percent of Chicago’s black
population lived in the black ghetto, where they
accounted for 82 percent of the population. Even
in 2000, 71 percent of Chicago’s black population
lived in tracts that were between 70 and 100 percent
black. The ethnic enclaves, in contrast, were mixed
and diluted. For example, only 2 percent of the Irish
lived in the Irish enclave, and they accounted for
only a third of the enclave’s population. Just under a

half of the Italians lived in Chicago’s Italian enclaves,
where they formed less than half of the population.
Thus, ghettos were enforced; enclaves were voluntary. Conventionally, ghettos are considered negative
and threatening, enclaves as positive and touristic;
the ghetto is viewed as a prison, the enclave a springboard. Therefore, ghettos persist, enclaves dissolve.
In recent times, ghetto has misleadingly been applied
to almost any area of ethnic concentration rather
than to areas meeting the dual criteria mentioned
previously.

Race or Poverty?
Ghettos are associated with poverty, poor housing,
crime, and dysfunctional social life. However, their
key characteristic is race. Some sociologists have represented ghettos as concentrations of poor people
who happen to be black. However, many studies
demonstrate that race, not income, is the defining
characteristic. One of the most important demonstrations was made by Karl Taeuber and Alma Taeuber.
They calculated for Chicago in 1960 that black-white
income differences “explained” only 12 percent of the
very high level of black segregation. Work by Douglas
Massey and Nancy Denton shows that for thirty metropolitan areas in the United States between 1970
and 1980, wealth made no difference to the very
high level of segregation between blacks and whites
with high incomes, blacks and whites with medium
incomes, and blacks and white with low incomes.

Ghettos and Consumer Culture
In terms of consumer culture, ghettos tend to be areas
of avoidance for nonblack groups. Attempts have been
made to assert that ghettos are areas of preference for
black groups. Many African Americans are reluctant
to be the first black families moving to predominantly
white areas, but the literature shows that to find better
housing, they want to move from the ghetto; increasingly, there has been a move of African Americans to
the suburbs. Since the 1968 Open Housing legislation, an increasing number of blacks have been able
to move to the suburbs, but constraints still exist, and
black ghettos have not dispersed. For example, actor
impersonators (white actors representing realtors/
estate agents with matching socioeconomic profiles as
genuine black home seekers) were offered far more
properties and better mortgages than were the black
clients. The latter often found that realtors steered

Gifts and Reciprocity

them to black areas or missed appointments or told
them that the properties had already been sold, while
telling the matched white actors that the properties
were still for sale. “Redlining” is another technique
found to be used by real estate agents. This involved
agents marking on a map areas (generally black)
within which neither mortgages nor home insurance
was available. In the first half of the twentieth century,
“block busting” was a technique used by unscrupulous agents to introduce blacks into all-white areas to
panic whites into cheap sales of their homes, which
the agents then sold to desperate blacks for a profit.
Work by Ingrid Gould Ellen has shown that there has
been a continuous increase in the number of mixed
tracts in the United States since the 1980s and that
examples of stable integrated tracts have been increasing. This is largely through the success of blacks being
able to move out of the ghetto. There is little evidence
of whites moving into or near the ghetto.
Ceri Peach
See also Ethnicity/Race; Geography; Inequalities; Poverty;
Social Exclusion; Spaces and Places; Urban Cultures

Further Readings
Ellen, Ingrid Gould. Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The
Prospects for Stable Racial Integration. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000
Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American
Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Park, Robert E. “The Urban Community as a Spatial
Pattern and a Moral Order.” In The Urban Community,
edited by Ernest W. Burgess, 3–18. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1926.
Philpott, Thomas. The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood
Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago,
1880–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Taeuber, Karl E, and Alma F. Taueber. “The Negro as an
Immigrant Group.” American Journal of Sociology 69,
no. 4 (1964): 374–382.

GIFTS

AND

RECIPROCITY

Long before objects were bought and sold, they were
given, circulated, and venerated. The intensely meaningful, demanding, and ambivalent nature of gift
exchange has long been recognized. In giving a gift, it
seems, we give a part of ourselves; something of our

657

emotions, hopes, and fears is embodied or carried
along in the giving of a gift. Further, the acceptance of
a gift, a remarkably formal process even today, somehow indebts and obligates the receiver, binding him or
her to reciprocate. Where giver and receiver are of similar standing or are relatively equal in power, gifts are
received with polite words of thanks, while the giver
will often “downplay” the act of giving with words
like “It isn’t much but . . . .” Where power relations are
deeply unequal, gifts are often given anonymously, as
in charitable acts, so that the giving does not humble or
obligate the receiver. In mythology, the generous giver
is sometimes masked, hooded, or exceptionally elusive so as not to confront the receiver with obligations.
For example, Robin Hood is an aristocrat who
appears poor and so may give to the poor as their
equal, while the figure of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus
“gives” without actually giving, or even existing,
and allows families to give generously but indirectly
through an enchanted medium. The children who
hope to receive presents from Santa Claus are obligated only by a vague, yet significant, request to “be
good” in a small reciprocation of Santa’s goodness.

Complexity of Gift Exchange
However, the force of reciprocity in gift giving is certainly not confined to mythical tales or what might
be thought of as “sentimental” occasions, such as
holidays and birthdays. The notion of give and take
and the “special” relationships this can generate
are central to the understanding of power, and of
political and military alliances. In the field of new
reproductive technologies, we speak of the giving or
donation of sperm and eggs; but where the individuals, biotechnology companies, or nation-states concerned seem to be acting solely in economic terms,
their activities are widely condemned and sometimes
judged illegal. In the realms of everyday leisure and
entertainment, the force of giving, sharing, and reciprocating is vitally important. What is given often
cannot be measured, certainly not by the abstract
system of money: when a friend cooks a meal for
you, the “value” of this act cannot be calculated in
terms of cost of ingredients, cost of heating and lighting, and cost of labor devoted to the production of
the meal. In reciprocation, you may cook a meal for
your friend, but you might do any number of other
things, such as listen to their troubles or forgive them
for their perceived role in a preceding event: persons,

658

Gifts and Reciprocity

objects, and feelings seem to merge or travel together
in gift exchange. The complexity and ambivalence
of these reciprocal relations seem to persist even in
the most high-tech forms of virtual social networking
where photos, videos, and stories are exchanged with
an expectation of reciprocation, though the sanctions
protecting this expectation are largely eliminated by
the distance afforded by the technological medium.
To what extent new technologies might curtail, transform, or even enhance moral relations of reciprocity
is a hotly contested issue that will motivate further
research in the humanities and social sciences.
In exchanging gifts, then, both parties seem to be
drawn into a process that is not reducible to the economic. Indeed, where the economic value of the gift
is low, negligible, or irrelevant, the emotional impact
of gift exchange may be at its highest—such as in the
giving of a kiss or the paying of a compliment. Most
forms of gift exchange involve an expectation or
even an obligation to “repay” the gift by reciprocation at some point in the future, but not immediately.
For example, if you buy a friend a birthday present,
you feel snubbed if he or she does not reciprocate at
your birthday: the person who has not reciprocated
may appear lesser, somehow drained of moral worth.
Yet we would undoubtedly feel very uncomfortable
if the birthday gift were reciprocated immediately; it
would be as if your act of gift giving was cancelled
out. The rule seems to be that if you receive, you
must give, appropriately and in turn. There is, then,
a moral or ethical dimension to gift exchange that is
fundamentally irreducible to economic calculation,
even as economic or financial value seems to dominate more and more aspects of modern life.

Approaches
The social meanings and consequences of gift
exchange have been studied by philosophers such
as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida; by sociologists and social anthropologists, notably Marcel
Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, and
Pierre Bourdieu; by economists, theologians, and literary critics; and by feminist scholars such as Luce
Irigaray. Many of these thinkers approach gift giving
in the broadest possible sense, covering not only the
exchange of presents but also the gift of being itself:
the gift of being alive, of the giving of life in birth,
and the giving of death in sacrifice. For Nietzsche,
gift giving is the “highest virtue,” and many thinkers

have explored the ethics of gift giving, arguing, in different ways, that the gift exchange process involves,
implies, or points toward a form of ethical relatedness
that is vital for the well-being of individuals and society but that is, perhaps, being erased, forgotten, or
replaced by patriarchal, consumerist, and technological culture. Gift exchange, then, has been presented
as a radical alternative to dominant liberal capitalist
modes of economic exchange. Capitalist economic
exchange is based on utilitarian and financial calculation that measures all values in terms of an abstract
system of money—as general equivalent. The goal
is the continual accumulation of capital, owned or
invested privately. Gift exchange, by contrast, tends
to generate social obligations of collective reciprocity, responsibility, and ethical relatedness. Moreover,
these “values” cannot be measured or calculated in
terms of monetary equivalence because their meaning
cannot be separated from the acts of exchange themselves, which are often ambivalent and are bound to
a temporality that is alien to financial calculation, as
we observed in the case of birthday presents.
The earliest instances of gift exchange are drawn
from religion. The obligatory exchange of gifts,
sometimes in the form of sacrifice to gods, spirits, or
ancestors, was practiced widely in classical civilization and continued throughout Christian antiquity
and into medieval societies. Gift exchange ceremonies also feature prominently in the Vedic scriptures
of Hinduism and in ancient Chinese law. Though
not always obligatory, the tradition of almsgiving,
the donation of money, food, or other goods to the
poor or needy on request, are important components
of Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism. Gifts and sacrifices were, and still are, given to gods in the hope
or expectation of protection, favor, or intervention.
Further, gods give of themselves: they make sacrifices
and perform deeds that, in turn, obligate and indebt
worshippers, making demands on them in a reciprocal but radically unequal relationship. While many
gifts are expensive, none is as costly as a sacrifice: an
act of giving that gives life as a gift to the receiver and
“gives” death to the giver. Sacrificial giving remains a
vital component of many religions.
Contemporary academic interest in notions of gift
exchange can be traced to Mauss’s hugely influential
Essai sur le don (1924, translated as The Gift, 1990).
Mauss, following the work of Emile Durkheim (his
uncle and the founder of modern sociology), understood collective rituals of gift exchange as ancient and

Gifts and Reciprocity

near-universal expressions of social “effervescence,”
the very energy that binds society. Indeed, the social
circulation of gifts and services has been understood
as the foundation of human culture, as constitutive
of the incest taboo and practice of exogamy through
which women were circulated (as “gifts”) among
neighboring tribes, forging alliances, deterring war,
and preventing incest. For the influential French
feminist Luce Irigaray, this circulation of women,
as commodities rather than as gifts proper, she contends, constitutes the very foundation of patriarchy
and the exploitation of women and nature by men.
Gift exchange appears to forge social bonds by
generating and maintaining relations of obligatory
reciprocity between elements of the social system,
both intersocial and intrasocial, but these social relations are not equal or symmetrical. Mauss studied
the so-called totemic religions of aboriginal Australia,
Pacific East Asia, and northwest America, arguing
that gift exchange creates and sustains links throughout the “social totality,” not only between tribes and
clans but also between ideas: between sacred and profane, living and dead, persons and things. For Mauss,
gift exchange consists of three interlocking moments:
the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and
the obligation to reciprocate. The ambivalent nature
of gift exchange, that it is both happy and festive
yet also demanding and solemn, is traced by Mauss
to the etymology of the word gift, which in Greek,
Latin, and German connotes not only a present or
offering but also poison.
Mauss suggests that ceremonies such as the
potlatch in North America and the Kula of the
Trobriand Islands were “both practical and mystical” (1990, 73). Participation is both “self-interested” and obligatory (not freely chosen). Social
hierarchy, honor, and prestige are at stake and are
contested. These are definitely not societies of communistic equality, Mauss asserts; nor is there a notion
of individual freedoms and rights that characterizes
modern capitalist societies. Wealth is circulated such
that the participants “did not emerge any richer than
before” (9), and, Mauss claims, there is no economic
advantage in the ceremonies even for the chiefs. The
gift objects are living wealth; they generate social
meaning and value, and this value actually increases
through the act of exchanging. These festivals, for
Mauss, demonstrate that the notion of credit and
loan predate the emergence of barter and money, so
the attempts of both liberal and Marxist thinkers to

659

understand the development of economy from barter to money to credit are, for Mauss, quite simply
wrong. As a result of these studies, Mauss proposed
a new social democratic program of welfare and a
general spirit of generosity distinct from either liberal capitalist or Marxist communist thinking. This
was to be fostered by a reformed education system
that Mauss hoped would heal modern societies damaged by war and egotistic individualism. However, as
pointed out by Lévi-Strauss, Mauss did not elaborate
on the power differences between members of the
tribes, or on the existence of slavery in such societies,
and has been much criticized for these omissions.
Mauss focused particularly on the potlatch ceremony practiced traditionally by First Nation peoples
of North America, such as the Tlingit and Haida.
Recognizing the imprecision and colonial history of
the term potlatch, Mauss proposes the term total
services and counter services (prestations et contreprestations totales) to describe systems of social
exchange that include the giving of presents but also
loans, entertainments, and hospitality in the widest
sense. The term potlatch Mauss reserved for “total services of an agonistic kind” with “very acute rivalry and
the destruction of wealth;” such ceremonies are “rare
but highly developed” (1990, 7). Among such tribes
there is, according to Mauss, honor in destruction; consumption, he suggests, goes “beyond all bounds. . . .
One must expend all that one has, keeping nothing
back. It is a competition to see who is richest and also
the most madly extravagant. Everything is based upon
the principles of antagonism and rivalry” (37).
The potlatch and its relationship to gift giving,
reciprocal social relations, and the possibilities for a
new or alternative ethics, have been explored by a
number of influential thinkers. For Georges Bataille,
dissident French Surrealist and influential theorist
of “excess,” the potlatch was a form of “unproductive expenditure” (dépense). Potlatch ceremonies,
Bataille declares, provoked intoxication, vertigo, and
ecstasy; they had “no end beyond themselves” and
fundamentally excluded bargaining and calculation
in an open destruction of wealth (1985, 118). The
destruction or consumption of wealth had a purpose,
however—to defy, humiliate, and obligate a rival
clan in a contest for honor or prestige. Honor itself
is not a commodity, and the value it possesses cannot be bought or accumulated. In contrast, modern
consumer capitalism, for Bataille, is an impoverished
social system where “everything that was generous,

660

Gifts and Reciprocity

orgiastic and excessive has disappeared” (124). For
Bataille, the rapturous collective effusion of potlatch
suggests an alternative ethical relation might be
possible in modern Western societies. For Bataille,
violence is an inevitable and constitutive feature of
any society, and he hoped that violence might be
dramatized and expressed in ritual form, rather than
“accumulating” or festering into the hatred that promotes war. The very destructiveness of potlatch illustrates that there are values higher than commercial
and rational calculation. In potlatch-like rituals, even
the separateness of individual identities—for Bataille,
the condition of narrow and calculative behavior—
might be swept away in a convulsive moment. Like
Mauss, Bataille supported increased welfare and aid
spending such as the U.S. Marshall Plan as a form of
gift giving vital for postwar reconstruction.
The controversial work of Baudrillard offers one
of the fullest explorations of gift and reciprocity
in contemporary consumer societies. Baudrillard,
deeply influenced by both Mauss and Bataille, argues
that consumer societies can be understood in terms
of a gift, or potlatch, given by society to individual
consumers that cannot be reciprocated and thereby
humbles and obligates. In consumer societies,
Baudrillard argues, “the commodity becomes once
again . . . by virtue of its very excess the image of
the gift, and of the inexhaustible and spectacular
prodigality which characterises the feast” (1998, 33).
For Baudrillard, like Bataille, consumer societies are
societies of waste and violence. Examples related by
Baudrillard include war and automobile crashes;
even advertising and celebrity culture possess “the
whiff of potlatch.” However,
the essential difference is that, in our current system,
this spectacular squandering no longer has the
crucial symbolic and collective significance it could
assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This
prestigious consummation . . . has been “personalised”
and mass-mediated. Its function is to provide the
economic stimulus for mass consumption. (46)

For Baudrillard, even the violence of 9/11 can be
understood as a violent countergift, an attempt to pay
back the West with interest for its ambivalent gifts of
consumer goods, democracy, and sexual liberation—
images, “signs,” or “simulations” of freedom.
Derrida also engages in a reading of Mauss and
gift exchange, focusing on the temporality of the gift:
the interval or term between the moment of giving
and the moment of reciprocation. Derrida argues

that the gift, at least as present or simple act of generosity, can never take place, precisely because of the
ambivalence of the process: that giver and receiver are
all too aware that a gift is given and that something
is owed. The exchange of gifts is, strictly speaking,
impossible because the notion of exchange undermines the possibility of a gift being a gift. However,
this very impossibility suggests, for Derrida, a form
of ethical relatedness that exceeds or escapes the
ambivalent logic of gift exchange. As an exemplar,
Derrida (1995) discusses the Old Testament story
of Abraham, on whom God (Yahweh) has placed
the terrible demand that he sacrifice his eldest son
Isaac. Abraham must give what he values above all
else; he must violate his instincts and social morality
by making the ultimate sacrifice. Only in accepting
God’s demand is he released from the demand, and
for reasons he cannot fathom. In this story, Derrida
finds a basis for an alternative ethics, one that
reaches beyond reason and calculation. Following
the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida writes
of “the absolute other,” of a uniqueness and incomparable singularity beyond language, beyond definition, beyond calculation. For Lévinas, this absolute
other is God. However, for Derrida, we are all, in our
unique and fundamental singularity, absolute other
to and for each other. We are all capable of absolute
sacrifice in an uncalculating ethical response to the
demands of the absolute other. According to Derrida,
only the gift of death that is sacrifice, the sacrifices
involved in giving birth, and the openness to absolute
otherness are truly disinterested and suggest an ethics
untainted by the calculation of a return or reward.

Final Thoughts
Whether or not we accept that gift exchange embodies or suggests a radical difference from and alternative to the institutions, assumptions, and goals of
capitalist market society, strong social and interpersonal bonds are forged by gift exchange, bonds that
exceed legalistic notions of contract or of economic
interdependence. Yet these bonds are ambivalent and
intensely volatile; they offer no simple solution or
panacea for modern, marketized, and technological
societies that, for many, lack sufficiently strong ethical
and social bonds.
William Pawlett
See also Christmas; Friendship; Money; Moralities;
Potlatch; Rituals; Sacred and Profane; Value: Exchange
and Use Value

Glastonbury/Woodstock

Further Readings
Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Visions
of Excess, edited by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and
Donald M. Leslie Jr., 116–129. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and
Structures. London: Sage, 1998.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other
Essays. London: Verso, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: Counterfeit Money.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss. London: Routledge, 1987.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for
Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge,
1990. First published 1924.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Vol. 1, An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968.

GLASTONBURY/WOODSTOCK
Glastonbury and Woodstock are open-air music festivals whose musical and ideological influence have
shaped the last four decades of youth culture in the
United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond.
For many, Woodstock represents the archetype of
the countercultural youth movements of the 1960s,
a music festival that defined a generation. Similarly,
Glastonbury is seen as the United Kingdom’s music
festival par excellence, one that has defined the representation and reception of rock in the United
Kingdom and further afield. While there is truth in
both of these stereotypes, their iconic statuses mask
their less straightforward origins and evolution. The
festivals also subvert some of the earlier orthodoxies
of the hegemony of a consumer society and the globalization of taste, both in their cultural content and in
their ideals and close links to countercultural groups.

Brief Histories of the Festivals
Running August 15–18, 1969, the Woodstock
Aquarian Music and Art Fair was not the first festival to bring together diverse publics and the drug
cultures of the 1960s around music. Earlier, more
musically focused examples like the Newport Jazz

661

and Folk festivals, which began in the 1950s, met
a more psychedelic audience of 60,000 at the time
of the first Monterey International Pop Festival in
June 1967, the so-called Summer of Love. A new
audience was clearly out there, but it was not until
the summer of 1969 that the ideals with which
Woodstock is associated—in particular, opposition
to the Vietnam War—began to resonate throughout
the United States. A mixture of good luck and bad
planning helped the festival become the long weekend that defined a decade: beset by practical difficulties and local opposition, Woodstock moved from its
original planned location near Wallkill, New York,
to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel via the local intermediary of Elliot Tiber, whose role in the festival is
explored in Ang Lee’s 2009 film Taking Woodstock.
Tiber aided the festival’s organizers, Michael Lang
and Artie Kornfeld, who set up the festival with the
financial backing of two young New York investors
interested in novel opportunities. A financial disaster,
the festival’s reputation and almost mythical status
grew after the event not only through the documentary film made by Michael Wadleigh, a triple LP, but
also because the homicide, accidental deaths, and
negative atmosphere of the Rolling Stones concert
at Altamont Speedway in California on December 6
of the same year represented Woodstock’s antithesis.
The failure of the two subsequent twenty-fifth and
thirtieth anniversary Woodstocks to repeat the original’s successes further mythologized the event.
Glastonbury Festival was founded by Somerset
farmer Michael Eavis, on his farm at Pilton, near
Glastonbury, United Kingdom, in 1970. From
that first edition, known as the Pilton Pop Festival,
through the few 1970s editions when it was known
as the Glastonbury Fayre, the festival drew increasing
public interest as its artistic importance developed.
Compared to events like the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, which attracted between 500,000 and 700,000,
Glastonbury’s first 1970 audience of 1,500 was tiny.
Though restricted by council licensing, up until 2002,
official audience numbers were swelled each year by
large numbers of people seeking free entry, many of
whom belonged to Britain’s countercultural community who saw the festival as an essential fixture
in their calendar, not least because of the festival’s
timing around the summer solstice and its location
in the mystical Vale of Avalon. Still modestly sized
in 1981, when 18,000 attended what was known as
the Glastonbury Festival, by 1990, when it took on
the name of Glastonbury Festival for Contemporary

662

Glastonbury/Woodstock

Performing Arts, it was attracting around 70,000,
and in 2008, it sold 140,000 tickets. Growing audience numbers, and occasional controversies—like
the violence of 1990—meant that the organization
of the festival became increasingly professional.
Alongside innovative business practice, the festival
has maintained its countercultural ethos and reputation through its altruism. With no shareholders,
after Eavis has covered his running costs (£21.2
million in 2007), paid himself and others, the charities and causes the festival supports—from 1981
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and from
1992 Oxfam, Greenpeace, and others—currently
receive between £1 and £2 million every year.

Glastonbury and Woodstock Today
As large public events, or even “mega-events,”
Glastonbury and Woodstock represent barometers
of both popular culture and the ways in which the
cultural industries have changed over the last forty
years. Around 450,000 people attended the original
Woodstock, but only 35,000 prepaid for their tickets,
as numbers drove the organizers to allow a free festival. Though the twenty-fifth anniversary edition in
August 1994 in Saugerties, New York, sold 190,000
tickets, in the spirit of the original festival, roughly
100,000 ticketless fans also managed to attend. In
spite of the free entry, and like the Woodstock ’99
that was to follow, this event was clearly rather
different from the original: one major difference
being the sponsorship of the ’94 event by Polygram
Diversified Entertainment (which coproduced the
event) and Pepsi, and the numbers of people watching worldwide on pay-per-view television and satellite. Just these international television rights alone
netted Polygram $12.5 million.
The biographies of those involved in Woodstock
also tell the stories of the sociopolitical issues of late
1960s America, not just opposition to U.S. aggression in Vietnam but also to a racist, misogynistic,
and homophobic society. So, beyond the free love
with which the original festival has become synonymous, the young Elliot Tiber also represented an
engaged member of the gay rights movement that
had—less than two months before—exploded onto
the streets of New York with the Stonewall Riots of
June 28. Meanwhile, one of the criticisms made
of Woodstock has been the overwhelming whiteness
of not only the audience but also most of the artists.

The performances of black musicians like Richie
Havens, Sly & The Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix,
in particular, were vital expressions of a shift from
civil rights organizations to the greater militancy of
Black Power.
Both Glastonbury and Woodstock have played
decisive roles in the careers of a number of artists,
particularly rock musicians. The popular success of
Woodstock boosted not only careers but also remuneration across the industry. Where Jimi Hendrix
took $18,000 for his Woodstock appearance, he
cost $72,000 for his next major concert, and this
leap in artists’ remuneration has made such a roster
of headlining artists difficult to repeat. Nevertheless,
Glastonbury has managed to trade on its symbolic capital in the music world to counter this
trend: the event has become so significant to artists that—anecdotally—headliners in 2009 accepted
only £200,000 from Michael Eavis rather than the
£2 million or so they would receive to play other
major U.K. festivals. The symbolic weight that
Woodstock and Glastonbury have accrued has
had rather different ramifications: nostalgia surrounding Woodstock has meant that repeat events
in 1994 and 1999 have been contested, artistically
and ideologically, whereas Glastonbury—in spite of
occasional problems—has managed over nearly four
decades to fuel its reputation through nostalgia and
a reputation for breaking boundaries.
Debates over the future of Woodstock rage on
Internet forums and discussion lists: the old hands
desperately try to maintain the original’s spirit and
ethos even in the face of the significant changes
that have occurred in the staging of live music festivals over the last forty years, with the pendulum
swinging from youthful idealism to highly planned
professionalism. Unsurprisingly, given the industry
of nostalgia surrounding the original, 2008 saw the
opening of the Woodstock Museum at the Bethel
Woods Center for the Arts: the outdoor event has
been brought indoors, institutionally tamed. In contrast, Glastonbury’s almost constant presence on the
British music scene from its inception means that its
legacy, and future, look rather different, not least
because this continuity has guaranteed that generation after generation of festivalgoers have made it
their own, and—as the debate over hip-hop artist
Jay-Z headlining in 2008 made clear—Glastonbury
has continued to experiment artistically, while maintaining an ideological commitment to the charities

Global Cities

and causes it has sponsored. With the collapse of the
record industry’s old business model, live music is on
the ascendancy, and the florescence of festival culture
suggests that links might be being reforged between
popular music, protest movements, and new political imaginaries.
Jasper Chalcraft
See also Culture Industries; Neo-Tribes; Popular Music;
Social Movements; Spectacles; Subculture; Youth
Culture

Further Readings
Bennett, Andy, ed. Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2004.
McKay, George. Glastonbury: A Very English Fair.
London: Gollancz, 2000.
Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music
and Art Fair. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Shearlaw, John, and Crispin Aubrey. Glastonbury: An Oral
History of the Music, Mud and Magic. London: Edbury
Press, 2005.
Spitz, Robert S. Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the
Woodstock Music Festival, 1969. New York: Viking
Press, 1979.
St. John, Graham. “Protestival: Global Days of Action and
Carnivalized Politics in the Present.” Social Movement
Studies 7, no. 2 (2008): 167–190.
Tiber, Elliott. Knock on Woodstock. New York: Festival
Books, 1994.

GLOBAL CITIES
The term global city has come to connote a unique
urban habitat acting as a portal and stage for world
connectivity. It bestows an image that is contemporary, international, multicultural, “wired,” cosmopolitan, congested, polarizing, and commanding
geographically boundless (transterritorial) spheres of
influence. Global cities are known for their inspiring
built environments where art meets function and for
their centrality in world affairs. As standard bearers
of postmodern lifestyles and consumption, global cities contain the principal command centers for managing world commerce, the nexus of intercultural
immersion, world-renowned research campuses, and
world stages for art and entertainment. Most also are
distinguished as global “gateways” harboring major
airports and “load-center” seaports.

663

As shown by Herman Boschken (2008), the term
is anchored in a collective multidimensional vision
that empirically describes and sets apart the global
city as a complex system stemming from numerous
post–World War II changes in world order (1960–
present). This global reordering specifically resulted
from a cumulative process involving a three-stage,
partly overlapping sequence of economic, sociological, and political transformations.
The first stage (starting about 1960) involved the
separation of production and consumption on an
immense international scale. Through a highly competitive system of remote multinational production
sites controlled and coordinated by a new fiscal and
logistical command structure, this economic stage
originally appeared as a concentration of consumption on American soil offset by a global dispersion
of supply (albeit skewed to the Pacific Rim). In addition, as noted by Herman Boschken (1988), it fostered a global maritime transportation infrastructure
centered on a few predominately urban load-center
seaports distributed worldwide.
This economic stage eventually yielded some
visibility to a second transformation (starting in
the 1970s) sparked by a revolution in information and media technologies. It materialized as a
symbols-driven cosmopolitan consumption, which
concentrated on urban entertainment “scenes” and
postmodern interest in cultural immersion. The
“global lifestyle” had arrived and brought with it
mushrooming demand for culturally significant
goods from all over the world and a host of qualityof-life urban services, as well as the free movement of
foreigners, information, and ethnic lifestyles across
national borders.
More recently, these two stages appear to have
given ground to a third transformation (starting in
the 1980s) involving a realignment of urban politics
founded on a new political culture of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. Inherently urbane, cultural
adherents became politically important constituencies in those cities where their collective aspirations
for world-class status orchestrated a renaissance
in urban development designed for high global
connectivity.
Viewed as caldrons of contemporary globalization, global cities today exhibit a developmental
process now spanning fifty years and paralleling
that of the three-stage transformations. That is, in
a highly discriminating fashion, “globalization can

664

Global Cities

be deconstructed in terms of the strategic sites where
global processes materialize” (Sassen 1998, 392)
and are grounded in what “geographically-situated
people do” (Smith and Timberlake 2001, 1657).
Global cities have emerged incrementally by brewing
and incorporating numerous economic, social, and
political forces of a globalizing world.
They also emerged under American influence
since the three-stage transformations followed a
certain temporal and geographic ordering that, until
recently, placed the United States at the center of
contemporary globalization and of global-city design
and imitation. Moreover, certain North American
cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto,
Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Philadelphia,
and Miami) appeared to be more central and instrumental to globalization’s transformational stages
than other North American cities.
Today, global cities throughout the world (e.g.,
London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai,
Sydney, Singapore) appear as strategic platforms of
world connectivity. Even though most cities have
some global attributes and connectivity, “platform”
cities typically contain a comprehensive set of dimensions that include (1) the scale of an urban area
where size appears to provide a critical mass necessary for holistic global functioning. But the list also
includes the global city as (2) an agglomerated command and control center for the global economy;
(3) a world entertainment stage providing symbols,
innovations, and standards for emulation globally;
(4) a noncorporate world research crucible composed of an agglomeration of university, government,
and tax-exempt organizations providing knowledge resources to a global village of policymakers;
(5) a center of multiculturalism existing as a nexus
for global social exchange; (6) a global gateway for
international transportation including air passenger
travel and maritime trade; and (7) an integrated and
accessible built environment augmented by effective
rail-based mobility systems.
To more fully appreciate the potential synergy
of these seven dimensions, one might conceive of
them as holistically interacting in a way that simultaneously imprints the momentum and routine of the
world stage onto an inhabitant’s daily consciousness,
activity level, and consumption patterns. Global cities possess a multifaceted character that immerses
urbanites in a different milieu than found in cities
exhibiting fewer global-city dimensions. Moreover,

global cities are a magnet for lifestyles that engender
exceptionally high activity and intra-urban mobility
levels. These “on the go” lifestyles seem to coalesce
around a highly visible presence of upper middle
class (UMC)—a socioeconomic status made up of
well-educated professionals and their cosmopolitan
and urbane families.
UMC breadwinners not only commute to their
professional jobs but also are likely to have an
agglomeration of business meetings with representatives of other organizations (public and private)
outside the office. Certain intra-urban activity sites
would be consistent with this characterization, such
as restaurants, theater, golf, or even a trip to the airport for “fly-in” meetings. Since the UMC has proportionally higher dual-breadwinner families (often
both professionally employed) than the median family, their postmodern commuting and consumption
patterns may be magnified even further.
Add to this the high-aspiring UMC family commuting with children to the best college-prep schools
across town, meeting for a game of tennis at the club,
after-school and weekend activities for the children,
and evening events outside of work. Further, add
myriad activities (jobs and commuting) of others
induced by UMC consumption demands for residential maid/nanny services and landscapers, private
social and recreational clubs, limo and retail pickup-and-delivery services, dental and cosmetic maintenance, and so on.
Consequently, the UMC is more evident (and a
greater proportion of the population) in global cities
than elsewhere. There are three reasons for this concentration. First, the nature of a global city in providing a platform for globally connected organizations
(i.e., corporations engaged in command-center
functions, noncorporate global research institutions,
world entertainment, and media firms) creates a
unique agglomeration of postindustrial (knowledgeprocessing) employment opportunities, contacts,
and exchanges for highly educated professionals in
global business, academia, and entertainment and
media (the latter of which includes artists, authors,
playwrights, actors, electronic gurus, and entertainment managers). Furthermore, as a genre, the UMC
imparts a “systemic power” over the activity scene
by providing a standard of behavior that some of the
remaining urban population may emulate as well.
Second, global cities are gateways of travel and
temporary stays for global business, research, and

Global Institutions

entertainment purposes and, therefore, attract a
larger mix of foreign, highly educated professionals
than other cities. Like their indigenous counterparts,
these foreign UMC are inclined to engage in heightened levels of consumption and seek greater mobility
throughout the city. This foreign contingent (often
with families in tow) further magnifies cognition of a
UMC presence in the global city.
Third, the UMC are the principal bearers of the
new political culture. Holding cosmopolitan aspirations of global status, UMC individuals are often a
dominant constituency for economic development
directed at increasing the city’s global centrality and
connectivity. Evidence of this in physical terms is
found in a global city’s comprehensive development
of new multipurpose central districts, having generously landscaped promenades threading together
artfully designed high-rise business towers with entertainment and residential centers, all made regionally
accessible by stylish, technologically advanced rail
transit. Being socially liberal, this same constituency
also exhibits greater tolerance for and appreciation
of foreign or ethnic cultures, diverse creativity, and
variant lifestyles, notes Richard Florida.
Herman L. Boschken
See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Cosmopolitanism;
Globalization; Information Society; Lifestyle;
Multiculturalism; Postmodernism; Social Class;
Urbanization

Further Readings
Abu-Lugod, Janet L. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles:
America’s Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999.
Boschken, Herman L. Strategic Design and Organizational
Change: Pacific Coast Seaports in Transition.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988.
Boschken, Herman L. Social Class, Politics and Urban
Markets: The Makings of Bias in Policy Outcomes.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Boschken, Herman L. “Global Cities, Systemic Power and
Upper-Middle-Class Influence.” Urban Affairs Review
38 (2003): 808–830.
Boschken, Herman L. “A Multiple-Perspectives Construct
of the American Global City.” Urban Studies 45 (2008):
3–28.
Brint, Steven. “Professionals and the ‘Knowledge
Economy’: Rethinking the Theory of Postindustrial
Society.” Current Sociology 49, no. 4 (2001): 101–132.

665

Clark, Terry Nichols, ed. The City as an Entertainment
Machine (Research in Urban Policy 9). New York: JAI
Press/Elsevier, 2004.
Clark, Terry Nichols, and Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot.
The New Political Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1998.
Erie, Steven. Globalizing L.A. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2004.
Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How
It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and
Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Friedmann, John. “The World City Hypothesis.”
Development and Change 17 (1986): 69–83.
Hall, Peter. The World Cities. London: Heinemann, 1966.
Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. New
York: The New Press, 1998.
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001.
Smith, David A., and Michael F. Timberlake. “World City
Networks and Hierarchies, 1977–1997.” American
Behavioral Scientist 44 (2001): 1656–1678.
Taylor, Peter J. World City Network: A Global Urban
Analysis. London: Routledge, 2004.

GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS
Global institutions are international organizations
that are established to solve global problems that cannot be handled by individuals, national governments,
or the market alone and need a global perspective.

What Global Institutions Are
As Henri Reymond has argued, if the institutional
innovation of the nineteenth century was the nationstate, the main innovation of the twentieth century
has been the international organization. While such
global institutions might appear remote to the people of affluent societies, they have more immediate
presence for citizens in countries affected by war and
conflict, or by problems of development like infant
mortality or infectious diseases. A major reason
behind the apparent remoteness of global institutions
in affluent societies is their apparent absence from
the everyday lives of contemporary consumers. Yet
such institutions play a significant role in regulating
consumption and mobilizing consumer responses to
global “problems” such as climate change. These
institutions increasingly adopt the tools of consumer
culture (such as celebrity culture and marketing) for

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Global Institutions

their own ends and have become sensitive to the ethical concerns of consumer groups (through consumer
movements and lobby groups).
International regime theory puts global institutions into context by explaining why individual
nation-states would voluntarily cede their sovereignty to international institutions to solve problems
that they could not themselves solve. The theory
emerged when international relations scholars had
to deal with something called a global commons, a
space that is borderless and in which each individual
could pursue his or her interest. The tragedy of the
commons suggests that without some regulation,
the consequences of human activity could be disastrous. In the latter half of the twentieth century, new
regimes have begun to be created and with them
global institutions.
Some key institutions include the World Trade
Organization, which seeks to remove artificial restrictions on trade and solve disputes without trade wars.
The growth of transnational organized crime as well
as trafficking in drugs and people has led to strong
international treaties that are overseen by the U.N.
Office on Drugs and Crime. How to ensure that
the Internet remains free and open, but not subject
to abuse, is being addressed in the U.N. Internet
Governance Forum, based on a new multistakeholder model. The U.N. Office for Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs was created to ensure coherence
in humanitarian relief when significant man-made
or natural disasters occur, such as the earthquake in
Haiti in 2010 or the Asian tsunami in 2004.
Climate change management is an important area
where a new regime is being created since dealing
with the increasing global temperature caused by
human use of carbon-based energy, and the reduction in forests will require new global institutions as
well as modification of existing ones. The problem
affects everyone, regardless of where they live, and
falls clearly within the tragedy of the commons since
it requires behavioral changes at the individual and
household level, with national policies and programs based on international norms and standards.
However, developing the climate change management regime has been slow. A global institution, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
was established in 1988 to provide a place where
consensus could be achieved about the facts of climate change. The IPCC has performed four appraisals and is working on the fifth. To achieve agreement,

it has had to engage a large and complex epistemic
community of climate scientists into the discussion
and has largely done so successfully, although it has
been contested by a group of climate change deniers,
many of whom are funded by large corporate interests seeking to influence consumers.
While the final institutional structure of the climate change institutions is still being negotiated,
they will likely be tasked with managing financial
transfers from developed to developing countries,
verifying that states are acting in compliance with
their obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and overseeing the acquisition, analysis, and
publication of scientific data. Some of the institutions, like the IPCC, which is overseen by the
World Meteorological Organization and the U.N.
Environment Programme, already exist. Others, like
those to move funds, are still being developed. One
is what is called the Clean Development Mechanism,
an institution to provide investment funds to developing countries so that they can reduce emissions
and then sell the resulting credits.
Dealing with climate change means addressing
how to provide energy from noncarbon sources. The
International Energy Agency has estimated that this
will require an investment of $24 trillion by 2030. As
they put it,
Households and businesses are largely responsible
for making the required investments, but governments
hold the key to changing the mix of energy
investment. The policy and regulatory frameworks
established at national and international levels will
determine whether investment and consumption
decisions are steered towards low-carbon options.
(2009, 3)

In short, everyone will have to have a consumer’s
interest in what the global institutions do.

How Global Institutions Work and
Relate to Consumer Issues
The range of global institutions is fairly broad, since
they cover a wide set of issues for which international
regimes have been created, but they are not easy for
consumers to perceive. In part, this is because they are
complex networks of different actors. They typically
work indirectly to affect results including negotiating
agreements on rules and regulations that states later
apply to their citizens. Often these are in the form

Global Institutions

of multinational treaties that are negotiated in open
forums in which nongovernmental groups participate.
Governments are the main formal actors in global
institutions, formally adopting agreements and acting as the main negotiators of content. However,
governments in most cases are not unitary actors,
and different parts of government interact with different organizations. For example, the main U.S.
counterpart to the World Health Organization is
not the State Department but rather the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Similarly, the main
counterparts for the International Monetary Fund
are central banks rather than foreign ministries.
National lobbying groups often try to influence
their governments’ positions in international negotiations, often through the national legislatures. In
the lead-up to the Conference of Parties to the U.N.
Climate Change Conference on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) that adopted the Kyoto Protocol, lobbying groups representing the coal industry in the
United States were successful in obtaining a congressional resolution opposing the main elements of the
Protocol (Pooley 2010), which was never ratified by
the United States.
Increasingly, voluntary and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) to which individuals belong
(as members or consumers) seek to influence international agreements. Environmental organizations,
like Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Federation,
are active in climate change negotiations. Human
rights groups like Amnesty International or Human
Rights Watch are active in negotiations about new or
revised human rights conventions or in compliance
monitoring. Organizations sometimes seek to prevent
negotiations from succeeding, as when the National
Rifle Association of the United States obtained
international status to lobby against a ban on illicit
trade in small arms as part of a U.N. Convention on
Organized Crime. NGOs try to direct and constrain
governmental negotiators and often provide an incentive to reach agreements. For example, the climate
change negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, in
December 2009 attracted over 40,000 participants
either at the negotiation site or in parallel events.
The Fourth U.N. Conference on Women in 1995
attracted 50,000 participants in the governmental
and nongovernmental parts. The work of NGOs has
been analyzed by Shamima Ahmed and David Potter.
Some NGOs have become leaders in the adoption
of international agreements. Various organizations

667

of persons with disabilities such as the World Blind
Union and Disabled Peoples’ International helped
define the parameters of the U.N. Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including finding places on government delegations, mounting side
events, and ensuring media coverage. Increasingly,
NGOs have sought prestige (and members) by arguing that they can influence international decision
making. A coalition of NGOs was instrumental in
obtaining an international convention to ban antipersonnel landmines.
The Internet has created a communications revolution, but its possible regulation can threaten its
openness. NGOs representing consumers as well as
the private sector have been active in working with
governments to clarify the policy issues through an
innovative and experimental institution called the
Internet Governance Forum. To a degree not found in
other areas, they have been successful in ensuring that
consumer views are considered as debates take place
over the future of the Internet (Mathiason 2008).
While the international civil servants who manage the global institutions are often distant (or,
more likely, invisible) in headquarters duty stations
like New York, Geneva, Bonn, or Vienna, they are
noticeable and approachable in field stations where
the organizations deliver services directly, especially
in developing countries. There, they become part
of national events and can be seen in their vehicles
or when they visit refugee camps, help coordinate
disaster relief, or undertake inspections of factories
to ensure than no child labor is being used.

How Global Institutions Relate to Consumers
As consumers, individuals relate to these global institutions in different ways. If an individual receives
an organization’s services—for example, by being a
refugee, by being in a country with armed conflict
where order is maintained by U.N. Peacekeepers, or
by being affected by a natural disaster like the Haiti
earthquake or the Asian tsunami—the individual is
likely concerned about the quality and effectiveness
of the services provided directly to him or her.
An individual may also be affected because the
standards agreed upon in global institutions improve
or constrain his or her own consumption. If an
individual buys clothing that is made in a developing country, the International Labour Organization
in Geneva seeks to ensure that it is not made using

668

Global Institutions

child labor. If an individual flies on an airplane, the
safety procedures and routing rules have been agreed
upon at the International Civil Aviation Organization
in Montreal. If an individual wants to use an insect
spray with a propellant, it will not contain chlorofluorocarbons, which, because of their effect on the ozone
layer, are prohibited under the Montreal Protocol
monitored by the United Nations Environment
Programme. If an individual’s electricity is generated
from nuclear power plants, the design and management of these plants has to conform to safety standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
There can be direct influences on individuals’ personal budgets as well. One of the approaches being
debated in climate change is to make carbon emissions more expensive by charging a tax or setting
up a market mechanism (called cap and trade) that
charges for excess production of carbon. Since most
households depend on carbon-based energy (for
heating, running automobiles, producing steel and
plastic), this can increase the amount that consumers
will have to spend for basics. The negotiations take
place in global institutions, and it will be these institutions that verify state compliance with agreed-upon
international norms.
Individuals may also relate to global institutions’
spokespersons. To humanize global institutions,
many organizations appoint goodwill ambassadors for programs on the premise that they will be
recognized and, additionally, will generate media
attention. Examples include actress Mia Farrow
as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Children’s
Fund (UNICEF); Roger Federer, the tennis star, as an
ambassador for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization; actress Angelina Jolie for the
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR);
designer Pierre Cardin for the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations; actress Nicole
Kidman for the U.N. Development Fund for Women
(UNIFEM); and Brazilian football legend Ronaldo
for the U.N. Development Programme.
This is not unlike the marketing strategies followed by international NGOs engaged in advocacy
that intend to work with (and influence) global institutions. Unlike international organizations, whose
funds come predominately from governments, these
organizations often reject government funds and
raise revenue from the general public. They have
sophisticated marketing strategies, often costing up
to 25 percent to 30 percent of budgets, to raise funds.

Finally, individuals are paying for many global
institutions through taxes. Global institutions are
largely funded by the governments that are their
formal members. Some funding is by assessed contributions (the obligatory dues that states pay to participate), while others are called extrabudgetary or
voluntary contributions that states provide for programs and projects that they favor. No studies have
been completed that have computed the total size of
the budgets of all global institutions, but figures are
available for those of the U.N. system. In 1996, the
assessed budgets of the U.N. system totaled $5.05
billion. By 2009, the total had reached $7.81 billion.
If extrabudgetary figures are included, the cash total
for 2007 was $24.81 billion. This is larger than the
budgets of most countries but, to put it in context,
only slightly more than British Petroleum had to set
aside for possible compensation in connection with
the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Individuals may also help global institutions
finance their activities directly. Increasingly, to build
up support and to raise funds, international organizations have begun to do direct fundraising with consumers. UNICEF has had campaigns to raise funds
through the sale of greeting cards and such nationally specific efforts as “Trick or Treat for UNICEF”
at Halloween in the United States. In 2008, private
fundraising for UNICEF amounted to $813.2 million,
of which $42 million was from the sale of UNICEF
cards and gifts (UNICEF 2009). This was about
one-third of UNICEF’s regular income for the year.
The UNICEF experience, which dates to 1945, has
begun to be mimicked by other organizations like the
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
(UNRWA), UNHCR, and UNIFEM, which has
now been incorporated into the new U.N. Entity for
Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.
Because of the complexity of government budgets,
which may obscure the amounts budgeted for global
institutions, pressures for accountability by taxpayers are usually not strong. The exception is when
there is a scandal involving finance that provokes legislative and media scrutiny. A recent example is “Oil
for Food,” a program set up by the U.N. Security
Council to provide humanitarian supplies to Iraq
when it was under international sanctions after the
first Gulf War in the 1990s. Allegations of corruption, including by U.N. officials, led to strong arguments for more intensive audit controls. These have
been implemented in all international organizations,

Global Institutions

even though international organizations have been
generally free of financial corruption.
Governments, as well as NGOs that deal with
the international public sector, have been concerned
with accountability. There are two types: whether
the funds given have been used appropriately and
whether the funds provided have led to results in
dealing with the problems for which they were
given. Both require oversight. To a large extent, this
has been a concern of governments, whose leaders
have established audit review boards and independent evaluation units and have promoted resultsbased management. The audit function has been
fairly successful, the results accountability less so, in
part because neither governments nor NGOs have
insisted on it.

Future of Global Institutions to Consumers
The number, size, and scope of global institutions
will likely grow during the twenty-first century, and
some of the directions have already been noted. As
they grow and become more connected with individuals, the organizations will have to reach out to
acquire public support. This will be complex, since
public information by international organizations
has typically been restricted due to states’ fears that
international organizations will mount propaganda
campaigns and subvert national governments.
Reaching out is easier in the twenty-first century
than in the twentieth, because the Internet has made
information by and about global institutions available to anyone with an Internet connection, a figure
that will soon include a high percentage of the world
population. Global institutions already post large
amounts of information on their websites and broadcast public negotiating sessions.
As important as reaching out is having a public
that understands the international system and can
influence it, directly or through national governments. As Anne Florini says,
This is where hard thinking is needed about what
constitutes “democracy” in the context of global
governance. . . . Democracy requires two things: a
system for providing people with a voice in the
making of decisions that affect them and a mechanism
for holding representatives accountable to those
whom they represent. (2005, 15)

This implies a kind of world citizenship.

669

A characteristic of citizenship is a sense of efficacy,
that an individual can influence government decision making. It is the basis of citizen’s authority over
government and is the basis of legitimacy for public
institutions. As global institutions develop during
the twenty-first century, they too will have to be
perceived as legitimate, and this, in turn, will require
that global publics feel that they can influence them.
Learning what global institutions do and how they
function should be a task of scholarship and education. The media needs to find a way of explaining
events and their connection to individuals. And concerned citizens need to make being a world citizen
one of their personal priorities.
John Mathiason
See also Citizenship; Consumer Policy (World Trade
Organization); Consumer Regulation; European
Union; Globalization; Governmentality; Social and
Economic Development; World-Systems Analysis

Further Readings
Ahmed, Shamima, and David Potter. NGOs in
International Politics. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press,
2006.
Florini, Anne. The Coming Democracy: New Rules for
Running a New World. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 2005.
Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science
162 (1968): 1243–1248.
Hasenclever, Andreas, Peter Mayer, and Volker Rittberger.
Theories of International Regimes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook:
Executive Summary. Paris: Author, 2009.
Karns, Margaret, and Karen A. Mingst. International
Organizations: The Politics and Process of Global
Governance. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 2010.
Krasner, Stephen D., ed. International Regimes. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. “Institutional
Perspective on Political Institutions.” Governance: An
International Journal of Policy and Administration 9,
no. 3 (July 1996): 247–264.
Mathiason, John R. Invisible Governance: International
Secretariats in Global Politics. Bloomfield, CT:
Kumarian Press, 2007.
Mathiason, John R. Internet Governance: The New
Frontier of Global Institutions. New York: Routledge,
2008.

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Globalization

Pooley, Eric. The Climate War: True Believers, Power
Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth. New York:
Hyperion, 2010.
United Nations Children’s Fund. Private Fundraising:
Financial Report and Statements for the Year Ended 31
December 2008, E/ICEF/2009/AB/L.2. July 20, 2009.

Yet it can be argued that there is something new to
the present world, the world that began roughly with
the end of the cold war in 1989–1990, and that goes
a long way to explain the rise of public interest in
globalization and transnational phenomena more
generally. Three factors, roughly coinciding in time,
may be mentioned.

GLOBALIZATION

• The end of the cold war itself entailed a more
encompassing global integration. The global twobloc system, which had lasted since the 1940s, had
made it difficult to think of geopolitics, transnational communication, and international trade in
terms not dictated by the opposition between the
United States and the Soviet Union and their
respective allies. With the dissolution of this conflict, the world appeared to have become a single
marketplace.

Globalization, a term that came into fashion around
1990, generally refers to processes leading to the
increased density, speed, and reach of transnational
connections, associated with the global spread of
capitalism and new information and communication
technologies. Globalization can be studied in its economic, political, ecological, or cultural aspects, and
there is a rich scholarly literature, much of it interdisciplinary, dealing with the subject (see Eriksen 2007).
Consumption is a central dimension of globalization, as noted by two leading scholars in the field:
“Globalization clearly involves the worldwide proliferation of consumption goods, settings, practices
and, most generally, consumer culture” (Ritzer and
Slater 2001, 7).
The period since World War II, and especially since
around 1990, has been a period of strongly intensified global interconnectedness. In the first postwar
decades, the number of transnational companies
grew, as did the number of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The United Nations
rapidly became a conglomerate of suborganizations
with offices in most countries. International travel
became easier and more common. In the 1960s,
the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan
coined the term the global village to designate the
new mass media situation, where especially television, in his view, would create shared frames of reference and mutual knowledge between people across
the globe. In this period, global change—economic,
environmental, political, cultural—became the subject of many new scholarly books. Some used the
term development, intimating that the poor countries
would eventually catch up with the rich ones. Others
preferred terms such as imperialism, suggesting that
the rich countries were actively exploiting the poor
ones and preventing them from developing.
Various parts of the world had been interconnected, and there was considerable awareness of this,
long before the coinage of the term globalization.

• The Internet, which had existed in an embryonic form since the late 1960s, began to grow
exponentially around 1990. Throughout the
1990s, media buzzwords were about bandwidths,
websites, portals, “the new economy,” and its
business opportunities. The World Wide Web was
introduced in 1992–1993, around the same time as
many academics and businesspeople became accustomed to using e-mail for their daily correspondence. Cell phones became ubiquitous in the rich
countries and eventually in the poorer ones. The
impact of this double delocalization—the physical
letter replaced by e-mail, the fixed phone line
replaced by the wireless mobile—on the everyday
life of millions of people has been considerable.
• Identity politics—nationalist, ethnic, religious, territorial—was at the forefront of the international agenda, both from above (states
demanding homogeneity or engaging in ethnic
cleansing) and from below (minorities demanding
rights or secession). The Salman Rushdie affair,
itself an excellent example of the globalization of
ideas, began with the issuing of a fatwa by Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of
Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic
Verses in 1988. It soon became apparent that
Rushdie could move freely nowhere in the world
since the fatwa had global implications. Only
two years later, Yugoslavia dissolved, with
ensuing civil wars based on ethnic differences.
In the same period, debates about immigration
and multiculturalism came to dominate political

Globalization

discourse in several Western countries, while the
Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party
came to power in India.
These three dimensions of globalization—
increased trade and transnational economic activity,
faster and denser communication networks, and
increased tensions between (and within) cultural
groups due to intensified mutual exposure—do not
suggest that the world has been fundamentally transformed after the late 1980s but that the driving forces
of economic, political, and cultural dynamics are
transnational—and that this is now widely acknowledged. As Roland Robertson puts it, “Globalization
as a concept refers both to the compression of the
world and the intensification of consciousness about
the world as a whole” (1992, 8).
Not everybody who writes about the contemporary world agrees that it has recently entered a distinctively “global” era. Some argue that the extent of
global integration was just as comprehensive, and in
some ways more encompassing, in the belle époque
of 1890–1914 than it is today, and the origins of
the full-fledged global capitalism of that era could
moreover be traced back to the early modern world
of European conquests, colonialism, and slavery.
Others claim that the nation-state remains “the preeminent power container of our era” (e.g., Giddens
1985—he later revised his position). Yet others point
out that a large number of people, and huge areas of
social and cultural life, are relatively untouched by
transnational processes.

Interconnectedness
In spite of these arguments, it would be difficult to
argue against the view that the world is more interconnected today than at any earlier historical period—
through satellite TV, Internet and mobile telephony,
migration and tourism, trade, and an intensified traffic in signs and meanings. The culinary capital of
India may be London; that of China, San Francisco.
To carry out anthropological fieldwork in a village in
the Dominican Republic, one has to spend at least a
few months in New York City, since half of the villagers are at any time working and living in the Big
Apple. The little trolls, “Scream” T-shirts, and expensive knitted sweaters sold as Norwegian souvenirs to
tourists visiting Oslo are made in Taiwan, Pakistan,
and Sri Lanka, respectively. The largest city in the
English-speaking Caribbean is London. And if the

671

classical patriarchal kinship system of the Taiwanese
had been unable to withstand the pressure of individualism from modernization, several shop owners
in Silicon Valley might still have been in business: the
patriclan is an efficient economic unit where interestfree loans and free services are available, and when
shops in California (and elsewhere) have to close
down because their customers have lost their jobs,
this is partly a result of competition from East Asia.
Such is the extent of global interconnectedness,
and one could go on to describe satellite television,
the Internet, cheap flights, and cell phones. The
implications for consumption patterns are evident
but not predictable. In some realms of consumption, people remain unexpectedly resilient to change,
while other areas change much faster than one might
have expected. For example, when cable and satellite
television became widespread in European countries
in the 1980s, many predicted that the new situation
would be detrimental to national cohesion since people could now watch television from any country in
the world. Yet, domestic programming remains the
most popular in every country, including the smallest
ones, in spite of the huge selection of channels.
Food habits, on the other hand, have changed
faster than predicted in many parts of the world,
especially the rich countries. In the United Kingdom,
chicken tikka masala has been declared a national
dish (indeed, the dish was probably first made in a
Glasgow restaurant in the late 1960s). The boiled
potato, a staple with virtually any hot meal in
Norway in the 1970s, has become a rare sight in that
country (outside the tourist circuit, where it remains
popular). Coffee bars and fast-food restaurants,
whether American or not, have similarly fast become
a familiar sight in every European city.
Differences between regions are not obliterated
due to the increased interconnectedness. The global
village is a community of communication and
exchange, not of homogeneity. However, the cultural
differences between regions, peoples, and nations are
much less clear-cut in a globalized era than they were
earlier, since similar goods and services are available
worldwide, although they are articulated through
local contexts that remain different.

Standardization
A key dimension of globalization is standardization, that is, the implementation of shared criteria
of measurement, exchange, and communication.

672

Globalization

Standardization enables comparability along a shared
set of criteria, such as clock time, thermometer temperature, written language, or money. For globalized
mass consumption to be possible, certain standards
have to be implemented, and the monetary economy
is arguably the most important one.
In the kinds of traditional societies typically
studied by anthropologists, both language and time
concepts exist, but not writing and clocks. Similarly,
moneylike instruments exist in many kinds of societies, but the presently near-universal kind of money,
“general-purpose money,” is recent and historically
culture bound. It does roughly the same thing to payment, value measurements, and exchange as clocks
and writing do to time and language, respectively.
They make the transaction abstract and impose a
standardized grid onto a large area (ultimately the
whole world). They place individual, mundane transactions under an invisible umbrella of abstraction.
Shell money, gold coins, and other compact valuables are known from a wide range of traditional
societies. They may, perhaps, be used as value standards to make different goods comparable—a bag of
grain equals half a gold coin; a goat equals half a gold
coin; thus, a sack of grain can be bartered with a goat.
They may be used as means of exchange—I can buy
two goats with a gold coin. They may even be used
as means of payment—I have killed my neighbor and
have to pay the widow and children three gold coins
in compensation. However, modern money is a much
more powerful technology than anything comparable
that we know from traditional societies. Above all, it
is universal in its field of applicability. One single kind
of money functions as a universal means of payment
and exchange, and as a value standard. West African
cowries had no value outside a limited area, and even
there, only certain commodities and services could be
purchased with them. General-purpose money is legal
tender in an entire state of millions of inhabitants and
is usually convertible to render them valid anywhere.
Regarded as information technology, money has
truly contributed to the creation of one world, albeit
a world into which only people of means are integrated. Money makes wages and purchasing power
all over the world comparable, makes it possible to
exchange a ton of taro from New Guinea with electronics from Taiwan, and it is a necessary medium
for the world of globalized consumption to be possible at all. Whereas transaction and trade in many
societies depended on trust and personal relationships

between seller and buyer, the abstract and universal
money we are familiar with imply an externalization
of economic transactions. As long as there is agreement over the economic value of the colored bits of
paper, one need not know either one’s debtors or
one’s creditors personally. With the recent move of
money into cyberspace, which entails that the same
plastic card can be used for economic transactions
nearly anywhere in the world, it becomes even more
abstract, notes Keith Hart.
The transitions from kinship to national identity,
from custom to legislation, from cowrie money or
similar to general-purpose money, from local religions to written religions of conversion, from persondependent morality to universalistic morality, from
memory to archives, from myths to history, and from
event-driven time to clock time—all point in the same
direction: from a small-scale society based on concrete
social relations and practical knowledge to a largescale society based on an abstract legislative system
and abstract knowledge founded in logic and science.
In an important sense, globalization continues
the work of nation building by creating shared standards, comparability, and “bridging principles” of
translation between formerly discrete and sometimes
incommensurable worlds. Anything from consumer
tastes to measurements and values are now being
standardized at a global level. This does not mean
that everybody is equally affected, or that standardization is perfect and all encompassing. However, it is
indisputable that the range of common denominators
is widening in its scope and deepening in its impact.
An example of standardization in the realm of consumption, which aptly illustrates this development, is
McDonaldization (Ritzer 1993), a term that does not
merely refer to the spread of fast-food restaurants but
also to the spread of a logic of production whereby
mass production of commodities and services is made
simple, staff can be replaced easily because few skills
are required, and the connection with the local community and its traditions is nonexistent. Developing a
similar argument, Alan Bryman has coined the term
Disneyization, defining it as “the process by which the
principles of the Disney theme parks are coming to
dominate more and more sectors of American society
as well as the rest of the world” (2004, 1)—mass production of a certain kind of consumer dream where
consumption is clean and sanitized, free of friction
or unpleasantness, safe and easy. Bryman’s analysis
shows that the principles of Disneyization are spread

Globalization

throughout the world, thereby creating standardized
consumption patterns where the products in question
are devoid of local content and unrelated to the context surrounding them.

Forms of Cultural Mixing
Globalization is often associated with cultural
hybridity or, simply, mixing. Perhaps especially visible in popular culture, new cultural forms emerge
out of diverse materials in a situation of increased
intercultural contact. Musical subgenres such as
bhangra (with South Asian and British elements), literary forms such as Nigerian literature in English,
culinary innovations such as salmon paté (North
European and French), and mixed personal identities
ranging from Black British to Ukrainian-Canadian
emerge in the world of heightened mobility.
Commonly seen as “Westernization,” processes of
mutual cultural influence and mixing—the cultural
dynamics of globalization—must in fact be understood as a multidirectional and truly complex process. Moreover, it must be kept in mind that there is
no such thing as a “pure” culture. Mixing has always
occurred, although its speed and intensity are higher
than before.
A number of terms are used to describe cultural
mixing, and it is necessary to distinguish between the
main forms.
Cultural pluralism directs the attention toward the
relative boundedness of the constituent groups or
categories that make up a society. It is a close
relative of multiculturalism. In the realm of
consumption, pluralism would imply that different
groups consume different kinds of goods
systematically because of cultural differences.
Hybridity directs attention toward individuals or
cultural forms that are reflexively—self-consciously—
mixed, that is, syntheses of cultural forms or
fragments of diverse origins. It is thus distinctive
from either pluralism or multiculturalism, where
boundaries between groups remain intact. Hybrid
consumption entails the creative mixing of products
and services of diverse origins.
Syncretism directs attention toward the
amalgamation of formerly discrete world views,
cultural meaning, and, in particular, religion.
Diasporic identity directs attention toward an
essentially social category consisting of people

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whose primary subjective belonging is in another
country.
Transnationalism directs attention, rather, to a
social existence attaching individuals and groups
not primarily to one particular place, but to several
or none.
Diffusion directs attention toward the flow of
substances and meanings between societies,
whether it is accompanied by actual social
encounters or not.
Creolization, finally, directs the attention toward
cultural phenomena that result from displacement
and the ensuing social encounter and mutual
influence between two or several groups, creating
an ongoing dynamic interchange of symbols and
practices, eventually leading to new forms with
varying degrees of stability.

Hybridity is the most general concept used here,
and it may refer to any obviously mixed cultural
form. World music, various forms of contemporary
“crossover” cuisine, and urban youth cultures borrowing elements from a variety of sources including
minority cultures and TV are typical examples of
phenomena explored under the heading hybridity.
Hybrid cultural forms are often counteracted by
quests for purity and “authenticity,” which may be,
but are not necessarily, politicized in situations of
increased ethnic diversity due to immigration.

Homogenization and Heterogenization
Does globalization lead to homogenization or to heterogenization—do we become more similar or more
different owing to the increase in transnational mobility and communication? In one sense, people worldwide arguably become more similar. Individualism,
which we here take to mean the belief that individuals have rights and responsibilities regardless of their
place in wider social configurations, is a central feature of global modernity. It is also easy to argue that
similarities in consumer preferences indicate a certain “flattening” or homogenization. Yet, at the same
time, local adaptations of universal or nearly universal phenomena show that global modernities always
have local expressions and that the assumed similarities may either conceal real differences in meaning
or that they may be superficial with no deep bearing on people’s existential condition. The question
is phrased too simplistically to have an unequivocal

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Globalization

answer, but studies of consumption may shed light
on it in several ways.
George Ritzer (2004) contrasts what he sees as
two pervasive tendencies in the contemporary world:
the grobalization of nothing, and the glocalization of
something. He defines glocalization as that which is
“locally conceived and controlled and rich in distinctive substance” (8), while grobalization is defined as
“generally centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content”
(3). In other words, standardized, mass-produced
goods catering to an assumed common denominator of disembedded market tastes are the outcome
of grobalization, while anything that couldn’t have
been produced anywhere but in a particular location
is defined as glocalization.
Ritzer says that there “is a gulf between those
who emphasize the increasing grobal influence of
capitalistic, Americanized, and McDonaldized interests and those who see the world growing increasingly pluralistic and indeterminate” (2004: 80). He
moreover distinguishes between the grobalizationglocalization of places, things, persons, and services.
The more personalized, place bound, and unique
something is, the more glocalized. For example,
while a craft barn represents the glocalization of
something, Disney World stands for the grobalization of nothing. A bar frequented because of its
skillful bartender or because it is where one’s friends
hang out is “something,” whereas hotel bars with
new customers every evening and a standardized,
transnational selection of cocktails is a “nothing.”
The big and standardized stands for nothing, while
the small and locally fashioned stands for something,
in Ritzer’s account.
Ritzer agrees that things are in fact more complicated. He admits that “grobalization can, at times,
involve something (for example, art exhibits that
move among art galleries throughout the world,
Italian exports of food like Parmigiano Reggiano and
Culatella ham)” (2004: 99), and conversely, that the
glocal can also produce “nothing,” such as tourist trinkets. He even concedes that there are “people today,
perhaps a majority, who prefer nothing to something
and who have good reason for that preference” (16),
thinking about those—hundreds of millions—who
scarcely have the opportunity to participate in the
consumption of nothing. People in poorer countries
produce much of the richer world’s nothingness but
can scarcely afford any of it for themselves.

Inspired by Marc Augé’s concept of nonplaces, but
also by Max Weber’s classic theory of disenchantment and rationalization, Ritzer establishes a series
of simple contrasts where everything mass produced,
ready-made, and instant appears dehumanized, and
where everything that is one of a kind (be it a product or an employee) is “enchanted” and authentic.
Many writers on globalization would be inclined
to see this analysis as simplistic. As pointed out by
Jean-Loup Amselle, even in McDonald’s restaurants,
“as one may discover by visiting its outlets throughout the world, [they] do not sell the same products
everywhere” (2001, 22). In India, where the majority
of the population does not eat beef, for example, the
Big Mac is a lamb burger. In addition, apparently
identical products and services are perceived in distinctly local ways. Coca-Cola, an everyday product
in most of the Western world, is associated with
weddings and other rituals among many peoples, not
least in Africa. The Macintosh computer, according
to Amselle, has become a symbol of identity among
French intellectuals resisting the global dominance of
Microsoft (in spite of it being an American product).
In other words, against the grobalization of nothing,
locals invest the “nothing” with something in discriminating, critical ways. And yet it remains a significant fact that the transnational standardization of
commodities and services is one important dimension
of globalization, even if the meaning of the products
and services thus disseminated vary locally.

Transnational Consumption
The globalization of consumption does not just refer
to the spread of similar patterns of consumption
or consumer preferences, of similar goods and services worldwide, or to complex forms of “mixed”
consumption. Globalization, seen as transnational
processes, also affects consumption as such, in the
sense that interpersonal transnational connections
influence consumption directly. It is a familiar fact
that migrants in Western cities have their own shops
with specially imported items of food and clothing,
and that their tastes influence the majority to some
extent. Less well known is the converse influence,
from the migrants in the West to those who stay at
home in the third world.
Remittances from migrants make up a substantial
part of the domestic economies in many parts of the
third world. As shown by Nigel Harris and others,

Globalization

remittances are spent in a variety of ways, with
considerable variation between countries. However,
almost everywhere, a proportion is invested in land
or small enterprises. It has been speculated that every
dollar sent back to the Philippines leads to a further
three dollars in local growth, either through investment or through boosting local demand.
Remittances take place at the interpersonal level,
creating strong ties of commitment, obligation, and
economic transactions between millions of individuals located sometimes at opposite ends of the
globe. Their effects on local consumption can be
significant not only in filling local purses but also
through influencing local consumer preferences. A
stroll in the Pakistani town of Kharian indicates what
this means: one will soon notice a not insignificant
“Norwegianization” in the town. People carry plastic
bags from Oslo shops, many speak Norwegian, and at
least one barber has a faded, framed photo of the late
King Olav V in his shop. Most of Norway’s Pakistani
hail from the Kharian area, and many travel back
and forth as often as time and money allow. Return
migrants or migrants on holiday “back home” often
have to save substantial sums to be able to present
their relatives with lavish gifts and to flaunt the
wealth expected of them. Justin-Daniel Gandoulou
describes Congolese men returning from Paris displaying Armani sunglasses and Gucci shoes to people
unaware of the fact that the same men have often
worked double shifts and led materially poor lives for
years to afford such conspicuous consumption.

Questions of Cultural Hegemony
Globalization is often, particularly regarding consumption, associated with Americanization; the
global dissemination of American films, popular
music, fast food, and so on, is seen as a—if not
the—main form of cultural globalization. However,
the standardized American forms witnessed in the
critiques of Disneyization and McDonaldization are
not representative of the actual flow of commodities
in the world. In fact, not even phenomena usually
seen as typically American are necessary American.
Fast-food restaurants are widespread worldwide, but
rarely market dominant, and the largest fast-food
corporation in the world is British, not American.
7-Eleven is owned by Japanese investors. Volkswagen
sells more cars in China than any American carmaker,
and Toyota is the third-largest-selling car made in the

675

United States itself. Although American companies
are market dominant in some areas, such as computers and the media and entertainment world, this
does not hold true as a general statement. Daniel
Miller describes a family scene from somewhere in
the third world where the children are watching
Pokémon on TV, their father has finally been able
to afford a new Mercedes-Benz, and the adults celebrate with bottles of whisky. As a matter of fact,
the car, the TV show, and the beverage have nothing
to do with the United States.
Although forms of consumption often described
as Western symbolize modern success in much of the
world, the actual origins of the goods and services consumed varies hugely. Tracing the itinerary of Hindi films
around the world, Brian Larkin shows not only how
popular these films are among youths in Indonesia,
Senegal, Nigeria, and elsewhere, but also how local
filmmakers in, for example, northern Nigeria “borrow
plots and styles from Bombay cinema” (2003, 171). In
fact, Hindi (Bollywood) films have been the most popular foreign films in northern Nigeria since the 1960s.
Even commodities that do have an American origin do not necessarily lead to Americanization in the
sense of obliterating the local. Anthropologists have
written about the indigenization of modernity, arguing that foreign artifacts and practices are incorporated into preexisting worlds of meaning, modifying
these life worlds somewhat, but not homogenizing
them. Many of the dimensions of modernity seen as
uniform worldwide, such as bureaucracies, markets,
computer networks, and human rights discourses,
always take on a distinctly local character, not to
mention consumption: a trip to McDonald’s triggers
an entirely different set of cultural connotations in
Amsterdam from what it does in Chicago, not to
mention Beijing. Or Moscow. As shown by Melissa
Caldwell, McDonald’s restaurants became a familiar and popular fixture in the daily life of Russians
with astonishing speed after the opening of the
first outlet in 1990. Surprisingly, “Muscovites have
incorporated McDonald’s into the more intimate
and sentimental spaces of their personal lives: family celebrations, cuisine and discourses about what it
means to be Russian today” (2004, 6). In her words,
Russians have “domesticated” the archetypal symbol
of Americanness and made it a Russian one.
Examples of such appropriations of foreign
goods and services are ubiquitous in the contemporary world. What may appear as dramatic cultural

676

Globalization

transformations may not be perceived as such.
Amazonian peoples who may have been contacted by
the outside world only a decade ago are perfectly at
ease having swapped their body paint for Manchester
United T-shirts and do not see it as Westernization or
even change. To them, change would mean a transformation of their relationship to each other, such
as being forced to disperse, engage in migrant labor,
and so on. This would also be a valid perspective
on the Pokémon-watching, whisky-drinking elite
invoked previously: insofar as their new patterns of
consumption do not interfere with the fundamental
structure of their relationships to each other, they do
not lead to radical cultural change.
Similar points are made in Harold Wilhite’s 2008
study of consumption in contemporary Kerala, but
Wilhite takes the argument one step further to show
that the uneven distribution of modern consumer
goods has created new divisions in Keralan society,
and also in what ways consumption is a controversial
theme in Indian public life, where many argue that
ancient Hindu values of frugality and modesty are
declining owing to the spread of mass consumption.

Reactions to Globalization
Critical reactions against market- and technologydriven globalization are widespread. Many countries
have state-sponsored campaigns urging consumers
to buy domestically produced goods, and appeals to
cultural, religious, or national identity are meant to
stem the rising tide of globalized consumption. Some
critics also take a structural, global view, arguing that
the world economy brings prosperity to the few and
poverty to the many.
Resistance to globalization can be classified into
three main varieties. First, the so-called antiglobalization movement, a loose coalition of farmers,
students, and political idealists in the rich countries,
have made strong protests and organized huge demonstrations against the instruments of global capitalism, particularly the World Trade Organization,
arguing—among other things—that it is unfavorable
to the needs of poor countries and that it leads to
an unhealthy and demeaning standardization of production (notably agriculture) in the rich countries.
It is to be noted here, and it has no bearing on the
arguments put forward by the movement, that the
antiglobalizers are themselves globalized: they share
a transnational mindset inspired by ideological developments in the North Atlantic; they communicate

electronically and travel to demonstrations by jet. It
is, in other words, globalization narrowly defined as
global capitalism they rebel against.
A less visible, and less overtly political, form of
political resistance to globalization is offered by the
transnational “slow” movements, notably slow food
and slow cities. Favoring traditional alternatives to
the transnational and standardized, these movements
emphasize the value of locally produced food and
not least local food traditions, slowness as a value
superior to speed in lifestyle questions, and a politics
that puts the quality of life before material standards
of living. Typical Western middle-class phenomena,
the slow movements first emerged in northern Italy,
where they are associated both with the preservation
of medieval towns and with local specialties such as
Culatella ham, wine, and lardo di Colonnata.
The third form of critique concentrates on the
moral and cultural aspects of globalization, arguing
that domestic products are more authentic and fulfilling than imports (even if the domestic products
are also mass produced and sometimes exported).
Exclusion is a major theme in research on globalization, and it affects many more than the people
either participating in antiglobalization or the slow
movements. For many of the millions of poor in the
third world, who have only experienced the negative
effects of globalization (such as loss of land, pauperization, loss of tradition and autonomy), being “standardized” to the extent of getting an education and a
job at the local fast-food restaurant would in many
cases be preferred to being neglected. Capitalism
creates both wealth and poverty simultaneously in
the lack of a state, or a transnational political body,
serving the needs not only of the market but also of
society. This gap—between a globally standardized
and synchronized economic system, on the one hand,
and weak transnational political instruments, on the
other—can probably be described as the main contradiction, or source of conflict, in a globalized era.
Some want the train of globalization to stop so that
they can get off; others want it to stop so that they
can get on. But both groups depend on a political
power willing and able to create a space enabling as
well as limiting transnational contact.

Dialectics of Globalization
In spite of the phenomenal growth of global interconnectedness since World War II, not everything
is in sync with everything else. First, as James

Globalization

Mittelman points out, “The [global] system affects
its components in very different ways. Globalization
is a partial, not a totalizing phenomenon. Countries
and regions are tethered to some aspects of globalization, but sizeable pockets remain removed from it”
(2001, 7). Although there is an “IT boom” in India,
the country emerging as a major power in the production of information technology, more than half of
the Indian population have never made a phone call.
As many writers on globalization have noted,
one particularly visible feature of it is the emergence
of strong localist and traditionalist identities. The
contrast between a borderless global network society, on the one hand, and fervent isolationism, on
the other, is like flypaper for journalists and scholars, and book titles like The Lexus and the Olive
Tree (Thomas Friedman) and Jihad vs. McWorld
(Benjamin Barber) are irresistible when the browsing
customer in an airport bookshop stumbles across
them. There is a simple dialectic to be grasped here:
the transnational network economy, and its cultural correlates, create opportunities for some and
powerlessness for others. French filmmakers are
unhappy with Hollywood’s global dominance; pious
Muslims are unhappy with images from cable TV
and from the London and Paris streets they walked
as students; Scandinavians worry about the future of
their welfare state in a situation of global economic
competition; and indigenous leaders worldwide are
concerned to retain a way of life and a culture that
are at least semitraditional. Global capitalism, it is
often said, produces both losers and winners, both
poverty and wealth. It could be added that even in
the cases where it provides increased (measurable)
wealth, it can also produce poverty at the cultural or
spiritual level. Countermovements against the limitless standardization and homogenization seemingly
resulting from globalization can thus be founded
in a variety of motivations, but all of them are to
do with autonomy at the personal or community
level. Globalization, even when met with little or no
resistance, can usually be described as glocalization:
the preexisting local is fused with global influence;
the particular merges with the universal to create
something true to the universal grammar of global
modernity, but at the same time locally embedded.

Concluding Summary
Truly global processes affect the conditions of
people living in particular localities, creating new

677

opportunities and new forms of vulnerability. Risks
are globally shared in the era of the nuclear bomb,
transnational terrorism, and potential ecological
disasters. On the same note, the economic conditions in particular localities frequently (some would
say always) depend on events taking place elsewhere
in the global system. If there is an industrial boom
in Taiwan, towns in the English Midlands will be
affected. If oil prices rise, that means salvation for
the oil-exporting Trinidadian economy and disaster
for the oil-importing, neighboring Barbadian one.
Patterns of consumption also seem to merge in
certain respects; people nearly everywhere desire similar goods, from cell phones to ready-made garments.
Now, a precondition for this to happen is the more or
less successful implementation of certain institutional
dimensions of modernity, notably that of a monetary
economy—if not necessarily evenly distributed wage
work and literacy. The ever-increasing transnational
flow of commodities, be they material or immaterial, creates a set of common cultural denominators
that appear to eradicate local distinctions. The hot
dog (halal or not, as the case may be), the pizza,
and the hamburger (or, in India, the lamb burger)
are truly parts of world cuisine; identical pop songs
are played in identical discotheques in Costa Rica
and Thailand; the same Coca-Cola commercials are
shown with minimal local variations at cinemas all
over the world; Dan Brown volumes are ubiquitous
wherever books are sold; and so on. Investment capital, military power, and world literature are being
disembedded from the constraints of space; they no
longer belong to a particular locality. With the development of the jet plane, the satellite dish, and, more
recently, the Internet, distance no longer seems a
limiting factor for the flow of influence, investments,
and cultural meaning.
Millions of people—indeed hundreds of millions—
will never have access to the wealth because they are
simply ignored and squeezed into increasingly marginal areas, like hunter-gatherers encountering armed,
well-organized agriculturalists in an earlier period.
The suffering of slumdwellers, dispossessed peasants,
unemployed men and women in cities, victims of war
and of economic exploitation, and their occasionally
well-orchestrated rebellions or alternative projects
seeking autonomy from globalized capitalism—these
are the trueborn children of globalization, just as the
cell phone and the Internet, the proliferation of international NGOs, the cheap tropical holiday, and the
growth of transnational soccer fandom are results of

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Glocalization

globalization. The global village is not a place devoid
of tensions or diversity, but a site, or a network of
networks if one prefers, where people are brought
into intensified contact with each other, leading to
confrontations and frictions, enrichment and opportunities, in the world of consumption as elsewhere.
The ambiguities and paradoxes of globalization are
here to stay.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
See also Americanization; Diaspora; Glocalization;
Information Society; McDonaldization; Money; Social
and Economic Development; Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings
Amselle, Jean-Loup. Branchements. Anthropologie de
l’universalité des cultures [Connections: Anthropology
of the universality of cultures]. Paris: Flammarion, 2001.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage,
2004.
Caldwell, Melissa. “Domesticating the French Fry:
McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 4, no. 1 (2004): 5–26.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Globalization: The Key
Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
Gandoulou, Justin-Daniel. Dandies à Bacongo: Le culte de
l’élégance dans la société congolaise contemporaine
[Dandies in Bacongo: The Cult of Elegance in
Contemporary Congolese Society]. Paris: L’Harmattan,
1989.
Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence.
Cambridge: Polity, 1985.
Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Harris, Nigel. Thinking the Unthinkable: The Immigrant
Myth Exposed. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002.
Hart, Keith. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal
World. London: Profile, 2000.
Larkin, Brian. “Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos,
Bollywood and Global Media.” In Multiculturalism,
Postcolonialism and Transnational Media, edited by Ella
Shohat and Robert Stam, 170–192. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2003.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London:
Routledge, 1994. First published 1964.
Miller, Daniel. “The Poverty of Morality.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 1, no. 2 (2001): 225–243.
Mittelman, James. “Globalization: Captors and Captives.”
In Capturing Globalization, edited by J. H. Mittelman
and N. Othman, 1–17. London: Routledge, 2001.

Ritzer, George. The Mcdonaldization of Society: An
Investigation into the Changing Character of
Contemporary Social Life. Newbury Park, CA: Pine
Forge Press, 1993.
Ritzer, George. The Globalization of Nothing. London:
Sage, 2004.
Ritzer, George, and Don Slater. “Editorial.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 1, no. 1 (2001): 5–8.
Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and
Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992.
Sahlins, Marshall D. “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes:
Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History.”
In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert
Borofsky, 377–394. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Wilhite, Harold. Consumption and the Transformation of
Everyday Life: A View from South India. Houndmills,
UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
Wilk, Richard. “Consumer Goods as Dialogue about
Development: Colonial Time and Television Time in
Belize.” In Consumption and Identity, edited by
Jonathan Friedman, 97–118. Chur, Switzerland:
Harwood, 1995.

GLOCALIZATION
Glocalization is a rather awkward neologism of indeterminate origin, coined to describe the interaction
between global and local forces in the modern world.
The term is most often used to describe how the
process of (economic) globalization is subject to the
countervailing tendencies of (cultural) localization,
with an emphasis on social agency and indeterminacy.
The precise origins of the word are uncertain. Some,
such as sociologist Roland Robertson (1994), have
suggested that the term was conceived in Japan in the
1980s, translated from the word dochakuka, referring to specific forms of business practice whereby
globalized production systems were adapted to suit
particular local conditions. Others suggest that the
term was first used at a Global Change Exhibition
in Bonn in 1990, becoming a marketing buzzword
and entering the Oxford Dictionary of New Words
in 1991. One of the first academics to refer to glocalization was Robertson (1992), who used the term
to counter the assumption that the global expansion
of capitalism led inevitably to the commodification
of local culture and the homogenization of difference. Rather than seeing globalization as working in
opposition to the forces of localization, Robertson
referred to glocalization to describe the linking of

Glocalization

locales across the globe through the process of timespace compression.
Whatever the term’s origins, the debate about
glocalization is central to the argument that globalization is an incomplete and contested process,
countering the charge that local differences are being
subsumed within a more uniform global culture.
Debating various terms, Roberston (1994) presents
glocalization as a refinement of the concept of globalization, designed to highlight the heterogenizing
aspects of globalization as well as its homogenizing
tendencies and emphasizing its spatial as much as its
temporal aspects. Robertson’s emphasis on the spatial
has appealed to geographers like Erik Swyngedouw,
who has also debated the relative merits of the
terms globalization and glocalization. Specifically,
Swyngedouw suggests that glocalization refers to a
situation in which economic activities and interfirm
networks are becoming simultaneously more transnational and in which institutional and regulatory
arrangements switch from the national scale both
upward to supranational or global scales and downward to the scale of the individual body or to local,
urban, or regional configurations. Here, too, adoption of the term glocalization is used to challenge the
tendency within studies of globalization to obscure,
marginalize, and silence the intense and ongoing
sociospatial struggles that have accompanied globalization, demonstrating how the geographical rescaling of economic activity has important ramifications
in terms of sociospatial asymmetries of power.
Doreen Massey has also argued against the inevitability of globalization, claiming instead that it is a
specific political project associated with the growth
of neoliberal capitalism. Massey argues that places
all have their own particular histories and trajectories that cannot be understood simply in terms of
an anonymous process of globalization, emanating
from somewhere else. Instead, she insists that globalizations are always locally produced (whether they
originate from London or New York or Tokyo, for
example). Massey also makes an important distinction between space and place, resisting the tendency
to contrast (global) space and (local) place, the former seen as active and the latter as passive. Instead
of seeing the local as a product of the global and
local places as the inevitable victim of globalization,
Massey argues for a more relational view of space and
place involving the mutual constitution of the global
and the local. So, for example, she sees places as the
moments through which the global is constituted,

679

invested, coordinated, and produced, with different
places occupying distinct positions within the wider
power geometries of the global. Even the most global
phenomena such as the international financial system
are grounded in specific places (including the City
of London, Wall Street, and various offshore tax
havens), and the forces of globalization are experienced differently in different places because of their
particular histories and accumulated layers of meaning. If globalization can be grounded and located in
this way, then the future no longer appears inevitable or incontestable, as recent anticapitalist protest
movements have sought to demonstrate.

Grounding Globalization
While globalization was once thought to lead to a
flattening out of the world and a homogenization of
cultural difference, anthropologists and geographers
were quick to counter such a unilinear view. Instead,
they have documented the hybridization of culture in
a series of distinctively glocalized places, often resulting from the transnational migration of people and
products, capital and commodities, information and
ideas, where new social forms constantly develop,
blending influences from different places. From this
perspective, glocalization can be seen as an attempt to
produce a more grounded and better-specified understanding of globalization. It also involves an attempt
to trace the specific contours of global change as they
are experienced in different places. There have, for
example, been many arguments about the hybridization or creolization of global culture as social forces,
and cultural artifacts that originate elsewhere in the
world are subject to local forces of appropriation and
reinterpretation. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai
refers to this as a process of “indigenisation,” claiming
that “as rapidly as forces from various metropolises
are brought into new societies, they tend to become
indigenised in one way or another” (1996, 32). His
ideas have inspired research on various forms of public culture in India including Bollywood cinema, television, drama, and advertising. Similarly, the Swedish
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz argues that the contemporary world is characterized by “an intense, continuous, comprehensive interplay between the indigenous
and the imported” (1996, 5). His case studies include
Nigerian Kung Fu, Manhattan fatwa, and a Polish
pope among the Maya. These examples all cast doubt
on notions of pure, untainted, and authentic local
cultures suddenly undermined by the anonymous

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Glocalization

forces of globalization, originating from elsewhere.
As British anthropologist Daniel Miller argues, this
may be seen as evidence of growing equality and as a
triumph of cultural relativism:
Central Africans in suits, Indonesian soap operas,
and South Asian brands are no longer [to be seen as]
inauthentic copies by people who have lost their
culture after being swamped by things that only
North Americans and Europeans “should” possess.
Rather there is the equality of genuine relativism that
makes none of us a model of real consumption and
all of us creative variants of social processes based
around the possession and use of commodities.
(1995, 144)

One might then be inclined to agree with those
who argue that, despite the forces of displacement
and deterritorialization that have accompanied globalization, subaltern strategies of resistance are still
possible, resulting in the relocalization of place. From
this perspective, globalization does not lead to the
inexorable erosion of place but can contribute to its
revitalization.

Globalization and Commodity Culture
The close link between globalization as a general social, economic, and political process and
the globalization of specific commodities is readily demonstrated. Indeed, globalization is sometimes rendered in popular and academic discourse
as McDonaldization or coca-colonization. George
Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis is well known and
widely debated. But even in the case of McDonald’s,
the globalization thesis needs to be tempered by evidence of the localization of global consumer culture.
There have, for example, been ethnographic studies of the expansion of McDonald’s in East Asia
and of the cultural specificity of eating a Big Mac in
France or Moscow. The conclusion of these diverse
studies is that the consumption of global products like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola is inflected differently in different (national, ethnic, and religious)
contexts. Marie Gillespie’s ethnography of Punjabi
Sikh teenagers in West London is a particularly rich
example, showing how eating a Big Mac or drinking a Coke can be interpreted as a specific form of
resistance by young people to their parents’ religious
strictures about what to eat and drink rather than as
a more generalized example of the globalization or

Americanization of local culture. The specific dynamics of ethnicity, generation, and place are, in this case,
more important to understanding these specific consumption practices than some generalized account of
globalization. Similarly, Helene Brembeck’s ethnography of family meals at McDonald’s in Sweden shows
how this foreign food, often associated with the
demise of “proper” family meals, can be appropriated within local contexts of consumption. According
to Brembeck’s work, the special time that families
used to spent together at home, on Friday nights or
on weekends, can be relocated to commercial venues
like McDonald’s without significantly undermining
its social significance as “family time.” Rather, she
suggests, McDonald’s is reappropriated as an alternative venue for family interaction, (re-)creating “family” and “home” in novel ways. Again, what might be
interpreted as “globalization” needs to be rethought
through the lens of specific local circumstances.
Miller’s 1998 work on local cultures of consumption in Trinidad provides further telling evidence of
the process of glocalization. Miller shows how the
local franchising and bottling of Coca-Cola reduces
its “Americanness” and how specific forms of consumption, where Coke is drunk in conjunction with
locally produced rum, reduce the significance of
particular brands, so that Coca-Cola becomes little
more than a “black sweet drink from Trinidad.” In
his earlier work, Miller applied a similar argument
to the Trinidadian consumption of American mass
media such as the U.S.-based soap opera The Young
and the Restless. The soap opera was a massive hit in
Trinidad, the subject of gleeful satire in calypsos, seen
as an epitome of Trinidadian bacchanal. Far from
being evidence of the Americanization of Caribbean
culture, Miller argues, the program’s American origins and content were less significant than the way
that the program was appropriated as a vehicle for
“local” debate about family issues, sexual relations,
and domestic morality in Trinidad.

Appropriation and Adaptation
As the preceding examples suggest, a process of glocalization can be observed in the way that global
brands are adapted for local demand. Indeed, the history of global advertising is littered with examples
that demonstrate the cultural limits of globalization
where the expansion of overseas markets is insensitive
to place-based social differences (Jackson 2004).

Glocalization

Case studies of successful glocalization strategies
are, by contrast, comparatively rare. An exception is
L. J. Wood and S. Grosvenor’s study of the British
confectionery firm Cadbury’s expansion into China,
where their standard brand of chocolate had to
be adapted to local taste and modes of consumption. Working through its Australian subsidiary,
Cadbury was obliged to make significant changes
to its way of doing business to accommodate guo
qing (the “special situation” in China). According
to Wood and Grosvenor, Cadbury had to adapt to
Chinese businesses practices, described as heavily
personal and based on guanxi (literally, connections)
and zinyong (one’s reputation for being reliable
and trustworthy). Rather than simply rolling out
its existing merchandise and marketing strategies,
Cadbury gave its products local names and changed
recipes to reduce the sugar content and increase the
volume of cocoa solids. Marketing and distribution
also faced challenges in a situation where self-service
and impulse buying were relatively unknown.
Similar acts of “translation” need to be made
when products flow in other directions, as in the
case of craft goods traveling from the Global South
(in Central America) to the Global North (in the
United States). Carol Hendrickson provides a case
study of this process in her account of the sale of
Guatemalan artifacts to U.S. consumers via mailorder catalogues. In this case, the products may be
specified as “Mayan” or generalized as “Indian” or
simply described as “traditional.” Their authenticity is averred by references to them being “handmade” or “crafted.” Claims are made concerning
their specific geographical origin “high above the
Guatemalan rainforests,” or they may be simply
described as “unique” or “one of a kind.” Similar
processes are documented in the case of British-Asian
fashion goods, particularly when sold to a white
British audience with little or no direct connection
to the Indian subcontinent. In this case, clothing may
be coded specifically as “Indian” or more generally
as “Eastern” or “Oriental.” Notions of authenticity
are inscribed in craft processes of embroidery and
stitching or specific practices of hand weaving or fabric dying but also in more elusive notions of cut and
color, style, and fit. Provenance may be generalized
as “Eastern” or “exotic” or specified as “Indian” or
“Rajasthani.” In marketing these fashion goods to
white British consumers, even greater liberties can
be taken, with advertisements set in North Africa,

681

models from Brazil, and the names of specific garments taken from all over the world (Dwyer and
Jackson 2003).
The study of transnational commodity culture
demonstrates the inadequacy of approaching globalization as a process that only operates in one
direction or in a unilinear pattern. There are many
examples where the flow of transnational migrants
from one place to another has been accompanied
by the flow of goods and services in both directions,
for the process of migration does not impact only on
those who define themselves as transnational. It can
also have a transformative effect on the “receiving”
society. Examples include the popularity of Tex-Mex
food in the United States following Mexican migration to el norte, where a version of Mexican food is
consumed by many people with little or no connection to Mexico, or the British adoption of curry as
the “national dish” following several generations of
immigration from the Indian subcontinent. A subtler
example, perhaps, is the gradual “Dominicanization”
of New York, following the migration of people and
goods from the Dominican Republic to the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. In her analysis of advertisements for Dominican rum, Nyberg Sørensen refers to
the representation of Americans’ alleged inability to
understand merengue or to talk Spanish (“Ay americano, no sabe nada”). While the author restricts her
interpretation to the advertisement’s gleeful reception
among Dominicans in New York (who apparently
enjoy the way their American “hosts” are satirized),
there are more complex processes at work here
across the whole transnational field. Understanding
exactly who gets the joke and at whose expense
requires detailed audience research, carefully attuned
to the complex politics of irony. The glocalization
of consumer products and of commodity culture in
general emerges as a rich terrain for future research.
The debate about glocalization (whether or not
this particular term is used) encompasses a wide field.
It engages with the economic forces through which
transnational companies seek to expand their global
reach and the migration of money, goods, people,
and information that accompanies this process. But
it also emphasizes the fact that globalization is never
a one-way street. Just as “globalization” always
comes from somewhere and is enacted by specific,
socially and geographically located actors, so too are
“global” processes subject to specific forms of localization, the precise form of which is shaped by the

682

Goal-Directed Consumption

previous histories of different places. Glocalization
invokes a politics of the global and the local not
simply in terms of different geographical scales but
through an understanding of the complex ways that
they are relationally connected. Global forces produce the local (in the sense that they have a specific
local impact). But the local also produces the global
in the sense that global forces always originate from
somewhere specific (however much their specific
geographies may be hidden or disguised). The invocation to “think global, act local” is just one response
to these apparently abstract and universal forces. But
a radical response to globalization, as implied in the
language of glocalization, requires us to disentangle
(and not to conflate) the local and the global, space
and place, abstract and concrete. These are important theoretical challenges for the future with high
political stakes in terms of policy and practice.
Peter Jackson
See also Americanization; Appropriation; Capitalism;
Cultural Flows; Globalization; McDonaldization;
Spaces and Places; Subaltern

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Brembeck, Helene. “Home to McDonald’s: Upholding the
Family Dinner with the Help of McDonald’s.” Food,
Culture and Society 8 (2005): 215–226.
Dwyer, Claire, and Jackson, Peter. “Commodifying
Difference: Selling Eastern Fashion.” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 21 (2003): 269–291.
Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change.
London: Routledge, 1995.
Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People,
Places. London: Routledge, 1996.
Hendrickson, Carol. “Selling Guatemala: Maya Export
Products in US Mail-Order Catalogues.” In CrossCultural Consumption, edited by David Howes,
106–121. London: Routledge, 1996.
Jackson, Peter. “Local Consumption Cultures in a
Globalizing World.” Transactions, Institute of British
Geographers 29 (2004): 165–178.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
Miller, Daniel. “Consumption and Commodities.” Annual
Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 141–161.
Miller, Daniel. “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from
Trinidad.” In Material Cultures, edited by Daniel Miller,
169–187. London: University College London Press,
1998.

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldisation Thesis: Explorations
and Extensions. London: Sage, 1998.
Robertson, Roland. Globalisation: Social Theory and
Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992.
Robertson, Roland. “Globalisation or Glocalisation?”
Journal of International Communication 1 (1994):
33–52.
Swyngedouw, Erik. “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’?
Networks, Territories and Rescaling.” Cambridge
Review of International Affairs 17 (2004): 25–48.
Wood, L. J., and S. Grosvenor. “Chocolate in China: The
Cadbury Experience.” Australian Geographer 28
(1997): 173–184.

GOAL-DIRECTED CONSUMPTION
The process of consumption can be goal directed
or experiential, according to Donna Hoffman and
Thomas Novack. Goal-directed consumption is
motivated by extrinsic concerns such as the utilitarian value of an object or the need to fulfill a specific
extrinsic goal. Goal-directed consumption is typically planned and directed. Overall, goal-directed
consumption is slow, conscious, effortful, highly
modifiable, and largely effect free. Experiential
consumption, in contrast, is motivated by intrinsic
concerns such as the immediate hedonic benefit or
the need to complete a ritualized behavior. Overall,
experiential consumption is fast, automatic, effortless, more difficult to modify, and intimately bound
up with emotional processing.
It remains uncertain which system is more important in deciding consumer behavior and how the two
systems might relate and interact. Clearly, people can
and do make deliberative, reasoned choices. Large
purchase decisions, such as the purchase of a new
television, usually involve actively weighing the pros
and cons of each television and pitting them side
by side until a winner emerges. At the same time,
however, people can and do judge experientially; one
television may simply feel more right, while a seemingly good television can be rejected because it feels
wrong. It is obviously difficult to decide if any single
judgment is “correct”; large purchases are made
infrequently, and there is rarely the opportunity to
try out alternatives under replicable conditions.
Over the past forty years, there has been an
increasing emphasis on experiential factors predicting
economic decisions. Richard Nisbett and Timothy
Wilson, for example, set up a stall in a busy shopping

Goal-Directed Consumption

center with four identical pairs of socks placed in
a row. Shoppers were asked to examine the socks
and state which they thought was the best quality.
They discovered a strong position effect such that the
socks placed to the right were proclaimed as the best
four times as often as the socks placed to the left. But
all the socks were identical. When asked to explain
their choice, the shoppers pointed to the better feel
and quality of the socks on the right or announced a
preference for the color. Nobody mentioned position
as having an influence.
When making choices, consumers may not deliberate and balance all the available information.
Sometimes they may not even “see” the information
that is available and will make an intuitive decision
based on information they are not even aware of.
None of this is perhaps that surprising. Much of
what human beings do is hidden from direct introspection. Tossing a ball up into the air and catching it, for example, involves performing multiple
differential equations that you will never be aware
of. Reaching out to grab a glass involves accelerating
your hand, opening your hand sufficiently to grab
the glass, decelerating your hand (so you don’t knock
the glass over), gripping the glass (sufficiently to hold
it firmly without shattering it), accelerating the glass
from its resting place toward your mouth, and then
decelerating it so that you may drink from it (and not
spill it down your front). Although you will do all
that to drink, you will barely be aware of any of it,
and that is a good thing. If every action were driven
by conscious agency, then we would be overwhelmed
by the effort of trying to control all the relevant
parameters with the requisite precision. Automaticity
is necessary to allow coherent, goal-directed behavior and coherent percepts.
In the preceding examples, the goal is to catch a
ball or to take a drink, and too much thinking makes
those things slow or impossible, as can be easily
observed when watching infants try to perform the
same actions. Getting things done involves a balance of thinking and acting, and consumer behavior
similarly involves a mix of hedonic and utilitarian
components. Purchases that are made regularly, for
example, can become ritualistic or habitual, made
without thought. Repeat purchases provide frequently co-occurring representations of perceptual
features, valence, and behavioral responses that
form associative clusters to drive future shopping
behaviors such that the original necessary effort is
no longer required. Such “impulse” buying might be

683

experiential, but it also fulfills the goal of getting the
shopping done quickly and effortlessly. Even when
shopping for less mundane items, impulsive purchases can meet the goal of having fun, whereas goaldirected shopping, with its high cognitive workload,
cannot.
The idea that human beings are driven both by
experiential and goal-directed concerns has been
around for a long time. In the Vatican is a sixteenthcentury fresco by Raphael called “The School
of Athens.” Depicted in the center are Plato and
Aristotle. Plato is pointing up to the sky, expressing
his experiential commitment, and he is flanked by
the intuitionist philosophers, including Xenophon
and Socrates. Aristotle holds out a steady hand of
reason and is flanked by the empirical thinkers,
including Euclid and Plotinus. The fresco beautifully
captures the balance between impulse and reflection.
Living a life driven only by impulse and emotion
would lead to disaster with rash decisions eventually taking their toll. But living a life driven only by
reason and conscious reflection would be paralyzing because each decision would take an intolerable
amount of time. We need to think but we also need
to shop.
Stuart Derbyshire
See also Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior;
Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Psychology; Rituals;
Routines and Habits; Self-Reflexivity; Theory of
Planned Behavior

Further Readings
Frith, Chris. Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates
Our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2007.
Hoffman, Donna, and Thomas Novak. “Marketing in
Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments:
Conceptual Foundations.” Journal of Marketing 60
(2006): 50–68.
Nisbett, Richard, and Timothy Wilson. “Telling More Than
We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.”
Psychological Review 84 (1977): 231–259.
Rafal, Robert, Shai Danziger, Giordana Grossi, Liana
Machado, and Robert Ward. “Visual Detection Is Gated
by Attending for Action: Evidence from Hemispatial
Neglect.” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 99 (2002): 16371–16375.
Tallis, Ray. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Human Being. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University
Press, 2003.

684

Goffman, Erving

GOFFMAN, ERVING (1922–1982)
Erving Goffman was born in 1922 in Alberta,
Canada, to parents of Jewish-Ukrainian descent.
In 1945, he enrolled as a graduate student at the
University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate
in 1953. After graduating from Chicago, Goffman
accepted a position at the University of California at
Berkeley. In 1968, he left Berkeley to accept a distinguished chair in sociology and anthropology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Goffman remained at
Pennsylvania until he died as a result of stomach cancer in 1982. At the time of his death, he was the president of the American Sociological Association, and
he crafted his last published work, “The Interaction
Order,” as his presidential address.
Goffman was one of the most original and provocative sociologists of the twentieth century. He
used his extraordinary analytic skills to establish
a new field of sociology—the study of face-to-face
interaction. In doing so, he demonstrated how and
why “the interaction order” was a relatively autonomous realm of social life, influenced but not determined by culture and social structure. In crafting
his groundbreaking analyses, Goffman drew on the
insights of a diverse array of scholars, including Emile
Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth
Burke, and Everett Hughes. Goffman also extended
the ideas of these thinkers in notable ways, applying
them to unexplored aspects of social life and blending
them with his own distinctive insights and concepts.
Goffman’s special genius laid in his ability to use
remarkably incisive metaphors and observations to
reveal the intricacies of face-to-face interaction.
Goffman became best known for developing the
dramaturgical theory of interaction. According to this
theory, social life mirrors theater, and people are like
actors on a stage. To realize desired selves, individuals must be “good actors” who can adeptly manipulate props, masks, moods, and settings to manage
the impressions of others. Selves, then, are dramatic
effects—they become established through convincing
performances and depend on the responses of others.
Selves are thus thoroughly social in nature. Rather
than being private possessions or personal capacities,
selves are something others temporarily grant to individuals based on their situated performances.
Goffman acknowledged that as people negotiate selves and construct social meanings, they draw

on codes rooted in the framework of culture. These
codes get expressed through an elaborate assortment of role performances, dramaturgical displays,
and interaction rituals. Yet Goffman emphasized
that interaction does not simply serve as a vehicle
through which culture gets enacted and reproduced.
Instead, the interaction order has its own distinctive
logic and dynamics. While culture informs this order,
it only sets broad parameters for action. That is, culture offers social actors “rough drafts” for behavior,
thereby leaving them room to improvise as they perform roles, present selves, and define situations.
In 1974, Goffman developed an approach called
frame analysis to examine how people organize their
experiences and define situations. In many respects,
frame analysis offered semiotics of contemporary
culture. According to Goffman, frames refer to interpretive schemes that enable people to make sense of
activity occurring around them. In analyzing frames
and their implications, Goffman demonstrated how
they can be reworked into “keys” and thus take on
meanings that are patterned on but different from
their original meaning. For example, the frame of
“a debate” could be keyed as a “mock debate” or
as a “debate practice.” As Goffman highlighted,
the process of keying complicates interactions by
undermining frames and making people uncertain
about what is happening. Most crucially, Goffman
delineated the basic keys and frames that individuals
use to organize their experiences. In the process, he
revealed how these interpretive schemes serve as a
kind of glue that holds culture, structure, and interaction together, albeit somewhat tenuously.
Drawing on frame analysis, Goffman offered his
most direct contribution to the study of consumer
culture in Gender Advertisements (1979), a book
that provided a detailed examination of magazine
ads and the rituals and bodily displays that portray
the “arrangement of the sexes.” Through his analyses, Goffman demonstrated how ads offer a revealing
window into culture, power, and identity in Western
societies, particularly in the realm of gender relationships. Goffman illustrated how ads serve not only
as frames that shape our conceptions of femininity
and masculinity, but also as institutional practices
through which seemingly natural gender differences
are socially constructed. Finally, in his analyses of
gender advertisements, Goffman highlighted themes
that permeated his entire body of work, including the
fabricated quality of social reality, the dramaturgical

Governmentality

elements of self-production, and the profoundly
social roots of allegedly natural arrangements. In
elaborating these themes, Goffman laid the groundwork for postmodern theories of consumer culture
and their emphases on simulation, hyperreality, signification, performativity, and decentered selfhood.
Kent Sandstrom
See also Autoethnography; Cultural Studies;
Embodiment; Femininity; Gender Advertising;
Hyperreality; Identity; Postmodernism; SelfPresentation; Simmel, Georg

Further Readings
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences
Research Centre, 1956.
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the
Organization of Experience. New York: Harper &
Row, 1974.
Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. New York:
Harper & Row, 1979.
Goffman, Erving. Exploring the Interaction Order. Edited
by Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1988.

GOVERNMENTALITY
The term governmentality emerges from the later
writings of the philosopher Michel Foucault, when
his attention turned to “the problem of population.”
This interest in population stems from Foucault’s
already established interest in “biopolitics,” by which
he means the networks and strategies of power in
the science and maintenance of the self. In bringing
issues of population to biopolitics, government alerts
us to the articulation of legitimate conduct with
ideas of productive citizenship and personal worth.
Furthermore, a productive and expanding body of
research has set out to examine the extent to which
practices of consumption and orderly consumerist
behavior have become integrated with the activities
and displays of productive citizenship.

The Turn to “Government”
The focus of government is an important development on Foucault’s earlier work on the exercise of
power. In a series of studies up to Discipline and

685

Punish, Foucault looks at how various regimes
of practice are designed to produce appropriately
behaved and compliant subjects. In Discipline and
Punish, he argues that the organization of the prison
is calculated to tailor the self-image and conduct
of the inmates toward the needs of orderliness and
reform, and in The Birth of the Clinic, he suggests
that the procedures and subjectivities of medical
examination produce the sensibility of the compliant patient. What unites these studies is the prominence of institutional convention and organization in
the exercise of power. An implication of this is that,
to a large extent, the effectiveness of these regimes
remains contingent upon their site specificity. In
other words, whether the context is the prison wing,
the clinician’s office, or the schoolroom, discursive
regimes produce the power relations necessary for
discipline and orderliness in a particular setting.
However, such regimes of control do not transfer
readily to the democratic state, in which strategies
of power are obligated to a systemic requirement for
personal autonomy and subtler networks of judgment and control. The response is a shift in the ends
of governmental power, from the pursuit and maintenance of sovereign rule to a duty of care over the
population. The systematic discharge of this care is
made possible by the development of a “science of
population,” producing necessary statistical analysis
of such phenomena as contagious disease, living conditions, and economic productivity. The oppressive
state becomes the nurturing state, intent on developing measures to enable a healthy population to thrive
as workers and consumers. At least in terms of its
rhetoric, government moves from the retention and
implementation of sovereign control toward the exercise of benign surveillance, responsibility, and care.
Successful government requires that projects of
development be internalized within the population,
and Foucault uses the example of the family to illustrate how this occurs. Prior to the emergence of population as a productive economic category, Foucault
argues, the family was the self-regulating unit for the
control of morality and hygiene. Drawing on forms
of knowledge made possible through the application
of statistics and expressible in universal statements of
policy, government is able to extend its rule of care
over the family. In matters ranging from the regulation of sexual behavior to the submission of children
to schooling and vaccination, the family occupies
dual roles as subject of state judgment and concern,

686

Governmentality

and as implementer of policies aimed at population
improvement. In this way, the family moves from an
internally determining source of control to an instrument of the will to govern. In summary, government
is the craft of developing an idealized population
through approved practices of free expression and
conduct within a framework of welfare and responsibility, conceived at policy level and implemented
from within the population itself. This can be illustrated through how advertising post–World War II
targeted the competent purchaser, particularly the
mother whose laundry could only be deemed suitably clean and white through the purchase of a specific soap powder (Myers 1994).

Government and the Good Consumer
Foucault emphasizes the importance of government
to the well-being of the controlling regime, arguing
that governmentality should be understood as “nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of
apparatuses of security” (2007, 48). However, every
bit as important is the safety of the economic underpinnings of the bureaucratic state, in organizing mass
production and fostering cultures of consumption.
Crucial to Foucault’s idea of government, therefore,
are the practices and judgments associated with commerce. Not only did the extension of government
coincide with the extension of capitalist exchange,
but the activities of governing also follow the grammar of the marketplace, “a site of verificationfalsification for government practice” (2008, 32).
The population is thereby governed through an internalized network of judgment based on accountability
to commodity value.
One of the ways in which consumerism is directed
inward is in manifestation of “taste” as an indicator of refined citizenship, and there exists a hierarchy of ever-more informed consumption practices
providing ways of demonstrating this. Appropriate
spending demonstrates control over one’s passions
and finances and betrays refinement. The practices of
distinguishing oneself in the selection and appropriate use of consumer products extends beyond Pierre
Bourdieu’s discussion of social class to the core of
the relationship with the social body. As Bourdieu
points out, the selection of consumer goods provides
a means of establishing a place in the social order, but
this is a performance of citizenship that can be surveyed, judged, and improved. By way of illustration,
Gareth Palmer highlights the expansion of television’s

relationship with consumer goods from the provision
of status-bringing commodities as prizes to the genre
of “makeover” television. Here, individuals presented
as deficient or reluctant consumers are subject to an
expert-driven transformation to a consumer who is
confident, orderly, and accomplished. In this, there
are echoes of Foucault’s discussion of classical Greece
and the well-maintained self as an object of aesthetic
pleasure, but Laurie Ouellette and James Hay suggest that what has changed is that “self-mastery over
style becomes reliant on the ability to choose from a
vast display of consumer goods” (2008, 109).
This is joined, Ouellette and Hay note, by a drive in
such programming toward enterprising self-improvement and, in programs such as The Apprentice, the
pursuit of productive economic success. That is, a
healthy, tasteful, and orderly relationship with material culture emerges hand-in-hand with the accumulation of disposable income. Foucault himself expresses
this relationship as that between governing practices
and “political economy,” producing “method[s] of
government that can procure the nation’s prosperity” (2008, 13). The modes of subjectivity that are
fostered to achieve this include relations of individual
material exchange—that is, the individualization of
a market mentality—and a personal commitment
to the hierarchies of international trade. But at the
level of the everyday, too, the accoutrements of
earned wealth and evidence of appropriate spending
practices provide signifiers of good citizenship. On
the one hand, self-worth is established and can be
learned through refined consumption choices. What
is perhaps more important, however, is that dynamic
citizenship demands the production of wealth as well
as healthy spending practices.

Conclusion
Governmentality offers a means of understanding how consumer culture links with issues of subjectivity and attitudes to regulation of the self, and
how these are connected to the wider cultural and
political environment. In particular, this aspect of
Foucault’s work introduces the related practices
of economy, welfare, and regulation into discussion
of the place of consumerism in the democratic state,
as well as the responsibility to produce wealth and be
seen to spend in an approved manner. It is certainly
the case that strategic forms of consumption can be
deployed to distinguish and empower subcultural
networks, but Foucault reminds us of the extent to

Gramsci, Antonio

which reflexive consumption of any form contributes
to broader practices of governance and orderliness.
Michael Higgins
See also Citizenship; Consumer Regulation; Consumer
Sovereignty; Families; Gender and the Media;
Moralities; Political Economy; Social Distinction

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology
of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage, 1973.
Foucault. Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault
Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham
Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Myers, Greg. Words in Ads. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. Better Living through
Reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Palmer, Gareth. Discipline and Liberty: Television and
Governance. Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press, 2003.
Ransom, John S. Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of
Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

GRAMSCI, ANTONIO (1891–1937)
Antonio Gramsci has been one of the most influential Italian intellectuals and one of the most innovative Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century.
Uncomfortable with the “vulgar” interpretation
of Karl Marx’s thought strictly based on economism and later dogmatized by Soviet Communism,
Gramsci cofounded the Italian Communist Party in
1921, splitting it by the Socialist Party. He was later
arrested by the Fascists. In prison, before dying at the
age of forty-six, he wrote the posthumously published
Prison Notebooks, where he articulated a number of
critical concepts that have proved very fertile over the
years, especially in the fields of cultural studies, history and anthropology, and social theory.
Gramsci, however, did not explicitly consider
himself a sociologist. Born in the small rural town

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of Ales, in Sardinia, to small-bourgeois parents, he
soon realized that his delicate constitution was arguably counterbalanced by his intellectual curiosity and
will to learn. Humpbacked since the age of four, he
won a scholarship at the University of Turin, where
he focused on linguistics. Immediately involved in
politics, he dropped out of the university to pursue
a career as a literary critic and, above all, political
columnist and agitator. Between 1917 and 1920, he
firmly supported the Russian Revolution, conceiving
it as a movement aimed at focusing on, emphasizing,
and defending the cognitive and material interests
of the working classes, whose mass actions could
eventually give them the power to change the existing
social order. The concrete effects of his thoughts in
that historical period were exemplified in his collaboration with Palmiro Togliatti and other Italian neoMarxists who aimed to mobilize and give voice to, in
particular, factory workers in northern Italy. After the
foundation of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci
went to work at the Communist International in
Moscow and returned to Italy only in 1924 to be in
charge of the party and to found the Italian newspaper L’Unità (The Unity), which is still in circulation
today. With the drastic advent of Fascism, Gramsci
and other party leaders were incarcerated in 1928.
In prison, he started studying and articulating his
critical thoughts by collecting fragmentary notes on a
daily basis since 1929, and when he died for prisonexacerbated fragile physical conditions and increased
illnesses, he had twenty-nine notebooks, which were
posthumously published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1949
and later translated into many languages worldwide.
Notwithstanding the unquestionable lack of an
organic conceptual synthesis, these notebooks have
represented a highly influential intellectual source for
a variety of scholars in the social sciences and cultural
studies. Much of their success is related to the concept of hegemony, through which Gramsci aimed to
explain the economic underdevelopment of southern
Italy and the failure of the project of a working-class
revolution in Italy. Gramsci identified in the moral
and civic—that is, exquisitely cultural, not merely
economic—dominance of the industrial and rural
bourgeoisie the conformism (and lack of revolutionary impulses) of the subaltern class. By offering an
insightful explanatory model of the power-making
dynamics of the dominant class and by articulating in
great details the crucial political role of intellectuals
in unveiling them and therefore to “speak for” the(ir)
lower classes, Gramsci unconsciously opened up a

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Grand Tour

whole stream of research and critical thought on the
relationships between society and culture. His theoretical reflections turned out to be particularly fitting
and fertile in the analyses of the modern societies,
where the institutions of the state and civil society are
highly structured and complexly interweaved, where
the consensus of the popular masses is crucially
necessary to rule, and where any wide social reform
requires a process of both symbolic and material
struggle. Over the years, Gramsci’s intellectual influence, particularly but not exclusively related to his
elaboration of the concept of cultural hegemony, has
arguably been mostly evident in the field of British
(sometimes explicitly called “Gramscian”) cultural
studies (as explicitly recognized by Stuart Hall) and,
more recently, of (Indian) subaltern studies.
Marco Solaroli
See also Anthropology; Cultural Studies; CultureIdeology of Consumerism; Hegemony; History;
Marxist Theories; Subaltern

Further Readings
Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni dal carcere [Prison
notebooks]. Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 1949.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks of
Antonio Gramsci. Translated and edited by Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1971.
Guha, Ranahit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds.
Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media,
Culture & Society 2 (1980): 57–72.

GRAND TOUR
In all but name, the grand tour came into being during the sixteenth century as a secular alternative to
the ancient but increasingly discredited custom of
pilgrimage, the instinct to travel proving too powerful to be suppressed by a mere alteration in religion.
This primarily educational phenomenon, involving
study of the foreign, including the acquisition of a
language or two, rather than the aspiration to reduce
one’s time in purgatory, thus emerged most noticeably among those northern European nations that
rejected Roman Catholicism (though as Petrarch and
the Wife of Bath had testified, there was always a
secular ingredient in pilgrimage).

Because of renewed emphasis on the commandment against graven images, however, the visual arts
in most of these Reformed countries remained in a
condition inferior to those of the more religiously
conservative Mediterranean region. With the ongoing patronage of both the church and its competing
city-states, Italy in particular continued to flourish as
the producer of exemplary works of fine and decorative art long after most other aspects of its economy
had declined. The longevity of this phenomenon was
indeed in large part due to the grand tour phenomenon, northern tourists providing an alternative and
expanding market for the widest range of found,
improved, or manufactured goods, from the tawdriest
souvenir, fake or otherwise, to the masterpieces that
still grace Britain’s country houses. Where medieval
pilgrims of all classes had acquired artifacts ranging
from lead tokens to jewel-encrusted gold and crystal
reliquaries, the elite travelers of the eighteenth century
established rules of taste according to which it was
the art and artist, almost regardless of religious significance, that prevailed. Eventually, via an ever-more
dominant middle class, this phenomenon filtered
down to the secular equivalent of the humbly born
medieval pilgrim who emerged with mass tourism.
With grand tour taste increasingly dominated by
classical antiquity and its Renaissance, Baroque, and
Enlightenment reinterpretations, the gap between
the competencies of England and Italy, where visual
culture was concerned, set the tone for most of the
ca. 1550–1850 period. Classical learning underpinned
English appreciation of the antique, but it was not
until the French Revolution cut Britain off from
the still largely Catholic continent that its contemporary artistic production begin to rival Italy’s. After
the defeat of Napoleon, the grand tour revived, but
its conventions were soon to be replaced by “the
grand circular tours” of Europe evolved by Thomas
Cook, involving travel by steam ship and train along
with new forms of industrial consumption, massproduced “souvenirs” replacing the pilgrim badges
and cheap relics of the Middle Ages.
Meanwhile, the acquisitive role of the elite was
increasingly assumed by the state, masterpieces being
gathered together in national museums. Directors of
the new institutions, such as Charles Eastlake of the
National Gallery, were often transitional between the
two traditions, having to mediate between the tastes
of the privileged and hoi polloi. Even in the later nineteenth century, a degree of anxiety regarding works
of art persisted, in part the legacy of the patriotic

Grand Tour

Protestantism of the early modern period. In 1878,
a full-scale, wooden mock-up of an Egyptian obelisk,
already known as “Cleopatra’s Needle,” was placed
outside the Houses of Parliament, but this proposed
location was vetoed as symbolically inappropriate,
and the original was erected more discretely on the
embankment. Few could have known that a quarter of a millennium earlier, the great collector Earl of
Arundel had hoped to erect an ancient obelisk in his
riverside garden a few hundred yards downstream.
Arundel’s uninhibited enthusiasm for acquiring a
wide variety of works of art may in part have been
thanks to his religious background: he was born and
raised a Roman Catholic and died one in exile in Italy
during the Civil Wars. Though his great art collection,
like that of Charles I, was dispersed, his example, not
least in allowing interested parties access to his house
and gardens, was crucial in the establishment of the
British Museum in the following century. The Arundel
Society, named after the collector Earl, was created
in 1849 at a meeting in Eastlake’s house to promote
greater knowledge of medieval and Renaissance art
and make chromolithographs of the best pictures
available to a wider public.
Arundel paid a deposit for the Obelisk of
Domitian through his art agent William Petty in
late 1636. Then still lying broken in four pieces in
the center of the Circus of Maxentius just off the
Appian Way, its export was vetoed by Pope Urban
VIII. Enhanced interest in the obelisk, encouraged
by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, culminated
in Pope Innocent X commissioning Bernini to repair
and re-erect it in Piazza Navona on his magnificent
Fountain of the Four Rivers. Describing the Circus of
Maxentius in his pioneering grand tour guidebook,
The Voyage of Italy (published posthumously in
1670), Richard Lassels recalled,
In the midst of it stood that Guglia which now
stands in the midst of Piazza Navona. I saw it lye
here broken in three peeces, and neglected quite till
the Earle of Arundel our late Lord Mareshal,
offering to buy it & having already depositated
threescore crownes in earnest for it, made the
Romans begin to think it a fine thing, and to stop the
transporting of it into England.

It may have been the attention Arundel paid the
obelisk that prompted John Bargrave, former fellow
of Peterhouse, Cambridge, to chip a bit off its base
not long before it was repaired and relocated to the
center of Rome. He not only succeeded in bringing

689

back this souvenir but it survives to this day, along
with the rest of his cabinet of curiosities, in Canterbury
Cathedral Library. Bargrave’s collection illustrates
the lower end of the scale of which the highest end
was epitomized by Arundel’s all-encompassing
Kunstkammer.
For although Arundel failed on this occasion to
export a work of art, from the time of his grand
tour of 1613–1614, when he was accompanied by
his wife, children, and Inigo Jones, until his death
in 1646, he was otherwise extremely successful in
acquiring works of art from as far away as Greece
and even Egypt (including a mummy), influencing others, including the Duke of Buckingham and
Charles I, to follow suit. It was as a result of this that
during the 1630s, despite having hitherto lagged far
behind in such matters, London briefly became one
of the artistic capitals of the world. The Civil Wars
and the execution of the king set back the country
drastically in this respect, as did to some extent even
the so-called Glorious Revolution, inasmuch as it was
a late manifestation of the Protestant Reformation
that took the second commandment sufficiently seriously to revive hostility to the visual arts.
Unlike the Dutch, who evolved genres such as
landscape, still life, domestic interiors, and portraiture as alternatives to religious iconography,
English Protestants only really accepted portraits as
compatible with their newly individualized religion.
Given the lack of encouragement of painting as a
profession, therefore, when portraits were required,
it proved necessary to import artists, from Holbein
and Hans Eworth in the sixteenth century to Mytens,
Van Dyck, Lely, and Kneller in the seventeenth.
Even when Britain finally produced more or less
major, homegrown artists in the second half of the
eighteenth century, these were primarily portraitists, most famously, Gainsborough and Reynolds.
Only in the early nineteenth century when, after the
climax of portraiture in the hands of Sir Thomas
Lawrence, landscape painting finally achieved an
equivalent prestige, did Britain finally produce two
artists, Turner and Constable, who could rival their
French or Italian equivalents (though Thomas Jones,
Alexander Cozens, and his son J. R. had been a
match for any).
In the meantime, the grand tour—the expression
coined by Lassels in his guidebook—had evolved into
a dominant feature in British civilization. Merchants
had always traveled, but the spiritual journeys undertaken since pagan times were both more venerable

690

Grand Tour

and relevant to the evolution of what became travel
for pleasure and education. By the sixteenth century,
the custom of traveling to sacred places, including
Rome, was too firmly established to be killed off
by the Reformers so the more progressive among
them adapted the phenomenon to new purposes.
As pilgrimage and the collecting of relics were discredited, so secularized travel and art collecting were
evolved in their place, justifications for visiting the
Mediterranean countries in particular emerging from
the same humanist sources that had prompted ecclesiastical reform in the first place.
In the mid-sixteenth century, moderate Protestants,
Thomas Hoby and his brother Sir Philip, justified
European travel in terms of the need to acquire
modern languages and manners, or familiarity with
the politics, fortifications, or exemplary hospitals of
Renaissance cities, which would qualify one for a
career in the diplomatic service. Partly through his
use of Leandro Alberti’s Descrittione di tutta l’Italia
(as the source for his travel journal), Thomas Hoby
was able to translate Castiglione’s Cortegiano into
English. William Thomas, author of The Historie of
Italie of 1549, paraphrased Machiavelli for Edward
VI. Sir Philip Sidney had his portrait painted in
Venice. William Harvey graduated in medicine at
Padua. Despite a late start and faltering follow up,
the British eventually became the most avid students
and collectors of art, focusing obsessively on the
antique and its post-Renaissance reinterpretations
and arranging their acquisitions in those newly created shrines to art that were their rebuilt country
houses, their London palaces, and eventually centralized museums, where paintings and sculpture came to
be worshipped in place of those richly encased relics
that had been adored in their chapels, churches, and
cathedrals. The absurd prices paid for works by early
twenty-first-century artists are the consequence of the
extraordinary momentum built up during this period.
The ambitious youth was now encouraged to
travel like Odysseus to study other peoples and
climes; in the words of Richard Lassels, “Ulysses is
set forth by Homer as the wiseth of all the Grecians,
because he had traveled much, and had seen . . . the
Cittyes and customes of many men.” Lassels warned,
however, against young men traveling for “a whole
month together, to Venice, for a night’s lodging with
an impudent woman. And thus by a false ayming
at breeding abroad, they returne with those diseases which hinder them from breeding at home.”

By the time the Napoleonic Wars rendered travel
to Italy even more difficult than it had been during
the Elizabethan war with Spain, the grand tour had
become de rigueur, not just as a finishing school for
young aristocrats, but for the would-be artist or
architect searching for clients or patrons, who were
now as likely to be found in Venice, Florence, or
Rome as in London. Prior to the defeat of Napoleon,
when appreciation of early Renaissance and Gothic
reemerged, the aesthetic ideal had been a classical
one, whose connoisseurial credentials assumed disparagement of the Gothic, which was associated with
the barbarians who had brought about the destruction of the Roman Empire that the British were now
aspiring to outdo.
The classical training received at grammar school,
most of it in Latin, followed by a couple of years
at Oxford, Cambridge, or the Inns of Court, meant
that the cultural memory of Mediterranean civilization was as familiar to young Englishmen (and many
women) as their own. By completing their education
with a tour of southern Europe, not only the aristocrat but also the mere gentleman could become
a good and useful citizen, with a decorous sense of
how to balance utilitas with voluptas or pleasure.
Lassels writes that he would have his youth “to be
not onely a Vertuous man but a Virtuoso too.”
By the early eighteenth century, the grand touring moral philosopher, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury,
who would return to Italy to die in Naples, provided
the ultimate justification for travel: by studying the
arts and sciences in a European context, one could
become not merely a “virtuoso” (in the sense that
Henry Peacham and Lassels had popularized) but
virtuous in the modern sense of the word also. This
became an accepted cliché that would only be problematized in the twentieth century by the image of a
cultured concentration camp Kommandant playing
classical music while his prisoners were being gassed.
The tourists commemorated their historic journeys with portraits of themselves, ideally in an Italian
setting. We do not know what Veronese’s portrait
of Philip Sidney looked like. In the background of
Domenico Tintoretto’s 1611 portrait of John Finet,
the future Master of Ceremonies to Charles I, then in
Venice as traveling tutor to Salisbury’s son, Viscount
Cranborne, we get a glimpse of the grand canal.
Perhaps Venice was similarly specified three years
later in the background of the group portrait of the
Earl and Countess of Arundel with their children

Grand Tour

by the same Tintoretto (recorded by his biographer
Carlo Ridolfi), but this is now lost. If the more accomplished successors of this not terribly talented son of
the more famous Jacopo Tintoretto—Carlo Maratti,
Francesco Trevisani, Pompeo Batoni, and Johan
Zoffany—produced more striking memorials of the
grand tour, such images reflected a deeper reality.
Firsthand acquaintance with Italy (and later, Greece
and Egypt) not only confirmed firsthand acquaintance with classical civilization, already conceptually
imbibed in school and university; it encouraged the
reproduction of a visual culture to complement this
literary and philosophical one. Much influenced by
the printmaker and architect, Giambattista Piranesi,
Robert Adam adapted what he found in Hadrian’s
Villa to town and country houses throughout Great
Britain, whence the style traveled on to North
America (though the likes of former grand tourist,
George Berkeley, had already encouraged the classical style in his house in Rhode Island).
Wedgwood and Chippendale meanwhile produced
a huge range of complementary items with which
to furnish the interiors of these and increasingly
more modest houses. The successors of Arundel’s
agent William Petty—Thomas Jenkins, for
example—eventually based themselves permanently
abroad, supplying visiting and returned collectors
such as Arundel’s descendant Charles Townley and
fellow Catholic Henry Blundell with often heavily
restored marbles for considerable sums. The muchtraveled Thomas Hope combined all these grand tour
ingredients in a comprehensive, neoclassical interior
decoration that eventually encompassed Greek and
Egyptian style and commodities. Returning grand
tourists such as architects William Chambers and
John Soane, or patrons and collectors such as the Earl
of Bristol or the even wealthier William Beckford, had
an even more profound influence on English taste,
eventually enlarging their range of artistic reference
beyond Italian sources as far as the Ottoman Empire
and China.
Since Christianity was still, for most, a given, combined now with the assumption of virtue founded
in Greek democracy, Pax Romana, and Renaissance
retrospection, the Industrial Revolution funded an
empire even more extensive than the Romans had
managed, indeed the largest in the history of world.
The evolution of the grand tour complemented the
evolution of Britain’s cultural progress toward the
attainment of this status. The fact that this empire,

691

though vast, failed to last as long as the Roman version, let alone the Egyptian, reminds one of the radical
nature of the religious and political disruptions that
characterized the immediately preceding centuries.
Where at least the visual arts were concerned, though
intensive, the planting of an essentially Mediterranean
civilization in British soil seems to have produced
roots that were insufficiently robust to survive as long
as the Roman, let alone the more profoundly conservative cultural hegemony of the Egyptians, which to a
large extent underpinned the entire phenomenon.
Edward Chaney
See also British Empire; Fine Arts; History; Souvenirs;
Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze; Visual Culture

Further Readings
Adam Matthew Digital. The Grand Tour. Marlborough,
UK: Adam Matthew, 2009. http://www.amdigital.co.uk/
Collections/Grand-Tour.aspx.
Bignamini, Ilaria, and Clare Hornsby. Digging and Dealing
in Eighteenth Century Rome. 2 vols. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2010.
Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour.
Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1992.
Chaney, Edward. The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion.
Geneva: C.I.R.V.I., 1985.
Chaney, Edward. The Evolution of the Grand Tour, rev. ed.
London: Routledge, 2000.
Chaney, Edward. The Evolution of English Collecting. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
Chaney, Edward. Inigo Jones’s “Roman Sketchbook.”
2 vols. London: Roxburghe Club, 2006.
Chaney, Edward. “Roma Britannica and the Cultural
Memory of Egypt.” In Roma Britiannica, edited by
David Marshall, Susan Russell, and Karin Wolfe,
147–170. Rome: British School at Rome, 2010.
Dolan, Brian. Ladies of the Grand Tour. London: Harper
Collins, 2001.
Hale, John. England and the Italian Renaissance. 4th ed.
Edited by E. Chaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Hibbert, Christopher. The Grand Tour. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974.
Ingammels, John. A Dictionary of British and Irish
Travellers in Italy 1701–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1997.
Lassels, Richard. The Voyage of Italy. Paris and London:
John Starkey, 1670.
Moore, Andrew. Norfolk and the Grand Tour: EighteenthCentury Travellers and Their Souvenirs. Norwich, UK:
Norfolk Museums Service, 1985.

692

Great Depression (U.S.)

Scott, Jonathan. The Pleasures of Antiquity: British
Collectors of Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003.
Spence, Joseph. Letters from the Grand Tour. Edited by
Slava Klima. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1975.
Stoye, John. English Travellers Abroad 1604–1667. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Wilton, Andrew, and Ilaria Bignamini, eds. Grand Tour:
The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. London:
Tate Gallery, 1996.

GREAT DEPRESSION (U.S.)
The economic crisis of the 1930s prompted a major
reassessment of the relationship between the state
and the economy in the United States. Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933–1941) expanded welfare provision, orchestrated a massive program of
public works, introduced a swath of new regulatory
agencies, and significantly empowered organized
labor. This, then, was a period of significant political
and ideological adjustment, but it was an adjustment
characterized by paradox, ambivalence, and uncertainty, particularly in relation to the politics of consumption.
The collapse of the U.S. economy following the
Wall Street Crash in October 1929 was sudden and
shocking. By mid-1930, the economy was at a virtual
standstill. As David Kennedy explains, when Franklin
D. Roosevelt entered the White House in March
1933, the gross national product had dropped to half
its 1929 level. A quarter of the workforce, meanwhile,
was unemployed. And yet, paradoxically, during the
Great Depression, the idea that consumption—and
consumers—held the key to national recovery gained
rather than lost currency. For example, the main pillar of early New Deal industrial policy, the ill-fated
National Recovery Administration (NRA), was predicated precisely on the notion that economic revival
required the effective harnessing of mass purchasing
power. Despite this, the New Deal was never able to
tackle the problem of underconsumption in decisive
fashion. At the root of the Roosevelt administration’s incoherent response was its failure to reconcile
the competing economic visions of planners, who
wanted to embrace large-scale solutions, with those
of more producer-oriented critics of monopoly, who
believed that economic bigness endangered American

democracy. According to Ellis Hawley, ambivalence
over how to manage the economy bedeviled public
policy throughout the Depression decade.
It was the shock of war that ultimately brought
this era of economic ambivalence to an end. Alan
Brinkley reports that by the mid-1940s, the New Deal
state, having largely retreated from the more radical proposals to restructure the U.S. economy it had
countenanced in the early 1930s, was committed to a
consumer-oriented approach. This strategy involved
combining modest use of Keynesian fiscal management with a commitment—albeit limited in comparison to those of Scandinavian and some western
European nations—to the welfare state. Thereafter,
doubts about the capacity of the market and of
large-scale capitalist institutions to deliver prosperity—which had been significant during the early New
Deal—did not resurface for a generation, with the
onset of malaise and stagflation in the 1970s.
The Great Depression was an age of fear and
insecurity. Innovations in consumer credit and
the rise of the chain store meant that in the 1920s,
more Americans than ever before had experienced
the benefits of mass production and consumption.
Between 1920 and 1930, the number of American
households with a washing machine tripled from
8 percent to 24 percent. Similarly, the automobile
completed its journey from luxury to necessity: only
a quarter of households had a car in 1920; by 1930,
the figure was as high as 60 percent (Zunz 1998, 84).
When it came, then, the Great Depression delivered
a particularly hard blow to middle-class Americans
who, encouraged by social engineers and by the burgeoning marketing and advertising industries, were
increasingly defining themselves in terms of their
ability to consume.
Rather than rebelling, however, the dominant
response to the collapse of the consumer culture
of the 1920s was a mixture of self-blame, escapism, and conformity, notes Robert McElvaine. The
popular films of the era were light comedies and
romances, and the decade’s best-selling book was
Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic, How to Win Friends
and Influence People, which encouraged readers to
adapt themselves to cultural norms rather than to
question them. What is remarkable about the 1930s,
in fact, is the degree to which patterns of consumption established in the 1920s were consolidated
rather than rejected. Instead of entirely rethinking
their spending patterns, Americans merely modified

Great Depression (U.S.)

them in order to live in much the same way as before.
According to Daniel Horowitz, this trend was
reflected in New Deal agencies such as the Works
Progress Administration, for example, by incorporating in its budget guidelines scope for spending on
commercialized leisure.
Not all Americans happily endorsed the drift from
a producer- to consumer-oriented order during the
Great Depression, however. Small-town merchants,
for instance, fought ferociously to resist the rise of
the chain store, particularly in the rural South, the
Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Employing a
political language that drew on rich populist and antimonopoly traditions, between 1931 and 1937, they
persuaded twenty-six state legislatures to pass punitive
antichain store tax laws. In some ways, this remarkable movement prefigured the campaigns against bigbox stores that have been mounted by U.S. consumer
activists since the 1980s (Scroop 2008).
Until recently, it was conventional for historians
to dismiss the antichain store movement out of hand
on the grounds that it was backward looking, based
on nostalgia, and as such doomed to fail. From an
early twenty-first-century vantage point, however,
that older view looks somewhat outmoded. Unease
about the influence and large scale of major retail
organizations, after all, is commonplace in contemporary culture, and not just in the United States. This
fact points to a key issue for the future development
of the history of consumption because it suggests
that accounts of the 1930s (and indeed of other periods), based on the crude adoption of modernization
theory, are in urgent need of refinement and revision.
The shift from a producer to a consumer order was
uneven and unpredictable. Americans responded
to the emergency of the Great Depression in complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways. So too did
policymakers, intellectuals, and other elites. In the
form of the New Deal, the principal political reaction
was decidedly haphazard. Given this complexity,

693

historians of consumption and consumerism in the
Great Depression are likely to develop approaches
and perspectives more alert than ever before to the
contingent nature of historical change. In particular,
they are likely to pay greater attention to the ways
in which the rise of a consumer order was contested
and resisted, shaping political outcomes and suggesting alternative possible futures.
Daniel Scroop
See also Advertising; American Dream; Consumption in
the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War;
Credit; Cycles of Production and Consumption;
History; Keynesian Demand Management;
Modernization Theory

Further Readings
Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism
in Depression and War. New York: Vintage Books,
1996.
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936.
Hawley, Ellis. The New Deal and the Problem of
Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Horowitz, Daniel. The Morality of Spending: Attitudes
toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Jacobs, Meg. Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in
Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American
People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America,
1929–1941. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993.
Scroop, Daniel M. “The Anti-Chain Store Movement and
the Politics of Consumption.” American Quarterly 60
(December 2008): 925–949.
Zunz, Olivier. Why the American Century? Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1998.

H
in styles of dress, and so on. It is, then, marked on the
body, but it is not confined to these manifestations of
the body: it also exists in dispositions, perceptions,
attitudes, and tastes. Indeed, habitus is a concept that
cuts across conventional mind/body splits. Equally,
the concept confounds conventional distinctions
between conscious and unconscious, objectivist and
subjectivist sociology, emotion and rationality, and
structure and agency.
Habitus carries the concept of history—both personal history and social, or collective, history. It is
“the individual trace of an entire collective history”
(Bourdieu 1990, 91). But in its incorporation into
a nonconscious second sense, it is forgotten as history. This emphasis on history is an important means
by which Bourdieu grounds his theory of practice.
What this argument suggests is what we like, what
we feel comfortable doing, how we know how to
behave in certain situations and not others, how we
know what to take notice of—all are unconsciously
incorporated, not through a dynamic repression (as
in psychoanalytic accounts) but through a generative “forgetting.” We have learned to know and like
certain things; we have learned how to do certain
things, but we have forgotten that we have learned
them. We do not typically “remember” the rules of
eating when we sit down to eat: they have usually
been learned by the body. If this is so for such apparently banal practices, it is equally so for practices
that are regarded as more elevated such as the appreciation of cultural artifacts. Thus, for Bourdieu, taste
is an effect, not of individual perception or innate
ability but of social processes. The incorporation

HABITS
See Habitus; Rituals; Routines and Habits;
Theories of Practice

HABITUS
Habitus is a “socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 2002, 126); it is Pierre Bourdieu’s way of
theorizing a self that is socially produced. The concept is designed to capture the dynamic and mutually constitutive relation between the person and the
social world, in which social relations become constituted within the self but also the self is constitutive of
social relations. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is key
to his analysis of social identity, social practice, and
social relations. It represents his attempt to theorize
the ways in which the social is literally incorporated.
As such, habitus is central to Bourdieu’s sociological analysis. Although used by earlier theorists, from
Aristotle to, more recently, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and Norbert Elias, Bourdieu claimed—with some
justification—to have developed a distinctive use of
the term. Certainly, it is in Bourdieu’s work that habitus is put to the most sustained analytical work.
Habitus has been described as a “second sense,”
“practical sense,” or “second nature” that equips
social actors with a practical “know-how.” It is
manifest in styles of standing and moving, taking up
space, in ways of speaking (idioms, as well as accent),
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Habitus

of these social processes into the habitus, however,
makes them, in a very real sense, part of who the
person is. The social actor, in this schema, acts out of
prereflexive knowledge rather than through rational
calculation.
This emphasis on the incorporation of the social
world, and on history, has led to one of the main
set of charges against the concept of habitus—that
it is determinist. However, Bourdieu emphatically
refuses this characterization, arguing that habitus is
not determining but generative. Although reproduction across generations does occur within this formulation, the dynamic character of the social world
means that it will not occur perfectly: for example,
more or less identical habitus can generate widely
different outcomes. Practical sense is bounded rather
than determined. Furthermore, Bourdieu charges his
critics with a failure to acknowledge what the social
world is like—to relinquish the illusion of mastery of
the self that is fostered by social relations:
What is it about [the concept of habitus] that is so
shocking? The answer, I think, is that it collides
head-on with the illusion of (intellectual) mastery of
oneself that is so deeply ingrained in intellectuals. To
the three “narcissistic wounds” evoked by Freud,
those visited upon humanity by Copernicus, Darwin
and Freud himself, one should add that which sociology inflicts upon us, especially when it applies to
“creators.” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 132)

In this respect, one important point to note is that
habitus has to be understood in relation to the fields
that provide its context and to the various forms of
capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) that
Bourdieu theorizes as being traded within the social
world. A field is a set of objective, historical relations. If habitus is a feel for the game, fields can be
seen as the games themselves. As such, they compose
the rules of the game as well as the people playing
the game. Fields are distinct but overlapping; they are
highly structured and governed by rules that come to
seem natural or consecrated. For Bourdieu, however,
they are the play of power relations and the outcome
of social struggles. The relationship between habitus, field, and capitals is summed up in Bourdieu’s
famous formulation (1998, 101):
(Habitus × Capital) + Field = Practice
This formula is far from transparent but does
delineate Bourdieu’s understanding of the ways in

which practice is an outcome of the interrelationship between personal dispositions, objective positions, and the volume and composition of various
capitals at one’s disposal. The relationship between
habitus and field is crucial since habitus are not freefloating but products of, and at home in, specific
sets of relations. Bourdieu and Wacquant argue,
Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and
in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside
social agents. And when habitus encounters a social
world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in
water’; it does not feel the weight of the water and
takes the world about itself for granted. (2002, 127)

People develop their habitus within specific fields
such that their sense of themselves can seem entirely
attuned to the world in which they exist. Thus, ways
of being are cultural forms turned into nature. In
other words, it is through habitus—routinely exercised and embodied—that cultural distinctions come
to seem natural.
Conversely, according to Diane Reay (2004),
when people enter an alien field, the lack of fit is
deeply felt within the self, generating dis-ease, but
also potentially generating new social forms since
fields are determined by habitus, which are in their
turn determined by fields.
Because habitus are profoundly social, they carry
the traces of the lines of division and distinction along
which the social is organized. That is, class, race,
gender, sexuality, and so on, are all marked within
the habitus. Further, and because these social distinctions are hierarchical, not all habitus are “worth”
the same. Some are normalized, while others are
pathological. In this sense, habitus clash, as well as
class. Part of the second sense embodied in habitus
entails a judgment of other habitus. However, only
some people have the authority to make such judgments “stick.”
What gives habitus its particular force, in this
context, is that power is conceptualized as working such that it is not what you do, or what you
have, that is marked as wrong or right, normal or
pathological, but who you are. Certainly, subjects
can resist such a positioning, and habitus may be
imperfectly aligned with the field. However, there are
some people who, by virtue of their habitus, field,
and capitals, are able to pass judgment, implicitly
or explicitly, on others, and to make that judgment
count. “Differences” between habitus, then, come

Hair Care/Hairdressing

to be made into inequalities through the exercise of
symbolic violence.
Through the notion of habitus, Bourdieu draws
attention to the ways in which domination works at
the level of affect. It becomes part of who we are,
not in making us passive but in fostering reactions
and forms of emotion that do not readily translate
into resistance. Domination fosters ressentiment,
which cannot then simply be turned into a badge
of honor.
Although Bourdieu has made the most use of habitus in his analysis of class inequalities and classed
identities, he himself saw it as having wider analytic
purchase, suggesting it could be used to explain all
forms of identity and inequality. Certainly, he explicitly uses it in the context of gender. The extent to
which this attempt is successful is debated: many
feminist scholars have pointed to its inadequacies,
arguing, for example, that in Bourdieu’s work,
women figure simply as bearers of capital rather than
as actors in their own right. Others, such as Lois
McNay, have found the notion of practical belief a
prereflexive set of understandings and practices, productive in theorizing gender as something more than
externally imposed definitions simply internalized by
a preexisting subject.
Habitus has been less widely taken up than
Bourdieu’s metaphors of capitals, perhaps because
of charges of determinism. When it is invoked, as
Diane Reay notes, it is sometimes simply referenced
rather than “put into practice” (2004, 440). Reay is
critical of this usage of habitus especially in her own
field of educational research, not because she is dissatisfied with the concept but because she argues, as
does Bourdieu himself, that his concepts are intended
to be used and applied, rather than simply referenced
as concepts. Nevertheless, there have been numerous successful attempts to work with the concept to
show the links between personal and collective, freedom and constraint, past and present (see, e.g., Reay
2002, Nash 2002).
Steph Lawler
See also Cultural Capital; Embodiment; Identity;
Routines and Habits; Social Distinction; Symbolic
Capital; Taste; Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity,
1990.

697

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1998. First
published 1986.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Cambridge:
Polity, 2001.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. First
published 1992.
McNay, Lois. “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre
Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity.” Theory, Culture
and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 95–117.
Nash, Roy. “The Educated Habitus, Progress at School and
Real Knowledge.” Interchange 33 (2002): 27–48.
Reay, Diane. “Feminist Theory, Habitus and Social Class:
Disrupting Notions of Classlessness.” Women’s Studies
International Forum 20 (1997): 225–233.
Reay, Diane. “‘It’s All Becoming a Habitus’: Beyond the
Habitual Use of Habitus in Educational Research.”
British Journal of Sociology of Education 25, no. 4
(2004): 431–444.

HAIR CARE/HAIRDRESSING
Hair care/hairdressing is a form of bodily grooming,
performed by either the self or another to hair on
the head. Hair care pertains to the wider practices
of hair maintenance, whereas hairdressing refers
more specifically to the act of paying a skilled professional to work on hair. Such practices may involve
washing, styling, coloring, cutting, setting, perming,
or straightening the hair. Due to the complexities
of some of these practices, and the skills and tools
required, many people choose to pay a hairdresser to
perform them. Hairdressers, or hair stylists, as they
are often referred to, may be mobile—visiting one’s
home—or a person can visit a hair salon where hair
care services and products are sold. Arguably, women
in the Western world spend more time engaging in
hair care practices than men due to societal norms
and expectations.

History
Hair is a universal substance with a global history.
Evidence of hair care has been found dating back
to ancient civilizations. The ancient Greeks favored
blonde hair, applying mixtures of potassium, pollen,
and gold in an attempt to lighten their locks, and
in Roman society, women’s hair was set in high,
elaborate styles using fake hair pieces, while Roman

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Hair Care/Hairdressing

men would visit a tonsor to have their hair curled.
Evidence of a hairdressing role has been found dating back to the Egyptian period, where the hair of
noblewomen would be attended to in the private
space of the female toilette. Such privacy regarding women’s hair in the Western world remained
unchanged until the twentieth century. Prior to the
seventeenth century, women’s hair was dressed at
home by female servants, in keeping with the protection of a woman’s decency and reputation. However,
around this time, the frisseur, or coiffeur, emerged.
Generally a male figure, the frisseur would dress the
hair of rich women at home. This marked a change
in women’s hair care and the beginning of professional female hairdressing, at least for the upper
classes. Nevertheless, women’s hair was still only
being dressed, not cut. It was the emergence of the
late-nineteenth-century department store that provided the space for the public dressing of women’s
hair and eventually its cutting. In the 1920s, the
“bob” cut was born with thousands of women, on
both sides of the Atlantic, turning to barbers, the
only people skilled enough to cut their hair. Within a
matter of years, many previously male barbershops
had become women’s hair salons, catering for the
new hair care regimes of their now female clientele.
At this time, the gendering of employment within
hair salons also began to change with a significant
growth in female hairdressers.
In contrast, the barber has always been a male
figure, cutting and shaving men’s hair in the public space of the barbershop or the street from as
early as ancient Greece. As the many incantations
of Christopher Bond’s original 1973 play Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street have illuminated, the European barber performed a multifaceted role, offering minor surgical procedures,
such as bloodletting and teeth pulling, alongside the
usual hair care practices. The role of the barber is
no longer a medical one; however, the remnants of
the barbershop’s history are still symbolized in contemporary society by the traditional red and white
pole, representative of the “blood and the bandage”
of past practices.

Symbolism, Social Regulation, and Resistance
Found at the margins of the body, hair’s unique status
as both a corporeal substance and social object has
ensured it a history cloaked in mystery, magic, and

potency. Constantly growing, yet easily removed,
hair has been imbued with symbolic notions of
phallicism, castration, and rebirth. The shaving and
cutting of hair has commonly operated as the physical outcome of metaphorical rites of passage and
ritual purification. Similarly, discourse surrounding
hair has operated to regulate class, race, and sexuality, and hair also works as a key site of resistance
and rebellion.
Racial discrimination based on hair texture and
hair classification has a profound history grounded
in essentialism. Despite the abolition of slavery in
the nineteenth century, such prejudices continued
as black people were “assimilated” into white hegemonic society. Various tools and techniques were
invented in an attempt to straighten black hair so
that it “resembled” that of white people. However,
from the 1960s, the tide was turning. Straightened
black hair began to be understood as a symbol of
a white civilizing process, and black beauty ideals were promoted in their place. Dreadlocks and
Afros became popular styles celebrating liberation
and symbolizing black, as opposed to white, ideals.
Such contestations undoubtedly established hair as a
politically charged substance.
Hair’s potency within the feminist movement
is a clear parallel. The 1920s bob, for example, is
closely associated with the suffragette movement and
women’s struggle to gain the right to vote. Similarly,
the various subcultures that emerged over the twentieth century all used hair as a political weapon,
both to mock the ruling elite and to challenge established ideals of masculinity and femininity. The
long, unkempt hair of the 1960s (male) hippy; the
Mohawks and Mohicans of 1980s punk; the shaved
head of the skinhead and the highly stylized greased
hair of the teddy boy are just some of the most striking examples of how men’s and women’s hair has
been used to signal particular identities. Thus, while
hair can be used to classify and control society, it has
also been used to signify resistance and rebellion.

Contemporary Relevance and Future Research
In contemporary Western society, the hair salon is an
integral feature of most urban districts. In the United
States alone, the hair salon industry has a combined
annual turnover of $16 billion, alongside a multimillion-dollar DIY hair care sector. Propelled forward by fashion and the media, the latest hairstyles

Happiness

are endorsed by celebrities, the glamorous personas
of contemporary society occupying the esteemed
sought-after position the aristocracy once held.
With advances in technology and science, the practices available for purchase at the salon are extensive.
Chemicals are used to permanently color, straighten,
or curl. Tools are employed to dry, temporarily wave,
or set. Even human or artificial hair extensions can
now be attached to one’s own to create added length
and volume. Hairdressing is a highly skilled business.
Despite the general appreciation of hair care as
a predominantly feminine activity, recent research
by the hairdressing industry suggests that men are
taking much more interest in hair and hair care.
Alongside products for hair loss and gray coverage,
traditionally aimed at men, hair product manufacturers are also launching male hair care ranges. The
gender division of labor and the clientele within the
hair salon also appears to be changing: the number
of male salon employees is steadily increasing, and
many salons are actively encouraging male customers to boost profits. The hair-product company ghd
has even begun marketing its famous mini-styler hair
iron at the male hair care market, aligning men’s hair
styling much more closely to women’s.
Doubly gendered in terms of both clientele and
staff, the salon is still primarily a feminine space.
Some barbershops remain, as do more recent unisex
salons, but these too are staffed by a predominantly
female workforce. Only the coveted positions at the
top of the profession remain dominated by men. The
growth in salons devoted specifically to black hair
indicate that race continues to inflect practices of hair
styling. Outside of the salon, supermarket shelves are
filled with DIY home dyes, highlighting and perming kits, shampoos, conditioners, sprays, gels, and
waxes. Electrical retailers sell hairdryers, straighteners, tongues, crimpers, and heated rollers, all to meet
home hair care demands. Even salons provide support to certain brands, encouraging their customers
to “take the salon experience home” in the form of
a bottle of shampoo or a pair of the latest hair irons.
Yet in spite of hair’s ubiquity, its political history of
control and subversion, or its everyday importance
to consumer society, hair/hair care and hairdressing
remain subjects overlooked by scholars.
Helen Holmes
See also Beauty Myth; Celebrity; Cosmetics; Ethnicity/
Race; Fashion; Femininity; Gender; Self-Presentation

699

Further Readings
Biddle-Perry, Geraldine, and Sarah Cheang. Introduction to
Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion, edited by Geraldine
Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang. Oxford: Berg, 2008.
Cox, Caroline. Good Hair Days: A History of British
Hairdressing. London: Quartet, 1999.
De Courtais, Georgine. Women’s Headdress and Hairstyles
in England from AD600 to Present Day. London: BT
Batsford Ltd, 1973.
Harvey Wingfield, A. Doing Business with Beauty: Black
Women, Hair Salons and the Racial Enclave Economy
(Perspectives on a Multiracial America). New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
Hebdige, Dick. Reggae Rastas and Rudies: Style and the
Subversion of Form (Stencilled Occasional Paper 24).
Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, University of Birmingham, 1974.
Stevenson, Karen. “Hairy Business: Organising the
Gendered Self.” In Contested Bodies, edited by Ruth
Halliday and John Hassard, 137–152. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Trasko, Mary. Daring Do’s: A History of Extraordinary
Hair. Paris: Flammarion, 1984.

HAPPINESS
What could be more important to contemporary
consumer culture than the search for happiness? It
seems obvious that attempting to accumulate consumer items that carry with them significant symbolic power is driven forward by the desire to “find
happiness,” to discover success, contentment, satisfaction. However, the critical literature on consumer culture that has grown rapidly in recent years
appears to indicate that happiness is not the necessary by-product of consumerism and that dissatisfaction and waste are often the end point of the
consumer cycle.
While consumerism is often seen as highly exploitative, alienating, environmentally destructive, and
culturally corrosive, the myth of consumer happiness remains a popular notion. Some of the liberal
accounts of consumerism that developed during the
1960s and 1970s highlighted innovative subcultural
creativity and ironic symbol inversion, and often
pitched unusual fashion and leisure pursuits as protopolitical activities that sought to destabilize capitalism and its oppressive state. For these commentators,
the subject could never be fully incorporated into

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Happiness

the discourse of capitalism. Human subjectivity
was fleet-of-foot, creative, and rebellious, and could
rearticulate the meaning of consumer symbolism
so that bland, mass-produced items would come to
reflect something defined by the community itself.
During the 1980s, this kind of speculation of the
nature of the subject became one of the dominant
modes of accounting for the formation of subcultures within the broader framework of consumer
culture. It is probably not a coincidence that this
approach found favor at exactly the same time as
global capitalism was radically reconfiguring its business plan and leftist politics was forced to capitulate
to neoliberalism’s apparent ability to improve living
conditions for the majority of the people.
Such liberal accounts, in which progressive politics
is boiled down to the ability of the subject to resist
the prescribed meanings of global capitalism, continue to linger, but as the twenty-first century begins
to take shape, it has become almost impossible to
ignore the very real problems of global consumerism. We might assume that the myth of consumer
happiness is an ideological strategy that is used to
propel consumers back to the market, to forget their
previous consumer dissatisfactions, and to hand
themselves over to a spectacular world of potential
indulgence, blocking out any reservations they might
have about the geopolitical downsides to the global
consumer market. Consumers are told that they
work hard, that they deserve it. What is life without
a little bit of indulgence now and then?
That enduring sense of contentment, that ephemeral “thing” that can make us genuinely happy,
has been something that people throughout history
have strived for. Philosophers have argued persuasively that the essence of life is struggle and hardship and that we are condemned to always want
what is beyond our reach. But this debate takes on a
decidedly different hue when this logic is applied to
contemporary consumer culture. Twentieth-century
politics was profoundly utopian and promised to
actually deliver human happiness and contentment
to its populations. We have now progressed beyond
this point. Utopian political projects are now almost
universally seen as unworldly, hopelessly optimistic, and deeply misguided. In the early years of the
twenty-first century, many believed that we had
hit on the perfect political and economic formula,
a pragmatic but progressive formula that had transcended ideology and promised to enable people to

embrace freedom and actually experience a sizable
portion of enduring happiness. That formula was an
open liberal democracy accompanied by global free
market capitalism. Almost all political parties in the
West treated this model as a fait accompli.
This formula, until the 2008 global economic
crash, succeeded in producing real rises in material
wealth. In Western societies, we could actually speak,
albeit in hushed tones, of the demise of real poverty.
Inequalities were growing, but that didn’t seem to
detract from the general rise in living standards or
the sense of forward motion toward the enigma
of happiness. Despite the sense of compulsory
optimism, voices on the margins were beginning
to recognize that increased material wealth didn’t
appear to be producing genuine human happiness.
Indeed, people seemed to be getting less happy:
more gloomy, withdrawn, dissatisfied, and dejected.
This is the problem for contemporary consumer culture: we appear to have freed ourselves from actual
material need, and consequently, we now have the
existential space to begin to explore the possibility
of happiness with greater energy. But contemporary
consumer culture appears totally incapable of yielding that happiness. In order to ensure the continued
circulation of commodities, we must look negatively
at our lives and possessions, we must be anxious
about our cultural worth in relation to our peers, we
must believe that, though happiness is not yet ours,
it can be, if we continue to work hard and history
continues on its present course. In what follows, this
entry expands on these themes, paying particular
attention to the place of happiness in sociology.

Happiness in Contemporary Culture
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has much to
contribute to our understanding of contemporary
happiness. Zizek’s philosophy suggests that we have,
in recent history, witnessed a fundamental transformation in the constitution of human subjectivity.
The cultural super-ego, which was for generations
the moderating voice of reason that encouraged the
subject to respect those parameters of social behavior laid down by one’s culture, has evolved. The
crucial psychodynamic power of the super-ego is
guilt. In traditional societies, the super-ego encouraged us to recognize the impact of our behavior on
others and to predict likely cultural responses to our
behavior. The power of the super-ego, analogous

Happiness

to an insistent regulatory “voice in our heads,”
attempted to prevent those who had been successfully installed within the symbolic order from
pursuing purely instrumental behaviors. Zizek contends that the role of guilt within the contemporary
super-ego has adapted to fundamental shifts within
Western societies, the most notable of which, for
Zizek, is the death of the “big other” and the dissolution of the traditional symbolic order. Now, we
are more likely to feel guilt as a result of our failure
to become fully immersed in the forms of personal
indulgence that are laid out for our delectation by
consumer culture. Without regular involvement in
these hedonistic cultures, we are likely to feel less
than a full participant in mainstream society, that
something important is missing from our identity,
and, more disturbingly, that our lives are somehow
being slowly erased by our failure to adequately
display an active involvement in the cultural and
economic logic of our times.
Zizek is attempting to draw our attention toward
a new cultural imperative, the active injunction,
“Enjoy!” We are increasingly compelled to seek
enjoyment in cultural fields, to chase experiences, to
attempt to satisfy a desire that cannot be satisfied. For
Zizek, this new injunction is controlling and restrictive and not at all as liberating as one might assume.
We are obliged to find pleasure in those activities that
are encouraged and designated “acceptable.” The
symbolic law remains intact and prevents us from
encountering the jouissance of those activities that
are external to our immediately social experience.
The ultimate point to take from this discussion, and
in relation to the place of happiness in contemporary
consumer culture, is that when we are ordered to
enjoy something, enjoyment itself becomes impossible. Enjoyment is indeed everywhere in consumer
culture and is a key component in the ability of
consumer culture to sustain and regenerate itself.
Life without consumer enjoyment seems to be a life
deprived of color, a bland almost-life that somehow
falls short of achieving the full potential of human
experience. Zizek’s observation therefore helps us
to make sense of key currents within contemporary
consumer culture—not just the desire to experience
indulgence and personal pleasure but also the clearly
identifiable absence of pleasure and happiness that
is a demonstrable aspect of the dedicated consumer
lifestyle. It is as if, surrounded as we are by the constant spectacle of indulgent consumerism, we are

701

increasingly incapable of experiencing any durable
sense of happiness or contentment.
If we follow Zizek’s logic, we appear to have
traded a philosophical concern with contentment, a
happiness that endures and shades the life of those
lucky enough to find it, for the thrill of hedonistic enjoyment, a fleeting pleasure that is quickly
replaced with a renewed sense of want. Mark Fisher,
for example, talks about the “depressive hedonia”
of contemporary Western youth, who appear transfixed by the constant flicker of shallow excitation
that exists within contemporary media and cyber
cultures, so utterly dedicated to this ostensibly indulgent world that they feel a marked sense of longing
if they are separated from it for one moment longer
than is absolutely necessary. Fisher’s critical point is
that these young people often fail to notice that they
aren’t really enjoying themselves very much, that
they are in fact rather sullen and withdrawn, cynical,
and painfully aware that their lives are devoid of real
excitement or existential passion.

A Sociology of Happiness?
Despite being at the very heart of historical philosophy and of considerable importance in many allied
fields, sociologists have contributed surprisingly
little to our understanding of human happiness. It
could be reasonably argued that, as a discipline that
developed and began to define itself at the beginning
of the twentieth century, sociology instead chose to
focus on forms of immiseration, exploitation, and
enslavement that were constructed by the new world
of industrial capitalism and enacted in its global economic relationships, social structures and institutions, and everyday forms of social interaction. We
might imagine that, in comparison to these crucial
issues, attempting to construct a modern sociology
of happiness seemed a rather trivial concern. For
much of the twentieth century, happiness was thus
considered tangential to serious sociological analysis,
and while sociologists dealt with many issues closely
related to the actual constitution of human happiness
in industrial societies, they failed to adequately challenge the prevailing assumptions about the meaning
and nature of happiness and shape a progressive discourse about how the individual might attempt to
improve the sum total of happiness in his or her life
or how the state might address this problem on a
grander scale.

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Happiness

It is also worth noting that in the first two-thirds
of the twentieth century, people were simply less concerned with ephemeral questions of identity, biography, and the constitution of “the good life.” During a
time of prescribed roles and clear biographical pathways, there was little space to engage in speculative
self-analysis or to adopt radically new life strategies
in the hope of banishing the pressures and strains of
everyday life. It is only now, in an age in which we
appear beset by ontological insecurity, depoliticization, risk, uncertainty, and fear, that happiness has
become a topical issue, provoking serious sociological analysis. Some theorists have argued that
the dizzying array of choices we face in postmodern
culture prompts us to feel something akin to vertigo
as we struggle to make sense of who we are and
our place in the world. A great deal of contemporary social and cultural theory suggests that we are
increasingly apprehensive and introspective, forever
analyzing ourselves and our social, cultural, and economic performance, hoping that the social mirror
will indeed reflect back at us an image of enviable
success, happiness, and achievement. As Oliver James
has noted, the nature of postindustrial Western societies propels individuals into a ceaseless series of social
comparisons that tend to produce forms of anxiety
and depression rather than happiness and reward.
The contemporary search for happiness is thus a
reflection of its increasingly elusive nature and the
rise of new forms of dissatisfaction, insecurity, and
restlessness. What Frank Furedi calls our “therapy
culture,” a culture that appears to exist within what
Robert Frank and Philip Cook have called a “winnertakes-all” society, seems to provoke within us all the
desire to prove to ourselves that we have “led a good
life,” “found happiness,” “made our mark on the
world,” and so on. Perhaps now more than at any
point in our history, we believe that happiness is actually out there waiting for us, that with a determined
attitude and a little bit of luck it can be ours.
A brief stroll around a local bookstore should
reveal rows of self-help books, all claiming to help
consumers to improve their lives, to block out negative experiences, and to strategically pursue happiness and contentment. Glancing at these rows of
books, or at the TV shows that address the same
themes, one can’t help but be struck by the problem
of a population desperately striving for happiness,
apparently laboring under the misapprehension that,
with one or two slight adjustments, happiness can be

theirs. Those lucky enough to occupy a social and
economic setting that enables them to create a space
between themselves and the practical and material
pressures of everyday life are perhaps more likely to
engage in subtle and occasionally productive forms
of self-analysis, but there is more than enough evidence to suggest that even marginalized populations
engage in fantasies of brisk upward mobility, rapid
accumulation of status, and the “happiness” they
believe accompanies symbolic success. The current
preoccupation with finding happiness in one’s life
is then tied in a complex way to our shifting social
structure, the postmodern problematization of truth,
the new ways in which we pursue and embrace image
identities, and the dominance of a market ideology
that is highly skilled at manufacturing desire and
applying symbolic significance to “things,” states of
being, places, and so forth.
This is not to say that a concern with happiness
was entirely missing from public culture during
early modernity. In America, a society founded on
and still deeply committed to a particular version
of philosophical, political, and economic liberalism, the “answer” to the question of happiness
has always been readily apparent: the incremental
progression of Western civilization, and the personal enrichment of each individual within it, is best
secured by the gradual reduction in external pressures that impinge on human freedom. After a brief
flirtation with progressive social democracy during
the New Deal era in the 1930s, America returned to
its ideological roots and assured its populace that its
commitment to existential and economic freedom
would inevitably lead to a happy and rewarding life
for each and every citizen. In the American imagination, every individual is free to plot his or her own
course in life and pursue his or her own reward, and
left unencumbered by government regulation and
intervention, the individual retains a greater degree
of freedom and, therefore, a better shot at happiness. In America, the idea that wealth and success
lead inexorably to happiness has become normalized and endlessly repeated throughout its culture.
To be rich is to be happy, and true happiness can
only be experienced by those who manage to accrue
such capital that allows them to cut themselves free
from the workaday world of pressure and responsibility and drift closer to the vivid dreamworlds of
perpetual indulgence, hedonism, and ostentatious
consumerism.

Harried Leisure Class

Happiness in consumer culture is associated with
freedoms to consume ever more goods: prosperity
equates with economic growth and greater consumption. This ideology of liberal capitalism, however,
inspires forms of anxiety, insecurity, and enmity.
What constitutes happiness and the good life is coming under increasing scrutiny as material abundance
is called into question by the challenges of global
inequalities, climate change, and the apparent dissatisfactions and contradictions on consumerism (Jackson
2009). As these challenges become increasingly
salient, what constitutes happiness and its equation
with consumer culture will come under increasing
scrutiny in both academic and public debates.
Simon Winlow
See also Affluent Society; Alienation; Capitalism;
Consumer Anxiety; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Hedonism; Materialism and
Postmaterialism; Well-Being

Further Readings
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books,
2009.
Frank, Robert, and Philip Cook. The Winner-Takes-All
Society. London: Penguin, 1996.
Furedi, Frank. Therapy Culture. London: Routledge, 2003.
Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a
Finite Planet. London: Earthscan, 2009.
James, Oliver. Britain on the Couch. London: Arrow, 1998.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 2000.

HARRIED LEISURE CLASS
The Harried Leisure Class was written by Staffan
Burenstam Linder, professor of economics at the
Stockholm School of Economics. In a concise and
thought-provoking book marking a departure
from the majority of his writings on international
trade, Linder challenged his fellow economists to
consider the consumption of time in the same way
that they considered monetary consumption. From
this starting point, in The Harried Leisure Class, he
presents a depressing but recognizable vision of the
negative consequences of economic growth in affluent economies.
The title of the book makes reference to Thorstein
Veblens’s classic The Theory of the Leisure Class,

703

written in 1899, in which Veblen describes an emerging ruling class who are in fact a “leisure class,” doing
very little productive work. Linder’s title makes direct
play on this by suggesting that the “leisure class” have
become, in modern times, a “harried leisure class.”
The theoretical structure of The Harried Leisure
Class, which Linder calls “a theory of time allocation,” begins by drawing attention to the existence of
two main types of competing resources in the process
of consumption—time and goods—with the implication that as one increases, the other must decrease.
The argument is based on the economic logic of a
vicious circle in which increasing rates of productivity must be matched by an increasing acceleration in
consumption. Consumption, however, takes time, so
that in a situation of economic growth, consumers
need to consume a larger number of goods per unit
of time. The outcome is an acceleration of the pace
of life in high-income countries where there is an
abundance of commodities, thus creating a “harried
leisure class.” In addition, increases in productivity
do not necessarily mean that people work less—
indeed, the more goods that are owned, the greater
the time needed for their maintenance and servicing, and hence the time spent in domestic work can
also rise. The overall increases in time necessary to
sustain greater levels of consumption in high income
countries also means that, contrary to intuition,
other aspects of the quality of life tend to decline—
the quality of services declines as their quantity
increases, as does the decision-making capabilities of
the consumer faced with an over-abundance of consumption goods and an increased opportunity cost
of the time required to make an informed purchase.
Consequently, less time is taken on each act of purchase, which becomes increasingly irrational.
For an affluent society to continue to consume
more in a situation of rising productivity, Linder proposes three mechanisms by which the “time-yield”
(the way in which leisure goods are combined with
leisure activities) of consumption may be increased.
First, consumption goods are continually replaced
with newer ones. Second, more than one type of
consumption good may be consumed simultaneously
(eating in front of the TV, for example). Third, goods
are consumed consecutively, but each one for a
shorter duration of time. Whether there is an increase
in the total duration of time spent in consumption
due to these mechanisms cannot be determined, but
for certain types of goods, at least, there is a decline

704

Harried Leisure Class

in the quality of consumption due to less time being
devoted to them. In addition, for activities that in
general take more time, such as cultural activities,
those that are less time-consuming tend to replace
more time-consuming ones (e.g., reading).
The prognosis for the future of affluent societies
is a depressing one according to Linder because of
the decreasing marginal utility of increases in income
due to an increasing scarcity of time. According to
this logic, income growth has to increase in a frantic
race to increase material standards—a situation that
may have negative effects on the environment, which
is not taken into consideration in official measures of
well-being. The insatiable demand for growth may
lead to a situation in which such societies enter into
a new kind of economic “unfreedom”—a destructive mania for economic advancement coupled with
a constant hunt for time.
Because it resonated with the debate about the
negative impacts of economic progress on the quality of life made popular in John Kenneth Galbraith’s
The Affluent Society (1958) and favored by the
“limits to growth” generation of the 1960s and
1970s (in which economic and technological progress intended to reduce the amount of work and
improve standards for living was seen in fact as
speeding up the pace of life and making life seem
more stressful), The Harried Leisure Class has had a
considerable impact, becoming a classic in research
on the relationship between economic growth, time,
and consumption. Its influence has been greatest
in the area of sociology and cultural consumption,
since its message resonates both with the work of
classical sociologists who wrote about increasing
acceleration tendencies in capitalism and modernism and with more recent debates on the pressure
of time in late modernity. Predating Fred Hirsch’s
Social Limits to Growth by six years, The Harried
Leisure Class nevertheless carries some worrying
accurate predictions about the future of affluent
society that many can recognize and identify with.
These are as follows:
1. An increasingly hectic tempo of life
2. An expanding mass of consumption goods
3. A decline in the time available for those in need
of welfare
4. An increasing attachment to goods as a class
but increasingly less to any single good

5. A decline in time spent in the cultivation of
mind and spirit
6. A declining utility of income, hence an
increasing emphasis on further economic
advancement
7. An increasing number of irrational decisions
made in the name of rationality
8. A new form of economic unfreedom that forces
destruction of the natural environment

Many of these predictions are likely to speak particularly to those most likely to read Linder’s book
(that is, to academics and researchers into time use
and the quality of life in late-modern society) because
it tells their personal story: an increasingly frantic
pace of life both in work and leisure. However, this
ad hominum explanation of the appeal of Linder’s
work does not do justice to the theoretical importance of the focus on time both as a resource and
as a principle of social organization, which links
The Harried Leisure Class both to the work of
the classical sociologists who wrote about the increasing acceleration of society associated with capitalism
and modernism and to modern debates about the
pressure of time in late modernity. Among the classical sociologists, Georg Simmel, for example, focused
on the ambivalence of the consequences of modernity and discussed changes in fashion as an example
of rapid transience. Karl Marx’s formulation of
the circulation of money in capitalism also predicts
direct consequences for the pace of life, since money
has constantly to be circulating both in production
and in sales in order to retain its value.
In contemporary industrialized societies, a huge
volume of both academic and more popular literature suggests a preoccupation with the idea of an
increasing pressure of time in modern society. The
early emphasis of this literature (dating from the
1990s) was an inexorable increase in work (Schor
1998) and the pace of life, leading to an increasing pressure of time and stress, and contributing to
dramatic metaphors of late-modern society such
as the “runaway juggernaut” (Giddens 1990).
More recently, academic attention has focused on
more-detailed empirical research that highlights the
diversity of the experience and the perception of
time pressure among different socioeconomic and
demographic groups (Robinson and Godbey 1999;
Jacobs and Gerson 2006). In particular, it appears

Health Care

that substantial increases in feelings of time pressure have been in the main a feature of the changing
employment structures and conditions of those from
specific socioeconomic and demographic groups—
especially those in higher-status jobs and dual-career
households.
The Harried Leisure Class has also provided
theoretical inspiration within research based on
time-use diary studies for the concept of “time
deepening” (Robinson and Godbey 1999) and
for research into the “temporal strategies of consumption” of the “work-rich, time-poor” (Sullivan
2008). In both, Linder’s concept of the time-yield
(the way in which leisure goods may be combined
with leisure activities), and his three mechanisms for
increasing this time-yield, is linked to the ability to
crowd more activities/goods into the same twentyfour-hour period. In the concept of time deepening,
this may take the form of attempting to speed up a
particular activity; substituting lengthy leisure activities by shorter ones; doing more than one leisure
activity simultaneously and planning the duration
of leisure activities more carefully. The temporal
strategies of consumption among those with high
incomes but little time involve the successive purchase of expensive consumer goods that are simply stored away rather than used and cramming a
greater number and variety of leisure activities into
the available time.
Oriel Sullivan
See also Affluent Society; Conspicuous Consumption;
Convenience; Downshifting; Economics; Leisure;
Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976.
Jacobs, Jerry A., and Kathleen Gerson. “Who Are the
Overworked Americans?” Review of Social Economy 1,
no. 4 (1998): 442–459.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906. First published
1867.
Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life:
The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. 2nd
ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999.

705

Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American. New York: Basic
Books, 1998.
Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In Georg Simmel: On
Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N.
Levine and Morris Janowitz, 294–323. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1972. First published 1904.
Sullivan, Oriel. “Busyness, Status Distinction and
Consumption Strategies of the Income-Rich, TimePoor.” Time & Society 17, no. 1 (2008): 71–92.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Viking, 1967. First published 1899.

HEALTH

AND

FITNESS

See Alternative Consumption; Body, The;
Health Care; Leisure; Obesity; Recreation;
Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being

HEALTH CARE
Health is a relative condition. Is an individual or
population healthy? The answer depends on both
the definition of health being applied by those
undertaking an assessment and how health is understood by the people themselves. Health care is more
tangible—a set of resources that are understood as
having a particular relationship with health. The
health care industry is the term often applied to the
organization of these resources and their expression
in terms of goods and services. Through the seeking of health care and commodities associated with
advancing health, the users of medical services in
Western capitalist countries have increasingly been
regarded by policymakers as consumers. Whereas
the term patient implies a relationship with a health
care professional, the term consumer has more complex associations and implies a commodification of
care. This reconceptualization has often occurred in
tandem with changes in the spaces in which health
care consultations take place. This entry considers
the reasons for, as well as the characteristics and
implications of, this transition toward health care
consumption.
The historical roots of health care lie in the role
of the traditional healer whose work was, like a
priest, a vocation rather than occupation. This
“calling” dimension is reflected in the Hippocratic

706

Health Care

oath, which, although still embraced by physicians
today, has its integrity threatened by concerns relating to remuneration and liability. Doctors (and other
health care professionals) are increasingly asked to
be conveyors of a commodity (health care) and not
the healers of their historical origins in contexts like
ancient Greece.
The origins of the use of the term consumer and
consumption in health care lie in the field of economics in which studies of demand constructed users
as consumers. However, many such demand-based
studies were in fact studies of utilization, because
in health care, the practices of consumers are heavily influenced by the activities of suppliers such as
doctors and insurance companies, notes Alistair
McGuire and colleagues. Over recent decades, consumer culture has grown to mediate many aspects of
political, economic, social, and cultural life. So, too,
health care has become part of the set of resources
that consumers use to satisfy their needs. Indeed, the
convergence of changes in technology, advertising,
and cultural acceptability has seen the medicalization
of domains of everyday life previously shrouded in
privacy and secrecy (e.g., Viagra and the commodification of sexual performance).
In the past, researchers have largely viewed the
consumption of services in terms of utilization behavior. However, a strict focus on behavior can overlook
a number of key elements of consumption: how providers shape practices, how spaces are crafted to be
conducive to consumption, how the media is used to
promote a culture of health care consumption, and
how nonpatients (e.g., philanthropic donors, family
members) can be complicit in creating consumer’s
world of health care.
Being a consumer implies having choice and
(literally or metaphorically) shopping around.
Although “doctor shopping” may exist, health care
reforms based on the assumption that this is a widespread behavior appear to do little to improve the
access to, or quality of, care for those who need it
most, according to J. R. Barnett and R. A. Kearns.
As E. D. Pellegrino states, the commodification of
care raises the question of whether the marketplace
is the right instrument for distributing health care.
Access barriers are pervasive and, if health care is
constructed as a consumption good, then distance,
costs, language, cultural acceptability, and hours of
opening can all mitigate against someone finding the
care that they need.

However, a deeper question is whether care itself
can reasonably be seen to be a consumable “good.”
In one sense, if a price is attached (either in the form
of cash-over-the-counter or via payment of insurance
premiums), such care is a consumable. However, at
a more fundamental level, there can be the presumption that individual units of a good or service are
capable of mutual substitution (i.e., one unit is essentially identical to another). Hence, visiting a grocery
store, one expects that the qualities of one bag of
flour are the same as the next. Can this presumption
(known as fungibility) be applied to health care? No,
says Pellegrino, who points to the essentially human
dimensions of the medical encounter and the intrinsic
variability of such encounters. Health care is not a
product that a doctor produces and a patient simply
consumes. Rather, there is invariably some measure
of relationship involved, even if only arising from
the trust that is extended by a patient in discussing
personal matters, or even to be touched by a doctor.
In the case of the bag of flour, by way of contrast,
the producer and consumer do not know each other.
To some critics, imposing a consumption framework debases health care. Indeed, there are arguably
moral consequences of imposing a market ethic on
the domain of health resulting in some people being
healthy and others not.
Beyond the relationships and “goods” such as
knowledge or services that define health care, consumption practices can be seen in the built environments in which formal transactions of care occur.
The very occupation of a space by patients and
families can be construed as “consuming” through
the act of “being there” and “dwelling” in the place
in however transitory a manner. For instance, being
able to choose the most reputable specialist, or enter
the most prestigious hospital, can be seen as endorsing a person’s self-ascribed status as well as involving
the more obvious receipt of medical treatment. In
other words, the place of care can affirm (or detract
from) their identity or place in the world.
Hospitals have arguably been the health care
sites that have most explicitly appealed to consumer
tastes. These are specific places of medical care that
have conventionally been highly functional in design
and location. Until about mid-twentieth century, hospitals generally only advertised themselves through
their location (e.g., on a hill or central city location)
or through their form (e.g., large size relative to other
buildings, prominent signs at entrance). Competitive

Health Care

private medicine has brought change with some private hospitals being not only sites of treatment but
also key elements within the landscape of discretionary consumption.
Yet the “packaging” of consumption activities has
also been noted in the public parts of the hospital
sector. Rather than ancillary and privatized elements
of status (e.g., luxuries available within a private
hospital room), in public hospitals, the patient is
more likely to be treated to “consumer comforts”
within the quasi-public space of the hospital atrium.
In 1997, for instance, Auckland’s Starship Children’s
Hospital controversially introduced a McDonald’s
into its foyer. Although this outlet could not sustain
controversy and shifts in the cultural acceptability of
fast food and closed in 2004, other elements of the
consumption landscape such as iconic children’s storybook characters and evidence of corporate sponsorship remain.
Ultimately, health care consumption is a paradox. Confronted by pain or injury, consumers are
unlikely to be ready or equipped with knowledge to
navigate their way through the variety of possibilities
for treatment and care offered by a competitive and
privatized health care system. However, the paucity
of “pure” consumerist behavior has not diminished
the emergence of consumption landscapes and
practices. In summary, there is a shift in the locus of
health care from the world of the service user to the
world of the consumer. Through being embedded in
a capitalist society, according to Iain Hay, health care
has become a “caring commodity”—something that
until recently was sought and dispensed relatively
inconspicuously behind the doors of professional
offices. A focus on costs recasts health care as a purchasable product rather than a relationship.
Beyond formal health care settings like clinics
and hospitals, there is an increasing diversification
of practitioners across a range of ancillary and
“complementary” forms of care and treatment (e.g.,
acupuncture, chiropractic, Ayurvedic therapies).
Along with this trend, the study of consumption
practices and the crafting of consumption spaces
could be broadened considerably. Any such investigation ought to be informed by a suite of qualitative
methodological approaches such as the discursive
analysis of advertising, the interpretation of architecture and signs, as well as attention to “consumer”
voices through interviews or focus groups. The last
of these approaches requires ethical deliberation: to

707

what extent is it reasonable to approach participants
in the course of their seeking treatment? Or do we
settle for engaging with potential consumers (i.e.,
members of the public at large who may be, but
are not at present, using such facilities or services)?
Some further promising directions in understanding the links between health care and consumption
are likely to include the preferences and practices of
diverse populations (e.g., new migrants), the role of
the Internet and other new media in “selling” health,
and place of consumption in reproducing health
inequalities.
Robin Kearns
See also Alternative Medicine; Body, The;
Commodification; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice;
Consumer Regulation; Cosmetic Surgery; State
Provisioning; Well-Being

Further Readings
Barnett, Ross., and Robin A. Kearns. “Shopping Around?
Consumerism and the Use of Private Accident and
Medical Clinics in Auckland, New Zealand.”
Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 1053–1075.
Evans, Robert G., and G. L. Stoddart. “Producing Health,
Consuming Care.” In Why Are Some People Healthy
and Others Not? The Determinants of Health of
Populations, edited by Robert G. Evans, Morris
L. Barer, and Theodore R. Marmor, 27–64. New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1994.
Gesler, Wilbert M. The Cultural Geography of Health
Care. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1991.
Hay Iain. The Caring Commodity. Auckland,
New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Joseph, Alun E., and David R. Phillips. Accessibility and
Utilization: Geographical Perspectives on Health Care
Delivery. London: Sage, 1984.
Kearns, Robin, and Ross Barnett. “Happy Meals in the
Starship Enterprise: Interpreting a Moral Geography of
Health Care Consumption.” Health and Place 6 (2000):
81–93.
McGuire, Alistair, John Henderson, and Gavin Mooney.
The Economics of Health Care. London: Routledge,
1987.
Pellegrino, Edmund D. “The Commodification of Medical
and Health Care: The Moral Consequences of a
Paradigm Shift from a Professional to a Market Ethic.”
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 24 (1999):
243–266.
Tiefer, Leonore. “The Viagra Phenomenon.” Sexualities
9 (2006): 273–294.

708

Hedonism

HEDONISM
To put it at its simplest, hedonism—and thus, the
related issues of hedonistic thought and hedonist
behavior—concerns the constant pursuit of pleasure and happiness, which are taken to be the only
worthwhile outcomes of any process of thinking or
any bout of action. Hedonism is thus a philosophy
and a way of being in the world that adheres firmly
to the belief that pleasure and happiness are the
ultimate and most important pursuits of any individual and indeed of humanity itself. This has significant implications, therefore, for the pleasure- and
happiness-seeking pursuits of individuals within the
context of global consumer cultures, specifically as it
is the very promise of the arrival of these properties
that is often seen to motivate consumer behavior.
Before reflecting more on this, however, there is a
rich and varied tradition of hedonistic thought that
is instructive for us here.
Perhaps still the most widely known doctrine of
hedonism—although neither proponent is likely to
have agreed with that label—is expressed in the philosophical writings of the nineteenth-century British
thinkers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. One
of the most celebrated figures in the history of liberalism, Mill advocated “one very simple principle” that
provides the foundation for the liberal idea of the
private realm of freedom guaranteed to the individual. In sum, he argues, the state is only permitted to
exercise power of the individual in order that it may
prevent the consequences of his actions causing harm
to others. This is significant because Mill believed
that, if left to their own devices, individuals would
go about pursuing their own good in their own way,
and thus it is the pursuit of personal happiness and
pleasure that guides individuals as they go about the
business of their everyday lives.
Linked to this assumption is the claim that individuals have the capacity to exercise free choices,
guided solely by their belief in making those choices
based on the perceived chances of obtaining pleasure
and happiness. In this way, individuals use their freedom of choice to seek the betterment of themselves,
and thus, taken together, individuals pursuing their
own good in their own way lends itself to an overall
social process that is able to deliver the perfectibility of mankind. Crucially, then, what is motivating
human thought and action is the pursuit of pleasure

and happiness, which when translated into a collection of individual pursuits of pleasure and happiness
are ultimately beneficial to society as a whole. Before
Mill, Bentham offered a rather simpler calculation
that of the importance of “the greatest happiness for
the greatest number of people.” As such, both individuals and governments ought to be guided in their
thoughts and actions by a single, dominant concern,
which is to quantitatively calculate the most efficient
way of achieving the maximum level of happiness for
the maximum number of people. If this is realized in
practice, so the theory goes, then it will be possible to
achieve the greatest total amount of happiness in a
given society. Although there are nuanced differences
between the two approaches outlined, each is clearly
informed by the logic of hedonism: that pleasure and
happiness ought rightly to be the only worthwhile
concern of any thought or action.
The tradition of hedonistic thought goes back
much further, however, and to bring this discussion
more explicitly into line with the concerns of analyzing consumer culture, there is another proponent of
this theory worthy of time here. If Mill and Bentham
are both well-known and prominent characters in the
historical studies of consumer culture, then the figure
of Aristippus of Cyrene (ca. 435–356 BCE) is perhaps
far less renowned. Nevertheless, in spite of occupying a position of relative historical obscurity, largely
because none of his own writings remain, Aristippus
provides one of the earliest defenses of the pursuit of
sensuous enjoyment in his exchange with Socrates (as
told in the Memorabilia of the student Xenophon). In
dialogue, Aristippus refuses to accept Socrates’ claim
that happiness is simply one outcome of moral action
and instead proffers the argument that happiness and
pleasure are the single supreme good and so ought
to be the sole end of all action. Notorious among his
contemporaries for maintaining a constantly calm
demeanor, Aristippus is also one of the earliest figures to argue staunchly for immediate gratification as
offering far greater levels of pleasure and happiness
than any attempt to defer satisfaction in the pursuit of
an identified longer-term objective.
In relation to the global consumer societies of
today, then, it is perhaps possible to suggest that
there is something of the spirit of Aristippus informing the hedonistic pursuits of individual men and
women as they dutifully play their roles as pleasureseeking consumers. This is certainly one of the lines
of enquiry suggested in Colin Campbell’s seminal

Hegemony

work The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern
Consumerism. Informed by Max Weber’s classic study of the Protestant ethic’s ascetic principles,
which provided such a fertile habitat for nascent capitalist systems, Campbell argues that consumerism
functions precisely in its capacity to stimulate individuals’ desires by frequently promising immediate
gratification, even though a more sober analysis of
empirical outcomes reveals this satisfaction to be typically elusive. Campbell identifies an underlying cultural logic at work in modern consumer culture, one
in which human imagination, desire, and emotion
play an essential role, signifying an often unrecognized commitment to those values and pursuits associated with the movement known as Romanticism,
in particular its celebration of the “cult of the self”
as a legitimating basis for the pursuit of purely
hedonistic activity. That modern consumerism has
become the playground of hedonism is one of the
lasting contributions of Campbell’s analysis.
Given all of this, then, one wonders how we are
to define this happiness and this pleasure that we are
all, each one of us, engaged daily in chasing. One of
the standard criticisms leveled at those who proffer a hedonistic philosophy is that the concepts of
“happiness”—and, by extension, “unhappiness”—
lack that fundamental universalism they require in
order to be meaningful beyond anything other than
a narrowly individualistic, narcissistic understanding.
The nature of happiness itself is peculiar, often arising from the end of a specific bout of unhappiness
and thus defined by the absence of a particularly
irksome quality, rather than the presence of something tangibly wonderful. To illustrate the point,
Zygmunt Bauman has recently reminded us that it
was Sigmund Freud who taught us that although “a
sudden end to a toothache may make the sufferer feel
wonderfully happy, teeth that are not painful hardly
ever do” (2007, 43). Consumerism as a mode of
being essentially works on a fundamental paradox:
that the chasing of ever more happiness and pleasure,
promised by the acquisition of goods and services
identified as capable of delivering these qualities,
does not result in satisfaction but, paradoxically, in
further unhappiness.
As Campbell’s study also identified, the more
creative one is in imagining the possible satisfactions that ever more novel and original goods may
bring, the more frustrated and dissatisfying the
actual acquisition of goods becomes. That is to say,

709

the capacity of consumer societies to enhance either
our personal or collective happiness is seemingly
fairly limited, with evidence of this derived from the
ceaselessness with which the pursuit of these qualities
continues unabated. As such, as a way of organizing
our individual life projects and our global societies,
the consumerist model would fail the tests laid down
by Bentham and Mill in the early stages of modern
liberalism. Consumerism as a mode of being thrives
only so long as it manages to render the nonsatisfaction of its members—the meaning is quite clear:
the unhappiness of consumers—the perpetual state
of normality. The reasons for this would appear to
be fairly explicit. To satisfy a consumer, to make a
consumer happy with her or his lot, is to stop a consumer from spending more. The mantra of today’s
global consumer societies and perhaps the best way
to capture the paradox of hedonism is, to borrow
again from Bauman, delivered through the words of
Robert Louis Stevenson, “to travel hopefully is a far
better thing than to arrive” (1881, 190).
Mark Davis
See also Asceticism; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice;
Desire; Happiness; Materialism and Postmaterialism;
Novelty; Protestant Ethic; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Oxford: Polity, 2007.
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
First published 1789.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. First published 1859.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Virginibus Puerisque and Other
Papers. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1994. First published
1904.
Xenophon. Memorabilia: Conversations of Socrates.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990.

HEGEMONY
Hegemony is a sociological concept developed by
Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci in
prison, after he was incarcerated by the Fascists,

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Hegemony

between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. It
refers to the dominance of a social class or group
over the others in a given society. The dominance
is practiced without materially violent methods but
through veiled dynamics, by making all the other
social classes of groups perceive its own values and
choices as natural norms, which are claimed to benefit everyone but actually, and invisibly, express the
interests of the ruling class and its strategic will to
control and dominate. In many respects, the concept
of hegemony underpins many contemporary fears of
consumer culture as an ideological tool for controlling the masses, for example, the mass-culture thesis
of the Frankfurt School and, later, developments in
cultural studies.
The concept of hegemony was articulated through
a number of fragmented reflections collected within
twenty-nine Prison Notebooks, which were written
in prison by Gramsci before dying sick at the age of
forty-six, posthumously published by Einaudi (Turin)
in 1949 and partially translated into English in 1971.
Gramsci’s critical thought was intrinsically based
on the historical and political environment of Italy’s
post–World War I period in which it developed. In
his daily notes elaborated in prison, Gramsci was trying to address two major sociopolitical problematic
conditions in Italy: the economic underdevelopment
of the southern regions and the failure of the project
of a working-class revolution. Gramsci’s explanation was elaborated precisely through the concept of
hegemony—an originally Russian term that had also
been adopted by Lenin. Conceived as the moral and
civic dominance of a social class over another, hegemony refers to the power of the dominant (industrial
and rural) bourgeois class over the so-called subaltern classes and, at the same time, of the arguably
more advanced working class on the rural class,
which was mainly living in Italian southern regions.
This second hegemonic form was claimed to hopefully and strategically induce rural peasants to give
up their historically rooted spirit of resignation to
enter into an alliance with the working-class members in a joint revolutionary project (this was also
the reason behind the title chosen by Gramsci for
the national newspaper he founded in 1924, L’Unità
[The Unity], which is still diffused in Italy nowadays). Even without providing a coherent theoretical
model, Gramsci’s fragmented and critical reflections
on the concept of hegemony provided an explanation
of the historical, political, and cultural foundations

on which class dominance operated in Italy during
the first decades of the twentieth century. What really
differentiated and made Gramsci’s theory so fertile
was his focus not only on material power relationships but also, and most interestingly, on the ability of acquiring consensus over the subaltern classes
through the ruling class’ moral and intellectual—that
is, deeply cultural, not merely economic—leadership.
Gramsci’s explanatory efforts were indeed profoundly connoted in political and cultural terms: his
analysis of the class domination dynamics was highly
focused not only on traditional political institutions
(such as the parliament, the law courts, the prisons)
but also on the institutions of the so-called civic society (such as the media, the schools, the churches, the
trade unions) that perform educative, cultural, and
representative functions.
The role of culture in Gramsci’s theory indeed
represents one of the most innovative and insightful rearticulations of Marx’s thought. Fundamentally
based on quite a rigid opposition between the socalled (determinant) material-economic structure and
the (determined) cultural-ideological superstructure,
Marx’s political theory argued that a capitalistic society’s economic inequalities would induce the working class to revolutionize the existent social order to
depose capitalism and establish a new communist
model. Gramsci advanced an explanation of the
failure of Marx’s prediction based on the relevance
attributable to both material and symbolic forms of
conflict, and more specifically on a crucial analytical distinction between the so-called war of position
and war of maneuver. His prison notebooks were
explicitly dedicated to “the intellectuals and the role
of culture.” Gramsci claimed that the war of position represents a culture war, where the intellectuals strive to acquire a dominant position and have
a louder voice in the media and the institutions of
the civil society in order to “speak for” their own
(low) classes and unveil the power-making dynamics
of the dominant class. This passage is crucial, since
the concept of cultural hegemony assumes that the
prevailing cultural norms are usually conceived to be
naturally given and therefore inevitable, while their
existence is actually rooted in a historical and strategic project of class domination. While workers and
lay people usually concentrate their concrete efforts
on the immediate concerns of their everyday lives, socalled organic intellectuals must make them refocus
their attention on the reasons and sources of their

Hegemony

subaltern condition and perceive the historically systemic nature of their social and economic oppression
and exploitation based on cultural hegemony. If and
when intellectuals win the so-called war of position,
their new visibility and public role will let them play
an educational role, increase class consciousness, and
start inspiring new organizational social forms and
revolutionary projects. By proving successful in the
war for position, communist leaders would eventually acquire the fundamental popular support and
political legitimation to begin the so-called war of
maneuver that will lead to (armed) insurrection
against the existing capitalistic power.
Through the concept of (cultural) hegemony,
Gramsci opened up a whole stream of sociological
research as well as political thought on the relationships between society and culture. Over the years,
Gramsci’s intellectual influence has been particularly strong in the transdisciplinary fields of (British)
cultural studies (as explicitly recognized by worldknown scholar and ex-director of the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stuart
Hall in 1980) and of (Indian) subaltern studies and
postcolonialism studies (as evident in the critical
analyses carried out by Ranahit Guha and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak and, more recently, by Dipesh
Chakrabarty). In the field of cultural studies, in
particular, Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and
resistance have proved extremely fertile in the
elaboration of new Marxist-oriented critical concepts and methodologies and have been adopted
to investigate the process of production, diffusion,
and consumption of institutional discourses, media
contents, and popular cultural forms as well as of
subcultural practices (as manifest in the very influential theoretical analysis of the possible forms of
readings and resistant rearticulation of hegemonic
media messages developed within the so-called
encoding/decoding model by Hall in 1973). Since
the late 1980s, however, Gramsci’s reflections on
the concept of cultural hegemony have been widely
applied, integrated, and critically rearticulated
within a wider variety of disciplinary fields, from
anthropology to cultural studies, from sociology
to political science, to critically deal with different social and cultural structural conditions from
“white hegemony” to “male hegemony,” as well as
with the multiple interweaving dynamics between
“race” and gender. Over the last two decades,
one of the most widely debated applications of

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Gramsci’s concept of hegemony emerged in the
intersection between the field of geopolitical
international relations and media studies. This
increasing literature has particularly contributed
to articulate an ideological critique of the hegemonic role of the United States by underlining
the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad
through political pressures and the pervasive
industrial diffusion of advertising and commercial
commodities for mass consumption, as well as by
advancing explanations of the U.S. foreign policies
as a wider hegemonic strategy that would aim at
the formation of an empire. From this perspective,
both scholars and political commentators (such as
Noam Chomsky) have strongly criticized recent
political and military interventions such as the
Iraq war and the propagandistic use of international media, which have, arguably, subtly diffused
the U.S. hegemonic vision of a new world order
post–September 11.
Marco Solaroli
See also Colonialism; Gramsci, Antonio; Marxist
Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Political
Economy; Production of Culture; Social Class

Further Readings
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest
for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books,
2003.
Gitlin, Todd. “Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic
Process in Television Entertainment.” In Television—the
Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb, 574–594.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks of
Antonio Gramsci. Translated and edited by Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1971.
Guha, Ranahit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds.
Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media,
Culture & Society 2 (1980a): 57–72.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some
Problematics and Problems.” In Culture, Media, Language:
Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979, edited by
Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul
Willis, 15–47. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1980b.

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Hierarchy of Needs

Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post War Britain. London:
Hutchinson, 1976.
Holsti, Kalevi. The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and
Diversity in International Theory. Winchester, MA:
Allen and Unwin, 1985.
Lash, Scott. “Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in
Mutation?” Theory, Culture, and Society 24 (2007): 55–78.

HIERARCHY

OF

NEEDS

While many social theorists resist the notion that
humans are driven by innate forces, the term need
is well established in everyday use and various traditions of social and economic thought and practice.
Need can be explicitly normative, pointing to conditions to be met for human beings to be healthy,
happy, free, fully human, fulfilling their potentials,
and so on. Such needs do not necessarily become
wants, because people may not know that particular
conditions are required, or may reject the struggle
to be more fulfilled (having decided that it is easier,
less painful, or more rewarding to settle for immediate gratification). One critique of consumer culture is
that it creates wants (e.g., for junk food) detrimental
to satisfaction of needs (for health, etc.). Proponents
of consumer sovereignty, seeing this as “we know
better than you do what is good for you” elitism,
argue that people should be free to satisfy their needs
through the exercise of consumer choice. (Though
when it comes to children, adults often believe that
they know best—hence efforts to restrict advertisements aimed at creating new wants among children.)
Another use of needs is more akin to the notion
of motives (many social researchers prefer this term).
Needs for achievement, affiliation, and the like have
been popular topics of psychological research. Such
needs are properties of individuals, deep-seated
desires that drive peoples’ behavior. The relative
strength or mode of expression of such needs may be
seen as a personality trait that can vary across people.
Conscious wants are interpreted as being expressions
of needs, mediated through cognitive structures and
social circumstances shaping the perception of how
far specific activities and choices are likely to satisfy
them. Thus, a need to achieve may be expressed in
efforts to excel at sports, business, professional, political, or artistic life. It may even take the form of ambitions to be a particularly effective consumer—getting

the best value for money, being knowledgeable about
a particular class of goods, and so on.
Particular social theorists may stress one or another
need (Sigmund Freud on sex, David McClelland on
achievement, Thorstein Veblen on status). But most
users of the need concept would agree that individuals have multiple needs. Then the question arises of
how the different needs interact. A course of activity may simultaneously satisfy several needs—dining
out with friends may satisfy both hunger and social
needs, buying an expensive car may satisfy needs for
mobility and for status. But often we face options
that would satisfy different needs to different extents,
quite possibly satisfying some at the expense of others. Many psychologists and behavioral economists
see individuals as making choices based on calculations of the probable amount of satisfaction (and the
risk of frustration) associated with different options.
One need may be particularly dominant in an individual, but the relative strength of different needs is
liable to fluctuate over time, as internal and external
conditions change (time elapses since the last meal, a
bad experience leads an individual to feel devalued in
terms of achievements). Advertising may be oriented
to making consumers dissatisfied with what they
have or enhancing the salience of specific needs, or it
may be more aimed at changing cognitions, convincing consumers that one way of spending money (e.g.,
on one particular brand) will be most satisfying.
The “hierarchy of needs” approach assumes that
certain lower-level needs have to be satisfied (at
least to some extent) before higher-level ones can
emerge or be addressed. Designers often employ
such an approach when considering requirements
that should be fulfilled for the product to be used
at all, as opposed to those required for more sophisticated use. More broadly, the best-known generic
approach, and the one that has done most to popularize ideas of a needs hierarchy, is that developed by
Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s account of individual
psychological motivation was developed from examining normal and particularly accomplished people,
in contrast to the more dysfunctional or troubled
individuals emphasized in psychiatry and psychoanalytically inspired psychology. His framework has
proved popular among management and market
researchers for several decades, though it has little
traction among professional psychologists.
Maslow modified his model throughout his career,
though core features remained fairly stable. The

Hierarchy of Needs

hierarchy is presented as a triangle, with the basic
needs at the base and more sophisticated ones at the
apex. As the more basic needs (Maslow described
them as deficit needs) are satisfied, the foundation is established for higher-level ones (growth or
meta-needs) to be pursued. Basic needs take priority
over the higher needs: extreme hunger or insecurity
is liable to dampen interest in one’s appearance or
the availability of good music. When deficit needs
are threatened, people who have become used to
functioning at higher levels may regress to a lower
need level.
There are four deficit needs that can be satiated.
Most basic are essential physiological needs, requirements for biological necessities (food, water, etc.).
These are succeeded by safety needs, striving for security and reduction of dangers, then social needs—for
friendship, community, love—become important,
followed by esteem needs. Esteem has interpersonal
dimensions (status and recognition in a community)
but also intrapersonal ones (self-respect).
The growth needs can be pursued but are not satiated like deficit needs—they involve self-actualization,
fulfilling human potentials. Failure to satisfy growth
needs may lead to such responses as depression,
alienation, and cynicism. Maslow elaborated on
these growth needs in various ways. In some later
work, Maslow suggested that cognitive (for knowledge and understanding) and aesthetic needs (for
creativity and beauty) might lie between esteem and
higher self-actualization needs, while above selfactualization self-transcendence, involving the quest
for spirituality, can emerge. Eventually Maslow
identified some seventeen types of self-actualization
needs and relaxed the idea of a strict hierarchy across
growth needs: they do not necessarily appear, or need
satisfaction, in a rigid inherent order. This lack of
strong hierarchy at the higher levels may encourage
users of Maslow’s approach to treat them simply as
different expressions of higher-order needs; his later
elaborations are often neglected and the more basic
and less complicated model taken to be sufficient.
In the course of human development, people are
expected to progress through the various levels of
the pyramid—though if needs at one level remain
unsatisfied, individuals may remain restricted to this
level. Thus, the hierarchy can be used to differentiate among people in terms of which needs are predominantly shaping their attitudes and behaviors.
The triangular visualization of the model (why not

713

a staircase or column?) has significant implications.
The most sophisticated needs occupy a smaller
area—perhaps signifying that they are quantitatively less powerful, or that relatively few people are
achieving these higher levels. (Maslow believed that,
even in affluent societies where most people’s basic
needs are met, self-actualization needs predominate
for only a small percentage of the population.)
Ronald Inglehart has explored value systems
around the world and over time, using survey data
to argue that generations who have had their basic
needs satisfied by growing up in times of material
affluence and security are more likely to display
“postmaterialist” perspectives. (Though they may
consume rather high levels of material goods, and
affluent consumer societies are adept at amplification
of materialistic desire.) This is a rare case of (a rather
simplified version of) the needs hierarchy approach
being taken seriously within contemporary empirical
social science. More generally, psychometric research
has repeatedly found little support for more elaborate versions of the Maslowian hierarchy, and social
psychology examines individual differences in other
frameworks. Meanwhile, the appearance and celebration of highly spiritual or artistic individuals in
impoverished regions and subcultures argues against
taking the hierarchy to be a staircase (where one step
has to be mounted before scaling the next).
Maslow’s analysis is still frequently encountered
in management and marketing fields. Some of the
appeal of the model is that it provides an easily
graspable account of the different types of motivation that may come into play in the choice of lifestyles and career paths—and which are relevant to
decisions as how to market goods and services (or to
decide which to bring to market) and how to reward
and inspire employees. Psychodemographic market
research often groups consumers into groups dominated by security, status, and similar concerns—and
Arnold Mitchell’s well-known VALS (values, attitudes, and lifestyles) approach to segmenting consumer groups was originally inspired by Maslowian
thinking. Discussions of working life often refer to
Frederick Herzberg’s two categories of hygiene needs
and motivators, resembling Maslow’s deficit and
growth needs. Another popular approach is Clayton
Alderfer’s ERG theory. This outlines a three-level hierarchy of existence (the basic physiological and safety
motives), relatedness (for social relationships and
esteem), and growth needs (personal development).

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Higher Education

Alderfer argued that a need does not have to be completely satisfied for other needs to emerge; an individual’s psychological state may reflect a mixture of
needs, which can potentially be drawn from different
levels of the hierarchy. Whether such approaches are
proposing a strict hierarchy of needs, or a more fluid
spectrum of needs, which may be ordered in different
ways across people and circumstances, is debatable.
Ian Miles
See also Desire; Happiness; Inalienable Wealth/
Inalienable Possession; Maslow, Abraham;
Materialism and Postmaterialism; Needs and Wants;
Psychology

Further Readings
Alderfer, Clayton. “An Empirical Test of a New Theory of
Human Needs.” Organizational Behavior and Human
Performance 4 (1969): 142–175.
Herzberg, Frederick. Work and the Nature of Man.
Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1966.
Inglehart, Ronald. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial
Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Maslow, Abraham. Toward a Psychology of Being. 2nd ed.
New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968.
Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. 2nd ed.
New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Trigg, Andrew B. “Deriving the Engel Curve: Pierre
Bourdieu and the Social Critique of Maslow’s Hierarchy
of Needs.” Review of Social Economy 62, no. 3 (2004):
393–406.
Wahba, A., and Lawrence Bridgewell. “Maslow
Reconsidered: A Review of Research on the Need
Hierarchy Theory.” Organizational Behavior and
Human Performance 15 (1976): 212–240.

HIGHER EDUCATION
Higher education refers to education of undergraduate degree level or above that is generally, but not
exclusively, undertaken within universities. It also
encompasses the broader set of activities of universities including research and enterprise. The growth
of consumption terminology, values, and practices
within higher education arose within a context
of rapid and complex global change that included
the increasing commodification of education and
research, which accelerated from the 1980s onward.
Globally, universities have become comparatively

more dependent on their relationships with industry
and less dependent on their relationships with states.
This contrasts with a former era where they were primarily aligned with states, and research and teaching
were more frequently conceptualized as public sector
activities provided as welfare. The new commodified higher education is characterized as managerialist: market-orientated managers control and shape
the work of academics to maximize income. Also,
the all-encompassing nature of marketization has
resulted in consumption-orientated behavior and values permeating all activities and relationships within
universities.
Education markets are not pure markets. One
reason is that a range of nonmarket factors shape
what happens in universities. The declining proportion of state funding is coupled with increasing state
control of universities, which is achieved by granting
and withdrawing state funding according to current
national priorities; for example, states might fund
universities that are successful in widening access to
students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those
who prioritize vocational or science courses. Publicly
available league tables that rate universities nationally and internationally are not produced by states
but are also influential in shaping the activities of
universities as they are important in conveying and
reinforcing reputations in national and global higher
education markets. Universities respond to league
tables because they are influential. Students draw
on them in choosing courses, and the most qualified
students expect to go to the highest-rated universities. The status of staff in universities is also heavily
dependent on reputation and league-table positions.
Universities use league tables in their marketing to
attract students, staff, and private and public financers of research and training. States, industry, and
universities increasingly act similarly because in
neoliberal societies, they are all organized through
market relations. State funding therefore does not
necessarily reduce marketization or the commodification of universities business. A whole range of
commodified products and activities are associated
with universities, including the following: the use and
creation of textbooks that package knowledge; the
creation and utilization of commercial software packages in teaching students; and the increasing role of
patents, copyrights, contracts, trademarks, and logos
in branding and asserting ownership. This restricts
access to knowledge to those who can afford to pay.

Higher Education

While the United States, Australia, and the United
Kingdom are the often-cited examples of increasingly
marketized higher education systems, a broader literature describes global trends that play out differently
in various national contexts. There has been a global
increase in the proportion of funding from private
sources (e.g., industry, alumni, benefactors, and
public-sector customers who pay for research and
training) and students (home and international)
and their parents (who pay fees), but the degree of
money from different sources varies as does the role
of higher education in different nations.
The massification of higher education, which
involves a continuous global expansion of student
numbers, has accelerated since the 1980s: the global
number of students rose from 28,084,000 in 1970
to 143,723,000 in 2006 (Unterhalter and Carpentier
2010, 11) and is projected to rise to more than
160 million by 2020 (Marquez 2002, 88). This globally significant market, which was estimated to be
worth $27 billion in 1995, is currently dominated
by the United States. Marketization has resulted
in diverse provision internationally with the growth
of virtual, privately funded, corporate-owned,
technical, franchise, and offshore universities and
museums as some of the alternative types. Current
debates dispute the degree to which these changes
impact positively or negatively on different aspects of
higher education, including the knowledge produced
through research, students’ learning and identities,
the pedagogies and curricula of universities, academic
staff, fair access to higher education, and national
and global economic and social (in)equality.
Commodification has grown as universities have
become key global institutions as a consequence of the
global knowledge economy that attaches economic
value to knowledge and its production. Universities
supplement the research of private companies,
providing important infrastructure (e.g., personnel
and equipment), and are in a position to contribute
research that is not immediately profitable that multinational companies would be unlikely to carry out.
However, private income has not necessarily meant
an overall increase in income for universities. There
is debate about whether knowledge produced within
universities has become too shaped by its commodification as a product for industries whose interests
are most often allied with wealthier nations and the
production of profit rather than being governed by
intellectual or disciplinary priorities or by the needs

715

of the disadvantaged groups and nations. These
criticisms reflect debates about the ownership of
knowledge and the accountability of universities: it is
strongly connected to the question of whose interests
should shape the production and dissemination of
knowledge through research and teaching.
Universities are involved in a complex set of consumption relationships involving a wide range of
actors, including states, industry, students, and their
parents. A key moment in the development of higher
education markets was the General Agreement on
Trade in Services (GATs), which defined education as
a product and gave international license to this trade.
It positioned neoliberal states as potential consumers or producers of higher education systems: universities and private companies can be the providers
of or accredit higher education courses in a variety
of nation-states. Thus far, the wealthier nations of
Northern America, Europe, and Australasia have
tended to be producers, setting up campuses or
courses in the less-wealthy nations of regions such
as Asia and Africa or providing online courses. This
commodification of education systems appears to be
increasing the already unequal relationships between
countries. It is possible that as the global economy
shifts, nations like China and India might benefit
economically, and educational hierarchies might also
shift. However, in current global league tables, existing status and wealth hierarchies are reflected and
reinforced.
There are different but overlapping approaches
to researching higher students as consumers that are
based on disciplinary traditions. From a business and
marketing perspective, higher education is a problematic service because it is a nebulous product. Its
success is dependent on the relationship the studentconsumer has with different facets of education (e.g.,
educational materials, tutors, buildings, and other
students). Students find it hard to judge prior to purchase/engagement, and evaluation of services can be
based on factors that are hard to control (e.g., the
appearance of a provider/teacher); reception is also
heavily dependent on expectations. The rational consumer model that higher education marketers use is
seen as problematic because a range of factors influence student choice, including background, social
class, ethnicity, school contexts, teachers, the media,
and lifestyle. Marketing in this field is viewed as lacking a theoretical and conceptual framing. Marketing
research also suggests that the information about

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Higher Education

universities that governments seek to make transparent though league tables and that they believe will
help student-consumers make choices are unlikely
to achieve this because the latter do not straightforwardly choose. However, the same could be said of
many services and products.
Sociologists and educationalists critique commodified higher education for the poorer quality of experience and the lower standard of education they think
will emerge if educational courses are conceived of as
a standardized product and the difficulties they think
will arise if they are taught to increasing masses of
students in systems with less resources. Sociologists
and educationalists also believe that students will
have poorer relationships with education if they conceive of themselves as consumers of an educational
qualification, a student lifestyle, and a passport to a
vocation. Although some authors see the increasing
bureaucratization or McDonaldization of services
for students as a somewhat inevitable consequence
of massification, which does provide access to higher
education for more students, they also believe that
remedial action is needed to stop higher education
deteriorating due to more students being educated
with fewer resources. They suggest that diverse
teaching methods, a wider variety of learning experiences, and the creative use of technology can revitalize higher education. This view contrasts with those
who suggest that higher education should not be
marketized and should be state funded.
There is an increasing wealth of research relevant
to the commodification of higher education. These
include the following factors, already discussed:
massification; marketization; the changing relationships between universities, states, and industry; the
globalization of higher education (including that
facilitated through technology); the growth of quality regimes; the global knowledge economy; and the
consumption and marketization of higher education.
However, other factors—including the vocationalization of higher education, the brain drain, and the
global movement of students and academic staff—
should also be explored for a fuller understanding of
the field.
Andrea Abbas
See also Bounded Rationality; Commercialization;
Commodification; Consumption Patterns and Trends;
Markets and Marketing; McDonaldization; Systems of
Provision

Further Readings
Abbas, Andrea, and Monica McLean. “Tackling Inequality
through Quality: A Comparative Case Study Using
Bernsteinian Concepts.” In Global Inequalities and
Higher Education: Whose Interests Are We Serving?
edited by Elaine Unterhalter and Vincent Carpentier,
241–267. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010.
Delanty, Gerard. Challenging Knowledge: The University in
the Knowledge Society. Buckingham, UK: The Society
for Research into Higher Education and the Open
University Press, 2001.
Foskett, Nicholas H., and Jane Hemsley-Brown. Choosing
Futures: Young People’s Decision-Making in Education,
Training and Careers Markets. London: Routledge/
Falmer, 2001.
Hayes, Dennis, and Robin Wynyard, eds. The
McDonaldization of Higher Education. London: Bergen
and Harvey, 2002.
Hemsley-Brown, Jane V., and Izhar Oplatka. “Universities
in a Competitive Global Marketplace: A Systematic
Review of the Literature on Higher Education
Marketing.” International Journal of Public Sector
Management 19, no. 4 (2006): 316–338.
Hill, Frances M. “Managing Service Quality in Higher
Education.” Quality Assurance in Education 3, no. 3
(1995): 10–21.
Marquez, A. M. “The Impact of Globalization on Higher
Education: The Latin American Context.” Chapter 7 of
Globalization and the Market in Higher Education:
Quality, Accreditation and Qualifications. Paris: the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) and Editions Economica,
2002.
McLean, Monica. Pedagogy and the University: Critical
Theory and Practice. London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2008.
Morely, Louise. Quality and Power in Higher Education.
Buckingham, UK: The Society for Research into Higher
Education and the Open University Press, 2003.
Ritzer, George. “Towards a Spectacularly Irrational
University Quotidian.” In The McDonaldization of
Higher Education, edited by Dennis Hayes and Robin
Wynyard, 19–32. London: Bergen and Harvey, 2002.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism
and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher
Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization. Globalization and the Market in Higher
Education: Quality, Accreditation and Qualifications.
Paris: Author and Editions Economica, 2002.

Hinduism
Unterhalter, Elaine, and Vincent Carpentier, eds. Global
Inequalities and Higher Education: Whose Interests Are
We Serving? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010.

HINDUISM

717

The pervasive and inherent godliness of all creation—living or inanimate—is thus the key metaphysical basis of Hinduism. All animate subjects and
objects, including subatomic particles not yet discovered, are manifestations of god.

Cultural Aspects
Hinduism refers to the religious beliefs, rituals, practices, philosophies, and worldviews of people who
self-identify as Hindus. Hindu religious practices
emerged in the northwestern parts of South Asia
(present-day Pakistan and northern India) several
centuries prior to Christ. While some trace the advent
of Hinduism to deep antiquity, a wider consensus
places the formalization of Hindu ideas to 1750 BC.
The word Hindu is an aspirate Persian-Arabic pronunciation of the river Sindhu (Indus), which people
to the east of it called Hindus.
Hindu majorities exist only in Nepal (99 percent)
and India (85 percent), with sizable minorities in Fiji,
Mauritius, and Suriname, and tiny but often economically powerful minorities in the United States,
Canada, the United Kingdom, and some nations in
Africa and the Middle East.
There is no founder or prophets in Hinduism.
There are, however, numerous gurus or teachers who
claim to show their followers the correct practices
and paths of Hinduism. Hinduism does not provide
formal mechanisms for proselytizing or conversion.
People are born into the religion. Some sects and
branches, however, do allow conversions (such as
the ISKCON Hare Krishna movement), but these
are minor. Although there are numerous ancient religious texts, unlike the Bible or the Koran, no single
text can lay claim as the word of god. Hindus are
thus not “people of the book” in the sense of submitting to one authoritative text.

Metaphysical Aspects
A major philosophical-metaphysical distinction
between Hinduism and the “religions of the book”—
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that Hinduism
“postulates no absolute distinction between divine
and human beings” (Fuller 2004, 3). Thus, people
greet each other and pray to gods with the same
gesture of folded hands, bowed head (“Namaste”).
As Fuller notes, however, there is almost always an
implied hierarchy: humans may be divine—but are
highly stratified—in the Hindu worldview.

In cultural terms, the continuous blending of divinity
and humanity implies blurring of the lines between
the sacred and the profane. A car can be used for
amorous dalliance, perhaps even a robbery, and
then worshipped with flowers and incense during
Vishwakarma Puja (a day to worship technology).
Several interesting and sometimes contradictory
views of consumer culture are found in Hinduism.
At a deep philosophical and spiritual level, the world
of goods is regarded as Maya—an illusion, a web of
entanglements in which humans are trapped through
unending cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. Ultimate
salvation (Nirvana, Moksha) is seen as an escape from
the reincarnation cycle, from the web of Maya, and
hence from all desire. And yet, there is pragmatic realization that daily life of ordinary people is rooted in
materialism. Hinduism therefore offers multiple paths
to godliness, including paths that rely very much on
material means. Swami Bhaskarananda, a monk in
the Ramakrishna Order, writes, “Hinduism offers
two major spiritual paths. . . . The path for householders is . . . ‘the path of permitted sensual desires.’
The path for monks is . . . ‘the path of renunciation of
sensual desires’” (2002, 109). The notion of what is
“permitted,” however, is quite flexible. Unlike Islam
or Orthodox Judaism, there are no explicit proscriptions about any form of consumption in Hinduism.
Even the “sacred cow” notion and the admonition
not to eat beef are generally seen as late developments
in Hinduism, probably to safeguard the economically
vital cattle stock in periods of famine.
Explicit consumer-related Hindu texts include
the call to hedonism by Charvak (“Consume clarified butter, even if this entails getting into debt”) and
elaborate rules for trade and payments specified in
Kautilya’s Arthashastra.
Unlike Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, Hinduism
does not employ sin concepts to govern human
behaviors. Instead, it employs the cosmic concept of
karma—all actions have consequences, but it could
take multiple incarnations for the consequences
to unfold. The basic moral message thus is, “Be

718

Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods

good, because it is good to be good.” Evil deeds
and immoral behaviors do accumulate in a cosmic
account, and the consequence could literally be a
dog’s life—reincarnation in subhuman forms.

The Original Postmodernism?
The cultural polyphony of Hinduism, and of India,
in fact could be characterized as the original postmodernism: “Indeed, Postmodernism looks as if it
could have been created for India because it makes
no attempt to produce one order, construct one principle” (Michaels and Harshay 2003, 9). Without an
identified founder or prophet, and without a designated savior—and because of its polyvalence—
Hinduism is highly adaptive. Monk Bhaskarananda
compares a religion to an attic in an old home:
Unless the attic is regularly cleaned, it gathers dust and
cobwebs and eventually becomes unusable. Similarly,
if a religion cannot be updated or cleaned from time to
time, it loses its usefulness and cannot relate anymore
to changed times and people. (2002, 5)

Because of adaptability, even the fundamentalist
strands in Hinduism, which do arise from time to
time, are not obscurantist or puritanical. Instead,
they tend to be revivalist and heritage glorifying.
Competing views of Hinduism—progressive, fundamentalist, and everything in between—are like a
postmodern coffeehouse: numerous blends, flavors, and concoctions are available, and people
can further modify these by adding their preferred
sweeteners and sprinkles.
Nikhilesh Dholakia
See also Christianity; Islam; Postmodernism; Rituals;
Sacred and Profane

Further Readings
Bhaskarananda, Swami. The Essentials of Hinduism.
Seattle, WA: Viveka Press, 2002.
Fuller, C. J. The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and
Society in India. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004.
Michaels, Axel. Hinduism: Past and Present. Translated by
Barbara Harshay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
Narayan, Kirin. Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk
Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Sugirtharajah, Sharada. Imagining Hinduism: A
Postcolonial Perspective. London: Routledge, 2003.

HIRE-PURCHASE
RENTAL GOODS

AND

A hire-purchase (H-P) activity is a transaction that
involves regular fees for the access to an entity, coupled with an option to buy provided that all conditions agreed in the contract are fulfilled at the end
of the predetermined period. As such, H-P can be
considered a type of installment credit. It allows the
consumer to gain immediate possession of a property
without obtaining the legal ownership of the physical
entity over an agreed period of time. Through offering direct access to the property, H-P fosters customers’ “buy now, pay later” attitude and encourages a
culture of borrowing, thereby strongly contributing
to an expansion of the consumer credit market.
H-P is a purchase of rights, not of a property.
According to property rights theory, the ownership
of a physical entity (property) consists of a bundle
of property rights: the right to exclude third parties
from the use of the property, the right to retain the
profits yielded from the use of the property, the right
to change the good, and the right to sell the property
or to convey some of the rights to others. In contrast to ownership, which includes all four property
rights, H-P allows the debtor to obtain only the two
former, while the two remaining rights rest with the
creditor. The legal ownership of the property vests
with the lender until the final installment payment
is made. As it is initially agreed on, with completion
of the final payment, the lessee can either exercise
the option to purchase the physical entity at a predetermined price or return it to the lender. In case
of default on payment, the lender is able to repossess the property. The lessee is bound to reimburse
the lender for any deficiency from the sale if it is
repossessed.
Mostly, rental goods are the foundation of
H-P transactions. Generally, a rental good can be
described as a physical entity. For example, vehicles,
machinery, technology, clothing, and handbags all
represent rental goods. Theoretically, with H-P, the
resale value of the rental good ought never to fall
below the sum of all installment payments, as in case
of default of payment, the lender may repossess the

Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods

rental good, which needs to retain sufficient value for
reselling purposes. Therefore, those rental goods subject to H-P contracts need to be sufficiently durable
in order to ensure that they can be sold secondhand.
H-P agreements can be concluded between
wholesalers and retailers or retailers and customers. Initially, the purchaser and the seller signed the
contract. Only at the beginning of 1900 did finance
corporations start to involve themselves in H-P transactions. Today, typically a finance company or commercial bank enters the contract. The vendor assigns
his interest in the agreement with the customer to the
finance company, which purchases the rental good
from the retailer and then hires it to the consumer.
Thus, the finance company acts as intermediary
between the buyer and the seller.
H-P was introduced in the second half of the
nineteenth century by Singer to promote the sale of
sewing machines among the working class in Britain.
With the cheapening of the motorcar before World
War I, the rate of increase in H-P contracts accelerated markedly. Between 1920 and 1939, the further
expansion in installment credit was mainly attributed
to the growing use of H-P as a means for financing
automobiles, furniture, audio equipment, household
commodities, and pianos by middle- and workingclass customers and for financing of machinery by
producers. H-P agreements remained unregulated
in Britain until 1938, when the Hire Purchase Act
was passed providing a legislative definition of the
rights of the customer in order to mitigate the abuses
perpetrated by many vendors. The Depression led
to a sharp decline in H-P transactions. During the
first years of World War II, H-P activities recovered,
and by 1941, they reached their peak. After the war,
the demand for durables surged and, as a result, the
uptake of H-P credits again gathered pace until 1960,
when other forms of consumer credits started to play
a bigger role.
Today, H-P agreements have gained importance
in the context of the credit crunch that began in
2008. Many lenders are increasingly wary of providing finance due to the credit crisis. As retailers offer
interest-free credits and deferred-payment starts,
H-P seems to be an attractive form of financing for
a growing number of private as well as business
customers. H-P regained its popularity especially in
Britain where the value of goods bought on H-P rose
by 9 percent between 2008 and 2009, according to
the Finance and Leasing Association.

719

Many customers enter H-P contracts because it
allows them to obtain possession of a physical entity
that they are unable to acquire against immediate
cash payment. For those without sufficient savings, H-P makes a wider range of physical entities
become available. Additionally, for many customers,
materialism seems to be a driving force to engage
in H-P transactions. With H-P, customers can possess socially important durables and hence enhance
their status and social position. H-P appears to be
especially attractive to lower-income groups because
it allows customers to gain access to goods that are
otherwise out of their reach. For businesses, H-P
provides a viable alternative form of finance to those
who are struggling to find funds or do not have a
significant asset base to use for debt security. As it
implies lower monthly payments than the firm
directly paying the purchase price, H-P has a positive
effect on the firm’s liquidity.
However, there are also disadvantages to the H-P
concept: first, there is the risk for the customer that
in case of default of payments, the lender has the
right to repossess the rental good; second, H-P can be
more costly than the purchase of the good, as the sum
of the installment payments may exceed the purchase
price. A third disadvantage is that in comparison to
total sales, H-P sales vary more sharply. Therefore,
according to Albert Haring, they lessen the stability
of the durable goods industry.
Sabine Moeller and Kristina Wittkowski
See also Appropriation; Consumer Durables; Consumer
Regulation; Credit; Debt; Economics; Great
Depression (U.S.)

Further Readings
Finance and Leasing Association. Consumers Seek Good
Deals in Tight Credit Market. May 26, 2009. http://
www.fla.org.uk/media/260509_consumer_finance_mar_
figs (accessed September 3, 2010).
Haring, Albert. “Instalment Selling of Durable Consumers’
Goods.” The Journal of Marketing 2, no. 4 (1938):
278–281.
“Hire-Purchase.” The IPA Review 8, no. 1 (1954):
16–21.
Knowles, Harry, Greg Patmore, and John Shields. “From
Hire Purchase to Property Development: The Rise and
Demise of the Industrial Acceptance Corporation in
Australia, 1926–77.” Accounting, Business and
Financial History 18, no. 3 (2008): 283–302.

720

Historical Analysis

Ponchio, Mateus Canniatti, and Francisco Aranha.
“Materialism as a Predictor Variable of Low Income
Consumer Behavior When Entering into Installment
Plan Agreements.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour
8 (2008): 21–34.
Scott, P. “The Twilight World of Interwar British Hire
Purchase.” Past and Present 177, no. 1 (2002):
195–225.
van der Eng, Pierre. “Consumer Credit in Australia during
the Twentieth Century.” Accounting Business &
Financial History 18, no. 2 (2008): 243–265.
Walker, John. “Hire Capacity of Rental Services.”
Managing Service Quality 9, no. 2 (1999): 116–120.

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
Historical analysis refers to the methods, time periods, and places that have been used to study consumption in past human societies. Historians have
studied consumption in its economic, cultural, and
political forms. They use a variety of techniques,
both quantitative and qualitative, to investigate
changing consumption patterns and practices, and
the changing meanings of consumption and “the
consumer.” Although Enlightenment histories contained discussions of what is now called consumer
behavior, it only emerged as a serious topic of historical research in the nineteenth century. Cultural
historian Jacob Burckhardt examined the fashions,
eating habits, and festivals of sixteenth-century Italy
as a way of revealing important values in Italian culture. In the twentieth century, historians expanded
their approach, becoming more systematic and analytical. They also moved forward in time and began
to scan areas outside of western Europe. Werner
Sombart argued that there was a casual link between
luxury goods and preindustrial manufacturing, calling capitalism “the child of luxury.” Fernand Braudel
explored how between 1500 and 1800 the lives of
ordinary people in Europe and Asia were limited by
material scarcity, including in consumption. A debate
also emerged about the origins of consumer society, which was variously dated back to eighteenth
century, between the 1880s and the 1920s, or after
World War II. This hunt for origins has been abandoned, however, mainly over disagreements about
how to define terms like consumer society or mass
consumption. Attention has now shifted back to
some of the concerns of Burckhardt: understanding

the meanings of consumption, although with a more
rigorous approach.

Economic Histories
Economic historians have focused on the importance of consumption in everyday economic behavior and its role in economic change. They explore
changing levels of expenditure and ownership of
possessions and shifts in the popularity of different
kinds of goods, for example, the move from woolen
to cotton clothing during the eighteenth century.
These are often related to wider economic trends—
in this case, the move in textile manufacturing from
cottage industry (wool) to factory production (cotton). To compensate for the lack of household financial accounts in all periods, they have used a variety
of sources including probate inventories, insurance
records, and court records. This has enabled a careful examination of exactly what kinds of things
people owned, the materials used, length of ownership, and cost. This approach is particularly well
developed for clothing and has established that
there was a lower-class interest in clothes and fashion by the eighteenth century, especially in England
and France (Styles 2007; Roche 1994). Historians
have also used international flows of commodities,
such as sugar or rubber, to explore the connections
within the imperial and world economies since
ca. 1700.
Some historians have addressed debates over
supply versus demand factors in causing economic
growth. Jan de Vries has controversially argued
that an increase in the consumption of commodities among lower-class European households was
crucial for laying the foundations for the Industrial
Revolution. Once households acquired the desire for
new or better food, clothes, or furniture, they began
to direct more of their labor and time toward production for the market and away from self-sufficiency.
This meant they received more payment in money,
enabling them to buy more consumer goods. It also
increased the amount of commodity production taking place. De Vries has called this the “industrious
revolution” and sees it as crucial for creating both
the demand for the goods that would be produced
by factories, as well as the time-disciplined workers
needed to labor there.
Not all historical analysis is so grand or sweeping;
smaller-scale studies often focus on specific places

Historical Analysis

such as the home. This approach has given historians
a detailed picture of the mechanisms of consumption and brought gender into sharper focus. Ruth
Schwartz Cowan has combined the two by looking
at the twentieth-century home as a “consumption
junction”—the time and place when women had to
choose between rival household technologies (e.g.,
different types of ovens) and why they did so.

Cultural Histories
Economic historians of consumption have sometimes run into difficulty generating the same longrun and reliable statistics as compared to topics like
capital formation or prices. Therefore, the role of
consumers in driving economic growth in the past
remains open to question. Partly in response to
this problem, attention has turned to the creation
of consumer desire and notions of taste. The role
of consumption in presenting or constructing identity, especially around class, gender, and ethnicity,
has also become an important topic. But it has also
allowed historians to practice the technique of using
a set of materials to pry open the very different values held by societies in the past. Simon Schama used
a variety of sources, including household possessions, to explore attitudes in the Dutch Republic of
the seventeenth century to such things as water and
cleanliness, which he argued were particularly distinctive to the Dutch at that time. He also explored
how the Dutch could hold two apparently different
values at the same time: Calvinist aestheticism, on
the one hand, and the desire for consumer goods, on
the other. This was partly intended as a historians’
response to Max Weber’s link between Protestantism
and the rise of capitalism.

Political Histories
Political histories of consumption explore how it has
created and organized political power and how it
has become a politicized activity. A well-developed
area has been the study of conspicuous consumption
in royal courts. Historians have shown how lavish
display was a key way of presenting royal power,
and the emulation by nobles of royal taste helped
to cement their loyalty to the monarch. A newer
development has been the study of consumption as
a political act and the consumer as a political identity. Rioting to enforce “fair” bread or rice prices
stretches a long way back into European and Asian

721

history. However, it is the nineteenth century that is
seen as the period when political movements of consumers emerged, beginning with the boycotts of plantation sugar by antislavery campaigners. Historians
have argued that consumption was important to the
emergence of mass politics, pointing to the popular
campaigns for free trade for liberalism, or the spread
of working-class consumer co-operatives for social
democracy. For nationalism, C. A. Bayly showed how
Gandhi was able to draw on long-standing Hindu
attitudes toward textile production in his demands
for swadeshi (home industry) in India. Ideas that
traditional ways of making textile were moral acts
mapped onto the nationalist campaign to promote
indigenous forms of manufacture and to drive
out British mass-produced cloth. For the twentieth century, recent work has focused on consumer
movements and their changing conception in political discourse and policy. There has been a strong
comparative and transnational basis to this work
(Chatriot, Chessel, and Hilton 2006).
Future research will almost certainly concentrate
on places outside of western Europe and North
America. For example, despite the well-established
links between producers in China and India and
European consumers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, little is known about Indian and
Chinese consumption outside of elite level. This will
be important to answer “the Great Divergence”
question—when, how, and why did western Europe
break away from Asia in economic development—as
consumption remains a key factor (Pomeranz 2008,
114–165). Historians have shown a bias toward
certain goods—food, textiles, or cars—over others.
Similarly, certain sites of consumption have been
privileged: homes, shops, and markets. What might
histories of consumption look like if they focused on
paper clips or fields? Finally, there is very little work
on periods before 1500 BCE, which highlights how
the history of consumption is implicitly tied to the
rise of capitalism. For those who want to take a longer view, histories of consumption of precapitalist
societies could shed a very different light on current
understanding.
William Farrell
See also Colonialism; Consumption in the United States:
Colonial Times to the Cold War; Enlightenment;
Fashion; History; History of Food; Industrial Society;
Luxury and Luxuries

722

History

Further Readings
Bayly, C. A. “The Origins of swadeshi (home industry):
Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930.” In The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
edited by Arjun Appadurai, 285–322. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life: The
Limits of the Possible. Translated by Siân Reynolds.
London: William Collins, 1981.
Burckhardt, Jacob. Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
Penguin: London, 1990. First published 1860.
Chatriot, Alain, Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, and Matthew
Hilton, eds. The Expert Consumer: Associations and
Professionals in Consumer Society. Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2006.
de Vries, Jan. “Between Purchasing Power and the World of
Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early
Modern Europe.” In Consumption and the World of
Goods, edited by J. Brewer and R. Porters, 85–132.
London: Routledge, 1994.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe,
and the Making of the Modern World Economy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion
in the Ancien Regime. Translated by Jean Birrell.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An
Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.
London: William Collins, 1987.
Schwartz Cowan, Ruth. “The Consumption Junction:
A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of
Technology.” In The Social Construction of
Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology
and History of Technology, edited by W. Bijker et al.,
261–280. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published
1913.
Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in
Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007.

HISTORY
Historical research, with some notable exceptions,
has usually privileged economic and quantitative
approaches to consumption analysis rather than the
cultural processes implied in consumption. Research
into consumption cultures has only emerged since
the 1980s and has focused on some fundamental

questions. This entry discusses the key aspects of
these current developments: the birth of a modern
consumer culture that evolved after the breaking
up of the “ancient regime of consumption” (i.e.,
a social regulation of the consumption processes
that was based legally on sumptuary laws); the
first globalization of consumptions; the analysis of
consumption cultures in terms of class, birth, and
development of new spaces and premises for consumer within the modern urban environment; mass
production/consumption systems; development and
the differentiation of consumer cultures in the latetwentieth century.

From the Sumptuary Laws to the Birth of
Modern Consumption
The beginning of the modern age of consumption can
be traced back to the eighteenth century when the
social and material framework of the consumption
processes changed. The overcoming of the ancient
regime of consumption allowed for the birth of new
consumption cultures. Sumptuary laws pursued
two goals: an ethical concern that descended from a
Christian conception according to which consumption had to be linked to social rank, and an economic
philosophy that saw luxury as a cause of the impoverishment of nations, requiring the enforcement of
strict social boundaries related to it. The controversy
surrounding luxury in eighteenth-century Europe
had strategic significance for the political debate
because of the dangers of extending previously prerogative consumption by the aristocracy to wider
social strata.
Thus, sumptuary laws provided a tool for disciplining consumption and therefore setting a symbolic
social order. While the enforcement of these regulations was difficult with engendered resistances and
protests, they were continuously reiterated in order
to reassert the hierarchical structure within society
and to eliminate symbolic challenges appearing from
the lower classes (Hunt 1996).
The success of The Fable of the Bees (1704) by
Bernard de Mandeville presents proof of the profound transformation that was taking place in the
eighteenth century within the concepts of consumption. Mandeville maintained the complementarities
of private vices and public virtues, reappraising
the role of luxury, which became the cornerstone
of individual satisfaction as well as the wealth of

History

the nations. Thus, in eighteenth-century Europe, a
wide intellectual debate led to a new appreciation
of consumption as a factor in civilization endorsing individual desires to pursue a more comfortable life and aesthetic pleasantness. One supporter
of luxury was Voltaire, while one of its detractors
was Rousseau, who gave the Roman empire as a
case in point for historical decline that was brought
about by a degeneration of morals caused by luxury
and by the pursuits of immediate pleasure. Inside
the works found in the Encyclopédie, as well as
within the Scottish Enlightenment, recognition of
the economic importance of luxury was associated
with the necessity to temper it with equity, moderation, and propriety. This definition of luxury
was very different from the competitive luxury of
court society, notes Norbert Elias, because it did not
comply with the custom of climbing social hierarchy through conspicuous consumption but instead,
according to Phillippe Perrot, helped to improve
material life and comfort. This was the direction
in which the nineteenth-century middle-class ethic
of consumption developed, resulting in the growth
of markets, the widespread acceptance of new consumptions, and the conservation of social distinctions that permitted luxury to become domesticated
and associated social dangers to be restrained.
This transformation in the prevailing discourse
that governed the ethics of consumption coincided
with the material transformations taking place
in society, in particular in northwestern Europe,
which was eventually epitomized by the expression “industrious revolution,” a term coined by
Jan de Vries after the traditional category of the
“Industrial Revolution.” By comparison to the
Industrial Revolution, the industrious revolution is
characterized by a longer interlude, beginning in the
seventeenth century. It involved complex social transformations within domestic spheres, within labor,
and by default consumption cultures. Recent historiography has recorded a general increase in consumption that had already begun to happen during the
second half of the seventeenth century in places such
as northern Europe and in the North American colonies. Some historians, according to Neil McKendrick
and colleagues, felt that the “consumption revolution” was a kind of logical and historical premise
of the Industrial Revolution. Improvement in living
conditions and the building of new lifestyles is well
documented in several geographical contexts and

723

has proved that new consumption styles depended
more on an autonomous cultural factor rather than
economic trends.

First Globalization of Consumption
One important change that suggests singling out the
seventeenth century as the watershed in the history
of consumption is the definitive globalization of consumption resources. Even though commercial transactions between continents had already occurred
during the Middle Ages and the ancient world, a stable and substantial interconnection between all world
continents dates back to the late-seventeenth century. These evolving relationships not only consisted
of simple geographical extensions of a commercial
network but also involved profound changes in the
interaction of power between the different world
areas as a result of the rise of European imperialism,
which in turn reshaped the exploitation of material
and human resources. The world system of economies was built by means of fierce conflicts between
various European empires that challenged each other
on the oceans and therefore touched off conquest
wars in order to acquire merchandise and to compel a new world geography of production suitable
for European demands. Navigation techniques, military force, and financial wealth were fundamental
tools in commercial expansion. The principal actors
in this enormous commercial development were several West and East Indian Companies. Subsequent
initial attempts by the Portuguese to build a commercial system protected by the state instigated the
pattern for successful companies, and following this
pattern, Dutch and English companies thus become
the key players in the world of commerce until the
early nineteenth century. These European institutions
managed to unite the force of modern states with
that of capitalist companies.
In the first phase of expansion, Asia was a main
source of consumption resources for European consumers, but the conquest of the Americas set into
motion a different, but equally important, set of economic dynamics. The American colonies were settled
by European empires that formed stable settlements
by means of forced or free migration, in particular
through the slave trade and the importation of slaves
from Africa and through the near extermination of
the native population. American colonies became a
fundamental supplier of consumption goods and raw

724

History

materials for European transformation industries,
and it has to be considered that without the use of
slavery, the consumption dynamics of Europe would
have followed a completely different path.
European and North American consumers took
advantage of this imperial expansion by modifying
their consumption cultures and experimenting with
new exotic products—which were initially only consumed by the elite in society but became the norm
in the mass-consumer practices in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. During the modern era, the
range of consumption goods imported from other
continents extended considerably: Asian textiles,
coffee from Africa, American cocoa, China tea and
chinaware, cotton from America, and sugar from
Caribbean isles, as well as tropical fruits, potatoes,
tomatoes, rice, and turkeys—all of these products
were extraordinarily new in Europe and were commercialized on a wider scale compared to that of the
Middle Ages. Some of these products found an immediate and enthusiastic appropriation by European
consumers; others encountered mistrust because they
altered habits and consumption hierarchy.
Why was it that products such as tobacco, tea,
coffee, sugar, and cocoa found a rapid and enthusiastic reception in Europe? There is no simple answer
to this question. Initially, the novelty, exotic origins,
and high prices of these products afforded a role of
social status marker. Nevertheless, through the course
of time, prices decreased, creating an increase in
the social spectrum of consumers so that the elite
character of these consumption goods faded. In the
seventeenth century, the medical culture too favored
the diffusion of these products, appraising their
beneficial qualities on health, which was occasionally encouraged by the same commercial companies
importing the goods. The overefficient commercialization of these products facilitated their widespread
diffusion, too, in particular toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Tea, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, and
sugar were products commercialized on a large scale
and were processed industrially, stored in enormous
warehouses, and distributed logistically, maintaining
a regular supply even to small urban markets. The
revolution in distribution eventually included the
provincial middle classes that developed consumption habits that also depended on global markets;
this in turn irritated those who saw the social diffusion of elite consumption as a sign of moral and
cultural decline. Despite these eighteenth-century

critics, however, free trade philosophy—a popular
notion that free trade was a basic right because it
guaranteed the freedom of the individual consumer
and the right to take advantage collectively from economic development (Trentmann 2008)—triumphed
during the nineteenth century, particularly within
the United Kingdom. This ideology became a
worldwide concept by the middle of the nineteenth
century and proved to be durable in the United
Kingdom, where it was supported even by workingclass organizations.
The appropriation of exotic consumptions was
distinguished according to geographical and social
contexts and resulted in the invention of new combinations of substances. Tea and coffee, for example,
were blended with sugar by European consumers,
whereas in the original context of consumption—in
Asia, for example, with tea, and Arabia with coffee—
they were not. Social class structures were influential
in the mode of consumption. Aristocratic consumption of tea and coffee emphasized the exotic nature
of these products and of their ritual consumption,
which required expensive chinaware and sometimes
even specific garments. Whereas for the middle
classes, consumption was a sober event and usually
occurred in coffeehouses, which became the centers
of economic activity and for the discussion of public affairs. Coffeehouses were usually attended by
male customers, but by the late-eighteenth century,
domestic consumption of tea or coffee became occasions for women’s sociability. Finally, the success
of the new beverages depended to some extent on
the stimulant effects proffered by them or on their
intoxication effects—as with tobacco—and they
eventually substituted older substances used in rural
areas of the then medieval Europe.

Class, Cultures, and Consumption
The decline of the ancien régime of consumption
based on sumptuary laws did not mean the end of
social regulation on consumption culture. In the nineteenth century, consumer cultures were remapped
according to distinctions in social class. Conspicuous
luxuries of aristocrats, which during the nineteenth
century blended together with the bourgeois elite
forming a common consumption culture, were very
different from the sober consumption culture of the
middle and lower middle classes. Middle classes
invested in decorous houses and clothes in order to

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distinguish their wealth and social status from that
of the working classes, who were compelled to be
prudent with the spending of their low incomes.
Within the same working class, there were differences in consumption cultures, and this depended on
the specific material conditions to which they were
subjected. One difference clearly separated bluecollar workers, who could rely on a stable job and
a regular income and who adopted some of the features of the lower middle classes, from that of the
casual laborer with irregular incomes, who, in turn,
minimized their fixed expenses—particularly homecentered consumptions—and preferred to spend any
surplus in the pub, gambling, or attending popular
variety shows. In spite of these differences within the
lower classes, the comparative difference with middle-class consumption culture was much greater. This
difference depended not only on income but also on
a diverse use of resources linked to social circumstances, nutritional needs, and social networks.
In 1912, Maurice Halbwachs began to analyze
consumption behaviors through the lens of class affiliation, demonstrating that a white-collar worker and
a blue-collar worker had very different consumption
styles even if they were in the same income bracket.
Moreover, sudden variations of this income did not
significantly change their consumption behavior.
This approach was aimed at criticizing Engels’s law
and, more broadly, the economists’ approach to consumption that suggests consumer choice is based on
utilitarian and rational criteria. Rather, Halbwachs
maintained that consumption behavior depended on
“social representation,” that is, on the social position
with which the consumer identified himself and on a
sort of habitus ascertained from childhood.
Working-class families did not minimize their
spending on eating and drinking, as they considered them requirements for the energy and strength
needed for hard labor, and because such practices
were central to patterns of sociability. Lodging, heating, and lighting were, however, regarded as less
important by the working classes when compared
with the middle classes, while the middle classes
placed greater emphasis on the home, the domestic
sphere, education, and cultural consumption.
In research carried out in 1933, Halbwachs reaffirmed the importance of social-class affiliation in
defining consumption cultures, although reassessing
boundaries that had strongly characterized the nineteenth-century consumption culture. World War I

725

and the advent of the 1920s epitomized further
modifications in social structures both in Europe
and more so in the United States, outlining a trend
toward mass consumption that weakened traditional class consumption cultures, especially those
of working-class families in which the breadwinner
was able to support the whole family and women
were not compelled to work outside the home.
Focus was on domesticity, children’s education, and
a thrift-shift consumption behavior toward a more
middle-class pattern; by contrast, the lower working classes to whom a women’s wage was essential
eventually perpetuated an active plebeian culture.
Women worked in the factories, attended pubs along
with men, socialized and drank in public places,
dressed their families with low-grade ready-made
clothes, and dedicated as little time to housework as
possible. Although this distinction between “respectable” and “wild” working class has merit, it must be
said that the boundaries between the two categories
could be fleeting. A period of long unemployment,
serious illness, or the death of the breadwinner could
rapidly degrade the standard of living from that of a
“respectable” working-class family to that of a beggar. It was not until the late-twentieth century that
the welfare states in Western countries were able to
protect the lower social classes from the dangers of
poverty. The “survival strategy” of the lower working class became highly elaborated and was recently
defined by a historiography that stresses the complex mobilization of productive and consumption
resources on a microsocial level.
The classification of consumer cultures according
to social-class affiliations proved particularly effective for the “long nineteenth century,” as well as
during the interwar years, but was criticized on two
fronts. The first relates to massification processes
that occurred by the late-nineteenth century, weakening social cleavages. These massifying processes were
particularly strong in the United States and were
accompanied by the transformation of industrial
production and commercial distribution. Some peculiarities in American social history made the United
States a fitting location for consumption massification. The absence of an ancien régime and a highly
mobile society weakened the rigid social distinctions of traditional consumption cultures that had
characterized nineteenth-century European societies.
Because of favorable social conditions, wide and unified markets that encouraged large-scale production,

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and rapid transformations in commercial and marketing infrastructures, the mass consumption culture was able to quickly develop with the promise
of well-being for all. American businessmen tried to
export this new consumption concept into Europe
after World War I but encountered many obstacles
due to social, cultural, and political resistance that
in turn refused to promote a consumption culture
that would vanquish the old social distinctions, and
due to general economic stagnation. It was only after
World War II that the American blueprint in consumption spread throughout western Europe, disguised as the framework of an Atlantic market under
U.S. hegemony. Thus, it was not a “pacific conquest”
but more a consequence of World War II.
This criticism can be said to be only partly acceptable because it is true that the massification processes
created a common base for consumption cultures that
traversed social divides, but they did not completely
eliminate consumption based on social-class affiliation. Rather, they created a common ground based
on new consumptions. Moreover, the simple mass
diffusion of consumption items did not necessarily
represent the principle factor of cultural massification because of the embodiment of the consumption
appropriation process that involved the consumer
group and the social context in which the appropriation occurred.
The second critical point in connection to the
differences within the social classes is that the historiography on working-class culture has for many
years only taken into consideration the adult white
male within these social backgrounds, obscuring
differences of gender, ethnicity, and generation.
Thus, recently, gender and ethnicity have become
important heuristic tools in the representation of
a more vivid and effective image of the life within
working-class districts and the tensions and conflicts
that also characterized them. Generation—as it has
been revealed by research conducted on the younger
generation of workers—has proved to be a very significant element of fracture for examining the complexity of working-class life, when considering that
consumption was often a field of conflict between
old and young workers.
This criticism has helped to move research from
the social roots of consumption cultures toward a
deeper and more composite understanding of the differences within working-class cultures. Nevertheless,
the fact that women and men, old and young, and

black and white workers established different types
of consumption cultures does not prevent us from
looking at them through the lens of commonalities,
which can be pointed out by a comparison with
the consumption of other social strata, such as that
of the middle classes and that of aristocracy. Thus,
social class remains an effective scientific tool for the
analysis of consumption cultures.

Commercial Distribution and
Consumer Cultures
Commercial distribution is a key aspect of the consumption process, and not only in functional terms.
The production of a commodity, the buildup of a
social relationship within commercial premises, and
the design and packaging that mediate the selling of
the product are all aspects that substantially contribute to the symbolic dimensions of consumption.
Urbanization and the increasing division of labor
in the nineteenth century strengthened the role of
the marketplace in supplying society with goods.
Commercial and technical infrastructures enhanced
the influence of these marketplaces. Water and road
networks in the eighteenth century, and railways
since the mid-nineteenth century, widened the scope
of markets and increased commercial competition
by allowing for the movement of goods to be faster
and cheaper, more punctual, and therefore reliable.
Medieval institutions such as annual fairs—typical
of a rural, poorly networked economy—waned
markedly or dramatically changed shape. The
image and function of urban markets were also
transformed: city markets became the junctions of
commercial networks based on the regional specialization in production integrated by new transport
technologies. Urged on by reform movements that
struggled to improve health conditions, the state
intervened to guarantee food quality and to regulate
the handling and processing of food in such places
as shops, stores, slaughterhouses, butchers, bakeries,
and dairies. The number of shops and the connections between retailers, wholesalers, and producers
increased greatly.
Although transformations were wide ranging,
capital and large cities had a vanguard role in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the provinces, people traveled to the capital cities to buy
fashion items (paintings, books, potteries, clothes,
etc.) and to attend the latest shows. This signified

History

the importance of provincial industrialists’ reaching
the capital cities to obtain more visibility for their
products.
Cities were at the forefront of commercial entertainment, too. Amusing gardens with an entry fee
provided an atmosphere of rural mystery within the
city. They provided music and performance shows,
fireworks, food and drinks, as well as a space for
social activities. They advertised their initiatives in
the press. Vauxhall Gardens offered simulation and
illusion, which became commodities, making it possible to play with one’s own identity experiencing
new social encounters due to the commercialization
of pleasure.
At the end of the nineteenth century, theme parks
had been established in several large cities. At the
Prater park in Vienna, the Venedig in Wien (Venice in
Vienna) was opened, which attempted to reproduce
Venice by combining the exoticism of nineteenthcentury fairs with new technological attractions
such as photography, electric lighting, phonographs,
and cinema. The simulation of Venice—complete
with buildings, canals, bridges, shops, coffeehouses,
even Venetian gondoliers—proved popular, and it
remained open for five years before it was finally
dismantled. It began a new trend in amusement and
was followed by later simulations of Japan, Spain,
and Egypt. Venedig in Wien and its successors thus
created a new space for reconfiguring the public consumption, using as its base mass entertainment.
Modern consumption processes refer to an imaginative dimension that has been dated to between
Reformation and romanticism. By transforming
inner desires and sensibilities, it became possible
to increase control and manipulate emotions. This
was also due to some special products created out
of the cultural industry, such as eighteenth-century
gothic fiction, which induced dreamlike experiences
in dimensions where fantasy did not substitute reality
but manipulated the very elements of realism producing the exalted and previously extinct emotions.
The melding of contrasting sensation (also typical of
modern hedonism)—mixing pleasure, sadness, and
nostalgia—nurtures in effect modern consumerism.
The insatiable consumption of objects, images, and
stories is a means of stimulating the imagination.
Thus, modern commercial organizations must feed
this need for image consumption as well as rationalize distribution for widening urban markets that cannot rely on self-consumption alone.

727

Arcades were privately owned spaces that were
open to the public, where new building materials and
technologies created an environment that combined
consumption with sociability. Walter Benjamin saw
in the arcades a resource for reenchanting the world
by means of the aesthetic dimensions of world commodities, the seductive experiences of consumption,
and the commercialization of social life. The capital
city that embraced this kind of urban consumption,
more than any other, was Paris, but arcades eventually spread throughout Europe and into many large
capital cities as well as early tourist cities like Bath.
Special exhibitions and world fairs also prompted
new forms of consumption, and besides some of
the more famous exhibitions found in London and
Paris, medium-sized cities also hosted exhibitions.
Promoters of pathbreaking technological innovations showcased them at great expositions (e.g., the
telegraph in London in 1851; the elevator and reinforced concrete in Paris in 1867; the sewing machine,
typewriter, and telephone in Philadelphia in 1876;
the refrigerator and electric light in Paris in 1878; the
phonograph in Paris in 1889). In addition to these
spectacular innovations, the great expositions displayed the tableaux of modern life. They made the
public aware of the commercial application of such
technologies and the daily impact they could have,
from personal body care to household appliances,
from food products to hobby items. Moreover, they
were a platform for glamorous representation bridging commercialization and ethnographic exhibition
built up by imperial cultures. The myth of progress
was celebrated within popular shows that mixed the
higher and lower cultures, fine arts and industries,
and circus and technologies.
The birth and diffusion of department stores
remains another important turning point in a cultural
historical assessment of consumption. At the end of
the nineteenth century, department stores became
the space par excellence for the modern consumer
culture. Although they had forerunners such as the
luxury shops during the first half of the nineteenth
century—which had already introduced sophisticated selling techniques—they represented a striking
discontinuity on the symbolic and practical levels.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the larger European
cities changed from being “introverted” to being
“extroverted.” The department store represented a
catalyst, a result, and an accelerator of this transformation process. Private capitalists invested in these

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History

urban areas promoting commercialization, urban
transportation, tourist infrastructures, commercial
institutions, and various other services. Thus, they
significantly modified the urban landscape through
commercialization and entertainment, providing new
social opportunities by consumption. Department
stores aimed at involving the public within a spectacle
of commodities that created an exciting environment
in which the ongoing renewal of shop windows and
the rhythm of sales modified the time dimensions of
mass consumption. Shopping became an element of
urban leisure through which to define individual and
collective identities, and department stores became
the benchmark of twentieth-century urban maps,
garnering mention in tourist guides along with civil
and religious monuments. They stood out with
their imposing premises but also invaded cities with
promotional material, picture cards, calendars, and
diaries. They recovered some of the traditional communication tools such as cheap prints and almanacs
by means of modern advertising strategies carried
out with bizarre, magical, exotic, and fantastical iconography that attracted predominantly children and
young people.
Department stores also played an important role
in the cultivation of modern consumptions. They
displayed methods of dressing oneself, they built up
environments, they introduced the consumer to the
“needs” of modern life, and they set new standards
in clothing, home furnishing, and leisure. Their role
in promoting consumptions provoked heavy criticism and found opposition on the whole for the negative influence they exerted on middle-class women,
disrupting their mental balance and restraints, lowering self-control, and even inducing kleptomania.
Department stores had a great impact on gender, not
only from a consumer point of view but also from an
employment point of view because they hired many
young saleswomen. The image and lifestyle of these
young women became more apparent as department
stores and commercial cultures challenged traditional
relationships of patronage for unmarried women
in the metropolis. Department store owners were
well aware of this subversive potential of consumer
cultures and tried to arrange a sort of compromise
between tradition and modernity, between national
image and the new consumer culture.
The boundary between emancipation and dependence was thin and ambiguous: on the one hand,
the new consumption cultures allowed women

subjectivation processes; on the other, advertisements created an image of femininity that set new
standards and requirements to which women had to
respond. Shopping areas provided infrastructures in
a female public sphere where women could associate
and new initiatives could take place.

The Crisis of Individual Consumerism
in the Interwar Period
Belle époque Europe seemed to have been launched
toward a future of progress that promised a continuous increase in wealth, and on the other side of the
Atlantic, new production and commercialization systems also promised to maintain this development in
mass consumption. The interwar periods dampened
enthusiasm due to the misery created by the wars and
the Great Depression of the 1930s. The free-market
ideology—which had accompanied consumption
increase for most of the nineteenth century—fell into
disgrace when consumption cultures became increasingly influenced by states both in material and symbolic terms. State control of main resources during
and after the wars and Soviet and technocratic experiences of economic planning were accompanied by
new emphasis on consumption as a collective or a
national question that attacked individualistic views
on consumption.
The Soviet experience was a sort of workshop of
new theories on consumption that would affect the
whole of Eastern Europe after World War II. During
the “war communism,” the abolition of moneyed
salaries reduced the role of money as a mediating tool in individual consumption. Salary paid in
kind made it possible for the state to determine and
organize “scientifically” consumption styles on “real
and biological needs,” overcoming the waste of individual consumerism. The rejection of bourgeois individualism was based on a view of the individual as
an expression of the social organism questioning the
legitimacy of his right to decide on his own. To bind
consumption to the physiological needs seemed to
be a decisive step toward increasing and optimizing
social resources and the building of socialism. Thus,
the socialist state became the regulator not only of
production but also of the entire social sphere. After
World War II, Nikita Khrushchev attempted to legitimize the Soviet system by increasing consumption
after the long shortages induced by Stalinism, and he
reaffirmed the famous Marxian quotation from the

History

Critique of the Gotha Program urging the apparatus to organize production in order to give to each
one according to his own needs. Thus, it was necessary to establish consumption standards that would
satisfy social needs excluding the idea of individual
desires as well as the consumer subjectivity implied
within it. The politics surrounding consumption in
Eastern Europe was easily governed because prices
were established by the state and were independent from production costs. The state established
which goods to produce and, through the regulation of prices, was also able to establish who would
consume individual goods and in what quantities.
Advertisements in socialist countries were developed
in order to symbolically support these bureaucratic
decision processes.
During the interwar periods, there were other
approaches to individual consumerism besides that
of the Soviet Union. In Germany, there was great
interest in American Fordism, which predictably
affected the consumption spheres. Rationalization
promoted new modern lifestyles for changing the
daily lives of the masses, their domestic spheres,
and entertainment channels through the use of new
mass consumption. Nevertheless, the stagnation of
the European economy during the interwar periods
and the persistence of a class structure within consumption cultures limited the possibility of developing mass consumption, and attempts to rationalize
consumption depended more on a need to cope with
shortages rather than that of commercial expansion. At the forefront of the catastrophic effects of
the Great Depression on German economy was a
debate on “the end of capitalism,” which proposed
a reorganization of the economy on the basis of corporatism and state intervention according to the patterns of economic organization found in fascist and
pan-German ideologies. This autarchic perspective
required a necessary nationalist rhetoric on consumption because it implied a closed system within which
to accomplish the production/consumption cycle.
Nationalist consumption ideologies were already
present in the nineteenth century, particularly in the
protectionist context of capitalistic expansion, but
in the 1930s, it became more effective not only in
Germany but also in other central European countries, for example, in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.
These assumptions found a breeding ground
in Germany because they were associated with
anti-Semitism—since Jews were represented as agents

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of the free-market global economy—and Italy where
autarchy was the necessary premise of war economy.

The Golden Age of Mass Consumption
Consumption and well-being were the fundamental pillars of democracy in United States by the
late-nineteenth century, although consumption was
tempered by ethical principles and moderation. In
this context, which prematurely legitimized consumption for the masses, new knowledge and selling
techniques easily developed, enlarging and renewing
the consumption spheres. Marketing and advertising
would boost consumption, resulting in a new pattern in daily lifestyles.
The American commercial culture had a fundamental influence on the global history of consumption in the twentieth century, promoting trends
toward massification of consumption and opposing the traditional class structures and symbolic
hierarchies that characterized the European consumption cultures. The encounter between these
two philosophies of consumption was not easy,
and attempts by several American businessmen to
export mass consumerism into Europe during the
interwar period were frustrated by rigid cultural
resistance. Mass consumption was associated with
bad taste and low aesthetic standards and therefore
considered a risk that threatened the social hierarchy based on taste and glamorous consumption. In
spite of these resistances—which came mainly from
the hegemonic classes in Europe—there was in the
first half of the twentieth century a popular enthusiasm for entertainment patterns coming from the
United States, witnessed by the success of shows
like the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, the revue
negre of Josephine Baker, or Hollywood movies
(Kroes-Rydell 2005).
After World War II, new political and economic
circumstances drew Western Europe and Japan
under American influence, which laid the foundations for the spread of mass consumption. Thus,
World War II was fundamental in sweeping away
European social resistance and in turn observed the
unfolding of American hegemony on the Western
world on military, economic, and symbolic levels. Tensions between American managers of the
European Recovery Program (ERP) and Italian businessmen revealed different visions for the development of a consumer society. The ERP was deemed

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History

to have created the industrial basis for high wages
and in turn expanding consumption, while several
European businessmen continued to consider low
wages as the main tool of capital accumulation.
They maintained that in Italy, capital was expensive
and labor was cheap, so they would have to reward
with more capital rather than labor to make the
economy grow, and they felt that they had to invest
particularly in the production of luxury goods for
which a strong market was anticipated. This was
a common idea in the early 1950s, which shows
how far away the hegemonic economic culture was
from the acknowledgment of mass consumption
as a fundamental tool for economic development.
Nonetheless, the American blueprint of mass consumption fully unfolded in Western Europe during
the 1950s and 1960s, dramatically changing consumption cultures. This process has sometimes been
defined as “Americanization,” which was effective
in emphasizing the depth of transformation and
the role played by the United States, but it was
misleading, too. First of all, when considering the
role of American mass-consumption patterns, one
must consider the long-term context, from at least
the 1920s onward. But above all, it could be said
that American influences have always been contested somehow, even at the time of its most powerful hegemony after World War II. Active processes
for reception and reinterpretation of significance
spread by an American consumption culture were
normal. Thus, it became necessary to analyze the
concrete vehicles of cultural mediation, the selection
of successfully imported elements of American material culture, and, above all, the reception process.
Reception processes were not linear: there was not
a simple transfer of meanings between the United
States and Europe because—as was pointed out by
anthropology and cultural studies—the reception of
a cultural product always implied an adaptation of
meaning that resulted in something new by comparison to that of the original. Moreover, reception processes occur within niche or specific social circuits so
that the building of consumption cultures have to be
analyzed as hybrid phenomena permeated by material and symbolic global flows—in which the United
States certainly had a fundamental role during the
twentieth century—but embedded deep within specific social contexts.
Nevertheless, the spread of mass consumption
during the second half of the twentieth century has

exerted a certain standardization of a material culture: privatization of domestic space furnished with
mass-produced furniture and equipped with electric
household appliances; individual mobility based on
the mass spread of cars and scooters for commuting
and—above all—for entertainment and tourism; and
commercialization of leisure within commercial area,
cinemas, clubs, and seaside resorts.
The commercial institution that supported this
powerful consumption growth was the supermarket,
which was already widespread in the United States
by the 1930s and which could compete with traditional shopkeepers because of the reduction in prices
allowing for self-service and economies of scale. In
Europe, supermarkets spread only after World War
II, and in some countries only during the 1960s, and
rapidly became the symbol of wealth, of consumer
choice, and of improved consumption standards for
the masses. It was a fundamental change that focused
primarily on food consumption with the diffusion
of packaged products that changed the relationship
between the consumer and the product. The brand
became the element that founded consumer trust in
the product, an idea reiterated by the function of
advertising—which could by this time advertise on
television, creating the consumption semiotic.
The diffusion of durable and other products
was often not, or not completely, new: sometimes
these products were in the marketplace already at
the beginning of the twentieth century. The newness was the mass characterization of consumption
that revolved around clothes, durables, furniture,
leisure activities, LPs and singles, motorbikes and
cars, and books and magazines. This relative standardization of consumption sometimes associated
with a sluggish social conformism was the target of
critiques of the affluent society in the 1960s. This
was just one side of the argument because along
with standardization, which effectively made for
a more homogenous consumption behavior on
national and even global levels, the expansion of
the material platform within society allowed for
different consumption styles due to the enormous
widening of the commercial offer. New subcultures
grew up around peculiar consumption styles that
affirmed different values, images, and messages that
fractured the social map. This process of differentiation occurred at the same time as standardization
because old regional and local specificity were dissolved, opening up consumption to a larger world

History

while at the same time allowing new identities and
cultural differences to arise from the differentiation
of consumption.

The Postmodern Age of Consumption
The trend in social differentiation by means of the
consumption styles accelerated in the 1980s, configuring the so-called postmodern styles of consumption. These consumption styles were the result of a
sort of bricolage of different cultural elements that
made decline usual and placed coherent distinctions
on class, generations, and even gender. In the 1980s
and 1990s, the enormous growth in global commercial media widened communication opportunities
and made it possible to articulate identities through
a broader field of symbolic resources, but the roots
of this current progress lay in the 1960s when youth
subcultures and the critics of social conformism and
mass consumption started a new wave of consumer
cultures and business initiatives: on the one hand,
there was grassroots innovation that challenged
hegemonic consumption cultures; on the other, the
semiotic of consumption was built up by advertisers
and businessmen who had begun to use this social
differentiation trend in an attempt to develop a marketplace that seemed to be full of standardized goods
for the masses. These two elements—“from below”
and “from above”—could be distinguished by an
analytical frame because, by historical experience,
they inevitably melded. Each social experience is
part of a semiotic circuit in which meanings build up
from the process of a commercialization flow. Even
the most radical subcultures are somehow linked to
commercial spheres, even if for reversing its message
for example in the case of the punk subculture.
Thus, the cultural roots of the postmodern styles
of consumption refer to the countercultural social
practices of the 1960s and 1970s and possibly earlier to the artistic practices of manipulation through
the use of symbols and signs typical of the vanguard
during the 1920s. But it was in the 1980s that they
became a common social experience because of the
global restructuring of capitalism after the depression of the 1970s; its recovery was due to key words
such as flexible specialization, small-scale, network
enterprises, just-in-time production—a whole institutional organization of the global economies that
endorsed and encouraged growing differentiation
of consumption. Standard mass production did not

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disappear, but the definition of consumer styles and
cultural identities did not depend on mass consumption but on the goods able to signify distinctions
and identities.
There are some elements that contradict these
ideals because throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the
diffusion of global brands reached unknown dimensions, representing a potential homologation of
global consumption. The global triumph of
McDonald’s during these decades is symbolic of the
homologation of cultural identity and social organization—or is it proof of a more complex phenomenon?
The research into the expansion of McDonald’s
within the Asian marketplace stressed the role of this
brand in standardizing consumption throughout the
world, primarily due to benchmarking in the production processes and to the commercialization of food,
but it is also maintained that McDonald’s was not
able to control the social message that spread through
the globe (Watson 1997). The messages represented
by McDonald’s food as well as the McDonald’s commercial premises can be very different according
to social and cultural contexts through which they
spread. They may be rejected as an alien invasion or
accepted enthusiastically as an exciting novelty, but
more often than not, they are noticeably appropriated in the context of eating habits and in the use
of urban space that may be very different country
to country. This suggests that even something so
commercially standardized such as that offered by
McDonald’s may become the object of appropriation
and domestication that differentiate its messages.
This may also be true of several other American and
global brands.
These appropriation processes are understood by
cultural studies as the agency of consumers able to
modify the meanings imposed by the commercial
semiotic, a sort of resistance to the social homologation through consumption. The approach of cultural
studies consumption has been extremely important
in stressing the limits of standardization in society
by means of consumption and in turn giving back
to consumers an active role. Nevertheless, it may be
misleading to ensue from this consumer agency a sort
of counter hegemonic role of a subjective consumer
culture toward the global dynamics of capitalism.
Indeed, global capitalism expands because of cultural
differences, marketing, and advertising that recognize and celebrate those differences in order to foster
new commercial markets. In other words, the goal

732

History of Food

of global capitalism is not cultural standardization
but the pursuit of profits, and if profits are achieved
through cultural differences, the entire semiotic
apparatus of commercial capitalism will encourage
cultural differences.
If we remain narrow-mindedly at a cultural level,
consumer processes seem to fully realize the postmodern freedom, but consumption items are inevitably
embedded in material processes because they are not
simply floating signifiers but are produced with raw
materials, because they require labor and investment,
and because they have an impact on health and the
environment. Commercialization processes involved
all aspects of these, and to have a critical perspective
on them requires the consideration of their environmental consequences, the labor conditions applied in
the production processes, and their effects on social,
gender, and ethnic inequalities. Consumption cultures are rooted in material contexts that cannot be
separated because they are an integral part of their
understanding.
Paolo Capuzzo
See also Capitalism; Department Stores; Great Depression
(U.S.); Historical Analysis; Luxury and Luxuries; Mass
Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Social Class

Further Readings
Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual
and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the
World of Goods. London: Routledge, 1993.
Crossick, Geoffrey, and Serge Jaumain, eds. Cathedrals of
Consumption: The European Department Store,
1850–1939. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.
De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance
through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2005.
de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer
Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the
Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Elias, Norbert. Die höfische Gesellschaft [The court
society]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Lang, 1969.
Hunt, Alan. Governance and Consuming Passions:
A History of Sumptuary Law. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1996.
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and John H. Plumb, eds.
The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Perrot, Phillippe. Le luxe. Une richesse entre faste e confort
XVIIIe–XIXe siècle [Luxury: A wealth between pomp
and comfort 18th–19th century]. Paris: Seuil, 1995.
Rappaport, Erika D. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the
Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: An
Investigation into the Changing Character of
Contemporary Social Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine
Forge, 1996.
Roche, Daniel. La culture des apparences. Une histoire du
vêtement (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) [Cultural appearances:
A history of clothing (17th–18th century)]. Paris:
Fayard, 1990.
Roche, Daniel. Histoire des choses banales. Naissance de la
consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles (17.–19.
siècle) [History of mundane things: Birth of
consumption in traditional societies (17th–19th
century)]. Paris: Fayard, 1997.
Rydell, Robert W., and Rob Kroes. Buffalo Bill in Bologna:
The Americanization of the World 1869–1922. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the
American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon, 1989.
Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Commerce,
Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Watson, James L., ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in
East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption
in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1982.

HISTORY

OF

FOOD

Studying history of food, or rather food from a
historical perspective, has been part of several disciplines’ research agenda, though archaeologists,
anthropologists, and historians have perhaps been
those most likely to dig deep into the earth and the
archives to interpret human remains in relation to
food consumption and to analyze foodways across
the globe, such as food customs in everyday life,
food production, preparation of dishes, cooking,
and cultural behaviors at table in different social
environments. During the nineteenth century, other
specialists such as sociologists—and later on in the
twentieth century, nutritionists and researchers from
the medical profession—have shown an interest in
explaining and discussing the modern consumer

History of Food

society by looking at historical processes and later
outcomes; at the beginning of the twenty-first century, researchers from different disciplines have
used historical insights to put their own studies into
context, as demonstrated in several recent encyclopedias on food and history and food and culture.
Although the number of studies on food in history
has increased considerably during the past decades,
the focus has mainly been on the Western world.

Food Habits
Food habits have changed considerably over time,
from the early history of human beings characterized as Homo sapiens more than a hundred thousand years ago to today’s consumer society in the
early twenty-first century. In this process of feeding mankind, we have gone from survival to plenty,
from hunting and gathering in the wild to hunting
and gathering among shelves and freezers in modern supermarkets, from an unprocessed unique
selection of various foods in the wild to industrialized, mass-produced, and distributed food. In the
past, a person’s food habits were dependent on
local availability of food, but in modern society,
we see a global exchange of food as a commodity,
where food has become a form of cultural expression among consumers. This also entails that the
function of food has made a transition from being
regarded foremost as fuel to being something that
essentially fulfills psychological needs. Many modern researchers see nutritional intake during the prehistoric era as preferable in many ways to modern
food intake, provided that energy requirements are
fulfilled, whereas our food habits at the beginning of
the twenty-first century are associated with welfare
problems such as the metabolic syndrome, which is
linked to overeating and an unbalanced diet.
Looking more specifically at food intake over
time, there have been some major periods of transition in the history of food. There are debates as to
whether man, meaning the first hominids during the
early prehistoric era, snatched carcasses or behaved
as daring hunters, as meat played an important part
in their diet. Moving forward in time, we know that
the human diet consisted of both vegetable foods,
such as wild plants, berries, roots, nuts, and mushrooms, and food from the animal kingdom. Man
learned to catch all sorts of aquatic animals, including fish and shellfish, such as fresh-water mussels,

733

while everything from birds to mammoths were
among the hunted land animals. Insects were also
a common foodstuff. Hunting and fishing tended to
be men’s work, while gathering of plants was seen
as a female task, showing that food-related work
was gendered long before modern times. During this
early period, cooking was invented. Cooking distinguished man from the animal kingdom and made
both animal and vegetable food more digestible.
About 10,000 years ago, there was a shift from food
collection to food production. In the process of controlling nature, both animals and crops were domesticated, which made food items such as different
grains and milk products (where milk-giving animals
existed) an important part of man’s food habits. Yet
not only cows were associated with milk products.
In Kazakhstan, the horse was used as a milk-giving
animal, resulting specifically in the product koumiss,
which is dated to about 3500 BC. In different parts
of the world, grains became a staple food early on,
for example, rice in Asia, rye in the northern parts of
Europe, wheat in the southern parts of Europe, and
corn (maize) in South America. Thus, the cuisines
of most agrarian societies have two important elements: a staple food and accompaniments, the latter consisting of vegetable- or animal-based foods.
Though we may suspect that the process by which
food transitioned from merely meeting nutritional
needs to symbolizing identity and cultural expression started before the Neolithic period, it is during
this period that the latter function was more accentuated. An example of this was the decision not to
domesticate the deer. In the Greek and Roman cultures, food from the untilled, uncultivated landscape
was a cultural symbol of the poor and was therefore avoided by more fortunate citizens. However,
it should be noted that the developing agricultural
society was still highly dependent on hunting and
fishing, and food products from these activities were
important features of many food cultures and in
many regions.
Thus, different cuisines were established around
the world. These could include the same food items,
but they were presented in different meals. Meals
were based on cooking with characteristic foods
in distinct combinations, with different preparation methods and eating techniques depending on
the specific value system, according to which some
foods were acceptable and others were not. There
were foods for the gods and for humans, and foods

734

History of Food

that played a part in the religious and political world.
For example, the pig and wine were associated with
Christian Europe, which was quite different especially
from the Muslim, but also from the Jewish, world.
Thus, in many cultures, religion has established the
rules and rituals we associate with a specific group
and its food choices. Food was categorized as edible,
as medicine, as food for the civilized, or as food that
only the barbarians would choose. Dietary rules in
relation to human health have frequently been part
of the interpretation of ancient food regimes, in
which, for example, spices had a special role.
Important discoveries and foods are associated
with different cultures. For instance, Egypt is credited
with the art of making bread and fermentation, Greece
played a key role in making olives not only an acceptable but also fashionable food in the Mediterranean
region, while the Romans made spices an essential
part of refined cooking. Rice was originally cultivated
in Asia, either in the southern parts of China or in
Thailand. In China, household pigs were seen as early
as perhaps 2000 BC, and in this part of the world, the
words for meat and pig became synonymous. From
a contemporary perspective, it could be said that the
Romans were the first to experience mass consumption through their so-called annona system, which
was established to relieve poverty. The annona was
sanctioned by the authorities and meant that almost
one third of the citizens of Rome were given free grain
so they could stay alive, but with Severus Alexander,
the free grain was replaced with ready-made bread.
Thus, mass-produced food was distributed to a group
living within one region and within one culture.
However, to say that we see here the first examples
of consumers would probably be a misinterpretation, as Frank Trentmann posited that the construction of the consumer as an identity and a category
would not be seen until the eighteenth century. Yet
in the coming millennia, we find many examples of
how food choices were associated with cultural and
social values, such as when food becomes fashion and
a sign of luxury and when food comes to represent
different strata in society. A specific example of this
is when food was used to establish regal and imperial
legitimacy during the Roman period, and later on to
establish other social and political hierarchies through
feasts and banquets.
Spices and salt were used early on in different cuisines but conquered kitchens all over the world when
the spice trade was intensified during the medieval

period. The most characteristic development of the
late Middle Ages in Europe was that most people
came to be dependent on an agrarian economy for
their sustenance and that markets became an important part of society and in relation to the purchasing
of food. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, food from the New World, the South American
continent especially, was discovered, and food items
such as potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, and corn
(maize) were introduced to the kitchens of Europe.
The more frequent traveling and trade around the
world affected food habits and cuisines by introducing new tastes, especially associated with fruits and
vegetables and new combinations of foods, leading to
the construction of new dishes and meals. During the
Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, conservation and preservation of food were developed,
which made food from almost any part of the world
available. Although alteration and adulteration of
food by dishonest tradesmen had been widespread
during the medieval period and perhaps earlier, food
scares and awareness of food safety among citizens
became more common during the nineteenth century. It is during this period that the consumer—as
a demanding, active, and identity-seeking citizen—is
constructed. The British taste in food was shaped
during the Victorian era, and tea gained new meanings in the course of political, scientific, and popular
debates: tea packed in China was considered more
dangerous than tea domestically packed and distributed. Thus, the notion of foreign food and specific
beliefs about unknown food that we associate with
consumer attitudes in the twenty-first century were
also seen centuries ago. During the twentieth century,
food habits changed rapidly, including food fashion,
which is perhaps the most dominant feature of the
modern period, together with the fact that we today,
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are
dependent on industrial mass-produced and distributed food. All this means that the consumers of today
must constantly relate to food choices and identity.
At the same time, food and health have become an
integrated part of society, the consumer, the citizen,
and the individual’s everyday life, which also affects
consumers’ identity in relation to food.

Food as a Research Area
History of food as a research area has transitioned
from studying the food itself—including what, how,

History of Food

when, and where it has been consumed—to looking
at the identities associated with food consumption.
This change in focus can be seen among archeologists as well as among anthropologists, sociologists,
and historians. What we have witnessed during
the past decades is the publication of a number
of anthologies on food in history in which scholars from many different disciplines are represented.
Historians who previously dealt with agrarian and
starvation crises or questions of social and economic
history became interested in the concept of identity in the second half of the 1990s. The quantitative approach to food history studies—meaning the
food budgets, food prices, and calories that were
in focus until the 1990s—was replaced by qualitative approaches. As an example of the quantitative
approach used in early food history studies, class
equality was discussed in terms of calories, cost, and
expenditure, rather than in terms of food choices,
beliefs, and stigma, which would be more common
factors in a qualitative approach. Analytical attention was also given to, for example, culinary cultures
and taste and how signs, codes, and consumption
are crucial to the construction of identities. A special
group of scholars were those belonging to the socalled Annales School, the histoire des mentalités,
which represented scholars studying everyday life.
In the late-twentieth century, interest in the construction of the consumer was beginning to take shape
also among food history researchers. Thus, we see
a movement from presenting descriptive studies on
food in history to more analytical and theoretical
approaches. A more recent special focus on food in
history is nutritional anthropology, which could be
explained by the increased interest in health and diet
among consumers and the medical profession during the late-twentieth century. The health benefits
of prehistoric food are discussed, and some experts
recommend that consumers eat a Stone Age diet as
an alternative to mass-produced industrial food.
However, the notion of how this so-called Stone
Age food is to be produced in modern times is not
altogether clear.
The focus on identity and culture as analytical
inputs when studying food in history is problematic
because of the problem of perspective: who is conducting the analysis? How can remains, in terms of
artifacts and documents, be interpreted by modern
man, when modern man has not only developed
over thousands of years as a biological creature,

735

both physically and mentally, but is also continually
affected by the culture in which she or he lives? Yet
it seems that more scholars than ever before, from
many different disciplines, are becoming interested
in the history and legacy of man that has shaped
our food habits, food choices, the way we as human
beings relate to food in everyday life, and how we
construct ourselves as individuals and group members, such as the family. The research area of food
in history has just started to develop and will be
interesting to follow in the future. Because of the
mundane image everyday food has had, the area of
gender and food in history has been neglected. It
would seem likely that this area will receive more
attention in the future.
Christina Fjellström
See also Dieting; Family Meal; Food Consumption; Food
Scares; Historical Analysis; History; Spices; Sugar; Tea

Further Readings
Baker, Sera, Martyn Allen, Sarah Middle, and Kristopher
Poole, eds. Food and Drink in Archaeology. Vol. 1.
Totnes, UK: Prosper Books, 2008.
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Food: A History. London:
Macmillan, 2001.
Flandrin, Jean-Louise, and Massimo Montanari, eds. Food:
A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present.
Translated by Albert Sonnenfeldt. New York: Penguin
Books, 2000.
Menell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Menell, Stephen, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. Van
Otterloo. The Sociology of Food, Eating, Diet and
Culture. London: Sage, 1992.
Mintz, Sidney M., and Christine M. Du Bois. “The
Anthropology of Food and Eating.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 31 (2002): 99–119.
Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994.
Outram, Alan K., Natalie A. Stear, Robin Bendrey, Sandra
Olsen, Alexei Kasparov, Victor Zaibert, Nick Thorpe,
and Richard P. Evershed. “The Earliest Horse
Harnessing and Milking.” Science 323 (2009):
1332–1335.
Rappaport, Erika. “Packaging China: Foreign Articles
and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea
Party.” In The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge,
Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by
Frank Trentmann, 125–146. Oxford: Berg Publisher,
2006.

736

Hobbyists and Amateurs

Scholliers, Peter, ed. Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking,
Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages.
Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. London:
Pimlico, 2003.
Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. London: Eyre Methuen,
1973.
Trentmann, Frank, ed. The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.

HOBBYISTS

AND

AMATEURS

Hobbyists and amateurs distinguish themselves from
many other kinds of participants in leisure in that
the first two systematically pursue, typically over a
period of many years, a complex, specialized, highly
fulfilling free-time activity. Such leisure engenders
acquisition of substantial skill, knowledge, or experience, usually a combination of these. Amateurs enjoy
a special relationship with professionals in the same
activity and with an interested public. Meanwhile,
hobbyists are distinguished from amateurs primarily by lack of a professional counterpart. Hobbyists
may also have commercial equivalents and often have
small publics who are interested in what they achieve.
Sometimes called enthusiasms, amateurism and
hobbyism are largely Western pastimes. They are
classified as “serious leisure,” which is frequently
compared with “casual leisure”: the immediately,
intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived, pleasurable core activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it. Thus, a casual leisure dabbler on the
piano differs in attitude and acquired skill from an
amateur, who in turn differs along these same lines
from a professional. Likewise, people who accumulate a few old books are not book collectors, since
collectors are hobbyists who, among other accomplishments, systematically acquire books, learn their
value as collectibles, and know the place of each in
society, culture, and history.
The consumptive practices of hobbyists and amateurs vary considerably according to type of participant. Amateurs are found in art, science, sports, and
entertainment. Hobbyists turn up in collecting, making and tinkering activities, activity participation
(noncompetitive, rule-based pursuits, e.g., fishing,
barbershop singing), sports and games (competitive,
rule-based pursuits, e.g., field hockey, long-distance

running), and the liberal arts hobbies (extensive selfdirected learning in an art, cuisine, language, science,
culture, history, etc.).

History
As professionalization spreads from one occupation to another, what was once considered hobbyist
leisure in some of these spheres quietly, inevitably,
and unnoticeably evolves into a new pursuit—one
best named modern amateurism. Modern amateurism has been rising alongside those occupations
where some leisure participants in the occupation
have discovered a livelihood there and, consequently,
can now devote themselves to it as a vocation rather
than an avocation.
What has been happening is that those who play
at the activities encompassed by these occupations
are being overrun in significance, if not in numbers,
by professionals and amateurs. It is a process that
seems to unfold as follows. As opportunities for fulltime pursuit of a skill or activity gradually appear,
those people with even an average aptitude for such
skills are able to develop them to a level observably
higher than that of the typical part-time participant.
With today’s mass availability of professional performances (or products), whatever the field, new standards of excellence soon confront all participants,
professional or not. Although the performances of
professionals are frequently impressive, no category
of participant is more impressed than that of nonprofessionals who, through direct experience, know
the activity intimately. Indeed, once they become
aware of professional standards, all they have accomplished seems mediocre by comparison. They are
thus faced with a critical choice in their careers as
participants: either restrict identification with the
activity to remain largely unaffected by such invidious comparisons or identify sufficiently with it to
attempt to meet those standards.
With the first choice, which is still common, the
part-time participant remains a player, dabbler, or
dilettante. For him, the activity is casual leisure. It
lacks necessity, obligation, and utility; it is enjoyed
with a disinterestedness that sets it apart as an activity from the participant’s everyday life. The second
choice, which is less common, impels part-time participants away from play toward pursuit of durable
benefits. The road to these benefits, however, is
characterized by necessity, obligation, seriousness,

Hobbyists and Amateurs

and commitment, as expressed in regimentation
(e.g., rehearsals, practice) and systematization (e.g.,
schedules, organization), leading to the status of
amateur for some and professional for others.
There was a time when casual and serious participants were alone in their leisure—without professionals to compete against, model themselves after,
or simply mingle with. Lacking such people, they
were, in effect, hobbyists. Indeed, the early history of
many contemporary professions is exclusively about
hobbyists, the only participants in the activity at the
time. In effect, these activities were too new, too little
in demand, or too underdeveloped to be pursued as
livelihoods. When their fields began, a number of
astronomers, archaeologists, teachers, musicians,
painters, jugglers, bowlers, soccer players, and so
forth, earned their living doing something else. Still,
by the standards of the day, they were the experts in
their areas of leisure.
Following the rise of professionalism in some fields,
amateurism lingered as an honorable tradition, while
attempts at full-time employment, not to mention
professionalization, were derided. Many nineteenthcentury, free-time (typically upper-class) artists, athletes, and scientists despised making money this way.
Knowledge about the history of hobbies centers
mainly on industrialized capitalist Europe and North
America from the mid-nineteenth century. Steven
Gelber observes that industrialism separated work
from leisure such that employment became more
work-like and nonwork became more problematic.
Americans, he said, responded in two ways to the
threat posed by leisure as potential mischief caused
by idle hands. Reformers tried to eliminate, or at
least restrict access to, inappropriate activity, while
encouraging people to seek socially approved freetime outlets. Hobbies and other serious leisure pursuits were high on the list of such outlets. Like work,
leisure had to be productive. Hobbies were also particularly valued, because they bridged especially well
the worlds of work and home. And both sexes found
them appealing, albeit mostly not the same ones.
Nevertheless, before approximately 1880, before
becoming defined as productive use of free time,
hobbies were considered “dangerous obsessions.”

Consumption and Serious Leisure
Many serious leisure pursuits, for participation in
their highly appealing core activities, require one

737

or more preliminary purchases. This is facilitative,
leisure-based consumption (Stebbins 2009). Here
the acquired item only inaugurates a set of activities,
which when completed enable the purchaser to use
the item to generate a satisfying and fulfilling leisure
experience. Consider an example: to play music,
amateur violinists must usually rent or purchase a
violin—a consumptive act. Yet their most profound
leisure experience is competently and artistically
playing music and, earlier, practicing to accomplish
this, all of which costs nothing, though, obviously,
it is facilitated by using the acquired instrument (a
consumer product). Moreover, this profound leisure experience may be further facilitated by buying music lessons and tickets for transportation to a
teacher’s studio. And there are hobbies and amateur
pursuits where consumption is negligible, if nonexistent. Here participants need not buy or rent something, as in collecting (e.g., leaves, seashells, insects),
the liberal arts reading hobbies, and certain outdoor
sports and participation activities (e.g., playing soccer or touch football, walking in nature, swimming
in a lake).
Still, noteworthy exceptions exist. For some, consumption, although peripheral to the core activity of
the serious leisure in question, may nevertheless be a
momentous act. Thus, buying an expensive, fine violin is thrilling for a committed amateur violinist, as
purchase of a purebred dog is for a hobbyist breeder
or a top-class sailboat is for a hobbyist sailor.
In fact the intricate relationship between consumption and serious leisure grows ever more
intricate when the act of acquisition is itself complicated. This intricacy seems especially common in
the hobby of collecting. Consider the efforts of a
coin collector to locate and buy a rare specimen.
This person must learn where to look for the item,
travel there to acquire it, and perhaps bargain with
its owner for an affordable price. This is, in fact,
a core activity of all collecting—acquisition of collectibles—though there are typically other such
activities, among them, cataloguing and preserving the collectibles acquired. Collectors of fine art,
old cars, and antique furniture, and possibly other
objects, also commonly experience in these involved
terms acquisition of their collectibles. Furthermore,
the violinist and dog breeder just mentioned,
though not collectors, may still make acquisitions
at this level of intricacy in the relationship between
consumption and serious leisure. Since, in these

738

Hollywood

instances, consumption is itself a core leisure activity, it has been dubbed core facilitative consumption.

Importance of Complex Leisure
Common knowledge has it, erroneously, that leisure is casual. Research and theory on its complex
forms (hobbyism, amateurism, volunteerism) have
begun to correct this misconception, albeit slowly.
Health implications alone justify distinguishing the
two types. For serious leisure, unlike casual leisure,
has been found to generate personal well-being
and, where it is physical (e.g., sports), also bodily
well-being. These are key benefits in a society with
abundant stress, obesity, and ill health.
Robert A. Stebbins
See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Collecting and
Collectibles; Electronic Video Gaming; Leisure;
Lifestyle; Prosumption; Sports; Well-Being

Further Readings
Cross, Gary. A Social History of Leisure since 1600. State
College, PA: Venture, 1990.
Gelber, Steven M. Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of
Work in America. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999.
Haworth, John T. Work, Leisure and Well-Being.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Stebbins, Robert A. Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our
Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007.
Stebbins, Robert A. Leisure and Consumption: Common
Ground, Separate Worlds. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.

HOLLYWOOD
Hollywood was a nineteenth-century agricultural
district in Los Angeles, California, that entrepreneur H. H. Wilcox transformed into America’s
cinematic heartland. For some, it is synonymous
with the Americanization of the culture industry—
that is, the production and distribution of cultural works, such as movies and television shows.
Wilcox bought the district (initially named Rancho
La Brea and inhabited by Amerindians) in 1886
and, together with his wife, converted newly christened “Hollywood” into a village. Within a few
years, the Wilcoxes had devised a grid plan to turn

the area into a flourishing community with a paved
Prospect Avenue (today known as Hollywood
Boulevard) and lots that were marketed primarily to Midwesterners to build residential properties. The community became part of the city of Los
Angeles in 1910, and a year later, Centaur Film
Co. moved in to establish the first studio. Other
corporate businesses followed, gradually turning
Hollywood into Los Angeles’ artistic commercial
hub. Banks, clubs, restaurants, and movie studios
completed this process, catering to the demands of a
growing film industry (Paramount Pictures [1912],
Columbia Pictures [1920], Warner Brothers [1923],
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [1924], 20th Century Fox
[1935]) that by the 1930s had acquired a global
reputation. The area has since developed into a
global tourist attraction, and in 1985, Hollywood
Boulevard’s commercial district was listed in the
National Register of Historic Places.
Although some studios have always been situated
outside Hollywood, the name itself came to signify
the entire U.S. film industry with its satellite commerce. By the 1960s, Hollywood had embraced the
music industry, too, with recording studios migrating
to Sunset Boulevard to complement the nightclubs of
the district. Hollywood’s power extends beyond the
history of cinema and into that of a cultural communications complex that has become integral to post1880s capitalist exchange. Its emergence coincided
with the decade in which social historians locate the
economic origins of World War I and the neoimperialist booming. The U.S. film industry established
itself internationally on the eve of the totalitarian slide in Europe (1920s–1930s), something that
almost coincided with the ideological use of mass
communications by the Nazi regime. The first systematic theorization of media industries originates
in the radical critique of mass consumption pioneered by the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute
of Social Research, Frankfurt University) whose
members fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to relocate in
the United States. There, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer developed the culture industry thesis,
casting American new communication technologies
as demagogic tools that divert collective consciousness from sociopolitical problems. In a Marxist vein,
popular culture (music, film, magazines) was seen as
a force that destroys the potential for a social revolution. Especially in the light of the increasing success
of Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, Adorno

Hollywood

and Horkheimer expressed the fear that the recipients of cinematic messages may become consumers
in abstracto—that is, consumers who have lost their
particularity and become interchangeable and quantifiable entities (Kellner 1989).
This interpretive model formed the basis on which
third world activists, artists, and critical political
economists developed the theoretical complex known
as cultural imperialism. The appropriation of a vast
array of culturally significant machines by the United
States (airplane, typewriter, electric light, and telephone) and their use to consolidate military domination from the 1960s (in Philippines, Thailand,
Cuba) turned the United States into a global
political player. Hollywood narratives reflected this
technological triumph, developing simultaneously
other ideological devices that endorsed American
sociocultural supremacy. Racist agendas found an
unhappy continuation in cinematic representations
of African and Asian cultures as inferior and backward, whereas practices of boycotting foreign films
(through introduction of patent and distribution or
copyright restrictions) further ensured America’s
ideological insularity. Hollywood and its multiple
production companies spread their control globally
by absorbing smaller companies with less capital to
finance expensive cinematic enterprises.
Compelling though this sociological model may
be, it underestimates the complexity of production,
because it considers the manufacturers of cultural
goods as mere participants in a conspiracy against
collective consciousness. Because manufacturers of
cultural goods are involved in creative manipulation
of symbols, some theorists view them as agents of
sociocultural change (Hesmondhalgh 2002). The
relationship between creative arts and commerce
seems to have become closer since sectors of creative
industries that were not commercial in the past (e.g.,
performing arts, broadcasting) have been commercialized. Applied to Hollywood-centered practices
of production and consumption, cultural imperialism identifies corporate globalization with its communicative counterpart. Doubtlessly, however, the
Hollywood industry remains an important global
player in the field of communications, especially
because its original cinematic commerce has diversified to embrace communication technologies (e.g.,
the Internet) and other arts (e.g., music or theater).
Specific cases indicate the limitations of the cultural imperialism model. The film The Beach (2000)

739

used material from another industry (it was based
on Alex Garland’s novel), generated a new one
(tourism in filmed Thai regions), promoted another
(CDs with the movie soundtrack), and produced
links between all three (Internet advertising of Thai
tourism, movie advertising of the book and the
soundtrack). The creation of such supra-industrial
complexes based on common ideas (“signs”) has
become standard Hollywood practice and defines
the new knowledge economy of productive consumption of ideas, note Scott Lash and John Urry.
This phenomenon may involve actual convergence
of industries—for example, with computer games
providing material for cinematic scripts (e.g., Tomb
Raider, initially a computer game, inspired two
movies [2001, 2003] starring Angelina Jolie) and
products for young consumers becoming movies (e.g., Transformers, a series of 1970s cartoons
turned toys fed into three films [2007, 2009, 2011]
that targeted young audiences). Nevertheless, lack
of economic regulation of such ventures may promote exploitation and induce reaction to further
commoditization. The Beach provoked reaction
by regional and global activist networks that condemned Hollywood and its auxiliaries (e.g., tourist
entrepreneurs or local, national and supranational
authorities) for the “destruction” of filmed locales
to produce pleasing shots for the cinematic tourist gaze. Hollywood actors, including Leonardo
DiCaprio and director Danny Boyle, figured in
interviews in an attempt to counter such criticism
(Tzanelli 2007).
Hollywood has also been challenged by foreign
media industries. For example, Tamar Liebes found
that although Israel’s television system has embraced
American technologies, genres, advertising styles,
and organizational modes, it has simultaneously subjected all these to domestic economic and political
interests. In addition to native viewers, Bollywood
films have millions of fans among expatriate Indian
communities and Western audiences. The very genre
(Bombay Hollywood) can be considered a culturally
situated response to Hollywood that fuses American
narratives with Hindu and Islamic traditions,
producing hybrids of global appeal. Hong Kong
and Chinese cinemas also have a global influence,
invading foreign markets traditionally controlled by
Hollywood. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner
note, just as audiences adopt different viewing
positions (interpretations of movies), Hollywood

740

Home Computer

films may project a polyvocal view of the world that
both contests and reinforces the social status quo.
The symbolic creativity of movie industries can only
be studied in its sociopolitical context (postcolonial,
nationalist). Hollywood is only one such context,
comprising various agents who may have conflicting
agendas.
Rodanthi Tzanelli
See also Americanization; Audience Research; Cinema;
Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Culture Industries;
Disorganized Capitalism; Mass Culture (Frankfurt
School); Media Convergence and Monopoly

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of
Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1993. First
published 1944.
Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. London:
Sage, 2002.
Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space.
London: Sage, 1994.
Liebes, Tamar. American Dreams, Hebrew Subtitles.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003.
Miller, Toby, Nittin Govil, John McMurria, Richard
Maxwell, and Ting Wang. Global Hollywood 2.
London: BFI, 2005.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1996.
Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Tzanelli, Rodanthi. The Cinematic Tourist. London:
Routledge, 2007.

HOME
See Appropriation; Architecture;
Do-It-Yourself; Ethnology/Folklore Studies;
Gardening; Gender; Gendering of Public
and Private Space; Households; Souvenirs

HOME COMPUTER
The history of the home computer provides an
example of how a technology once felt to be far

removed from the home and everyday patterns of
life was subsequently developed, promoted, and
embraced—indeed consumed—as a product. For
many, the home computer continues to mediate a
wide range of consumer activities from e-commerce
to online gaming.
The home computer consists of a technology
originally called a microcomputer to distinguish it
from the larger minicomputer and mainframe computer. The most well-known brand is IBM’s Personal
Computer (PC), based on Microsoft software, and
hence these devices are sometimes referred to as PCs,
using the brand name as a generic one. In many
developed countries, the majority of households now
have a home computer, although even here adoption reflects sociodemographics such as age (fewer
machines used by the older population) and socioeconomic status (fewer used by those with lower
socioeconomic status).
In the early 1970s, a variety of individuals,
including some working within information technology (IT) companies, had been building prototypes of
“small” computers—ranging from the size of a desk
to that of a large television. But in general, there
were industry doubts about whether there would
be any widespread interest in using such devices.
This was in large part because the main trajectory
of development in the computer field was toward
larger, faster, and more powerful machines, not
smaller ones that could do less (the exception being
minicomputers whose real-time operation offered a
different functionality to mainframes). Hence, most
of the original interest in the possibilities offered
by a microcomputer, a machine one could personally own and even build for oneself, came from the
electronic hobbyist community. This included some
working within the computer industry such as the
later founders of Apple.
U.S. hobbyist magazines portrayed computing as a new frontier for these enthusiasts, and the
first kit microcomputer to be sold within this community was the Altair in 1975. By the late 1970s,
these machines were being sold for educational and
business purposes, and in 1981, IBM launched its
PC, using Microsoft’s operating system. While its
success and that of other machines using this system
helped establish the product within these markets,
there were still doubts in the consumer electronics
field about whether there would ever be a market
specifically for a “home” computer, whether it would

Home Computer

be useful in that setting, although some hardware
companies such as Tandy, Texas Instruments, and
Commodore persevered in trying to create this market. As had happened decades earlier in the case of
radios, the design of microcomputers had by now
changed, initially with the Apple computer, to make
them aesthetically more attractive than the original
hobbyist machines that looked more like pieces of
technical equipment.
The history of home computers varied slightly
in different countries. For example, in the United
Kingdom, Sinclair brought out the ZX80 and then
ZX81, much cheaper than contemporary U.S.
machines and marketed as machines to learn about
computing. One key use of home computers in the
early 1980s that helped to establish the product in
the home was game playing, where the home computer took some of the market dominated by games
consoles. In fact, in the United Kingdom, it took a
decade before game playing was replaced by word
processing as the major use.
Two developments in the 1990s helped to boost
the adoption of home computers. The first was the
move to the machine being “multimedia,” principally
through the addition of sound cards and CD-ROM
storage. The second was the use of home computers to access the emerging Internet. Since that time,
the PC has remained the most common device, or
“platform,” for accessing the Internet, and hence for
communicating and socializing online (e.g., through
the emergence of social network sites) as well as for
watching streamed and downloaded audiovisual
material such a catch-up TV. But other, especially
wireless, devices—from laptops to (increasingly
smart) mobile phones and iPads—increasingly offer
alternative platforms.
To put research on people’s experiences of home
computers into context, it was only in the 1980s
that social scientists started to take an interest in the
“consumption” of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) in general, and this applied to
traditional media like TV as well as the telephone. As
a new technology, it was understandable that early
social surveys examining home computer adoption
from the mid-1980s considered factors shaping the
take-up of these machines. The early 1990s was
also the period when the domestication framework
was emerging, which generated research into how
the home computer was fitted into the routines of
the home.

741

From the start, certain strands of that research
were also interested in the consequences of home
computers, for example, whether it displaced time
spent on other activities, including watching TV and
socializing with others. These were research issues
that in many ways prefigured the questions that
would be asked of the Internet a decade later. This
also applied to the concerns over the home computers’ “addictiveness” that was explored in various
studies as well as explorations in what home computer use could mean for people’s sense of identity.
As in the case of other ICTs, a number of these
concerns related specifically to the potential consequences for children and youth since young people
were perceived as being potentially more open to formative influences at this point in their development.
Since those early studies, occasional work of children
continues to appear.
Several studies dealt with gender and the home
computer, with different emphases: for example,
Jane Wheelock focused on a mother’s lack of leisure
time constraining interest, whereas Leslie Haddon
(2004) studied the differences in motivation arising from boys’ and girls’ gendered social networks.
One key focus of various studies has been the issue
of male versus female engagement with technologies connected with the gendered process of identity
formation. Such qualitative studies, including ones
examining ICTs more generally, have commented on
gender interactions in the home, such as competition
for computer use. Meanwhile, a 2006 quantitative
research by Malcolm Brynin has suggested a decline
in gender differences as regards actual uses.
There has been a trickle of home computer studies from the later 1990s, including a book on the
topic by Elaine Lally. But to an extent, studies of the
Internet seem to have attracted research attention
away from the home computer itself.
Leslie Haddon
See also Addiction; Consumer Durables; Consumption
Patterns and Trends; Diffusion Studies and Trickle
Down; Domestic Technologies; Electronic Video
Gaming; Gender; Hobbyists and Amateurs; Information
Society; Innovation Studies; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Brynin, Malcolm. “The Neutered Computer.” In
Computers, Phones and the Internet: Domesticating
Information Technology, edited by Robert Kraut,

742

Horkheimer, Max

Malcolm Brynin, and Sara Kiesler, 84–96. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
Haddon, Leslie. “The Home Computer: The Making of a
Consumer Electronic.” Science as Culture 1, no. 2
(1988): 7–51.
Haddon, Leslie. “Explaining ICT Consumption: The Case
of the Home Computer.” In Consuming Technologies:
Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, edited by
Roger Silverstone and Erik Hirsch, 82–96. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Haddon, Leslie. Information and Communication
Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction
and Research Guide. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Lally, Elaine. At Home with Computers. Oxford: Berg,
2002.
Rogers, Everett. “The Diffusion of Home Computers
among Households in Silicon Valley.” Marriage and
Family Review 8 (1985): 89–100.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human
Spirit. London: Granada, 1984.
Turkle, Sherry. “Computational Reticence: Why Women
Fear the Intimate Machine.” In Technology and
Women’s Voices, edited by Cheris Kramerae, 41–61.
London: Routledge, 1988.
Vitalari, Nicholas, Allardi Venkatesh, and Kjell Gronhang.
“Computing in the Home: Shifts in Time Allocation
Patterns of Households.” Communications of the ACM
28 (1985): 512–522.
Wheelock, Jane. “Personal Computers, Gender and an
Institutional Model of the Household.” In Consuming
Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic
Spaces, edited by Roger Silverstone and Erik Hirsch,
97–112. London: Routledge, 1992.

HOMOGENIZATION
HYBRIDIZATION

VERSUS

See Americanization; Delocalization; Diaspora;
Globalization; Glocalization; Japan as
a Consumer Culture; Multiculturalism;
Tourism Studies

HOMOSEXUALITY
See Pink Pounds/Dollars; Queer Theory;
Sexuality

HORKHEIMER, MAX (1895–1973)
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and
social scientist. He was the founder of critical theory.
Horkheimer’s intellectual sources included the philosophies of the French Enlightenment, Immanuel
Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. He also drew on ideas
from sociology and psychoanalysis. Between 1931
and 1958, Horkheimer served as the director of the
Institute of Social Research of Frankfurt am Main,
Germany (also known as the Frankfurt School). The
1933 National Socialist takeover forced Horkheimer,
who was of Jewish origin, to immigrate to America,
where the institute was temporarily set up. He
returned to Germany in 1948. Horkheimer ranks as
one of Europe’s most prominent twentieth-century
social thinkers. His work has shaped the projects of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen
Habermas, and many others.
Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and
Critical Theory” is widely read as a programmatic
statement of critical theory. Horkheimer rejects theory’s “traditional” role as a scheme for classifying
data. A critical theory of society determines the basic
structure and processes of the capitalist condition,
notably class relations and commodity exchange,
and examines their operation on individual life and
specific social phenomena. Critical thought also surpasses theory’s traditional status as a set of hypotheses to be tested by empirical observation. Since
even perception and theoretical thought—decisive
components of humankind’s interaction with
nature—are socially predetermined, critical theory
cannot accept empirical data as representations of
reality but must scrutinize factual and theoretical
knowledge claims with regard to their hidden social
dimension. Traditional theory, Horkheimer further
alleges, denies the connection between science and
socially transformative practice, thus serving to perpetuate the status quo. Critical theory, by contrast,
consciously combines social analysis with social critique and opposition in the interest of humanity’s
“emancipation from slavery” (1972, 246) and the
“happiness of all individuals” (248).
Horkheimer’s development of critical theory
is linked to his critique of the dominant modes of
thinking in capitalist society. Human thought, he
argues in Eclipse of Reason, has been reduced to a

Household Budgets

“subjective” instrumental rationality essentially concerned with calculating the most effective means to
given ends (good or evil). Thinking has been aligned
with industrial commodity production. The capacity of “objective” reason to determine truly rational
ends congruent with the attainment of human fulfillment is atrophying. Instrumental reason chiefly aids
mankind’s domination and exploitation of external
nature, which culminates in people’s domination of
their inner nature, especially their desires, and in the
subjugation of others. When nature “revolts” against
its repression, it releases forces—notably instinctual
energies—that become susceptible to mobilization by
violent political movements.
Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer
coauthored with Adorno in the 1940s, interconnects
these considerations with a vehement critique of
mass culture. Horkheimer and Adorno highlight the
culture industry’s capacity to cultivate widespread
consumer demand for its products. These cultural
commodities in turn have the power to shape their
consumers’ consciousness to the effect of enlisting the
masses in the maintenance of the capitalist order. For
example, popular literature, magazines, newspapers,
radio, television, and cinema depict life primarily
in its familiar, everyday mundanity. Unlike genuine
art, mass culture never critically judges social reality, failing to convey the possibility and desirability
of improved conditions. The message is plain: “This
is reality as it is and should be and will be” (2004,
96). Moreover, many TV programs and films are
structured according to patterns of punishment and
reward for their characters. Thus, deviance is repeatedly admonished, while socially acceptable behavior
is glorified, sometimes even dictated. In fact, the
very distinction between leisure and labor drawn
by the culture industry is illusory. “Entertainment,”
argue Horkheimer and Adorno, “is the prolongation of work under late capitalism” (2002, 109): the
consumption of mercilessly standardized cultural
artifacts resembles the mechanized operations of
the industrial workday; the time set aside for amusement and relaxation mainly functions to re-create the
individual’s labor power for production. The culture
industry, Horkheimer and Adorno warn, encourages
people to adapt to the capitalist condition, to silence
their urge for material fulfillment, and to surrender
their social resistance.
Matthias Benzer

743

See also Adorno, Theodor; Capitalism; Commodities;
Culture Industries; False Consciousness/False Needs; Mass
Culture (Frankfurt School); Rationalization; Sociology

Further Readings
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New
York: Herder and Herder, 1972. First published 1937.
Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. London: Continuum,
2004. First published 1947.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002. First published 1947.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History,
Theories and Political Significance. Cambridge: Polity,
1994.

HOUSEHOLD BUDGETS
A household can be defined as one person living alone, or a group of people living at the same
address, with common housekeeping and sharing either some living space or at least one meal a
day. Budgets are the arrangements made to balance
income and expenditure over a given period of time.
When the two words are used together, as in the
term household budgets, the result is a topic that has
recently been the focus of vigorous critical debate, in
which anthropologists, sociologists, and some economists have collected new empirical data to mount
an attack on a key concept in traditional economics.
These debates have been concerned with the definition of the term household and with the extent to
which the household is the appropriate unit for analyzing consumption budgets and discussing the living
standards of individuals and families. To understand
these debates, it is necessary to outline three different
interpretations of the term household budgets.

Interpretations
The Household as a Unit
First, there is the traditional approach of classical economics in which the household is a key unit
of analysis. Theoretically, the household is treated
as though it were an individual, earning and spending money to maintain a standard of living that is
assumed to be shared by all household members.
Working with this definition has underlined the enormous variations in household incomes and the extent

744

Household Budgets

to which budgets, and patterns of expenditure, vary
with income level. In general, the proportion of its
income that a household spends on food decreases as
household income rises; this is known as Engel’s Law
and it also applies to spending on housing and other
necessities. Thus, the proportion of income spent
on food in developed countries varies from under
10 percent for affluent households to over a third
for low-income households. In the world as a whole,
over a billion people live on less than $1.25 per day
(United Nations 2009). At these income levels, managing the household budget becomes less a matter of
making choices and more a matter of surviving at the
most basic level.

Income and Expenditure
The second approach grows out of a critique of
the traditional definition of a household, outlined
already. This argues that in reality households neither earn nor spend money; both these activities are
actually carried out by individuals. Anthropologists
and economists working in developing countries
have shown that how the money enters the household can affect the way it is used and spent. Different
members of households may have different spending
priorities. This means moving away from models of
the household that emphasize sharing, altruism, and
cooperation, to models that include the possibility
of negotiation, bargaining, and even conflict. Many
studies have shown that there is a positive association between the amount of money controlled by
women and the amount the household spends on
food, household necessities, women’s and children’s
clothing, and child-care expenses. This was the key
finding of the cross-national study carried out by
Agnes Quisumbing and John Maluccio. There can
be poor individuals in households with adequate
incomes. Studies such as these have suggested that
important social and economic processes take place
between earning and spending and that the intrahousehold economy warrants investigation in its
own right.

The Intra-Household Economy
This third approach, focusing on the intrahousehold economy and sometimes described as
opening up the black box of the household, has been
adopted mainly by sociologists and social policy analysts. Given the disparity in incomes between men

and women, and their different spending responsibilities, there has to be some redistribution of resources
within households if those who earn less are not to
live at a lower standard of living than those who earn
more. Every household has to devise some arrangement by which this redistribution of resources can
take place. Most of the empirical research has been
concerned with couple households and with their
systems of money management, with individual partners being interviewed separately as well as together.
Studies have now been carried out in Australia,
Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand,
Spain, Sweden, the United States, and elsewhere,
with broadly comparable results.
Systems of money management vary greatly, but
research has shown that there are clear patterns in
how couples control and allocate their money. Early
qualitative research carried out in Britain suggested
a typology of allocative systems (Pahl 1989) that has
since been refined and expanded in quantitative surveys. One such typology made distinctions between
• the female whole wage system where the
woman manages all the money except the man’s
personal spending money;
• the housekeeping allowance/male whole
wage system in which the man either gives the
woman an allowance for housekeeping or manages all the money;
• the pooling system in which couples pool all
their money, usually in a joint account;
• the partial pool in which couples pool some of
their money to pay for collective expenditure and
keep the rest separate to spend as they choose; and
• the independent management system in which
both partners have their own independent income
that they keep separate, each having responsibility
for different items of household expenditure.
One study of couples under thirty-five living in
Britain in 2002 showed that the pooling system was
used by just over half of all couples; 7 percent used
the female whole wage system, 7 percent used the
housekeeping allowance system, 19 percent used the
partial pool, and 13 percent used independent management of money (Vogler et al. 2008). Compared
with earlier work, these figures suggest that the move
toward independence in couple finances is taking
place quite fast.

Households

Explanations and Implications
Explaining patterns in the intra-household economy
is complex, and any summary is necessarily a simplification. When the household has a low income,
typically women control and manage finances. As
household income rises, the sources of that income
become important. If only the husband is earning,
typically he controls finances and delegates management of part of the budget to his wife. If both
partners are earning, it is likely that finances will be
considered joint, though the partner who contributes
the larger proportion of income is likely to have a
greater say in financial decisions.
Younger couples, those without children and those
who are cohabiting rather than married, are more
likely to maintain independence in financial matters
by keeping some or all of their income separate from
any household budget. Independent management
of money is also more often found among remarried couples, who may have financial responsibilities
toward people in other households; this motive may
also be relevant to parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where
the system of “separate purses” is common. New
forms of money, such as credit cards, debit cards, and
Internet banking, are accelerating the trend toward
independence.
Research continues about the implications, for
individuals and families, of different systems for
managing the household budget. Some key points
include the following:
• It cannot be assumed that all members of
households have the same standard of living; there
can be poor individuals in households with adequate incomes.
• Money that enters the household through the
hands of a woman is in general more likely to be
spent on children and on collective household
necessities than money that enters the household
via a man.
• When income is short and making ends meet
is difficult, it is more likely than the woman will
manage the budget; the higher the household
income, the more likely it is that the man will be in
charge of finances.
• Independence in couple finances works well as
long as both partners are earning similar amounts;
however, when one partner’s income falls, this can
be a route to inequality within the household.

745

Ideologies can also be crucial in shaping the
access that individuals have to household monies,
though some ideologies will conflict with others. For
example, the idea of sharing money within a loving
relationship can be at odds with the idea that earners
have an entitlement to the money they have earned.
The idea that the man should be the breadwinner is
being undercut by aspirations for gender equality and
individual financial autonomy. All three approaches
outlined have a contribution to make to understand
the complexities of household budgets; using just one
approach risks ignoring much that is important. As
household compositions change (such as the rise of
single-person households) and trends in consumption diversify, the ways that households distribute
and manage their resources will remain an important
subject for identifying the continuing inequalities of
consumer cultures.
Jan Pahl
See also Domestic Division of Labor; Families; Gender;
Households; Inequalities; Measuring Standards of
Living; Money; Systems of Provision

Further Readings
Pahl, Jan. Money and Marriage. Basingstoke,
UK: Macmillan, 1989.
Pahl, Jan. “Family Finances, Individualization, Spending
Patterns and Access to Credit.” The Journal of
Socio-Economics 37 (2008): 552–576.
Quisumbing, Agnes, and John Malaccio. Intra-household
Allocation and Gender Relations. Washington,
DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2000.
Stocks, Janet, Capitolina Diaz, and Bjørn Hallerod. Modern
Couples: Sharing Money, Sharing Life. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
United Nations. Millennium Development Goals Report
2009. New York: Author, 2009.
Vogler, Carolyn, Michaela Brockman, and Richard
Wiggins. “Managing Money in New Heterosexual
Forms of Intimate Relationships.” The Journal of
Socio-Economics 37 (2008) 552–576.

HOUSEHOLDS
In recent years, much social theorizing has focused
on changes in personal life. In particular, structural
changes associated with late modernity, including
especially globalization and individualization, are

746

Households

recognized as having had a profound effect on the
routine construction of the life course and the patterning of family commitments and relationships.
Most noticeably, in Westernized countries, albeit
with significant national variation, there is far greater
diversity in patterns of family formation and dissolution than there was in the mid-twentieth century.
In particular, there have been substantial shifts in
the social patterning of sexual relations, partnership, cohabitation and marriage, and childbirth. In
turn, the timing of key life markers has been altering. Not only are marriage rates declining, but the
fewer marriages that there are now occur at later
ages. Similarly, age at first birth, whether inside or
outside marriage, has been increasing, as has the age
at which people finally leave the parental home. As
a result, life-course transitions now tend to be less
ordered and clear-cut than they were previously.
These relational and life-course changes are having a significant impact on the social organization of
households. There have, of course, always been shifts
in household composition across the life course, with
living arrangements inevitably being shaped by the
wider circumstances of people’s lives. Expressed
differently, the decisions people make about their
household arrangements depend on the options open
to them at different phases of their life course, which
in turn depend on both the character of their domestic and familial commitments and the availability of
different forms of housing. With the reordering of
personal life characteristic of late modernity, there
is significantly greater diversity in household experiences across time, with movements into and out of
new and existing households routinely being more
varied and less predictable. Flux in these matters is
more common and more normative now than it was
for much of the twentieth century.
In turn, this has raised interesting questions for
the study of household consumption. This entry
focuses on three of these: the changing constitution
of households, the relationship between individual
and household consumption, and the emergence of
the home as a domain for—rather then just a site
of—consumption.

Household Composition
The demographic shifts summarized already, particularly with regard to partnership and family formation
and dissolution, have involved significant changes

in the patterning of people’s “household careers.”
Two changes are especially important in considering
consumption.
First, there has been an appreciable decrease in the
size of households. This tendency stretches back a
long time but has been particularly marked in recent
years. For example, in Britain at the beginning of
the twentieth century, average household size was
around 4.5. By the turn of the twenty-first century,
average household size had almost halved to 2.4.
Aside from more housing units being available, the
major cause of this change lay in the increasing numbers of single- and two-person households. In particular, increased longevity has meant that more people
are living longer as a couple or alone as widows or
widowers in later life, with the rise in separation and
divorce also contributing to these shifts.
Second, different pathways in and out of households have developed over the last thirty years.
Again, increased levels of separation and divorce,
as well as consequent repartnering for many, have
been important in this. Like the life course itself,
household careers inevitably reflect the greater diversity there is in the decisions people individually and
collectively make about the desirability of different
partnership arrangements at different phases of their
lives. As partnership commitment, whether marriage
or cohabitation, becomes characterized by greater
degrees of fission, consequent household arrangements reflect these changing commitments. In addition though, there has also been increased flux in
household careers as a result of the radical transformations that have been occurring in early adulthood
throughout the Western world.
In essence, the lifestyles and responsibilities
of young adults—those in their early and middle
twenties—are quite distinct now from the patterns
that were dominant thirty years ago. In particular,
with increasing median age of both marriage (and
similar committed relationships) and first birth, the
young adulthood phase of life is being constructed
as one that offers relative exemption from “adult”
responsibilities. Although there is a good deal of
diversity in this, influenced in part by class location,
early adulthood has come increasingly to be seen as
a period of individual freedom rather than the initial
phase of “settling down.” This shift has had significant impacts on the household practices and trajectories of people in this age range. Two tendencies are
worth highlighting here.

Households

The first is that there are significant numbers
of young adults now living in variations of shared
households. These are not family households but
rather households of (largely) unrelated individuals
who are living together for some period. This can
take a number of forms. Some are based on existing friendship groups; others are developed through
people advertising for others to share a household
with them. Some may involve one or more cohabiting couples, though the patterns of cohabitation
are likely to be quite flexible. Some involve shared
responsibility for the property; others are built more
around one person having legal tenancy and the others being effectively lodgers. As well as this flexibility in household composition, there is often a quite
high degree of turnover and mobility in and out of
these households.
The second marked change in patterns of household membership among young adults concerns the
transition out of the parental household. In the past,
this quite typically occurred by the time the young
adult reached his or her early twenties. More importantly, this tended to be a once-and-for-all transition.
That is, once a young adult “left home,” be this for
education, employment, or marriage, he or she rarely
returned to live in the parental household again.
(Of course, some continued to live in the parental
household after marriage because of housing shortage, but typically these people had never lived away.)
Contemporary patterns are far less clear-cut. It
is now more common for young adult children to
return to the parental home following periods of living in alternative households. This may be as a result
of relationship breakdown, employment change,
or completing education. The parental home has
become recognized as more a form of “safety net”
for adult children, mirroring the acceptance of this
phase of life as a period of decreased stability compared to previous generations’ experiences.

Defining Households
So far, questions of how “household” is to be defined
have been left implicit. At one level, household seems
a straightforward concept. In reality, it is more complex than is commonly assumed. A household consists of those individuals who live together and share
a common residence. But complexity arises because
not everyone constructs a lifestyle that involves doing
all the things routinely associated with sharing a

747

residence and living together with the same group
of people. For example, living together is normally
seen as involving coresidence, a shared domestic
economy, and common meal times. Within this, no
one individual needs to be present for all pertinent
household events, but they do need normally to be
participants. For many people, this is unproblematic.
They do share a common residence with others and
participate with them in activities that are defined as
“household relevant.”
For some individuals, though, and consequently
for some households, these issues are less straightforward. To use an example from the past, it was
quite common for some children in large workingclass families to live much of the day in the parental
household but sleep at a grandparent’s home or with
an aunt or uncle. Contemporary lifestyles involve
other complexities. For example, some people work
away from home for significant periods of the week
or for longer blocks of time. Some couples spend a
great deal of time together but maintain their own
separate homes. University students often have membership of different households—their university one
and their parental home. Other young adults may
also be “irregular” members of the parental household. Similarly, some ethnic minority groups may
find that housing design in their country of residence
is ill suited to their extended family practices, with
the consequence that the household is enacted across
a number of different properties.
All these examples illustrate how the greater flexibility in the construction of family relationships
occurring under late modernity creates difficulties
for specifying the boundaries of household. For
administrative purposes, such as local tax collection
and the collection of national censuses data, these
difficulties need resolution through bureaucratic
“rules.” For social enquiry, the task is less the precise
specification of household boundaries and more
a recognition of the greater diversity occurring in people’s domestic and household arrangements. Not everyone lives in easily defined, conventional households.

Individual and Household Consumption
Equally, though, the diverse patterning of household
composition has consequences for scholars interested in consumption behavior. The most evident
questions concern the appropriate units of consumption. It is clearly relevant at times to base analysis

748

Households

on individual consumption, but at other times—or,
perhaps more accurately, for other questions—the
household is the appropriate analytical unit. Yet the
idea of household consumption itself contains some
problematic elements, in particular around the unity
that the concept implies. As with analyses about how
“the family’ operates in contemporary society, so a
focus on “the household” seems to imply a clearly
demarcated and well-bounded household configuration among whose members there is agreement and a
common purpose. Just as family scholars now rightly
emphasize family diversity rather than an assumed
uniformity, so too in issues of consumption, it would
be inappropriate to assume that households necessarily operate as a single, unified entity. Family members experience the same “family” in different ways,
depending in part on their structural location within
the family. So, too, household members experience
the same household in different ways, again in part
depending on their position within the household.
In this, position within the household is clearly
influenced by factors like age and generational status, but also reflects the relative power and authority
of the different actors. Whether or not there is within
a particular household someone who can be designated as “head of household,” differential control of
resources will inevitably reflect both the dynamics of
the household group and the external social and economic positions of those within it. So, too, the relationships that exist between the household members
in terms of commitment and patterns of involvement
will also influence the degree to which the household
effectively acts as a social entity in consumption matters. Households comprising a committed couple and
their dependent children will, in these regards, clearly
act differently compared to households consisting of
two recently cohabiting adults or households comprising unrelated young adults.
Within family sociology, David Morgan introduced the idea of “family practices.” His intention
was to convey the importance of thinking about
families as constituted through the ordinary, and
sometimes extraordinary, activities that compose
these relationships. Rather than perceiving the family as a given structural formation, he wanted to
emphasize the agency through which family members create family organization. Rather similarly, it is
useful to think of households as constituted through
their household practices and, in the current context, their household consumption practices. The

advantages of this perspective are twofold. First, it
captures the agency of the different household members in the creation of household consumption patterns. Second, as a consequence of this, it highlights
the diversity there is in the ways households manage consumption, both across different households
and over time. It makes it more apparent that consumption within households is sometimes collective,
sometimes individual, and sometimes a combination
of the two.
Key questions concern the following: the patterns
of consumption in different households, who within
the household makes decisions about different types
of consumption, the relationship between individual and collective consumption, and who benefits in
what ways from the consumption decisions made.
These concerns mirror those of much research into
marital inequalities. Famously, the decision-making
approach to marital power pioneered by Robert
Blood and Donald Wolfe is in significant measure
built on decisions related to consumption. So, too,
studies of money management within marriages
and other committed relationships are principally
concerned with consumption differences and who
controls which expenditures. Studies of moneymanagement strategies in family households where
there are comparatively few resources have highlighted the importance of distinguishing between
control and responsibility. Typically, in these circumstances, women as wives and mothers are
given responsibility for managing routine household consumption but have to do so with insufficient resources to satisfy all needs. Though they
seem powerful in holding responsibility, in reality
the way that most manage is through prioritizing
expenditure on other household members.
These issues are of less consequence in other forms
of household—for example, single-person households or households of nonfamily others—where
expenditure is not pooled in the same ways. With
these latter, of course, there can still be conflicts over
consumption issues, but they are generally framed
differently. For example, in student households, tensions can emerge over setting levels of contribution
to shared “pots” of money for household services
or over the doing—or, perhaps more accurately, the
nondoing—of household shopping. In addition to
being interesting in their own right, examining consumption practices, including those that generate disagreement, in these and other nonfamily households

Households

can help illuminate household consumption dynamics in other household types.

The Home and Consumption
As noted, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish
household from family consumption; indeed, at
times, doing so is unhelpful. Similarly, discussions
of household consumption inevitably overlap with
consideration of the home as the symbolic and
material location of the household. Higher living standards over the twentieth century resulted
in significant improvements in housing standards
in Western societies, as well as changes in tenure
patterns. The significance of the home was transformed: as well as being the site of domesticity, it
became an arena symbolizing individual and familial identity. With technological innovations and the
development of new products, expenditure on the
home itself, as distinct from the costs of daily living, became increasingly significant within domestic
economies.
Not only were larger amounts of money spent
on mortgages and rents, but creating an appropriate
style and ambience in the home also came to be seen
as a major lifestyle project. Reflected in the growth
of, for example, furniture outlets, do-it-yourself
stores, and magazines/TV programs devoted to
home design, home refurbishment became of
increasing importance both culturally and economically. These shifts in expenditure on the home as a
material artifact clearly impact household consumption practices in ways that are different to routine
domestic expenditure. For instance, how issues of
style and fashion operate in this sphere, how people
come to decide what to spend and what to prioritize,
how consumption is related to capital accumulation
in the home, and the like, are issues of some consequence for understanding patterns of household
consumption.
The ability of people to spend resources on the
home is clearly related to their material circumstances. Those who are better off have always used
modes of conspicuous consumption on their homes
to indicate their superior status. The difference now is
twofold. First, there is greater wealth among Western
populations, so more people have resources available
to fashion their domestic environments. And second,
the market has responded to this by mass-producing
far more home-oriented artifacts and technologies

749

than previously. Yet there remain many whose homes
are inadequate by contemporary standards and who
lack the resources required for these forms of home
consumption. So while the place of the home in social
and cultural life has been altering, in part as a result
of household consumption decisions and practices,
people’s economic location clearly patterns the extent
to which they are able to engage in home consumption of this sort. Moreover, economic location is not
solely about class position, important though this is.
It also incorporates other structural inequalities, particularly those of gender, age, and ethnicity.

Future Research
There are many areas of household consumption
that require further research. To begin with, it is
important that researchers continue to recognize that
in some contexts, consumption is as much collective
as it is individual. Within this, families and households both represent important “collectivities.”
Researching the development of different consumption practices and regimes in families and households
remains an important task, especially across time.
Moreover, it needs recognizing that while households and families frequently overlap, analytically,
they are distinct. Further research would be particularly welcome on households that do not consider
themselves to be families. The growth of new forms
of partnership, including cohabitation, in which
family connection is less established, are especially
pertinent here, as are other forms of household that
involve friendship rather than kinship. The ways in
which consumption decisions are collectively organized in such increasingly common “nonstandard”
households offer many new and interesting avenues
for future research.
Graham Allan
See also Do-It-Yourself; Domestic Division of Labor;
Families; Household Budgets; Life Course; Romantic
Love; Sex; Single-Person Households

Further Readings
Allan, Graham, and Graham Crow. Families, Households
and Society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2001.
Blood, Robert, and Donald Wolfe. Husbands and Wives:
The Dynamics of Married Living. New York: Free Press,
1960.

750

Hyperreality

Darling, Elizabeth, and Lesley Whitworth, eds. Women and
the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1940.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
Heath, Sue, and Elizabeth Cleaver. Young, Free and Single:
Twenty-Somethings and Household Change.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Hogg, Margaret, Carolyn Folkman Curasi, and Pauline
Maclaran. “The (Re-)Configuration of Production and
Consumption in Empty Nest Households/Families.”
Consumption Markets & Culture 7 (2004): 239–259.
Morgan, David. Family Connections. Cambridge: Polity,
1996.
Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea.
New York: Viking, 1986.
Saunders, Peter. A Nation of Home Owners. London:
Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Stacey, Judith. Brave New Families. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998.
Vogler, Carolyn. “Cohabiting Couples: Rethinking Money
in the Household at the Beginning of the Twenty First
Century.” Sociological Review, 53 (2005): 1–29.

HYPERREALITY
Hyperreality literally means “more (real) than real.”
According to Jean Baudrillard, with whom the term
is particularly associated, “The hyperreal . . . effaces
the contradiction of the real and the imaginary”
(1993, 72). Unsurprisingly, the term has gained currency wherever reality has been remade to the measure of the imaginary: one thinks of theme parks like
Disneyland, the themed environments of shopping
malls, and the “virtual worlds” conjured up by digital technologies. The term hyperrealism was, however, initially coined in the 1960s, as the European
term for superrealism or photorealism (Battcock
1975)—the U.S. art movement that engaged in generating “hyperrealistic” reproductions of the real
(such as paintings of incredible, “photographic”
accuracy and detail). The way in which the term
is most frequently used today is aptly illustrated
by the (now defunct) “Palace of Living Arts” in
Los Angeles, visited by Umberto Eco on one of his
Travels in Hyperreality. There, waxwork displays
reproduced “in three dimensions, life-size and, obviously, in full color, the great masterpieces of painting
of all time” (Eco 1987, 18). The “living” art was
advertised as better than the originals. Alongside
the waxwork tableaux were reproductions of

the old masters they represented—in vivid colors,
unblemished by the ravages of time, as fresh as the
day the completed canvas was first lifted off the
easel. “The Palace’s philosophy is not, ‘We are giving
you the reproduction so that you will want the original,’ but rather, ‘We are giving you the reproduction
so you will no longer feel any need for the original’”
(19). Nonetheless, while the idea that the “copy”
is better than the “original”—or the “image” more
important than the “reality” (Boorstin 1961)—is
frequently implied whenever the term hyperreality
is invoked, the concept has more complex implications than this casual usage implies. It is telling
that Baudrillard cites Disneyland explicitly not as
a geographically delimited example of a hyperreal
environment—an enclosed space where the imaginary becomes more real than reality—but as a means
of “deterrence,” intended to put us off the scent of
an altogether more disturbing hypothesis: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make
us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los
Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no
longer real, but belong to the hyperreal” (1994, 12).
Disneyland is presented as “fake” in a vain attempt
to resuscitate the real: “It is no longer a question
of a false representation of reality (ideology) but
of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real,
and thus of saving the reality principle” (12–13).
It has been a commonplace of Western thought
to distinguish between the real (what really is the
case, which belongs to the order of being) and the
imaginary (what merely seems to be the case, which
belongs to the order of appearances). The former
is solid and reliable, the latter, flighty and untrustworthy. The notion of the hyperreal threatens to
undo several centuries of dedicated effort to keep the
two separate and clearly distinguishable—not least
where representations (or copies) could be confused
with the real (or the original). Baudrillard’s suggestion that Disneyland functions to convince us that
all is well on this score, when in fact all is far from
well, launches a challenge to a way of thinking to
which we have become thoroughly accustomed.
Little wonder, therefore, that attempts to think
through the concept of hyperreality can all too easily
slip back into a way of thinking that the concept
actually disqualifies. Baudrillard’s point is not that
the image has become more important than the real
but that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of
a distinction between the two—that this distinction

Hyperreality

can no longer be maintained, and that it is no longer
upheld in our culture (even if our culture still insists
on using now-redundant terms, in a desperate bid
to disguise the fact that the distinction is no longer
operative).
If the distinction between reality and representation has been effaced, one cannot, for example, maintain that erstwhile reality is becoming more and more
image-like and less and less real—the basis of innumerable critiques of consumer culture as image saturated and insubstantial—without equally upholding
that erstwhile images are becoming more and more
real, that there is an excess as much as a lack of reality. But this formulation is already inadequate in that
it leaves the initial distinction between reality and
its representation intact, surreptitiously smuggling it
in again by the back door. If hyperreality implies a
world where there are no longer any grounds for taking the so-called “representation” as inferior to, or
derivative of, the thing it (purportedly) re-presents,
the appropriate conceptual lexicon now hinges on
the terminology of simulacra and simulation. The
sense of simulation proper to hyperreality does not,
however, imply a degree of dissimulation, falsity, or
deception, which would be to obliquely construe the
presence of a solid and durable reality elsewhere. On
the contrary, the erstwhile representation becomes
“its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 1994, 6)—a
“copy” for which there is no “original,” where the
supposed “copy” is an “original” in its own right. In
such a world,
all things stand ultimately for nothing but
themselves—there is no division between things that
mean and things that are meant. More exactly, each
such division is but momentary, protean, and ultimately reversible. It is just by linguistic inertia that
we still talk of signifiers, bereaved of signifieds, as
signifiers; of signs which stand but for themselves, as
“appearances.” (Bauman 1993, 36)

The term appearance spontaneously implies its
distinction from an underlying reality (from what
actually is the case, despite appearances to the
contrary). By their very nature, appearances are
deceptive—prompting efforts to dig deeper and
ascertain what is really the case. Our ingrained
habit of thinking in such terms is increasingly misleading. The hyperreal is powerful precisely because
it sidesteps the kind of questions appropriate to
situations where the distinction between reality and

751

appearance holds good. Its power “derives from its
immunity to the sort of interrogation which one
would address to an appearance” (Bauman 1993,
36). Having effaced the distinction between reality and appearance, the hyperreal automatically
disqualifies the kind of objections that reassert
the distinction by insisting on speaking in terms
of appearances, images, and representations as if
these were mere shadows of the real, somehow less
real than anything else. The trajectory of modernity
has progressively ensured that they are not. The
serial production methods set in sway by industrial
capitalism were responsible for generating an initial
situation where the real no longer equated to the
original, where the copy no longer carried the pejorative implications of the counterfeit (technological
means of reproduction such as the photocopier, for
example, produce facsimiles, not fakes). This paves
the way for a further transition toward a situation
in which the opposition between the real and its
derivative copy breaks down entirely, to the extent
that the “very definition of the real [becomes] that
of which it is possible to provide an equivalent
reproduction” (Baudrillard 1993, 73). For example,
the real vanishes into the code of the word processor: none of the three copies of the document I print
out can be identified as the original; each is a pure
simulacrum, implying “a real without origin or
reality” (Baudrillard 1994, 1).
Precisely this property saturates consumer culture.
Consider, for example, a product like margarine,
which was first devised as a utilitarian substitute for
butter—buerre économique. Not only was margarine not the first counterfeit butter—the long history
of trading standards reveals considerable evidence
of counterfeiting and adulteration—but it was not,
in fact, a counterfeit at all. Despite its resemblance
to butter, margarine is its own substance. Its initial
marketing, as Roland Barthes (1973) famously demonstrated, attempted to establish this in a rhetorical form of inoculation. The consumer’s reticence
to consume margarine instead of butter formed the
basis of early advertising campaigns proclaiming it
to be better than butter: “Margarine’s resemblance
to butter entails that its simulacral features themselves become the foundation of its advantages, and
of its delights in the mouths of sceptics” (Genosko
2008, 83). Margarine is not, then, simply a degraded
copy of butter. Meanwhile, butter is itself an industrialized simulation of the degraded motifs of nature

752

Hyperreality

and tradition (it is colored golden yellow with added
dyes, for instance). Both butter and margarine
are realized in an ever-shifting play of signs. Held
together in simulation, the transmogrification of one
transforms the substance of the other: a flavorless
margarine makes for a tastier butter, a vitaminenriched margarine makes for a more unhealthy
butter, and so on. Butter and margarine are not held
together by a force of nature—still less by the force
of semblance—but by contingent encounter. This
is the all-pervasive pattern of a hyperreal culture.
The “real” of the simulacrum is reproduction, not
resemblance.
While the radical implications of the hypothesis
of hyperreality are all too readily reappropriated into
ways of thinking that disarm and domesticate its
force—particularly in uses of the term that confine
its consequences to themed megamalls or the virtual
reality of cyberspace, insistent on maintaining the
contrast between the real and the imaginary—its
force cannot be so easily constrained. In significant
measure, it is in relation to consumerism that the
implosion of the distinction between appearance and
reality assumes its paradigmatic role (Clarke 2003).
David B. Clarke

See also Authenticity; Counterfeited Goods; Disney;
Postmodernism; Reality TV; Semiotics; Simulacrum;
Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1973.
Battcock, Gregory, ed. Super Realism: A Critical
Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.
Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London:
Sage, 1993.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Sweet Scent of Decomposition.”
In Forget Baudrillard? edited by Chris Rojek and Bryan
S. Turner, 22–46. London: Routledge, 1993.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events
in America. New York: Vintage, 1961.
Clarke, David B. The Consumer Society and the
Postmodern City. London: Routledge, 2003.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. London: Picador, 1987.
Genosko, Gary. “Better Than Butter: Margarine and
Simulation.” In Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, edited
by David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin,
and Richard G. Smith, 83–90. London: Routledge, 2008.

I
IDENTITY

Theories and Approaches
Most recent engagements with theorizing identity
have been seen as antiessentialist, that is, as challenging the notion of a fixed, unitary subject and a single
self or identity. Identities are seen as always changing
and thus both indicative of contemporary anxieties
and also offering possibilities of transformation in a
world characterized by the speed of change and new
configurations of the self. This stress on change has
also meant that identities are seen as fragmented and
fluid and even in crisis. Many critiques, especially
those of cultural studies, picked up on the speed of
change and the mobility and contingency of identifications in the contemporary world and the difficulties in modern life of knowing “who we are.”
However, the transformations that result from the
significant movement of people and knowledge in
the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can
be also be understood as creating contexts in which
people seek stability and a sense of belonging. Stuart
Hall’s work recognized some of the dilemmas posed
by the concept of identity in his productive reconfiguration of the ideas of routes, rather than roots, and
by positing the advantages of an identity that engages
with becoming rather than seeking myths of origin. His arguments have stressed the possibilities of
becoming and a particularly creative version of what
is largely a social constructionist approach. Identity
politics associated with what were called new social
movements, which focused on issues of race and

Identity matters in all sorts of ways in the academy
and in everyday life. The concept has been used in a
variety of fields of study, especially from the 1970s
in relation to politics, through what was called identity politics and as a focus for understanding some of
the national and ethnical conflict in the global arena,
which characterized the latter part of the twentieth
century. Identity brings together personal investment and the social worlds in which those investments are made and which shape who we are. The
concept of identity has particular resonance within
the field of the study of consumption. The relationship between production and consumption has been
transformed and traditional certainties subverted
through new processes and practices, including a
massive reconfiguration of work. Consumption is
now seen as extending not only to a wide range of
goods and services but also to an ever-expanding
range of identities. Those who promote products are
only too aware of the need to link their product to a
desirable and attractive lifestyle and to the idea that
change is always possible. The idea of consuming
identities suggests that growing numbers of people
might shape who they are through what they consume. Such ideas fit in well with contemporary cultural stress on individual choice and the importance
of consumption rather than production in the making and remaking of identities.

753

754

Identity

ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and environmental matters, challenged the hegemony of social
class as the key determinant of identity within new
explanatory frameworks. Debates at the level of the
individual and in the wider international arena have
been framed by the idea of identity crises in many
different areas of experience from personal concerns
with intimacy, sexuality, gender, and embodiment to
identifications with nation and place and ethnic affiliations within global as well as local politics. A major
strength of the concept of identity is the possibilities
it offers for exploring the relationship between personal, inner and social, outer worlds. Identity always
incorporates being situated in the social world where
each person plays a socially recognized part or
role, as posited by Erving Goffman, or sees the self
through the eyes of others, in what George Herbert
Mead in 1934 called the “I” and the “me.”
Identity has a long history in the academy, although
the explosion of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interest of the twentieth century can be seen
to be most powerfully linked to ideas of social change
and fragmentation, including the developments of
globalization in relation to self-identity, as suggested
by Anthony Giddens, and the idea of identity crisis as
a social, cultural phenomenon as argued by Kobena
Mercer or as inner conflict in Erik Erikson’s work on
the psychosocial stages of development. Questions of
identity have become central to the human and social
sciences. Just as what had previously been the remit
of psychology in relation to subjectivity, the self, and
inner worlds, so social psychology and sociology in
interrogating the relationship between individuals
and the wider society became a means of explaining
social uncertainties and dislocation and a key component of culture as argued by Ernesto Laclau. This
interest in identity as a focus for theories of social
change in the global arena has developed along with
the shift, especially in Western cultures, to a focus on
the self and projects for understanding and improving the self or, more critically, through what Nikolas
Rose has called psy-discourses of self-obsessed
Western cultures. Of the two strands, however—the
first emphasizing the primacy of inner worlds and
the second placing the wider arena and social worlds
at the center of the analysis of the driving forces in
identity formation—both see individual selves constituted through inner worlds and change on the global
arena and social worlds that highlight the two main
themes in the development of thinking about identity.

Identity always involves the interface and interconnections between inner and outer social worlds,
which are enmeshed in often complicated ways. Each
has capacities to affect the other. Although the focus
of each strand is different, there are shared concerns
with exploring how identities are made and remade
and in challenging essentialist versions of the self as
fixed. The first strand includes psychological, psychoanalytic, and psychodynamic approaches that have
focused more on identity formation and the second,
the sociological, includes approaches that seek to
explain the emergence of different identity positions
historically, such as the rational individual in relation
to social institutions and regulatory practices in the
wider social, political, and economic world.
The language of identity has shifted across time,
and there are still distinctions made between self,
subject, and identity positions although there are also
blurred boundaries, and “self” is in common currency. Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes between self,
identity, and agency over time but argues that such
differences have limited application in contemporary
society. However, along with Anthony Giddens, he
claims that the autonomy of the self as agent concerns producing accounts of oneself. Giddens has
endeavored to combine the personal and the social
in a theoretical approach that combines social regulatory forces with the possibilities of agency by bringing
together structure and agency in the idea of structuration. Subjectivity has at some points been more
closely linked to psychoanalytic approaches and
those which stress irrational as well as rational forces
in play. Subjectivity includes a sense of self, which
is constituted through conscious and unconscious
thoughts and sensations, but subjects are subjected to
social forces and flows and have to take up a position
within the social worlds in which they are situated
and which make up the multiple identities of each
person, according to Kath Woodward (1997).
The interconnections between inner and outer
worlds have been a feature of psychological and psychodynamic approaches to identity, in many cases
drawing on Freudian theories of identification as the
process through which a child comes to take in the
outside world of persons and objects. The psyche is
thus made up of an ego, superego, and unconscious,
which are in constant tension. Psychoanalytic thinking has been very influential within cultural studies’
approaches (Woodward 1997) and what has been
called the “subject of language approach,” which

Identity

drew on Althusserian, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Redman in du Gay, Evans, and
Redman 2005). What was distinctive about this
approach was the idea that identities are made up in
and through difference and, as a result, are dependent
on an outside that both denies them and provides the
conditions of their possibility; subjects are thus hailed
or interpellated unconsciously recognizing themselves
as named by forces outside themselves. Identities so
reproduced might appear to be determined by language and symbolic systems. This approach suggests
not only that identities work but also that subjects
have very little control over their constitutions.
Symbolic systems seem more important than any
inner conflict or contradiction and endeavor to present a broad-based explanatory framework, which
can be applied to all aspects of identity formation and
which prioritize representational systems. The stress
on language and cultural representations, however,
still has much to offer in a media-saturated world of
semiotic, symbolic systems.
The tendency of such Lacanian-influenced theories to generalize may account for the development of
alternative approaches that draw on object relations
thinkers and practitioners following Melanie Klein.
These approaches have stressed different aspects of
Sigmund Freud’s work and focused on the motherchild relationship in the formation of identity rather
than the Lacanian entry into the patriarchal symbolic
of language and the “law of the father.” The object
relations branch of psychoanalytic thinking offers
a different normative perspective and focuses more
on the clinical context of therapy, counseling, and
self-improvement to explore the complex processes
through which individuals recognize themselves
through inner-directed rather than outer-directed processes. Thinkers within this tradition have endeavored
to demonstrate how the social world both impacts on
the psyche and is influenced and shaped by psychic
forces and that individuals unconsciously use aspects
of the outer, social world to represent aspects of their
own internal world. Thus, “internal objects” are
allowed a relative autonomy, which can be destructive or creative so that inner life is not a simple or
mere reflection of the external world; it has its own
dynamic as Ian Craib argued.
Theories of identity have also played a key role
in sociological and philosophical theories, which
have emphasized the importance of social material
processes in the formation of identities. Such views

755

have often mapped the historical emergence of new
versions of the self and in the latter part of the twentieth century were often in dialogue with Michel
Foucault’s genealogical approach, such as in the work
of Nikolas Rose. Foucault’s approach suggested that
selves are constituted through a process of discursive,
historical construction of identities. Foucault’s subject
is reproduced through discursive regimes with historical developments creating particular figures, which
are identity positions reproduced through knowledge
and political and social systems. It is not only figures
like the “hysterical woman” or the homosexual who
are “put into discourse” through the circulation of
knowledge systems, such as psychological or psychoanalytic theories, but it is also that the very notion of
the rational individual, or the sovereign consumer,
could be seen as constituted historically through
the emergence of a set of practices and knowledge
rather than any sense of agency, either collective or
individual. Psychoanalysis is one such discursive
regime according to Foucault whose arguments are
in many ways antithetical to those of psychoanalysis,
although there have been attempts at rapprochement,
notably in the work of Judith Butler, who endeavored
to bring together the strongly social constructionist
ideas of Foucault and psychoanalytic theories of the
unconscious forces that shape the self and the power
of psychic investment. Some of the challenges of
object relations theories, although not always directly
engaging with Foucault, have stressed the absence of
any sense of agency in Foucault’s notion of subjectification, in spite of his attempts to relocate the self as
active in his technologies of the self.

Identity and Consumption
The concept of identity has played an important
part in the field of consumption and consumption studies, especially in the shift in emphasis
from production to consumption in social and
economic theoretical critiques. To grasp what is
happening when consumers purchase goods and
services, an understanding of both identity formation and the range of identities available and how
they might be linked to products is vital, as demonstrated by Roberta Sassatelli in her work on
consumer culture. Identity politics opened new
avenues of creativity and routes for the promotion of diverse identifications. Identity has particular resonance in the field of consumption, where

756

Identity

theories of identity offer understanding of the interrelationship between production and consumption and
the specific processes that are implicated in the practices of consumption. Consumption, especially in late
modernity, when it is characterized by aspirations
and desires as well as need, invokes the importance
of how people see themselves and are seen by others
and suggests that the question of who am I? could
be answered by buying into identities. Consumption
brings together the two major dimensions of identity,
as a concept that links inner and outer worlds and
presents the interface between the personal and the
social, the individual and the society. The idea of consuming identity has different inflections, but identity
involves the creation, enactment performance, and
understanding of “who you are” in everyday life, in
the context of the globalizing forces that also become
routine and individualized. Identity bridges the gap
between the personal and the social, the local and the
global and speaks to material practices, which open
up and constrain the possibilities for difference, so
that people may be both consumed by and consume
identities in multiple and contested ways, which are
not simply a matter of rational choice, nor are they
entirely determined.
Discussion of consuming identities has also
acknowledged the embodiment that is also constitutive of identity, for example, as emphasized in the
work of Parsi Falk. In what Alexandra Howson has
called the corporeal turn, there has been increasing
recognition of Pierre Bourdieu’s focus on body practices, for example, through the investment of physical
capital in particular identities and his claim that we are
our bodies and that self and body, as mind and body,
are inextricably enmeshed. Embodiment is central to
Bourdieu’s account of taste and the ways in which
consumption shapes and is shaped by embodied
identities. Much recent work has drawn on phenomenological accounts of embodiment to demonstrate
the complex ways in which bodies are part of making
sense of the self and of shaping identity and offer possibilities as well as presenting a limit to our projects.

Addressing Imbalances
Each of these strands of thinking about identity,
although each has a different focus, can be seen
as challenging a unitary view of the self, which
is anyway grounded in either an embodied fixity
or the unitary, bounded, rational individual of the
Enlightenment as has been explored in Hall’s work

on cultural identities. Attempts at reconciling different theoretical positions have largely been involved
in addressing imbalances between the two elements
of the identity equation as well as exploring the possibilities of agency in what seems often to be a field
dominated by constraints and social forces. Identity,
however, is always attentive to the interrelationship
between inside and outside, the self and the social,
wherever particular emphasis lies.
Approaches that stress the social or discursive
construction of identity might appear guilty of what
was called oversocialization, which the incorporation of psychoanalytic theories has sought to redress.
However, identity always has to have a self or a subject, who is interpellated or subjectified, which means
that the concept retains its relevance in spite of some
imbalance. The usefulness of the concept of identity has been challenged in different ways in recent
times. For example, the links between identity and
identity politics in the late-twentieth century is seen to
imply fixity rather than the dynamism and motor for
change that it needed. Paul Gilroy argues that identification is more useful. Slavoj Žižek suggests that
identity cannot adequately explain or make possible
resistance to the global, diffused, and homogenized
hegemony of global consumers, which may be sacrificed to literal consumption, at least for those who
can afford it, which subverts the utility of identity
in relation to political and social equality, especially
for the growing numbers of impoverished people
across the globe. Identity, however, retains enormous
importance through its interdisciplinary applications
and its usefulness in bringing together inner and outer
worlds and providing a genuine theoretical tool for
the reconciliation of the personal and the political and
the individual and the social, which has considerable
usefulness in the field of consumption, especially as
a space that offers possibilities for the making and
remaking of identities.
Kath Woodward
See also Belonging; Collective Identity; Consumer
(Freedom of) Choice; Cultural Studies; Gender;
Individualization; Interpellation; Postmodernism;
Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings
Du Gay, Paul, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman. Identity: A
Reader. London: Sage, 2005.
Eliot, Anthony. Concepts of the Self. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Polity, 2007.

Imaginative Hedonism
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Hall, S. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan
Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1990.
Howson, Alexandra. Embodying Gender. London: Sage,
2005.
Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.
Woodward, Kath. “Concepts of Identity and Difference.”
In Identity and Difference, edited by Kath Woodward,
7–62. London: Sage, 1997.
Woodward, Kath. Questioning Identity. London:
Routledge, 2004.
Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating
Bodies, Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave,
2009.

IMAGINATIVE HEDONISM
The concept of imaginative hedonism has been
developed by Colin Campbell (1987) to account for
the apparent insatiability of the modern consumer.
Campbell states that this insatiability cannot be
explained by a generalization of aristocratic luxury
consumption. Such luxury in “traditional hedonism”
typically is not innovative but merely quantitative
excess over need satisfaction. Having moved beyond
necessity, the traditional hedonist tries to re-create
the pleasure of need satisfaction by intensifying and
refining the sensual stimuli involved. But in relying
on sensations, such hedonism still remains bound
by the absolute limits to possible physical arousal.
Further, overstimulation does not only fail to infinitely increase pleasure, but also it often achieves the
opposite: nausea. Traditional luxury consumption
normally has the function of asserting social rank
(cf. conspicuous consumption), and this performance
character, too, militates against the possibility of
achieving genuine pleasure.
To allow insatiability, Campbell argues, the link
to sensual stimuli must be severed and pleasure seeking has to shift to emotions instead. Pleasure then no
longer is a property of stimulating external objects
but of internal “spiritual” processes. Here, pleasure

757

is gained by conjuring up emotional states through
a skilled mastery of the imagination, by indulging in
daydreams. While these daydreams are facilitated by
the use of consumer goods, the pleasure is not in the
immediate sensual effect of those goods on the consumer but in the consumer’s self-illusionary engagement with them. As this involves a considerable degree
of self-control, Campbell also speaks of “autonomous” hedonism. The imaginative hedonist enjoys
involvement in fictional worlds, shares the adventures
of invented characters he or she can identify with, or
dreams him- or herself into a semifictional identity
while, for example, donning a certain style of dress,
driving a particular car, and being on holiday or in a
theme park. This self-illusion does not lead to multiple
personalities or a loss of reality in a world of simulacra
as it is performed in a cynical mode: the illusions are
“felt to be true”—but “known to be false.” Crucial
for this feeling of truth is that the dreamed-up parallel realities are still realistic in that they are internally
consistent worlds—not entirely arbitrary fantasies.
The imaginative hedonist not only uses consumer
goods as a launch pad or aide for further daydreams
but also is able to anticipate the pleasure to be had
from objects not yet acquired. Thus, not only the
desired object is a source of enjoyment, but desire
itself also becomes an object of gratification. This
leads into a dynamics of longing in which the acquisition of the desired object nearly always must disappoint as daydreams will be more perfect than any
reality they anticipate. This frustration then triggers
new longings, which fuels demand for novel products
and thereby accounts for fashion as “most central of
all institutions of modern consumerism” (Campbell
1987, 93).
To explain the emergence and persistence of modern autonomous imaginative hedonism, Campbell
employs an argumentative strategy modeled after
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. As the economic
system does not “produce” mentalities but can only
favor some already existing ones over others, the
“spirit of modern consumerism” like the “spirit of
capitalism” must have sprung from other sources.
Just as Weber singles out Calvinism as source of
the spirit of capitalist producers and administrators, so Campbell identifies Romanticism as the
source of the spirit of consumerism. This genealogy has been criticized as it does not account for
the continued existence of consumerism after the
demise of the Romantic movement (Holbrook and
Hirschman 1993). Campbell holds against this that

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Imaginative Hedonism

once the consumerist mentality has emerged, like the
Protestant ethic of production, the romantic ethic
of consumption no longer needs the originating
spiritual movement as it is sustained by its fit to the
current social system. Campbell locates the site of
reproduction in the gendered personality attributions
in the middle-class nuclear family that reproduce a
“purito-romantic personality system” in which the
father identification encourages a rationalistic work
ethic and the mother identification encourages emotionality, creativity, and imagination.
In recourse on Georg Simmel, one could also argue
that such an institutionalized support is to be found
in what could be termed structural romanticism of
money. Money mediation encourages romantic
imagination by creating distance between the subject and the desired object and thus establishing a
space for longing. It also brings the entirety of reality
(existing and possible) within reach of the moneyowning subject, allowing for realistic daydreams
about desired objects. Finally, since money represents
all possibilities, every concrete purchasing decision
constitutes a rejection of other possibilities while they
are still symbolically represented as such. It thus contributes to the frustration of realized desires.
Sharon Boden and Simon J. Williams point out
that the concept of imaginative hedonism is limited in
scope. It does not address those areas of consumption
that are driven by corporeal emotional stimulation,
addictive attachments, and social pressures. Daniel
Miller also insists that everyday shopping behaviors
are more driven by “ordinary” love and care than
by romantic pleasure seeking. Imaginative hedonism
clearly does not cover the entirety of the contemporary consumer experience—and Campbell (2003)
makes it clear it is not intended to. It is designed to
highlight that part of the modern consumer mentality that is new and can be seen as the force behind
the expansive drive of consumerism. While there are
many relatively “unimaginative” consumer goods to
be had (albeit the fact that even washing powders
and potatoes are advertised in contexts of dream
worlds), there are product groups that are primarily
directed at imaginative hedonism.
A pioneering case is books, especially novels,
where the enjoyment rests entirely on the consumers’ ability to imagine themselves as witness or even
protagonist in the fictive world created. This is still
a strong element in consumer culture, with novels
not only offering access to parallel worlds but also,
from the ponds of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia

to the Riemann cuts in Phillip Pullmann’s His Dark
Materials trilogy, making parallel worlds a subject
matter in its own right. Popular novels to this day
encourage identification without asking for serious
commitment. They also operate on the hypothetical
realism of daydreams rather than mere fantasy even
where, as in the case of Harry Potter, they dive into
an explicitly “magic” world. Cinema and television
are developments of this field, creating more realistic
illusions and demanding higher skills in decontrol
and recontrol of emotions. Virtual worlds from their
beginnings in handbook- and map-based role games
to computer games and the Internet-based adoption
of “imaginary forms of selfhood” (Streeter 2003)
radicalize this form of romantic pleasure seeking
in parallel worlds by making the consumer player
a coauthor of the plot. Other commodities may be
less fully romanticized, but most combine functional
elements responding to needs, emotional attachment, and signification of belonging and standing,
with aspects of imaginative hedonism. For example,
food—for Campbell the ideal object for traditional
hedonism and still laden with necessity, sensual
attachment, and status (e.g., Lupton 1996)—has
clearly acquired an imaginative aspect during the
Romantic period (Gigante and Morton 2003).
The concept of imaginative hedonism can also be
employed to account for the quasi-religious nature
of consumerism (Varul 2008). Thomas Luckmann
argues that the “symbolic universes” instituted by
religions refer at once to everyday life and point “to
a world that is experienced as transcending everyday
life” (1967, 43). Imaginative hedonists as daydreamers do precisely this: they conjure symbolic universes,
dream worlds that are rooted in their ordinary existence, but take them from there into a range of imagined situations, adventures, and identities. Campbell
therefore sees imaginative hedonism contributing
an “other-worldly” trait in contemporary culture.
Imaginative hedonism is transformative in that it is
widening the consuming individual’s spiritual existence, giving access if not to higher, at least to parallel
worlds. The difference from traditional religiosity of
course is that the suspension of disbelief here is willing and that the transcendent worlds conjured are at
the command of the consumer.
Matthias Zick Varul
See also Desire; Happiness; Hedonism; Needs and Wants;
Postmodernism; Protestant Ethic; Simulacrum; Tamed
Hedonism

Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions

Further Readings
Boden, Sharon, and Simon J. Williams. “Consumption and
Emotion: The Romantic Ethic Revisited.” Sociology 36,
no. 3 (2002): 493–512.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Campbell, Colin. “On Understanding Modern
Consumerism and Misunderstanding the Romantic
Ethic Thesis.” Sociology 37, no. 4 (2003): 791–797.
Gigante, Denise and Timothy Morton, eds. Cultures of
Taste—Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Holbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. The
Semiotics of Consumption. New York: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1993.
Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion. New York:
Macmillan, 1967.
Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body, and the Self. London:
Sage, 1996.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998.
Streeter, Thomas. “The Romantic Self and the Politics of
Internet Commercialization.” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5
(2003): 648–668.
Varul, Matthias Zick. “After Heroism: Religion versus
Consumerism.” Islam and Christian Muslim Relations
19, no. 2 (2008): 237–255.

IMPLICIT ATTITUDES
See Attitude Surveys; Psychology

INALIENABLE WEALTH/INALIENABLE
POSSESSIONS
Inalienable wealth, or inalienable possessions, according to Carolyn Folkman Curasi, Linda L. Price, and
Eric J. Arnould, refers to a particular category of possessions: those items that should not be given away or
sold but that are instead maintained from generation
to generation, within the tight boundaries of their
owning family, clan, or group. Objects in this special
category of possessions remain inalienably attached
to their original owner, even long after the object has
been transferred from that individual. Inalienable
possessions are maintained with the clear intention of
passing the object forward within that family or owning group for perpetuity. The key value of inalienable

759

wealth is its ability to define the identity of the group
in a historical sense, suggests Annette B. Weiner. These
items hold a power over the owning people who have
come to understand the items’ meanings and history
and thus the importance of the object to their family or group members. Family heirlooms often fit
this description, when the heirlooms are continually
passed forward through the family lineage with layers
of the object’s family history bundled with it.

History
Inalienable wealth and inalienable possessions were
first examined in studies by anthropologists focusing on the material culture of indigenous populations
or tribes. In these studies of geographically confined
and socially homogeneous societies, anthropologists
found that a few objects seemed to remain inalienably attached to their original owners and came to
represent the identities of larger social groups. Deep
meanings typically accrued in these objects through
the possession’s close association with its original
owner’s achievements, fame, ancestral history, aesthetics, and/or economic value.
The deep meanings and strong history invested in
inalienable possessions increased the cultural density
of those items and in so doing greatly increased their
value. Possessions that became especially culturally
dense circulated exceptionally slowly within a population, in comparison to objects less dense with cultural meaning. Inalienable possessions, symbolically
dense with cultural meaning, were so valued that
their owning families refused to allow these items to
circulate outside of their family or clan. The objects
that were withheld from circulation for extended
periods of time became increasingly valuable. The
resulting inalienable possessions are objects that have
been strategically held back while other less culturally dense items were exchanged instead.

Inalienable Possessions in
Contemporary Society
Contemporary middle-class North American families behave consistently with those described in previous theory on inalienable possessions and inalienable
wealth. North American research participants are
able to easily identify possessions that closely conform to those described in earlier anthropological
accounts. Consumers’ behavior surrounding family heirlooms often share the themes and behaviors

760

Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions

depicted in earlier anthropological studies examining
inalienable wealth.

Valuing and Meanings of
Inalienable Wealth
The inalienable possession’s value is substantial;
but this value lies in its strong affective component,
directly tied to its significant meaning to the family
or to the owning group. Its value is well in excess
of its monetary exchange price in the marketplace.
Inalienable possessions have a history and meanings
that are understood by those in the family or descent
group within which it is transferred, but they may
have far less meaning and thus far less value to those
outside of the group.
An inalienable possession has the ability to
define an individual or a group in a historical sense.
Inalienable possessions have the capacity to transport
the past into the present, allowing the achievements,
titles, history, accomplishments, and mythology of
past family members to be transferred to the identity
of the present generation. Stories told about inalienable possessions and passed forward through the
lineage socialize new generations of that family to the
values held by older members of the lineage, helping
to shape and perpetuate that family’s identity.
John, age 48, illustrates. He inherited his greatgreat-grandfather’s ring, brought back from
California during the gold rush. John describes the
ring as “a link to the past” and explains that the ring
symbolizes the ideal of pursuing a dream through
adversity. John’s story of the ring includes “family
history,” a mythical time, “the Gold Rush, along
with the Wild West and Indians.” The ring’s history
suggests values held by the family and passed down
within the lineage that are communicated each time
the story of the ring is retold. At the end of John’s
narrative of the history of this inalienable possession,
he summarizes: “So every time I look at the ring I
appreciate it more, because I know what he had to
go through, walking all the way to California to pursue a dream” (Curasi, Price, and Arnold 2004, 617).
Inalienable possessions allow an individual and its
family members to become more and greater than
they would be without the inalienable possession. The
family’s identity is enlarged and expanded because
they are able to take ownership of the achievements,
titles, mythologies, and histories of past family and
group members. In bundling histories with valued
items, these objects become greater than their own

materiality. These objects become a tangible scaffolding on which to attach and pass forward important
family stories.
As long as the possession and its meanings are
protected, the object provides a mechanism by which
individual mortality is transcended, ensuring the survival of a measure of the individual’s or the group’s
immortality, notes Weiner. Not only is the original
owner immortalized through the telling and retelling
of his or her life story as the inalienable object is passed
forward through the lineage, but the later generations
of later family members are also within the layers of
stories about the possession that accumulate as the
contemporary histories of new generations are added
to the meaning bundle of the inalienable possession.
With each additional layer of stories told, additional
family members also become immortalized as their
stories, too, are added and passed forward through
the lineage, bundled with the inalienable possession.
Passing inalienable wealth forward through the
lineage has important societal benefits as well as
benefits to the owning family. It is one of the ways
that societies as well as families are able to continually perpetuate themselves. Stories, passed forward
through the lineage attached to inalienable possessions, are often rich with lessons and have the ability
to socialize younger family members about the values, gender roles, and behaviors that hold sway with
older generations of that family group.

Caretakers
The boundary of ownership of these items is porous.
Although an individual may be given primary responsibility for holding and protecting the item, in actuality the inalienable possession belongs to the group
and not to a particular individual within that group.
Because inalienable possessions are deemed to be
so incredibly valuable to the owning group, a caretaker or curator is carefully selected and groomed
over time to understand the true meaning and history
of the wealth. Caretakers are trained to vividly retell
possession stories, passing forward the myths, stories, and histories bundled with the inalienable possession so that the owning group will not lose sight
of the significance of the possession or of their family lineage. Caretakers are responsible for educating
others within the group of the meanings and values
inherent in these objects. In addition, caretakers also
are responsible for protecting the inalienable wealth
from loss or harm.

Income

The Danger of Loss or Damage
Transferring the possession to a new caretaker is
inherently dangerous because at the time of transfer,
loss or damage to the possession or its loss of meaning is a far greater possibility. Such a loss could lead
to a reduction in the caretaker’s and the group’s identity and thereby their perceived distinctiveness and
status. Thus, the selection of a curator and the transfer of the inalienable possession to this new possessor
can be a precarious period of time.
Loss or damage to inalienable possessions is
believed to foreshadow the loss of this part of the
group’s identity within the current group’s generation and, for all generations to come. Being able to
maintain the inalienable possession against all of
the exigencies that may arise attests to the caretakers’ and the group’s ability to hold themselves and
their group together. Thus, owning families will go
to great lengths to prevent damage to or the loss of
these inalienable possessions.
Josie, age 83, illustrates the obligation to protect
the inalienable wealth she is entrusted with. She
describes a sword that belonged to her grandfather,
a Civil War veteran. She explains that her grandfather carried the sword at the legendary battle of
Vicksburg. As a toddler, Josie inherited the sword
because she was “his namesake and his favorite
grandchild,” and she plans to pass the sword on to
her grandson. Josie sees the sword as a proud, distinct family possession that future generations of her
family must keep. She preserves the stories of the
sword by frequently retelling them to her family, and
she hides the sword when she leaves town (Curasi,
Price, and Arnould 2004, 617).

Importance in Societies With
Ranking or Hierarchies
Inalienable wealth provides evidence of the hierarchy
within families, made visible by caretaker selections
and the associated possession transfers. Inalienable
wealth or inalienable possessions are politically
salient within societies, too, because keeping a treasured possession in the face of all of the eventualities that could cause its loss, over generations, defines
and entrenches the owning group’s distinctiveness
and achievement. Age adds value to inalienable possessions and so does the ability to hold onto these
objects for extended periods of time. Understanding
all of the ill fortunes that can happen to a family,

761

company, or to a people over an extended period
of time, the ability to hold on to these items, over
generations, and to protect them against all of the
exigencies that could happen provides the owning
group with documentation of their distinctiveness
and superiority in a particular realm. Thus, inalienable wealth has its greatest importance in societies
that maintain a system of social ranking or hierarchy because inalienable wealth allows individuals to
demonstrate their status, achievement, continuity,
prestige, and/or distinctiveness. The longtime ownership of such an object confirms the owning lineage’s
superiority and preeminence within the existing
social hierarchy.
An individual’s role in social life is fragmentary unless
attached to something of permanence. The history of
the past, equally fragmentary, is concentrated in an
object that, in its material substance, defies
destruction. Thus, keeping an object defined as
inalienable adds to the value of one’s past, making
the past a powerful resource for the present and for
the future. . . . With inalienable wealth we also find
“visual substitutes” for history, ancestors, and the
immortality of human life. (Weiner 1985, 224)

Carolyn Folkman Curasi
See also Anthropology; Collecting and Collectibles;
Dematerialization; Identity; Inheritance; Material
Culture; Memory; Positional Goods

Further Readings
Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, Linda L. Price, and Eric
J. Arnould. “How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions
Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth.” Journal of
Consumer Behavior, 31 (December 2004): 609–622.
Weiner, Annette B. “Inalienable Wealth.” American
Ethnologist 12 (1985): 210–227.
Weiner, Annette B. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of
Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992.
Weiner, Annette B. “Cultural Difference and the Density of
Objects.” American Ethnologist 21, no. 1 (1994): 391–403.

INCOME
Income “is broadly speaking that what comes in”
(Simons: The Definition of Income, 1938/1969, 64),
incorporating monetary and/or natural income. Both

762

Income

kinds are key indicators for consumption patterns
and thus for consumer culture. Monetary income
can be generated from land, produced goods and
services, and consumers’ capital, and gained from
trading profit. The following dimensions are important determinants of income: income type—gross
versus net; the entity—varying from a rather macroeconomic (countries, population groups) to a
microeconomic level (households, individuals); the
timeframe—on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual
basis or regarding individuals’ long-term income or
life cycle view.

Concepts of Income and
Their Measurement
Income is especially relevant in comparing different
entities over time in various contexts and for different purposes. Thus, many psychological, social, economic, and managerial theories have the central idea
of social comparison and use income as one of the
main indicators. Today’s concepts are mainly based
on John Maynard Keynes’s first systematic conceptualizing of income comparison in 1936, followed
by James Duesenberry’s notion on relative income
and consumption in 1949, and Richard Easterlin’s
statement in 1974 that welfare does not depend on
absolute but rather on relative income. In 1957,
Milton Friedman introduced the concept of permanent income, which is closely related to the concept
of welfare.
Income is a key determinant of individual and
household consumption patterns. For an individual,
the income is the sum of all wages, salaries, interest
rates, profits, payments, rents, transfers, and other
received earnings. A widely used concept for comparing individuals’ or households’ welfare is disposable
income that consists of earnings, self-employment
and capital income and public cash transfers, from
which income taxes and social security contributions
paid by households are deducted. Comparing households’ welfare calls for a definition of the term household itself. Here, different approaches coexist: the
household as economic unit, dwelling unit, family,
or network (Warner and Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik 2003).
Moreover, an equalization of the income is essential to account for the different household sizes and
compositions. One of the most widely used scales is
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) weighting scheme that is

perpetually adjusted from the old Oxford scale over
the modified OECD scale toward the square-root
scale. The latter one uses the net income divided by
the square roots of the number of household members as equivalence income.
On a societal level, social income is a prominent
measure to evaluate and compare countries’ welfare.
The OECD compares societal incomes, such as the
gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the
value added in a region—usually a country—by
goods and services produced by labor and property
or transaction profits. On a per capita basis, it reflects
economic welfare or well-being. Purchasing power
parities (PPP) equalize incomes and show relatively
what the same shopping basket costs in different
countries. PPPs are preferable over exchange rates.
Converting the GDP via PPP to a common currency
and considering the unequal purchasing power of
national currencies (price levels) allow for international comparison of economic sizes and welfare.

Application for Discussions on
Poverty and Inequality
Income inequality and poverty are highly prominent
issues in policy and popular debate. Several incomerelated measurements are suitable for displaying income inequality and poverty. Two important
measures of income inequality are the Lorenz curve
and the Gini-coefficient. Whereas the Lorenz curve
plots the cumulative shares of the population—from
poorest to richest—against the cumulative share of
income that they receive, the Gini-coefficient displays
the area between the line-of-equality and the Lorenz
curve. The values of the Gini-coefficient range
between 0 in case of “perfect equality” and 100 in
case of “perfect inequality.” Scandinavian countries have a Gini-coefficient of around 25 while the
United States had one of 41 in 2007 (United Nations
Development Programme 2007/2008).
To measure income poverty, there are a number of
approaches—all using disposable household income:
Some take the shopping basket approach where typical costs of required goods and services that ensure a
minimum living standard are assessed and equalized
over time. Others use relative thresholds of income,
for example, the 50 percentage or 60 percentage of
the median income. The concept of income poverty
experienced an extension by including other indicators such as the access to education, dwelling, health,

Individualization

and resources to debt. Another approach considers
consumption streams instead of income, which is justified by a closer connection to long-term income. Using
the latter approach, the difference is that households
experiencing temporary income falls are not defined as
poor. Thus, consumption data report generally lower
poverty and inequality rates than mere income estimates. The measurement of poverty has strong policy
implications, for example, how to reduce poverty or
how to equalize opportunities.
On both individual and societal levels, monetary
income is often thought of as a proxy for full income.
Besides financial aspects, full income incorporates
other nonmonetary incomes such as leisure or health.
However, the nonmonetary income is difficult to
assess. For example, involuntary leisure time due to
unemployment might be evaluated rather low whereas
voluntary leisure is estimated to be high in value, but
attempts to price nonmonetary income lead to the
same hourly value for both types of leisure. On the
societal level, the description of values and goods that
are produced within a society depends on the definition of goods and services that count as productive
and on the values ascribed to them.
Wencke Gwozdz
See also Debt; Economic Indicators; Economics;
Household Budgets; Inequalities; Keynes, John
Maynard; Leisure; Money; Poverty; Well-Being

Further Readings
Case, Karl E., Ray C. Fair, and Sharon M. Oyster,
Principles of Economics. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009.
Eurostat. Consumers in Europe. Luxembourg: Office for
Official Publications of the European Communities,
2009. ISBN 978-92-79-11362-8.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
[OECD]. What are Equivalence Scales? Paris: OECD
Social Policy Division, 2005.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
[OECD]. OECD Factbook 2009: Economic,
Environmental and Social Statistics. Paris: OECD, 2009.
Simons, Henry C. “The Definition of Income.” In Readings
in the Concept and Measurement of Income, edited by
Robert H. Parker, 63–73. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1969. Originally published in Personal
Income Taxation: The Definition of Income as a
Problem of Fiscal Policy, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1938.

763

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human
Development Report 2007/08. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Warner, Uwe, and Jürgen H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik. “How
to Measure Income.” In Advances in Cross-national
Comparison, edited by Jürgen H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik
and Christof Wolf, 307–326. New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum, 2003.

INDIVIDUALIZATION
Classical sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and
Georg Simmel recognized individualization as a feature of Western modernity together with functional
differentiation and rationalization. Drawing on their
work, individualization is defined as the social surfacing of the individual as a unique intersection of
social roles, responsibility, and functions as well as
the cultural accentuation of the individual as an independent, separated, and original being. Through the
workings of functional differentiation, each social
actor comes to occupy a fairly unique social position
in the complex web of interdependencies that makes
up the social space, while rationalization of the self
in the form of reflexive self-monitoring allows for
integrative effects. Individuality thus acquires a particular moral value: the individual human being as
an autonomous self is thus, Durkheim suggested, the
God of the apparently secular culture of modernity.
Individualization is an ambivalent phenomenon,
clarified Simmel; individuals are not simply free to
constitute themselves, they are required to do so.
According to Foucault, psychologizing becomes the
norm as to lay explanations of human behavior,
while self-control takes the place of external control
in the ordinary government of human subjectivity.
The theme of individualization has recently been
taken up again by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck
and Anthony Giddens to put forward a theory of
second or late modernity. Following the classics,
Beck considers that individual behavior has become
less bound by traditional norms and class-based collective identity and argues that one’s life is increasingly a reflexive self-programmed project. Thus, in
contrast to traditional societies where social norms
emanated from the collectivity, in modern societies,
“individuals must, in part, supply [norms] for themselves, import them into their biographies through
their own actions” (Beck and Gernsheim 2002, 2).

764

Individualization

Beck contends that although individualization came
about at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution,
this was largely confined to middle- and upper-class
males whereas in second modernity—largely coinciding with the postindustrial economy and the
postmodern culture emerging since the 1960s—individualization has extended to other social strata.
Furthermore, first modernity entailed both disembedding and re-embedding (actors were disentangled
from traditional structures such as hierarchical structures based on privilege or lineage and re-embedded
into new, fairly stable structures such as bureaucracies and family); however, second modernity works
through a general process of disembedding without
re-embedding. At the macrolevel, this entails a social
and cultural shift that happens not through the
breaking of the fundamental structures of modernity
but through their radicalization; at the microlevel,
this entails emphasis on individual choice and identity. At both levels, consumption acquires relevance.

Reflexive Individualization
Participation in the market as consumers is crucial for
the accomplishment of individual identity in the age
of what not only Beck but also Giddens and Zygmunt
Bauman have called reflexive individualization. Much
emphasis has thus been placed on purposive individual stylization of oneself through consumer choices. In
this perspective, in a situation of cultural declassification and increasing emphasis on individuality, the self
becomes a reflexive and secular project, which works
on an ever-refined level of body presentation. This
involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny,
planning, and ordering of elements and choices into a
coherent narrative of identity. If for liberalism, choice
is just freedom, for these theories, choice is somehow
compulsory: we are forced into it not so much by the
drive of the capitalist economy but by the absence of
a stable social and cultural order in a post-traditional
society. Consumer choice is not only central, but also
it is obligatory. We have “no choice, but to choose,”
writes Giddens (1991, 81). For Beck (1992, 131),
“Liberalism presupposed a coherent identity, yet identity seems to be precisely the main problem of modern existence and is itself something to be chosen”;
the self is thus “a project which is directed to us by
a pluralized world and must be pursued within that
pluralized world.” Of course, together with choice
comes self-responsibility for the chosen self, and

risk-perception changes accordingly: now risks are
in the region of anomie, linked to the incapacity to
perform convincingly a positively valued self through
one’s own choices. As Giddens observes (1991, 80),
late modernity confronts the individual with a complex diversity of choices that is “non-foundational,”
produces anxiety, and offers “little help as to which
options should be selected.” The solution to such
risk and anxiety to be found in consumer culture is,
for Bauman (1992, 200), “technical”: it solves the
problem of the durable and coherent self in the face
of incessant nonfoundational complexity by treating all problems as solvable through specific commodities. Each of them may be highly functional for
a precise task, but they still have to be arranged in
a coherent, credible whole. Lifestyle, as a reflexive
attempt at consumer coherence, can be seen as a way
in which the pluralism of post-traditional identity is
managed by individuals and organized (or exploited)
by commerce.
Giddens stresses that in the context of posttraditional societies “the cumulative choices that
combine to form a lifestyle define the nucleus of a
person’s identity”: “the very core of self-identity” is
“mobile” and “reflexive,” made of “routinized practices . . . reflexively open to change,” with consumer
choices the “small decisions a person makes every
day,” being “not only about how to act but who to
be” (1991, 81). Lifestyle orders things into a certain
unity, reducing the plurality of choice and affording
a sense of “ontological security.” Social reproduction is thus transferred from traditional culture to
the market for goods (and labor). The notion of individual wants become central to economic growth,
and standardized consumption patterns become
central to economic stability, reducing risks not only
for individuals but also for corporations. This may
bring us to conceive of the self as a commodity itself,
and indeed, Giddens seems to adumbrate a process
of self-commodification with “self-actualization
[being] packaged and distributed according to market criteria” (198).
While similar arguments have been important to
link a reflection on consumption to broader theoretical debates, they run the risk of overemphasizing
disembedding effects as well as reflexivity, either in
a triumphant or in a worried voice, as paramount
characterizations of consumption and the consumer.
They also tend to stress hegemonic grand narratives
of consumer culture and identity rather than situate

Individualization

ordinary and yet meaningful practices of consumption. Certainly, identity, consumption, choice, and
projecting are strongly related in contemporary culture. Yet we should be wary of considering consumption as a purely reflexive activity as it may appear
in theories of reflexive individualization. Indeed, in
many domains of action mediated by commercial
relations, we are not asked to rely only on our freedom of choice to account for participation, preference, and taste. Reference to an ultimate “authentic,”
“original,” and “natural” self are becoming strong
cultural options, often related to the advice of experts
and supported by the norms of consumers’ institution, much as other cultural options such as snobbism, imitation, distinction, or fashion have come to
be looked at with some suspicion. More broadly, routines have been shown to be important in understanding ordinary consumer practices—from eating to
supermarket shopping, from going to a gym to using
a car. When we consume, precisely because we act in
practical ways, we do not reflect on everything; to the
contrary, the meanings we attribute to our practices
and the narratives with which we reflexively create
our trajectory of consumption at least partly reflect
(and thus blindly construct upon) the conditions in
which we find ourselves and act. The bounded reflexivity of consumption corresponds to the fact that
people not only express but also constitute themselves
through what they get and use. Consumption not
only expresses but also performs identity: through
making objects their own, social actors make themselves, both as consumers and as selves with specific
and different roles linked to different identity markers such as ethnicity, gender sexuality, social status,
and so on, which are loosely coupled with specific
styles of consumption. All in all, there is a tendency in
the reflexive individualization thesis to provide fairly
abstract theories of consumption and identity to the
effect of overlooking everyday consumer practices
(what people do with goods) and how they engage
with a variety of social identities not reducible to consumption. This tendency corresponds to a conflation
of the normative aspect of identity building (what
consumers are as normative social persona) and the
practical aspect of agency constitution, which is much
more embedded, varied, conflicting, and contested
and which feeds back on the consumer as a normative social identity.
Admittedly, in post-traditional societies defined
by consumer culture, the relation of the self to

765

commodities is crucial and subjectively elaborated
(via personal style, self-narration, and so forth). But
just as it is wrong to conceive of it as crystalline, allpowerful reflexivity, it would be mistaken to consider
that reflexive individualization preludes the death of
the subject, as if what the consumer-self at the end
of their projects expects is meaningless subjugation.
According to Simmel, as modernity progresses, social
actors move from a situation in which their identity
is, as it were, imposed by the things they happen to
possess (i.e., their actions are determined by bundles
of objects corresponding to a traditional and rigid
distribution of roles and resources) to a situation of
“absolute potentiality.” With the triumph of commercial culture, individuals are freed from the structural links with goods that “enslave” them: objects
have become commodities, which can be bought and
exchanged by subjects. The most immediate consequence of this is the neutralization of the power of
things to determine people’s identity. However, the
freedom that money confers paves the way to indeterminacy; it is a freedom “without any directive,
without any definite and determining content. Such
freedom favours that emptiness and instability that
allows one to give full rein to every accidental, whimsical and tempting impulse” (Simmel 1990, 402). In
this situation, we have greater negative freedom (i.e.,
freedom from external bonds, including restrictions
as linked to tradition) on what to consume and how,
but positive freedom (i.e., freedom to do things) may
be in jeopardy. In fact, negative freedom does not
afford indications for the constitution of individual
identities consistent through time; thus, people’s life
may be dominated by a nostalgic desire to confer new
meanings to things and a constant uneasiness with
respect to the rationale of their consumption.
This perspective is resolutely opposed to the idea
that commoditization, and with it the multiplications
of images and objects, accompanies the dissolution
of the subject and the collapse of available space
for appropriating, decoding, and decommoditizing
objects and images. Instead, the space available for
the subject increases, but paradoxically, it is precisely
for this reason that one can find oneself paralyzed,
incapable of giving personal value to things. In
other words, the constitution of the subject through
goods is an active but inconclusive process, a neverending endeavor that cannot provide once and for
all a stable identity. Still, it is precisely because of this
inconclusiveness that consumption is a creative and

766

Individualization

dynamic process, an ongoing emancipation from the
constraints implicit in the possession of any particular good or goods combination. Expressed in wider
sociotheoretical terms, we may say that contemporary consumer practices allow for a maximum of
individual specificity but leave on the subject the onus
of justification, the possibility that such specificity
finds its place in the social order. This may well correspond to what Erving Goffman famously branded
as “bureaucratization of the spirit”: the fragmentary
condition of the modern subject who has to manage
a highly specific set of different roles while projecting
a unitary and coherent self. Clearly, in many ways,
this is broader than consumption. The experiential
investment of the self, for example, extends into
the corporate world, whereby creative workers are
expected to be good at selling themselves: adopting
an entrepreneurial, promotional outlook as their
own, needing a projectable, flexible, creative self
who is always pursuing some sort of activity, never
to be without a project, without ideas, to be always
looking forward to and preparing for something.
On these premises, we should avoid considering
that reflexive individualization simply couples with
an unremitting process of commoditization, which
extends entirely to the self. Surely, commercial relations extend today in private domains, which were
often encoded through what was construed as opposed
to the market and deemed “affective” or “personal.”
But we have come to appreciate the extent to which
market and emotions have always been intertwined,
sustaining each other in a continuous dialectic made
of conflicts and accommodations. Furthermore, if we
focus on consumption and identity, we should appreciate that modern consumers are basically asked to be
active, to produce themselves as the source of value,
participating in the process of decommoditization
and indeed constituting themselves as agents of such
a process. Put differently, consumption is a sphere of
action regulated according to the cultural principle
of individual expression. Obviously, this is not to
say that the actor is absolutely free. To the contrary,
the subjectivity required by consumption is, in some
ways, a binding individuality. To adequately perform
their social roles as consumers, actors must thus find
a point of balance between the bored indifference of
the blasé, the pursuit of difference as an end in itself
of the eccentric, and indeed the other-directed striving
for distinction of the snob. They must express their
deepest and most peculiar subjectivities.

Individual Choice
As a normative cultural identity, the consumer
appears in striking continuity with hegemonic modern views of subjectivity. The development of capitalist society has consolidated and popularized a
particular notion of the subject: the autonomous
actor in a growing distance from things. Things are
increasingly seen as radically different from humans,
and this growing distance between the nature of
people on one side and that of objects on the other
accompanies the idea that objects can compromise
people’s humanity rather than complete it. Still, from
John Locke onward, modern identity also relies on
material objects and property for grounding. There is
thus a fundamental contradiction in the way we conceive modern identity: a paradox between idealism
and materialism, which clearly defines our relation
with consumption. Briefly, such paradox entails that
subjects perform their identity through commodities
as difference from commodities. Idealism thus stimulates materialism: in fact, in contrast to many tribal
societies where people become the objects through
which the values of a culture are fixed, in our culture,
things have been given the fundamental role of objectifying cultural categories, of tangibly fixing meanings and values.
In such circumstances, the notion of individual
choice acquires momentum as a hegemonic normative frame, which has both been sustained by expert
knowledge and deployed through a myriad of local
norms and particularities to evaluate consumer practices, their worth, moral adequacy, and normality.
Choosing things just for a try or just for fun, for
present physical enjoyment, or for sophisticated aesthetic pleasure is fine so long as it is the self who is
playing the game. As such, choice relies on specific
anthropological presuppositions: invited to think
of themselves as choosers, individuals are asked to
promote their desires and pleasures as the ultimate
source of value while keeping mastery over them. To
consume properly, people must be masters of their
will. In other terms, consumers are sovereigns of the
market in so far as they are sovereigns of themselves.
The consumer’s sovereignty is a double-edged sovereignty: hedonism, the search for pleasure, must be
tempered by various forms of detachment, which
stress the subject’s capacity to guide that search,
to dose pleasures, to avoid addiction, to be, in a
word, recognizable as someone who autonomously

Individualization

chooses. If renouncing the material world has been
one way that many cultures have used to signal a
spiritual calling (early Christian anchorites, Buddhist
monks, medieval saints refusing food, etc.), our
world, both idealist and materialist, calls on us all to
positively demonstrate our capacity to choose. In this
situation, even the fact that our desires may discover
different objects and that these objects are continuously changing may help in sustaining the game of
having a self-possessed self. The development of the
so-called post-Fordist economy may be seen in this
light: the ceaseless innovation of consumer goods, the
continuously superseded adoption of different fashions, the endless combination of styles that appears
to grant consumers a continuous liberation from the
specific objects, which they have chosen, allowing for
the renewed exercise of choice. Still, the possibility to
“exit” (i.e., choose not to choose) a particular good
remains a powerful means to guarantee that what
links us to it is indeed our choice. This obviously
doesn’t imply a return to asceticism but rather that
the emphasis must remain on the subjects and their
ability to govern the world and themselves, on the
right of the subjects to satisfy their own desires with
objects, and not on the objects and their pleasures.

Contemporary Research Directions
Seen in this light, individualization is both a process
and a perspective defining both a type of society and
a historical period with different accentuations from
early to late modernity. And it is a deeply ambivalent phenomenon whereby consumption is shaped
by an individualistic activity and increasingly appears
as a terrain of ambivalence for the development of
human identities. Individualization has a dual character, whereby it may be able to emancipate people but
binds them to specific conditions; to offer significant
capacities, which may become heavy burdens; and
to solve certain problems but create others. Invested
by individualizing forces, both cultural and social,
consumption is a disputed terrain, which not always
heralds freedom but nonetheless potentially carries
social change, creativity, and satisfaction—depending
on its organization. In (late) modernity, consumption
has largely been organized around the expression
of self, with a far too autonomous, self-contained,
self-possessed vision of the self as its moral benchmark. And yet consumption remains a symbolic and
practical affair of a deeply social nature: it can only

767

partly be reflexive as it is grounded in institutionally
enforced rituals and interactions; it can only partly
reflect the wishes of an autonomous self as this very
self constitutes itself through practices of consumption that fundamentally involve webs of social relations. In many ways, thus, contemporary researchers
confronting the individualization thesis have to bring
it back to everyday reality, to consider what are the
limits that deeply rooted and multilayered ordinary
practices, social relations, structural hierarchies, and
institutions put to reflexivity and self-projection while
offering taken-for-granted routes for choice and trust.
They have to consider how actor-consumers occupying different social positions face and translate individualization both as an opportunity and as a limit,
and they have to consider how different commodities
or commodities’ domains materialize different occasions for different forms of individualization. All in
all, scholars of consumer culture are called to problematize the individualization thesis as a grandtheoretical scheme that needs to be variously nuanced,
if not overturned, when dealing with the extremely
varied world of consumption.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Identity;
Ordinary Consumption; Postmodernism; Promotional
Culture; Self-Reflexivity; Social Class; Tamed Hedonism

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and
Structures. London: Sage, 1998. First published 1970.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Post-modernity.
London: Routledge, 1992.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
London: Sage, 1992. First published 1986.
Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Gernsheim. Individualization:
Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political
Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002.
Durkheim, Emile. “Individualism and the Intellectuals.” In
Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, edited by
R. Bellah, 43–57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. 2 vols. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1978 and 1982. First published 1936 and
1939.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
edited by H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 208–228.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983.

768

Industrial Society

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge:
Polity, 1991.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Sassatelli, Roberta. “Trust, Choice and Routine: Putting the
Consumer on Trial.” Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy 4, no. 4 (2001): 84–105.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory,
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Simmel, Georg. Philosophy of Money. 2nd ed. London:
Routledge, 1990. First published 1907.
Taylor, C. The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern
Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Warde, Alan, and Jukka Gronow, eds. Ordinary
Consumption. London: Routledge, 2001.

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
Industrial society refers to a society that has passed
through an industrial revolution, with the large-scale
organization of manufacturing and other sectors of
the economy and high levels of division of labor and
mechanization of processes having become commonplace. The products of manufacturing industry will
be present in many spheres of consumption, from
the infrastructures of energy and transport to manufactured appliances in the home and everyday life.
Often, new consumer goods are “domesticated” versions of what were earlier industrial goods—sewing
machines, telephones, computers, and so on.
The term industrial societies is part of everyday
speech. It is commonly applied to countries of North
America, to practically all European countries, to
much of the former Soviet Union, to Japan (and
often Korea), and to Australia and New Zealand.
Those cases where the label has been applied for
many decades are often viewed as advanced industrial societies and contrasted with newly industrializing countries (NICs) and emerging economies
(especially China and India). (Deindustrialisation
is used to refer to severe loss of manufacturing
to NICs and emerging economies.) Finally, other
developing countries or underdeveloped economies may be seen as awaiting their own industrial
transformations.
These categories are prevalent; however, the term
industrial society has been, and remains, contentious.

At its most basic, contemporary use of the term
refers to societies with a strong manufacturing sector,
integrated into the wider economy (i.e., not mainly
focused on overseas exports). Such societies feature a
shift in the workforce away from agriculture, where
mechanization and agribusinesses’ pursuit of economies of scale act as “push factors” and the greater
attractions of city life as a “pull factor.” They also
feature a decline in the role of craft production of
goods and a greater divorce between home and workplace. The market provides many basic goods and
services that were previously self-produced, though
domestic work still remained highly important for
meal preparation, personal care, and so on. Early
industrialization is typically connected with largescale urbanization, as many workers move to be
close to factory and related workplaces. This means
the emergence of modes of consumption based on
urban living and the dwellings, goods, and services
that go along with this. The bulk of the population
becomes urbanized, with employment shifting to
manufacturing and service industries.
The archetypal industrial revolutions in Europe
and the United States stretched over many decades,
as new factory systems and technologies were
introduced, accompanied by massive changes in
occupational structures and workplace organization
and experience. Many commentators describe two
industrial revolutions—the first beginning in Great
Britain in the late-eighteenth century and involving
the use of water power and steam engines, the organization of work in factories, the growth of machinebased manufacturing (e.g., in textile industries), the
construction and use of canals and improvement of
roads, et cetera. New techniques in metallurgy were
used to make machinery that could be employed in
many industries. From the mid-nineteenth century,
the Second Industrial Revolution involved the wider
application of coal and steam power, including in
transport—railways and steam-powered ships—
and improved communications through telegraphy.
In the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
internal combustion engine and electrical machinery made much more mobility and flexibility possible, so much so that some commentators refer to
a Third Industrial Revolution. (New information
technology is similarly seen as the core technology in
a further revolution.) The leadership of the first revolutions may have been with Great Britain, but the
approaches and techniques diffused widely round the

Industrial Society

world, with the United States being at the forefront
of many twentieth-century developments.
The factory system, with increasingly advanced
mechanization and grueling working hours, was
accompanied by new approaches to industrial discipline. One important area for discipline involved
time use—experience of time became governed more
by the routines of the workplace, less by the natural
cycles of the sun and seasons. Though the evidence is
debated, there are indications that the amount of free
time (for consumption) that workers had declined
in the course of the Industrial Revolution, though it
grew again in the twentieth century. Various efforts
to codify industrial discipline reached their apogee in
Taylor’s “scientific management,” which emerged in
the twentieth century as a set of principles about the
division of labor, standardization of tasks, application of time-and-motion methods, and so forth.
Mass consumption of new industrial products
emerged alongside the growth of mass consumption.
Mass markets for many goods that had previously
been the preserve of the rich became possible as the
price of clothing, metalware, and other goods was
brought down. New consumer goods were also
introduced, along with mass media and other consumer services. The archetypal new consumer good
was the motor car, whose production became the
central industry of many Western economies—and
whose most famous producer for mass markets
gave its name to a whole system of production. The
so-called Fordist system of mass production aimed
at using highly standardized and intensive work
organization (with some elements of Taylorism and
emphasis on assembly-line operations that could
use less skilled labor) to produce standardized (and
thereby relatively cheap) products for newly affluent mass markets. Social researchers argue about the
accuracy of characterizations of Fordism and how
much of the economy really did fit this model. But
industrial societies in the middle years of the twentieth century—when not caught up in depression and
war—were evidently entering, and being reshaped
by, an age of mass consumption.
One argument goes that de-skilled, highly routinized work in factory contexts, with less exercise of
craft skills and less scope for exercise of autonomy
in the workplace—the patterns of work supposedly
characterizing Fordism and Taylorism—means less
scope for fulfillment in working life. The same situation applies to office and other white-collar workers

769

operating in routinized service organizations. In some
accounts, this leads to more passive orientations and
more consumption of mass cultural products of a
fairly standardized and undemanding kind. In other
accounts, consumption of goods and services and leisure activities become more critical features of identity
and goals for life. Consumption here becomes a compensation for the alienating effects of industrial work,
but the forms that consumption takes may reflect this
alienation, together with other features of the new
industrial order (its inequalities, speeding up of activities, etc.). Yet other accounts take a more instrumentalist view—industrialization permits more affluence
and higher levels of consumption, and thus, leisure
pursuits become more salient in people’s lives. The
accounts vary in how critical they are of industrialism and its styles of consumption, but they have some
points of agreement. Growing emphasis on leisure and
consumption means, for many of these commentators, that decisions such as where to live, how long to
work, and of course what income to seek are related
to these desires; and this is one determinant of what
job opportunities are pursued. How far employment
prospects are limited and constraining is a matter on
which different authors disagree.
Thus, industrial society is seen as influencing
consumer culture in many ways—through the patterns of living established around urbanization and
working hours, through industrial work’s influences
on social organization (e.g., trade unionization and
identification with other workers) and individual
psychology (e.g., opportunity to gain knowledge
and creative fulfillment), through the availability of
consumer goods, and so on. The patterns of influence have varied across countries and cultures, as the
precise course of industrialization has been shaped
by geography, social structure, forms of governance,
and other features of the preindustrial society.
Consumer culture around the world reflects preindustrial heritage and not just uneven pace and extension of industrial development.
Industrial society always had its critics, sometimes
taking the form of backward-looking pastoralism,
sometimes challenging the power structures and
alienated relationships of industrial society. Many
critics of the age of mass consumption saw mechanisms of social control at work, with consumer
culture encouraging the masses to embrace things
as they are and to see ongoing change as welcome
progress. Other perspectives were more critical of the

770

Industrial Society

banality of mass culture, and various social movements sought to step outside of the mainstream.
More recent critics have stressed the environmental
costs of industrial ways of life.
The forms taken by industrialization have also
evolved over time. In the pioneering industrial
societies, industrialization extended its scale, with
new industries being created and more parts of
the economy being organized in industrial fashion (so that we now talk of agricultural, service,
even cultural industries). New technologies were
introduced—from steam power to electricity and
petroleum-driven equipment, with these latter
power systems also becoming the basis for a wide
range of consumer goods. Manufacturing production became more automated and capital intensive
(and with the development of new information technologies this also became the case for many service
industries). Lowered communication and transport
costs enabled the creation of large-scale production
for dispersed markets in the early years of industrialism, and as costs of coordination and distribution
have continued to fall, we see further international
division of labor, with the relocation of production
and the establishment of new supply chains—what is
described as globalization.
Other changes in industrial society are seen by
some commentators as meaning a decisive restructuring of the nature of this society—or even a sharp
break with it. By the late-twentieth century, the idea
of a post-Fordist and even postindustrial society
was becoming commonplace—manufacturing is
increasingly automated and offshore and employment is more centered on service industries. But
of course consumers continue to purchase and use
goods produced by manufacturers—even if more of
these manufacturers are located overseas (often in
NICs). And the advanced economies still value and
compete in high-technology manufacturing, with
one of the key tenets of the post-Fordist argument
being that mass markets have themselves changed
as affluence continued to grow. Consumer markets
have become more fragmented, the argument goes,
with people less inclined to want basic standardized
products and more keen on pursuing and expressing
their own tastes and lifestyles. As leisure has become
more central to how people define their identities, so
they are less content to be part of a homogeneous
mass. Thus, the argument goes, there is a shift away
from Fordism toward production systems based less

on mass production (though this still remains important) and more on “mass customization.”
Postindustrialism has sometimes been welcomed
as the beginning of a new era where social conflicts
based on the old conflict of proletariat-industrial
worker and capitalist-manager will be eroded in
an “end of ideology” or even an “end of history.”
Such pronouncements have appeared premature, to
say the least, in the wake of the rise of new social
movements and conflicts around ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, and the like. Early discussions of the coming industrial society, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, similarly welcomed it as ushering in
a new age of reason, a resolution of the social and
ideological conflicts associated with feudal power
structures—overcoming the vested interests and
authority of church and aristocracy. The emphasis on
reason and scientific-technical progress is also echoed
in contemporary discussions of the “knowledgebased economy.” Ironically, then, both the establishment and the transcendence of industrial society are
welcomed in some quarters as the continuation of
the project begun by the Enlightenment.
Ian Miles
See also Alienation; Capitalism; Division of Labor;
Leisure; Mass Production and Consumption;
Postindustrial Society; Service Industry; Urbanization

Further Readings
Amin, Ash, ed. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1994.
Badham, Richard J. Theories of Industrial Society. London:
Croom Helm, 1986.
Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures. 2nd ed. London:
Routledge, 1994.
Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c.
1780–c. 1880. London: Croom Helm, 1980.
Fraser, W. Hamish. The Coming of the Mass Market,
1850–1914. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Freeman, Christopher, and Francisco Lourça. As Time
Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the
Information Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technical
Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe
from 1750 to the Present. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Piore, Michael J., and Charles F. Sabel. The Second
Industrial Divide. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Inequalities
Scase, Richard, ed. Industrial Societies: Crisis and Division
in Western Capitalism and State Socialism. London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Whitley, Richard. Divergent Capitalisms: The Social
Structuring and Change of Business Systems. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.

INEQUALITIES
Inequality is a broad concept that takes many forms
but can be generally thought of as an uneven distribution of power. It is not easy to imagine inequality. What
one sees depends very much on where one is situated
and where one is looking. Consider Zanzibar; for
example, the Indian Ocean islands, which put the zan
into Tanzania. Tan came from the German colonial
name for mainland Tanzania, which was Tanganika.
Zanzibar Town, like Bristol in the United Kingdom,
was a key port for the trading of people as slaves
among other tradable entities. People were stolen from
the mainland of Africa to be sold into an international
slave trade. That the grandeur of these cities is built
on such exploitation of other people is sufficient to
make one uneasy about the magnificent buildings that
remain from that period. Slavery, the ownership of
one person by another person, is an extreme example
of inequality, an inequality of rights, of consumption
and ability to command goods where one person is
commanding and the other is the “goods.”
Another example is Sheffield, a city in England
that came to be a city because it was for a short
time the best-known place in the world for making steel. The remaining men making steel, mostly
employed in the Stocksbridge plant, have been laid
off because of the aftereffects of the economic crash
of 2008. That steel was often used to make armaments; more recently, it was used in making cars.
The city emphasizes cutlery rather than weaponry
production. However, it was not because of spoon
manufacturing that Sheffield was bombed during
World War II. Although some children in Sheffield
are taught that steel was invented in Sheffield, the
techniques of turning iron into steel were developed
in China after having first been brought from villages in Africa, where smiths first made rudimentary
steel in furnaces, now long forgotten. Usurping history is another extreme example of inequality.
Inequalities exist in access to health care, in how
law operates, and in low pay for people doing the

771

most dangerous, most boring, or hardest of jobs.
Inequalities are easily observed in the differences
in what people are able (have the power) to do, to
choose, to use and the places that they are able to
go. Yet inequality has to be distinguished from differences in identity, just as equality does not mean
sameness. When there is a relatively small difference in two people’s ability to command goods and
to choose the direction of their lives, they are not
unequal but do have different experiences.
The focus in this entry is on economic inequalities. Various people have stressed the importance of
looking at a broader range of variables; however,
some contend that many of the inequalities that exist
today can be traced back to people’s means—in subsistence societies, this may take the form of livestock
and land but in many parts of the world primarily
means money. Examples include politicians “buying” votes and voters “buying” politicians (economic
power relates to political power) and richer people
affording better health care and more nutritious food
(economic power relates to life expectancy). Thus,
those with money can often translate this money into
other forms of power and advantage. However, the
power of their money depends on what their money
is worth compared to that of others.

Inequality and Consumption
The concept of inequality is important to understanding the actions and positionings of individuals when
studying consumption. Someone who is rich is able
to command goods and services in a very different
way from someone who is poor. Income, while not
necessarily determining identity or style, affects how
much and what someone can consume. As Naomi
Klein points out, inequalities also affect the relationships between people, typically with poorer people
producing/servicing and richer people consuming,
which can herald additional inequalities in human
rights, pay, and respect. There are also inequalities
in the negative effects of consumption. For example,
people in poorer countries are said to be the first to
suffer from climatic changes brought about by others’ consumption of carbon.
It is hoped that future historians will look back to
the inequalities that we live with today in the same
way that we now reflect on past (and sometimes contemporary) forms of slavery. However, it often takes
time for it to become socially desirable rather than

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Inequalities

avant-garde to say that exploiting others for one’s
own advantage is unacceptable. It can take time to
even use those terms to think about unequal societies. Recent research, reported by Polly Toynbee and
David Walker, investigated the attitudes of workers in
the financial district of the City of London and shows
the views people have of their own wealth. Some rich
people felt that they were successful because of their
skill and hard work, based on the idea that everyone has an equal chance to choose their career and
fortune. As such, some felt that people who make
the “wrong choice” or “do not work hard” have no
right to complain about their circumstances.
A recent opinion piece from Clive James suggests
that attitudes toward wealth have changed and that
valuing money for its own sake is a thing of the past.
Throughout his discourse, James expresses confusion about what someone would actually do with
their millions or billions. He argues that people with
too much money look silly, especially when they do
ridiculous things such as star in perfume advertisements to earn money they can’t possibly need:
I hereby predict that from now on, starting today,
nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can
predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich
slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only
aim in mind. Getting rich for its own sake will look
as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when
the neck gets thicker than the head and the thighs
and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu.
And on the men it looks even worse. (James 2009)

This critique of wealth is an essential companion for more established critiques of poverty, if
inequality is going to be successfully challenged.
This is because inequality, as discussed later, is bad
for the rich, the poor, and the in-between, not just
for those who initially appear to lose out most.

A Nugget of Intellectual Context
Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his
“Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” in the eighteenth century. He argued that inequality is something that is created and sustained by human society,
which did not exist among men in nature. Rousseau
also argued that the powerful construct institutions
to keep peace and stability, protecting their property; this remains an opinion held by many today
(it is often said of the welfare state). As George
Monbiot has argued, such constructions can be seen

at the level of international institutions where voting structures do not necessarily reflect population
size but the political, economic, and military power
of the country. An alternative is greater equality. For
instance, historical utopian socialisms have proposed
an equality which, according to Bob Sutcliffe (2005,
2) is “very far from homogeneity or conformity; it
means the protection of freedom through equal civil
and political rights and distribution according to
need and not ability to pay.”

Geographies of Inequality
Inequality is a highly geographical phenomenon, as
often rich and poor people occupy different physical spaces, or—if they are in the same place—they
are likely to play different roles. The highly spatial
nature of inequality makes it relevant to geographers
and particularly suitable for mapping. Maps can
quickly show uneven distributions of goods, money,
access to communications, and much more between
individuals, groups, and national population. When
Charles Booth and his research team drew “poverty”
maps of London, they were mapping inequality.
The maps show seven social classes, ranging from
the poorest to the well-off or, in his terms, from the
“vicious and semi-criminal” to those with “good
ordinary earnings” to the “upper middle and upper
classes.” Zooming out, Figures 1 and 2 show global
distributions of net imports and net exports of toys,
measured economically using purchasing power parity. Similar trade maps showing dozens of varieties of
goods and services can be found at the WorldMapper
website. These examples of mapping exemplify the
range of scales at which inequalities exist.

Methodological Issues
Although inequality has many forms, it is often measured in economic terms. Common measures include
the Gini coefficient and ratios of the earnings of the
richest to those of the poorest. The Gini coefficient
measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1:
where 0 is perfect equality (e.g., when everyone has
the same earnings) and 1 is mathematically “perfect”
inequality (e.g., where one person gets 100% of total
earnings and everyone else gets nothing). Countrylevel Gini coefficients do not reach these extremes.
Comparing earnings of the richest and poorest deciles
(10%) or quintiles (20%) of the population produces
a ratio of earnings of the rich to the poor. Comparing
the richest and poorest deciles by definition produces

Inequalities

Figure 1

773

Net Exports of Toys in 2002; Territory Size Shows the Proportion of All Net Toy Exports (Measured in
US$ Purchasing Power Parity)

Source: www.worldmapper.org. © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of
Michigan).

Figure 2

Net Imports of Toys in 2002; Territory Size Shows the Proportion of All Net Toy Imports (Measured in
US$ Purchasing Power Parity)

Source: www.worldmapper.org. © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of
Michigan).

774

Inequalities

larger ratios than does comparing quintiles. The different measures of economic inequality, different
types of inequality, and multiple scales on which to
measure it can add ambiguity to debates about how
inequalities are changing.
At the world level, inequality can be measured
using international data, which use the country as
the unit of analysis; global data compare individuals in the whole world population. The international
comparison, between countries, which works on the
assumption that everyone within a country shares
the national average, gave a ratio of 30:1 of income
of the richest 10% of countries to poorest 10% in
1997. A global comparison of individuals, irrespective of their country, shows greater inequalities of
63:1. As Sutcliffe has shown, comparing incomes
using both these methods shows increases in inequalities leading up to 1997. Bigger inequalities are shown
when global comparisons are made because the very
richest people in the world are being compared to
the very poorest, as extremes are not moderated by
national averages.

Contentions
What Causes Inequality?
The causes of inequality are the subject of some
disagreement—some blame poverty on those who
suffer it whereas others cite the structure of society as
the cause of inequalities. A case in point is ex-World
Bank economist Paul Collier’s work on who he views
as the problematic bottom billion. In identifying
what causes poverty, Collier looks within countries
but overlooks the history of international inequalities, including 500 years of underinvestment in
poorer countries combined with net wealth transfer
from the poor to rich world. In a review of research
spanning two centuries, David Gordon shows that
most poverty has structural causes. For example, the
rich and powerful often use their position to keep
themselves in a privileged state, as was argued in the
1700s by Rousseau. Examples of this are, according
to Monbiot, that the United Nations, World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, and World Trade
Organization are all skewed in favor of the rich.
Is Inequality Bad?
There are many arguments against inequality,
stating that equality is preferable because it can allow
people to use human resources more fully, it could

create a larger market for goods, and it would reduce
policing costs. However, others such as Sutcliffe and
Göran Therborn stress that redistribution is desirable because of the central component of social
justice, independent of consequences. Social justice
here could pertain to rights, health, and the conviction that people are equal and so deserve equality. In
contrast, some argue that inequality is good because
it stimulates competition, it motivates, it is selective,
and it rewards. Rousseau suggested that “inequality easily gains ground among base and ambitious
souls” (quoted in Sutcliffe 2005, 47), people who
have more concern for themselves than for living in a
functional society.
It is rarely discussed that inequality afflicts the
rich as well as the poor. In his 2007 book Affluenza,
Oliver James documents some negative outcomes of
being rich, which include depression and paranoia.
According to James, living unequally as a rich person
means possibly feeling threatened by others who have
less and feeling depressed from looking for fulfillment
in objects of social status and how others respond to
these rather than in the engaging in enjoyable activities. An example of paranoia, or even justified fear, is
the gated communities of rich people in South Africa
(among other countries). Placing spikes, barbed wire,
high walls, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and security guards between oneself and others is illustrative
of societal breakdown and distrust, which is psychologically unhealthy for all involved.
Richard Wilkinson and colleagues have argued
that among rich countries, those that are more equal
are also more healthy. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
argue that in rich countries “average standards cease
to matter, but whether you are doing better or worse
than other people, where you come in the social
pecking order, continues to be important—for health,
happiness, and for a large array of social problems”
(2009, 13).

Inequality and Policy
Discussion of inequality is arguably more politically
charged than that of poverty. Poverty conceptually focuses on a “problematic” segment of society;
inequality is concerned with society as a whole, so
everybody is under the microscope. Poverty and
inequality are related because the poor are those
with less when resources are unequally distributed.
Focusing on poverty rather than inequality conceals the role of the rich and middle classes, almost

Informal Economy

conceptually excusing them for the poverty that is
part of the society in which they live. An example
of this is the Millennium Development Goals that,
according to Samir Amin, focus on the poor rather
than inequalities. As such, meeting the goal of the
Millennium Development Goals for reducing the
mortality rates of under five years does not necessarily lead to reductions in the gap between the underfive’s mortality in the richest and poorest quintiles
of the population. Kath Moser, David Leon, and
Davidson Gwatkin reveal that sometimes the differences can actually increase.

Future Directions
In 2007, it was suggested that “everyone is talking about inequalities now.” Since then, discussions
about inequality in the U.K. media have increased.
Anna Barford reports that inequality was a key
topic of debate in the run up to the 2010 U.K. general election, in part due to the cross-party pressure
exerted by the associated Equality Trust and One
Society groups. Yet inequality has been a topic of
discussion for hundreds of years and remains an
academic concern.
Geographical location and historical period influence the type of inequality that is evident. In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, perspectives
on wealth may be changing. To take a longer view, the
world became much more equal from 1929 to about
1978. However, in 2011, world inequality seems more
and more like it did in 1929. Inequality has been
reduced before and can certainly be reduced again.
Anna Barford and Danny Dorling
See also Affluent Society; Consumption Patterns and
Trends; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Global Institutions; Happiness; Health
Care; Poverty; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings
Amin, Samir. “The Millennium Development Goals: A
Critique from the South.” Monthly Review 57, no. 10
(2006): 1–9.
Barford, Anna. “An International Comparative Study of
Attitudes Towards Socio-Economic Inequality.” PhD
diss., Department of Geography, University of Sheffield,
UK, 2010.
Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest
Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

775

Gordon, David. “Eradicating Poverty in the 21st Century:
When Will Social Justice Be Done?” Inaugural lecture,
University of Bristol, UK, October 18, 2004.
James, Clive. “New Year Prediction: On Getting Rich
Quick.” In BBC Radio 4: A Point of View, 2009. Also
available online at http://clivejames.com/point-of-view/
get-rich-quick.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: HarperCollins, 2000.
Monbiot, George. The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a
New World Order. London: Flamingo, 2003.
Moser, Kath A., David A. Leon, and Davidson R. Gwatkin.
“How Does Progress Towards the Child Mortality
Millennium Development Goal Affect Inequalities
Between the Poorest and Least Poor? Analysis of
Demographic and Health Survey Data.” British Medical
Journal 331 (2005): 1180–1182.
Sutcliffe, Bob. 100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World.
London: Zed Books, 2005.
Therborn, Göran. “The Killing Fields of Inequality.” In The
Crash: A View from the Left (a collection published
through the journal Soundings: A Journal of Politics and
Culture), edited by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan
Rutherford, 109–117. Middlesex, UK: Lawrence and
Wishart, 2009.
Toynbee, Polly, and David Walker. “Meet the Rich.”
Guardian—Money Section. August 4, 2008.
Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level:
Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
London: Allen Lane, 2009.

Websites
WorldMapper. www.worldmapper.org.

INFORMAL ECONOMY
The informal economy is defined as all work that is
not “formal employment,” by which is meant paid
work registered with the state for tax, social security,
and labor law purposes. This defining of the informal economy in terms of what it is not accurately
displays the centrality of formal employment in contemporary society. The consequence is that the informal economy is a residual catchall umbrella category
into which all work that is not formal employment
is cast. The result is that multifarious forms of work
are brought together under this heading of the informal economy. To differentiate the heterogeneous
types of work practice grouped together in this leftover, or residual, category, three broad types of informal work are commonly distinguished. First, there is

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Informal Economy

self-provisioning, which is the unpaid household
work undertaken by household members for themselves or for other members of their household.
Second, there is unpaid community work, which is
unpaid work conducted by household members by
and for the extended family, social, or neighborhood
networks and more formal voluntary and community groups. Third and finally, there is paid informal
work, which is monetized exchange unregistered
by or hidden from the state for tax, social security,
and/or labor law purposes but which is legal in all
other respects. The value of this concept to consumer
culture and consumption is that it reveals that the
production is not confined to the workplace and consumption to the home but is much more complex
and nuanced in contemporary consumer culture.

Historical Depictions of the
Informal Economy
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the informal economy was nearly universally depicted as a
dwindling sphere that was rapidly disappearing from
view. The trajectory of economic development was
widely believed to be one in which there was a natural, inevitable, and unstoppable shift of work from
the informal into the formal economy. The informal
economy was consequently viewed as a residue, or
leftover, from precapitalism, and its continuing presence a sign of “underdevelopment,” “traditionalism,” and “backwardness.” The formal economy,
meanwhile, was viewed as representing “progress,”
“development,” “modernity,” and “advancement.”
From this classical perspective that has been
variously referred to as the “formalization,” “dual
economy,” “modernization,” “leftover,” or “residue”
thesis, the formal and informal economies were
portrayed as stable, bounded, and constituted via
negation, with the “superordinate” formal economy
endowed with positive attributes and impacts and the
subservient “other”—the informal economy—with
negativity. In consequence, the formal and informal
economies were both temporally and hierarchically
sequenced. They were temporally sequenced in that
the formal economy was portrayed as in the ascendancy and replacing the informal economy that was
read as “the mere vestige of a disappearing past [or
as] transitory or provisional” (Latouche, 1993, 49).
Indeed, this was seen as a natural, organic, inevitable, immutable, and unstoppable process. They were

hierarchically sequenced, meanwhile, in that the
informal economy was normatively deemed “regressive” and the formal economy “progressive,” as
clearly depicted in “modernization” thinking, which
hierarchically (and temporally) convenes differences
between countries by placing first world nations at
the front of the “development” queue while those
nations in the second and third worlds are positioned
behind them due to their slower progression toward
formalization (Massey, 2005).
This residue thesis, in consequence, is not simply
a theory that has been seeking to reflect reality but
has been a “performative discourse” that has sought
to make the real world conform to its representation,
justified by the claim that the failure of the real to
conform to the portrayal is a consequence not just of
imperfections of lived practice but a failure that itself
has undesirable impacts. This has been nowhere
more finely exemplified than in the seminal work of
Arturio Escobar (1995) who uncovers how so-called
third (majority) world countries became viewed as
a problem due to their lack of “development” (i.e.,
formalization) and charts how a whole range of institutions and practices were constructed to help them
conform more to the prescribed desired end-state of
“formalization.”
In recent years, however, not the least due to the
widespread finding that in the contemporary era, the
informal economy appears to be growing rather than
declining relative to the formal economy, this view of
formalization as natural, inevitable, and unstoppable
has come under attack. The result is the emergence of
a range of different contemporary schools of thought
regarding the informal economy, all of which have
emerged directly out of an attempt to challenge various aspects of this formalization thesis.

The By-Product Thesis
A first contemporary perspective explains the
reemergence and growth of the informal economy
as a direct by-product of the advent of a deregulated
open world economy. This is asserted to be not only
encouraging a race-to-the-bottom in terms of labor
standards but also resulting in the off-loading of surplus labor onto the informal economy.
On the one hand, therefore, the growth of the
informal economy is viewed to directly result from
employers seeking to reduce costs by adopting new
strategies that involve the use of informal labor, such

Informal Economy

as subcontracting various stages of production to
those employing informal employees under degrading, low-paid, and exploitative sweatshoplike conditions, exemplified by the garment manufacturing
sector. As Mike Davis (2006, 186) puts it, what we are
currently witnessing on a global scale is the reemergence of “primitive forms of exploitation that have
been given new life by postmodern globalization.”
On the other hand, the recent growth of the
informal economy is also seen as a by-product of the
demise of the full-employment and/or comprehensive
formal welfare state regime that characterized the
Fordist era where responsibility for the social reproduction of the unemployed was provided by the state
via public welfare provision. In the new post-Fordist
era, it is asserted that those of little use to capitalism
are no longer maintained as a reserve army of labor
and socially reproduced by the formal welfare state.
Instead, they are off-loaded into the informal economy where they eke out their survival as a last resort
in the absence of alternative means of livelihood. The
informal sphere is therefore viewed as extensive in
marginalized populations since its role is to act as a
substitute for the formal economy in its absence.
This rereading consequently adopts the same normative hierarchical depiction of the formal and informal economies as the earlier residue thesis. It reads
the informal economy negatively and adheres to the
formalization as the “route to progress” perspective. In contrast to the residue thesis, however, this is
more a prescription of the required trajectory rather
than an organic, inevitable, immutable, and unstoppable view of the direction of change. A prominent
example is the International Labor Organization
whose “decent work” campaign advocates that
marginal populations decanted into the informal
economy should be reintegrated into the formal
economy and therefore decent work. Here, in consequence, the informal economy is an exploitative
low-waged sweatshoplike sphere and/or inhabited by
marginalized populations excluded from the formal
economy who engage in such work out of necessity
as a survival strategy and last resort, and “progress”
is depicted as lying in a process of formalization.

Chosen Alternative Thesis
For other contemporary commentators who recognize the prevalence and growth of the informal
sector, however, this hierarchical ordering that

777

privileges the formal economy as the path to progress
is replaced by a depiction of informalization as the
route to advancement. Akin to the residue discourse, the informal and formal economies are here
often portrayed as separate and discrete, but unlike
both the residue and by-product approaches, participation in informal work is viewed as possessing
positive attributes and impacts and portrayed as
undertaken as a matter of choice rather than due to
a lack of choice.
Conventionally, the most prominent group representing informal work in this manner has been
the neoliberal who portrays informal workers as
heroes casting off the shackles of an overburdensome state. More recently, however, they have been
joined by radical green commentators who positively
view informal work as resonating with their desire
for localization and self-reliance as well as an array
of postdevelopment, critical, and post-structuralist
scholars seeking to imagine and enact alternative
futures for economic development beyond formalization and commodification.
Inverting the hierarchical portrayal of formal
and informal work in the residue and by-product
discourses, this perspective therefore views informal
work as possessing positive attributes and impacts.
The conventional normative portrayal of economic
development as a process of formalization is countered with an alternative inverted view of development and progress as a process of informalization.

Complementary Thesis
A final contemporary discourse again depicts the
informal economy as possessing largely positive attributes and impacts but views the formal and informal
economies as inextricably intertwined rather than as
separate. In this representation, formal and informal
work are viewed as complementary in the sense that
they grow or decline in tandem, rather than one contracting when the other expands. This is argued at
a range of spatial scales. At the global and national
level, for instance, both are seen to grow or decline
in tandem. Similar arguments are made at the level of
localities and households. Relatively affluent populations and households, who are the major beneficiaries of the formal economy, are also seen as the major
beneficiaries of the informal economy, conducting
not only more self-provisioning, unpaid community
exchange, and undeclared work than households

778

Informal Economy

excluded from the formal economy but also more
rewarding forms of informal work.
The consequence is that uneven development is
characterized not as a polarization between formalized and informalized populations, or put another
way, between those pursuing formalized work
strategies and those consigned to informal work
practices. Instead, uneven development is depicted
as a rift between “work busy” or “fully engaged”
households with multiple formal jobs and high levels
of engagement in self-provisioning, unpaid community exchange, and paid informal work and “work
deprived” or “disengaged” households excluded not
only from the formal economy but also from engagement in the informal economy due to their lack of
resources, skills, and networks. Here, therefore, progress is depicted as not simply a process of formalization but in terms of the capabilities of populations to
engage in both formal and informal work.

Informal Economy in Lived Practice
The contemporary studies of the informal economy
reveal that no one school of thought is universally
applicable. Instead, different schools apply to different types of informal work and populations at varying times. When considering the limited number of
households pursuing subsistence modes of production, for example, and how very few households
remain untouched by the formal economy, the historical residue thesis appears valid. Indeed, this seems
to be further reinforced by the evidence from many
rural areas, which reveals that the numbers of subsistence households are dwindling as the young leave
the countryside and move to the towns in search of
formal employment.
When considering other types of informal work,
however, it is the representation of the informal
economy as a by-product of a new emergent form of
capitalism that is using informal working arrangements to compete and off-loading onto the informal
sector those no longer of valid use to it. Support
for this comes not only when examining forms of
informal waged employment such as sweatshoplike factory work but also when wider trends are
recognized such as that participation in the informal economy is much greater among lower-income
populations excluded from the formal economy. Yet
to depict all of the informal economy in this manner
is a misnomer.

As the evidence in support of the representation of
the informal economy as a complement to the formal
economy clearly displays, informal work, at least in
some of its varieties and in some populations, is often
not a sphere inhabited purely by the marginalized but
rather is a realm that reinforces, rather than reduces,
the sociospatial disparities in the formal economy.
This is exemplified in the realm of do-it-yourself
activity, for example. It is also apparent in the many
studies that reveal that the level of self-provisioning,
unpaid community exchange and paid informal work
is often greater in affluent than deprived populations.
There are also types of informal work that are a chosen alternative to the formal economy. Not only is
there a culture of resistance to immersion in the formal economy, at least among some engaged in subsistence production as their primary work strategy,
as exemplified by “back-to-the-landers,” but there
is also the extensive “hidden enterprise culture” of
off-the-books enterprise and entrepreneurship being
pursued as a widespread resistance practice to the (in
their eyes) overexcessive regulation and state corruption, which provides solid support for the depiction of
informal work as a chosen alternative (Snyder 2004).
The result is that although varying discourses
are appropriate as representations of different types
of informal work and varying populations, no one
articulation fully captures the diverse nature and multiple meanings of the informal economy. However,
if the view is transcended that these are competing
discourses and it is recognized that each is a depiction of particular types of informal work and various populations, as Martha Chen has prominently
suggested, then it becomes quickly obvious that by
incorporating all of them, a finer-grained and more
comprehensive understanding of the complex and
diverse meanings of the informal economy could well
be achieved.
How, therefore, might these articulations be
coupled together to reach this more holistic understanding? To fuse these contrasting representations
to achieve a finer-grained and more comprehensive
understanding of the complex and multiple meanings of the informal economy, it is necessary to recognize (a) first, a spectrum of informal work ranging
from varieties that are relatively separate from the
formal sphere (e.g., subsistence-oriented households)
to those that are relatively intertwined with the formal economy (e.g., “envelope wages,” do-it-yourself
activity) and (b) second, a continuum of types of

Informal Economy

informal work ranging from those with mostly positive features (e.g., paid favors, unpaid community
exchange, informal entrepreneurship) to those with
largely negative attributes (e.g., exploitative sweatshoplike informal waged employment). Adopting
this integrative conceptual framework facilitates an
understanding of the multifarious nature of informal
work and its variable consequences and impacts.

Future Directions
In the past, the study of the informal economy has
been plagued by persistent debates between representatives of rival discourses who contest each other’s
viewpoint despite their talking about different forms
of informal work (e.g., neoliberals on informal selfemployment and by-product theorists on informal
waged employment). The above more integrative
conceptual framework, if widely adopted, will enable
such erroneous debates to be transcended. It might
also begin to put a stop to the all-too-common occurrence whereby discourses simply focus on those forms
of informal work that conform to their depiction of
informal work while ignoring those that do not. As
Michael Samers has highlighted, for instance, postdevelopment theorists viewing informal work as
a chosen alternative seem to display a myopic disregard for forms of informal work that do not conform to their portrayal such as low-waged informal
employment conducted under sweatshoplike working
conditions. This, however, is not unique to these commentators. It applies across the spectrum of discourses.
Second, if this more integrative conceptual
framework is more widely adopted in the future, it
might also start to result in more nuanced public
policy approaches toward the informal economy.
Currently, a largely negative approach predominates, reflecting the dominance of the residue and
by-product perspectives. This is particularly the case
when considering what needs to be done about paid
informal work where the dominant approach is to
eradicate such work by increasing the probability of
detection and the penalties if caught. It is similarly
the case when considering other forms of informal
work. Few, if any, governments move beyond a formal employment-centered discourse when discussing economic development. If the above conceptual
framework is more widely adopted, however, then
this would help identify those forms of informal
work that need to be eradicated and those that need

779

to be either transformed into formal employment or
tacitly condoned rather than adopting a “one size
fits all” public policy approach that treats all types
the same.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, this more
holistic framework might also help the long-standing
but simplistic arguments about whether formalization
or informalization is the path to progress to be finally
transcended. Rather than an “on-off” decision about
whether formalization or informalization is the way
forward for economic development, more nuanced
and finer-grained debates about the nature and direction of economic development could perhaps start to
emerge that pursue a more “pick and mix” approach
toward various types of informal (and formal) work.
So too might depictions of consumer culture adopt
more nuanced understandings of what constitutes
production and consumption that transcend the representation of production as confined to the employment-place and consumption to the home.
Colin C. Williams
See also Collective Consumption; Globalization;
Informalization; Post-Fordism; Poverty; Self-Service
Economy; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings
Castells, Manuel, and Alejandro Portes. “World
Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the
Informal Economy.” In The Informal Economy:
Studies in Advanced and Less Developing Countries,
edited by Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and
Laura A. Benton. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989.
Chen, Martha. “Rethinking the Informal Economy:
Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal
Regulatory Environment.” In Linking the Formal and
Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, edited by
Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor
Ostrom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.
De Soto, Hernando. The Other Path. London: Harper
and Row, 1989.
Escobar, Arturio. Encountering Development: The Making
and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995.
Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in
Post-Industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Gibson-Graham, Julie-Kathy. A Post-Capitalist Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

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Informalization

Latouche, Serge. In the Wake of Affluent Society: An
Exploration of Post-Development. London: Zed, 1993.
Leyshon, Andrew, Roger Lee, and Colin C. Williams, eds.
Alternative Economic Spaces. London: Sage, 2003.
Maloney, William F. “Informality Revisited.” World
Development 32 (2004): 1159–1178.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
Pahl, Raymond. Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell,
1984.
Samers, Michael. “The Myopia of ‘Diverse Economies,’ or
a Critique of the ‘Informal Economy.’” Antipode 37
(2005): 875–886.
Snyder, Karen. “Routes to the Informal Economy in
New York’s East Village: Crisis, Economics and
Identity.” Sociological Perspectives 47 (2004): 215–240.
Williams, Colin C. A Commodified World? Mapping the
Limits of Capitalism. London: Zed, 2005.

INFORMALIZATION
The concept of informalization was coined in
1976 by the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters. It was
developed primarily to understand and interpret
the growing leniency in codes of conduct and feeling in Western societies of the 1960s and 1970s. In
Amsterdam, discussions of this increasing “permissiveness” included the question of how to interpret
these changes and, more specifically, whether they
involved a change in the direction of what Norbert
Elias had called the civilizing process. The framing
of this question within Elias’s theory of wide range
and scope gave rise to the theory of informalization
processes. It provides a perspective in which both the
process of informalization and the spread of consumer culture turn out to have sprung from the same
speedup of social interweaving processes and the
same intensification of social competition.
In his 1939/2000 book The Civilizing Process,
now a classic for being the first systematic study of
the history of manners and emotion regulation, Elias
shows how between the fifteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, European regimes of manners and emotions had expanded and become increasingly strict
and detailed, giving rise to a particular type of selfregulation, a type of habitus and personality with a
particular conscience formation. It was a long-term
process toward the formalizing of manners and the
disciplining of people and their emotions. By presenting a large number of excerpts from manners books

in chronological order, focusing particularly on manners regarding basic human functions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, defecating, and blowing one’s
nose, as well as on those regulating sexual and aggressive impulses, Elias uncovered evidence of long-term
changes in the codes of manners thus opening a window to developments in social structures and personality structures. The overall directional trend in codes
of behavior and feeling provided an empirical basis
for integrating historical sociology and psychology.
The process of formalizing manners and disciplining
of people continued in the nineteenth century, and
although many a change had been perceived before
the 1960s and 1970s—particularly in the 1920s—it
was only during the “expressive revolution” (Parsons
1978, 300–324) that changes in manners and lifestyles became so impressive as to give rise to the
question of whether the whole civilizing process had
changed direction. With regard to the informalization
of manners, the answer was that it obviously had, but
regarding the disciplining of people and their emotions, developments had continued in the direction
of increasing demands on emotion management or
self-regulation.
Later studies showed the expressive revolution
to have been a moment of rapid acceleration in
a long-term process of informalization, involving
much broader social layers than in earlier accelerations such as around the turn of the century and in
the 1920s. Particularly, Wouters’s monographs Sex
and Manners and Informalization provide extensive
evidence that from the last decades of the nineteenth
century onward, the code of manners and lifestyles
in four Western countries (Britain, the United States,
Germany, and the Netherlands) came to allow for
an increasing variety of behavioral and emotional
alternatives: manners becoming more lenient, more
differentiated, and varied for a wider and more differentiated public (see also Elias 1996; and Stearns
2007). Many modes of conduct that in the preceding
long-term process of formalization had been curbed
or forbidden came to be allowed, particularly in matters of sexuality. With one significant exception, all
behaviors, manners, and arts, such as the written
and spoken language, clothing, music, dancing, hairstyles, conduct, and emotions, became less formally
restricted and regulated thus giving way to a widening range of acceptable behavioral and emotional
options. People became more frank and more at ease
in expressing and discussing their feelings.

Informalization

For several reasons, however, an acceptable and
respectable usage of these alternatives implied a
continued increase of the demands that were being
made on self-regulation. One reason is because the
ways in which individuals fashion their selection
of alternatives became increasingly important as
a criterion for status attribution. Another reason,
closely connected, is that any selection of alternatives should look “natural”: it is a constraint to be
unconstrained, at ease, and authentic. Moreover,
informalization also involved rising external social
constraints toward such self-restraints as being
reflexive, showing presence of mind, considerateness,
role taking, and the ability to tolerate and control
conflicts and to compromise. And last but not least,
there was no “liberation” of displays of superiority
and inferiority—quite the contrary. This observation touches on the exception to the widening of the
range of socially acceptable behaviors and feelings
and also on a major difference from permissiveness:
informalization implies that feelings and displays of
superiority and inferiority were increasingly curbed
and forbidden.
Particularly, by the social ascent of a wide variety of groups—the working classes, women, youth,
homosexuals, blacks and other immigrants—and
their integration within national and international
networks of interdependency, all concerned were
expected to treat each other increasingly on the basis
of equality, that is, to avoid open displays of inferiority and superiority. Thus, declining power differences
between various groups and social classes went hand
in hand with expanding mutual identification and
diminishing social and psychic distance between people. Expressing any such distance, whether pertaining to people of different social class, age, or gender,
had to be done in relatively cautious and concealed
ways. Increasingly, information on differences in rank
was disguised or concealed. The established codes of
behavior changed accordingly, and as rising numbers
of people came to direct themselves to these codes,
status competition turned more subtle and demanding, without losing any of its intensity. Competition
in smooth manners and relaxed lifestyles functioned
as a driver of both informalization and consumer
culture, particularly from the 1960s onward, when
the increase of wealth and its spread in most Western
countries via welfare state arrangements triggered a
wave of emancipation and informalization as well as
a spread of consumer culture.

781

Directly connected to the informalization process
is an “emancipation of emotions”: their representation in the center of personality—consciousness.
This is a partial reversal of what had happened to
the regulation of emotions in the process of formalization. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, “dangerous” emotions such as those related
to physical (including sexual) violence had come to
be avoided, repressed, and denied in increasingly
automatic ways, that is, increasingly regulated by the
inner fears of a rather rigid and authoritarian conscience, functioning as a “second nature.” A secondnature or conscience-dominated type of personality
became dominant. In the process of informalization,
all kinds of emotions that in the long-term process
of formalizing manners and disciplining people had
been repressed and denied gained access to consciousness and wider acceptance in more informal
social codes. They were again “discovered” as part
of a collective emotional makeup—representing a
shift from conscience to consciousness. The Wouters
studies provide evidence of a rising control of the fear
of slippery slopes, the rise of a stronger and yet more
flexible self-regulation in which these emotions were
expressed but kept under control.
Between the 1950s and 1980s, these processes
of social and psychic emancipation and integration
accelerated dramatically. The conviction that being
open to dangerous emotions would almost irrevocably be followed by acting on them was destroyed.
This old conviction expressed a fear that is symptomatic of rather authoritarian relationships and
social controls, as well as of a rather rigid type of
self-control, dominated by a more or less automatically functioning authoritarian conscience. From
being an advantage, this “inner-directedness”
(Riesman 1950), that is, internalized social controls
of a fixed kind, changed into being a handicap when
in less hierarchical relationships, when overcoming
this fear came to be taken for granted. Only a more
ego-dominated self-regulation allowed for the reflexive and flexible calculation that came to be expected.
Thus, increasing numbers of people have become
aware of emotions and temptations in circumstances
where fears and dangers had been dominant before.
It was the overall emancipation and integration
of “lower” social groups in Western societies that
triggered and allowed for the emancipation and
integration of “lower impulses” and emotions in
personality.

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Information Society

Yet it was only after the 1950s that the dominant
mode of self-regulation had reached a strength and
scope that increasingly enabled people to admit to
themselves and to others to have dangerous emotions without provoking status anxiety and shame,
particularly the shame-fear of losing control and
having to give in. In the process of informalization, both psychic and social censorship declined,
and to the extent that it has become natural to
perceive the pulls and pushes of both first nature
and second nature, a third nature type of personality has been developing. Its further development
depends on the above-mentioned exception, that
is, on the control of emotions connected with the
struggle for power, status, and value, particularly
the feelings of inferiority and superiority. For these
feelings appear to be highly significant for understanding why social and psychic conflicts erupt in
violence.
Cas Wouters
See also Civilizing Processes; Collective Identity; Elias,
Norbert; Emotions; Habitus; Lifestyle; Self-Reflexivity;
Sex; Social Class

Further Readings
Elias, Norbert. The Germans, edited by Michael Schröter.
Cambridge: Polity, 1996.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and
Psychogenetic Investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2000. First published 1939.
Parsons, Talcott. Action Theory and the Human Condition.
New York: Free Press, 1978.
Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. With N. Glazer and
R. Denney. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1950.
Stearns, Peter N. “Informalization and Contemporary
Manners: The Wouters Studies.” Theory and Society 36,
no. 4 (2007): 373–379.
Wouters, Cas “Is het civilisatieproces van richting
veranderd?” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 3, no.
3 (1976): 336–60. English version in Human
Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, edited by P.
Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom, and H. Korte, 437–54
(Amsterdam: Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift,
1977).
Wouters, Cas. Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in
the West 1890–2000. London: Sage, 2004.
Wouters, Cas. Informalization: Manners and Emotions
since 1890. London: Sage, 2007.

INFORMATION SOCIETY
Information society refers to a society where modern information technologies are widely used and
where information-related work and sectors have
become highly significant economic activities. Time
and money spent on consuming both established
informational goods and services (e.g., mass media)
and new ones (such as computers, mobile phones,
and websites) are liable to become more significant—
though there may be competition for consumers
between and within old and new media.

History
The term information society (IS) was apparently
first used in Japan in the 1960s. It became commonly
employed in many Western countries in the 1980s,
with many policymakers endorsing the term by setting up government departments or agencies, or at
least strategy committees, concerned with IS policies.
The European Union decided to label its program as
dealing with “information society technologies” in
place of the standard information technologies (or
information and communication technologies)—
partly to suggest a wide compass, partly to set its
research strategies in the context of social goals, as
opposed to what was seen as the overly technological
and/or economic ideas in the United States (where
“information superhighways” were being promoted)
and elsewhere.
The attention given to the idea of IS reflected the
great interest directed to the new information technologies (ITs) that were beginning to proliferate in
the 1980s. New products, such as the microcomputer (now better known as the personal computer),
video games, the pocket calculator, digital watches,
and digital audio equipment (the first compact disc
systems), teletext, videorecorders, and more, were
being introduced into many homes. Workplaces
were similarly the site of introduction of new equipment—word processors and office microcomputers,
programmable machine tools and industrial robotics,
fax (a longstanding technology that really took off
only in the 1980s), the beginnings of large-scale computer networking with e-mail systems, and so on.
Videotex systems, allowing consumers to communicate with computer networks using simple
terminals from their homes (basic keyboards, with

Information Society

household TV sets as the display medium, attached
to the telephone system) were introduced in many
countries to great acclaim. Most of these failed to
evoke consumer interest—they tied up the TV and
telephone, the information provided was often available by other means (not least teletext, which had
been introduced at roughly the same time and which
was free to use). The exception was the Minitel
system in France, which used dedicated terminals
(looking much like small laptops) and rapid telecommunications—which were given away by France
Telecom as the alternative to printed telephone directories. Many observers were struck by the way in
which the magazine racks of news agents suddenly
featured large numbers of magazines dedicated to
home computers in the United Kingdom, the United
States, and elsewhere—but in France, there was
enormous cultural interest in Minitel, and in particular the entrepreneurs behind, and the social groups
using, its messagerie—the 1980s equivalent of social
networking websites.
The videotext story demonstrates that not every
new information technology was embraced with
open arms. There are several similar stories of investors setting up expensive systems that failed to gain
mass markets. One striking case was an early mobile
telephone system (CT2, which went under various
proprietary names, including “Rabbit” in the United
Kingdom) that would allow outgoing calls only (if
you were within 100 meters of a base station). Pagers
(text communication devices that had a brief popularity) had to be used to alert the user that someone
else would like to talk with them. But many new
consumer products achieved very rapid diffusion,
with the popularity of CD technology astounding
observers. (DVD systems later took off at comparable rates.)
Underpinning this ever-expanding range of new
products and industrial processes and the ongoing
rapid development of their user-friendliness and
capabilities were important advances in knowledge
and in the key underpinning technologies that this
knowledge fed into. Though there were many contributory technologies—lasers, optical fibers, new
sorts of software, and so on—the most important
of these was microelectronics. Microelectronics
involves the ability to place the equivalent of huge
numbers of transistors and other components on
small pieces of silicon wafer. This meant that digital
information of any kind could be processed—stored,

783

communicated, displayed, transformed—by devices
that were much smaller (often portable), cheaper,
and more powerful than had previously been possible. After the 1980s, new products proliferated, with
the mobile (cellular) phone, digital TV, broadband
Internet, and the World Wide Web being only a few
of many examples. Microelectronics itself has been
subject to continual dramatic change, with Moore’s
law describing how the number of transistors that
can be embedded on a chip of a given size has been
doubling every couple of years.

Approaches
For some authors, the defining feature of IS is that
it represents a society in which the use of these new
ITs has become pervasive. One might argue about
what “pervasive” means—what level of use of what
types of microelectronics-enabled technologies is
involved?—but new information technologies have
certainly widely displaced established technologies
in the industrial and domestic spheres. Even devices
whose essential components operate more on the
basis of motor power—washing machines, motor
cars, for example—are typically reengineered so that
their controls and displays employ microelectronics,
and new features are added (from more programs for
washing machines to automatic braking systems and
in-car entertainment in motor vehicles).
This approach to IS emphasizes the development
and application of new technological capabilities
and can thus be labeled a sociotechnical approach.
For some commentators, this represents more than
a revolution in technologies themselves; our ways
of life and culture are also transformed as we use
these technologies and exploit the opportunities they
provide. Some have argued that these social transformations are necessitated by new ITs, that there is
one logical set of consequences associated with the
diffusion of information processing and communication capabilities—that may be resisted but eventually
will triumph. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the
end of the 1980s was a major case in point: the command-and-control bureaucracy could not survive in
an age of freer communications. Less dramatically,
there have been many striking examples of firms and
whole industries failing to adopt new ITs and adapt
their practices accordingly—the crisis that digital
downloading has meant for established music industries is just one of these. Technological determinism

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Information Society

thus features prominently in some portrayals of
IS as associated with new IT: but a sociotechnical
approach can be more dynamic, seeing technological changes as one of a complex series of interacting social processes, with technology development
and use stemming from within the social order, not
impacting on it from outside.
In some versions of the sociotechnical account, IS
means a radical break away from industrial society—
just as industrialism (which could contentiously be
identified with new industrial technologies—such as
steam and then electric motors) displaced agricultural
society. The new technologies permit further automation of much industrial work; they promote the establishment of new, more creative and knowledge-based
occupations; they enable more flexibility in production and the move toward post-Fordism with flexible
customization of products, more responsible workers, and flatter organizational forms. Management
information systems, mobile communications, and
data warehousing and mining have rendered such
new organizational forms more viable. Teleworking
and new forms of mobile working become more possible, government is transformed through the adoption of e-government, and consumers become more
active “prosumers” as they turn away from mass
consumption to make their own music, films, and
communities and contribute their own content to
social networking sites and other new media. Radical
social transformation—often portrayed in practically
utopian terms—is often associated with the new ITs.
But there are also bleaker views of IS, focusing on
the growth of surveillance and new forms of social
control, on digital divides and other inequalities, on
polarization between knowledge elites and the population at large, and on the vulnerabilities of large
technological systems and the dangers of a dehumanizing technocratic rationality.
Many commentators have criticized the sociotechnical viewpoint, arguing that while in purely technological terms there may be a revolution, in terms
of social affairs, we see much more of a slow evolution of practices and relationships—and how far
this should be attributed to technology as opposed to
autonomous social development is open to question.
Indeed, the supposedly radical new microelectronics
is a further step on an evolutionary trajectory from
electronic valves through transistors and integrated
circuits. Information technologies extend back before
electronics to paper-based systems: photography,

phonograms, heliograms, mechanical calculating
machines, and much more. But these various devices
worked in different ways. New pervasive core technologies and digitalization are being applied to information of all kinds; this can be seen as representing
qualitative change as well as simple augmentation of
capacities.
The argument about the slower pace of social
change is more cogent, perhaps. Many social institutions remain unchanged in many respects, even
though they are permeated by computer and communication systems. There may be new captains of
industry associated with some of the new technologies, but fundamental change in power structures
remains elusive. TV’s dominance as a mass medium
has yet to topple in the face of the Internet, and prosumers do not seem to be increasing in numbers. In
any case, it is misleading to think of new technology
as causing social change: a more accurate view is that
as social actors become aware of new technological
capabilities (an awareness that is itself socially constructed through differential access to knowledge),
they create opportunities (using capabilities and
resources that are also unequally distributed across
social groups) to pursue their interests. New social
practices may be introduced; the differing interests
of social actors can make this a protracted affair,
and the results often differ from the protagonists’
expectations. A sociotechnical view need not involve
a crude technological determinism—though there
certainly are commentators who argue that new IT is
the cause of the emergence of novel social formations
that together constitute an information society.
The sociotechnical perspective on IS is only one
of a number of approaches that have attempted to
define—or sometimes to displace—the term. A more
socioeconomic approach was popular for some time
in the 1980s and beyond, though it is less frequently
encountered in the twenty-first century. This approach
identifies the IS with the prevalence of “information
sectors” and “information occupations,” and the
most influential attempt to articulate this in statistical terms was introduced in the late 1970s by Marc
Uri Porat in the United States—his classifications
were subsequently employed by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to
map developments in many countries. The information sectors are those industries whose main functions
are generating information products (publishing,
broadcasting, etc.), distributing information (e.g.,

Information Society

post and telecommunications, bookstores, and news
agents), and supplying the equipment and software
to support information processing and communications (computer and telecommunications equipment
and software, etc.). Porat differentiated between
a primary information sector, whose outputs are
information products, and a secondary information
sector, whose information outputs are applied in the
production of noninformation, or no information,
goods and services. In terms of information occupations, he distinguished between information producers (scientists, artists, market researchers, consultants,
many professionals), processors (administrative and
managerial, process control and supervisory, and
clerical and related staff), distributors (e.g., educators,
communication workers), and infrastructure workers (information machine staff, post and telecommunications workers). The statistical analyses using
such definitions charted, for most countries, a longterm and substantial growth in information work
as a share of all employment (e.g., Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]
1986). Porat’s approach was able to provide a
graphic picture of the growing economic importance
of specialized information activities. This made it very
appealing, though many commentators took issue
with the statistical classifications involved and argued
that it is unhelpful to combine together widely disparate sorts of work under a single heading. There were,
furthermore, concerns that new IT might automate
away many of the information occupations that Porat
charted.
The impressive growth of information work
revealed by these studies needs explanation, too.
How far are these new activities and the effects of
specialization and the division of labor fragmenting
activities that were previously combined in more
craftlike work? After all, all economic life throughout
human history has necessarily depended on information—have we not always been information societies in this sense? If the new phenomena are largely
associated with new generations of IT, then this is
lost in the socioeconomic statistics generated by this
approach to IS.
Though the Porat statistics are encountered infrequently nowadays, the approach lives on in the more
sophisticated accounts of a knowledge economy or
knowledge-based or knowledge-driven economy.
(Sometimes the word society is employed here.)
While it is accepted that all human societies depend

785

on knowledge, these accounts stress the large-scale
investment, in modern times, into the production and
reproduction of knowledge. Whereas information can
be soap operas and escapist entertainment, knowledge is accorded a higher status. In these accounts,
what is particularly stressed in formalized and to a
large extent codifiable knowledge is created through
activities such as research and development, testing
and surveying and reproduced through the various
levels of education and specialist media. Rather than
attempt to aggregate these activities into a single measure, the claim is made that high quantity and quality
of the activities is vitally important for international
competitiveness. Indicators are cited concerning
investment in these activities, the growth of institutions that support them (education and training,
consultancy and related services), and the numbers
of qualified scientists and engineers and employees in
other knowledge-based occupations. Information—
or rather useful knowledge and supporting data—are
being used to steer economic activities, to render production processes more efficient and effective, and to
underpin the innovations, which form new products
and processes.
Policymakers have been as ready to adopt the idea
of knowledge-based economies as they have been to
talk of information societies, and the two concepts
have often seemed interchangeable. It is tempting to
see the growing emphasis on evidence-based policymaking as an effort to extend the logic—or at least
the rhetoric—of the knowledge economy to political
practice.
If the first two approaches are most prevalent
among technologists and engineers, and economists
and politicians, respectively, then a third approach
is more often articulated by sociologists and media
researchers. However, we should note that they will
often be wary of the term IS, and prefer to use other
terminology—postmodern society, for example. The
approach or approaches here can be labeled sociocultural. Here the stress is put on how people relate
to and use information, not so much in economic
activities (as in the knowledge-based economy perspective). The arguments about postmodernity are
wide-ranging and highly contested, but some key
themes relating to the IS can be outlined.
With economic growth and increasing affluence, with the decline of traditional agricultural and
industrial work and more time spent in education,
leisure, and retirement have come a set of changes in

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Information Society

consumption and how we think about consumption.
There is a greater penetration of commodity relationships into many quarters of life—mass media,
organized spectacles, and corporate restructuring of
public spaces, for example. Simultaneously, there is
greater diversity of lifestyles, fragmentation of consumer demand, and growing scope for consumer-led
generation of content (especially in new media, as
well as in such well-established formats as TV and
radio phone-ins). As basic requirements for shelter,
clothing, transport, and the like are met, so consumer attention (and product differentiation from
the industry side) has focused on symbolic attributes
of consumer goods and services. Goods (e.g., motor
cars, clothes) and services (e.g., holidays, theater performances) are chosen for what they symbolize, what
they are seen to express about the consumer.
In IS terms, this means a growth in the importance
of symbolic—informational—features of products of
all kinds, and this importance is reflected in the higher
prices that are attached to, for example, designer
clothes and products of all kinds. But the sociocultural approach also stresses qualitative change in
the role of information in postmodern societies so
that we enter an “economy of signs” where the signs
effectively take on a life of their own. A striking
example from outside the world of consumer culture
itself is the huge expansion of the financial sectors
of the economy, with the creation of many layers
of financial “products” that are dealing with (often
unreliable) information about information. Money,
debt, and property rights are data that become the
subject of dizzying layers of speculation, trade, and
repackaging. Qualitative change is harder to capture
statistically than diffusion of new IT and changes in
technological capability or the expansion of information industries and occupations stressed in the other
two approaches. But many telling examples can be
amassed of how consumer choices, media content,
and everyday discourse reflect the developments
stressed in the sociocultural approach. This approach
thus puts great emphasis on the informational elements of consumer culture in IS and tends to treat the
material elements as more or less incidental.
While each of the three approaches focuses on specific types of development, identifying these as constitutive of IS, it is not inevitable that they are mutually
exclusive. Indeed, the approaches have many complementary features, as can be seen in various rich
descriptions of contemporary change. For instance,

the notion of post-Fordism represents an intriguing combination of the three approaches sketched
out above. To summarize extremely briefly, we can
see sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociotechnical elements in the vision of post-Fordism. Markets
and consumer demand become more fragmented as
consumers increasingly value symbolic features of
the products they buy. Greater levels of information
about consumer interests and requirements need to
be built into the innovation and production processes,
while work organization has to build on employee
skills and knowledge. And new IT supports all of
this, enabling rapid flows of intelligence about market
reaction to product offerings and rapid reprogramming of production equipment.
Over time, the three approaches to IS have become
intertwined; discussions have had to adapt to the
manifestation of trends that were merely the object
of speculation in earlier periods. Developments such
as those associated with new forms of globalization,
demographic trends, and with new challenges of
security and climate change have also come to preoccupy commentators. Arguably, we see less speculation about IS representing a transition away from
industrial society and more framing of IS as a further
stage of industrialism. Different forms of IS may
be manifested in different cultural settings—partly
as a matter of the governance of new information
systems, partly reflecting diverse cultural (and economic) histories and patterns of taste.

Emerging Information Technologies and
Consumer Culture
IS itself may be set to evolve through successive generations, as new types and applications of IT emerge
and their new capabilities are adopted (or not).
Practically every decade since the 1960s has seen new
patterns of IT use becoming widespread—from use
of mainframe computers only by large organizations
for back-office functions, through the adoption of
PCs in professional office work, to the mass diffusion of consumer computer systems (and embedded
microelectronics in many other consumer devices),
to the widespread availability of the Internet and
World Wide Web services, to Web 2.0 and mobile IT
devices of many types. This list is only a telegraphed
account of one series of changes, and a thorough
accounting of the evolution of all sorts of media
and consumer products would take up much space.

Information Technology

A fuller account, less dominated by the sociotechnical
approach, might not feature “generations” in the way
that is familiar from the IT world. It describes rather
smoother patterns of socioeconomic change (shifts
in industrial structure often take decades to become
apparent). Sociocultural development is multifaceted
and harder to summarize and quite possibly features
ebbs and flows, as what were at the time seen to be
epochal trends turned out to be transitory fashions.
But the fundamental point is that IS is dynamic and
evolving rather than a fixed state toward which societies are moving. In terms of consumer culture, this
suggests two things. First, cultural development may
be built around new communication and information processing capabilities; be informed by the levels
of education, new patterns of work, and structures
of careers; and reflect “postmodern” concern with
the symbolic content of consumption and the forms
of reflexivity that accompany this. Second, consumer
culture will itself continue to evolve and both shape
and be shaped by these broad social developments, in
ways that can reliably be predicted to be intriguing,
even if little else is predictable about them.

787

Kumar, Krishan. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern
Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World.
2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Machlup, Fritz. The Production and Distribution of
Knowledge in the United States. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1962.
Mansell, Robin, and W. Edward Steinmuller. Mobilizing the
Information Society: Strategies for Growth and
Opportunity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD). Trends in the Information Economy. Paris:
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, 1986.
Porat, Marc Uri. The Information Economy. Washington,
DC: US Department of Commerce, Office of
Telecommunications, OT Special Publication, 77–12(1),
1977.
Webster, Frank, ed. The Information Society Reader.
London: Routledge, 2004.
Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society.
3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2006.
Wyatt, Sally, Felicity Henwood, Nod Miller, and Peter
Senker, eds. Technology and In/equality: Questioning
the Information Society. London: Routledge, 2000.

Ian Miles
See also Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down;
Disorganized Capitalism; Electronic Video Gaming;
Governmentality; Home Computer; Mass Production
and Consumption; Mobile Phones; Network Society;
Postindustrial Society; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and
Economic Origins of the Information Society.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1,
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.
2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.
Duff, Alistair S. Information Society Studies. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Dutton, William H., ed. Information and Communication
Technologies: Visions and Realities. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Dutton, William H., Malcolm Peltu, and Margaret Bruce,
eds. Society on the Line: Information Politics in the
Digital Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman.
Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the
Computer Revolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Information technology refers to the hardware and
software that are used to store, retrieve, and manipulate information. Information technologies (IT) have
become embedded in so many systems, processes,
spaces, and objects since the 1980s that entire societies are routinely referred to as information societies.
In the broadest sense, information technologies refer
to the means through which information is configured, stored, and used and might include early symbolic systems, alphabets, inscription, writing, and so
on. During the twentieth century, information and
technology have become inextricably tied together,
latterly through the convergence of computing and
telecommunications, enabling the development and
diffusion of new commodities and modes of production, provision, distribution, and consumption. The
range, nature, and geographical scope of information technologies has changed radically even over the
first decade of the twenty-first century—especially in
terms of networks and new mobilities—and has arguably challenged some of the basic tenets and boundaries of production and consumption. Reflecting this,

788

Information Technology

the term now commonly includes communication to
become information and communication technologies (ICTs) plus the distinction between media and
ICTs has become harder to maintain, with theoretical
and methodological implications for understanding
the roles of communication and information technologies in mediating production and consumption.

Historical and Intellectual Context
The emergence and character of information technologies over the course of the twentieth century are the
outcome of complex technological, economic, social,
political, and cultural contexts and processes. In technological terms, the fairly rapid development of personal computers, cable, satellite and digital television,
office workstations, computer networks, and so on,
are innovations as significant in scope and scale as
the rise of agriculture and the machine technologies
of the Industrial Revolution. Across disciplines, most
changes have been understood under the rubric of the
information society—characterized by informational
service work and employment, a global economy, a
reorganization of time-space, the saturation of everyday life by media—a term that is related in various
different ways to processes of postindustrialization,
postmodernization, and globalization (see Webster
2002). IT is thought to be implicated in a transition
from industrial to postindustrial society, organized
to disorganized capitalism, and mass production and
consumption to flexible specialization and individualized consumption in service economies.
The intellectual contexts for understanding IT
and consumer culture in the context of an information society are varied. Economic approaches have
favored measuring increases in informational goods
and services and their relative worth to the overall
national economy. Sociological approaches have
often drawn on Daniel Bell’s canonical analysis of
postindustrialism and in particular the new occupations and consumption patterns implied by such a
shift. Geographers, and those interested in the sociospatial aspects of production and consumption, have
examined the role of IT in enabling “networked”
spaces to emerge, allowing for differentiated flows
of goods and services to arise. Post-Marxist cultural
theorists have inherited the legacy of the Frankfurt
school critique of the culture industry, where the current consumer culture represents a perfect alignment
of technology and capital. The intellectual context

of postmodernism has had a profound influence on
theories of consumer culture, especially the production and consumption of images, signs, and lifestyle,
and provides an important trajectory in locating ITbased media as central in mediating consumption and
consumer identities through advertising and marketing, according to Mike Featherstone. Similarly, those
studying “new media” have pointed to the novel
characteristics of networked media, suggesting that
many-to-many communication establishes radically
different modes of distribution and exchange that
have impacted on the form and content of goods and
services, the relations between producers and consumers, and the theoretical assumptions underpinning
conceptions of capitalist power. Others in information science and science and technology studies (STS),
such as Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star,
suggest thinking about IT as the often-invisible infrastructure or architecture of classification, management, and ordering in contemporary societies.

Key Dimensions
Information technology should be understood as
both having a role in shaping cultures of consumption and as something consumed in its own right. In
broad terms, mediating systems enabled by IT are
implicated in major social, cultural, and politicaleconomic change. The shift toward a particular material culture of late capitalism coincides with the rise
of information technology. Furthermore, most definitions of globalization or global consumption point
to the increasing mobility of information, products,
services, images, finance, and so on, all of which are
in some degree shaped and facilitated by information
technology. Debates have emerged dialectically in
terms of promises and threats to the existing social,
economic, and political order.
Bell argued that Western economies were reorientating around the information and service sectors
as opposed to manufacturing. The so-called postindustrial societies are characterized by the growth of
scientific knowledge, particularly its use in economic
productivity and growth. The concomitant growth in
“knowledge industries” and “knowledge work” are
partly the outcome of innovation in IT; indeed, the
functioning of Western economies today is inseparable from the production, processing, and distribution of information goods and services. The related
forms of occupational restructuring, and debates

Information Technology

about de-skilling, re-skilling and flexible labor, are
now a major aspect of debates around the growth
of e-commerce, the nature of information or media
work, and the emergence of multiple digital divides.
Within a sociological tradition, the work of
Manuel Castells has been instrumental in moving
recent debates about IT in the wake of the Internet
from the sphere of production toward an expansive
concept of the network society. While Castells supports the argument about informational labor, he
links this to a new social structure (networks) and
new forms of identity related to how informational
flows stand in contrast to physical places. Economic
activity becomes spatially dispersed but globally integrated, reducing the strategic significance of place
but enhancing the strategic role of major cities as
producers and consumers. Networks are composed
of interconnected nodes where information is collated, analyzed, and used to shape decision making. Distinctions arise between IT enabled “timeless
time”/“spaces of flows” and physical places, which
continue to be the focus of everyday life, rooting
culture and transmitting history. Digital television–
and Internet-facilitated global flows are key components of global cultural communication, especially in
advertising and marketing. The erosions of boundaries between home and work and public and private
are other aspects of time-space reconfiguration and
have important implications for our understanding
of the dynamics of production and consumption.
The actual continuities and discontinuities between
digitally mediated global, national, urban, rural, and
domestic forms of production and consumption are
extremely complex.
There are a number of related arenas within which
the consumption of ICTs and/or the consumption of
other goods and services through ICTs seem particularly significant.
First, the terrain of advertising and marketing has arguably been transformed by information
technology and especially digitization, including the
increasing prevalence of screens and what Jonathan
E. Schroeder calls visual consumption enhanced
by the “new visuality” of the Internet and the vast
visual content industries. This has been viewed as
part of a shift toward experience, attention, or image
economies in which images and signs are increasingly
significant as products in their own right. From this
point of view, individual and collective identities now
appear inseparable from images in the Global North.

789

There have been substantive changes in the nature of
advertising, how and through what means objects
are visually presented to consumers and how consumption itself is visually portrayed. The shift from
product-orientated advertising to brand-orientated
or lifestyle marketing in some ways exemplifies
these processes, particularly where brand images are
opened up to multidirectional flows of information,
often with unpredictable or creative results.
Second, the issue of the commodification of information is a major theme within both the political
economy of production and consumption and within
approaches stemming from cultural studies of media,
according to Roger Silverstone. This relates to not
only the above concern with advertising and imageloaded products but also concerns with the commodification of personal data, of informational goods such
as music and movie files, financial products, health
information, information applications, and intellectual property and copyright. This raises questions of
the intangibility of products, the nature of market and
nonmarket, state and nonstate modes of provisioning, and assertion of ownership, alongside issues of
how such goods and services are actually consumed
in relation to established trajectories of modern consumption. One line of thought is to theorize the forms
of immaterial laboring undertaken by consumers as
a critique of consumer empowerment. There is little
doubt that diverse forms of cultural production and
consumption are facilitated by the capacity for manyto-many communication (as opposed to the broadcasting model of one-to-many) and increasing access
to information, with the development of the Internet.
Greater volumes of data are being communicated by
a range of technologies. On the basis of this, information society theorists argue that the changes underway
represent not just quantitative but qualitative social
change—transforming households, communities,
education, health, work, democracy, and identities.
Third, at the level of lived experience and practice
in everyday life, there has been a huge growth of cultural activities, institutions, and practices in relation
to information technology. In this particular sense,
culture in terms of information and data has become
increasingly significant in contemporary society, and
with new ICTs, the means to produce, circulate, and
exchange cultural objects has expanded enormously.
Influential work on the consumption of ICTs in
the domestic sphere has been largely ethnographic
research. The emphasis here, as shown by Elaine

790

Information Technology

Lally, has been to demonstrate the reciprocities
between established patterns of domestic life related
to class, gender and ethnicity, and the new technologies incorporated. Other major contributions in an
anthropological vein have been that of Daniel Miller
and Don Slater (2000), exploring the production and
consumption dynamics of the Internet in Trinidadian
society (also Livingstone on the consumption of
ICTs by youth and children). Others such as Barry
Wellman and Caroline A. Haythornwaite have situated these dynamics in terms of social network analysis. In a theoretical and speculative vein, many now
describe economies in terms of cultural economies,
emphasizing the amount of informational and symbolic goods and services generating capital. Social
theories of identity and “liquid” or “fluid” social
relations stem in part from the remote connections
and instant communication based on IT.
Fourth, how the production and consumption of
IT is approached methodologically varies widely. The
quantitative measures supplied by economic analyses
of information work and the service economy have
been criticized for applying arbitrary classifications
of information. Political-economic approaches have
highlighted the ongoing monopolization of cultural
production through processes of commodification
and convergence, notes Vincent Mosco. In cultural
sociology and anthropology, some have argued for
the development of online or virtual methods to track
and interpret information flows. Most recently, the
rise of social media, such as Twitter, are prompting
questions about how acquisition patterns and trends
have become more transparent and traceable. Such
a phenomenon is of great interest to both academics studying consumer culture and to those seeking
to understand or codify consumer behavior more
generally.

Key Debates
Several key conceptual and empirical debates underpin the relevant literature across these disciplinary
domains.
First, a core debate at the heart of the varied literature is the extent to which IT can be singled out
as causally determining some of the broader changes
in production and consumption. Many accounts of
an information or network society have a residual
determinism, which can reproduce a productive
bias in consumer culture studies. Information society theorists can be broadly categorized in terms of

those who see technology as the driving force behind
change versus those who see social factors as shaping
technology and history. This debate, technological
determinism versus forms of social or cultural determinism, lies at the heart of the sociology of technology, although more relational theories are arguably
becoming dominant, according to Bruno Latour. The
broader point concerns the hardware or materials of
consumer culture and how they are accounted for
in any theory or analysis of stability and change in
cultures of consumption.
Second, there are questions about whether and
when quantitative changes (increasing information
flows, growing information economy, increased ownership of IT devices) constitute qualitative change
(a new social order). There is a debate here about
whether the present is radically different or merely
the continuation of long-running phenomena or tendencies. This in turn is inextricably tied to progressive and pessimistic accounts of stability and change.
For some, the information society is characterized by
greater freedom and fulfillment, whereas others point
to the continuation or exacerbation of long-running
inequalities and patterns of control. Debates about
whether the production and consumption of information can be best understood quantitatively or qualitatively are ongoing, but it is increasingly recognized
that IT itself in the form of software applications
increasingly provides the ability to combine both
approaches successfully.
Third, as a consequence of the proliferation of
information technology, it has arguably become less
clear who producers and consumers are, what their
characteristics are, or from the perspective of those
researching media production and consumption, who
the audiences are. In the last five years, the boundaries between production and consumption, especially
in terms of labor and leisure, have become particularly contested when we consider the advent of Web
2.0 and wireless information technologies enabling
unprecedented volumes of user-generated content.
In this sense, the processes of simultaneous cultural
production and consumption are linked to older and
broader discourses of prosumption or cocreation,
referring to mixed forms of provision, mass customization, professional consumption, craft consumption, and so on, each of which has implications for
socioeconomic analyses of informational capitalism
and also for issues of identity formation and power
dynamics. It is important to note here, however, that
there is much debate within analyses of ICTs about

Information Technology

local specificities and their relationships with accounts
of macro- and mesolevel change.
Such forms of IT-enabled dynamism have been
integral to recent accounts of speed and mobility
(of information, images, finance, devices, people)
and arguments about the relationship between the
social and the cultural. In advertising, for example,
it is arguably becoming more difficult to retain an
ocularcentric view of how vision operates in relation
to consumption. On the one hand, the intertwining
of the visual, of information, and of production and
consumption through branding produces a radical
intertextual immediacy that renders the notion of a
separate realm of representation (and of ideological
manipulation) highly problematic, according to Scott
Lash. The development of multidirectional and multifunctional media is clearly central here, distancing
these trajectories from those of mass media through
radio and television.

Directions
The aforementioned analyses of information technology as central to socioeconomic, political, and cultural shifts in production and consumption processes
continue to provide robust and significant ways of
understanding contemporary cultures of consumption. There are several ongoing trends, which bring
to the fore issues of information technology and consumer culture.
First, the spread and capacities of geospatial
software and databases present new challenges
in terms of how we conceive consumer behavior.
On the one hand, there are highly nuanced forms
of classification emerging through the mapping
of acquisition in relation to the spaces and places of
consumption. On the other hand, such software
intervenes in consumption processes in potentially
unforeseen ways. The ways in which numerous
devices and their applications are reorganizing
consumption activities is a major dimension of
contemporary marketing strategy where the flows
of information produced through ordinary practice
(made visible in online data as “consumption patterns”) are invisibly classified by software. Instead
of searching for our preferences in the marketplace,
we are presented with our preferences as the result
of algorithmic assessment of previous interests
or purchases. As individual consumers, we are
increasingly “socially sorted” into differentiated
lifestyle categories and at the same time encouraged

791

to “sort ourselves out” in terms of consumption
orientations and preferences.
Second, the development of IT systems in the
Global South presents us with issues of how different
cultures of consumption will emerge in relation to
IT and how they might be similar or different from
those of Western late modernity. Informational labor,
which represents a growing sector in China, India,
and elsewhere, involves IT as its central component.
From a political-economic perspective such growth
is highly significant in comparative terms. It also has
implications for comparative analyses of socioeconomic change more generally and for relationships
between changes in production and patterns of consumption in what may be very different national and
regional cultures.
Third, the increasingly important issues of sustainable consumption relate directly to the expansion
of IT-based systems and devices. The growing prevalence of digital trash represents a key policy concern
for those interested in establishing the parameters of
sustainable or low carbon societies. The phenomenon of e-waste relates to issues of practice, systems,
and ideals in future cultures of consumption and is
likely to be of particular significance in theoretical,
empirical, and policy terms. The realization that digital culture is an expansive material culture is particularly important in this regard.
Martin Hand
See also Actor-Network Theory; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling
and Up-Skilling; E-Commerce; Globalization; Home
Computer; Identity; Markets and Marketing; Social
Shaping of Technology; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Bell, D. The Coming of Postindustrial Society. London:
Penguin, 1974.
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age. 3 vols. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007.
Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An
Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Mosco, Vincent. The Political Economy of
Communication. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2009.
Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London:
Routledge, 2002.

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Informational Capital

Silverstone, Roger. Media and Morality. Cambridge: Polity,
2007.
Thrift, N. Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage, 2005.
Webster, F. Theories of the Information Society. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Wellman, B., and Haythornwaite, C. The Internet in
Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

INFORMATIONAL CAPITAL
The term informational capital designates the form
of capital that prevails in an information economy.
If industrial capital—such as machinery, stocks, and
buildings—was the most important form of capital
in an industrial economy, then informational capital—such as patents, trademarks, and other forms
of intellectual property, as well as less well defined
entities such as goodwill, intellectual or social capital, know-how, and corporate culture—become the
most important forms of capital in an information
economy. In particular, in contemporary consumer
culture, informational capital, such as brands, has
acquired an unprecedented influence on consumer
practices as well as the value of goods. However, the
terms capital, information, and information economy are not simple.
The concept of an information economy can be
traced to postwar U.S. debates on a coming postindustrial order, where services and the production of
information by means of information (essentially,
scientific innovation, education, and overall societal management and planning) would be the economically dominant activities. In these debates, the
notion of an information economy was linked to
utopian projections of an emerging postmaterialistic
consciousness, combining an artistic quest for selfrealization with ecological awareness and the end
of ideology and social conflict. In reality, however, it
would seem that the growing economic importance
of informational assets has been linked to accelerating global injustices and conflicts. In short, there
is no necessary link between an informationcentric
economy and a progressive social order. Another
critique that can be mounted toward the concept of
information economy is its overly cognitive emphasis.
Indeed, while codified knowledge, chiefly in the form
of patents and other intellectual property, remains
relevant and important, a lot of evidence—not least
within the managerial literature itself—tends to stress

the growing relevance of things such as brand and
intellectual or social capital that stands for assets that
are essentially relational, not cognitive: for example,
the ability of a firm to install an ambiance of consumer good will or a work environment that favors
creativity and collaboration. This way, the postindustrial economy would not so much be an information
economy as a relational or ethical economy and its
chief assets not informational capital as much as relational or ethical capital.
The term capital is equally complex (if less contested). If we want to construct a (provisional) theory
of informational capital, then we need to depart from
its three distinct meanings. From one point of view,
capital is a thing. It is a tool that is employed to produce something, a means of production. A hammer,
a steamroller, or a computer can work as capital in
relation to the labor of some living human subject
that employs it. From another point of view, capital
embodies a relation of power. The machine, the factory, and the computer contain a series of affordances
and constraints that push the labor process to evolve
in a particular way, in accordance with the functional
requirements of the particular production process.
From a third point of view, capital is an embodiment
of value. Different assets, factories, machinery, and
goodwill appear on balance sheets as resources that
can be capitalized on, that can work as collaterals for
loans or support the price of stock. Given this diversity of meanings attached to the term capital, a theory
of informational capital would have to embrace three
diverse aspects: information as a means of production, information as a form of power, and information as a form of value.
In the first sense, informational capital would
signify a new kind of productive resource that is
chiefly immaterial, that is, that consists of forms of
information (or of relations) that can be productively
put to work in generating outcomes that are valuable and that lend themselves to private appropriation. This would entail things such as web portals,
knowledge capital, and social capital. However,
these resources become useful only in relation to
their ability to mobilize a productive power or some
sort of informational or immaterial labor. The social
capital of a firm is useful insofar as the network of
relations that it encompasses enables the company
to perform certain actions; a web portal is useful
insofar at it accumulates traffic or (webpage) clicks.
In general, informational capital tends to create value

Informational Capital

by mobilizing productive resources (labor) that are
external to and independent of the firm that owns the
informational asset. Indeed, one crucial characteristic of the development of an information economy
has been the massive socialization of the production
process (aided by new information and communication technologies and a concomitant reoccurrence to
external resources and to “free labor” such as consumers giving attention to a brand, users contributing traffic to a website, or the public participating in
socialized innovation processes). At the same time,
this development has been paralleled by a continuous commercial mediatization of culture and communication. This way, informational capital is no
longer located to a particular place, but it tends to
saturate the life-world to the extent that it is no longer meaningful to maintain a distinction between
media and reality or for that matter between labor
and life. Informational capital would thus represent
the proprietary appropriation of what is essentially a
socialized productive power such as the “ordinary”
ability of consumers to relate to or network around a
brand, the ability of employees to construct the kinds
of social relations that enable a firm to respond to
market demands with a high degree of flexibility or
agility, or the ability of a company to appropriate
and own the fruits of a scientific research process
that tends to employ a growing multitude of diverse
actors. Seen this way, informational capital essentially represents the private appropriation of what
Karl Marx called general intellect.
In the second sense, this ubiquitous nature of
informational capital is linked to a different logic of
governance. Industrial capital was linked to discipline as a modality of governance. Discipline reached
its fullest development in the factory system (and the
other institutions such as schools and prisons that
mimicked that model), where spatial and temporal recomposition, together with the omnipresent,
objective rule of the machine, made possible new
and more radical forms of reeducation and reforms.
Informational capital works more like a program;
it does not so much impose sanctions as much as
it empowers and suggests a direction. A brand, for
example, is a complex of information that enters into
the informational flows of daily life and directs and
anticipates it in particular ways. Brands are made by
a kind of loop, similar to those employed in computer programming (if you chose this brand of coffee, then this kind of experience becomes possible).

793

It is important to notice that these loops are not
binding. Other forms of experiences, uses, and attitudes are possible. There are seldom sanctions. As a
form of governance, programming is not restrictive
as much as it is enabling. Brands, like informational
capital in general, rule through the freedom of their
subjects, empowering them in particular directions.
Sometimes, such empowering loops can be merely
symbolic; at other times, they have more tangible
manifestations (architecture that directs the flow of
impressions in a branded space; websites that link
to other websites; branded computer operating systems, such as the Apple Mac OS, that automatically
contain particular forms of software such as iTunes,
which in turn link to particular commercial ventures,
such as the iTunes music store). Such programming
depends on the ubiquitous surveillance of the social
enabled by information and communications technologies. Data mining, lifestyle clustering, cookies,
and other online tracking devices and information
systems that link cash registers, bar codes, and
information gathered through loyalty cards create a
myriad of feedback points through which the autonomous productivity of the social can contribute to,
alter, and refine programming strategies.
Finally, informational capital entails a different
logic of value. Industrial capital was linked to a logic
where the value of products had a linear relation to
the amounts of scarce productive resources invested
in their production (labor time, machine time, etc.).
Since informational capital tends to function by
putting to work external and ubiquitous resources
that are per definition abundant and hence without
value—like the abundant productivity of consumers
or the collective intelligence or general intellect of a
firm—productive time can no longer function as a
measure of value. Indeed, the absence of an established measure of value is one of the main factors
behind the speculative nature of the intangibles that
represent informational capital on corporate balance
sheets. Although there have been a few attempts at
articulating a value logic of informational capital
such as Daniel Bell’s knowledge theory of value in
the 1970s, it is the contemporary theories, within and
outside the managerial world, that tend to point to
an emerging ethical logic of value, where economic
value becomes increasingly dependent on the ability
to create a positive social impact. This is logical, since
informational capital is mainly relational capital; that
is, the foundation of its ability to generate economic

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Infrastructures and Utilities

value is the stock of positive social relations that it represents. Seen this way, the salience of corporate social
responsibility, socially responsible investments, and
ethical consumption would reflect the rising importance of a value logic proper to informational capital,
where value is related to the ability of firms and other
actors to erect the kinds of durable social relations
that allow them to appropriate generally available
knowledge, employee or consumer creativity, a good
reputation, and other productive assets that can neither be purchased nor contractually enforced.
Adam Arvidsson
See also Branding; Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS);
Information Society; Information Technology;
Materialism and Postmaterialim; Postindustrial
Society; Social Networks

Further Readings
Arvidsson, Adam. “The Ethical Economy: Towards a PostCapitalist Theory of Value.” Capital & Class 33, no. 1
(Spring 2009): 13–29.
Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New
York: Basic Books, 1973.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of
Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after
Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Mattelart, Armand. Histoire de la societé de l’information
[History of the Information Society]. Paris: Editions La
Découverte, 2001.

INFRASTRUCTURES

AND

UTILITIES

Infrastructures are network-bound large technological systems through which utility services are supplied, distributed, and consumed. Utilities are the
providers of these services, which encompass drinking water, electricity, gas supply, waste collection, and
sewer services.
Until quite recently, the term consumer, let alone
consumer culture, was absent in the vocabulary of
utility managers. Utility management has long been
the domain of engineers and urban planners who
have been actively rolling out huge networks of
pipes and wires, with the aim of servicing the public at large. Right at the point where the pipes and
wires reached the homes of individual users, utility

managers’ involvement suddenly ended. This point is
physically marked with a meter and rhetorically and
legally with the divide between the “public or collective” network on the one hand and the “private”
network beyond the meter. Hence, references to
consumption and consumers in utility management
language are to be found in terms such as beyond the
meter, the demand side, and connections.
Viewed from the other side of the meter, much
of the consumer culture literature has had a blind
spot on how consumers relate to the network-bound
systems that are providing them the basic services
such as water, energy, or waste disposal. Narratives
of identity building, distinction, or conspicuous consumption arguably deal with fashions and commodities, not with mostly invisible networks that supply
“universal services” to consumers.
An infrastructural perspective of consumer culture
shows that consumption practices have always—at
least partly—been shaped and constrained by infrastructural provisions. Even more so, the changes
witnessed over the past decades in the organization
and outlay of infrastructural provision point to even
stronger alignment between consumer culture and
infrastructures and utilities.
The scope of this entry is that of water and sewer
infrastructures, energy supply, and waste collection
services, all networks that have been rolled out over
more than a century in at least the Western part of
the world. The following section presents an overview of the many ways consumer practices are
related in material and sociocultural terms to the
provision of network-bound services, followed by
a roughly sequential presentation of five modes of
network-bound provision with an emphasis on how
these modes of provision have reshaped the relations
between consumers and utilities. Special emphasis
is given in the subsequent section on the present
marketized mode of provision illustrating what a
“consumerist turn” and a “splintering of network
services” may entail for everyday life and consumption. Lastly, some theoretical and methodological
implications for the study of consumption in relation
to infrastructures are explored.

Infrastructures of Consumption
It is not hugely surprising that most consumption
studies tend to overlook infrastructures and utilities.
In material and in symbolic terms, consumption has

Infrastructures and Utilities

been related to the purchase of goods, how we relate
to goods, and how our goods tell a story about ourselves or how we construct a lifestyle by surrounding
ourselves with carefully chosen matter. Only from the
1980s have scholars shown interest in how consumers relate to infrastructures. Ruth Schwartz Cowan in
a now classic book, More Work for Mothers (1983),
showed how the industrialization of the American
household was not the result of individual householder’s decision making but of the rolling out of a number of crucial infrastructures of consumption during
the first half of the twentieth century. Once rolled out
and made available to the public at large, such infrastructures of consumption were taken for granted
by consumers and providers as well as consumption
scholars. Yet there is much to say for the crucial roles
such infrastructures play in shaping our daily practices and how daily practices shape infrastructures.
Availability of utility services in the Western households has shaped and in many respects pushed up the
levels of cleanliness, comfort, and convenience consumers adhere to, as Elizabeth Shove and others have
shown in numerous studies of practices such as bathing, showering, and air conditioning.

Development of Infrastructures of
Consumption Over Time
If consumer practices align with infrastructural provision, then the variety and development in modes
of infrastructural provision is of crucial importance
to understand the evolvement of consumer culture
as well. Based on the studies of Stephen Graham
and Simon Marvin for utilities in the United
Kingdom and Thomas Hughes for electricity networks in the United States, Bas van Vliet, Heather
Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove constructed five
different modes of network organization and their
underlying implications for consumption and everyday life. These modes of provision may occur in
sequence but can also coexist depending on infrastructure and context.
An autonomous mode of provision comprises
stand-alone self-managed grids at a local scale in
which consumers are the providers of localized
resources. Harvesting one’s own drinking water from
a private well and burning waste in domestic fires
are examples. When independent suppliers become
involved in providing such local services, we can
speak of piecemeal modes of organization. Here, we

795

see the forms of electricity provision by local suppliers who have built small grids for beneficiaries.
Consumers are no longer comanagers as the balance
of management is shifted toward the provider. The
third, the integrated mode of organization, introduces a more centralized coordination and management of loads, which means that supply and demand
over larger integrated networks are optimized to
make maximum use of the capacity (power stations,
networks) installed. In one step further, a universal
mode of organization, demand is not regarded as
something to be differentiated, promoted, or controlled, but as a nonnegotiable need that has to be
met. As electricity, water, sewer, and waste networks
were extended up to regional and national levels,
demand had to be generated to sustain these systems
of mass production. It is in this mode of provision,
dominating during a long time from the 1950s to
the 1980s, that consumers have become treated as
passive connections of uniform services. Demand is
predicted for them and services provided accordingly.
A clear example of such rationale emerged after the
discovery and exploitation of huge gas reserves in the
Netherlands in the early 1960s. Within just five years,
a nationwide piped gas network was built accompanied with a national media campaign for central
(gas) heating and gas cooking. Instead of being stuck
in the one and only heated room, central heating
enabled householders to heat kitchens, studies, and
bed- and bathrooms with numerous implications for
everyday family life.
The last mode of organization is a marketized
mode and refers to the major turn that infrastructures of consumption have made since the 1980s
as a consequence of privatization and liberalization
of utility markets. A further analysis in terms of the
alignment between marketized modes of service provision and consumer culture is given below.

Splintering Utility Services, Differentiating
Consumer Roles
A marketized mode or provision involves the diversification of utility services through multiple providers and partially fragmented grids. In most cases,
marketized provision evolved from a paradigm shift
from universal modes of provision, which means
that market principles were introduced in situations
where state companies had a natural monopoly,
with captive consumers having no choice but to use

796

Infrastructures and Utilities

and pay for the utility services provided. The logic
of infrastructure management, in which fixed units
of power and water were delivered at standardized
cost as part of a wider universal service obligation,
is being challenged by a new logic in which “infrastructure resources are becoming commoditized,
gradually differentiated in terms of cost, availability
and quality over space and time” (Guy, Marvin, and
Moss 2001, 31). The call for liberalization of utility
markets and private participation in the provision
of utility services was based on the idea that state
companies were overstaffed, inefficient, and not solvent enough to make the huge investments needed
to upgrade the existing networks. Since the 1980s,
everywhere in the Western world, services such as
telecom, public transport (railways, bus lines), waste
collection, electricity supply, and water supply have
at least partly been transferred to private parties
through concessions, lease contracts, and up to full
divestiture. Much of the public and political debates
around this issue has been devoted to responsibility of the state versus private businesses to provide
the universal services to the population, about tariff
setting and investments in hardware, and issues of
equity and rights of access to basic services. What
is at stake here, however, is the possible alignment
between provision and consumption.
The opening of utility markets like electricity led
to the emergence of multiple providers who try to
compete with differentiated services. The picture
of single regional or national grids is revised into
splintered, partly fragmented grids served by more
localized resources and providers: grey and rainwater
systems replacing parts of water supply, combined
heat-power stations in residential sites, solar panels
in the built environment, and wind turbines in rural
communities that produce electricity on a localized
scale. Environmental issues were among the first to
be used to differentiate among infrastructure providers in the 1990s. Green electricity was the first differentiated service in European electricity markets as
were green providers the first to differentiate from
the normal ones. Consumers—who were so far
considered passive connections—were being asked
to consider switching to another electricity provider
on the basis that they were “greener” and, later on,
cheaper or more service-oriented than their competitors. The possibility for consumers to make a choice,
between different providers, their services, and even
the sources they produce electricity from, signals the

end of their role as captive consumer and the start of
a new identity: that of customer. But the opening of
utility markets has led to more than that. With the
increased possibilities created by new legislation and
subsidy programs for solar or wind electricity production, everyone, including domestic consumers,
could become providers of electricity to the common
grid. With this birth of the coproviding consumer
in utility markets, the strict boundaries between
the domains of consumption and provision of utility services have become blurred. Many more roles
for consumers toward utility service providers can
now be defined. Next to the roles mentioned above,
the role of citizen-consumer should be mentioned: a
consumer who bases new choices in utility services
on societal or environmental considerations and
becomes a local beneficiary of a windmill association, a supporter of a local waste recycling scheme,
or a protestor against prospective nonsustainable
developments in utility provision.
Now that it seems that consumers have become
much more visible in utility service provision and
that infrastructures have become much more visible
in consumer culture, some implications for the theory and methodology for understanding the relation
between consumer culture and infrastructures can
be given.

Theoretical and Methodological Implications
Infrastructures have traditionally been the object
of engineering sciences, economics, urban geography, and historical research. Major contributions
from a historical perspective with strong implications for the social sciences are Hughes’s Networks
of Power: Electrification in Western Society,
1880–1930 and Cowan’s More Work for Mothers.
Where Hughes introduced a systemic sociotechnical
perspective on the change of large technical systems,
Cowan showed how such changes have shaped and
constrained American household consumption
in the twentieth century. Since then, a diverse but
linked school of thought has emerged under the
umbrella of science and technology studies, part of
which deliberately deal with the linkages between
infrastructures, consumption, and everyday life.
Although the approaches toward the links between
consumption and infrastructures diverge from
issues of technological scripting, consumer choice,
and greening of lifestyles, all of these scholars

Infrastructures and Utilities

emphasize the two-way nature of the relationship
between infrastructures on the one hand and human
behavior on the other.
Consumer studies, on the other hand, has moved
its scope from individualist or single goods points of
view toward more contextual approaches including
the relevance of studying consumption through a
focus on access and use of different modes of infrastructural service provision.
Not surprisingly, the two fields of consumer studies and science and technology studies have found a
common ground in the classical sociological debate
around structure and agency. Based on this structuration theory, Gert Spaargaren has built a model
in which social practices rather than actors or infrastructural systems are central to the study of the
interplay between the two. It enables an analysis of
the reduction of environmental impacts of consumption in terms of deliberate achievements of knowledgeable and capable agents who make use of the
possibilities offered to them through specific systems
of provision.
The key issue here is consumer choice around
which many academic disputes have been built and
especially in cases where consumers are connected
to infrastructures that lock them into certain service regimes. Are consumers indeed free to choose
between the new infrastructural services provided
to them, or is this choice constructed, mediated, or
manipulated by the larger sociotechnical infrastructures in which consumer practices are embedded?
Where does agency end and (infra)structure begin?
An important field of study in this respect is of
how normality and everyday life routines are being
constructed in the interplay between the larger
systems of provision, consumption practices, and
objects. Elizabeth Shove and others have studied the
interplay for the practices of bathing, showering, air
conditioning and Zöe Sofoulis for water demand.
Although greatly revealing, these studies about the
interplay between consumption and infrastructures
are not going as far as suggesting how to influence
consumer behavior in more ethical, fair, or sustainable ways. The role of technology and infrastructures in deliberately shaping consumer behavior may
have unfavorable connotations for technological
determinism and social engineering. But if certain
infrastructures indeed manage to shape behavioral
choices, then this might raise the attention of
activists and politicians to propose “prescriptive”

797

infrastructures to change behavior, notes Ralf
Brand. Such deliberate construction of consumer
choice through (participatory) infrastructural design
is, however, rarely seen in consumer studies so far.
Most consumer culture scholars deliver a thorough
analysis of the interplay between consumer practices
and infrastructure provision but are hesitant to enter
the domain reserved for policymakers or activists
when it comes to designing future policies for infrastructures and consumption.
An emerging field of research in infrastructures
and utilities within urban geography, the consumer
culture and science and technology studies are of
sensory aspects of infrastructures. When consumers become coproviders, services become differentiated, and environmentalists start to plea for
making consumption patterns visible to encourage
rational use, then “visibility” is indeed a key issue
in a world that was until recently in the background
and underground. The questions being addressed
are, what exactly is made visible, for what purpose,
and for whom? Smart meters for energy and water
may reveal individual consumption patterns to providers, but they may also make providers visible
to consumers. And now that they’ve become more
visible, are infrastructure services also becoming
objects of conspicuous consumption and distinction, and what are the social and environmental
implications for that?
Last, a further liberalization and differentiation
of utility markets show a blurring of boundaries
not only between provision and consumption but
also between the different utilities. Energy providers
become involved in the supply of hot water to households (competing with drinking water supply), waste
managers in electricity production, and water suppliers perhaps in hydroelectricity. Traditional patterns
of provision and consumption that were attached to
either water or energy of waste now break up, and
new alignments and possibilities may emerge.
With such ongoing dynamics in the interplay
between infrastructures and utilities on the one
hand and consumption on the other, social scientific research in this field will keep on renewing and
extending as it did over the last fifteen years.
Bas J. M. van Vliet
See also Air and Rail Travel; Collective Consumption;
Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Demand;
Cycles of Production and Consumption; Domestic

798

Inheritance

Technologies; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Renewable Resources

Further Readings
Brand, Ralf. “Urban Infrastructures and Sustainable Social
Practices.” Journal of Urban Technology 12, no. 2
(2005): 1–25.
Fine, Ben, and Ellen Leopold. The World of Consumption.
London: Routledge, 1993.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991.
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. “More Than Ducts
and Wires: Post-Fordism, Cities and Utility Networks.”
In Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, edited by
P. Healy, 169–190. London: Wiley, 1995.
Guy, Simon, Simon Marvin, and Timothy Moss, eds.
Urban Infrastructure in Transition: Networks,
Buildings, Plans. London: Earthscan, 2001.
Hegger, Dries. “Greening Sanitary Systems: An End-User
Perspective.” PhD diss., Wageningen University,
Wageningen, The Netherlands, 2007.
Kessides, Ioannis N. “Infrastructure Privatization and
Regulation: Promises and Perils.” World Bank Research
Observer 20, no. 1 (2005): 81.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience:
The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg,
2003.
Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas van Vliet,
eds. Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of
Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2004.
Spaargaren, Gert, and Bas van Vliet. “Lifestyles,
Consumption and the Environment: The Ecological
Modernisation of Domestic Consumption.”
Environmental Politics 9, no. 1 (2000): 50–76.
Summerton, Jane, ed. Changing Large Technical Systems.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.
van Vliet, Bas. “Greening the Grid: The Ecological
Modernisation of Network-Bound Systems.” PhD diss.,
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands,
2002.
van Vliet, Bas, Heather Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove.
Infrastructures of Consumption: Environmental
Innovation in the Utility Industries. London: Earthscan,
2005.
Warde, A. “Production, Consumption and Social Change:
Reservations Regarding Peter Saunders’ Sociology of
Consumption.” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 14, no. 2 (1990): 228–248.

INHERITANCE
Inheritance is defined as money, property, possessions, or a title that is received from a family member,
especially at the time of his or her death, with the
transfer of ownership legally protected by the court
system. It is also defined as the receipt of a right or
an object previously owned by a now deceased family member. It is often considered as the receipt of a
legacy, that is, part of a family heritage. Something
received from a parent or parents as in a genetic
transmission is also considered an inheritance. In a
social or societal context, inheritance is a process by
which property relations, social relations, and cultural relations are reproduced over time, within families as well as societies.

The Historical Significance of Inheritance
Inheritance, in a general sense, has existed since preliterate times. Intergenerational transfers are a phenomenon found in all societies, with inheritance
as the most common technique for affecting these
transfers. Inheritance filled an important economic
function in preindustrialized societies, sustaining the
economic health of family members. In premodern
times, an inheritance had the ability to provide surviving family members with the finances needed to
subsist after the death of a primary wage earner or
provider. Their survival was commonly so dependent
on this transfer of wealth that there were often laws
in place to ensure that property owners bequeathed
their property to their surviving kin. In a macro sense,
an inheritance was a means through which society
was able to perpetuate itself and to economically sustain itself. It was the means through which societies
were able to reproduce their culture and social structures, filling a fundamental social role in societies.
Items transferred intergenerationally as part of
an inheritance also served to provide evidence of a
family’s status within the community. Inherited items
were a symbol of the prominence of the owning lineage. A family’s ability to maintain china, silver, jewelry, and other nonutilitarian household goods, even
during hard economic times, demonstrated the social
position and the sustained generations of strength
and wealth of the owning family. Inherited possessions with their “patina,” or gentle signs of aging, on

Inheritance

china, silver, and other items transferred intergenerationally documented the family’s status and provided
evidence of the lineage’s long-standing honor, good
name, and thus gentility.
Along with the inheritance of most of their belongings, a sense of the family continuity was also transferred to the next generation. Each generation was
then the beneficiary of the history, stories, and values
of the previous generations of the family. Thus, as
possessions were moved forward in the lineage, a
sense of comfort, security, continuity, and the family
identity were also passed forward.

Inheritance in Contemporary Society
Inheritance became less important with the emergence
of a consumer culture, traced to Europe beginning in
the sixteenth century and becoming more fully visible in the eighteenth century. With a strong consumer
culture, inherited possessions became less popular as
individuals and families were swept up in the newly
found consumption behavior of these times. Instead
of demonstrating status through inherited possessions, individuals began to demonstrate their status in
society through their ownership of the latest fashions.
A number of factors in the early 1900s continued
to lessen the importance of inherited items. According
to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. life expectancy
increased dramatically to an average of 78 years of age
in 2009, a substantial increase since 1900, when life
expectancies hovered around age 48. Coinciding with
this increase in average life expectancy, governments
created a range of programs, including society-wide
welfare, social security, and insurance, that could sustain family members, especially the very young, the
very old, and those not currently gainfully employed.
With these governmental programs, the necessity of
inheritances has been greatly lessened in contemporary societies, often making the symbolic nature of
these transfers far more important than their monetary value.
In more recent times, researchers in the early
1990s predicted that we would see the greatest transfer of wealth in history, as the World War II generation parents were predicted to transfer an estimated
$10.4 trillion in inheritance wealth to their adult baby
boomer children. Research that followed increased
those expectations, with estimates rising to a prediction that each baby boomer would receive an average

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of just under $100,000 dollars. However, by 2002,
as the stock market soured, economists reduced their
estimates to less than half of the previously predicted
amount, underscoring the lesser impact of this inheritance transfer between generations. In addition to
the weakening economy, this generation of parents is
living longer, thus, requiring the use of more of their
accumulated wealth.
Although inheritances have diminished in terms of
their financial necessity, they can provide continuity
to family systems and are still credited with helping
to maintain the social structure of society. It is one
way that societies and families are able to continually perpetuate themselves. Stories are often passed
forward through the lineage attached to possessions
and assets. These stories are often rich with lessons,
with the ability to socialize younger family members
about the values, gender roles, and behaviors that
hold sway with older generations of that family
group.
The gift-giving nature of inheritance increases
the likelihood of reciprocity and exchanges within
the family unit, important characteristics of strong,
cohesive social structures. Inheritance transfers have
been linked with serial reciprocity, with members of
one generation giving to a younger generation in a
similar manner to that of the gifts they received from
their descendants, often involving expected future
generational transfers within families.
With testamentary freedom, that is, the freedom
to decide to whom one’s belongings will be given
to on one’s death, consumers have the freedom to
assign their possessions to individuals of their choice,
within a framework set by the local or regional government. This testamentary freedom makes visible
individuals’ feelings about which family members
they prefer to transfer their possessions to, making
apparent their perceptions of the boundaries of their
kinship network.
While the inheritance of assets may be relatively
easy to divide, the inheritance of objects is rarely so
easy to apportion among heirs. Familial competition may ensue among siblings, all hoping to inherit
a valued family heirloom. Heirlooms also provide
evidence of the hierarchy within families, made visible by these possession transfers. Inheritances may
also transcend the kinship lines, serving to bring
those individuals in the fringes of the lineage into
the family. In these instances, families often entrust a

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Inheritance

daughter-in-law or a son-in-law, for example, with a
family heirloom, providing documentation that this
daughter-in-law or son-in-law is thought of “just like
a daughter” or “just like a son.”
In contemporary developed societies, inheritance,
including the transference of heirlooms, remains pervasive across middle-class and upper-class families,
although fewer items are transferred in contemporary kinship groups than were commonly transferred
during medieval and early modern families. Few
families traced in recent research denied the existence
or value of family heirlooms and most voiced pride
to have cared for intergenerationally transferred
items through the many migrations and relocations
typical of contemporary consumers.
Individuals report that heirlooms received in
their inheritances are beneficial by keeping their
family units more cohesive, serving as a scaffolding
to attach stories that illustrate their family identity,
demonstrating their families’ status distinctions, and
representing religious and moral values. Through the
inheritance of heirlooms, consumers are able to enlist
the achievements of ancestors and to move the distinction of their lineage forward in time.
One particular type of inheritance is that of
inalienable possessions. These are items that are
thought to be too valuable to leave the confines of the
family lineage. They are maintained by family members with the intention of passing them forward to
the next generation. Family members envision future
and yet unborn family members continuing to pass
the inalienable possession through the lineage for
perpetuity.
Objects selected to be transferred to younger family members are laden with meaning, both through
family descendents and through their carefully
crafted histories. These objects have been carefully
selected to serve as symbolic vehicles with the ability to imaginatively extend the status, honors, and
achievements of their family group into the future.
Inheritances allow contemporary consumers to pass
forward items that preserve a favored group identity
and make tangible their ancestral past.
The meanings and stories attached to these items
keep them inalienably tied to their original owner.
Instead of individuals having ownership of these possessions, they are instead owned by the family, or
lineage. Younger family members are schooled in the
importance of passing these items on later to future
generations. In addition to protecting these objects

for future generations, caretakers teach members
of the youngest generation about the family history
associated with the inalienable wealth and thus serve
to also teach family lessons and values. Current caretakers have responsibility to select a member of the
younger generation to someday transfer the item to,
with the assurance that the items will be well cared
for during that generation and that it will continue its
ascent into the future. Although inalienable wealth is
commonly thought to be objects, research also suggests that financial assets can also have the qualities of
inalienable wealth. Inalienable possessions can serve
as repositories of family histories, with the ability to
link current generations to a stream of ancestors providing current family members a social distinction.
Carolyn Folkman Curasi
See also Age and Aging; Consumer Society; Families;
Gifts and Reciprocity; Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable
Possessions; Material Culture; Memory; Retirement

Further Readings
Bradford, Tonya Williams. “Intergenerationally Gifted
Asset Dispositions.” Journal of Consumer Research
36 (June 1, 2009): 93–111.
Curasi, Carolyn F., Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnould.
“How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become
Families’ Inalienable Wealth.” Journal of Consumer
Research 31 (December 2004): 609–622.
Epp, Amber, and Linda L. Price. “Family Identity: A
Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption
Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research 35 (June 1,
2008): 50–70.
Finch, Janet, and Jennifer Mason. Passing On: Kinship and
Inheritance in England. London: Routledge, 2000.
Goody, Jack, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson. Family
and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe
1200–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976.
McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer
Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990.
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The
Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of
Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982.
Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of
Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983.

Innovation Studies
Sussman, Marvin B., Judith N. Cates, and David T. Smith.
The Family and Inheritance. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1970.

INNOVATION STUDIES
The Oxford English Dictionary credits the economist Joseph Schumpeter with the modern definition
of innovation. In his 1939 book Business Cycles, this
Harvard University professor distinguished between
invention and innovation. Invention is the process
of turning a new idea into a useful thing; the process
can be accidental or deliberate. In contrast, innovation occurs when an entrepreneur or an organization purposely works to bring an idea, technique, or
product into widespread use or to apply it to new
settings. An innovation can be a new invention, but it
might simply be an old product, process, or concept
presented in a novel way.
Innovation is important to consumer society
for several reasons. The many novelties that are at
the heart of daily experience—everything from the
annual vehicle model change to the latest Disney
production—are developed in response to public
desires uncovered through consumer research. Over
the centuries but especially since the early twentieth
century, firms and industries have innovated with
the aid of sophisticated mechanisms for determining
what consumers expect from products. These mechanisms have included door-to-door surveys, motivational research, and World Wide Web polling and
have involved a group of expert “go-betweens,” or
“intermediaries,” that facilitate the interface with the
marketplace. Examining consumer society from the
innovators’ perspective can provide a deeper understanding of how consumer desires are perceived by
manufacturers and how technical and managerial
constraints came to shape products in the grocery
store, the strip mall, and the airport duty-free shop.

The Sites of Innovation
Historically, innovation has transpired in two settings: industries or firms. In industries, actors who
might otherwise be competitors collaborate in pursuit of a common goal. This occurred in Gilded Age
America, when different railroads grappled with a
series of tragic accidents and joined forces to adopt
new technologies and technical standards for the

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greater good. These new artifacts—secure coupling
devices and a uniform set of colors for signals—
were recent inventions, but the innovation was their
application throughout the railroad industry. Similar
innovation occurs today at the industry level through
trade associations or standard-setting agencies,
such as the National Bureau of Standards and the
International Organization for Standardization, or
ISO. The main function of standards is to facilitate
the flow of products from farms, forests, mines, and
sea to processing and manufacturing plants and to
the ultimate consumer.
In firms, innovation historically occurred when
companies sought to improve existing processes and
products or to create entirely new ones. In the first
case, innovation was often linked to the rise of big
business and the quest for economies of scale. As
large firms made standardized goods for oligopolistic
markets, they competed by introducing efficiencies
in production, packaging, and distribution. In massproduction industries like meatpacking, cost-cutting
imperatives gave birth to new processes, as was the
case in Chicago at the turn of the last century. The
slaughterhouses of Armour and Company and Swift
& Company did not invent a new type of cow, sheep,
or hog, but they achieved scale economies in part
through a manufacturing innovation, the “disassembly” line. At the firm level, innovation could also be
linked to the basic need to develop new products.
Manufacturers that followed this path moved from
one business cycle to the next in pursuit of “novelty.”
They relied heavily on flexible production practices,
awarded managers a great deal of autonomy, and
paid considerable attention to the external environment. For example, in New York City’s garment district, which enjoyed a golden age of manufacturing
from the 1920s through the 1980s, firms developed
products by keeping tabs on Paris fashion and adapting new French styles to suit the distinctive needs of
the American market.
Innovation was crucial to the rise of consumer
society in several ways. Innovative firms helped the
economy grow. In the United States, big-business
innovators like U.S. Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad,
the Central Leather Company, General Mills, and
General Motors dominated the economy and kept
the country running. By employing large numbers
of people in blue-collar and white-collar jobs, they
extended abundance to countless Americans. They
also created products like railroad cars, automobiles,

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Innovation Studies

meats, and cereal, which generally improved the
standard of living.
Less visible to the consumer, but just as important
to consumer society, were the specialty manufacturers that catered to niche markets. Between 1909 and
2009, for example, the Rohm and Haas Company
grew into the world’s largest maker of specialty
chemicals by introducing leather processing chemicals, acrylic plastic sheeting, polymers for fast-drying
latex paints, and the electronic chemicals in virtually
all circuit boards and chips. The company had a distinctive corporate culture that emphasized customer
service and its close relationship with customers—
tanners in the 1910s, American and British aircraft
builders during World War II, European farmers during the Marshall Plan, and electronics companies in
the 1990s—allowed Rohm and Haas to create products for highly specific applications, such as Plexiglas
canopies for fighter planes and helicopters. Although
few people recognize the name of Rohm and Haas
(which merged with the U.S. giant Dow Chemical in
2009), its products also go into consumer goods like
sunscreen, water softeners, paint, circuit boards, and
microprocessors, which help to make everyday life
more comfortable and convenient.
This alternative path to innovation—with its
emphasis on niche markets and the continuous
production of novel goods—was also the modus
operandi for countless firms that made consumer
durables. Companies producing the goods essential
to consumer identity—household furnishings, china
and glassware, hats and suits, shoes and handbags,
electronics, and so forth—depended on rapid change
in product design for their livelihoods. Product innovation, more so than process innovation, was the key
to their future.
Scholars who write about innovation often pose
questions that are pertinent to the history of consumer society. What prompts companies to innovate?
What leads some firms to grow into big businesses
and other to remain smaller and more flexible?
Does industrial research drive product development
or vice versa? Who holds the power in innovation?
Do manufacturers and retailers drive change, or do
consumers somehow express cultural needs that
manufacturers and retailers labor to fulfill? The
relationship between producers and consumers is
complex and variable, depending on the time, place,
industry, and product.

Consumers have long been crucial to innovation in
industries that are just getting started. Radio is one of
the best examples of a consumer-driven innovation.
In 1910, nobody could walk into a store and buy a
tabletop or console radio that had been assembled at
the factory, as an Apple iPad or a MacBook Air laptop would today. People interested in the new “wireless” technology had to buy electronic parts made for
commercial and military use and put together their
own radio sets at home. As technical journals and
popular magazines began to publicize the wireless,
middle-class people who like to tinker discovered the
fun of home electronics. These hobbyists—mostly
schoolboys but some men and women, too—bought
electronic parts, assembled their own receivers, and
spent countless hours sending messages to each
other. Radio buffs were well-educated do-it-yourself
types, the first “nerds.” They used large portable
radios that ran on batteries, and they wore ear tubes
or headsets to hear broadcasted sounds that were
collected by large antennae. These early radios were
not things of beauty but consisted of glass vacuum
tubes, black boxes, and plastic knobs connected by
wires. Twisting the knobs to find the right frequency
was a fine art, often mastered by the young people in
the family who relished the challenge. Radio’s popularity among amateur transmitters, later nicknamed
“hams,” paved the way for its entry into the home as
a major entertainment vehicle.
Scholars of innovation in more mature industries have studied different situations to learn about
interplay of supply and demand. Historian Ruth
Schwartz Cowan emphasizes the importance of the
consumption junction, the metaphorical meeting
place for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. As
shoppers selected products in the marketplace, their
signals were picked up by manufacturers and retailers, who had to figure out what to make and sell.
Early on, much data collecting occurred in markets
and stores, as producers simply watched consumers as they shopped. Formal practices for gathering,
analyzing, and disseminating data emerged in the
Modern Era (1900–1945), when publishers, advertising agencies, and manufacturers embraced the
new field of survey research. When statistics failed
to explain shoppers’ motivations, another new profession—motivational research, which blossomed in
the cold war era—borrowed insights from psychology and applied them to the analysis of markets.

Innovation Studies

Working at the consumption junction, managers
seeking to innovate studied sales figures, designed
products, and planned advertising campaigns. But
the folks who ran American companies could not
always leave their desks, so they sometimes relied
on surrogates. These “fashion intermediaries” had
the primary responsibility for making connections
within the marketplace or “imagining the consumer.” Intermediaries worked in various types of
jobs: interior decorator, fashion designer, retail buyer,
merchandise manager, advertising executive, design
consultant, home economist, sales analyst, market
surveyor, and motivational researcher. Their principle job was to channel news from consumer to
manufacturer, helping the wheels of production and
innovation turn.
An example from the U.S. pottery industry
shows how fashion intermediaries standing at the
consumption junction facilitated innovation. From
the 1910s through the 1950s, the Homer Laughlin
China Company of Newell, West Virginia, grew into
the world’s largest pottery company by capitalizing
on the U.S. demand for inexpensive tableware, a
demand that emerged as working-class consumers
strove to emulate the dining habits of their social
betters. To learn what styles these shoppers liked,
Homer Laughlin’s managers relied on the professional retail buyers who worked for their largest
customers, the new five-and-tens that dominated the
main streets in factory cities and market towns. From
his office in lower Manhattan, the crockery buyer
for F. W. Woolworth, the nation’s largest chain store,
was responsible for selecting the merchandise that
would appeal to blue-collar consumers across the
land. Before the days of computers, large retailers like
Woolworth’s kept track of popular lines by hiring an
army of clerks to analyze the detailed, typed reports
on sales assembled by local store managers. The buyers would also travel around the country, visiting
stores and watching women as they shopped. The
combination of quantitative and qualitative data provided the buyer with insight on consumer tastes. He
knew which crockery shapes and decal decorations
sold well in Pittsburgh and so on for stores across the
country. Knowing the market, the crockery buyer visited the Homer Laughlin plant several times per year
to select the next season’s merchandise. Together, the
factory’s salesmen, general manager, and art director
and the retail buyer would negotiate the look of next

803

season’s styles. The aim was not to shape taste but to
respond to the desires of Woolworth’s shoppers.
Businessmen were embroiled in the culture of their
times, and most knew something about household
routines, as did Homer Laughlin’s managers and
the Woolworth’s crockery buyer. There were certain
patterns and preferences shared by most Americans.
But when the intricacies of domestic life confounded,
male executives turned to female fashion intermediaries for stylistic tips about clothing and home
decoration. Since the eighteenth century, companies
have understood the consumer to be female and the
home to be the primary site of consumption. Women
integrated goods into family and group rituals, sometimes using them in unexpected and creative ways.
New styles and tastes emerged. The trick for business was to learn about these fashions before they
bubbled into popular culture and to integrate them
into product design to create new innovations.
The need for the woman’s viewpoint created job
opportunities for female professionals who could
help companies to innovate. During the early twentieth century, Corning Glass Works became a leading specialty glass manufacturer through innovative
practices such as research and development, licensing, and joint ventures. Corning’s diversified product
portfolio—it made lightbulb envelopes and filaments
for General Electric, drawn glass for thermometers,
colored lamp covers for railroad signals, and Pyrex
baking ware—allowed the firm to spread its highly
specialized knowledge across a range of products and
customers. But when the company ventured into consumer durables with Pyrex baking dishes, it stumbled
and fell. Introduced in 1915, Pyrex bake ware was
made from heat-resistant glassware that had been
developed for railroad signal lamps. Corning managers hoped the shatterproof glass would appeal to
homemakers versed in the efficiency and cleanliness
crazes of the Progressive Era. But after the launch,
Pyrex sales foundered and stagnated. Corning turned
to the J. Walter Thompson Company, one of the
nation’s leading advertising agencies, that through
market research surveys discovered why women did
not like Pyrex. It was too expensive and did not come
in useful shapes and sizes.
To get a better handle on the women’s viewpoint, Corning managers established a modest
department of home economics, headed by Lucy
M. Maltby. Trained in the burgeoning field at Iowa

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Innovation Studies

State University, Maltby spent nearly four decades
at Corning, directing a department that answered
consumer mail, demonstrated products to consumers, and collaborated with the design department on
new products. As a fashion intermediary, Maltby
helped Corning’s engineers, designers, and managers
to understand the homemaker’s needs and brought
authenticity to the design process. Her staff helped
to design shapes that fit into women’s hands and
advised male designers to introduce products that
matched popular decorating styles. Maltby did not
invent Pyrex, but she was an innovator who helped
to improve its performance and sales. This pattern
was followed in other consumer industries, such as
processed food and appliances, which relied on home
economists as fashion intermediaries or consumer
surrogates in innovation.
In many consumer-oriented businesses, fashion
intermediaries labored hard to imagine the customer
and report on his or her tastes. But the presence
of intermediaries did not guarantee that business
would always make products that shoppers wanted.
Intermediaries coexisted with another type of business professional, the tastemaker, who saw consumers as malleable individuals, ripe for manipulation.
Tastemakers tried to remake the consumer in their
own images, imposing their ideas about what was
beautiful on the buying public. Often, their visions
did not find favor in the mass market. Sometimes,
they were simply ahead of the curve, resulting in
designs such as the 1934 Chrysler Airflow, beloved
by the critics but relegated to obscurity by consumers, who refused to buy it. In other cases, their ideas
were welcomed by consumers who wanted to distinguish themselves from the “unwashed masses”
by purchasing distinctive goods as status symbols.
Rookwood pottery, art deco kitchen ranges, and
Danish modern furniture are good examples. Their
creators wanted to reshape mass-market taste, but
the majority of American shoppers preferred more
traditional designs. Still, the American market, by
virtue of size and segmentation, absorbed these products as luxury goods, or upmarket lines.
Over the past two centuries, consumers often
had greater weight than manufacturers or retailers in innovation. This has been particularly true
in competitive markets, where personal taste determined the look and feel of the final product. Hands
tied, retailers watched shoppers as they decided to
buy some products while leaving other stock on the

shelf. Popular culture—movies, radio, magazines, the
World Wide Web—reverberated with the sounds of
consumers chattering about their favorite goods and
leisure activities. Concrete information about choice
found its way into corporate offices through sales statistics and market research. Smart manufacturers and
retailers kept tabs, adjusting the product portfolio as
dictated by the consumer jury. Those who listened to
customers and consumers proved successful.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk
See also Capitalism; Consumer Demand; Consumer
Durables; Cool Hunters; Cultural Intermediaries;
Cycles of Production and Consumption; Gender;
Information Technology; Markets and Marketing;
Novelty

Further Readings
Bakker, Gerben. “Building Knowledge about the Consumer:
The Emergence of Market Research in the Motion
Picture Industry.” In The Emergence of Modern
Marketing, edited by Roy Church and Andrew Godley,
101–127. London: F. Cass, 2003.
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Design and
Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. American Consumer Society,
1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. Wheeling,
IL: Harlan-Davidson, 2009.
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Rohm and Haas: A Century of
Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2009.
Clarke, Sally H., Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Steven W.
Usselman, eds. The Challenge of Remaining Innovative:
Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “The Consumption Junction:
A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of
Technology.” In The Social Construction of
Technological Systems, edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas
P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 261–280. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1984.
Graham, Margaret B. W. “Technology and Innovation.” In
The Oxford Handbook of Business History, edited by
Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin, 347–373. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lester, Richard K., and Michael J. Piore. Innovation: The
Missing Dimension. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004.
Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Internet

INTERNET
The Internet is among the rare group of entities—
whether inventions, ideas, or cultural phenomena
more broadly—that began as a development within
the U.S. Department of Defense and later came to
be one of the most impactful social forces in a way
unimagined by the initial developers, researchers,
and scientists. The Internet, and later the World Wide
Web, has to this day made a lasting impression globally. First conceived of as a last-ditch means of communication within the military in case the normal
means of doing so were damaged by nuclear attack,
the Internet was, in some ways, the bomb shelter of
the realm of telecommunications. Later, when universities revitalized it as a means of sharing research,
it took on the general “shape,” if you will, of what
we today recognize as the Internet.
Today, the Internet is a media technology consisting of a global network of computers and other
devices that allow for the relatively quick and easy
transmission of data built on layers of protocols. It
is this that has allowed for a variety of uses, including commerce, communication, data storage, and
research. To put it in terms media theorist Marshall
McLuhan once used, the Internet is the medium
that contains all other media as its content. In other
words, the Internet stands as the metamedia of the
twenty-first century. For this reason, the Internet has
since the 1990s been considered an important area of
research by sociologists, anthropologists, communications scholars, and economists. More than twenty
years after the Internet arrived on the consumer market, it is seen as an integral part of social research
on identity, social interaction, culture, politics and
consumption and has been a fruitful area of research
in the humanities as well.

Emergence and Proliferation
The Internet—as something that the masses, not
just those who were affiliated with academia or the
military, understood, identified and had some experience with—emerged in earnest in the 1990s, during an era that many call the dot-com boom or the
information technology revolution of the 1990s.
The preponderance of mailed CDs offering a trial
of one thousand free hours of America Online,
CompuServe, or Prodigy, some of the earliest

805

Internet service providers (ISPs) that made headway in the U.S. consumer market, are a reminder
of this era. For the most part, these ISPs were the
first foray into the Internet for many people in the
United States. The Internet took off in the United
States more quickly than it had in most other countries due to a convergence of various factors. For
one, the personal computer, which had entered
the consumer market as early as the 1980s, had
decreased in price enough to be affordable for
many consumers. In addition, the Internet had
also been backed by legislation in both the George
H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, which
allowed for the rapid building of the infrastructure necessary for Internet access in schools, for
instance. And of course, the dot-com boom, which
lasted from 1995 to 2000, made for not only cultural tangibility but also the speedy development of
a variety of media technologies, as computer scientists, venture capitalists, and tech geeks were all
creating new products.
By the late 1990s, as the dot-com boom turned
into a bust, concerns over who had access to the
Internet (and computers generally) and who didn’t
began to surface under the umbrella of the term digital divide, which was first introduced by the Clinton
administration. More than a simple economic gold
rush, the Internet began to be viewed as a resource,
as even a human right, as Stephen Kurczy reports.
The appearance of such views signaled the end of the
Internet as novelty and the beginning of the Internet
as a major component of social and political life for
many human beings.
Although the terms Internet, online, and the Web
are often conflated, each deserves more specificity
when used. The Internet, as described above, is the
name of the network of networks that is able to link
computers to one another. The World Wide Web,
on the other hand, is the visual representation of the
Internet that we are most familiar with today. We
access it through a World Wide Web browser and
tend to navigate to specific “spaces” on the World
Wide Web through a URL (uniform resource locator) or web address. These two are not equivalent.
Prior to the World Wide Web, there were means by
which to access the World Wide Web and be online,
without typing in a web address. For instance, in the
1990s, the dominant experience of being online came
from America Online, which had its own “world”
of keywords, chat rooms, and channels. Hence,

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Internet

accessing web content did not require one to open
up a World Wide Web browser at all. One could stay
within AOL’s Internet architecture.
The various means by which people access e-mail
is a more contemporary example. E-mail was one of
the earliest functions of the Internet. There are two
main ways of accessing e-mail. What most people
today use is webmail. One goes to a URL to read,
write, and send e-mail messages. However, some
use e-mail clients, such as Mozilla Thunderbird,
Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Mail. These allow the
accessing of e-mail messages without using a World
Wide Web browser. Another example is computer
games, such as World of Warcraft, which require an
Internet connection but are not played on the World
Wide Web but through an application (or program)
that connects to the Internet on its own.
In the wake of the wane of services such as America
Online and Prodigy, which was spurred by the rise
of broadband Internet, which did not require the
use of a phone line for connecting, the World Wide
Web had become the dominant mode of accessing
the Internet. As cable TV providers began to bundle
broadband Internet access with cable service, broadband Internet became more available in the United
States. In Asia, broadband had been available much
sooner than in the United States, such as in South
Korea, which, as a nation, has migrated completely
from dial-up phone access to broadband access. This
can be said of many parts of the European Union
as well, although the rate of broadband penetration
of Asia far outpaces the United States and European
Union. Today, broadband Internet has had the most
global reach since its inception due to wireless technologies. In parts of Asia, such as Iran, and Africa,
such as Nigeria and Ghana, the means by which
most people access the World Wide Web is through
mobile devices, reports Richard Wray.

Scholarship
Over the course of its development, from the
command-line Internet, which looked more like
MS-DOS, to the World Wide Web with its hyperlinks, to Web 2.0 with its sociality, there have been
numerous studies of the Internet and the World Wide
Web, with perspectives changing according to the
dominant framework of the World Wide Web.
It is in this period in which names such as Google,
Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube came to be not

simply websites but cultural institutions. In fact,
some view Google to be the World Wide Web itself.
For many, if it is not “googleable,” then it does not
exist. It is no surprise that it is during this period that
a surge of Internet scholarship emerged.
The first wave of Internet studies can be called
pre-Web. These consisted of research in the realm
of identity and communities in multiuser domains
(MUDs) and the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (The
WELL), virtual worlds that are mirrored today most
accurately by Second Life and multiplayer games,
such as World of Warcraft (Turkle 1984; Rheingold
1993). These studies tended to focus on the effect
of the ways in which members of such communities
reinvented themselves to form second selves, identities that were removed from their “real” (or nonvirtual) lives. Members of communities were using
these technologies to gender swap, create multiple
personas, and so on; thus, multiple and decentered
identities became a meme of sorts that defined this
wave. As this was the early years of virtual communities, the scholarship of this wave also focused on the
legitimacy of online social interactions. The connections forged in MUDs and WELLs were indeed very
real, they argued. However, this approach assumed
that identity and Internet are categorically distinct
entities. But with the onset of the World Wide Web,
more studies focused on how behaviors and actions
have been “remediated” (Bolter and Grusin 2000)
on the World Wide Web and, in turn, woven into
everyday life.
With the proliferation of the World Wide Web,
Internet studies looked toward the various social
forms that existed offline that made it onto the
World Wide Web. One of the most oft mentioned
was that of economics and search. Though indeed
the dot-com boom had been an instance of the intersection of the Internet and venture capital, the ability
to buy (and sell) on the World Wide Web is perhaps
the most lasting impression of what scholars call
Web 1.0. The World Wide Web’s rather low barrier
of entry allowed for businesses of all kinds to create a
digital storefront on the World Wide Web. This was
made even easier by the emergence of sites like eBay
and later Amazon, where users could sell and buy
products on the World Wide Web relatively securely.
But the Internet was not a place where the trading of
goods was necessarily legal.
The Internet also gave birth to file-sharing services
such as Napster and later BitTorrent, which allowed

Internet

for the exchange of media files through an Internet
connection. While the earliest of file-sharing services
focused on music files, file sharing exploded into
other media, including films and computer programs.
Therefore, scholarship began to revolve around
copyright and intellectual property issues both in the
academy and in the greater public. Debates over the
phrase “information wants to be free,” which is at
the heart of the ideology of the open-source movement, began to appear in the literature. Although the
open-source movement is specific in its purported
ideals (some of which are highly technical) and selfdefinition, its ideological kernel can be found in the
general user-centric culture of the World Wide Web,
of which YouTube is perhaps a salient example.
YouTube, a popular video-sharing site, has arguably
created a new “genre” of video, many of which are
mundane, amateurish videos of a day spent at the
zoo, for example (Heffernan 2009).
This theme of participation has also fueled much
and increasing research in the realm of economics,
consumption, and politics on the Internet, in an
era that many media analysts and scholars refer to
as Web 2.0, which is shorthand for “the becoming
social” of the World Wide Web. Whereas in the first
generation of the World Wide Web it was viewed
as an information superhighway, that is, a large
database or resource from which users could gather
information, Web 2.0 is seen as an arena in which the
user is not only a consumer of information but also a
producer. The experience of the prosumer of Web 2.0
is active, not passive like in the days when one would
merely “look it up on the Internet.” The Internet, or
the World Wide Web more precisely, is increasingly
becoming the place where the diverse dimensions of
one’s life play out—whether it is work or leisure.
Blogging and social networking are perhaps the
most prominent examples of Web 2.0. Although
some media analysts, such as Chris Anderson, have
pointed to Wikipedia as the example of Web 2.0
par excellence, it seems that blogging and social
networking may be more ubiquitous. Blogging, the
practice of keeping a weblog, has become so widespread that British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
News Online (2005) estimates that a blog is created
“every second.” At the core of the “ethic” of blogging is sharing. Blogging, while it does not necessarily have to be so, consists of short posts oriented
around a link, photo, or video. It usually refers to
something outside of itself. This, however, does not

807

mean that blog posts are not original in their content.
As David Carr suggests, many successful blogs, such
as Gawker, a gossip blog, or The Awl, a mixed blog
of cultural criticism, news, and music, gain notoriety and web traffic through writing style and tone
though they link to other sources in nearly every post.
The prosumer is also explored in the work of
media scholar Henry Jenkins, who has taken note of
the ways in which the World Wide Web has affected
learning, in particular, literacy. In his analysis of the
online fan fiction culture that emerged from the
Harry Potter book series, Jenkins argues that Harry
Potter fan sites are instances of the development of
an informal learning culture; they are organic affinity
spaces characterized by a dynamic of participation
(in this case, of creating one’s own narratives using
the characters and settings of the popular novel series
by J. K. Rowling).
The rhetoric of Web 2.0, however, did not abandon identity altogether. In this vein, some scholars
such as danah boyd have looked at the effect of social
network sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, on
identity formation across life stages. As she argues,
different age groups use the World Wide Web in varying ways. Youth, for instance, use the World Wide
Web mostly for consumption, attention, and keeping
in touch with friends, while “20 somethings” use the
World Wide Web for courting (as opposed to dating) and seeking meaningful labor, that is, careers
as opposed to jobs. But identity on the World Wide
Web, more generally, becomes an exercise in careful self-curation, where one’s multifaceted identity is
presented carefully in the various social networks of
which he or she is a part. To describe this phenomenon, boyd uses the language of sociologist Erving
Goffman, calling it identity performance. Along
similar lines, scholars, including boyd, of race on
the Internet have remarked the rather novel way in
which racial identity comes into play on the Internet,
in particular in social spaces, such as MySpace, and
on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). In the case of
the latter, Lisa Nakamura has remarked that there
is extensive identity performance in the modification
of buddy icons, the avatars that are associated with
AIM accounts, that, to use her example, express a
Muslim identity.
Due to the default nature of anonymity of the
Internet, there has been much difficulty in simply
translating methodological frameworks—whether
social scientific, philosophical, statistical, or

808

Internet

humanistic—from offline to online. There is rich literature about the merits of performing, for instance,
ethnography on the World Wide Web. Some scholars, including Angela Cora Garcia and Sam Han,
have suggested that lurking, the Internet, or Net,
lingo (Netlingo) slang term for the act of observing
but not participating in a social space on the World
Wide Web, whether it be a discussion board, e-mail
list, or chat room, is the preferred method of ethnographic research on the World Wide Web. Others
such as Norman Denzin pointing to the immense
amount of text that is available on the World Wide
Web, have used the Internet as a giant archive for
content and discourse analysis. And some have
used the Internet primarily as a portal for survey
research, because of the anonymity it provides.

Future Directions
The debate on the future of the Internet has recently
flared up due to an article in Wired magazine written
by Anderson and Michael Wolff titled “The Web is
Dead. Long Live the Internet.” The tongue-in-cheek
nature of their proclamation has less to do with an
antitechnology reactionary revolution and more to do
with a technical point. They are not in the least talking about the end of the forms of connectivity facilitated by a global network of computers. Rather, they
are addressing the fact that the dominance of mobility in the contemporary computing experience has
pushed the orientation of the Internet toward apps,
software that is run on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets (e.g., Apple’s iPad). Anderson and
Wolff’s point that the World Wide Web as the dominant framework of how we understand the Internet
is on the decline is probably true, if things continue
to go in the direction of mobile devices as they seem
to be. However, the phenomenology of mobility that
buttresses their claim is perhaps where they make the
largest of contributions. Future Internet research will
have to reckon with the impact of mobile Internet,
wherein one could look up the sale items of a clothing store by pointing one’s smartphone camera at the
store’s quick response (QR) code (similar to a bar
code). The possibilities of augmented reality are no
longer just a figment of science-fictive imagination
but already here. The discussions on whether the
Internet is an important aspect of modern life are
moot. The future is already present in that regard.
Sam Han

See also Communication Studies; E-Commerce; Electronic
Video Gaming; Home Computer; Information Society;
Information Technology; Prosumption; Virtual
Communities

Further Readings
Anderson, Chris, and Michael Wolff. “The Web Is Dead.
Long Live the Internet.” Wired, September 2010.
Available at http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/
ff_webrip/all/1.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation:
Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2000.
boyd, danah. “Incantations for Muggles: The Role of
Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life.”
San Diego, CA, 2007. Available at http://www.danah
.org/papers/talks/Etech2007.html.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News Online.
“One Blog Created ‘Every Second.’” BBC, August 2,
2005, sec. Technology. Available at http://news.bbc
.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4737671.stm.
Carr, David. “The Awl Finds Some Level of Online
Success.” New York Times, October 24, 2010. Available
at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/business/
media/25carr.html?_r=1 (accessed December 21, 2010).
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1,
The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Denzin, Norman K. “Cybertalk and the Method of
Instances.” In Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues
and Methods for Examining the Net, edited by Steve
Jones, 107–125. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999.
Garcia, Angela Cora, Alecea I. Standlee, Jennifer Bechkoff,
and Yan Cui. “Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet
and Computer-Mediated Communication.” Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography 38, no. 1 (February 1,
2009): 52–84.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
New York: Penguin, 1990.
Han, Sam. Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Heffernan, Virginia. “Uploading the Avant-Garde.” New
York Times Magazine, September 6, 2009. Available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06FOBmedium-t.html?_r=1&hpw.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New
Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
Kurczy, Stephen. “Is Internet Access a Human Right?
Top 10 Nations That Say Yes.—CSMonitor.com.”
Christian Science Monitor, March 9, 2010.
Available at http://www.csmonitor.com/World/

Interpellation
Global-News/2010/0309/Is-Internet-access-ahuman-right-Top-10-nations-that-say-yes.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man. New York: Signet, 1964.
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the
Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human
Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Wray, Richard. “Africa Sees Massive Growth in Mobile
Web Usage.” Guardian, December 22, 2009. Available
at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/22/
mobilephones-internet.

INTERPELLATION
The concept of interpellation has had considerable
importance in analyses of consumer culture both in
the academy and in the practice of marketing and
advertising. This concept makes an important contribution to understanding the processes whereby people are recruited into identity positions thus bringing
together the inner world of unconscious processes and
external representations that occupy the public terrain
of ideas, symbols, images, and myths. The concept of
interpellation accords high priority to symbolic systems and representations but combines them with the
operation of the psyche and psychological processes in
the structuralist tradition. By offering an explanation
of the mechanisms through which people are recruited
into identity positions through being confronted
with symbolic systems and signs, interpellation presents useful material for the design of advertisements.
Cultural studies theorists are able to decode such sets
of symbols, which those in advertising and the creative
industries construct using the same sets of knowledge.
The semiotics of symbolic systems that appeal to
unconscious forces play a key role in these processes.
Interpellation is all about how the mechanisms of
identification work and how we come to think of ourselves as that person who has that identity. Consumers
can be seen to be interpellated by the associations of
a product or service that draws them in so that they
think, yes, that’s me; I’m that kind of person.
Interpellation derives from the work of the French
social philosopher Louis Althusser who sought to

809

provide a nonreductionist explanation for the operation of ideological processes through which people,
as individuals or as members of groups, including
social classes, took up identity positions and were
recruited into ideologies. Althusser’s earlier work
had been called into question by the failure of the
political events in Europe 1968 (and in particular of
the French Communist Party to bring about revolutionary change), so he sought to provide an explanation that went beyond the idea of a repressive state
and explored more subtle and complex modes of
subjectivization.
Althusser’s critique, in his work on ideological state apparatuses ([ISAs], 1984), suggested that
ideologies provide the basis of the presuppositions
through which people make sense of their everyday
lives; ideology largely operates on people unconsciously; that is, we are unaware of the social structures that seem so taken for granted that they are
common sense and seem obvious. In invoking the
notion of common sense, Althusser was building on
the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci,
whose engagement with everyday assumptions and
the routine operation of ideologies and beliefs have
also informed theories of consumption. Althusser
goes on to pose questions about how ideologies as
systems of mass representation or structures work
on us internally. How are we recruited into these
perspectives on the world that become assumed and
taken for granted? Althusser’s response to this question is that ideologies work through the philosophical and juridical category of the subject, which he
sees as a social category, for example, a legal subject,
a sexual subject, a gendered subject, and a grammatical subject. Thus, the subject of ideology is a constructed category, which is pivotal to the functioning
of ideology through which concrete individuals are
constituted.
Interpellation presents the next stage of
Althusser’s argument as the precise mechanism of
recruitment. Interpellation both names and positions
the individual, for example, as a subject of the law
through the mechanism of hailing, in which each of
us immediately recognizes ourselves as subjects who
are being addressed, and through the process of recognition, we submit ourselves to the consequences of
that positioning. Being interpellated is like someone
calling out your name in the street, and you turn
around because you recognize that it is you who is
being hailed (or you think it is you). Althusser uses

810

Interpellation

the example of Christian religion to demonstrate the
different stages whereby first, the individual is interpellated as a subject, then is subjected to the Subject
(the divine subject par excellence); next, individuals
recognize each other and themselves as subjects. Last
comes the acceptance that on condition that subjects recognize themselves and behave accordingly,
“everything will be all right” (1971, 170). Thus, subjects are themselves implicated in the process; they
are not merely the passive recipients and followers of
ideology, whatever form ideology takes. The subject
is also positioned within a set of assumptions, what
Gramsci defined as common sense and spontaneous
ideology.
In terms of consumption, this means buying
the product and buying into its associated lifestyle,
through our aspirations if not actually. The moment
of recognition and of being hailed is a spontaneous
identification, like hearing someone call out your
name when you turn around and think, that’s me
who is being addressed. Sometimes, your name could
be a national identity; some representations, such
as the flag or national strip at sporting events, hail
the spectator or fan as a member of that nation. In
the context of consumption, the name we recognize
is more usually that associated with a lifestyle—the
homemaker, the fashionista, the caring parent, the
sexy young professional, the streetwise youth, the
prudent saver or investor. Positions vary, but through
the process of interpellation, we recognize our place
within the discourse and its characteristics so that
we can identify ourselves in that place as potential
authors. An interpellation operates both to identify
and to circumscribe events, by defining subjects who
also feel they are active in the process and are making a choice. Thus, the mechanisms of interpellation
have some purchase in redressing the determinacy
of Frankfurt school theories of consumption, which
presented the consumer as the passive construct of
class-based ideologies of capitalist production and in
a state of false consciousness. Theories of consumption have shifted from an emphasis on the culture
industry and critiques of capitalist commodifcation
toward approaches that stress creativity.
Although extensively criticized, the concept of
interpellation is frequently invoked in a more general way as descriptive of the moments when, for
example, people recognize the sort of person they
are and want to be. Michel Foucault challenged
Althusser’s notion of ideology as necessarily standing

for that which is in opposition to “truth.” Although
Foucault shared Althusser’s antihumanist critique
of the concept of a unified subject and argued that
subjects are produced and not given, he suggested
that production of subjectivity was not through
unconscious processes and rejected Althusser’s use
of psychoanalysis. Others such as Michèle Barrett,
following Foucault, have argued that to suggest that
the subject is hailed into an identity position suggests
that there must be a subject who exists prior to the
process whereby that subject is recruited and identifies with a particular identity. Although Althusser
sought to avoid the constraints of false consciousness in his formulation of the idea of interpellation, it
can, nonetheless, be seen to work all too effectively,
and the concept of interpellation cannot accommodate resistance or creativity. For example, as studies
of subcultures, starting with Stuart Hall and Tony
Jefferson’s Resistance Through Ritual (1976) and
Paul Willis’s 1978 study of symbolic creativity have
demonstrated, individual consumers and subcultural
groups use goods in a subversive way. The artifacts
of consumption are polysemous and multiaccented
rather than delivering a simple message.
However, Althusser’s incorporation of unconscious forces into the processes and the intensity of
that moment when we feel that we are named by
interpellation captures the dynamic of recognition
and the moment at which the subject is “summoned
into place” (Hall 1996). As Judith Williamson has
argued, interpellation captures exactly what happens in advertisements that address us through the
trope of hey you! and we recognize that we are being
addressed, and at that moment, we take on the subject position that is offered. It may not always work,
but when it does, interpellation catches some depth
of the moment of identification.
Kath Woodward
See also Advertising; Althusser, Louis; Cultural Studies;
Identity; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Psychoanalysis; Semiotics; Subculture

Further Readings
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books,
1971.
Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984.
Barrett, Michèle. The Politics of Truth. Cambridge: Polity,
1991.

Inventing Tradition
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 1972–1977, translated by Colin
Gordon. London: Harvester Press, 1977.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks.
London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
Hall, Stuart. “Introduction, Who Needs Identity?” In
Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall
and Paul Du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage, 1996.
McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From
“Jackie” to “Just Seventeen.” Basingstoke, UK:
Macmillan Education, 1991.
Negus, Keith, and Michael Pickering. Creativity,
Communication and Cultural Value. London: Sage,
2004.
Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology
and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Harvester
Press, 1978.
Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge, 1978.

INVENTING TRADITION
The definition of the term tradition is wide ranging
and fluid. It is commonly accepted to refer to a set
of practices, customs, or values, largely of a symbolic
nature, that are passed through generations through
repetition (and often ceremony) thus inferring a sense
of continuity and identity. Traditions are often held in
high regard, as perceived wisdom transmitted from
one generation to the next to be revered and protected. The term inventing tradition was first coined
by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their 1983
publication The Invention of Tradition to describe
fictitious, socially constructed practices, which are
governed (both overtly and tacitly) by accepted rules
and/or ritual to inoculate certain values, norms, and
behaviors. This groundbreaking but contested collection of essays questioned the authenticity of seemingly “indigenous” or “true” traditions and suggested
that many are in fact recent constructions that have
been imagined to serve particular agendas in the present day. The process or act of “inventing” a tradition, they suggested, emanates from “novel situations
which take reference to old situations or which establish their own through quasi-obligatory repetition”
(1983, 9). Through this modernist-constructivist
reading of community and nationality, the traditions
to which each subscribe are embedded effectively in
traditions that are ultimately determined not by historical “fact” but by an aggregation of sentiment,

811

nostalgia, and politics all stemming from the identity
requirements of the moment.
Invented traditions are said to differ from indigenous or “authentic” traditions in that they are
social fabrications that are enacted or established to
construct some sort of lineage with the past that is
not necessarily there. While many are new cultural
creations, others borrow, evolve from, and merge
with the past. Through time, their origins become
blurred or romanticized until it is no longer possible
to differentiate between the original and invented
tradition. Hobsbawn (1983) draws on the invention of new architectural traditions in Britain in the
late-nineteenth century to illustrate this point. The
intellectual elite at that time chose to construct parliament buildings (as a national symbol) using materials and a style reminiscent of the Neo-Gothic Era
as opposed to the Classical trend of that time. They
believed the medieval reimaginings of Parliament
were more congruent with the English national
character. The Gothic style the buildings eventually
assumed implied a natural continuity with the past
despite being subject to extensive revisionism.

Functions
Invented traditions are inextricably linked to the heritage process and the construction of identity, heritage
meaning the selective use or manipulation of the past
in and for the present. Like heritage, invented traditions are not “given”; rather, they are “made” and
serve a number of social, political, and economic
functions. The motivations for constructing or inventing a connection with the past are wide ranging but
appear to stem primarily from the need for some sort
of social cohesion. Hobsbawm (1983, 9) believes
there are three “types” of invented traditions: “(1)
those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or
membership of groups, real or artificial communities;
(2) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relationships of authority; and (3) those whose
main purpose was socialization, the inoculation of
beliefs, value systems, and conventions of behaviour.”
All three give weight to the idea that the invention of
tradition is a highly political process where cultural
practices and acts are symbolically constituted to
evoke memories of the past, which serve to strengthen
a group’s position and/or its institutions in the present.
Evoking, enacting, and inventing tradition has
been an integral part of nation-building for centuries.

812

Inventing Tradition

Nations are in effect groups of people who believe
they consist of a single people based on shared criteria, which can be both cultural and historical. In these
“imagined communities” as Anderson called them in
1993, all of the members will never truly know each
other; nations are created and flagged through the
invention and reinvention of tradition. Responsible
for formally instituting contrived practices or activities, the role of national governments in inventing
traditions is fundamentally important. They are
responsible for manipulating the nation’s story into
a narrative that underpins the essence of nationalist ideology. This ideology, permeated by myths and
historical inaccuracies, is commonly referred to as a
form of emotional glue, which binds people together
and promotes a collective identity; it is tradition that
helps formulate this ideology through creating a
moral code or consciousness. The late-nineteenth and
early twentieth century in Europe, for example, saw a
wave of nation-building unleashed by the dissolution
of empires and the call for self-determination. Across
Europe, new national governments took a vested
interest in the production of enduring national identities and their accompanying narratives. At the cornerstone of each was a series of invented or reinvented
traditions. It is important to note that inventing tradition is not solely the preserve of the state. Operating
on a number of scales, forging a connection with the
past is just as important to a small ethnic or cultural
group as the nation-state in its quest for legitimization
and validation. Invented traditions are also especially
important to groups whose identity is under threat. In
such cases, there are pronounced attempts to exhibit
a strong, resilient, and authentic identity.
Traditions are invented not only to strengthen our
connection with those we identify with but also to
reify our connection with the lands we inhabit (or
aspire to). Related then to the process of inventing
tradition is the act of territoriality. Territories are
places that typically consist of some kind of homogeneous, collectivized community or group, which
share a common sense of identity that is grounded
in tradition and heritage. Territoriality, which can be
understood as the processes by which territories are
controlled (as the geographic expression of power), is
needed to structure groups and their resources inside
demarcated boundaries and is therefore entrenched
within cultural practices and social relationships.
Spatial practices activities that bolster and sustain the
power of the dominating group are essential components for its control over the hegemonic values that

it represents or imposes. Within society then, various
groups invent symbolic traditions that resonate with
their sense of identity. This is then performed through
ritual and repetition, which serves to simultaneously
incite remembering and demarcate boundaries of
inclusion and exclusion.
Like heritage, the invention of tradition is sensitive
to economics and the forces of globalization. In serving a wide range of social functions, such traditions
can dichotomously contribute to and be shaped by
tourism. Heritage tourism for the most part draws
on the reenactment and staging of cultural traditions.
Tourism in the popular island of Bali in southern
Indonesia offers an insight into how invented traditions both respond to and shape tourism in an
increasingly global world, according to Johnson in
1999. Since the 1970s, music and arts in Bali have
become highly attuned to the needs of tourists and
have resulted in the modification and emergence of a
number of new cultural practices. The Barong dance
drama, a local Balinese dance evoking the gods, has
since the island’s emergence as a tourist destination been shaped to meet the demands of tourists.
A religious rite designed to balance good and evil,
the original Barong lasted for three hours. This has
been trimmed to one hour to satisfy the needs of the
busloads of tourists that visit the village to experience what they perceive to be authentic Balinese
traditions.
The impulse to invent a tradition typically emanates from times of social or political change.
Traditions are very sensitive to the social, cultural,
economic, and political milieu within which they
occur (or are invented). K. Shida’s study of the
“invention” of the Shinto wedding ceremony in
Japan is a particularly illuminating example of how
a tradition can be invented in response to changing
sociopolitical circumstances. The Japanese consider
the Shinzen wedding a tradition that is steeped in
Japanese history. It is, however, a modern product
imagined primarily as a counterpart to the Christian
wedding ceremony. Shida suggests that the emergence of this particular tradition can be attributed
to the rapidly changing socioeconomic profile of
Japan in the twentieth century. The contemporary
reinvention of Shinzen weddings can be traced to
the Meiji Restoration (1868–1902), which witnessed
the rebirth of imperial government following some
seven hundred years of Shogun military power. This
coincided with the force of Westernization, known
as Bunmei-kaika “civilization and development,”

Inventing Tradition

which permitted degrees of Western cultures and
values to be incorporated into everyday life in Japan
without jeopardizing its own character. The first
ceremony took place in 1900 with the wedding of
the crown prince. This ceremony was a mixture of
customs of the newly constituted State Shintoism and
new invention, which came to be mirrored throughout Japan. In the years that followed, Western dress
was incorporated into the ceremony, and it moved
out of private households and into the public
domain. Not only did this new ceremony not bear
any resemblance to ancient Japanese traditions and
customs, but it had also, as Shida notes, actively broken away from them. State Shintoism was abolished
after the war in 1945, which once again had important implications for the reinvention of the wedding
tradition. Shinto priests began trying to make a living
from weddings by setting up marriage halls and performing ceremonies. They focused on the ceremony
as an ancient and spiritual tradition dating back to
the Heian era (AD 794–1192). Shida suggests that
over the course of a single generation, the majority of
Japanese people perceived the Shintoist ceremony as
a feudal ceremony with ancient origins. Symptomatic
of Japan’s quest for modernization and denounced
by critics as anticolonial, the “new” ceremony
offered an appeasing alternative to that of the Meiji
Restoration era. It became much more solemn, simplistic, and cost-effective. Conversely, the “original”
traditional ceremony was ritualistic, lengthy, and,
as Shida notes, perceived within the rapidly changing society as unsophisticated. Since the 1960s, the
Shintoist ceremony has incorporated many Western
traditions. Inventing the Shintoist wedding tradition
converged with the emergence of the Japanese bridal
industry as a response to new patterns of consumerism to reflect Japan’s changing economic and cultural profile. The new Shintoist wedding was hugely
attractive to Japan’s growing urban workforce. Its
introduction was imagined to serve as a counterpart
to the Christian Western wedding ceremony.

Role in Contemporary Consumer Culture
The invention of tradition has become an integral part
of consumer culture in our modern, rapidly changing world. Scholars within cultural studies working
in the realm of consumer culture have more recently
employed the term to critique modern societies
through an examination of certain cultural consumer
patterns of consumption. A good example of this can

813

be found in the invention or rather reinvention of the
tea-drinking tradition in southern China. Tea drinking is widely heralded as an ancient and indigenous
Chinese tradition (thus it is perceived to be authentic
and original). The production of tea for export dates
back to the eighteenth century when it was China’s
largest export. Yet the tradition of tea drinking in the
Fujian district, according to Tan Chee-Beng and Ding
Yuling, is a relatively new or rather reinvented tradition, which has been occasioned by a significant shift
in consumer culture in post-Mao China. While the
reinvention of this particular tradition is based on an
indigenous practice, it must be understood in the context of an increasingly global world and its implications for the economy and growing political might
of China. Economic reform in the 1980s coupled
with changing perceptions of social status had important ramifications for both the tea-drinking industry
and tradition. The convergence of the Taiwanese tea
industry and business in Quanzhou entrepreneurs
instigated the rebirth of the tradition. As its popularity grew, more and more people engaged in the reinvention of this ancient Chinese tradition. Tea drinking
is illustrative of new forms of consumption (and production) in post-Mao China. The whole practice of
making and drinking tea has been transformed. It has
become an economic enterprise and has also stimulated a variety of related initiatives. It has become a
modern feature of life in places such as Quanzhou,
championed by business people, farmers, and local
government and consumed not only by the city’s
inhabitants but also by an increasing number of tourists who come to participate in and consume Chinese
traditions. The number of tearooms has grown
steadily. Housed in buildings in the style of traditional
Minnin architecture, they serve those who come not
just to drink tea but to engage in the ritualization of
an age-old Chinese custom. Despite their perceived
traditional nature, tearooms are almost an indispensable feature of modern life in the fast-moving urban
environment of Fujian. They facilitate new ways of
conducting social relations and offer a new way to
consume tea. Chee-Beng and Yuling suggest that tea
is not simply a beverage. It is rather indicative of
class, status, and of relationships with other people.
While the tea industry began effectively in China, the
practice of tea drinking has become an invented tradition in places like England where, since the 1880s, it
became fashionable and is today widely regarded as
the quintessential “English” drink—as a formidable
part of English national identity. Through symbolic

814

Islam

ritualism, new cultural practices have morphed into
authentic traditions, so much so that their origins
have become blurred, and there is little possibility of
determining fact from fiction.

Criticism
The concept of inventing or invented traditions has
not been without its critics, many of whom have
commented on the term’s utility. One of the most pervasive arguments has focused on the idea that there
is no such thing as an indigenous, authentic, or true
tradition. The very nature of traditions and customs
as practices, values, or norms that are proscribed by
groups or individuals at certain points of time, no
doubt responding to specific socioeconomic conditions, means that every tradition is in fact an invented
one. Shida, for example, believes that everything in
society and culture originates from an invention.
Through time, these inventions evolve into traditions
as people grow to ignore its origin, inventor, and purpose. Others have criticized the concept of invented
traditions for being antinativist. The assertion that
many of the traditions we perceive to be authentic
whenever they are imagined has also been interpreted by some as patronizing, for assuming a certain
naiveté on the part of those inventing the tradition in
question. For others, the whole concept of tradition
is trivialized: we continuously shop around and look
to the past for some sort of tradition that best suits
our sense of self at that particular moment.
Sara McDowell
See also Authenticity; Belonging; Collective Identity;
History; Japan as a Consumer Culture; National
Cultures; Othering; Tourism Studies

Further Readings
Chee-Beng, Tan, and Ding Yuling. “The Promotion of
Tea in South China: Re-inventing Tradition in an Old
Industry.” Food and Foodways 18, no. 3 (2010):
121–144.
Hobsbawn, Eric. “Invented Traditions.” In The Invention of
Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger,
1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of
Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Johnson, Henry. “Balinese Music, Tourism and
Globalisation: Inventing Traditions within and across
Cultures.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4, no.
2 (2002): 8–32.

Shida, K. “The Shintoist Wedding Ceremony in Japan: An
Invented Tradition.” Media, Culture and Society 21, no.
2 (1999): 195–204.

ISLAM
Islam, the most recent of the monotheistic religions,
originated in the Arabic peninsula in the seventh century. Today, the inhabitants of the Middle East and
North Africa are predominantly Muslim. Moreover,
large Muslim populations reside in southern,
Southeast, and central Asia, and there are Muslim
communities in the Balkans, Russia, Europe, and
North America. In Arabic, the word Islam means “to
accept, surrender or submit”; accordingly, the faith
requires that believers demonstrate full submission to
God. The book of Islam, the Qur’an, acknowledges
all the prior prophets, including Moses and Jesus,
and sees Muhammad as the final prophet.
Islamic faith is built on five pillars: Shahada, testimony of faith; Salat, daily prayer, executed five times
a day; Zakat, almsgiving; Sawm, fasting during the
month of Ramadan; and Hajj, once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca for those physically and financially
fit. In addition, orthodox adherents follow sharia,
the Islamic law, which regulates public and private
as well as religious life. Sharia shapes many aspects
of daily life from personal diet and dress to banking. Islam also distinguishes haram (forbidden) from
halal (lawful) and encourages believers to consume
halal versions of foods, drinks, clothing, hygiene
products, financial instruments, and so on. However,
the interpretations and practices of Islam show
great diversity across different cultures. While much
stricter versions of Islam are followed in Afghanistan
and Saudi Arabia, more moderate adaptations are
observed in Turkey and Tunisia.
While all religions by definition give priority to
spirituality over materiality, or the sacred over the
profane, history shows that faith, commerce, and consumption have always been intertwined. Depictions
of important pious figures in novels, poems, history
books, paintings, and miniatures indicate lavish consumption and possessions of these people and their
families. Similarly, in contemporary times, despite the
stereotypical perception of Islam as anticonsumerist and anticapitalist, investigations of consumption
in Islamic geographies indicate a consumerist ethos

Islam

and lifestyle. Muslim consumers, whether they live
in Dubai, Istanbul, or London, are just as interested
in brands, designer clothes, trendy cars, plasma
televisions, five-star resorts, travel, luxury homes,
fast foods, and private education for their children
as any other consumer (Godazgar 2007; NavaroYashin 2002; Sandıkcı and Ger 2002; Starrett 1995).
Muslim entrepreneurs and business people, whether
they operate in Germany, Kuwait, or Malaysia, are
as concerned with making profit in various sectors
such as food, beverage, information technology, tourism, media, and construction as any other capitalist
(Demir, Acar, and Toprak 2004; Khan and Bhatti
2008). Such practices and lifestyles are consistent
with Islam’s acceptance of worldly pleasures.
Even though sharia and the notion of haram
impose many restrictions in consumption of food,
drink, clothing, and leisure activities, Islam acknowledges that pleasurable enjoyment of material things
is important in life (Ülgener 1981). It propagates
hedonism as long as it is moderate and moderated
through practices such as zakat. Acquisitiveness must
be balanced by compassion, generosity, and sharing
wealth. The discourses of moderation and balance
serve to legitimize consumption and ensure that one’s
morality is intact (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2000).
For example, in the case of clothing, modesty and
pleasant appearance act as key ethical tenets that
shape the practice (Sandıkcı and Ger 2005). Many
urban faithful women spend a lot of money on
designer clothes, shoes, and accessories and “work”
diligently to craft fashionable yet religiously appropriate looks. They justify their interest in fashion by
negotiating what modesty and pleasant appearance
mean and require. They state that they buy many
designer and branded outfits and fashion accessories
not to attract the male gaze but to reflect an appealing image. They argue that by dressing fashionably,
they do not jeopardize their modesty. On the contrary, they fulfill an Islamic duty—looking beautiful—and also act as role models to inspire others to
dress according to Islamic principles.
An essentialist juxtaposition of Islam with
“Western” consumer culture willingly or unwillingly
contributes to the discourse of the “clash of civilizations.” Recent studies show that most Muslims do
not oppose consumption—they actively engage in
consumption albeit in an Islamic way: for example,
hanging a picture of the Kaba (a sacred Islamic building) rather than a figurative painting on the wall or

815

drinking juice rather than beer. Consumption patterns
can be and are appropriated into religiously acceptable
styles without undermining consumption itself. This
is perhaps even easier in the case of Islam for which
hedonism is an accepted way to live and is less of a
sin than in Christianity. Religious convictions blend
with cultural capital, taste, and aesthetics all of which
construct different lifestyles and consumption patterns
along class lines rather than solely religious beliefs.
Religion provides yet another discourse, one among
many others that shape and legitimize consumption
practices. The logic of capitalist markets and the ideology of consumerism coexist with the logic and ideology of Islam, constructing consumption practices that
negotiate daily tensions, just like in any other context.
Özlem Sandıkcı and Güliz Ger
See also Appropriation; Asceticism; Christianity; Gender;
Hinduism; Protestant Ethic

Further Readings
Belk, Russell W., Güliz Ger, and Soren Askegaard. “The
Missing Streetcar Named Desire.” In The Why of
Consumption, edited by S. Ratneshwar, David Glen
Mick, and Cynthia Huffman, 98–119. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Demir, Ömer, Mustafa Acar, and Metin Toprak. “Anatolian
Tigers or Islamic Capital: Prospects and Challenges.”
Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 6 (2004): 166–188.
Godazgar, Hossein. “Islam versus Consumerism and
Postmodernism in the Context of Iran.” Social Compass
54, no. 3 (2007): 389–418.
Khan, M. Mansoor, and M. Ishaq Bhatti. “Islamic Banking
and Finance: On Its Way to Globalization.” Managerial
Finance 34, no. 10 (2008): 708–725.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. “The Market for Identities:
Secularism, Islamism, Commodities.” In Fragments of
Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, edited by
Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, 221–253. London:
I. B. Tauris, 2002.
Sandıkcı, Özlem, and Güliz Ger. “In-Between Modernities
and Postmodernities: Investigating Turkish
Consumptionscape.” Advances in Consumer Research
29 (2002): 465–470.
Sandıkcı, Özlem, and Güliz Ger. “Aesthetics, Ethics and
Politics of the Turkish Headscarf.” In Clothing as
Material Culture, edited by Susanne Kuechler and
Daniel Miller, 61–82. London: Berg, 2005.
Starrett, Gregory. “The Political Economy of Religious
Commodities in Cairo.” American Anthropologist 97,
no. 1 (1995): 51–68.

816

Italian Fascism and Fashion

ITALIAN FASCISM

AND

FASHION

To be in line with the “modernity” of more advanced
capitalist nations, such as France, Great Britain, and
the United States, the Italian Fascist regime, especially
during the 1930s in its second decade of existence
when it had become a consolidated presence, dedicated a great deal of attention to culture industries
(cinema, sports, fashion, popular press, and publications). In the culture industry, Fascism saw a crucial
and powerful machine able to create what historian
Philip Cannistraro has called the fabbrica del consenso (the factory of consensus). This was, of course,
a phenomenon identified by the Frankfurt school and
developed in a much more sophisticated manner by
Walter Benjamin, who wrote extensively on fashion
and its mechanisms of power, politics, and the body
in a developing mass society. It is, indeed, within the
context of the great transformations occurring in the
opening decades of the twentieth century, the reorganization of capitalism, changes in lifestyles, modes of
production and consumption, as well as the spread of
new cultural ideals through the media (cinema, popular press, etc.), that we can better understand how the
Italian Fascist regime used the consumption of fashion
to influence culture. In the case of Fascism, fashion
was paramount to mold the masses by establishing
the terms and boundaries of ways of being and acting,
forms of lifestyle, appearance, how to speak and dress
according to the dictates of the totalitarian regime.

Italian Fascism as a Modernizing Force
As stated in the Italian Fascist regime’s manifesto,
and documented in several studies, Fascism looked
both to the past and the future. It sought to be seen
not only as a modernizing force but also as a continuation of Italian tradition and of the glorious past
of Italy (like the Roman Empire). This call to tradition could be identified as the regime’s comfort zone,
accommodating Italians from different geographical
areas and translating into cultural images myths like
those of the prolific mother or the rural housewife.
An illustration of this can be found in an Istituto
Luce documentary titled La grande adunata delle
forze femminili (Great parade of female forces) that
took place in Rome on May 28, 1939, and chronicles a massive female parade organized by Benito
Mussolini. This was a national gathering of women

from all over Italy that aimed at celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Fasci giovanili
di combattimento (Fascist youth combat brigades).
The parade represented an occasion to put women
on display as an integral part of the national body
politic through their uniforms showing their roles in
the family and in society. Three distinct moments of
the documentary juxtapose shots of women wearing
sports uniforms with shots of women from the countryside wearing regional costumes. These representations illustrate not only the sharp contrast between
the military-like uniformity of the athletes and the
women in traditional regional costumes but also the
differences in dress within the same group of women.
The latter group—those in regional costume—wear
accessory items, such as necklaces, earrings, shawls,
lace collars, ornaments, and headgear, and have a
completely different body posture from the women
wearing the regime-sponsored or sports uniforms, as
if they were out taking a walk rather than marching.
What we find illustrated in the documentary footage is a visual confirmation of the two-sided, indeed
ambivalent, nature of the Fascist attempt to include
every single woman of the Italian peninsula in its
purview. In this way, the regime embraced a way
to modernity that also included local time-honored
traditions.

Fascism and Fashion
The construction of a new Italy and new Italians, for
men, women, and children alike, was a vital plank
in the Fascist regime’s political and cultural project.
Many of the regime’s initiatives aimed at changing
the national character. In 1934, for example, in the
article “Vestire alla fascista” (Dressing as a Fascist),
Francesco Salvori had strongly encouraged the
adoption of civil uniforms (Del Buono 1971, 247).
He wrote:
We live in a corporative epoch, an epoch of permanent
civil militarization. . . . The new Italians must live like
heroes; if not all of them with magnanimous gestures,
which is impossible, at least with their thoughts and
desires. Being heroes in style at least is very often the
first step toward the substance of real heroes.
(Translation, Paulicelli 2004)

Fascist propaganda exploited fashion to the full
and made style one of the major concerns of fascist
ideology and aesthetics. As Stephen Gundle (2000,

Italian Fascism and Fashion

131) points out, “to give style,” the aesthetic
expression that reflected Mussolini’s political aim
to transform the populace, had a pragmatic counterpart in the expression “to fascistize.”
The consolidation of the regime’s policy on fashion was part and parcel of a more general move
to consolidate control in other areas of Italian life.
The 1930s saw the creation of several government
institutions that were set up to ensure Fascist control over areas such as sports and leisure time. Along
with fashion, in fact, the regime used the cinema and
sports to convey and solidify its message of modernity, discipline, order, and amusement. Both cinema
and sports took on important roles in the diffusion
of cultural models, in the construction of gender and
identities, and in the politics of style. Fashion, sports,
and cinema—the Cinecittà film studio was inaugurated in 1937—were interrelated in many ways,
arguably the most important being the visual power
inherent in the spectacle and the feast for the eyes
they provided in displaying dynamism and modernity. As a consequence, cinema, sports, and fashion
were also linked in the diffusion and the creation of
national models and bodies with which women of all
classes could identify or fantasize.
As an examination of Fascist documentation on
fashion reveals, Mussolini considered fashion not
only as a fundamental component of the Italian
economy but also as a powerful and appealing vehicle for the process of modernization and the projection, both domestically and abroad, of an image of
“new Italy” and “new Italians” and, of course, for
the creation of an Italian fashion and Italian national
brand (Paulicelli 2004).
To this end, a government institution (Ente
Nazionale della Moda [ENM]) was created to control the fashion industry as a whole and promote
Italian fashion. Fashion was recruited by the regime
as a means of regulating people’s appearance and
behavior in public and private spaces. In addition,
Fascist policies on fashion aimed at creating a distinct
Italian style with which Italians could identify, and
which would be the basis for an increase in Italian
clothes exports. The move to organize fashion was in
line with Mussolini’s keen nationalist intent, which
also informed other sectors of culture.
Stricter policies emerged from the ENM after
1935, following the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia and
the subsequent sanctions applied against Italy by the
League of Nations. The economic hardship that had

817

been intensified by these sanctions required a new
set of regulations and led to the development of
autarchic fabrics and fashion, so the economy could
become self-sufficient and not rely on foreign imports
of raw materials. However, the deeply entrenched
habit of the Italian high bourgeoisie to go to Paris
for its clothes was something of a hindrance to the
regime’s policy. So deeply ingrained was this habit
that not even the autarchic policies of the regime and
the ENM were able to halt completely the amount of
luxury goods imported from abroad.
To this “indiscipline” on the part of Italian
women who, despite the strongest of hints that they
should buy their clothes at home, continued to purchase French-made fashions, the regime responded
with a twentieth-century version of the sumptuary
laws emanating further policies, all of which tended
toward the disciplining of the social body.

Fashion and the Forging of National Identity
Fashion is not only dress. It is also culture, mentality, a way of being, and a gesture. The Fascist regime
understood this and used the power of fashion in
its discursive and propagandistic strategies. In the
attempt to Italianize and, at the same time, establish
a language of fashion pertaining to Italian culture,
aesthetics, and tradition, the regime aimed at codifying taste and style to forge a national identity in
line with the regime’s nationalistic plan. The ENM
bureaucrats were of the opinion that the creation
of a national fashion went hand in hand with the
construction of a properly specialized lexicon that
had strong and direct links to the Italian language,
to Italian literature, to the conventional codes and
the history that had marked its cultural context. In
1936, Cesare Meano began a project aimed at eliminating the French terminology that was widely used
in the “global” language of fashion. Fashion and chic
meant “France.” He also sought to create an Italian
lexicon of fashion to plug the gap in the Italian language left by the purge of French terms. Therefore,
the publication of Meano’s text had the paradoxical
aim of both establishing and retrieving a national tradition in the culture of fashion.
The publication of Meano’s text opened up a
debate not only on the complexity of the relationship
between fashion as an industry but also as a symbolic force within the context of a totalitarian regime
and its project to forge a sexy image of Italy through

818

Italian Fascism and Fashion

fashion and style to be projected both in Italy and
abroad.
Meano’s project, however, was far more complex
than a straightforward nationalization of the language of Italian fashion. Indeed, a close and critical
analysis of Meano’s text reveals the two-pronged
result its rhetorical strategies achieved. On the one
hand, Meano fulfills the nationalist scope of translating French terms into Italian, as well as offering
an Italian glossary of specific terms of clothing and
style. On the other, he offers what Roland Barthes
will later call a “description of fashion” that does not
limit itself only to proposing a model as a mere copy
of reality. Rather, the aim of Meano’s project was to
circulate fashion as a meaning and therefore as an
ideology. Words and their organization in a narrative, then, have the task of providing the necessary
tools with which to create the “culture” for an appreciation of “Italian taste” and fashion both at home
and abroad. As such, in Meano’s Commentario,
language is identified with its performative and persuasive qualities. Meano’s creation of a language of
Italian fashion can also be better understood in the
context of fashion journalism and how the two are
interrelated.
In selecting an impressive number of entries
that he connects to fashion, costume, and culture,
Meano lingers particularly over definitions of style,
beauty, and elegance and offers tips on these subjects to females, males, and children, according to
the taste and accepted codes of the epoch. The text,
then, is a useful window onto the common sense of
the world of fashion and manners in 1930s Italy.
According to the ENM, the Commentario aimed to
establish a national tradition in fashion and to define
its relations with high and popular culture, economics, and the disciplines of style and language. In the
ideological plan of Fascism, fashion was identified
as a privileged terrain that would make a significant
contribution to the achievement of the nation’s sense
of self.

Italian Fascism, Fashion, and Gender
Under Fascism, there was a double take on women.
The fashion of the 1930s proclaimed a return to
the old days: Torniamo all’antico (Let’s go back to
the old ways), was in fact the title of an editorial by
Lina Putelli in the periodical Per voi signora, which
became, together with Bellezza, the official mouthpiece of the ENM. Here the garçonne, or flapper, is

gone and replaced by a more elaborate image of femininity in dress. In the “Scollaturai (Cleavage)” entry
in the Commentario, there are descriptions of women
from different social classes, from the high society
femme fatale, who wore dresses that covered her neck
but revealed her completely exposed back (Meano
1936, 345), to the modest women who work in a
Piedmontese workshop and learn how to continue
the tradition of local embroidery called bandera.
The emphasis on traditional roles also presents
an overtly misogynist view. This is what informs
Meano’s description of the intellettualità della donna
(intellectual ability of women; 1936, 205) in which
his main aim, in line with regime policy, is to emphasize women’s qualities as bearers of children instead
of their intellectual work. Meano, while stressing the
feminine side of fashion, minimizes the relationship
between men and fashion. He puts men in what he
calls the zona neutrale immobile (neutral immobile
zone), which is to say that men lack audacity in the
cut of their clothes and in the use of vibrant colors. This neutral zone is praised as the “calm little
stream,” Meano’s way of stating that this sober style
is very much in line with the notion of virility, heroism, and strength that the regime wished to reinforce
and maintain.

Conclusion
The Fascist project to nationalize the masses and
instill a one-sided image of national identity failed
for a series of concomitant reasons. Indeed, Fascist
nationalism and its empty rhetoric was able neither
to construct an Italian national identity that closed in
on itself nor to be a permanent and universal inspiration for an Italian fashion and style. The history
of Fascist fashion policy is one of continuities rather
than ruptures. Indeed, continuity and fashion’s deep
roots have been to the benefit of the fashion industry.
In fact, it was on the basis of the debate on nationalism that took place in the pre-Fascist liberal period
and that spilled over into Fascist fashion policy that
many of the foundations for the postwar boom in
Italian fashion were laid. Fascism was able to use and
combine, seeking to render them its own, different
cultures, local and national traditions, modernity
and literary figures of the past, folklore, the female
athlete and the prolific mother, the urban consumer
and the massaia rurale (rural housewife). The history of Italian fashion under Fascism illuminates our
understanding of the mechanisms by and through

Italian Fascism and Fashion

which the regime created its power. At the same time,
it also reveals the gaps that were the premise of the
regime’s failure and ultimate downfall.
Eugenia Paulicelli
See also Consumer Nationalism; Culture Industries;
Fashion; Gender; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Modernization Theory; Style; Taste

Further Readings
Aspesi, Natalia. Il lusso & l’Autarchia. Storia dell’eleganza
italiana. Milan, Italy: Rizzoli, 1982.
Brin, Irene. Usi e Costumi 1920–1940. Palermo, Italy:
Sellerio, 1981.
Brin, Irene. Cose viste 1938–1939. Palermo, Italy: Sellerio,
1994.
Cannistraro, Philip. La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e
Mass Media. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975.
De Giorgio, Michela. Le italiane dall’Unita’ ad oggi.
Roma-Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1992.

819

De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy,
1922–1943. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991.
Del Buono, Oreste, ed. Eia, Eia, Ei, Alalá. ’La Stampa
italiana sotto il fascismo 1919–1943. Preface by Nicola
Tranfaglia. Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1971.
Dogliani, Patrizia. Il Fascismo degli italiani. Torino, Italy:
Utet, 2009.
Gentile, Emilio. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy.
Translated by Keith Botsford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996.
Gundle, Stephen. “Il Bel Paese: Art, beauty and the cult of
appearance.” In The Politics of Italian National
Identity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Gino
Bedani and Bruce Haddock. Cardiff, UK: University of
Wales Press, 2000.
Meano, Cesare. Commentario-Dizionario italiano della
moda. Turin, Italy: Ente Nazionale della Moda (ENM),
1936.
Paulicelli, Eugenia. Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the
Black Shirt. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

J
JAPAN

AS A

rate (which peaked in the 1970s) contrasts sharply
with the consumerism highlighted in the West (often
described as “excess”), in particular in the United
States, suggesting an alternative model of development for consumer culture.
Despite what is claimed as being the unique
characteristics of Japanese consumer culture, globalization has been a fundamental condition for
its modern development. Discussion about modern
consumer culture in Japan therefore needs to start
by examining Japanese consumer culture’s intricately
hybrid nature. European and American consumer
cultures were constantly being imported into Japan
since the country’s reopening to the outside world in
the mid-nineteenth century. The rise of “cultural living” (bunka seikatsu) after World War I was largely
inspired by European and North American products
as well as ideas. Upper-middle class consumers,
although their presence was small and limited in large
cities at that time, were often exposed to Western
consumer culture at exhibitions organized by department stores. According to Harry Harootunian, these
upper-middle class consumers became excited and
inspired by, perhaps even enlightened about, modern
Western lifestyles. However, these early developments
were soon halted by the wartime ultranationalist
government, which placed restrictions on the use of
products, as well as the range of cultural activities
(including languages), originating from foreign countries. Thus, when the Occupation Force (1945–1952)
led by the Allied Powers (constituted mainly by U.S.
military personnel) landed on Japanese soil and
became visible to local people in autumn 1945, it

CONSUMER CULTURE

Consumer culture has long been a major index when
scholars discuss Japan. From electrical appliances
to computer games and their character-related merchandise to luxury designer-brand fashions, a variety
of commodities produced and circulated by Japanese
companies have a strong presence across the globe.
Also, Japanese shoppers enthusiastically hitting the
high street are a part of everyday scenes in major
cities in rich as well as developing countries. Today,
the great maturity of Japanese consumer culture—
namely, its pervasiveness and strong weight in the
national economy as well as individuals’ lives based
on large-scale, well-developed production systems
and information technologies—is, perhaps, the element of Japanese society most frequently exposed to
non-Japanese audiences (cf. Clammer 1997; Alison
2006).
A variety of scholars have studied consumer culture in Japan from a variety of angles, and many of
them identified aspects that they argue are distinctive to Japan in contrast to American and European
consumer cultures. At the start of their collected volume examining consumer cultures in East Asia and
the West, Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan
argue, for example, that “our focus on Japan provides a fresh way of examining ambivalence toward
consumerism throughout the world. Japan has long
embodied the tensions of a modern consumer society” (2006, 4). According to them, the thriftiness
of Japanese people exemplified by a high savings
821

822

Japan as a Consumer Culture

was viewed as a medium that was physically carrying
foreign culture, in particular American culture, into
everyday Japanese life. Streets and shops in Tokyo
were renamed in English, and restaurants and bars
were packed with Allied soldiers enjoying jazz music
while the shortage of basic foodstuffs was compensated for by foreign aid, as noted by John Dower.
Bread made from wheat given to Japan as aid and
milk became the essential components of school
meals during the occupation period, changing eating
practices in schools and homes.
It is worth noting that the spread of consumer culture, in particular American consumer culture, after
World War II was intended by the Civil Information
and Education Bureau (CIE) of the Supreme
Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) as a means
of cultural policy to eliminate “feudalistic remnants”
that led Imperial Japan to carry out irrational and
disastrous war efforts and in so doing “democratize”
Japan. In local communities across Japan, films that
portrayed an affluent, bright American lifestyle were
shown, for example a scene of a nuclear family having a Thanksgiving dinner. In addition, as Shunya
Yoshimi has discussed, American cartoons like
Blondie were published in national newspapers and
became hugely popular, conveying in a concrete way
the glamour of an American-style private family life
blessed by material prosperity. This particular way
of spreading propaganda was effective at “seducing”
Japanese people to concentrate on fulfillment of
their private lives by turning away from the prewar
dedication to the national war effort. For example,
Asahi Shinbun Gakugeibu notes that housewives in
rural communities inspired by the CIE film organized
a joint purchase of Western-style kitchens to replace
the old-fashioned cooking stoves in their households.
For many Japanese who were still struggling to make
a living in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, the
Western-style kitchen was simply too expensive for
individual households in rural villages to purchase.
Housewives therefore got together to discuss and
implement a joint purchase. This is one instance of
how “democracy” was exercised in postwar Japan.
In the mid-1950s, the Japanese economy went
into a phase of unprecedented rapid growth that
lasted almost twenty years, with an average annual
growth rate of 9.1 percent. In 1956, the government’s
Economic White Paper declared that “the ‘postwar’
has ended,” meaning that postwar reconstruction
would no longer provide opportunities for economic

growth. Three years later, the term consumer revolution (shōhi kakumei) made its first appearance in the
White Paper as a means of maintaining and stimulating growth. Indeed, strong individual and household
consumption was the main factor behind the realization of the so-called high economic growth between
1955 and 1973. In particular, various household
electrical appliances, such as washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, freezers, and vacuum cleaners
were eagerly sought after in the 1950s and 1960s by
Japanese people who wished to modernize and in so
doing better their everyday lives. One of the washing
machine advertisements by Toshiba was led by the
slogan “How can housewives enjoy their spare time
by reading? The quickest way is to rationalize the
time spent on washing clothes.” Here, the washing
machine is projected as a means of liberating women.
The government exploited these consumers’
demands by dubbing its economic plan of 1960 the
Income-Doubling Plan, linking the growth of the
national economy with the increasing increments
of individual/household income that could be spent
on enjoying consumptive activities. Simultaneously,
as Garon’s work on the postwar savings promotion
scheme demonstrates, the promotion of consumption in the early postwar was countered by the
nationwide governmental campaign that encouraged Japanese people to wisely organize and manage
their household economies. In this sense, the idea of
consumption promoted in the early postwar period
was “tamed,” being coupled with national economic
planning. Both the acts of consumption and saving
were thereby designed to achieve happiness and fulfillment for individuals and families, with excessive
acts being excluded.
In 1968, Japan’s gross national product (GNP) per
capita was the second highest after the United States.
With the growth in purchasing power, consumer culture in Japan hit its pinnacle in the 1970s and 1980s.
Two developments since the 1970s are particularly
noteworthy. First, as an oft-mentioned advertising
slogan from 1980, “myself, new discovery” (jibun,
shin-hakken), from a nationwide department store
and fashion retail chain, the Saison Group, suggests,
individual consumption patterns were increasingly
understood as an index representing identities.
Tanaka Yasuo’s award-winning novel Somehow,
Crystal (Nantonaku Kurisutaru), first published in
a journal in 1980, epitomizes this tendency. Instead
of thick descriptions of characters, Tanaka provides

Japan as a Consumer Culture

the readers with 422 footnotes, most of them being
information about commodities, fashion brands,
shops, and restaurants, with which the readers were
supposed to construct the characters’ lifestyles and
thus the characters themselves.
Second, as consumer culture in Japan developed
further, young single women’s active and often
aggressive consumption patterns started to attract
attention, their being linked to other social issues
such as the declining birth rate—an issue that is currently a concern among Japan’s policy-making elite
with regard to the sustainability of economic growth
and the social security system. In the 1990s, sociologist Masahiro Yamada coined the term parasite singles (parasaito shinguru) to refer to young Japanese
in their twenties and thirties who are still single and
live with their parents. According to Yamada, those
young Japanese tend to opt out of forming families,
as revealed by the decline of the marriage and birth
rates, because they hope to keep enjoying their single
lifestyles with a relatively large sum of disposable
income. Although the term parasite single is gender
neutral, Yamada tends to refer to women’s consumption patterns rather than men’s and in so doing
problematizes “excessive” consumer culture among
young women as creating a serious problem for the
Japanese state.
Unlike other East and Southeast Asian countries
that were severely affected by the Asian financial
crisis in 1997, Japan’s economic downturn started
in the early 1990s and has continued to define the
basic tone of economic momentum up until today
except for a short period of relief in the early 2000s.
The prolonged economic setback resulted in a
reduction in the size of disposable income for many
Japanese and, more importantly, clear stratification
of consumers. While there are still some who enjoy
luxurious consumptive activities, which are increasingly becoming globalized, others are unable even to
afford a place to live, as witnessed at New Year’s in
2009 when a park in central Tokyo was turned into
a shelter for approximately five hundred homeless
people. Under such circumstances, individuals’ consumption patterns appear as manifestations of their
social and economic positions, going beyond mere
expressions of “the self” in an increasingly stratified
society.
Overall, consumer culture has long been evolving in Japan in a close relationship with consumer
cultures in other developed countries, particularly the

823

United States. However, the speed of development
was much faster in Japan than its predecessors in
western Europe and North America, especially in the
postwar period, corresponding to ups and downs in
the national political economy, with ruling authorities (the Japanese government as well as the Allied
Powers) playing a role in the process. Ambivalence
toward consumerism was expressed when popular
consumptive desires and activities were viewed as
excessive to the extent that they were seen to be jeopardizing political, economic, and social processes.
Simultaneously, certain types of consumption patterns, in particular those relating to family happiness
and well-being, have been encouraged. All in all,
Japan as a consumer culture certainly embodies the
tensions of a modern consumer society.
Takeda Hiroko
See also Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer
Nationalism; Consumer Policy (Japan); Domestic
Technologies; Globalization; Social and Economic
Development; Thrift; Well-Being

Further Readings
Alison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the
Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006.
Asahi Shinbun Gakugeibu. Daidokoro Kara Sengo ga
Mieru [The postwar that can be seen from kitchen].
Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1995.
Clammer, John. Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology
of Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of
World War II. London: Penguin, 2000.
Garon, Sheldon. “Saving for My Own Good and the Good
of the Nation: Economic Nationalism in Modern
Japan.” In Nation and Nationalism in Japan, edited by
Sandra Wilson, 97–114. London: RoutledgeCurzon,
2002.
Garon, Sheldon, and Patricia L. Maclachlan.
“Introduction.” In The Ambivalent Consumer:
Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West,
edited by Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan,
1–15. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Harootunian, Harry. Overcome by Modernity: History,
Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Miura, Atsushi, and Chizuko Ueno. Shōhi Shakai Kara
Kakusa Shakai e: Chu-ryu- Dankai to Karyu- Junia
Nomirai [From a consumer society to a society with
income gaps: Middle-Class baby boomers and their

824

Jeans

lower-class juniors]. Tokyo: Kawade Shōbō Shinsha,
2007.
Takeda, Hiroko. “Delicious Food in a Beautiful Country:
Nationhood and Nationalism in Discourses on Food in
Contemporary Japan.” SEN: Studies in Ethnicity and
Nationalism 8, no. 1 (2008): 5–29.
Tanaka, Yasuo. Nantonaku, Kurisutaru [Somehow,
Crystal]. Tokyo: Kawade Shōbō Shinsha, 1981.
Yamada, Masahhiro. Parasaito Shinguru no Jidai [The age
of parasite singles]. Tokyo: Chikuma Sohten, 1999.
Yoshimi, Shunya. “‘America’ as Desire and Violence:
Americanization in Postwar Japan and Asia during the
Cold War.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2003):
433–450.

JEANS
Since the 1960s, jeans have been identified with a
wide array of roles in consumption practices, in articulations of popular cultures as well as in social theory and research. In fact, as a garment, jeans invite
different forms of reflection when discussed as a
nineteenth-century work outfit, as a stylization motif
of American middle-class lifestyle, as a cold war
counterculture outfit, as a high fashion item, or as
an ubiquitous and complex manifestation of twentyfirst-century global consumption. Indeed, few types
of garments compare with jeans as an everyday outfit
of such an intense global use.
The materialization of jeans as a distinct garment
and product can be mainly associated with Levi
(originally Löb) Strauss, a Jewish immigrant from
Bavaria. Strauss arrived in San Francisco in 1853 and
founded a dry-goods wholesale company supplying gold rush miners with tents, blankets, and other
textile products. Information regarding the early
years of the Levi Strauss & Co (LS&CO) is scarce,
mainly because the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
and fire destroyed its headquarters. This, together
with the intense marketing of the origins of the Levi
brand, make the inquiry into the “birth of jeans” an
arduous task. The generic term jeans was not used
until the twentieth century despite evidence that
eighteenth-century Americans wore work trousers
and bib overalls made from denim. In the 1850s to
1860s, LS&CO supplied general stores with work
pants made of canvas, and subsequently of denim,
but did not brand them as LS&CO products. It was
not branded until 1873 when Jacob W. Davis, a

Reno tailor and entrepeneur, established a business
connection with LS&CO, and they jointly registered
a patent titled “Improvement in Fastening PocketOpenings.” These denim work pants, at that time
called waist overalls, with patented riveted fasteners
became the basis of the subsequent branded Levi’s
jeans, although it was not until 1960 that the term
jeans was used in LS&CO’s advertising. When the
riveted “pants of Levi’s” appeared on the market
in the West Coast, they had to compete with other
branded denim overalls, such as Can’t Bust ’Em.
In the 1870s to 1880s, the retailing industry in the
United States grew in terms of size and complexity,
necessitating companies to consciously build consumer loyalty with the help of brands and marketing. Thus, LS&CO marked its textile products with
copper rivets (exclusively until 1890), the two-horse
brand (after 1886), the Levi’s trademark (1928),
the red tab (1936), or the winglike arches of double
orange stitching on the back pocket (registered only
in 1943). In addition, many work-wear apparel manufacturers extended their product line to such items
as male office dress, pants, and coats (LS&CO),
children’s playwear (OshKosh B’Gosh) or women’s
work apparel (H.D. Lee).
Jeans have been made predominantly of denim, a
heavy, 9- to 13-ounce cotton twill with a characteristic diagonal and bicolor, mostly blue-white, ribbing.
The term denim is derived from serge de Nîmes, once
a generic name for a wool-silk blend twill whereas
denim from the mid-nineteenth century refers mostly
to a heavy, pure cotton fabric. The term jeans as a
generic term for a cotton-made fabric dates back
to sixteenth-century Genoa, whose looms supplied
western Europe with a coarse textile of blue dye
called Gênes. Jeans, however, as a generic name for
denim pants came into use in the 1930s in the United
States. The blue dye of jeans and denim was originally natural indigo, though after the early 1900s, a
chemically manufactured blue dye was used. Today,
India, Brazil, China, and Turkey are major denimproducing countries.
For many decades, until roughly WWII, denim
waist overalls (e.g., Levi’s), Union-Alls (e.g.,
H.D. Lee), or overalls (e.g., Blue Bell) as garments
were basically loose-fitting pants intended for
American men for outdoor work but sometimes worn
as street wear. Mostly, miners, farmers, and other
low-skilled manual laborers wore denim outfits early
on. However, in the 1910s, marketing stressed not

Jeans

only the usefulness of overalls in motoring but also the
safety, sanitation, and efficiency of denim overalls for
female factory workers. For example, Lee-made overalls were worn by the U.S. Army during WWI, but after
1920, Lee’s marketing of knickerbockers for women
promoted an active lifestyle as drivers or tourists.
The developments of hookless fasteners (zippers) and Sanforized (preshrunk) fabric repositioned
denim overalls as specialized work attire for the
modern industrial worker. Changes in the design of
the denim overalls, together with marketing allusions
employed by the manufacturers (e.g., the industrious laborer, the machine master, or the emancipated
woman) dovetailed with a growing customer need
for garments that could be useful for stylization
purposes. Stylization is a cultural strategy of expressive representations, such as speech, behavior, look,
outfit, and other visible elements of lifestyle, through
which individuals and groups can express particular
meanings about their identity, their norms, and their
stand on issues affecting social status.
The first major attempt to relocate jeans from the
position of a coarse working garb into a stylistically
relevant attire was made by manufacturers in the
1920s. Their choice of style was Western, an influential and ever-present theme in American popular culture since the 1870s. Allusions to Western and rodeo
constituted a cultural strategy that combined such
distinct meanings as the physical durability of denim;
the actual outfit of outdoorsmen; the moralizing
allegorical faculties of thick, stiff, and tight dress; the
emerging consumer culture; and burgeoning popular
culture genres, such as Western comics, novels, shows,
and movies. Lee 101 Cowboy pants, introduced in
1924, presented a slimmer cut compared to previous
overalls. Denim marketing in the 1920s to 1940s
stressing the Western look was based on the flourishing rodeo scene, the weekend dude ranch tourism
in the American West, and old West cinema starring
Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or John Wayne.
East Coast fashion stores and magazines extended
their attention to denim from the mid-1930s: Levi’s
introduced denim pants for women in 1934 and the
back pocket red tab in 1936. Until the 1950s, when
cinema popularized the image of the teenaged, jeanwearing rebel, jeans were worn as everyday attire
only by nonconformist artists; for the middle class,
jeans were still a cowboy costume at best.
Jeans, called dungarees at that time, entered into the
everyday wardrobe of the middle class as an integral

825

part of the teenage rebel outfit, along with leather
jackets, infantry boots, and white T-shirts. Rock and
roll music and Hollywood movies, such as The Wild
One with Marlon Brando or Rebel without a Cause
with James Dean presented denim as an expressive
agent of youth rebellion against mainstream society.
Various streams of nonconformist youth cultures in
the 1950s to 1960s combined a new politics of the
age, gender, and sexuality that aimed to yield a lived
authenticity through such expressions as behavior,
lifestyle, the publicly displayed body, dancing, hairstyle, and outfit in which jeans played a central role.
Jeans as an integral part of rock and roll and hippie
lifestyle subcultures and movements had become a
U.S. exported global phenomenon. By 1965, major
denim labels had set up their international divisions.
LS&CO sales grew tenfold between 1964 and 1975.
The mid-1970s brought a further important diversification in the consumption, use, and meaning of
jeans with the appearance of designer jeans as upscale
fashion items whose brands were carefully managed.
In the 1980s, the unisex flared outfit of the counterculture had split into meticulously crafted female and
male cut wear accentuating body contours, a change
that coincided with increased sexual references in
denim marketing. Further stylization occurred when
subcultures such as disco, punk, and hip-hop used
jeans to express meanings central to their aesthetics
and ethics. Subsequently, various aspects of identity,
sensibility, or walk of life—such as ethical consumption, environment protection, designer outfit zeal,
collector activity, or distinct apellations of age, gender, sexuality, or race—can be expressed through
particular uses of denim in everyday life. The diversification of denim into ever-particularizing niches of
life prescribes new approaches to analyses of jeans’
meanings. Though marketing often captures jeans as
holders of essential meanings such as freedom, creativity, hip, or rebellion, anthropological accounts of
denim wearers and dress scholarship often highlight
ambiguous, dynamic, and heterogenous meaning
structures in objects and practices associated with
wearing jeans. Central to these constructs is the
notion that denim, as a border territory between the
body and the outside world, facilitates exchanges of
meanings between the self and the social world.
Ferenc Hammer
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life;
Americanization; Authenticity; Body, The; Clothing

826

Jeans

Consumption; Consumption in the United States:
Colonial Times to the Cold War; Fashion; Lifestyle;
Material Culture; Subculture

Further Readings
Bancroft Library. Regional Oral History Office. “Levi
Strauss & Co.: Tailors to the World: Oral History
Transcript and Related Material, 1972–1976.” Berkeley:
University of California, 1976. Available at http://www
.archive.org/details/tailorstotheworld00levirich.
Botterill, Jacqueline. “Cowboys, Outlaws and Artists: The
Rhetoric of Authenticity and Contemporary Jeans and
Sneaker Advertisements.” Journal of Consumer Culture
7, no. 1 (2007): 105–126.
Downey, Lynn. Levi Strauss & Co. Mount Pleasant, SC:
Arcadia, 2007.

Finlayson, Iain. Denim: An American Legend. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1990.
Fiske, John. The Jeaning of America, in Understanding
Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Gordon, Beverly. “American Denim: Blue Jeans and Their
Multiple Layers of Meaning.” In Dress and Popular
Culture, edited by Patricia Anne Cunningham and Susan
Voso Lab, 31–45. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1991.
Miller, Daniel, and Sophie Woodward. “Manifesto for a
Study of Denim.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie
Sociale 15, no. 3 (2007): 335–351.
Oliver, Valerie Burnham. “Jeans.” In Fashion and Costume
in American Popular Culture: A Reference Guide,
63–66. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Sullivan, James. Jeans: A Cultural History of an American
Icon. New York: Gotham Books, 2006.

K
human freedom and provides a rule, the categorical
imperative, to constitute a common world of moral
experience. The Critique of the Power of Judgment
(1790), unlike the other two, is not meant to legislate on the world but bridge the “incalculable gulf”
that exists “between the domain of the concept of
nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible” (Critique of
the Power of Judgment, “Introduction”). In Kant’s
mind, this mediation is essential to account for the
possibility of realizing the demands of moral goodness in a mechanical order of nature, which is in
principle indifferent to them.
The activity of criticism is necessary because
“through no fault of its own,” human reason otherwise enters into self-contradiction and destroys itself.
Kant believes our reason has the “peculiar fate” of
being burdened “with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the
nature of reason itself, but which it cannot possibly
answer, since they transcend every capacity of human
reason” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface”). Lack
of awareness about reason’s inner structure has triggered interminable disputes among philosophers.
It divided the discipline into warring camps, each
expressing a partial truth about human rationality
and hence capable of achieving a short-lived victory.
This was particularly evident in the case of modern
rationalists and empiricists, which forced philosophy to oscillate between dogmatism and skepticism.
Kant’s project was to bring peace among philosophical contenders. To this effect, he proposed a kind of
therapy: knowing the limits of knowledge allows

KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804)
Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. He earned this
distinction by introducing a new style of philosophizing, the critique of reason. Unlike the dialogue
or the genealogy, which try to answer the question of what is something or how it came about,
criticism is occupied not so much with objects but
with the conditions for the possibility of our experiencing them. Critical philosophy undertakes the
examination of the powers reason employs to cognize the world of nature, to act according to duty,
and to judge natural and human purposes. Its job
is to determine the limits and legitimate mode of
employment of the rational powers that make such
activities possible. In the case of cognition, the experience is made possible by our understanding the
legislating of its rules (the so-called categories) over
nature. In the case of morality, pure practical reason
legislates over human sensibility, making us autonomous. In the case of the aesthetic, teleological experience, the power of judgment provides a rule for us
to make sense of beautiful objects, organisms, and
the whole of creation.
Kant was a thoroughly systematic thinker. Thus,
he devised an independent Critique to justify the
legislation of each rational power. The Critique of
Pure Reason (first published in 1781 and revised
in 1787) vindicates the role of the understanding in
the constitution of the natural world. The Critique
of Practical Reason (1788) vindicates the reality of
827

828

Keynes, John Maynard

reason to overcome its obsession with grasping the
absolute; Kant argued that the unsatisfied metaphysical drive could then be channeled to productive
practical and spiritual purposes. This, for him, was
the main lesson of criticism: “to deny knowledge
in order to make room for faith” (Critique of Pure
Reason, “Preface”).
There is a basic, defiant gesture underlying Kant’s
major writings: he understood himself as introducing a revolution in our ways of thinking about every
important aspect of human activity. In knowledge,
Kant showed that what we call objectivity was
subjectively patterned by the labors of our understanding; in morality, that what we call good was
the result of our rational activity of self-legislation;
in aesthetics, that what we call beautiful was not
a property of the object but the pleasurable outcome of the play of our mental faculties; in religion, that we must obey God’s commands not
because God so wishes but because they coincide
with the demands of our own reason. All these
conceptual “revolutions” share a common feature: they place the autonomous activity of a
subject at the center of philosophical attention.
If Marx is right in describing the experience of
modernity as one in which everything solid melts
into thin air, then Kant, by making us aware of our
(almost unlimited) capacity for action and authorship, can be considered as the father of the modern
period. He influenced everything and everybody,
from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Friedrich
Nietzsche to existentialism to American pragmatism
to the analytic tradition. In the realm of political
philosophy, Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are
among the most enthusiastic recent Kantian voices.
Pablo Muchnik
See also Aesthetics; Consuming the Environment;
Happiness; Hedonism; Marx, Karl; Moralities; Taste

Further Readings
Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An
Interpretation and Defense. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Akademie-edition,
Vols. 1–29. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902.
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wood, Allen. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.

KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD
(1883–1946)
John Maynard Keynes, born in Cambridge to John
Neville Keynes and Florence Ada Brown, was a
British economist and one of the most influential
thinkers of the twentieth century. He was created
Baron Keynes of Tilton in 1942. Educated at Eton,
he read and taught at the University of Cambridge,
where he was a fellow of King’s College. He served
in the Indian Office and advised His Majesty’s
Treasury during World War I, being appointed
financial representative to the Versailles Peace
Conference. On that occasion, he took a stance
against the heavy reparations imposed on Germany
(which resulted in his Economic Consequences of
the Peace of 1919), displaying considerable foresight, and straightway became a public character.
A prolific author, he wrote on a range of academic
and policy issues, from probability to money to
ethics to international relations (and most of his
books and papers are now collected in the Collected
Writings), though Keynes’s name is inevitably
linked to his masterpiece, The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
This work was a theoretical reaction to the Great
Depression and revolutionized for some decades the
world of economics. It would also exert an enduring
influence on the economic policies of Western governments in the postwar period. Keynes overturned
the so-called Say’s law, a keystone of (neo)classical
economics, which postulated the natural tendency of
the economy toward equilibrium on the grounds that
production created a market for the commodities
produced. Instead, he argued that demand for goods
and services was the primum movens, emphasizing
consumer spending. Keynes extolled consumption
over thrift, which had been held as a virtue in the
Victorian era. Thrift was a “paradox” for it actually
led to recession.
In The General Theory, Keynes defined consumption as a function of real income. “The relationship
between the community’s income and what it can
be expected to spend on consumption,” he wrote,
“will depend on the psychological characteristic of

Keynesian Demand Management

the community, which we shall call its propensity to
consume. That is to say, consumption will depend on
the level of aggregate income and, therefore, on the
level of employment, . . . except when there is some
change in the propensity to consume” (28).
The relationship between consumption and
income hypothesized by Keynes can be written as a
linear function whereby the former, beyond a subsistence level called “autonomous consumption”
(the y-intercept), is given by the latter multiplied by
a parameter, which represents the “marginal propensity to consume,” that is, what proportion of an
increase in income will not be saved. This is supposed
to be a positive quantity, but lower than the increase
itself, and dependent on both objective and subjective
factors (see Keynes 1936, book 3). Subjective factors
are psychologically, culturally, and historically determined; they are assumed to be constant for any given
context.
When a depression occurs, as in 1929, state intervention is needed to get the economy going again.
Increase in public expenditure compensates for the
stagnation in private consumption and breaks the
vicious circle of the recession, causing the growth
of production and a greater disposable income.
Expansionary fiscal policy might also take the form
of a reduced tax burden, which should prove useful to cure milder business cycle recessions through
direct stimulation of household consumption.
Keynes’s consumption function was later criticized
by the Harvard economist James S. Duesenberry for
exaggerating the importance of income and underestimating that of subjective factors, which influence
the propensity to consume. Drawing on the institutionalist toolbox, he questioned the effectiveness of
Keynesian fiscal policies. Giving people more money
would not automatically affect their expenditure, for
consumer behavior has above all a social significance.
It depends on the emulation of others, and moreover,
it is path dependent. In fact, he argued, consumption levels are sticky in the short run, even during
recessions. Anyway, it should be noted that Keynes
and Duesenberry were observing two very different
historical situations.
Francesco Boldizzoni
See also Commodities; Economic Sociology; Economics;
Great Depression (U.S.); Keynesian Demand
Management; State Provisioning; Thrift

829

Further Readings
Backhouse, Roger E., and Bradley W. Bateman, eds. The
Cambridge Companion to Keynes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Duesenberry, James S. Income, Saving and the Theory of
Consumer Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1949.
Keynes, John M. The General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936.
Keynes, John M. Collected Writings. Edited by A.
Robinson and D. E. Moggridge. London: Macmillan,
1971–1989.
Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946:
Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. New York: Penguin,
2005.

KEYNESIAN DEMAND
MANAGEMENT
The notion of demand management is commonly
used in the field of macroeconomics in relation to
the adoption of government policies that facilitate
the achievement of full employment equilibrium
in the economy. The widely known scholar John
Maynard Keynes first advocated such intervention in his classic 1936 work General Theory. The
British economist was a stark critic of the classical
orthodoxy, in particular of the culture of laissez-faire
whereby market imbalances are best dealt by natural adjustments of demand and supply, which, under
certain conditions, are expected to restore equilibrium prices and quantities. Keynes observed that such
imbalances tend to occur cyclically as a consequence
of lack of demand, and if left untreated, could degenerate in severe downturns or periods of prolonged
recession. Since under such circumstances the private
sector is unable to boost demand, Keynes argued that
government should intervene directly and “spend its
way out of a recession,” that is, run a budget deficit.
Subsequently, as soon as private sector spending had
been restored to normal levels, government should
reduce spending and pay off the debts accumulated
during the downturn.
Prolonged slumps in the economy carry the danger
of triggering a virtuous circle: as unemployment rises
and real wages fall, both consumer confidence and
aggregate demand decrease thus creating a financial
burden due to unemployment benefits (in economies

830

Keynesian Demand Management

like the United Kingdom) as well as diminished revenue from direct and indirect taxation. Government
interventions following the Keynesian recipe are also
known as counter-cyclical demand management policies: this is because if aggregate demand is lower than
equilibrium levels, then government should pursue
reflationary policies—such as cutting taxes or boosting government spending—to push demand up and
boost employment and output. On the other hand,
if aggregate demand is higher than the equilibrium
level and there are risks of inflation, the prescription
is adopting deflationary policies, such as tax increases
or cutting public spending.
In the aftermath of World War II, Keynesian economics shaped policy in several advanced countries,
which had set full employment as a primary target.
Those strategies based on massive government intervention, however, had a mixed record. During the
1950s and 1960s, most nations enjoyed the strongest
and most sustained period of economic growth and
prosperity ever recorded before or since, with high
real wages allowing more households to improve
their lifestyles by purchasing expensive durable
goods such as televisions and cars. These phenomena
are at the root of the dramatic changes that characterized the emergence of the so-called affluent society.
By the mid-1970s, however, a dramatic turn in macroeconomic conditions around the world due to the
oil crisis led to generalized stagflation, that is, strong
inflation combined with high unemployment levels.
It has been observed that at the root of the recurring crises in international financial relationships
in the postwar period were substantial price variations across economies and that such discrepancies
tended to grow as inflation accelerated. By 1973, the
Bretton Woods system of normally fixed exchange
rates was replaced by a regime of fluctuating rates,
which would eventually push inflation even more.
Most national authorities sought refuge in monetary
and fiscal policies aimed at containing inflation.
However, inflation has proven stubbornly persistent
everywhere. Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands,
and Japan managed to restore acceptable levels by
the end of the 1970s followed by the United States
in the early 1980s, but several other countries did
not manage until the 1990s. Similarly, unemployment grew rapidly worldwide, also partly due to the
reorientation of industrial production away from
commodities and toward services.

This critical transition in recent economic history
undermined confidence toward demand management policies and fueled an extensive debate among
economists. It has been observed that even when
unemployment was low, sustained economic growth
and high inflation increased the deficit in the balance
of payments. The option of compressing demand
reduced the deficit and curbed inflation but pushed
the economy toward mild recession with rising
unemployment; this, in turn, encouraged government to increase the level of demand and thus restart
what Christopher Pissarides terms the stop-go cycle.
Another important issue is that policies seeking full
employment along the Keynesian prescription have
been known to generate adverse effects in other areas
of economic activity; for example, with full employment, labor is in short supply and therefore relatively
costlier, which would in turn trigger increases in the
price of goods and services thus encouraging demands
for still higher wages, and so on. This process could
clearly produce spiraling inflation. In the 1960s and
1970s, growing awareness of the link between wages
and inflation led some Western European governments to seek tighter coordination with management
and unions, an attempt that failed, however, due to
lack of agreement, according to Daniel J. B. Mitchell.
Over the last two decades, Keynesian economics
has been and continues to be under close scrutiny.
While it is widely accepted among economists that
governments need to play an active role through
active fiscal policy to restore cyclical imbalances, erroneous forecasts carry the risk of actually destabilizing
the economy. At the same time, however, opposite
monetarist policies have proven rather ineffective too.
Recent alternatives include incentive-based incomes
policies, explicit restraints to factor returns as well as
a return to Keynesian-oriented solutions.
Davide Consoli
See also Affluent Society; Commodities; Consumer
Demand; Economics; Income; Keynes, John Maynard;
Money; Service Industry

Further Readings
Colander, David C., ed. Incentive-Based Incomes Policies:
Advances in TIP and MAP. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger,
1986.
Cornwall, John. Economic Breakdown and Recovery:
Theory and Policy. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994.

Kyrk, Hazel
Gershuny, Jonathan, and Ian Miles. The New Service
Economy. London: Pinter, 1983.
McLeod, Alex N. The Fearsome Dilemma: Simultaneous
Inflation and Unemployment. Stratford, ON: Mercury
Press, 1994.
McLeod, Alex N. “The Problem Is Inflation-Control, Not
Spending-Control.” Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro
Quarterly Review (June 1995): 146–158.
Mitchell, Daniel J. B. Unions, Wages and Inflation.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1980.
Pissarides, Christopher. “Unemployment in Britain: A
European Success Story.” In Structural Unemployment
in Western Europe: Reasons and Remedies, edited by
Martin Werding, 209–236. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006.

KYRK, HAZEL (1886–1957)
Hazel Kyrk was an important economist who
focused on family and consumer economics. She was
born in Ashley, Ohio. Her university education began
in 1904 at Ohio Wesleyan, where she supported herself by working for the family of economics professor Leon C. Marshall. In 1908, Kyrk entered the
University of Chicago and once again worked for
the Marshall family, who had moved there previously. She graduated with a PhB in 1910 and began a
PhD under the supervision of James A. Field. While
working on her doctorate, Kyrk taught at Iowa State
College (1911), Wellesley (1911–1912), and Oberlin
(1914–1918). In 1918, she accepted an invitation
from Field to do statistical work in England. She then
returned to Oberlin and completed her PhD in 1920.
Her dissertation won the prestigious Hart, Schaffner,
and Marx prize, and a revised version was published
in 1923 as A Theory of Consumption.
Kyrk left Oberlin in 1921. She taught summer school at Bryn Mawr (1922–1925), worked
briefly at the Food Research Institute at Stanford
(1923–1924), where she coauthored a book on the
American baking industry (Kyrk and Davis 1925),
and at Iowa State College (1924–1925) before being
offered a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Departments of Home Economics and
Economics at Chicago. She continued her work
on consumer economics and published Economic
Problems of the Family in 1933. In 1941, she was
promoted to full professor. In 1953, a revised version

831

of her 1933 book was published as The Family in the
American Economy.
The key argument in A Theory of Consumption
(1923) is that patterns of consumption behavior are
largely determined by norms of the “appropriate and
necessary” or by socially defined “standards of living.” In her view, a theory of consumption must take
account of these standards and norms, explain how
they came to be, how they relate to valuation and
choice, how they develop and change, and indicate
how they might be improved through policy (22).
This led Kyrk to critique marginal utility theory as
a basis for understanding consumption behavior
and to develop an instrumental theory of choice.
This institutional approach to consumption, built
around the concept of accepted standards of living,
was widely adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. Other
women economists, such as Theresa McMahon and
Jessica Peixotto, contributed, but Kyrk’s work provided the central theoretical argument.
Kyrk’s Economic Problems of the Family (1933)
had a broader scope, discussing not only issues in
consumption and standards of living but also issues
in household production; the economic position of
women; employment of married women; family
incomes and their adequacy; family decision making;
risks of disability, unemployment, and old age; savings; social security; and consumer information and
consumer protection. This book was path breaking
in many respects, emphasizing the family as a joint
decision-making unit over the allocation of household resources. Although Kyrk’s approach remained
firmly within the institutionalist tradition, the issues
dealt with anticipate much of the more recent neoclassical literature on the economics of the family by
Gary Becker and others.
Kyrk also contributed to issues involving women,
the family, consumption, and housing through
her work for the Women’s Trade Union League
of Chicago and for various government agencies.
Between 1938 and 1941, she was chief economist
of the Bureau of Home Economics, where she made
major contributions to the Consumers Purchases
Study, the foundation for calculating the base year
prices for the consumer price index. Later, she worked
for the Office of Price Administration on wartime
price controls and the Bureau of Labor Statistics on
the Minimum Standard Budget and revisions to the
consumer price index.

832

Kyrk, Hazel

At Chicago, she mentored other women faculty
and supervised a number of women graduate students,
including Margaret Reid. Kyrk never married but
took in and raised the teenaged daughter of a cousin.
She died in 1957 at her summer home in Vermont.
Malcolm Rutherford
See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Economic
Sociology; Economics; Families; Feminist Movement;
Households; Measuring Standards of Living; Veblen,
Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings
Beller, Andrea H., and D. E. Kiss. “Kyrk, Hazel.” In
Women Building Chicago, edited by Rima Lunin

Schultz and Adele Hast, 482–485. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001.
Dorfman, Joseph. The Economic Mind in
American Civilization. Vol. 5. New York: Viking,
1959.
Kyrk, Hazel. A Theory of Consumption. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1923.
Kyrk, Hazel. Economic Problems of the Family. New York:
Harper, 1933.
Kyrk, Hazel, and Joseph S. Davis. The American Baking
Industry, 1848–1923. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1925.
Nelson, Elizabeth. “Hazel Kyrk.” In Notable American
Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara
Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, 405–406.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1980.

L
on locally understood gendered household divisions
of labor, a strategy that also limits the potential for
women to earn overtime wages. What this suggests
is that the labor market is not a single location but is
instead a combination of the spatiality of both workers and employers.
Perhaps most famously, Henry Ford recognized
the interlinked nature of labor and consumption.
Mass production of his automobiles not only meant
significant changes in both the way that workers’
jobs were defined in relation to production but also
meant that economies of scale could be achieved that
would enable those with lower wages to be able to
purchase the goods that they were involved in producing. While Ford was not the only manufacturer
to understand and capitalize on the consumer potential of his workforce and the benefits of mass production, the way that he organized production around
specific tasks in an assembly-line format, such that
workers no longer were skilled in producing the
whole object but instead were skilled in one aspect
of production, is referred to as Fordism (see Gramsci
1971). Many argue that the overall division of labor
into separate, repetitive tasks leads ultimately to a
de-skilling of labor more generally (e.g., Braverman
1974). Others argue, however, that because production is a dynamic process and because competition
relies on innovation in the production process as well
as innovation in the goods and services being produced, what results are a re-skilling and a resocializing of labor (see Attwell 1987).
The process of labor-market change has important implications for how workers are able to sell

LABOR MARKETS
At its most basic, a labor market is where labor supply (workers) and labor demand (employers) come
together. Although this definition is suggestive of a
marketplace where workers advertise themselves to
potential employers, in reality, workers’ ability to
sell their labor is linked to the skills and experience
that they have (human capital); the awareness that
they have about the availability of a particular job,
which is largely tied to their social networks; the
location of the job in relation to their home or their
willingness to undertake a migration to be within
commuting distance of the employer; and also their
own domestic responsibilities. Likewise, because not
all employees are the same, employers must discriminate between those who are selling their
labor. One way they do this is by using the social
networks of their existing employees to find other
potential workers. Employers also make judgments
about the employability and skill level of individuals based on sociospatial positionality (e.g., gender, race, class, age). For example, employers may
choose locations for factories to capture the labor of
Asian women, partly on the belief that Asian women
have nimble fingers and are therefore more suitable
to sewing tasks or computer chip production than
other social groups who are perhaps located in other
places or in other social groupings (Pearson 2000).
Likewise, as Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt illustrate, employers may shape their employment conditions by offering “mother’s hours” that are based
833

834

Labor Markets

their labor in the labor market. First, employers may
seek out labor markets in low-waged regions. A good
example of this is textiles production. Historically,
the United Kingdom and the New England region
of the United States were the center of textiles manufacturing. As recently as 2001, Marks and Spencer, a
large high-street retailer in the United Kingdom, purchased all its clothing from producers in the United
Kingdom. However, due to competition from other
retailers who sourced their goods from producers in
Asia and could offer similar products at a lower price,
Marks and Spencer among others subsequently
dropped U.K. suppliers in favor of offshore producers. Between 1988 and 2001, the United Kingdom
lost over 40 percent of its textile jobs (a loss of over
339,000 jobs). Second, those producers remaining
in what are locally considered declining industries
often restructure their employment by changing the
way work is done through the introduction of new
technologies or by seeking out a workforce that is
socially distinct from that traditionally associated
with the industry. For example, shifting employment
from a largely white, native workforce to a largely
immigrant workforce (as was the case in textiles
production in the United Kingdom) or changing the
gender of the employment by altering the conditions
of work (e.g., by offering mother’s hours rather than
overtime). The result of this restructuring is often
a decline in the number of workers, as is often the
case with technological changes to the production
process, or a decline in wages or both. For workers,
these changes mean that there are new labor markets
in those places that are economically less well-off.
Likewise, in the labor markets, change in the old location occurs such that a new group of people may be
able to sell their labor power, whereas those who had
traditionally had a place find themselves redundant
in the local labor market. Importantly, goods such as
textiles do not disappear from the marketplace when
labor market re-skilling occurs. What this means for
consumers in places where industry has re-skilled is
that there is often a greater geographical and social
separation between the consumer and the goods
being produced. As a result, consumers have less
understanding of the conditions under which those
goods are produced than they once did.
Recent research and political activism has focused
on production networks with the aim of making
the journey that a good or commodity takes from
raw material to retail outlet more transparent for

consumers. Some of this research has specifically
shown how as a good moves from one stage in the
chain to the next it is also moving through different labor markets. Examples of this kind of research
include Louise Crewe’s writings concerning fashion
and the work of a number of authors that focus
on food items (e.g., Suzanne Freidberg’s research
on green beans [2003] and Ian Cook’s research on
tropical fruit [1995]). Likewise, consumer activist groups have campaigned for better labor market conditions for workers through their pressure
on the retailers that source from these regions. An
example is the pressure campaign against Nike corporation that illustrated wage differentials between
the workers who sew the shoes and the advertisers and celebrities who sell the shoes. More recent
examples are the television journalism programs
and activist campaigns highlighting the use of child
labor, extremely low-waged outsourcing arrangements, and sweatshop conditions in the production
of consumer goods, such as the soccer balls used in
the World Cup and clothes for low-cost retailers,
such as Primark. These efforts have meant that child
labor is no longer viewed as an acceptable practice,
though unscrupulous producers often try to hide
their continued use of this labor pool in an effort to
continue to make available low cost goods in high
consumption economies.
These recent efforts by those interested in labor
markets as they are embedded within consumption
chains has helped to change labor market practices
for the most marginal in economically poor regions
through the introduction of controls on how retailers
in well-off nations are able to buy the goods they sell.
The recognition that all labor markets are defined
in the relationships between workplaces, home, and
residential setting offers considerable opportunity
for those interested in consumption as labor markets
reside at the center of the connections and contradictions between production and reproduction in a capitalist system. Indeed, reconsidering how we consume
also opens up possibilities for new ways of producing
that in turn has implications for how labor supply is
offered and taken up.
Megan K. Blake
See also Capitalism; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and
Up-Skilling; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Gramsci, Antonio; Mass
Production and Consumption

Lasch, Christopher

Further Readings
Attwell, Paul. “The Deskilling Controversy.” Work and
Occupations 14 (1987): 323–346.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Cook, Ian. “Constructing the ‘Exotic’: The Case of Tropical
Fruit.” In Geographical Worlds, edited by John Allen
and Doreen Massey, 137–142. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Crewe, Louise. “Unravelling Fashion’s Commodity
Chains.” In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited
by Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer, 195–214.
London: Routledge, 2004.
Freidberg, Suzanne. “Cleaning Up Down South:
Supermarkets, Ethical Trade and African Horticulture.”
Social and Cultural Geography 4 (2003): 27–43.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
Hanson, Susan, and Geraldine Pratt. Gender, Work, and
Space. New York: Routledge, 1985.
Pearson, Ruth. “‘Nimble Fingers’ Revisited: Reflections on
Women and Third-World Industrialisation in the Late
Twentieth Century.” In Feminist Visions of
Development, edited by Cecile Jackson and Ruth
Pearson, 172–189. London: Routledge, 2000.

LASCH, CHRISTOPHER
(1932–1994)
Despite launching a sustained assault on the very
foundations of the American way of life, Christopher
Lasch is now considered to be one of the most
important public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Lasch was a historian but did not confine his
inquiry to the annals of history. Rather, he utilized a
deep understanding of historical processes to address
contemporary Western culture as it unfolded. Lasch
addressed issues as diverse as public morality, the
family, the rise of feminism and liberalism in the
postwar era, and the growth of the market and its
gradual domination of social life and in doing so displayed a perspicacious ability to grasp the essence
of postwar America as it abandoned its brief flirtation with social democracy and returned to its founding principles of existential and economic freedom.
Lasch offered a detailed and incisive critique of both
the political left and right, but we can basically sum

835

up his intellectual approach as an amalgamation of
socialism, with its traditional concern with the power
of capitalism to corrupt public culture and everyday
life, and conservatism, inasmuch as he was deeply
suspicious of the onward march of twentieth-century
liberalism and what he considered the thoughtless
deconstruction of traditional social institutions.
Lasch was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1932, the
son of progressive and intellectual parents. Lasch’s
mother held a PhD and taught philosophy at the universities of Nebraska and Missouri, and his father
studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes
Scholar and eventually became a noted journalist,
winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorials that criticized
American involvement in Vietnam. Lasch eventually
received his doctorate in history from Columbia in
1961 and took up a post at the University of Iowa as
Assistant Professor in History in that same year. After
a number of other moves, Lasch eventually arrived at
the University of Rochester in 1970 as Professor of
History where he spent the rest of his career.
Lasch was a prodigious writer and it is impossible
to offer a comprehensive digest of his work here. He
wrote ten books in total, with the last two published
posthumously after Lasch succumbed to cancer in
1994. Perhaps the most celebrated of Lasch’s books
is The Culture of Narcissism. The core thesis of this
book is perhaps even more pertinent today than it
was at the time of its first publication in 1979. In
this book, Lasch charts the broad range of social
pressures that have destabilized the traditional family
and led to a rise in narcissistic personality types. For
Lasch, the onward march of liberal humanism, coupled with developing forms of capital accumulation
centered on competitive consumerism, have led to a
marked increase in narcissism. Lasch offers a scathing critique of the liberal projects of the sixties that
sought to free the individual from constraining social
structures. This narcissistic focus on the needs and
desires of the individual threatened the well-being of
the collective ways of life on which modern civilization was structured.
We can only guess at what Lasch would have
made of the rise of global neoliberalism, the branding
of the everyday life and the solipsistic identity projects that make up an increasingly important part of
public culture. It seems unlikely that he would have
found anything positive to say about the apparent
instrumentalization of community, the media nature
of contemporary (post) politics, and the increasingly

836

Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix

desperate scramble to accumulate and display (Hall,
Winlow, and Ancrum 2008). Ever the historian, it
is likely that Lasch would have detailed the deep
historical and ideological roots of liberalism, roots
that continue to shape American economy and culture and structure both the political left and right. He
would have argued that this American ideology has
prepared the ground for a new and evermore socially
corrosive advanced market capitalism, an economic
system that seeks to draw all into an aggressive battle
for cultural significance that sustains the consumer
economy but has profound implications for psychic
well-being and social order. Given the recent challenges to global capital and the apparent inability
of the left to construct a realistic alternative to it, it
is perhaps time we revisited the work of Lasch and
reconsidered how his brand of conservative egalitarianism might benefit contemporary social and
cultural analysis.
Simon Winlow
See also Families; Happiness; Hedonism; Narcissism

Further Readings
Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. Criminal
Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and
the New Culture of Narcissism. Cullompton, UK:
Willan, 2008.

LAZARSFELD, PAUL FELIX
(1901–1976)
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-born applied
social psychologist who, somewhat improbably,
became a dominant figure in postwar American sociology. With a conventional academic career blocked
by anti-Semitism, Lazarsfeld in the late 1920s created
an applied market research institute in Vienna that
would, after his emigration to the United States in
1933, serve as a model for his institutes at Newark
and Columbia. Owing to exigencies of contract work
and his own methodological interests, Lazarsfeld and
his research teams would go on to generate a number
of important studies of consumer behavior over the
next two decades, before turning to other questions
in the 1950s.
Lazarsfeld, encouraged by the physicist (and fellow
socialist) Friedrich Adler, had earned a doctorate in

applied mathematics in 1925, the same year he began
a close association with Charlotte and Karl Buhler,
directors of the university’s Psychological Institute.
With the Buhlers’ support, Lazarsfeld soon founded
a fledgling market research institute—an early act
of entrepreneurial pluck. Lazarsfeld’s approach to
market research was original, and his emphasis on
interpreting consumer motive would provoke both
admiration and controversy when he brought the
techniques to the United States in the 1930s. He
claimed that consumer decision making, often unconscious and sometimes irrational, could be gleaned
from consumers’ motivational self-descriptions with
the aid of careful questioning and analysis. Already
in Vienna he was leveraging client demands for scholarly ends.
Lazarsfeld soon produced a book-length community study of working-class leisure practices in
a depression-ravaged industrial town, Marienthal,
which earned him a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to the United States. He used his Rockefeller
year for a series of cross-country trips and volunteer research projects and established connections with dozens of applied social psychologists.
When Austria’s fascists seized power in 1934,
Lazarsfeld—a socialist and a Jew—applied to
remain in the country.
In the mid-1930s, he volunteered at the
Psychological Corporation, collaborated with David
Craig at the University of Pittsburgh’s Retail Research
Institute, and wrote four chapters for an American
Marketing Society (1937) methods text. In early
1935, he published his classic, manifesto-like article,
“The Art of Asking Why in Marketing Research.”
His arguments for reason analysis and for the indispensability of the unscripted, reactive depth interview
were widely influential and prefigured the focused
interview that future colleague Robert Merton was
to codify a decade later.
In 1936, Lazarsfeld convinced the University of
Newark’s ambitious president to sponsor a Newark
Research Center housed in an abandoned brewery
near campus and funded—like his Vienna institute—
by client-commissioned contract studies. The
work style he would make famous at Columbia—
methodological innovation, high analytic intelligence,
the valued hunch, the quantitative-qualitative mix,
directorial omnipotence, the scholarly reanalysis of client data, even the chaos and financial precariousness—
was already routine at Newark.

Lefebvre, Henri

The same year, Lazarsfeld embraced the new
sampling-based polling techniques pioneered by
George Gallup and other commercial pollsters during
that year’s presidential race. Owing to his methodological agility and social acumen, Lazarsfeld soon found
himself at the center of the new interdisciplinary field
of public opinion research, which cohered around
the survey methods themselves and a set of overlapping relationships among psychologists, sociologists,
pollsters, market researchers, and foundation officials
clustered in the northeastern United States. Lazarsfeld
was soon asked to direct the Princeton Radio Research
Project, a Rockefeller-backed audience-research initiative that used the new survey techniques. Personal
conflicts with other Princeton Project principals led
Lazarsfeld to shift its affiliation to Columbia in 1939.
It was Columbia’s Office of Radio Research (ORR)
that would become, in 1944, the influential Bureau
of Applied Social Research (BASR). Lazarsfeld’s
own full-time appointment to Columbia’s sociology
department came in 1941, the same year the department recruited Merton. An unlikely alliance and longterm collaboration—Merton would go on to serve as
the BASR’s associate director and to author influential Bureau-sponsored work, such as Mass Persuasion
(1946)—helped to establish Columbia as a major
center of sociology in the early postwar years.
The ORR/BASR sponsored a number of landmark
studies on media audiences and consumption, including work by fellow refugees Theodor Adorno, Leo
Lowenthal, and Herta Herzog (Lazarsfeld’s second
wife). Lazarsfeld’s own Radio and the Printed Page
(1940), The People’s Choice (1944), and Personal
Influence (1955) analyzed consumption, politics, and
media habits in ways that remain influential across
a number of fields. By the early 1950s, Lazarsfeld’s
prominence within postwar sociology enabled him
to focus more exclusively on the methodological
questions that had always been his real preoccupation. He largely abandoned the consumption and
media topics that were, after all, the products of
funding opportunism. Recalling his Austrian years,
Lazarsfeld (1969) once remarked, “Such is the origin
of my Vienna market research studies: the result of
the methodological equivalence of socialist voting
and the buying of soap” (279).
Jeff Pooley
See also Broadcast Media; Communication Studies;
Consumer Behavior; Leisure; Markets and Marketing;

837

Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture;
Psychology

Further Readings
American Marketing Society. The Technique of Marketing
Research. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.
Jahoda, Marie, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel.
Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed
Community. Chicago: Aldine, Atherton, 1971.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. “The Art of Asking Why in Marketing
Research.” National Marketing Review 1 (1935):
32–43.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. “An Episode in the History of Social
Research.” In The Intellectual Migration: Europe and
America, 1930–1960, edited by Donald Fleming and
Bernard Bailyn, 270–337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1969.
Merton, Robert K. Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology
of a War Bond Drive. New York: Harper & Brothers,
1946.

LEFEBVRE, HENRI (1901–1991)
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist sociologist
and philosopher. Lefebvre is best known for his
theorizing of geography and urban space, but his
three-volume Critique of Everyday Life also offers a
trenchant analysis of consumer culture and capitalism’s colonization of leisure time and private life.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Lefebvre
was at the center of many pivotal cultural, political,
and intellectual movements, including the avant-garde
of Dada and surrealism, the uprisings of May 1968,
and the development of postmodernism.
Lefebvre’s intellectual roots were formed between
the two world wars as he mixed Marxism with the
insights of Dada and surrealism. The interwar avantgardes explored how art, performance, and spontaneous action could disorient the dominant ideology
in which social conventions appear as natural and
inevitable. They also allowed Lefebvre to imagine a
new type of society where life itself would be a work
of art, constituted by desire and creativity. Along
with Andre Breton and many of the other surrealists,
Lefebvre joined the French Communist Party (PCF)
in 1928. But while the surrealists’ relationship to the
Party was volatile and short-lived, Lefebvre stayed
on and served as one of its most prominent intellectual spokesman throughout the next three decades,

838

Leisure

despite the fact that his ideas often conflicted with
their interpretations of Marxism that favored “scientific” notions of objective determination. Like Georg
Lukács, Lefebvre argued for a more philosophical
and humanist reading of Marx that extracted the
Hegelian residue in the concepts of alienation, reification, and class consciousness.
Beginning with the first volume of Critique of
Everyday Life, written in 1947, Lefebvre suggested
that capitalism was commoditizing not only labor
but also leisure, family, sexuality, the body, and the
imagination. He emphasized that “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work. . . . So we work to
earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to
get away from work” (1991, 39–40; italics in original). Like the Frankfurt school, Lefebvre observed
that Western societies were becoming increasingly
oriented around consumption and commercial
entertainment, but while these apparatuses of the
culture industry promised relief from the workplace,
in reality they represented an extension of alienation
in everyday life. Lefebvre sought to theorize the junction of instrumental rationality and mass culture
through the term “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (1984, 68–109).
Nonetheless, Lefebvre refused to succumb to the
pessimism and despair that engulfed other Marxists
in the decades after World War II. From Lefebvre’s
perspective, the consumer culture did not represent
the triumph of “false needs” because leisure, pleasure, and self-expression are all essential human faculties. What are false are not the needs that capital
promises to fulfill but the commodities and signs that
are supposed to realize them. Lefebvre wrote, “They
can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real
need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive
appearance” (1991, 40). Although their diagnoses
of postwar society were otherwise quite similar,
Lefebvre thus felt compelled to differentiate himself
from Herbert Marcuse: “Can terrorist pressures
and repression reinforce individual self-repression
to the point of closing all issues? Against Marcuse
we continue to assert that they cannot” (1984, 66).
As early as 1962, Lefebvre had identified young
people as a potentially revolutionary agent of social
change: “Everywhere we see them showing signs of
dissatisfaction and rebellion. . . . It is they who continue the uninterrupted dialogue between ideal and
experiment” (1995, 195). In May 1968, the speculations of Lefebvre and the like-minded Situationist

International momentarily came to fruition as young
people seized the streets of Paris while general strikes
and mass demonstrations involving millions nearly
toppled the French government.
After 1968, Lefebvre pursued his study of social
space and cities, including his most renowned
work, The Production of Space (1974 [English
trans. 1991]). Otherwise, however, Lefebvre’s influence was negligible once post-structuralism and
postmodernism came to dominate the French intellectual scene. He did maintain an indirect presence
through his student Jean Baudrillard whose earliest
works on the semiotics of consumer culture bear
traces of Lefebvre’s thought. But unlike Baudrillard
and so many other post-1968 French intellectuals,
Lefebvre never renounced Marxism or his utopian
hopes for revolution once postmodern ideas became
fashionable.
Ryan Moore
See also Alienation; Baudrillard, Jean; Body, The;
Collective Identity; Commodification; Families;
Leisure; Marcuse, Herbert; Marxist Theories; Mass
Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; PostStructuralism; Reification; Sexuality; Spatial Analysis;
Surrealism

Further Readings
Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1.
Translated by John Moore. New York: Verso, 1991.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 1991.
Lefebvre, Henri. Introduction to Modernity. New York:
Verso, 1995.

LEISURE
In modern societies, the term leisure is used, explicitly or implicitly, as an adjective or noun to refer to
time that is unaccounted for by work, other obligations and necessary activities, the things that are done
in this time, and the experiences that are derived.
Leisure and consumption overlap; neither encompasses the whole of the other. That said, it is within
leisure time and through leisure spending that consumer cultures have developed to a point where an
issue of current debate is whether consumer cultures

Leisure

have not only penetrated but also are overwhelming
the whole of leisure.

What Is Leisure?
The systematic study of leisure dates from the creation of leisure studies as a specialist academic
subject in North America in the 1950s and 1960s.
Leisure had been studied previously but nearly
always as a by-product in studies of work and occupations through exploring the “long arm of the job”
or in community studies where leisure was covered
as part of family and neighborhood life. Until leisure
itself became the focus, a precise definition seems to
have been considered unnecessary.
Leisure has been defined as a type of time, a type
of activity, and a type of experience and various combinations of these, but researchers have found that
time is the truly basic, essential feature in a satisfactory concept of modern leisure. With this recognition, we see instantly that the leisure of today is a
product of modern, industrial society. Many of the
activities that we engage in during leisure predate the
modern era. This applies to sports and games, drinking, and various arts and crafts. As far as we can
tell, throughout history human beings have played,
amused themselves and one another, and found time
to relax, but this was not leisure as we know it today.
Modern leisure is a product of the compartmentalization and rationalization of work. Industrialism takes
work out of homes and neighborhoods and relocates
it in mines, factories, and offices, where people work
at set times, under work-specific authority, and amid
work-specific relationships. Thus work becomes a
part of life. Industrialism also involves the rationalization of work insofar as jobs are preformed not
according to custom, or in ways that will maximize
workers’ enjoyment, but to maximize the quantity
and quality of output and minimize costs. If people
find their jobs enjoyable, this is a fortuitous byproduct rather than the prime consideration. Thus,
work has become a part of life in which employees
are required to follow their employers’ commands.
Opportunities to do things purely for the intrinsic
satisfaction, just for fun, to choose for oneself are
pushed into nonwork time. Hence, the everyday (in
modern societies) meaning of leisure is work-free
time during which, in contrast to when people are
working, they are able to do what they please, purely
for the personal satisfaction. In earlier times, when

839

the term leisure was used, it described a particular
class of people or a total way of life. Modern leisure
is different: it is a part of life that is available (in principle) for everyone.
There are no activities that are always and only leisure activities. Playing a sport, gardening, or reading
can be one person’s work and someone else’s leisure.
It is impossible to tell from the activity itself—only by
whether it is done in work or leisure time. There are
no uniquely leisure experiences. Leisure, like work,
can be enjoyable or boring. During leisure, we may
be able to choose to do things that we find especially
satisfying, but we often choose simply to relax and
idle time away.
The leisure that the populations of Western
countries experience today is a product of contextual conditions in addition to the modern nature of
paid work. Leisure’s character owes much to the
existence of a market economy that offers choices—
invariably wider choices than when the state is the
monopoly supplier. Our leisure is also a product of
civil society—the existence of space in which people
can organize to do things collectively with others
who share their interests. Civil society is the home
of religious and political organizations and the clubs
that cater to numerous sports, arts, and hobbies.
Finally, leisure as we know it becomes possible only
when the traditions that once prescribed entire ways
of life for members of neighborhood and religious
communities have weakened. These ways of life usually scripted different roles for males and females,
different age groups, and different social strata.
De-traditionalization releases individuals, groups of
friends, and families “to do their own things,” which
may be different from the leisure choices of neighbors. All this means that leisure is highly context
dependent. A sphere of life that will be recognized as
leisure is found wherever work has been modernized,
but the character of leisure itself, not just how leisure
is used, varies between, on the one hand, Western
societies where all the above contextual features are
present and other modern societies.
It is certainly possible to define leisure in a way
that makes it universal and recognizable in all societies. This is possible because, as acknowledged above,
throughout history people have had hours, sometimes days and weeks, free from productive work
when they have been able to rest, relax, refresh, and
enjoy various sports and other pastimes. Thus, some
writers compare the leisure of people in primitive

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Leisure

societies, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece
and Rome, and feudal Europe with the leisure of the
present day. However, it soon becomes apparent that
we are not comparing like with like. The contrasts
often lead to the conclusion that present-day leisure
is debased, deformed, overcommercialized, and dedicated to trivia rather than to cultivating the whole
person (believed to be the ideal life in ancient Athens).
The error lies in judging one era using the standards
of another. The study of leisure in the modern world
has produced a body of knowledge about, for example, work-leisure relationships, that simply cannot be
mapped onto societies where both work and leisure
were not modernized.

Measuring Leisure and Its Uses
Researching leisure is more cumbersome than investigating most other areas of life. If leisure is basically
a type of time, then the basic measurements have to
be how much leisure time an entire population, different subsections, and different individuals possess.
Time Diaries
The most effective way of answering these questions is through time diary studies. Representative
samples of a population are asked then persuaded
to keep time diaries specifying what they were doing
during successive 10- or 15-minute spells throughout
a day. They may then be asked follow-up questions
(answers to be jotted down in the diary alongside
the activities) about where they were and who they
were with. The most recent time diary studies require
records to be kept for no more than one or two days.
Compliance dips if respondents are expected to keep
diaries for longer periods. Representative results for
all days are guaranteed by asking as many respondents about a Monday as about a Tuesday, and so
on. Time diary studies are expensive to undertake.
The diaries have to be delivered by hand then collected, whereupon the field workers must check the
entries with respondents to ensure that everything
has been answered correctly. The analysis of the data
is complicated. So these investigations are infrequent.
Uses of time are coded into a large number of categories (playing specific sports, ironing clothes, for
example), which are then aggregated, usually into
paid work, other work (typically household chores),
unpaid caring, personal maintenance (eating, bathing, dressing, etc.), traveling, and sleep. The residue

is treated as leisure. The crude amounts and proportions of time that are devoted to specific activities can
then be calculated.
This kind of evidence is most useful for charting
long-term trends in time use, comparing time use
patterns in different sections of a population, and
measuring the total amounts of time that are devoted
to activities that occupy most people (or a great
many people) on most days (watching television is
the prime example). Time diary evidence is less useful
for investigating activities that are not clearly time
bounded (listening to background music and interacting with family members, for example). Also,
most specific activities are practiced less frequently
than daily. Time budgets are useless for assessing the
proportions of a population that play sports, attend
the theater, and so on. This requires a different kind
of inquiry.
Participation Surveys
The proportions of a population who take part
in different kinds of leisure are usually measured
through participation surveys. Representative samples are presented with checklists of activities and are
asked to say in which they have taken part within a
specified time period (usually during the last week
or month). Those who have taken part can then be
asked, How often? Those who have not participated
during the last week or month can be asked about
the last year then their entire lifetimes. Using selected
thresholds, the proportions of a population, and subsections of it, who are participants in different activities can be measured and compared.
This kind of research proves too undiscriminating when dealing with types of leisure in which
most people take part daily and where the pertinent
question is not whether but for how many hours?
However, most specific leisure activities are engaged
in less frequently, and the main difficulty in obtaining comprehensive information about a population’s
uses of leisure is that there are hundreds of different leisure activities. A list of all indoor and outdoor
sports alone fills several questionnaire pages. So
most participation surveys focus on just one type of
leisure—attendance at arts events, participation in
sports, going on holiday, or visiting the countryside,
for example. A problem is that different investigations use different thresholds to decide who should be
counted as a participant (weekly, monthly, annually),
which makes it difficult to aggregate the evidence.

Leisure

The investigations are usually conducted as market
research for specific leisure industries, which leaves
gaps, mainly noncommercial uses of leisure, such as
hobby clubs, and the data collected are not always
freely available to anyone who is interested.
Expenditure Surveys
A complementary approach focuses on money—
how much is spent on different activities or uses of
time and by whom. All the leisure industries know
how much they are worth—the totals spent on their
goods and services by consumers and, in some cases,
by government departments and state agencies.
However, the industries’ budgets do not tell us which
consumers are spending the money. In all the economically advanced countries, the most comprehensive information is collected by governments in
social surveys in which representative samples of
people are asked to record all their spending, usually
throughout a week or month. They are also asked
about their sources and levels of income and the
occupations (if any) of household members. A limitation, as regards leisure, is that cashless leisure is not a
feature. Also, the sampling unit in these surveys is the
household, and we cannot learn exactly who (wife
or husband, for example) is spending on alcohol,
theater visits, and so forth.
All the above types of inquiry are quantitative, but
most leisure research projects are qualitative, focusing on particular sections of a population or participants in specific activities, typically exploring their
motivations, gratifications, and the constraints that
shape their opportunities. However, all small-scale
qualitative studies rely on the macroquantitative picture to establish exactly how many and which types
of people their own small numbers may represent.
Experience Sampling
This is a research technique (the only research
method) that has been developed primarily for use in
leisure research. Its use follows the assumption that if
we want to learn about the experiences—the satisfactions and frustrations—associated with different uses
of leisure, then people need to be questioned about
their feelings at the time when these feelings are alive.
This kind of research involves persuading participants to carry beepers at all times, which are alerted
randomly but with an assurance that the apparatus
will not beep at night. As soon as they are beeped,

841

or as soon as possible afterwards, participants are
expected to complete a short questionnaire (in a
booklet) saying what they are doing, where and with
whom, and how they are feeling—elated, stressed,
bored, relaxed, or whatever.

Trends in Leisure
In most Western and ex-communist countries,
trends in leisure can be traced accurately from the
1960s onward because time diary, spending, and
participation surveys have been conducted throughout this period. Earlier trends are known but with
less precision.
Leisure time, as a proportion of lifetime, appears
to have expanded continuously since the earliest
stages of industrialism, a period during which in
Britain, the first industrial nation, hours of work
were extended. From then until the 1970s, hours
of work were progressively rolled back. The working day, the workweek, and the work life were all
shortened. By the 1960s, a “historical inversion”
was underway—leisure time exceeding working
time during a typical workweek. Even so, prior to
the 1970s, total gains in work-free time had arisen
mainly through enlarging the sections of the population outside the paid workforce—the young who had
been removed into education and older age groups
who could retire on pensions. Also, the reductions
in weekly hours of paid work had achieved no more
than regaining free time that had been lost during the
takeoff into industrialism.
Since the 1960s, leisure time has continued to
grow, almost wholly as a result of the further enlargement of work-free age groups. Young people are
remaining even longer in education. Retirement has
been extended due to increased longevity. There is
an unresolved debate about whether typical weekly
hours of paid work have lengthened or simply stabilized for persons in the paid workforce, but there
is agreement that the earlier downward trend has
ended. The total paid workloads of households containing adults of working age have typically risen due
to increased rates of labor market participation by
women.
World War II appears to have been a watershed.
Previously, trade unions had pressed for shorter
hours of work to spread the available work and
reduce unemployment. When governments adopted
Keynesian methods of macroeconomic management
and succeeded in achieving and maintaining full

842

Leisure

employment, workforce pressure for reduced hours
of work appears to have subsided. After the war,
workers began to expect and demand progressively
rising real wages and standards of living. Consumer
culture was taking over.
Another unresolved debate is about whether
domestic technology has released more time for leisure or whether rising standards and expectations
have maintained time spent on home and child care.
During the last forty years, net gains in leisure time
have been modest and nonexistent for most members
of the paid workforce. Meanwhile, spending on leisure goods and services had risen steeply. The benefits of economic growth have been taken by workers
in the form of higher wages and salaries rather than
increased leisure time. The more affluent a country,
the higher the proportion of its income is spent on
leisure goods and services, and within countries, the
most prosperous sections of the populations spend
the highest proportions of their incomes on leisure.
The concentration of further gains in work-free lifetime among nonemployed sections of the population,
while overall growth in total incomes has benefited
mainly those employed, has resulted in a tendency
for the most advanced, now postindustrial societies,
to polarize into the money-rich time-poor on the one
hand, and the money-poor time-rich on the other.
Since the 1950s, researchers have been trying
to measure the quality of life using life satisfaction
and happiness questions. The results show that in
Western countries people are now no happier, no
more content with their lives than was the case in
the 1950s. The particular ways in which leisure has
grown have not delivered fulfillment. Indeed, experience sampling has found that during leisure time the
most common psychological state is apathy, largely
due to the huge swathes of time that people spend
watching television.
A major current debate among leisure researchers is about whether the current distribution of work
and leisure time across the life course reflects people’s
genuine preferences or is due to constraints. Are
workers forced to choose between long hours or no
hours of paid work? Do they opt for (over) full-time
hours because working less incurs huge financial
penalties? Have governments been well-advised to
encourage young people to spend longer and longer
in education while maintaining retirement ages that
were fixed when the typical life was much shorter
than today? Does the current organization of the

typical life course place workers under intense pressure to earn, which distorts work-life balance?

How Leisure Is Used
The popularity of different kinds of leisure can be
compared in terms of the amounts of time or money
that they account for or the proportion of the population that takes part. It is impossible to establish a
simple rank order. Even so, there is no mistaking the
big three.
Media
TV, radio, films, recorded music, print, and nowadays the Internet account for around a half of all
leisure time. Television is still king of the media in
terms of hours spent viewing, but it is the Internet
that is currently driving change. The Internet is now an
alternative source of films, recorded music, news
and chat; the base for thousands of interest groups;
and a way of purchasing all types of goods. All other
media, and leisure activities more generally, are having to adapt to, learn to live with, and maybe benefit
from the Internet. Fifty years ago, all other media
were having to adjust to the age of television. Today,
people are not devoting more time overall to the
media, but they now have a much wider choice of
what to view, listen to, and read, and they are paying
a lot more per hour through purchasing hardware
and software and channel subscriptions.
Out-of-Home Eating and Drinking
Out-of-home eating and drinking are now among
the top leisure activities. Dining out regularly used
to be a privilege of the rich and an occasional indulgence for the many. Today, in the world’s more prosperous countries, a meal and a drink, or at least a
drink, has risen into leisure’s top division by becoming a normal part of going out for any other leisure
purpose—a trip to the cinema, a concert or a sports
event, for example. Bars, cafes, and restaurants are
at the heart of the night-time economies that have
boomed throughout the world, creating so-called
24-hour cities. Also, there is considerable alcohol
consumption during home-based leisure.
Tourism
Over 90 percent of the global population does
not cross international frontiers in any year. Indeed,

Leisure

international tourism has reached mass proportions
only in Europe—a fairly small continent containing
over thirty fairly small countries, many of which
are among the world’s richest. Even in these countries, substantial minorities (around 40 percent in
Britain) do not take a holiday (at least four nights
away from home) in any year. This proportion has
hardly changed since data collection began in 1970.
However, the people who take holidays are now taking them more frequently—twice or more per year,
short breaks as well as main holidays—and are traveling farther and spending much more. Consumer
spending on tourism makes it among the world’s
largest industries.
The big three are followed by medium-sized leisure industries—gambling (which is benefiting from
the Internet) and sex where the video or DVD is the
main product, supplemented by printed materials,
with striptease reviving due to the popularity of table
and lap dancing, plus the difficult-to-quantify forms
of bodywork. In terms of the numbers of people who
take part and money turnover, these leisure industries
are far larger than the cinema, the theater, concerts of
all types, sports (watching at live events and playing),
art galleries and museums, theme parks and amusement parks, stately homes and other heritage sites,
and other activities that probably spring to mind
more rapidly than betting and sex when leisure is
mentioned.
How can we explain how people use their free
time and money? One theory is that we tend to do
whatever is easy, and commerce in particular makes
its services easy to access and to use. Leisure researchers know that peaks of satisfaction are associated
with demanding, challenging leisure activities. Even
if lay people know this from personal experience,
they may still prefer to do whatever is easiest.

Leisure and Social Divisions
A major set of perennial research issues has been about
the differences in uses of leisure that are associated
with different occupations, age groups, and gender.
Occupations
Until the 1970s, successive studies focused on
uses of leisure that characterized particular occupations. Sometimes, the occupational specificities

843

were said to be due to “compensation”—employees
seeking experiences at leisure that were unavailable at work—and sometimes the specificities were
attributed to spillover of work-based interests, social
relationships, and skills. The key point to note is
that this entire genre of research has now become
defunct. The most likely reason is the breakup of the
occupational communities in which shared leisure
formerly developed. The sharing occurred when
workers practiced the same occupations throughout their working lives, when many towns were
dominated by single industries, and when workplace
and neighborhood social relationships reinforced
one another as in coal-mining villages, fishing ports,
and so on.
Another change over time is that the higher social
strata have ceased to be leisure highbrows and
have become leisure omnivores, meaning that they
are now the most involved in formerly middle- and
lowbrow uses of leisure (such as the production and
consumption of popular music) in addition to their
traditional highbrow interests (classical music and
the like). This change is believed to be due at least
partly to high rates of upward social mobility into
the higher strata. A result is that the lower strata
(people in lower-skilled, lower-paid, and less secure
occupations) now lead leisure lives that are simply
disadvantaged rather than different. They do less of
virtually everything except watching television.
Age
There has been a recent growth of interest in the
entire aging process due to the aging of the populations in economically advanced countries. The main
changes that occur in leisure during the life course
are well known, and these have not changed. Young
people and young adult singles are the most active
age groups in most forms of out-of-home leisure.
Then, many leisure activities are dropped during a
“life cycle squeeze” that accompanies new household
and family formation. In later life, it is exceptional
rather than the rule for older leisure interests to be
revived or new leisure activities taken up. The general
trend is for participation in out-of-home leisure to
decline further as people retire from work, as incomes
decline, family members disperse, following bereavement, and eventually declining health. Yet later life is
known to be the life stage when active leisure makes
the greatest difference to personal well-being, which

844

Leisure

depends on people remaining active whereas most
become increasingly inactive. A key issue for leisure
research is how this might be changed.

Leisure values (choosing, doing things for their own
sake, a fun morality) replacing the work ethic and
pervading all areas of life. In practice, work remains
governed by a business rationality.

Gender
The trend over time in Western countries is
toward genderless leisure. This results from more
women taking part in leisure activities that were
once considered masculine—watching and playing
sports, drinking alcohol fulsomely, and going out
in all-female groups. However, there are still gender differences, and today, the main controversy is
whether these are simply differences or evidence
that one sex (usually presumed to be men) is
advantaged, while the other (women) is disadvantaged. The “just differences” case is, first, the lack
of evidence that women want to do more of the
things that men do more of, namely, playing outdoor sports, consuming large quantities of alcohol,
and losing money on gambling, and second, that
wherever and whenever time diaries have been
used, the results have shown consistently that over
the entire life course, men and women do broadly
similar amounts of work when all kinds of work
are taken into account (paid work, housework, and
caring). The contrary view is that a presumption
of female disadvantage is justified because overall
women earn less than men, and their leisure is less
“pure” (more likely to be shared with children) and
more fragmented (more likely to be interrupted by
housework and child care).

The Role of Leisure in Society
Its growth has been accompanied by repeated forecasts of leisure playing not only a larger but also a
stronger role in people’s lives. However, up to now,
all specific predictions have been confounded.
Self-actualization and personal fulfillment for
everyone as an outcome of people’s enhanced scope
to express their full potential through leisure activities. In practice, life satisfaction and happiness (as
measured by questionnaires) have not risen alongside
the growth of leisure time and activity.
Leisure time becoming pivotal, with other activities
fitted around leisure priorities. In practice, leisure
continues to concede precedence to work and family
obligations.

Leisure becoming the source of our most significant social relationships. Leisure is often where
future marital partners first meet each other. Some
claim that friends are replacing families as sources
of social and emotional support. However, this
probably applies, as it has always applied, only
during the (nowadays extended) youth and young
adult life stages.
Leisure interests and activities becoming major sources
of identities—who we feel we really are and how
others see us. All social roles confer identities, but do
leisure identities operate in as sustained and generalized
ways (observed in all spheres of life) as age, sex, ethnic
or national, and occupational identities?
The main roles of present-day leisure appear to
be basically the same as yesterday: recuperation
and restoration of mind and body, inconsequential
enjoyment, and expressing interests and identities
with other roots (occupations, families, nationality, gender, and age).

State Interventions
All governments intervene in leisure. They provide
directly, and they subsidize. They tax and sometimes
prohibit. Governments intervene with a variety of
objectives and have always done so. As a result, we
have track records from which it is possible to say
what works or at least stands a reasonable chance of
success and which aims are unlikely to be realized.
Governments can try to change the public’s leisure
behavior. Reducing crime is still a good promise to
make when seeking state support for youth leisure
provisions. This is despite the now abundant evidence
that leisure provisions have not worked. Despite
generous state support for the classical arts in most
Western countries, the audiences for classical music,
opera, and ballet remained little changed throughout
the twentieth century. The U.K. government is
among the many that are currently urging more
active leisure to fight an “obesity epidemic,” but in
the United Kingdom, levels of participation in sports

Leisure

and other forms of active leisure have declined since
the early 1990s.
State support is often justified in terms of widening
access to include the less well-off, but this has also
failed to work. In sports and the arts, and indeed in
virtually everything that has received state support, it
is the better-off who have benefited most from the
provisions.
Governments can promote and publicize a country’s
assets to boost inward tourism, which then triggers
an economic multiplier. They can also try to raise
their countries’ international profiles, boost national
prestige, and strengthen national identities by
encouraging and publicizing high achievements in
sports and the arts. This can work, but the “game” is
zero-sum. In the short term, the global size of the
tourist market is finite. One country’s gain is another
country’s loss, and this also applies in the quest for
artistic and sporting excellence (there can be only one
winner in any event).
Governments can protect leisure resources and
maintain them for public benefit in perpetuity. They
can do this with the countryside, coastlines, urban
parks, heritage sites, and artifacts. This really does
work. There are opportunity costs—of selling land
for development or private use, for example—but the
public benefits can last forever. This not only works
but also can do so for every country, region, city,
town, and village.

The Case for More Comparisons
Most of our knowledge about leisure is based on
experience and research in Western countries. This
knowledge may not apply in all modern societies
because, as emphasized earlier, leisure is highly context dependent.
Modernization in the West has been linked to
de-traditionalization, a process that is less evident in
Saudi Arabia despite the country’s startling economic
progress. In Islamic countries, modern leisure may
well develop differently than in the West. In China,
the legacies of Confucianism and Taoism are unlikely
to be eradicated and may well have profound implications for the people’s leisure. In China and in other
newly and recently industrializing countries of East
Asia, normal hours of work are at levels that western

845

Europe and North America left behind a century
ago. Hours of work may be rolled back as the Asian
countries become more prosperous, or the Asian’s
countries’ traditional cultures could lead to their
adopting different modern priorities.
Former communist countries have a distinctive set
of recent experiences: loss of state support for leisure provisions alongside the impoverishment of the
majority of the populations and the creation of new,
tiny super-rich strata during the early stages of the
postcommunist transition. These countries also have
a deeper history, which remains an important source
of knowledge about how modern leisure is constituted. Communism provided examples of leisure in
societies where there were no commercial suppliers
and no genuine voluntary associations and where the
state had a much stronger purchase over how citizens used their leisure than has been exercised in any
other modern societies.
Ken Roberts
See also Affluent Society; Gender; Harried Leisure Class;
Information Technology; Leisure Studies; Measuring
Standards of Living; Postindustrial Society; Youth
Culture

Further Readings
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.
Dumazedier, Joffre. Toward a Society of Leisure.
New York: Free Press, 1967.
Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure
in Postindustrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Parker, Stanley. The Future of Work and Leisure. London:
MacGibbon and Kee, 1971.
Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing
Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American
Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907.
Rapoport, Rhona, and Robert N. Rapoport. Leisure and
the Family Life-Cycle. London: Routledge, 1975.
Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life:
The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time.
University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999.
Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American. New York:
Basic Books, 1991.
Stebbins, Robert. Amateurs, Professionals and Serious
Leisure. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queens University Press,
1992.
Wearing, Betsy. Leisure and Feminist Theory. London:
Sage, 1998.

846

Leisure Studies

LEISURE STUDIES
Leisure studies is an academic discipline that studies
leisure, combining theories and methods from sociology, psychology, economics, history, geography, and
many other disciplines.

Foundations
Leisure studies was created in North America in the
1950s and 60s. These were not the first scholars to
study leisure, but they were the first to describe themselves collectively as leisure scholars. At that time,
leisure scholars paid little if any attention to commercial leisure and consumer cultures. Their leisure
was serviced by public and voluntary sector providers. This is no longer the case (leisure studies today
has wider horizons), but the initially limited perspective of leisure studies helps to explain why the study
of consumption and consumer cultures developed as
separate enterprises.
It would be an oversimplification to say that the
birth of leisure studies was a straightforward response
to the growth of leisure and recognition of its importance in people’s lives. There were additional influences that gave North American leisure studies a
specifically North American character. The 1950s and
1960s were years of steady expansion in higher education in the United States. By the end of the 1960s,
around half of all young Americans were graduating
high school and enrolling in college. This expansion
led to a graduatization (a more recently coined term)
of occupations for which a college degree was not formerly required. These occupations included professional and management jobs in the public parks and
recreation services. By World War II, the United States
already had public recreation services, which included
urban and national parks. Parks were the jewels in
public leisure provisions. University departments with
parks and recreation and similar titles were created to
supply these leisure services with qualified labor, and
the subject taught in these departments was called leisure studies. The departments gave parks a privileged
position in their teaching and research portfolios, but
students were also prepared for work in sports, with
the disabled, the elderly, at-risk youth, and in other
specialist leisure fields.
The United States’ leisure scholars have never
created a scholarly association. They have always

aligned with and met during conferences of the
National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA),
which is primarily an association of parks professionals. There is a College of Leisure Sciences, a
group of leading leisure scholars, currently with
around one hundred members, which also holds its
meetings at NRPA conferences. The NRPA launched
North America’s first academic leisure journal, the
Journal of Leisure Research, in 1969. In 1978, this
was joined by a second journal, Leisure Sciences.
Canada’s leisure scholars organized the first of what
became a triennial series of congresses in 1975 and in
1983 created the Canadian Association for Leisure
Studies (CALS). These congresses have become the
main primarily scholarly forum for leisure researchers and teachers from all over North America.
During the 1970s, leisure studies spread to
Britain. The North American subject was a model,
and the existing leisure studies literature was largely
American in origin. However, the British version of
leisure studies was not an exact replica. The circumstances in which leisure studies was established in
U.K. higher education were broadly similar to the
favorable conditions in America in the 1950s and
1960s. In the 1970s, U.K. higher education was
expanding, especially in polytechnics, which at that
time paralleled universities in a binary higher education system. A feature of the polytechnics was
supposed to be their greater responsiveness to the
economy’s labor requirements. By the 1970s, the
United Kingdom had a set of national agencies with
responsibilities for the arts, the countryside, sports,
and tourism, plus the older British Broadcasting
Corporation. Then, during the 1970s, as part of a
broader rationalization (we would now say modernization) of local government, formerly separate local
authority departments of baths, parks, libraries, playing fields, and so on were merged in departments,
which usually had leisure or recreation in their titles.
Thus, national agencies and local government were
then creating leisure services jobs to which graduates
from leisure studies departments could be recruited.
Parks have been less central in the United Kingdom
than in North American leisure studies. Sports have
been the kind of leisure in which U.K. leisure studies has displayed particular interest. There are two
reasons for this. First, sports account for large proportions of the efforts and budgets of local authority
leisure services departments, and these departments,
together with the national agencies for sports (there

Leisure Studies

are now separate agencies for the four countries of
the United Kingdom) and their regional offshoots,
all offer jobs that are suitable for graduates. Second,
the bases from which leisure studies grew in polytechnics were often courses that had trained physical
education teachers. During the 1970s, former teacher
training colleges, which had already become colleges
of education, became colleges of higher education
and broadened their syllabi. Some of these colleges
were assimilated into polytechnics. Others remained
freestanding, but nearly all these institutions were
given university status in the 1990s or early twentyfirst century.
U.K. leisure scholars established their own scholarly association, the Leisure Studies Association
(LSA), in 1975 and launched an official journal,
Leisure Studies, in 1982. The LSA has probably been
the world’s most active and influential association of
leisure scholars. Its journal and papers presented at
its annual conferences, which have filled a series of
books, have become a major part of the literature
used in leisure studies courses all over the world.
The national conferences of the LSA regularly attract
delegates from many other countries and also act as
a forum where researchers with specific interests in
sports, tourism, hospitality, events, and so on, can
find common ground.
Two international bodies that were created in
the 1950s and ’60s helped to globalize leisure studies by linking the Anglo-American communities to
scholars based elsewhere who were studying leisure,
though not necessarily under that label, and by
simultaneously kindling interest in the serious academic study of leisure where this had not previously
existed. First, the World Leisure and Recreation
Association (WLRA), now known as the World
Leisure Organization, was formed in North America
in 1952. By the 1980s, WLRA was organizing
World Leisure Congresses (their current title), which
have become biannual events. The World Leisure
Organization (formerly WLRA) has its own refereed
publication, the World Leisure Journal, which is the
senior journal in the field in terms of age.
Second, at the end of the 1960s, the International
Sociological Association (ISA) established a Research
Committee on Leisure (RC13). The ISA now has
over 50 research committees. They are numbered in
the order in which they were created; RC13 is among
the oldest. Leisure scholars who are not sociologists
attend the meetings of this committee, which has

847

always aligned as closely with leisure studies as with
mainstream sociology. The original official journal
of RC13, Loisir et Societe/Leisure and Society, is
bilingual (English and French) and is edited and published in Canada.
At the time of its foundation, most of RC13’s
active members were not from the United States or
the United Kingdom. They were from the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, France, and Frenchspeaking Canada. These countries had grown their
own leisure studies (though not under that title). The
communist authorities in the Soviet Union and its
Eastern European satellites had a strong interest in
their people’s “ways of life.” Communism was supposed to be nurturing a socialist way of life. Its details
were unknown. It was to be developed through praxis
(theoretically informed action). However, this way of
life was expected to synthesize elements of high and
traditional (folk) cultures and to obliterate divisions
between town and countryside and between social
classes. Communism regarded free time and holidays
as important rights, and great efforts were made by
governments and communist party organizations to
ensure that all sections of the population had access
to the arts and opportunities to play sports and, if
they were talented, to excel in these fields. By the
1960s, all the communist countries had research centers that investigated how people were spending their
free time and rates of participation in different leisure
activities.
The French had its own history in and approaches
to the study of leisure. Ever since the French
Revolution, the democratization of culture (access
to the Louvre and other cultural facilities and opportunities to practise and to excel in these fields) had
been an aim of state policy in France. By the 1960s,
France had a minileisure research industry charting
the extent (very limited) to which culture had actually been democratized. This was the context in which
France produced cultural radicals who advocated cultural democracy—recognizing and enabling the people (the workers) to develop their own cultural forms
and products instead of trying to engage them in the
culture of the elite. This was the intellectual context
against which Pierre Bourdieu formed his ideas about
the role of culture in the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities. Joffre Dumazedier, the first president of RC13, intervened in these debates, arguing
that leisure time could act as a source of new leisure
values, which would usher in a “society of leisure.”

848

Leisure Studies

Leisure studies proved easy to internationalize
because researchers found huge similarities in uses
of leisure time in all modern countries (the predominance of TV viewing, for example). Moreover,
similar differences in leisure behavior by age, gender,
and social class were discovered. Leisure researchers everywhere were using comparable research
methods, most notably time-use surveys and participation surveys, which ask people whether they
take part in lists of activities and, if they do take
part, how frequently. By joining RC13 and/or
WLRA, individuals and groups that were studying
leisure in all parts of the world could become part
of global leisure studies. Enthusiasts were able to
take models from abroad and implant them in their
own countries’ higher education and research agendas. The most successful transplanting has been
of Anglo-American leisure studies into Australia
and New Zealand, which now have their own
Australia and New Zealand Association for Leisure
Studies (ANZALS). This particular transplantation was facilitated by the migration of U.K. and
North American leisure scholars to the Southern
Hemisphere. Through the activities of RC13 and
WLRA, it was discovered that kindred research was
being accomplished in a large number of additional
countries—the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium,
Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Latin America (this list
is not exhaustive). Since the 1970s, existing models of leisure studies (usually the American model)
have been taken to and established in South Korea,
Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and other AsiaPacific countries.

Challenges
Throughout its lifetime, leisure studies has been a
rather shaky alliance of scholars who have never
been agreed on whether what unites them is a field
of study or an embryonic discipline. Inevitably, the
first generation who created leisure studies had roots
in older disciplines—sociology, psychology, geography, economics, and so on. Were they fusing their
contributions into a new synthesized body of theory
and methods that would stand as a discipline in its
own right, equal in intellectual stature to older academic subjects? Or was leisure studies simply a field
best studied by “proper” sociologists, economists,
and so forth? This debate has never been resolved. It

is not peculiar to leisure studies. There are equivalent
arguments about urban studies, education, criminology, et cetera.
Since the 1970s, there have been additional challenges. New divisions have opened among leisure
scholars. One might say that leisure studies has fallen
victim to its own success. By the 1980s, the subject
had grown to a size that enabled, maybe required, it
to split into scholars with interests in particular types
of leisure—sports, tourism, the arts, and so on.
Leisure has always faced challengers for core
concept status in its field. Play, recreation, popular
culture, and everyday life have been contenders.
However, in recent years, the most serious challenge
has been from “consumption.” Present-day societies
are more likely to be called consumer societies and
their cultures consumer cultures than leisure societies and leisure cultures. Scholars attracted into the
field since the 1970s, especially those from older academic disciplines, have been more likely to identify
with consumption than leisure. Leisure studies today
embraces commercial leisure and consumer cultures,
but most research and writing on consumption and
consumer cultures is outside leisure studies. Maybe
greater cross-fertilisation would sensitize consumption researchers to the boundaries and barriers to the
spread of consumer cultures.

Achievements
Leisure studies is not really threatened. It can thrive
without students enrolled in courses titled leisure
studies and with scholars whose primary affiliations
lie elsewhere—with a particular kind of leisure, or
core concept, or an older discipline. Among its cognate subjects, leisure studies has the advantage of
having been first on the scene. It now has a literature
with a history. It has a well-established set of scholarly associations, conferences, and journals. The conferences and journals are venues where specialists in
different kinds of leisure, and even consumption, can
still reach wider audiences than anywhere else.
Even more important, leisure studies has developed a solid body of knowledge that no other subject
replicates. The kinds of research in which leisure
scholars specialize (they use the findings even if they
do not collect the data) are time-use surveys and
participation surveys. There are now time series in
some countries spanning fifty years. Leisure studies

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

can show how time is used in different sections of a
population (males and females, different age groups
and socioeconomic strata), and how this has changed
over the last half century or so. There is similar information about participation in different leisure activities. The main relationships that have been identified
(by age, gender, and socioeconomic status) have
proved remarkably durable and constant between
countries. This gives leisure studies a solid knowledge base and a set of explanations (some agreed,
others contested) of the variations and changes that
have occurred.
Ken Roberts
See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Consumer Culture in the USSR;
Consumer Rights and the Law; Leisure; Measuring
Standards of Living; Tourism Studies; Well-Being

Further Readings
Cushman, G., A. J. Veal, and J. Zuzanek, eds. Free Time
and Leisure Participation: International Perspectives.
Wallingford, UK: Centre for Agricultural Bioscience
International (CABI), 2006.
Dumazedier, Joffre. Toward a Society of Leisure. New
York: Free Press, 1967.
Roberts, Kenneth. Leisure in Contemporary Society.
Wallingford, UK: Centre for Agricultural Bioscience
International (CABI), 2006.
Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life:
The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999.
Rojek, Chris. Leisure Theory: Principles and Practice.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Rojek, Chris, Susan M. Shaw, and Anthony J. Veal, eds.
A Handbook of Leisure Studies. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE
(1908–2009)
Traditionally, anthropology was dominated by
detailed studies of particular peoples, but in the
1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss developed an analytical approach to culture that provoked the linguistic turn throughout the humanities. Lévi-Strauss
looked at the patterns of similarity and differences
between aspects of different cultures—kinship, myth,

849

religion, magic, food—and showed how they could
be interpreted systematically. He introduced the idea
of structural linguistics to help in this task of crosscultural comparison and established the approach of
structuralism that resonated far beyond anthropology. Structuralism offered a method that could be
applied to instances of cultural form independently
of the historical detail and ethnological specificity.
In Structural Anthropology (1958 [English trans.
1968]), Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems
could be analyzed with an approach, derived from
the linguistics of Nikolai Troubetzkoy and Roman
Jakobson, that identified pairs “of oppositions”
(1968, 35). When kinship was reduced to a series
of components (husband, wife, son, uncle, etc.)
whose variable patterns of relations across different
societies were represented using symbols borrowed
from mathematics, the analysis revealed structural
consistencies in the various transformations of relations between terms. Apparently, different kinship
systems were simply different ways of achieving
a certain type of mediation, namely, that it is “the
women of the group, who are circulated between
clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of
the group, which are circulated between individuals”
(1968, 61). Lévi-Srauss argued that the techniques
of structural linguistics could be applied to kinship
because its cultural form is realized in and through
language, through the way people refer to each other
and account for their relations. In rebutting the sexism implicit in the asymmetry between the sexes in
his analysis, he pointed out that the women in these
systems were not mere objects but were able to speak
and contribute to the formation of culture.
One of Lévi-Strauss’s most significant contributions to the analysis of culture was to point out that
an abstract theory is not necessary for a member
to have a detailed and systematic knowledge about
what he or she is doing. The complex classifications and taxonomies of plants and animals created
by premodern people require equivalent mental
operations to science but use a different approach.
Presuming that those things that look alike function
alike, for example, may not stand up to experimental
scrutiny but such a “science of the concrete” does
help to organize complex classification systems.
Mythical thought is, he says in The Savage Mind
(1962 [English trans. 1966]), a “kind of intellectual
‘bricolage’” (1966, 13) drawing on signs that already

850

Licensing of Clothing Brands

have a cultural currency as ideas, using “whatever
is at hand.” In contrast, the science of the engineer
constructs ideal concepts designed for each specific
project that escape the constraints of their cultural
origins. Whether designing a new commodity, putting together images and copy for an advertisement,
producing a television program, or shopping for an
outfit, the participant in consumer culture is engaged
in a complex bricolage of signs to create something
new that nonetheless carries the traces of the culture
from which it has been formed.
In analyzing the consumption of food, LéviStrauss showed that as humans employed fire to cook
their food, they demonstrated a move toward human
“culture,” but when they tolerated putrefaction, it
signified a return toward animal “nature.” Cultural
transformation is achieved not only by the cooking of
food but also by the cooking up of stories: the myths
about sex, death, family relationships, animals, and
nature that he analyzed in painstaking detail. LéviStrauss analyzed over eight hundred myths from different tribal groups of indigenous people in America
and discovered recurring patterns of categories and
themes. His approach to anthropology demonstrated
the possibilities of cross-cultural analyses but most
importantly showed that ordinary culture was not
peculiar to the specific history of a group of people.
Ordinary culture—and this is as true of consumer
culture as native preindustrial tribal cultures—is
everywhere a vehicle for managing the complexities
of social life: establishing origins, marking social relationships, setting out ways of life, and distinguishing
human culture from nature. In the study of consumption, Lévi-Strauss’s themes of food, totems, myth,
magic, and knowledge recur as it is recognized that
contemporary culture creates myths through advertising, treats commodities as magical, brands as totems,
food as lifestyle and links social identity to knowing
how to manage these elements of cultural life.
Tim Dant
See also Anthropology; Branding; Bricolage; Cultural
Studies; Food Consumption; Gender; Identity;
Lifestyle; Structuralism

Further Readings
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London:
Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1966.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968.

LICENSING

OF

CLOTHING BRANDS

Licensing agreements lease the right to use legally
a protected brand name and its relevant logo and
graphic to apply on a product, a service, or a promotion. The licensor owns the mark, and the licensee
can be a manufacturer, supplier, or distributor who
acts on behalf of the licensor and whose production output is increased by the perceived value of a
well-known brand. In the fashion industry, licensing
issues mainly concern a partnership between a brand
with high reputation (often international) and a local
or international manufacturer, who often holds an
agreement to distribute.
Licensing can be studied through various disciplines concerning management, law, international
commerce, and globalization. It concerns intellectual
property rights, export techniques and international
distribution, marketing and branding, product development and extension.
In terms of management, licensing is a powerful
means to grow a company, though in a different way
as a licensor or as a licensee. A licensor bears less
financial risk compared to a licensee who invests in
production, distribution, communication, and often
design and creation. It is a means to reach new customer targets and geographical zones and expand
business rapidly and efficiently.
In terms of market positioning, licensing agreements on clothing brands have a wide scope and are
used by all kinds of companies. Brands can range
from high fashion (with a remarkable aesthetic sense
and image, such as haute couture), to middle- and
lower-priced character goods (cartoon figures, movies), with relatively low design input.
In terms of products, clothing brands used to
develop “textile made” items (ready to wear for
women, men and children’s wear, lingerie and
underwear, knitwear, sportswear, nightwear, etc.) are
increasingly expanded into new markets such as cosmetics and perfumes, leather goods, interior goods
and home furnishings (e.g., Ralph Lauren Home collection), jewelry, and more recently high tech (e.g.,
Dior mobile phone).

Historical and Geographical Outline
The history of licensing dates back to the advent
of the entertainment industry in the United States.

Licensing of Clothing Brands

Movie stars (e.g., Shirley Temple), comic characters
(e.g., Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny), radio (in the
1930s), and television programs in the late 1940s
and 1950s reached millions of households. Products
bearing these names were sold to an increasing number of customers.
Licensing went through different stages from the
late 1940s to today. French designer Christian Dior
was a pioneer among his peers in haute couture, not
only for the “New Look” he launched but also for
signing licensing agreements with American department stores. This company was also a pioneer when
in 1998 it canceled its major contract with Kanebo
group in Japan to reposition the brand and invest
in a new and glamorous brand image for younger
targets. In fact, after a boom of designer brands
licensing in the 1970s and 1980s, due to the development of mass consumption and fashion appeal,
the business grew worldwide. In the 1990s, a lack
of control in brand management, resulting in poor
design, product quality, distribution, and communication, harmed the brand image of major clothing
brands. As a consequence, many companies changed
strategy and canceled contracts.
In the beginning of the twenty-first century, most
manufacturers of consumer goods produce licensed
products, as identifiable brand names are an added
value in the competitive market. With the advent of
worldwide sports events, such as World Cup (since
1994), licensing has reached a different step as a
powerful marketing advantage and a financial leverage, although products involved are relatively lowpriced goods (cups, hats, T-shirts, posters, pens, etc.).
In terms of geographical reach, licensing is a
global business. The development of consumer society in Europe and Japan, after the United States,
further developed the business internationally. As a
matter of fact, Western clothing brands have been
used as licensing agreements to enter the Japanese
market, but in the 1990s, buyers in this mature market changed their consumer habits, and appreciated
authentic goods directly imported from abroad.
More recently, China has become the market with
the highest potential, with a high demand deriving
from a growing middle class. Also, licensing is a way
for local Chinese manufacturers to learn foreign
expertise and to gain knowledge, as the Japanese
companies did for various years.
Some countries are more legitimate in terms of
licensing and to a large extent come from Europe and

851

the United States. The most famous and financially
powerful licensed brands in clothing come from
France (Dior, Givenchy), the United States (Ralph
Lauren, Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein),
Italy (Armani, Versace, Valentino, Gucci), Germany
(Hugo Boss, Escada), and the United Kingdom
(Burberry, Vivienne, Westwood).

Contemporary Relevance and Key Issues
Nurturing the brand and controlling it is a key issue.
As a matter of fact, licensees can be larger than the
fashion brands they sign with. For example, the
l’Oreal group, a leader in cosmetics, enabled worldwide distribution of French brand Cacharel perfumes
and strengthened its image, although the fashion
brand promoter has had difficulty managing a retail
network. Contrarily, the Cardin group signed numerous contracts, which resulted in a loss of its brand
value. Scarcity is part of the process, and poorly
managed licensing may give too much exposure to
a brand.
Counterfeit is another key issue. Intellectual
property rights are not applied equally around the
world, especially in China. In the same way, associations (e.g., Licensing Industry Merchandisers’
Association, or LIMA, in the United States), trade
shows, and trade publications (e.g., Superbrand in
the United Kingdom since 1994) relating to licensing
and branding (e.g., Interbrand) also help the industry
develop worldwide, by organizing awards, surveys,
and rankings. Therefore, attending international
licensing shows, which gather licensors and licensees
from around the world, is a way for those involved in
licensing to keep ahead of central issues and experts
networks.

Future Direction and Application
Future directions for research on licensing may look
to contemporary business and brand management
evolution and globalization as licensing will remain
an efficient tool to adapt to local needs of the BRIC
countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Identifiable
products, often at a more reasonable price, suiting
different regions and middle-class consumers, are
better managed by local licensees. Furthermore, the
increasing role of design in the industry, leading to
a “design management” approach, will emphasize
the need for research on innovation and branding and for understanding the creative and cultural

852

Life Course

industries. As such, national branding—the strategy
a government implements to promote its country’s
image and change its perception on an international
scale—may be considered one of the future directions for research.
Sabine Ichikawa
See also Branding; Clothing Consumption; Consumer
Culture in East Asia; Culture Industries

Further Readings
Aaker, David A. Building Strong Brands. New York: Free
Press, 1996.
Aaker, David A., V. Kumar, and George S. Day. Marketing
Research. 5th ed. New York: Wiley, 1995.
Kapferer, Jean-Noel. Strategic Brand Management: New
Approaches to Creating and Evaluating Brand Equity.
London: Kogan Page, 1997.
Kapferer, Jean-Noel. Reinventing the Brand. London:
Kogan Page, 2001.

LIFE COURSE
Life course refers to the identifiable stages of transition that individuals and households typically pass
through, such as childhood, youth, parenthood, middle age, and retirement. It is, therefore, a term used
to relate social structures, institutions, and history to
particular changes and trajectories in individuals and
families over time. Its importance to consumer culture rests on the identification of typical patterns (and
demand) for consumption activities across life-course
stages and in terms of how consumer culture impacts
on, and even fragments, those stages. Its contemporary usage highlights the importance of life experience
for understanding social change and the contingency
and variation of individual or family transitions as
opposed to a series of fixed, sequential stages. This
disembarks from the term’s original use by sociologist Leonard Cain in “Life Course and Social
Structure” (in Handbook of Modern Sociology,
edited by R. E. L. Faris, 1964) to refer to how social
status changes as a function of age. The change in
focus coincided with a drop in the popularity of life
cycle, often used interchangeably with life course but
more commonly emphasizing individual development, as in psychologist Erik Erikson’s eight stages in
Identity and the Life Cycle (1959/1980), or change

in nuclear family structures, as first established by
demographer Paul Glick’s seven-stage “Family Life
Cycle” (1947). The concept of life cycle, borrowed
from the natural sciences, emerged at the end of the
nineteenth century in social scientific debates and
continues to be used in economics and in the study of
organizations (O’Rand and Krecker 1990).
The life-course perspective is mainly used to
discuss individual aging processes and the family,
although it has some claims as a research paradigm
in its own right for understanding social change
(Heinz, Huinink, and Weymann 2009). The work of
Glen Elder, following his book Children of the Great
Depression (1978), has been central in developing
and conceptualizing the term. The main principles
of the term are outlined by Vern Bengtson, Glen H.
Elder, and Norella M. Putney as the cohort interconnectedness of lives often referred to as generations,
the importance of historical context in shaping individual trajectories, individual- or family-based transitions relative to these contexts, interconnectedness
between life-course stages themselves, and the recognition of people’s own agency in their construction of
their lives.
Large-scale demographic changes, such as the
aging of most advanced industrial societies, have
consolidated life course as a field of social scientific
study, particularly as the fragmentation of work
rhythms and the rise of consumer culture have
been highlighted as de-standardizing the stages it is
seen to consist of. For example, Zygmunt Bauman
(1990) refers to the emergence of “nomadic” identities across the life course as consumer cultures make
available a range of consumption styles, irrespective of age, that people can “wander” between, as
opposed to conventional constraints related to stage
in the life course. According to Andrew Blaikie, such
processes lead to a blurring of life-stage boundaries.
In other words, the emerging range of consumption
styles and lifestyles generate increasingly individualized trajectories, what Jenny Hockey and Allison
James describe as being a “pattern of consumerism which points towards self-generated life-course
transitions” (2003, 194). Studies of popular culture,
however, continue to focus on particular age brackets. These include particular interest in the consumption of young people and, since the 1980s, the “new
old” or “third agers”: middle-aged retirees with the
material affluence to continue to engage with consumer culture (Laslett 1989).

Life Course

While agency and individualism have been emphasized in recent accounts of changes in the contemporary experience of the life course, there have also
been studies that discuss the often ambivalent role of
advertising and popular culture in promoting “new”
identities, bounded not by age but by cultural interests. Studies on “images” of aging have revealed, on
the one hand, new discursive constructions of older
age as a period of renewal and of self-exploration, as
in the development of postretirement lifestyle titles,
such as Choice, previously named Retirement Choice
(Featherstone and Hepworth 1995). Portrayals of
these opportunities for leisure and self-actualization,
however, continue to fetishize youthfulness and
pathologize declines in productivity and physical or
sexual abilities (Katz and Marshall, 2003). Hockey
and James also point out, in Social Identities across
the Lifecourse, that marketers continue to market
according to strict age categories, suggesting that
although middle and older ages certainly represent
a growing spending power, these more empowering and transcendent forms of identifications are
considered—by marketers at least—as somewhat
superficial.
The debate over life-course stages clearly reflects
larger theoretical arguments between more poststructuralist accounts of society and pragmatists
who question the extent of the breakdown of
traditional-modernist social categories. The popularity of terms such as the third age have transformed
how consumption over the life course is understood,
but research also shows a tension between this and
the inevitability of physical aging processes, as well
as the continuing relevance of class, ethnicity, and
other indicators. The use of diets, exercise regimes,
and plastic surgery allows for an increasingly motile
body that puts off the most unattractive, if not
the most uncomfortable, effects of physical aging.
Qualitative research has often portrayed changes in
the body as inevitable but superficial, the tension
between outward aging processes and an “essentially youthful self” a “mask of age” (Featherstone
and Hepworth 1991). This kind of move situates
stages of the life course as the beliefs and attitudes
of the “rest of society,” approximating Cain’s
changing social status model of life course originally conceptualized in the 1960s. Stephen Katz and
Barbara Marshall, meanwhile, point out “popular
demographic terms such as ‘boomers’ . . . and ‘third
agers’ gloss over the negative realities of poverty

853

and inequality in old age” (2003, 5). And Sandra
Fredman shows these inequalities to disproportionately affect members of ethnic minorities. Although
consumer culture offers opportunities to self-actualize
that may render life-course trajectories much more
flexible, social and cultural imperatives still dominate
many people’s experiences of life stages, transitions,
and of aging.
As something of a footnote, while many agree
that popular culture and demographic changes have
served to de-standardize the life course, there often
appears no clear consensus on what exactly has
been de-standardized. Those working in the field of
families seem to be referring to timing of key generational “transitions,” such as childbirth and the start
of parenting and new or changed roles relating to
relationships or kinship. For individuals, however, it
is considerably more ambiguous, implicating one or
more familial roles; the starting, ending, and resuming of work and education; and membership of
popular age-based signifiers, such as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle, and old age. Since the
popularity of the term life course is in part based on
a rejection of the stages outlined in the definition of
life cycle, there is an increasing need to return to the
model or to reconstruct it in order for it to remain
conceptually useful.
Luke Yates
See also Age and Aging; Childhood; Families; Generation;
Households; Identity; Retirement; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Bengtson, Vern, Glen H. Elder, and Norella M. Putney.
“The Lifecourse Perspective on Ageing: Linked Lives,
Timing, and History.” In The Cambridge Handbook of
Age and Ageing, edited by Malcolm L. Johnson, 493–
501. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Blaikie, Andrew. Ageing and Popular Culture. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “The Mask of
Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course.” Chap. 15 in
The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited
by Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S.
Turner. London: Sage, 1991.
Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “Images of
Positive Aging: A Case Study of Retirement Choice
Magazine.” Chap. 3 in Images of Aging: Cultural

854

Life(style) Politics

Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike
Featherstone and Andrew Wernick. London: Routledge,
1995.
Fredman, Sandra. “The Age of Equality.” Chap. 3 in Age
as an Equality Issue, edited by Sandra Fredman and
Sarah Spencer. Oxford: Hart, 2003.
Heinz, Walter R., Johannes Huinink, and Ansgar
Weymann. The Life Course Reader: Individuals and
Societies across Time. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus
Verlag, 2009.
Hockey, Jenny, and Allison James. Social Identities across
the Lifecourse. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
Katz, Stephen, and Barbara Marshall. “New Sex for Old:
Lifestyle, Consumerism, and the Ethics of Aging Well.”
Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003): 3–16.
Laslett, Peter. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the
Third Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
O’Rand, Angela M., and Margaret L. Krecker. “Concepts
of the Life Cycle: Their History, Meanings, and Uses in
the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 16
(1990): 241–262.

LIFE(STYLE) POLITICS
Life(style) politics have emerged as a new form of
politics next to the politics we know from the world
of voters, parties, and parliaments. According to
Anthony Giddens, life politics are about lifestyle
choices, about personal identity, about our personal ways of dealing with planetary threats and
risks. Life politics concern the morals of everyday
life and the “foundational principles” underlying
our consumption practices and our lifestyles. They
are in particular relevant for analyzing consumption behaviors since they can be shown to refer to
our ways of dwelling in a house, taking a holiday,
and eating and drinking. As forms of politics, they
describe how we, as responsible citizens and as “ethical” consumers, become involved in efforts, projects,
and policies to make this world a better, more sustainable world. The concept of life(style) politics as
introduced by Giddens and Ulrich Beck in the sociological discourse takes on a special significance during the phase of reflexive modernity. It is assumed
that—because of the disenchantment of science in
particular—individuals are confronted with the need
to reflect on the implicit and explicit choices implied
in the reproduction of the set of practices that makes

up their lifestyles. When compared to earlier phases
of modernity, the narrative of the self in reflexive
modernity can be said to be a self-made construct to
a considerable extent.
Two dangers can be identified when discussing
life(style) politics. First, because they are named
life(style) politics, one could easily get the impression that these new politics are more superficial since
they refer to the latest trends, fashions, and behaviors
from the world of celebrities, women’s magazines,
and cars. As life(style) politics, they would then be
different from “real” or “genuine” politics in the
sense of not addressing issues of power, conflict,
and domination in a serious way. A second potential
misunderstanding could be that life(style) politics
are about individuals only. Because this new form
of politics is about personal identities and about
the norms and values that people adhere to in their
everyday consumption behaviors, life politics run the
risk of being treated as a form of “micropolitics” to
be analyzed in isolation from the big political issues
and social structures.
In this entry, a discussion of life(style) politics is
presented that prevents a shallow understanding or
interpretation of life politics. It is argued that life(style)
politics are as real and important as other, traditional
forms of (emancipatory) politics. When it comes to
changing deeply engrafted patterns of consumption
in modern consumer societies, life(style) politics can
be shown to be even more powerful and effective in
some respects when compared to traditional forms
of politics. They derive their specific powers from
the interconnections made between private, personal
affairs on the one hand and public, collective affairs
on the other. As such, life(style) politics can do things
that normal politics are not supposed to do: discuss,
open up, and in some circumscribed ways interfere
with the “personal” matters and lifestyle choices of
sovereign consumers and their “private” consumption behaviors to contribute to and help establish
more sustainable patterns of consumption in society.
To move away from an “individualist interpretation,” it is argued that life(style) politics should be
analyzed as politics of practices. They refer to the
shared social practices that individuals embrace in
their everyday life and the implicit or explicit ethical
and political choices made in that respect. To further
analyze and discuss the social and political nature
of life(style) politics, in this entry, life(style) politics
are compared with two other forms of political

855

Life(style) Politics

Ecological Citizenship
Ecological citizenship is close to the existing concept of citizenship as used by David Held and other
authors in the political science tradition. Especially,
Andrew Dobson and his colleagues have contributed
to the discussion of citizenship rights and responsibilities from the perspective of sustainable development.
In the Dobson initiated debate, the concepts of ecological or environmental citizenship are defined in a
broad way. Ecological citizenship is taken to refer not
just to the public debate and the publicly defined roles
for citizens in sustainable development; the concept is
also said to embrace the attitudes and motives of individuals who choose sustainable behavior, both in the
balization
glo
State
Authority
Ecological
Citizenship

CCs

n
zatio
ali

Political
Consumerism
Market
Authority

Figure 1

Life(style)
Politics
Moral
Authority

globali
za

As Beck in particular has made clear in a number of
essays, politics in the twenty-first century are different from politics in the post–World War II period.
The crucial difference between politics in simple (preChernobyl) and reflexive (post-Chernobyl) modernity
has to do with the pervasive impact of globalization.
First, due to globalization, the interrelations between
the economy, politics, and civil society have changed.
As a result of the more frequent and intense interpenetration of states, markets, and civil society, the
neat distinction between citizens versus consumers
has been dissolved. Second, the role of nation-states
in national and international politics especially has
to be reconsidered in reflexive modernity. According
to Manuel Castells, in the global network society,
states are no longer able to manage the flow of peoples, ideas, and risks in ways similar to the period
directly following World War II. Politics and forms of
authority in reflexive modernity are de-territorialized
and denationalized in fundamental and irreversible
ways while their primary tasks and responsibilities
have changed. So third, instead of managing the
distribution of “goods” in the context of the emerging national welfare states, the key challenges and
tasks for politics in reflexive modernity have to do
with the distribution of global “bads,” in particular
the environmental, financial, and health and safety
risks, which crosscut and perforate national borders.
Instead of regulating access to (economic) resources,
the regulation of exposure to global risks becomes the
key challenge for politics at different levels, from the
regional up to the global.
It is against this background of the changing
nature of politics in reflexive modernity that one has
to discuss the different roles that individual human
agents can adopt in processes of social and political change. The three ideal-type roles offered here

glo
b

Citizen-Consumer Roles in (Environmental)
Change: Three Ideal-Types

as an analytical tool—illustrated in Figure 1—refer
to different forms of authority, which are mobilized
and used as legitimate sources of power, at the same
time emphasizing different dimensions of the role of
citizen consumers in processes of (environmental)
change. The main aim of this entry is to provide an
exploratory discussion of these three ideal-type roles
for CCs. For a historical analysis of the emerging
roles, rights and responsibilities of citizens and consumers, readers are referred to the work of Frank
Trentmann in particular.

n
tio

engagements of citizen consumers (CCs) with (environmental) social change: ecological citizenship and
ethical or political consumerism. All three ideal-type
forms of political commitment of citizen consumers
will shortly be introduced while elaborating in some
detail on life(style) politics as politics of practices. At
the end of this entry, the potential contribution of
life(style) politics to redirecting empirical research on
sustainable consumption is reviewed.

Three Ideal-Type Forms of Engagement of
Citizen Consumers (CCs) with
(Environmental) Change in Reflexive
Modernity

Source: Gert Spaargaren and Arthur P. J. Mol 2008.

856

Life(style) Politics

public sphere as well as in the private sphere of the
market. Issues which are normally discussed under
the heading of “green consumption” and “the changing of attitudes and behaviors” are brought together
under the umbrella of environmental citizenship.
The concept of ecological citizenship used here
remains a bit closer to the more circumscribed meaning attributed to the concept of citizenship in political sciences. It refers primarily to the participation
of citizens in and their orientations toward political
discourses on sustainable development. In the context of this societal, public discourse, the rights and
responsibilities, or duties, of citizens are debated and
defined. Citizens (rightly) demand to be free from
environmental risks inflicted on them by others,
inside or outside the territory of the nation-state(s)
they belong to. They argue for environmental security
in a similar vein as implied in the debates on national
security. However, in the field of environmental politics there was no need for a 9/11 event to make citizens aware of the fact that nation-states alone or by
themselves cannot guarantee environmental security.
Cross bordering pollution and global environmental
risks are and have been for a long time at the centre
of environmental politics, as Beck in particular has
argued. Ecological citizenship has gone through a
process of denationalization or de-territorialization
already since the 1980s.
The fact that most citizen consumers do not perceive of transnational ecological citizenship rights and
responsibilities as such has to do with the neglect in
the political discourse of new forms of postnational
or cosmopolitan citizenship. Also, environmental
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been
slow in recognizing and organizing new forms of
ecological citizenship at transnational levels, partly
since they feared for lower levels of environmental
protection or security resulting from the denationalization of environmental politics.
With the increase of both formal and informal
transnational networks for environmental politics
and governance and strengthened by the upsurge in
informational governance, the postnational forms
of ecological citizenship will most likely gain considerable importance in the near future. The use of
public scorecards, transnational campaigns for naming and shaming, Internet-based mobilizations of
environmental activists beyond national borders, and
the strengthening of environmental NGO-networks
at international—and even global—levels are just

a few examples of the new forms of transnational
citizenship based forms of environmental authority.
With globalization, these global civil society actors
are expected to increase their relative power and
authority vis-à-vis state-based forms of environmental authorities.

Political Consumerism
Whereas ecological citizenship makes room for environmental authority primarily in the public domain,
political consumerism articulates citizen-consumer
authority in the private domain of consumption.
Although globalization does not by itself lead to a
loss of power for end users at the lower end of production-consumption chains and networks, political
consumerism draws attention to the need for new
forms of power and authority that citizen consumers
can use in the context of globalized markets.
Michelle Micheletti has been among the first to
recognize the importance of new market-based forms
of politics and has investigated them in some depth
under the label of political consumerism. These more
voluntary, ad hoc organized, and mostly civil society based forms of (environmental) politics have as
their constitutive characteristic the fact that they
are directed toward (the greening of) productionconsumption chains and networks that are behind
our everyday consumption practices. Political consumerism refers to all the political forms that connect environmental activities of upstream economic
actors of production-consumption chains and networks more directly and visibly with the interests
and activities of citizen consumers at the lower end of
these chains and networks, and vice versa.
Figure 2 displays the relationships of power
between actors at the upstream and actors at the
downstream end of production-consumption chains
and networks. It visualizes a concept of environmental power, which—in the tradition of Max
Weber—could be circumscribed as the capacity of
social actors to reduce the environmental impacts of
consumption and production where these impacts
are directly connected to sets of practices, which are
predominantly under the control of other actors. In
the environmental literature, the concepts of direct
and indirect environmental impacts are used to refer
to situations in which environmental performance
is under the control of actors in the downstream
(consumer or end user determined) and upstream

Life(style) Politics

(provider dominated) ends of production consumption chains and networks, respectively.
To analyze and discuss market-based forms of
politics, the label political consumerism is preferred
over ethical consumerism to emphasize the fact that
also these low-entry forms of environmental politics have to be organized and gain extra legitimacy
and authority when a liaison can be realized with
state environmental authorities at different levels of
scale. The main and frequently discussed examples
within this category are environmental labeling and
certification schemes and related forms of the consumer boycotts of sustainable products and services
of (green) providers. As can be concluded from
the studies on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), and Fair
Trade (FT) labels as conducted by Peter Oosterveer
among others, citizen-consumers’ buying power
is becoming an increasingly relevant source of
power used for political purposes. And this insight
is recognized and worked on by diverse networks
covering actors and interests from civil society, the
market, and the state.
Where the FSC-labeling scheme is regarded as
environmental NGO-initiated and dominated, the
driving forces behind the MSC-label came from
industry. Political consumerism is important for
green providers since it helps create and sustain
level playing fields for green industries and products. But political consumerism also works the other

857

way around: In political consumerism, unfocused
citizen-consumer concerns for sustainability are
articulated, translated, and directed to providers in
production-consumption chains, giving citizen consumers authority and power in a nontrivial way.
Due to the globalizing of production-consumption
networks, the role of trust (in distant providers,
in invisible technologies, in complex and diverse
information flows) gains special importance in this
respect. Environmental NGOs again have a crucial
role to play in this, since they are regarded by citizen
consumers as the most reliable and successful trustenhancing mediators between market actors and
citizen consumers.

Life(style) Politics and Social Practices
Whereas ecological citizenship comes closest to
politics and political consumerism refers to power
relations in markets in particular, life(style) politics
are primarily about civil society actors and about
dynamics of change, which go beyond states and
markets. Life(style)politics are life-world politics
and as such directly connected to the morals and
choices that are implied in our ordinary (consumption) routines. Because, as Zygmunt Bauman has
noted, “lifestyles boil down almost entirely to styles
of consumption” (1990, 207), life(style) politics and
consumption can be regarded as being much interwoven also at the microlevel of our everyday life.

Power Flows
Consumers

Disposal

Use

Access

direct impacts on the environment

Provisioning

Production

Design

indirect impacts on the environment

Providers

Figure 2

Relative Powers of Consumers and Providers in Influencing the (In)direct Environmental Impacts within
Production-Consumption Chains

Source: Gert Spaargaren and C. S. A. (Kris) van Koppen 2009.

Life(style) Politics

a
nctur l Spec
ifi
nju
c

isposi
t
i
ral D
o
na
l

dwelling,
the house
going for
a holiday
commuting

on

cooking and
dining out

Structure

bathing and
showering

Figure 3

General Dispositional and Conjunctural Specific Elements of Lifestyles

Source: Gert Spaargaren and Peter Oosterveer 2010.

g

Co

ne
Ge
Actors

Social Practices

systems of pr
ovi
si

Life Styles

Following Rob Stones in this respect, we distinguish between a general dispositional dimension of
the lifestyle of actors on the one hand and a conjunctural specific dimension on the other (see Figure 3).
The general dispositional dimension of the lifestyle
consists of the foundational principles specific actors
adhere to and that they use throughout a number of
behavioral contexts. As such, the concept resembles
the concept of attitude as used in the sociopsychological tradition of research on (environmental)
behaviors and sustainable consumption in particular.
The conjunctural specific dimension of the lifestyle
of actors refers to and is connected with the specific
set of practices they embrace in everyday life. The
rules and resources—or values and dispositions—
operational in this dimension of the lifestyle are
(tacitly) followed, reproduced, and altered in the
context of social practices, which actors share with
other actors. By outlining and defining two dimensions of lifestyles in this specific way, it is possible to
connect the individual to the social in a theoretically
meaningful way.
Life(style) politics then refers to the ways in
which (groups of) individuals at some points in time
(especially when confronted with sudden changes,
challenges, or fatal moments) are made to reflect
on their everyday lives and the narratives attached
to it. The sources of deroutinization and the ensuing discursive reflection can be located either in
personal, private life (divorce, illness) or rooted in

d
lize

When living their daily lives in reflexive modernity, individuals are confronted with the impacts
of globalization in a direct and concrete manner.
The food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the cars
we drive come from systems of provision that by
now have global reach. When bothering about the
sustainability aspects of products and services in
terms of traceability and the social and ecological
conditions of their production and distribution, we
become aware of the massive impacts of globalization on production and consumption. It is because
of the globalization of consumption that life(style)
politics can be said to connect the personal to the
planetary in a direct, unmediated way in the present
phase of modernity.
While it is true that life(style) politics are about
private, personal, and individual morals, and commitments and responsibilities, it is important to note
that life(style) politics do not favor automatically
or exclusively individualist notions of politics and
consumer empowerment. They are individualist policies in a specific, circumscribed way. The concept of
lifestyle as used by Anthony Giddens refers to the
cluster of habits and story lines that result from individuals’ participation in a set of everyday life routines
they share with others. Every citizen consumer can
be characterized by his or her unique combination
of shared practices, the level of integration of these
practices, and the story lines that he or she connects
to these practices.

a
lob

858

Rules &
Resources

Life(style) Politics

wider social and political processes (bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]-food crisis, financial
crisis). Deroutinization of practices can (be made to)
happen both at the level of the individual and on
the level of social practices. The direct consequences
of agents reflexively (re)considering their existing
behaviors and narratives will most times pertain
both to the level of the individuals as well as to the
practices involved.
Life(style) politics are important for sustainable
consumption policies primarily because they deal
with individual affairs without disconnecting the private and the personal from the public and the global.
If separate waste collection is well organized at home
and engraved into the lifestyle of the individual, he or
she will be disturbed, upset and deroutinized when
the infrastructure for waste separation turns out to
be lacking in the office, at the railway station, and
at the campsite. Or it will be the other way around:
When employers make a set of sustainable options
for commuters available at work, they can seek to
deliberately optimize this “green mobility mix” in
such a way that actors start using the options also at
home, for their private and family related mobilities.
Research concerning these different mechanisms of
spillover is just in its infancy and makes us aware of
some of the complexities involved.

Epilogue
When applied as politics of practices and distinguished
from ecological citizenship and political consumerism in a way as suggested above, the significance of
life(style) politics for the greening of global consumption can hardly be underestimated. In consumerist
societies, life(style) politics for more sustainable consumption must be regarded as of similar weight and
importance as the greening of industry policies, which
originated in the productive phase of modernity. The
three ideal-type roles for citizen-consumer involvement in environmental change will, in empirical reality, always overlap, with hybrid forms to be detected
along all the three connecting lines of Figure 1. The
added value of the analytical distinctions made
will have to be tested and further proven in empirical research. In conclusion, one type of sustainable
consumption research, which could benefit from
the analytical distinctions introduced here, will be
shortly discussed.

859

In a paper on the “ethics in consumption,”
Clive Barnett and his colleagues discuss the need
for organized ethics with respect to globalizing
consumption-production chains. Since the globalization of consumption has removed distant (local)
producers from view for the citizen consumers at
the downstream end of the chains, trust in and care
about distant producers have to be organized, with
(eco- and fair trade) labeling schemes and certification schemes serving as the obvious examples. They
have to make visible and debatable the rules for dealing with risks and responsibilities for distant others.
So far, however, the commitments and roles of citizen
consumers in labeling systems—mapping out distant
actors and processes—have been conceptualized in
an individualistic way primarily. Responsible citizen
consumers are supposed to take their responsibilities
by reading the label and using it as a guideline for
consumption. Ethical consumption for this reason
has been limited primarily to moral selving, either
in the form of explicit performances and display or in
the form of more humble, ordinary, even anonymous
modes of consumer conduct. In being limited to
individual considerations and choices primarily, the
analyses of ethical consumption so far have focused
on the individual aspects of life(style) politics, more
in particular on general dispositions of actors toward
fair trade and sustainable consumption. Barnett suggests that the individualist approaches to ethical consumption become transformed and translated into
a more social and sociological approach when the
process of moral selving is connected to ethical governance for production-consumption chains and
networks. This can be realized by induced forms of
deroutinization at the level of consumption practices. The implicit ethical rules guiding the practices
are made visible with the help of policies, practices,
and campaigns of NGOs, governments, or organized
groups of consumers. They open up for reflection the
commitment and obligations toward distant others
and—so we would add—distant natures as well.
By connecting—in the increasing number of social
science studies of eco- and fair trade labeling—
life(style) politics in a more direct way to forms of
political consumerism, the twin processes of governing consumption chains and governing the consuming self are analyzed in their mutual dependency.
The commitments of (organized) citizen consumers
for sustainable consumption are analyzed in terms

860

Lifestyle

of the interplay between the simultaneous processes
of governing the chain and governing the consuming
self. In doing so, a new field of empirical research on
the ethics and politics of globalizing green consumption is opened up.
Gert Spaargaren
See also Citizenship; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Globalization;
Individualization; Lifestyle; Political and Ethical
Consumption; Self-Reflexivity; Social Movements

Further Readings
Barnett, Clive, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, and Alice Malpass.
Articulating Ethics on Consumption. Working Paper
no. 17 of ESRC-AHRB Research Programme on Cultures
of Consumption. London: Birkbeck College, 2004.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Thinking Sociologically. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990.
Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine
andere Moderne [Risk society. On the way to another
modernity]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp,
1986.
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society
and Culture. Vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
Dobson, Andrew, and Derek Bell, eds. Environmental
Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
Held, David. Democracy and the Global Order.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping:
Individuals, Consumerism and Collective Action. New
York: Palgrave, 2003.
Oosterveer, Peter. Global Governance of Food Production
and Consumption: Issues and Challenges. Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2007.
Spaargaren, Gert, and Arthur P. J. Mol. “Greening Global
Consumption: Politics and Authority.” Global
Environmental Change 18, no. 3 (2008): 350–359.
Spaargaren, Gert, and Peter Oosterveer. “CitizenConsumers as Change Agents in Globalizing Modernity:
The Case of Sustainable Consumption.” Sustainability
2 (2010): 1887–1908.
Spaargaren, Gert, and C. S. A. (Kris) van Koppen.
“Provider Strategies and the Greening of Consumption
Practices: Exploring the Role of Companies in
Sustainable Consumption.” In The New Middle Classes:
Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental
Concern, edited by Hellmuth Lange and Lars Meier,

81–100. Bremen, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2009.
(ISBN: 978-1-4020-9937-3)
Stones, Rob. Structuration Theory. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2005.
Trentmann, Frank, ed. The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.

LIFESTYLE
The idea of lifestyle has a long history that is closely
associated with consumption practices and consumer
culture. It refers to the ways in which people express
their identities through the practices that they are
engaged in, notably outside of the area of work and
typically within the arena of consumption. In particular, it is a term often associated with matters of
how people communicate their tastes through their
individual everyday interests and practices.
While there was a surge of interest in the question
of lifestyle in the 1990s within sociological and cultural studies, styles of life sometimes associated with
social class position were an important issue for
early sociological writers, such as Thorstein Veblen,
Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, at the end of the
nineteenth century. In particular, lifestyle seemed a
way of addressing not just issues of class but also of
status, which had become less certain at that time
because of rapid social change with the modernization of Western societies. For Veblen, the newly
monied rising capitalist class, or leisure class, of the
late-nineteenth century in America, unable to draw
on aristocratic tradition and rank to assert their
emerging status within society, used the conspicuous
display of consumer goods to highlight their wealth
and emerging prominent social position. Weber, too,
in an essay called “Class, Status, Party” sought to
show how each of these three dimensions of social
life determined a person’s position within society
and his or her access to life chances and social power.
Although often closely associated, Weber argued
that class and status were not always directly connected. Class, for Weber, is established by a person’s
economic position within the capitalist marketplace
while status and status groups relate to more cultural factors associated with questions of honor and
position within a community. For example, a person can have a high and powerful class position but
belong to a weak status group or vice versa. While

Lifestyle

this analysis does not address the issue of lifestyle
directly, the suggestion is that it will be shaped not
just by class position but also through the relationship between the social class and status group that a
person belongs to.
Simmel’s analysis of what he called styles of life
is altogether more detailed and explicit on the question of lifestyle, and it forms the lengthy final chapter of his most important book from 1900, The
Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel argues that
money within a capitalist society produces a culture
in which separate spheres of life develop around
which objective lifestyles are formed that people
identify with. Styles of life are an expression of individual creative potential that people create from
their experiences—how we express who we are
and make the world meaningful to ourselves and
others—those styles of living become objectified as
recognizable lifestyles within a money economy and
the rationalizing culture it promotes. Linked to his
theory of objective culture as a source of alienation
from the vitality of living creative practices, Simmel
suggests that lifestyles are the outcomes of a rationalized capitalist culture that lead to the fragmentation of experience in modern society.
These issues of consumer display, status honor,
and of subjective experience and forms of cultural
expression that were prominent within classical sociology went into abeyance within most sociological
writing in the mid-twentieth century where a preoccupation with the establishment of social order in the
Durkheimian and functionalist tradition or an interest around issues of class conflict and production
rather than consumption within an industrial society
among Marxists preoccupied most sociologists in
that period. Where an interest in styles of living was
kept alive during this time was in ethnographic work
around cultural (or subcultural) practice—within
the Chicago school tradition in the United States
and mass observation studies, notably of working
class life in Britain. However, it is since the 1980s
when consumer culture again became a prominent
sociological issue that the idea of lifestyle began to
be reestablished as a key question associated with
similar issues of taste and status (Bourdieu, 1984)
and styles of life and identity as before.
Often linked to the postmodern turn and to
ideas about the changing character of capitalism,
Scott Lash and John Urry argued that capitalist
society had become more disorganized than before

861

and, according to David Chaney (2002), its culture
more fragmented and uncertain. Whereas some
such as Pierre Bourdieu continued to hold the view
that the taste and outlook that people have on
life, their lifestyle, is shaped indirectly by their class
position through the accumulation of different forms
of capital that help them to engage with a structuring habitus, others saw this cultural fragmentation
as creating an opportunity for identity formation and
lifestyle choices not available in the past to all except
the wealthiest in society. Within these debates, lifestyle
as a concept has come to emphasize issues of agency,
practice, and meaning making within the spaces of
everyday life as a key feature for understanding the
character of contemporary society. In particular,
lifestyle has come to be associated with how people
express who they are, their identities, through their
consumption practices, tastes, and stylistic preferences. Less pessimistic than Simmel on the alienating
character of modern life within a capitalist society,
the others’ central theme remains the need to express
one’s identity and one’s experiences through styles
of living in a fragmented culture that a consumer
society brings with it. To make sense of their experiences, Mike Feathersone argued that people create
lifestyles out of their interests, enthusiasms, hobbies,
and style preferences through an aestheticization of
daily life. This refers to the idea that people work on
themselves in a reflexive way to communicate a sense
of who they are to others through what they do in
their leisure time, their cultural affiliations, and how
they look.
A weak link to questions of class remains, however, in this analysis as it did for Veblen and Weber in
earlier times. If the wealthy leisure class of conspicuous consumers were the class that typified how modern lifestyles were being made in the 1890s, then it is
the so-called new middle class—those employed in
service sector jobs notably in the creative industries
associated with such things as media, marketing, and
publishing and in the various culture industries of
music, art, and television—who are seen as the trend
setters in creating lifestyle choices in the 1990s and
today. This so-called new middle class has been studied because some have argued that its social prominence within contemporary capitalist societies and
its direct experience of cultural fragmentation allows
the members of this group culturally to distance
themselves from previous forms of class distinction
in shaping their outlook and their tastes. It is believed

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Lifestyle Typologies

that they are able to draw from across the class
divide when developing lifestyles that are seemingly
omnivorous in enjoying both expressions of high art
alongside forms of popular culture in a way that does
not follow a previously distinct class pattern.
In general, though, empirical investigation of
these issues has been inconclusive as to whether
lifestyle and social position, notably associated with
social class, have become completely disassociated
and completely individualized even among the new
middle class. From a high point of debate in the late
1990s with the focus firmly then on exploring lifestyle though looking at individual agency, over the
past decade, a greater emphasis has been placed on
lifestyle as the outcome of the structuring of tastes
informed by Bourdieu’s earlier and more class determined analysis. One change is that issues of gender
and ethnicity now sit alongside social class as what
is seen to be shaping people’s tastes as well as their
opportunities (or constraints) in being able to express
them as lifestyles. However, the similarity between
some of these recent arguments and those expressed
over a century ago by Veblen, Weber, and Simmel
suggests that lifestyle remains an interesting problem
through which to explore the tensions in modern
experience between expressions of agency and effects
of structuring social constraints rather than one
which is likely to be fully resolved just in one direction or the other.
Kevin Hetherington
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Disorganized
Capitalism; Lifestyle Typologies; Postmodernism; SelfReflexivity; Social Distinction; Status; Taste

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge and
Keegan Paul, 1984.
Chaney, David. Lifestyles. London: Routledge, 1996.
Chaney, David. Cultural Change and Everyday Life.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. The End of Organised
Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 1987.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space,
London: Sage, 1994.
Savage, Mike, James Barlow, Peter Dickens, and Tony
Fielding. Property, Bureaucracy and Culture. London:
Routledge, 1992.

Shields, Rob, ed. Lifestyle Shopping. London: Routledge,
1992.
Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste. London: Sage,
1997.
Wynne, Derek. Leisure, Lifestyle and the New Middle
Class. London: Routledge, 1998.

LIFESTYLE TYPOLOGIES
Lifestyles can be defined as the way people live and
present themselves to others. They do this through
the brands of products they purchase, which reflect
matters such as their taste, values, beliefs, and socioeconomic status. As consumer cultures have developed, consumer lifestyles have become increasingly
significant sources of identity and status, making
typologies of them particularly valuable for marketing purposes. Typologies involving lifestyles are
classifications of different categories of consumers.
These lifestyle typologies are generally developed by
marketers to enable advertisers to target individuals
more effectively.
Marketers are interested in classifying people to
understand people’s consumer behavior better. There
are two rules that must be followed when classifying people’s lifestyles. First, the categories must not
be ambiguous—each person must fit into one and
only one group. Second, the classification of lifestyles
must be comprehensive and cover everyone.
There have been numerous lifestyle typologies
developed by marketing companies over the past
decades. Here, a few lifestyle typologies are discussed, beginning with that created by the Total
Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey.
It developed an instrument called Equitrends that
studied approximately two hundred brands in fiftyfive product groups. The company used a survey to
study consumption practices and ended up classifying Americans into seven categories and listing some
products they prefer, which are described below.
1. Intellects: Michelin Tires, Wall Street Journal
2. Conformists: Kodak, Hallmark, Crest
3. Popularity Seekers: Nike, Mercedes Benz, Home
Box Office
4. Pragmatists: Fisher-Price, Rubbermaid, Mr. Coffee
5. Activists: Maytag, Kenmore

Lifestyle Typologies

6. Relief-Seekers: IBM computers, CNN, Hilton
7. Sentimentalists: Campbell soups, Hershey’s,
Folgers

Marketing companies tend to give jazzy, descriptive
and memorable names to their categories.
One of the more popular typologies was the
Values and Lifestyles or VALS typology developed
by SRI, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo
Park, California. SRI developed two different typologies: first VALS1 and then its successor, VALS 2.
The VALS typologies categorize consumers by their
demographics and on the basis of cultural trends.
The categories were developed by giving consumers a thirty-question survey that not only obtained
demographic information but also provided insights
into their values and beliefs. The lists below show the
different categories for each of the VALS marketing
typologies and briefly describe each of them.
VALS1
1. Survivors: Old, poor, and not in the cultural
mainstream
2. Sustainers: Young, on edge of poverty, and
ambitious
3. Belongers: Conventional and conservative
tastes, sentimental
4. Emulators: Upwardly mobile, status conscious,
want to be successful
5. Achievers: Society’s leaders; successful, with
high status; materialistic
6. I-Am-Me’s: Narcissistic, young, exhibitionistic,
individualistic
7. Experientials: Grown up I-Am-Me’s, focus on
inner growth
8. Societally Conscious Individuals: Simple living,
environmental causes, smallness of scale

VALS2 provides a different list of categories,
based primarily on the ability of people to actually
purchase desired products.
VALS2
1. Actualizers: Wealthy and successful, interested
in social issues and social change
2. Fulfilleds: Practical, like durability and
functionality in products, mature, well off
3. Achievers: Career oriented, buy things to reflect
their success, value structure, stability
4. Experiencers: Young, impulsive, enthusiastic,
love to spend money, risk takers
5. Believers: Highly principled conservative
consumers, buy well-known brands
6. Strivers: Desire approval of others, are like
Achievers but have less money
7. Makers: Active, self-sufficient, are like
Experiencers
8. Strugglers: Poor and struggling to survive

These categories assume that people act rationally
and don’t purchase things they can’t afford.
The Claritas Corporation, now called Claritas
Nielsen, has developed a typology based on the
notion that people tend to live in places with other
people like them, principally in terms of their socioeconomic status. Claritas Nielsen bases its typology
on zip codes and has developed a typology that
divides American consumers into fourteen lifestyle
groupings, based on income and lifestyles, and
sixty-six different consumer preference groupings,
based on zip codes. Like other marketing companies, Claritas Nielsen tends to give groups “catchy”
names that offer some insights into the nature of the
groups being dealt with. The fourteen lifestyles are
shown below:

Lifestyles

Income

Urban
Urban Uptown
Midtown Mix
Urban Cores
Inner Suburbs

Suburban
Elite Suburbs
The Affluentials
Middle Burbs
Rustic Living

863

Second City
Second City Society
City Centers
Micro City Blues

Town & Country
Landed Gentry
Country Comfort
Middle America

864

Lifestyle Typologies

This list focuses on where people live and that
those at the top of the chart are wealthier than those
at the bottom of the list.
Claritas Nielsen developed a more refined typology called PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip
Marketers) a number of years ago that lists sixtysix groupings. It describes PRIZM as follows on its
Internet website:
PRIZM operates on the principle that “birds of a
feather flock together.” It’s a worldwide phenomenon that people with similar cultural backgrounds,
needs, and perspectives naturally gravitate toward
one another, choose to live in neighborhoods offering
affordable advantages and compatible lifestyles. That’s
why, for instance, many young career singles and couples choose dynamic urban neighborhoods like Chicago’s Gold Coast, while families with children prefer
the suburbs which offer more affordable housing,
convenient shopping, and strong local schools.

Claritas Nielsen also obtains its information from
the government and survey data. It argues that its
data should be interpreted in a general way and not
as an actual portrait of the lifestyles it deals with,
which means it deals with purchasing preferences
and not actual purchasing behavior. It focuses on
zip codes, where it provides as many as five different PRIZM clusters in a single zip code even though
there may be as many as twenty different clusters
found in that zip code.
For Claritas Nielsen, identities are based on location; it argues, “You are where you live.” Each zip
code covers from 2,500 to 15,000 households, but
the Claritas Nielsen PRIZM groups deal with census
block groups of between 250 and 500 households
and its “ZIP+four” with from 6 to 12 households.
Claritas Nielsen claims to offer rather precise information about the consumption behavior of the different groups in its typology.
It should be pointed out that many social scientists don’t believe that “you are where you live”
because of several factors. For example, in some
wealthy suburban areas, a number of homeowners
are “grandfathered in,” which means they purchased
their homes many years ago when the homes were
relatively inexpensive. A list of the Claritas Nielsen
sixty-six consumer cultures follows, with 01. Upper
Crust being the wealthiest and most successful group
and 66. Low Rise Living being the least successful
group, socioeconomically speaking.

01. Upper Crust
02. Blue Blood Estates
03. Movers & Shakers
04. Young Digerati
05. Country Squires
06. Winner’s Circle
07. Money & Brains
08. Executive Suites
09. Big Fish, Small Pond
10. Second City Elite
11. God’s Country
12. Brite Lites, Li’l City
13. Upward Bound
14. New Empty Nests
15. Pools & Patios
16. Bohemian Mix
17. Beltway Boomers
18. Kids & Cul-de-Sacs
19. Home Sweet Home
20. Fast-Track Families
21. Gray Power
22. Young Influentials
23. Greenbelt Sports
24. Up-and-Comers
25. Country Casuals
26. The Cosmopolitans
27. Middleburg Managers
28. Traditional Times
29. American Dreams
30. Suburban Sprawl
31. Urban Achievers
32. New Homesteaders
33. Big Sky Families
34. White Picket Fences
35. Boomtown Singles
36. Blue-Chip Blues
37. Mayberry-ville
38. Simple Pleasures
39. Domestic Duos
40. Close-In Couples
41. Sunset City Blues

Likert Scales

865

42. Red, White, & Blues
43. Heartlanders
44. New Beginnings
45. Blue Highways
46. Old Glories
47. City Startups

Lifestyle

Group
Boundaries

Number
of Rules

Strong
Strong
Weak
Weak

Many and Varied
Few and Weak
Few and Weak
Many and Varied

Elitist
Egalitarian
Individualist
Fatalists

48. Young & Rustic
49. American Classics
50. Kid Country USA
51. Shotguns & Pickups
52. Suburban Pioneers

What is important to recognize, Douglas argues,
is that our desire to purchase products and services
are not based on individual taste and psychological
temperament but on the unconsciously held imperatives of the lifestyle to which we belong.

53. Mobility Blues

Arthur Asa Berger

54. Multi-Culti Mosaic
55. Golden Ponds

See also Consumer Behavior; Douglas, Mary; Lifestyle;
Markets and Marketing; Status; Taste

56. Crossroads Villagers
57. Old Miltowns

Further Readings

58. Back Country

Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’Til You Drop: Consumer
Behavior and American Culture. Boulder, CO: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2005.
Berger, Arthur Asa. Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture.
3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Douglas, Mary. “In Defence of Shopping.” In The
Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin
Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage, 1997.
Michman, Ronald D. Lifestyle Market Segmentation. New
York: Praeger, 1991.
Mitchell, Arnold. The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are
and Where We Are Going. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Vyncka, Patrick. “Lifestyle Segmentation: From Attitudes,
Interests and Opinions, to Values, Aesthetic Styles, Life
Visions and Media Preferences.” European Journal of
Communication 17, no. 4 (2002): 445–463.

59. Urban Elders
60. Park Bench Set
61. City Roots
62. Hometown Retired
63. Family Thrifts
64. Bedrock America
65. Big City Blues
66. Low Rise Living

It is possible to find out what people in any zip
code are like by accessing the Claritas Nielsen
website.
The final typology discussed here is one developed by social anthropologist Mary Douglas,
who argues—based on what is called grid-group
theory—that there are four, and only four, lifestyles
in modern societies. This theory maintains that each
of us is a member of a group with either weak or
strong boundaries and also that each group has
either few or many rules and prescriptions. When
you combine the kinds of groups to which people
belong and the number of rules and prescriptions
to which they are subjected, you get four mutually
hostile lifestyles—elitist (hierarchist), individualist,
egalitarian, and fatalist (Douglas and other gridgroup theorists use other names for the lifestyles in
some cases):

Websites
Claritas Nielsen. www.mybestsegments.com.

LIKERT SCALES
Likert scale is a technique to measure complex
concepts, such as attitudes, styles of media use, or
satisfaction for aspects of life, and have become
increasingly common for survey research into consumer behavior. Due to simplicity, it is the most wellknown and used practice of unidimensional scaling.
By scales, we mean “measurement instruments

866

Likert Scales

that are collections of items combined into a
composite score, and intended to reveal levels of
theoretical variables not readily observable by direct
means” (DeVellis 2003, 8–9). For instance, it is
common to combine a set of variables (exposition
to political information on newspapers, exposition
to political information on television, knowledge of
political facts, knowledge of political leaders, etc.) into
a single index to measure the level of political
information of a sample of individuals. Political
information is an example of a unidimensional
scale: combined with others (electoral participation,
parties participation, associations participation,
etc.), it can originate a multidimensional scale to
reveal political participation.
The original and principal application of Likert
scale is the measurement of attitudes (Likert 1932).
If attitudes are general beliefs impossible to observe,
then opinions derived from such attitudes are easier
to reveal: based on this principle, Likert scales consist of a set of opinions on which individuals are
asked to agree or disagree. For instance, it is possible
to define a scale of social dominance from the agreement or disagreement individuals give on a battery
of opinions like the following ones: “Some groups of
people are simply inferior to other groups,” “It’s OK
if some groups have more of a chance in life than
others,” “If certain groups stayed in their place, we
would have fewer problems,” and so on. Likert scale
is used in other applications where items change—
they are not opinions—while scale analysis procedures remain the same. From the point of view of
consumer culture, two other applications of Likert
scale are particularly meaningful: the measurement
of the frequency and satisfaction for consumption
behavior. For instance, it is possible to define an
index of cultural extra-domestic consumption asking for the frequency individuals go to cinemas,
theaters, libraries, and so forth. Moreover, the satisfaction for the various aspects of these and other
consumptions can be investigated.
The procedure to define a Likert scale presents
three phases: formulating questions, administering questions, and analyzing scale. Attention is
paid here to the first and the last phases that are
the more specific to Likert scales. As to the first
phase, the usual norms in question wording apply:
statements must be clear, concise, straightforward,
and unambiguous while the vocabulary must be as
simple as possible, according to the cognitive skills

of the respondents. Double negatives (e.g., “I am
not in favor of corporations stopping funding for
antinuclear groups”) or double-barreled statements
(e.g., “I support civil rights because discrimination
is a crime against God”; an individual could agree
with the first part of the sentence disagreeing with
the second part) should be avoided. In attitudes
measurement applications, it is important that
sentences permit a judgment of value (opinions)
rather than a judgment of fact: “Two persons with
decidedly different attitudes may, nevertheless,
agree on questions of fact. Consequently, their reaction to a statement of fact is no indication of their
attitudes” (Likert 1932, 44). Opinions can come
from different sources: newspapers and magazines,
books, addresses and pamphlets, parallel pieces of
qualitative research (e.g., focus group), previous
research. As to question and response formats, out
of the four kinds of questions originally proposed
by Likert, the five-point agreement/disagreement
scale (strongly approve, approve, undecided, disapprove, strongly disapprove) prevailed in the scaling
research following his contribution. On this basis,
much methodological research has been developed
on three technical points: whether to allow a longer
seven-point scale, whether to permit a central neutral option (undecided), whether to allow a residual
option (don’t know).
Once the questions have been administered, a
numerical value must be assigned to the response
alternatives. In his original article, Likert proposed
two methods: a so-called Sigma method, based on
normal distribution, and a simpler method of scoring. The latter, that Likert found works as well as
the Sigma method and prevailed in the following
scaling research, is illustrated as follows:
If five alternatives have been used, it is necessary to
assign values of from one to five with the three
assigned to the undecided position on each statement.
The ONE end is assigned to one extreme of the
attitude continuum and the FIVE to the other; this
should be done consistently for each of the statements
which it is expected will be included in the scale.
(Likert 1932, 46)

On the basis of this scoring, a scale is the simple sum
of the different items.
At this point, data analysis aims at assessing three
characteristics of the scale: reliability, validity, unidimensionality. In scaling, reliability refers to the

Likert Scales

amount of the observed results that can be attributed
to the underlying concept to observe rather than to
other sources (the measurement errors that occur in
the various phases of the operationalization process).
Reliability can be measured on the basis of the correlations between scale scores (alternate forms, splithalf, test-retest reliability) or on the basis of internal
consistency (Cronbach’s alpha). In the social sciences
approach, where few items are usually administered to many individuals on a single occasion, the
last definition is preferable. Internal consistency is
considered a reliability measure since it is assumed
that items referring to the same underlying concept
should be highly intercorrelated. Cronbach’s alpha
is a standard indicator of internal consistency, and it
depends on two parameters: the inter-item mean correlation and the number of items, as they raise alpha
increases. It varies from 0 to 1: scale reliability is
judged satisfactory when Cronbach’s alpha is above
0.7. Once the questions have been administered, the
only way to increase reliability is to perform an item
analysis to drop items loosely related to the scale.
Signals of loose relation can be detected by many
coefficients, but the most exploited are the item-scale
correlation and the alpha in the case where the item
is dropped. Much less performed in social sciences
research practice are the validity and unidimensionality checks.
Determining that a scale is reliable does not guarantee
that the latent variable shared by the items is, in fact,
the variable of interest to the scale developer. The
adequacy of a scale as a measure of a specific variable
(e.g., perceived psychological stress) is an issue of
validity. (DeVellis 2003, 49)

There are many validation procedures, and it is valuable to mention at least two of them: In criterionrelated validation, the relation between the scale
and an external standard is evaluated (e.g., a university admission test can predict the following student career?); in construct validation, the relation
between the scale and other variables (constructs)
is evaluated according to the theoretical knowledge
in the field (e.g., is this prejudice scale correlated to
education?). Finally, unidimensionality is checked
through standard multidimensional techniques, such
as factor analysis.
In developing Likert scales, there are at least
three problems researchers must be aware of. The
first one is the so-called response-set, that is, the

867

tendency to give the same response to a battery of
items. To discourage—or at least to detect—the
triggering of such mechanism, it is useful that the
semantic orientation of the different items is not
homogeneous:
To avoid any space of error or any tendency to a
stereotyped response it seems desirable to have
different statements so worded that about one-half
of them have one end of the attitude continuum
corresponding to the left or upper part of the
reaction alternatives and the other half have the
same end of the attitude continuum corresponding
to the right or lower part of the reaction alternatives.
(Likert 1932, 46)

Second, people at the opposite ends of the
continuum could agree or disagree with the same
item due to its ambiguity: it is the case of doublebarreled statements and other sentences (e.g., “The
woman has the right to decide for herself whether
to have or not have children”: a male chauvinist
could agree on this item on the basis that he could
consider children a women’s exclusive problem).
Last, when items are summed to create a scale, it
is assumed that items are cardinal variables when,
strictly speaking, they are ordinal variables. Such an
assumption is not obvious since agreeing is cognitively easier than disagreeing, and also, the distance
between the different categories of agreement and
disagreement varies from item to item. It follows
that cardinality assumption should be deepened
when a Likert scale is a central variable of a piece
of research.
Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi
See also Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior;
Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture;
Multivariate Analysis; Surveys

Further Readings
Carmines, Edward G., and Richard Zeller. A. Reliability
and Validity Assessment. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979.
DeVellis, Robert F. Scale Development: Theory and
Applications. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003.
Likert, Rensis. “A Technique for the Measurement of
Attitudes.” Archives of Psychology 140 (1932): 1–55.
McIver, John P., and Edward G. Carmines. Unidimensional
Scaling. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981.
Spector, Paul E. Summated Rating Scale Construction: An
Introduction. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.

868

Liminality

LIMINALITY
Liminality is a term associated with rites of passage
through which a person’s identity and status is transformed at different times in his or her life. First systematically studied by the anthropologist Arnold Van
Gennep in the book Rites of Passage (1960), rites of
passage were noted to have a three-stage structure.
The first stage, separation, saw the person about
to undergo the transforming rite have all previous
markers of his or her identity removed. In the second stage, liminal, that person, removed from his or
her community, would undergo some form of ritual
ordeal or initiation ceremony before in the third
phase, reaggregation, being returned to his or her
community with a new identity. Such rites are often
associated with the passage between key life stages
including transition from childhood to adulthood or
marriage or with the rites associated with the death
of a person and his or her burial.
As well as being associated with different times in
a person’s life, these rites often have their own social
spaces—the liminal phase, in particular, is often associated with a particular space of initiation removed
from the everyday spaces of the community associated with the rite. It was also often noted that in the
liminal phase, many social norms and conventions
are temporarily overturned in sanctioned but otherwise transgressive forms of behavior as part of the
rite. Those undergoing initiation in this phase will
also typically experience a strong sense of communion and intense emotional experience associated
with such things as pain and hallucinogens, as well
as the intense emotional experience of being through
the performance of the rite.
Such rites have long been of interest for anthropologists and one in particular, Victor Turner, wrote
a series of works in the 1960s and 1970s on rites in
both small-scale societies as well as Western society.
While much of the early writing on rites of passage,
including Turner’s own, understood these rituals as
a functional requirement for how life-course identities were constituted within a society and how such
ritual helped to affirm existing social structures, this
began to change when he attempted to apply these
concepts to understand aspects of Western consumer
societies. Of particular note is that Turner sought to
understand the 1960s counterculture in the United
States using elements from this analysis of rites of

passage. Turner argued that social structures often
produced moments of anti-structure, which are liminal in character. This involves the creation of free
spaces where social norms can be transgressed and
oppositional or alternative identities established.
Festivals such as those at Woodstock, Stonehenge,
or Glastonbury, as well as bohemian neighborhoods,
such as Greenwich Village in New York, Haight
Ashbury in San Francisco, or the Left Bank in Paris,
can all be seen as liminal spaces where subcultures
or neo-tribes were able to establish new identities
and lifestyle practices that challenged the social conventions of their day. In this analysis, Turner went
on to try and free ideas of liminality from the earlier
functionalist context of being seen as a necessary
process associated with social reproduction to a
space of freedom and play where novel forms of
community might be established. He introduced the
term liminoid in contrast to liminal to understand
such spaces and their practices freed from the structuring principles of a rite of passage.
In the late 1980s, an emerging interest in the
creation of alternative lifestyles and neo-tribes in
which the challenging of social norms, creation of
new identities, a strong sense of communion, and
the creation of free spaces for social experimentation
reemerged. Prominent in this analysis was an interest
in liminal space (rather than liminality as the middle
stage in a rite of passage) as a space for alternative
consumption practices. The term liminality began to
be associated with others like neo-tribes, marginal
space, transgression, and transgressive identities as
well as with the carnivalesque practices associated
with the overturning of social conventions and
identity markers (Bakhtin 1984). The application
of such terms was no longer applied simply to the
remains of the counterculture but more broadly to
some of the practices of creating identities through
consumption. As well as sites such as free festivals
and raves, secondhand shops, New Age centers, and
other sites of alternative consumption where people
could be different and create a new identity through
their consumption practices, uses (or reuses) of fashion and style and through their identifications with
others who share their consumption practices were
seen as key forms of identification created with liminal space. Although previous countercultures had
created liminal spaces in which to challenge social
conventions through creating new fashions, taking
illegal drugs, and developing new styles of music

Linder, Staffan Burenstam

just as the new ones of the 1990s were doing, those
earlier countercultures had often had strong political
motivations and beliefs that were the foundation for
such practices. Many were often anticonsumption
in their motivation. The new ones of the 1980s and
1990s, however, appeared more hedonistic and playful in their forms of transgression, less overtly political in character, and more accepting of consumption
practices—albeit alternative forms of consumption.
Indeed, they often made overt use of consumption
practices rather than to see consumerism as something to be challenged as part of a capitalist society.
It might be argued, though, that the reaggregating dynamics of rites of passage are more present in
this use of liminal free spaces and transgressive acts
than is immediately apparent. Many spaces such
as festivals, raves, alternative shopping sites associated with such things as tattooing and piercing as
well as cheap secondhand and retro clothing and
New Age spirituality have subsequently ended up
becoming influential on mainstream consumption
and fashion in more recent years. A phenomenon of
the late 1990s and 2000s has been that many countercultural spaces from twenty or thirty years ago
are now more mainstream and commercial spaces,
no longer on the liminal fringes of consumer society
but at its forefront.
Kevin Hetherington
See also Identity; Life Course; Lifestyle; Neo-Tribes;
Rituals; Spaces and Places; Subculture; Tamed
Hedonism

Further Readings
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984.
Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Hetherington, Kevin. “Stonehenge and Its Festival: Spaces
of Consumption.” In Lifestyle Shopping, edited by Rob
Shields, 83–98. London: Routledge, 1992.
Hetherington, Kevin. “Identity Formation, Space and Social
Centrality.” Theory, Culture and Society 13, no. 4
(1996): 33–52.
McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty. London: Verso,
1996.
Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin. London: Routledge,
1991.
Shields, Rob, ed. Lifestyle Shopping. London: Routledge,
1992.

869

Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1967.
Turner Victor. The Ritual Process. London: Routledge and
Keegan Paul, 1969.
Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1974.

LINDER, STAFFAN BURENSTAM
(1931–2000)
Staffan Burenstam Linder was a Swedish economist
based at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE),
who also spent time at the universities of Columbia,
Stanford, and Yale, among others. As Professor of
Economics and President of the SSE, he founded
the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Latvia,
in 1993. He was active politically, first as a conservative member of the Swedish parliament (writing
the economic-political program for the Swedish
Conservative party in 1966) and in his later years
as head of the Swedish delegation to the European
parliament. Known for his independence of thought,
his main contribution to economics was the socalled Linder thesis, a conjecture regarding patterns
of international trade in industrial goods first articulated in An Essay on Trade and Transformation,
the book that he presented for his doctoral thesis in
1961. In contradiction to prevailing theories, which
hypothesized trade as occurring between countries
with complementary resources, he argued that the
more similar the demand structures (emanating from
similar per capita incomes) of countries, the more
likely they were to trade with one another.
Linder was also among the first to recognize the
future significance of the Pacific economies, proclaiming in The Pacific Century (1986) that the
century of the Pacific had begun. In the area of consumer culture, he is known for his short but influential book The Harried Leisure Class (1970), which
marked something of a departure from the majority
of his writings on international trade and has become
a classic in research on the relationship between economic growth, time, and consumption. In it, Linder
demonstrates the economic logic of a vicious circle
in which increasing rates of productivity must be
matched by increasing acceleration in consumption.
Since consumption takes time, however, the outcome
in the affluent societies is an increasing acceleration

870

Locality

of the pace of life and the “harried leisure class.”
The ultimate result is a society driven by the need for
economic growth and a decline in overall well-being.
The impact of the book has perhaps been greatest
in the area of sociology, since its message resonates
both with the work of classical sociologists who
wrote about social acceleration and with more recent
debates on the pressure of time in late modernity.
Oriel Sullivan
See also Affluent Society; Consumption and Time Use;
Convenience; Economics; Harried Leisure Class;
Industrial Society; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings
Godbey, Geoffrey. “The Harried Leisure Class” (Book
review). Journal of Leisure Research 35, no. 4 (Fall
2003): 478–480.
Lundahl, Mats. “To Be an Independent Thinker: An
Intellectual Portrait of Staffan Burenstam Linder.”
European Journal of the History of Economic Thought
12, no. 4 (2005): 663–688.

LOCALITY
There have been many debates within social science
about the importance of locality in shaping people’s
experiences. In some of these debates, locality is the
key concept used; in others, analysis is framed around
ideas of community or neighborhood. All such terms
carry with them different connotations, but equally
all in essence are concerned with the ways in which
the more or less local impacts the structure of social
relationships in which people are involved. The term
more or less local is deliberately vague as what different researchers take locality to mean varies significantly, depending on the research questions they
are addressing. For some, the remit of the word or
application of the concept is highly local; for others,
the reference may be to a city or a larger conglomeration or even a region. Whatever the unit
in question, the focal concern is with the relationship
between the social and economic structure of relatively
proximate geographical space on people’s experiences
and lifestyles, including their consumption practices.
Much of the early research into localities was
driven by a concern to understand the basis of
community solidarity, in line with popular—and

longstanding—theorizing that community life had
experienced significant decline with urban and
industrial development. Oversimplifying somewhat,
two main traditions can be identified within this perspective. First, there was research that focused on
local personal and social connection. This research
examined the extent to which individuals were reliant on others (family, friends, neighbors) who also
lived in that locality and dependent on the institutions (shops, employment, leisure facilities) found
there. Its dominant questions concerned the extent
to which people were socially and economically
embedded in localities, a matter which was inevitably differentiated by, among other factors, class,
gender, and life-course position.
The second (linked) tradition was more concerned with the institutional relationships within a
community. It focused more on the structure of the
local social system, including organizational linkages
and the mechanisms by which different groupings
sought to protect their political and economic interests. Although much interesting research developed,
especially in the mid-twentieth century, around this
second perspective, its weaknesses became increasingly apparent. In particular, in the highly connected
world of contemporary commercial society, it was
recognized that people’s life chances and lifestyles
could never be properly understood through focusing
solely on local social organization and institutional
connection.
Despite such theoretical critiques, many of the core
questions about locality remain important for understanding people’s experiences. Notwithstanding the
impact of globalization, the local—in its different
formulations—still represents a prime site in which
lifestyles are constructed and resources contested
and consumed. That is, while many of the decisions
that shape the social and economic character of particular areas are consequent on actions taken outside
the local sphere, responses to these wider structural
occurrences are often framed at a local or regional
level. Indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized that
the local now needs to be understood “through the
lens of global relationships” (Savage, Bagnall, and
Longhurst 2005, 3). In other words, rather than rendering the local as unimportant, globalization adds
fresh complexities to the patterning of local social,
economic, and political relationships. As Doreen
Massey (1991, 29) contends, we need to think in
terms of “a global sense of the local, a global sense

Longitudinal Studies

of place.” Her argument is that globalization does
not equate to the homogenization of locality. Rather,
the mixture of local and global in different localities
is itself “yet another source of (the reproduction of)
geographical uneven development, and thus of the
uniqueness of place.”
Consider, for example, the consumption of housing. What type of housing is built, who has access to
it, how its use alters across time, and so on, clearly
influence the characteristics of the local population
and the lifestyles they develop. Similarly, the local
protest movements that develop in response to land
use issues, whether these involve new shopping
developments, new roads, or facilities for housing
socially less desirable groups, indicate the significance of the local in the construction and consumption of lifestyle. Importantly too, research into the
impact on different local labor markets of national
and international economic restructuring at the end
of the twentieth century demonstrated the importance of local responses and initiatives. In Cooke’s
(2009, 260) words, local proactivity “facilitated
responses and initiatives by some, not all, localities to self-improve their conditions of living and
working within the constraint and opportunity-sets
locally available.”
In the context of globalization, consider too the
consequences of increased levels of international
migration. For some migrants, especially those with
wealth, the local is of little importance; they do
not become embedded within it to any significant
degree. For most migrants, though, the process of
settling involves establishing a local organizational
framework that reflects their cultural identity. For
example, those involved develop economic enterprises, build places for worship, form political
organizations, and the like, in the process generating
personal networks through which knowledge and
resources, as well as ties of kinship and amity, can
flourish. These processes lead to the migrants and
their families becoming embedded in the new locality, though frequently they simultaneously sustain
connection with their “home” localities through
continuing transnational networks of support and
exchange.
In these and other ways, globalization adds fresh
complexities to the social, economic, and political relationships that emerge in different localities.
Rather than becoming redundant sociologically,
locality has enduring significance, being routinely

871

reconstituted over time as a consequence of the interplay of local and nonlocal processes. In this, locality
matters for understanding people’s differential incorporation into social organization and the patterning
of lifestyle, consumption, and identity.
Graham Allan
See also Belonging; Geography; Globalization;
Glocalization; Migration; Spaces and Places;
Transnational Capitalism; Urbanization

Further Readings
Cooke, Philip. “Locality Debates.” In International
Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 256–262. London:
Elsevier, 2009.
Delanty, Gerard. Community. London: Routledge, 2003.
Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism
Today (June 1991): 24–29.
Phillipson, Christopher, Miriam Bernard, Judith Phillips,
and James Ogg. The Family and Community Life of
Older People. London: Routledge, 2001.
Savage, Michael, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst.
Globalization and Belonging. London: Sage, 2005.

LONGITUDINAL STUDIES
In general terms, longitudinal studies are research
designs dealing with the problem of time and change.
To give a proper definition of longitudinal studies it
is necessary to follow some steps. First, it has to be
acknowledged that longitudinal research is not a single technique to collect or analyze social sciences data
(such as, for instance, Likert scales to survey attitudes
or regression analysis). Longitudinal research is a set
of techniques matched according to different objectives. Second, it is useful to contrast longitudinal with
cross-sectional studies, that piece of social research
not only most specialists—but also most laymen—
are acquainted with. In cross-sectional studies, data
are collected for each case (individuals, organizations, countries, etc.) only once; they refer to a single
time interval (that is the same for all cases). An example could be a telephone survey about ethnic consumption where data are collected once and refer to
a single period. By contrast, in longitudinal studies,
collection takes place more than once and—above
all—refers to different periods (days, years, etc.).
Third, an important distinction is between collection
occasions and time points. Collection occasions are

872

Longitudinal Studies

the number of times the researcher enters the field
(for instance, organizing a new survey or experiment); time points are the number of periods the data
refer to (i.e., in household panels, it is usual to ask the
occupational condition for every month of the year
preceding the interview). Collection occasions and
time points usually coincide (in the year Y0, information is collected about the interval Y0; in the year Y1,
about the interval Y1; and so on). But it is not always
the case: in a single interview, a subject can be asked
to think back on his or her life with regard to family,
work, education, et cetera (a standard practice in lifecourse research). Finally, cases can change from one
collection occasion to the other. Not all authors agree
on this statement: some restrict longitudinal studies
to designs where cases are the same (Rose 2000).
Only these research designs provide the chance to
study change at the individual level (see below). Here
the alternative position on the argument is adopted:
it is useful to consider the different features of the
full range of techniques used in collecting and analyzing data for different time periods. These last two
points are useful to better understand the longitudinal research designs that are introduced later in this
entry.
At the end of these steps, it is possible to adopt the
following definition:
Longitudinal research must be defined in terms of
both the data and the methods of analysis that are
used in the research. Longitudinal research is a
research in which: (a) data are collected for each item
or variable for two or more distinct time periods;
(b) the subjects or cases analyzed are the same or at
least comparable from one period to the next; and
(c) the analysis involves some comparison of data
between or among periods. (Menard 2002, 2)

According to Greg J. Duncan and Graham Kalton
(2002, 50–78), the different longitudinal designs
encountered on a research field can be classified as
follows:
1. In repeated cross-sectional surveys, the kind
of information collected (e.g., questions to
subjects) is the same over time while samples
change. Anyway, samples are drawn from
equivalent populations (in terms of geographical boundaries, age-limits, etc.).
2. In panel surveys, information collected and
samples are the same over time. Panel surveys

can differ deeply in the interval between
rounds of data collection; it can range from
weeks (as is usual for consumer panels in market research) to years (as is usual in household
panels). There are also hybrid designs where
subjects stay in the panel not for all its length
but just for a part of it; this is the case of the
Surveys of Consumers (SOC) held at the
University of Michigan since 1946.
3. In retrospective cross-sectional surveys, there
are many time points but just one collection
occasion.
4. Electronic data archives can also be used to set
up longitudinal designs. They may be administrative or even commercial; the last can be a
valuable source of information to study consuming behavior. According to the research
designs and objectives, a myriad of data analysis techniques exist that are useful for different
purposes. The interested reader can refer to
Menard’s Longitudinal Research.
It is not easy to give an overview of the origins
of longitudinal research since many disciplines—not
only social sciences—are involved in them, notes
Elisabetta Ruspini. If we focus on data collection,
longitudinal studies origins can be traced back to the
first national censuses in New France (now Quebec,
since 1665), Sweden (1749), Norway and Denmark
(1769), and the United States (1790). As to longitudinal data analysis, we have to wait until the 1920s
in the United States to appreciate—in psychology
and medical sciences—a flourishing of longitudinal
studies concerning child development. It is interesting to note that two of the most important stages in
longitudinal studies history are strictly connected to
consumption and consumer culture. In fact, one of
the methodological problems Paul F. Lazarsfeld tried
to solve introducing panel studies was the causal
order of the relationship between consumption and
advertising (Do we buy a certain product after listening to the advertising on the radio? Or do we listen to
the advertising of a product we bought to gratify ourselves?). Lazarsfeld’s contribution was particularly
valuable because he was the first to introduce systematically longitudinal studies in social sciences, particularly in sociology and in political science. The second
important stage strictly connected to consumption
took place at the end of the 1960s with the American

Luxury and Luxuries

Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID). It was
the first of a series of household panels that became
widespread even in Europe during the 1980s. They
cover individuals’ socioeconomic condition—much
attention is paid to consumption behavior—and their
growth is due to the information need concerning
demographics and the social and economic crises of
advanced societies since the 1970s.
Briefly, there are four objectives that longitudinal studies try to achieve. First, as anticipated by
Lazarsfeld’s pioneering work, longitudinal studies
could be set up to establish causal relationships. From
a statistical point of view, three conditions have to
be satisfied: (1) there must be a systematic relationship (covariation) between cause and effect; (2) the
relation has to be not spurious, that is, it must persist
even when other variables are controlled for; (3) the
supposed cause must precede (or be simultaneous
with) the supposed effect. In the context of standard
cross-sectional studies, the first two conditions can
be controlled for while the third one—concerning the
causal order—can be only assumed. In the context
of longitudinal studies, a direct control for causal
order is possible. Second, longitudinal data are collected when one wants to analyze individual or social
change. In the first case, we want, for instance, to
study how individuals enter, persist, or exit from a
condition of poverty; in the second case, we want to
know if poverty is increasing, stable, or decreasing in
the whole society or in some of its subgroups. Third,
longitudinal studies are necessary if one wants to disentangle age, period, or cohort effects. For example, a
general decrease in book reading could be explained
as an age effect (people getting older stop reading),
as a cohort effect (individuals born and socialized in
different years have decreasing reading practices), or
as a period effect (the whole society declines due to
specific historical conditions). Fourth, when studying
changes at the individual level, we could be interested
in distinguishing inertial effects from omitted variables effects. Let’s go back to the poverty example.
In such a field, there can be inertial effects (the longer
one is poor, the more difficult it is to exit poverty) due,
for instance, to demoralization. Such inertial effects
tend to be overestimated if one does not take into
account (omit) important variables such as household
networks. Longitudinal studies allow for the variables
researchers should omit to be taken into account, so
as to get better estimates of inertial effects.
Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi

873

See also Measuring Standards of Living; Surveys

Further Readings
Duncan, Greg J., and Graham Kalton. “Issues of Design
and Analysis of Surveys Across Time.” International
Statistical Review 55 (1987): 97–111.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. “The Uses of Panels in Social Research.”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
92 (1948): 405–410.
Menard, Scott. Longitudinal Research. 2nd ed. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002.
Rose, David, ed. Researching Social and Economic Change:
The Uses of Household Panel Studies. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Ruspini, Elisabetta. Introduction to Longitudinal Research.
London: Routledge, 2002.

LUXURY

AND

LUXURIES

Luxury refers to a condition of comfort characterized by opulence, elegance, and the enjoyment of
desirable, inessential and rare objects, and pleasurable activities. As term, concept, and practice, luxury
presents a complex history in Western cultures owing
to its connotations of distinction, privilege, and selfindulgence and because of its relevance to notions
of progress, stability, and decline. Already amply
debated in the Hebrew and Greco-Roman civilizations, excessive sumptuousness and spectacular display have traditionally proved controversial issues.
A gratuitous and therefore “scandalous” waste of
resources, luxury has been associated with immorality and sin on a variety of levels. It is indeed significant that the Latin luxus has an etymological
connection to luxuria, or lust. In particular, Western
cultures have traditionally figured the pernicious
effects of luxury through feminized allegories thus
designating it as an intrinsically female quality and
an effeminizing influence on men.
In An Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1767/1995), Adam Ferguson points out the difficulty of providing a satisfactory and coherent definition of luxury, as he observes that “we are far from
being agreed on the application of the term luxury,”
which may generally be taken to “signify that complicated apparatus which mankind devise for the ease
and convenience of life” and “all that assemblage
which is intended rather to please the fancy, than to
obviate real wants, and which is rather ornamental

874

Luxury and Luxuries

than useful” (1995, 232–233). Presenting it as an
“assemblage,” Ferguson avoids defining luxury as a
mere accumulation of objects (or luxuries). In fact,
luxury also implies distinctive activities and gestures
of self-display crucial to its function as a positional
category locating the individual in relation to other
individuals and socioeconomic groups.
Luxury corresponds to a discourse, an intersection of knowledge and power in Michel Foucault’s
terminology, which undergoes important epistemic
shifts in different cultural and historical environments. As such, it is both an object and a sign, the
product of wealth and the representation of its usage.
In semiotic terms, then, luxury is not an index but
a multifaceted sign. It directs its addressee toward
absent (and often largely implicit) signifieds belonging to complex cultural mythologies of lack and
overabundance. A “cultural marker . . . halfway
between object and sign,” and, more generally, “less
an external substance than a cultural coefficient”
(Morton 2000, 18–19), luxury is intimately related
to artistic and literary representation, and therefore
plays an important and multifaceted role in definitions of communal and individual identities.

Luxury in History
The Old Testament defined luxury as a sin in line
with the punishment of unregulated enjoyment
expounded in the book of Genesis. Biblical lore
fixed the traditional Western approach to luxury
by treating it as a cause of sociopolitical decline,
especially in Samuel and Kings, and an “active” sin,
a rebellion against the Law of God to be eradicated
from individuals and society (Sekora 1977, 23–28).
Later treatments of luxury in classical civilizations
presented essential similarities with Hebrew precedents. Thus, in Greek philosophy and legislation, it
was often featured as a destabilizing force threatening the balance of the cosmos, a pernicious human
impulse to be curbed and controlled. For Socrates,
in Plato’s Republic, the luxurious individual is the
lowest form of humanity in whom appetites prevail over reason, an agent of anarchy in an otherwise orderly universe. Similarly, Roman culture
produced a substantial number of denunciations of
luxury and calls for its suppression to ensure the
subsistence of the res publica. Thus, Roman legislators identified with ever-increasing precision the

forms of luxurious indulgence to be punished, and
luxury called forth the rhetorical skills of Cicero, the
satirical barbs of Juvenal, and the historical critiques
of Sallust, who dated the penetration of luxury
into Rome back to its destruction of Carthage, and
Livy, for whom luxury had entered Rome with the
return of its victorious armies from Asia in 187 BCE
(Sekora 1977, 36–37).
Drawing on these precedents, the Fathers of the
Christian Church associated luxury with corruption
and damnation and accordingly influenced medieval conceptions of it. Another distinctive feature of
late-medieval discourses on the evils of luxury were
the sumptuary laws that harked back to such classical precedents as the Roman sumptuariae leges
and aimed at regulating consumption along socioeconomic lines. In fourteenth-century England, for
instance, Edward III passed the earliest sumptuary
decrees, later significantly expanded during the reign
of Henry VII in the late-fifteenth century. Still in force
well into the later modern era, these highly controversial statutes were specific manifestations of the
clash between the ritualized luxury of feudal civilization and a growing bourgeois culture characterized
by acquisitiveness and ostentation.
The development of modern Western discourses
of luxury climaxed in the eighteenth century, when
it became a central concern in a wide-ranging debate
on such themes as civilization, progress, and decline.
In the process, the discourse touched on issues of
stability, protoanthropological theories of national
character, the evolution of human societies, private
morality and public virtues, and the delineation of
discrete gendered identities. Perhaps the single most
influential work that launched the Enlightenment
debate on luxury on a European scale was Bernard
Mandeville’s satirical poem “The Grumbling Hive”
(1705), republished with prose additions as The
Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723). Here, the author
rejects the idea of the fundamentally selfless nature
of human beings, arguing instead that self-interest
is their main motivation and a fundamental force
of change. As a major manifestation of this human
tendency, luxury represents progress, wealth, and
power. Mandeville’s polemical statements gave rise
to a controversy that prompted interventions from
all the different national Enlightenment traditions.
In particular, the question of human progress significantly expanded the scope of the debate, as

Luxury and Luxuries

did assessments of the civilizing potential of what
Charles-Louis de Montesquieu termed le doux commerce (sweet commerce).
The suggestion that luxury could contribute
to cultural refinement and the development of
the arts (as in David Hume’s essay “Of Luxury,”
1742; later retitled “Of Refinement in the Arts,”
1760) was an extremely divisive concept. Exemplary
among the vindications of luxury was Voltaire’s provocative poem “Le Mondain” (1736), whereas one
of the most vocal censors was John Brown in his
severely anticommercial Estimate of the Manners
and Principles of the Times (1757–1758). Yet as
intellectuals started to defend luxe de commodité
(luxury of comfort) or literature and the arts as
forms of luxury, the century saw a gradual process of
rationalization and “demoralization” of the sumptuous that progressively removed it from religious
and ethical strictures. As a result, by the 1790s, the
discourse had reorganized along three main lines—a
continuation of traditional condemnations, a moderate mediation between older and newer approaches,
and views of luxury as inextricably woven into
contemporaneity. In this latter perspective, Adam
Smith’s writings on political economy—especially
The Wealth of Nations (1776)—significantly treated
luxury objects as mere components of an economic
system and thus anticipated nineteenth-century
developments.
In the new century, luxury objects were more
widely available and thus increasingly associated
with the decencies of life. Yet although this industrial and democratized luxury became typical of
bourgeois society, political economists increasingly
abandoned it as a relevant category in a situation
dominated by mass production and consumption.
By contrast, near the end of the century, luxury and
luxuries began to feature prominently in innovative
sociological studies on the consumption practices of
the wealthy bourgeoisie. In 1880–1801, Henri Joseph
Léon Baudrillart published his ambitiously exhaustive History of Private and Public Luxury from
Antiquity to the Present. Thorstein Veblen’s identification of “conspicuous consumption” as a defining
trait of the “leisure class” allowed for an up-to-date
examination of luxury and its social symbolism (in
The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899). Equally
significant contributions were Georg Simmel’s On
Social Differentiation (1890) and Werner Sombart’s

875

Luxury and Capitalism (1913). The human sciences
variously appropriated the issue of luxury and gave
it renewed importance as a central category in interpretations of contemporary social and economic
phenomena. Sociological reevaluations of superfluity
as a key factor of discrimination and classification,
what Pierre Bourdieu calls the logic of “distinction,”
were also part of the background to Marcel Mauss’s
theory of the gift (The Gift, 1923–1924). As a form
of gratuitous expenditure resonant with symbolic
values, Mauss’s gift belongs in an economy of excess
that works through the expulsion of meaningful
waste. Also drawing on Mauss’s theory, Georges
Bataille’s notion of the “accursed share”—the symbolic surplus and dangerous superabundance that
societies ritually exorcise and expel—was another
significant, early twentieth-century attempt at making sense of excessive consumption (The Accursed
Share, 1949).

Contemporary Issues
The intersection of object and sign, materiality and
representation, typical of the discourse of luxury, is
particularly crucial in recent manifestations and figurations of the sumptuous. From the late-twentieth
century, luxury industries have started to merge
into conglomerates, the largest of which is LVMH
(Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton). Founded in 1987,
this company incorporates over 50 luxury brands
in the areas of perfumes and cosmetics, fashion,
champagne and liqueurs, jewelry, and leisure. It also
owns the Bon Marché department store in Paris,
the original inspiration for Emile Zola’s novel about
late-nineteenth-century retail culture and consumer
economy, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883). The “group
mission and values” statement on LVMH’s official
website declares that the company is committed to
spreading “the most refined qualities of the Western
‘Art de Vivre’ around the world” through products
that convey “cultural values” by mixing “tradition
and innovation” and capable of “kindl[ing] dream
and fantasy.” This global conglomerate has opened
the way for similar companies such as the Frenchbased PPR, originally Pinault-Printemps-Redoute,
and Swiss-based Richemont.
Owing to the remarkable increase in the demand
for, and consumption of, luxury goods and activities,
recent scholarship has again focused on luxury as a

876

Luxury and Luxuries

relevant economic factor. In Luxury Fever (1999),
Robert H. Frank has examined the exponential growth
of luxury consumption in the late-twentieth-century
United States by setting it in the context of a widening gap between the rise in the retributions of upper
socioeconomic groups and a generally slower average
growth of incomes. Also, from a North American
perspective, James B. Twitchell has addressed recent
manifestations of conspicuous consumption as part of
a compelling passion for luxury that has uninterruptedly affected Western societies since the 1950s. He has
also suggested a taxonomy of contemporary forms of
luxury through such categories as “technoluxe,” technological luxuries gradually mutating into necessities;
“populuxe,” originating with the 1950s to 1960s consumer boom and the beginnings of emulative celebrity
culture; and “opuluxe,” contemporary “luxurifications” of consumption in the areas of fashion, retail,
advertising, and the media.
Although sustained investments in the discourse of
luxury are a thing of the past, contemporary scholarship continues to engage with this concept as a complex cultural fact producing important effects at the
nexus of materiality and signification. In a postmodern perspective, therefore, luxury constitutes an aesthetic and economic frame enabling Western cultural
systems to define, and make sense of, notions of ownership, practices of consumption, and ideas of taste
and distinction within a context broadly characterized by mutable and aleatory principles. Particularly,
luxury matters in relation to a dimension of individual
choice that is one of the few reliable tenets in a situation where shared patterns of consumer behavior and
identity no longer obtain. Luxury is thus a knowingly
relativized category, whose provisional and strategic
relevance betrays a keen awareness of the unstoppable
interplay of signs, objects, and activities composing
contemporary Western cultural systems. Particularly,
the discourse of luxury bears on contemporary
notions of subjectivity and treatments of identity as
construct and performance. Its distinctive positional
function contributes to processes of distinction and
classification of the body and the self, as well as to a
reassessment of the cultural value of space and time.
American designer Tom Ford has recently
described “democratized” luxury as one of the main
outcomes of his transformation of the Gucci fashion house in the mid- to late 1990s. As a result of
these changes, “people from lots of different income
levels could then participate in the dream. It became

mass luxury” (2004, 26). Ford observes further that
“fashion is a luxury, just like steak or caviar or champagne,” and stresses its relevance to identity-making
processes: luxury “adds something to your life,”
because we are all essentially “physical beings who
live in a material world” (2004, 21). These words
clarify the extent to which luxury matters to contemporary definitions of individuality and a dimension
of enjoyment that justifies the indispensable presence of objects and signs of superfluity in contemporary lives. Recasting and updating older models
of individual hedonistic consumption originating in
Romantic-period culture, Ford’s statements confirm
that luxury contributes to delineating forms of selfhood within the time- and space-specific conditions
of pleasurable enjoyment, conspicuous consumption,
and self-display.
It is hardly coincidental that essential coordinates
of subjectivity, such as time and space, should be
deeply affected by contemporary revisions and reinventions of luxury as object and sign. Space becomes
luxurious whenever one experiences the opulence
of emptiness as a form of pleasantly gratuitous spatial expenditure. A case in point is Rem Koolhaas’s
(Office for Metropolitan Architecture [OMA])
Prada shop in New York’s SoHo district, opened
in December 2001. Located in the building previously used for the SoHo branch of the Guggenheim
Museum, the shop covers an area of 23,000 square
feet and is estimated to have cost around 40 million
dollars. In the main section of this enormous retail
space, designer wares are displayed in a large empty
area that not only increases the luxury aura of the
goods on sale through ritualized presentation but
also transforms superfluous space itself into a luxurious experience. Similarly, the luxury of emptiness
as the paradoxically ultimate form of sumptuousness is in full sight in Andreas Gursky’s (photo) art
installations “Prada I” (1996), “Prada II” (1997),
and “Prada III” (1998). In the second of these
works, in particular, the hallmark shelves of a Prada
shop stand completely empty. This representation of
(absent) opulence uncannily conjures up the luxury
aura of the missing goods, expenditure as mirage
and impossibility, and the self-renewing desire for
the unattainable. Thus, this artwork effectively
transforms a void into an evocation of the multiple
suggestions of luxury.
German intellectual Hans Magnus Enzensberger
has emphasized how space and time (especially its

Luxury Taxes

slowness) have recently become luxuries that are
more radically relevant to contemporary sociocultural formations than older forms based on the ostentation of material wealth. Paradoxically, however,
present-day elites cannot enjoy such luxury, caught
up as they are in late-capitalist patterns of incessant
production and consumption. In an ironic twist,
Enzensberger suggests that those who may enjoy
time-as-luxury are the masses of the unemployed, the
elderly, immigrants, and refugees, who are the bottom layers of contemporary advanced societies. Yet
for these people, time is anything but a privilege. If
luxury constantly oscillates between materiality and
signification, Enzensberger’s provocative approach
utterly dematerializes it into time and space, even as
he locates it at the center of the structural fault lines
underlying contemporary societies.
The conversion of luxury into a spatiotemporal reality is both a measure of its cultural importance and its conceptual slipperiness. Indeed,
Enzensberger’s interpretation ultimately respects
the lines of development of the discourse of luxury.
It engages with the difficulty of defining luxury’s
transitional and contingent nature, its combination
of materiality and signification, while recognizing
its centrality to complex sociocultural systems. In
Arjun Appadurai’s words, luxury objects—and, we
may add, activities—are “goods whose principal
use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply
incarnated signs” (1986, 38; italics in original). It
is precisely the multiplicity and instability of luxury
that grounds the uninterrupted investment in its production and consumption, as well as its discursive
relevance and vitality in Western cultures.

877

Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Zig Zag: The Politics of
Culture and Vice Versa. New York: New Press, 1997.
Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society.
Edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Ford, Tom. Tom Ford. Foreword by Anna Wintour.
Introduction by Graydon Carter. Interview and text by
Bridget Foley. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Frank, Robert H. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to
Satisfy in an Era of Excess. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Hollein, Max, and Christoph Gruneberg, eds. Shopping: A
Century of Art and Consumer Culture. Liverpool, UK:
Tate Liverpool, 2002.
Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic
Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Perrot, Philippe. Le Luxe: Une richesse entre faste et
comfort XVIIIe–XIXe siècle [Luxury: Wealth between
opulence and comfort in the 18th–19th centuries]. Paris:
Seuil, 1995.
Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought,
Eden to Smollett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977.
Silverstein, Michael J., and Neil Fiske (with John Butman).
Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury
Goods—and How Companies Create Them. New York:
Portfolio, 2008.
Twitchell, James B. Living It Up: Our Love Affair with
Luxury. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Websites
LVMH. www.lvmh.com.

Diego Saglia
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Desire; Fashion;
Identity; Luxury Taxes; Positional Goods;
Postmodernism; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities
in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century
Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual
and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Calefato, Patrizia. Lusso [Luxury]. Rome: Meltemi, 2003.

LUXURY TAXES
A luxury tax is an excise levy on goods or services
considered to be luxuries rather than necessities. If
luxuries are consumed conspicuously with the intention to gain social status by distinction, one can call
them status goods. The taxation of status goods has
a long tradition. Historical examples are taxes on servants, drapes, hair powder, or windows in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth century in England
or Holland. Modern examples can be found in the
United States, where luxury taxes were introduced
on expensive cars, boats, aircrafts, jewelry, and furs
in the late-twentieth century.

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Luxury Taxes

Generally, goods can be taxed for several reasons: taxes are levied on goods for fiscal reasons
to finance governmental activities, such as defense,
infrastructure, and social redistribution. This is not
without problems because taxes on goods other
than lump-sum taxes distort behavior away from
goods (and activities) that are taxed toward goods
(and activities) that are not taxed. As a result of the
tax, individuals reduce their economic activities,
which causes an economic loss over the revenue
collected on a societal level. This loss of welfare is
known as the excess burden or deadweight loss of
taxation.
Initiated by the seminal work of Frank P. Ramsey
(1927) and carried on by Peter A. Diamond and
James A. Mirrlees (1971), the optimal taxation literature identifies tax systems that minimize the distortion of behavior and with this the excess burden
of taxation, subject to a certain amount of governmental revenue. The main question in this stream
of literature is, How can a certain budget be raised
through commodity taxes with minimal distortions
and therefore with a minimum excess burden?
Corrective taxes have a totally other intention.
The work of Arthur C. Pigou (1920) analyzes the use
of taxes to correct for externalities associated with
imperfect private markets. With corrective taxes, the
state tries to internalize the negative external effects
of a certain kind of destructive or harmful behavior.
Examples are pollution of the environment or behavior that negatively affects health, such as the use of
cigarettes or alcohol. Here the question to be answered
is, How can a certain kind of behavior be changed by
taxes to maximize welfare?
Also, the taxation of status goods and luxuries has
a long tradition in economic theory and thinking and
often implies strong normative statements. From a
mercantilist perspective, ostentatious consumption
of luxuries diminishes capital accumulation, reduces
economic growth, and is to be seen as immoral and
condemnable. Therefore, conspicuous consumption
was often tried to inhibit by sumptuary laws but with
little success.
Bernard de Mandeville offers a contrary view,
however, in his poem “The Grumbling Hive: or,
Knaves Turn’d Honest” published first in 1705 and
again in 1714 in his seminal work The Fable of the
Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. He states
that any selfish economic activity and thus also the

conspicuous consumption of luxuries generates
economic growth and increases welfare. In other
words, from Mandeville’s perspective, status seeking
is a socially desirable motive.
With the actual development of trade and economic prosperity, the mercantilist thesis that high
levels of consumption were incompatible with sustainable economic growth was disproved.
Intellectual authorities of the classical school, such
as Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), and
John Rae (Statement of Some New Principles on
the Subject of Political Economy, 1834), distinguish
between legitimate and illegitimate consumption and
fear economic and social instability. Consumption
behavior, which corresponds to individual rank in
society, is seen as legitimate whereas consumption that exceeds individual rank in society is to be
repudiated.
Conspicuous consumption also plays a central role in the work of institutionalist Thorstein
B. Veblen. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, he
describes the consumption behavior of the pecuniary
upper class as well as its propensity to avoid useful
work and its negative effects on economic and societal development.
A renaissance of this kind of thinking can
be found in the social and consumption criticism of
John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society,
1958), Fred Hirsch (Social Limits to Growth,
1976), and Tibor Scitovsky (The Joyless Economy,
1976), who focus on qualitative aspects of economic
progress. Assuming status seeking as a zero-sum
game, Hirsch even emphasizes the social limits to
growth.
More recently, the relation between status seeking, conspicuous consumption, and interpersonal
effects have gained attention in consumption theory.
The idea is that individuals gain a social usefulness
by conspicuous consumption in a social environment besides the materialistic usefulness from consumption. Two branches of ideas can be identified:
In the contributions of Robert H. Frank (1985) as
well as Norman J. Ireland (1994), individuals care
about their status, in other words, about their rank
in the consumption or income hierarchy of society.
Whereas in Frank’s model, rank in the consumption
hierarchy causes usefulness directly, in the model of
Ireland, individuals look after their status in a world
of asymmetric information. Individuals usually know

Luxury Taxes

their own income quite well but cannot observe
the income of others directly. However, individuals
have the option to signal their wealth by the conspicuous consumption of positional (visible) goods.
In the “signaling equilibrium,” observers then infer
correctly about individuals’ ranks in the income
hierarchy of society, which causes status utility to
the individual. All these models have in common
that status is a value itself and causes purpose or
worth directly. By contrast to the instrumental use of
conspicuous consumption, for instance, to impress
potential partners, this implies that the motivation to
consume conspicuously can be seen as intrinsic.
All of these contributions essentially adhere to
Hirsch’s way of thinking and define status seeking as
a zero-sum game: consumption of status goods raises
the worth of those who consume conspicuously but
decreases the worth of those who do not. Thus,
resources used in status-driven consumption cannot increase welfare on a societal level. The authors
claim that the conspicuous consumption of status
goods is welfare decreasing and often recommend
introducing a luxury tax to internalize the negative
external effects of conspicuous consumption. These
results are hardly surprising because they follow
directly from the assumption that if status seeking is
assumed to be a zero-sum game, it cannot be welfare
improving.
In line with Hirsch’s ideas, in 1990, a 10 percent
luxury excise tax was introduced by the U.S. government on sales of expensive cars, boats, aircrafts,
jewelry, and furs. From this perspective, Hirsch’s way
of thinking can be seen as quite successful. However,
after only three years, the tax was removed, because
of unwanted side effects and distortions. On the
one hand, consumers changed their consumption
behavior toward other status goods, which were not
affected by the new tax. On the other hand, producers changed their product lines toward more mainstream or offered to reimburse the luxury tax.
A different point of view is reflected by Laurie S.
Bagwell and B. Douglas Bernheim (1996) and Justus
Haucap (2001) where demonstrative consumption is
seen as a useful signaling or communication device in
the initiation of social contacts. Here, status itself does
not cause usefulness directly; that is, the motivation
to consume conspicuously can be seen as extrinsic
or instrumental. Again, individuals face asymmetric
information. They know their own income quite well

879

but cannot observe the income of potential partners
directly. However, individuals have the option to
signal their wealth by the demonstrative consumption of positional (visible) goods with the objective
to match with desired partners, and Haucap demonstrates that conspicuous consumption as a signal
or communication device in social interaction may
be welfare improving. However, if status signaling
by the conspicuous consumption of status goods can
be welfare increasing, it should not be taxed from a
welfare economic perspective.
In the history of economic thought, luxury, status
seeking, and conspicuous consumption are seen as
highly divergent. Thus, it is hardly surprising that
economic advice with respect to a possible governmental intervention varies with time and perspective.
Whereas historical policy recommendations are often
based on open moral considerations, more recent
ones are often based on the arbitrary definition of
status seeking as a zero-sum game and with this on
a questionable welfare analysis. Taking these results
into account today, luxury taxes are hard to justify.
Tobias Thomas
See also Affluent Society; Conspicuous Consumption;
Desire; Economics; Luxury and Luxuries; Positional
Goods; Social Class; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings
Bagwell, Laurie S., and B. Douglas Bernheim. “Veblen
Effects in a Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.”
American Economic Review 86 (1996): 349–373.
Diamond, Peter A., and James A. Mirrlees. “Optimal
Taxation and Public Production I: Production Efficiency
and II: Tax Rules.” American Economic Review
61 (1971): 8–27 and 261–278.
Frank, Robert H. “The Demand for Unobservable and
Other Nonpositional Goods.” American Economic
Review 75 (1985): 101–116.
Haucap, Justus. “Consumption and Social Relationship
(in German).” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftswissenschaften
(Review of Economics), 52 (2001): 243–263.
Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976.
Ireland, Norman J. “On Limiting the Market for Status
Signals.” Journal of Public Economics 53 (1994): 111–126.
Pigou, C. Arthur. The Economics of Welfare. London:
Macmillan, 1920.
Ramsey, Frank P. “A Contribution to the Theory of
Taxation.” Economic Journal 37 (1927): 47–61.

880

Lyotard, Jean-François

Veblen, Thorstein B. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study of Institutions. New York: New
American Library of World Literature, 1899. Reprint,
1953.

LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS
(1924–1998)
The origins of postmodernism lie in the architecture and writing of Robert Venturi in the 1960s and
Charles Jencks’s identification of an architectural
movement in the 1980s. But it is with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979 [English
trans. 1984]) that the broader implications of a
shift in the nature of modernity were first explored.
Lyotard, whose early career was as a philosophy
teacher and Marxist activitist, later employed
Freudian ideas as he engaged with the contemporary philosophical debates that grew out of phenomenology and post-structuralism.
The key feature of the postmodern world that he
described was the failure of the grand narratives—
those of religion, philosophy and politics—to continue to legitimate knowledge claims. The problem
was the success of science in arbitrating the truthvalue of descriptive statements and in eradicating
contradictions. Science operates with a different
pragmatics (rules of the discourse) from narrative
knowledge, so statements making a claim to truth
are subject to standards of proof as evidence is verified or falsified. This happens within a community
of those with equal rights to contribute statements
and the effect is to progress toward a consensus.
Science can produce institutions and professions,
but this system of knowledge is at odds with the
narrative-based language games traditionally used
to establish a broader social bond. Societies have, up
to and through modernity, been bound together by
systems of knowledge in which who speaks and how
they speak are what confirms the value of what they
say. The form of what is to count as knowledge—
the social stance of speakers; the rhetoric of words,
rhythms and patterns, and references—is specific
to each culture. Who knows is distinguished from
who doesn’t according to the criteria of justice,
beauty, happiness, truth, and efficiency that are

already established in a culture and are used to judge
the competence of the performance of knowledge
claims. It is through tradition and custom that
these standards are set and narrative knowledge
can then blend descriptive knowledge with ethical
knowledge—how the world is with how human
beings should act. Narrative knowledge produces a
coherent and complete system of know-how, knowing how to speak and knowing how to hear “through
which the community’s relationship to itself and
its environment is played out. What is transmitted
through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules
that constitutes the social bond” (Lyotard 1984, 21).
The success of science as a mode of knowledge
that describes the world has undermined the grand
narratives, leading to a weakening of the social
bond and resulting in the postmodern condition.
Scientific thinking led to the operations of commercial companies and the state being transformed
into technological systems organized around principles of efficiency. But, Lyotard argues, efficiency,
performance maximization, and power combine
to produce local self-legitimating systems that are
independent of an overarching grand narrative that
might legitimate them all in relation to society as a
whole. Despite the fact that science has developed
to try to grasp instability (chaos, complexity), the
postmodern condition is one of many little narratives that work for particular fields of human activity but which are each temporary and unstable.
There is no grand narrative that can draw them
together into a coherent whole, legitimating the specialized knowledge of different fields through the
same criteria.
Lyotard revisited the theme of the postmodern a
number of times in essays and papers, but though
it attracted wide interest, it was not perhaps the
source of his most subtle philosophical ideas. These
are difficult to grasp and impossible to summarize
or adequately represent, but they involve provocative debates around a series of different forms of
knowledge and discourse. In Libidinal Economy
(1974 [English Trans. 1993]), Lyotard articulated
a response to the sterility of semiology through
an invocation of the body that draws on Sigmund
Freud’s ideas about drives, cathexis, and polymorphous sexuality. In The Differend (1983 [English
trans. 1988]), his theme is the conflict in discourse
between those who justifiably disagree in ways that

Lyotard, Jean-François

can never be properly resolved. All of these ideas
reappear in collections of essays that also cover
aesthetic and technological topics and a recurring
interest in time and judgment.
Tim Dant
See also Freud, Sigmund; Marxist Theories; Philosophy;
Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism; Semiotics

881

Further Readings
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1984.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. London:
Athalone Press, 1993.

M
economy, continue to reap its benefits. Rather than
a vindication of the new forms of liberal self-interest,
Mandeville’s work, functioning as a critique of early
eighteenth-century ideology, instead focuses on the
manner in which many supposed moralists employ
a discourse of virtue as an instrument in view of their
own self-interested ends.
Mandeville’s literary career began in 1703 with a
pro-Whig political satire as well as translations and
imitations of La Fontaine’s fables. After trying his
hand at several more political and burlesque satires,
Mandeville wrote the satirical poem that would lead
to his literary infamy, first published in 1705 as “The
Grumbling Hive: Or, the Knaves Turn’d Honest.”
Following the 1711 publication of his medical work,
A Treatise of the Hypochondriak and Hysterick
Passions, Mandeville added twenty explanatory
prose “Remarks” and the crucial philosophical treatise “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue”
(a text that Adam Smith suggests served as the conceptual foundation of Rousseau’s Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality) to this poem, which was republished in 1714 under the title The Fable of the Bees:
Or, Private Vice, Publick Benefits. Still, the work
remained virtually ignored until, following its third
augmentation and republication in 1723, the Grand
Jury of Middlesex attempted to censor the work,
claiming that it sought “to run down Religion and
Virtue as prejudicial to Society, and detrimental to
the State; and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride
and all vices as necessary to Public Welfare” (quoted
in Hundert 1997, xv). Although never resulting in
censorship, the cases piqued the public interest and
ultimately transformed The Fable of the Bees into

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD
(1670–1733)
Born in the environs of Rotterdam in 1670, Bernard
Mandeville obtained a medical degree from the
University of Leiden in 1691. After settling in London,
he began working as a physician treating nervous
disorders while pursuing a modest literary career. In
1723, however, following several attempts to censor
his chef d’oeuvre (masterpiece), The Fable of the Bees;
Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Mandeville unexpectedly became early eighteenth-century London’s
most infamous observer of changing societal and
economic realities. The Fable, which insists that the
motive force driving the increasingly liberal market
economy was self-interest rather than a benevolent
civic humanism, generated a scandal that lasted
throughout the eighteenth century, eliciting replies
from some of the most significant Enlightenment figures, including Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Berkeley,
David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam
Smith, and Immanuel Kant. Until his death from
influenza in 1733, Mandeville continually retooled
the Fable’s central position to counter the continual
attacks from his moralist and civic humanist critics, who insisted that public virtues, not “private
vices,” were the cement of human society. Whereas
Mandeville’s contemporaries traditionally depicted
his work as an inaugural, unapologetic vindication
of a laissez-faire economy, it targets, on the contrary,
moralists who, although appalled by Mandeville’s
depiction of the inherent viciousness of new market
883

884

Marcuse, Herbert

a national phenomenon and the name Mandeville,
often referred to as Man-devil, into a lightning rod
for debates concerning the changing vision of the
relation between morality and economy.
Other significant works, such as A Modest
Defense of Public Stews, in which he argues for statesponsored houses of prostitution or his “An Essay on
Charity and Charity-Schools” (reviled by Karl Marx)
in which he attacks schools designed to educate the
working poor, walk a fine line between advocacy and
critique. It is for this reason that Mandeville is often
misunderstood. The criticism directed at Mandeville
resulted from his appearing to be a champion of the
underlying selfish viciousness driving the new market economy. Understanding the critical thrust of his
project relies on reading it in relation to his intellectual
predecessors, especially Pierre Nicole, Pierre Bayle,
and La Rochefoucauld. As E. J. Hundert has demonstrated unambiguously, Mandeville’s Fable appropriates the French Augustinian skeptical arguments
of these late-seventeenth-century philosophers and
adapts them to the contours of London’s new market
realities. The section of the Fable titled “A Search into
the Nature of Society” gives a concise articulation of
Mandeville’s central position: society is the continuation of the self-seeking animal appetite transposed
into the social world, so society is founded grounded
on a paradox that Kant, referring to Mandeville,
will eventually call “unsocial sociability.” Lawgivers
must convince everyone that it is beneficial to repress
individual appetites and do so only to advance selfinterested ends by attaining what Mandeville refers to
(long before Marx’s English translators) as a “general
equivalent,” which is an imaginary reward that takes
the place of immediate satisfaction. In this way, however, virtue functions as yet one more mechanism,
routed through the laws of the nation and custom,
for pursuing one’s self-interest.
Craig Carson
See also Kant, Immanuel; Marx, Karl; Self-Interest;
Smith, Adam

Further Readings
Force, Pierre. Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A
Genealogy of Economic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Hundert, E. J. The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard
Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Hundert, E. J. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.
Mandeville, Bernard. Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices,
Publick Benefits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

MARCUSE, HERBERT
(1898–1979)
Born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Herbert Marcuse
came of age during World War I and served in the
German Army. Becoming disillusioned with the internal politics of the military, he began pursuit of an academic career. After receiving his doctorate, Marcuse
began a habilitation under Martin Heidegger,
the preeminent German philosopher of that era.
However, Marcuse left Freiburg in 1933 (largely due
to Heidegger’s affiliation with the National Socialist
Party) and joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung, now
frequently referred to as the Frankfurt school, where
he developed enduring professional relationships with
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Marcuse
fled Germany in 1934 and immigrated to the United
States. He took a hiatus from scholarship in the
1940s and early 1950s, working for both the Office
of Secret Services and the U.S. State Department, in
what, ostensibly, was an effort to directly contribute
to the struggle against fascism. Following his service,
Marcuse wrote the first of his major works, Eros and
Civilization (1955), followed by One-Dimensional
Man (1964) and The Aesthetic Dimension (1979).
In this later period of his career, Marcuse tended to
synthesize Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxian
structural analysis. His most important contributions
to consumption theory include the concepts of surplus repression, repressive de-sublimation, and onedimensional society, which are explained below.
Marcuse believed that humans are first and foremost motivated by the pursuit of pleasure. Like
Sigmund Freud, Marcuse viewed this “pleasure principle” as potentially dangerous because, in a world of
scarcity, survival often depends on our ability to sacrifice immediate desires for the sake of our long-term
best interests. And because nature leaves so many of
our desires unfilled, Marcuse argued that repression
and alienation are basic aspects of human social life.
The raison d’être of society is to help individuals fulfill all the natural desires that we would be unable
to meet if left in isolation. However, society can only

Marcuse, Herbert

extend human productivity by systematically forcing
its constituents to toil (a term that Marcuse uses to
designate labor that is both sublimated and alienated).
Even though the productive capacities of industrialized nations have come to far exceed that which is
necessary to meet all of the basic needs of their constituents, workers in these nations find themselves
toiling not less (as we would assume, since toil is no
longer justified by society’s original purpose of generating sufficient resources to satisfy the basic instinctual needs of its constituents) but more. This toil in
excess of what is required to meet basic instinctual
needs is what Marcuse terms surplus repression.
In essence, Marcuse argues that capitalism has
become a social pathology, supplanting the historical
purpose of society with its own logic of perpetual
market expansion. To support and justify its continued growth (and the maintenance of extraordinary
social repression, which such growth requires),
capitalism must penetrate the psyche of each individual to produce novel needs and desires that it
can subsequently fulfill. Thus, in late capitalism, the
modus operandi of industry is to facilitate expanded
production through the control and organization of
consumption.
Another major problematic that persists throughout Marcuse’s writings concerns consumer capitalism’s appropriation of the very mechanisms that once
acted as the engine of social change and adapted
society to better meet human needs:
Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were—
just as free enterprise, which they served—essentially
critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent
material and intellectual culture by a more productive
and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights
and liberties shared the fate of the society of which
they had become an integral part. The achievement
cancels the premises. (1964, 1)

Once capitalism revolutionized human productive capacity, overcame scarcity, and made it possible to finally fulfill all basic human needs, criticism
of the capitalist system, however rational, becomes
increasingly repudiated as a threat to prosperity.
Combined with the ever-present manipulation of
the media, aversion to social criticism has produced
a “one-dimensional” society incapable of change,
notes Marcuse (1964). Society continues to move
only farther down a path of increased bureaucratic
and technological rationalization. The consequence

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is that we find ourselves less and less happy, despite
greater and greater abundance.
Marcuse’s later writings argue that liberation
from the toil and repression, which dominate human
life under consumer capitalism, can be achieved only
through a “great refusal” by those yet to be fully
absorbed into the global capitalist system (i.e., the
people of the developing world). Only in these societies is it possible to create an alternate vision for the
future. The developed world must relearn from the
developing world the ability to be critical of the status quo and to imagine better alternatives. We may
even characterize the entire arc of Marcuse’s work as
exhibiting a sort of utopian methodology, whereby
“a specific historical practice is measured against its
own historical alternatives” (1964, xlii).
In his last major work, Marcuse retreats from his
pessimism a bit, offering art as one possible challenge
to consumerism because it creates a space to escape
the logic of capitalism and produce alternate visions
of the material relations that constitute society.
Marcuse (1979, ix) claims that
by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely
autonomous vis à vis the given social relations. In its
autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the
same time transcends them.

Such efforts, however, may also be appropriated
by capitalist institutions and turned on their head.
This should not be surprising since Marcuse believes
that even the most basic sex and other basic instinctual pleasures are used to distract us and divert
energy that could otherwise be put to use imagining
utopian alternatives. He describes this process as
“repressive de-sublimation.”
PJ Rey
See also Alienation; Broadcast Media; Capitalism; Desire;
Industrial Society; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Needs and Wants; Print Media; Psychoanalysis;
Rationalization

Further Readings
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated
by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1955. First
published 1920.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964.

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Markets and Marketing

Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a
Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (AD). Boston: Beacon
Press, 1979.

MARKETING DIVERSITY
See Markets and Marketing

MARKETING SOCIAL CHANGE
See Markets and Marketing

MARKETS

AND

MARKETING

Markets and marketing, in the broadest sense of
exchanging or bartering goods and services, are likely
prehistoric. They predate the origin of money as
entire trade systems based on barter clearly existed.
Z. S. Demirdjian, places the start of marketing more
than nine thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian
civilization of Proto-Armenia. He suggests that
ever since humankind settled to a sedentary life style,
marketing may have emerged to facilitate the
exchange process of either surplus or scarce food
grown through agriculture and domesticated animals
raised for food or for beasts of burden. (2005, 102)

Exchange is considered the key element defining
marketing (Bagozzi 1975). According to Adam
Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the propensity to “truck, barter, and trade” is common to all
humans. Notions of property, ownership, and capital
or surplus are necessary as well, but these can exist at
a group rather than individual level. Indeed, the contemporary corporation is an instance of a group
exchanging resources with other groups (B2B, or
business-to-business marketing) as well as with individuals (B2C, or business-to-consumer marketing).
Although Richard Bagozzi focused on the utilitarian
exchange of money, goods, and services in marketing,
he also recognized the symbolic exchange of intangibles such as the explicit and implicit promises of
brand advertising. Philip Kotler and Sidney Levy suggested a broadening of the scope of marketing as well
in urging that nonprofit organizations, such as governments, religious groups, politicians, hospitals, and

charitable organizations, should also employ principles of marketing to engage in better exchanges with
their various constituencies. This was a contentious
suggestion from the start. Among the objections
raised is that this broadened notion of marketing
potentially makes everything and everyone another
good to be marketed. Such “commoditization” may
or may not preclude alternative motivational and
inspirational frameworks, such as sincerity, art, love,
education, and divine calling. But it gives people
pause to ask, Is nothing sacred? That is, is there
nothing—blood, human organs, warfare, babies, sex,
prayer—that we want to keep outside the mechanisms of the market?
Attempts to answer this question have led some
to try to demonstrate that markets and marketing
are not the only means by which we give and receive
tangible and intangible valuables. Marcel Mauss
(1925/1967) in The Gift: Forms and Functions of
Exchange in Archaic Societies suggested that the gift
economy preceded the market economy and was
characterized by the obligatory exchange of largely
unnecessary objects to promote peaceful relations
between clans and societies. Christopher Gregory
characterizes such gift exchange as involving the
transfer of inalienable objects between people in a
state of reciprocal interdependence to establish a
qualitative relationship between them. Commodity
exchange, on the other hand, is seen by Gregory to
involve the transfer of alienable objects between people in a state of independence to establish quantitative
equivalence between the objects transacted. When
goods are alienable, the previous and current owners
can walk away from an exchange without obligations to ever see one another again. But the inalienability brought about by gift exchange binds the giver
and receiver into an ongoing relationship variously
characterized as debt, gratitude, or friendship.
Gregory’s characterization of gift exchange versus commodity exchange (i.e., marketing) has been
criticized as drawing too extreme a distinction
between the two. Alfred Gell, for instance, finds that
the sharp distinction between gifts and commodity exchange is overdrawn and contends that the
Melanesian ceremonial gift exchange, or Kula ring,
that so fascinated Mauss, is really derived from the
template of commodity barter. If so, there is a special
irony in that Mauss started his work on the gift to
counter the utilitarianism of marketplace exchange.
Although Mauss ultimately failed to find a more

Markets and Marketing

humane alternative to the market in the gift, a group
of largely French anthropologists and theorists carry
on this intellectual quest through Mouvement AntiUtilitarieste dans les Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS.
The organization was founded in 1980 to oppose
the highly rational choice approach to human behavior championed by Gary Becker and the Chicago
school of economics. Others, operating from different theoretical vantage points, have also in one way
or another attempted to demonstrate that there is
an alternative to supposedly rational marketplace
exchange as a grand model of human behavior. They
include feminist critiques of exchange, treatments
of the agapic love inherent in “the gift economy,”
a view of the imperative for passing along the gift
as the key to creativity and community, Marshall
Sahlins’s specification of “generalized reciprocity” as
giving without keeping track of debts imposed, and
work on sharing as a one-way transfer of resources
without reciprocal obligations (e.g., Belk 2007). But
even these attempts to theorize transfers outside of
the market come under attack when critics point out
self-interested motives for gift giving, debts imposed
by parental nurturing, and privatization of once
shared familial resources like money, music systems,
televisions, meals, and automobiles.
As these attempts to theorize alternatives to the
market mechanism suggest, there is a widespread
feeling that there is something not only impersonal
but also inhumane and alienating about the marketplace. Although there may be some truth to this
characterization of the market, there is also evidence that marketplace exchange is not as cold and
alienating as it is often thought to be. For example,
Mark Granovetter finds that business relationships
are often embedded in networks of friendship and
quite personal relationships. The Chinese concept of
guanxi involves networks of personal connections
in which relationships may be used to extract personal and business favors. Furthermore, two popular
concepts in contemporary marketing that champion
marketplace embeddedness are those of relationship
marketing (RM) and customer relationship management (CRM). Rather than being based on the
premise that personal relationships between buyers
and sellers make for a better world, both concepts
are aimed at achieving higher profits by generating
customer loyalty. The argument is that it is easier and
less expensive to keep a current customer than to find
a new one. Airline frequent flyer loyalty programs

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are one example, and CRM software makes it easier
to track online customers and recommend new offerings that are likely to appeal given their past purchase
history. The mechanisms by which greater customer
loyalties are sought are a combination of trust building and power sharing leading to commitment and
cooperation rather than antagonism between the two
parties.
Despite such attempts to humanize the practice of
marketing, there remains a taint on its image. Gell
(1992, 142) summarized this negative image with
two simple pairs of signs: “Gift-reciprocity—good/
market-exchange—bad.” The reasons for these characterizations are not hard to find. Greed, self-interest,
and mutual competitive antagonism do not make for
warm human interactions in the way that generosity,
altruism, and loving kindness do. The greed implied
here is more than mere self-interest or rational choice;
instead, it implies selfishness and an irrational desire
for more. There are also more cynical takes on RM
and CRM such as Stephen Brown’s characterization
of relationship marketing as an ingratiating obsequious attempt to fake sincere concern for the client’s
well-being and Dan Ariely’s goading question of
whether one’s overdraft at the bank is likely to lead
to a friendly call from the manager and a fee waiver
or whether it is more likely to result in a hefty penalty fee. Coupled with internal critiques of abrasive
or unethical marketing tactics, imbalanced outcomes
of marketing globalization, and promotion-fueled
consumer materialism, it is little wonder that the
image of marketing in a postmodern age is little different from the era of robber barons, hucksterism,
and snake oil salesmen. But do such negative perceptions reflect the reality of markets and marketing?
To begin to answer this question we need to more
closely examine the nature of both institutions.

Markets
The term markets is used in two senses to refer to
both places of exchange including farmers’ markets;
shopping malls; Internet auction sites, such as eBay;
and other concentrations of sellers and buyers and
to groups of potential buyers like the market for an
electric car, a new film, or used toys. The latter use
of markets as people is considered in the next section
while the former use of markets as places is the focus
here. Fernand Braudel characterizes early locational
markets as involving

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Markets and Marketing

immediate exchange: the goods are sold on the spot,
the purchases are taken and paid for there and then.
. . . This very ancient form of exchange was already
being practiced at Pompeii, Ostia or Timgad, and
had been for centuries or millennia before that:
ancient Greece had its markets, as did classical
China, or the Egypt of the Pharaohs, or Babylonia
where exchange made its very earliest appearance.
(1982, 29)

Small towns in Europe held markets once or
twice a week during the fifteenth- through eighteenthcentury period that Braudel studied, and big cities
had daily markets. The regularity of such markets
made them preferable to traveling merchants, both
because of their reliability and the increased surveillance and trust they promoted. Trade rules also
evolved to ensure fair weights and measures, to
collect import duties, and to regulate trading hours
and conditions. Even so, there were complaints of
greed, excessive food prices, smuggling, and unfair
monopolies (Braudel 1982, 49). Mikhail Bakhtin
characterized such markets and fairs as sites of
carnivalesque inversion where merriment, eroticism, subversion of order, and bacchanalian excess
were the order of the day. While today’s shopping
mall spectacles are sedate by comparison, certain
markets such as those of the casino resorts and
fantasy malls of Las Vegas may come close.
Eventually, periodic markets came to be challenged by permanent shops that were open daily. In
Braudel’s analysis, a key reason that shops began to
replace periodic markets is that they extended credit
to customers. Nevertheless, fairs continued to exist,
due in part to their festive carnivelesque atmosphere.
Peddlers also persisted to fill the gaps in channels
of distribution where fixed location shops of particular types did not exist. Many retail shops were
clustered by specialty or by type of clientele (e.g.,
luxury shops for the carriage trade). Along with
retail shops, wholesalers, warehouses, and service
industries such as banks, pawnbrokers, inns, and
apothecaries developed alongside the retail trade
in goods. Some of these service industries began to
operate regionally as with the Medicis who acted as
money changers to the Vatican. Eventually, regional
stock markets arose, and trade began over longer
distances (including goods shipped between the
New World, Europe, Africa, and Asia). As the use
of money spread and populations became more

literate, print advertising began to proliferate as
well. While trade routes, such as the Silk Road and
the spice routes, were ancient corridors of commerce, the European discovery and colonization of
the Americas set off a great expansion of multiway
trade involving both new goods and new markets.
This was a marked change from 1600 when Braudel
reports that in Europe grain traveled only five to
ten miles, cattle up to eleven miles, sheep forty to
seventy miles, and wool and woolen cloth twenty to
forty miles. Calicos from India; porcelain, silk, and
tea from China; flower bulbs from Turkey; spices
from India; slaves from Africa; and tobacco, sugar,
chocolate, rum, and coffee from the New World
were all among the consumer goods that began to
be transported across vast oceans with increasing
frequency.
We know the greatest amount about markets in
Europe and the United States. The historic role of
trade and markets in countries such as China is less
well researched. While Chinese goods were popular
in the West, China resisted Western goods for some
time (Stearns 2006). When nouveau riche merchants sought to display their wealth in late Ming
China, they strove to acquire local luxuries such as
Chinese art, gardens, dinnerware, and furniture. It
was not until after the British won the Opium War
and opened up treaty port cities like Shanghai in the
late-nineteenth century that foreign goods began to
become prominent in Chinese markets. Even in these
cases, the restriction of foreign merchants to the
treaty port cities meant that it was Chinese merchants
who carried these goods inland and retained control
of Chinese markets. By the early twentieth century,
there was a strong presence of Western goods in
China ranging from cigarettes to clocks to clothing.
The battle for Chinese markets that ensued between
Chinese and foreign brands had nationalistic overtones that were also fueled by Japanese invasions
and the increasing presence of colonial foreigners in
cities such as Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong.
Foreign brands were perceived as higher in quality
and status, whereas local brands tended to be lower
priced and were seen as more patriotic. However, it
was not uncommon for Chinese brands to be given
foreign-sounding names and for foreign brands to
adopt Chinese names in opposing efforts to make
exotic or localize their images.
While the nature of the physical or locational marketplace has gone through many phases and there are

Markets and Marketing

many differences across industries, several general
observations can be made about contemporary markets. Economies of scale have meant that larger retailers and retail chains have generally had an advantage,
and small-scale independent mom-and-pop stores
have gradually been replaced by larger retail chains
and big-box stores. Some regions such as India, which
has the largest number of small-scale retail shops in
the world, have been more resistant to the entry of
big-box stores and chains. But such stores are making an increasing foothold on the Indian subcontinent
and elsewhere. Larger stores generally appeal to consumers based on depth of merchandise (e.g., Borders
books), breadth of merchandise (e.g., Toys“R”Us),
and low prices (e.g., Walmart). There are exceptions
as seen, for example, with the more expensive and
narrower, shallower range merchandise found at convenience stores, such as the Japanese-owned 7-Eleven
stores. These stores compete instead on the basis of
handy locations, long store hours, and short checkout
lines. In many cases, personal service by clerks has
been replaced by self-service, sometimes including
self-checkout as well. The Universal Product Code
(UPC, or barcode) makes checkout, inventory replenishment, sales analysis, and accounting much easier
and quicker where stores have these systems integrated into their management information systems.
One of the functions of markets is to break and
mix the bulk of mass production into more appealing assortments of merchandise. But more than a
convenient assemblage of merchandise is necessary to attract contemporary buyers. Shopping has
become a recreational activity for many people and
a source that stimulates the senses and the imagination. The concept of designed retail environments
has often been linked to utopian images of consumer
paradises where seemingly any wish can be fulfilled
at a price. Early department stores were often grand
spaces variously referred to as dream worlds, palaces of consumption, and temples or cathedrals of
consumption. They offered inviting cornucopian
displays of exotic merchandise, deferential clerks,
and sumptuous architecture and design. Even though
this cornucopia was not equally available to all races
and classes and resulted in some anticonsumption
protests, the general theme of consumer abundance
was strong in twentieth-century America in particular. During the last half of the twentieth century and
continuing into the present, the United States and a
growing portion of the world also saw the rise of

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the spectacular, air-conditioned, self-enclosed shopping mall. Although these malls owe something to
the nineteenth-century covered arcades of France and
Italy, the concept was less connected to the pedestrian
flaneur than to the rise of automobile culture. And as
shopping malls began to compete with each other and
seek larger trading areas, a number of them began to
borrow from theme parks to create more and more
spectacular themed environments. This trend also
extends to spectacular retail “servicescapes,” such as
Niketowns, ESPN Zone stores, Rain Forest Cafes,
McDonald’s playlands, and American Girl stores.
Such malls and retail environments are reminiscent
of Bakhtin’s observations of carnivalesque fairs in
fifteenth- through eighteenth-century Europe. But in
the case of malls, the experience is much more controlled and safe from pickpockets, prostitutes, and
beggars. Furthermore, while these shopping mall
spaces may appear to be quasi-public spaces replacing
the town square with more comfortable alternatives,
they are private spaces where only a limited range of
behavior (mostly related to buying) may take place.
Another market trend within the past two decades
has been the rise of the virtual market and Internet
retailing. Despite the notable successes of Amazon.
com, eBay, Dell Computers, and a few other prominent Internet-only sites, many successful Internet
retailers also maintain brick-and-mortar off-line
stores. Although many consumers prefer the convenience of being able to shop online at any time of day
or night without ever leaving their homes or offices,
as well as the ability to readily compare prices online,
others prefer to touch, open, read, taste, and try on
merchandise before buying. In addition, brick-andmortar stores offer more instant gratification in
receiving the product at the moment of purchase and
the ability to return goods easily. As the next section
discusses, the fixed-location store may also be more
stimulating and entertaining than the online store. The
presence of other shoppers may be either a positive or
negative factor in physical location stores. Crowded
checkout lines at the supermarket may be unappealing, but being at a concert or religious service with
many others may add to the experience. Product categories are also important determinants, and certain
concepts such as online dentists, hairdressers, or automobile repair don’t lend themselves readily to online
selling. However, there are product categories such as
music, film, and books that can now be downloaded
quickly enough to provide fairly instant gratification.

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Markets and Marketing

Not only has more of the in-store activity been
shifted to consumers, but consumers have often also
become cocreators of the meaning of many of the
things they buy. This is especially evident in virtual
worlds, such as Second Life; interactive multiplayer
online games, such as World of Warcraft; and social
networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and
Twitter. Wiki sites, such as Wikipedia; visual sharing
cites, such as YouTube and Flickr; and open-source
software, such as Linux, rely on consumers for most
of their content. There is also another sense in which
consumers have taken more control of the market
through illegal file sharing of commercial music and
film. The film and music industries have been slow in
finding a profitable business model to operate from
in light of these new “free” markets and have instead
relied on legal claims of intellectual property rights
and some prosecution of high-profile cases of users
and facilitators of illegal Internet file swapping. Even
the Grateful Dead band, which for years had allowed
“tapers” to freely tape and swap concert tapes or
their digital equivalent as long as they weren’t selling them, cracked down in 2005 and made efforts
to stop the practice. This is not the first time that
new recording or broadcast technologies have been
viewed as a threat by the music and film industries.
Radio, television, tape recorders, video tape recorders, and recordable CD-ROMs and DVDs were all
resisted previously. Prominent cases like Napster
and Pirate Bay show how consumers are creating
their own nonprofit markets and seem to be able to
keep one step ahead of zealous industry adversaries
of these practices. As soon as one such site is shut
down, new alternative plans for file sharing seem to
emerge. In light of earlier discussions of alternatives
to the market, file sharing as well as coproduction in
phenomena such as Wikipedia and Linux, the sentiment that there should be alternatives to the market
seems alive, well, and newly empowered by the possibilities created by Internet technologies. The intellectual property battles currently taking place also
have some counterparts in markets for pirated or
counterfeited physical goods, except that the product
is more ephemeral in the case of digital copies.
As we begin to see in Internet selling and piracy,
marketing is no longer confined to activities that
occur at a fixed geographic place. But thus far in
looking at the place where goods are exchanged, we
have primarily considered only one of the “4 Ps” of
marketing. We now turn to the other three—product,

price, and promotion—that compose the marketing
mix. Together with place, it is this marketing mix for
a particular offering, as well as the strategic and tactical planning and monitoring behind it, that make up
the activity of marketing.

Marketing
Kalman Applbaum begins his analysis of marketing by noting the social sciences’ utter failure to
seriously consider the institution or practice of modern marketing. Aside from rare exceptions such as
Neil McKendrick’s treatment of the early marketing tactics of the now bankrupt Wedgwood porcelain company, social science accounts of consumers
encountering marketing offerings take a highly utilitarian perspective, scarcely recognizing the symbolic
role of brands and advertising. We are instead told
of consumers provisioning themselves in the marketplace by buying commodities. But, despite using
these terms himself, Applbaum (2004) observes that
modern marketing is a postcommodity phenomenon:
Marketing as a profession, first arose to deal with
the problem of expanding markets after they had
reached their natural limits, that is, when the market
for “needed” goods, at least in certain classes, had
become saturated. This is why marketing is a
product of affluent or abundant society—even if
eventually professional marketers expand and apply
their techniques in impoverished places as well. (9)

In other words, while marketing has been around
as long as there have been markets, the profession
of marketing arose when commodities such as sugar
were branded and consumers had to be enticed to
buy more and more of what by some sober reasoning are unnecessary goods and services.
Nevertheless, the chief fiction of marketing—the
marketing concept—holds that rather than trying
to sell consumers something for which they have
no need, successful marketing first identifies consumer needs and then produces offerings that satisfy
these needs. Jean Baudrillard called this need-based
formulation the democratic alibi. Aside from the
fact that marketing research sometimes identifies
consumer desires that we may be willing to pay for
(e.g., cup holders in automobiles), most new products originate by trial, error, and inspiration on the
production side of the producer/consumer divide
that marketing straddles. Thus, consumers didn’t

Markets and Marketing

first articulate a need for a GPS direction device for
automobiles, a mouse and graphical user interface
for computers, or a new flavor of Baskin-Robbins ice
cream. But once these things were created, marketing faced the challenge of convincing consumers that
they wanted them. This is not to say that marketers
are solely in the business of tricking or seducing consumers as is sometimes suggested. Rather, consumers
in a consumer society often serve as willing sorcerer’s
apprentices, displaying a willing “desire to desire”
and an inclination, if not eager readiness, for selfseduction (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003).
The primary ways in which marketers attempt
to attract consumers to buy things they do not need
are through product and store design, branding,
packaging, promotion, pricing, distribution strategies, market segmentation, and product positioning.
As Baudrillard suggests, consumers are not buying
use value or exchange value. They are buying sign
value, which is to say, all the meanings that marketers
are able to attach to the product. We are not buying a particular odiferous combination of chemicals
when we buy a perfume. We are instead buying the
promise of a more attractive sexually alluring self.
This meaning comes from a number of cues provided
by marketers. They include the perfume’s luxurious
packaging, its provocative and familiar brand name,
the sumptuous store in which it is sold, the celebrity
who appears in its advertising, its expensive price
tag, and the image of others who buy the brand
as well as the way that we imagine that others will
respond to us once we don it. In simple testing of
perfumes by themselves versus with accompanying
packaging, Chloe perfume went from being perceived to convey a somewhat oppressive warmth to
being seen as sensual and seductive, whereas Poison
perfume went from being associated with a heavily
made up and overly assertive woman to a woman
with casual elegance (Jellinek et al. 1991). The same
study showed that dark perfume packages resulted in
ratings of the fragrance as heavy and sweet, whereas
light colored packages led to ratings of a light and
delicate fragrance. Notably, the perfume bottle and
packaging often costs ten times more than its contents
to produce, illustrating that meaning making can be
more important than the product when it comes to
marketing image goods.
As the perfume example suggests, packaging
and design do more than safeguard the product on
offer. Men’s and women’s hair brushes, watches, and

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shavers look different not so much for functional
reasons as for their ability to convey masculinity and
femininity, even if the signs that create these product
personalities are initially largely or entirely arbitrary.
Packages are more than containers for products:
the design of stores, employee uniforms, signage,
company websites, corporate stationery, and other
visible elements form a part of a firm’s package, or
integrated marketing communication (IMC), which
helps shape consumer opinions, expectations, and
experiences. Thus, a part of the reason that a fish
served in a high-end restaurant tastes far better than
the same fish at a fish and chips kiosk has little to do
with the food preparation and everything to do with
the ambiance, price, and the presence of courteous
waiters and maître d’s who compose its “package.”
Two further marketing practices that go hand in
hand in stimulating consumer desire are branding
and promotion. Interbrand annually ranks the brand
equity of global brands, entirely independent of its
physical and monetary assets. In descending order,
the top ten for 2008 were Coca-Cola (worth US$67
billion), IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Nokia,
Toyota, Intel, McDonald’s, Disney, and Google
(worth US$26 billion). Adam Arvidsson calls brands
the paradigmatic embodiment of informational capitalism. So influential and powerful have such brands
become that critics like Naomi Klein have taken
particular aim at these “brand bullies” and their
increasingly pervasive advertising. Successful brands
have not only acquired personalities, they have also
become constitutive of the personalities of consumers
who embrace and display them. They have become
emblematic of cultural values. Brand communities
and brand tribes have grown up around brands such
as Harley Davidson, Apple, and Saab. So successful
has the brand become that churches, universities, symphonies, art galleries, and museums have all sought
to brand themselves. Sports teams have done so long
ago, and now their uniforms, stadia, and equipment
have added the cobrands of other firms who want
to capitalize on the attention these teams draw. They
are willing to pay hefty fees to advertise in this highly
visible and often televised manner.
As the existence of brand tribes, brand personalities, and brand communities imply, not all brands
appeal to all people. Sometimes, this is the result of
certain consumers self-selecting favorite brands and
endowing a certain brand with coolness, but more
often, it is at least partly the result of marketers

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Markets and Marketing

targeting a particular group of consumers and
designing the entire marketing mix to appeal to
them. Markets, in the sense of people rather than
places, are divided based on variables such as age,
income, gender, geographic region, lifestyle, and
values. Offerings are created and delivered to the
selected target market with the right appeals, in the
right media, at the right price, in the right places,
with the right product or service characteristics to
try to capture the patronage of one particular segment that has been chosen. In this sense, sellers of
a pickup truck are not directly competing against
sellers of subcompact cars, sports cars, or luxury
sedans. The choice of a market segment is made in
light of competition and the chances of success with
a particular “product position.” Product positioning
is creating an image for a brand that is intended to
be uniquely appealing to a target group. Techniques
such as semiotic analysis, ethnography, metaphor
analysis, analysis of cultural codes, multidimensional scaling, conjoint measurement, attitude measurement, and geodemographics are used to match
product design, advertising appeals, and product
distribution with target markets. Syndicated and
custom market research provides feedback on the
success of marketing campaigns and the campaigns
are adjusted, revised, or deepened to shore up brand
recognition and imagery among target markets.
Often, these campaigns are long running and memorable, even if they are vague in terms of product benefits promised. It is not hard to think of memorable
campaigns for companies such as Apple, Nike, and
McDonald’s. Children today, even before they enter
school, already know far more brand names than
they know the names of local flora and fauna.
Nevertheless, none of these marketing efforts
guarantee success, and the majority of new products
fail before they ever generate a profit. In the age of
the Internet, with the decay of traditional media audiences, fragmentation of markets, advertising clutter,
and increasing consumer empowerment thanks to
online advice and peer ratings, marketers have turned
to practices that go by names such as microsegmentation, stealth marketing, under the radar marketing,
antiadvertising, viral marketing, guerilla marketing,
product placements, brand fests, and other innovative techniques to try to reach their target markets
and secure their favor. Internet banner advertising
on sites such as Google is becoming increasingly targeted to specific users based on the nature of their

searches and past search activity. But the basic tasks
of markets and marketing remain much the same as
they have been for several thousand years: to make
a sale and to follow that with repeat sales to a consumer who has become brand loyal.
Although the immediate goal of marketing efforts
are often said to follow an awareness, interest, desire,
and action (AIDA) model of moving the consumer
through these successive stages, marketing has more
macroeffects as well. If we are taught to desire the
new, then we must learn to dislike the old. If we are
repeatedly told that existing products and brands fail
to make our clothes bright, our teeth white, and our
hair just right, then we become more anxious. And
if we are shown that people will admire us, find us
irresistibly attractive, or treat us better if we have
newer, more expensive, and more stylish possessions,
then we may become more materialistic and begin to
assume that having more things will make us happy,
fulfilled, and popular. Marketing is not the only source
of such messages. We also learn them from television,
computer games, films, virtual worlds, magazines, and
social networking sites. But through sponsorship and
promotion, marketing plays a key role in influencing
these media as well. Even video games have paid product placements in them. And that blog or comment on
an Internet forum may not be the unbiased unsponsored consumer that it appears to be either. Even those
cool kids in our child’s classroom may have gotten
their sneakers free from Nike, Reebok, or Adidas so
that they can act as walking billboards and influence
other children. As Applbaum appropriately said in
titling his book, we are living in the marketing era.
One further trend in marketing that has accelerated in the past two decades is globalization. Not
only are multinational companies outsourcing more
of the production of their products, but they may
also outsource customer service, marketing research,
promotion, product distribution, transportation, and
more. Intellectual discussions of globalism began
with claims of cultural imperialism, observing that
core Western products are inundating the peripheral
world. They raised alarming visions of the whole
world eating McDonald’s food, watching American
films and television, and wearing Nike sneakers.
This thesis has largely been set aside. It was first supplanted by the idea that the local is more vital than
this passive model implies. The audience is much
more active in scrutinizing global product and service
offerings, and even when the goods are embraced,

Markets and Marketing

their meanings are localized. The vitality of local
culture has also been deemed a strong countervailing force, suggesting that even though there may be
superficial adoption of global goods, cultural values
remain largely intact. But this thesis has also been
largely discarded and more complex ideas about
hybridity, creolization, and two-way cultural interpenetration of the global and the local are currently
more common.
Together with the trend toward outsourcing, globalization is also shifting the balance of economic
power in the world, resulting in the rise of Asian
economies. In the cases of Japan and Korea, earlier
expertise in being suppliers of merchandise for overseas brand manufacturers eventually led to global
brands of their own, especially in electronics and
vehicles. China currently has very few global brands,
but the Chinese government is helping brands such
as Haire appliances, Li Ning athletic shoes, and TCL
electronics firm in their bids to become prominent
global brands. Already, at least according to twentiethcentury criteria, China has become more like a firstworld nation, and its trading partners, especially its
largest trading partner—the United States—have
become more like third-world nations in terms of
trade statistics. For example, the United States ships
unfinished cotton, wool, scrap metal, and scrap paper
to China and then reimports clothing, machinery,
electronics, and cardboard boxes containing all sorts
of products from foods to toys from China. The value
of the raw materials shipped to China is far less than
the value of finished goods received from China.
But while the West supplies the largest markets to
China, the control of marketing activities still rest
largely in the West. Most of the companies mentioned
in this article, including all but two of those on the
Interbrand top ten, are American companies. Thus,
the one activity not outsourced—brand marketing—
remains largely concentrated in the United States.
Russell W. Belk
See also Branding; E-Commerce; Economic Sociology;
Methods of Market Research; Prosumption; Store
Loyalty Cards; Value: Exchange and Use Value;
Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Applbaum, Kalman. The Marketing Era: From Professional
Practice to Global Provisioning. London: Routledge,
2004.

893

Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces
That Shape Our Decisions. New York: HarperCollins,
2008.
Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media
Culture, London: Routledge, 2006.
Bagozzi, Richard. “Marketing as Exchange.” Journal of
Marketing 39, no. 4 (1975): 32–39.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1965. Rabelais and His World.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981.
Belk, Russell. “Why Not Share Rather Than Own?”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 611 (May 2007): 126–140.
Belk, Russell W., Güliz Ger, and Søren Askegaard. “The
Fire of Desire: A Multisided Inquiry into Consumer
Passion,” Journal of Consumer Research 30 (December
2003): 326–351.
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization
and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Vol. 2, translated
by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
(Originally published as Les Jeux de l'Echange. Paris:
Librairie Armand Colin, 1979).
Brown, Stephen. Postmodern Marketing Two: Telling Tales.
London: International Thomson Business Press, 1998.
Demirdjian, Z. S. “The Rise and Fall of Marketing in
Mesopotamia: A Conundrum in the Cradle of
Civilization.” In The Future of Marketing’s Past:
Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Historical
Analysis and Research in Marketing, edited by
Leighann C. Neilson, 102–115. Long Beach, CA:
Association for Historical Analysis and Research in
Marketing, 2005.
Gell, Alfred. “Inter-Tribal Commodity Barter and
Reproductive Gift Exchange in Old Melanesia.” In
Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological
Approach, edited by Caroline Humphrey and Stephen
Hugh-Jones, 142–168. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.
Granovetter, Mark. “Economic Action and Social Structure:
The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of
Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510.
Gregory, Christopher A. Gifts and Commodities. London:
Academic Press, 1982.
Jellinek, J. Stephan, B. Olias du Bosque, J. Gschwind, Bernd
Schubert, and Andreas Scharf. “The Scent and the
Marketing Mix.” In Proceedings of the Seminar on Fine
Fragrances in Consumer Products, 75–92. Amsterdam:
European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research
(ESOMAR), 1991.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
New York: Picador, 1999.

894

Marshall, Alfred

Kotler, Philip, and Sidney J. Levy. “Broadening the Concept
of Marketing.” Journal of Marketing 33 (July 1969):
10–15.
McKendrick, Neil. “Commercialization and the Economy.”
In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, edited
by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb,
9–194. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine,
1972.
Stearns, Peter. Consumerism in World History: The Global
Transformation of Desire. 2nd ed. London: Routledge,
2006.

MARSHALL, ALFRED (1842–1924)
Alfred Marshall was born in Bermondsey (Surrey,
United Kingdom) in a middle-class family. After
attending Merchant Taylors’ School, in London, he
was admitted to St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating as second in the first class of the Mathematical
Tripos in 1865. Deep concern for the human and
social problems of the time triggered his interest in
moral and mental science, eventually determining
the choice of economics as his subject of study. This
apprenticeship gave him a unique combination of
technical skills and wide philosophical and historical perspectives, as witnessed by his early writings.
As a fellow of St John’s, he lectured in the Moral
Sciences Tripos, mainly on economics, until 1877
when his marriage with Mary Paley forced him to
resign because celibacy was required by Cambridge
University regulations. The couple moved to live
near Bristol University College, where Alfred was
appointed professor of political economy. After
a short spell in Oxford, in 1885, he returned to
Cambridge where he spent the rest of his academic
life, successfully fighting to establish the Economics
Tripos before his retirement in 1908. In 1890, he
published Principles of Economics, which he revised
up to the 8th edition, in 1920. His other major work,
Industry and Trade, ideally a sequel to Principles,
was published in 1919. A third book, Money, Credit
and Commerce (1922), is a collection of earlier material on monetary issues. After his death, A. C. Pigou
edited Memorials of Alfred Marshall (1925), which
collects most of his articles.
Marshall devoted great attention to consumers’ behavior although, unlike other marginalist

economists, he awarded it no special prominence
as the foundation of economic theory. He believed
demand and supply, wants and activities to be symmetrical forces whose joint action determines the
value of goods, as in the metaphor of the two blades
of a pair of scissors. Moreover, in the long run, activities were considered to play a more important role
in shaping the evolution of the economy. He thought
the main causal influence of consumption was due
to its effects on producers, whose working abilities
depend on the standard of life. Insofar as consumption raises the standard of life, it enhances the productivity of labor and promotes economic growth.
Marshall distinguished this aspect of consumption
from its more limited function of giving pleasure and
satisfaction to the consumer, without any effect on
his or her productivity. The latter only raises the standard of comfort, in contraposition to the standard of
life. Both, however, fall under the unified utilitarian
evaluation of the consumer who maximizes his or
her satisfaction. This is a clear instance of the mix of
utilitarian and evolutionary considerations that characterize Marshall’s economics. Each single choice, at
a given moment, is explainable in utilitarian terms,
as the result of driving forces that can be compared
and accurately measured thanks to the yardstick
provided by money. This gives economics its unique
position among the social sciences. But in the long
term, the quality of the choices themselves shapes the
economic system and reacts on its functioning.
On the analytical side, Marshall developed the
concept of elasticity of demand (dq/q//dp/p), which
measures the reaction of consumers’ behavior to
price changes. Marshall’s demand curves, the inclination of which is usually negative (except for so-called
Giffen goods), are reliable indicators of behavior
only in the proximity of the real price. This is enough
for many practical problems of welfare economics, based on the notion of consumer’s rent and the
assumption of the constant utility of money, roughly
justifiable for small variations in income and prices.
But static considerations neglect the irreversibility of
consumption patterns and their influence on preferences as a learning process.
Marshall also noticed relevant changes in consumption patterns attributable to the growth
of wealth. Given the role of fashion, which he
denounced, and the positional value of goods, consumers are trapped in a vicious circle in which their
satisfaction depends on their relative social status.

Marx, Karl

Welfare judgments, based on the concept of consumer’s rent, are therefore conditional and dependent on
income distribution.
Marshall did not deny the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility on a practical basis as
the foundation of welfare economic policies.
Tiziano Raffaelli
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Demand;
Consumer Sovereignty; Economics; Happiness;
Income; Measuring Standards of Living; Needs and
Wants; Political Economy; Positional Goods; Price and
Price Mechanisms; Status

Further Readings
Aldrich, John. “The Course of Marshall’s Theorizing About
Demand.” History of Political Economy 28 (Summer
1996): 171–217.
Dardi, Marco. “Demand.” Chap. 39 in The Elgar
Companion to Alfred Marshall, edited by Tiziano
Raffaelli, Giacomo Becattini, and Marco Dardi.
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006.
Friedman, Milton. “The Marshallian Demand Curve.”
Journal of Political Economy 57 (December 1949):
463–495.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. “Revisiting Marshall’s
Constancy of Marginal Utility of Money.” Southern
Economic Journal 35 (October 1968): 176–181.

MARX, KARL (1818–1883)
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany. He studied
law at the University of Bonn and then philosophy
at the University of Berlin. He was an economist,
historian, social and political philosopher, and a revolutionary communist. Along with other revolutionaries
such as Mikhail Bakhtin and his friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels, he established the International
Working Men’s Association in 1864. He became
a journalist and editor for the Rheinische Zeitung
(Rhenish Gazette) and the Deutsch-französische
Jahrbucher (the German-French Annals). However,
his writings attracted the attention of the Prussian
authorities who subsequently issued a warrant for
his arrest, which meant he had to move a number
of times back and forth between Germany, Belgium,
and France until finally settling in England in 1849,
where he thought and hoped the communist revolution would occur.

895

Marx was a materialist who employed a dialectical method of inquiry. The dialectical materialist
critique in his work is derived from the development
and transformation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel’s idealist conception of history. Therefore,
his critical focus was on studying the patterns and
dynamics of the economy and how throughout history they had shaped the social order. Employing a
materialist perspective meant that Marx considered
consumer culture to be merely an ideological corollary that corresponds to a society’s particular stage
of economic development (mode of production).
Marx and Engels presented a concise summary of
the material dynamics of history in The Communist
Manifesto. They suggest that economic progress is
an unstoppable force, that there is a relentless unfolding of the economic epochal stages that societies
have and will move through: feudalism, capitalism,
a transitory socialism, and ultimately communism.
Marx argued that the mode of production determines
all social relationships and the culture of a society.
Therefore, production rather than consumption is
the basis of the social order. Moreover, production
is the starting point of all economic processes
whereas consumption is the end, at which point the
whole process starts again.
The famous preface in Marx’s A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy explains how
Marx considered the economy to be the central determinant of cultural, social, and political life. When
he outlines the economic base and superstructure
dynamic, he claims the economic base is dominant
since it shapes and structures social life, including
consciousness and cultural activity:
In the social production of their existence, men
inevitably enter into definite relations, which are
independent of their will, namely relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production.
The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is
not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines
their consciousness. (Marx 1859/1977, i)

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Marxist Theories

Indeed, consumer culture and desire find meaning and articulation through the ideological and
institutional arrangements of the superstructure.
Furthermore, Marx claimed that the capitalist
mode of production had given rise to a consumer
culture rooted in bourgeois ideology:
The bourgeoisie through its exploitation gave a
cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country . . . in place of old
wants satisfied by the productions of the country we
find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. (Marx and
Engels 1848/1985, 83–84)

Marx elaborated by employing the notion of commodity fetishism; this refers to what a commodity is
worth, not because of its practical “use value” but
what it is worth on the free market—its “exchange
value.” Therefore, desire for certain commodities
start to take on social and cultural meaning beyond
the basic function of a commodity and that certain
forms of consumption embody bourgeois ideological
notions of cosmopolitanism and sophistication.
However, unlike contemporary Marxist theorists that
claim consumption is the basis of the social order,
Marx maintained that the totality of social and cultural life rests on the stability of the economic base.
Therefore, when the mode of production is transformed, all the ideological and institutional structures
that shape consumer culture will transform too.
Yousaf Ibrahim
See also Alienation; Capitalism; Commodification;
Cosmopolitanism; Marxist Theories; Value: Exchange
and Use Value

Further Readings
Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress, 1974.
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy. Moscow: Progress, 1977.
Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 2003.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist
Manifesto. London: Penguin, 1985.

MARXIST THEORIES
Western Marxist theories of consumer culture represent a rupture from the classical and orthodox eastern
Marxist theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin,

and Rosa Luxemburg. However, the rupture was not
immediate but took place over a number of years.
Gyorg Lukacs’s work and personal political history
represent, in some respects, an overlap between the
traditions. Major differences between the two traditions are that Western Marxists reject Marx’s claim
of the historical inevitability of the proletarian revolution and subsequent liberation. This is in large part
due to the brutality and oppression that occurred
following the Russian Revolution, especially under
Stalin’s Soviet version of socialism. Although both
traditions see consumption as an “extension of production” (Adorno 1967/1983, 26), Western Marxists
who lived in the United States had analyzed and
explained the role consumer culture has played in
negating revolutionary ideas through the integration
of the working class into the capitalist system. For
Marx, the working class was the historic class that
was to bring about revolutionary transformation,
the decisive agent, as it were. For Western Marxists,
such as Herbert Marcuse, the working class had been
politically neutralized through the ideological manipulation of consumer culture in Western capitalist
societies (particularly the United States): “In the capitalist world (bourgeoisie and proletariat) are still the
basic classes. However, the capitalist development
has altered the structure and function of these two
classes in such a way that they no longer appear to
be the agents of historical transformation” (Marcuse
1964, 11). This is an especially sharp point of departure between the two traditions when analyzing
Western capitalist societies. Therefore, consumer culture is foregrounded in the Western Marxist analysis
of modern capitalist society.

Theorists and Theories
There are a number of key Western Marxist thinkers
who developed critical theories of consumer culture in
capitalist society. They are Antonio Gramsci, Walter
Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and
Marcuse. All but Gramsci were members of the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany,
also known as the Frankfurt school. Appalled by the
atrocities of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and
having to seek exile in the United States, the theorists
from the Frankfurt school established an approach
known as critical theory:
Critical Theory is informed by multidisciplinary
research, combined with the attempt to construct a
systematic, comprehensive social theory that can

Marxist Theories

confront the key social and political problems of the
day. The work of the Critical Theorists . . . provides
a critique of a full range of ideologies from mass
culture to religion. Some versions of Critical Theory
are motivated by an interest . . . in the emancipation
of those who are oppressed and dominated. Critical
Theory is thus informed by a critique of domination
and a theory of liberation. (Kellner 1992, 1)

This approach explains why members of the
Frankfurt school considered both Soviet style socialism and Western capitalism to be oppressive,
through both direct coercive physical repression
and through more subtle and ostensible ideological
means. Although there has been collaborative
research between some critical theorists, it is important to note that they do not represent a homogenous, or unified, body of Marxist thought. This is
to be expected, however, since totalitarian theories
were viewed with suspicion; it was constructive disagreement, nuance, and critical development that
were cultivated within this school of thought. They
were all too aware not to reify theory itself.
According to Lukacs, “Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat” is a key starting
point from which to analyze Marxist theories of
consumer culture. He argued that commodity relations are dominant and therefore underlie all other
processes (e.g., labor, law, politics) in modern society.
Society therefore becomes ever more rationalized and
instrumentally rational leading to reification, which
is an ideological distortion presenting the world
around us as if it was objective and natural. In his
theory of commodification, he argues labor, like all
commodities, is rationalized and objectified, which
removes any control the individual has over the labor
process—the resultant effect is that what is produced
is also reified. Thus,
consumer articles no longer appear as the products
of an organic process within a community (as, for
example, a village community). They now appear on
the one hand, as abstract members of a species
identical by definition with its other members and,
on the other hand, as isolated objects the possession
or non possession of which depends on rational
calculations. (Lukacs 1923/1971, 91)

Horkheimer and Adorno developed and extended
Lukacs’s ideas by arguing that instrumental rationality shapes the sphere of consumption as well
as production. In fact, the same techniques of

897

scheduling and systematic planning within the
workplace are used within the leisure industry.
That is, leisure time pursuits are homogenized,
standardized, and uniformly packaged to be sold
on a market that is dictated by their exchange
value rather than their use value—a process that
Marx identified as “commodity fetishism” (Marx,
1867/1974, 76). Consumer wants and desires
therefore follow the instrumental and rational
logic of profitability but are masked as true needs
and wants. Therefore, culture is reproduced
according to the lowest common denominator,
which is economically efficient rather than culturally enriching. The culture industry disseminates
its messages to a mass consumer market using the
mass media; constant advertising of a desirable
bourgeois lifestyle is used to break any resistance
and negate radical or revolutionary ideas. An ideological manipulation in the form of desire for luxury items is cultivated within consumer society
leading to a culture of conformity.
Commodities hence become free to take on a wide
range of cultural associations and illusions.
Advertising in particular is able to exploit this and
attach images of romance, exotics, desire, beauty,
fulfilment, communality, scientific progress and the
good life to mundane consumer goods such as soap,
washing machines, motorcars and alcoholic drinks.
(Featherstone 2000, 14)

A false consciousness develops as consumers are
bombarded with a diet of aspirational bourgeois
images that create the illusion of freedom and choice.
Adorno’s critique of popular music is a key
example of a consumer product that gives the illusion of freedom of choice when really it is standardized and predigested. It is what he termed pseudo
individualization:
By pseudo-individualisation we mean endowing
cultural mass production with the halo of freechoice or open market on the basis of standardisation
itself. Standardisation of song hits keeps the
customers in line by doing their listening for them, as
it were. Pseudo-individualisation for its part, keeps
them in line by making them forget that what they
listen to is already listened for them, or pre-digested.
(1941/1994, 197–210)

It is Marcuse who offers a precise understanding of integration of the working class into capitalist society:

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Marxist Theories

The productive apparatus and the goods and services
which it produces “sell” or impose the social system
as a whole. The means of mass transportation and
communication, the commodities of lodging, food,
and clothing, the irresistible output of the
entertainment and information industry carry with
them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain
intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the
consumers more or less pleasantly to producers and,
through the latter, to the whole. (1964, 26)

It is this integration and reproduction of consumer habits, attitudes, or more precisely culture
that negates and prevents any revolutionary ideas
taking hold, which is the key to understanding
Marxist theories of consumer culture:
The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they
promote false consciousness which is immune
against its falsehood. And as these beneficial
products become available to more individuals in
more social classes, the indoctrination they carry
ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life.
(Marcuse 1964, 27)

In this respect, Marcuse is arguing that Western
capitalist society, through mass production technologies with a mass distribution, is shaping culture to the extent that individuals become
ideologically indoctrinated, manipulated, and “one
dimensional.” In effect, one dimensional society
“claims the individual” (10). The individual does
not have any autonomy either in the workplace or
in the marketplace as a consumer.

Critiques
Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction” offers a critique
of the somewhat deterministic views held by Adorno,
Horkheimer, and Marcuse. While they held that techniques of production, which are mirrored by patterns
of consumption, tend to control and repress citizens’
political imagination and revolutionary potential,
Benjamin argued that new technologies could actually enable social criticism by citizens wanting to
consume art. That is, artists through new technology
had in their grasp new technology that could be used
to subvert and produce radical messages. Artists and
writers could use new technology to become producers themselves. In this respect, the bourgeoisie no
longer have total control over the production of texts

and possibly meaning. Therefore, different ideological messages could be propagated by artists that are
not necessarily aligned with capitalist class interests.
Gramsci’s contribution to the understanding of
ideology elucidates the complex dynamics of how
the interests of different classes may become aligned.
However, in modern and liberal capitalist societies,
it would be inappropriate and in most cases not
necessary to shape the actions of citizens. Therefore,
dominant bourgeois values are developed through
the superstructure of civil society to the extent they
become hegemonic. That is, consumers actually
consent to capitalist patterns of production and
consumption. They realize their desires, not because
they are under a false consciousness but because it is
in their material interests to comply. Therefore, the
strategy on the part of the bourgeoisie is to make
their class interest become total, so consumer markets can be continually developed for the working
classes. Therefore, it is imperative that bourgeois
notions are represented as universal and common
sense. Therefore, hegemony is a very useful concept,
which highlights how an economic system, such as
capitalism, is maintained despite economic, political, and social inequalities. However, hegemony is
not fixed or permanent; it is fought over and negotiated. Indeed, in capitalist societies, it is a constant
process of political persuasion and often compromise
between groups that are attempting to establish a
counter hegemony. Therefore, Gramsci along with
Benjamin offers a more optimistic view than others
from the Frankfurt school.
Gramsci’s work offers a powerful framework for
the analysis of consumer culture in modern capitalist
society. Gramsci’s work was adapted by Stuart Hall
and his colleagues in the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in
the 1970s and 1980s. In Policing the Crisis (1978),
he and his colleagues employed Gramsci’s notions
of hegemony and the national popular. The authors
argued that in the 1970s, Britain was in a state of
crisis; the government and the media therefore sought
to rearticulate dominant class interests with the wider
public. The media demonized certain groups responsible for the breakdown in law and order and the
economic crisis the country was in. The consequences
of this was that a “new popular authoritarian” ideology took hold, which meant that a government under
Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. Thatcher,
having a popular mandate, then set about attacking

Masculinity

trade unions she claimed were hindering economic
development, and at the same time, she was selling
off public utilities, which meant that citizens became
consumers who could now enjoy a share in society’s wealth by aligning their interests with those of
the capitalist class. Therefore, working classes now
became shareholders in this new consumer society
that was no longer hindered by trade unions.

Contemporary Research on Consumption
Western Marxist critiques of consumer culture have
now been superseded by new questions concerning
the “morality of consumption” (see Wilk’s article
“Consuming Morality” in the Journal of Consumer
Culture, 2001, as an example). This includes, but
is not limited to, issues of fair trade and sustainability, for example. These issues hold a place not
just in academic research but in the popular imagination. Political campaigns have sought to address
these issues by lifting the “commodity veil”—which
seeks to connect Western consumers with developing country producers to ensure that the latter are
not exploited and environmental damage is avoided,
all the while bearing in mind that local cultures
should not be displaced. Contemporary research
on consumer culture has been reoriented toward
sound empirical evidence on consumption practices.
Therefore, consumption is no longer simply regarded
as a corollary of production, nor are consumers
treated as cultural dopes, as suggested by Marcuse
and Adorno. Rather, research seeks to empirically
investigate consumption in its own right, which does
not conform to Marxist frameworks that suggested
the domination of ideology propagated by a dominant class.
Yousaf Ibrahim
See also Alienation; Commodification; Commodities;
Hegemony; Industrial Society; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Political Economy; Value:
Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1983.
Adorno, Theodor W. “On Popular Music.” Chap. 20 in
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited
by John Storey. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994. First published 1941.

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Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, 217–252.
London: Fontana, 1977. First published 1935.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. London: Sage, 2000.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of
Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane, 1973. First
published 1947.
Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Lukacs, Gyorg. “Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat.” In History and Class Consciousness:
Studies in Marxist Dialectics, edited by Gyorg Lukacs,
83–221. London: Merlin Press, 1971. First published
1923.
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of
Industrial Society. London: Routledge Keagan Paul,
1964.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress, 1974. First
published 1867.

MASCULINITY
Masculinity is a term generally used to denote a set
of characteristics, actions, attitudes, expectations, and
ways of being that a particular society maintains for
men. What is considered masculine changes over time
and varies between and within social classes, racial
and ethnic groups, subcultures, cultures, and societies. Societal-wide dominant stereotypical images and
established practices, however, create an overall normative structure. This structure legitimates what it
means to be an ideal man—physically, mentally, and
emotionally. R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt
call this dominant form hegemonic masculinity. They
conclude that the contemporary hegemonic American
image of masculinity is that of an individual who is
middle class, strong, confident, unemotional, physically fit, overtly heterosexual, and a provider and protector of women. Similarly, Nicholas Townsend lists
four elements that constitute a contemporary “package deal” of successful manhood: heterosexual marriage, fatherhood, employment, and home ownership.
Others have alternatively conceptualized masculinity
as an entire way of communicating (a discourse), a
hardened social structure or a fluid performance that
changes both between and within persons.
Masculinity is strongly tied to the consumer culture because it is constructed and disseminated by

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Masculinity

mass media images, advertising, and information.
It is also often juxtaposed against images or ideals
of femininity to market a variety of products such
as toys, video games, magazines, music, television
shows and movies, alcohol, and cars. Studies suggest that at least some boys and men internalize these
images and construct identities, enact behavior, purchase goods and services, and even shape bodies that
conform to what is presented to them. Males who
fail to obey the rules or live up to these visions of
masculinity are sanctioned negatively—sometimes
violently—by self and others.
The ideal male physical form in general and even
specific male body parts have been a moving marketing target. For instance, while the current American
ideal conflates muscularity and fitness with maleness and desirability, notes Kenneth Dutton, the
bodybuilding associated with such a physique is
a historical creation. In the United States, the first
ever bodybuilding competition appeared in 1891.
In later years, Strong Man competitions featuring
men displaying physical prowess became popular.
By the 1920s, barbells and weight lifting gear were
widely available for individual purchase. During the
1930s, a muscle and beach culture appeared, showing boys and men what “real” men should look like
and where they could buy the products to achieve
the look. Popular magazines, such as Beefcake, portrayed the image of a real man as one with exaggerated muscular definition. Advertisements of the time,
such as the Atlas Man campaign, poked fun at thin
men and offered ways to bulk them up into real men.
The Atlas campaign also linked violence with masculinity. In it, a scrawny man who has sand kicked in
his face bulks up to beat up others who challenged
his masculinity. These images of muscular masculinity remain even today in the form of men’s health
and fitness magazines, bodybuilding competitions,
Gladiator programs, and national sport cultures,
such as football.
Studies have shown that hegemonic masculinity
featuring the hypermale, “V” shaped torso is marketed to men and boys in an assortment of consumer
products. For instance, a study by Harrison G.
Pope and colleagues in the 1990s compared thirty
years’ worth of male toy action figures by measuring
the figures’ waists, biceps, and chests scaled to the
measurements of an average man. It revealed that
contemporary action figures’ body measurements
were out of proportion even with the most muscular

bodybuilder. A content analysis of Men’s Health
magazine showed that such ideals clearly guided the
magazine’s presentation of health issues: real men eat
red meat, drink beer, eat prepared convenience food
(stereotypically, men only cook if they are grilling),
and are sexual champions. The overriding theme
(exemplified by such articles as “Add 2 Inches to
Your Chest,” “Build Abs That Show,” and “Look
Like a Men’s Health Cover Model”) was of the ideal
man as bodybuilder, according to Arran Stibbe.
While women were historically a target market for
beauty products, a growing consumer market emphasizing the male consumer is emerging. Many of these
products appeal to the stereotypical hegemonic male,
featuring the type of muscular men pictured in fitness magazines selling products with product names
that feature outdoor activity, such as Mountain Surge
and Arctic Rush. But also emerging is an appeal to
a “consumer male” who is targeted by items such
as facial creams, antiaging creams, hair dyes, exfoliates, body shaving devices, and fashion wear. As
J. Clarkson puts it, this male “adopts a lifestyle that
includes excessive grooming and interest in fashion
not typically regarded as masculine behavior” (as
cited in Conseur, Hathcote, and Kim 2008, 549).
Male sexuality is consistently associated with
hegemonic masculinity in the consumer culture. It is
there narrowly defined, with the ability to achieve an
erection presented as the sine qua non of male sexuality, according to Jay Baglia. For example, a number
of male enhancement products currently target penis
size and stamina as crucial components of male sexuality. Other advertisements, varying in their subtlety,
include phallic objects, simulate sexual encounters, or imply ejaculatory orgasms to sell products.
Additionally, advertisements also enlist homophobia
cloaked in the guise of masculine humor as a marketing tool. In a 2010 Super Bowl advertisement, two
men accidentally kiss while eating the same candy
bar. Their reaction is to immediately do something
stereotypically hypermasculine—in this case, to rip
out their chest hair.
Media products specifically targeted to teenage
males such as MTV and hip-hop have been critiqued
for their emphasis on a combination of consumerism mixed with violence, toughness, sexual conquest,
heterosexism, homophobia, and aggression as critical
elements of masculinity. For instance, a number of
films produced by the Media Education Foundation
have shown how entertainment and music videos

Masculinity

construct an environment of pseudo pornographic
images where real men commit violence against
other men and women with no consequences, where
rape is tacitly condoned, and where homosexual men
are portrayed as unmanly.
While it remains unclear precisely how or even if
these images of masculinity influence ideas and behavior, several studies offer insights into behaviors around
product use, body image, and stereotyping. For example, Duane Hargreaves and Marika Tiggemann found
their sample of adolescent boys aged fourteen to
sixteen to be concerned with the muscularity of their
growing bodies. Whereas the boys initially said that
they would not do anything to change the way they
looked, further probing revealed that many engaged
in body changing strategies, such as disordered eating
habits and using protein diets to boost muscle mass.
Other studies have shown that male consumers of
hip-hop may use homophobic and/or sexist taunts,
not to attack women or gays but rather to “masculinize” themselves while “feminizing” others. Similarly,
based on her research in a suburban high school,
C. J. Pascoe theorizes that there exists a “fag discourse” where adolescents use the “spectre” of homosexuality as a way to enforce masculinity among
peers through joking relationships. More important,
Pascoe’s research shows that this discourse is fluid and
usually has nothing to do with being gay. As she puts
it, “Few boys are permanently identified as fags; most
move in and out of fag positions” (2007, 342). She
also illustrates that ideas of what is masculine can vary
dramatically between racial groups. Within her study,
the ability to dance and the attention given to clothes
and shoes were symbols of status and masculinity for
African American teens. Conversely, white boys who
embodied these characteristics were considered “gay”
and unmasculine within their groups. Finally, a study
of 219 college students by Amanda Conseur and colleagues indicates links between appearance-related
self-esteem, media consumption, and the emergence
of the consumer male. More important, these authors
note the overall lack of research on masculinities in
diverse groups in general and the phenomenon of
emerging consumer male masculinities in particular.
Modern demographic changes, such as an aging
population and increased racial and ethnic diversity,
combined with changes in job structures, family roles,
and increasingly diverse forms of media dissemination, necessitate a more multidimensional, multifaceted, and representational depiction of the complexity

901

of boys’ and men’s lives. Research on masculinity
and consumer culture can benefit by sociologically
inspired life-course and intersectionalities approaches.
A life-course approach, for example, emphasizes that
life events such as marriage, childbearing, entrance
into the workforce, or aging can alter how men
perceive their roles as men. Further, this approach
shows that as men age, they may be held to different
standards of masculinity or find that they are unable
to conform or adapt to hegemonic ideologies. An
intersectionalities approach emphasizes the importance of understanding the interplay of differences
across ascribed and achieved statuses such as age,
race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, ability, and religious or political affiliation. It
also highlights the multiple ways in which differences
influence personal and consumer behavior. That is to
say that one is never just male, just gay, or just poor,
but simultaneously all three statuses. Identities, therefore, are built on the confluence of all three of these
statuses (and others). One status may emerge as more
or less salient in different situations. Taken together,
current studies and new approaches leave room for
many promising new directions that explore the links
between consumer culture and masculinity.
Susan L. Wortmann and Nicholas Park
See also Advertising; Broadcast Media; Femininity; Life
Course; Men’s Magazines; Metrosexual; Sex; Sexuality

Further Readings
Baglia, Jay. The Viagra Ad Venture: Masculinity, Media,
and the Performance of Sexual Health. New York: Peter
Lang, 2005.
Connell, R. W., and James Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic
Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and
Society 19 (2005): 829–859.
Conseur, Amanda, Jan Hathcote, and Soyoung Kim.
“Consumer Masculinity Behavior among College
Students and Its Relationship to Self Esteem and Media
Significance.” Sex Roles 58 (2008): 549–555.
Dutton, Kenneth. The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal
of Male Physical Development. New York: Continuum,
1995.
Hargreaves, Duane, and Marika Tiggemann. “Body Image
Is for Girls: A Qualitative Study of Boys’ Body Image.”
Journal of Health Psychology 11 (2006): 567–576.
Pascoe, C. J. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality
in High School. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007.

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Maslow, Abraham

Pope, Harrison G., Roberto Olivardia, Amanda A. Gruber,
and John Borowiecki. “Evolving Ideals of Male Body
Image as Seen through Action Toys.” International
Journal of Eating Disorders 26 (1999): 65–72.
Robson, David. “A History Lesson in Body Building.”
BodyBuilding.com, 2010. http://www.bodybuilding.com/
fun/drobson61.htm. (Accessed August 28, 2010).
Stibbe, Arran. “Health and the Social Construction of
Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine.” Men and
Masculinities 7 (2004): 31–51.
Townsend, Nicholas. The Package Deal: Marriage, Work,
and Fatherhood in Men’s Lives. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2002.

MASLOW, ABRAHAM (1908–1970)
Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist whose work on human needs, self-actualization,
and higher levels of consciousness was extremely
influential in the third quarter of the twentieth
century. He played an important role in establishing
the tradition of humanistic psychology. He was born
in New York and first studied law then psychology,
achieving a doctorate in 1934 at the University of
Wisconsin. He chaired the psychology department at
Brandeis from 1951 to 1969.
Of greatest relevance to consumer studies is his
account of a hierarchy of needs. The core notion here
is that basic material needs (“scarcity needs”) have to
be satisfied before people become interested in pursuing higher goals (“growth needs”). Experience of
particular problems in satisfying one or other needs
in early life may result in people continuing to be
preoccupied by this need, even when the scarcity is
removed. Maslow’s needs hierarchy is widely used
in consumer and management research and practice,
well away from his own interests in psychotherapy
and personal growth. Often it is adopted in a diluted
form—the list of needs is simplified, or the notion of
a firm hierarchy is abandoned.
In consumer studies, Maslow’s ideas have been
invoked to help explain differences between consumers in terms of the objects of consumption that
are sought and in the meanings that are attached to
them. For example, consumers may be more oriented
toward consumption that satisfies hunger or security
needs, demonstrates social status, or enables progress
toward higher aspirations such as attaining knowledge or aesthetic satisfaction. Furthermore, a specific

item of consumption may be valued in different
ways and have different meanings for different
consumers—clean clothes may be desired to be
hygienic or to display wealth, TV news may be
watched to learn about personally threatening events
or to gain greater understanding of social affairs.
Maslow was an early advocate of humanistic
psychology. This was seen as a “third way” between
what in the postwar period were the dominant
approaches in American psychology: behaviorism
and psychoanalysis. (Only in the last quarter of the
twentieth century did the cognitive approach rise to
prominence in psychology.) Behaviorism was criticized for its reductionist focus on animal behavior
and neglect of mental processes. Psychoanalysis was
criticized for its emphasis on morbid processes and
neurotic people (though Maslow borrowed quite
a few elements of his needs theory from Sigmund
Freud and his followers—including breakaway figures, such as Alfred Adler, of inferiority complex
fame). Maslow advocated a humanistic psychology
that explored—and could be used to improve—the
mental lives of ordinary people. This meant understanding what constituted positive mental health
and how to understand and help realize higher levels of human potential. From the late 1950s, he set
about bringing together a community of like-minded
humanistic psychologists and therapists and helped
establish the American Association of Humanistic
Psychology in 1961.
With its stress on personal growth and selfrealization, humanistic psychology was to become a
significant strand of thought around the world in the
next decades. The personal growth movement led
to a flourishing of encounter groups and alternative
therapies in the 1970s, which have left their mark on
consumer culture into the twenty-first century. The
counterculture (1960/70s) and new age (1980s on)
movements drew in rather cavalier manner on these
ideas, too, which continue to resonate in self-help,
community development, and motivational philosophies of many kinds.
Also of great appeal to these movements was
Maslow’s explication of the nature of peak experiences and what he saw as the disinterested perception of self-actualizing people who have attained a
state of being-cognition in which they have enhanced
self-knowledge and understanding of the world.
Peak experiences resemble musicians and sports
enthusiasts’ state of being “in the zone,” the mystical

Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

experience of spiritual people, and some of the “good
trip” altered states of consciousness associated with
psychedelic drugs. Psychologists have discussed these
states in various ways (transpersonal, oceanic, ecstatic
states), and some spiritual traditions have the notion
of enlightenment as an ongoing state rather like beingcognition. Counterculture and new age movements
can be seen as moving toward seeing these states
and experiences as potential objects of consumption
that can be sought through purchasing or otherwise
accessing growth opportunities such as courses in
meditation, yoga, or any one of a myriad of often cultish spiritual traditions. Some of these have received a
good deal of celebrity endorsement. Maslow would
probably reject the commercialization of his ideas,
while welcoming their broader dissemination.
Ian Miles
See also Consumer Behavior; Freud, Sigmund; Hierarchy
of Needs; Needs and Wants; Psychoanalysis;
Psychology; Satiation; Scarcity; Social Movements

Further Readings
Maslow, Abraham. Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964.
Maslow, Abraham. Toward a Psychology of Being.
New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968. First
published 1962.
Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York:
Harper & Row, 1970. First published 1954.
Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

MASS CULTURE
(FRANKFURT SCHOOL)
Mass culture refers to a sociological concept that
informs the analyses of the culture industry, its
products, and their consumption conducted by
the members of the Institute of Social Research of
Frankfurt am Main, Germany (often referred to as
the Frankfurt school). The concept of mass culture
plays a significant role in the Frankfurt school’s
theoretical examinations of the entertainment and
leisure industry as well as in its empirically enriched
studies of cultural goods—pop music, jazz, radio,
cinema, television programs, advertising, popular literature—and their impact on consumers.
The works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer,

903

Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse have been
particularly influential.

Context, Aims, Approach, Reception
The Institute’s associates carried out the majority
of their investigations of mass culture between the
1930s and 1970s. Their most important research
took place in the United States, where they found
exile during the reign of National Socialism in
Germany (1933–1945). In fact, only some members, among them Adorno and Horkheimer, chose
to return to Europe after World War II (1939–1945).
Löwenthal, Marcuse, and several of their colleagues
stayed in America. The Frankfurt school’s inquiries
into mass culture were profoundly inspired by its
members’ encounters with the evermore pervasive
popular culture of the United States. Accordingly,
products of the American culture industry played
an outstanding role in their analyses. Nevertheless,
all four thinkers mentioned deemed their conceptual
devices and substantive insights pertinent to studying
the mass culture of capitalist society more generally.
They also explored links between popular culture
and overt political propaganda in the democratic as
well as totalitarian societies of their time.
The Frankfurt school members’ examinations of
mass culture formed part of their quest for a “critical theory” of society. Mass culture, they held, was
inextricable from the governing social relations of
capitalism. Their foremost analytical objectives were
to scrutinize mass culture in relation to the wider cultural, economic, and social conditions within which it
was produced and consumed; and to investigate the
impact of the consumption of the culture industry’s
products on individual consumers, the intellectual
and cultural climate of capitalism, and its constituent social relations. In addition to these objectives, the
Institute’s associates pursued explicitly political aims.
They ascribed to popular culture the power of manipulating consumers into accepting and perpetuating a
social status quo, which was detrimental to individual
lives. Moreover, they considered the culture industry a
likely factor facilitating fascist radicalizations of capitalist societies. Correspondingly, their writings aimed
to highlight the ideological functions of mass culture,
critically undermine the allure of its substance, and
thereby enhance the population’s social awareness.
Adorno, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, and Marcuse
were all engaged in the development of the theoretical

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Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

frameworks that guided their critical scrutiny of mass
culture in relation to the capitalist social whole. They
drew on a range of conceptual resources from different disciplines such as Karl Marx’s examinations
of the commodity, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis,
and approaches from sociology, psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics (especially musicology and literary studies). Additionally, Adorno and Löwenthal
carried out a series of—largely qualitative—empirical content analyses of specific cultural commodities. Adorno’s work contains inquiries into pop and
jazz songs, radio and television programs (chiefly
on the basis of manuscripts), and astrological texts.
Löwenthal is known for his investigations of popular
literature, including pulp biographies and magazines.
The Frankfurt school’s writings on mass culture
have occasioned much debate, above all in the social
sciences. Many responses have been severely critical.
The members of the Institute have been reproached
for overgeneralizing about mass culture and disregarding genuine differences between individual
artifacts, issuing one-sided condemnations of the
ideological and integrative function of popular culture
owing to an inability or refusal to see its subversive
potential, and an exaggerated reliance on theoretical inquiry at the expense of systematic empirical
research. Those studies that do have empirical components have been criticized for their allegedly narrow focus on cultural goods and a failure to engage in
sustained research on consumers. This accusation is
significant insofar as Adorno, for example, examined
products of the culture industry partly to elucidate
their impact on individual consumers and capitalist
social relations—an approach he termed “cultural
criticism” as “social physiognomy” (1983, 30)—but
conducted no rigorous empirical surveys of listeners,
viewers, or readers. Adorno defended this mode of
procedure, arguing that consumers’ responses were
shaped precisely by the substance of cultural artifacts. Löwenthal (1984, 203–204) added the more
pragmatic point that establishing “reactions . . . by
means of various interviewing techniques . . . seems
to be rather premature . . . until more is known about
the content structure” of the artifacts.
Criticisms notwithstanding, the Frankfurt school’s
theoretical frameworks as well as the empirical
inquiries carried out by some of its members have
contributed considerably to the widespread interest
in popular culture in contemporary European and
American social science. Their examinations of the

culture industry have inspired and influenced a range
of research projects and continue to be key reference
points for the study of mass culture in sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Production: Commodification, Administration,
Standardization, Pseudo Individualization
Adorno and Horkheimer warn that the term mass
culture (no less than the term mass media) is partly
misleading. It insinuates that the mass of cultural
artifacts available in capitalism actualizes the spontaneous aesthetic expressions of the people. Yet mass
culture is neither created by the masses nor for the
masses. It comprises the products of the culture
industry. This commercial sector, which emerged
from the “search for new opportunities for the realization of capital in the most economically developed
countries” (Adorno 1991, 99), especially in America
and Europe, is dominated by monopolies of highly
concentrated “economic power” (Adorno 1998, 41).
Broadcasting and motion picture companies, for
instance, control the production of television and
film, while hit tunes are turned out by centralized
music enterprises. The primary purpose of mass
cultural goods is to function as consumer articles
on the market, as commodities that generate profit
through commercial exchange.
The production and distribution of culture as
fungible consumer goods involves its rigid administration. Mass culture is a separate business sector
where articles are manufactured, managed, and disseminated according to a set of abstract categories:
“serious” (classical) and “light” (pop) music, “A” and
“B” movies, “high-,” “middle-,” and “lowbrow”
literature, and so on. This classificatory grid, the
Frankfurt theorists insist, does not reflect the inherent
nature of people’s needs. Rather, the mass consumption of a culture reduced to types of commodities
aligns the specific demands of different individuals
with the homogeneous tastes of consumer groups.
The culture industry increasingly determines the
“needs of consumers—producing, controlling, disciplining them” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 115).
Adorno concedes that the term industry has limited application to the production of mass culture.
Whereas conventional industrial production (e.g.,
of automobiles on assembly lines) follows a meticulous division of labor, the manufacture of mass
culture embraces a significantly less thoroughgoing

Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

separation of tasks, many of which (e.g., the
composition of hit songs) are still “in a handicraft
stage” (Adorno 2006, 419). And yet the fabrication
and dissemination of cultural commodities is industrial not just in the sense that it is as comprehensively
governed by monopoly capital and administration as
other industrial sectors. The concepts culture industry and mass culture also instructively convey that
the production of cultural consumer articles, like the
industrial manufacture of other goods, entails their
standardization. Given the growing uniformity of its
customers’ wants, the culture industry’s economic
success hinges on supplying products that conform
to a set of sanctioned schemata. “All mass culture is
fundamentally adaptation” (Adorno 1991, 67). The
new, which would deviate from customary models,
is jettisoned in advance as too great a business risk.
Adorno provides numerous illustrations of the standardization of mass cultural artifacts. Of outstanding
relevance to his work is the homogenization of music.
Hit songs, he argues, follow strict compositional formulas, such as the “rule that the chorus consists of
thirty-two bars and that the range is limited to one
octave and one note” (Adorno 2006, 412–413). The
“mass phenomenon” of jazz adheres to approved
schemes like the “crude unity of the basic rhythm,
the identically sustained metre, the quarter-note”
(Adorno 1983, 121). Similarly, films and television
programs ceaselessly repeat the same character structures, actions, plots, and endings. Of course, insofar
as the culture industry’s monotonous output evens
out consumer tastes, the standardization of cultural
commodities constitutes a mere reaction “to the
vote which [the culture industry] has itself rigged”
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 106). By the same
token, the industrial standardization of cultural
goods further homogenizes customers’ demands for
identical products.
Simultaneously, however, the consumption of
mass culture would slacken if the interchangeability of cultural artifacts became obvious to people.
Hence, the culture industry must veil standardization
with pseudo individualization. Mass cultural commodities are endowed with superficial variations and
schematic nuances, so as to appear unique, distinctive, and new without really violating the demand for
uniformity. Superficial variations are on display in
films, which employ different stars and technological
effects to hide the contents’ basic sameness. Schematic
nuances can be heard in jazz improvisations, which

905

sound like original manifestations of musicianship
but, “planned out in advance with machinelike precision,” actually use “well-defined tricks, formulas and
clichés” (Adorno 1983, 123). In this respect, too,
popular culture resembles other industrially manufactured mass products—cars of competing brands,
for example, whose fundamental likeness is masked
by trivial addenda such as minor gadgets and schematized distinctions in cubic capacity, number of
cylinders, and so on. Pseudo individualization constitutes the simple yet effective trick of concealing that
mass culture is “more shallow and standardized than
any of its fans can ever be” (Adorno 1999, 246). The
universal imperative to thrive on the market burdens
the culture industry with the double requirement of
homogenizing its goods and faking their uniqueness.

Mass Consumption, Mass Deception,
Mass Conformism
According to the Frankfurt school, the widespread
consumer demand for the products of mass culture
is not natural but superimposed by society and cultivated by the culture industry. Crucially, these “needs
to relax, to have fun, to . . . consume in accordance
with advertisements, to love and hate what others
love and hate” (Marcuse 1991, 5) thwart the transformation of capitalism and cement its perpetuation.
For the commodities of the leisure and entertainment
industries have the power to undercut their consumers’
resistance to the prevailing social order and to lure
them into conformist thought and behavior. More
specifically, the Frankfurt theorists maintain that
mass culture fulfills a multifaceted function of “mass
deception” or “mass betrayal.” This deceptive function constitutes the culture industry’s most potent
antidote to social opposition.
Productions such as radio or television programs,
for instance, incessantly disseminate conventional
modes of thinking through an evermore pervasive
media apparatus. Thus, the culture industry infringes
on independent reasoning and inculcates individuals
with socially approved patterns of thought. When
cultural goods are presented to the masses—notably
through advertising—the spotlight is on their monetary value or commodity character. Customers
come to enjoy, even idolize, mere exchange values,
forgoing any critical engagement with concrete substance. “Where they react at all, it no longer makes
any difference whether it is to Beethoven’s Seventh

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Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

Symphony or to a bikini” (Adorno 1991, 37).
Moreover, appearing as affairs of leisure rather than
production, mass cultural articles mask the true purpose of their consumption: to prolong the workday
by enhancing the recreation of labor power through
relaxation. As Horkheimer (1972, 275) notes, here,
the culture industry continues a trend that has been
characteristic of capitalism from its outset: “Life outside the office and shop was appointed to refresh a
man’s strength for office and shop; it was . . . a mere
appendage, a kind of tail to the comet of labor, measured, like labor, by time, and termed ‘free time.’”
The culture industry, its Frankfurt critics claim,
leaves less and less room for genuine art. Authentic
artworks of the past still contained images of utopian fulfillment incompatible with existing social
conditions. This allowed art to raise awareness of
the dissatisfactory state of those conditions. Popular
culture, by contrast, unfalteringly delivers superficial
representations of the status quo. “The vamp, the
national hero, the beatnik, the neurotic housewife,
the gangster, the star, the charismatic tycoon perform
a function . . . contrary to that of their cultural predecessors. They are . . . types of the same life” (Marcuse
1991, 59). The obstinate repetition of mundane facts
about aspects of quotidian existence invites consumers to dismiss the idea that the world could or should
be different from the way it presents itself here and
now. In a comparable fashion, Löwenthal argues,
“The pompous display of fixed dates, events, names,
letters” (1984, 190) in pulp biographies conveys the
message “whatever was, was always that way, is that
way, and so it will remain” (193). The audience is
encouraged to renounce its oppositional responses to
the extant social order as useless or unnecessary and
to fall into line with social conventions.
From a similar angle, the Institute’s associates
pillory the culture industry’s false portrayals of the
course of the world as immune to human intervention and historical change. Löwenthal (1984, 191)
highlights this problem with reference to popular
literature: “history acquires the traits of an overpowering robot, who, however, hardly seems to be the
result of human production.” Jazz, Adorno (1983,
124–125) adds, no longer expresses a historical reality at all: the homogenous bars and segments of a jazz
piece (unlike those of serious music) follow no logical
compositional progression but can be “moved about
at will.” Consumers of such artifacts are sold misrepresentations of the present social conditions—which
were created, are maintained, and could be abolished

by humans—as fate: intangible to collective human
action or downright invariant. Once again, the culture industry persuades its customers to abandon
social resistance as a fruitless waste of effort.
Certain films, television and radio programs, and
a myriad of printed materials are even said to promote or dictate a conformist conduct of life. Mass
culture facilitates and indeed enforces people’s identification with norms of socially acceptable behavior.
Pulp biographies, Löwenthal illustrates, frequently
praise their protagonists’ efficiency in material tasks,
sociability in interpersonal relations, and restraint in
revealing emotions:
In tone the catalogue of these traits . . . resembles a
digest of military orders of the day: burlesque
laudations and reprimands. . . . In content, . . . the
yardstick is social adjustment. (Löwenthal 1984, 220)
These life stories are really intended to be educational
models. They are written . . . for someone who the
next day may try to emulate the man whom he has
just envied. (Löwenthal 1984, 207)

Adorno’s study of the Los Angeles Times astrology section between late 1952 and early 1953 presents similar considerations. Conveying the aura of
cosmic authority, the column advises readers to
divide their days into two phases: a.m. is reserved for
work, chores, duties, career concerns, and money
dealings; p.m. is set aside for leisure, pleasure, amusement, sports, relaxation, and romance. Readers
gladly accept the column’s recommendations as normative guidance. For in conditions that constantly
confront individuals with the conflicting demands of
production and consumption, the message that
merely obeying the stars can help meet those demands
provides ideological reassurance. Thus, people are
animated to organize their lives in harmony with
social habits:
The idea is that both ranges of activity will
benefit: no instinctual aberrations will interfere
with seriousness of rational behavior, no signs
of seriousness and responsibility will cast their
shadow over fun. . . . The individual . . .
functions as a producer and . . . as a consumer.
(Adorno 2002, 97)

However, on closer inspection, notes Adorno, the
column permits pleasure only if it serves some purpose
connected to work (e.g., making acquaintances at parties to further one’s career). This is the directive the
reader is ultimately supposed to swallow, so that even

Mass Observation

his “outbreak” (Adorno 2002, 105) from production
will lead him back into socially tolerable productive
activities. Astrology, Adorno is convinced, simply
circulates variations on “the categorical imperative of
the culture industry,” which “proclaims: you shall conform . . . to that which exists anyway” (Adorno 1991,
104). The organized deception of mass culture cultivates what Marcuse (1991, 12) terms one-dimensional
thought and one-dimensional behavior. Its function is
to nip political opposition in the bud and make the
masses perform within the existing social order.
Finally, the critical theorists underline the culture
industry’s capacity to transmit distorting images
of objective suffering variously as healthy, normal,
inconsequential, or unreal. The cinema, for example,
exhibits a series of “happy endings,” sitcoms offer
lighthearted portrayals of economic misery, and
television—ostensibly channeling the entire world
into every viewer’s home—palliates the distant,
incomprehensible, estranged character of capitalist social relations. By distracting consumers from
their socially conditioned plight, the culture industry
further shrouds the requirement of social transformation. “Amusement always means . . . forgetting
suffering. . . . It is . . . escape . . . from the last thought
of resisting . . . reality” (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002, 115–116).
According to the Frankfurt school, the deceptive
influence of mass culture on its consumers is comparable to the beguiling impact of political propaganda.
It stifles the masses’ consciousness of the possibility
and necessity of social change, leads them to abandon
oppositional and socially transformative activities, and
lures them into upholding a wretched social condition,
which only they could alter. In “consumers’ culture,”
Löwenthal (1984, 300) concludes, people have become
“the serfs of a life style of conformity and regulation.”
Matthias Benzer
See also Adorno, Theodor; Advertising; Cultural
Intermediaries; Cultural Studies; Cultural Turn;
Horkheimer, Max; Marcuse, Herbert; Marxist
Theories; Production of Culture

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1983.
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays
on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991.
Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models: Interventions and
Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

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Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Athlone
Press, 1999.
Adorno, Theodor W. The Stars Down to Earth and Other
Essays on the Irrational in Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Adorno, Theodor W. Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I:
Fragment gebliebene Schriften. Band 3 [Current of
music: Elements of a radio theory]. Frankfurt am Main,
Germany: Suhrkamp, 2006.
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays.
New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Lowenthal, Leo. Literature and Mass Culture:
Communication in Society. Vol. 1. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 1984.
Marcuse, Herbert. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory.
London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1968.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London:
Routledge, 1991.

MASS OBSERVATION
The U.K. Mass Observation (M-O) Project began in
1937 and still continues over seventy years later. Its
central methodological tenet was to “observe,” to
watch and record people’s behavior and conversations. It has been suggested that M-O is an enigma
(Hubble 2010), and there is ongoing discussion as to
whether it was a research project or a social movement
(Summerfield 1985). M-O was indeed founded by
three young intellectuals: Tom Harrison, a self-taught
anthropologist; Charles Madge, a poet and journalist (later to become a Professor of Sociology at the
University of Birmingham); and Humphrey Jennings,
a painter poet, writer, and filmmaker. They came
together through the pages of the New Statesman.
To date, M-O represents an important data resource
for understanding the everyday lives of British people,
including their leisure practices, patterns, and understandings of consumption. It laid important foundations for market research but has been underused by
researchers in the field of consumption. The M-O
studies contained within the project provide potentially instructive sociohistorical insights into the emergence and trajectories of consumer culture.
M-O members used a blend of anthropology,
sociology (influenced by Robert and Helen Lynd’s

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Mass Observation

studies of “Middletown,” also known as Muncie,
Indiana, in the 1920s), and psychoanalysis and
set out to tap into the British social consciousness
through the use of images as well as words. Part of
the impetus for M-O was dissatisfaction with the
media coverage of the abdication of Edward VIII in
1936, and the founders set out to document the feelings of the people about this and other events. M-O
developed in the context of, and indeed encapsulated,
“the social division between modernity and tradition which was laid bare by the abdication crisis”
(Hubble 2010, 5). The key to the early work was the
team’s use of images as “social facts.” Image in this
modernist sense meant the coming together of the
intellectual and emotional in a specific moment. This
idea brought merged ideas from imagist poetry and
the exploration of everyday lives with the intention
of exploring meanings generated without dominant
narratives. M-O was critical of what its members
described as the “obsession with statistics” and held
to the view that without qualitative work “sociologists will never be able to look further than the day
after tomorrow” (Madge and Harrisson 1937, 6).
Between 1937 and 1939, Harrison, with a team
of investigators, subjected Bolton (Worktown) to
“scientific” scrutiny—a team of paid investigators
looked into a variety of public situations: meetings,
religious occasions, sporting and leisure activities, in
the street and at work, and recorded people’s behavior and conversation in as much detail as possible.
Perhaps the most famous documentation of this project was edited by Harrison and published as The Pub
and the People in 1943 based on observer’s accounts
of patterns of behavior and widely ranging activities
in Bolton’s public houses. The data demonstrate the
role of the pub as an important public, political, and
educational space as well as a place to relax and meet
friends and provide a useful insight into M-O’s value
in offering an insight into what Hubble describes as
a “possibly short-lived 1930s inclusive cultural consciousness” (2010, 6).
During World War II, M-O conducted a project
to gather material in London not only using similar
techniques but also including sample surveys and
interviews. A survey of what people ate was carried
out in 1939 and repeated with the same households
in 1941, and what emerged as most significant was
how unwilling people were to alter their eating habits even in the context of food shortages. A typical
response was, “We have the meat ration roast on

Sunday, cold on Monday, stewed on Tuesday, minced
on Wednesday. It makes a change and we manage
that way. After that we have bread and cheese—we
don’t do so badly you know.”
The responses suggest that there was little attempt
to do anything new with the rations, contrary to
other discussions of creative and flexible food practices during the war—the watchword seems to have
been “less of the same.”
Another strand of work, led by Madge and
Jennings, exhorted people to “observe themselves,”
and observers were recruited via newspapers and other
publications, and by 1945, three thousand people had
been involved, either as respondents to Directives (a
monthly open-ended thematic questionnaire) or as
diarists. Three hundred people kept full personal diaries throughout the war, the most famous being those
of Nella Last—Housewife 49 (published in three volumes in 2006, 2008, and 2010 and dramatized for
television in 2005). These examples give just a flavor
of the extent and richness of the data collected during
this early period.
By 1940, M-O was reporting on the nation’s
morale to the Ministry of Information, and Jennings
went on to make films for the government’s Crown
Film Unit. Madge left the Project in 1940, at least
in part as a result of becoming uncomfortable with
what he called “home front espionage.” Harrison
left to join the war effort as a member of the Special
Operations Executive. The project itself continued,
however, with volunteer writers submitting diaries
and responses to Directives throughout the war and
afterward (although in much reduced numbers).
With the growth of consumerism and the rise of market research, aspects of M-O found a niche, and it
was registered as a limited company in 1949.
Meanwhile, M-O moved out of methodological
acceptability in the 1950s and 1960s—being seen as
unrepresentative by the more positivist social science
of the time. However, academic and political interest
in auto- and biographical writing, women’s history,
and working class history emerged at the end of the
1960s supported particularly by the growth of feminist scholarship. This provided a fertile context for
the establishment of the Mass Observation Archive
and later the “new” Mass Observation Project.
The archive is a charitable trust, which was established at the University of Sussex in 1970 by Asa
(Lord) Briggs, then Vice Chancellor of the University,
and thus opening it up as a public resource for

Mass Production and Consumption

historical research. The archive contains all the material from 1937 through 1949 as well as some later
additions. The collection comprises in-depth accounts
(both opinion and experience) of everyday life: stories, memoirs, lists, letters, diagrams, drawings, maps,
diaries, photographs, press cuttings, confessions,
reports on people, and places and events across a
wide variety of topics. The original Mass Observation
Project idea of a national panel was revived in 1981.
Through the press, television, and radio, new volunteer writers or “Mass Observation correspondents”
were recruited from all over Britain. This “project”
under the direction of Professor Dorothy Sheridan
differs from other similar social investigations because
of its historical link to the original Mass Observation
Project and because of its focus on voluntary, selfmotivated participation. The idea that everyone can
participate in creating their own history or social science is as much at the heart of the present-day project
as it was in the early days. The mass observers do not
constitute a statistically representative sample of the
population but can be seen as reporters or “citizen
journalists” who provide a window on their worlds.
The material is solicited in response to Directives
or open-ended questions sent to the respondents by
post or e-mail three times a year. The Directives contain two or three broad themes, many of which have
been chosen in collaboration with researchers, and
cover both personal issues and wider political and
social issues and events. Over four thousand people
have taken part since 1981, many of them corresponding over several years.
On May 12, 2010, the Mass Observation Archive
trustees repeated the 1937 call for people from all
parts of the United Kingdom to record, in a diary,
everything that they did on May 12.
May 12, 1937, was the day of George VI’s coronation, and many people wrote about being involved
in this national event. Seventy-three years later, the
researchers expected May 12 to be a very ordinary
day. As it happened, it was the first day of the new
coalition government, and the resulting diaries provide a glimpse into everyday life on this date.
The continuing popular and academic revival of
interest in the Mass Observation Project indicates
that “ordinary lives” and “ordinariness” central to
the original project are of continuing interest in the
twenty-first century. This interest may well increase
in the context of confessional and reality media and
the spread of ongoing auto-/biographical accounts

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through sites such as Facebook and Twitter—indeed
the archive is itself on Twitter. In this context, it
is, perhaps, hardly surprising that the data from
the current project are more focused on individual
experiences and opposed to the documentation of a
fairly open public space, which was at the heart of
the early work. Observational research has become
technically easier than it was in the 1930s, with more
recent research using such techniques, the use of
closed-circuit television (CCTV) to record household
activities in individuals’ kitchens being an example
(Martens and Scott 2006). However, it has also
become much more challenging, as codes of ethical
practice focus increasingly on the protection of privacy and protection of individual respondents. It is
hard to imagine researchers being granted permission
to lurk under the current equivalent of Blackpool
pier to “observe” everyday and night sexual activity.
Sue Scott
See also Autoethnography; Convenience; Cultural
Studies; Leisure; Markets and Marketing;
Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture;
Ordinary Consumption

Further Readings
Hubble, Nick. Mass Observation and Everyday Life.
London: Palgrave, 2010.
Madge, Charles, and Tom H. Harrisson. Mass
Observation. London: Frederick Muller, 1937.
Martens, Lydia, and Sue Scott. “Under the Kitchen Surface:
Domestic Products and Conflicting Constructions of
Home.” Home Cultures 3, no. 1 (2006): 39–62.
Summerfield, Penny. “Mass-Observation: Social Research
or Social Movement?” Journal of Contemporary
History 20 (1985): 429–452.

MASS PRODUCTION
CONSUMPTION

AND

Though mass production essentially refers to
the manufacture of a product on a large scale, it generally has a more specific meaning. The term is most
commonly associated with the production of large
quantities of standardized goods using assembly-line
techniques. It was the introduction of this approach
to industrial production that transformed much of
twentieth-century manufacturing, and supported

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Mass Production and Consumption

the flood of goods into consumer markets (and into
other markets such as the Second World War’s military forces).

Assembly-Line Production
In an assembly line, the good that is the end of production is constructed in a step-by-step fashion, in
which successive components are put together and
specific operations performed (e.g., the parts of a car
are fitted together, paints are sprayed onto the body,
and so on). The components are standardized, so they
can be fitted into place without needing more work.
Individual workers are stationed at specific parts of
the assembly line along which the product that is
being assembled is moved. They repeat the same operations on a succession of part-assembled products.
In principle, they can become highly skilled in these
specific operations, without having much understanding of the whole production process. This contrasts with traditional craft work, where one person
might take a product through many stages of its creation. Mass production introduces a high division of
labor and makes use of economies of scale—that is, it
is possible to make goods more cheaply (and often
more rapidly) when they are produced on a large scale.
Mass production is often seen as a twentieth-century
invention: the terms mass production and assembly
line both date from the first quarter of that century
and are particularly identified with Henry Ford. But
historians of industrialization trace assembly-line
methods back to at least the 1660s, when they were
being used in a pencil factory in Castille, Spain, or even
earlier, to the rapid building of warships from standardized parts in sixteenth-century Venice.
Ford’s achievement was to synthesize many of the
elements of mass production that had emerged by
the early twentieth century. One notable step was
the application of electrification to create moving
assembly lines. Now, the unfinished product was
brought to the worker rather than vice versa. This
also imposed a time pressure on production, and
assembly lines had to be designed to take account
of the fact that some steps in production took longer to accomplish than others. The Model T car was
introduced in 1908, but the moving assembly line
was implemented five years later. Though Ford was
neither the first to mass produce automobiles nor the
first to use assembly lines, his system was able to produce cars at a remarkable pace, so fast indeed that

for some time only black paint dried rapidly enough
to be used in these vehicles (giving the iconic Model
T its famous color). Costing half the price of comparable cars from other manufacturers, the Model T
was taken up by a mass market, stoked by advertising and clever publicity, and served by a network of
local dealers across the United States.
Assembly-line techniques have become common
across the manufacturing industry and have been
identified with a system of production known as
Fordism as much because of Henry Ford’s visionary pronouncements and managerial philosophy as
because of his creativity in engineering. He was outstanding not just in pushing assembly-line methods
forward but also in explicitly linking mass production and mass consumption.

Impact of the Industrial Revolution
The nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution saw
many developments that contributed to a vast expansion of production and consumption of industrial
goods. The organization of work in factories brought
workers together in large numbers, creating new sites
for consumption (even though many urban workers were impoverished). Steam and later petroleum
and electrical power, new equipment such as machine
tools, and new materials made it possible to create
goods on much-expanded scales and to create new
goods. Improved transport and communications
made it possible to reach wider markets as well as
to source raw materials from around the world.
Production on increasing scales allowed for cost savings, and the possibility of making goods that had
previously been the reserve of aristocrats became
accessible to the burgeoning middle classes. Indeed,
a wider range of goods became affordable to the
working classes, too. These ranged from foodstuffs
and consumables such as teas, coffee, and tobacco
through metal cutlery, furniture, and clothing to
books and newspapers. Warfare, as well as growing
consumer markets, was an important driving force
of many of the developments in industrial processes
(and many products that entered consumer markets
came from industrial processes honed in the manufacture of textiles for military uniforms, metals for weapons, etc.). Just as markets grew in the late-nineteenth
century and communities became larger and more
anonymous, so there was a growth of larger shops
in urban centers. Shopping was conducted in new

Mass Production and Consumption

ways, so customers bought goods with cash rather
than with credit. Cash registers and other ways of
handling money were introduced. A greater division
of labor was introduced in shops—specialized roles
of salespeople and counter assistants in department
stores (large shops with multiple specialized departments), for example. More efforts were made to create a pleasing customer experience (e.g., attractive
displays, restaurants).
Ford moved this trajectory on too, focusing on
how mass markets could be created for a complex
industrial product that had initially been the province
of the well-to-do. He aimed not only to mass produce affordable cars but also to help create the consumers that could afford and desire them. Ford gave
his automobile workers a shorter working week and
paid them a wage that was considered particularly
high at the time (“the 5 dollar day and the 40 hour
week”). This was beneficial in terms of allowing him
to recruit and retain the most productive workers.
But he also argued that more affluent workers would
become new consumers of his products, envisioning
a future where mass production was married to mass
consumption. (Famously, he dismissed the notion of
using robots to undertake industrial work since they
would not be consumers: ironically, the automobile
industry has subsequently become one of the pioneers of industrial robotics.)

Criticisms
Opinions about standardized and mass production
methods and their results were divided from the
outset. From the outset, there had been many critics
of factory work, and already in the late-nineteenth
century, William Morris had been among the most
influential Victorian critics of mechanized and standardized production. He saw it not only as involving
degraded working conditions, as earlier critics of factory work had emphasized, but also he denounced
the loss of individual creativity in production (in
ways resonant of later claims about the “de-skilling”
of the workforce through the use of new information technology). The aesthetics of handicrafts were
disappearing as industry created lowest-commondenominator and functional goods, and Morris notably argued this from a socialist perspective, not as
an elitist bemoaning the poor taste of the proletariat. With the advent of Fordism, Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times (1936) was a classic film portrait

911

of the individual worker at the mercy of industrial
machinery. Although Ford’s cars were widely hailed
as a breakthrough, mass-produced goods were often
seen as low quality. People of more refined taste
would consume “superior” products, markets that
coexist with those for the (visibly) mass produced.

Expansion
Despite (and especially after) the Great Depression
and two world wars, the twentieth century saw an
immense expansion of mass production. Likewise,
there was a burgeoning of the mass consumption that
is the necessary complement of mass production—if
those goods cannot be sold, then the firms making
them will fail. Thus, alongside substantial change in
the manufacturing industry and the creation of more
affluent societies, it was necessary to develop systems
for distribution and retail of goods and for marketing and other ways of developing receptive attitudes
among consumers. Transport systems were improved
to support the delivery of consumer goods as well as
securing the supply of raw materials and components
to factories—and roads were needed to support automobile traffic, too. Often, alongside the promotion of
new products through advertising and product placement in mass media, there were new infrastructures
needed (e.g., electricity and gas systems to provide
power for consumer goods), new regulations (road
safety, broadcasting licenses, and so on). The private motor car became an important symbol of the
Fordism mass consumer society and of individual success with it. Cars and car ownership were celebrated
in song and art, with health and environmental concerns taking a back seat.
The car industry was associated with an elaborate
distribution network, with chains of dealers, garages
and repair shops, and, of course, petroleum stations
emerging across the landscape of industrial economies. But other mass-produced consumer goods were
also making their mark, sometimes not only through
specialized stores (e.g., hardware and electrical goods)
but also often through variety chain stores (such as
Woolworths and Marks and Spencer), which early in
the twentieth century were selling household goods
and clothing. An element of self-service was introduced, as customers selected goods from counters
and gave these to assistants and cashiers. Later in the
century, self-service supermarkets took off, retailing
food and nonfood products on a mass basis. With the

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Mass Production and Consumption

spread of car ownerships, bigger supermarkets could
be situated on the periphery of towns, with consumers driving to shop and carry home their purchases.
Mass consumption was supported by industrial-scale
shopping experiences in malls and hypermarkets, with
the standardization of industrial goods mirrored in the
standardization of brands, layouts, and contents from
city to city.

Massification Versus Fragmentation
Cultural critics sometimes warned against massification—the creation of much more homogeneous
societies, where regional and even class differences
in consumer and cultural taste were eroded by mass
production and mass consumption. It was sometimes
assumed that there would also be a homogenization
of attitudes and lifestyles: people’s work experiences
would be similar, their consumption experiences
would be increasingly similar, their ways of life and
patterns of thinking would converge. However, this
perspective was challenged by researchers of social values and lifestyles, who argued that there was, rather, a
fragmentation of consumer society into many different
subcultures (not to mention huge differences visible
across industrial societies, where we see major differences in attitudes and ways of life even within Europe
and North America, let alone between these societies
and between them and other industrial economies in
Japan, Korea, and the like). Affluent consumers were
actually freer to follow individual tastes, and shorter
working hours gave them more time to elaborate on
these. Socioeconomic trends were also indicating that
these tastes were less predictably shaped by people’s
occupational status. The workforce was not becoming
dominated by relatively unskilled industrial workers.
Changes within the manufacturing industry itself and
the growth of many service sectors of the economy
meant that a more diverse workforce was emerging
in a more complex society. Coupled with the experience of longer spells in education and other periods
away from the workplace and the ability to choose
between ever-expanding ranges of consumer goods
and services, there was if anything more diversity in
consumption patterns.
Of course, many everyday staples are still objects
of mass consumption, and mass production techniques are employed in factories around the world
that supply goods for Western consumer markets.

But the diversification of consumption, rather than
its wholesale massification, is a phenomenon widely
accepted by marketers and sociologists alike by the
later decades of the twentieth century. This resonated
with a more general analysis that the era of Fordism
was coming to a close, that a new era of post-Fordism was emerging. Indeed, the point was made that
Fordism mass production only characterized a small
share of work in industrial society during the heyday of Fordism. Perhaps it applied to car factories,
but garages and repair shops were organized much
more along the lines of traditional craft production.
Many industries were organized in quite specific
ways—consider, for example, fishing, nursing care,
road maintenance. While there were moves toward
intensified divisions of labor and the use of standardized components in many sectors, discussions of
the industrialization of services were, for example,
only emerging in the 1970s. Perhaps Fordism was
an aspiration for managers in these sectors rather
than the reality. In any case, post-Fordism was being
announced as the “coming thing” in the 1970s and
1980s, around the same time that postmodernism
was in vogue as describing changes in culture and
philosophy.
In this case, post-Fordism was seen to represent
a turn from mass production to what were known
as flexible specialization (allowing rapid change in
production systems, for example, as feedback from
retail indicates that a particular version of a product
is in most demand) and mass customization (typically, meaning that numerous variants of a product
could be assembled using standard components,
colors, etc.). On the industrial side, this was seen to
be in part related to the application of new technologies (especially information technologies and equipment embodying programmable microelectronics,
such as numerically controlled machine tools and
robotics) that allowed for rapid shifts in the details
of the goods that were being produced. Economies
of scope (reducing the average prices of several
products by producing them together) were seen as
achievable as well as economies of scale (reducing the
price of one product by making it in large numbers).
Furthermore, it was recognized that methods such as
team working and quality control circles and just-intime supply were being used successfully by Japanese
companies, which were in many cases eclipsing
their Western competition. The need for a flexible

Mass Tourism

workforce that could adapt to new techniques, technologies, and products was seen as paramount. On
the market side, the argument was that, with people’s
basic requirements satisfied by mass-produced goods,
many markets were becoming saturated. Thus, the
expanding areas of demand would be for more specialized goods, reflecting the fragmentation of tastes
and lifestyles in affluent societies. People wanted
more choice, to express their identities and pursue
their interests. Markets were not only more diverse
but also were more volatile, as consumer fashions
and fads came and went, as innovation became a
competitive priority in many markets.
Just as the scale and scope of Fordism may have
been exaggerated, so the shift to post-Fordism may
be much less a sudden and dramatic break than some
commentators were arguing it to be. Additionally,
the exact form of post-Fordism remains debatable.
One important trend in the period since the 1980s
has been the growing inequality within Western societies (especially the United Kingdom and the United
States), with the prospect of many workers being
trapped in low-skill, low-wage, insecure jobs and
with a reduction in the middle-range jobs and steps in
career ladders. Many of the low-wage jobs are in sectors such as retail and catering, which have become
increasingly dominated by large corporations, and
one view of this development is that we are witnessing a shift from Ford’s strategy (as a manufacturer) of
using higher wages to create consumer markets to an
approach based on locking-in lower wage workers
to cheap goods (that are often produced by very lowwage workers made in emerging economies) that
they are distributing cheaply. The end of Fordism
may be more like Walmartism (unskilled staff stacking shelves) than Toyotaism (more autonomous and
skilled manufacturing workers engaged in flexible
specialization). Equally likely, we will continue to see
diverse patterns of production organization across
different sectors and heterogeneity of consumption
across multiple occupational groups.
Nevertheless, the discussions around Fordism and
post-Fordism point to important features of industrial
economies. Production and consumption patterns
are organized in extremely different ways from those
characterizing societies before the rise of industrial
capitalism, and the development of methods of mass
production and social systems of mass consumption
have been a central feature of this transformation.

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That production and consumption will continue to
change, as capitalism continues to evolve in its restless
way, should come as no surprise.
Ian Miles
See also Affluent Society; Consumer Society;
Consumption Patterns and Trends; Cycles of
Production and Consumption; Industrial Society; Mass
Culture (Frankfurt School); Post-Fordism;
Postindustrial Society

Further Readings
Amin, Ash, ed. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994.
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York:
Vintage, 2008.
Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and
the Social Roots of Consumer Culture. New York:
McGraw Hill, 1976.
Hounshell, David A. From the American System to Mass
Production: 1800–1932. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Kipping, M., and O. Bjarnar, eds. The Americanisation of
European Business: The Marshall Plan and the Transfer
of US Management Models. London: Routledge, 1998.
Piore, Michael, and Charles Sabel. The Second Industrial
Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic
Books, 1984.
Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History: The
Global Transformation of Desire. London: Routledge,
2001.
Womack, J., D. Jones, and D. Roos. The Machine That
Changed the World. New York: Harper-Perennial,
1991.
Wood, Stephen, ed. The Transformation of Work?
London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

MASS TOURISM
Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world.
Factoring in such matters as travel agents, transportation, hotels, restaurants, guides, and sites of interest
to tourists—such as nature reserves, museums, sports
arenas, concert halls, and theaters—one can understand why tourism has arrived at such a position of
centrality in the world’s economy and is a major factor in contemporary consumer cultures.

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Mass Tourism

Defining Tourism
At the root of the term tourist is the word tournos,
which can be defined as “making a circle.” Tourists
travel from one place to another, stay for a while, and
return home. There is a disagreement among tourism
scholars about whether one can differentiate between
tourists and travelers; this entry considers them to be
the same, though the word tourist has some negative
connotations connected with regimentation (“will
everyone please get on the bus”), superficiality (“if
it’s Wednesday, we must be in Istanbul”), huge numbers of people, and consumer culture.
According to the World Tourist Organization,
tourism can be defined as follows:
It comprises the activities of persons traveling to
and staying in places outside their usual environment
for not more than one consecutive year for leisure,
business and other purposes not related to the
exercise of an activity remunerated from within the
place visited.

Other definitions of tourism allow people to work
for short periods of time away from their homes in
other countries or cities, but they must return to their
homes after they have finished their work to be considered tourists.
There are two kinds of mass tourism: domestic
tourism, in which people stay within the country
where they reside and travel to different cities and
areas of the country, and foreign tourism, in which
people travel beyond their borders. Some foreign
travel can be a short day trip across a border.

There are around 6.3 billion people on the earth,
which means that approximately one out of every
seven persons made an international trip in 2008.
The ten most popular countries were as follows. See
the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer Update for
more recent statistics on world tourism.
Country

Number of Tourists

1. France

67,310,000

2. United States

47,752,000

3. Spain

43,252,000

4. Italy

34,087,000

5. United Kingdom

25,515,000

6. China

23,770,000

7. Poland

19,520,000

8. Mexico

19,351,000

9. Canada

17,636,000

10. Hungary

17,248,000

This list of the most popular countries to visit
changes from year to year. In 2001, Austria and
Germany were on the list and China, Poland, and
Hungary were not. The Olympics in Beijing, China,
in 2008 were popular and help to explain why China
made the list of top ten travel destinations for 2008.

Characteristics of International Travel
Size of the Tourism Industry
Figures provided by the United Nations World
Tourism Organization (UNWTO) indicate that there
were 924 million international tourist arrivals in
2008. This breaks down as follows (with all figures
rounded):
Europe

448 million

Asia and Pacific

188 million

Americas

147 million

Africa

46 million

Middle East

53 million

In Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on
Tourism, Arthur Asa Berger offers a list of characteristics of foreign travel (2004, 9):
It is temporary, for a relatively short period of time.
It is voluntary, done by choice.
It is done in foreign lands or places outside one’s
usual environment.
It is tied to leisure and pleasure and consumer
culture.
It is discretionary, done because the tourist desires
to do so.
It is done for pleasure, entertainment and related
considerations.

Mass Tourism

It is not involved with business and earning money
while abroad.
It is based on a round trip, tied to a return to one’s
point of origin.
It is made possible by technological developments
in travel and communication, among other things.
It is a mass phenomenon, done by large numbers of
people.

It is difficult at times to distinguish tourism
from business travel, for business people in foreign
countries who find time to visit museums, attend a
symphony concert, and visit sites of interest to
tourists can also be thought of as tourists.
At one time, travel was primarily an activity of elites
who had the money and time to visit foreign lands. It
was only when we developed means of mass transportation, such as river steamers, railroads, airplanes, and
ocean cruisers, that mass tourism developed. Tourism
is “mass” in that huge numbers of people now travel
and visit near or distant parts of their own countries
or other lands, as the statistics listed above demonstrate. Tourism is also complex because it requires a
number of institutions to flourish—what might be
called a tourism infrastructure of travel agents, hotels
and inns, restaurants, entertainment sites or natural
beauty sites, transportation facilities, and so on. The
world has been turned into a gigantic collection of
tourist destinations, of varying kinds, to suit the inclinations of tourists. Tourism is also a highly segmented
industry, with many different kinds of travel available
to tourists and many different functions connected
to travel, such as nature tourism, sex tourism, sports
tourism, adventure tourism, cultural tourism, and
health tourism.

Categories of Tourists
Tourism scholars have suggested a number of typologies to describe tourism and explain tourist behavior.
One such typology was created by Israeli sociologist
Erik Cohen. In his article, “Toward a Sociology of
International Tourism” (quoted in Kotler, Bowen,
and Makens: Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism
1999, 662), he discusses what he describes as organized mass tourists:
The organized mass tourist is the least adventurous
and remains largely confined to his “environmental
bubble” throughout his trip. The guided tour,

915

conducted in an air conditioned bus, traveling at high
speed through a streaming countryside, represents
the prototype of the organized mass tourist. This
tourist type buys a package tour as if it were just
another commodity in the modern mass market. The
itinerary for his trip is fixed in advance, and all his
stops are well-prepared and guided: he makes almost
no decisions for himself and stays almost exclusively
in the microenvironment of his home country.
Familiarity is at a maximum, novelty at a minimum.

Cohen lists four kinds of tourists in his article: the
organized mass tourist, the individual mass tourist,
the explorer, and the drifter. The individual mass
tourist makes his or her travel arrangements using a
travel agency but retains a certain amount of control
over his time and itinerary and ventures out of the
“bubble” to interact with people more than the organized mass tourist does. The explorer makes all of his
arrangements and wants to experience the cultures
he visits, but he doesn’t want to completely remove
himself from the bubble. Drifters abandon the bubble and go native, attempting to live the way natives
do in the countries they visit. Mass tourism is made
up mostly of organized mass tourists and individual
mass tourists, with explorers and drifters making up
a relatively small percentage of tourists.
Perhaps the most influential typology was developed by Stanley Plog. He argues in an essay, “Why
Destinations Rise and Fall in Popularity,” that there
are five kinds of tourists based on their adventurousness: psychocentric, near psychocentric, mid-centric,
near allocentric, and allocentric. Allocentric tourists
tolerate risk and are adventurous. According to Plog,
allocentric tourists—backpackers and explorers—
discover new tourism sites of interest, and as they
become developed, they start attracting tourists from
the other end of the continuum. When the sites are well
developed and have all the creature comforts many
tourists demand, they attract psychocentric tourists.

Conclusions
As one of the largest industries in the world, with
its impact felt by so many parts of the economies of
countries everywhere, mass tourism is a major factor
in contemporary consumer cultures. It is also highly
sensitive to economic conditions and to social and
political developments. Because of its economic and
cultural importance, tourism is not only of interest
to governments, who wish to develop their tourism

916

Material Culture

industries, but also it is of interest to academic institutions. Tourism is now studied in many universities,
and there are numerous academic journals devoted
to various aspects of tourism.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Air and Rail Travel; Consumption Patterns and
Trends; Disney; Grand Tour; Leisure; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural
Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press, 2004.
Cohen, Erik. “Toward a Sociology of International
Tourism.” Quoted in Marketing for Hospitality and
Tourism, 662. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1999.
Kotler, Philip, John Bowen, and James Makens. Marketing
for Hospitality and Tourism. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the
Leisure Class. New York: Schocken, 1976.
Plog, Stanley. “Why Destinations Rise and Fall in
Popularity.” Cornell Hotel and Restaurant
Administration Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1974): 58.

Websites
World Tourist Organization. http://www.unwto.org/
statistics/index.htm.

MATERIAL CULTURE
Material culture refers to the objects and things
that are distinctive of a human cultural group. For
archaeology and anthropology, this has included
clothes, pots, weapons, tools, and jewelry as well as
houses and boats. All these things are human made,
and many of them are decorated as well as serving a
practical function; their design is often what makes
them distinctive of a particular people at a particular
time. Once such things are no longer made within
the household but are bought and sold within a commodity market, the stuff of material culture becomes
the stuff of consumer culture. In late modern society,
the objects of material culture are made industrially
and bought through shops and other outlets before
they are consumed.

Understanding Culture Through
Material Artifacts
The lives of preliterate and other past cultures are often
visible only in the remains of their material culture:
the shards of pottery; the burial mounds that have
preserved weapons and jewelry; the unearthed traces
of homes, grain stores, middens; the wrecks of ships
and their contents. When recovered from beneath the
ground or the sea, these artifacts become the treasures
studied by ethnologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists and often classified, cataloged, and preserved
in museums. The material culture of past societies can
be consumed in the activities of collecting old things
or simply through visiting museums and looking at
the objects while imagining a different form of life.
Archaeology is the study of the physical remains of
earlier human societies, and while much of its focus is
on the form of artifacts, the precise dating of objects
and the environmental context in which they existed
are as important.
Anthropology, the study of humankind, has a
similar interest in the material life of different cultures but extends beyond those that have ceased to
exist. The modern approach to ethnographic study
within anthropology can be traced to Bronislaw
Malinowski’s work with the Trobriand Islanders
during the First World War. Malinowski described
the shells, the armbands, and the canoes of the Kula
exchange system, the status economy of the Trobriand
Islands. What is distinctive about Malinowski’s ethnographic account is that it has to do with the social
activities in which things were bound up rather than
of things as objects—he describes what people did
with the things and how they came to be vehicles for
meaning and significance. The material stuff of shells
and canoes that he describes is embedded within the
cultural practices of magic and ritual, as well as those
of manufacture, bartering, and exchange. The material objects of the Kula are analyzed by Malinowski
as entwined in the people’s culture of myths and
beliefs, so, for example, he describes the canoes of the
Trobrianders as items of “material culture” that are
defined by their purposes, their ownership, and
the ceremonies and customs associated with them:
“A craft is surrounded by an atmosphere of romance,
built up of tradition and of personal experience. It
is an object of cult and admiration, a living thing,
possessing its own individuality” (1932, 105). A special creeper, called the wayugo, is used for tying the

Material Culture

decking to the hulls and outriggers, but this is also
the name used for the magic and the spells that are
cast during canoe building. These include rituals that
call on ancestors to sit in the canoes and invoke the
spirit of a mythical “flying canoe.”

Material Culture and Social Lives
The material culture of modern societies seems at
first glance to be so dominated by rational technical innovation that the association of ritual, magic,
and myth with ordinary things can seem distant
and alien. Instead, the modern era seems dominated by the idea of function, of objects that have
been designed for specific uses that they fulfill more
or less well. But the contemporary study of material culture has also analyzed the consumption of
objects as more than functional and tied to culture
in a way that replicates the ritual, magic, and myth
that Malinowski describes. Roland Barthes’s seminal
collection of essays Mythologies, first published in
1957, described a number of fields of material culture in ways that identify what seem to be modern
technological things in terms of myths and ancient
tradition. For example, he described new cars like the
Citroën DS as “the exact equivalent of great Gothic
cathedrals,” each to be appropriated by a whole population “as a purely magical object” (Barthes 1972,
88), and writes of plastic as “the stuff of alchemy”
(97). Jean Baudrillard in his The System of Objects,
first published in 1968, describes material culture
in terms of the atmospheric—that is, immaterial—
values of materials such as wood and glass and the
myth of functionality that characterized the cars,
televisions, and washing machines of modern material culture. The consumption of these technological
devices changed the gestural vocabulary of modern
consumers and the variety of purposes to which tools
and devices could be put. Another dimension of the
consumption of material culture was the passionate
collecting of objects to be identified by their age and
authenticity and organized according to categories of
distinction.
Baudrillard’s (1981) identification of the sign
value of objects has been treated within cultural
studies as indicating the social status and identity
of the wearer or user. In a well-known example,
Dick Hebdige, who had earlier described the style
of punk and reggae material culture, argues that an
object such as the Italian motor scooter has to be

917

understood in relation to the networks of design,
production, and consumption. Advertising provides
a visible mediation between these networks and a
resource that has been drawn on in many subsequent
attempts to analyze the consumption of material culture. The images and ascribed values of objects can
be analyzed as associated with those who consume
the object. Hebdige describes, for example, how
the Lambretta was used as a display item in fashion
shops, and the advertisements for the scooter showed
it being used by fashionable young women engaging
in the pursuits of modernity—shopping, by the sea, in
the country, in a busy city. To explore the connection
between personal and cultural identity requires more
than the association of the person and object, and
for Pierre Bourdieu, the object is never singular but
always incorporated into the lifestyle or “habitus”
that is originally acquired through socialization from
family background and education. In his approach,
cultural capital, the inherited or acquired parameters
of taste, shapes how the individual consumes material culture. Bourdieu places little emphasis on types
of objects—such as cars, clothes, domestic objects,
and art objects—but shows how they are incorporated into the cultural practices of consumption that
distinguish classes and class fractions.
The anthropological concern with material culture took a distinctive turn in the last quarter of the
twentieth century with a series of arguments that
material “stuff” was constitutive of social lives rather
than being simply a product of social action. This
approach turned the concern of political economy
with production on its head and proposed that the
processes of consumption were just as central to
the creation of societies. Mary Douglas and Baron
Isherwood argued that the choice of goods by consumers demonstrated moral judgments through a
symbolic meaning system that both expressed and
generated culture. Goods are not simply chosen
on functional grounds or for economic reasons
but are selected for customary use, for example, as
gifts, to express identities and relationships. Arjun
Appadurai developed this anthropological approach
that emphasized the symbolic value and meaning of
goods to show how exchange, often across cultural
boundaries, was about cultural values and not just
price. By focusing not on the things themselves but
on their social lives, the anthropology of material
consumption underlined the political consequences
of exchange in consumption. Goods acquire cultural

918

Material Culture

value from their association with certain people who
have social status, and then, when those goods are
exchanged, they can confer that status on their consumers. In contrast, Karl Marx’s materialism had
analyzed the importance of the material world of
things that were made and used in ordinary life as arising through the dialectical relations between people
and things that mean new things are constantly
brought into being by people’s work, which in turn
lead to new forms of human being, in a continuing
cycle of change. The anthropologist Daniel Miller
revisited the dialectical materialism of Marxism (the
phrase is Plekhanov’s) to argue that consumption
could be seen as a strategy of self-creation in the face
of the alienation of the worker. If Marx saw capitalist
production as alienating the worker from the goods
he produced, Miller saw the consumption of goods
by the worker as a reabsorption into their lives of
stuff that could give them meaning and identity in
relation to the people around them. This approach
led to studies of material culture in industrialized and
capitalist societies that analyzed how practices such
as shopping and collecting contribute to individual
and social identities, establishing relationships of
common interest and attachment as well as those of
social distinction and relative status. After something
has been bought and taken into someone’s possession, it is subject to a series of practices that, as Grant
McCracken and others argued, produce a living relation between the thing and its users. These are the
practices of cleaning, repairing, placing, and decorating that fit material objects into homes and everyday
lives. Objects are located where visitors can see them,
or they acquire a distinctive patina through use, and so
they become identified with persons and places. When
they are passed on to others, disinvestment rituals
clean and prepare the object, withdrawing it from its
place in the life and home of their original owner.

Material Culture: Design,
Use and Interactions
The design of modern objects has prepared them
for the ways that they are taken into everyday lives.
As part of the production of goods, design may be
focused on the function of the object, but it must
also respond to the aesthetic context into which it
will be incorporated. The decoration of technical
devices with “natural” forms—a leaf pattern on an
iron grate, the flower motif on a toaster—are ways
in which design prepares an object for reabsorption

by its consumer by overlaying the mechanical and
industrial form of the thing itself. But there is a more
complex cultural relationship that contributes to the
form of material goods through the generation of a
collective taste that feeds back desire and interest in
certain types of goods to designers. This is the creation of desire for iron grates and toasters as “new”
objects that improve ordinary lives and so stimulates their production and consumption. Just as the
origins of the Kula system cannot be disconnected
from the aesthetic interest in shells or the pleasures
of sailing canoes, so the desire for modern objects
such as mobile phones and baseball caps cannot be
disconnected from the cultural creation of tastes.
Design is not simply about the shape of an object
but extends into the cultural context into which it is
introduced. The advertisements, television programs,
and magazine and newspaper articles that pervade
the culture of industrialized, consumer societies are
all used to introduce us to the latest or the fashionably old “things,” and their pictorial and discursive
representations keep us informed about our changing material culture. On the one hand, we are being
persuaded to buy things by a capitalist system intent
on designing us as consumers, while on the other,
this discursive material culture is itself a circulation of ideas and values about things and the world
we inhabit. Our interest, knowledge, and desire of
things—a new car, for example—can be provoked
by reading about them or seeing images of them on
television. But the consumption of material discourse
does not mean that we will buy the thing and appropriate it into our lifestyle, though it may mean we
recognize its meaning for our culture.
What emerges about material culture from
Malinowski’s work, and is reinforced in subsequent
debates, is that the importance of objects is not that
they are simply there within our society in a physical sense but that they are taken up in activities and
practices in the everyday lives of people. There are
objects in museums behind glass cases that we are not
allowed to touch, but even these are there to evoke
the social life of a past time in which they shaped
particular practices. The objects on display in shops
are similarly not displayed for their intrinsic value as
things just to be looked at but as things that we might
like to bring into our lives. We may admire the clothes
on a dummy in a shop window or worn by a model
in a magazine feature, but as we look at the price,
we are wondering how they would look on us. A
more recent approach to the consumption of material

Material Culture

culture has focused on the embodied interaction with
objects: how they are used, how they are taken up in
everyday practices, how they fit into the interaction
between people. Christian Heath and his colleagues
(e.g., Heath and Luff 2000) have undertaken a series
of fine-grained analyses of the interactions between
people and things that pay particular attention to
how things are involved in the interactions between
people. The screens and telephones of a control room,
the equipment in an operating theater, the gavel of
the auctioneer all shape different types of work that
people undertake and are intrinsic to the human
interactions in those work settings. This detailed
analysis of material interaction uses video recording
to allow the minutiae of taken-for-granted everyday
use of things to be carefully studied, to show how
material objects contribute to the way that people in
late modern societies make their culture. Eric Laurier
has used a similar approach to study material interactions between people, their cars, and the road, and
Tim Dant has used a phenomenological approach to
analyze the work of service and repair on cars.
Other researchers have focused on the social and
cultural systems within which material objects are
entwined. Nicky Gregson and her colleagues have,
for example, explored how living with things involves
a set of variable and changing relationships as items
are disposed of either to be bought and reused or
to be thrown away as waste. Elizabeth Shove and
her colleagues have drawn on the approach to material culture of both consumption and technology
studies to argue that design is a process of everyday
life in which objects become inserted into ordinary
practices. Kettles, cameras, and plastic cups shape
particular ways of doing things, so they can be
said to design our ordinary practices of making hot
drinks, remembering family events, and having a
picnic. These practices in turn stimulate designers to
find new or different types of objects that will fit in
with but modify existing practices. The stepwise and
progressive evolution of a material culture means
that within a few decades, ways of doing ordinary
things—cooking, communicating, listening to music,
for example—will change in response to both to the
work of designers and technologists and to the developing interests and desires of people.

Material Culture and Contemporary Society
By the end of the twentieth century, much of the local
variation in material culture had been overlaid by

919

a global culture. Distinctive local headgear had, for
many but certainly not all men, been displaced by
the globally ubiquitous baseball cap that symbolizes
informality and a connection to consumer capitalism, especially that of its culture of origin, the United
States, through its brands and logos. The dark lounge
suit with pale shirt and colored tie has by a similar
process become a universal signifier throughout the
world of masculine status, power, and importance.
However, despite rapid changes in gender relations
across many cultures, the distinction between masculine and feminine ways of dressing has persisted; the
baseball cap and the dark suit are worn by women
but not with the same consistency nor without
residual connotations of cross-dressing. During the
twentieth century, Western consumer societies have
paid great attention to things; increasing wealth and
technological innovation has created an expanding
range of consumer goods and encouraged their continued and blasé acquisition and replacement. The
capacity of new things to extend the possibilities of
human lives is taken for granted, but sometimes,
material culture is fetishistic about the old; we want
to see the latest design of car or phone, but we are
also reverential toward the classic car and the early
telephones. But can this mode of material civilization with its continual renewal and replacement of
things and the persistent advancement and growth
of material culture continue through the twenty-first
century? The depletion of natural resources, particularly oil as a source both of energy and chemicals,
and the difficulty of recycling materials that have
been transformed and embedded in technical objects
suggests that there must be a limit. The exponentially
increasing population is constantly stimulated by a
global communication system that presents everyone
with an ideal material culture to aspire to. And yet
it is the processes of producing and consuming the
material stuff of modern life that provoked climate
change. Perhaps the twenty-first century will revert
to a slower, technologically simpler, and more lasting material culture that emphasizes conservation of
resources, repair, recycling, and reuse. But while there
are people living together in societies, they will make
things to use, to exchange, to display, and to cherish
in a material culture, just as the Trobriander islanders
did and just as the rich consumer societies have done.
Tim Dant
See also Anthropology; Belonging; Desire; Identity;
Lifestyle; Semiotics; Symbolic Value; Taste

920

Materialism and Postmaterialism

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Cape, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso,
1996.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge, 1986.
Dant, Tim. Materiality and Society. Maidenhead, UK:
Open University Press, 2005.
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of
Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.
London: Routledge, 1979.
Gregson, Nicky. Living with Things: Ridding,
Accommodation, Dwelling. Oxford: Sean Kingston,
2006.
Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. Technology in Action.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hebdige, Dick. “Object as Image: The Italian Scooter
Cycle.” In Hiding in the Light, 77–115. London:
Routledge, 1988.
Laurier, Eric. “Doing Office Work on the Motorway.”
Theory, Culture & Society 21, nos. 4/5 (2004): 261–277.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
London: Routledge, 1932.
McCracken, Grant. Cultures of Consumption: New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer
Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Shove, Elizabeth, Mathew Watson, Martyn Hand, and Jack
Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg,
2007.

MATERIALISM AND
POSTMATERIALISM
The term materialism refers to a set of values where
the individual is primarily concerned with material possessions. Karl Marx used the term materialism to show that the major concern for individuals
throughout history has been the acquisition of those
goods and services required for survival. However,
others such as Russell Belk have shown that in contemporary society individuals have transformed that
concern for material security into a more egocentric
value set. Such notions are found within consumer

cultures where “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen
1994) practices involve the acquisition of more
wealth and goods for the outward expression of success. In recent times, however, Ronald Inglehart has
proposed that this particular ideal is beginning to
fade with intergenerational change as societies across
the West develop postmaterialist mind-sets. Inglehart
uses statistical research to show that individuals are
more inclined to place high value on attributes such as
political freedom rather than materialistic concerns.
Materialism, however, was introduced and discussed primarily in the philosophical world and can
be identified as the opposite of those transcendentalists, such as William Wordsworth or Henry David
Thoreau. Essentially, the argument made by materialist philosophy is that the only true things that exist
are matter. Such thoughts reject those who consider
supernatural powers to be real, such as a deity.
However, the most influential work on materialism
emerged with Marx’s discussion of historical materialism in the mid-1800s.
For Marx, history can be defined by an underlying social condition, which has always required individuals to satisfy basic human needs. Shelter, food,
and clothing have for him been the major concern
for societies past and present. Marx critically engaged
with this by suggesting that these basic necessities of
life have created a unique set of social relations in
capitalism. Here, he famously argued that two classes
were created, the bourgeois (owners of production—
factories, workshops) and the proletariat (those who
worked). While the bourgeois increased in wealth
and economic security, the proletariat remained
poor, barely sustaining the basic needs of life. Thus,
the lower classes were more concerned with doing
all they could to secure these necessities unlike the
bourgeois. Due to the nature of capitalism, though,
the only thing that the proletariat had to offer, Marx
famously argued, was their labor, which the bourgeois exploited for their own monetary gain.
While concern with the basic necessities of life
may have motivated the proletariat in obtaining
wealth, the bourgeois or upper classes were also
incited to develop their prosperity, albeit for differing reasons. American economist and sociologist
Thorstein Veblen in 1899 examined and wrote about
the process of emulation among the elite classes.
Here, he argued that individuals were encouraged
to acquire outward symbols of their economic success to secure higher status and power. This social
phenomenon he labeled “conspicuous consumption”

Materialism and Postmaterialism

(Veblen 1994). Veblen proposed further that this
ambition to acquire more wealth for status soon
began to influence the poorer classes who adopted
trends of the higher classes in consumption. These
notions underpin the contemporary consumption
model where emulation or “keeping up with the
Joneses” in material wealth became the motivating
principle for individuals in capitalist societies. Belk
perhaps extends this by suggesting that materialism
in contemporary culture rests on a more self-centered
mind-set. He constructed an empirical model where
it was revealed that within the West, individuals were
becoming more possessive, nongenerous, and envious as consumer culture developed.
Yet in 1971, political scientist Inglehart made
some critical empirical inquiries into the value structure of individuals in Europe that challenges these
findings from Belk and the other theorists mentioned
above. Using Abraham Maslow’s popular psychological theory of motivation (which espouses that once
basic needs are met, higher values such as freedom
and happiness are sought after), Inglehart showed
through survey research that individuals were now
developing more postmaterialist tendencies. He
argued that research showed an intergenerational
social change in attitude toward material wealth,
with people no longer “acting in pursuit of goals”
related to “economic security” or status (Inglehart
1971, 991). This, he concluded, was the result of
a long and sustained period of economic growth
where the baby boomer generation knew little of the
poverty and scarcity that their predecessors endured
before and after World Wars I and II. As economic
security was perhaps now “taken for granted, as the
supply of water or the air we breathe,” individuals
were freed to move beyond the problems of materialism outlined by Marx and concentrate on higher
values such as self-expression (991). To evidence this
shift, Inglehart developed the postmaterialist index
as a standard measure of postmaterialism among the
social sciences. Here, survey respondents were asked
to place in order certain values ranging from protecting freedom of speech and maintaining national
security to fighting rising oil prices. Through the
resulting data sets, Inglehart was able to show that
societies across the West were becoming more concerned with the higher-order goals and values than
with more materialist-focused attributes.
Inglehart’s work and the collaborative efforts with
his colleague Paul Abramson on this shift to postmaterialist values, however, have not been without critique.

921

Criticism for his research mainly centers on the validity of the postmaterialist index used by Inglehart to
prove his case for social change. For instance, in a
paper published in 1999, authors Darren Davis and
Christian Davenport argued that the tendency toward
postmaterialism cannot be predicted by age or generation, contrary to Inglehart’s findings. Furthermore,
an earlier contribution to the debate by Alan Marsh
showed that those identified as postmaterialist were
just as likely to feel dissatisfaction with material wealth
as those labeled as materialist. Influential American
sociologist Juliet Schor has also found that the desire
to acquire more consumer goods for “aspirational”
reasons was still a predominant feature of Western culture and individual lifestyles following from Veblen’s
theories.
Despite this criticism, however, there is some evidence to suggest that a tendency toward postmaterialism is encouraging some social change. Movements
across advanced capitalist societies have emerged as
a counter to materialism and conspicuous consumption. For instance, the voluntary simplicity movement
(also known as downshifting, or simple living) has
provoked some individuals to begin living life with
different value priorities. Those who participate in
the voluntary simplicity movement seek to minimize
time and effort spent in obtaining material wealth
and engaging in consumption practices. Instead, more
meaningful lifestyles are sought through families,
individual leisure time, and other cultural practices. In
some cases, according to Lawrence Moss, this process
of simplifying motivates a migration away from cities
into rural, mountain, or beachside locations where
lifestyles are considered more authentic and less
materialistic. However, the term voluntary simplicity
developed by Duane Elgin was also originally based
on a wider collective motivation to alleviate the problems that mass consumption has on the environment
rather than simply an individualistic desire for more
meaning. Thus, the voluntary simplicity movement
has been linked to other anticonsumption networks
including the slow food movement, which espouses
the use of traditional methods of producing and
cooking food over the fast-food, or McDonaldized,
industry. Yet these simplified practices can also be
“conspicuously” focused with upper classes using
these new lifestyles to distinguish themselves culturally from lower classes.
Other forms of postmaterialism within consumer
culture can be seen in the boycott and buycott movements where commodities are used for political

922

Mauss, Marcel

motivation. Here, the object for sale no longer represents its material value but another alternative, usually political, agenda. For instance, the boycott Nike
campaign of 1996 onward sought to educate consumers about the detrimental circumstances of the labor
standards in those third-world countries where the
product was produced. The boycott was designed then
to send a political message to Nike that modern consumers valued human rights above cheap products.
Similarly, certain buycott campaigns have emerged in
recent times where social and/or political networks
urge consumers to consume certain products in a bid
to protest political or civil agendas of certain companies or political powers.
Nick Osbaldiston
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Culture Jamming;
Dematerialization; Lifestyle; Marxist Theories; Needs
and Wants; Political and Ethical Consumption;
Well-Being

Further Readings
Abramson, Paul, and Ronald Inglehart. Value Change in
Global Perspective. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995.
Belk, Russell. “Materialism: Trait Aspects of Living in the
Material World.” Journal of Consumer Research 12
(December 1985): 265–280.
Davis, Darren, and Christian Davenport. “Assessing the
Validity of the Postmaterialist Index.” American
Political Science Review 93, no. 3 (1999): 649–664.
Elgin, Duane. Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life
That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. New York:
Quill, 1991.
Inglehart, Ronald. “The Silent Revolution in Post-Industrial
Societies.” American Political Science Review 65 (1971):
991–1017.
Marsh, Alan. “The Silent Revolution, Value Priorities and
the Quality of Life in Britain.” American Political
Science Review 69 (1975): 1–30.
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy. New York: International, 1970.
Moss, Lawrence. The Amenity Migrants: Seeking and
Sustaining Mountains and Their Cultures. Cambridge:
Centre for Agricultural Bioscience (CAB) International,
2006.
Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need. New York: HarperPerennial,
1999.
Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class. London:
Penguin, 1994.

MAUSS, MARCEL (1872–1950)
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist. He studied at Bordeaux
University as well as at the École Pratique des
Hautes Études and the Sorbonne in Paris. From
1901 onward, Mauss taught History of the Religions
of Uncivilized Peoples at the École. In 1925, he
cofounded the Institut d’Éthnologie. Six years later,
he received the chair in sociology at the Collège de
France. Mauss was a nephew and student of sociologist Émile Durkheim, who deeply influenced his
thinking. They collaborated on several research projects (e.g., Durkheim and Mauss 1963) and Mauss
contributed extensively to Durkheim’s journal
L’Année Sociologique (1898–1913). Mauss served in
the First World War (1914–1918). He was a socialist
political activist for much of his life.
In The Gift, his most celebrated work, Mauss
investigates the gift exchange systems organizing
“primitive” societies. He describes the gift system as
a “total social fact,” which governs religious, legal,
moral, political, economic, and aesthetic institutions.
In archaic communities, social relations are typically
established through the exchange and circulation of
presents—objects, services, and people—between
clans, tribes, and families as well as between humans
and nature, the dead, spirits, and the Gods. Gift transactions are neither voluntary nor disinterested but
motivated by the social obligation to give, to receive,
and to reciprocate. Refusing to exchange is considered an insult equivalent to rejecting social alliances.
Although Mauss focuses on the peoples of Polynesia,
Melanesia, and North America, he also underscores
the importance of the exchange-gift principle in
antiquity and its hidden operation in modern society.
Among the tribes of America’s Northwest, gift
exchange takes the form of the potlatch system.
Potlatches are festivals of frequently hostile gift transactions. Participants seek to outdo each other in their
presents—often giving all they have—and “even go
as far as the purely sumptuary destruction of wealth”
(Mauss 1990, 8). Through extravagant donations,
the rivals aim to demonstrate their wealth to compete successfully for social honor and rank. Mauss
identifies similar practices in other parts of the word,
notably in Melanesia.
One of Mauss’s (1990, 4) key questions is, “What
rule . . . compels the gift that has been received to

McDonaldization

be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides
in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it
back?” Archaic societies, he argues in response, cherish the notion that the thing given is not inactive but
contains a “spirit” that connects it to the giver and
makes it wish to return. The collective belief in the
“spirit of the thing given”—variously named mana
or hau—motivates people to pass it on. Mauss’s
argument was influenced by his inquiries into collectivities practicing magic and has generated considerable controversy in anthropology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss
1987, 45–66).
Mauss’s thought has left an extraordinary legacy
in several disciplines. His writings shaped the work
of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, influenced the outlook of the Collège de Sociologie and
the anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences
(whose French acronym is MAUSS), and provided
decisive inspiration for Georges Bataille’s theory of
expenditure, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic
exchange, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.
More recently, social scientists have drawn on Mauss’s
work to distinguish between gift exchange and commodity exchange. The gift transactions of gift systems
are obligatory and establish enduring social bonds.
Things are inseparable from transactors and their alliances; the boundaries between legal codes concerning
objects and those concerning humans are blurred.
Commodity exchange, by contrast, is conceived as
a transaction between independent agents who part
ways once the transaction is completed. Things are
treated purely as entities of use value and exchange
value and deemed dissociable from transactors.
Correspondingly, modern legal systems sharply differentiate between laws relating to objects and laws
relating to people. Sociologists of consumption have
employed this framework in their analyses of social
relations and of relationships between people and
consumer objects in contemporary capitalism.
Matthias Benzer
See also Bataille, Georges; Baudrillard, Jean; Durkheim,
Emile; Gifts and Reciprocity; Lévi-Strauss, Claude;
Potlatch

Further Readings
Carrier, James. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and
Western Capitalism since 1700. New York: Routledge,
1995.

923

Durkheim, Émile, and Marcel Mauss. Primitive
Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange
in Archaic Societies. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. New York:
Routledge, 2001.

MCDONALDIZATION
McDonaldization is defined as the spread of the
basic principles of the fast-food restaurant throughout society and the world. The principles are
(1) efficiency, (2) predictability, (3) calculability of
quantity versus quality, (4) control, largely through
the replacement of human technology by nonhuman
technology (machines, automation). In many ways
the fifth, albeit unintended, principle is the most
important from both an empirical and an analytical
perspective: (5) the irrationalities of rationality. The
irrationalities include the antitheses of principles one
through four (e.g., inefficiency), homogenization,
dehumanization (of workers and customers), adverse
health effects, adverse effects on the environment,
disenchantment, and so on.
These principles did not come into existence
with the birth of McDonald’s (the pioneer and most
important of the fast-food chains) but predated it
by decades (e.g., Henry Ford’s assembly line and
F. W. Taylor’s principles of scientific management), if
not by a century or more (the bureaucracy, especially
the German bureaucracy analyzed by Max Weber).
However, all of its predecessors were focused on
production. McDonaldization was (and is) concerned
with production (e.g., of the employees who work the
griddle or at the counter), but in many ways, its most
important innovation was to extend these principles
to the consumer and consumption. In Ford’s assembly line or Weber’s bureaucracy, it was the workers
who were affected, even controlled, by these basic
principles. However, in Ray Kroc’s (the founder of the
McDonald’s chain; the inventors were the McDonald
brothers) McDonald’s, and now in all fast-food restaurants, it is both the employees and the consumers
who are similarly affected and controlled. Control
over customers must, of course, be subtler than control over employees, but it is control nonetheless.

924

McDonaldization

Theoretically, the idea of McDonaldization can
be traced to Max Weber’s work on bureaucracy,
which, of course, is embedded in his larger theory
of rationalization. Weber saw rationalization as a
process created in the Occident, which was affecting
an increasing number of sectors of society and proliferating globally (even though it had to overcome
significant barriers in many parts of the world). To
Weber, the bureaucracy was the paradigm of that
process and increasing bureaucratization accompanied the spread of rationalization. In the context of
Weber’s theory, McDonaldization is a modern version of rationalization in which the fast-food restaurant supplants the bureaucracy as the paradigm of
the process. Like rationalization, McDonaldization
is spreading across many sectors of society. Also like
rationalization, McDonaldization was created in the
West (the United States) and is spreading throughout
the world (there are many global chains of fast-food
restaurants—McDonald’s alone has over thirty thousand restaurants, the majority of which are outside the
United States—to say nothing of indigenous clones
throughout the world). And both processes can be
seen as having a series of unforeseen consequences,
most importantly the irrationality of rationality.

Principles
McDonald’s, and more generally McDonaldized systems, emphasize efficiency, or discovering and using
the best possible route to any of its goals. Overall,
the fast-food restaurant is an efficient way for people
to acquire and consume their food. Over the years,
many innovations have been made to further increase
this efficiency. The best example of this is the drivethrough window. Before that innovation, driving to
the restaurant, parking, going inside the restaurant,
ordering, eating, cleaning up, returning to one’s car,
and driving home were considered more efficient
than cooking and eating at home. With the advent of
the drive-through, most of the steps involved in eating at a fast-food restaurant were eliminated; eating
there via the drive-through had become much more
efficient.
The second dimension of McDonaldization is
calculability, an emphasis on that which can be
quantified—on quantity rather than quality. This translates into an emphasis on size (usually large, “supersize
me”) and price (usually low) and often both—large
quantities and low price (a “value meal”). In the end,
this means a focus on mediocre, if not downright poor

quality, products, or service. Thus, McDonaldized
systems tend to emphasize quantity to the detriment
of quality. One does not expect high quality from a
McDonaldized system but instead a lot of something
at a low price. At McDonald’s, this is most famously
exemplified by the “Big Mac,” which is notably not
called the “Delicious Mac.”
Third is the dimension of predictability, or the
offer of a product and/or service that is the same
from one time to another, as well as from one place
to another. Thus, the Big Mac a consumer devours
today is pretty much the same as the one eaten yesterday and that will be consumed tomorrow. Similarly,
the Big Mac eaten in London is much the same as
the one eaten in New York or Tokyo. There are no
surprises in McDonaldized systems, and this goes for
both workers and consumers.
The fourth dimension of McDonaldization is control, especially through the substitution of nonhuman for human technology. The most unpredictable
element in any McDonaldized system is people—
those who work in, and are served by, the system.
Conventional methods of control are deployed, especially direct control by managers and surveillance
techniques of various sorts. However, what defines
McDonaldized systems in this regard is the elimination of technologies controlled by people and their
replacement with technologies that control people.
This involves not only increased control but also the
de-skilling of work whereby skills are taken away
from people and built into various technologies.
Thus, for example, instead of having a human determine when the french fries are done, a sensor does
the job, sets off an alarm, and the fry basket is automatically lifted out of the oil. A de-skilled employee
is left simply to empty the fry basket.
Interestingly, customers are also controlled,
although to a lesser degree and less overtly by nonhuman technologies (they also experience and are
affected by the other principles of McDonaldization).
For example, the marquee limits or determines their
menu options and virtually eliminates the ability to
ask for special items or methods of preparation. The
best example is the drive-through window, which is,
in effect, an assembly line for consumers; and once
on it, it is difficult for consumers to get off. Further,
it prevents the customer from entering the restaurant
and causing all sorts of potential difficulties (making a mess, being disruptive). It makes it clear, in a
curious reversal of conventional wisdom about restaurants and retail establishments in general, that the

McDonaldization

customer is not welcome. The ideal customer, from
the point of view of any McDonaldized system, is
one who never enters whatever establishment we are
discussing.

The Irrationality of McDonaldization
McDonaldization is a more contemporary name
for, and version of, rationalization and like the latter is inevitably linked to a series of irrationalities. In
one sense, the irrationalities are simply the reverse of
each of the dimensions listed above. So, for example,
instead of being efficient, McDonaldized systems often
end up operating quite inefficiently. Long lines of people at the counter or long lines of cars snaking past the
drive-through window would be examples of this.
A second irrationality of rationality is homogenization. The goal of McDonaldized systems is to
homogenize as much as possible in as many locales
as possible. While this may make sense from a business point of view, and may have desirable consequences from the perspective of many consumers, it
has its downside in the sense of producing a boring
sameness in local areas, nationally, and even globally. Much that is meaningful, especially culturally, is
eliminated when more and more things and areas are
increasingly similar.
Third, McDonaldization tends to produce dehumanizing systems. For diners, eating becomes something to be completed as quickly as possible rather
than a major source of human enjoyment and satisfaction. Customers tend to deal with dehumanized,
scripted employees. For the latter, the work is dehumanized as more skills are built into the nonhuman
technologies.
Fourth, McDonaldization, especially as it exists
in the fast-food restaurant, has a series of adverse
effects on people’s health. People are consuming far
too much sugar, salt, and cholesterol with the result
that they are more likely to develop diabetes, high
blood pressure, and coronary artery disease, among
others. Especially irrational is the effect of all of this
on children who are lured to fast-food restaurants
and hooked on all of these things with the result that
we now are faced with epidemics of childhood diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.
Fifth, the environment is affected negatively by
McDonaldization in a variety of ways. To take the
fast-food restaurant, for example, there is the inefficiency involved in eating beef rather than, say, the
grain consumed by cattle. Cattle must consume

925

vast quantities of grain to produce a much smaller
amount of beef; we would be far better off eating the
grain ourselves. Then, there are trees destroyed for
all that paper and cardboard used in the packaging
of fast food, much of which ends up as debris along
roads and highways.
Finally, McDonaldized systems are disenchanted
(Ritzer 2005). This is another way of saying that
they are rationalized. In this case, the emphasis is
on the loss of magic, enchantment, as a result of
McDonaldization. What should be magical experiences end up being highly rationalized experiences as
their enchantment is leeched out, if not consciously
eliminated, to create an experience that is efficient,
predictable, highly controlled, and so on. This is
best exemplified by the highly McDonaldized experience offered by Disney Worlds in various locales
throughout the world. While calling itself the “magic
kingdom,” Disney World offers instead a highly
rationalized, disenchanted experience.

The Significance of the Fast-Food
Restaurant in Consumer Culture
While McDonaldization extends far beyond the fastfood restaurant, it does serve to highlight the importance of the fast-food restaurant in the contemporary
world, especially in consumer culture. In many ways,
McDonald’s role in the realm of the history of consumption is parallel to the role played by Ford in
production. That is, McDonald’s created a system
that revolutionized consumption in much the same
way that Ford and its assembly line revolutionized
production. It is McDonald’s system that is important and not fast food. After all, all societies have
had some form of fast food and outlets where people
can obtain it (stalls, kiosks, shops, etc.). It was the
system—the principles as they are outlined above—
as it was applied to food that was key in transforming
what foods we consume (e.g., finger foods) and how
we consume them (standing, walking, driving). Of
broader importance was the extension of this system
to virtually all forms of consumption, as well as to
the sites in which they are consumed. McDonald’s, of
course, revolutionized the franchise and chain-store
system with the result that, at least in the developed
world, much of what we consume is purchased from
chains and franchises. The chains and franchises
have, in turn, become the heart of another revolution
in consumption—the shopping mall (Ritzer 2005).
A visit to such a mall has largely become a visit to a

926

McDonaldization

central location in which most of the most popular
chain stores and their wares are to be found.
While McDonaldization is not focally about food,
it is undoubtedly the consumption of food that has
been most transformed by it. Perhaps the key word
here is “fast”—we live in a world in which it is
increasingly the case that food (and much else) is to
be consumed fast. Whatever the food—tacos, pizza,
egg rolls, hamburgers, fried chicken, shwarma—the
common denominator is that it, in the main, must
be finger food that can be consumed quickly, often
while doing something else (driving a car, making
a cell phone call, watching TV, etc.). Eating in this
way is akin to refueling one’s automobile at the selfservice pump. The idea is to do it as quickly as one
can so that one can move on to some other task or
activity. The result, in the case of food (and much
else), is that the quality of the food ends up having
little or no importance to consumers. All that matters
is that it can be gotten and eaten quickly and that it
is inexpensive.
The importance of the “fast” in fast food is
underscored by the rise of the slow food movement. Although its base is in Italy, it has grown to
be a global force with about eighty-five thousand
members. The organization’s name was, of course,
chosen to contrast its goals to that of the fast-food
restaurant. (In fact, the origin of the movement was a
protest against the opening of a McDonald’s near the
Spanish Steps in Rome.) Thus, the movement favors
meals that are slowly created and consumed. It wants
food to be something to be savored and not something to be consumed as quickly as possible.
The slow food movement also champions the
quality of food and of the dining experience. Thus,
it is at least as much the “good food” movement as
it is the “slow food” movement. This is related to its
stand in favor of local and natural food rather than
the industrial food fostered by the fast-food industry.
The local and the natural are seen as of higher quality than industrial food, but the latter is tending to
reduce the demand for the former. In the process, the
prices for local and natural food are driven up, and
this makes it even more difficult for it to compete
with low-priced industrial food.
This relates to another implication of McDonaldization for consumption, the dimension of calculability, that is, what has been termed the “high
cost of low price” (Greenwald, 2005). In the case of
fast-food restaurants, this has meant the triumph of

cheap, low quality, often unhealthy industrial food.
This has been extended not only to all chains and
franchises but also to all contemporary sites of consumption. It is perhaps best applied to the modern
behemoth of consumption—Walmart—now the
largest corporation in the world. The fact that it,
and not General Motors or General Electric, is the
largest corporation is a reflection of the increasing
hegemony of consumption rather than production.
Walmart is, of course, known for its low prices, but
those low prices come with a variety of high costs
including low-paid work, reliance on cheap imports,
destruction of American industries, and so on. In a
broader sense, Walmart is a major force in encouraging consumption, in leading to a society increasingly
characterized by hyperconsumption (Ritzer 2001).
There are various costs associated with hyperconsumption. One is the obsession with consumption
and whether, in the end, a life devoted to it can be
truly satisfying (Campbell 1989). Another is increasing indebtedness—mortgage, automobile, and credit
card debt (Ritzer 1995). It could be argued that
hyperconsumption has led to a society increasingly
characterized by hyperdebt.

Beyond the Fast-Food Restaurant
The concept of McDonaldization makes it clear that
its principles extend far beyond the fast-food restaurant to more and more sectors of society. Much work
on the concept since it was first introduced by Ritzer
in 1983 has been devoted to analyzing its extension
to such settings as theme parks (Bryman 2004), the
church (Drane 2008), higher education (Hayes and
Wynyard 2002), social work (Dustin 2007), and
many others (for a number of examples, see Ritzer
2006). McDonaldization, like rationalization, is a
theory that extends to an ever-increasing number of
sectors of society.

Globalization, McDonaldization, and
Consumption
Similarly, McDonaldization is also by definition a
global process. In fact, conceptually it is one of three
major ways of thinking about globalization (Pieterse
2004). It is seen as emphasizing global homogenization, and while this is part of McDonaldization, it
certainly does not argue that everything around the
world is growing identical. It, and much of the literature on McDonaldization, recognizes that there

McLuhan, Marshall

is diversity among McDonaldized settings as they
adapt to local realities (Watson 1997; Caldwell
2004). However, even as they adapt, they retain the
core principles outlined above. In that sense, they
lead to increasing global homogeneity.
Within that context, consumption settings, products and services, experiences, and the like grow
increasingly similar throughout the world. Again,
this is best exemplified by McDonald’s, which offers
much the same setting, products, services, and experiences everywhere in the world (or at least the one
hundred thirty or so countries that it has reached
so far). More importantly, there are the indigenous
clones of McDonald’s throughout the world, which,
while superficially different, operate on the basis of
the same principles (it makes little difference whether
hamburgers or jerk chicken are offered using these
principles). All this is magnified greatly when we take
into account the fact that McDonaldization extends
far beyond the fast-food restaurant and its origins in
the United States. It is a truly global process that has
extended its reach to most corners of the world.
George Ritzer
See also Americanization; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and
Up-Skilling; Food Consumption; Franchising;
Globalization; Industrial Society; Mass Production and
Consumption; Rationalization

Further Readings
Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage,
2004.
Caldwell, Melissa. “Domesticating the French Fry:
McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 4, no. 1 (March 2004): 5–26.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Drane, John. After McDonaldization. London: Darton,
Longman, and Todd, 2008.
Dustin, Donna. The McDonaldization of Social Work.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
Greenwald, Robert, director. Walmart: The High Cost of
Low Price. (Film). Brave New Films, 2005.
Hayes, Dennis, and Robin Wynyard, eds. The
McDonaldization of Higher Education. Westport, CT:
Bergin and Garvey, 2002.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Globalization and Culture: Global
Melange. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
Ritzer, George. “The McDonaldization of Society.” Journal
of American Culture 6, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 100–107.

927

Ritzer, George. Expressing America: A Critique of the
Global Credit Card Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine
Forge, 1995.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis. London:
Sage, 1997.
Ritzer, George. Explorations in the Sociology of
Consumption. London: Sage, 2001.
Ritzer, George. Enchanting a Disenchanted World:
Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. 2nd ed.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2005.
Ritzer, George, ed. McDonaldization: The Reader. 2nd ed.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2006.
Watson, James, ed. McDonaldization in East Asia.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

MCLUHAN, MARSHALL
(1911–1980)
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian academic, author, speaker, and consultant whose controversial pronouncements on the connections between
media and culture revolutionized media studies and
initiated a worldwide conversation on the impacts of
media that persists to this day. McLuhan considered
as a medium any technology, technique, or artifact
that changes the pace, volume, or pattern of human
interactions. Thus, clothing, housing, clocks, money,
airplanes, and automobiles can be considered media
as much as communication media per se.
His most influential work, Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man, landed on the cultural scene
in 1964 like a meteorite, exploding across the media
landscape and igniting fiery debates. The incendiary
nature of this work was deliberate. It was written
in an aphoristic, probing style consciously chosen to
provoke readers and to jar them out of their complacent acceptance of media as neutral vessels into
which content can simply be poured and conveyed
directly without our being conditioned by the formal
qualities of the medium itself.
He likened the content of a medium to “the
juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract
the watchdog of the mind” (1964, 18). A medium
exploits or extends one of our faculties or senses
and in the process numbs our awareness of it, rearranging our sense ratios and patterns of perception.
Thus, alphabetic literacy detribalizes oral cultures by
exchanging an eye for an ear. We come to assume

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Mead, George Herbert

that the particular ways of perceiving, thinking, and
interacting fostered by a medium are natural and
universal. Hence, the principle for which he is best
known is “the medium is the message.”
Both historically and contemporaneously, cultures
can be placed along a continuum extending from
complete orality to alphabetic manuscript literacy,
the high literacy produced by the printing press and
thence to the postliteracy of the electronic era. The
ratio between orality and literacy in a culture betokens not only its patterns of perception but also its
attitudes toward production and consumption.
Producer-oriented values are more closely associated
with the acoustic, nonlinear, sculptural, and nonspecialist qualities of oral, traditional cultures. Consumeroriented values are more closely associated with the
visual, linear, detached, and specialist perspectives
fostered by scanning uniform lines of print, leading
to the comparatively passive acceptance of completed
“packages.” To McLuhan, the mosaic pattern of the
television image demands more participation in the
completion of the image than does reading and thus
retribalizes highly literate, individualistic cultures.
The same medium can have a “hot,” detribalizing
effect on “cool,” participatory cultures while at the
same time cooling down hot cultures that have a high
degree of specialization in roles and functions.
For example, McLuhan saw Europe and America
exchanging attitudes and values after World War II.
Europeans were increasingly stressing visual values
in fashion and design, and their economies were
embracing a greater quantity of uniform consumer
goods whereas Americans were beginning “to
rebel against uniform consumer values for the first
time” and putting “stress on touch, on participation, involvement, and sculptural values” in both
personal styles and products (1964, 120). He saw
advertisements moving away from linear, denotative statements of the benefits of products toward
dramas founded in depth psychology that engaged
and involved observers in dynamic processes. “The
corporate image of process includes the consumer in
the producer role as well” (227).
This process is accelerated by automation, which
“affects not just production, but every phase of
consumption and marketing” (McLuhan 1964,
349). His recognition of the growing importance of
computer programming and networking anticipated
the social effects of the World Wide Web, which
facilitates the participation of consumers in the

production cycle. Printing on demand, the ability
to order customized computer systems and other
goods with just-in-time production and delivery,
and customer reviews of products and services are
examples of how online communication can blur
the distinction between consumer and producer.
McLuhan often cited a passage in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake that he thought best expressed the
way in which electronic communication has freed the
modern age from the detachment and passivity of
Gutenberg technology: “My consumers are they not
my producers?” (1962, 278).
James C. Morrison
See also Advertising; Post-Fordism; Print Media;
Television

Further Readings
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making
of Typographic Man. Toronto, ON: University of
Toronto Press, 1962.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Reprinted
with new introduction by Lewis H. Lapham.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media:
The New Science. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press, 1988.

MEAD, GEORGE HERBERT
(1863–1931)
George Herbert Mead was an American social psychologist whose ideas on the social nature of the
human self exerted a profound influence on sociology, especially on the American sociological strand
known as symbolic interactionism. Mead did his
graduate training first at Harvard, and later in
Germany (Leipzig and Berlin). After a brief experience
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mead joined the department of philosophy of the University of Chicago in
1894, where he remained until the end of his career.
Much like Berlin for Georg Simmel and Paris for
Walter Benjamin, fin de siècle Chicago became a crucial context for Mead’s intellectual life and an enduring object of his radical democratic civic engagement.
Chicago was primarily for Mead a production
site of manufactured goods and a destiny for hundreds of thousands of European emigrant workers.

Measuring Satisfaction

The conspicuous consumerism of the emergent leisure class that caught the attention of his contemporary Thorstein Veblen was not an issue of immediate
concern to Mead, whose main object of research
was a social theory of human subjectivity. The latter, however, is a valuable resource in the analysis of
contemporary consumer culture.
There are two main reasons for this. First, Mead’s
social conception of the self helps us understand how
our identity is formed through what we consume.
Consumption is here understood as the acquisition,
usage, and exchange of things. For Mead, human
beings live in a world made of objects. Most objects
are physical: we can grab them, feel them, use them.
But human beings are objects too, albeit of a different sort. We are social objects insofar as we are able
to reflect on other objects, including other human
beings and ourselves. Mead explains this process
through the sociopsychological mechanism of “taking the attitude or role of the other.” We constitute
ourselves “through taking the attitude of the other
individuals toward ourselves so that we stimulate
ourselves by our own gesture” (1934/1997, 279).
This is true both of physical and social objects: we
are what we are by putting ourselves in the role of
the other, be it a pen or a friend. Hence, in Mead’s
work, the consumption of physical objects assumes
an original character. Consider the example of a pair
of trousers. By assuming the role of the trousers, we
are able to incorporate some of their qualities even
before we actually put them on (their size and style,
for instance), and adjust our action toward them
accordingly. We are capable not only of anticipating
whether they fit us but also, and crucially, of anticipating what will be the reaction of other individuals
to our wearing of them.
Second, and relatedly, the study of consumption
practices can benefit from Mead’s concepts of the
significant symbol and meaning. A word is a significant symbol insofar as it calls out in the individual
uttering it a functionally identical response that is
called out in his interlocutors. Mead exemplified this
with a footprint of a bear. When we stumble on this
imprinted piece of mud, we associate it with the passing of a bear at some previous moment. We might
be afraid, not of the footprint itself but of what it
means—the bear. The footprint is the symbol, and
the bear is its meaning. For Mead, symbolization creates objects: the piece of mud becomes a “footprint”
only when we look at it and interpret it as meaning

929

“bear.” Mead’s generative conception of symbolization has relevant implications for the analysis of
consumption today. Along with the concept of “taking the role of the other” discussed above, it helps
clarify the sociopsychological underpinnings of the
process of consumption. Mead’s process view of reality undercuts the rigid dichotomy that tends to separate production from consumption. Consumers of
physical objects are responsible for their symbolical
transformation into socially meaningful objects. A
piece of clothing is as materially produced in a factory as it is symbolically produced by the consumers themselves: it ceases to be a piece of cloth and
becomes a socially meaningful object only because
of the human ability of symbolization. In this sense,
social actors symbolically produce their objects of
consumption. Although not directly aimed at the
study of consumerism, Mead’s seminal contribution
to social theory contains valuable insights for the
analysis of consumer culture today.
Filipe Carreira da Silva
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Identity;
Interpellation; Leisure; Psychology; Semiotics;
Sociology; Symbolic Value

Further Readings
Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society from the
Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W.
Morris. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997. First
published 1934.

MEASURING SATISFACTION
Customer satisfaction has become an important construct for many firms, and it also appears frequently
in academic theories of consumer behavior. It is typically viewed as a global evaluation made by the customer after his or her consumption. This evaluative
aspect is something customer satisfaction shares with
many other customer-related constructs—such as attitudes, image, emotions, and perceived quality—and
it reflects that evaluations along a negative-positive
dimension is a fundamental aspect of how customers
respond to the environment. Indeed, human beings
appear to be almost programmed to make evaluations
of objects and events in negative and positive terms.
In contrast to some other frequently used evaluation

930

Measuring Satisfaction

constructs in marketing, however, customer satisfaction is a postconsumption construct thus requiring an
existing customer (i.e., an individual who has actually experienced one particular offer) rather than a
potential customer. The typical way of measuring customer satisfaction is to use questionnaire items with
a response format comprising several steps on a scale
ranging from very dissatisfied to very satisfied.

Satisfaction Scales
Many satisfaction specific scales have been used
in academic research and in commercial marketing research—there is no established measurement
standard such as in the case of length, weight, time,
and several other nonpsychological constructs.
Traditionally, satisfaction scales have been of the
single-item type, which means that one single satisfaction question is asked in the questionnaire. Over
time, however, multi-item scales have become more
prevalent. They thus require several questions—
within the frame of the same questionnaire—about
customer satisfaction. An advantage with the multiitem approach is that the reliability of the satisfaction
measure can be estimated in terms of the internal
consistency of the responses to the individual questions. Such estimates are often obtained by computing Cronbach’s alpha, an indicator taking on values
ranging from 0 to 1. Values above 0.7 indicate that
reliability is at an acceptable level. Indeed, serious
academic marketing journals are nowadays demanding that the researcher who is using questionnaires
should estimate and report the level of reliability
in the measures before he or she proceeds to the
analysis, and a multi-item approach offers a convenient way to deal with such demands. The typical
approach, then, is to (a) ask several questions about
customers’ satisfaction with one particular offer,
(b) estimate the reliability, and (c) create a new satisfaction variable, for each respondent, to be used in
the subsequent analysis (given that the reliability is
at an acceptable level). This new variable is usually
calculated as the mean response to the individual satisfaction questions in the multi-item measure.
Even though different researchers use different
questions and different response formats for their
satisfaction measures, one particular multi-item measure has been used more often than others. This measure consists of three questions and was first used
in the customer satisfaction barometer developed in

Sweden at the end of the 1980s. The same approach
was later used in the American customer satisfaction
barometer and in several other national satisfaction
barometers. By now, satisfaction data have been collected from a gargantuan number of customers—in
many different countries and with regard to many
different offers—with these three questions (and the
response formats): “How satisfied or dissatisfied are
you with XYZ?” (1 = very dissatisfied, 10 = very satisfied), “To what extent does XYZ meet your expectations?” (1 = not at all, 10 = totally), and “Imagine a
[the product or offer in focus] that is perfect in every
respect. How near or how far from this ideal do you
find XYZ?” (1 = very far from, 10 = cannot get any
closer). It should be noted that these questions can
be employed for two conceptually distinct types of
customer satisfaction: transaction-specific satisfaction (i.e., satisfaction after one particular transaction)
and accumulated satisfaction (i.e., satisfaction after
several transactions).

Typical Results
The result of attempts to measure customer satisfaction has typically one striking feature: the distribution
of satisfaction scores is skewed, in the sense that the
majority of customers end up on a high as opposed
to a low level of the satisfaction continuum. The
technical term for this is that the distribution is negatively skewed. Given that many other characteristics
of individuals—such as intelligence and length—are
normally distributed in a population and thus subject
to a symmetric, bell-shaped distribution, this skewed
satisfaction distribution has indeed puzzled researchers. It has even led some critics to suggest that it is
so easy to obtain a high level of satisfaction that
the construct fails to provide a challenging goal for
the marketer who is serious about how to improve
an offer.
In any event, several explanations have been
offered for the skewed distribution. One explanation is that most individuals are subject to a general
positivity bias thus resulting in skewed evaluations in
many cases other than customer satisfaction. It has
been argued that this bias has evolutionary advantages; if the individual has a positive rather than a
negative view of objects and events, it is likely to
facilitate survival-enhancing behaviors such as the
development of good relations to others. Another
explanation is that a skewed distribution is exactly

Measuring Satisfaction

what we would expect, at least for a market in which
(a) there are several competing alternatives to choose
from, and (b) information about these alternatives is
available before a purchase. Given that these characteristics exist, it is indeed possible for the customer to
select offers that are likely to be satisfying rather than
dissatisfying. An additional explanation does also
exist: it is more comfortable from a cognitive point of
view to be satisfied rather than dissatisfied, and this
may lead the customer to adjust his or her satisfaction upward in cases where the selected alternative
was less satisfying.
Some demographical response patterns have also
emerged from the frequent use of customer satisfaction measures: women tend to be more satisfied
than men, older people tend to be more satisfied than
younger people, and persons with a low education
level tend to be more satisfied than those with a high
education level.

Using the Results
The typical customer satisfaction questionnaire
includes measures of potential determinants and consequences of satisfaction, which means that satisfaction scores are often used in attempts to examine the
associations between satisfaction and its causes and
effects. However, it is also possible to use the level
of customer satisfaction per se for various purposes.
It can be used for monitoring the development of
satisfaction over time with regard to one particular
firm’s customers and for comparing the performance
of different units within the same firm (e.g., different
stores in the same chain). The level of satisfaction per
se can also be used for benchmarking purposes and
in marketing communications. The latter use, such
as presenting satisfaction results in an ad, is particularly tempting in the light of the skewed distribution;
the high scores from the typical survey may appear
impressing and persuasive—at least for those who
are not familiar with the nature of the satisfaction
distribution.

Current Practice and Future Challenges
Measuring satisfaction has become a prevalent practice in many firms, and there are several reasons why
this activity has become popular. First, customer satisfaction is intimately linked to what many marketers
believe is a main rationale of marketing: to satisfy the
customer’s needs. Second, the summarizing nature of

931

a satisfaction score provides a high level of economy,
in the sense that a single score is carrier of information about the firm’s performance in customerrelated terms. Third, many studies have shown that
customer satisfaction is positively associated with
several customer behavior variables that firms typically consider valuable (e.g., repurchases, increased
potential for cross-selling, and word-of-mouth).
Indeed, studies have also shown that customer satisfaction is positively associated with financial outcomes, such as profitability and cash flow stability.
Moreover, measuring satisfaction in a survey comprising also the customer’s perceived performance of
discrete attributes of the firm’s offer (e.g., opening
hours and varieties of products on offer) has become
an attractive diagnostic instrument for management’s
attribute-level decisions.
It is also possible, however, that the skewed distribution is one reason why customer satisfaction
has become a popular construct, particularly from
marketing practitioners’ point of view, because a
construct generating high rather than low scores can
be used for several communication-related purposes
(e.g., attempts to impress investors and potential
customers). Yet as already indicated, the skewed
distribution may lead to an exaggerated view of the
firm’s performance level and thereby to difficulties in
identifying areas where improvement is needed. Some
scholars have therefore started to examine other postconsumption constructs that are less likely to produce
a skewed distribution. Typically, such constructs have
a higher affective charge than customer satisfaction.
Delight, joy, and excitement are examples. They are
thus constructs that require more effort from the firm
to reach high levels. And these constructs may also
have a stronger impact on various effects typically
attributed to customer satisfaction such as loyalty and
word-of-mouth. Today, however, customer satisfaction is still the most frequently measured postconsumption construct.
Magnus Söderlund
See also Attitude Surveys; Consumer Behavior; Consumer
Dissatisfaction; Happiness; Markets and Marketing;
Methods of Market Research; Shopping

Further Readings
Churchill, Gilbert A. “A Paradigm for Developing Better
Measures of Marketing Constructs.” Journal of
Marketing Research 16 (February 1979): 64–73.

932

Measuring Standards of Living

Fornell, Claes. “A National Customer Satisfaction
Barometer: The Swedish Experience.” Journal of
Marketing 56 (January 1992): 6–21.
Johnson, Michael D., Anders Gustafsson, Tor W.
Andreassen, Line Lervik, and Jaesung Cha. “The
Evolution and Future of National Satisfaction Index
Models.” Journal of Economic Psychology 22 (2001):
217–245.
Peterson, Robert A., and William R. Wilson. “Measuring
Customer Satisfaction: Fact and Artifact.” Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science 20 (1992): 161–171.

MEASURING STANDARDS

OF

LIVING

Measuring standards of living is the process of
assessing the level of economic welfare and consumer
satisfaction, strictly in terms of economic well-being,
of a given economic context. The standard of living determines a household’s or a consumer’s ability
to purchase goods and services from which utility
is then derived in a certain time or place. The term
refers specifically to the economic component of
utility, hence excluding any other impact the good
has on well-being. For instance, the availability of
sun impacts the standard of living to the extent that
good weather is consumed (e.g., with more leisure
activity), but it does not include the impact of sun
on other aspects of the utility function (e.g., the psychological or health benefit deriving from it, or the
pleasure deriving from leisure). Due to its purely economic nature, standards of living indicate the economic welfare of an economy or an individual and
can be used as an indicator of poverty.
A broader measure of welfare that includes more
general benefits on consumer utility is the concept
of quality of life. While living standards encompass purely material consumption in terms of the
goods purchased and consumed, quality of life also
includes intangible aspects of welfare that are not
closely related to economics (and are difficult to
quantify economically). These include, for instance,
the physical, social, and emotional components of
living. Consequently, the concept of quality of life
corresponds to a broader definition of well-being,
which includes happiness, health, freedom, and all
other noneconomic components of life that contribute to personal wealth. Due to the different perspective given to well-being by the concept of standards
of living and quality of life, it would be possible and
conceivable to have a high standard of living (high

level of economic welfare) although having a low
quality of life.
The concept of standards of living is a key concept
in welfare economics: it provides an indication of the
level of the economic well-being of an individual or
a group of individuals living in a country. This indicator can then be used to compare different groups
of people, living in the same location (e.g., changes
of welfare over time), or across different countries.
In other words, a measure of the standard of living
allows the comparison in the level of economic wellbeing in different economic and social environments.
Amartya Sen indicates three main perspectives in the
analysis of the standards of living in the literature:
utility, opulence, and freedom. While a utilitarian
perspective interprets the standard of living in terms
of material satisfaction derived from consumption,
the opulent point of view focuses on the aspect of
material possession deriving from a living standard
(as from the perspective of a Consumer Price Index).
Finally, the freedom approach focuses on the issue
of being capable of accessing a living standard hence
proposing the relativity of the concept of poverty and
well-being to the context that it relates to.
Due to its importance in economics, the measurement of the standards of living is a necessary option.
This type of assessment is crucial in understanding
social equality and poverty, providing a quantitative
element that allows monitoring the evolution in the
living standards of different individuals over time
and space. Specifically, a quantification of standard
of living lends itself to the analysis of access to health
care services (O’Donnell et al. 2008), material deprivation (Montgomery et al. 2000), and other aspects
of poverty, such as social mobility.
Living standards can be measured in two main
ways: using macroeconomic data or using microeconomic surveys.

Macroeconomic Approach
Initial approaches of the literature would propose the use of aggregate indicators such as gross
domestic product (GDP; Easterlin 2000) or gross
national product (GNP; Brainerd 2010) to represent the level of living standard in a country. These
indicators are readily available and can allow crosscountry comparisons when reported in a common
currency. This is for instance the approach followed
by the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) to include standard of living in the Human

Measuring Standards of Living

Development Index (HDI). However, despite their
practical use, macroeconomic indicators fail to give
a specific representation of economic well-being to
the extent that they depict development from the perspective of an economic outcome (e.g., growth), with
no focus on social achievements. Furthermore, they
represent consumption from a macroeconomic point
of view, which does not allow a microeconomic
insight.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is another
macroeconomic indicator of the standard of living.
Rather than measuring living standards itself, the
CPI aims at measuring the change in expenditures
following a price change a consumer has to accept to
maintain his initial standard of living. This is generally intended as a measure of inflation, which corresponds to the increase in the cost (or value) of a
living standard over time.
Due to the shortsightedness of purely macroeconomic indicators, standards of living can be measured using socioeconomic aggregates with a social
connotation. For instance, an indicator of a higher
standard of living can be infant mortality, deaths per
every one thousand inhabitants, access to technology (e.g., number of refrigerators per one thousand
people), access and quality of health care (e.g., number of hospital beds per one thousand people), or life
expectancy. Alternatively, anthropometric information can be used as proxy for the standard of living
of an economy, such as using average height, which
provides information on the nutritional and health
status of the population.
Despite their better performance as a proxy for
standards of living compared to macroeconomic
aggregates, the use of specific indicators can be
restrictive because they only observe and describe a
single feature of the standard of living (e.g., health
for the child mortality rate or technology diffusion
for TV ownership), which is not fully representative
of the economic context being described, and may
be induced by specific policies or cultural beliefs. To
solve the problem, it is possible to combine these
indicators in a single composite index based on the
sum of the mean-normalized value of each variable,
including an indicator for each key item (Bennett
included fourteen variables that accounted for health
care availability, access to education, technology
and transport diffusion, and consumption of nonnecessities). However, the composite index might fail
to properly account for the relative importance of
goods (if no weight is specified) or fail to account for

933

those indicators that have been arbitrarily excluded
from the index.

Microeconomic Approach
Alternative to the use of macroeconomic aggregate
is the use of indicator of consumption at a unit level.
This approach seems in theory more reliable, because
it allows the measurement of living standards at an
individual or household level. In fact, if total consumption of goods and services is what defines standards of living, this can be measured directly where
it takes place. Owen O’Donnell and colleagues indicate three main measures of living standards: total
consumption, which can be proxied by total expenditures, and household income. Alternatively, living
standards can be estimated using specific multivariate techniques, such as factor analysis or principal
component analysis, or adjusting for specific consumption variables.
Consumption appears to be considered the most
appropriate (and correct) measure of living standards.
This would correspond to all the goods (durable and
nondurable) consumed by a person or household in a
given time period. Measuring total consumption is a
challenging task for three reasons: first, it is difficult
to correctly assess the amount of goods consumed,
which are not always recorded, and to aggregate
them in a single index; second, it is difficult to estimate consumption of durable goods (e.g., a house or
a hi-fi stereo), as these goods are paid for once and
used over time. Finally, it is hard to quantify the level
of consumption of own-made produce (e.g., kitchen
gardens) and nonmarket goods (e.g., environmental
goods), as their consumption is free and hence not
measurable in monetary terms, despite providing an
economic benefit to the consumer.
Due to the problems related to the correct assessment of a value of consumption, an alternative indicator could be the total expenditure for any type of
goods a person or a household commits to in a given
time unit. These types of data are generally preferred
due to the widespread inclusion of questions assessing expenditure in household and consumer surveys.
Furthermore, this type of information is easy to collect and easy to answer for the respondent. In fact,
while it is difficult to aggregate two different items
in terms of quantity (e.g., milk and a DVD player),
summation is easy when all goods consumed are
measured in monetary terms. However, this indicator is a rough approximation of consumption, since

934

Measuring Standards of Living

expenditures do not account for three factors. First,
it is still difficult to estimate the value of own-made
products, which can constitute a large share of
expenditure in developing countries, due to the lack
of a price for the goods. This problem is fairly manageable: if the total quantity of the product made is
known, its unit market price can be assumed to be
the same for a similar good (or the average price of
all similar goods) sold in the marketplace in the area
where the respondent lives. A second problem is the
inclusion of durable goods: expenditures in this case
have an occasional peak corresponding to the time
of purchase, but consumption is spread over time,
and data on expenditures should include the specific amount of durable good consumed in the time
considered (e.g., the equivalent of the total payment
divided by the total amount of time taken for consumption). A final, and more problematic, issue is
that total expenditure can be significantly different
from total quantity consumed: a wealthy household
could spend on total consumption the same amount
spent by a poor household although purchasing less
goods of a higher quality.
A last commonly available instrument that can
capture the value of living standards is disposable
income. This variable is available in virtually every
existing survey, and it is an accessible indicator to
count on. However, income is an imperfect measure
of standards of living and a rough approximation
of total consumption, to the extent that individuals
and households can subsidize their consumption
using external support (e.g., borrowing money) or
can consume less than they earn and save money.
More importantly, the collection of income data is
often problematic for two reasons: first, income is
generally considered a sensitive piece of information,
and respondents often tend to refrain from revealing it; second, in developing countries, work is often
seasonal and subject to frequent external economic
shocks, and data could reveal unusually high or low
income values because of these fluctuations.
An alternative to the use of an aggregate indicator
of the standard of living is the use of disaggregate
information regarding specific goods, particularly
durable goods. Household surveys generally include
information on ownership of several durable goods
(e.g., a refrigerator, a television, a car) or access to
certain services (e.g., access to clean water, electricity, or health services), which grouped indicate the
standard of living of the household and its members.
This could complement the use of other indicators of

living standards in regression analysis as a series of
dummy variables (ownership versus nonownership).
This set of disaggregate indicators can be merged
into a single index, summing all variables to obtain
a total ownership variable. An alternative approach
is to group these variables using specific multivariate
techniques, such as factor analysis, or principal component analysis, which obtain a single continuous
variable that indicates the standard of living at the
household level. Imposing the existence and derivation of a single factor, principal component analysis
groups the whole set of dummies in a single variable
that provides a statistical estimate of the standard
of living, which can be used to rank and relate individuals. This approach, which is statistically reliable,
gives a simple and understandable overview of the
standard of living, but the final factor obtained generally has a low correlation with consumption.

Final Thoughts
There is no univocal approach in the measurement of
living standards. Although the overall aim is to measure total consumption of goods and services, this is
usually unfeasible because of problems in establishing
a unique approach that would integrate all goods and
services used, as well as the provision of nonmarket
goods and services. Due to the concrete impossibility to perfectly measure consumption, proxy variables
inevitably become a key tool for the measurement of
living standards. However, these are imperfect substitutes of total consumption, and their use requires an
understanding of all their strengths and weaknesses
to interpret correctly the meaning of the data used
and the results obtained. The structure of the problem
and the research question will determine whether the
appropriate proxy is a macroeconomic (e.g., GDP),
or a microeconomic (e.g., expenditures) variable.
Luca A. Panzone
See also Consumer Expenditure Surveys; Consumption
and Time Use; Economics; Happiness; Income; Quality
of Life; Systems of Provision; Well-Being

Further Readings
Becker, Gary S., Tomas J. Philipson, and Rodrigo R. Soares.
“The Quantity and Quality of Life and the Evolution of
World Inequality.” American Economic Review 95, no.
1 (2005): 277–291.
Bennett, M. K. “On Measurement of Relative National
Standards of Living.” Quarterly Journal of Economics
51, no. 2 (1937): 317–336.

Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption
Boskin, Michael J., Ellen R. Dulberger, Robert J. Gordon,
Zvi Griliches, and Dale W. Jorgenson. “Consumer
Prices, the Consumer Price Index, and the Cost of
Living.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 1
(1998): 3–26.
Brainerd, Elizabeth. “Reassessing the Standard of Living in
the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using Archival and
Anthropometric Data.” Journal of Economic History
70, no. 1 (2010): 83–117.
Broda, Christian, Ephraim Leibtag, and David E. Weinstein.
“The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor’s Living
Standards.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 2
(2009): 77–97.
Dasgupta, Partha, and Martin Weale. “On Measuring the
Quality of Life.” World Development 20, no. 1 (1992):
119–131.
Easterlin, Richard A. “The Worldwide Standard of Living
since 1800.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14,
no. 1 (2000): 7–26.
Montgomery, Mark R., Michele Gragnolati, Kathleen
A. Burke, and Edmundo Paredes. “Measuring Living
Standards with Proxy Variables.” Demography 37, no.
2 (2000): 155–174.
O’Donnell, Owen, Eddy van Doorslaer, Adam Wagstaff,
and Magnus Lindelow. “Measurement of Living
Standards.” In Analyzing Health Equity Using
Household Survey Data. New York: The World Bank,
2008. Also available online at http://siteresources
.worldbank.org/INTPAH/Resources/
Publications/459843–1195594469249/
HealthEquityFINAL.pdf.
Oswald, Andrew J. “Happiness and Economic
Performance.” The Economic Journal 107, no. 445
(1997): 1815–1831.
Schultze, Charles L. “The Consumer Price Index:
Conceptual Issues and Practical Suggestions.” Journal of
Economic Perspectives 17, no. 1 (2003): 3–22.
Sen, Amartya. “The Living Standard.” Oxford Economic
Papers, New Series: Economic Theory and Hicksian
Themes, 36 (1984): S74–S90.
United Nations Development Programme. “Composite
Indices—HDI and Beyond.” Available at http://hdr
.undp.org/en/statistics/indices (undated).

MEASURING THE ENVIRONMENTAL
IMPACT OF CONSUMPTION
Consumption—including the provision of goods
and services for consumption—has a wide variety
of impacts on the environment: land is cultivated,
energy resources exploited, and toxic substances

935

emitted to water and air. To manage environmental
impacts, it is necessary to conceptualize and often
also to quantify them. Measures of environmental
impacts have thus coevolved with the development
of environmental regulation, and the number of measures has increased over time.

Energy
In the first decades of environmental regulation, the
main concerns related to production whereas consumption caught little attention. The main exception
was the energy issue where the energy crisis in the
1970s called for regulation of consumer behavior.
This called for knowledge about the energy impacts
of consumption and raised questions such as, Which
parts of consumption are the most energy consuming? Which groups of consumers use most energy?
The energy studies from the 1970s pioneered methods that are still used and further developed.
The most basic question concerns the delimitation
of consumption: What should count as consumption? If consumption is considered to be the ultimate
aim of production, then all environmental impacts of
economic activities should in principle be attributed
to consumption. Consumers are not only “responsible” for the environmental impacts associated with
the use of products and services in everyday life but
also responsible for the effects associated with the
provision of these products and services. In accordance with this perspective, energy studies usually
cover both direct and indirect energy consumption.
Direct energy consumption occurs when households
buy energy carriers, such as fuel oil, gas, petrol, and
electricity, and use it for heating or cooling their
dwellings and for cooking, operating appliances, and
driving their cars. Indirect energy use occurs in relation to the acquisition of all the goods and services
where energy has been spent to provide them. Studies
differ with regard to the assessment of the relative
size of direct and indirect energy consumption, but in
general, the indirect energy consumption is estimated
to be just a big as the direct in Western households.
The calculation of the indirect energy consumption
is not an easy task. For a specific product, a process
analysis can describe the whole chain of processes
involved in providing the product and the energy
use associated with each stage. As this is a laborious method, which is not useful for macrooriented
studies, energy researchers turned to study household energy consumption on the basis of economic

936

Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption

input-output (IO) tables combined with information
on energy production measured in physical units
(Suh 2009). As this method is fundamental for much
other work, the basics are explained in the following.
A typical IO table describes economic flows
within a year in a national economy: the total value
of the production from each economic sector and the
delivery of this production to other economic sectors
(as intermediary input) and to final demand. Table
1 illustrates an input-output table in the simplest
form (for simplicity, an economy with no trade is
assumed). Z is an n × n matrix showing the flows
of interindustry (or sector) deliveries. The number
of production sectors included in the table differs
between countries. Often, only about 60 sectors are
specified, but the most advanced tables are disaggregated into about 350 sectors. A row shows what a
given sector delivers to other sectors, while a column
shows what a sector receives from other sectors. The
F matrix shows the deliveries from the producing
sectors to final users, usually split into various categories of private consumption, government expenditure, and investment. Finally, the V matrix shows
the deliveries of primary inputs (capital and labor) to
the sectors (as the deliveries are measured in money
terms, the V matrix represents “value added,” which
is the same as the earnings of employees and capital
owners).
Table 1

A Schematic Input-Output Table
Sectors
123...n

Final demand

Sectors 1 2 3 . . . n

Z

F

Factor inputs

V

In general, statistical offices provide IO tables measured in money terms, implying that the entries
combine quantity and price. To use an IO table as
the basis for calculations of energy use, it is necessary to add information on the output of the energyproducing sectors in physical terms, and this is
provided from energy accounts. Combined with various assumptions, the IO table and the related information on energy are turned into a model where it
is possible to calculate the direct and indirect energy
intensity of a given sector’s production. It is assumed
that the sector produces a homogenous output, and

the energy intensity of this output is given by the
total amount of energy required to produce the value
of 100 euros of the output. The resulting table shows
both the direct deliveries of energy necessary to produce the output and the indirect deliveries of energy
through the sectors providing other inputs needed
for the production. The chain of deliveries is long,
but mathematical modeling eases the calculations.
Private consumption is one of the categories of
final demand. It is usually divided into a number of
subcategories such as food, transport, and housing,
and in some countries, the broad categories are subdivided in more detail—food into meat, vegetables,
milk, and so on. By combining the data on final consumption with the energy intensities of the sectors
providing the commodities for final consumption,
the energy requirements for household consumption
can be calculated.
Other final uses are investments and government
expenditure. The energy requirements of investments
are thus not attributed to consumption, although it
can be argued that the ultimate aim of investments
is to contribute to future consumption. A few recent
studies attempt to take this into account.
For simplicity, import and export are left out in
the explanations above, but foreign trade is included
in IO tables and calculations of energy requirements.
As data are usually not available on the production
technologies and energy requirements related to
imported goods, it is necessary to make the restrictive
assumption that imported goods are produced in the
same way as they would have been if they had been
produced within the country. As more and more
countries provide IO tables and energy accounts, this
assumption can be replaced by specific information
on how the imports have been produced, and some
studies have succeeded in including such specific calculations on imports.
At a relatively high level of aggregation, studies based on IO tables can respond to the question
regarding which parts of private consumption are the
most energy-intensive. Of course, if the categories of
direct energy consumption are singled out as separate categories, they come out as the most energyintensive: if consumers spend 100 euros on petrol
or electricity, then they use much more energy than
if they spend 100 euros on any nonenergy category
of consumption. From the perspective of the consumer, it is seldom interesting in itself to consume
energy: energy is usually a means to provide more

Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption

meaningful categories of consumption. When the
direct energy consumption is allocated between more
meaningful categories, the real energy-intensive consumption categories turn out to be food, transport,
heating and cooling of the dwelling, and the running
of various electric appliances in the household.
The data on consumption in IO tables concern
the whole national economy, but already in the
1970s, the energy study pioneers were also interested in distinguishing between various groups
of consumers. This is possible when the data on
energy-intensities from IO modeling are combined
with family budget data from consumer surveys.
Family budget data include household consumption
of a large number of commodities as well as data
on household characteristics such as the number
and age of persons in the households, the level of
income, type of accommodation, and geographical
location. To combine the two sets of data, it is necessary to aggregate the large number of commodities
from the consumer surveys into the smaller number
of categories in the IO tables. Then, the energyintensities from the IO tables can be used to calculate the energy requirements of various types of
households. Studies demonstrate, for instance, that
energy requirements grow with increasing income
but less than proportionately. Another result is
that rural households use more energy than urban
households, other things being equal. Although
these results are robust, there are exceptions due to
country-specific circumstances.

Other Environmental Impacts
The emphasis of environmental policies shifted
over time: from the reactive efforts and end-of-pipe
approaches to the focus on prevention of waste and
emissions through cleaner production technologies
and in the 1990s, the emergence of product policies
addressing the whole lifecycle of products. Product
policies are meant to encourage producers to provide more environmentally friendly products, and
consumers are assigned the role of demanding these
products. A precondition for such policies, including labeling of products, is a consensus about which
products are better than others from an environmental perspective. With regard to energy consumption,
this was not too difficult, and compulsory energy
labeling of electric appliances, such as refrigerators,
was introduced in the European Union in 1995. But

937

products have many other environmental impacts
through their life cycle than those related to energy.
During the 1990s, life cycle assessment (LCA) was
developed as a tool for broad environmental analysis
and for decision support for the choices of products
and technologies. A LCA assesses the environmental
impacts of a product (or product system), accounting
for the emissions and resource uses during the production, distribution, use, and disposal of the product. Often, it is used to compare different ways of
fulfilling a certain aim such as the provision of a functional unit such as the washing of 1,000 kg of cotton
clothes. A large number of emissions and resource
uses are included, such as carbon dioxide (CO2),
methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbon (HFC), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxide
(NOx), chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), heavy metals,
water use, and land use—just to mention a few. Some
emission types and resource uses can be aggregated
according to their contribution to particular types of
environmental effects. For instance, emissions contributing to global warming are added according to
their global warming potential, and similar exercises
are carried out for other impact categories, such as
acidification, eutrophication, ozone depletion, and
toxic impacts. To compare the environmental impacts
of various products, it is, however, also necessary to
aggregate across impact categories—weighting their
relative importance. Various types of weighting are
applied, based on, for instance, the distance-to-target
approach, social panels weighting, or damage cost
estimates.
To be useful for regulation, the methods and data
for carrying out LCAs have to be standardized. The
International Standard Organization introduced a
first standard in 1997, and extensive databases are
available for purchase. United Nations Environment
Programme cooperates with scientific societies on
further harmonization and dissemination, but a
diversity of competing methods is still in use, in particular for the impact assessment phase. Obviously,
there are strong business interests in this field, making standardization even more complex than in the
field of IO tables, which normally are provided by
national statistical bureaus. In spite of the difficulties, LCA is used as the basis for environmental labeling of such brands as the European Flower and the
Nordic Swan.
Concurrently with the development of LCA at
the microlevel, the statistical bureaus improved their

938

Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption

environmental statistics at the macrolevel and developed the NAMEA systems (National Accounting
Matrices including Environmental Accounts), and
more broadly the SEEA accounts (System of integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting).
They include a further development of the combination of IO tables with energy accounts described
above, now including a larger selection of environmental impacts that are related to the economic
IO tables through satellite accounts. Several environmental impacts are directly related to the use of
energy such as CO2, SO2 and NOx, but other impacts
such as water use and the use of nonenergy materials
with problematic effects are increasingly included.
The IO tables with environmental extensions can be
used to calculate the environmental impacts related
to the spending of 100 euros for various categories of
consumer goods, not only in terms of energy-intensities (joule per 100 euros spent on a given category of
consumer goods) but also in terms of other impacts
such as the amount of water consumption and the
amount of air pollution by hazardous substances.
Calculations based on this information illustrate that
the relative environmental impact of various categories of consumer goods differ depending on the
type of impact considered, suggests Mette Wier and
colleagues.
The IO tables with environmental extensions are
now used for improving LCA calculations. A weak
point of LCA is the differing degree of completeness, which sometimes implies that an incompletely
studied product looks better than a more thoroughly
investigated one. Systematic linking of process-based
LCA and IO analysis in hybrid models contributes to
ensuring the same degree of completeness.
The environmentally extended IO tables are still
highly aggregated, and they include very few environmental impacts compared to LCA. Researchers
have used information from LCA databases for elaborating on the environmentally extended IO tables.
Analyses based on this model confirm the result that
the relative environmental impact of various categories of consumer goods differ depending on the type
of impact considered. But it is also emphasized that
even when a broad list of impact categories are taken
into account, the classic result from energy studies
is confirmed: transport (by car and airborne), food
(meat and dairy, followed by other types of food),
and energy use related to the home (heating, cooling, energy-using appliances) are the consumption

categories with the largest environmental impacts,
larger than corresponding to their share of consumer
expenditures.

Indicators
The 1990s saw more than the development of product policies. In the wake of the Brundtland Report
and the Rio conference, the issue of sustainability
came to the fore, including the discussion on the
global environmental impacts of consumption in
affluent countries. This raised research questions such
as, Does the consumption in a given region develop in
a more or less sustainable direction? To what extent
does the consumption in a given region give rise to
environmental impacts outside the region? While
there may be good arguments for including all known
important impact categories when decisions are made
on products at the microlevel, it is less obvious that
so many details and complex weighting systems are
relevant when it comes to macrolevel analyses. For
this purpose, broad indicators for the totality of
environmental impacts are more suitable. An obvious candidate is energy use as energy is basic for the
metabolism of human societies and because many
environmental problems are strongly correlated with
energy use. In addition to energy, other broad indicators were developed in the 1990s.
One is the ecological footprint, which measures
the size of the land needed to provide the consumer
goods for a group of people, for instance, in a country or a city. Statistics on land use and agricultural
productivity are used to calculate how much land is
appropriated for the production of various articles of
food and timber products and how much land is covered by buildings and infrastructure. In addition, the
footprint takes into account the use of fossil energy
by assessing the forest area that would be needed
to absorb the related CO2 emissions. This measure
has been successful as an illustrative device for demonstrating the enormous environmental impact of
modern lifestyles: three globes would be needed if
everybody in the world lived like, for example, the
Canadians.
Another approach is economy-wide material flow
accounting. This is an attempt to describe the metabolism of society in a systematic and consistent way
where the overall material throughput of a national
economy is accounted for and all flows are expressed
in tons per year. The inputs to the economy are all

Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption

the domestically extracted materials plus imports,
and the outputs are air emissions, waste disposal,
and so forth, plus exports. The accounts fulfill the
mass balance principle: inputs equal outputs plus
stock increases, that is, the material accumulation
in society in the form of, for instance, infrastructure
(even in countries with already well-developed infrastructure, the yearly material accumulation is assessed
to be massive, e.g., 11 tons per person in Denmark
[Pedersen 1999]). Some of the materials set in motion
by economic processes never enter the economy as
priced materials and can be seen as input and output
at the same time. This unused extraction (e.g., mining
overburden) has a considerable size, but the data are
not very reliable. As an extension to the economywide material flow accounts and monetary inputoutput tables, physical input-output tables can be
used to describe not only the material flows into and
out of the national economy but also the flows within
the economy. This makes it possible to calculate the
material requirements related to various categories
of consumption—that is, not only the weight of consumer goods but also the weight of all the inputs that
went into providing the good. However, so far, physical input-output tables have not been widely applied.
A recent addition to the measures of environmental impacts is water footprints. This is a method to
calculate the direct and indirect water requirements
related to the provision of goods and services.
In general, measures based on inputs—energy,
materials, land use, water—are much easier to understand and more transparent than measures including
emissions. Each of the few inputs can be aggregated
in one measure—joule, kilogram, square meter,
liter—although there is an enormous number of
emissions measured in many different ways. In many
cases, the input measures are sufficient as rough indicators of the environmental impacts, preferably in
a combination where they complement each other.
They are partly overlapping as, for instance, energy
use is included in material flow accounting, but they
emphasize various aspects.
Analyses based on these broad indicators demonstrate that improvements in environmental efficiencies over time (e.g., falling energy and materials use
per 100 euros of consumption) are usually more than
counteracted by growing consumption (the so-called
rebound effect). In general, consumption has developed in a nonsustainable direction, and consumption
in the affluent countries gives rise to considerable

939

environmental impacts in the poorer parts of the
world (Weisz 2007).
The measures described here in the context of
macrolevel assessments are also used for microlevel
assessments, for instance, the ecological footprint of
a meal, the water footprint of a cup of coffee, the
material input per unit of a service such as the washing of 1,000 kg of clothes. Such measures can give
interesting and thought-provoking information, but
as stand-alone measures for microlevel decisions,
they may be problematic because they do not capture, for instance, toxic effects.
Most studies focus on the environmental impacts
of categories of consumer goods, but the need to
take a more activity-based approach is increasingly
emphasized because activities are what make sense
to people and because the way we spend our time is
decisive for the environmental impact. The first steps
toward measuring the environmental impacts of
activities have been taken by linking time use studies,
consumer expenditure data, and data on energy and
material flows (Jalas 2006).
Measuring the environmental impact of consumption is a concern of several research communities
within the fields of ecological economics, industrial
ecology, life cycle assessment, and input-output
modeling, and more information can be found in the
related journals.
Inge Røpke
See also Consumer Protest: Environment; Consuming the
Environment; Dematerialization; Eco-Labeling;
Economics; Energy Consumption; Environmental
Footprinting; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption

Further Readings
“Consumption and Industrial Ecology.” Special Issue,
Journal of Industrial Ecology 9, no. 1–2 (2005).
Eurostat. Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounts and
Derived Indicators: A Methodological Guide.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the
European Communities, 2001.
International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
ISO14040: Environmental Management—Life Cycle
Assessment—Principles and Framework. Geneva,
Switzerland: International Organization for
Standardization, 1997.
Jalas, Mikko. Busy, Wise and Idle Time: A Study of the
Temporalities of Consumption in the Environmental

940

Media Convergence and Monopoly

Debate. Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki School of
Economics, 2006.
Lenzen, Manfred, Mette Wier, Claude Cohen, Hitoshi
Hayami, Shonali Pachauri, and Roberto Schaeffer.
“A Comparative Multivariate Analysis of Household
Energy Requirements in Australia, Brazil, Denmark,
India and Japan.” Energy 31 (2006): 181–207.
Noorman, Klaas Jan, and Ton Schoot Uiterkamp, eds.
Green Households: Domestic Consumers, Environment
and Sustainability. London: Earthscan, 1998.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD). “Measuring Material Flows and Resource
Productivity: Synthesis Report.” Danvers, MA: OECD,
2008. Available at http://www.oecd.org/
dataoecd/55/12/40464014.pdf.
Pedersen, Ole Gravgård. Physical Input-Output Tables for
Denmark: Products and Materials 1990; Air Emissions
1990–1992. Copenhagen: Statistics Denmark, 1999.
“Priorities of Environmental Product Policy.” Special Issue,
Journal of Industrial Ecology 10, no. 3 (2006).
Suh, Sangwon, ed. Handbook on Input-Output Economics
for Industrial Ecology. New York: Springer, 2009.
United Nations. Handbook of National Accounting:
Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting
2003. New York: United Nations, European
Commission, International Monetary Fund, OECD,
World Bank, 2003. Also available at http://unstats.un
.org/unsd/envaccounting/seea2003.pdf.
Weisz, Helga. “Combining Social Metabolism and InputOutput Analyses to Account for Ecologically Unequal
Trade.” Chap. 15 in Rethinking Environmental History:
World-System History and Global Environmental
Change, edited by Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan
Martinez-Alier. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007.
Wier, Mette, Line Block Christoffersen, Trine S. Jensen, Ole
G. Pedersen, Hans Keiding, and Jesper Munksgaard.
“Evaluating Sustainability of Household
Consumption—Using DEA to Assess Environmental
Performance.” Economic Systems Research 17, no. 4
(2005): 425–447.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE
MONOPOLY

AND

Media convergence describes several phenomena
with differing relationships with monopoly and consumer culture. In relation to news media, it refers to
mergers and acquisitions of press, radio, and television by large corporations and the consequent
monopoly of news production and consumption.

Entertainment media convergence is also described
as vertical integration, or global integration, and
includes the convergence of news and entertainment
to produce infotainment and the global reach of
American entertainment media. The term is less commonly used to describe the convergence of media technologies such as Internet-capable game consoles and
multiple-function mobile phones. More recently, and
with considerable ramifications for monopoly and for
consumers, media convergence refers to the blurring
of production, distribution, and consumption practices on the Internet.
News media serve a central communicative function in complex societies where they inform dispersed
populations and facilitate a sense of cultural commonality. Shared language and knowledge engender
a sense of belonging to “imagined communities”
(Anderson 1987), the cultural element of the nationstate. They are also vital to the democratic public
sphere as both an information source and host of
public debate. In its fourth estate role, news media
function as an accountability mechanism and check
on the abuse of power in the interests of the population. Diversity and independence from power and
commercial interests are thought to be vital if news
media are to serve the public interest, yet commercial
media are a capitalist enterprise following the logic of
the market. Unregulated and deregulated media markets saw the rise of corporate, in some cases global,
news media conglomerates through merger and
acquisition processes during the twentieth century
and the emergence of the media mogul. Individual
news outlets proliferated with the introduction of
frequency modulation (FM) radio and pay television,
whereas ownership concentrated into fewer hands,
providing the appearance of diversity and consumer
choice while decreasing diversity of content.
Although a small number of news media corporations monopolize local and global news and current affairs markets, local outlets tailor information
to local interests but remain selective in coverage.
For example, commercial news outlets are unlikely
to publish or broadcast news that is unfavorable to
advertisers. As advertising is the primary revenue
source for commercial news media, the interests of
advertisers are given higher priority than the public
interest. The fourth estate role of commercial news
media is compromised as it cannot serve both the
public interest and the interests of powerful advertisers. Selective coverage is an element of agenda setting,

Media Convergence and Monopoly

as monopoly of the market allows the monopoly of
public focus. Where entertainment media corporations hold interests in news media, news outlets can
also be used as promotional vehicles for the products
and personalities of entertainment media. Launches
of new movies, music, games, and associated products are reported as news, alongside celebrity gossip
and coverage of events such as award ceremonies.
The convergence of news and entertainment media
also extends to technology where, for example, Sony
Corporation might use a recording artist from their
music label to promote the release of a new game
console, while local news media include elements of
the launch in a story about crowds lining up to buy
the new console.
The concentration of entertainment media ownership followed the pattern of monopoly in news media
during the twentieth century, which saw promotional
partnerships with other manufacturers and retailers
and American domination of entertainment media
on a global scale. Vertical integration describes convergence between different types of media outlet and
partnerships between entertainment and other industries that both promote, for example, a new movie
through a news outlet, while creating new retail
opportunities for nominally unrelated industries.
Although associated products such as posters, books,
and soundtracks had been common for some time,
the Star Wars series saw the first example of vertical integration on a large scale. Copyright licensing
arrangements saw the production and widespread
consumption of figurines, costumes, bed linen, glassware, key rings, lightsabers, and so on, and Star
Wars consumption became a lifestyle option. Vertical
integration has since become the norm, particularly
in the children’s market, as the release of a new animated feature film routinely sees character figurines
included in fast-food packages and the concurrent
release of electronic games. Characters appear on
food packaging and stationery as cross promotion
includes more unrelated industries seeking to profit
from the appeal of entertainment.
The copyright protections that underpin these
complex commercial relationships in the United
States are incorporated into international and bilateral free trade agreements. Trade negotiations build
protection of American copyright into agreements on
agricultural, mineral, and other resources, which protect the American monopoly of entertainment media
in other countries. Whereas entertainment media

941

exports are a major component of the U.S. economy,
the interests of media corporations are considered in
diplomatic, military, and other relationships as well.
The domination of “global Hollywood” (Miller et al.
2001) is supported by important economic and security considerations, which also erode local cultural
production industries, which cannot compete with
the volume or promotional budgets of the American
industry. The global consumption of American culture
is thought to erode local cultural identities, as consumers are exposed to more depictions of American
life than their own.
While these convergences have developed the
centralization of media production, others surrounding the Internet and the activities of consumers have decentralized production and are thought
to represent a threat to the copyright arrangements
supporting monopolies. In the late-twentieth century, technological convergence was focused on the
“black box” (Jenkins 2006), a widely anticipated
development that would deliver all types of media
through a single unit. The developer of the successful
delivery unit would monopolize all media, as content
and technological compatibility would require necessary licensing arrangements. The black box failed to
materialize, however, as technologies such as game
consoles have proliferated and relied on incompatibility to maintain market share. Henry Jenkins points
out that the monopolizing tendencies of centralized
production have long been incompatible with the
cultural practices of consumers. Technological developments that allow consumers to participate in or
modify content have seen a convergence of content
and consumer practice following the logic of the
social rather than the market.
Convergence culture describes practices that can
no longer be described as consumption, giving rise
to descriptions like “prosumage” and “produsage”
(Bruns 2008), which suggest blurring of production
and consumption. These practices are most evident
on the Internet, as new and existing content is manipulated and blended as seen in the video mashup (the
combination of multiple sources of video that usually have no relation to each other). Participation
culture sees the altruistic contributions that result in
Wikipedia and video library sites and the more contingent participation in crowd sourcing, which sees
participants accumulating resources in the process of
problem solving. Consumers of radio, television, and
print media share their experiences and observations

942

Medieval Consumption

with others online via laptops and mobile phones,
sharing, manipulating, and reconfiguring the meaning of content.
Value is reorganized here, as the scarcity that
increases value in the logic of capitalism is reversed,
and a cultural artifact gains value as it spreads
through social networks. Viral marketing follows this
social logic, relying on consumers passing content to
friends rather than broadcast exposure. The practices
of content sharing include peer-to-peer file sharing
and BitTorrent systems, which violate the copyright
of commercial media producers. Debate over Internet
piracy has yet to resolve the extent of revenue lost
to file sharing, whether corporate media production
can sustain that loss, or whether the prosecution of
offenders is an effective deterrent. Jenkins argues that
the values of participation culture and corporate culture can both be accommodated where their interests
converge, which is on the social and cultural value of
content. Content produced as a residue of sociality
and participation culture is also eroding the monopoly of corporate producers to some extent, as small
networks with specific, niche interests decentralize
and disperse the former mass audience.
The convergences of the twentieth century saw
media ownership and production concentrated into
fewer hands. The proliferation of outlets delivering
similar content was tailored to meet local contexts
in the case of news media, but the same content was
delivered on a global scale in the case of entertainment media. These monopolies are still powerful and
present in the early twenty-first century, but recent
developments have seen an erosion of that dominance as cultures of consumption embrace the cultural logic of the social Internet. Boundaries between
production and consumption are blurred as the practices of cultural participation emphasize the social
use of media, as opposed to the passive consumption of media. These developments are so recent and
the pace of change so rapid that the continuation of
consumer-driven decentralizing processes cannot be
assumed. However, corporate news media profits
have eroded so significantly that change in that sector is certain, with currently unknown ramifications
for convergence, monopoly, and consumers.
Lyn Calcutt
See also Advertising; Broadcast Media;
Commercialization; Culture Jamming; Hollywood;
Internet; Prosumption; Radio

Further Readings
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso,
1987.
Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond:
From Production to Produsage (Digital Formations).
New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Dahlgren, Peter, and Colin Sparks. Communication and
Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere. London:
Routledge, 1991.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New
Media Collide. New York: New York University Press,
2006.
Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard
Maxwell. Global Hollywood. London: British Film
Institute, 2001.

MEDIEVAL CONSUMPTION
If we consider societies other than our own, then we
see differences in both consumption patterns and in
the way people regard these consumption patterns.
At the same time, we also see similarities. Differences
and similarities can also be seen if we look at the past
of our own society. This entry considers some aspects
of consumption in medieval Europe.
The remainder of this entry comprises five sections. The first considers a few general features of
medieval Europe. Then, in separate sections, medieval consumption of three different goods—food,
pilgrimages, and clothing—is considered. Next medieval resistance to materialism is considered. Finally, a
few conclusions are drawn.

Europe in the Middle Ages
The medieval period in European history lasted from
around the fourth or fifth century to near the end of
the fifteenth century. Events that are sometimes used
to mark the beginning are Constantine’s adoption
of Christianity as the official religion of Rome near
the beginning of the fourth century or the end of the
western Roman Empire around 476 CE. The end is
often marked by the fall of Constantinople in 1453
or the discovery of America in 1492.
One would not expect any thousand-year period
to be changeless, and so it is with the Middle Ages.

Medieval Consumption

The period up to about 1000 CE is often called the
Dark Ages, in large part because we know little
about what happened then. Much more is known
about the later period, including about consumption,
and we shall focus on this period. However, even this
later period saw considerable change, both in larger
consumption patterns and in fashions. In part, these
changes came about from large population changes.
For example, the population of England probably
fell from around 5 to 6 million to half that number
between 1300 and around 1450, in consequence of
intermittent famine, bubonic plague, and a variety
of other causes, and this fall seems to have affected
consumption patterns.
Consumption also differed between different areas
or countries at the same time. For example, the foods
consumed in the Mediterranean area were different
from those consumed in northwestern Europe, as
indeed they still are.
Compared to contemporary Western society, medieval society was poor. There were fewer types of goods
to consume, and many of these were in very restricted
supply. The distribution of goods was very uneven
across different social classes. Almost every period
and area in medieval Europe featured class differences
that were more pronounced than those in our own
societies. Unsurprisingly, the large differences in status
and wealth were reflected in differences in consumption. More subtly, differences in consumption between
the classes, for example, with regard to clothing, also
served as class markers.

Food
Although there remains much to discover, our knowledge of what medieval Europeans ate and drank has
expanded. Sources include medieval recipe books,
the accounts of manors and other organizations, and
the results from archaeological investigations, such
as counts of animal and fish bones found in medieval rubbish tips. (See Woolgar, Serjeantson, and
Waldron, 2006, for an overview of methods and of
many of the findings reported in this section.)
The range of food available to medieval Europeans
was, of course, narrower than that for their presentday descendants. Potatoes, turkeys, and tomatoes
had yet to be discovered in the Americas. Far East
spices, such as cloves or black pepper, were available
only to the wealthy. The relatively more primitive
infrastructure implied that regional differences in diet

943

were more important in the Middle Ages than they
are today. Throughout the period, the rich generally
consumed much more protein than the poor.
On the other hand, the view that virtually the
entire population existed on a diet composed almost
entirely of the local grain occasionally enlivened by
meat that was unseasoned except by salt goes too
far in the other direction. A wide range of herbs was
grown and used throughout Europe, including some
(e.g., rue) that we do not use today. Indeed, there
appear to have been sporadic attempts to grow foreign herbs and spices (e.g., saffron) in areas where
this is not done today. A variety of fruit and vegetables were readily available. Even inland areas usually
had some access to fish—from freshwater fishponds
or transport from the coast. Game, although mostly
consumed by the upper classes, was often more
freely available than it is today. Although many of
the foods shipped to England from foreign parts were
luxuries, more commonplace foods that could be
grown locally, such as onions or cabbages, were also
imported.
There were also changes in the consumption of
food during the Middle Ages. The Norman conquest
seems to have brought about not only a restriction
of deer hunting and consumption to the English
upper class but also a new ritual that accompanied it.
Change could also benefit the poor. The large decline
in the population of England between 1300 and 1450,
noted earlier, was accompanied by a shift in production from cereals to animal products. In consequence,
meat, especially beef and mutton, was consumed by
a wider range of people and in greater quantity at the
later date. There was also an accompanying shift to
consuming wheat rather than less preferred grains.

Pilgrimages
On the whole, the way in which medieval people ate
was different but not vastly different from the way
we eat today. However, medieval people devoted a
much greater proportion of their resources to what
might broadly be termed religious goods. The most
visible demonstrations of this devotion are, of course,
the medieval churches and cathedrals that were built
in almost every part of Europe. Many of these still
inspire awe today. Religious buildings were generally commissioned by communities of one kind or
another, but pilgrimages were undertaken, enjoyed,
and usually paid for by individuals.

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Medieval Consumption

To go on a medieval pilgrimage usually implied
going on a lengthy journey that terminated at some
religious shrine. Of course, many such shrines were
mostly known locally and visited mostly by local
people. But others had great fame and people traveled much longer distances to reach them.
Within England, the most famous shrine was at
Canterbury where Thomas à Becket had been murdered in 1170. As in other cases, the shrine’s reputation was enhanced by reports of miracles occurring
to visitors (e.g., Clarke 1975). Chaucer’s (1986)
Canterbury Tales is a well-known fictional account
of a group of pilgrims who were traveling from
various places in England to visit the shrine. The prologue to the Tales contains a brief introduction to a
group that is notable for spanning a wide range of
medieval society. There is a knight, a merchant, and
a prioress but also a ploughman and a poor priest.
Chaucer (Prologue, lines 1–4) says little about most
of their individual motives for making the journey
but does remark at the very beginning that people
long to go on pilgrimage:
When the sweet showers of April have
pierced
The drought of March, and pierced it to the
root,
And every vein is bathed in that moisture
Whose quickening force will engender the
flower.
The two most prominent international shrines
were at Santiago de Compostella in Spain, where
long but not very well-substantiated legend located
the remains of the apostle James, and Jerusalem
itself. Pilgrims traveled great distances to both.
Jerusalem was a very long journey for any western
or northern European, as well as frequently a very
dangerous one. The medieval routes to Santiago
seem to have extended all over Europe, including
to Riga on the eastern Baltic coast. Getting to these
places was always an adventure.
Jerusalem, of course, attracted not only ordinary
travelers but also crusaders. It is worth remembering
that the crusaders, or at least the more highly placed
ones, generally paid their own way and for the most
part received no material reward for their efforts. For
example, of the leaders of the First Crusade, while
Bohemond was clearly motivated at least in part
by a desire to gain territory of his own, Robert of
Normandy returned to his duchy (which he seems

to have mortgaged to pay for his part in the crusade)
shortly after the capture of Jerusalem.
Overall, pilgrimages seem to have been undertaken
for a variety of purposes, including genuine religious
belief, a desire to see the world, and adventure seeking. Similarly, mixed motives can be found in today’s
travelers. Indeed, one of the medieval pilgrim routes,
the one to Santiago de Compostella, is walked today
by an increasing number of people, and their websites record a variety of different motives.

Clothing
There are few better examples of conspicuous consumption than medieval clothing. Clothing served as
a marker of class, status, and wealth, as well as a
means of attracting suitable partners.
In the thirteenth century, in The Romance of the
Rose, whose subsequent popularity owed much to its
advice on how to succeed at courtly love, the narrator is advised by the character Love that
the man who seeks love is worth nothing without
elegance. Elegance is not pride. One is worth more
for being elegant, provided that he be empty of
pride, so that he is neither foolish nor presumptuous.
Outfit yourself beautifully, according to your income,
in both dress and footwear. Beautiful garments and
adornments improve a man a great deal. Therefore,
you should give your clothes to someone who
knows how to do good tailoring, who will seat the
seams well and make the sleeves fit properly. You
should have fine laced shoes and small boots and get
new ones often, and you must see that they are so
close fitting that the vulgar will go around arguing
over the way you are going to get into or out of
them. (de Lorris and de Meun 1995, 60)

Such advice seems to have been widely heeded,
particularly by the upper class. The later Middle
Ages saw a general fashion for tightly fitting and
often rather impractical clothing. For example,
there were the famously pointed shoes, known as
poulaines, padded bellies (in the 1350s), and liripipes (scarves or cords that hung down from
hoods, sometimes to the ground). Such fashions
often met with hostility and ridicule, particularly
from the clergy, but this did little to dent their
popularity. Indeed, a theme of late medieval fashion is a tendency for those of relatively lower class
or status to attempt to mimic the styles of their
social betters, notes Stella Mary Newton (1980).

Medieval Consumption

There are a number of indications of the importance that people attached to looking good in their
clothes. The detail to clothing in late medieval painting is one. The dress of the allegorical characters in
The Romance of the Rose is described in some detail.
The prologue to The Canterbury Tales describes the
dress of each of the pilgrims. For example, the narrator notices that the sleeves of the monk “were edged
and trimmed with squirrel fur, the finest in the land”
(Chaucer 1986, 6). Note, too, that Chaucer expected
his readers to infer from this that the monk is of high
status and worldly, as is also apparent from the rest
of his description of the monk.
Most medieval outer garments were made of wool,
some of it very fine. Undergarments were often made
from linen. The Chinese monopoly on growing silk
had been broken in the early Middle Ages and a number of Mediterranean countries had established silk
industries. Fur was prized as a lining, but garments
made entirely of fur were thought a mark of savagery.
Ermine and miniver (a white or pale fur taken from
stoats) were highly valued. Most clothing seems to
have been dyed, but some colors (particularly blue,
made from woad) were quite cheap and readily available, while others (e.g., reds) were expensive. Tailoring
seems to have become more sophisticated in the later
Middle Ages, as the earlier practice of making clothing
from piecing together the whole rectangles in which it
was woven gave way to cutting out curved patterns
from the woven cloth. Lace making seems to have
originated as a means of fastening different pieces of
material together.

Opposition to Materialism
Many medieval clergymen were unimpressed by
materialism. So, for example, Thomas Aquinas
writes that the claim “that money can do everything
is the mass-opinion of silly people who recognise only
the material things which can be bought” (Summa
Theologiae, 1,2.2.1.Ad 1). “Indeed, giving to the
poor is not only good in itself but also because it
frees us from the love of riches” (Summa Theologiae,
2.2.32.1). In discussing the sin of avarice, he makes a
claim that might be rejected by modern economists
but is held by many other folk today just as it was
in the Middle Ages: “It is impossible for one man to
enjoy extreme wealth without someone else suffering
extreme want” (Summa Theologiae, 2.2.118.1).
Discomfort with material values was particularly sharply expressed in the Franciscan Order of

945

friars. This had much to do with the character of its
founder, St. Francis of Assisi. Francis’s father was a
well-off cloth merchant, and Francis himself worked
in the business. His decision to undertake a religious
life was opposed by his father. When father and son
went to the Bishop of Assisi to resolve their dispute,
the father pointed out that he had provided Francis’s
clothing. As related by Thomas of Celano, Francis’s
biographer, Francis’s immediate response was to
cheerfully strip himself naked and ask the bishop for
an old robe in which to dress himself.
A concern with clothing was embedded in the
original rule of the order. Everyone was to wear
inexpensive clothing, to be patched if necessary
with sackcloth or other cheap materials. Everyone
should have one tunic with a hood but was allowed
a second hoodless tunic if necessary. Shoes were to
be worn only if necessary. Generally, the tunics were
of undyed wool and thus brown or grey (hence,
the term grey friars in England). Although clothing
was a particular concern, early Franciscans were
expected to embrace poverty in a number of other
ways. They were expected to mingle with the poor
in the outside world, not to own property, and not to
handle money. St Francis attracted a large following
and enormous admiration in his own lifetime, and,
as time wore on after his death, the order received
numerous bequests, which had the effect of compromising the order’s poverty. The late thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries then saw great controversy
about the meaning of poverty and frequent persecution of those Franciscans who continued to preach
the virtue of living in poverty.
The new and expensive fashions of the fourteenth
century attracted considerable hostility from clerical writers, according to Newton. However, many
lay figures also thought the new fashions ridiculous if not downright evil. For example, Geoffroy
de la Tour Landry (1868), writing instructions for
his daughters in the late-fourteenth century, told
the story of a devil appearing in the mirror of one
woman who was late for church because of spending too long dressing herself. Another woman who
followed a fashion for plucking out the hair of her
eyebrows and forehead is said to have ended up
tormented in hell by a devil that thrust hot burning
needles into her face and head.
Unsurprisingly, many late medieval jurisdictions
resorted to regulations, often known as sumptuary
laws, in an attempt to curb luxurious excesses. In
1337, the city of Lucca, for example, restricted the

946

Memorials

amount that could be spent on new jewelry. In 1348,
Alfonso XI of Castile severely limited who might
wear cloth of gold or silk and when it could be worn.
The English sumptuary laws of 1363 went into some
detail as to precisely what different classes of people
were permitted to wear. Artisans, for example, were
not supposed to wear gold, and certainly not miniver.
The motives for these laws seem to have been either
varied or mixed. These included a desire by many to
reduce ostentatious display and to limit expenditure on
items such as pointed shoes that were seen by many as
vain and ridiculous. However, another motive seems
to have been a desire to maintain the social status quo
and existing class markers by limiting certain items of
apparel to particular social classes. At any rate, most
such regulation seems to have been rather ineffective.

Conclusion
Research into conditions of life in the Middle Ages is
ongoing, and it is likely that in the future we will
know rather more about medieval consumption than
we do now. At present, there are large gaps in our
knowledge, particularly in our knowledge of the
consumption and living conditions of the lower classes.
However, even given the existing state of our
knowledge, some parallels with modern consumption are easy to see. Travel for adventure and enlightenment was quite common. Many of our medieval
ancestors seem to have enthusiastically engaged in
conspicuous consumption, particularly of clothing,
when they had the opportunity. Those who did not
engage in it seem often to have enthusiastically condemned it.
Simon Kemp
See also Clothing Consumption; Food Consumption;
Historical Analysis; History; History of Food; Spices;
Sumptuary Laws; Textiles

Further Readings
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. London, UK:
Blackfriars, 1964.
Burr, David. Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of
the Usus Pauper Controversy. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Translated by
David Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Clarke, Basil. Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain. Cardiff,
UK: University of Wales, 1975.

De La Tour-Landry, Geoffroy. The Book of the Knight of
La Tour-Landry. Anon. translator, edited by Thomas
Wright. London: Early English Text Society, Old Series
N. 33, 1868.
De Lorris, Guillaume, and Jean De Meun. The Romance of
the Rose. 3rd ed. Translated by Charles Dahlberg.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Lambert, M. D. Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the
Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the
Franciscan Order 1210–1323. London: Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1961.
Newton, Stella Mary. Fashion in the Age of the Black
Prince: A Study of the Years 1340–1365. St Edmonds,
UK: Bowdell Press, 1980.
Pipponier, Francoise, and Perrine Mane. Dress in the
Middle Ages. Translated by Caroline Beamish. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Sykes, N. J. “From Cu and Sceap to Beffe and Motton: The
Management, Distribution, and Consumption of Cattle
and Sheep in Medieval England.” In Food in Medieval
England: Diet and Nutrition, edited by Christopher
M. Woolgar, Dale Serjeantson, and Tony Waldron,
56–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Woolgar, Christopher M., Dale Serjeantson, and Tony
Waldron, eds. Food in Medieval England: Diet and
Nutrition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

MEMORIALS
A memorial can be defined as a cultural artifact (such
as a gravestone, a sculpture, a statue, a park) aimed
at giving shape to a certain past. Usually, a memorial is devoted either to a group of people (soldiers,
victims) or to an event (an earthquake, a terroristic
attack, a war). A memorial is usually intended for
commemorative purposes, and it functions as a symbolic marker that fixes forever (or at least over a long
period of time) the shifting meanings attributed to
an event. A memorial inscribes the event in public
discourse, and in doing so, it contributes to the crystallization and legitimation of a certain version of the
event that it commemorates. The different definitions
of memorials are related to corresponding conceptions of the past and different definitions of memory.
The definition of memorial depends on how
the past is conceived. The past is often considered
as something stable. It is something given once and
forever. According to this conception, the past is an
object—outside in the world out there—that one

Memorials

can discover, and a memorial is a “representation”
depicting that past. However, many theorists have
argued that the past is not self-evident, and it has not
a unique potential meaning. Maurice Halbwachs, the
first sociologist who dealt explicitly with the social
context of the process of remembering, argues that
the past is a social construction shaped by the concerns of the present. The memorial, in this perspective, represents the act of fixing the past in a specific
cultural shape and is therefore a sort of “frozen”
representation of the past.
In his book, The Collective Memory (1968),
Halbwachs analyzes the relation between individual, collective, and social memory. The individual
memory is that of a single person, the collective one
pertains to a group of people who actively remember
a certain past and share a common set of meanings
of that past. The social memory is what comes before
and after the collective memory. Memorials are a
typical example of social memory. In this perspective, a memorial comes “before” the individual and
collective memories because it can provoke and activate them. However, a memorial also comes “after”
the individual and collective memories, insofar as it
continues to exist when individuals and groups have
forgotten its meaning.
In memory studies, the Halbwachsian definition of memory has become central, and it has
inspired subsequent studies on this topic. Most of
the literature dealing with social memories attempts
to address the question of the socially constructed
nature of the past by examining the social processes
that affect and shape a certain representation of the
past. Besides, memory studies consider the implications of the social nature of memory as a strategy for
understanding how contrasting versions of a certain
event, sustained by different social groups, compete
within the public arena. A memorial, in this perspective, is the result of that competition.
How does the act of fixing the past into a memorial take place? Not all memories circulate in the public discourse in the same way: some of them are more
successful than others in taking shape and therefore
are more easily inscribed in public discourse. There
is a competition among the memories of different
events in the public discourse. Indeed, there are no
memorials to commemorate most past events. That a
specific event or group of people is selected for commemoration through a memorial does not depend
on the gravity of the event, which is not self-evident.

947

It depends on how the competition among different
memories is articulated and “solved” in the public
arena. The acknowledged importance of a past event
is a consequence of a successful inscription of that past
in the public discourse, rather than a cause. A very
important contribution in the analysis of this point
is from the Yale School on cultural trauma studies
(Alexander et al. 2004): the authors argue that there
is always a gap between a trauma that has occurred
and its meaning. This gap corresponds to the trauma
process. In other words, there is no trauma that has
in itself a fixed and objective meaning or public relevance. It has to be socially constructed. For trauma
to emerge at a cultural level, a new master narrative
has to be successfully established by a carrier group
who projects the trauma claim to the public. A successful process of collective representation of the
traumatic event has to deal with the following issues:
(a) the nature of the pain, (b) the nature of the victim, (c) relation of the trauma victim to the wider
audience, and (d) attribution of responsibility. This
provides a useful key to understanding how a memorial can emerge in the public discourse: the process of
constructing a memorial is not neutral; it has to deal
with the answers to these four points. A memorial is
a public narration of the event to be commemorated.
Its cultural shape corresponds not only to the form
of that public memory but also to the effects of its
content. The cultural codes used to inscribe a controversial past in the public discourse will make possible a certain public knowledge of that past, which
will depend also on the nature of the code itself. For
example, the act of remembering “desaparecidos”
in South America differs if we listen to Sting’s song
“They Dance Alone” (where Sting remembers how
women used to dance alone in public to denounce the
violence of torture and mass killing of the regime) or
if we pass by a commemorative monument located in
a park. In the second case, our attention will not be
selective or focused, and our gaze on the monument
will probably last just a few seconds. The different
meanings of the memorial depend not only on the
way in which it gives shape to the past but also on
the different receptive processes of the visitors: while
some of them will observe the memorial for very long
(because, for example, they are victims’ relatives or
historians), some others will just pass by quickly.
If we consider memorials as pieces of social
memory (Halbwachs 1968) or of cultural memory
(Assmann 1992), then they are not only the successful

948

Memorials

result of a competition among conflicting events to
be commemorated, but they also represent the fixing
of a specific version of that past. Once a traumatic
event has been acknowledged as “relevant enough”
to be commemorated through the construction of a
memorial, the next step is to identify what version
of that past will be fixed through that memorial.
Indeed, in the public arena there is also a competition among conflicting versions of the same event:
the so-called contested memories. Different social
groups (survivors, victims’ relatives, institutional and
political actors involved, etc.) compete to have their
version of what happened prevail. These conflicts
and the ways in which they constantly articulate and
rearticulate the public narration of what happened
literally construct the structure of plausibility of that
memory. It means that they set the limits of what can
be said or not in relation to that event. The cultural
shapes of that memory (e.g., the memorial, a monument, a public display) will emerge exactly within the
limits set by that available structure of plausibility.
The spaces where these public displays are located are
highly symbolic, according to Pierre Nora, and play a
relevant role in the construction of national identities.
There are several types of memorials: national
memorials are authorized in the United States by the
U.S. Congress and are designated by a protected area
to commemorate an event or a person (for example,
the George Washington Masonic National Memorial
and the Oklahoma City National Memorial). War
memorials celebrate a war or commemorate the soldiers who died in the war. Examples of war memorials
are the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Nelson’s Column
in London, the National War Memorial, the Shrine
of Remembrance in Melbourne, the National War
Memorial in Canada, the Tannenberg Memorial in
Germany. Virtual memorials are online memorial
websites that celebrate the personal life story of a
departed loved one. They represent a new trend and
are becoming quite common. War memorials can
be especially controversial, as remembering a war is
first of all a matter of power. Robin Wagner-Pacifici
and Barry Schwartz have conducted a research on
the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial: in this case, the
past to commemorate is particularly “difficult” and
controversial. From the very beginning, the authors
underline that the representation of these contrasting aspects of the war can be better understood if
framed by the tension between contrasting genres of
memorization. The very contradictions the Vietnam

Veterans’ Memorial has to solve have to do primarily
with the ambivalence of a commemoration that considers the participants without mentioning the cause.
These contradictions reflect also “the state’s inability
to effect a uniform interpretation of the past” (1991,
407): if for the survivors the question remains, What
did we fight for? for the rest of the nation it is, Is
that war worthy of being commemorated? In that
research, the authors draw on the concept of commemorative genre:
When is a war memorial no longer a war memorial?
This matter, the negotiability of genre, is germane
to our study. Is there some essence of “war
memorialness” and can people identify it? Most
important, how does this generic essence translate
conflicting ideas about the Vietnam War into the
monument-making process? (Wagner-Pacifici and
Schwartz 1991, 381)

The commemorative processes cannot lead to
any common and consensual representation of the
past: the memorial design does not solve the ambivalence but simply articulates it by separating the
cause and the participants in the war. Following this
pioneering study, several other researches were conducted on memorials (Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983; Schwartz and Bayma 1999; Tota 2005), documenting that memorials are spaces and places where
power relations are articulated, where national identities are negotiated, where international relations
are questioned.
Anna Lisa Tota
See also Inventing Tradition; Material Culture; Memory;
National Cultures; Object Biographies; Othering;
Spectacles

Further Readings
Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil
J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Cultural Trauma and
Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004.
Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift,
Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen
Hochkulturen. München, Germany: Beck’sche, 1992.
Halbwachs Maurice. La mémoire collective [The collective
memory]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.
Hobsbawm, Eric J., and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention
of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983.

Memory
Middleton, David, and Derek Edwards, eds. Collective
Remembering. London: Sage, 1990.
Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de la mémoire. Paris: Gallimard,
1984–1986.
Schwartz, Barry. “The Social Context of Commemoration:
A Study in Collective Memory.” Social Forces 61
(1982): 374–402.
Schwartz Barry, and Todd Bayma. “Commemoration and
the Politics of Recognition: The Korean War Veterans
Memorial.” American Behavioural Scientists 42, no. 6
(1999): 946–967.
Shils, Edward A. Tradition. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1981.
Tota, Anna Lisa. “Counter–Memories of Terrorism: The
Public Inscription of a Dramatic Past.” In The Blackwell
Companion to the Sociology of Culture, edited by M.
D. Jacobs and N. Weiss Hanharan, 272–285. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005.
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, and Barry Schwartz. “The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.”
American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1991):
376–420.

MEMORY
Memory, in its broadest sense, refers to a faculty by
which we remember; in its sociological conceptualization, it refers to representations of the past, which
involve emotions and reconstructions of past experiences in such a way as to make them meaningful for
the present.
The fact that “we live with memory on our lips
but in societies without living memory” (Nora 1996,
5) is one of the most interesting paradoxes of contemporary societies. The attraction of memory in
postnational, posttraditional, and global societies
can be illustrated by our readiness to erect memorials
to events that have only just happened and to participate in the numerous events of public commemoration as well as by the widespread interest in old
places, crafts, and houses. The passion for the preservation of personal memory is visible in the growth
of the heritage industry and the proliferation of personal blogs, memorial websites, and family history
websites, with tracing family history being the third
most popular activity on the World Wide Web, after
shopping and pornography, according to R. Hardy.
Since memory practices are increasingly seen as
one of the central characteristics of contemporary

949

culture, studies of social memory are becoming an
important part of any examination of contemporary society’s main problems and tensions. The
recent approach to memory in social science tends
to assume that memory is essentially social, that is,
located in institutions in the forms of rules, laws,
standardized practices, and records. The present-day
memory discourse, while contributing to the development of a deeper and more insightful understanding
of the workings of memory, still relies on Maurice
Halbwachs’s 1992 description of the complexity of
the process of social remembering. Halbwachs’s conceptualization of collective memory as shared social
frameworks of individual recollections follows Emile
Durkheim’s belief that every society exhibits and
requires a sense of continuity with the past, seen as
the essential factor in creating solidarity. According
to Halbwachs, collective memory is always “socially
framed” since social groups determine what is
“memorable” and how it will be remembered.
Hence, although memory is a faculty of individual
minds, remembering is more than a personal act as
even the most personal memories are embedded in
social context and shaped by social factors that make
social remembering possible, such as language, rituals, and commemoration practices. What is remembered is profoundly shaped by what has been shared
with others such that what is remembered is always
a “memory of an intersubjective past, of past time
lived in relation to other people” (Misztal 2003, 6).
Collective memory refers not to living memory but
to organized cultural representations and practices. It
is “quite different from the sum total of the personal
recollections of its various individual members, as it
includes only those that are commonly shared by all
of them” (Zerubavel 1997, 96).
Remembering, as an active social process of “sense
making through time” (Olick and Levy 1997, 922),
serves social purposes at the personal and social levels. Social memory is the crucial condition of people
relations since both conflict and cooperation hinge on
it. Memories give ways of comprehending the world,
a set of values and beliefs about the world, substance
to a group’s identity, and ensure the reproduction
and cohesion of a given social and political order. Yet
memories are always open to dispute, contestation,
often fraught with disagreement and controversy.
The preoccupation with memory as a basis for collective identity could lead to dangerous consequences,
as frequent conflicts over “the truth” about the past

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Memory

between different groups across the world attest.
Memory can be used as a political instrument that
legitimizes nationalist myths, ideologies, and propaganda and can be an expression of nostalgia, all of
which tend to distort the past by idealizing or even falsifying it. The nostalgia for the past is often re-created
for popular consumption and leads to further commercialization of a heritage industry interested in
old places, crafts, houses, countrysides, old railways,
and “the world of spectacle, of popular fair and mass
entertainment” (Huyssen 1995, 19). Given the high
turnover rate of consumable items, the relationship
between remembering and consumption in modern
societies is rather complex. On the one hand, the
temporality of consumption tends to induce forgetting. On the other, not all consumer objects obey the
pressure of increasing velocity; we keep memorabilia
and collect many items reminding us about our past.
The amnesiac effect of the temporality of consumption is also undermined by the fact that objects can
generate an involuntary association with the past,
as Proust famously illustrated by the Remembrance
of Things Past narrator’s memory of childhood that
comes to him with the taste of a madeleine dipped
in hot tea. Moreover, memory is sustained by the
mode of encoding operative in gift exchange. “Gift
exchange potentates memory because, as Mauss
first perceived, it rests upon a triple obligations: the
obligation to give, the obligation to receive and the
obligation to reciprocate” (Connerton 2009, 53).
Until recently, cultural memory—which refers to
memories constructed from the cultural forms and
cultural forms available for use by people to construct
their relations to the past and which is embodied in
regularly repeated practices, commemorations, festivals, and rites and stored in history textbooks, TV
footage, archives, museums, war memorials, and
monuments—helped to construct national identities. Today, globalization, cultural interpenetration,
and electronic media have contributed to the emergence of cosmopolitan memory. As our experience is
increasingly mediated by representations, new conditions for the functioning and the status of global
memory are created, suggests Daniel Levy and Natan
Sznaider. The role of this new cosmopolitan memory
refers to its contribution to democracy and justice.
The growing valorization of memory as the essential
element of democratic systems is associated with its
role in enriching civil society and the new status of
the remembrance of past injustices. The assertion that

collective memory is the condition of the democratic
order’s reaching its potential is based on the assumption that the democratic system’s health depends on
its self-critical working through of the past and that
only by preserving collective memory can we master democratic institutions and democratic values.
Without memory, that is, without the checking of, and
reflection on, past records of institutions and public
activities, we will have no warnings against potential
dangers to democratic structures and no opportunity
to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies. Memory also enriches civil society
because the order rooted in remembering cultivates
our democratic right to the truth. Additionally, the
uses we make of the past and the manner in which we
reminisce facilitate inputs to democratic life. Memory,
understood as a set of complex practices, which contributes to our self-awareness, allows us to assess our
potentialities and limits and therefore to take an independent stand on public issues (Misztal 2005).
Finally, memory, understood as anything that is
transmitted from the past to the present, is essential
for the functioning of any collectivity because every
group needs a collective consciousness and ethos.
The era of electronic communication, globalization
of popular culture, and the decline of old social divisions, enhances the emerging generational cultures.
Seeing a generation as having its own distinctive
memory rooted in a common experience of events
during adolescence or early adulthood stresses the
importance of a generation for explaining the feeling
and destiny of a specific group of people. Studies of
collective memories show that memories are structured by generational divisions and that attributions
of importance to national and world events of the
past half century tend to be a function of individuals
having common past experiences.
Memory is a large and multilayered field of study,
increasingly bringing together researchers from
various disciplines. Current sociology studies in the
social aspects of remembering can be divided into
five fields: investigations of commemorations, investigations of the links between memory and identity,
studies of traumatic memory, research on connections between memory and justice, and studies of
cosmopolitan memory. Researching the construction
of any social vision of the past tends to focus on four
types of participants in the memory game, namely,
the state institutions (from the national to local levels), the institutions of civil society (various voluntary

Men’s Magazines

groups and social movements), noninstitutionalized
agents (private actors), and external actors (international publics or other agencies). Studies of memory
deploy a mixed methodology combining traditional
and innovative methods of data collection, including
bibliographical methods, oral history, documentary
analysis, video, photography, and interviews. Many
aspects of memory, from everyday remembering to
traumatic memories, can be studied by focusing on
biographies and biographical material, such as letters,
autobiographical accounts, and personal narratives,
which are interesting tools for understanding reality and grasping the essence of individual memory.
These testimonies or ways of seeing and interpreting
events from particular locations at particular points
can be added to by a historical-sociological analysis
of changes in the meaning of studied events. Studies
of cultural memory often use forms of content and
discourse analyses of this material in their research.
Barbara Misztal
See also Autoethnography; Cosmopolitanism; Gifts and
Reciprocity; Globalization; Historical Analysis;
Memorials; Spectacles

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W. “What Does Coming to Terms with
the Past Mean?” translated by T. Bahti and G.
Hartman. In Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective,
edited by G. Hartaman, 114–129. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986.
Connerton, Paul. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited,
introduced, and translated by L. A. Coser. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1992.
Hardy, R. “Great Auntie Ruth’s Family Secrets.” Guardian,
December 27, 2008, Family section, pp. 4–5.
Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories. London: Routledge,
1995.
Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and
Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2006.
Misztal, Barbara A. Social Theories of Remembering.
Berkshire, UK: Open University, 2003.
Misztal, Barbara A. “Memory and Democracy.” American
Behavioral Scientists 48, no. 10 (2005): 1320–1339.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Realms of Memory. Vols. 1–3. Translated
by A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.

951

Olick, Jeffrey K., and Daniel Levy. “Collective Memory and
Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in
German Politics.” American Sociological Review 62
(1997): 927–936.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Translated
by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.
London: Penguin Books, 1989.
Schuman, Howard, and Jacqueline Scott. “Generations and
Collective Memories.” American Sociological Review
54 (June 1989): 359–381.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. Social Mindscape: An Invitation to
Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997.

MEN’S MAGAZINES
Over the last several years, more and more men’s lifestyle magazines, offering self-help and bodily discipline articles, have become available. According to
some observers, this generation of “new magazines”
reflects a trend toward men’s changing gender relations and bodily and self-identities; according to
others, these magazines stabilize the traditional relationship between hegemonic and subordinated masculinities. Either way, the male body seems to be at
the core of a concern (and a gaze) centered on a consumerist use and representation. The male body is a
desirable and desiring one, concerned with health, fitness, and beauty, which define an “embodied masculine lifestyle.”
Not only are masculinities and male bodies
socially constructed and imagined (the media—
including men’s lifestyle magazines—being one of
the primary factors in that construction, with daily
representations of masculinity and male bodies), but
the very concept of lifestyle is also “no more than
a construct of theory or research” (McQuail 1997,
94), which addresses the tensions between the private sphere (domesticity, the “feminine realm”) and
the public scene (dominated by men’s working lives),
within a consumerist framework.
Several scholars argue that the contemporary era is
witnessing a “crisis of masculinity.” Masculinity and
the male body are changing, reflecting men’s changing gender relations and self-identities. This change
encompasses all the traditional spheres, which have
defined and regulated masculinities and male bodies.
In addition, men pay more attention to their physical and emotional health, and today, the male body

952

Men’s Magazines

is subject to continuous scrutiny—it is objectified,
exploited, and monitored.
Men’s lifestyle magazines open up such an ambiguous and contradictory space where men’s bodies are represented as objects for other men’s gazes
and as a suitable subject for the increasing care and
concern—and marketing attention—of bodily practices, bodily health, fitness, beauty, and sexuality.
Tim Edwards emphasizes the role of consumer
culture in the shaping of the male body as it is
accomplished by the men’s lifestyle magazines. It is
doubtless that the rise of men’s lifestyle magazines
has much to do with the consumer culture; furthermore, these magazines ask individuals to assume selfresponsibility for the way they feel, they behave, and
they look, with their display of the male body as a
vehicle of care and pleasure.
The commodification of the male body is one of
the main features of men’s magazines. The commodified male body displayed by men’s magazines can be
found not only in sections devoted to style and fashion but also in advertisements. Advertisements in the
magazines tell the readers how men should present
themselves, how men should take care of themselves,
how they should live, what they should smell like,
and how their physiques should look. What is interesting here is that the majority of the advertisements
represent almost exclusively male subjects, with very
few images of women. Men are encouraged to use
a whole set of beauty and body care products that
were traditionally associated with women; for this
reason, advertisers must legitimate these products for
manly use, one strategy being that of using stereotypical images of the male body.
Another major feature of the men’s magazines
is the medicalization of the male body. If the “new
man” and the “metrosexual,” whether they are imagined types of masculinity produced by the media and
the public discourse or not, are obsessed with bodily
fitness and health, then men’s magazines are the place
where this obsession is encouraged and connected
with arenas as diverse as illness, diet, cosmetic surgery, beauty care, and so forth. The uncertain body
framed by these magazines is a risky body, which has
to be prevented from illness, disease, and, ultimately,
death. Much of the stylistic and narrative construction of this kind of article is based on irony, which
seems to be one way for the magazine staff to face
such serious issues as death prevention.
Another important feature of men’s magazines is
the embodiment of sexuality. The kind of sexuality

framed by men’s magazines is strictly “normally”
heterosexual, and the magazines help to define the
(social and cultural) construction of heterosexual
masculinity by defining it both positively and negatively. Heterosexual masculinity embodies such
“positive” and “hegemonic” characteristics as success and status, toughness and dominance, and it is
also defined according to what it is not, that is, not
feminine and not homosexual.
Men’s magazines contribute to a sort of “globalization of the male body” (Connell 2000), where the
global media represent a single model of masculinity, which is hegemonic and globally disciplined. It
is important to underline that men’s magazines are
almost internationally syndicated titles, available in
several countries in the world. While analyzing men’s
magazines, one deals with a “copycat masculinity”
where globalization meets the media formats and
the different forms of socially and culturally embodied male identity. As with television formats, men’s
magazine formats are global in concept and local in
production, but the local translation of the global
masculinity, which is represented and regulated by
these magazines, is almost an “imagined masculinity,” just like the imagined national community it
refers to. This copycat masculinity is framed by such
frames as the encouragement of self-surveillance of
bodily health and appearance and the incentive of
lifestyle benefits, within the primary framework of a
globalized male body with its anxieties of the flesh,
its fears of contamination, and loss of identity.
Federico Boni
See also Advertising; Beauty Myth; Embodiment;
Lifestyle; Masculinity; Metrosexual; Print Media;
Sexuality

Further Readings
Benwell, Bethan, ed. Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle
Magazines. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Connell, Robert W. The Men and the Boys. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000.
Crewe, Ben. Representing Men: Cultural Production and
Producers in the Men’s Magazine Market. Oxford: Berg,
2003.
Edwards, Tim. Men in the Mirror: Men’s Fashion,
Masculinity and Consumer Society. London: Cassell,
1997.
Jackson, Peter, Nick Stevenson, and Kate Brooks. Making
Sense of Men’s Magazines. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.
McQuail, Denis. Audience Analysis. London: Sage, 1997.

Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

METHODOLOGIES FOR STUDYING
CONSUMER CULTURE
The range of research methods for studying consumption and consumer culture is diverse and reflects
the array of methods that are available generally to
researchers in the cultural, psychological, and social
sciences. Principally, there are two methodological
poles that can be identified in studies of consumer
culture. First, we can observe researchers using methods reflecting positivist approaches based mainly
on quantitative methods, including survey analysis,
experimental designs, biophysical measurement,
and cognitive testing. Along different lines, we can
see researchers employing qualitative and interpretive methods based on interviews, ethnographic and
participatory methods, material and object-based
approaches, and semiotics.
The field of consumption studies is one where various disciplines from the social, psychological, and economic sciences meet to form a conglomerate field. By
no means is there a consensus within this field about
research topics and questions. The questions asked by
researchers and the methods they use tend to reflect
the norms, innovations, and methodological debates
occurring more generally within each discipline.
Furthermore, much like wider consumer culture, the
methods researchers use to study consumer culture
are themselves subject to trends, fashions, and ongoing innovations. For example, we might refer to the
“postmodern turn” in methods of the 1980s and
1990s, in contrast to the era of unbridled positivism,
which directed much of the twentieth century’s social
and economic research, or indeed a series of turns in
the last few decades that can broadly be described as
postpositivist and involving niche methods inspired
by narrative studies, semiotic and visual approaches,
practice studies, or materiality studies. The disciplinary affiliations of consumer researchers have a large
degree of impact on the predominant methods they are
likely to employ. Although it is a pattern that is changing to some degree, it is mostly the case that economic
and psychological research approaches tend to employ
positivist and quantitative methods whereas the tradition in sociological and cultural research tends to be
oriented to more interpretive and qualitative methods.
There are some obvious pros and cons associated with the range of research approaches used
in the field of consumer research. The diversity of

953

methodological traditions is valuable in circulating a
multiplicity of data collection approaches, asking a
range of research questions and providing information on diverse aspects of consumer culture that can
be accessed only through the different frameworks of
these disciplines. However, on the other hand, it can
lead to a bewildering diversity of findings, informed
by completely different methodological assumptions, each illustrating only a tiny or limited aspect of
consumer culture. Researchers at each of the methodological poles pay little attention to each other’s
work. This massive diversity is based on the fact that
studies of consumer culture themselves have assorted
disciplinary bases as their vantage point, each having
their own historically consolidated preferences for
favored methods, which are often not used just out
of convenience or usefulness but in fact are elemental
to the very epistemological constitution of their disciplines and subsequently the worldview of researchers
themselves. Thus, economics and psychology were
the powerhouse disciplines for consumer research
throughout much of the twentieth century’s latter half. With an emphasis on cognitive analyses of
consumer behavior, cost-benefit analysis, and consumer decision-making processes, they were seen as
offering a natural home for studies of consumers and
consumption. However, starting in the 1970s and
becoming even more significant in the subsequent
decades, researchers in anthropology, sociology, fashion and design studies, and media and communication studies came to greater prominence. The field
of consumption studies was greatly invigorated by
this diversity and this also helped to consolidate consumption studies as a pandisciplinary field of inquiry.
These recent approaches have used mostly qualitative
and interpretive approaches, which, combined with
innovative theoretical and conceptual frameworks,
have shed a different light on consumer practices.

Definitions and Key Terms
First, we need to distinguish most basically, and
importantly, between methods and methodologies.
Methods refer simply to the techniques, strategies,
and actual data collection procedures researchers use
for compiling their data. Thus, the social survey is
a method, as is a face-to-face interview, participant
observation, or photograph analysis. Methodologies
refers to the reflective study of methods and particularly the study of the philosophical assumptions
behind methods and the types of knowledge they

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Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

generate, which is often referred to as the field of
epistemology. Thus, a methodological assumption
of positivist approaches is the idea of a universally
accepted objective reality, which is amenable to scientific study, while interpretive methods are premised on the methodological assumption that reality
is constructed via interpretations, codes, narratives,
and symbols best understood through interviews or
ethnographic methods (Hudson and Ozanne 1988).
It is best, therefore, not to assume that methods
are objective but rather that they give partial, and
somewhat prejudiced, information about the objects
they study.
Second, it is useful to distinguish between the
two broad schools of qualitative and quantitative
methods. Quantitative methods involve the numericization of observed phenomena and the statistical
analyses of these. Thus, aspects of consumer practices such as the frequency of certain behaviors or
the degree of particular value and attitudinal orientations can be measured quantitatively, for example,
on a numeric scale. Alternately, qualitative methods
look to the qualities and textures of experiences, attitudes, outlooks, and practices through nonnumeric
methods. Most commonly, these methods collect
textual data based on interviews or the analysis of
written documents, images, or materials. Sometimes,
researchers use these methodological approaches in
combination or convert one form of data to another.
For example, the frequency of themes or keywords
within a consumer interview could be quantified and
reported in numeric form.
Third, we can distinguish between positivist, postpositivist, and postmodern paradigms in consumer
research. This is a distinction that also operates
outside of consumer research, and while it broadly
follows the qualitative-quantitative distinction, it
adds an extra and important epistemological dimension. Positivist approaches make the assumption that
aspects of the social and cultural world such as consumer behaviors or attitudes are amenable to description and measurement via approaches that adopt
logical scientific procedures based on principles of
empirical measurement. All positivist approaches
suggest that there is an objective world that can be
studied and known through the scientific approach.
Most positivist research is likely to be quantitative in
design, though some qualitative research can also be
positivist. In contrast, postpositivist approaches challenge the idea that scientific approaches can access a

universally known external reality or truth and suggest that the knower (the researcher) and ways of
knowing (the methods employed) can never really
be separated. Thus, knowledge that researchers
produce is always contingent on a range of factors,
constructed and interpreted by them in the form of
research narratives, and susceptible to various types
of unacknowledged irrationalities and cultural biases.
While postpositivism does not necessarily throw out
all the entrenched methods for studying consumer
behavior, it does force researchers to become more
reflexive and cautious about interpreting the meaning and validity of their results. The postmodern
paradigm is similar in many respects to the postpositivist paradigm but gives weight to a greater diversity
of approaches and research models. For example, it
might emphasize the narrative construction of reality,
the plurality of different interpretations of objects and
events and the uncertainty and instability of regimes
of semiotic signification. Postmodern consumer
research is also likely to incorporate innovative and
experiential methods, which give priority to things
such as emotion, bodily senses, and feelings using
qualitative and interpretive approaches. In addition,
the postmodern perspective looks not for a unitary or
comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior
but acknowledges the fragmented and performative
aspects of consumption and consumer practice.
Fourth, we must also be clear that though we can
think of different research methods and approaches
in consumer research, it is also important to distinguish different fields and objects of research.
Frequently, these distinctions align with disciplinary
orientations. Thus, sociologists and cultural studies
scholars tend to talk of researching aspects of the
larger “consumer culture” or “consumer society,” as
well as things which express or embody those things,
such as consumer objects, spaces of consumption,
fashions and street culture, obsessions with the home
or individualizing one’s environment, or subcultural
consumption networks. Psychologists and economists tend to focus more on individual attributes and
practices associated with things, such as attitudes,
practices, perceptions, goals, and decision making.
Anthropologists tend to focus at the level of the
social group on things, such as objects within networked exchanges, the rituals, myths, and symbols
of consumption and on the circulation of consumption objects within communities. In a direct way,
then, the field of consumer research broadly becomes

Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

defined by the different disciplinary orientations of
each separate field that constitutes it. Thus, as well
as providing a rich body of theory and concepts for
consumer research, each discipline brings its own
tool kit of research methods and approaches.

The Positivist and Quantitative
Tradition in Consumer Research
The positivist tradition in consumer research found
its full flowering via the discipline of psychology in
the 1960s and 1970s, though its roots were established somewhat earlier during the long period of
positivism’s ascendancy and eventual dominance
through the twentieth century. This trend is broadly
in line with dominance of positivist, quantitative
methods in psychology and the social science disciplines generally during the twentieth century. What
followed as a matter of course was the extension of
this positivist, scientific tradition into research on
consumers through the growing fields of marketing,
business studies, advertising, and consumer sciences.
Much of this style of research is associated with relatively uncritical but often highly scientific studies
from a positivist angle and finds its home in marketing, business, and consumer studies research. This
style of research was most strongly developed and
entrenched in North America, and its main aim is
to apply scientific research techniques to understand
consumer behavior. While this research is conducted
in the name of scientific inquiry, intellectual curiosity and socioeconomic inquiry broadly, its ultimate
goal is to more effectively market and sell products
through generating a scientific understanding of consumer behavior. That said, there are consumer culture
researchers within sociology who hold to positivist
tenets or who tend toward positivist and systemic
explanations in their research. In the sections that
follow, the major positivist and quantitative research
methods used in consumer research are outlined.
Laboratory and Experimental Designs
The most pure form of positivist research is possible when all variables within the research setting
are specified and their expression and interactions
closely monitored. This is possible in laboratory and
certain experimental studies. In laboratory studies,
researchers put subjects in particular circumstances
where they are forced to make decisions and judgments and take pathways of action that can be

955

monitored through their talk, decisions, neurophysical indicators, and also their body language. Such
things are directly observable by researchers and are
made easily amenable to coding and measurement.
Because they decontextualize consumption by taking it well outside its natural social settings, such a
style of inquiry might seem extremely artificial and
reductive to many consumer studies researchers, but
to adherents of positivism, they are seen as offering the best hope of reaching exacting degrees of
specification and measurement. The article by Alan
G. Sawyer (1975) is exemplary of this epistemological position. In it, Sawyer examines and reviews
various experimental studies in consumer research
with an eye to assessing and controlling issues of
validity and reliability, especially related to the
effects of respondent expectations and assessments
of the researcher and their research. Such an effort
is symptomatic of the positivist trait of controlling
extraneous variables, which might impact research
outcomes or confuse interpretation of results. Sawyer
points to a wide range of studies in the period of the
1950s to 1970s that sought to assess whether consumers used the price of an item as a cue to rating
its quality or desirability. These types of studies followed a typical research design. In them, research
subjects are presented with various product choices,
each differentiated by relevant variables such as
their price, their name and branding, or the color of
their label and are asked to rank preferences for the
products. In other experiments, the effect of repeated
exposure to advertisements on brand memory, evaluation, and purchase intentions might be explored
through simple experimental designs. Other research
on consumer wayfinding has also used field-based
experimental research designs involving a positivist approach. Wayfinding refers to the strategies
consumers use to navigate their way around a commercial zone or consumption setting, whether it is a
theme park, shopping mall, supermarket, or airport
terminal. For example, in research by Philip Titus
and Peter Everett, participants were given a shopping
list of twenty-one items and asked simply to collect
the items as if they were on a normal supermarket
shopping expedition. The research subjects were
fitted with audio equipment and accompanied by
research assistants in an effort to learn about the spatial strategies of consumers in commercial settings. In
other experimental studies (e.g., O’Neill 1992), participants’ wayfinding strategies can be studied and

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Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

modeled by giving them wayfinding tasks in virtual
environments, administered by computer.
Neuroimaging and Biomeasurement
Higher levels of precise scientific measurement
and also a greater degree of explanatory power can
be introduced by the use of various types of biological and physical measurement. Here, various medical and scientific technological systems are used to
advance explanations of consumer behavior by
looking directly at and into the brain. Increasingly,
in neuroscientific studies of consumers, research
participants may also be asked to make consumer
decisions, judgments, and reasonings in the context
of being monitored by sophisticated brain imaging and activity-measurement instrumentation.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), at present the
most advanced and popular piece of body imaging
equipment available, is currently being evaluated by
consumer science researchers interested in measuring
brain responses to consumer scenarios. Essentially,
the MRI can be directed to focus on the whole body,
or a part of it, with the brain’s “neuroimaging” being
of most interest to consumer researchers. With technology that is able to directly observe and measure
various vital aspects of brain functioning in real
time, one can imagine the possibilities for measuring
many aspects of consumer behavior. For example,
in a 2010 study by Anita Tusche, Stefan Bode, and
John-Dylan Haynes, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure people’s
neurological responses to a visual stream of passing motor vehicles. Essentially, they were asking a
very interesting question about how attentive people
were to these cars in respect to positively evaluating them and also judging their desire to purchase
one of them. For example, if while waiting to cross
the road, you see an inspiring and shiny new model
sports car or a hip vintage Mercedes or Citroen, to
what degree are you inspired to go ahead and try to
purchase that vehicle? One of the researchers’ main
findings, based on interpretation of biological and
neurological indicators, was that people responded
automatically, even subconsciously, to the passing
array of motor vehicles. Even when they were apparently paying low levels of attention, the measuring
equipment showed that their brains were registering
the flow of brands, styles, shapes, colors, and various aesthetic cues they were being exposed to. How

this awareness ultimately translates to purchasing
behavior is another question entirely, of course. It
does, however, offer potentially interesting results
for researchers interested in spatiomateriality of consumption and various types of commodityscapes. In
a 2004 study by Samuel M. McClure and colleagues,
participants’ brains were monitored by an MRI scan
during taste tests for the popular cola drink brands
Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Researchers compared respondents’ favored tastes for each drink in situations
where they were sometimes aware that they were
drinking one or the other brand. The results show
different brain activity patterns while drinking CocaCola, suggesting that the very idea that they were
drinking Coca-Cola rather than Pepsi excited a part
of their brains associated with emotion and affect.
Interestingly, these results show how far cultural
learnings about iconic brands have to at least some
degree become wired into our brains and constitute
automatic responses to brand imagery.
Various other scientific measurements of the
embodied basis of consumer practices are commonplace. As outlined by Werner Kroeber-Riel (1979),
these are based on the assumptions of a psychobiological model of human behavior, a research field at
the intersection of biology, psychology, and physiology. The fundamental methodological assumption
of such research, often understood as neuropsychological in nature, is that human behavior is directly
related to the physiological processes of the nervous
system, and in particular the brain. The level and
type of brain activity is taken as the independent
variable in such studies, meaning it is considered to
be the key explanatory factor, while individual and
behavioral variables—often termed drives in psychological research—such as learning, motivation, emotion, and mood are considered as dependent factors.
Thus, in terms of consumption theory, aspects such
as a consumer’s level of arousal and excitement when
presented with an object or image are directly measurable by various physiological indices. By systematically varying certain aspects of an image of object,
for example, its color, scale, price tag, or the advertising slogan accompanying it, precise measures of a
person’s activation (that is, their excitement, arousal,
awareness, etc.) can be measured and mapped. The
argument made, in effect, is that such indices “don’t
lie.” That is, when giving verbal responses, people
are prone to various factors that might influence or
inhibit their responses by way of embarrassment or

Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

anxiety in the social context of the interview. In terms
of measuring activation levels, physiological indices
are held to be valid and direct measures of people’s
responses. The physiological indices commonly
used are based on a range of widely used measures.
These include electrophysiological measures, such
as the electroencephalogram (EEG), the galvanic
skin response (GSR), and various technologies that
directly monitor eye movements. In the study by
D. Witt (reported in Kroeber-Riel 1979), for example, respondents were shown a variety of advertising
images each displaying varying degrees of eroticism.
The subjects’ eye movements were measured while
being exposed to the images. The premise was
that being activated, aroused, and visually fixed
on an advertising image will in turn lead to better
remembering of that image and therefore a stronger consumption orientation to it in the future. The
implication being, of course, since levels of activation
express the intensity of affective processes, to be optimally aroused by advertising or other visual stimuli,
consumers need to be presented with things that are
maximally stimulating to them. Experimental, laboratory, and neurophysiological research offer a number of apparently attractive features to researchers
that relate to variable specification, precision of measurement, and the capacity to design research strategies so that variable interactions are acknowledged
or controlled for. The end result, while apparently
scientifically rigorous and technologically sophisticated, is not necessarily a better theory of consumer
culture on consumer behavior. The reasons for this
will become clear when interpretive research methodologies are considered later in this entry.
Survey Sampling and Questionnaires
Derived from the social sciences, including the
disciplines of sociology, economics and psychology,
the social survey questionnaire is probably the most
extensively used positivist technique in consumer
research. A notable example of the use of surveys in
explanations of consumption is the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu’s study of cultural consumption patterns in French society in a book called Distinction.
On the basis of a large questionnaire survey of people’s leisure and cultural consumption habits, such as
the movies they like, their knowledge of composers, or
the type of art they appreciate, Bourdieu undertakes
a sophisticated statistical analysis of the distribution

957

of cultural tastes in French society, linking them to
new types of social inequality based on consumption
patterns. A major advantage of questionnaire surveys
is that they are particularly useful at tapping into
consumer’s attitudes, values, practices, and behaviors.
However, they can also be susceptible to various types
of inaccuracies related to memory, interviewer effects,
and also survey effects resulting from problems in
question design or ordering. A principle characteristic
of surveys is that, like most positivist research methods, they are variable centered research approaches.
This means that on the basis of narrowly defined concepts, researchers develop indicators to make a valid
measure of the concepts, which are then analyzed in
relation to one another through statistical techniques.
The common mode of analysis uses the logic of independent and dependent variables, whereby a series
of explanatory variables or factors (called the independent variables) can be shown to influence the set
of dependent variables. For example, an individual’s
level of spending on going to live music concerts might
be explained by a range of factors such as discretionary income, the time available for leisure, and proximity to live music venues. With statistical analysis,
the strength of these causal variables in influencing
live-music-event attendance can be calculated. The
result is that researchers concentrate their analyses
on the interactions of variables, deducing information about consumers and their patterns of consumption from these variables. Such methods are often said
to be deductive in nature, meaning that they begin
with a given set of topics for inquiry, often guided
by theoretical assumptions, research questions, and
perhaps even specific research hypotheses, which can
be tested using specific research methods such as the
social survey questionnaire.
The classical survey questionnaire is premised
on a random sample of respondents drawn from a
population of interest, though samples may also be
drawn with the goal of selecting any relevant target subpopulation for study. A general distinction
between probability and nonprobability samples can
be made. In a probability sample, the parameters of
the target population are known via access to official
records, such as voter rolls (e.g., all people aged 18 to
39 who live in a particular district of a city), and the
representativeness of any given survey of these people
can be judged against such parameters. This allows
research findings to be stated according to various
levels of statistically known certainty, which in turn

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Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

means that research findings can have more or less
scientific validity depending on how accurate they
are in representing the population of interest. In a
nonprobability sample, we cannot say with any certainty that the findings of a survey can be said to represent the views of a population of interest because
the respondents have not been selected according
to randomized selection procedures. Nevertheless,
nonprobability samples can be used to test certain
theoretical questions of interest and also to target
specific populations of research interest, such as
shoppers who visit a particular shopping center at
a given time or people who have recently purchased
something via online shopping. In these cases, gaining a representative, probabilistic sample is unfeasible, unnecessary, or even impossible, so researchers
instead might sample people by their availability and
direct convenience, by quasi-randomized techniques
(such as every 10th person who approaches them in
a shopping mall), or by way of a snowball sampling
strategy where respondents themselves recommend
other potential participants who they know to fit
various characteristics (e.g., a researcher may ask a
respondent to recommend other friends who they
know have purchased an item of clothing online).

Qualitative and Interpretive Approaches
in Consumer Research
History, Background, and Rationale
Though it may not yet be the dominant research
paradigm in comparison to quantitative and positivistic models, the qualitative and interpretive research
tradition in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies is firmly entrenched within
consumption studies. This is in large part due to
the disciplinary acceptance of a range of classical,
canonical texts within the human sciences that have
advocated such approaches and that now constitute widely accepted disciplinary bedrock in these
fields. It is worth briefly revisiting central themes
from these canonical texts, for they can be seen in
strong contrast to the positivist model discussed
earlier. In sociology, Max Weber’s methodological
principle of verstehen—a German word that means
to “understand”—is a major point of inspiration.
Weber argued in his book Economy and Society:
An Outline of Interpretive Sociology that sociology
should develop as a social science, in contrast to the
models of the natural sciences. Dealing with human

beings, sociology should concern itself with being a
science of social action and that this action must be
understood from the perspective of the social actors
themselves. Thus, Weber asserted that the task of
sociology was to identify the meanings and motivations that people attributed to their own behaviors.
No external, objective valid criteria could exist for
understanding these behaviors, except the meanings
actors subjectively attributed to them, which reveal a
sociological logic of their own. In a similar vein, the
sociologist Georg Simmel urged sociologists to look
to the individual as the focal point of their studies,
arguing that society was no more than a collection of
individuals. Clearly, such a principle was set in contrast against the positivist and quantitative paradigm,
which sought to aggregate and generalize about
social behaviors via quantitative methods rather than
individualize them.
In anthropology, ethnographic methods exemplifying the qualitative approach were pioneered by
eminent scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski,
Edward Evans-Pritchard, and Margaret Mead and
have been absolutely essential to the discipline’s very
formation. More recently, the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz’s methodological premise of thick description, famously explicated in his study of Balinese
cockfighting and included in his important book The
Interpretation of Cultures, has become an essential
piece for understanding the interpretive approach in
the social sciences. Pointing back to Weber’s definition of culture as consisting of complex webs of significance people both create and routinely reproduce
in their everyday practices, the essential idea of thick
description is that all human actions exist within a
broader culture structure, consisting of multilayered
symbols, texts, and meanings, and that it is the task
of the cultural analyst to uncover these through the
practice of thick description. In using such a practice,
the researcher could locate the meanings participants
themselves assigned to events and practices in their
own culture. Instead of proclaiming to be an “objective” reading of cultural practices by an outsider,
thick description supposedly allows for a reading of
a culture and its practices according to that culture’s
own concepts and circuits of meaning. In terms of a
rationale for understanding consumption, there is a
clear implication that researchers should look to the
meanings consumers themselves articulate.
While interpretivism is well established within the
traditional social sciences as an alternative research

Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

paradigm to quantitative positivism, within the field
of business and marketing consumer research, it has
only been since the 1980s that this approach has
begun to consolidate (Belk 1995; Goulding 1999).
Prior to this point, much consumer research within
marketing and business studies “retained the strong
rationality biases inherited from economics and
the strong micro biases inherited from marketing”
(Belk 1995, 60). Belk (1995) understands this shift
to interpretivism to be a result of the slow infusion of anthropological and sociological scholars
into business schools and the growing awareness
of scholars in the economics and marketing-based
disciplines that much innovation was occurring in
the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, which
had embraced a new version of consumption studies with enthusiasm in the 1980s, which in turn was
leading consumer research into different territories.
Of course, not all scholars would take up the challenge of such approaches, and it is still the case that
positivism retains a hegemonic position in the field
even though these new paradigms arose with some
prominence (Goulding 1999). Christina Goulding
points to a widely known paper by Belk (1989) as
a breakthrough paper in embodying key elements
of the new interpretive consumer research because
it draws on a range of anthropological, literary, and
historical themes in its survey of the sacralization
process of consumer objects.
Consumer Interviews
Interviews with consumers are an increasingly
relevant methodology within consumption studies
and consumer research, which can either completely
replace or also complement other data collection
procedures. In contrast to questionnaire surveys,
interviews allow consumers to attach rationales,
reasons, and narratives to their answers rather than
merely check the checkbox closed-question options,
which are the basis of questionnaire surveys. In doing
so, it is true that they provide data that are messier,
more difficult to code and quickly summarize, and
susceptible to interviewer effects and the respondents’ verbal capabilities. However, on the other
hand, because it engages more deeply with consumers, it is potentially much more rich and interesting
for researchers. Consumer interviews can be defined
as direct research encounters between researchers
and either individuals or groups, characterized by

959

research subjects being encouraged to give extended
or reflective verbal answers to researcher questions.
Consumer interviews are mostly done in face-to-face
settings where researchers and interviewees are in
direct physical proximity, though they can also be
done remotely, for example, using the Internet or by
telephone.
It is common to distinguish between more openended, less structured consumer interviews, and
also semistructured interviews where an interview
schedule of questions may be used by the interviewer.
The open-ended consumer interview proceeds on
the basis of giving as little interviewer directed information as possible to the respondent so that their
responses are untainted by any assumptions the
researchers might suggest or convey through their
questions. The hope with such open-ended questions is that the respondent is largely free to talk on a
topic rather than be guided by the logic implicit in a
series of researcher-generated questions. In contrast,
the semistructured interview proceeds with a series
of researcher-generated questions on a topic in mind
but lets the interview proceed with some degree of
freedom depending on the issues and matters raised
by the interviewee. This type of interview is therefore
to some degree interviewee led because it is based
on the principle that interviewees themselves are
the “experts” on topics researchers wish to know
about. Semistructured interviews are particularly
good at balancing the researcher’s desire to explore
particular concepts or practices, with a commitment
to letting new bits of information, insights, or perspectives guide what is often seen as the “conversation” between the researcher and the interviewee. In
this sense, the more open-ended interview method
can involve a radical decentering of the relationship
between the researcher and the researched, assuming
that those being researched now have at least some
power to reconstruct an experiential and subjective
account of their consumption practices rather than
one based on a deductive, hypothesis testing model.
Focus Groups
Focus groups are a common method in both
academic and applied or industry-based consumer
research. In its classical format, a focus group consists of a group of respondents, usually between five
and ten people, and a moderator who asks questions,
prompts discussion, and generally ensures an open

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Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

and balanced discussion where opportunities to contribute are shared among the respondent group. In
the social sciences, where the social survey, ethnography, and in-depth interview form the golden triangle
of historically accepted methods, focus groups were
to some degree resisted as a data collection technique
appropriate for serious research. This is also changing
somewhat, as researchers are beginning to advocate
the use of focus groups, especially for understanding
the process and construction of group and collective
identities (Munday 2006). Within marketing and
business research in academic and applied settings,
the focus group is a principal method and has also
been refined and innovated upon to a substantial
degree. For example, in one style of focus group, it
is commonplace for members of the research team to
stand in an adjacent room and observe the interactions of group participants; dual focus groups may
occur where one group is able to observe another
and respond to it, or a group may have multiple
moderators each with different roles to play in guiding or challenging the discussion. The main advantage with focus groups is that the interactional and
collective dimensions of opinion and attitude formation become very apparent. In group discussions
where there are a variety of participants, there tends
to be a natural space for expressing and emphasizing
the pros and cons of an issue or question, presenting points for and against and generally reaching a
consensus point in the discussion where all points
of view are exhausted. This allows the researchers
to see people’s discursive sense-making procedures
unfold and reveals the logic of their attitudes, preferences, and values (Munday 2006). On the downside,
focus groups need to be carefully managed to limit
potentially damaging dominant personalities, which
might skew the group discussion. Further, while they
model group decision-making processes effectively,
they rarely do more than skim the surface of people’s
preferences and opinions without getting to the
deeper components and are more prone than one-toone interviews to potential influences from the focus
group moderator and other participants.
Ethnographic Methods
Ethnographic methods are an attempt to sympathetically account holistically for people’s attitudes,
values, and practices. By associating closely with a
population of interest, such as living in their community or spending significant amounts of time with

them, researchers hope to develop a deep understanding of a particular group. Ethnography as a particular
method is really defined only by the desire to associate closely with a population of interest to reach a
deep understanding of its values and practices. In fact,
we might think of ethnography as an umbrella term
combining a range of traditional methods including
interviews, observational and unobtrusive methods,
participant observation, visual analysis, and semiotic
and textual analysis. The anthropologist of contemporary consumption, Daniel Miller has produced a
range of important ethnographies of consumption,
including a study of shopping practices (Miller 1998)
where he spent time going shopping with people
to understand shopping practices as more than
either mundane provisioning or indulgent hedonism.
Miller has also published a study of the role of
objects in constructing the home and the link between
such objects and people’s desired ways of living
(Miller 2008).
Visual and Material Research Methods
In the last decade or two, there has been a significant move in sociology, cultural studies, and also
some historical and literary studies toward studying
both the image and the object. Thus, we have the
rise of visual research methods and also material culture, or materialities, research. Rather than studying
human subjects, as most methods do in a direct way
through interviews, observations or experiments,
new approaches have advocated looking to the role
of nonhuman, or apparently inanimate, things in
creating, reproducing, and directing crucial aspects
of social life. Historically, the technique of semiotic
analysis dealt with analyzing the linguistic characteristics and structure of the visual and material world,
classically exemplified in Roland Barthes’s seminal
study Mythologies; however, these new approaches
look more closely at the visual and material constitution of social life. This point seems increasingly relevant to studies of consumer culture and consumption
practices, which at their core are inherently and
fundamentally visual; for example, think of advertising and its use of use color or its visual portrayal
of consumer dreams and ideals. Advertising is also
directly material because much consumption involves
a direct physical engagement between people and
material objects (Tilley et al. 2006; Shove et al. 2007;
Emmison and Smith 2000; Woodward 2007).
Ian Woodward

Methods of Market Research
See also Ethnography; Focus Groups; Methods of Market
Research; Multivariate Analysis; Neuromarketing;
Photography and Video; Semiotics; Surveys

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1972.
Belk, Russell W. “Studies in the New Consumer
Behaviour.” Chap. 2 in Acknowledging Consumption:
A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller.
London: Routledge, 1995.
Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, and John F. Sherry Jr.
“The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behaviour:
Theodicy on the Odyssey.” Journal of Consumer
Research 16 (June 1989): 1–37.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Emmison, Michael, and Philip Smith. Researching the
Visual: Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in
Social and Cultural Inquiry, London: Sage, 2000.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York:
Basic Books, 1973.
Goulding, Christina. “Consumer Research, Interpretive
Paradigms and Methodological Ambiguities.” European
Journal of Marketing 33, nos. 9–10 (1999): 859–873.
Hudson, Laurel Anderson, and Julie L. Ozanne.
“Alternative Ways of Seeking Knowledge in Consumer
Research.” Journal of Consumer Research 14 (March
1988): 508–521.
Kenning, Peter, Hilke Plassmann, and Dieter Ahlert.
“Applications of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
for Market Research.” Qualitative Market Research:
An International Journal 10, no. 2 (2007): 135—152.
Kroeber-Riel, Werner. “Activation Research:
Psychobiological Approaches in Consumer Research.”
Journal of Consumer Research 5, no. 4 (1979):
240–250.
McClure, Samuel M., Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim
S. Cypert, Latané M. Montague, and P. Read
Montague. “Neural Correlates of Behavioural
Preferences for Culturally Familiar Drinks.” Neuron
44 (2004): 379–387.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. London: Polity,
1998.
Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. London: Polity,
2008.
Munday, Jennie. “Identity in Focus: The Use of Focus
Groups to Study the Construction of Collective
Identity.” Sociology 40, no. 1 (2006): 89–105.
O’Neill, Michael J. “Effects of Familiarity and Plan
Complexity on Wayfinding in Simulated Buildings.”
Journal of Environmental Psychology 12, no. 4 (1992):
319–327.

961

Sawyer, Alan G. “Demand Artifacts in Laboratory
Experiments in Consumer Research.” Journal of
Consumer Research 1, no. 4 (1975): 20–30.
Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack
Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg,
2007.
Tilley, Chris, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike
Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer. Handbook of Material
Culture. London: Sage, 2006.
Tusche Anita, Stefan Bode, and John-Dylan Haynes.
“Neural Responses to Unattended Products Predict
Later Consumer Choices.” Journal of Neuroscience 30,
no. 23 (2010): 8024–8031.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: Outline of an
Interpretive Approach to Sociology. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1978.
Woodward, Ian. Understanding Material Culture. London:
Sage, 2007.

METHODS

OF

MARKET RESEARCH

Market research is inextricably intertwined with consumer culture. From its origins in the early twentieth century, the primary task of the market research
industry has been to provide information and insights
on consumers to client organizations. Indeed, market
researchers argued that they played a key linking role
between the consumer and the supplier. For example, Colin McDonald and Stephen King claimed that
market research contributed to democracy through
consumer enfranchisement. C. H. Wells (1999,
4), in his history of market research in the United
States, concluded that “market researchers not only
changed American business but also American culture.” Through their research studies, the pioneers
of market research promoted a new view of society,
one that defined people by their buying power and
ability to consume rather than by their social class,
“a vision of consumer society that remains with us
today” (Wells 1999, 4).
Market researchers employ a wide range of
research methods and techniques, only a few of which
can be considered here. Specifically, questionnairebased surveys and focus groups are discussed in some
detail as well as some newer methods such as brain
scanning and ethnographic studies. However, before
considering these methods, it is important to consider
the context in which they are developed and applied,
namely, the market research environment. Most
textbooks make a distinction between academic and

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applied research. The former aims to expand the limits
of knowledge and does not usually attempt to generate solutions to pragmatic problems. Applied research,
undertaken by market researchers, is conducted to
help decision makers in client organizations with specific real-life problems. This distinction is important
since it means that applied market research is largely
client driven.
First, nearly all of the major developments and
changes in the market research industry and the
methods it employs have been “driven by changes in
client needs and business circumstances” (Chadwick
2006, 391). For example, the 1980s saw significant
developments in the methods and techniques used
to research brands as client companies recognized
the importance of branding in securing competitive
advantage. This was the decade that saw the development of concepts such as brand valuation and brand
equity. In 2006, Simon Chadwick estimated that
some 30 percent of market research data collection
in the United States is carried out over the Internet.
He argues that speed and cost are the main reasons
for the growth of Internet based research. By the time
the findings from more traditional collection methods, such as face-to-face interviews, are delivered to
the client, the problem may have changed. Secondly,
clients place a premium on research findings and
recommendations and particularly on the consumer
insights that researchers generate. This means that
clients focus less on the theory and methodology
that informed the research design and its execution.
Market researchers are not usually expected to provide in-depth theoretical or methodological justifications for their research design decisions in the ways
that are required of academic researchers. Thus, market researchers have more flexibility to experiment
with research design and execution.
Of course, market research is also influenced by
consumer attitudes to and preparedness to participate
in research studies. Declining response rates to survey
research is a longer-term trend, meaning that researchers and their clients have had to find more unobtrusive ways of securing consumer information such as
customer relationship management (CRM) databases
and loyalty cards that record transaction data at the
level of the individual consumer. Additionally, the
difficulties of securing the co-operation of younger
consumers to participate in focus group and interview
studies became a key factor in market researchers’
adoption of ethnographic research.

Market research involves primary (field) research,
whereby data are collected directly from consumers,
and secondary (desk) research, or both. These days
most secondary research involves mining customer
transaction data in CRM databases or, indeed, mining large databases that have been compiled from
data in the public domain. Experian’s MOSAIC is
an example of the latter. It is a geodemographic database that uses data from the U.K. census of population and other publicly available sources to allocate
all households in the United Kingdom into one of
61 clusters or segments based on their geographic
location, demographic profile, lifestyle, and other
attributes. MOSAIC, and the many other similar
databases available, is especially useful in segmentation studies. One of the main benefits of databases,
and CRM databases in particular, is that they can
warehouse vast amounts of historical, as well as current, customer transaction data. This means that they
can be mined to identify trends in customer behavior
in addition to the more usual customer loyalty and
lifetime value metrics.
The discussion that follows focuses on the origins and characteristics of the two primary research
methods that are used most frequently to understand
consumers and consumption: questionnaire surveys
and focus groups.

Questionnaire Survey
The market research survey remains the most heavily used primary data collection method. The survey
has a long history, and the first large-scale survey was
probably Charles Booth’s study of English social conditions in the early 1900s. Booth’s survey methods
included statistics, informant interviews, and observational studies. He provided much of the intellectual
lineage for U.S. survey research and, in turn, market
research. However, the most immediate ancestors of
survey research as we know it today were the opinion
pollsters George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald
Crossley. They introduced techniques from market
research into opinion polling and correctly forecast
the re-election of President Roosevelt in 1936. Market
researchers are credited with initiating a more systematic approach to sampling in the 1920s. Unlike
their sociological and social reformist counterparts,
they were most interested in consumers who could
afford to purchase the variety of products that were
flooding the marketplace. A nationally representative

Methods of Market Research

sample would result in the inclusion of many whose
income levels were below the poverty line and, therefore, not of interest to marketers because they lacked
buying power. Thus, in the interests of cost and time
efficiency, market researchers began to select samples
that were representative of an existing or potential
target market. In other words, they introduced the
use of quota sampling to obtain a cross section of
consumers with sufficient means to buy a particular
product or service. Typically, they used census data
to help them establish quotas that combined sex, age,
region, and city size. It was these quotas that Gallup,
Roper, and Crossley introduced so successfully into
opinion poll research. In the same way, the origins of
today’s socioeconomic grouping classification can be
traced to the ABCD system used by researchers in the
J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency to describe
quotas for income (A being the group with highest
income quotas). In these classification systems, the
early beginnings of people being defined by buying
power and their ability to consume rather than by
social class are seen.
Nowadays, market researchers use three basic
types of survey research: ad hoc, continuous, and
tracking. An ad hoc survey is one that is custom
designed for a particular client, to investigate declining sales of organic foods, for example. Ad hoc surveys frequently use a cross-sectional design, that is,
collecting data from two or more groups of people
at the same time to compare the extent to which the
groups differ in relation to a dependent variable. In
contrast, continuous and tracking surveys are longitudinal and compare data gathered over a period of
time. Continuous surveys collect data from the same
sources over time and enable regular monitoring
of a market. As large-scale research appeared to be
increasingly expensive in the 1920s, market researchers set up special groups of consumers known as
panels. These panels were used to research inter alia
new products, radio listening habits, and attitudes to
advertising. Panels are popular with consumer goods
producers since they track the sales and market
shares of brands. The most common panel, according to Peter Chisnall, is the consumer purchase panel,
which surveys a large number of households. Leading
market research companies, such as Taylor Nelson
Sofres (TNS) and A. C. Nielsen, run continuous
panels consisting of many thousands of households
to monitor all types of household purchases but
particularly food and drink. These days, the panel

963

members (respondents) sweep handheld scanners
across the barcodes of their purchases rather than
complete questionnaires or purchase diaries.
Whereas continuous panel research collects data
from the same sample of respondents, a tracking
study collects data over time from matched samples
of the same population. Tracking studies can aid the
development of marketing strategies, for instance,
measuring brand usage, awareness, and preferences
or monitoring advertising effectiveness.

Focus Groups
Qualitative market research accounts for only 15 percent of the global market research market by value,
according to the European Society for Opinion and
Marketing Research (ESOMAR 2005). However, this
belies its importance since qualitative studies are often
small in scale and value compared with most survey
based studies. Until well into the 1990s, qualitative
market research was largely portrayed as useful for
exploratory research purposes but lacking the theoretical and methodological strengths of quantitative
research. The focus group is by far the most widely
used qualitative research technique and also the most
controversial. Quantitative market researchers and
marketing academics regularly argued, for instance,
that focus groups should be used only for exploratory
research purposes. By contrast, focus groups have
always been popular with research buyers and clients.
The origins of the focus group were initially credited to the U.S. sociologist Robert Merton. Merton
and his colleagues at Columbia University developed the focused interview during the 1940s when
investigating audience reactions to radio programs.
It is more probable, however, that the focus group
emerged from a variety of geographic and disciplinary locations. Geographically, between the 1920s
and 1950s, various permutations of the focus group
method emerged in Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
and the United States. The disciplinary sources
included anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and advertising, all of which provide different
theoretical and practical perspectives on focus group
research today.
The focus group is a group interview under the
direction of a moderator. The moderator develops
a discussion guide in conjunction with the client.
The moderator facilitates the discussion between
group participants, ensuring that everyone has an

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opportunity to express their views and that the discussion remains focused on the research topic. The
interaction between group participants plays a key
role in generating data that are not usually accessible
when participants are interviewed individually, note
Miriam Catterall and Pauline Maclaran. Typically, a
market research project will involve up to six groups.
Participants are specially recruited to meet quotas
(e.g., on product or service usage and user demographics) to achieve intergroup heterogeneity and
intragroup homogeneity. A group usually comprises
up to eight participants and meets for between one
and a half to two hours. The discussions are audioor video-recorded and later transcribed for analysis
and interpretation. The findings and recommendations are reported back to the client.
The most distinctive methodological feature of
the focus group is that group dynamics are actively
employed to generate data. One of the most consistent findings from psychology is that all groups, no
matter how temporary, will be subject to group processes or dynamics. These group dynamics benefit
focus groups in that the group environment provides
greater security and anonymity for its members,
encourages participants to speak out in front of others, and is also supportive and exciting. Of course,
some such as Terry Bristol and Edward Fern see
group dynamics as a major disadvantage, arguing
that the discussion may be dominated by forceful
individuals who suppress or unduly influence the
views of other participants.
As mentioned earlier, applied market researchers
have a considerable degree of methodological freedom, allowing them to experiment with research
design and execution. This has certainly been the
case with the “basic” focus group design. Many market research focus groups incorporate one or more
projective and enabling techniques. Another variant
on the basic design is the pretasking group whereby
group participants may be asked to perform various activities or tasks before they come to the group
such as going without their favorite brand of coffee
for a week, taking photographs of mealtimes, and
so on. These activities, or their products, form the
basis of discussion within the group. Increasingly,
focus groups are being combined with observation
studies. For example, prior to or during the group
discussion, the moderator accompanies group participants to a supermarket where they may be asked
to pay particular attention to the delicatessen. The

group’s observations are then used to stimulate discussion. Sometimes, the recruitment for the focus
group is designed to be nonrepresentative of consumers. Brand advocates or obsessives may be recruited
because of their high levels of interest or enthusiasm
for brand(s). They are atypical consumers, but it is
because of this that they can bring new insights to a
problem or identify potential brand extensions.

Recent Trends
Two recent trends in market research methods are
worthy of note, and also somewhat controversial,
namely, ethnography and brain scanning. Over the
past decade, market researchers have increasingly
added ethnographic research to their repertoire.
Ethnography refers both to an approach to fieldwork
that mainly involves participant observation and
to the written product of the fieldwork, such as an
account of a night’s clubbing by a group of students.
There are now many guides to doing ethnography
in an applied market research context (e.g., Arnould
and Price 2006; Sutherland and Denny 2008) as well
as practical case examples (e.g., Pring 2007).
Certainly, ethnographic research is proving
invaluable in reaching difficult-to-access consumers.
Researchers specializing in the study of youth markets were among the first to discover the usefulness
of ethnographic methods. Traditionally, focus groups
with young people have been portrayed by Janine
Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca as “difficult”
to organize and run with any meaningful outcomes.
Typically, an ethnographic project might involve the
“participant” researcher videoing a group of young
people spending an evening out in a club or pub.
This would be followed by a focus group recruited
from some of the evening’s participants the following
day. A video of the previous evening may be played
back to the group, and participants would be asked
to describe and discuss what is happening. A variation on this is where the young people are provided
with cameras and asked to record events themselves
for later playback and discussion.
Other situations where ethnography has proved
valuable are in researching consumer lifestyles
whereby behavior can be observed in its wider
context; thus, it is possible to identify exactly how
products or brands fit into people’s everyday lives
including when and where the product is consumed,
what other products are consumed with it, who else

Metropole

is present, what consumers are doing and talking
about while consuming, and so on.
The use of ethnography in the applied commercial research context has come in for considerable
criticism. Some, such as Alison Stein Wellner, argue
that the budgetary and time constraints in the commercial world mean that market researchers are not
doing “authentic” ethnography but “hit and run”
ethnography, blitzkrieg ethnography, and ethnodunking. However, such distinctions between authentic
and inauthentic ethnography are missing a key point
about applied market research. Applied research clients want consumer insights, and they want them on
time and within budget. Thus, the market research
industry, from its inception, has endeavored to
develop new methods and techniques and to adapt
existing ones to this end to understand consumer
culture.
During the 1970s, some researchers employed
a variety of technologies including psychogalvanometers (similar to lie detector machines) and eye
pupil movement cameras to investigate consumers’
automatic responses when presented with advertisements. Currently, some researchers such as Martin
Lindstrom are employing sophisticated brain scanners, or more precisely, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect how consumers’
brains light up in response to advertisements. The
use of fMRI stems from advertisers’ and marketers’
recent interest in neuroscience, which has revealed
that much of our brain activity happens on an unconscious level, and which has prompted new theories of
low involvement processing, reports Robert Heath.
Pauline Maclaran, Miriam Catterall, and
Margaret K. Hogg
See also Advertising; Attitude Surveys; Consumer
Interviews; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Focus
Groups; Lifestyle; Markets and Marketing;
Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Surveys

Further Readings
Arnould, Eric J., and Linda L. Price. “Market-Oriented
Ethnography Revisited.” Journal of Advertising
Research 46, no. 3 (2006): 251–262.
Bristol, Terry, and Edward F. Fern. “Exploring the
Atmosphere Created in Focus Group Interviews:
Comparing Consumers’ Feelings Across Qualitative
Techniques.” Journal of the Market Research Society
38, no. 2, (1996): 185–195.

965

Catterall, Miriam, and Pauline Maclaran. “Focus Groups
in Marketing Research.” Chap. 19 in Handbook of
Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, edited by
Russell W. Belk. Armonk, NY: Edward Elgar, 2006.
Chadwick, Simon. “Client-Driven Change: The Impact of
Changes in Client Needs on the Research Industry.”
International Journal of Market Research 48, no. 4
(2006): 391–414.
Chisnall, Peter. Marketing Research. 6th ed. Berkshire,
UK: McGraw-Hill Education, 2005.
Converse, Jean M. Survey Research in the United States:
Roots and Emergence 1890–1960. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987.
Heath, Robert. The Hidden Power of Advertising: How
Low Involvement Processing Influences the Way We
Choose Brands. London: NTC Publications, 2001.
Lindstrom, Martin. Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why
We Buy. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Lopiano-Misdom, Janine, and Joanne De Luca. Street
Trends: How Today’s Alternative Youth Cultures Are
Creating Tomorrow’s Mainstream Markets. New York:
Harper Business, 1997.
McDonald, Colin, and Stephen King. Sampling the
Universe: The Growth, Development and Influence of
Market Research in Britain since 1945. London: NTC
Publications, 1996.
Merton, Robert K., and Patricia L. Kendall. “The Focused
Interview.” American Journal of Sociology 51 (1946):
541–557.
Pring, Ian. “Going Underground: How Ethnography
Helped the Tube Tunnel to the Heart of Its Brand.”
International Journal of Market Research 49, no. 6
(2007): 693–705.
Sunderland, Patricia L., and Rita M. Denny. Doing
Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek,
CA: Left Coast Press, 2008.
Wellner, Alison Stein. “Watch Me Now.” American
Demographics 24, no. 9 (2002): S1–S4.
Wells, C. H. “Remapping America: Market Research and
American Society, 1900–1940.” PhD diss., University of
Virginia, 1999.

METROPOLE
A metropole is the country at the heart of an empire:
the seat of political, cultural, and economic power
that stretches across geographical space to control
and influence territories outside domestic boundaries. The metropole played a significant role in
the development of consumer culture: it exported

966

Metropole

Western industrialization and mercantile capitalism
and was also the source of modern global commodity trades. On the one hand, the metropole was the
main buyer of primary resources and commodities
exported from the colonies. On the other hand, it
was the source of a wide variety of manufactured
goods, often made from those primary resources
sourced from the empire, which were then profitably
sold in the markets of the colonies. These economic
influences—arguably at the root of contemporary
consumer culture—are inseparable from other forms
of power.
Exemplary metropoles include imperial Rome
prior to the age of European colonization initiated
in the mid-fifteenth century and Spain, France, and
Britain thereafter (the status of America as the center
of a contemporary “empire” is the subject of some
debate). The characteristics of the metropole are the
possession of political, cultural, and economic power,
be it in the shape of strong military resources, such as
armies and navies, which ease invasion and takeover;
advanced technologies facilitating a command over
space and time through transport and communications; or dominant ideological, linguistic, or religious
beliefs that shore up and justify the imperial mentality. These resources are put to use to influence and
control nondomestic territories in such a way as to
benefit the metropole.
The term metropole should be distinguished
from metropolis. Although the former is rooted in
the latter and in antiquity metropolis also referred
to the originating city of a colony, the terms are by
no means interchangeable. Due to the rise of the
nation-state and imperialism, metropole refers to the
home country in its entirety. A metropolis is a city
of great size and influence, and in the colonial context, this might refer to a large or powerful city in
the metropole. In her study of the dialectic between
the practices of English missionaries in Jamaica and
slavery-abolitionist groups in Birmingham in the
mid-nineteenth century, Catherine Hall not only
refers to the latter as “the midland metropolis” but
also distinguishes metropole as a term used to refer
to Britain as “the mother country.” Metropolitan is
an adjective that can be used to describe the qualities
or culture of either a metropole or a metropolis.
The records of history are testaments to the influence of a metropole on its empire. Those territories
and societies subjected to the attentions of metropolitan powers, from the earliest stages of seafaring

exploration and mercantile capitalism to imperial
expansion and colonization proper, experienced violent plunder in many guises. The legacy of enforced
labor policies enacted and supported by metropolitan powers, whether slavery in the Caribbean and
Americas or indentured workforces across the south
and east of Africa and in Asia, endures in the cultures and societies of Brazil, America, South Africa,
Sri Lanka, and many other countries. Linked to this
and equally significant to the experience of colonization was the way in which metropoles would treat
colonies as both sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. In the case of Britain,
arguably its entire economic power rested on the
enforced “symbiosis” between primary producers in
the colonies and British manufacturers (Hobsbawm
1987, 39–40). The metropolitan demand for various primary products often led to the dependent
economy developing in such a way as to rely entirely
on the production of one resource, thus creating
“banana” or “coffee republics” (Hobsbawm 1987,
50). Peripheral countries survived economically by
exporting primary produce to metropoles (and thus
had no incentive to industrialize). In 1860, it is estimated that “half of all exports from Asia, Africa
and Latin America had been sent to one country,
Great Britain” (Hobsbawm 1987, 52). The import
of these primary products and the rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution allowed
Britain to rapidly develop leading expertise in the
manufacture of a wide variety of commodities such
as combustion engines, guns, forks, buttons and
hooks, textiles, saucepans, bells, and locks and keys.
Many of these goods “had their origins in the workshops of Birmingham” (and other metropolises), and
being required the world over, especially by metropolitan settlers, the colonies “provided a particularly
significant market” (Hall 2002, 271). In economic
terms, and with direct bearing on the rise of modernist consumerism, the metropole must then be defined
as both voracious importer of primary products and
exporter of manufactured goods. Thus, especially
in the case of Britain, the metropole is structurally
linked with the colony in an economic relationship in
which both are dependent but in which the benefits
accrue primarily to the former.
The term metropole thus has the most currency in
studies of colonialism and postcolonialism, in which
context it describes the imperialist mother country
(located in Western Europe) that overtook other

Metropole

territories (in the Americas, Africa, and Australasia)
as its colonies or dependencies. The model of power
implied by this relationship is one in which influence
and domination spreads outward from a center. In
this context, the metropole’s opposite is the colony,
which is the place “penetrated and controlled by it”
(Loomba 1998, 7). The notion of metropole cannot be understood without reference to an opposite;
indeed, the metropole/colony binary has been central
to both scholarship affiliated with imperial historiography and to postcolonial critique. Affiliated binary
couplings include core/periphery, domestic/imperial, colonizer/colonized, civilization/barbarism, and
developed/underdeveloped.
Some commentators argue that these economic
relationships of imperialism have persisted into the
contemporary age despite the retreat of colonial
powers and the wave of independence across colonies, starting after the Second World War and culminating in South Africa’s liberation in 1994. Indeed, it
is perhaps optimistic to imagine that over five hundred years of asymmetrical relations between metropole and empire could be erased or reversed in only
several decades. In seeking to explain why it is that
the developing world remains locked to unfavorable economic relations with the developed, dependency theorists argue that it is due to the “systematic
underdevelopment geared to the demands of capital
accumulation in the metropole countries” (Axford
1995, 5). Dependency and underdevelopment in
the periphery is a “structural feature of the global
economy” rooted in “a single historical process” and
varied only to “the extent to which the periphery was
rich in resources of value to core powers” (Axford
1995, 49). From this perspective, the term metropole,
although outdated in terms of politics, is still salient
from the perspective of global economic relations,
which remain dominated by “unequal exchanges
between core countries specialising in the production
and export of high-value-added consumer goods,
and peripheral ones still playing out their historical
role as suppliers of raw materials to the metropole”
(Axford 1995, 50).
There are also many significant effects of the
empire on the metropole. As many historians of colonialism have argued, it is disingenuous and simplistic
to conceive of the “metropole-colony axis” (Cooper
and Stoler 1997, 28) as operating only centrifugally from the center to the periphery—this simply
indulges imperial conceit. As already noted, their

967

empires allowed metropoles to accrue political prestige in the global system as well as massive economic
enrichment. But important cultural influences of the
colonies on the metropole, a reversed centripetal
influence, can also be noted. The availability of a wide
range of—once luxury, now everyday—foodstuffs
and commodities sourced from “exotic” locations
had an irreversible effect on metropolitan cultures.
Britain is again a case in point. The empire was not
only a series of far-flung colonies at the service of the
Crown and pumping resources into the industrialists’
enterprises, but also it was “stacked on the shelves of
the humblest shop, in the smallest, most inaccessible
villages” (Walvin 1997, 197) of Britain in the form
of soap made from vegetable oils from West Africa,
tea from Ceylon, sugar from the Caribbean and elsewhere, tobacco from “Rhodesia,” and so on. The
various rituals of consumption that evolved around
the availability of these goods came to define not only
the material dimensions of everyday life (De Groot,
2006) but also the metropolitan identity—tea, sugary
biscuits, and jam are almost inseparable from British
culture today (Walvin 1997). Furthermore, representations of colonies and indigenous people circulated
throughout the metropoles, through advertising and
media imagery and in popular rhetoric. Colonized
individuals also visited and immigrated to the metropole, from the early humiliations of “human zoos”
and visiting indigenous performers to later waves of
migration and the establishment of rooted and acculturated ethnic communities. In these many ways, the
colonies—their resources and goods, their people
and images—were consistently present in the metropole, to the extent that some scholars argue that it
“was constituted in part by the Empire” (Hall and
Rose 2006, 5).
The co-constitution of colony and metropole
points to the inadequacy of centrifugal and centripetal conceptions of influence, suggesting the traditional
focus of the “centre/periphery relation” should be
challenged (Hall and Rose 2006, 5). This highlights
that the metropole/colony is not “a stable duality”
(Cooper 2005, 22) and that the two must be brought
into “one analytic field” (Cooper and Stoler 1997,
15). Furthermore, due attention should be paid to
the metropole as one node in broader and more complex webs of power and influence—“imperial networks” (Lester 2001)—that operated across empires
and between colonies. Current research develops this
perspective by examining the existence of centers of

968

Metrosexual

power other than the metropole in imperialist systems, past and present.
Mehita Iqani
See also Colonialism; Commodities; Global Cities;
Postcolonial Theory; Social and Economic
Development; Spaces and Places; Spices; Sugar

Further Readings
Axford, Barrie. The Global System: Economics, Politics
and Culture. New York: St. Martins, 1995.
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory,
Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005.
Cooper, Frederick, and Anne L. Stoler. “Between Metropole
and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda.” In
Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois
World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Anne L. Stoler,
1–57. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
De Groot, Joanna. “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial
Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire.”
In At Home With Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the
Imperial World, edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya
O. Rose, 166–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006.
Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony
in the English Imagination 1830–1867. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2002.
Hall, Catherine, and Sonya O. Rose, eds. At Home with
Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Empire. New York:
Vintage, 1987.
Lester, Alan. Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in
Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism-Postcolonialism. London:
Routledge, 1998.
Walvin, James. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and
British Taste, 1660–1800. London: MacMillan, 1997.

METROSEXUAL
The metrosexual male (there is no female metrosexuality) is commonly understood, in the North
American and British use of the term, to be a young
man who, shunning any reluctance and hesitation
informed by received notions and expectations of
masculine patterns of behavior, engages in grooming

to the betterment of his appearance. That is, the
metrosexual male will attend to his clothes and
hair, will employ hair conditioners, skin creams,
and moisturizers, with the understanding that this
will render him more attractive to the opposite sex.
Such traditionally female concerns with appearance
are not perceived to be a challenge to his heterosexuality—his “hetero-certainty” as queer theorists
put it—but rather an enhancement of his sexual
potential, his “pulling power.” In these respects,
the metrosexual represents an emergent consumer
group—a group in search of grooming products
specifically designed and marketed to a set of needs,
and a group with the potential to propel a niche
market into the mainstream.
The female, encountering the metrosexual male,
will find evidenced a concern with appearance and
thus the potential of the male to be “arm candy,”
preferable to the rough and ready males otherwise
available (unmoisturized, clothing as considered in
predominantly utilitarian ways, haircuts standardized and manageable, carrying the sweat and wear of
the day, etc.). Furthermore, this concern for appearance, it could be surmised, is indicative of intelligence,
character and a general concern for others (the “sensitive man,” akin to the “singer-songwriter” model;
not homophobic or racist or given over to violence; a
reader; domestic in the sense of a cook, a cleaner, and
an ironer), and a creative temperament (the so-called
Renaissance man and then “new man” of the late
1980s and onward). And further still, metrosexuality
denotes upward mobility; freed from the blue-collar
environs of the building site, the factory floor, the
lorry cab, and so on, the metrosexual male comes
to understand the importance of affective labor in
the white-collar environs of the office, the upmarket
cafe, and the conference or presentation room. From
the working-class female perspective, and in respect
to societal affirmations given to postwar embourgeoisement, the metrosexual represents an economic
progression from the male role models adopted by
the generation of their fathers and grandfathers. With
embourgeoisement comes the migration from rural
to urban areas and the consolidation of city-center
lifestyles, and so the phenomenon of metrosexuality
is understood to germinate and occur in the centers
of society—the metropolitan areas and their forms of
lifestyles. (The earliest uses of the term metrosexual
in the popular press, in the mid-1990s, coincide with
urban regeneration and the repopulation of formerly

Metrosexual

desolate city centers.) As Matt Houlbrook notes in
his study of London’s queer subcultures, the city, with
its plethora of available experiences—particularly
for the newly arrived and the naive—thus becomes
“a productive space that generates and stabilizes a
new form of selfhood and way of life . . . a space of
affirmation, liberation, and citizenship” (2006, 3).
Metrosexuality thus engenders and finesses further
upward mobility.
Such themes of new modes of male presentation
and upward mobility underlie the advertising campaigns for male skin moisturizers, which are often
provided with the caveat that they are related to
shaving, to hair conditioners, and the sexualization
of the male body in advertisements for male underwear (the footballer David Beckham, held to be an
embodiment of the metrosexual ideal, has modeled
for Armani campaigns in recent years). In this way,
the social dividend of upward mobility—sexual
activity—is understood to be available via a new
beauty regime and new concerns of self-presentation,
now appropriate to the social spaces of the urban
conurbation.

The Ideological Positions of Metrosexuality
This phenomenon represents two problematic areas.
First, that the attraction for the male of adopting a
more metrosexual lifestyle/appearance is an attraction predicated on the idea of increased sexual
conquests—the very opposite of the intention as read
by the female encountering the metrosexual male.
In itself, this contradiction between perception and
intention is no different from those associated with
all forms of male grooming and presentation and
indeed seemingly disinterested display of sophistication, maturity, and wit mounted to impress the object
of desire. Second, and more convolutedly, the phenomenon as described—in male, heterosexual, patriarch terms, in respect to female heterosexuality and
with the assumption of a female tendency to search
for one “appropriate” male—is highly retrogressive.
This indicates the way in which metrosexuality, once
identified in the real world, had been capitalized
on by advertising companies, reconceptualized and
arguably heterosexualized in the process, and then
rearticulated in respect to a further opening up of
markets so that previously minority products take on
a wide appeal. Thus, metrosexuality is relayed into
the market not only by commerce via the imagery

969

of advertisements but also in, as ever, symbiotic relationships with magazines, comment and opinion
pieces in newspapers, the profiles of newly emergent
celebrities, and so forth.
The striking heterosexualization of metrosexuality (in the Armani images of Beckham, for example,
machismo is merely “reframed” via a metrosexual
window dressing) points to the perceived homosexual origins of a concern with male grooming. Any
attempt at a prettification, even toward entirely heterosexual ends, had traditionally been met with contempt. In John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and
Men, the character of Curley, who applies Vaseline to
his hands so as to ensure softer skin for the benefit of
his wife, elicits suspicion from his fellow rural workers. The Hollywood film noir antagonist is either
a roughian or heavy (slow, apelike, and violent;
“primitive” as a model of man) or smooth (wellpresented, effeminate, with a concern for his mother,
and surrounded by other men). More recently, the
South Park episode “South Park Is Gay” posited
annoyance in the town’s homosexual community
at an outbreak of metrosexuality, perceived as an
intrusive “faking” of homosexuality. The bohemian
homosexuals among the “bright young things” of
the 1920s, who adopted feminine fashions, even to
the point of transvestism and unconcealed makeup,
were understood to be flaunting their sexual difference; resigned to their role as sodomites and outcasts,
they sought to rejoice in such marginalization rather
than (as polite society would increasingly demand,
particularly during the austere years after the Second
World War) remain effectively invisible. These exceptions that proved the rule, however, can be seen as
forerunners to the male of the “glam rock” period.
Here, makeup, an ambiguous sexuality, and “genderbending” (becoming ambiguous in sexual orientation and/or gender) were briefly entirely in vogue
in popular, mainstream culture. Urban myths concerning men from building sites carefully applying
makeup prior to a night out in fashionable urban
clubs in the first half of the 1970s speak of the ending of a ghettoization of the cultures of sexual difference. Although the glam period is often considered
as forgotten, or remembered with embarrassment,
this second “Summer of Love” (entirely comparable,
that is, to 1967 in its attempt at utopian modes of
existence) has long remained in the popular consciousness, particularly through pop music. Yet this
afterlife, when considered in relation to the very lack

970

Migration

of homosexuality (David Bowie’s seeming eventual
heterosexuality, Morrissey’s proclaimed asexuality,
and the straightness of effeminate and “queeny”
Brett Anderson of Suede), was criticized by queer
theorists as “tourist homosexuality”: an acting gay
rather than being gay—an acceptable simulacrum in
an industry with radical pretensions but deeply conservative practices and politics. In this criticism, the
feminization of males would seem to be a legacy of
a homosexual bucking of the trend. In this respect,
metrosexuality owes its biggest debt to homosexual
cultures, in direct opposition to heterosexualization
of commercialized metrosexuality.
However, this lineage merely reinforces the idea
that the essence of metrosexuality is a concern with
presentation on the part of the male or, more precisely, the male who is not ashamed to exhibit evidence of a concern with appearance. This raises the
question as to whether metrosexuality really does
represent a new phenomenon; from the dandy of the
1920s to the medallion man of the 1970s, presentation has been a facet of seductive strategies. It is arguable, therefore, that motive for metrosexuality is the
female, who now wishes to have less heterosexually
sexualized males. The “metro-” part of the term also
suggests that the urban-dwelling female, on encountering the urban-dwelling male (that is, those in the
domain of white collar, tertiary, and affective labor)
no longer requires outward signs of sexual prowess
from this group. The “rough and ready” is readily
available in the hinterland (figuratively and literally:
the gentrification of inner cities has banished the previous occupants to the city outskirts). Metrosexuality,
therefore, suggests a new class stratification and
codification of female desire rather than—as is often
understood—the enlightenment that occurs through
a breaking of sexual role models.
Benjamin Halligan
See also Beauty Myth; Celebrity; Clothing Consumption;
Cosmetics; Masculinity; Men’s Magazines; SelfPresentation; Sex; Sexuality

Further Readings
Coad, David. The Metrosexual. New York: SUNY Press,
2008.
Edwards, Tim. Cultures of Masculinity. London:
Routledge, 2005.
Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasure in
the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006.

MIGRATION
The term migration refers to the forced or voluntary
movement of people between one place and another.
Immigration has a more limited meaning. It refers to
an international movement of people that leads to
the permanent settlement of migrants in the country of destination. While studies of migration have
focused on particular periods of time and sending
and receiving locales—such as the movement of some
30 million Europeans out of the continent between
the mid-nineteenth century and World War I or the
turn of the twenty-first century flows from the south
of the world to the north—historians agree that
human mobility has been the norm throughout world
history. Some scholars even challenge the actual
significance of migration history as a discrete subdiscipline, echoing the famous opening sentence of pioneering U.S. immigration historian Oscar Handlin’s
book The Uprooted, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
Current theorizations see international migration
as regulated by multifactor systems of global interconnections, which include colonialism and decolonization, wars and ethnic persecution, preferred
commercial routes and trade relations, fluctuating
financial and labor markets, cultural and religious
translocal bonds, tourism, and so on. They replaced
earlier economics explanations of migration dynamics focused on origin-destination economic factors,
such as overpopulation and unemployment, encouraging population expulsion in some places and availability of jobs and unclaimed land attracting it in
others. An enduring legacy of the now-discredited
“push-and-pull” model is that migrants in the
capitalist world system have been much more often
studied as producers—workers and participants in
the different national working classes—rather than
consumers. If relatively overlooked by academic literature, however, it is evident that consumer culture
has had a tremendous importance in migratory processes, from the formation of the decision to emigrate
to the redefinition of identities involved in any migration and settlement project to the development of
translocal flows of goods, capitals, ideas, and images
that accompany those of mobile people.
Consumer culture and migration intersect on
two major terrains: (1) the behavior and practices
of migrants as consumers and (2) the representation

Migration

and cross-cultural consumption of migrant cultures,
identities, and styles via commodities and experiences, which are variously branded as “ethnic.” The
two levels are actually tightly interrelated. Migrant
consumption can be viewed as another form of
production—a production of ethnic meanings, values, and tastes, which, in turn, can become objects
of “consumption of the other” in the global market
for difference. Articulating their individual and collective identities as styles or subcultures by means
of their consumer choices and behaviors, migrants
provide for a public self-representation of their social
identities that, in an economy increasingly revolving
around symbolic production, can be marketed and
incorporated in everything from food to politics,
fashion, film, tourism, and so forth. It is only for the
sake of convenience that it may be helpful to examine (1) and (2) separately.
The influence of consumer culture on both the
shaping and the commodification of migrant identities has arguably intensified in the last decades.
Depending on the political and social conditions
they encounter in their place of arrival, and their
racial and cultural identity, migrant groups may
develop into relatively separate communities,
often as a result of segregation and discrimination.
Processes of ethnicization—the formation of immigrant cultures—might last for generations, turning
the descendents of the immigrants into socially distinct segments of the population. Anthropologists
and sociologists have argued that since the late
1980s, technological innovations, along with the
emergence of a global, postindustrial, and consumeroriented economy, have radically changed qualitatively the experience of migration and ethnicization.
Assimilation into host societies and nation-states has
ceased to be the ineludible eventual fate of immigrant
groups, as originally theorized by the Chicago school
of sociology. Fast and cheap transportation over long
distances and electronic media and communications
have made it easier for migrants to live transnational
lives, that is, maintaining psychological, political, and
economic links with their real or putative place of
origin. The concept of diaspora is accordingly often
invoked of late in migration studies to mean large
groups of globally dispersed displaced people who
continue to share a sense of affiliation and belonging
to a common “home.” Being de-territorialized communities bounded by culturally produced senses of
common pasts, values, interests, and tastes, presentday diasporas have typically found in consumer

971

culture a powerful means of self-production and selfrepresentation. Deindustrialization and globalization
have resulted in an economy revolving on symbolic
and cultural production and in an accelerated circulation of meanings, images, and fantasies about the
other. Not only have migrant identities become a
common area of study in consumer culture, but they
have also been brought into the consciousness of millions of consumers worldwide.

Consumer Culture and the Immigrant Body
Under modern capitalism, human mobility is often
the result of projects of social mobility, which consumer culture sets in motion. The global circulation
of consumer goods and mediated images of consumerism provide potential mobile people with visions of
better material existences and fantasies about alternative lifestyles elsewhere. Working-class Jewish women
in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century anticipated more comfortable and exciting lives in New
York through the near worshipping of mass-produced American brand commodities, such as canned
condensed milk and chocolate bars. The consumer
styles of returning migrants from el Norte and the
images of American consumer environment spread
by satellite TV channels, mobile phones, and myriad
other media are decisive factors in drawing Mexican
migrants to enter, often illegally and dangerously,
the United States. Their acculturation as American
consumers begins in Mexico and is a central part of
their transnational migration project, a pattern strikingly similar to those of Albanian migrants to Italy or
rural-to-urban migrant workers in southern China.
In the destination country—or city, in the case of
urbanized rural people—migrants are confronted
with otherness, that is, with differences in language,
appearance, habits, beliefs, and memory (or any combination of these) that set them apart from the rest of
the population. As they construct their self as alien,
consumer culture typically works as an immediate
and convenient terrain of mediation, understanding,
and representation of difference. In a perspective
reminiscent of Norbert Elias’s theory of civilization
and Michel Foucault’s social disciplination, a number of writers have insisted on consumer culture as
a pathway to assimilation into modern urban society, suggesting that migrants typically articulate this
work of self-reinvention through varied techniques
of the body. In fact, while reflexive investment in the
presentation of the self and body maintenance has

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Migration

been described as a typical expression of middle-class
postmodern consumer culture, migrants seem to
have been historically at the edge of the creation of
plastic lifestyles via the consuming body.
In turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York,
Italian and Jewish immigrants quickly abandoned
their old-world clothes to dress in American fashion, taking advantage of the cheap, mass-produced,
ready-made clothing assembled in the city’s sweatshops. New requests for health and efficiency, dictated by the transformation of the immigrant body
into the Fordist body regulated by industrial time and
the rhythm of the city, were increasingly met with the
help of professional medicine and commercial drugs
in place of folk medicine and traditional remedies.
First- and second-generation immigrant women were
among the most avid consumers of cosmetics. Beauty
powders, lipsticks, eyeliners, perfumes, and hair
dyes not only allowed immigrant women to modify
phenotypic features, such as skin color, eye shape,
and body form (more or less fluctuant evidences of
race, ethnicity, class, and gender standing) but also
signaled their entry into the world of commercialized
leisure and growing independence from the patterns
of courtship and sexuality imposed on them by the
immigrant family and community. For migrants in
different times and places, food habits have been a
means to try to shape and control their bodies as well
as their hybrid identities. Punjabi immigrant girls
in London in the 1980s preferred British fast food
to the Indian cuisine their parents cooked at home
on the grounds that the latter was fattening and
would have ruined their efforts at attaining a slim
“Western” body.

Consumer Culture and the Immigrant Home
The striving for assimilation that these consumer
strategies of the body reveal should not obscure the
work of creative agency on the part of the immigrant
consumer and the authenticity of the resulting ethnic/
diasporic cultures. Indeed, early critics of consumer
culture as mass deception have insisted on its homogenizing and disruptive effect on immigrant cultures
(which multiculturalists as well as assimilationists
romantically imagine as consistent and coherent,
while they themselves are a product of infinite layers of change and exchange). But recent contributions
contend that the “modern stuff” of consumer culture
provides migrant groups and racial minorities with

the cultural material to create original and dynamic
subcultures out of the need to negotiate and represent
their place in the larger hosting society and transnationally. The effort of migrant consumers at making
sense of the world through commodities, services,
and mass media can be interpreted as what Michel
De Certeau has called (subversive) tactics—forms
of resistance and identification vis-à-vis popular
culture—and appreciated as such by looking at different sites of migrant consumption, such as the home.
The purchase of a house, either in the place of
destination or, more often, in the country of origin,
has historically featured among the most common
motives for the activation of migration projects. To
people used to struggles with economic insecurity,
the investment in homeownership has often seemed
the soundest they could possibly make. The massive
flow of remittance money that migrants send back to
the country of origin—slightly less than $400 billion
in 2008, according to the International Monetary
Fund—is largely destined for the purchase of living
properties. But migrants have also consistently constructed their home, owned or rented, as a private
space of ethnic/diasporic domesticity, leisure, and
consumption, typically mingling commercial culture
and “tradition.” In Chicago in the 1920s and 30s,
southern and eastern European immigrant women
used mass-produced furniture as well as traditional
embroidery to decorate their modest apartments,
pursuing notions of domesticity that, while dramatically innovative if compared to the circumstances of
their rural past, also widely departed from those of
their middle-class American counterparts. Sicilian
immigrants used their state-of-the-art, installmentpurchased Victrola gramophones to play and dance
to Italian records while Poles tuned in their new
radios to listen to Polish-language programs, which
were sponsored by Polish American food producers and caterers. These strategies of symbolic organization and use of domestic space transcend time,
space, and social class, as the example of present-day
female, professional Hindu Indians living in Canada
shows. By conspicuously decorating their new homes
with paintings, tapestries, and handcrafted objects
from India, these women balance their feelings of
departure from Hindu identity and its hierarchies of
value, as publicly expressed by their accumulative
behavior of luxury and mundane consumer goods.
More in general, consumer culture provides codes
and materials for the restructuring of family rituals

Migration

in the immigrant home. Often, the cultural, psychological, and physical stress posed on migrants by the
circumstances of migration reflect on increasing worries of immigrant males, parents, or religious and/
or political authorities about the behaviors, mores,
and sexuality of immigrant women, the continuing
loyalty of the second generation, and the solidity of
the diasporic family as an institution. The response
is frequently the ritualization of domestic life and
consumption, that is, the transformation of the
immigrant family festive events into ritualized sites
of consumption, within which expression of group
solidarity and ritual reaffirmation of gender and
generational relations of power are performed. The
religious and secular celebrations of the year and life
cycle become a productive force of the home as an
ethnic haven, which contrasts with a worldly, alienating, public world. It is in this context of celebration of
family communion, memory, and cultural difference
that the production, preparation, and consumption
of ethnic food gain much of their symbolic power.
Original food patterns are revisited and reinvented
as a result of market conditions, the availability of
ingredients, borrowings between cooks, and so on,
but the resulting cuisines are held and felt as authentic on account of their social relevance.

Consumer Culture and the
Immigrant Community
Such a construction of the immigrant home through
ritual and consumer culture is an inherently transnational process, in that the local “home” is produced at the intersection of translocal, national,
and global cultural fields. The same commixture
of local and global is also apparent at the level of
another fundamental site of migrant consumption—
the community. Migrants have created space-bound
communities (neighborhoods) by concentrating in
certain districts of cities and rural areas, where they
have been numerically overrepresented and/or especially visible because of their dominant cultural and
social impact on public space (even though, as it
is often the case, a specific group may have actually come short of representing the near total population of a certain area thus mingling with many
“others” on a day-to-day basis). The spatial concentration of migrant people of a certain nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion is typically a product of both
the desire of migrants to live in close proximity with

973

their peers and enjoy their solidarity and familiarity
and of discrimination or reluctance on the part of the
rest of the population to live near them. Chinatowns,
barrios, Arab quarters, little Italies, and Jewish ghettos have emerged in cities worldwide out of the wish
of migrants to live near their workplaces, families,
and acquaintances and out of speculation and redlining in real estate and/or the flight of the resident
population (most of the time themselves immigrants
of an earlier era), which refuses to share space with
certain kinds of migrants.
Consumer culture has been a powerful means of
production of such migrant/ethnic communities. At
the neighborhood level, consumer institutions and
practices consistently “make” the migrant community. Ethnic stores, open markets, restaurants,
fast-food establishments, call centers, and so on
(represented as “ethnic” by the ethnicity of the goods
and wares they sell, the colors of a national flag or
the language of the shop sign, the language spoken
and the ethnicity of the owner and personnel) mark
the urban landscape with specific signifiers of identity (for the consumption of both group insiders and
outsiders) and provide the community with a sense
of self-sufficiency in terms of the material needed to
maintain and nurture its cultural specificity.
Hindu Indian grocery stores, for example, fulfill
a number of functions in present-day Hindu Indian
neighborhoods in Santa Clara, California, and
Queens, New York. Not only do the colors, flavors,
and smells of the merchandise on display shape
the otherwise anonymous urban public space and
appeal to the taste of Hindu Indian immigrants in
a way chain supermarkets could not, but the grocery store functions also as a gathering place, especially for immigrant women. While shopping there,
Hindu Indian women inhabit a public space without
causing community disapproval, enjoy sociability, exchange information, and reaffirm—through
gendered-specialized consumer practices—their
attachment to and endorsement of “Indian culture.”
Younger, native English-speaking second-generation
women may patronize Hindu Indian grocery stores
even more consciously as a form of statement and
display (to the rest of the community) of their
will to maintain or reconnect to a Hindu Indian
identity—as made evident by their determination to
cook the more laborious, time-demanding Hindu
Indian food. By catering to these needs, grocery store
owners actively function as makers of Hindu Indian

974

Migration

diasporic nationalism. Drawing virtually all their
profit from the niche economy of enclave consumers,
they are likely to be active in the community, sponsoring leisure activities and nationalist commemorations. They maintain strong connections with India
because of their import business and painstakingly
respond to the heterogeneous demands of a culturally
and regionally heterogeneous clientele, at the same
time providing a space and the materials for different
patterns and practices to melt into an “Indian style,”
or diasporic, consumer subculture. In particular, they
are ready to satisfy and reinforce a most common
consumer psychological dynamic—nostalgia for
India—which embeds popular mass-produced brand
products, such as Maggi noodles, Hamam soap,
Brahmi hair oil, Glucose biscuits, and Amul butter,
with a soothing, comforting meaning. Even if many
Hindu Indian immigrants cannot, nor actually want
to, return to India physically, at least they can return
to the home country in the imaginary, by consuming
Hindu Indian products handed to them by Hindu
Indian hands.
The consolidation of an ethnic market of immigrant consumers has often fostered the emergence
of immigrant business communities—the subject
matter of the interdisciplinary field of ethnic entrepreneurship studies, which explores the dynamics and different degree of success of the economic
activity of immigrant groups and minorities. Enclave
ethnic entrepreneurs—immigrant or minority businessmen whose clients mostly belong to their own
ethnic group—may enjoy an advantage over bigger and wealthier competitors such as mainstream
corporations on account of their cultural and social
capital. The importance of cultural capital is evident
in their capacity to know about the special needs of
their own niche of ethnic consumers and possess the
technology and skills to meet them. As in the case
of Islamic halal butchers or Jewish manufacturers
of kosher food, cultural capital can put ethnic entrepreneurs in a condition of virtual monopoly over a
particular trade. Social capital—the ability to access
limited resources because of an individual’s embeddedness in social networks based on cultural, kinship, occupational, or emotional ties—may provide
ethnic entrepreneurs with assets such as cheap labor
(immigrant workers may be willing to work longer
shifts for lower wages if they do so for an employer
who happens to be a fellow countryman or even a
relative) and easy credit (provided at cheaper rates

or better conditions by coethnic investors and suppliers). As a result, ethnic businessmen may be able
to offer goods and services at a competitive price to
their ethnic and nonethnic clients. The Italian restaurants and Chinese laundries that have appeared in
many large cities of the world since the early twentieth century have often survived and thrived because
of the economic edge provided by the social capital
accumulated by immigrant entrepreneurs.
Finally, even when they have carried nonethniclabeled commodities—from TV sets and washing
machines to ready-made clothes and Coca-Cola—
immigrant retailers in ethnic neighborhoods (often
members of the same immigrant group; sometimes,
immigrants from other backgrounds that the ethnoracial system of division of labor has assigned to
work in minority communities, as in the notorious
case of the Korean convenience-store owners operating in American black ghettos) have consistently fulfilled the function of making mass-produced brand
goods available and accessible to ethnic consumers—an opportunity that nonimmigrant businessmen
may pass on, judging it unprofitable, risky, or even
dangerous. They can be considered recent-time epitomes of what world historian Philip Curtin has called
trade diasporas: communities of merchants and cultural brokers living in a host society, which evolved
along long-distance trade routes across Asia, Africa,
the Americas, and Europe since ancient times and
resulted in thick networks of cultural intermediation
and exchange.

Marketing and Consuming
Immigrant Identities
However, ethnic entrepreneurs do not necessarily
need their niche market to be contained in enclaves.
In fact, migrant ethnic groups are communities of
belonging that do not need localized face-to-face
interaction to proclaim its members share a common heritage, welfare, and destiny. Nations, as
Benedict Anderson has famously argued, are “imagined communities” whose sense of common identity,
belonging, and loyalty is produced by synchronically
sharing over long distances the consumption of the
same “national” narratives and cultural artifacts:
notably, news, literature, theater, film, and TV in a
national language. Non-space-bound immigrant ethnic communities are, just like nations (often understanding themselves as a displaced part of a nation),

Migration

de-territorialized communities of feeling, and their
shared sensibilities extend to matters of taste, style,
and interests.
That is why even large multinational corporations
have marketed their products to and intensely targeted specific ethnic groups. The process is not new:
in the early twentieth century, companies like General
Electric or Pepsi advertised their products in the
foreign-language press directed at immigrant readers,
which thrived in the United States until World War II.
But the development has accelerated immensely since
the 1970s. The postindustrial economy has replaced
the production of a few lines of countless standardized products for a homogeneous mass market,
so central to Fordism, with a regime based on the
diversification of production and the segmentation
of the consumer market. In the sphere of production,
post-Fordism outsourcing, flexilization, and delocalization of labor has dramatically redefined the relationships between the more developed countries and
the rest of the world, influencing the quantity and
the quality of the global human mobility flows of the
late-twentieth and early twenty-first century whereas
in the sphere of consumption, the emphasis on the
marketing of small-batch, rapid-turnover customized
products has transformed the immigrant and ethnic
subjects into detectable consumer segments, with
their own specific demographics, income levels, and
attitudes to be marketed accordingly. Furthermore,
at least in the West, the cultural politics of the 1960s,
with its emphasis on self-expression, has brought to
the fore a number of identities in search of public
recognition for their specific needs and agendas—
the youth, women, gays and lesbians, minorities of
color, and immigrant and ethnic communities among
others—which marketers and advertisers were ready
to transform into as many market segments. In the
United States, two national TV networks, Univision
and Telemundo, broadcast in Spanish and inundate
Latino viewers—which have grown for size and value
to the status of a key consumer base—with commercials for many kinds of products. French, German,
and Dutch telecoms advertise in immigrants’ native
languages using images and symbols that immigrants
supposedly find familiar and appealing to give the
impression that call rates and services are tailored on
immigrants’ preferences and needs.
In the same logic of market diversification and segmentation, immigrant and ethnic identities, cultures,
and cultural artifacts have become most valuable

975

“commodities” for a consumer culture increasingly
centered on the symbolic value of things and experiences and the variety of possible and mutable meanings of the latter depending on the particular market
segment. Immigrant ethnic cultures provide for a vast
inventory of styles that can be used and reused—by
immigrant businesses as well as mainstream manufacturing and cultural industries—to embed products
with meanings and difference. Food, as well as arts
and crafts, is an obvious example. The commercial
fortunes of ethnic cuisines, restaurants, and cookbooks witness a tremendously expanding interest
of an international, cosmopolitan middle class for
the authentic, the traditional, and the artisanal that
modernity has taken away from their living experience. For such a bourgeoning group of middle-class
consumers, developing an expertise on immigrant
cuisines and specialty ethnic foodstuffs means
accumulating vital cultural capital to be spent on a
variety of social occasions. But immigrant identities
are able to add crucial cultural value to commodities across the specter of contemporary consumer
culture. Latinidad, for example, is a catchword that
refers both to a feeling of self-representation and cultural empowerment on the part of Mexican, Puerto
Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Latina American
immigrants to North America and elsewhere and to
an immaterial quality that adds commercial appeal
to Hollywood actors and actresses, pop music stars,
videogames, urban fashions, cosmetics product lines,
and foods.
Second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants have been among the most avid consumers
of immigrant identities, styles, and pasts, as they—
by now sometimes educated and financially secure
members of the middle class—have looked back at
their “roots.” In America, this phenomenon, which
not incidentally emerged along with the African
American civil rights movement on the one hand and
the virtual disappearance of the industrial working
class on the other, has been labeled ethnic revival.
The desire for reconstituting an ethnic memory or
simply reinventing a truer and more authentic self
through the exploration of (often formerly despised)
immigrant heritages has translated into many forms
of consumption—from genealogical research to visits to immigration museums, walking tours of long
gone as well as present-day urban immigrant ghettos,
and ethnic, or diaspora, tourism—journeys of selfdiscovery to one’s “ancestral home.” Again, none of

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Migration

these forms of consumption of the immigrant other
are totally new: at the turn of the twentieth century,
early travel guidebooks of London and New York
included descriptions of the peculiarities of the city’s
immigrant quarters, which middle-class prototourists
could visit to sense the thrills of “slumming.” What
is new is the striking readiness of contemporary
consumer culture to provide consumers of the other
with everything from the most “authentic” to commodified, museified, and even Disneyfied versions of
the immigrant experience. Chain restaurants, such as
Olive Garden and Sbarro, owned by multinationals
and serving the same standardized food in all their
many worldwide locations, are “themed” (imbued
with mass-produced meaning and difference) by
means of sepia-tone pictures of immigrant families
posted on the walls and other would-be paraphernalia of a bygone immigrant era.
The complex and interconnected ways in which
consumer culture defines migration experiences, in
both participating in the construction and creation
of migrant identities and transforming the latter, in
turn, into objects of consumption, are finally illustrated by the migrant spectatorship and readership
of mass media and the representation of migration
in popular culture. Here, again, it is necessary to distinguish among different level of analysis. (1) Mass
media are consumed by mobile people for information about other places. Not only do potentially
mobile people frame their migration project partly
on the basis of the knowledge about possible destinations they accumulate from the consumption of
information and popular culture, but they also use
global mass media to help them to keep in touch with
(and in the process shape) their diasporic culture.
Immigrants consistently continue to form their sense
of the host society and their place in it by consuming both mainstream and diasporic media. In France,
immigrant viewers from Islamic countries are much
more likely to be equipped with satellite television
receivers, with which they watch Arab TV channels,
than the majority population. Iranians living in the
United States conspicuously shape their thoughts,
ideas, and images of themselves and others through
the consumption of media that include Iranian satellite television and prayers recorded on audio cassettes
that get played by taxi drivers during their long work
shifts. (2) Mass media represent the immigrants for
the use of the hosting society. Immigrants and their
cultures and habits function as contents for mass

media and popular culture, nurturing discourses that
encompass the enrichment of TV show and feature
film narratives, sometimes benevolent in character
and emphasizing appealing exotic features and sometimes as representations that link their presence in
the host society with crime, xenophobia, and social
disintegration that serve political parties and movements to promote populist, chauvinistic, or even racist political agendas. (3) Mass media include cultural
production that originated in the migrant sending
countries and is being consumed globally. Films,
TV series, and other popular culture artifacts produced in the home country can become part of the
cultural patrimony of the diaspora, while at the
same time, become an object of the cross-cultural
consumption of the other by nondiasporic people in
host societies—Bollywood films being probably one
of the most immediate example that can be made.
The overlapping of self-representation, representation, commodification, and consumption of cultural
diversity inherent in the cinema of the diaspora and
its commercial circuits suggests the function of consumer culture in both shaping and disseminating
migrant identities and public images.
Simone Cinotto
See also Diaspora; Ghettos; Globalization; Identity;
Multiculturalism; Orientalism; Othering; Postcolonial
Theory; Tourism Studies

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the
Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2, no. 2
(Spring 1990): 1–24.
Belasco, Warren. “Ethnic Fast Foods: The Corporate Melting
Pot.” Food and Foodways 1, no. 2 (1987): 31–48.
Cinotto, Simone. “‘Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!’
Food, Family, and Community among Italian Immigrants
of New York.” In Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in
Italian-American Lives, edited by Joseph Sciorra, 11–44.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
Cohen, Lizabeth. “Encountering Mass Culture at the
Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the
1920s.” American Quarterly 41, no. 1 (March 1989):
6–33.
Davila, Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of
a People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of
Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side,
1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

Mimesis
Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and
the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998.
Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change.
New York: Routledge, 1995.
Grewal, Irdepal. “Traveling Barbie: Indian Transnationality
and New Consumer Subjects.” Positions 7, no. 3
(1999): 799–827.
Hall, Michael, and Allan Williams, eds. Tourism and
Migration: New Relationships between Production and
Consumption. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer,
2002.
Halter, Marilyn. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of
Ethnicity. New York: Schocken, 2002.
Heinze, Andrew. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish
Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for
American Identity. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992.
Howes, David, ed. Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global
Markets, Local Realities. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Mankekar, Purnima. “‘India Shopping’: Indian Grocery
Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging.”
Ethnos 67, no. 1 (March 2002): 75–97.
Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian
Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and
Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1986.
Portes, Alejandro, ed. The Economic Sociology of
Immigration: Essays on Networks, Ethnicity and
Entrepreneurship. New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1998.
Yu, Henry. “How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes: PostNationalist American Studies as a History of Race,
Migration, and the Commodification of Culture.” In
Post-Nationalist American Studies, edited by John
Carlos Rowe, 223–248. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.

MIMESIS
The word mimesis means imitation and comes from
the Greek words mimeisthat for copy and mimos for
imitator. There are a number of other words related
to mimesis that are similar, such as mime and mimic.
Plato dealt with mimesis and the notion that art is
a representation of something else in his book The
Republic, but it was Aristotle whose writings in
Poetics had the most influence. Aristotle (around 330

977

BC) made mimesis the basis of his theory of art. He
wrote in Poetics that literary works, such as dramas,
are imitations of reality and suggests that there are
three kinds of imitation: the medium of imitation, the
objects that are imitated, and the mode of imitation.
For the medium of imitation, he discusses various
arts and language. When he comes to the objects of
imitation, he spells out his theories of the arts and
writes:
Since the objects of imitation are men of action, and
these men must be either of a higher or a lower type
(for moral character mainly answers to these
divisions, goodness and badness being the
distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows
that we must represent men either as better than in
real life, or as worse, or as they are. (Aristotle, in
Smith and Parks 1951, 30)

Aristotle is dealing with “men of action” here,
by which he means what we would call a plot.
When he comes to the matter of the mode of imitation, the third of his topics relating to imitation,
he writes that poets can use a personality, speak for
himself, or have his characters interact with one
another. He then moves on to differentiate comedy,
which involves imitations of persons inferior to us
who are ludicrous, from tragedy, which imitates
actions that are “serious complete, and of a certain
magnitude” (1951, 36). Aristotle’s mimetic theories
influenced the work of dramatists for thousands of
years, and he can be considered the father of the
mimetic theory of art. There are other theories of art,
such as the pragmatic theory, which argues that art
must be functional and do something; the objective
theory, which argues that art creates its own reality;
and the emotive theory, which argues that art’s basic
function is to stimulate powerful feelings in people.
Mimesis or imitation plays an important role
in consumer culture, allied as it is to identification.
Mimetic theory explains why advertisers use movie
stars, celebrities, and heroic sports figures to sell
products. Consciously, we may seek to imitate those
we admire; this desire to imitate others is connected
to an unconscious and somewhat regressive process
known as identification. Identification involves our
unconsciously internalizing various role models as
ideals and imitating them in various ways, such as
by purchasing the products they sell. As we develop,
we identify with many people for short periods of
time in the process of learning how to consolidate

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Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age

our identities. When we are older, we find ourselves
imitating others by purchasing what they purchase,
carried along, in part, by the powerful collective
force of fashion.
French literary scholar René Girard developed a
theory to explain the power of Shakespeare’s plays
and also why we purchase the products that are
endorsed by celebrities and other role models. In his
book, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, he
discusses what he describes as “mimetic desire.” He
writes in the introduction to his book (1991, 3):
When we think of those phenomena in which
mimicry is likely to play a role, we enumerate such
things as dress, mannerisms, facial expressions,
speech, stage acting, artistic creation, and so forth,
but we never think of desire. Consequently, we
see imitation in social life as a force for gregariousness and bland conformity through the mass
reproduction of a few social models.

In his book, he argues that mimetic desire informs
all of Shakespeare’s plays and is central to their power.
The reason we are affected by Shakespeare’s plays
is that everyone, everywhere experiences mimetic
desire.
Girard also suggests that mimetic desire is a potent
force in advertising. He writes (1991, 123):
When business wants to increase the sale of a
product, it resorts to advertising. In order to inflame
our desire, advertisers try to convince us that the
beautiful people all over the world are already in
love with their products. If the industry needs a
patron saint, it should select Pandarus. Shakespeare
is a prophet of modern advertising. His Pandarus
dangles in front of his prospective customers the
prestigious desire that will arouse their own.

The problem with desire, he adds, is that it is
always self-defeating; we find the products we can
possess unsatisfactory; it is the things we cannot
possess that always intrigue us. We desire things
not for their intrinsic value, he tells us, but because
they are desired by others, and we imitate their
desire. If Girard is correct, mimetic desire is a force
that has an enormous impact on our lives and
helps explain why people behave the way they do
and consume the way they do. Desire, by itself, is
relatively formless and fluid; it needs something to
attach itself to, and one of the ways it functions is
to focus our attention on products and services

that we believe will enrich our lives the way they
have enriched, so we imagine, the lives of those we
are imitating. Mimetic desire is the mirror image of
mimetic rivalry, and as Girard explains, imitation
can pull people together and pull them apart, both
at the same time. People who share the same desire
are united by a powerful force, but if they cannot
share what they desire, then they become rivals
and enemies.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Desire; Diffusion
Studies and Trickle Down; Fashion; Identity;
Interpellation; Lifestyle; Taste

Further Readings
Auerbach, Erich, and Willard R. Trask. Mimesis: The
Presentation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Girard, René. A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient
Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002.
McKeon, Richard. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York:
Random House, 1941.
Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis (the New Critical Idiom).
New York: Routledge, 2006.
Smith, James Harry, and Edd Winfield Parks. The Great
Critics: An Anthology of Literary Criticism. 3rd ed. rev.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1951.

MOBILE MEDIA GADGETS
ANALOG AGE

OF THE

As a cultural practice, the “mobile” use of media technologies has developed alongside the growing individualization and mobilization of consumer societies
during the second half of the twentieth century and
in connection with analog media gadgets, such as the
portable radio or the cassette recorder. Being mobile
did not refer only to a physical movement but also to
the potential use of portables “anytime, anywhere,”
that is, without the need of location-bound wires
or connections. Portable electronics were used both
indoors and outdoors as well as in stationary and
mobile modes, and their extensive and widespread
use led to new mobility and technological cultures.

Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age

These were characterized not only by a high autonomy and flexibility but also by an increased inflexibility, since portables often served as “snail shells” in
which to house one’s personal values, routines, and
environment.
The mobile use of radios, televisions, or hi-fi systems was not self-evident, since the dominant appropriation of consumer electronics of the second half
of the twentieth century had been a domestic one:
Stationary models provided leisure and entertainment
in one’s private home. The technological prerequisite for portables was miniaturization, facilitated by
transistors, integrated circuits, and enhanced battery
power and later on, liquid crystal displays (LCD).
From the portable radio of the 1950s onward, most
portable electronics were at first introduced into the
market as “travel companions.” They were supposed to be carried along on leisure and business
journeys, and they were supposed to enable their
users to uphold essential or appreciated stationary
routines while away from stationary equipment.
By integrating them more and more into their daily
lives, users ultimately shaped these travel companions
into “everyday companions.” In this transformation,
business men, vacationers, and, above all, teenagers
were lead users, and the young, urban generation
left a significant imprint on the emerging mobility
culture. Yet in the end, nearly all generations used
portables. Portable radios, cassette recorders, or
Walkmans reached a higher diffusion than the stationary equipment though their technical quality was
mostly inferior, and their popularity enforced an individualization, even a personalization, of technology.
Meanwhile, during the phases of their appropriation,
constitutive norms and structures of everyday social
life were renegotiated, namely, the subtle spatiotemporal structures of everyday life, such as the public or
private and work or leisure distinction, the temporal
ordering of activities and concepts of individuality
and collectivity.
Portable, cordless electronics promise to “free”
their owners from the many temporal, spatial, and
social constraints involved in the stationary use of
technology. Along with being marketed for business
travels, the portable radio of the 1950s was marketed as well for outdoor summer picnics or sporting
events. In the United States, the portable radio was
mass produced from the late 1930s, while European
and Asian companies followed in the 1950s. At the
end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, the portable radio

979

was used to supply entertainment at picnics or to
keep in contact with native broadcasting and thus
with a familiar language and soundscape while on
vacation abroad. But at the same time and along
with the trend toward secondary listening, users
tuned in with their portables “in between,” or in parallel to everyday situations or obligations, be it driving, gardening, dressing, eating, or working. For a
home-based use, most portable radios also integrated
the possibility to connect them to the main supply.
The portable radio thus represented the primary portable media gadget to be used by the average mass
consumer in everyday life. It enhanced the mediatization and technologization of both the private and
the public sphere. In particular, teenagers acquired
portables as primary sets since prices for portable
radios, in particular the pocket-sized sets and eastern Asian imports, were low. In addition, in war and
cold war times, portable radios were valued as handy
information tools and considered necessary in fallout shelters. In the end, with a growing dispersion of
both portable and stationary sets, radio listening was
dissociated from its initial domestic and family structures, while it became integrated into the individual’s
daily routines. The single cabinet-like stationary set
was substituted by a multitude of mobile, semimobile
(automobile) and fixed receivers, and broadcasting
increasingly offered programs that could be listened
to in between and alongside further activities. Radio
sounds permeated nearly every room in the home, be
it the bedroom or the bathroom, as well as the car as
“private space” on wheels and manifold public settings, such as public pools, parks, or pedestrian zones.
It was the car radio—both in the form of a
car’s fixed feature or a portable set used in the
automobile—that popularized the literal mobile use
of the radio, that is, listening while being in physical
movement. The multitasking of steering and listening at first had been perceived as a risky distraction.
Since the 1960s, when commuting between work and
home became normal and car traffic more dense, the
meaning of the car radio changed from a risky distracter to a stimulating animator. In line with the subsequent establishment of traffic channels, car radios
later on were considered as helpful navigation pilots
that enhanced traffic security. For the drivers, mobile
car music served to control moods, and besides, the
listening car driver experienced an augmented sense
of speed due to the musical rhythms that underscored
the movement. The private automobile space also

980

Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age

proved to be a dominant place to test and explore
mobile media use in the case of later portables, such
as tape recorders, navigators, or even DVD players.
Since the late 1960s, cassette recorders became
the means of mobile listening to self-chosen music.
The compact and handy Philips cassette became
the standard for mobile listening in Europe, while
in the United States, the 8-track format dominated
car listening. Due to Philips successful strategic
marketing, a diverse number of prerecorded music
cassettes became available in the early 1970s, and
cassette recorders now enabled users to always have
their favorite pop and rock stars at hand. While the
recording function—enabling a location-independent
“hunting” for sounds—had induced the introduction of the Philips pocket recorder “3300” in 1963,
recording later on became less important than playing self-chosen music. However, with the so-called
boom boxes, or radio recorders, of the 1970s and
1980s, young users redefined the recording function
as a means (a very stationary one) of “hit hunting”:
They compiled their own mix tapes by recording
their favorite songs from radio broadcasts. Such
radio cassette recorders literally took over the many
places where the portable radio had once been used.
Often, these combination units were placed quite stationary on the kitchen shelves, inside hobby rooms,
or the garage, and so forth, and there, they ran on
electricity rather than on battery power.
At the end of the 1970s, a multitude of portable media units were available, from the tiny
pocket recorder to the portable hi-fi set or camping
units that also integrated television. But it was the
Japanese company Sony that interweaved the culture
of once stationary hi-fi and headphone listening with
mobile listening practices. The Sony Walkman from
1979 combined a simple cassette player with stereo
headphones. The resulting listening experience can
best be compared to the listening experience in a
car: the transit space is reduced to a visual perception underlain with self-chosen music. In the course
of the 1980s, while Western societies experienced
an increasing individualization and mobilization,
mobile headphone usage was soon valued as a means
to carve out some privacy wherever needed, be it in
the subway, on the airplane, or while jogging. Besides,
they enabled users to listen to various learning kits
in between, turning “idle” into “useful” time.
Via portable audio equipment, music, once spatially tied to public concert halls, festival locations,

or later on, private living rooms, became ubiquitous.
Portables became personal technologies, and they
partly complemented, partly substituted former
family-shared technologies. They served as fashionable garments and delivered identity statements. Just
as the aural sense is predestined for mobile multitasking activities, so acoustic rather than visual-based
portable electronics were shaped into perfect companions for people on the move, be it the car driver
or the pedestrian. At the same time, the mobile music
enhanced their kinesthetic experience of motion and
speed. Portable televisions largely served as secondary stationary equipment to be used on the terrace,
in the children’s room, on the camping site, or in
holiday houses, thus enabling the individualization
of television consumption. Pocket televisions, such as
the Sony Watchman from 1982, proved less successful, whereas the Nintendo GameBoy from 1989 and
multimedia cell phones popularized visually based
mobile consumption practices. Recently, cell phones
have increasingly been constructed as multifunctional
electronic companions that shall integrate nearly any
previous portable, be it the wristwatch, the timer, the
radio, the camera, or the music player.
Heike Weber
See also Domestic Technologies; Electronic Video Gaming;
Individualization; Information Technology; Mobile
Phones; Radio; Walkmans and iPods; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Bijsterveld, Karin. “‘What Do I Do with My Tape
Recorder . . . ?’: Sound Hunting and the Sounds of
Everyday Dutch Life in the 1950s and 1960s.” Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24, no. 4 (2004):
S613–S634.
Bull, Michael. “Soundscapes of the Car: A Critical
Ethnography of Automobile Habitation.” In Car Cultures,
edited by Daniel Miller, 185–203. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Schiffer, M. B. The Portable Radio in American Life.
London: Routledge, 1991.
Spigel, Lynn. “Portable TV: Studies in Domestic Space
Travels.” In Technological Visions. The Hopes and
Fears That Shape New Technologies, edited by Marita
Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach,
110–144. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Weber, H. Das Versprechen mobiler Freiheit. Zur Kultur- und
Technikgeschichte von Kofferradio, Walkman und
Handy. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Publishing,
2008.

Mobile Phones

MOBILE PHONES
The widespread use of mobile (cell) phones in most
countries now affects social innovation and consumer culture in a range of settings including social
groups such as family, friends, and intimate networks, as well as across broader social networks
including employment, business, and services such
as medicine and education. The uses and applications of mobile phone digital content and services are
becoming increasingly sophisticated when compared
to basic, though popular, traditional services such as
short message services (SMS). Multimedia messaging
services (MMS) and applications and mobile e-mail
and Internet applications along with global positioning system (GPS)–enabled handsets and the iPhone
have made a defining impact on the business end
and experience end of consumer culture. The growing social, cultural, and economic impact of mobile
digital content and services is evidenced in European
and Southeast Asian nations in particular and will
take on greater significance in the social and cultural
life of society in other regions, as the major telecommunication carriers commit to 3G broadband and
associated enhanced services in the coming years.
As in the past, the introduction of innovative
information and communication technologies (ICT),
products, and services evoked changes in existing patterns of employment, family structures, leisure activities, concepts of time, and existing societal values
such as privacy and notions of personal and public
space, even patterns of human settlement and education. Mobile phones find a distinct resonance with
consumer culture given their affinity within both the
work and leisure milieu—with fashion and media
purposing—and as an expression of style and design.
Personalized devices such as mobile phones are
showing similar trajectories in consumer culture but
are, however, unique in that they penetrate geographical spaces with existing products and innovations
that enable consumption and communication to be
applied in new social, cultural, or psychological ways.
Such products and services are typified by inputs
based on knowledge, creativity, and differentiation.
Phone users now have a means of group communication, media content access (entertainment, information, data), and the ability to “synchronise everyday
life” (Ling 2001) with home, school, or work through
high-speed broadband mobile phone devices and

981

networks. These innovative though now established
applications of the mobile are in addition to evolving
cultural and social applications of the device.
Beyond voice call and media consumption applications, mobiles are used in a variety of contexts: for
electronic transfer of key diagnostic sounds and data
to remotely monitor medical patients and use of SMS
text messages as a form of patient contact tracing at
hospital units; for those in the deaf community, use
of SMS and MMS delivers them independence and
opportunities not possible beforehand (M. Power
and D. Power 2004).
This proliferation of mobile technology in the
social and cultural domain and the notion of the
mobile as an ubiquitous technology have seeded
issues, which track through the development of the
mobile phone (just as previous twentieth-century
technologies underwent development, such as radio
and television). The attention such debates cause
are repeats of what Nikhilesh Dholakia and Detlev
Zwick (2003) identify as modernist visions of technological development, which tend toward “dystopian aesthetics”—something like a good-versus-evil
conversation (the “evils” of video games and violence
being another recent example).
When it comes to the mobile and wireless,
visions of the future are no less volatile. In her book
Tomorrow’s People, Susan Greenfield (2003) implies
a moderately dystopian image for the metaphoric
end of public space, as the mobile phone becomes a
cyborglike attachment. Wearing the mobile embedded
in our clothes (not to mention teeth, skin, and nails—
all currently possible to varying degrees), she imagines
crowded streets full of people oblivious to the flow
of life going on around them—and to each other. In
a clear reflection of what already occurs on trains, in
restaurants, and in streets, everyone will chatter, laugh,
shout, and argue seemingly to themselves. And yet
more evil are speculations about whether broadband
wireless and mobiles increase the networking capabilities of criminals, terrorists, and pedophiles. While
Howard Rheingold’s (2002) Smart Mobs defined a
cohort of users as any group who use mobile communications to organize collective action (for good
mostly), such mobs are also capable, for example, of
organizing the coordination of gang rape by SMS or
street attacks against migrants by white supremacists.
Demonstrating a perverse bond of the “good” and
“evil” of the mobile, on the morning of the Madrid
train bombings in 2004 (detonated by mobile

982

Mobile Phones

phones), the mobile network became congested as
desperate relatives attempted to phone passengers.
Likewise, rescuers and doctors must deal with the
ringing of victims’ mobiles in all large-scale disasters. In the September 11, 2001, attack in the United
States, relatives and partners of victims are left with
the eternal “voice prints” on phone messages sent
from those who called unattended home phones or
switched off mobiles before perishing. In the film
21 Grams (2003, Inarritu), Naomi Watts’s character
lies devastated and drugged as she continually listens
to a message from her husband, delivered as he walks
home with their two children—all killed moments
later in a car crash. In Finland, a woman who called
the emergency number from her mobile to report her
husband had been murdered was murdered as she
made this call.
Perceptions of technology and the future and
“what might be” for consumer culture often find
their way into our popular culture representations
of the future: the first digital (LED) watch worn in
the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) seemed
outrageous and wonderful at the time. It was the
beginning of the modernist button and lights era
of digital technology (buttons and lights still play
a part in consumer technology across many items),
begun decades earlier with the flashing lights and
gimmickry of most science fiction. In a postmodernist era of technology configuration, it has taken the
proliferation of wireless, mobiles, the Internet, and
computing power miniaturization to combine a trifecta of point, push, and pull of such technologies.
This is well summarized by Akia Yoshioka, Hiroyuki
Toki, Noboru Takahashi and Shunji Ito (2006) who
describe how we point at a device we wish to control or indeed interact with, pull information from
the device or move it around, and push information
to it or another device. Apple’s iPhone is a consummate example of this theory coming to life (in our
film analogy, think Minority Report where Tom
Cruise [Anderton] manipulates images received from
telepathic precogs in a virtual reality murder puzzle
console screen, not unlike the iPhone).
For consumer contexts, it is this point, push, pull
capacity and the utopian ideals of the “ubiquitous,
unaware, and unconscious” scenario that will take
mobiles beyond social sharing into unobtrusive,
everyday collaboration and interaction that does not
yield to the dystopian scenarios of a detached, cruel,
and inequitable society.

While such sanguine considerations may appear
somewhat utopian in themselves, the realities of
mobile phone consumption and the need for catchup regulation and policy are still evident. To better confront assertions, which are invariably made
of the mobile phone, the development of evolving
research agendas will be required. Such examples
include analyzing cultural understandings of mobile
information access and communication for the identification and exploitation of innovation in business,
services, governance, and social enterprise. Effects on
sociability in the family and broader social networks
will entail complex research assignments. What are
the key contextual factors to consider that promote
content innovation, for example, marketing, evolving technology expectations, intellectual property
regimes, privacy concerns, and illegal activities? To
what extent should personal consumption freedoms
and social group and industrial needs inform customized innovations in technology and its delivery?
Do major geographical and demographic sectors
within nations differ significantly in their demands
for content and its delivery? If so, how are these to
be resolved? In the delivery of content, how can the
mobile phone provide maximum media complementarity to other institutions and devices that contribute to a knowledge society and economy? These
are some of the questions that are yet to be fully
explored and resolved as the mobile phone continues to immerse itself in consumer culture and our
everyday lives.
Harvey May
See also Individualization; Information Technology;
Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age; Radio;
Social Networks; Telephones; Virtual Communities;
Youth Culture

Further Readings
Dholakia, Nikhilesh, and Detlev Zwick. Mobile Spaces and
Boundaryless Spaces: Slavish Lifestyles, Seductive
Meanderings or Creative Empowerment? 2003.
Available online at http://ritim.cba.uri.edu/wp2003/pdf_
format/HOIT-Mobility-Technology-BoundaryPaper-v06.pdf.
Goggin, G. ed. Mobile Phone Cultures. London: Routledge,
2008.
Greenfield, Susan. Tomorrow’s People: How 21st Century
Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel.
London: Allen Lane, 2003.

Modernization Theory
Ling, R. Adolescent Girls and Young Adult Men: Two
Subcultures of the Mobile Phone. Norway: Telnor,
2001.
Power, M., and Power, D. “Everyone Here Speaks TXT:
Deaf People Using SMS in Australia and the Rest of the
World.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9,
no. 3 (2004): 333–343.
Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002.
Yoshioka, Akia, Hiroyuki Toki, Noboru Takahashi, and
Shunji Ito. “Point, Push, Pull: The FAU Interface.”
Interactions 13, no. 4 (2006): 40–41.

MODERNIZATION THEORY
Modernization has been an important concept in
the second half of the twentieth century to grasp
and describe the ongoing technological, economical,
social, and cultural changes that are associated with
industrialization and democratization. The actual
term modernization theory refers to an intellectual
movement consisting mainly of scholars in the United
States in the 1950s and 1960s. Social scientists were
eager to show that the West (especially the United
States) had reached a point in history that foreshadows the future history of other states. Embedded
within the cold war struggle, Western scientists proposed the United States as a better role model for the
developing postcolonial world than that of the USSR.
Particularly influential was Walt Rostow’s concept of
economic growth, which asserted that all countries
would sooner or later enter the path to modernization
moving from traditional societies through a period of
transition to the age of high mass consumption.
In a broader sense, many theoretical accounts of
long-term changes that led to a “modern” Western
world in North America and Europe from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as modernization theories. The key elements comprise the
notions of development and progress on various
levels. Here are some of the general contentions of
modernization theories: It has been argued that past
economies based on rural agriculture were replaced
by an urban industrial economy. Nature, in the past
endured as vicissitudes of fate, became technologically managed. Economic and technological changes
that occurred alongside development and progress are
interpreted as influencing social changes. For instance,
the size of the household, which once included three

983

generations and often dependent nonfamily members, became increasingly understood as a historical
form of dwelling that gave way to the nuclear family
as the norm for modern households. Moreover, small
scale village life based on kinship and tradition was
replaced by urban cosmopolitanism and superstition
by scientific knowledge.
Theories of capitalism, industrialization, and
production employ the notion of modernization as
much as theories of consumption that seek to capture the emergence of consumer societies and mass
consumption. Both the modernization theory of the
mid-twentieth century and modernization theories
in general had and continue to have an impact on
the field of consumption studies. The intersection
between modernization theories and the studies
of consumption cultures is mainly one that occurs
where on the one hand, grand theories of social
change deal with consumption issues and on the
other hand, theories of consumption work within the
broader framework of social theory. Most accounts
of consumption cultures are based on, work through,
or rework grand social theories. To understand what
theoretically informed consumption studies argue
with and against, it is important to know influential
concepts of social theory and change in respect to
consumption cultures.

From Modernization to Postmodernity
Many of the concerns arising from globalized market
relations are tied to the normative contents of modernization theory and its successors. American intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s successfully sought to
convince the U.S. government and organizations such
as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) to transfer the model of liberal markets
to postcolonial countries (Latham 2000). Economic
growth was and still is seen as the basic condition
for stabilizing countries and international relations.
Since then, many development programs sought to
weave yet more or less self-sufficient regions at home
and abroad into the global (i.e., capitalist) market to
stimulate economic growth.
Modernization theory itself became increasingly
criticized by the early 1970s for its technocratic
approach and the increasingly violent implementation of its basic principles especially apparent in the
Vietnam War. Modernization theory became unfashionable if still influential and was replaced by various

984

Modernization Theory

strands of theorizations of culture, identity, and difference that are often summarized as postmodern
and post-structuralist. The agenda of modernization
theorists disregarded cultural differences as a mere
opposition between traditional and modern societies.
Differences would vanish once all societies entered
the route to modernization, and all cultures would
converge to a single one based on the economic
principles of markets and free trade. The realization
that cultural differences are not likely to vanish in the
near future and are even increasing within “modern”
societies led to the insight that Western theorists are
not bestowed with a superior viewpoint but represent only one of many possible perspectives on the
world. The refashioning of culture as a main site of
social science studies has many roots but especially
noteworthy is Clifford Geertz, a major exponent of
what later came to be termed the “cultural turn.”
With the transformation of modernization theory
into postmodernism, consumption became an important topic. Whereas modernization theory still rested
on the productional and technocratic understandings
of progress outlined by Karl Marx or Max Weber,
since the 1970s, consumption and consumer culture
were recognized as the driving force of social change.
French theorists such as Roland Barthes or Albert
Camus already began to take everyday life cultures
seriously in the 1940s and 1950s. Clifford Geertz
famously explored the cockfighting of Bali in the
1960s. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) started a series of investigations into the history of popular culture in the
1960s. Jean Baudrillard subsequently asserted in his
book The Consumer Society, originally published in
French in 1970, that consumption is more important
than production, for it is within the realm of consumption that meanings and needs are created. From
there, it was only a short step to the vibrant studies
of various consumer cultures and the ways in which
commodities, lifestyles, and leisure are invested with
multiple and constantly changing meanings (Lash
and Urry 1994). These studies reveal that there is not
only one consumer culture but also many different
and changing cultures. This led to the conclusion that
consumption is as much about satisfying basic needs
as it is about the creation and construction of identity
through difference; what you eat, what you wear,
where you go for holidays became seen as a matter
of creating a distinct personality. In more historical
terms, this was analyzed as a shift from the era of

mass consumption where people consumed increasing amounts of homogeneous products such as cars
and refrigerators to the era of postmodern consumption of specialized variations of goods that facilitated
individualized quests for identity. From a production
point of view, the shift from a modern to postmodern
consumer society can be equated with the shift from
the highly standardized and hierarchical economies
of scale of Fordism to the flexible and specialized
economies of scope of post-Fordism (Jayne 2006).
Nevertheless, notions of a postmodern consumer
culture have to reconcile a new contradiction that
reveals how the roots of postmodern thinking lie in
modernization theory. Following the basic insight that
postmodernity refers to flexibility, diversity, and differentiation (see Mansvelt 2005, 44), it has been stated
that variations persist across space and complete
convergence is unlikely (Jackson 2004). Moreover,
accounts of postmodern consumption are keen to
stress how this form of consumption spreads around
the globe and how this particular globalization process can be observed nearly everywhere. This paradox
of homogenization (retail, brands, and consumption
become everywhere the same) and heterogenization
(but it is interpreted and lived everywhere and individually different) is a common insight of writings on
postmodernity. But there is less acknowledgment of
the continued influence of the ideas of convergence
and Americanization presented by modernization
theorists. As Frank Trentmann (2006) notes, historiographies of the consumer tend to focus on a single
birthplace and time of the consumer society and its
subsequent spread. Instead, he proposes, the history of consumption is better understood as circular
processes that vary across space and time cultivating
specific notions of consumption and consumerism
accompanied by contradictory interpretations and
moral debates. Though interconnections have a considerable effect on the commodities available throughout the world, it is far from being a fact that consumer
cultures converge over time on a global scale.

Modern Consumption and Social Theory
From a theoretical point of view, three ingredients
appear to be necessary to constitute a modern consumer culture. First, there is consumption, which is
usually understood as a process somewhere between
using and using up—certain activities and practices
that revolve around the biological reproduction of

Modernization Theory

human bodies; the usage of resources, things, and services; and the time spent in nonproductive activities
such as listening to music or watching TV. Second,
all of these activities are enacted by or related to
human beings who can thus be seen as consumers.
The concept of the consumer as a social category
is a remarkable invention of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, identifying a new criterion for social
stratification. Third, consumers are not mere users of
things but consumers of commodities. Commodities
can be anything, from tangible rocks and landscapes, houses, and cars to ideas and images. That
anything can become a commodity means it can be
recognized within the logic of the marketable. It has
to be something that can be exchanged, purchased,
or experienced through some form of payment.
Modernization, therefore, is often associated with
the capitalist restructuring of material cultures.
Arjun Appadurai suggests that capitalist societies
have more things in the commodity phase than noncapitalist societies. Through a critical consideration
of Marx’s distinction between commodities and
products, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, and
Pierre Bourdieu’s inversion of the dualistic notion
of small, traditional societies being characterized by
gifting and barter and modern, capitalist societies by
calculated (based on money) commodity exchange,
he advocates approaching commodities as things in
a certain situation, which is the commodity situation. Any “thing,” he argues, that is defined by its
exchangeability for some other thing, becomes a
commodity. There are three levels of analyses that
Appadurai derives from this insight. First, a biographical approach to things looks for the commodity phase and asks when, where, and how things
move in and out of the commodity state. Second,
within different symbolic and moral cultural frameworks, certain things are classified as exchangeable
whereas others are not. Therefore, not all things
have a commodity candidacy. Third, the commodity context is the variety of social arenas that help
link “candidacy” and “phase,” the link between the
social environment of the commodity and its temporal and symbolic state. Commodities are defined
as “things that, at a certain phase in their careers
and in a particular context, meet the requirements
of commodity candidacy” (1986, 16, emphasis in
original). Thus, commodification is the transformation of any “thing” into a commodity, may it be fresh
water by the local water company or fresh air by

985

CO2 certificates. Increasing levels of commodification became identified as a key element of Western
modernization.
Marx developed within the framework of longterm historical change the concept of the commodity
fetish in the mid-nineteenth century. He described
the changing social relations under the logic of
capitalism. According to Marx, at the center of this
process rests the increasingly abstract organization
of production creating a large impoverished class of
workers who produce commodities and subsequent
profits for the bourgeois elite. The logics of efficiency
and profit favor an increasing division of labor thus
alienating workers from the products of their work.
This paradox becomes most apparent when workers
have to buy the products of their own work without recognizing them as the outcome of their own
labor. The commodities produced are thus detached
from the processes of production and the underlying social relations, which are usually characterized
by the exploitation of workers. In other words,
the final commodity ready for purchase veils the
exploitive reality of production. This is what Marx
understands as the commodity fetish. In the wake
of Marx, scholars of consumption have repeatedly
analyzed the fetishization of commodities. Especially
the physical distance of producers and consumers
seem to help profit-seeking companies to obscure
the origins of a commodity and the work conditions
under which it is produced. This is interpreted as the
outcome of technological and organizational innovations shrinking the barriers of long distance for commodity exchange, thus detaching the production of
commodities from consumer markets. The analysis
of commodity chains has sought to produce knowledge about the hidden geographies of production.
Likewise, initiatives promoting ethical consumption
have focused on unveiling the commodity fetish by
revealing the processes of production and attempt to
reconnect producers and customers by establishing
new relations that are based on notions of justice and
fairness such as fair trade products. Similar efforts
can be observed in the invention of organic products
that can be understood as a critique of the modernization of agriculture, that is, large-scale farms, and
their reliance on chemical and biotechnological innovations. But fair trade and organic products have
been equally accused of deliberately constructing
the commodity fetish in commodifying “ethics” and
“tradition,” yet adding a new drive for the capitalist

986

Modernization Theory

endeavor to expand the logic of profitable market
relations.
The new insights of the inner workings of the
commodity fetish and consumer cultures became
incorporated into a new wave of modernization
theories that did not conceptualize postmodernity as
a new era but a continued intensification of modernization processes. This time, the main authors did not
focus on the postcolonial world but sought to theorize the ongoing transformation of Western societies.
Notably, Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens
(1990) produced new accounts of the modern conditions, their historical development, and the societal
implications. Beck elaborated on the term reflexive
modernization referring to the multiple problems
emerging from industrialization solved through scientific reasoning. In his influential book Risk Society,
he depicts how processes of modernization including
mass consumption give rise to social and environmental dangers that are equally tackled by another
round of innovations, which give modernization its
distinctive momentum.
Giddens views the processes of disembedding
and re-embedding at the core of modernization. In
premodern societies, he contends, most lives transpired on a small-scale level where people lived in
villages and small towns and knew each other and
their identity and belonging was to a considerable
degree embedded in the local environment they lived
in. However, with modernization, societies became
more mobile, and technological innovations allowed
for sociality beyond the local. People became therefore disembedded from their local lives but sought
at the same time to re-embed themselves in a global
context. To give an example, in premodern lives,
identity was tied to the village whereas in modern
times it is more likely that identity is derived from
globally available lifestyles and sociality is found
with peers from all over the world rather than with
those who live in the immediate neighborhood.
Both Giddens and Beck see individualization as a
major component and driving force of modernization since the 1950s. The term refers mainly to the
increasing freedom that individuals enjoy in Western
societies and the ways to lead a self-determined life.
But this entails on the other hand the increasing pressures on individuals to manage their lives on their
own. Social identities based on class would become
less and less important, and the ongoing evolving
flexibility of work cultures would render traditional

concepts such as the career virtually meaningless as
fast-changing contexts lead to fragmented lives and
careers (Sennett 1998).
In a similar vein, Zygmunt Bauman describes the
transition from the producer to the consumer society. Whereas the modern state of the late-nineteenth
and early twentieth century tried to introduce the
society as a stable and everlasting entity that offers
individuals immortality within these premises, this
relationship was turned upside down by consumerism. Society, in Bauman’s view, is no longer stable
and solid; it is fluid and rapidly changing. Therefore,
individualization is another term to describe the
only thing that reaches immortality, the individual
self. And this is identified by Bauman as the driving force behind consumer market capitalism. Every
individual has constantly to adapt to a changing
(consumer) society to remain oneself, develop, or
improve the self. This leaves the individual in constant uncertainty, and this contradiction has to be
resolved through shopping for things one considers
as a solution to anxieties that arise from uncertainty.
Giddens described how late modernity makes
individuals responsible for their actions on a fundamental level. Whereas traditional societies provide
social roles, individuals under modern conditions,
Giddens (1991) argues, have to create their own narratives of who to be, what to do, and how to act.
This includes practices of consumption, especially
purchasing behavior. Whereas in historical times the
consumer was the least responsible person along the
commodity chain, now consumers are considered
to be responsible for their purchase and therefore
responsible for the social relations of production.
Following this logic, their choice determines whether
workers in the postcolonial world have to suffer or
get a fair deal, whether chickens are allowed to roam
freely, or the rainforest is cut down. The notion of
the consumer-driven market puts the consumer in
charge. By the same token, consumers are bestowed
with the sole responsibility for themselves and the
well-being of everyone else, including the environment and future generations. This trend has also been
interpreted in a more Foucauldian vein, focusing on
processes labeled as neoliberalization. Here again, it
is the individual body that becomes identified as the
object of subordination through individualization.
Michel Foucault identifies in his work a major transition from the individual ruler ruling society to the
society ruling individuals. This happens in his view

Modernization Theory

through what he calls governmentality, the implementation of self-discipline as the most important
achievement. This form of self-governance produces
subjects (in both senses). From the perspective of
consumer culture, neoliberalization then denotes
essentially responsibility shouldered by consumers,
where consumers are blamed for social hardship and
environmental deterioration. Moreover, it becomes
everyone’s duty to stay healthy and to keep one’s
body in shape to minimize the costs of social solidarity such as health care. Individual consumers thus
become recast as rational managers of their own and
others’ fortunes, health, and bodies.

History of the Consumer Society as the
History of Modernization
Theoretical accounts of the transition from producer
to consumer society were criticized as representing
an undifferentiated history. The notion of the consumer society emerging somewhere between the latenineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century
has been constantly challenged by pushing back the
boundaries of modern consumption to the sixteenth
century and even further (McKendrick, Brewer, and
Plumb 1982). All research into the history of consumption suggests that there has not been a sharp
break or single shift from a more premodern society
to a consumer society. Instead, consumption cultures
transmogrified over the course of history in various
directions, sometimes displaying striking similarities
between distant places, sometimes major differences
within the same places. On a more material basis,
there has been an overall increase in the production of
commodities. But this would suggest a growing producer society rather than consumer society. Moreover,
growth in production and trade has not been a simple addition of items to the market that were not
available through purchase before. Rather, complex
patterns of technological change, fashions, and innovation led to the marginalizing of many products that
were regarded as essential before (Glennie 1995). In
addition, the thesis that consumers are using products now to create identity and to enhance individuality more than ever before is hard to maintain. The
histories of fashion, jewelry, or house decoration, for
example, show the important role of material culture
in constructing identity and singularity over the whole
course of human history. Moreover, the scarcity of
historical evidence on consumer cultures before the

987

1500s in terms of actual practices and usage should
not be interpreted as a lack of consumption cultures
in earlier historical periods.
That contemporary consumption seems to be
modern has to do with the discovery of consumption
as a topic for scrutiny by social scientists and historians especially since the 1970s (and that is where
the latest postmodern consumer revolution allegedly occurred). The notion of a modern consumer
society rests on the influential idea of modernization.
It seems to be impossible to conceive of the history
of goods and consumption in other terms than historical progress. This is one of the major legacies of
modernization theories. They have permeated the
social sciences in elevating everyday life binaries such
as old and new to the scientific concepts of tradition
and modernity.
Though there has been occasional criticism of
the singular and universal linearity of the history of
consumption, the notion that consumer practices
such as shopping and eating out, services such as dry
cleaning, package holidays, and commodification
comprising more and more things previously outside of capitalist market relations such as individual
bodies, education, and health care has changed the
social role of consumption and marks the transition
from producer and user societies to consumer societies (Mansvelt 2005, 37). There was arguably an
absolute increase in the production of things, but the
equation with an increase of commodities is flawed.
As noted above, Paul Glennie already suggested a
deeper look at how objects became commodities not
just at different places but at different times and when
they moved out of the commodity status. The commodification of public space through shopping centers, entertainment, and cafes, for instance, is often
used as the example par excellence to show how the
neoliberal postmodern city exerts control and surveillance through the organization of space around
commodity cultures. But similar attempts to control
the consuming public can be observed at different
times and in different places. For example, Evelyn
Welch provides us with a rich and detailed account
on consumption and shopping in Renaissance Italy
where the commodification of space was as much
practiced then as today, and the control of the public (citizens, strangers, women, servants, children,
etc.) was a constant concern for the authorities. Of
course, there are many differences between shopping
in Venice around 1500 to shopping in, say, Sheffield,

988

Modernization Theory

United Kingdom in 2009, but to draw a straight
line from early modern times with few commodities
available to a late modern age of hypercommodification is historically untenable.
Another, often overlooked example that Welch
illustrates is the commodification of heaven through
the trade in indulgence; these papers, issued by the
pope, became increasingly popular around 1500
and were a highly valued commodity throughout
Europe. Today, having digested Protestant ethics, this
strikes many as an odd and false practice. Similarly,
the commodifying of the body as an object of beautification and constant care (and repair) has a longstanding history (see, for example, the body cults in
ancient Greece and Rome). Moreover, in Europe and
America for most of their histories, the human body
was something that was commodified in a sense that
it could be bought. The abolition of slave trade is a
very recent phenomenon, and there are still many
regions in which slavery is common, to say nothing
of the worldwide human trafficking. But from a legal
perspective, the human being as purchasable item has
moved out of the commodity circuit in many parts of
the world. Thus, rather than drawing historical lines
from low commodity to high commodity societies,
the more adequate question is what was, at a given
time and place, considered a commodity; how did the
objects in question achieve a taken-for-granted commodity status; when, how, by whom did this status
become challenged; and if and how they did move out
of the commodity status. This would add a historical understanding to the already established spatial
understanding of commodification and production
of meaning along the commodity chain and should
be practiced alongside Trentmann’s (2004) suggestion
to explore historical framings of consumers and consumption rather than framing consumers historically.

Critique of Implicit Modernization
Theories in Consumption Studies
Notions of progress, modernization, and development have a long history preceding the era of modernization theory considerably. However, there
appears, at least from an American-European perspective, to be a tendency that is historically stable:
The tension between positive or optimistic and negative or pessimistic interpretation of these processes.
Whereas negative readings tend to depict an inevitable but not desirable future that can be somehow

already experienced in the present and is foreshadowed by the past, usually ending either with bleak
resignation or the hope for some magic reversal
of the depicted trend, positive readings treat progress as a historical fact but fear nevertheless for its
future well-being and call for continued efforts and
strengthening of progress (Horowitz 2004).
This intriguing phenomenon is not confined to the
contradictions of modernity. A brilliant example of a
pessimistic reading of culture is Tacitus’s treatise on
the Germania, written around AD 100, intended to
show his Roman compatriots a simpler, more modest, more authentic, and more desirable lifestyle than
the perceived decadence of Rome. Commentators of
modernity at the verge of the nineteenth century, such
as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, or
Thorstein Veblen, displayed a similar pessimistic attitude toward their own societies and allowed themselves a good deal of nostalgia.
In turn, much of the appeal of the original
Marxian theory in the nineteenth century, as well as
the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s
(if decisively different), is its unbroken optimism.
Contemporary problems and injustice are viewed as
phenomena of transition that will for sure be overcome in a better future that is inevitable. Tragically,
both theoretical backgrounds served as justification
for massive manslaughter. Often, ties between theoretical thinkers and political institutions were closer
than expected. For instance, the modernization theorist Walt Rostow was not only one of the most prominent head figures of modernization theory but also
a highly influential advisor for the U.S. government
in the 1960s on foreign policy and was referred to
as the architect of the Vietnam War (Gilman 2003).
This was followed by disappointment and repudiation of modernization theory from within, by conservative as well as left critics. The 1990s, however,
saw a brief return of modernization theory with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and state communism
as an influential doctrine. Many theorists felt vindicated, and Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of
history. But this brief period of optimism withered
within a few years as the capitalist reorganization of
former communist countries produced harsh poverty
on a massive scale and the attacks of 9/11 showed
how little convergence and how much deep-rooted
antagonism and anger drives world politics. These
cyclical waves of pessimism and optimism are certainly overlapping, but they have interesting relations

Modernization Theory

to the ways in which consumption is interpreted
and related issues are treated. In the more pessimistic start of the twenty-first century, consumption
becomes increasingly recast in terms of ethics and
morality. Questions of how to either avoid or make
consumption good (e.g., by greening it) seem to gain
the upper hand in many discourses inside and outside
academia.
To engage in a thorough analysis of consumption, today and in the past, and even to think about
trends and actions to be taken in the future, therefore,
means not to ignore historicizing accounts of developing consumer cultures and its adherent pessimistic or
optimistic readings but to bring these elements back
into the analysis (Everts and Jackson 2009). Debates,
interpretations, and political actions surrounding
issues of consumption are better understood with
an eye on the diverse understandings of social and
cultural history that circulate among politicians,
scholars, economic agents, and others. To understand
consumption and specific consumption practices
(including the avoidance of consumption) in different
times and in different places requires therefore attending not only to the material conditions but also to
the changing and competing interpretations of consumption issues. In twentieth-century North America,
Australia, and Europe, for example, many of these
understandings revolved around modernization as a
taken-for-granted process. Different assessments of
this process produced futuristic enthusiasm on the
one extreme and nostalgic criticism on the other. In
pragmatist terms, of course, this applies to elaborate
ethical notions of the good life, notions that are freed
from biased views that either welcome increased commodity consumption uncritically or look for a specific
historical point where it all went wrong. From this
perspective, future research should focus on unraveling the paradox that from a global perspective still
most of humanity desperately needs more consumption (Miller 2001, 227–228) whereas less consumption seems to be the crucial imperative to secure the
resources needed for future consumption. This would
imply a critical engagement with the positive connoted ideology of growth in terms of production and
profits and the often negative connoted growth of
consumption itself.
Jonathan Everts
See also Capitalism; Commodification; Disorganized
Capitalism; Globalization; Individualization; Political

989

and Ethical Consumption; Postmodernism;
Protestant Ethic

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the
Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun
Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Consuming Life.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 1 (2001): 9–29.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
London: Sage, 1992.
Everts, Jonathan, and Peter Jackson. “Modernisation and
the Practices of Contemporary Food Shopping.”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
27 (2009): 917–935.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991.
Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization
Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Glennie, Paul. “Consumption within Historical Studies.”
In Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New
Studies, edited by D. Miller, 164–203. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Horowitz, Daniel. The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of
American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Jackson, Peter. “Local Consumption Cultures in a
Globalizing World.” Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 29 (2004): 165–178.
Jayne, Mark. Cities and Consumption. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and
Space. London: Sage, 1994.
Latham, Michael. Modernization as Ideology: American
Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy
Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000.
Mansvelt, Juliana. Geographies of Consumption. London:
Sage, 2005.
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The
Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization
of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982.
Miller, Daniel. “The Poverty of Morality.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 1 (2001): 225–243.

990

Money

Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The
Personal Consequences of Work in the New
Capitalism. New York: Norton, 1998.
Trentmann, Frank. “Beyond Consumerism: New
Historical Perspectives on Consumption.” Journal of
Contemporary History 39 (2004): 373–401.
Trentmann, Frank. “The Modern Genealogy of the
Consumer: Meanings, Identities and Political Synapses.”
In Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical
Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, edited by
J. Brewer and F. Trentmann, 19–70. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer
Cultures in Italy 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005.

MONEY
Marketing specialists Eric Arnould and Craig
Thompson have synthesized consumer culture theory
(CCT) across twenty years of research. In their overview, money is missing. They note that “‘consumer
culture’ . . . conceptualizes an interconnected system
of commercially produced images, texts, and objects
that groups use—through the construction of overlapping and even conflicting practices, identities,
and meanings” (2005, 869), but they do not identify
money as an object in the system of meaning making.
Money is much more than legal tender. It depends
on social interactions, shared understandings, and
trust to function and to be recognized as having the
qualities of money. Money does three things: (1) it
facilitates the transfer of the rights to goods and services (transfer facilitation); (2) it may be used in a
variety of social locations, across various interaction
partners, and for diverse sets of rights (generalized
use); and (3) it enables the storage of economic value
(storage capacity) (Zelizer 2001).

Money in History
Money has taken a number of different forms
throughout history, and these forms have been
matched to particular categories of practice. For
example, in Monomotapa at the Gulf of Guinea,
slave traders used the local currency (cotton cloth)
to pay for slaves and valued the price of a slave as a
large piece of cloth called “a piece of India,” denoting
its size. In time, the expression became synonymous
with a male slave between the age of fifteen and forty
(Braudel 1981, 442). In other words, the language

of money constituted the language of everyday life.
Other premodern currencies included copper bracelets (manillas), seashells (zimbos and cowries), coral,
dried fish, furs, and nails, to name but a few.
In the West, money itself reflected the social differentiations of class and status in society. Writing
about money in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, historian Fernand Braudel demonstrated how
different categories of people were matched to different categories of money:
Every metal played its part: gold, reserved for
princes, large merchants (even the Church); silver
for ordinary transactions; copper naturally for
the smallest. Copper was the “black” money of
people of small means and the poor. Mixed with
a little silver it blackened quickly and deserved its
name. (1981, 458)

This use of money as a means of communicating social identity was not new. In a study of how
money was used in Roman society between 200
BCE and CE 200, Michael Crawford recalls how a
person’s relationship with money affected his dignity and reputation. As a result, Tiberius intervened in the dispute between the moneylenders
and members of the upper classes to preserve their
social status and to maintain the social order.
Crawford writes:
In Rome, on the only known occasion on which
money was supplied at public demand, it was
supplied not for economic reasons, but, as we might
expect, in order to preserve social status. In A.D. 33
the moneylenders of Rome, accused of irregularities,
tried to turn the tables on their accusers and
attempted to call in all their debts. The debtors were
threatened with the necessity of selling off their land
on a rapidly falling market to the evident profit of the
usurers. But Tiberius intervened with an interest-free
loan of 100,000,000 sesterces to those whose dignitas
and fama were threatened. . . . On occasions of what
appear to have been general currency shortages in 63,
49 and 44 B.C. no comparable intervention took
place. (1970, 46)

Money functioned as a communicative instrument
of social status and as a social mechanism for stability. In this instance, the social status of a particular
category of individuals (not society’s economic
well-being) was threatened and therefore warranted
an intervention in the money market. Had a different category of individuals been threatened by the

Money

moneylenders, the informal rules about how money
should be used, against whom an economic threat
could be made, and from whom the rule’s enforcement would come may have differed.
Just as different categories of persons are matched
with different categories of money, so too are different categories of money matched with varying rules
of use. Crawford notes that some coins that held
more economic value were nonetheless less valuable
by virtue of the image on the coin. The Roman historian Arrian wrote that the coin bearing the image of
Nero held more economic value than the one bearing the image of Trajan; however, the Nero coin was
considered morally rotten but the Trajan one fine. In
other words, money was more than a means to an
end but was an end in itself, encompassing a set of
values judgments. Money carried images and meanings that ought not to be defiled. Indeed, Tiberius
considered it a capital offense for a coin bearing the
image of Augustus to be taken into a brothel or lavatory precisely because some types of money must be
protected from defilement or moral pollution (see
Crawford 1970, 47).
Political scientist Eric Helleiner describes the
moral and symbolic dimensions of money in his
analysis of the linkage between money and national
identity. Writing about France, Helleiner notes
the growing use of national currency among the
rural poor of France . . . as one part of a broader
transformation that transformed “peasants into
Frenchmen” in the late 19th century. In his words,
the new standardized national currency became “a
universal language that all understood and all now
wanted to speak.” (1998, 1415)

In other words, the currency served as a great
leveler, dulling rural-urban distinctions and making more salient the money individuals used as an
indication of the nation to which each belonged.
The sense of belonging to a nation is accomplished through ritual acts, and money serves as
a language and an instrument for such rituals.
Currencies carry nationalist symbols and narratives
about the country’s traditions and affect how people
within society communicate with one another and
with outsiders. Indeed, the intermingling of currencies requires individuals to engage in translations
that mark differences between themselves and those
who use other currencies. The experience one has by
virtue of the currency one holds (particularly in an
economic crisis that affects one’s own country but

991

not nearby countries) means that those holding an
affected currency will sense that they have a shared
sense of fate and will begin to see themselves as
belonging to a national community.
Helleiner notes that currencies are used in religious-like interactions as people place their trust (an
act of faith) and declare their devotion to a particular
currency form. Helleiner discusses Adam Muller, a
conservative Prussian writing in the early nineteenth
century, who argued that the role of the state was to
foster a sense of national pride and identity and that
national currency was a key tool for achieving this.
However, Helleiner (1998, 1427) makes it clear that
“this bond was not in terms of the issues of imagery,
communication, the community of fate, or sovereignty. . . . Rather, it was at a more emotional level.”
Helleiner uses an 1863 letter from S. M. Clark,
the chief clerk of the U.S. Treasury, addressed to
Secretary Salmon Chase, to illustrate how the producers of currency intend to disseminate nationalist
images through the circulation of money in the marketplace. The letter reads as follows:
[The money] would tend to teach the masses the
prominent periods in our nation’s history. The
laboring man who should receive every Saturday
night, a copy of “Surrender of Burgoyne” for his
weekly wages, would soon inquire who General
Burgoyne was, and to whom he surrendered. This
curiosity would be aroused and he would learn the
facts from a fellow laborer or from his employer.
The same would be true of other National pictures,
and in time many would be taught leading incidents
in our country’s history, so that they would soon be
familiar to those who would never read them in
books, teaching them history and imbuing them
with a National feeling. (Helleiner 1998, 1412)

In other words, because money is widely circulated voluntarily by people who happen to use the
market for procuring their needs, the state does
not have to force a sense of national feeling. The
national culture would cohere by virtue of consumption and economic exchange. As individuals
engage in their routines and move through their
daily rounds, they encounter monies and the
images carried thereon. In this way, it is easy to
understand why Braudel referred to money as one
of the elementary “structures of everyday life”
(Helleiner 1998, 1413).
Money is such an elementary form of everyday life that it is often taken for granted, and in its

992

Money

taken-for-grantedness, it is able to constitute meaning
structures that influence the course of social action.
Sociologists Bruce Carruthers and Sarah Babb use
the historical case of money after the Civil War
in the United States to demonstrate the extent to
which the implicit expectations people have about
money and its uses gets challenged when the medium
of exchange itself becomes ambiguous and unsettled.
The expenses of the Civil War were so great that the
national government had to abandon the gold standard for fiat money. A variety of monies presented
themselves: “national bank notes, state bank notes,
greenbacks, currency convertible into specie, and specie coin” (1996, 1557). Two camps—the bullionists
(advocates of “hard money”) and the greenbackers
(advocates of “soft money”)—emerged to contest the
form that money should take in the United States. For
the former, money had an intrinsic value, and its holders were honest Christians (not pagan shape-shifters).
For the latter, money was a democratic creation subject to democratic control. Both sides argued that the
type of money the state issued spoke to the underlying
character and identity of the nation.
The link between culture and money can be seen
clearly during crises when new currencies are created.
In Argentina in 2001 about $400 million in goods
and services was traded using “scrips” rather than
the country’s official currency. These alternative currencies were put into circulation by local clubs, but
other types of currency were produced and put into
circulation by provincial governments. For example,
the patacon was a new currency issued in Argentina
in response to the debt crisis and the sharp devaluation of the peso:
Some businesses here, like McDonald’s, have
cautiously embraced the new currency. On Wednesday,
the chain put up signs announcing “I believe in my
country: I accept patacones” at its restaurants here
and began offering a special “Patacombo,” consisting
of two cheeseburgers, medium fries and soft drink, for
five patacones—but only if the customer has exact
change. (Rohter 2001)

From Money to Monies
Viviana Zelizer reminds us that the same material
currency becomes socially differentiated into such
categories as the wage, honorarium, salary, allowance, gift, ransom, bonus, tip, and premium (each
of these categories represents a different form of

money). The money itself may be understood to be
“pin money” (money made by women) by virtue
of the gender and class position of who earned it,
who will use it, and how it will be spent. In the late
1800s and early 1900s, a woman’s allowance was
subject to cultural codes that meant that it was inappropriate for an upper-class woman to walk around
with large amounts of money (her allowance), but
it was considered appropriate for her to have a high
limit on her charge accounts at the department store.
Husbands felt that to give their wives too large an
allowance would relegate her to the status of servant.
Her category as wife had to match with the appropriate medium of exchange to communicate the right
messages and to do what felt right (1989). Likewise,
pin money was considered appropriate for routine
household expenditures (groceries, cleaning supplies)
but not for household investments (home improvement projects or large appliances). Similar findings
hold for contemporary families receiving remittances
from a family member working abroad.
To understand the creation of these different distinctions, what Zelizer calls different types of money,
one has to ask five questions: what are the different
categories of use (uses), who are the people using the
monies (users), how are monies being distributed
among budgeting categories (allocation system), who
is making the decisions about how monies are being
used (control), and from where does a household’s
monies come (sources)? The sources include salary,
lotteries, honoraria, scholarships, and gifts from people who have a particular type of relationship with
the recipient.
The creation of these monies affects and is affected
by what Zelizer calls “circuits of commerce.” A
circuit is a “bounded set of relations among social
sites,” and these sites may be individuals, households, organizations, or other entities. A commercial
circuit has (1) “a well-defined boundary with some
control over transactions crossing the boundary”;
(2) “a distinctive set of transfers of goods, services,
or claims” being made within the social ties of the
interaction partners; (3) a set of distinctive media of
exchange (legal tender being one of several media
types) that are employed to effect a transfer; and (4)
ties between interaction partners that have “some
shared meaning” (2001, 123).
Circuits of commerce bear a strong family resemblance to what marketing specialists Albert Muniz
and Thomas O’Guinn call brand communities,

Money

except that circuits function as an umbrella concept
for other phenomena besides brand communities.
The primary difference is that the concept of brand
community does not posit monies as important for
the maintenance of identity boundaries beyond offering an individual the ability to pay for a particular
set of goods or services. In Zelizer’s account, monies themselves can serve as a marker of community,
for example, airline miles; credit cards bearing the
flag of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) community and other affinity groups; casino
tokens; and food stamps. Another example is the
proliferation of local currencies, such as the Local
Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), nongovernment
issued currencies restricted to a particular community of exchange. In some cases, legal tender is mixed
with these local currencies to purchase a wide array
of goods and services within a restricted circuit of
commerce. Entry into LETS does not depend on an
individual’s ascribed characteristics but rather on the
personal decision to identify with a particular community and to honor the covenant of that community (Lietaer 2001). In all of these examples, money
becomes recognizable through its function as bolstering social ties of some sort while erecting boundaries
against other types of social connection.
Ironically, an abundance of money, rather than its
lack, is often blamed for the inability of indigenous
people to lead culturally rich lives. In her study of the
Seminole Indian casino in Florida, Jessica Cattellino
demonstrates how money becomes differentiated as
“earned” versus “unearned” as outsiders evaluate
the effect of the casino’s profits on the moral character of Native Americans. Within the indigenous population, other distinctions are made based on how
the casino earnings are distributed to tribal members,
and the money itself is referred to as “per caps.” For
the Seminoles under study, their Green Corn Dance
serves as a template for the distribution of the casino’s profits, and it is those profits that enable some to
lead more culturally rich lives. Helene Johns Buster, a
Seminole Indian of the panther clan, recognizes that
the source of funds affects how those funds are spent:
I feel that [the money] is rightly due to us. It is kind
of like newfound money. You buy all of your play
things and all of the things you always wanted with
that. And then after you get all of that stuff you
realize, hey, there is still a life, I still have to live a life,
even with all of my toys I still have to go and make

993

a life for myself. Hopefully, we’re going to get, as a
tribe, into that place where we say, oh, okay, we
have all our toys now. Now I need to learn how to
invest this money. I need to think about my future.
We’re not at that point yet. (quoted in Cattellino
2008, 82)

Money is more than just a means to a cultural
end. The way that money is earmarked depends on
how much time a certain quantity of money has been
held by a particular category of people. Indeed, the
earned and unearned categories of money take on a
qualitatively different connotation when it is being
used by Native Americans rather than trust fund
babies or stockholders. These differences in how
people are categorized depend in part not only on
what they do with money but also on their social
position and the belief that they are acting rationally,
given their constraints (Wherry 2008).

Money in Theory
While Emile Durkheim had little to say about money,
his nephew Marcel Mauss offered a cultural approach
to money that took into account the interaction partners and other background conditions that make
money effective as a medium of exchange. In The Gift,
Mauss argued that an individual’s gift is vested with
her spirit, and this inalienable quality of the gift compels the recipient to reciprocate in kind. These objects
being exchanged are attractive not because of the
money value (price) but rather because the individuals
involved are moral agents responding to moral stimuli.
Objects used as money enabled these moral claims to
be affirmed by the givers and recipients of gifts. These
insights about the role of money in the exchange of
gifts as well as the implications of money for constituting the category of gift (rather than a repayment)
have been taken up in Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a
Theory of Practice. Bourdieu, however, focuses on the
timing of the exchange rather than on money per se.
Karl Marx described money as a common denominator, a “radical leveler” that “does away with all distinctions associated with traditional social relations”
(1974, 32). In Structures of Everyday Life (1981),
Braudel proffers a Marxist understanding of money
as detrimental to intimate social relationships; the
emergence of money brought “[s]harp variations in
prices of essential foodstuffs; incomprehensible relationships in which man no longer recognized either
himself, his customs or his ancient values” (436).

994

Money

Lamentably, labor became alienated from laborers
and the individual’s work became commodified,
just as the worker her- or himself became “a thing.”
Braudel inserted a description of old Breton peasants
written by Noël du Fail in 1548 to demonstrate the
changes money wrought in people’s daily lives:
Chickens and goslings are hardly allowed to come
to perfection before they are taken to sell [to the
town market of course] for money to be given either
to the lawyer or the doctor (people [formerly]
almost unknown), to the one in return for dealing
harshly with his neighbor, disinheriting him, having
him put in prison; to the other for curing him of a
fever, ordering him to be bled . . . for a clyster; all of
which our late Tiphaine La Bloye of fond memory
[a bone setter] cured, without so much mumbling,
fumbling and antidotes. (quoted in Braudel:
Structures, 1981, 436)

While Braudel’s intention was to demonstrate
how money eradicates the social, he instead
described changing circuits of commerce in which
money was replacing other media of exchange.
What money did was change the temporality of
exchanges, reducing wait times, foreclosing cycles
of maturation, giving rise to new social conventions and social forms (cf. Giddens 1991).
In The Philosophy of Money (2004), Georg
Simmel notes that money is free to move across
social sites without regard for social class, caste, or
tribe. According to Helleiner, both Marx and Simmel
“implied that, through its ability to reduce everything
in the nation to a common ‘language,’ a national
currency enabled citizens not just to communicate
economically but also to think in a similar way and
to situate themselves in a common fashion within the
national community” (Helleiner 1998, 1417–1418).
Talcott Parsons posits that money is indeed a
language, a communication system, and that the
economy is a means for society to adapt to its environment. Adaptation (A), indeed, is one of the four
prerequisites for a society to function. The other
prerequisites are the capacity to set goals (G), which
orient decision making; the ability to generate a
common language to facilitate the integration (I) of
society’s disparate parts; and the capacity to maintain the latent (L) patterns within a society. These
four prerequisites fit into Parsons’s AGIL scheme as
a grand theory of the social system. While Parsons
imagined that families and schools would function as

mediating institutions for maintaining latent patterns
in society, other scholars have looked to consumer
culture to fulfill this function.

The Future of Money and Consumer Culture
How might sociological studies of money be incorporated into consumer culture theory’s four strands
of research, identified by Arnould and Thompson
(2005) as (1) consumer identity projects, (2) market
cultures, (3) sociohistoric patterning of consumption,
and (4) mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and
consumers’ interpretive strategies (871)?

Consumer Identity Projects
While consumers work with materials produced
by marketers to constitute a sense of self, they also
come to characterize themselves by virtue of how
they use money in the marketplace. One can move
closer to or farther away from the mainstream by
one’s willingness to engage in instrumental, methodical calculations about goods and services in terms
of money prices. To assimilate into the American
mainstream, for example, is to use money “like an
American.” To spite one’s critics in the mainstream
for deriding one’s membership in a subculture is to
use money defiantly. Money may be carried, flashed,
tucked away, or discretely contained. Consumers
engage in these strategies dramaturgically to make
a statement about who they are (the self) and where
they fit in the social system (e.g., Wherry 2008).
Paying more attention to what people actually do
with money publicly and how people talk about
money would deepen our understandings of consumer identity projects.

Marketplace Cultures
Marketplaces are spaces of ritual interaction.
Money represents the sacrifice that a buyer makes
for a particular gain. Sociologist Daniel Miller
describes such sacrifices in A Theory of Shopping
(1998) as religious-like, and in this ritual interaction, money and prices matter. Future research
might investigate the repertoires of market interactions and the timing of such repertoires as well
as the stock narratives that signal different types
of purchasing situations and that are matched to
different types of interaction partners. It is likely
that different informal rules and principles govern how money is handled and what prices are

Money

995

considered fair in a variety of marketplace situations. Sociologists Charles Smith and Olav Velthuis
have demonstrated how money and prices function
as dramaturgic props in the dramaturgic enactments that accomplish different market situations.
These informal rules and principles are more clearly
seen when money is taken fully into account.

money does indeed matter for the future of consumer
culture theory.

Sociohistoric Patterning

Further Readings

This line of research investigates how institutions
and social structure influence consumption patterns.
Institutions and social structure certainly have led to
a proliferation of “special monies,” but Zelizer finds
that the medium itself is bolstering, reconstituting, and
sometimes contesting consumption norms for particular categories of persons. Future research might ask
how (and if) these new forms of money, tokens, affinity credit cards, and the like are making some consumption constraints more resonant (buy from people
within one’s community, buy eco-friendly products,
etc.). What makes the medium resonate a particular
community, and how do different communities use
money to establish the community’s boundaries?

Arnould, Eric J., and Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer
Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research.”
Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2005): 868–882.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to 18th
Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
Carruthers, Bruce G., and Sarah Babb. “The Color of
Money and the Nature of Value: Greenbacks and Gold
in Postbellum America.” American Journal of Sociology
101 (1996): 1556–1591.
Cattellino, Jessica. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming
and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008.
Crawford, Michael. “Money and Exchange in the Roman
World.” Journal of Roman Studies 60 (1970): 40–48.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Helleiner, Eric. “National Currencies and National
Identities.” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (1998):
1409–1436.
Lietaer, Bernard A. The Future of Money: A New Way to
Create Wealth, Work and a Wiser World. London:
Century, 2001.
Marx, Karl. Capital. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1974.
Mauss, Marcel. 1950. The Gift: The Form and Reason for
Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2000.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Oxford: Polity Press,
1998.
Muniz, Albert M., Jr., and Thomas C. O’Guinn. “Brand
Community.” Journal of Consumer Research 27 (2001):
412–432.
Parsons, Talcott. The Social System. New York: Free Press,
1966. First published 1951.
Rohter, Larry. “Argentina’s Stopgap Cash Gets Some Funny
Looks.” New York Times, August 21, 2001.
Smith, Charles W. Auctions: The Social Construction of
Value. New York: Free Press, 1989.
Velthuis, Olav. “Symbolic Meanings of Prices: Constructing
the Value of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam and

Mass-Mediated Ideologies and
Interpretive Strategies
To what extent does money function explicitly or
implicitly in marketing messages about what a particular type of consumer should buy? How are different forms of money (e.g., frequent flyer points) used
to entice consumption? How is the manner in which
money changes hands constitutive of an ideology
about the marketplace and under what circumstances
do these exchange practices get called into question?
By asking about when the use of money becomes
ambiguous or unsettled, one can then see how money
and social identities are indeed socially constructed
and how the naturalized notion of money as a mere
instrument facilitating market exchange may be more
thoroughly debunked.
Finally, CCT research tends to avoid national
definitions of culture and focuses instead on the
multifarious cultural groups within a national territory. To what extent might these investigations of
national cultures inform the dynamics of identity formation in local communities? How loosely coupled
are national and community definitions of what the
different forms of money are and what the different
uses of money mean? These questions indicate that

Frederick F. Wherry
See also Belonging; Braudel, Fernand; Gifts and
Reciprocity; Identity; Moral Economy; National
Cultures; Shopping; Value: Exchange and Use Value

996

Moral Economy

New York Galleries.” Theory and Society 32 (2003):
181–215.
Wherry, Frederick F. “The Social Characterizations of Price:
The Fool, the Faithful, the Frivolous, and the Frugal.”
Sociological Theory 26 (2008): 363–379.
Zelizer, Viviana. “The Social Meaning of Money: ‘Special
Monies.’” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989):
342–377.
Zelizer, Viviana. “Circuits of Commerce.” In Self, Social
Structure, and Beliefs: Explorations in the Sociological
Thought of Neil Smelser, edited by Jeffrey Alexander,
Gary T. Marx, and Christine Williams, 122–144.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

MORAL ECONOMY
Although anthropologists and historians have often
reserved the term moral economy for pre- or noncapitalist societies, there is a strong case for applying it to all societies, for economic practices always
involve social relations that are structured by norms
regarding what people are allowed or required to do,
whether in terms of what they contribute or what
they receive. These historically specific norms are
constitutive of economic institutions and may sometimes be enshrined in law, as in the case of capitalist property rights. They may be contested, as those
of usury have been and still are in some societies,
though once they become established, they tend to
be regarded as natural in popular thought. Second,
actors’ moral sentiments and commitments influence
their economic behavior; thus, for example, Daniel
Miller (1998) shows that far from being merely
self-interested, shoppers’ behavior is often strongly
shaped by their moral commitment to their families.
Third, whether intended or not, individual economic
actions have moral consequences; for example,
changes in consumption patterns affect the welfare
of producers.
The term moral economy is also used to refer to
the study of such matters, be it largely descriptive
or normative. The classical political economy of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exemplified
this approach, but the cultural and moral content
was progressively removed with the rise of a separate
discipline of economics in the late-nineteenth century
and is only now being restored (e.g., Etzioni 1988;
Wolfe 1993). This attempted expulsion represents an
uncritical reflection of the disembedding of economic

processes from social regulation that has occurred
with the rise of capitalism (Polanyi 1944).
Concerns with moral economy can be traced back
to Aristotle: first, in his discussions of the production and consumption of use values as the proper
goal of economic activity and his critique of money
making as a vice based on the inversion of means
and ends and second, in his critique of pleonaxia,
or insatiable acquisitiveness. Adam Smith’s work on
moral sentiments and nascent capitalism exemplifies
a moral economic approach. Although the former
concern is most clearly set out in his Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the latter in his Wealth of Nations,
he clearly saw them as complementary and continued to work on both themes to the end of his life.
The former book analyzes and evaluates the moral
regulation of individual behavior in producing social
order; the latter examines the difference that the rise
of “commercial society” makes or ought to make to
this order. In normative terms, Smith saw both good
and bad in the new economy. Thus, with respect to
consumption, he disapprovingly notes the role of
vanity and the pursuit of envy in driving consumption, anticipating Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption, while simultaneously noting
that this has the benefit of encouraging economic
growth. Although he was clearly concerned about
economic inequalities, he also thought the poorest
had benefited from the rise of commercial society.
In the nineteenth century, this predisciplinary political and moral economy gave way to the discipline of
economics, and normative concerns about economic
life became the province of the discipline of political
philosophy. Subsequently, a small number of ethical
socialists, communitarians, and political philosophy
writers, concerned primarily with the politics of distribution, kept alive the interests of moral economy
as defined here. For Karl Polanyi, the most troubling
feature of the rise of the self-regulating market was
its threat to culture, though it was commodification
of labor power rather than consumption matters that
he seemed to have in mind.
The revival of Marxism in the 1960s and ’70s
challenged the constitutive norms of capitalism, but
not surprisingly, given Karl Marx’s troubled relationship to moral questions, tended not to articulate an
ethical critique. Feminist economists have, in effect,
developed such a critique, highlighting the gendering of economic practices both in terms of economic
rewards and contributions of labor. They have

Moral Geography

expanded the concerns of moral economy to include
the domestic sphere, showing, inter alia, how consumption requires work, particularly by women. The
decline of Marxist scholarship, with its prioritization
of production and its often negative and ascetic view
of consumption, coupled with the cultural turn, have
ushered in a turn to consumption (Miller 1995).
Possibly the reaction against earlier elitist critiques of
consumption has allowed a more favorable view of
popular consumption.
Another recent theme concerns ethical consumption. This follows the rise of popular concern about
the social and ecological provenance of what is consumed. Fair trade is the best-known expression of
the former, and concerns about the latter are evident
in relation to organic food and in broader issues of
sustainability and reduction of carbon emissions
in response to global warming (Sassatelli 2007;
Trentmann 2006). One might also expect studies of
what people consider to be reasonable levels of consumption and a return to the critique of pleonaxia.
Given the challenge to existing patterns and growth
of consumption posed by global warming and economic recession, one might expect interest in moral
economy to grow and to become more critical.
Andrew Sayer
See also Cultural Turn; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Inequalities; Philosophy;
Political and Ethical Consumption; Political Economy;
Self-Interest; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Booth, William James. “On the Idea of the Moral
Economy.” American Political Science Review 88
(1994): 653–667.
Etzioni, Amitai. The Moral Dimension. New York: Free
Press, 1988.
Miller, Daniel, ed. Acknowledging Consumption. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. New York: Basic
Books, 1944.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 2007.
Trentmann, Frank, ed. The Making of the Consumer.
London: Berg, 2006.
Wolfe, Alan. Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral
Obligation. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993.

997

MORAL GEOGRAPHY
Moral geography is the subdiscipline of geography
concerned with the relationship between morality and
space. A primary concern of moral geographers has
been the relationship between morality and distance,
often referred to as “the problem of distant strangers.”
Theories of care account for moral motivation, which
they find in the concrete relationships and experiences
of more-than-rational and thoroughly social persons.
Proceeding from this, however, some theories imply
that care favors situations of social and geographical
proximity, such as the intimate home life of mother
and child. Moral geographers have sought a route out
of this fix by exploring ways to extend care across
space. They have suggested that care might be institutionalized (after Tronto 1993). And they have promoted a relational ontology (after Robinson 1999),
through which people might recognize the diverse
relationships that make and support them, and the
great spatial extent of these relationships.
It is in the project of extending care across space
that moral geography meets consumer culture. Some
geographers have concerned themselves with the welfare of producers in global commodity chains (e.g.,
Harvey 1990). They have worried that such welfare is
obscured from the view of consumers by the fetish of
the commodity and the distance spanned by contemporary commodity chains. They have sought to make
consumers more aware of labor or environmental
conditions at the other end of these chains through
commodity chain analysis (e.g., Hughes and Reimer
2004). By providing consumers with geographical
knowledge, they have sought to influence consumer
behavior. The hope has been that, in turn, consumer
behavior—whether through boycotts or buycotts—
will influence the behavior of production managers.
This approach, however, rests on a conception of
consumers as autonomous and rational choosers.
But a number of studies in geography and related disciplines have found consumers to be unrecognizable
from this conception. Consumption practices tend to
be directed toward the needs, desires, and concerns
of others (Miller 1998). They tend to unfold against
a background of already existing, multiple, and contradictory obligations and expectations. In addition,
consumption practices tend to be habitual and routine at least as often as they are particularly conscious
and deliberative (Groncow and Warde 2001).

998

Moralities

Social movement organizations interested in
extending care across space through ethical consumption seem to share this more sophisticated understanding of consumption practices. They tend to approach
potential supporters not as egoistical consumers but
as members of social networks centered on sites and
institutions such as schools and churches (Clarke et
al. 2007). Rather than simply providing information
to people and exhorting them to act, these organizations tend to pursue change in consumer behavior
along two avenues. The first leads organizations
to provide people with narrative story lines that
acknowledge the complexities of modern life but connect them to themes of inequality and exploitation
(Littler 2005). The second avenue leads organizations to provide people with devices that make acting
differently practicable. Such devices include organic
vegetable boxes and fair trade products. Along this
avenue, social movement organizations can be found
lobbying the procurement officers of public authorities and the buyers of private retailers attempting to
ensure that all products available in their canteens
and shops are “ethical” in some way or another and
that consumer choice is removed from the equation
(Malpass et al. 2007). It is at this point that moral
geography and consumer culture begin to part company, as moral geographers turn their attention to the
relationship between campaigners, retailers, and regulators. This separation is not entirely clean, however,
since campaigns tend to feed off and work through
media attention, and in turn, media attention can be
secured in contemporary society through sales figures
of “ethical” products and the figure of the “ethical
consumer” (Clarke et al. 2006).
Nick Clarke
See also Consumer Behavior; Consumer Education;
Eco-Labeling; Fair Trade; Political and Ethical
Consumption; Responsible Consumption; Social
Movements; Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Clarke, Nick, Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass.
“Globalising the Consumer: Doing Politics in an Ethical
Register.” Political Geography 26 (2006): 231–249.
Clarke, Nick, Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass.
“The Political Rationalities of Fair Trade Consumption
in the United Kingdom.” Politics and Society 35, no. 4
(2007): 583–607.
Groncow, Jutta, and Alan Warde. Ordinary Consumption.
London: Routledge, 2001.

Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the
Geographical Imagination.” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 418–434.
Hughes, Alex, and Suzanne Reimer. Geographies of
Commodity Chains. London: Routledge, 2004.
Littler, Jo. “Beyond the Boycott: Anti-Consumerism,
Cultural Change, and the Limits of Reflexivity.”
Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (2005): 227–252.
Malpass, Alice, Paul Cloke, Clive Barnett, and Nick Clarke.
“Fairtrade Urbanism: the Politics of Place Beyond Place
in the Bristol Fair-Trade City Campaign.” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 3
(2007): 633–645.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity,
1998.
Robinson, Fiona. Globalising Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory
and International Relations. Oxford: Westview, 1999.
Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for
an Ethic of Care. London: Routledge, 1993.

MORALITIES
The term moralities refers to the notion that economic
processes and particularly actions in the marketplace
have social and cultural foundations that yield ethical and moral questions, without which economic
conduct and consumption cannot be properly understood. The following observations depict this problem from a sociological perspective.

Major Dimensions and the History of
Morality in Economic Thought
For large stretches of the twentieth century, the
notion that (social) morality, (cultural) values, or
(individual) emotions play a significant role in the
way we conduct business was a marginalized sentimentality. Neoclassical economic theory and its
derivatives, which dominated economic as well as
politico-economic discourse, imposed a strictly rationalist conception of economic action. Still, the roots
of this prevalent doctrine of the market are of relatively recent origin. Two rough strands of this development, which may themselves be called a conventional
and thus ultimately value-based conception of the
economy, can be identified: (1) the scientification and
labor-specific differentiation of modern society and its
academic investigation, in the wake of Max Weber
and other pioneers of economic and social thought
in the first part of the last century. Weber drives forward a radical notion of a materialist rationality that

Moralities

emphasizes the instrumentalist nature of a certain
modern-day, self-interest-promoting kind of cognition. Weber’s immense contributions to a then young
social science have had far-reaching ramifications for
both sociology and economics and can still be traced
today, down to the core concept of methodological
individualism, which remains a prominent foundation for many strands of social and economic theory.
(2) In conjunction with this development in the history of ideas, we can observe a shift of focus within
economics from the moral-philosophical, macroperspective treatise of founders such as Adam Smith
(who focuses in his Theory of Moral Sentiments on
social contexts in which the morality of actors plays
a dominant role among personal exchanges) toward
narrower, mathematical approaches that are oriented
toward the explication of economic “laws” such as the
notion of an equilibrium (Pareto-optimum). Economists’ interests in the markets might thus be said
to have been narrowed down to a mere “theory of
exchange” (Harrison C. White: Economics and
Sociology, 1990), which rests on a few presuppositional but typified assumptions and then moves on
to ever finer models. There is no debate that general equilibrium theory, the calculable actions of the
homo oeconomicus, or economic man, and other axiomatic figures of economic theory represent a “model
approach” to economic and thus social reality. Indeed,
rational choice models have been successfully applied
even outside economic questions, for example, in political science.
Although there have been several attempts to
introduce considerations of consumption (Thorstein
Veblen, John K. Galbraith, etc.) and to break with
political economy’s preference for matters of production (most famously John M. Keynes’s general
theory), the mainstream of economics went down the
road of an ever-narrower consideration of a specialized economics resting on its own premises, regardless
of the social foundations and cultural embeddedness
of economic action. Even sociological accounts were
preoccupied with matters of production (Marxism
paradigmatically so) and the analysis of the material structure of industrialism—both in capitalist
and socialist economies. Against such notions were
increasing attempts to break with these myopic tendencies, within the theory of economy as well as in
sociology (e.g., new economic sociology, new institutional economics). Another strand challenging the
existing theoretical orthodoxy for a more comprehensive account of modern day economy comprises

999

cultural approaches to consumption as an important contemporary means of social participation,
an approach that has been particularly successful in
English-language cultural studies (not least due to its
engrained departure from political economy).

History of Economic Morality
From the onset of Western civilization, economic
thought was deeply entangled with questions of
politics and ethics and determined by the relatively
narrow confines of the polis. In Aristotelian philosophy, which would greatly influence the subsequent career of economic theory well into the age
of Enlightenment, the economy was based on the
wealth of a few whose riches relied on the ownership
of land and those who had to work for their subsistence. The ultimate question of such philosophical
reasoning was the establishment and maintenance of
a natural order of things. Possession established the
status of the citizen, as only those who commanded
considerable wealth could put their mind to politics.
All goods served a certain utility; thus, any superfluous commodities encouraged trade, a development
potentially dangerous to the status quo. The ethic
of Aristotelian economy resides, then, in the uses to
which possessions are put and the economic conduct,
which must follow the rules of modesty and charity
to maintain the natural equilibrium of things; excessive trading or lending were thus considered wrong.
In medieval times, the economy was subject to a
Christian moral philosophy that firmly rests on its
predecessor of antiquity. A Christian had the right
to extrema necessitas to survive; on top of that, the
necessarium allows for a life according to one’s social
rank. Anything that exceeds the latter needs to be
given to those that lack the former—the root of what
we call charity (caritas).
It was only in the eighteenth century that the
economy acquired the status of a social field in its
own right. Adam Smith conceptualized a political
economy, which until then had been only a part of
larger philosophical questions about social coherence, as a central—and soon enough the central—
dimension of social organization. As Smith put it,
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love,
and never talk to them of our own necessities but of
their advantages. (The Wealth of Nations, 1776, ii)

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Moralities

Still, even this idea of the economy remains
closely bound to a moral philosophy and rooted in
a utilitarian ethic of collective welfare. Such a
notion was not only new with regard to its scope
(the nation), however, but also carried with it a
new moral foundation for doing business with others. Up to the Middle Ages, the economic surrounding was one’s own family. It
produced goods through common work and
consumed them in common. And they consumed
only what they had produced, for they had nothing
else to consume; and they only produced what they
wished to consume, because they had no use for the
surplus that went beyond that. (Max Weber: Stock
and Commodity Exchanges, 1894/see 2000 ed., 306)

Hence, self-interest as a motivation in exchange
relations is a new notion. It only becomes privileged
after the concept of the individual gains in social
significance over that of the community. With the
establishment of new markets of hitherto unknown
reach and with the new production regime of industrialization and all the sociostructural changes that
came with it, humanity enters into an immense
transformation that includes migration into the cities, wage labor, urbanization, the bourgeois ascent
to social status, and entrepreneurship.
Economics, as an occupation in its own right,
comes into being only within the larger context of
the modernization of society and thus with a rapid
enlargement of the scope of one’s economic actions
and new dependencies. New forms of social coherence bring about new forms of (organic) solidarity
(to use Emile Durkheim’s famous expression), which
become necessary once older forms of existence
subside. The Enlightenment philosophers celebrate
the new order and advance the conviction that markets redeem the people from their traditional social
chains and liberate them from both material (hunger,
malnutrition, poverty, and sickness) and immaterial
distress or suffering. The markets are seen as liberators and as the basis for liberty. Thus, the more the
economy managed to free itself from the logics of
and interferences from other social systems, the better it could bring about a new liberty and wealth.
Still, even in modern society, the functional differentiation of the economy does not mean that it
acquires complete autonomy from other social institutions. Rather, the economy remains embedded in
social lives as markets perpetually seek to renew their
affiliation with their social surroundings by striving

to include ever-new spheres of social life (expansion of the markets), inducing affluence in formerly
poor economies, introducing new social forms that
become adopted outside the economic realm, and,
not least, providing considerable resources to sustain
an advertising industry that perpetually feeds off and
contributes to a larger-than-life spectacle of everyday
life. Thus, the connection between the economy and
its environment is a live one and is arguably much
more malleable than often assumed.

The Noneconomic Foundations
of the Market
There is hardly a concept more in dispute and essentially contested than the notion of morality, or moral
conduct. The concept of the market is apparently a
neutral, explanatory economic concept that shuns
any appeal to moral argument. If one agrees to the
notion of the economy as constituting a central and,
at times predominant, branch of the social, then
strict demarcations and ideal typical models of economic action are of limited use. Against the notion
of economic action as a strictly rational and utilitymaximizing form of social action and the economy
as an autonomous and separate field within modern
society, the exposure of economic processes to the
concepts of culture and morality might yield some
interesting advancements. Still, a reductionist attitude
toward all matters economic indicates a reluctance to
adopt such perspectives, and there has been significant debate over social and sociological approaches
to explaining economic behavior and action.
Congruent with the notion of the new importance
of culture and the pervasiveness of sociocultural
changes in modern (consumer) societies in the past
couple of decades (which finds its academic equivalent in the cultural turn), a “culturalist” account of
contemporary markets may reveal processes and
phenomena that remain hidden from the traditional
economic view. Still, it might be just those traits that
best help us advance our knowledge of modern-day
economic conduct, and especially that of consumers.
In fact, the newly ascribed importance of the demand
side of market exchange is in itself a relatively new
component of an advanced approach to economics. If countless analyses of the capitalist mode of
production have shed a bright light on the supply
side, economics and social science in general have for
a long time been negligent in dealing with the discourses and practices of consumption.

Moralities

Until quite recently, morality was an explicit
ingredient of doing business with one’s own people
and with strangers (guided by religion and the dominant social structure). One reason for the widespread
invisibility of moral considerations for economic
action today—an elusiveness that might lead to the
point of virtual obliteration of the original motives—
seems to lie in the fact that cultural, moral, and subsequently political decisions are quickly absorbed
into markets. They will then appear to be of an economic nature and thus part of the economic system.
A broader approach that strives to take into account
the whole range of sociological expertise must
occupy itself with such presuppositions. The stability
of markets and the conduct of market actors have
non- or pre-economic roots. The moral, normative,
and ultimately judicial foundations that such conduct
relies on are not themselves to be explained economically. That such systems of belief and reliance, regulation and administration have evolved into the highly
complex structures of law, government, and economic
routine that make modern markets possible renders
them social phenomena and thus culturally receptive.
This insight leads to a heightened importance of
moral questions for market behavior, which is probably most visible in the increasingly important role of
consumer motivation and choice. That which seemed
a constant given within economic theory received
a lot of attention lately: the preferences of consumers, and with them, the meanings that are ascribed
to the plethora of consumer products. Still, the new
importance of brands, images, and products is more
than the sum total of individual decisions: state
regulations interfere not only with the production of
certain commodities but also with how, by whom,
and when they might be produced (labor laws,
protection of children and pregnant women, trade
regulations regarding the possibility of consuming
certain goods, e.g., beverages). Such laws also affect
specific production processes, the import of ingredients destined for production, or an entire range of
commodities intended for consumption. The origins
of, or the basis for, such market regulations would
be far removed from considerations that simply
ensure that the particular commodities and services
offered to consumers be the least expensive variety
in their category. The genesis of such rules is likely
linked in turn to various possible reasons intended
to legitimize such regulations in the first instance—
reasons that may have a multitude of social, cultural, or political origins. Economic processes of

1001

production and consumption permanently reproduce
such underlying features as much as they are based
on them. Generational and technical changes might
then reveal the cultural preconditions on which such
behavior rests, as for example, in the case of pirated
music or video or the ascent of the “open-source”
movement. As a result, moral reflections are incorporated into the economic conduct of many actors,
the commodities exchanged, and the rules governing
market conduct.

Current Trends: A Moralization of Markets
If we follow Durkheim’s notion that “each people has
its moral code which is determined by the conditions
in which it [is] living” (Emile Durkheim: The Division
of Labor in Society, 1883, 184), then our mode of
subsistence is always already entangled with all other
social conduct. Marginalized by the evolution of ever
finer and more insulated economic models, such
interdependencies have received relatively little attention in the academic world. The influence of morality (in the broadest sense) may be described on two
different levels: First, there is the general notion that
all human conduct and action, and thus economic
action, is fundamentally social. Questions of culture,
however, loathed by many for its elusive nature, can
only artificially be removed from any explanation of
human (business) interaction. Second, sociostructural
as well as sociocultural changes over the last hundred
or so years have done their share in shaping economic
conduct on all levels. This applies not only particularly to consumers and their role within consumer
markets but also—in varied form and consequence—
to government bodies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or multilateral organizations (e.g., the
European Union). The historical increase in wealth
of the people of the industrialized world over the
last hundred years, as well as the onset of what has
come to be called the knowledge society, and with
it the heightened knowledgeability of the people, are
at the root of a process that might be called a moralization of markets.
As consumers with increased spending capacities
become more knowledgeable and take part in an
increasingly global experience through old and new
media networks, their motives of consumption tend
to change (this is initially true for a small group that
wields a high degree of influence on public opinion).
At the same time, in the course of these changes,
goods and services themselves are affected by this

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Motivation Research

process, since intrinsic moral qualities are attributed
to them (e.g., renewable forms of energy, fair trade
products, ethical investments). Besides their economic value, the moral value of goods and services
increasingly comes to the fore. Also, the motives of
the social change become codetermining factors for
legal rules and procedures (e.g., minimum standards
or limits) in the production and consumption of
goods and services. The confrontation of values of
production with those—now increasingly decisive—
of consumption can then be seen as the mainspring of
a self-realizing and self-reinforcing process. Increased
global trade, globalized network communications,
and transnational advertising and public relations
campaigns provide for a potential global dissemination of this transformation process. A moralization
of markets, then, refers to comprehensive dynamics
of overall social change, initially driven by, but not
confined to, notions of consumer sovereignty.
The desires, the ideas, or the innovativeness of the
modern consumer becomes an important ingredient of the products and the services that reach the
marketplace. The market becomes a source of moral
legislation. In other words, morally coded markets
are populated not only by consumers and producers who explicitly desire to consider responsibilities
not of their immediate interest but also by producers, distributors, and consumers who are forced
by the logic of market realities to act responsibly.
Commodities and services contain decisions and
meanings that reflect the history of the products and
their market relations. Such an unavoidable, though
often concealed, coupling of cultural orientations to
products and services available in the marketplace, a
coupling that has come to be called culturalization,
emerges as an important feature of the production
and consumption process and as a significant attribute of goods and services. The producers of goods
and goods themselves not only become the transmission belts of cultural orientations but also emerge as
cultural agents or agencies, even originating cultural
meaning. It is not surprising to find that the moralities of economic conduct become inscribed in the
reputation of the producer or supplier of services and
commodities. Conceived in this manner, the value
base of the markets manifests itself behind the backs
of market participants, making them a decisive force
of economic development, albeit an unconscious one.
Marian Adolf and Nico Stehr

See also Consumer Sovereignty; Cultural Turn; Economic
Sociology; Lifestyle; Materialism and Postmaterialism;
Political and Ethical Consumption; Social and
Economic Development

Further Readings
Amitai, Etzioni. The Moral Dimension: Toward a New
Economics. New York: Free Press, 1988.
Granovetter, Mark S. “Economic Action and Social
Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American
Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481–510.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests:
Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Lane, Robert E. The Market Experience. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and
Politics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.
Stehr, Nico. Moral Markets: How Knowledge and
Affluence Change Consumers and Products. Boulder,
CO: Paradigm, 2008.
Stehr, Nico, Christoph Henning, and Bernd Weiler, eds.
The Moralization of the Markets. London: Transaction,
2006.
Swedberg, Richard. Economics and Sociology: On
Redefining Their Boundaries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
Swedberg, Richard. Principles of Economic Sociology.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

MORTGAGES
See Credit; Debt; Economics

MOTIVATION RESEARCH
The term motivation was introduced in the 1930s
by people in advertising who wanted to disclose the
motives behind people’s consumption choices. It
originally referred to a set of unconscious factors that
were thought to trigger people’s behaviors, similar to
the ring of a bell causing a dog to salivate in Pavlov’s
famous experiment. Thus, motivation research partially originated from the practical developments in
marketing techniques and also from the ideological
developments in the social sciences, which at the beginning of the twentieth century broke off with the model
of economic man as described by classical economists.
Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler in psychology, Georg

Motivation Research

Simmel, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber
in sociology had introduced the idea that people’s
behavior need not be rational and often cannot be.
The purpose of motivation research, especially
strong in the marketing field during the 1950s, was
to provide an understanding of the reasons that
move people to behave in one way or another. Ernest
Dichter and Louis Cheskin are known as the two key
proponents. Dichter declared that rationalism was
a kind of fetishism and that the desire to seem sensible to oneself and to others makes it difficult if not
impossible to have direct access to pertinent information regarding motivation. Cheskin discovered
that perceptions were influenced by factors formerly
thought to have little importance.
Influenced by psychoanalysis and the success
it had in being able to identify some of the deeplying motives behind human behaviors, motivation
researchers explored the possibilities of similarly
explaining and understanding why consumers exhibited the behaviors that they did, behaviors that were
often considered to be irrational. Such explanation
and understanding, motivation researchers believed,
would lead to better and more successful relations
with consumers. Organizations that understood
the deeper reasons behind why consumers felt and
thought as they did and acted as they did would be
able to further satisfy the needs or desires of their
consumers, know better what and how to communicate to and with their consumers, and, when necessary, be more effective in controlling or modifying the
behaviors of consumers. It seemed logical that as the
reasons for them were explained, behaviors would be
better understood, and better understanding would
mean better success in interacting with and responding to consumers and their behaviors.
Helped by the work of the sociopsychologist Kurt
Lewin, who analyzed and described the way obstacles operate in psychological behavior, Dichter and
Cheskin proposed that advertising techniques should
work on motivations by way of strengthening positive, deeper significations and minimizing any that
act as an obstacle. As Sidney Levy (1999), who was
one of the pioneers of motivation research in marketing, indicates, a number of scholars along with
Dichter and Cheskin, as well as a number of business
people, played a key role in the growth of motivation
research and in its applications to advertising and
other marketing efforts.
Given the reasoning that guided them, motivation researchers used techniques similar to those of

1003

psychoanalysts to get at deeper reasons underlying
consumers’ behaviors. Unlike a patient and his or
her analyst, however, the motivation researcher and
the consumer could not, practically, spend months
and years in analysis; but the reasons behind consumption behaviors were not, hopefully, as deeply
sub- or unconscious, hidden, and difficult to bring to
consciousness. Thus, motivation researchers thought
that methods such as in-depth interviews that lasted
around one or two hours and focus groups that lasted
somewhat longer and provided the opportunity for
consumers to resonate with each other could get to
sufficiently deep and informative reasons underlying
consumer feelings and actions. Further used were
“projective” techniques that also came out of psychoanalysis and that provided insights into reasons
otherwise not easily expressed by consumers.
These efforts and methods produced successful results, contributing to better business and
specifically marketing outcomes, one of the most
well-known examples being that of the California
prunes that had been forced out of the market by the
new laxative drugs. Motivation researchers pointed
out that consumers associated prunes with the elderly
and dullness and suggested colorful ads associating
the prunes with young kids cheerfully playing and
slogans like “Put wings on your feet!” and “Get that
top of the world feeling.”
Motivation research became popular and highly
applied in the 1950s, extending into the 1960s. Yet it
has not flourished as a field, or, as some might say, it
has disappeared. The reasons for this may have been
twofold: (1) the criticism of motivation research,
which was not forcefully and directly countered,
and (2) the perceived success of the other (prediction
focused) approach.
Criticisms of motivation research centered mostly
on the validity of the information coming from the
techniques used. Most critics blamed these techniques for producing ambiguous results at best.
Other critics were more interested in how this information was used and by whom. They were concerned that this research was performed to produce
information for businesses that used it to persuade
and manipulate consumers (Packard 1957).
These criticisms constituted one reason why motivation research lost ground. Levy (1999, 459) also
suggests other reasons such as the “burgeoning interest in the use of computers and cognitive processes.”
Cognitive processes were of special interest to the
prediction-focused researchers of consumer behavior.

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Motivation Research

In the business disciplines, this approach to consumer
behavior has been founded on the attitude-behavior
relationship models that came mostly out of the
sociopsychology field. Among these, the FishbeinAjzen models, often named the theory of reasoned
action, have been especially influential. Although
the measurement of attitudes is based in ordinal
scales, researchers in this tradition have assumed
the measures to be interval measures thus providing
quantitative, metric analyses, which allow for the
conventional validity and reliability measures. This
has helped this approach to make claims of being
more “scientific.” In a period, specifically the 1960s
and 1970s, when business disciplines were fighting
for acceptance into the scientific community and
at a time when the positivist philosophy of science
was dominant—despite Thomas Kuhn’s influential
essay on the temporality of scientific paradigms—the
quantitative and metric nature of the predictionfocused approach proved advantageous over the
qualitative nature of the explanation-focused, motivation-research approach.
Methods used by motivation researchers have not
disappeared, however, and experienced resurgence
from the 1990s onward. Businesses have, throughout this time, heavily used the focus group method.
In its resurgence among scholars, in-depth interviews
have been the method of preference. In the marketing
and consumer research disciplines, renewed interest
in qualitative techniques, inherited from motivation
research, originally received heavy criticism and resistance. Beyond issues of the validity and usefulness of
the techniques in representing the world, the debate
involved matters of philosophy of science and generally pitted the positivists in the field against the
interpretivists, some of whom were (critical) relativists. Having transcended these debates, qualitative
researchers have successfully contributed to the marketing and consumer research literature extensively,
and have found recognition among practitioners.
However, as different disciplines interested in
human motives developed and interacted, it became
clear that irrational and unconscious motives of
human behavior are plentiful and interrelated and
that research traditions themselves are always embedded in a cultural and historical context. Even though
motivation research had pointed out the limits of the
classical economic paradigm, it actually had failed to
identify and take into consideration its own fascination for the same physics of the seventeenth century
that had inspired classical economics. The idea of a

psychological force to be identified, of a tension to be
tamed, is now somewhat outdated in contemporary
psychology and sociopsychology. Today, the concept
of motivation is perceived to be insufficient to encompass all that it was intended to and to be somewhat
reductionist. What motivation researchers called a
motivation is now understood as a complex set of
associations of factors that are never static but reconstructed in time and always called into question, as the
different levels and factors at stake interact in relation
with new experiences and challenges. Today, researchers are less reluctant to try to dissociate human behavior as every process and factor at any level refers to
other processes and factors at other levels. They are
more respectful of the complexity of what formerly
was intended to be simplified by using the concept of
motivation. The concept of identity, which recognizes
the complexity of human behavior to a greater extent
and helps consumption research to be less decontextualized and atemporal, has gained more currency.
There are also attempts to increase the relevance of
consumer research by paying greater attention to the
social and the cultural and by expanding the audience
for this research to more than mere business interests.
The methods developed in motivation research are
still in use but now aim to provide a more complex
approach to motivational systems. A large number
of motivational factors are often identified and then
aggregated into typologies to differentiate between
different ways of relating to products and services.
Thus, they often underlie mappings and segmentation of consumers.
Dominique Bouchet and A. Fuat Fırat
See also Attitude Surveys; Attitude Theory; Consumer
Behavior; Consumer Interviews; Focus Groups;
Methods of Market Research; Psychology; Theory of
Planned Behavior

Further Readings
Dichter, Ernest. Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The
Psychology of the World of Objects. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1960.
Dichter, Ernest. The Strategy of Desire. Chicago: T. V.
Broadman, 1960.
Cheskin, Louis. Why People Buy. Motivation Research and
Its Successful Application. New York: Liveright, 1959.
Levy, Sidney J. “Motivation Research.” Community
Organization, 1958 Proceedings. 85th Annual Forum of
National Conference on Social Welfare. New York:
Columbia Press, 1958.

Multiculturalism
Levy, Sidney J. “Qualitative Research.” In Brands,
Consumers, Symbols, & Research, compiled by D. W.
Rook, 449–461. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999.
Lewin, Kurt. A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1935.
Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York:
Harper, 1970.
Murray, Henry A. Explorations in Personality. New York:
Oxford, 1938.
Nuttin, Joseph. Théorie de la motivation humaine. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1980.
Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: Pocket
Books, 1957.

MULTICULTURALISM
Multiculturalism is a political and social movement
that acknowledges and supports cultural diversity
within a society. The discourse of multiculturalism
has become central to public debates around education, immigration, national identity, and democracy.
Multiculturalism, as a social movement, has been promoted as a means for undoing social oppressions associated with race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Proponents of multiculturalism hail it as the respect
and celebration of the cultural diversity, and opponents
often malign it as an ideology that is relativist and
thus damaging to morals, truth, and national identity.
Empirically, it is a virtual social fact that in once predominantly white nations, daily life had become actually, if not always agreeably, multicultural by the 1990s
in the sense that peoples once marginalized have risen
to positions of power in state and corporate life.

Beginnings
Multiculturalism first became an issue in large
immigrant-based nations, most notably in Australia,
Canada, and the United States. Canada was the first
country to adopt an official “multicultural policy”
in 1971. The Canadian policy was a reflection of the
growing recognition of the bilingual and bicultural
(Franco and Anglo) nature of the country but was
also a response to growing immigration into all the
Canadian regions. Canada could no longer assume
that it had one distinct national culture. Australia
changed and dismantled its policy of white-only immigration following World War II and officially ended
it in 1973. The United States, known for the assimilationist ideal of the “melting pot,” had the notion

1005

challenged by the civil rights movement in the 1950s
and 1960s. Debates over multiculturalism have often
focused on education in the United States (see Bloom
1988). From these beginnings, the multiculturalism
debate spread quite quickly and prominently into primary and secondary education with the goal of reorganizing education for the benefit of students from
minority groups. Since then, multiculturalism has
been central in debates on culture, identity politics,
and cosmopolitanism that are apparent in all labordependent, globally economic nations in the world.
In particular, multiculturalism has been associated
and concurrent with the rise of globalization. Since,
as far back as the late 1960s, the emergent global
era has become one of unparalleled flows of people
and their cultures, both through physical migration
and immigration and the dissemination of information through the Internet and mobile communication
technologies. Information about and engagement
with other cultures seems to be increasing along an
irreversible line.

Culture
Culture, by traditional definition, is a local or regional
phenomenon, expressing a singularity that does not
sit easily with the prefix multi, which designates an
ideal. Cultures have always been in contact with one
another. In fact, it is hard to imagine any kind of
society or culture that is or has ever been completely
homogenous. Multiculturalism, some have argued, is
thus less a reaction to increased cultural and ethnic
diversity than a new form of political imaginary of
cultural identity. Seyla Benhabib argues that the various popular modes of characterizing multiculturalism, whether it is citizenship or cultural rights, taken
together “signal a new political imaginary that propels cultural identity issues in the broadest sense to
the forefront of political discourse” (2002, viii).
The strongest expression of multiculturalism is
the ethical version that underpins the ethics of recognition. Ethical recognition—or “strong,” multiculturalism (Taylor 1994)—has close affinities with
liberalism, tolerance, and moral relativism. Strong
multiculturalism thus entails the assertion that there
are no universal truths; instead, ethics are culturally
generated and based. Canadian philosopher Charles
Taylor is one of the most prominent figures in ethical
debates over multiculturalism. His position, which
has close affinities with liberalism, tolerance, and
moral relativism, is considered to be a strong version

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of multiculturalism arguing that the most important aspect of multiculturalism is the recognition
of diverse cultures. With deep regard for Hegelian
ideas, Taylor asserts that unrecognized cultures are
ones that feel empty and thus cannot supply the cultural vitality that helps to build community and a
sense of identity. The modern and global world is,
thus, one that calls attention to cultural differences
and the struggles to maintain those identities.
One of the difficult questions for ethical multiculturalism is how to resolve intolerance. What happens
when one culture does not recognize or tolerate the
other? Should tolerant cultures respect intolerant
ones? One example of this kind of conflict is the
Salman Rushdie Affair. The publication of Rushdie’s
1988 novel The Satanic Verses initially raised complaints with Muslim groups in the United Kingdom,
based on the argument that there were passages and
statements that were offensive. They argued that the
book was demeaning to their culture and through
protests attracted international attention. In 1989,
the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, issued a fatw against Rushdie, calling for
his execution. The conflict has come to be representative of the way in which liberal multiculturalism has
difficulty taking into account moral relativism. What
is the nature of free speech? Can there be tolerance of
illiberal cultures? Is tolerance itself a universal value?
How, in a theoretically multicultural society, are
unwanted practices to be condemned or eliminated?
Strong versions of multiculturalism break with
moral relativism on these questions and move to a
principle of recognition and respect. However, the
open question is whether this is still multiculturalism
per se. Indeed, perhaps multiculturalism might not
in fact be the correct word. One of the ironies of the
word multiculturalism is the suffix. If multiculturalism is taken to be a challenge to an existing system
that promotes monocultural, or cultural dominance,
by supporting culturally diverse and different groups,
then how is it that multiculturalism can maintain the
suffix –ism, which denotes a system of belief? Second,
how does multiculturalism square with tolerance? Is
it the promotion of difference or the enforcement of
“difference-blind” tolerance of cultures? Critics resist
these ideas, arguing that strong multiculturalisms
undermine a valuable majority culture.
Thus, multiculturalism might be better conceptualized as a statement about the reality of the world,
which has some advantages but one major limitation. Struggles for recognition are about membership

in a society. What are the credentials for citizenship,
and who has access to the resources of a society?
Charles Lemert argues that multiculturalism should
best be used as a “proper adjective in reference to
any world in which there is widespread dissension
with respect to membership rules, which is to say:
principles, values, policies—and, above all, proper
identity confessions” (2002, 93). Thus, multiculturalism—if we should call it that—arose in the wake of
world changes such as the disintegration of the colonial system, civil rights movements, migrations, and
displacements—all of which brought to challenged
nation-states the realities of unequal access to social
and economic goods and, accordingly, demands from
many different groups for an honest diversity politics
that includes fairness in the distribution of goods. In
this conception, multiculturalism is a struggle that
is culture based but of economic and material significance for the survival of peoples in global and
national peripheries. Recognition necessarily leads to
the question of access to resources.

Identity Politics
The visible expression of cultural identity and cultural belonging is expressed through many different
everyday social practices: art, religion, and other
symbolic modes of collective consumption. When
undertaken by the marginal sections of a society,
these are often unrecognized by the majority. Yet
material needs, such as voting power and authority,
food and shelter, health and public safety, and many
other social benefits, are frequently maldistributed
among the poor and marginal sections of modern
societies. Thus, when opponents of multiculturalism
claim it is a threat to national identity by minority
ethnic groups (or other groups in the same social
position), opponents often conveniently ignore that
these groups, especially new immigrant workers,
were welcomed (whether legally or illegally) to provide necessary contributions to the economic vitality
of the hosts countries and regions.
It is plainly impossible to limit the implications
of multiculturalism to questions of what might be
called cultural or symbolic consumption. In Black
Reconstruction (1934), W. E. B. DuBois put forth
the idea of the “racial wage” to account for the fact
that after the American Civil War, poor whites were
recruited to the side of the dominant class of whites
in the South on the basis of a symbolic wage. They
were paid poorly (often as poorly as freed blacks), but

Multiculturalism

at least, the claim was, they were paid in the symbolic
good of being white. There are many examples of ways
in which the symbolic consumption even of a nonmajority ethnic identity offers social and even economic
benefits within the ethnic group. Recent immigrant
populations over the years have usually clustered in
ethnic enclaves where they had access to their customary languages, foods, values, and other social practices.
And the consumption of these symbolic benefits led to
economic benefits, such as work with ethnic merchants,
access to entry-level work positions in the dominant
society, and even an early form of intragroup microfinancing. In many instances, the economic factor, over
time, led to social inclusion (or new social inclusion).
This has been the case with many sectors of the Jewish
and Irish populations in the United States. In other
cases, ethnic groups were welcomed at higher levels in
the host economy with relatively little restriction due to
their symbolic identities—among them, south and east
Asians and many Middle Eastern groups who brought
technological expertise, high levels of education, or
family wealth due to petroleum and other resources in
their native lands.
Still, given the complexity of the multicultural
experience, it would seem nearly impossible to
empirically track the effect of ethnic consumption for
a particular identity, let alone for the broader questions of tolerance or recognition. Also, in most cases
(with the possible exception of some east and south
Asians), there remains evidence that even economic
progress in the host country—that is, the ability to
consume material goods as well as ethnic identities—
does little to redress the deeper structural issues of
cultural equality.
Even when the discussion of multiculturalism is
restricted to issues of consumption of symbolic or identity goods, it is evident the phenomenon plays a key
role in national societies. At the level of (multi)cultural
identity, consumption plays a key role in social and
state formation the world over. Where there is migration, there is symbolic identity clustering, and where
ethnic in-groups seek their own foods and practices,
they also seek income, which leads to the creation of
new consumption patterns in the host country. Few
dispute that global multiculturalism stands behind
multicultural practices in a host nation and that it is
much more than migration as such that causes fundamental changes in the host nation. The same local
people who may complain (usually inaccurately) that
immigrant groups are somehow illegitimately benefiting from education and health resources in the host

1007

country may consume “ethnic” food and other goods
and services provided by immigrants. Even if multiculturalism makes cultural homogeneity virtually impossible, the ideal of a singular national cultural remains
surprisingly vibrant. In the long run of history, the
maintenance of a “pure” national identity is at best an
ideal and in reality barely more than that.

Cosmopolitanism
By early in the 2000s (perhaps especially because of
the shock of the violent attacks of 9/11 in the United
States and similar events in England, Spain, Mumbai,
and around the world) multiculturalism itself has been
called into question. The question arises not because
of the arguments about the good (or evil) of recognizing cultural differences but from the evidence that,
whatever one thinks of these “different” people, they
are “here” to stay and cannot easily be removed from
the host countries. Hence, the notorious instances of
acts of real or symbolic violence against immigrant
peoples, many of whom had become citizens of the
host country. One example is the debate in France over
whether Islamic school children must remove Islamic
garb while in school. Those who claim that Islamic
citizens should present themselves as assimilated to
French liberal traditions are met by those who claim
that ethnic groups that enriched their new countries
have a right to protect their traditional habits.
Today, in the second decade of the 2000s, the
question of multiculturalism is not limited to any
given national society. The term culture falls short of
the mark when talking about global phenomenon.
Cultures are vibrant when they are rooted in local
attitudes, beliefs, and practices where they can be
reinforced. But what happens when even large and
still relatively powerful global nations, such as the
United States, are unable to protect their own sense
of a common national identity? Politicians may refer
to such identities as “the American people,” and
many the world over seek to “consume” the status of
American citizenship. Yet the ideal of strong assimilation in the national identity is hard to square with
the fact that any given nation is caught in the pushes
and pulls of globalization. The idea that globalization
leads to global homogenizing of a global, or cosmopolitan, culture is a compelling but essentially weak
claim in the face of widespread instances of interethnic group violence and civil war—not to mention the
skyrocketing number of “migrants” who are fleeing
economic or civic misery in their homelands. Millions

1008

Multiculturalism

are homeless. Children die of malnutrition. Diseases
are epidemic. And even the once secure middle class
has economic concerns. The numbers are virtually
impossible to count. How exactly do we count the
number of young girls from the poor regions of the
world who are pressed into slavery in the sex trade?
How exactly do we measure the degree to which the
trade in illegal drugs has degraded local economies in
Afghanistan or Columbia?
Once globalization is factored into the equation,
multiculturalism as a name for a degree of cultural
consumption becomes something quite different
from what at first its proponents had in mind. Not
only is it not any longer a matter of the celebration of
diversity or the recognition of the value of a different
ethnic or social identity, but it is also a global struggle
for inclusion into viable economic marketplaces.
The consumption of an identity (whether of the host
country or whether by hosts of the new immigrants)
now also involves economic consumption. This is
true even if the consumption market is, say, the drug
trade centered in impoverished neighborhoods where
there are no other means of gainful employment.
There are still many who take seriously the
implied, if not expressed, point of multiculturalism.
They do because, notwithstanding its tardy arrival
on the scene of democratic ideas, the ideals of human
equalities and liberties are deeply rooted in the values
of Enlightenment. Even when the realities of those
ideas are sharply diminished in democratic societies,
the values remain. Jürgen Habermas, for example,
argues that globalization means a limiting of political
cultures to protect democratic ideals. States can no
longer rely on a social consensus of values and must
seek foundations elsewhere such as in procedures.
Similarly Bhikhu Parekh points out that multiculturalism means cultural conflict at a local level but
that the resolutions are not possible when framed as
debates over intrinsic value. In the Rushdie affair, for
example, the first Muslim protestors demanded that
the book include a paragraph disclaimer designating
it a work of fiction. When that demand was refused,
the affair escalated. Parekh lays out the various, and
often minority, cultural practices concerned with consumption or lifestyle that are likely to disturb societies, including dress codes, education, dietary codes,
funeral rights, and the distinction between public
and private life. This is the other side of Habermas’s
coin—or, better put, conflicts over the practices on
which daily life moves along are themselves the

evidence for the need for political and legal solutions
of some kind. How legitimacy for these solutions can
be established in a global situation is far from clear.
That they are worthy of pursuit is beyond doubt.

Concluding Thoughts
Though the history of multiculturalism as an idea
is relatively brief, in the few decades since the ideal
appeared prominently in the 1960s, multiculturalism
has served to bring to the fore of public awareness the
deep structural nature of national and global social
orders. Though globalization may have sealed the
fate of multiculturalism as a consumption and expression of cultural values alone, it has also made the world
aware of the urgent need for an international system
that supports and encourages what common values
may be possible in the face of economic inequalities,
wars, and civil violence. Perhaps, in the end, the most
important contribution of multiculturalism has been
to bring the global family to the awareness that the
Enlightenment dream that the cultural freedom of
individuals will automatically lead to economic fairness was vastly insufficient to the realities.
Daniel Chaffee
See also Belonging; Collective Identity; Cosmopolitanism;
Diaspora; Ethnicity/Race; Globalization; Inequalities;
National Cultures

Further Readings
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.”
Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 617–639.
Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture: Equality and
Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Fish, Stanley. “Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are
Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech.” Critical
Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 378–395.
Gordon, Avery, and Christopher Newfield, eds. Mapping
Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Struggles for Recognition in the
Democratic Constitutional State.” In Multiculturalism:
Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy
Gutmann, 107–148. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994.
Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory
of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Multiple Correspondence Analysis
Lemert, Charles. Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of
Society. London: New York: Routledge, 2002.
Parekh, Bhikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural
Diversity and Political Theory. New York: Basingstoke,
2000.
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. The Disuniting of America:
Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Knoxville, TN:
Whittle Direct Books, 1991.
Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” In
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition,
edited by Amy Gutmann, 25–74. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994.

MULTIPLE CORRESPONDENCE
ANALYSIS
Correspondence analysis is a method for interpreting
tabular data visually in the form of spatial maps in
which the rows and columns of the table are depicted
as points. The basic form of the method visualizes
cross-tabulations found typically in the social sciences, for example, education groups cross-tabulated
Table 1

1009

with political party voted for or a table of counts of
the number of consumers that associate each of a set
of brands with a set of attributes. Multiple correspondence analysis generalizes this method to many
variables, typically questions in a survey, showing
how the response categories interrelate.
As a first example, we use data from Tawnya
Covert’s article “Consumption and Citizenship during World War II: Product Advertisements in Women’s
Magazines,” a study in the Journal of Consumer
Culture on consumption during the period of the
Second World War after Pearl Harbor, as observed
through a sample of advertisements aimed at
American women. From their wording, the advertisements could be categorized into three types of advertising appeal: unrestricted consumption ads, rationing
ads, deferred payment ads, and an additional fourth
category gathering other appeals. Table 1 reproduces
two tables from this article, stacked one on top of the
other: cross-tabulations of product type by appeal and
of year by appeal. Since there are no missing data,
the column totals of the two tables are identical. The
author interprets these data by calculating percentages

Cross-Tabulations of Product Type by Appeal and Year by Appeal; World War II Data
Unrestricted Consumption

Cosmetics
Personal hygiene
Household
Baby
Food
Small appliancess
Large appliances
Clothes
Cigarettes
Linens
Mattresses
Silverware
Home decor
Miscellaneous

Deferred Spending

Rationed Supplies

Other Appeals

Sum

219
254
173
65
439
1
1
99
45
13
14
0
45
42

0
1
9
0
11
11
55
4
0
9
5
32
24
45

0
14
15
2
82
2
9
17
0
18
3
2
4
5

1
4
4
1
8
1
7
1
0
2
0
0
3
26

220
273
201
68
540
15
72
121
45
42
22
34
76
118

Sum

1410

206

173

58

1847

1942
1943
1944
1945

126
549
549
186

7
59
112
28

4
65
87
17

3
18
25
12

140
691
773
243

Sum

1410

206

173

58

1847

Source: Covert 2003, 327, 330.

1010

Multiple Correspondence Analysis

3
0.0694 (10.6%)

Rationed
supplies

2

Linens

1

Food
0.5302 (80.8%)
0

Clothes

Small
appliances

Mattresses

1943
1944
Household
Personal_hygiene
Baby
1942 1945
Cigarettes
Cosmetics Unrestricted
consumption

Silverware

Large appliances
Deferred
spending

Home decor

Miscellaneous

–1

–2

Other_appeals
–3
–2

Figure 1

–1

0

1

2

3

Correspondence Analysis Map of the Cross-Tabulations in Table 1

Note: The map is determined by the first table, and the rows (years) of the second table are added as supplementary points.
Source: Based on data from Covert 2003, 327, 330.

in each row; for example, of the 540 advertisements
for food, 439 (81.3%) correspond to unrestricted
consumption, 11 (2.0%) to deferred spending, 82
(15.2%) to rationed supplies, and 8 (1.5%) to others. This type of table is perfect for the application of
correspondence analysis, a method for visualizing
count data.
Figure 1 is the correspondence analysis (CA) of
the first table (product type by appeal), with the
second table (years by appeal) also visualized as
so-called supplementary, or passive, points. The
basic properties of the method are explained
through the interpretation of this map, followed
by a description of the extension to multivariate

categorical data, called multiple correspondence
analysis (MCA).

Simple Correspondence Analysis
The simple form of correspondence analysis (CA)
applies primarily to cross-tabulations such as those
in Table 1. The method visualizes the information
in the table by depicting the rows and columns as
points in a spatial map (see Greenacre 2007). In the
same way that this table is interpreted numerically by
calculating proportions, or equivalently percentages,
relative to the row (product) totals, so CA visualizes
these sets of relative frequencies as points in a space

Multiple Correspondence Analysis

to facilitate comparison of the products. The reason why silverware and large and small appliances
are grouped together on the right side in Figure 1
is because their proportions across the appeal categories are similar. And the reason why personal
hygiene, baby, cosmetics, et cetera, on the left side,
are far from those on the right is because their proportions are quite different from those. In fact, the
horizontal axis in this map coincides with the largest
differences in the data set. The value 0.5302 on this
axis quantifies how much of the total interproduct
difference is “explained” by this axis, being 80.8%
of that total. The vertical axis is not as important as
the first, as shown by the value of 0.0694 (10.6%
of total), but together they explain 91.4% of the
interproduct differences. This percentage is analogous to the explained variance concept in multiple
regression—the two axes can be considered two new
variables, with values for the products equal to their
coordinates, and these two variables predict the proportions in the data with an accuracy of 91.4%, with
only 8.6% of the “variance” unexplained.
The presence of the column (appeal) categories
in the map completes the picture and enriches the
interpretation, because they clarify why the products group and separate as they do. The left-to-right
opposition of the products is due to the contrast of
unrestricted consumption on the left and deferred
spending on the right, while the more modest vertical opposition (linens versus miscellaneous) is due to
rationed supplies opposing other appeals.
Figure 1 is one of the ways the CA map can be
drawn, where each product is at a weighted average
position of the appeal categories, the weights being
the relative frequencies of the product. For example,
for product category food (see percentages given
above) the set of relative frequencies is [ 0.813 0.020
0.152 0.015 ], called the profile. If these four values
are assigned to the four respective appeal points, then
the weighted average position is exactly where the
point food is situated in the map, thus, closer to the
point unrestricted consumption. Each product finds
its position in terms of its profile values, explaining why silverware, et cetera, is so close to deferred
spending (almost 100% in this category) and why
personal hygiene, et cetera, is so close to unrestricted
consumption (almost 100% in this category). The
four appeal points are the positions in the map of
the extreme profiles where the count is concentrated
totally into one category. For example, the point for

1011

unrestricted consumption is the profile [ 1 0 0 0 ],
for deferred spending [ 0 1 0 0 ], and so on, and the
product point food, for example (see food profile
above), satisfies the weighted average formula:
0.813 [ 1 0 0 0 ]  0.020 [ 0 1 0 0 ]  0.152
[ 0 0 1 0 ]  0.015 [ 0 0 0 1 ]
This explains its position closer to unrestricted
spending.
The center of the map coincides with the average
product as well as the average for each of the appeal
categories. Thus, the product linen is situated between
unrestricted consumption and deferred spending—
but must be more than average on deferred spending (in fact, 9/42, or 21%, compared to the average
206/1847, or 11%)—and must also have the highest
percentage of rationed supplies (18/42, or 43%).
The map produced by CA is the optimal one for
representing the data in the first table (product by
appeal) in Table 1. The second table (year by appeal)
is based on the same data but shows the counts of the
different types of appeal in each of the four years of
the study. Each year has a profile; for example, 1942’s
profile is [ 0.900 0.050 0.029 0.021 ] while 1945’s is
[ 0.765 0.115 0.070 0.050 ], showing that deferred
spending was higher in the last year. These points can
be added to the existing map as weighted averages in
exactly the same way, the only difference being that
they are not optimally represented. These are called
supplementary points. In Figure 1, the trend from
year to year can thus be observed, with 1942 starting close to unrestricted consumption, then 1943 and
1944 going to the right and upward, toward deferred
spending and rationed supplies (14.5% and 11.3%
respectively in 1944, which are the highest across the
years, and the lowest percentage, 71.0%, on unrestricted consumption), and finally 1945’s position
tending toward the other appeals (5.0%, the highest
over the years).
CA is a graphical technique, aimed primarily at
count data, which visualizes the relative frequencies across the rows of a cross-tabulation. Each
set of relative frequencies, called a profile, is represented as a point at the weighted average of a set
of extreme points representing the columns. The
map is optimal in the sense that the profile values
are displayed as accurately as possible in the twodimensional map. The method can be applied
to the row or column profiles; that is, the original
table can be transposed so that column profiles

1012

Multiple Correspondence Analysis

are displayed relative to points representing the
rows. Figure 1 is just one of the possible graphical
options in CA, and the recommended literature
should be consulted to see the other options.

Multiple Correspondence Analysis
The simple form of CA described above is applicable
to a cross-tabulation, usually with two different types
of variables on the rows and columns, as in Table 1.
In multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), there
are several similar variables describing a particular
phenomenon of interest, and the method’s objective
is to visualize how all these variables interrelate. The
variables are usually questions concerning a particular theme in a social or consumer marketing survey
(see Greenacre and Blasius 2006).
The example that we have chosen is taken from
the survey on the environment undertaken by the
International Social Survey Program ([ISSP] 2000).
We chose the following four questions from the survey, which possibly capture an underlying attitude
among consumers on environmental issues:
A: Man-made chemicals can cause cancer:
1  definitely true . . . 4  definitely not true
B: Pesticides in food: 1  extremely dangerous . . .
5  not dangerous at all
C: Modifying genes of certain crops: 1  extremely
dangerous . . . 5  not dangerous at all
D: Sort glasses for recycling: 1 = always . . .
4  never

Each category of response for each question will
be a point in the MCA map. The presence of various forms of nonresponse are an important issue in
these types of data and can be included as an additional category (or categories) for each variable, but
to simplify the explanation of MCA, we consider
here only respondents with no missing values: a
total of 16,969 respondents from 25 countries.
There are 4  5  5  4  18 categories in the four
variables. The method aims to visualize the associations between these categories across the respondents: categories that co-occur much more frequently
than one would expect will be grouped together,
while those that have few respondents in common
will be placed far apart. In addition, a supplementary categorical variable such as the country of the
respondents can be added to the map afterward to

see if it has any connection with the configuration
of response category associations.
Figure 2 shows the MCA of these data, where the
category points and country points are depicted, the
latter as supplementary points. Consecutive categories of the four ordinal variables are connected and
show a typical arch pattern found in CA and MCA,
going from an attitude of seeing the environment
threatened on the upper left to the opposite attitude
on the upper right, with intermediate category points
generally at the bottom of the arch (see comment
below). In this map, category points are displayed
as averages across the respondents. In fact, there are
also 16,969 respondent points scattered on the map,
not displayed but arranged in an optimal way so that
respondents with similar responses are close together
and those with different responses far apart. In fact,
there are a maximum of 4  5  5  4  400 patterns of response, so the respondents pile up at each
of these 400 positions, and MCA can be thought of
as explaining the maximum variance of these respondent points in a low-dimensional map. Each category
point is thus situated at the average position of that
subset of respondents corresponding to the respective
category. Thus, C1—“thinking genetic modification
is extremely dangerous”—is the mean of all the people with this response, while B1 nearby corresponds
to the mean of people with the response “pesticides
in food is extremely dangerous.” The fact that these
two categories are nearby implies that there must
be more people giving these two responses than one
would expect from their respective proportions in the
data set. The glass recycling variable follows a completely different trajectory from the other variables,
with the “never” response D4 pulled back toward
the left, but this may be because some of the countries on the left did not recycle glass at the time of
the survey. Clearly variables A, B, and C are strongly
interrelated and not so much with D.
Any other category associated with the respondents can be depicted on the map, even though it has
not been used to compute the map. Thus, the country point RUS (Russia) is the mean of all Russians
in the survey, so being close to B1 and C1 means
that Russians must also be giving the same two
responses at a higher than expected level. A country
such as Israel (IL), lying inside the arch formed by
the category points, must have higher than average
percentages of respondents at both extremes of the
scale and fewer intermediate responses: this shows a

Multiple Correspondence Analysis

1013

0.7
0.0104 (16.7 %)
A: chemicals cause cancer
B: pesticides in food
C: genetic modification of crops
D: glass recycling

0.6

not dangerous
B5 at all

0.5

not dangerous
at all
IL

0.4

C5

0.3

B4
definitely
not true
A4

RUS

0.2

C1 B1

RP

MEX
A1

0.1

never
D4
BG
DK
CDN

0.0375 (60.0 %)

GB A3

0

–0.1

A

SLO
DW

DE

–0.2

–0.3
–0.5

Figure 2

D1

CZ

SF

D3 D2

NI

US

N

B3

C3

NL

IRL

CH A2
J B2
C2

P

C4

NZ

S

E

–0.4

–0.3

–0.2

–0.1

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

Multiple Correspondence Analysis of Consumer Attitudes to Environmental Issues, Showing Categories of
the Four Variables Analyzed (Only One Extreme Category of Each Variable Is Labeled)

Note: The country means of the respondents are shown as supplementary points, labeled by their international abbreviations.
Source: Based on data from International Social Survey Program: Environment (ISSP) 2000.

polarization of opinion in Israel. Remember that the
map is constructed to show the associations between
the four variables as accurately as possible, while
countries are displayed as supplementary points
after the map is established.
Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) analyzes
respondent-level data on several categorical variables
simultaneously in one spatial map. The categories
are the means of those respondents that give the
respective categories, and any additional categorical
variable that classifies the respondents into groups

can be displayed in the same way after the map is
constructed, to assist in the interpretation.
Both CA and MCA may be performed using the
CA package developed by Michael Greenacre and
Oleg Nenadi, using the free software language R
(www.R-project.org).
Michael Greenacre
See also Consumer Behavior; Methodologies for Studying
Consumer Culture; Methods of Market Research;
Multivariate Analysis

1014

Multisited Ethnography

Further Readings
Covert, Tawnya. “Consumption and Citizenship during
World War II: Product Advertisements in Women’s
Magazines.” Journal of Consumer Culture 3, no. 3
(2003): 315–342.
Greenacre, Michael. Correspondence Analysis in Practice.
2nd ed. London: Chapman & Hall Press, 2007.
Greenacre, Michael, and Blasius, Jörg, eds. Multiple
Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods.
London: Chapman & Hall Press, 2006.
Greenacre, Michael, and Oleg Nenadi.
“Correspondence Analysis in R, with Two- and
Three-Dimensional Graphics: The CA Package.”
Journal of Statistical Software 20, no. 3 (2007).
Available and downloadable from http://www
.jstatsoft.org/v20/i03/paper.
International Social Survey Program: Environment (ISSP).
Cologne, Germany: Central Archive of Empirical Social
Research, 2000.

MULTISITED ETHNOGRAPHY
Multisited ethnography is a methodological approach
first described by anthropologist George Marcus that
has become widely used and invoked in studies of geographically dispersed phenomena such as capital and
labor market flows, commodity chains, international
institutions, migration, and communications media.
Although the term multisited ethnography usually
refers to the practice of an ethnographer undertaking
research in, and between, several physical locations
as part of a single study, it is also sometimes used
to describe investigation of a single location that is
explicitly conceived of as part of a larger context that
exceeds the boundaries of the field site.
In his original writings on the subject, Marcus
portrayed multisited ethnography as an emergent
strand of anthropological research that challenged
the conventional ethnographic focus on a single field
site—and thus the theoretical and methodological
assumptions that underpinned such a focus—and was
well suited to understanding an increasingly interconnected world. Rather than intensively investigating a
single location, the multisited ethnographer is free to
track the movement of, or connections between, people, stories, objects, conflicts, and cultural meanings
across multiple sites and potentially across historical
periods. As such, multisited ethnography challenges
the often-implicit assumption that “communities”

or “cultures” are geographically bounded, internally
homogeneous, and can be studied in isolation.
Although Marcus described an anthropological
project, multisited ethnography has become popular
within broader studies of consumption, and elsewhere, because of its pertinence to the global flow
of goods, ideas, people, and relations. For example,
researchers might deploy a multisited methodology
in tracing a particular commodity from production
through consumption to disposal, the local development of global brands, the virtual and physical experiences of participants in online communities, the
expansion of global social movements, or the spread
of managerial techniques through transnational business networks. Proponents of multisited ethnography have argued that because such phenomena are
frequently uncoupled from a specific physical place,
they cannot be properly apprehended by investigation of a single site. Instead, such phenomena require
a method that can extend the ethnographers purview
into nonphysical places or that can follow the relationships, institutions, discourses, techniques, and
people that connect different places.
Despite its growing interdisciplinary popularity,
there are several criticisms of multisited ethnography as a method and as a description of a method.
In a prominent critique of multisited ethnography,
anthropologist Ghassan Hage has argued that
research across several geographical locations
has always been part of ethnographic practice.
Often cited in this regard is the work of Bronislaw
Malinowski, the early-twentieth-century pioneer of
intensive ethnographic fieldwork, whose tracking
of goods and traders in the Kula exchange system
spanned the Trobriand Island archipelago off the east
coast of Papua New Guinea. Similarly, some ethnographers of migration and of world religions claim to
have long been engaged in research that encompasses
multiple localities and that tackles the relationship
between local forms of practice and global systems.
Hage further argues that investigation of several
geographical places does not necessarily make an
ethnography multisited; rather, intensive study of,
for example, a transnational family, may better be
understood as undertaking fieldwork in a single geographically noncontiguous site.
A more commonly cited weakness of multisited
ethnography is its potential sacrifice of depth. That
is, by attempting to investigate multiple sites and thus
spending less time in any one place, researchers may

Multivariate Analysis

forgo the deep knowledge of research participants
and their local context that is often considered the
main strength of the ethnographic method. Although
it is possible to spend long periods immersed in
several field sites, such long-term research is often
constrained by time and financial considerations.
Consequently, Ulf Hannerz has suggested that some
multisited research relies on interviews as much as
it does on the more traditionally ethnographic but
time-intensive practice of participant observation.
Alternatively, investigation of one field site may take
precedence over the others thus calling into question
whether a study is truly multisited.
Another recent strand of critique points to the
tendency of some multisited ethnographers to assume
that there are cohesive and bounded transnational
“systems” that can be understood in their entirety if
one only investigates their constituent parts. Critics
such as Matei Candea argue that such assumptions
are, at best, naïve and perpetuate an implicit holism
that simply replaces bounded “cultures” with larger
transnational entities. Such criticisms do not necessarily reject the practice of multisited ethnography
altogether; rather, they suggest that ethnographers
should be aware of the partiality of both multisited
and single-sited ethnography and of the inevitable selfimposed limits drawn around any subject of ethnographic investigation.
Stewart Muir
See also Anthropology; Delocalization; Ethnography;
Ethnology/Folklore Studies; Methodologies for
Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings
Candea, Matei. “Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the
Bounded Field-site.” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 13, no. 1 (2007): 167–184.
Hage, Ghassan. “A Not So Multi-sited Ethnography of a
Not So Imagined Community.” Anthropological Theory
5, no. 4, (2005): 463–475.
Hannerz, Ulf. “Being There . . . and There . . . and There!
Reflections on Multi-site Ethnography.” Ethnography 4,
no. 2 (2003): 201–216.
Marcus, George E. “Contemporary Problems of
Ethnography in the Modern World System.” In Writing
Culture, edited by J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus,
165–193. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Marcus George E. “Ethnography in/of the World System:
The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual
Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117.

1015

MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS
Multivariate analysis is a set of statistical techniques
that analyze the characteristics of a population
observing the statistical dependence of multiple
variables simultaneously. Multivariate data analysis groups a large variety of different statistical techniques that are commonly used in applied social
sciences, having practical applications in economics,
psychology, marketing, and sociology as well in a
large variety of other disciplines. The common feature
of these techniques is the ability to analyze the population with respect to a variety of different attributes
simultaneously. Multivariate techniques differ essentially on the statistical assumptions on which they
are built, and they generally target different research
questions. The common feature is that they include
several variables simultaneously in the analysis of
the problem. Specific differences are presented in the
remaining of this entry.
There are several techniques for multivariate analysis (Figure 1). They are grouped into two main categories: dependence and interdependence techniques.
Dependence techniques explore the dependence
between one or more dependent variables and one
or more independent variables, that is, how the mean
of these variables relate to each others. This category
is further differentiated in terms of the number of
dependent and independent variables, as well as in
terms of the metric used in the dependent variable—
essentially if the variable is continuous (metric) or
discrete (binary or ordered). Examples are multiple
regression analysis, discriminant analysis, multivariate
analysis of variance (MANOVA), and conjoint analysis.
Interdependence techniques analyze the interrelation among variables but assuming no hierarchical
dependence among them. This category is further
differentiated in terms of the subject of the statistical analysis, which can refer to variables, cases (e.g.,
consumers), or objects in analysis, as well in the
metric of the variables. Examples of interdependence
techniques are factor (and principal components)
analysis, cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis.

Regression Analysis
Regression analysis is a multivariate technique
that aims at estimating the conditional mean of a

1016

Multivariate Analysis

Type of
relation

Dependence

Interdependence

Number of
dependent
variables

Structure
of the
relationship

More than one

One
Objects

Type of
relationship

Scale of
dependent
variable

Single

Scale of
attributes

Multiple
Continuous

Scale of
independent
variable

Scale of
dependent
variable

Discrete

Variables
Continuous

Conjoint
analysis

Regression
analysis

Cases
Continuous/discrete

Discrete

Discriminant
analysis

Factor analysis/
principal
component
analysis

Cluster
analysis

Multidimensional
scaling

Discrete

Correspondence
analysis

Continuous
Discrete

Structural
equation
modeling

Figure 1

MANOVA

Correlation
analysis

Classification of Multivariate Techniques

Source: Hair et al. 2006, 14–15.

population while measuring the impact of influencing covariates on the average. In regression analysis,
several independent variables are simultaneously
related to a dependent variable. The methodology, started in the early 1800s (Stigler 1981), was
later named regression by Francis Galton in an
anthropological study. On that occasion, the name
regression was used to describe the biological phenomenon of extremes regressing toward the mean
of the population: in Galton’s example, descendants
of tall ancestors tended to be shorter, while shorter
parents tended to have taller descendants, indicating an overall convergence toward the average of
the population.
The basic principle of regression analysis is
the estimate of a line that best fits a series of data.
Essentially, in the basic case where a variable Y has a
mean conditionally dependent on X, regression analysis enables the researcher to estimate the line that
describes Y as a function of X, identifying the relation
Y     ⴢ X   (Figure 2). In the equation, the
unknown parameters are estimated, where  indicates the mean of the population (the intercept), and
 indicates the increase in Y for each unit increase in
X (the coefficient of the slope). The residual of the

equation is , which is a stochastic component and
indicates the difference between the real value and the
estimated value. In the case of multivariate regression,
X corresponds to a matrix of at least two columns.
The “best” value of the unknown parameters is
estimated using the principles of least squared, which
corresponds to the principle that the best coefficients are those that have the lowest sum of squared
distance from the mean. To achieve a consistent
estimate, regression analysis is based on the GaussMarkov theorem, which provides the so-called
best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE). When one
or more of the assumptions of the Gauss-Markov
theorem do not hold, a BLUE estimator can still be
achieved using generalized least squared (GLS) methodologies for the treatment of heteroskedasticity and
autocorrelation.
Despite the historical importance of least squared
methods, modern regression analysis provides a
large variety of modeling and estimation techniques
that incorporate different features of data availability. In fact, current modeling options allow for
the treatment of truncated data and discrete and
binary data, which increases the scope of use of this
type of technique.

Multivariate Analysis

y

α
β

X

Figure 2

Graphical Representation of the Relation
between Y and X Using Regression Analysis

Correlation Analysis
Correlation analysis is an approach similar to
regression analysis, as the methodology estimates
the dependence between variables. Compared to a
regression, correlation analysis does not find a unidirectional relation between variables and does not
allow the estimate of the conditional dependence
between a dependent variable and multiple different
variables simultaneously. However, the influence of
a third variable can be removed calculating the partial correlation between two variables. More importantly, it is not possible to identify a dependent and
an independent variable in correlation analysis, since
there is no hierarchy between X and Y.
Analysis of correlation was developed in the nineteenth century by Gauss and Galton and later formally conceptualized by Karl Pearson (Rodgers and
Nicewander, 1988). Mathematically, the correlation
between the two variables X and Y is expressed by a
correlation coefficient ␳XY, which is calculated as
cov(X,
Y)
_______
␳XY  _________
, where  is the standard deviation,
√␴ 2X ␴ 2Y
[(X ␮X) (Y ␮Y)]
is the covarwhile cov(X, Y)  ____________________
n
iance between X and Y. The methodology expresses
only the amount of standardized covariance shared by
two variables and the direction of the influence (i.e.,
positive or negative). Using more than two variables, it
is possible to obtain a single correlation coefficient
between each pair of variables.

MANOVA
To explore the difference between populations, techniques such as MANOVA and discriminant analysis

1017

are helpful tools. MANOVA, or multivariate analysis of variance, is a multivariate extension of the
ANOVA, which applies to cases with multiple dependent variables. The methodology, known in the
1800s, was formalized by R. A. Fisher early in the
twentieth century. Instead of using multiple t-tests,
and losing statistical power, MANOVA (as the univariate ANOVA) estimates the significance of the
difference in the mean of different treatments simultaneously (Hair et al. 2006).
An ANOVA essentially decomposes the total sum
of squared residuals (SST)
of a variable x, which
__
is calculated as (x x)2  N ␴2, into two components: the sum of the square between treatment
groups (SSG), and the sum of squares within individual treatments (SSE), which is contained in the
residuals. Consequently, SST  SSG  SSE. In a case
where there are N observations in k treatments, SST
is characterized by (N 1) degrees of freedom, while
SSG and SSE have respectively (k 1) and [(N 1)
(k
1)]  (N
k) degrees of freedom. Fisher
observed that the ratio of SSG and SSE, adjusted by
the degrees of freedom, could be used to infer the statistical difference of the treatments. The test is strucSSG / _______
SSE  F, with null hypothesis
tured as ______
k 1 N k
H0 : ␮1  ␮2  …  ␮k. The F value obtained from
the test can be compared to tabulated values of
a Fisher distribution to infer whether X differs by
treatment or not.
The multivariate extension of the ANOVA, the
MANOVA, estimates the same using multiple dependent variables. The objective of MANOVA is to test
whether two or more dependent variables differ
within two or more groups of the population. The
methodology essentially compares whether two vectors of means are significantly different from each
other at any given point within the vector or not. For
instance, in a system of m dependent variables and
k treatments, the null hypothesis of the MANOVA is

(

H0 :

)(

)

␮11
␮12

␮1k

␮21
␮22

␮2k

   


…

␮m1
␮m2

␮mk

 

The test of the null hypothesis is essentially the
same of the ANOVA, where the mean is not a scalar
but a vector. In the multivariate case, the test requires
more complex statistical foundations based on
matrix algebra and can be done using specific statistics, such as Pillai’s trace, Hotelling-Lawley trace,
Wilks’s lambda, and Roy’s largest root, which differ

1018

Multivariate Analysis

in the mathematical approach used to estimate the
sampling distribution of the multivariate F test (Bray
and Maxwell, 1985).

ZA

ZB
ZCS

Discriminant Analysis
Discriminant analysis is a technique that aims at
identifying the differences between consumers (or
other units of analysis) belonging to different groups
(e.g., potential buyers vs. potential nonbuyers). The
objective of this approach is to assign unknown
individuals (subjects of the analysis) to one of the
multiple groups on the basis of their characteristics
(Lachenbruch and Goldstein, 1979). This technique
is particularly important in understanding what
characterizes group membership via the identification of those discriminating factors that statistically
differ in the different groups. A similar research
question can be tackled using regression analysis,
using specific binary dependent variable models
(Hair et al. 2006).
If there are k groups of consumers that are classified using a binary variable, the problem of a
noncontinuous dependent variable can be overcome
estimating the so-called Z scores for each observation using a linear discriminant equation. Once this is
done, discriminant analysis estimates a centroid (the
mean value of Z) for each group. If the population
is characterized by k groups, there will be a centroid
for each, identifiable as ZA, ZB, ..., Zk. The distance
of each pair of centroids is estimated using cutting
NZA  NZB
,
scores, which are calculated as ZCS  ___________
ZA  ZB
where N indicates the number of units within each
group. The shared probability between each couple
of means will determine whether the means are significantly similar or not: if the standardized probability curves overlap for less than 5% of the probability,
the centroids are considered significantly different
from each other. Consumers can then be allocated
depending on their individual Z score to each group,
as illustrated in Figure 3.

Conjoint Analysis
To understand how consumers make preferences,
the multivariate technique used is conjoint analysis.
Developed conceptually in the early 1960s in mathematical psychology (Green and Srinivasan 1978),
the approach is now commonly used in marketing
and consumer studies.

Person belongs
to group A

Figure 3

Person belongs
to group B

Z Scores and Allocation of Respondents to
Groups

The objective of the method is to understand
how individuals make trade-offs between attributes
when making their choice, and use the observed
behavior to forecast future choices. The economic
rationale of this technique is based on the concept
of utility, where consumers are expected to compare products based on their attributes. When comparing products with different levels of the same
attributes, consumers make trade-offs between
them and choose the option that will generate the
highest total utility.
Conjoint analysis considers goods and products
as a bundle of characteristics (called factors), which
appear at different levels (e.g., different quantity, price,
brand). To observe trade-offs, consumers are asked to
rank (order from the highest to the lowest preference)
and/or rate (e.g., giving a value from 1–10) different
products or different attributes. Consumers’ response
to this question represents a measure of consumer
utility, which would be higher for the product or characteristic that ranks higher. Statistical analysis then is
able to observe consumer preference for attributes by
standardizing the square deviation from the average
rank (or rating) of each attribute (Hair et al. 2006).
A disadvantage of conjoint analysis is that it
observes choice intentions or potential preferences
rather than actual choices, to the extent that rating or ranking does not effectively reveal a choice.
Consequently, no information on the choice probability is actually contained in the results of a conjoint analysis but only an ideal ranking structure,
and results are not perfectly reflective of utility.
Furthermore, consumers rank or rate using different
scales, which are individual and different to generalize

Multivariate Analysis

Characteristic A
Characteristic B

Factor
1

Characteristic C
Characteristic D

Factor
2

Characteristic E
Characteristic F
Characteristic G

Factor
3

Characteristic H

Figure 4

Visual Representation of a Factor Analysis

(Green and Srinivasan 1978). Nevertheless, the
approach is still commonly in use and widely applied.

Factor Analysis
Compared to the techniques analyzed so far, interdependence techniques play a role in grouping attributes,
individuals, or products and conceptually do not
describe the population but identify similarities. Factor
analysis (FA) is a technique used to reduce the amount
of information in the data. The main objective of this
methodology is to “condense” a large number of
observed variables in a data set into a smaller number
of latent constructs called factors (Figure 4), which are
estimated statistically observing the common variance
of the variables included in the analysis. Originally
introduced in psychometric analysis (Goldberger
1972), the methodology is now commonly used in
social sciences and other applied sciences that require
the analysis of large quantities of data.
Factor analysis models linear combinations of factors, which include a stochastic component, in the
form (see Lawley and Maxwell 1962)
k

xi 

∑l
r=1

ir

fr  ei

(i  1,2,…, p)

where xi are the p variates included in the analysis,
fr are factors (which have unit variance), and lir are
coefficients, called factor loadings. The term ei indicates the residuals, which are assumed independent
of each other in each equation. The number of factors, k, is generally specified by the operator.

1019

The meaning of each factor can be established by
observing the component matrix, which reports the
correlation between each factor and the original variable. Since the significance of the correlation cannot
be generally tested statistically, usually correlations
higher than 0.5/0.6 are retained, while assuming no
impact of the other variables.

Principal Component Analysis
Principal component analysis (PCA) is often considered a particular case of FA, although the methodologies differ substantially from a conceptual point of
view (Jolliffe 2002, 158). Compared to FA, PCA has
a variance-maximization objective: all xi are transformed into new variables yi , which retain the maximum amount of variance, but are now uncorrelated.
All the yi are then standardized into new variables zi
(Lawley and Maxwell 1962), which are correlated
with the original variate as
xi 

∑w
r=1

ir

zr

(i,r  1,2,…, p)

The coefficients wir indicate the weight of the
variate. The number of factors is identified through
the use of a unit cutoff point, called eigenvalue: all
factors capturing an amount of variance higher than
one are retained. The eigenvalue can be observed in
a scree plot, as in Figure 5, where the total number
of factors retained equals 4.
Compared to FA, which incorporates only shared
variance, PCA incorporates all the available variance
in the factors (Hair et al. 2006). The choice between
these methods depends on theoretical grounds: FA is
generally preferred when focusing on the latent construct of the original data; PCA is advisable when the
objective is the inclusion of most of the variance.

Cluster Analysis
Cluster analysis is an interdependence technique that
groups consumers in homogeneous sets. This technique, commonly used in market segmentation to
identify a cluster of consumers and their profile (Punj
and Stewart 1983), classifies individual units according
to a specific set of variables selected by the researcher.
The basic rationale of this methodology is to
group individuals by their location in the space. This
is measured not in terms of physical distance but
with regard to specific characteristics of the unit in
analysis. The variables included identify the location

1020

Multivariate Analysis

8
7

Eigenvalue

6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Component Number

Figure 5

Example of Scree Plot of the Variance Contained in Different Factors

A

B

C

AB

D

E

CD

CDE

ABCDE

heterogeneity (Figure 7). The number of final clusters is generally selected either by precise theoretical
expectations or using the stopping rule. This criterion
identifies the number of clusters by observing the
percentage changes in heterogeneity in the final part
of the agglomeration procedure. The final number of
clusters corresponds to the total number of observations minus the step presenting the highest percentage
change (excluding the initial steps) plus one (Hair et al.
2006, 610).

Multidimensional Scaling
Figure 6

Agglomeration Schedule of a Cluster
Analysis

of every unit (e.g., product or consumer) in the space
univocally. These observations are then progressively
grouped by proximity, locating clusters of consumers,
which are homogeneous with respect to the selected
parameters (Figure 6). In the simple case of two variables X and Y, the distance between two individuals
can be calculated using the Euclidean equation
_____________________
Dist  √(X1 X2)2  (Y1 Y2)2
although other measures of distance are available in
the literature (Hair et al. 2006).
The resulting clusters are characterized by a low
within-cluster heterogeneity and high between-cluster

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is also known as
perceptual mapping. This methodology, first conceptualized in 1938, is commonly used in the analysis
of products, mainly product positioning, life cycle
analysis, and research questions exploring product
competition (Green 1975).
The objective of this technique is to represent the
unit of analysis graphically in a multidimensional
space. In particular, it draws attributes on a Cartesian
coordinate plane, and products are then represented
within this plane. Attributes can either be objective
measurements of an attribute or subjective perception
of the same. When the analysis considers only two
parameters, these are represented in a bi-dimensional
axis. Units are then located in accordance to the
amount of these attributes they contain, and

Multivariate Analysis

1021

High Quality

Expenditure
cluster C

Product A
Product E

Consumer type 1
Product B

Consumer type 3
High price

Low price
cluster B

cluster A

Product D
Consumer type 2
Product C
Low Quality

Income
Between-cluster variation

Figure 8

Two-Dimension Perceptual Map

Within-cluster variation

Figure 7

Grouping of Individuals by Cluster

represented in the space. The result of this process is
a perceptual map that plots the relative position of
each unit (Figure 8). The closer products are located,
the more similar they are. This would identify, for
instance, very close competitors or very close substitutes. Consumer preferences for the same attributes
can complement the analysis and are represented on
the same graph. Observing the location of preferences
compared to actual products, it is possible to improve
consumer welfare by targeting specific consumers
with those products more suitable for their taste.

Correspondence Analysis
Correspondence analysis is a technique for dimensional reduction (similar to PCA and FA) and perceptual mapping (as MDS) (Hair et al. 2006). Compared
to PCA, correspondence analysis rescales the variates,
increasing the generality of the approach (Hill 1974),
and it also differs from MDS in the statistical component, which focuses on composition rather than
decomposition (Hair et al. 2006). While the method
is essentially the same as an MDS, correspondence
analysis addresses those research questions using categorical rather than continuous data (Hill 1974).

Structural Equation Modeling
The final methodology analysis is structural equation
modeling (SEM), an advanced multivariate technique
that combines both dependence and interdependence

techniques. SEM, developed in the 1920s (Goldberger
1972), consists of the simultaneous use of a regression
analysis and a factor analysis (Hair et al. 2006). The
starting point of a SEM is the definition of a model
that describes an economic phenomenon, which
relates a certain number of variables to a well-defined
outcome (i.e., a dependent variable).
The rationale of this family of statistical models
is the existence of a causal relation between a dependent and a set of exogenous independent variables,
which in turn are a function of dependent variables.
More specifically, it often happens that an independent variable does not represent the measure that the
researcher intended, but it actually is a proxy. For
instance, the use of the income variable is not a perfect measure of disposable income, since it includes
taxes and other expenses that differ among respondents. However, the proxy variable can be identified
as the underlying construct of a larger set of variables
that are related to each other using a factor analysis
(Goldberger 1972).
From a practical perspective, the latent construct
is therefore identified using a factor analysis, and the
resulting factors are regressed against a dependent
variable, in a process similar to a regression analysis.
The steps and the correlation ( ) between the different variables can be observed in a path diagram, as
in Figure 9.
Multivariate analysis plays a major role in consumer studies and provides an important tool in the
exploration of the issues reported in this section.
The choice of the most appropriate technique in

1022

Multivariate Analysis

Characteristic 1
ρ1–A

ρ1–2

ρ1–3

Characteristic 2
ρ2–3

ρ2–A

Factor A

ρP–CC

Dependent
variable

ρ3–A

Characteristic 3

Figure 9

Path Diagram and Estimated SEM

addressing specific research questions depends on the
question itself and on the data at hand.
Luca A. Panzone
See also Consumer Behavior; Econometrics; Economics;
Measuring Standards of Living; Methodologies for
Studying Consumer Culture; Methods of Market
Research; Multiple Correspondence Analysis;
Preference Formation

Further Readings
Bray, James H., and Scott E. Maxwell. Multivariate
Analysis of Variance (Sage University Paper Series on
Quantitative Research Methods, Vol. 54). Newbury
Park, CA: Sage, 1985.
Fisher, R. A. “Studies in Crop Variation. I. An Examination
of the Yield of Dressed Grain from Broadbalk.” Journal
of Agricultural Science 11, no. 2 (1921): 107–135.
Galton, Francis. “Regression towards Mediocrity in
Hereditary Stature.” Journal of the Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 (1886): 246–263.
Goldberger, A. S. “Structural Equation Models in the Social
Sciences.” Econometrica 40, no. 6 (1972): 979–1001.
Green, Paul. “Marketing Applications of MDS: Assessment
and Outlook.” Journal of Marketing 39 (1975): 24–31.
Green, Paul E., and V. Srinivasan. “Conjoint Analysis in
Consumer Research: Issues and Outlook.” Journal of
Consumer Research 5, no. 2 (1978): 103–123.
Hair, Joseph F., William C. Black, Barry J. Babin, and
Rolph E. Anderson. Multivariate Data Analysis. 6th ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.

Hill, M. O. “Correspondence Analysis: A Neglected
Multivariate Method.” Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society. Series C (Applied Statistics) 23, no. 3 (1974):
340–354.
Hill, R. Carter, William E. Griffiths, and Guay C. Lim.
Principles of Econometrics. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley and Sons, 2008.
Jolliffe, I. T. Principal Component Analysis. 2nd ed. New
York: Springer-Verlag, 2002.
Lachenbruch, Peter A., and M. Goldstein. “Discriminant
Analysis.” Biometrics 35, no. 1 (1979): 69–85.
Lawley, D. N., and A. E. Maxwell. “Factor Analysis as a
Statistical Method.” Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society, Series D (The Statistician) 12, no. 3 (1962):
209–229.
Punj, Girish, and David W. Stewart. “Cluster Analysis in
Marketing Research: Review and Suggestions for
Application.” Journal of Marketing Research 20, no. 2
(1983): 134–148.
Rodgers, Joseph Lee, and W. Alan Nicewander. “Thirteen
Ways to Look at the Correlation Coefficient.” American
Statistician 42, no. 1 (1988): 59–66.
Stigler, Stephen M. “Gauss and the Invention of Least
Squares.” Annals of Statistics 9, no. 3 (1981):
465–474.

MUSEUMS
See Collecting and Collectibles

N
NARCISSISM
The inspiration for the modern concept of narcissism is the ancient Greek legend of Narcissus, a
Thespian hero who, after rejecting the advances of
the nymph Echo, fell in love with his own image,
which he refused to accept as merely a reflection. He
suffered fits of melancholia and mania until he died
of starvation, turning into the flower that still bears
his name. Essentially a cautionary tale warning of the
fatal consequences of self-obsession and the denial
of external reality, it also is featured in Christian discourse as an aspect of original sin and idolatry, what
Martin Luther called incurvatus in se ipsum, or “the
love that is bent towards itself” rather than extended
outward to the external authority of God.
Contemporary definitions of the concept vary
across the humanities and social sciences. In psychology, it means a personality that craves admiration
as it overestimates itself and its abilities, while the
psychoanalytical conception sticks closer to the original mythological meaning of an individual who has
difficulty distinguishing the self from its reflection
in external objects. It is recognized in some schools
of psychiatry and psychology as a severe personality disorder, and in this vein, Otto Kernberg links
“malignant narcissism” to hubris, megalomania,
aggression, and gang leadership.
In the humanities and cultural studies, narcissism
is recognized as a sociocultural phenomenon, a tendency among the self-styled elite to indulge in ostentatious displays of beauty and taste to distinguish

themselves from the mundane “herd.” Across
Western history, dandies, flaneurs, new romantics,
and metrosexuals have all demonstrated their obsession with appearance and style. This is seen by
some cultural theorists as subversive, transgressive,
and even protopolitical but by others as antisocial
and pathogenic. In his Gothic novel, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, often accused of being a
narcissistic dandy himself, criticized high modernity
as an immature culture obsessed with eternal youth
and beauty.
Sigmund Freud saw primary narcissism as a
universal characteristic of early child development,
where the baby’s primary needs are satisfied by a
mother who is loved as an external other yet who
also seems to be an extension of the self. This sense
of unity directs libidinal energy that had been initially cathected (turned outward toward an external
object) back inward toward the ego, creating feelings of omnipotent self-appreciation and self-love,
which combine with primary aggressive instincts to
produce potentially destructive drives. Civilization
is built from the renunciation of the gratification of
these drives and the subsequent sublimation of these
drives, which builds the superego but leaves us with
a nagging discontent created by the superego’s guilt.
Secondary narcissism can appear as the position of
primary narcissism is lost in the oedipal stage, where
the self encounters social pressure and is expected
to identify with external others. Difficulties can arise
if the libido withdraws from these external objects
and again directs its energies back toward the self,
in which case the individual will see significance

1023

1024

Narcissism

only in the objects of her own immediate needs and
desires or those seen exclusively as her own work
and a reflection of her self. The secondary narcissist
can experience difficulty in modifying her views as
they are tested in reality and in empathizing with the
needs and views of others who threaten her fragile
identity and self-worth.
For Jacques Lacan, all humans are born too
early in a helpless condition. The terror induced by
this “prematuration” and lack of bodily control is
addressed in the mirror phase by the early ego as it
splits itself and seeks identification with an apparently complete and competent external image. The
ego becomes trapped in this image as it strives to
maintain a false sense of completeness in reaction
to the underlying sense of bodily fragmentation,
and thus, the self begins to desire both the other and
what the other desires. This idea filled the gap left
by Freud on the psychosocial origin of narcissism
and is crucial to the study of consumer culture and
subjectivity. Social language binds the infant to its
image in the external world; therefore, narcissism
also exists as an unconscious symbolic identification
with the image as an ideal. This furnishes us with a
more detailed explanation of how culture intrudes
in the individual psyche and its relations with others. Lacan also made the vital distinction between the
ideal ego, the fantasized image that the pre-Oedipal
subject assumes it already is, and the ego ideal, the
symbolic ideal that the post-Oedipal subject thinks
it could be after some effort is expended. According
to Slavoj Žižek, consumer culture begins its intrusion in the Oedipal phase, by displacing traditional
orders of symbols that cut “gaps” in the narcissistic
relationship by providing alternative noncommercial
ideals that inspire sociability, rational reflection, and
eventual maturation. The marketing industry places
a procession of manufactured ego ideals in the mind
of the young consumer, which, as they are presented
as being both competent and instantly attainable
identities, meld with the ideal ego, thus prolonging
indefinitely the narcissistic identification process and
the subject’s insatiable desire to acquire image-laden
objects that reflect and comfort the self, according to
Steve Hall and colleagues.
Freud (1989) had also suggested that art is a compensatory substitute for the repression of instincts
that is necessary to lead society, but this draws the
elite toward a narcissistic satisfaction with their own
cultural ideals. This form of hubris can permeate

whole societies where the subordinate admire their
iconic yet undeserving leaders. According to Erich
Fromm, consumer culture promotes this type of
group narcissism. To avoid accusations of vanity and
madness, the narcissist projects his own image onto
significant others thus expressing extreme admiration for what is essentially a reflection of the self.
Rejecting the everyday life of social production as
emptiness and boredom, the narcissist, lacking the
talent or self-marketing skills necessary to grab attention, seeks identification with charismatic manufactured icons promoted by the mass media. Looking to
get close to these icons to see his reflection in them,
the narcissist becomes attuned to the icons’ desires
and styles, and thus, the icons, replacing traditional
significant others, such as parents, historical figures,
and political leaders, become effective marketing
tools.
Christopher Lasch took the idea of group narcissism a stage further. Whereas earlier radical liberal
thinkers, such as Herbert Marcuse, saw narcissism as
a potential portal into a new and liberated mode of
being, Lasch was prominent among a number of critics who accused radical liberals of rather impatiently
and foolishly playing into the hands of the marketing
industry and the corporate state bureaucracy. The
rise of consumer culture laid the foundation for a
generalized narcissistic personality structure, which
featured a dread of aging and social/familial obligations along with an obsession with youth, beauty,
fame, and celebrity. False individualism based on a
bureaucratized therapeutic culture had replaced real
autonomous individualism, and this toxic culture
coincided with the decline of meaningful work, the
rise of the information society, and the intrusion
of market logic into all aspects of everyday life. In
a similar yet characteristically more radical vein,
Žižek argues that consumer culture is a vehicle for
promoting liberal-capitalist ideology. It is inevitably
narcissistic and destructive as it creates a maelstrom
of individualization, risk, reflexivity, hedonism, and
jouissance, which perpetually disrupts the symbolic
order, the external authority that carries the prohibitions and taboos posited by Freud and Lacan as
essential to the inner conquest of narcissism and
aggression.
Initially, narcissism might well have been an unwelcome by-product of consumer culture, but now, it
has been incorporated into the strategies of the marketing industry as a means of bonding individuals

National Cultures

around manufactured icons who use their status as
complete and competent performers in the market to
advertise products. Orders of alternative symbols can
create space for maturation and rational reflexivity,
furnishing subjects with alternative sources of identity, alternative concepts, and authoritative demands
from the fields of art, love, science, and politics,
notes Alain Badiou. However, today these alternative symbolic orders are discouraged, often disparaged by the high priests of hip culture as antiquated
and repressive. Thus, in the absence of alternative
sources of desire, for many individuals, the desire for
the symbols carried by consumer products becomes a
lifelong obsession. For those in positions of material
disadvantage, who have experienced the extreme loss
of identities once provided by traditional class, ethnic,
and familial groups, this compulsion can have criminogenic tendencies, according to Hall and colleagues.
On behalf of industry’s need for high consumer
demand and profits, consumer culture systematically
fosters and prolongs narcissism, despite the possibility of an eventual terminus in fatalism, nihilism, and
decadence.
Steve Hall
See also Consumer Socialization; Dandyism; Flaneur/
euse; Freud, Sigmund; Identity; Lasch, Christopher;
Marcuse, Herbert; Metrosexual; Obsession;
Psychoanalysis

Further Readings
Badiou, Alain. Ethics. London: Verso, 2002.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. London:
Hogarth, 1979.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. London:
Norton, 1989.
Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
London: Penguin, 1990.
Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. Criminal
Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton,
UK: Willan, 2008.
Kernberg, Otto. The Psychotherapeutic Management of
Paranoid, Narcissistic and Paranoid Transferences.
New York: Guilford Press, 1994.
Lacan, Jacques. Escrits. London: Norton, 2006.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. London:
Abacus, 1979.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. New York:
Vintage, 1961.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 2000.

1025

NATIONAL CULTURES
National cultures are the designs for living that
people identified by nation are perceived to share,
including attributes such as language, dress, style,
diet, religion, sports, leisure, and consumption patterns. Numerous works on particular national cultures have been published, often within a narrative
frame of redemption or decline, but attempts to verify generalizations and assumptions about national
cultures and cultural differences in behavior, sentiments, beliefs, practices, and attitudes have had limited success. Despite these difficulties nation-states,
with perceived national cultures, have become
widely accepted as the normal political arrangement,
although the connection between nation and state
is ambiguous. It is on this socially constructed reality that this discussion focuses first with a consideration of the genesis of the nation-state followed by
consideration of national cultures from the points of
view of national character, belonging and community, patriotism and nationalism, and citizenship and
consumption.

Genesis of the Nation-State
The relationship between nation and state is disputed. For modernists, such as Ernest Gellner, Tom
Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm, and Elie Kedourie, nations
are essentially new forms of political community
that came to prominence in Europe in the nineteenth
century—and later exported to the rest of the
world—in a unique social transition to modernity,
stimulated by industrialism, mass production, and
war, an increasingly professionalized state, urban
populations, and the development of mass means
of communications. By this argument, states tend to
precede nations, although some historians acknowledge an earlier “ethnic core,” where strategic regions
first cohere with elements of a common culture and
by conquest or allegiance incorporate peripheries.
Examples cited include France, Japan, England, and
China where origins have been sought, for example,
in fourteenth-century Europe where both the Ile de
France and an emergent English realm defined the
other through warfare.
In effect, the debate about the age of national
cultures depends on definition. If it is accepted that
an essential attribute of nations is the sovereignty

1026

National Cultures

of the people, then nations are modern constructions first popularly asserted in France with the
1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen (“The source of all sovereignty resides in
the Nation”) before being applied as a model in the
nineteenth century with the demand for the inclusion of more categories of the population, such as
the lower orders and women, under the umbrella of
citizenship. If, on the other hand, it is sufficient that
strategic political orders of preindustrial societies
have at times forged institutions to express notions
of geographical belonging and identity to mobilize
populations, then incipient national cultures can be
sought worldwide through long periods of history
including those of ancient Egypt, Persia at the time
of the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE), China during
the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), and Japan of
the Heian period (794–1185).

National Character
The concepts of national character and national culture derive from the eighteenth century in England,
France, and Germany (Smith 1991). Favored ideas
are those of the collective unity or the indivisibility
of the people using metaphors drawn from family relationships, the extension of individual selfdetermination to the imagined collective self, the
uniqueness and value of the genius of each nation,
and the awakening of the collective self. Hugely
influential here was the work of Johann Gottfried
von Herder, who makes the early conceptual distinction between the nation as a living sociological whole
expressed though language, customs, religion, and
the territorial home in contrast to nationalism as the
narrow self-interested conflict between nations. By
the nineteenth century, these ideas tend to be organized in a historicist time frame around the key idea
of progress and narratives describing the growth,
advancement, and decline of nations.
Studies comparing national cultures to establish
empirically the supposed attributes of national character have had limited success. By the criterion of
social science citation, by far the most influential
remains that of Geertz Hofstede. Extracting his data
from attitude surveys undertaken within IBM subsidiaries, Hofstede has concluded that there are four
reasonably discrete and central bipolar dimensions
of national culture and that forty out of the sixty-six
countries tested might be given a comparative score

on each of these four dimensions (Power Distance,
Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism versus
Collectivism, and Masculinity versus Femininity).
In order, these indexes attempt to score the degree
to which respondents agree that the less powerful
accept and expect power to be distributed unequally,
tolerate ambiguity or uncertainty, integrate individuals into groups, and are assertive and competitive
as distinct from modest and caring. He later added
a fifth dimension of Confucian Dynamism, where
scoring attempts to establish how future-oriented
respondents are. Hofstede’s work has been criticized on methodological, conceptual, and empirical
grounds (see, for example, McSweeney 2002). In
particular, it is suggested that he does not pay sufficient attention to the fluid and complicated connection between states and nations, and he does
not acknowledge properly the difficulty of disentangling the influences of cultural factors that might
be deemed national from shifting social and demographic factors, such as class, gender, region, age,
urbanization, and ethnicity. Finally, his findings do
not appear to have been replicated (see, for example, Terracciano, Abdel-Khalek, and Adam 2005).
Other influential cross-cultural studies, such as those
of Harry Triandis, Shalom Schwartz, and Ed Diener,
are perhaps open to comparable methodological
and conceptual reservations.

Belonging and Community
National cultures are widely acknowledged to be
strategic for the maintenance of the state through
institutions designed to encourage cohesion by nurturing a sense of belonging and community. For
Ernest Gellner, national cultures are the key to the
bonding of the atomized individuals of industrial
civilization in part initiated and sustained by rationalized codes of communication managed through
the establishment of compulsory state-organized
schooling. Language policies promoting a common
language, a shared history and geography, and state
pageants have often guided state schooling and state
control of school curricula. Where these common
cultural links did not exist, attempts have been made
to shape them both positively and negatively, for
example, through enforced language policies and
propagandist versions of school history. This is in
marked contrast to preindustrial civilizations where
segmented communities were often systematically

National Cultures

segregated from each other by elites for the purpose,
in part, of political control. There is widespread
agreement also with Benedict Anderson that one
important means by which large numbers of people
came together to interact synchronically was what
he calls print capitalism, the application of printing
combined with capitalist organization of markets
and labor. Again, a contrast is made with earlier
political communities where script languages, such
as Latin, in part functioned to segregate privileged
elites and their power.

Nationalism and Patriotism
In the modern era where nation-states tend to be
regarded as the normal political communities,
the ideology of nationalism and the sentiments
of patriotism are closely associated with national
cultures. That people ought to be identified by
nation and located in specific geographical territories as the normatively acceptable political state
became asserted through new global institutions of
the twentieth century, such as the United Nations
(founded 1945), the World Health Organization
(founded 1948), the World Bank (founded
1944), and the International Olympic Committee
(founded 1894, later to become the governing
body of the international Olympic Movement).
These global associations of nations are seen by a
new global television audience reinforced later by
the remarkable flowering of digitalized communications. National cultures become linked to the
paraphernalia of national boundaries, frontiers,
passports, languages, maps, flags, anthems, capital cities, currency, architectural representations,
personifications, and heroes. Some indication of
the popularity of nations is the rapid increase in
membership of the United Nations from its foundation membership of fifty-five in 1946 to ninetynine by 1960 and 192 in 2010. The cultural shift
is illustrated by the history of national flags and
passports. Originally used for military signals on
the battlefield, flags were first adapted for civil use
in the late eighteenth century, but it is during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that most
European countries adopted them, followed later
by non-European powers. Passports, a rarity in the
nineteenth century, become standardized, first for
League of Nations members, only after the international conference on passports in 1920.

1027

Patriotism is the bonding sentiment of nations. For
the historian Ernest Renan, the means to achieve this
solidarity is common sacrifice, a collective experience
of trauma that once established is reified through
rites, pageants, ceremonials, and memorials where
the myths, memories, and narratives of nations are
reproduced and reinterpreted. The mass slaughter of
two world wars, for example, has provided the focus
of many national patriotic ceremonials, including
Remembrance Day or Armistice Day for the United
Kingdom and Commonwealth, Veterans Day in
the United States, the Defender of the Motherland
Day of the Russian Federation, and Anzac Day for
Australia and New Zealand. National memorials
and monuments have provided a material focus with
national twentieth-century symbolic motifs, such as
walls, tombs of the Unknown Soldier, eternal flames,
and military parades. Each appeal by leaders for collective effort and sacrifice is then related to the ongoing story of heroism and suffering.
Nevertheless, the importance of the everyday
should not be underestimated in the maintenance
and development of national cultures. It has been
plausibly suggested by both Michael Billig and Tim
Edensor that television has provided the means here
for a deritualization, since underpinning the annual
calendar of national patriotic events is the “banal
nationalism” of the everyday. By this argument,
populations enact imaginatively shared experiences
of national communion in their homes through
breakfast shows, weather forecasts, national sports
events, and news bulletins where belonging is celebrated not just daily but moment by moment.
People are situated in the rhythms of the national
calendar, and both television and newspapers represent the nation as a personality in personal relations
with other nations.

Citizenship and Consumption
National cultures and consumer culture are most
obviously linked through the interconnected activities of tourism, the heritage industry, sports, entertainment, and the branding of products, all of
which have generated large research literatures.
International sporting events, such as the Olympic
Games and the football (soccer) World Cup, or music
competitions, such as the Eurovision song contest,
have developed elaborately choreographed displays
for huge international television audiences in which

1028

National Cultures

stereotypical national attributes shaped by advertisers are reiterated. Administrations led by the United
States, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom,
in particular, are habitually commissioning marketing expertise to enhance such national profiles, which
has encouraged low-income nations to follow suit in
the hope of increasing tourism and inward investment. A new profession has emerged claiming expertise in branding the nation much influenced by the
work of Simon Anholt (Olins 2004; Potter 2009).
There are perhaps more interesting connections.
The ideal of citizenship and individual choice is central
to national cultures. Citizenship is also linked to both
consumer culture (Soper and Trentmann 2008) and
national culture as, for example, through consumer
campaigns and consumer organizations. Moreover,
as Gellner suggests, national ideologies of industrial
societies stress perpetual growth for social control
reasons, that the promise of continuous growth is
necessary for elites to sustain power (“universal
Danegeld buying off social aggression with material
enhancement”). If Gellner is right, then consumerism
is strategic not only to the ideology of national cultures but also to the survival of nation-states.
Since consumerism, presumably, develops farthest
where markets are most unconstrained, an obvious
starting point would be to compare national cultures
shaped by a socialist political program compared to
those most influenced by neoliberalism. As Amy
Porter notes in her study of changing consumption
practices in Cuba, consumption is tied to individualism and choice and so has large political and social
consequences. As well as transforming perceptions
of citizenship, her ethnographic analysis suggests
that the changing expectations and social behavior
caused by consumption, particularly where distinctions are made between who can and who cannot
consume, can undermine national unity and fragment perceptions of belonging. A similar dialectic
is noted in studies of national cultures that adopt
consumer strategies for national causes. Karl Gerth,
for example, demonstrates how nationalism helped
shape consumer culture in early twentieth-century
China. In effect, a “buy Chinese” policy politicized
and nationalized consumer culture, a policy that had
unintended consequences since the embraced consumerism also helped shape national culture. This
phenomenon is explored in a recent study of the
growth of the Palestine middle class during Mandate
Palestine, where nationalism reinforces consumption

by encouraging the acquisition of nationally produced products. Yet as Deborah Bernstein and Badi
Hasisi demonstrate, the encouraged consumer attitudes led also to the transcending of these nationally
encouraged boundaries since many of the advertised
products were of foreign origin or were imported
by the national rival. In addition, the advertisements
conveyed “Western bourgeois” values, which were in
contradiction to the national goal of ending colonial
domination.
Another line of inquiry is to consider the consequences of attempts to extend consumer culture
into the public sphere, which itself has tended to be
regarded as a part of the domain of national cultures.
Examples might include the creation of mercenary
armies and the partial or complete privatization of
police forces, security services, broadcasting, prisons,
health services, and schools. As Michael Sandel notes,
a seminal contribution is the study of blood transfusion by Richard Titmuss, who found that transforming the giving of blood from a gift exchange into a
consumer commodity not only led to increased contamination, waste, and inefficiency but also changed
the nature of the actors’ moral stance to each other.
National cultural institutions have been promoted
historically as moral guardians also of the private
sphere, particularly through an ideological defense
of family life and individual privacy. Examination
of national resistance to or acceptance of consumer
values into this sphere is instructive about national
cultural values. Obvious examples are the targeting
of young children with advertising and the marketing of sexual relationships, pornography, and drugs
such as alcohol and tobacco. A case in point was
the perceived threat to advertising interests posed by
Sweden’s declared concern about protecting children
against targeted advertising during its Presidency
of the European Union in 2001 in advance of the
Television Without Frontiers Directive of 2002 and
the different styles of national popular resistance in
individual European countries to the dismantling of
national legislations or public institutions protecting
young children’s rights to freedom from television
advertising in the home.
New directions of research on national cultures
follow directly from these considerations stimulated, in particular, by debates about the nature of
globalization; the combining of nation states into
larger power blocks, such as the European Union; and
the possibilities posed by the digital revolution for

Needs and Wants

the imagined community. Sociologists have often
discussed societies as though they are nation-states
thereby contributing uncritically to the ideology of
nationalism. A related line of inquiry concerns itself
with the question about who is of the nation. Since
national cultures reify memory, the myths, stories,
and symbols they represent can be appropriated by
groups previously marginalized by or excluded from
the national myth, as the remarkably resonant black
glove salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at
the 1968 Olympic Games and the Martin Luther
King Jr. “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln
Memorial in 1963 demonstrate. Contemporary
examples include the debates about the plans for
location of an Islamic center near Ground Zero
in New York and that in Europe concerning the
deporting of the Romany stimulated by the policy of
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. The assumption that national cultures might be in decline or that
larger loyalties might prove popular has yet to be
established. It is entirely possible that this notion of
national culture, of European origin and application,
will prove increasingly awkward to export to the
rest of the world. For example, the special difficulties of applying the idea of national cultures to states
shaped in an Islamic cultural context has often been
recognized as problematic, whereas debates about
identifying the nations contained within the states of
Africa, the Balkans, or Asia provoke more than just
academic interest. On the other hand, there is some
evidence that globalization will stimulate more local
allegiances, including those of national and religious
revival, so that nations and their cultures could continue to grow in number.
Sebastian Garman
See also Belonging; Citizenship; Cultural Studies;
Ethnicity/Race; Globalization; Industrial Society;
Orientalism; World Exhibitions

1029

Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture and
Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2002.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the
Creation of the Nation. Harvard East Asian
Monographs, 224. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Asia Center, 2003.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention
of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983.
Hofstede, Geertz. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing
Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations
across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001.
McSweeney, Brendan. “Hofstede’s Model of National
Cultural Differences and Their Consequences:
A Triumph of Faith—a Failure of Analysis.” Human
Relations 55 (2002): 89–117.
Olins, Wally. “Branding the Nation: The Historical
Context.” In Destination Branding: Creating the Unique
Destination Proposition, 2nd ed., edited by Nigel
Morgan, Annette Pritchard, and Roger Pride, 17–25.
Oxford: Elsevier, 2004.
Porter, Amy. “Fleeting Dreams and Flowing Goods:
Citizenship and Consumption in Havana, Cuba.”
Political and Legal Anthropology Review 31, no. 1
(May 2008): 134–149.
Potter, Evan. Branding Canada: Projecting Canada’s Soft
Power through Public Diplomacy. Montreal, QC, and
Kingston, ON: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Sandel, Michael. “Markets and Morals.” Reith Lectures
2009: A New Citizenship. Lecture 1 (Transmission:
June 9, 2009).
Smith, Anthony. National Identity. London: Penguin, 1991.
Soper, Kate, and Frank Trentmann, eds. Citizenship and
Consumption. Hampshire, NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008.
Terracciano, Antonio, A. Abdel-Khalek, and L. Adam.
“National Character Does Not Reflect Mean
Personality Trait Levels in 49 Cultures.” Science 310,
no. 5745 (October 2005): 96–100.

Further Readings
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso,
1983.
Bernstein, Deborah, and Badi Hasisi. “‘Buy and Promote
the National Cause’: Consumption, Class Formation
and Nationalism in Mandate Palestinian Society.”
Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (January 2008):
127–150.
Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995.

NEEDS

AND

WANTS

A need is defined as a circumstance in which
something is necessary, a thing that is wanted or
required. Want refers to scarcity, the state of being
absent, or a desire for something necessary to life.
The concepts of need and want are present in social
sciences literature since its earlier stages. Central

1030

Needs and Wants

to the depiction and evaluation of production and
consumption systems and activities, they are also
significant for the discussion and characterization
of broader topics, ranging from the distinctive
nature of modern capitalism and the problems of
social cohesion and inequality it generated to matters of human agency, particularly in the context of
the new social order termed the consumer society.
Because of the vastness of the theoretical debates
and the multiplicity of approaches it generated,
needs/wants can be addressed via diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives and lines of inquiry.
Since an overall presentation would be impossible
to accomplish here, this entry privileges the anthropological and sociological debates regarding the
relationships between subjects and objects in the
context of mass-consumption societies. The entry
is structured in four segments, all of them corresponding to main lines of discussion concerning the
relevance of the concept(s) to the study of contemporary consumer culture.
Sociologist Don Slater is responsible for one of the
most productive contemporary works in this matter. Slater introduces the idea that the centrality of
the concept of need in the context of social sciences
resides in the fact that consumer culture should be
understood as a particular historical arrangement for
producing and mediating human needs, and therefore, its evaluation depends on its performance, or its
ability to respond to them. However, since needs are
defined by people, to assess the performance of consumer culture to react positively to people’s needs,
it is first necessary to collectively identify what is
needed and/or wanted by each society. This assumption links the social definition of needs to the question of how people should live their lives, placing
consumption at the heart of the political debate. It
articulates, as Slater states, visions of “the good life.”
To say that something is needed means claiming the
allocation of a certain amount of resources to the
production and reproduction of a modality of life,
which embodies particular values. Moreover, people
tend to satisfy their needs through commodities, that
is, things acquired in the market, which contributes
to the enhancement of the gap between their roles as
producers and consumers. This “secondhand” relationship with contemporary material culture raises
issues directly related to consumer agency that, as
sociologist Roberta Sassatelli stresses, concentrate in
the rationalities that guide consumer behavior. Thus,

besides being central to the discussion of how people
should live, the concept of need is also pivotal to the
discussion of how people make sense of their actions
as consumers.

Needs and Wants or Needs Versus Wants?
Some of the most visible attempts to find a definition
of need that could contribute to drawing possible
answers to the above-mentioned questions involved
its opposition to other concepts, predominantly not
only to want but also to desire, prefer, or wish.
According to Slater, the distinction between need
and want is particularly significant because it allows
the definition of the first as something essential to
a body, a social order or an identity that has to be
satisfied. Needs therefore are objective, compelling,
existential, universal, and, most importantly, essential. This definition allowed both social thought and
common sense to transform the concept of need
into a powerful political tool since it anchors social
claims in the context of necessity and, often, also
of nature. Wants, on the other hand, are defined as
subjective or as self-centered aims, desires, or pleasures. Compared with needs, they are trivial and, by
definition, insatiable since they do not result from
necessity or nature. Following Slater, the distinction
between needs and wants based on these parameters
promoted the association of needs to human nature
or to society and of wants to individual choice. Thus,
the first can be subjected to objective authoritative
knowledge, whereas the second admit guidance and
intervention only from the individual experiencing
them. Notions such as “the sovereignty of the consumer” or “the undisputed nature of personal taste”
rely on the idea that wants, contrary to needs, do not
constitute a matter of rational knowledge and exist
beyond collective life and social debate.
A complementary form of the need/want dichotomy resulted in the distinction between “true”
and “false” needs. According to John Galbraith,
Canadian-American economist author of The
Affluent Society (1958), true needs are, by definition, urgent to satisfy given that they are grounded
in physical necessities. Unlike false or created needs,
they do not ask for the intervention of an external
entity to call attention to their existence. They are,
as Zygmunt Bauman, Polish sociologist author of
Consuming Life (2007), argues, grounded in survival, exist in a restricted and fixed number, and

Needs and Wants

have their limits set by their instrumentality. Unlike
true needs, false needs are created by the market and
constitute powerful mechanisms of social manipulation and control of consumption practices, since they
have the ability to induce people to buy things that
they do not really need.

Nature Versus Culture
In line with the arguments that try to discern and
define what a “real” need is by opposition to false
ones or to wants, some authors argue that the reasons beyond its difference reside in its relationship
with nature. In Discourse in Inequality (1775)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, early nineteenth-century
Swiss philosopher, discusses the problems inherent to modern needs. According to the author, in
modern societies needs are insatiable due to the
fact that they are disconnected from nature and
from rational social order. In a state of nature,
man acts on the basis of finite needs, of real needs.
So the insatiable man of unlimited greed typical
of modern societies is not a man in the state of
nature but a social being. Society is responsible for
the creation of the desiring individual as well as
of his unlimited needs, both constituting powerful
mechanisms of social domination. Collective life
established the grounds for comparison, competition, inequality, and the necessity of approval and
admiration by others. Need and desire started to
be associated with possession, and social recognition became progressively dependent on the things
one owned. With capitalism, socially created needs
become more and more determined by fashion and
public scrutiny, generating a new form of tyranny
that pressures man to validate his social position
through private property. According to Sassatelli
and Slater, in the words of some authors from critical theory and postmodernism who have embraced
this distinction, we can avoid being slaves of the
commodity only if we remain slaves of nature.
That is, people can only and truly be themselves if
desires are limited to the ones grounded in “basic”
human necessities. These positions are responsible
for the naturalization of the concept by means of
a line of argument that tends to define natural true
needs as “universal,” “essential,” or deriving from
“scientific knowledge.” The satisfaction of natural
needs is enunciated as a precondition to culture
therefore defining it as secondary to nature, and

1031

consumption is reduced to the act of keeping the
human body alive.

Premodern Scarce Societies Versus
Modern Affluent Societies
What happens to human needs in modern affluent
societies? How are they different regarding other
models of organization of collective life? What are
the most relevant impacts of modern needs in structural principles and subjective life?
Although not focused in the discussion of the
concepts of needs/wants, Daniel Horowitz’s work,
The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the
Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (1985),
provides an insightful account of the consequences
of the changes introduced by the arrival of the “consumer society,” according to Francis Wayland, Henry
Thoreau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Daniel Webster.
Their ideas greatly influenced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the American perceptions about the impacts of materialism on people
and on social organization, therefore representing a
positive contextualization to the discussion that follows. Inspired by Calvinist principles, Wayland states
that “the insatiate striving for more,” introduced
by increasing consumption, constituted a threat to
virtue and morality. Thoreau also contends that the
pursuit of more goods dictated by emulation and
fashion lessened the quality of life because to achieve
it people had to labor increasingly. Tocqueville shares
a similar pessimism as, in his view, materialism
threatens to dissolve social bonds and turns people
restless and anxious. Contrary to the previous positions, Webster’s contribution calls attention to the
existence of a relationship between civilization and
material advancement, therefore contradicting the
existence of an opposition between mass production
and moral elevation.
The work of Emile Durkheim, nineteenthcentury French sociologist, is strategic to discern
the lengths and centrality of the concept of need
in social theory discussions on the classical subject matter of premodern versus modern social
life. In Suicide, a Study in Sociology (1897/2002),
Durkheim discusses the concept of modern individualist needs in the broader framework of collective
solidarity and coordination. In his view, and unlike
premodern societies that presented strong mechanisms of social cohesion, modern societies have

1032

Needs and Wants

gradually substituted them by formal networks of
interdependences between individuals, which are
incapable of generating the substantive cultural
bonds necessary for the production of social cohesion. This alteration has major impacts in the ways
individuals relate to their needs and desires. In premodern societies, economic scarcity contributed to
social regulation by controlling human needs and
wants. However, modern deregulation and industrial development established the conditions for the
exponential expansion of human needs that are, in
principle, insatiable. The failure of the mechanisms
of social control and solidarity leads to a situation of
crescent individualism. Freed from these regulation
mechanisms, individual needs become impossible to
satisfy, regardless of the developments happening in
production, causing both anomie and frustration.
While Durkheim’s contribution calls attention
to the negative impacts of modern needs, as well
as to their consequences in terms of further individualism, in the social order, Marxist theory established the grounds for a conceptualization of “the
consumer” as a subject more and more incapable
of recognizing what his needs and wants really are.
According to Karl Marx, nineteenth-century social
scientist and philosopher, to expand production in
capitalist economies, producers have to gain control over human needs. This means that production
does not respond to consumer necessities but rather
creates and shapes them, according to its own
particular economic interests. In the Grundrisse
(1939/1973), Marx states that production creates
objects that correspond to human needs. There is no
production without needs. That is, consumption creates the ideal, “the impelling cause for production,
which is its presupposing” (91). However, he also
mentions that objects can be consumed as objects
of needs, only to a certain level. Where the need for
a certain use value (i.e., an object of consumption)
ceases, “it ceases to be a use value” for “the object
is measured as use value by the need for it” (405).
In capitalist economies, the production of surplus
value, based on the increase of the productive forces,
will necessarily require the production of new consumption: “firstly quantitative expansion of existing
consumption; secondly: creation of new needs by
propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly:
production of new needs and discovery and creation
of new use values” (408; emphasis in original).
That is why Marxian authors state that in capitalist

affluent societies, needs are progressively controlled
by the sphere of production, which is gradually both
responsible for its shaping and managing and for
imposing them on the consumers.
Galbraith, one of the most visible non-Marxian
voices, also calls attention to the distinctive nature of
needs and wants in modern societies. According to
the author, as societies become increasingly affluent,
needs and wants are increasingly created by the same
processes that are responsible for their satisfaction.
Then, high levels of production imply higher levels of
want creation, necessitating, in turn, higher levels of
want satisfaction.
The work of Jean Baudrillard, twentieth-century
French sociologist, also resulted in a pessimistic view
of contemporary affluent societies. He argued that
modern consumption is not about fruition or satisfaction of human desires. Baudrillard’s original position regarding consumption drew upon the Marxist
concept of use value. Things, he argues, never had
an original use value that capitalism manipulated to
control consumer practices. Since objects integrate a
system of communication, classification, and social
ordering, their value does not derive from their ability to respond to a specific need but rather from
their meanings. In contemporary capitalist societies,
meanings or signifiers have, according to Baudrillard,
gained autonomy, forming an alternative reality with
a specific system of signification. Consequently, he
argued, consumption does not relate to concrete
needs, since contemporary needs are also part of the
abstract system of signification.

Beyond Needs and Wants:
The Uses of Things
The theoretical arguments previously presented
were particularly relevant during the second half of
the twentieth century. These critical points of view
of contemporary consumer culture have, however,
been challenged by a group of authors who focused
mainly on examining how some contemporary massproduced consumption items were being used by
subjects to objectify the nature of modernity as social
experience. These alternative perspectives shifted
the angle through which anthropology and sociology observed consumption practices. To understand
consumption and its social and cultural significance,
they argue, it is necessary to observe what people do
with the things they get from the market and to ask

Needs and Wants

what part materiality plays in human interactions
and rituals; how consumers appropriate, transform,
and domesticate objects and their meanings; and to
what extent they integrate contemporary cosmologies. That is, why and for what do people want the
things they acquire?
These interrogations constitute main lines of
inquiry in contemporary material culture and consumption research and contributed to establishing
the concept of needs as culturally constituted. Needs
are defined as formulations of peoples’ values, identities, and commitments to live the kind of life they
have decided to live. As Sassatelli summarizes, even
those needs that look fundamental to survival, such
as shelter, food, and drink, cannot turn us back to
nature. What is significant about these specific needs
is not survival but rather how people managed to
satisfy them: what they did to stay alive and with
whom. By the same token, the distance separating
needs from the concept of wants is blurred. There
are no true or false needs, since it is impossible to
abstract human needs from social interaction and
from the structure of power that permeates them.
Moreover, the revision of the concept of needs convoyed with two other significant theoretical shifts:
the institutionalization of the notion of consumption
as a relational and imminently social practice and the
redefinition of the consumer as an active subject in
his relationships with things, with other consumers,
and with the market.
From the contributions to this major revision,
the work of English anthropologist Mary Douglas
deserves special consideration since it directly
addresses the issue of needs/wants in modern capitalist societies. In The World of Goods, Douglas and
Baron Isherwood (1979) call attention to the fact
that the economy seems unable to respond to the
question of why people want things. This happens
because the economy has cut the social dimension
off the concept, an error that should be amended
since consumption decisions have always constituted
a vital source of culture in all times and contexts.
According to the authors, decisions involving objects
and goods are the mainspring of culture, and consumer choices are fundamental to their own life,
given that they necessarily reflect who they are and
how they relate to others. In the end, consumption is
a social and cultural activity of production of a universe of values. Then, instead of thinking that goods
are primarily needed for subsistence, Douglas and

1033

Isherwood assert that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture. Though some
goods sometimes serve physical needs, they also serve
to communicate with others and to relate to them.
People use things to speak about themselves and
to learn things from others. Goods are for making
sense, and consumption is about finding consistent
meanings made visible through physical things. The
objective of consumers, then, translates a concern for
information about the changing cultural scene, as
well as for getting and controlling information about
it if possible. According to Douglas, in a finite social
world, securely bounded, meanings echo and reinforce one another. Despite the differences in terms of
the intensity of the changes happening in the market,
the same is true in economies of scale. Consumers
have to gain or keep control of the sources of information so that their interpretations, their cosmological syntheses, are consistent and secure.
Contemporary theoretical frameworks allow us
to understand consumption practices as an expression of social relationships with others and with
goods and validate the idea that people actively and
strategically use objects for the production of meaning, as well as to mark their social actions and positioning strategies. By focusing on the cultural uses
of things rather than on the political and economic
mechanisms beyond the relationships between production and consumption, these frameworks situate
the study of contemporary consumption in the realm
of everyday naturalized practices and call attention
to the constitutive and expressive potentials of ordinary, often invisible, and, to use an expression coined
by Daniel Miller, humble objects.
Marta Rodrigues Vilar Rosales
See also Consumer Demand; Consumer Society; False
Consciousness/False Needs; Hierarchy of Needs;
Material Culture; Materialism and Postmaterialism;
Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity,
2007.
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of
Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.
New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Durkheim, Emile. Suicide, a Study in Sociology. London:
Routledge, 2002. First published 1897.

1034

Neo-Tribes

Galbraith, John. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998. First published 1958.
Horowitz, Daniel. The Morality of Spending: Attitudes
toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 1973. First
published 1939.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture, History, Theory and
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Slater, Don. “Consumer Culture and the Politics of Need.”
Chap. 3 in Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and
Consumption, edited by Mica Nava, Andrew Blake, Ian
MacRury, and Barry Ritchards. London: Routledge,
1997.
Slater, Don. “Needs/Wants.” In Core Sociological
Dichotomies, edited by Chris Jenks, 315–328. London:
Sage, 1998.

NEO-TRIBES
Neo-tribes was a term coined by the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli in the late 1980s and was his
major contribution to debates surrounding the postmodern turn within contemporary society that came
to prominence at that time. The term is used to highlight chosen or elective social groupings that people
create with one another on the basis of a strong
sense of shared emotion and feeling, often around
a common interest. Maffesoli argues that emotional
solidarity has become the basis for groupings where
there is shared feeling and a coming together around
some form of emotional solidarity and an associated
set of markers of membership and identification
ranging from values to styles of dress to common
enthusiasms and hobbies.
Maffesoli’s approach starts from the principle
concerns of classic French sociology—how to maintain social solidarity in an increasingly individualizing and contractual society where older forms of
belonging and community have been eroded. Emile
Durkheim, the leading contributor to these debates
in the 1890s, had argued that premodern society
was premised on a form of social solidarity that he
described as mechanical solidarity in which social
ties were rooted in religion, custom, and tradition
and were ascribed to individuals by their birth
and social standing within such social conditions.

Modern society, with its complex division of labor
and individualizing tendencies, undermines the conditions of mechanical solidarity, Durkheim believed,
creating a potential condition of normlessness (anomie). The antidote for this, Durkheim argued, was
to promote new forms of social solidarity, what he
called organic solidarity, that were not founded in
custom, tradition, and geographical community but
rather in the modern, contractual forms of association that characterize modern society at its best. He
imagined new forms of association based on civic ties
that he described as corporations.
The position that Maffesoli takes up in relation
to this Durkheimian view is to suggest that modern society has been characterized by mechanical
solidarity too—it is as much ascribed in terms of the
identities and forms of association people have available to them (mostly associated with such things as
work roles, social class, and family tradition). Only
as these ascriptive conditions break down with the
beginnings of a postindustrial, postmodern society
do we see the real beginnings of organic solidarity.
But, Maffesoli believes, this will be based around
emotional communities rather than the more formal
civic associations that Durkheim imagined.
Neo-tribes for Maffesoli are, therefore, emotional
communities that provide people with a sense of
belonging and solidarity in a postmodern society.
In sociological terms, they are achieved rather than
ascribed, meaning that although they can provide a
strong sense of belonging for members and group
solidarity and rules can have a strong hold over
individuals, one chooses to join or leave them in the
way one does not do with family or social class. Neotribes make use of a symbolic language of membership associated with common lifestyle features, styles
of dress, shared interests, and shared values. Typical
examples of neo-tribes are youth groups, lifestyle
enthusiasms, gangs, communes—in fact, any kind
of grouping that is brought together around some
kind of shared passion. There may be a New Age
religious basis to that passion, a political motivation
(often anarchist in character), or a consumer motivation based around common interests, fan culture, or
even brands.
Maffesoli’s arguments were to influence a number of writers who believed that postmodernity was
characterized by a shift away from modern society
in which social class had been the predominant
means of defining a person’s social position and sense

Neo-Tribes

of solidarity and identity. In particular, Zygmunt
Bauman had for some years been making this argument and was one of the first English-speaking social
scientists to advocate the rise of a postmodern society
and to take up some of Maffesoli’s ideas in describing some of its key conditions.
The association of neo-tribes with consumption
and the idea of a consumer society largely came
about because of many of those arguing that we
had moved into a postmodern society and the key
assumption that one of the things that characterized
the shift from modernity to postmodernity was that
the former was very much an industrial society in
which production had become ascendant, whereas
postmodernity was a postindustrial, service-based
society in which consumption was more prominent.
For some, the ideas of postmodernity and consumer
society became synonymous. So if production-based
modern societies were ones where belonging and a
sense of community were encountered through the
social class one was born into, with only a limited
amount of social mobility allowing some to move
out of such conditions, then those arguing that these
conditions had been eroded sought an alternative
basis for understanding group belonging in a postmodern/consumer society. Neo-tribes seemed to fit
the bill. A key characteristic of those advocating a
society characterized by the rise of neo-tribes was the
importance they gave to individual choice, whereby
one got one’s sense of belonging. Unlike class, one
could choose which neo-tribes to belong to, and
when to leave, had the opportunity for multiple
memberships, and so on. Neo-tribes, while they provided a sense of social solidarity and membership,
seemed to also provide an outlet for individual selfexpression that seemed to sit easily with the values
of choice associated with consumerism. Indicative
of this was Rob Shields’s highly influential edited
collection Lifestyle Shopping, which epitomized a
position in which shopping and the emotional communities associated with it rather than work and
social class came to be seen as the defining characteristic of postmodernity.
To develop these arguments, many of those
engaged in these debates in the early 1990s sought
ideas from earlier work to highlight their arguments.
Important in this was the work around rites de passage and liminality by anthropologist Victor Turner,
not least because his concept of communitas seemed
to have much in common with that of neo-tribes.

1035

Communitas is the condition of heightened emotional belonging that people experience when they
are engaged in liminal rites of passage. It is often
associated with acts of transgression associated
with the (temporary) overturning of social structure
within these rites. Because Turner had argued that
a playful contemporary version of these rites, liminod rather than liminal, could be associated with
contemporary forms of antiestablishment politics
(notably the hippy counterculture of the 1960s and
1970s), this seemed to offer much to those advocating the elective nature of social solidarity in a
consumer society. Not only did this lead to the formation of emotional communities, but they often
engaged also in liminod practices and forms of antistructure transgressive behavior and the establishing
of alternative lifestyles.
Others looked back further still and found, in the
analysis of the German youth and cultural movements of the early twentieth century, a term for such
intense emotional communities—Bund (often translated as communion), which described emotional
groupings, often centered on a charismatic leader
(Hetherington 1998). This appeared to have parallels with the term neo-tribe. Indeed, early German
sociologist Herman Schmalenbach, who had first
developed the term Bund into a sociological concept
in 1922 as an alternative to the terms Gemeinschaft
(traditional community) and Gesellschaft (associational society), had gone so far as to suggest that a
new kind of society would come after modern society and the key form of association within it would
be Bund.
The fate of neo-tribes as a term is one that has
waned considerably since the mid-1990s when it
was at the forefront of debates around consumer
society and lifestyle. It is a term that has had some
influence on those working on youth groups for
whom the term subculture is too much associated
with the so-called magical resolution of contradictions in social class within society that young
people experience (Cohen 1972; Hebdige 1979).
It continues to have some resonance too for those
investigating fan cultures and groupings associated
with particular brands. However, most who write
about consumption now would argue that the shift
from conditions of modernity to postmodernity was
significantly overstated. Much of the focus within
debates around consumption since the mid-1990s
has shifted away from themes of individual freedom

1036

Network Society

of expression and transgressive playfulness and
looked more on the continuing structural constraints
that shape people’s lives—not just those of class but,
significantly, ethnicity and gender too, in which freedoms are often restricted or curtailed.
It is still apparent, however, that there are plenty
of empirical instances of people coming together
in groups and creating a shared sense of belonging through emotional ties that they create with
one another. Not only are the same groups such as
youth groups, fan groups, and religious and political
groups that were around 20 years ago still a prominent part of the cultural scene and important as a
basis for social identification around which people
shape their identities, but they have also been joined
by online community construction, the most recent
form of which has been social networking. This is an
emerging and growing form of virtual co-presence
that is often a precondition for social solidarity and
belonging, and particular neo-tribal affiliations as
well as extended friendship networks seem to be a
part of it. Whereas some of the grand claims about
postmodernity, individual freedom of expression,
and transgressive playfulness as defining features of
society associated in debates with neo-tribalism now
seem both dated and overstated, the cultural significance of emotional communities, neo-tribes, communitas, or Bund, however, do not.
Kevin Hetherington
See also Alternative Consumption; Belonging; Consumer
(Freedom of) Choice; Identity; Individualization;
Lifestyle; Political and Ethical Consumption;
Postmodernism

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Thinking Sociologically. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990.
Cohen, Phil. “Sub-cultural Conflict and Working-Class
Community.” Working Papers in Cultural Studies, No.
2, Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, UK, 1972.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture. London: Routledge, 1979.
Hetherington, Kevin. Expressions of Identity. London:
Sage, 1998.
Maffesoli, Michel. The Time of the Tribes. London: Sage,
1996.
Shields, Rob. Lifestyle Shopping. London: Routledge, 1992.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. New York:
Performing Arts Journal, 1982.

NETWORK SOCIETY
The network society is an emerging societal structure where human relationships are increasingly
organized around technologically assisted information “flows.” This spaceless and timeless world without boundaries has transformed elements of human
identity, relationships, consumption, and work.
It is also changing worldwide economies and state
powers. It has created unprecedented opportunities
while sharpening inequalities related to technological
access. Consumer culture both modifies and is modified by the network society.
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, e-mail and Internet
chat rooms, and a host of other activities that mediate interpersonal communication by way of electronic technology are all part of the network society.
In many ways, the network society is the consumer
culture of many portions of the developed world. On
a microlevel, routine solo shopping may turn into a
technologically assisted long-distance interpersonal
interaction. If an American shopper takes a cell
phone picture of a computer that she wants to purchase, e-mails it to her friend in Denmark—whom
she knows only through Facebook and who is also
shopping for computers—and then calls, texts, or
e-mails about the prospective purchase, these friends
have joined technological interaction with consumption. Rather than meeting face-to-face, the shopper
and her friend are connected through technology
even as they go about their other consumption activities. Indeed, their consumption activities are likely
to be modified by their communication. A network
society has also changed the ways in which people
meet each other. For example, in the United States, it
is now estimated that about 30 million people meet
romantically online through paid social networking
sites (Madden 2006), and the number is expected
to increase. As these examples demonstrate, the network society is embedded in various consumption
activities, perhaps inseparably so.
The network society is also a change in which
whole societies operate. For example, monetary systems are so tied into one another electronically that a
problem that occurs in one industry in one country
can and will have an impact on the global economy
because of transaction speeds and electronic wealth
that the network society promotes. Clear evidence of
this has been seen recently in the United States with

Network Society

the housing crisis that had a domino effect throughout the global economy, devaluing the U.S. dollar as
it went.

Network Society Defined
Jan van Dijk, a Dutch sociologist, first used the term
network society in his 1991 book, De Netwerkmaatschappij. He defined a network society as one
that is shaped by the combination of social and
media networks that complement and/or eventually
replace interpersonal interactions. In other words,
people become linked to one another indirectly
through technology, but this technology takes on a
life of its own. It seeps into and changes interpersonal, organizational, and societal structures. van
Dijk thought that a network of digital connections
would replace paper communication mediums, such
as newspapers and letters. This prediction has essentially come to pass as newspapers struggle to survive
and as letter writing has been replaced by e-mail. In
van Dijk’s view, the individual person, organization,
and community are still the basic organizational
units of a society.
Manuel Castells, who is best identified with the
network society, takes a different view. For Castells,
the world has been fundamentally transformed. No
longer are people, groups, and organizations the
basic units of society. They have, instead, been supplanted by “networks.” In a three-volume series,
The Information Age, Castells details a “qualitative
change” in the ways in which humans live in their
society. He argues that while all societies require
information to survive, the phrase information
society is vague and misleading. Instead, the term
network society emphasizes the ways in which information is disseminated. Castells sees technologically
processed information as the “key ingredient” of
modern societies, places where “flows of messages
and images between networks constitute the basic
thread of our social structure” (The Rise of the
Network Society, vol. 1, 1996, 508).
In Castells’s model, key social structures and activities that occur in the society are organized within
electronically mediated networks. These networks
are made up of a set of interconnected nodes. These
nodes may take a variety of forms: from financial
marketplaces to televisions, cell phones, or aggregates of interconnected people such as firms or street
gangs. The important thing to remember is this: the

1037

network is an open, decentralized structure. It can
expand without limits or disruptions. It can add new
nodes as the need arises, as long as they can communicate with the network. In this way, the network
society is a dynamic system, fluidly changing and
adapting to new circumstances. It has not interfered
with capitalism, enhancing it instead and allowing it
to move effortlessly across the globe.

Network Society and the New Economy
As a result of the rise of a network society, Castells
indicates that we now live in a new economy, which
consists of three fundamental features. The first feature is that it is informational. In previous societies,
the ability to work hard or fast helped to determine
productivity. In the new economy, the ability to
generate and process information within the network dictates the productivity and competitiveness
of individuals and organizations. It is also global.
Under globalization, the core strategic activities of
economies—the financial markets, international
trade, science and technology, and so on—work in
real time on a global scale. In other words, a business transaction that takes place in China can have
an instantaneous impact on the stock market in New
York. Finally, the new economy is networked. This
interconnectivity has led to the realization of a new
type of economic organization that Castells refers
to as the network enterprise, a network of firms or
parts of firms where the unit of production is the
business project.
This new economy is, as Castells and others
have argued, a capitalistic one with global interconnections. However, Castells observes that the former rules of capitalism have changed and adapted
according to technologies such as the Internet and
wireless communication that have come online.
Furthermore, global electronic capitalism has broken down boundaries between countries, separating it in many ways from political systems as it
flows into countries that have not necessarily been
capitalistic in the past. China now considers itself
a socialist government with Chinese characteristics.
Importantly, entrepreneurial endeavors have taken
hold throughout China, and it has become a major
player in the world economy. George Ritzer (2000)
observes that the global economy (the “financial
casino”) exemplifies the merger of networks and
information systems:

1038

Network Society

Money won and lost here is now far more important
than that earned through the production process.
Money has come to be separated from production;
we are in a capitalist age defined by the endless
search for money. (585)

The rise of electronic commerce is central to this
new economy and its impact on consumer culture.
Patrick McKeown argues that it is quite possible
that electronic commerce will be part of all commercial transactions in the future. He does not mean
that everyone will make online consumer purchases,
although that will most certainly be a part of it. He
means that the networks that exist within a network
society will assist consumers in making their decisions, determining their needs and wants, and then
locating organizations that can fulfill those desires.
Instead of dealing simply with a single merchant, the
consumer will deal with multiple merchants, gather
information from other customers, and even test
products before even venturing to a traditional store.
Within the network society, the individual who links
to the network through an Internet connection,
cell phone, or other digital means is now a node in
that network.
McKeown notes that a variety of cultural changes
around consumption has occurred in the new economy. People now shop comfortably from their homes
via the Internet. They allow individual companies to
come into their homes to sell goods through various television commercials and websites. Networks
make it possible to work, play, and relate to friends
and relatives without leaving the house.
Additionally, an unprecedented number and variety of people have unprecedented access to information with a click of a button. As of March 2009, an
estimated 1.6 billion people actively accessed the
Internet, a marked increase from the estimated 165
million users in 1999. In 2008, in the United States
alone, the Internet reached 69 percent of households,
and more than 209 million Americans used the
Internet at home or at work. Internet users in the
United States spend about 33 hours a month surfing the World Wide Web at home, plus 80 hours a
month at work. Based on a recent survey, 33 percent
of American consumers identify the Internet as an
essential medium in their lives. Amazon.com, eBay,
and other websites offer popular marketplaces for
selling products. In 2009, eBay’s online trading community had more than 220 million registered users

worldwide and made more than 16 million transactions (Armstrong and Kotler 2009). Online marketing, in fact, is transforming the traditional consumer
culture to a network-based consumer culture.
With such numbers of people accessing information, it is no wonder that global markets are changing in a variety of ways. As more individuals actively
participate in existing financial markets and create
their own markets, the marketplace itself will change.
Additionally, individuals from both developing and
undeveloped nations are participating because infrastructural requirements are changing. A country that,
until now, has not had phone service can acquire it
with the placement of a few cell towers instead of
going through the process of setting telephone poles
and hanging telephone wire across the country. In
other words, global populations can now have access
to the network without too much effort.

Network Society and Culture
Just as the network society has impacted economic
systems, it is also fundamentally shaping and changing cultures. In Castells’s model, humanity has proceeded through three historical evolutionary stages.
First, human culture was at the mercy of nature.
After the industrial revolution, nature was at the
mercy of human culture. Now, in the network society, culture has taken on a life of its own. Now information becomes “the key ingredient of our social
organization and . . . flows of messages and images
between networks constitute the basic thread of our
social structure” (1996, 508).
The Internet, for instance, has transformed
cultures as it has spread globally. Like the new
economy, culture, too, has become informational,
global, and networked; the expression of culture is
limited only by the technology, which appears to
have subsumed it. Like the network society itself,
culture has become an open system. Mass media, for
example, is no longer limited to a traditional television viewership. While a news network like Cable
News Network (CNN) can now reach an audience
through a traditional television set in someone’s
living room, it can also reach its viewers through
online webcasting, through the individual Facebook
pages of its anchors, through its CNN and affiliated
websites, through Twitter, Flickr, and e-mail alerts
as well as other channels. But this media is also
not a one-way experience. Take the example of the

Network Society

CNN iReporter. Now the audience can potentially
produce and upload its own news to CNN. People
can also respond to stories. The CNN iReport phenomenon also shows the power of the new mass
media system that is only possible as a result of the
networked society.
A contemporary example of the network society’s
fluidity is the 2009 postelection conflicts in Iran.
After the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, voters who accused the government of election fraud
protested in the streets. Ahmadinejad’s government
limited the protestors’ ability to spread information
through the Internet, television, and other devices. It
also limited worldwide access to the protests by prohibiting journalists from covering them. However,
the world was connected to the conflict. Information
continued to flow because cell phone technology had
spread throughout the country. Anyone with a cell
phone constituted a node in the network. In this case,
individuals took pictures and movies of the protests
and sent them out into the network, where they were
then picked up by news agencies, blogs, and citizens
across the globe.
The network society also impacts other realms
of cultural exchange besides the news. As Castells
argues, the inclusiveness and flexibility of this new
system of symbolic exchange allows for differentiated and multichannel expression, but most cultural
expressions are bounded and supported by the network society and its technologies, constituting what
Castells calls real virtuality. In other words, cultural
expression is structured and shaped within the network society. The ways in which individuals relate
to the world are shaped by the technologies that they
have surrounded themselves with. We see evidence
of this in the language shortcuts people take within
technology, as in the shortened symbols for such
phrases as by the way (BTW) and best friend forever
(BFF). We also see evidence of this in the methods
individuals use to interact with others. For example,
students leave the classroom and immediately make
phone calls or check text messages instead of talking
with the other students around them. Additionally,
people on Facebook and MySpace collect electronic
friends as a badge of honor, but there is little interaction with many of those so-called friends. It is the
technology that provides the symbols and icons
that individuals now use to think about and express
culture rather than only human interactions in the
physical world. This is what Castells means by the

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real virtuality. Culture comes from virtual experiences rather than the real experience.
Finally, the network society has the potential to
sharpen sociocultural and economic inequalities. For
example, most of the world’s citizens do not have
access to the Internet. The Internet has penetrated
only 24.7 percent of the entire world; of those
with access, Africa has 6.7 percent, Asia 18.5 percent, and North America 73.9 percent (http://www
.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). If being part of
the culture means being part of a network, then those
who do not have access become disadvantaged in
both a material and a virtual sense.

Future Research
Many aspects of the content, effects, and implications of network society have yet to be discovered,
theorized, and explored. For example, what quality
of messages reaches individuals through network
society? Some have observed we now have unheralded opportunity for the dissemination of differentiated messages, whereas others have argued that the
messages are similar and that information is suppressed. For instance, in the United States, not only
does CNN engage in providing news but so do Fox
News, Microsoft/National Broadcasting Company
(MSNBC), and a host of other network and cable
news programs. However, these channels are owned
by a small concentration of media conglomerates that
have control over what messages are presented to the
public. On the other hand, blogs, wikis, Twitter, and
other means controlled by individuals may allow for
diversity in such messages.
What effect will network society ultimately have
on individuals and societies? Castells has observed
that the network society destroys human society
because it separates “power from political representation, production from consumption, information from communication” (Nyíri 2004, 10). How
will local cultures, political powers, and economic
systems change as the network society continues to
develop? In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues
that social capital structures are diminishing within
the United States as people increasingly look after
themselves and do things on their own. To what
extent is this phenomenon exacerbated by the network society as individuals, through technology,
become increasingly set apart from others by the very
technology that connects them? And what will be the

1040

Neuromarketing

effect? For Putnam, a loss of social capital will have a
corrosive effect on democracy itself.
Additionally, how does the Internet transform
consumer culture, particularly as it pertains to the
individual? Increasingly, individuals are turning to
the Internet to create a presentation of self that associates them with various signs, symbols, and artifacts
culled from popular culture. How will this continue
to play out as the network society becomes more
fully integrated with society as a whole?
Finally, how will researchers analyze and explore
virtual networks? Will traditional forms of research
methodologies be sufficient? Rob Kozinets provides
somewhat of an answer with the adaptation of
ethnographic methods into netnography, a method
that provides insight into online communities. This
method is essentially a hybrid using traditional methodology but allowing for the differences associated
with online data collection and interpretation. If we
continue to adapt other forms of data collection and
other research methodologies into the network society, how then do we account for such essential items
as reliability and validity? These and other research
questions abound within the network society.
Aubrey R. Fowler, Jie Gao, and Susan L. Wortmann
See also Capitalism; E-Commerce; Globalization;
Information Society; Information Technology; Internet;
Social Networks; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An
Introduction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009.
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age. Vol. 1, The Rise of
the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997.
Castells, Manuel. End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell,
1998.
Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Kozinets, Rob. “The Field behind the Screen: Using
Netnography for Marketing Research in Online
Communities.” Journal of Marketing Research
39 (February 2002): 61–72.
Madden, Mary. “Romance Blossoms on the Internet, but
There Is Still Public Concern about the Safety of Online
Dating.” PewInternet.org. (Press Release, under “Online
Dating,” March 5, 2006). http://www.pewinternet.org/
Press-Releases/2006/Romance-blossoms-on-the-internet-

but-there-is-still-public-concern-about-the-safety-ofonline-dating.aspx (accessed August 28, 2009).
McKeown, Patrick G. Information Technology and the
Networked Economy. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt
College, 2001.
Mohammed, Rafi A., Robert J. Fisher, Bernard J. Jaworski,
and Aileen M. Cahill. Internet Marketing: Building
Advantage in a Networked Economy. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2001.
Nyíri, J. C. “Review of Castells, The Information Age.” In
Manuel Castells, edited by F. Webster and B. Dimitriou,
5–34. London: Sage, 2004.
Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival
of American Community. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2000.
Ritzer, George. Sociological Theory. New York: McGrawHill, 2000.
van Dijk, Jan. “The One-Dimensional Network Society of
Manuel Castells.” New Media and Society 1, no. 1
(1999): 127–138.
van Dijk, Jan. The Network Society: Social Aspects of New
Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.

NEUROMARKETING
Neuromarketing can be defined as the obtaining
of information useful for marketers by subjecting
individuals to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other similar methods of studying
automatic responses in the brain to certain stimuli,
generally involving products and brands that are part
of consumer culture. The term seems to have been
first used by Ale Smidts, a marketing research scholar
at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, around
2002. There are questions about the origins of the
method, but some researchers suggest it began when
Gerry Zaltman, a marketing professor at Harvard
University, started scanning people’s brains to gain
insights into consumer preferences.
Some scholars consider neuromarketing to be a
branch of neuroeconomics, and others describe it
as a part of decision neuroscience. There are neuroeconomics centers at such universities as George
Mason University, MIT, Duke University, and the
California Institute of Technology, and a Society for
Neuroeconomics that was incorporated in 2005.
Neuromarketing is a means of studying consumer preferences and buying patterns by examining automatic neurological responses—that is,

Neuromarketing

which parts of people’s brains are activated due to
increased oxygenated blood flow—when they are
shown images of products or other material related
to consumer culture. This method avoids problems
caused by asking people to verbalize their feelings
about products and brands, since their responses to
these questions are not always reliable. On the other
hand, there is the question of how much the fMRI
machines, which are noisy and which stress people
being tested to some degree, may have an impact on
the brain’s functioning. There is also the matter of
how marketers translate the physical responses of
our brains, as discovered by fMRI, into campaigns
and advertising that will be effective. The theory is
that when researchers understand more about how
the brain functions and can see what responses the
brain has to certain stimuli, they can use knowledge
of the emotional responses people make to images
of products and brands to figure out better ways of
shaping consumer decision making.
An important experiment in the development of
neuromarketing occurred in 2003 when Professor
Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, used fMRI to
find out why Pepsi won blind taste tests although
people generally said they preferred the taste of
Coca-Cola. Montague discovered that the medial
prefrontal cortex of people being scanned was activated (lit up brightly on the fMRI) when they were
told they were drinking Coca-Cola, due in some
measure, it is assumed, to the effectiveness of CocaCola’s marketing and advertising.
Neuromarketing techniques are now being
employed in many countries. In Oxford, England,
a company named Neurosense has used neuromarketing to determine how viewers respond to
commercials at different times of the day. There
are numerous researchers in the field such as
BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group in Atlanta;
a neuromarketing consulting company in Vienna,
Neuroconsult; a company in Los Angeles, FKF,
that uses neuromarketing to study political decision making; researchers at the Social Cognitive
Neuroscience Laboratory at the California Institute
of Technology; a neuroeconomics lab at Stanford;
the Center for Neuroeconomics in the Netherlands;
SalesBrain in San Francisco; and companies in
many other countries using fMRI for a variety of
purposes.

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Neuromarketing is also a factor in political campaigns. Research has indicated that many people’s
political affiliations are more or less “hardwired”
and that they do not, generally speaking, respond to
logical arguments when making choices for political offices. It has also been found that parts of the
brain are activated differently in Democrats and
Republicans when shown images of the September
11 World Trade Center disaster.
Neuromarketers face the problem of how to translate the physical responses of our brains into marketing and advertising campaigns that will be effective.
Just because a certain part of a person’s brain is activated when shown an image of a product or a brand
doesn’t mean that that person has positive feelings
about it or will want to purchase that product.
A study by Brian Knutson and colleagues found that
“specific patterns of brain activation predict purchasing” (2007, 153), but there are a number of variables
that can adversely affect things such as high prices.
Some marketing scholars and practitioners regard
neuromarketing as one more fad sweeping the industry, whose influence and impact will be short-lived.
Whether neuromarketing becomes an important tool
in marketing (with Orwellian implications involving
some kind of mind control) or is just a passing fad
remains to be seen. Another problem is that neuromarketing is relatively expensive to use.
Finally, there is the matter of ethical questions
involved with using the kind of information obtained
in fMRI studies to persuade people to purchase products and services or to vote for certain politicians
or political parties by hitting their “buy buttons.”
Some psychologists consider neuroeconomics and
neuromarketing research to be unethical, though the
American Psychological Association accepts neuromarketing research as acceptable and not something
that will be detrimental to people’s well-being.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Advertising; Coca-Cola; Consumer Demand;
Markets and Marketing; Preference Formation;
Well-Being

Further Readings
Knutson, Brian, Scott Rick, G. Elliott Wimmer, Drazen
Prelec, and George Loewenstein. “Neural Predictors of
Purchases.” Neuron 53 (2007): 147–156.
McCarthy, Terry. “Getting Inside Your Head.” Time,
October 24, 2005, pp. 95–97.

1042

New Right

Renvoisé, Patrick, and Christophe Morin. Neuromarketing:
Understanding the “Buy Buttons” in Your Customer’s
Brain. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007.
Szegedy-Maszak, Marianne. “Mysteries of the Mind.” U.S.
News & World Report, February 28, 2005, pp. 53–61.

NEW RIGHT
The New Right is used to describe a broad set of policies that are generally right-wing and emphasize the
value of the free market economically and politically.
They tend to call for the privatization of industries
and welfare systems as well as the rolling back of the
welfare state.

Principles
The main principles of New Right philosophy were
set out by Friedrich Hayek (1944) and Milton
Friedman (1962). The New Right is interpreted
slightly differently in each country, and some examples are set out below. Generally, though, it is closely
related to the development of consumerism and
characterized by those political parties and governments that are proponents of individualism and
challenge the social democratic consensus of postwar welfare states.
The relationship of the New Right to consumerism is strongly linked to the principles of allowing consumers free choice and therefore dictates
the economic structure of a society—that demand
should create supply. It therefore contrasts somewhat with the basic tenets of consumerism, which is
usually interpreted as people purchasing goods and
consuming materials in excess of their basic needs.
For example, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative
government in the United Kingdom in the 1980s
emphasized seeking “value for money” in government expenditure, setting up market-style arrangements for purchasing and providing services at the
local level, and treating users of social services as
consumers.

The New Right Internationally
In Australia, the New Right emerged in the 1970s
and 1980s and advocated more socially conservative policies, in contrast to the “Old Right,” which in
turn had advocated economically conservative policies. The prime minister at the time, John Howard,

implemented some New Right reforms such as
partial privatization, but these, like those adopted in
New Zealand, were not wholesale, as they were in
the United Kingdom and the United States, which
have historically been the main proponents of New
Right policies.
In contrast with countries such as the United
Kingdom where the New Right is associated with
Conservative parties, in New Zealand, the Labour
Party adopted New Right policies while simultaneously pursuing more liberal policies, such as decriminalizing homosexuality and implementing equal pay
legislation. In 1987, the Labour Party won the election with the majority of voters approving of such
synthesis. After this election, however, New Zealand
began to pursue privatization of state departments,
following in the United Kingdom’s Conservative
Thatcher government. Eventually, these policies
began to be opposed by political parties such as the
Alliance Party, who joined with the Greens and others who were against New Right economics.
In the United Kingdom, the emergence of the New
Right in the early 1980s was accompanied by commentaries on the family, crime, and education. It can
be argued that Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister between 1979 and 1991, was much influenced by
both Hayek’s work and the close working relationship shared with Ronald Reagan, U.S. president from
1981 to 1989, whose thinking was similarly right
wing. This form of Conservatism has since become
known as Thatcherism. The New Right intended to
dismantle the welfare state, which they considered
had allowed some to become overly dependent on
it, as well as privatization of nationalized industries
and the reduction of power that trades unions had
over employers and the economy (Hills and Stewart
2005).
The New Right considered it particularly important to target trades unions as they restrict unemployed people from offering to work at a wage lower
than the one determined at what the New Right sees
as “the natural rate.” They therefore argued that
this power needs to be reduced to ensure that the
labor market as a whole becomes more competitive
and the natural rate of unemployment may then be
reduced. When Thatcher was replaced by the next
Conservative prime minister, John Major, in 1991,
there was growing disillusionment with such policies as economic monetarism and their effect on the
economy (Bochel et al. 2005).

New Right

In the United States, the New Right has a slightly
more diverse meaning: historically, two distinct
Conservative movements exist, and they differ from
what was termed the Old Right, which was characterized by policies of nonintervention. The first
New Right in the United States occurred around
1955–1964 and was characterized by “fusionism,”
representing classic liberal economics along with traditional social values and an anticommunist stance
(Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson,
eds.: American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia,
2006). What is described as the second New Right
occurred from around 1964 to the present date, and
this had strong links with nationalism and religion.
These policies contributed to Ronald Reagan’s being
elected president in 1980, and he and Margaret
Thatcher worked closely together in implementing
similar New Right policies.
In Germany, the Neue Rechte (literally, new right)
consists of two parts: the Jungkonservative (young
conservatives), who search for followers in the civically minded part of the population; and the National
revolutionäre (national revolutionists), who are looking for followers in the ultraright part of the German
population and use the rhetorics of right-wing politicians, such as Gregor and Otto Strasser. It is also
worth noting that there can be a need to distinguish
between the market in goods and the market in labor;
for example, newer additions to the European Union
can sometimes be committed to blocking the flow of
labor to preserve nationality such as in the sensitive
issue of immigration.

New Right in Practice
New Right theorists and politicians have strong and
sometimes controversial views on areas of society
such as the family. They are proponents of the nuclear
family (a married man and woman and their biological children living together) and believe that there is
a “breakdown” in family structure as two-parent
families decrease in number and lone-parent families
increase (9 percent of families in the United States
are headed by lone parents [Bergman 2007] and
22 percent of families in the United Kingdom [Hills
and Stewart 2005]). Criticisms of the New Right’s
view of the family are many, including placing the
blame on single parents for their status and ignoring
the fact that victims of domestic violence and child
abuse would be substantially harmed if forced to

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remain in violent relationships just to avoid lone parenthood and potentially becoming financially dependent on the state.
A controversial New Right American theorist is
Charles Murray, writing in the 1990s. He linked lone
parenthood, crime, and deviance to what he termed
the underclass. He claimed that due to the increasing number of lone parents, the lack of a positive
male role model, particularly for young males, means
they increasingly turn to crime. Murray also believed
their mothers were generally dependent on welfare,
which gave the young males little incentive to work
themselves, so they would repeat the cycle and continue to be dependent on the welfare state. There are
many criticisms of Murray, including research by the
Children’s Society that clearly finds that the family
structure within which children live is not an indicator of happiness or welfare dependence and that
a positive male role model can be anyone from the
child’s family or friend network.
The Thatcher government of the United Kingdom
took Murray’s findings into account and, allied with
its own New Right philosophy, implemented a series
of reductions to welfare benefits for lone parents.
They believed, according to Gordon Hughes and
Gail Lewis, this was an “unproductive sector,” draining state resources and initiatives. The Child Poverty
Action Group found that one in four children from
all families were living in poverty in the United
Kingdom in 1984.

Summary
New Right policies are characterized worldwide
by economic ideas of individuality, consumerism,
and removal of welfare state dependency systems.
They continue to be controversial and their success
debatable.
Gill Gillespie
See also Consumer Demand; Consumer Regulation;
Consumer Sovereignty; Families; Political Science;
State Provisioning

Further Readings
Bergman, M. Single-Parent Households Showed Little
Variation since 1994. Washington, DC: US Census
Bureau, 2007.
Blakemore, Ken, and Edwin Griggs. Social Policy.
Berkshire, UK: Open University, 2007.

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Nostalgia

Bochel, Hugh M., Catherine Bochel, Robert Page, and
Robert Sykes. Social Policy: Issues and Developments.
London: Prentice-Hall, 2005.
Child Poverty Action Group. Changed Priorities Ahead:
Evidence to the Review of Benefits for Children and
Young People. London: Child Poverty Action Group,
1984.
Children’s Society, The. A Report into Fatherhood. London:
The Children’s Society, 2010.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Gray, John. Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government
and the Common Environment. London: Routledge,
1993.
Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1944.
Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
New York: Free Press, 1994.
Hills, John, and Kitty Stewart, eds. A More Equal Society?
Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2005.
Hughes, Gordon, and Gail Lewis. Unsettling Welfare: The
Reconstruction of Social Policy. London: Routledge,
1998.
Southgate, Troy. Tradition and Revolution. Aarhus,
Denmark: Integral Tradition, 2007.

NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia is commonly understood to be a condition of mourning or yearning for a past when
things were better or more certain or simpler:
when, in short, today’s nostalgic person would
not have been beset by the troubles of the present
and would have been all the more content for it.
Nostalgia, as a human condition, presupposes that
the past has gone, along with those times and particulars, people and places, mourned and missed.
To live in the present as if in the past would be
better termed as anachronistic and gives rise to a
melancholy or sentimental disposition; one experiences nostalgia, for better or worse, freely or otherwise, from a later point of one’s own narrative.
One “looks back” and revisits the past so that
one can then look forward again and take leave
of the past. Attempts to undo or “cure” nostalgia through the re-creation of the past in the present are made in vain. So re-creating your parent’s
cooking long after leaving home (despite having

subsequently lost a taste for it) or flicking through
the pages of Tatler magazine long after you yourself were a debutant or attending a religious service
(even a service conducted in Latin) long after abandoning the practices of religion are all enjoyable
and harmless nostalgic practices.
Yet the condition of nostalgia, if overindulged, can
lead to an unhealthy obsession with this past at the
expense of the need to live in the present. Everyone
enjoys periods of revelry, a tendency to reminisce
and to return to the experiences of and so become
reacquainted with one’s younger self—in the sense of
the ideals, hopes, and aspirations from earlier times,
even the more carnal and questionable desires that
have since been grown out of or cast aside. To lose
touch with one’s younger self is considered to be at
the root of psychological problems and often the
foundation of urban alienation, not least in respect of
the mass migrations from open rural or semi-urban
spaces to the confines of the slum dwellings that
proliferate around the majority of urban conurbations (cf. Davis 2007) and the resultant eradication
of traces of an earlier existence. The profound psychological impact of being wrenched out of one way
of life naturally gives rise to an attempt to deny the
trauma of the present and to focus instead on a time
of earlier harmony.
In psychoanalytical terms, the person who denies
traumatic events in his or her own history (e.g., the
loss of loved ones, sexual assault, or the untimely
destruction of the family unit) and so suppresses
grief through a refusal of nostalgia becomes open to
a “return of the repressed.” The sudden reemergence
of the troubled personal history forces the subject to
belatedly deal with difficult reactions and emotions,
often in ways detrimental to his or her own interests. The reductive characterization typical in much
British television comedy where the class rebel is
revealed to be of middle class stock (or the pedantic
stickler for the mores and social codes of the bourgeoisie who turns out to be of humble origins) is
effectively predicated along the lines advanced by
Sigmund Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious: defensive, deceptive behavior indicative of unresolved feelings about, or a failure to
comes to terms with, the past. Thus, grief and grieving can be interpreted as a way of allowing nostalgia
to proliferate, not least in respect of the inevitable
erosion of the family unit.

Nostalgia

The emotional investment in the past, or one’s
own past, can be heightened so as to shore up the
connections to the familiar and to a sense of oneself,
when the person is besieged by the unfamiliar—the
confusions and new paradigms of modern existence.
An emotional investment in the past increasingly
becomes the foundation for psychological wholeness
in a fast-paced, even disappointing, adult world. And
nostalgia, rather than a retreat to the past, can be said
to find in the past the answers to the present. The perspective that arises from framing the past in the present dissipates the magnitude of the new. In J. M. W.
Turner’s celebrated 1838 painting, The Fighting
Téméraire Tugged to Her Berth to Be Broken Up, the
once revered battleship of the Trafalgar campaign is
seen approaching the yard where it will be dismantled. The uncouth tug boat, with its dark plume of
smoke (the pollution of the ascendant industrial age),
cannot detract from the deathbed transfiguration
Turner affords the Téméraire: the setting sun lights
the greasy London water and low estuary clouds
with a golden orange while the Téméraire seems to
fade from view, as if a ghost ship, against the diminished horizon of blue sky. For Turner, the wreckage
of former civilizations casts doubt on the certainties
of the new, emergent empires.

Nostalgia and Consumer Culture
Nostalgia is readily subject to a consumer culture
that capitalizes on the promises of delivering happiness. The suggested nostalgic properties of a consumer item presents the product as speaking directly
to one’s memories and emotions rather than, as
Grant McCracken argues from an historical perspective, on the origins of modern consumerism, seeking
to shape those memories and emotions for the ends
of further commercial exploitation.
Nostalgia has emerged as a preeminent, if not
the preeminent, commercial category. Nostalgia is
the goal of market research toward targeted advertising—the way of establishing the language that is
most familiar and most welcome and believable for
the key consumers. Ultimately, for Colin Campbell,
a sentimentality pervades the presentation of new
commercial products, even at their most modish and
novel (i.e., those seemingly without nostalgia): their
promises are founded on older notions of enjoyment
and fulfillment and break with a Protestant tradition

1045

read as relatively ascetic, comfortless, and lacking in
the commercial orientation of feelings.
With advances in visual technology comes the
opportunity not only to summon up the past but
also to summon up the imagined idyll of the past
with ever great verisimilitude. Thus, Victorian photographers would specialize in touching up photographs of the deceased (rouging the lips, adding
pallor to the cheeks), and Ridley Scott’s celebrated
1973 television commercial for Hovis bread (a vision
of a bygone age in Northern Britain with cobbled
streets, flat caps, a boy on a bicycle, a dialect and
parochial voice-over) is rendered in a suitably fauxantiquated aesthetic. Scott’s images are delivered as
black-and-whiteness-in-color: homely and earthly—
that is, organic—browns. This existence may have
gone, the advertisement intimates, but its essential
healthiness (specifically, wheat germ) remains available; Hovis bread is still “as good for you today as
it’s always been.”
The emergence of social networking sites on the
Internet enabled and finessed reunification with old
school friends or old friends in general. Access to the
Friends Reunited search engine and database was
offered for a fee, and with this came the advertised
ability to hold back the years and reengage with those
very human emotions of actual friendship. However,
in reality it could be said that Friends Reunited merely
offered the chance to live in a state of nostalgia—to
renew friendships virtually rather than actually and
to ensure the nostalgia hit remained confined to the
e-mail in-box.
A further commercialization of nostalgia has
been particularly apparent for the generation born
to the baby boomer generation—those who lived
to reap the benefits of the favorable economic climate generated by their parents, via higher levels
of education and health, the proliferation of consumables, and without (for those in Western Europe
at least) military conscription. Formative cultural
experiences, particularly forms of popular culture,
are endlessly recycled: pop groups re-form and tour,
favorite television shows are released on DVD or
are remade, varieties of fondly remembered candies
become available once again, “retrogamers” replay
old video games, CD compilations of music from
recent eras predominate in both homes and (now
that this generation are themselves parents) in the
restaurants and shops frequented, original albums

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Novelty

are digitally restored, repackaged, and reissued—
that is, are to be re-bought. In the former East Bloc,
the phenomenon of Ostalgie has occurred—a longing for the life of East Bloc state socialism before the
“advances” and freedoms of 1989 and the close of
the Cold War.

Nostalgia and Postmodernism
New waves of nostalgic revelry come to form a continuum of nostalgia; the nostalgic discourse replicates
itself until—to use semiotic terms—its signifiers come
to exist without a recollection or historical sense of
what it was that is actually being signified. A certain
aesthetic style speaks of a nostalgia that is, if considered even in passing, entirely ahistorical and can be
consumed independently of any emotional connection to or investment in the times and places to which
the style alludes. Such postmodern nostalgia was
identified by Fredric Jameson as the nostalgia mode,
as seen in operation in the film Body Heat (it can
also be said to be visible in the films of David Lynch
that fetishize 1950s small town American life). This
visual discourse of nostalgia, which ranges freely and
ahistorically across any number of periods and fashions, arguably works to construct a shared sense of
belonging from scratch, in and for an evermore alienating and depersonalized world.
Benjamin Halligan
See also Advertising; Authenticity; Collecting and
Collectibles; Inventing Tradition; Memory; Novelty;
Postmodernism; Retro

Further Readings
Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and
Nostalgia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic
Books, 2008.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2007.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious. London: Penguin Books, 1994. First
published 1905.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1992.
McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer
Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988.

NOVELTY
There are numerous competing views about the
development of consumer society (see, for example,
Brewer and Porter 1993). Yet most researchers agree
that novelty products have played a central role in
shaping it. One view has it that the roots of consumer
society can be traced back to Elizabethan England
of the second half of the sixteenth century, when a
large amount of novelties appeared on the market.
Furniture, for example, began to be valued more for
its novelty value than its patina. Although novelties
had existed for a long time, their value as an organizing force of an economy became recognized in
the early years of industrialization, most notably by
Adam Smith.
The latter half of the nineteenth century marks
another milestone in the evolution of consumer
society. This was when mass production and mass
distribution were made possible by organizational
innovations like the assembly line and by better
transport connections. It was also at this time that
the first department stores opened in France and
England, and the first world’s fairs were organized
expressly to display novelty products.
Early department stores were excellent showcases
for novelties. They allowed all social classes free and
equal entry to see industrially manufactured products.
Émile Zola’s famous novel Au Bonheur des Dames
(1883) describes this transitional era from the viewpoint of a Parisian woman. Almost at the same time,
the form and idea of the department store emerged
at the fringes of Europe, for instance, the opening of
the Stockmann’s Department Stories in Stockholm
(1843) and in Helsinki (1862). G. F. Stockmann,
originally a German merchant from Lübeck, would
subsequently sell both the first cars and the first bicycles in Finland. After the Second World War, popular
toys such as Meccano sets, Lego bricks, and Barbie
Dolls were first available at Stockmann’s, and also
the first practical RCA television set was introduced
there in 1954 to the Finnish public. Today, the total
amount of items at Stockmann’s in Helsinki is about
five hundred thousand.
At about the same time as department stores were
conjuring a new world of commercial dreams, the
first extravagant world’s fairs were held to exhibit
novelties to the general public. Alexander Graham
Bell’s telephone, for instance, was first presented at

Novelty

the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia—although it
failed to attract much attention at the time. From
the start, world’s fairs emphasized the theme of technological progress and the divide between old and
new. The atmosphere of a forward-looking society
culminated in the twentieth century when Chicago’s
A Century of Progress fair in 1933 and New York’s
The World of Tomorrow in 1939 displayed groundbreaking novelties such as the tape recorder, television, washing machine, nylon, and asbestos. They
introduced to the public whole new worlds of fashion and style, modeled along the principles of art
deco and streamlined design and new lifestyles such
as a mobile, car-based future.
As industrial production scales expanded, the gap
between consumers and producers started to widen.
Partly to relieve this tension, large companies began to
invest in market research and advertising. Market segmentation and product differentiation prompted them
to produce specific commodities for specific customer
groups. Particularly during the Great Depression
(1929–1939), the creation of new markets and new
needs developed into an industry of its own. New professionals—advertisers, market researchers, designers,
and fashion gurus—were hired to work for giant companies. New needs, both genuine and artificial, were
produced and products became still more diversified.
According to prominent economists Joseph
Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith, the above
trends of market making signaled a shift toward a
new era of monopolistic competition. More recent
research has similarly explained the social transition
by the surge of novelty products and quickening speed
of market changes. Frederick Jameson, Alvin Toffler,
Michael Porter, John Urry, and many other frequently
quoted scholars have increasingly shifted the research
interest from production to consumption, from collectives to individuals, and from subsistence to style.
These portrayals of the new era, although drawn
from widely different sources, all assign a central
explanatory task to novelties in the fast-changing
consumer market. Products are diversifying at an
accelerating pace, product variety is growing, and
consumers are fragmenting into smaller and smaller
groups. A noteworthy point is that the claims describing the transition provide scant empirical evidence of
increased product variety. Market differentiation and
volatility are taken as purely external factors enforcing new patterns of more general development, note
Paula Hirst and Jonathan Zeitlin.

1047

In fact, surprisingly little empirical research attention is addressed to novelty products outside of historical study. Economics, sociology, and marketing
research, for example, have approached novelties
primarily as experiential phenomena and only secondly as historical or material changes—let alone
focusing on entire product ecologies. The narrow
perspective may be partly related to the conventional
Oxford English Dictionary definition of a novelty
as “something new, not previously experienced,
unusual, or unfamiliar.” Sociologist Colin Campbell
(1992, Chap. 3, 55) correspondingly argued that the
term novelty is purely experiential: “more likely to be
a judgment which an individual makes on the basis
of previous experience and is largely unrelated to any
given characteristic of the product itself.”
In recent years, innovation research has especially
challenged the assumption that novelties should be
examined purely as experiential or culturally constructed phenomena. As research focus has shifted
to consumer-driven innovations and whole systems
of innovations, companies have grown increasingly
preoccupied with the need to create radical, discontinuous, generational, or breakthrough innovations.
At the same time, it is increasingly understood that to
understand radical product innovation from consumers’ points of view, one should understand the ways
disruptive innovations change social practices—the
way we live, work, and learn: “Really substantive
innovation—the telephone, the copier, the automobile, the personal computer, or the internet—is quite
disruptive, drastically altering social practices” (John
Seely Brown, in Chesbrough, 2003, ix).
Moving the focus in the future to the dynamics of
social practices will change the approach to novelties
within social and economic research. A practice-oriented
viewpoint will direct theoretical research interest to
material artifacts and dynamic systems of practices.
At the same time, it is becoming equally important to
empirically operationalize the pace of change.
The extent to which product variety increases
or decreases in time is surely an empirical, possibly
even an unsolved, question. In present-day markets,
product variety can increase and decrease simultaneously depending on the selected point of view, product group, and product life span. Thus, accounting
for changes in product diversity or variety obviously
involves many problems. For instance, are all eight
automobile type models or all three hundred shampoo brands really different products?

1048

Novelty

From an individual consumer’s standpoint,
product variety can grow for a plurality of reasons:
increased personal resources (available time, finances,
mobility, etc.), opening of new types of outlets, or
expanded product mix in existing outlets. It is possible that at the same time technological product variety actually decreases. (The variety encountered by
the individual consumer may therefore widen even if
overall variety in the market narrows.) Increasingly,
international commerce might reduce the differences
in product variety between cultures and artifacts,
although the overall supply within individual cultures
and individual consumers might be growing (e.g.,
entertainment and toy industry products). Therefore,
it is debatable to what extent the fact of the situation
in Finland—every day, one new product appears in
the grocery shops, while every third day, one product
disappears—reflects growth of real variety.
One distinct qualitative change in product variety
over time is the shift from household raw materials
to end products. This can be seen by examining the
100,000 articles in the sales catalogs of U.S. mail
order enterprises during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Initially, mail order businesses and
department stores sold mainly various “intermediate inputs” with a clear emphasis on clothes and
cooking: fabrics for clothing and apparatuses for
storing and preparing food. A bicycle, for instance,
represented a long-term investment with self-evident
inclusion of repair kits and spare parts—unlike in
our day, when the (Western) life span of a bicycle is
something like a few years.
Increase in product variety among different product groups seems to observe an interesting regularity:
The early stages of the product life cycle represents a
period of fermentation during which product variety
grows explosively—take automobiles in the 1900s,
television sets in the 1920s, or microcomputers in the
1980s. After some time, a “dominant design” of the
product emerges, which the product architecture in
this group starts to follow, making products resemble
each other more and more. The development of such
standards and architectures that govern the market
is explained by both technological and competitive
factors, note Philip Anderson and Mike Tushman.
In the early 1900s, both the Western business
world and intelligentsia widely agreed that consumer
society had reached its limits: Since all the important
innovations to ease everyday life have already been
made, the fruits of increased productivity will be
used in the future for increased leisure instead of for
developing new products. It was predicted that in a

hundred years’ time, the workweek would be only
eight hours. Similar claims are made nearly a century
later by many of the apostles of the end of labor (e.g.,
Jeremy Rifkin), who felt that the needs of Western
man had reached saturation point. In light of the history of consumer society, this is a daring forecast.
The past few centuries can surely be described as an
era of innovations and novelty products and insatiable needs. Economic growth and increased productivity have, first and foremost, been manifested as
a flood of novelties—and only secondly as increased
leisure time.
Mika Pantzar
See also Department Stores; Desire; Innovation Studies;
Markets and Marketing; Mass Production and
Consumption; Modernization Theory; Postindustrial
Society; World Exhibitions

Further Readings
Anderson Philip, and Mike Tushman. “Technological
Discontinuities and Dominant Design: A Cyclical Model
of Technological Change.” Administrative Science
Quarterly 35 (1990): 604–633.
Brewer, John, and Ray Porter, eds. Consumption and the
World of Goods. London: Routledge, 1993.
Campbell, Colin. “The Desire for the New: Its Nature and
Social Location as Presented in Theories of Fashion and
Modern Consumerism.” Chap. 3 in Consuming
Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic
Spaces, edited by Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch.
London: Routledge, 1992.
Chesbrough, Henry. Open Innovation: The New
Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
Cross, Gary. The Making of Consumer Culture. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Hirst, Paula, and Jonathan Zeitlin. “Flexible
Specialization versus Post-Fordism: Theory, Evidence
and Policy Implications.” Economy and Society 20,
no. 1 (1991): 1–56.
McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer
Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988.
Pantzar, Mika. “The Growth of Product Variety—a
Myth?” Journal of Consumer Studies and Home
Economics 16 (1992): 345–362.
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the
American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon, 1989.
Williams, Rosalind. Dream Worlds Mass Consumption in
Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.

O
OBESITY
Given the large element of chance determining the
constancy of food supplies, many traditional societies have regarded famine as an event sent by God to
punish the wicked (Clarkson and Crawford 2001).
More recently, a view has emerged that the overcoming of food scarcity is an evolutionary marker
of the human condition, revealing tensions between
food availability, affordability, and inequality. For
most of human history, obesity has been an irrelevance, being a physiological characteristic limited to
the wealthy. The fact that a situation of mass population overweight, if not clinical obesity, has now
achieved normalcy in many societies raises questions not only for public health but also for contemporary culture.
The scientific debate around food availability
was instigated in the late-eighteenth century by
British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus.
Malthus examined the relationship between food
production and population change, arguing that the
human population size would grow until checked by
events such as famine, disease, or war. More recently,
Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel documented what he
described as humanity’s struggle to defeat undernutrition and the associated burdens of disease and low
economic growth.
In fact, the predictive elements of both analyses
have been frustrated by later events. In defiance of
Malthus, agricultural productivity kept pace with
population growth, increasingly rendering famine

more a localized rather than universal human condition. While over eight hundred thousand people
remain undernourished worldwide, the majority of
the world’s population is adequately fed (Devereux
2000). Fogel’s studies focused on the physiological
and economic benefits of improving nutrition, but
the evident advantages of food abundance have now
tipped the other way. The World Health Organization
(WHO) has predicted that there will be 2.3 billion
overweight adults in the world by 2015 with more
than 700 million of these obese. The United States
is the world’s pacesetter. From 2003 to 2004,
17.1 percent of U.S. children and adolescents were
overweight and 32.2 percent of adults were obese
(Ogden et al. 2006). The costs in terms of medical
care and economic performance are immense.
The WHO defines overweight as a body mass
index (BMI) equal to or more than 25, and obesity
as a BMI equal to or more than 30. Obesity is associated with a range of health, social, and economic
consequences, but unlike most dietary-related diseases, obesity also has an additional cultural significance due to its highly visual nature.
The physiological explanation of weight gain is
largely uncomplicated, although genetic factors add
to the picture. When calorie consumption outpaces
calorie-consuming physical activity, energy imbalance occurs, and individuals gain weight. While
some economists have attempted to explain obesity
principally in terms of private consumption choices
in the context of technological change (Philipson and
Posner 1999), the fact that individuals find it difficult to correct such imbalances suggests that a more

1049

1050

Obesity

complex, and certainly more culturally informed,
explanation is required.
Though it seems a statement of the obvious, population weight gain requires the societal abundance
of food or at least of some types of food. In Europe
after World War II, food shortages led to the creation
of the Common Agricultural Policy, which in turn
led to increases in farm productivity and agricultural
surpluses. Subsidies and protectionist measures have
since extended throughout the world. In circumstances of falling food prices and rising incomes,
the proportion of household expenditure on food
plummeted, leading food and drink manufacturers
to invest in “value added” products, such as processed and prepared foods, and to establish global
systems of product sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and branding. New foods, often devised in
laboratory conditions employing cheap, subsidized
commodities, have been typically energy dense (i.e.,
high in calorific value) containing high levels of saturated fats, sugar, and salt. For the same consumption weight as traditional foods, consumers therefore
receive a much higher calorific intake. Energy-dense
foods are cheaper and thus more appealing to poorer
sections of the population.
If the energy input side of energy balance has
changed, so too has the other side of the energy
equation, energy expenditure. Beginning in Western
countries, deindustrialization released workers to
less physically demanding roles in administrative
and services economic sectors. As suburban living
expanded, work-home travel distances increased
while cheapening private motor transport replaced
walking or cycling. The new leisure industry, and in
particular new forms of screen-based entertainment,
has displaced more active pursuits. A football match
played in Manchester may be watched in Kenya.
Economist Barry Popkin has analyzed these trends
via his concept of the nutrition transition. But it has
also been suggested that such a transition is not one
societal process but actually three: not only diet and
physical activity, both of which have a direct link to
nutrition, but also culture, which has a more complex
association and is more difficult to express in quantitative terms (Lang and Rayner 2007). Thus, while an
understanding of cultural transition for body weight
goes beyond food, it is the shifting culture of food
that may offer the best access point for study.
The constituents of food culture range from expectations about what to eat, how much to eat, where

to eat, and when to eat and to whom to eat with.
Countries such as Spain, Greece, and Italy, once fabled
for their vegetable-rich diets, have maintained in outward form their traditional diets but supplemented
with previously unaffordable high-fat ingredients.
Changes in the food industry in contrast reflect demographic and technological shifts. Changes in work
patterns and family dynamics, linked to the feminization of the workforce, have offered opportunities for
increasing sales of convenience foods. Beginning from
a low base in the 1950s but by the century’s end having worldwide presence, supermarkets have become
the world’s prime distribution point for processed
foods. Food advertising and marketing is a significant
driver of dietary transition, particularly for more susceptible children. Canned and bottled sugary drinks
and confectionaries, in particular, became ubiquitous
to public settings, such as schools, although mounting
alarm at their health impact resulted in measures to
limit them.
In many societies, obesity has strongly negative
connotations, often amplified by the media, but this
is not universal. In the Pacific basin and parts of
northwestern Africa, large body size is socially prized.
In Western countries, the stereotyping of overweight
people as lazy or feckless, alongside images of beauty
and fitness associated with celebrity culture, might
suggest a role for restraining social norms, and certainly, dieting is a common and socially sanctioned
response to weight gain. If so, the cultural proscription either of overconsumption or the overweight is
hardly effective in restraining epidemiological trends
while dieting produces a characteristic pattern of
weight loss followed by regain. The reason appears to
be that group or self-imposed dietary self-regulation
is undermined by the constant and ubiquitous availability of food while the mere factor of membership
in social networks in which members are overweight
appears to influence personal weight increase or loss.
Cultural transition is a new research focus for
the study of obesity, particularly as a means for
determining new public health measures. However,
it is unlikely that measures limited to the cultural
domain, such as health education, social marketing,
or the behavioral sciences, will have a significant
impact in halting or reversing trends unless these are
allied to overall changes in the determinants of food
consumption and energy expenditure.
Geof Rayner

Object Biographies
See also Anorexia; Binge and Excess; Body, The;
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Family Meal; Food
Consumption; Food Scares; Health Care

Further Readings
Clarkson, Leslie A., and E. Margaret Crawford. Feast and
Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland, 1500–1920.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Devereux, Stephen. Famine in the Twentieth Century. IDS
Working Papers. Brighton, UK: Institute of Development
Studies, 2000.
Fogel, Robert William. The Global Struggle to Escape from
Chronic Malnutrition since 1700. Proceedings of the
World Food Programme/United Nations University.
Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization, 1997.
Lang, T., and G. Rayner. “Overcoming Policy Cacophany
on Obesity: An Ecological Public Health Framework for
Politicians.” Obesity Reviews 8, no. 1 (2007): 165–181.
Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of
Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of
Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr.
Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers. London:
Printed for J. Johnson, 1798.
Ogden, Cynthia L., Margaret D. Carroll, Lester R. Curtin,
Margaret A. McDowell, Carolyn J. Tabak, and
Katherine M. Flegal. “Prevalence of Overweight and
Obesity in the United States, 1999–2004.” JAMA 295,
no. 13 (2006): 1549–1555.
Philipson, Tomas J., and Richard A. Posner. The Long-Run
Growth in Obesity as a Function of Technological
Change. NBER Working Paper No. 7423. Washington,
DC: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1999.
Popkin, Barry M. “An Overview on the Nutrition Transition
and Its Health Implication: The Bellagio Meeting.” Public
Health Nutrition 5, no. 1A (2001): 93–103.

OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES
An object biography is a story told through an
object. The term biography literally means the writing of a life, a life told as a story. Usually, a biography is meant to describe a person’s life, but a thing
can speak volumes about its makers and possessors,
its various uses, its inherent qualities. Object biographies can thus provide key material and symbolic
indicators that illuminate the values and beliefs of
consumer culture.
Igor Kopytoff argued that just as the commoditization of persons could have a biographical

1051

trajectory, so too could objects be viewed biographically as having “careers.” He used enslavement as
an example of the process of turning a person into a
commodity but one in which the slave could take on
a new identity, even while remaining a potential commodity of future exchange. Things could be viewed
similarly as involving telling trajectories between
commoditization and the singular, between signifying exchange value, or signifying personal meaning. In their book, The Meaning of Things, Mihaly
Csikzentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton systematically examined the ways transactions between
people and their possessions reveal much about identity, family relationships, and the making of meaning
in domestic life.
The stories told through objects have played a
crucial role traditionally in archaeology and more
recently an increasingly significant one in anthropology, history, sociology, and other disciplines, as
well as emergent fields such as material culture and
consumption studies. Objects can act as cultural
indicators through which inferences about people,
institutions, practices, beliefs, places, epochs, and
even evolution can be made. Consumption of objects
involves beliefs attributed to or deriving from objects,
which become sources of study by consumption
researchers. Object biographies may be taken as the
stories people tell about their things or as the stories’
things, as objects, themselves tell.

What Things Say
An object such as a bone can reveal to an archaeologist much about a creature, just as a stone can reveal
how it might have been used as an artifact, that is, a
humanly shaped object. A diamond ring is an artifact
whose biography involves its crafting into being, but
likely more importantly for its possessor, it would
concern its meaning as a commodity purchased as a
gift to signify a wedding. But it could also be a family
heirloom handed down for generations. It could be
a stolen object. Material culture tells a story, though
usually not the whole story.
Archaeologists and historians have traditionally dated the swaths of history by the things that
humans fashion or use: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age,
the Iron Age. And these traditional categories could
be followed by the steel age, the atomic age, and now
perhaps the silicon age. These “ages” are attempts to
picture human prehistory and history through material

1052

Object Biographies

indicators, implying that those objects provide the
most accurate way to depict human development.
Yet hard material indicators that endure may not
provide traces of the social relations they were used
for or involved in. Similarly, the horticultural practices of prehistory that relied on awareness of plants
rather than hard, enduring physical techniques do
not leave many traces either, despite their centrality
to human development and culture. Still, the human
romance with things was indeed crucial to human
evolution, and it makes sense to see transactions with
objects as not only enabling a coevolution of people
and things but also as significant for the biographical
passage from infancy to adulthood.
One of the problems with the “hard-thing” ages
of humankind approach to human development is
precisely the way it overvalues stuff that lasts and
undervalues social practices involving symbolic communication, or soft textile cordage, traps, baskets,
shelters, and so on. The soft technologies don’t survive; the hard ones do, and so tendencies toward
objectivism end up defining a people as Paleolithic or
Neolithic, based on surviving stone tools. Hence the
“hard-thing” view of history and prehistory is itself
a mirror of the modern age of materialism and its
idealization of the thing.
Yet the biography of objects can provide deep
insights into a culture. Vladimir Nabokov imagined
in 1925 a writer one hundred years in the future
who would go to a technological museum to examine an old Berlin trolley car from his time and view
the incidental objects connected with it: a conductor’s uniform and money changer, an advertisement
over a trolley window. All of these trivial objects
would be ennobled by the writer’s depiction of them,
thanks to what Nabokov called “the kindly mirrors
of future times.”
Old everyday objects can become “antiques,”
traded for prices that would have astounded their
original makers or purchasers. Such objects can provide a biography of an age. And when some of these
artifacts come with biographical documentation,
their value can increase even more. An old shoebox
of baseball cards from the early twentieth century,
found in a shed about to be demolished, recently sold
for tens of thousands of dollars. Similarly, a painting
by a well-known painter will be regarded as more
valuable when the painter’s signature is on it and
even more valuable if there is a documentable story
to go with it, somehow connected to the painting.

Objects can hold histories apart from how they
are valued. In his book, The Evolution of Useful
Things: How Everyday Artifacts—from Forks and
Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers—Came to Be as
They Are, Henry Petroski traced the development
of common objects normally taken for granted. The
simple fork holds a history of how Europeans gradually moved from eating with a knife to adding a
second prong to the stabilizing knife, now “forked,”
to better hold meat while cutting it, and finally to
the four-pronged utensil known as a fork. Similar
questions concerning where stuff comes from, how
things are designed, how they successfully meet
the market or not, and how a variety of fields must
coordinate their abilities to produce commodities
as diverse as toasters or toilets is also taken up by
Harvey Molotch.
Witold Rybczynski provides an interesting look
at how modern consciousness can be seen in the
very embodiment of what people consider “home”
to be in his book Home. There, he traces the rise of
taken-for-granted qualities such as privacy, intimacy,
and comfort and how they are relatively recent social
constructions of the past few centuries that not only
reveal the emerging modern European consciousness
but also became projected into the built environment
of the house. Separate bedrooms and movable chairs
and couches illustrate new objects and valuations of
what home could mean that are now accepted as traditional and even “universal.”
Russell Belk has examined collecting from the
range of officially sanctioned museums to the borderline compulsive collector, for whom the act of
acquisition brings a kind of relief similar to the act
of washing hands by obsessive-compulsives. He
notes that it is the act of acquisition rather than the
possession that provides momentary pleasure for
these more extreme collectors, just as it is the act
of washing rather than clean hands that salves the
drives of those with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
But most collectors willingly compare their activities
to addiction.
It becomes all the more interesting then to consider the role of museums in society, where institutional collecting manifests as crypto-sacred centers
of object worship. Art museum goers typically move
from painting to painting in hushed spectatorial
silence as though in a church, though museums try to
make the experience more participatory by engaging
the life stories of objects.

Object Biographies

Sherry Turkle’s 2008 edited collection, The Inner
History of Devices, provides an interesting variation
on object biographies, with contributors describing how technological objects usually considered to
be more impersonal become imbued with personal
meaning. In a 2007 edited collection, she and the
other authors delve into “evocative objects,” ranging, for example, from closets and salvaged photographs to stuffed bunnies and date books.

What People Say
People tell stories, often about things. Things can
enter into life stories in significant ways. Not all stories are about things, but all things can be told as
stories. But what if one tells the stories of things
from the thing’s point of view: thing biography,
thing stories passing through lives, from use and
reuse to refuse, change and exchange, memory and
oblivion. The same thing can grow new meanings
or lose old ones over time or through change of
possession, becoming, in effect, a different object
for its possessor.
What stories do possessions tell of their possessors? Consider the enigma of “Rosebud” in Orson
Welles’s film Citizen Kane, the last word uttered by
the dying millionaire, and which turns out to be his
childhood sled, lost amid his vast treasures. It is a
mirror of his spontaneous self, itself lost to his vast
power and wealth, the one living symbol in the mausoleum of empty dreams in which he dies.
Eugene Halton has shown how thing stories, told
from the perspective of the object rather than its
possessors, such as a title of property, an old painting purchased at a yard sale, or a desk and its drawers, open up ways of viewing home life as an art
and craft, as a realm of freedom transcending the
mastering of necessities and accumulation of commodities. He turns the question of materialism to
whether the things and their thing stories are in the
end simply property and consumption indicators, or
whether they can act as means and embodiments
of self-creation through the practice of “the art and
craft of home” (2008, 177–228; see also RochbergHalton 1986, 168–188).
Anthropologist Janet Hoskins uses the idea
of biographical objects to great effect in her book
Biographical Objects, which traces the role of objects
in the lives of the Kodi people of east Indonesia. One
amazing story she relates is that of the head of a Rara

1053

nobleman named Rato Malo, which was unfortunately separated from the rest of his living body
by a party of Kodi headhunters before the turn of
the last century and kept as a trophy. Rato Malo’s
son was sold into slavery, later worked for the first
Catholic mission, and acquired literacy, and as an
adult returned to his homeland and worked for the
colonial administration. He acquired the financial
and political means to be able to negotiate for the
return of his father’s skull, not by outright purchase,
as one would find in currency-dominated societies,
but through marriage bartering.
The skull would return as a “counter-prestation
for brideswealth,” that is, something given by the
wife givers in return for something given by the wife
takers. This required that the skull be ritually treated
as a “female exchange valuable, then ‘dressed’ in
male clothes, reunited with the bones of the body,
and reburied as a person” (Hoskins 1998, 7).
In this account, the biographical interaction
between person and thing gets extremely entangled.
It seems fair to say that most people think of their
head as essential to their identity. But here, the head
of Rato Malo took on a biographical career of its
own, its presence becoming a Kodi trophy and its
absence becoming a source of loss for the family,
then developing into a desired object of purchase by
the son, then a commodity of exchange, one involving appropriate ritual gender changes, and finally
becoming again the head of Rato Malo, reburied as
a person. Though this may seem an exotic case, it
highlights only the ways people imbue things with
qualities of personhood.
Marcel Mauss’s classic work, The Gift, explored
how “the thing given is not inert. It is alive and often
personified, and strives to bring to its original clan
and homeland some equivalent to take its place”
(1925/1967, 10–12). Traditional gifts act as nodal
points in social networks, bearing social relations
through exchange.
Many traditional peoples view objects as detached
aspects of persons and as spiritually alive. Modern
peoples, even when emotionally attached to possessions, still usually view objects as inanimate, yet
when the object is viewed as a sign that can communicate social relations, it becomes easier to see how
objects can be living incarnations of social relations.
A person consists not only of those sign habits that
comprise one’s sense of self but also of the objects of
those sign-habits. Persons and things cocultivate each

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Object Biographies

other through sign activities. A family scrapbook is a
tangible memory, an object that not only embodies a
biography of the family but can also help to instill that
biography in the developing identities of family members. A builder creates constructions that can cocreate
the further development of the builder: we find ourselves in objects and they find their way into us.

What Things Mean
Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s groundbreaking study of eighty-two three-generation families in the north Chicago area showed that while
the consumption system of status and class distinction is objectively present in the home, it assumes
less importance in what people regard as their special possessions. The research also revealed significant differences in kinds of objects and meanings of
objects mentioned by children versus their parents
and grandparents, with children mentioning more
kinetic objects and meanings related to self as special
versus grandparents and, to a lesser extent, parents
naming a predominance of contemplation objects
and meanings relating to extended family. Case studies of things revealed deep insights into the biography
of families as well as individual family members. One
bed in which three generations of one family were
conceived acted as a sign of the ongoing dissolution
of the family and of the midlife crisis of the father.
Respondents in this study often revealed much
more about themselves and their families when
talking about their special things than when talking
directly about themselves. Interviewing people about
their possessions amply demonstrates how the typical home is an ongoing “show and tell” of the beliefs
of its inhabitants, revealing the myriad influences—
conscious and unconscious, conventional and personal—which comprise the meanings of artifacts and
the self. In other words, there remain possibilities for
personal meaning not reducible to status and class
meanings, even though possibly embedded in them.
Daniel Miller, who has written a number of works
on objects and consumption, in 2008, published a
collection of object biographies titled The Comfort of
Things, based on fieldwork undertaken over a year
and a half on a single South London street. One sees
a marvelous variety of households and objects, a wide
ranging palette of social life in all its diversity through
the verbal “portraits” Miller draws. His first two chapters, “Empty” and “Full,” provide a stark contrast of

how things can tell of an individual’s disconnect from
life or of a family’s full engagement with it.
In other chapters, Miller weaves social analysis
into the biographies while allowing the objects to
have their say. At one point, he notes the irreducible
value of the individual biography or portrait:
All my academic studies have shown that the people
who successfully forge meaningful relationships to
things are often the same as those who forge
meaningful relationships with people, while those
who fail at one usually also fail at the other, because
the two are much more akin and entwined than is
commonly appreciated. (195)

So far so good. But Miller continues, “Sometimes,
however, we meet a Citizen Kane, a figure for whom
the really significant object is the one which represents the viable material relationship that stood in
the stead of viable social relationships” (195).
The things of the home connote stability, tangibility, permanence. Yet “things change,” as the expression goes, and there is movement not only of objects
but also of meanings. People periodically feel a need
to move furniture and decorations, to purchase new
objects and discard old ones—even when the piece of
furniture or decorative object might still be perfectly
good. Why do people keep things in storage facilities
for years only to then discard them as “junk”? What
are the things that homeless people find more important to carry, store, or pawn than a roof over their
own heads? What people keep and consume, where
they keep it, how and when they acquired it, and
why they value it all can reveal the life of the person.
Therein lies the stuff of object biographies and
of potential research. Indeed, the marketing of consumer culture is predicated on continually creating
the wants in people to consume ever anew. In many
of these movements and acts of consumption, we see
indicators of “identity work.” But the promise of an
identity through blank consumption of things rests
on a materialist assumption that neglects to consider
how the transactions between people and things, the
dialogues people have with their objects, determine
how both identity and the real life of the thing emerge.
Eugene Halton
See also Actor-Network Theory; Collecting and
Collectibles; Commodification; Decommodification;
Gifts and Reciprocity; Identity; Material Culture;
Materialism and Postmaterialism

Obsession

Further Readings
Belk, Russell W. “Possessions and the Extended Self.”
Journal of Consumer Research 15 (1988): 139–168.
Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society
(Collecting Cultures). London: Routledge, 1995.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton.
The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Halton, Eugene. The Great Brain Suck: And Other
American Epiphanies. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008.
Hoskins, Janet. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the
Stories of Peoples’ Lives. London: Routledge, 1998.
Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things:
Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of
Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of
Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton,
1967. First published 1925.
Miller, Daniel, ed. Material Cultures: Why Some Things
Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity,
2008.
Molotch, Harvey. Where Stuff Comes From: How
Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other
Things Come to Be as They Are. London: Routledge,
2003.
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How
Everyday Artifacts—from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips
and Zippers—Came to Be as They Are. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Rochberg-Halton, Eugene. Meaning and Modernity.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Rybczynski, Witold. Home. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think
With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Turkle, Sherry, ed. The Inner History of Devices.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

OBSESSION
Obsession can be defined as a burdensome and
uncontrollable compulsion to repeat an idea, emotion, or thought, for example, a ritualized pattern
of consumption. Often, this obsessive repetition is
accompanied by feelings of distress or anxiety in
the consciousness of the obsessive person. Although
linked to concepts such as infatuation, intoxication,

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or lust, obsession is unique in that it is both an
unwelcome burden that produces fear or anxiety
in relation to the object repeated in consciousness
(i.e., idea, emotion, thought, etc.) and is an uncontrollable repetition that fixates the consciousness of
the person on a particular object. While obsession
is often considered pathological, such a definition is
possible only if the obsession obstructs the free will of
the person in a prohibitive and disquieting way, and
a survey of current media may indicate some misuse
of the term to define a generic passionate attachment
to an object or idea only.
In terms of commodification and consumption,
obsession is characteristic of impulsive exchanges
wherein the obsessive person will seek out support
for their exchanges through other people, such as
reviews, professional opinions, and other such confidants. The obsessive person generally exhibits an
aggressive disposition toward the object of his or her
obsession, and this leads these exchanges to often be
wrought with great psychodynamic tension, guilt,
and a sense of helplessness. Hence, obsession is often
cast as a pathological engagement with a conscious
object such as an idea, emotion, or thought, and
is here distinct from commodity fetishism, which
entails endlessly repeated consumption and longing
and can contribute to the “hype” generated by some
marketing and advertising strategies.
Although obsession has a long and varied history
in literature, poetry, theater, and mythology, our
contemporary conception of it is greatly indebted to
the metapsychological foundations laid by Sigmund
Freud’s clinical psychoanalytic theorizing and modeling of psychodynamic processes. According to
the classical psychoanalytic framework developed
by Freud, obsession shares its neurotic disposition
with phobias and some forms of narcissism. The
obsessional neurotic suffers from a sense of external overdetermination by something akin to providence, fate, or destiny. In turn, this overly noisy
authority produces the feeling of guilt in the obsessional neurotic because his or her sense of personal
freedom cannot accord to the overdetermination
of this ideal authority. According to Freud, obsessional neurotics carry within themselves a fear of
conscience and a strong degree of self-reliance, and
their obsessive rituals are reminiscent of religious
practices. In their rebellion against this overly noisy
authority, the ego of obsessional neurotics situates
any objectionable impulses outside itself (i.e., in the

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Obsession

authority itself) leading to contradictory reactionformations that rebel against the ideal authority
only to find this authority overdetermining these
reactions. In this death and resuscitation of fate,
the obsessional neurotic falls into an interminable
self-torment that can lead to the torturing of the
compulsively repeated object.
The Freudian view situates obsession in the species of transference neuroses already stated: obsessions, phobias, and narcissism. This facilitates a
reading of obsession through a character typology
that economizes the storage and discharge of psychical energy, or libido. Within this typology, obsession is given three structures: obsessional neurosis,
erotic-obsessiveness, and narcissistic-obsession. In
the former, obsessional neurosis, the transference
between the person and others is forged through
a diverse range of references to the compulsively
repeated object. This transference need not be limited to human beings but always retains a structure
that futilely attempts to defer the object of obsession
because it is a neurosis. One might easily observe this
psychodynamic process in any conservative view’s
distaste for elaborate upheaval and change, which
itself is inevitable, as is perhaps the case with contemporary discourses around beauty products and
antiaging treatments wherein the markets for these
commodities are noticeably fearful of the inevitability of aging. That is not to say that all consumers
of beauty products and antiaging treatments are
neurotic but rather that the psychodynamics of the
markets opened up by these products and treatments
function by way of an obsessive repetition to “aging”
and/or “beauty” as an idea, emotion, or thought: a
conscious object.
The second libidinal type, the erotic-obsessive,
has similar neurotic operations to the former obsessional neurotic but exhibits a form of rebellion that
demands recognition of other people and objects
as they appear to the perception of the obsessive.
Pertaining to the conception of eros from Hellenic
antiquity, the erotics of this type of obsessive are
part of life itself. This means that the dependency
on people and objects is interior to the obsessive’s
consciousness and explicitly refutes consumption
as an exhibitionistic phenomenon. One need only
watch a Hollywood film about serial killers, such as
The Silence of the Lambs, Along Came a Spider, or
Se7en, to observe the psychodynamics of this type.
In these three films in particular, the serial killer

characters have an intense consciousness that ritualizes the discharge of its energy through private ritualistic consumption, that is, hidden shrines, macabre
and playful murder scenarios, and so forth.
The final type of obsession in Freud’s schema
is narcissistic-obsessive. Whereas the obsessional
neurotic can find support for his or her rebellion
against authority in any manner of things, including other people, politics, science, religion, and so
on, and the erotic-obsessive seeks out the virulent
strains of eros, the narcissistic-obsessive relies on a
purely cultural network of support. For Freud, this
type of obsession pursues the arts and humanities
for their well-documented open and interpretative functions. As the phrasing implies, this type of
obsessive person again inflects his or her demand for
the recognition of rebellion against an ideal authority within the person’s own psyche. Cultures and
countercultures of fandom are all too easily brought
under this rubric to explain their atemporal, ahistorical fixation with particular cultural objects: be
they of highbrow or lowbrow appeal or somewhere
in between.
Obsession is an unusual function as it compels a
burdensome return to an object. As we have noted
above, this return can take many forms and entails a
contradiction of rebellion and recognition. This may,
on occasion, lead to self-torment or the torturing of
the object of obsessive consumption.
Daniel Hourigan
See also Desire; Freud, Sigmund; Identity;
Individualization; Narcissism; Psychoanalysis;
Resistance; Structuralism

Further Readings
Bowlby, Rachel. Shopping with Freud. London: Routledge,
1993.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethics and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. New York: Basil Blackwell,
1987.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973.
Freud, Sigmund. On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality and Other Works. London: Penguin Books,
1991.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Woodward, Ian. Understanding Material Culture. London:
Sage, 2007.

Opinion Leaders

OPINION LEADERS
Outside of the social sciences, the term opinion
leader is widely used to allude to celebrities in politics
and the media and to public intellectuals, who are
thought to have and to hold large followings. In the
social sciences, the term refers to everyday influentials whose advice is sought and acknowledged by
family, friends, and neighbors.
In this restricted sense, the term dates to Paul
Lazarsfeld and colleagues’ The People’s Choice,
an empirical study of how voters make their decisions during the course of a presidential campaign.
Expecting to document the influential power of the
media, the Lazarsfeld team found instead that those
who made up their minds or changed them during
the campaign were more likely to attribute influence to word-of-mouth than to radio or newspapers.
Taking a further step, the researchers found that such
everyday influence tends to flow from persons—now
dubbed opinion leaders—who were more likely to
be exposed to the mass media than those whom they
influenced. This tentative finding, whereby opinion
leaders were thought to serve as gatekeepers, came to
be known as “the two-step flow of communication.”
Reacting to these findings, publishers and broadcasters saw potential advantage in being able to establish that there would likely be opinion leaders among
their audiences who might pass along what they
have read or heard. Time magazine and MacFadden
Publications were among the first to sponsor further
research along these lines. The Time study (Merton
1949) showed a concentration of “cosmopolitan”
leaders among readers of the magazine who were
looked to for information and advice about politics and fashion—but only few “local” leaders who
were expert in supermarket sales and neighborhood
affairs. The idea that opinion leaders may “specialize” in certain domains and the possibility that the
several social classes breed their own brands of
leadership led to the MacFadden study (Katz and
Lazarsfeld 1955) that, indeed, showed only a little
overlap among influentials in the domains of shopping, fashions, movie going, and politics. And, in a
more detailed analysis of influential-influencee pairs,
Lazarsfeld’s team found that both members of the
pair shared the same social class and that there was
little trickle down from one class to another—except,
perhaps, in the political domain. MacFadden was

1057

reassured that the lower-middle-class women who
read True Story were influential for, and were influenced by, women much like themselves. Moreover,
each of these studies gave further support to the
two-step flow hypothesis in that the opinion leaders
tended to be more attuned to the media in their areas
of specialization than were the persons for whom
they were influential.
Apart from shared class membership, Lazarsfeld’s
studies found that “marketing leaders” tended to
be older women, more experienced in shopping
and more gregarious, whose advisees also included
younger women. On the other hand, “fashion leaders” and their followers were more likely to be younger
women because interest in fashion, it seems, predominates among younger women. This research suggests
that leadership—including opinion leadership—is not
just a personal trait. However qualified, the potential
for leadership in a given domain cannot be activated
without interested followers.
This series of studies gradually shifted attention
from episodes of leadership to the exchange of influence among persons with shared interest, regardless
of who influenced whom, and from individual decisions to change from the spread of innovation to
the spread of an innovation through a community.
Thus, James C. Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert
Menzel traced the spread of a new antibiotic in communities of physicians whose social and professional
relations—mapped sociometrically—served as channels through which medical innovations flow. It was
found, for example, that sociometric “centrality”
was strongly correlated with the date on which doctors wrote their first prescriptions of the new drug;
the more integrated the physician, the earlier the
adoption. It was also found that near simultaneity
in time of adoption characterized those doctors who
shared membership in a sociometric clique or who
shared offices with each other, as if a “collective decision” were involved. The diffusion process followed
the familiar “S” shape, in which adoption proceeds
from a slow and individualistic start to a “tipping
point,” after which it accelerates in a cascade and
then tapers off. Opinion leaders and others who
were well connected “outside” were among the early
adopters (but not the earliest). The study emphasized
the influence of salesmen, medical journals, and
peers in the phases of individual decision making and
the unmistakable imprint of interpersonal influence
in the collective cascade.

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Opinion Polls

The Coleman team soon discovered that rural
sociologists had long been interested in the diffusion
of new farm practices and that they had paid particular attention—in the land-grant colleges—to the
role of the agricultural extension agent, the formal
opinion leader, and the informal opinion leaders who
propelled acceptance of the innovation. A landmark
study in this tradition is that of Bryce Ryan and Neal
C. Gross on the diffusion of hybrid seed corn in Iowa
that was later challenged by the econometric model
of Zvi Griliches.
The prominence of diffusion studies owes much to
the ever-growing potential of the computer in tracking
the flow of influence through social networks but no
less to the lifelong work of Everett Rogers in surveying the field. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point
popularized this line of investigation much later, even
if his work may be faulted for concentrating on stories
of success almost to the exclusion of failures. If one
wants to influence contraceptive behavior, Gladwell
observes, mobilize the hairdressers who serve as opinion leaders for the captive audience of their clients.
Elihu Katz
See also Celebrity; Cool Hunters; Cultural Intermediaries;
Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Lazarsfeld, Paul
Felix; Markets and Marketing; Opinion Polls; Social
Networks

Further Readings
Coleman, James C., Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel.
Medical Innovation: A Diffusion Study. Indianapolis,
IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things
Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
Griliches, Zvi. “Hybrid Corn and the Economics of
Innovation.” Science 132 (1960): 275–280.
Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence: The
Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass
Communications. New York: Free Press, 1955.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet.
The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His
Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, 1944.
Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure.
New York: Free Press, 1949.
Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. New York:
Free Press, 1962.
Ryan, Bryce, and Neal C. Gross. “The Diffusion of Hybrid
Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities.” Rural Sociology
8 (1943): 15–24.

OPINION POLLS
Opinion polls are sample-based and interview-led
quantitative surveys designed for collecting information on the attitudes and behaviors of a given population on a certain set of social, political, ethical, or
economic issues. In both historical and methodological terms, opinion polls are closely linked to market
research, of which they represent a subsequent extension to the study of public opinion. It was consumer
research that first used sampling and interviewing to
analyze the habits, interests, needs, and preferences of
consumers. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, companies have employed quantitative surveys,
alongside qualitative research techniques, for such
diverse purposes as probing consumer perceptions or
revealing consumer trends, gathering consumer feedback or monitoring consumer moods. A broad majority of polling organizations continue to base their
business mainly on market and consumer research,
while public opinion polls, preelection polling, or exit
polls represent only a marginal share of their activities.
More specifically, the most direct historical antecedents of opinion polls are to be found in the market
research, which some United States agencies began to
carry out on behalf of businesses or publications from
1910 onward. The purpose of this research, which
was already based on the principles of sampling and
interview methods, was to provide their clients with
information about the characteristics and preferences
of their customers or readers. The major pioneers
of modern opinion polls, George Gallup and Elmo
Roper, came from the field of market research in
the United States. Both published the results of their
respective opinion polls for the first time in 1935.
The magazine Fortune published Roper’s poll, relating both to the consumption of cigarettes and the
possession of motor cars by their interviewees and to
their opinions on the subjects of taxation or the role
of government in creating jobs.

Methodological Issues
The notion of representative sampling is one of the
methodological pivots of opinion polls. A sample is a
group of individuals who are selected as representative of a given population (citizens, voters, consumers, youngsters, housewives, etc.) through random
extraction (probability sampling). According to the

Opinion Polls

mathematical theory of probability, assigning each
member of a population with an equal probability of
being selected is a sufficient condition for obtaining
a final sample that is relatively similar to the whole
population, with a predictable degree of approximation, which depends on the sample size. Due to an
inherent statistical bias known as sampling error, the
expected gap between the values in the sample and
in the population (or the confidence interval) is, for
example, around 3 percentage points for a sample
of one thousand interviewees—the standard size in
contemporary opinion polling. This means that an
opinion expressed by, say, 28 percent of interviewees
more realistically reflects the opinion of a proportion
of between 25 and 31 percent (28 percent plus/minus
3 percentage points) of the observed population. In
addition to probability sampling, another technique,
known as quota sampling, is used, particularly by
non–Anglo-American commercial pollsters, to
ensure certain sociodemographic variables (sex, age,
region, occupation, etc.) with exactly the same proportion in the sample as in the general population.
Although it may be effective for practical purposes,
the quota sampling technique (or nonprobability
sampling) is regarded as arbitrary from a statistical
theory perspective, since it is incongruent with the
law of probability. However, since the strict theoretical assumptions required for probability sampling
are systematically violated in real-world practices
(i.e., low response rates among the originally sampled
individuals), a mixed method combining probability
and quota sampling can be considered as standard
procedure in modern public opinion polling.
Interviewing through structured questionnaires
is the other methodological basis of opinion polls.
Having inherited the behaviorist assumption of stimulus invariance—every individual must be submitted
to exactly the same stimulus for their responses to
be measured and compared—questionnaires follow a rigorously fixed sequence of open-ended and,
much more often, close-ended (multiple-choice)
questions, alternatively ordered through ordinal
(i.e., agree very much/somewhat/not very much/
not at all), numeric (i.e., likability measures from
0 to 100), or categorical (qualitative) scales (items
such as “Catholic” or “Protestant,” rather than
“anxiety,” “anger,” or “empathy”). Similarly, interviewers are given precise instructions about how to
interact with respondents—whether the interview is
conducted face-to-face (computer-assisted personal

1059

interviewing, CAPI) or by telephone (computerassisted telephone interviewing, CATI)—to minimize, if not neutralize, their possible influence on
the latter’s responses. Even more importantly, the
question formulation, both in terms of terminological choice (wording) and of meaning, selection,
and emphasis (framing), as well as the succession
in which questions are being presented (question
order), are seen as being of major importance for
the questionnaire construction since they potentially
affect individual responses and therefore poll results.
Classic studies on context effects have detected a
high susceptibility on opinion poll results, depending, for example, on the number of categories or
the presence of the “don’t know” item, or on the
acquiescence phenomenon concerning questions
that involve agreement.

Theoretical Controversies
and Research Trends
More fundamentally, the nature of citizens’ opinions, as revealed by poll questions, has been challenged, stating that what polls measure, at least on
more abstract political issues, are mere “nonattitudes” based on almost random responses. Beyond
this classical “minimalist” perspective embodied
by Philip Converse, a more recent orientation in
public opinion research tends to stress the public’s fundamental ambivalence on a high number
of issues—the less obtrusive and politically crystallized in particular—and the importance of a
consideration being accessible—that is, freshly
renewed or reiterated in the respondent’s mind—
to shift the individual’s choice toward one side or
the other of the response set. This top-of-the-mind
model of opinion formation—as described by John
Zaller—also leaves considerable room, not only
for pollsters to manipulate and selectively “prime”
arguments in the poll questions but also, more generally, for a wide influence by the media. This is
because the news media is seen as being capable
of setting the issue agenda and framing such issues
in certain terms rather than in others. Therefore,
this postminimalist perspective still tends to depict
a process of elite domination of the public, where
both polling and media organizations belong to
a social elite that seems to have the ability, along
with governmental and other political actors, of
truly “constructing” public opinion. Other scholars

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Opium Trade

such as William Saris and Paul Sniderman show,
however, how opinion polling can bring out the
citizens’ genuine ideological orientations in relation
to the main political issues, as long as it provides
the respondents with information about both the
main sides and arguments of the issue considered.
Moreover, the very legitimacy of opinion polling
as a method for studying public opinion is rarely
questioned nowadays, after decades of controversies
placing pollsters in opposition to sociologists and
other tenants of a pre-polls definition of public opinion, in which the leading actors were not so much
individual citizens as active minorities, organized
groups, social movements, and other forms of collective action (from Blumer 1948; Bourdieu 1979).
The emergence of both a methodological and
epistemological equivalence of citizens and consumers in postindustrial societies has made opinion polls
a standard tool for all branches—from commercial
to political—of marketing and market research.
The technological evolution of data collection techniques and internet polling (computer-assisted web
interviewing, CAWI) in particular, currently permits
all sorts of private and public companies not only
to promote the traditional tasks of audience targeting, segmentation, positioning, or messaging development but also to analyze and constantly monitor
consumer purchasing behavior, spending habits, saving strategies, or online shopping trends. The use of
the Internet for polling purposes is also emerging as
a possible way out for what appeared as the most
serious challenge facing opinion polls over the last
decades—the continuously decreasing response rates
of a public that is saturated with highly differentiated
direct marketing telephone contacts.
Mauro Barisione
See also Attitude Surveys; Audience Research; Consumer
Behavior; Consumer Interviews; Markets and
Marketing; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Opinion Leaders; Surveys

Further Readings
Blumer, Herbert. “Public Opinion and Public Opinion
Polling.” American Sociological Review 13, no. 5
(1948): 542–549.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Public Opinion Does Not Exist.” In
Communication and Class Struggle, edited by Armand
Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, 124–130. New York:
International General, 1979.

Converse, Philip. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass
Publics.” In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David
E. Apter, 206–261. New York: Free Press, 1964.
Jackman, Mary R. “Education and Prejudice or Education
and Response Set?” American Sociological Review
38 (1973): 327–339.
Kotler, Philip, and Gary Armstrong. Principles of
Marketing. 10th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 2008.
Payne, Stanley L. The Art of Asking Questions. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951.
Saris, William E., and Paul M. Sniderman, eds. Studies in
Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement
Error, and Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004.
Schuman, Howard, and Stanley Presser, eds. Questions and
Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question
Form, Wording and Context. New York: Academic,
1981.
Zaller, John. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

OPIUM TRADE
Opium is one of the most important traded commodities in history. It is derived from the sap of the opium
poppy. Opium is rich in morphine and codeine, both
of which have narcotic properties. It has been used
for millennia as a recreational drug, in religious ritual,
and for medical purposes. Because of its addictive
properties and its consequent ability to attract consumption, opium has also been used by governments
as an instrument of taxation and trade policy. At its
zenith in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the opium trade spanned most of the world,
including North and South America, the Caribbean,
Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. During this
period, the consumer culture of opium underwent a
profound transformation. This entry focuses on the
impact of the opium trade on the consumer culture
of opium, with emphasis on colonial Asia in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At the time of the coming of European traders to
Asia, the consumption of opium in the region was
uneven. Chinese and Indian doctors had known of
the pharmacologic properties of opium for centuries. In some areas, including west Asia and India,
its use was widespread among some communities
during religious festivals and marriage ceremonies.

Opium Trade

The discovery by European traders that the trade
in opium could be highly profitable catalyzed the
expansion of the opium trade network into regions
of Asia that traditionally had had little exposure to
the drug. With the demise of the great European
trading companies in the precolonial era, most
notably the British East India Company and the
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East
India Company, or Dutch East India Company), the
opium trade fell into the hands of their powerful
successor states. It was this set of transitions that
aligned three powerful forces that were to lead to
the explosion and mainstreaming of the opium consumer culture in Asia.
Chief among the forces that contributed to
the spread of opium across Asia was the need for
colonial states to raise revenue so as not to drain
the coffers of the European mother states. On the
production side, the major sources of opium were
British India, the Levant, and Persia. Of these, British
India was the chief source, and the British India government worked systematically to supply most of
colonial Asia with opium at great profit to the state
treasury. On the consumption side, again, the incentive to raise taxes based on consumption led to the
formation of a variety of state-sponsored and statecontrolled structures, including the Opium Regies
of French IndoChina and the Dutch East Indies and
the opium monopoly in British India. Siam, Japanese
Taiwan, British Burma, and British Malaya created
similar structures for this purpose. For most years
and in most cases, these colonial states purchased the
bulk of their opium from British India.
The second factor that contributed to the widespread implementation of opium regimes throughout
Asia was the efflorescence and penetration, by the late
colonial era, of colonial state structures into the fabric
of Asian society. On the production side, the British
developed an elaborate system for the cultivation of
opium, with effective mechanisms for enforcement
to prevent the smuggling of the drug outside the
monopoly system. The Dutch erected an opium factory in Batavia (now Jakarta) to refine and standardize the raw opium they were importing from British
India. In a similar vein, the British established opium
factories in India, some of which continue to produce
and refine opium for the pharmaceutical industry.
The construction of efficient transportation systems
in a number of Asian colonies benefited both the production and the distribution and consumption of the

1061

drug. In many instances, governments created systems and networks for the auction and subsequent
licensing of retailers and retail of opium. By the early
twentieth century, colonial governments in most of
Asia had created an effective system of production,
trade, and distribution of opium that legally monopolized this large and lucrative market.
The third factor that contributed to the spread of
the opium consumer culture in colonial Asia was
the nature of the drug itself. In many consumers, it
created a dependence that assured any taxing authority of a reliable base and any exporter of a reliable
market. It was this very property that had contributed to the opium wars between Britain and China
earlier in the nineteenth century. As Britain saw its
balance of trade with China plummet, it saw in the
export of opium to China the potential to reverse the
drain of silver from the British Empire. At the same
time, China was keen to minimize opium imports to
protect its strong position in the trade with Britain
and to minimize if not eliminate some of the social
ills that would inevitably accompany the consumption of the drug. The consequence of these opposing
positions was the opium wars, which led to the gradual opening of the Chinese market to opium from
British India and the explosion of opium consumption in China. The superior power of the European
states ensured that an opium consumer culture such
as had hitherto never been witnessed took hold in
Asia. The remarkable effectiveness with which the
European enterprise penetrated colonial Asia gave
rise to the widespread production, distribution, and
consumption of opium in the region. Millions of
colonial subjects consumed the drug, resulting in the
generation of funds to fill colonial state coffers. An
inevitable consequence of the rise of the opium consumer culture in Asia was its spread back to Europe
and, ultimately, to America.
During the colonial period in Asia, opium increasingly entered into a variety of social and cultural
spaces, both in Asia and worldwide. In China, by
the nineteenth century, the transformation of opium
from a medicinal drug to a recreational drug with
aphrodisiac properties was complete. A thriving sex
and pornography industry developed out of this
transition. The opium den culture, with the attendant economies built around opium, gambling, and
prostitution, flourished. In Europe, famous nineteenth century literary figures, such as Thomas de
Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, indulged in

1062

Ordinary Consumption

the habit, and it found its way into mainstream literature, including the popular works of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. Opium increasingly came to be used
as the intoxicant of choice at social occasions in a
variety of cultures, and its increased availability and
acceptability led to an increase in its use in medicine
as well. During this period, opium came to be consumed in a variety of forms, each of which had its
associated paraphernalia, including opium weights,
scales, pipes, bowls, and lamps.
The opium trade and the consumer culture that
developed as the result of its systematic implementation and expansion in the late colonial period in
Asia are of great contemporary relevance. In an era
in which governments frequently look to the sale
and taxation of commodities and activities that are
capable of breeding consumer dependence, including cigarettes, gambling, and alcohol, the profound
impacts that such policies can have on the broader
consumer culture are often dismissed or overlooked.
Perhaps more dangerously, the dependence of governments on the traffic and trade in addictive commodities can create a set of incentives that cause the
governments to actively promote their consumption.
While such outcomes are by no means foregone conclusions, they nevertheless receive little attention in
scholarly debate on public policy. This is an area of
research on which scholars need to focus, especially
in times of fiscal stress.
Siddharth Chandra
See also Addiction; British Empire; Colonialism;
Consumer Culture in East Asia; Gambling; History;
Smuggling and Black Markets

Further Readings
Brook, Timothy, and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. Opium
Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
de Quincey, Thomas. “Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater.” London Magazine (September–October
1821): 293–312, 353–379.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Adventure VI—The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Strand
Magazine (December 1891): 623–637.
Great Britain, Royal Commission on Opium. First Report
of the Royal Commission on Opium; with Minutes of
Evidence and Appendices. London: Printed for Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, by Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1894.

La Motte, Ellen N. The Opium Monopoly. New York:
MacMillan, 1920.
Lefebure, Molly. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of
Opium. New York: Stein and Day, 1974.
Richards, John F. “Opium and the British Indian Empire:
The Royal Commission of 1895.” Modern Asian
Studies 36, no. 2 (2002): 375–420.
Rush, James R. Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and
Chinese Enterprise in Colonial Indonesia, 1860–1910.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Trocki, Carl A. Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in
Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1990.
Zheng, Yangwen. The Social Life of Opium in China.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

ORDINARY CONSUMPTION
Ordinary consumption refers to mundane, quotidian,
and routinized forms of consumption and to the theoretical and academic approaches, which pay these
forms of consumption serious attention. As such, this
term is in fact a millennial manifesto, calling for a radical reorientation of cultural studies of consumption.
The constitution of consumption as a proper
focus for academic inquiry was inseparable from the
broader cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences through the 1980s and 1990s. Through insights
generated in cultural studies, the positive potential
of the processes of consumption, the opportunities
offered by the market to consumers were increasingly recognized. Rather than a dupe of capitalism
and the market, the consumer became understood as
a self-reflexive, creative, active agent. While the study
of consumption through the 1990s was diverse and
fragmented, it was nevertheless characterized by a
focus on the symbolic properties of products and of
processes and spaces of consumption.
It is against this backdrop that calls to pay attention to mundane commodities and services and forms
of consumption embedded in quotidian routines
emerged. These concerns crystallized most clearly in
the edited collection Ordinary Consumption (Gronow
and Warde 2001). The introduction to the volume
suggests that focusing on themes like choice, freedom,
taste, lifestyle, and identity neglected much of substance in consumption. What came of all those forms
of consumption with limited scope for self-reflexivity,
with little if any potential for communicating taste,

Ordinary Consumption

distinction, or identity, or that fail to excite emotion
and passion? The authors’ contention is that new
insights must emerge if we refocus our attention
toward forms of consumption that escape dominant
modes of analysis and explanation: that by considering inconspicuous rather than conspicuous forms of
consumption; by exploring collective, routinized, and
conventional conduct rather than moments of conscious individual decision making; and by considering
situations and processes of use rather than moments
of acquisition, scholars of consumption will uncover
different logics and relationships.
Ordinary consumption does not provide a neat
classification for empirical phenomena. That is, there
is no definitive statement of what sorts of consumption, what particular commodities or services, are
“ordinary” and which are not. Many studies that
can be situated in the emergent field of ordinary consumption have certainly focused on profoundly mundane, inconspicuous products, such as in routine food
consumption or the use of utilities, such as energy
and water. Ordinary consumption, however, is better
understood as an approach, a broadly defined but
nevertheless distinctive analytical sensitivity, than as
an empirical class of things or activities. This is illustrated by studies that explore commodities that have
been staples of analysis in terms of identity, status,
and meaning as objects of ordinary consumption.
For example, Tim Dant and Pater Martin (2001)
examine cars, a clear means of individual symbolic
expression in terms of mundane use to better understand the car’s deep entrenchment in society.
The application of this analytical sensitivity toward
the mundane has indeed led to the uncovering of previously hidden relationships and processes that run
throughout the intermingling of consumption with
the rest of the social. A broad thrust of the arguments
that emerge is a contestation of established models of
human agency and the potency of consumer choice
in the market. While the relevance of insights from
ordinary consumption should not be reduced to their
implications for ideas of choice, it is both a significant theme and one around which several of the key
insights from the field can be introduced.
First, a key focus of work in ordinary consumption has been on the embeddedness of much
consumption within the routines that serve as the
submerged foundations supporting the accomplishment of everyday life. The very practice of shopping
is largely routinized, with most people doing most

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of their shopping at the same few shops and largely
buying the same selection of products on a fairly regular temporal cycle of weeks and months. Without
such a routine, the coordination of provisioning of a
family would simply take too much time and effort
amid the bewildering choices available on the shelves
of supermarkets. This social function of routines
runs much deeper than enabling an individual to
manage the weekly shopping, and interrogations of
ordinary consumption, often drawing on Anthony
Giddens’s theories of structuration and the role of
practical consciousness, locate consumption within
the reproduction of shared social routines. This is
visible, for example, in time-use data, which reveal
shared diurnal rhythms of consumption of food at
established meal times. Such evidence, while perhaps
unsurprising, illustrates the routine embeddedness of
much consumption in the reproduction of fundamental social structures, limiting the power of individual
choice to change consumption habits.
Second, and closely related, is an emphasis on convention and normality. It is necessary to look at differences in shared conventions across space or across
time to understand the ways in which patterns of
consumption and social norms develop, or coevolve,
alongside one another. Elizabeth Shove (2003) traces
the complex relationships behind dynamics in shared
norms of comfort, cleanliness, and convenience with
implications for thoroughly mundane forms of consumption such as doing the laundry or using a freezer.
For example, she explores what underlies shifting
standards of bodily cleanliness such that a society like
the United Kingdom can travel from a norm of generally avoiding getting wet without a good reason a
few centuries ago, to a normal expectation of a weekly
bath a few decades ago, to a current norm of showering around once a day. The story of this shift is a complex one covering not only shifting understandings of
the body and the threats to its health—ideas of dirt,
germs, and bacteria and changing tolerances for the
smell of human bodies—but also the shifting possibilities for washing through the development of technologies and domestic spaces of bathing and of domestic
plumbing technologies including the normalization
of the shower. The consumption of things such as
bathroom fittings, and of water and the energy to heat
it, emerges as constituted not by individual choice so
much as by historic dynamics in shared conventions,
which coevolve with the possibilities for consuming
the resources necessary to fulfill those conventions.

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Organ and Blood Donations

This leads to a third key focus: the significance
of infrastructures and systems of provision. It is
most clear when looking at inconspicuous forms of
consumption, especially of utilities, that patterns of
consumption are in part constituted by the infrastructures and systems that provide the resources,
products, and services consumed. For example,
infrastructures of electricity provision have coevolved
with technologies such as lights, cookers, radios,
dishwashers, and computers, which in turn have
coevolved with shared expectations of the standards
and means through which services such as light,
cooking, entertainment, and communication are provided. With forms of consumption locked in to the
complex sociotechnical systemic interdependencies
that support them, there are real limits to the range
of consumer choice.
These insights contest easy expectations of the
potency of consumer choice but do much more
besides to understand the dynamics that lie behind
changing patterns of consumption. These preoccupations also indicate how a focus on ordinary
consumption has been grounds for cultural studies
of consumption to link with broader contemporary
debates in the social sciences. Through systematic
attention to the mundane, relationships with technologies, products, and spaces emerge that can be
illuminated through contemporary developments
in the theorization of materiality and sociotechnical
systems, not least from actor-network theory and
the broader field of science and technology studies.
Attention to routine and to the details of actions
around ordinary consumption has provided grounds
for growing engagement also with theories of practice in relation to consumption.
That the millennial manifesto of ordinary consumption has led to work curiously in tune with
broader contemporary currents in the social sciences indicates that, like most successful manifestos,
this was more capturing a moment than creating
a movement. Indeed, paying attention to ordinary
consumption has become quite ordinary for scholars
of consumption to the extent that the term does not
crop up a lot. So far as it remains an identifiable tradition, it is strongest in relation to the problematic
relations between consumption, environment, and
policy (e.g., Southerton, Chappells, and Van Vliet
2004), where the seemingly ineluctable escalation
of resource consumption is clearly linked to shifting routines, norms, and infrastructures and where

policy responses based on naive assumptions of individual choice are curiously durable.
Matthew Watson
See also Actor-Network Theory; Automobiles; Cultural
Studies; Cultural Turn; Infrastructures and Utilities;
Routines and Habits; Systems of Provision; Theories
of Practice

Further Readings
Dant, Tim, and Pater Martin. “By Car: Carrying Modern
Society.” In Ordinary Consumption, edited by
J. Gronow and A. Warde, 143–157. London: Routledge,
2001.
Gronow, Jukka, and Alan Warde, eds. Ordinary
Consumption. London: Routledge, 2001.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience:
The Social Organisation of Normality. Oxford: Berg,
2003.
Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack
Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg,
2007.
Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas Van Vliet.
Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of
Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar, 2004.

ORGAN

AND

BLOOD DONATIONS

Donation is the main avenue for obtaining organs
and blood that became essential for high-tech medicine during the second part of the twentieth century.
Donation is the gift of an organ or blood without
any compensation or payment. Organ and blood
donations are at the root of an uncommon economy
in consumers’ society. Scarcity, which is unusual in
wealthy economies, characterizes the offer of organs
and blood; it explains many debates about blood and
organ procurement, for example, the morality of the
donation of human body parts and tissues, the safety
of blood given or sold, the issue of satisfying increasing demand, and the status of human body parts and
tissues transformed into commodities.

Organizations and Technical Change
States, commercial and industrial firms, or nonlucrative organizations manage organ and blood collection. In the United States, blood banks were created

Organ and Blood Donations

during the interwar years. After World War II,
industrial firms began to collect blood and plasma
to produce blood derivatives products. In 1974, the
National Blood Policy Act advocated for the collection of blood from voluntary donors. In 1984,
the National Organ and Transplant Act prohibited the selling of organs and established the Organ
Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).
In France, nonlucrative organizations monopolized, with the agreement of the French State, the
collection of blood and organs until the end of the
1980s. Several scandals prompted the organization
to change, and now the French State manages and
controls the whole collection and distribution of all
human body parts and tissues. French law prohibits
the selling of blood and organs.
Scientific and technical changes transformed the
collection of blood into an industry. The fractionation of plasma during the 1950s and the discovery
of many blood derivatives increased the consumption of blood. The use of immunosuppressive drugs
contributes to the growth of demand for organs
and compels improved management. The public,
governments, physicians, and patients ask for the
respect of human dignity and condemn the selling of human body parts but want to obtain safe
products. On one hand, people assert the ethics of
organ and blood donation; on the other hand, they
consume human body parts and tissues to recover
from illnesses.

Ethics of Organ and Blood Collection
In 1970, Richard Titmuss published The Gift
Relationship in which he explains why the unpaid
gift is “better” than the selling of blood. The poor
and the unhealthy would sell their blood and “good”
blood would be scarce. This book provoked an
important debate, which contributed to the National
Blood Policy being enacted in the United States.
The collection of organs raises other ethical questions, such as how to ensure the deceased person
agrees with the gift of his or her organs. In France,
“presumed consent” is the rule: people are considered to agree if they did not expressly refuse. In the
United States, organ donors register with their state
organ registry. Another issue is how to encourage
people to donate organs. The debate in France is
focused on presumed consent versus expressed consent. In the United States, discussions concern the

1065

exhortation to give: despite the prohibition of organ
selling, some compensation might be offered as payment for the funeral.
Last, technical devices may help to increase the
collection of organs. The definition of death as brain
death or as stopped heart impacts organ harvesting.
These definitions are discussed among physicians,
politicians, and even the public.

Blood and Organ Safety
During the 1980s, a tainted blood scandal in France
brought to the forefront discussions about giving or
selling organs and blood. In France, blood given by
voluntary donors is considered “good” blood, meaning safer than paid blood. Similar arguments arose
in the 1970s regarding hepatitis transmission. The
question isn’t how the blood is obtained but how the
blood collection is organized. Blood banks’ activity
relies on voluntary donors: alienating people from
giving blood would affect blood supplies. Similarly,
industrial firms producing plasma derivatives have
to offer safe products, so everything should be done
to satisfy the patient consumers. Obtaining resources
for blood banks and satisfying patients for industrial
firms explain the two different ways of managing the
safety of organ and blood products.
In the case of the procurement of the organs
and human tissues, the question of safety is partly
embedded within the debate about the market and
partly within the debate about the risk of transmission of diseases, especially Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.
Bones, cardiac valves, explanted hearts, and so forth
are used in many surgical purposes. Safer products
may require the legal notion of res nullius (nobody’s
property) to rule their procurement. The requirement
of higher safety for blood and organs obliges the
improvement of the management of donations.

A Market for Blood and Organs
Because of increasing demand and the scarcity of
organs, several ethicists and physicians suggest that
the market should be an issue in the 2000s. At the
same time, others such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes
advocate against the market issue, arguing that it
is an exploitation of human beings that will likely
result in the emergence of a “transplant tourism.”
Despite the prohibition of blood and organ trade
in many countries, the process of collection, preparation, and distribution is monetary: national health

1066

Organic Food

systems define price lists for blood transfusion and
organ transplants. In France, people with renal deficiency are encouraged to ask for a kidney transplant
because it is “cheaper” than dialysis. Thus, questions
about the market for blood and organs should be
considered as well as the attitudes of the consumers,
the patients themselves.

The Commodities
Technical devices and scientific knowledge contribute to the transformation of blood or human tissues into derivatives or sophisticated products. This
modification could be called a commodification: the
change of human products into consumer goods.
But if human products are turned into commodities,
then should it be possible to patent them? This was
discussed with the Moore affair between 1984 and
1990, as some cancerous liver cells were removed
and patented. If blood or human tissues are donated,
then should businesses be allowed to benefit by marketing and selling them? In France, voluntary donors
criticized the creation of an industrial firm manufacturing and selling blood derivative products in 1993.
These questions suggest that the increasing use of
organ and blood as a consequence of the development of high-tech medicine contributes to the change
of health economics.
Sophie Chauveau
See also Body, The; Commodification; Gifts and
Reciprocity; Health Care; Moralities; Scarcity

Further Readings
Chauveau, Sophie. “From Human Blood to Blood
Products. Blood Collection and Blood Derived Products
in France after 1950: A Third Way of Standardising
Therapeutic Agents?” In Harmonizing Drugs. Standards
in 20th-Century Pharmaceutical History, edited by
C. Bonah, C. Masutti, A. Rasmussen, and J. Simon,
181–201. Paris: Editions Glyphe, 2009.
Cherry, Mark. Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs,
Transplantation, and the Market. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.
Healy, Kieran. Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for
Human Blood and Organs. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
Lederer, Susan. Flesh and Blood: A Cultural History of
Transplantation and Transfusion in Twentieth-Century
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Sharp, Lesley A. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants,
Denatured Bodies and the Transformed Self. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006.
Steiner, Philippe. La transplantation d’organes. Un
commerce entre les êtres humains [Organ
transplantation: A trade between humans]. Paris:
Gallimard, 2010.
Waldby, Catherine, and Robert Mitchell. Tissue Economies:
Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006.

ORGANIC FOOD
Organic food refers to foodstuff produced according
to organic farming methods. Generally, it concerns
the preservation of natural ecosystems and biodiversity, environmental protection, animal welfare,
and the social and ecological impacts of agricultural systems. Its definition is multifaceted and varies
greatly according to spatial, temporal, and sociocultural processes.
Consuming organic food might entail a critique of
intensive food systems. It can be perceived as a “beacon,” which illuminates the failings of mainstream
agricultural production and promotes an alternative way of consuming and producing food that is
socially, ethically, environmentally, and economically
sound. It can be associated with countercultures of
food consumption and production, an ethics of care
(for both humans and nonhumans), a turn to quality
food, and also with increasing levels of reflexivity in
contemporary societies as a response to globalized
and invisible food risks. Organic food consumption
is often deemed as an ethical and political act.
For many consumers, organic foods render a
plethora of meanings: healthier, fresher, nutritious,
seasonal, ecological, safe, ethical, homemade, tasty,
not genetically modified, traditional, aesthetically
appealing, small and dirty, expensive, exclusionist,
and untrustworthy. Many of these meanings are
contradictory and defy a scientific knowledge base.
For example, it is contentious whether organic foods
are healthier or safer than conventional products due
to their microbiological contents. All these meanings reveal the complexities of organic food—a
notion recently scrutinized regarding its innocuous
associations and counterculture features, so detrimental in the emergence of the organic farming
movement in the early twentieth century.

Organic Food

This movement emerged as the result of a set of
ideas, philosophical principles, and trials of new
agricultural practices. Some of its pioneering figures
were European. Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner
developed biodynamic agriculture in the 1920s. In
1930, Hans Müller and Hans-Peter Rush expanded
further the method of organic-biological farming. In
the 1940s, British-born Sir Albert Howard, considered the father of organic agriculture, was pivotal
in describing composting techniques to ensure soil
fertility. According to Philip Conford, these writings
were inspirational for the foundation of the British
organic farming association—Soil Association—set
up in 1946 by Lady Eve Balfour.
In the United States, four main factors were pivotal
in the emergence of the organic farming movement:
the campaigns centered on alternative production
technologies (instigated by Howard’s writings), the
health and pure food crusades, the 1960s counterculture movements (wherein hippy cultures were
paramount in their dissemination), and modern
environmentalism. Eventually, the culmination of
the organic food movement came with its regulation,
institutionalization, and commercial globalization,
mainly in the 1990s. By linking local geographies
to global economies, organic food moved from its
associations with a hippy counterculture to “yuppie
chow,” notes Julie Guthman.
Undeniably, organic agriculture has seen remarkable growth over the years. In 2008, the biggest
extensions of organically farmed landholdings in the
world were located in Australia, Argentina, China,
and the United States. In Europe, 8.2 million hectares were managed organically (1.7 percent of its
total agricultural land). International sales of organic
food and drink have reached U.S.$50 (Willer and
Kilcher 2010).
The academic interest in organic food reflects the
growth of this sector on a worldwide scale. One of
the ongoing debates within the social sciences literature comprises the unpacking of organic food contradictions through examining conflicting logics across
local-global food systems. This discussion has focused
on the tensions that pull the organic food sector in two
different directions: a move toward “conventionalization” and globalization (apparent in the bourgeoning
of an organic food industry) and a countertendency
toward the preservation of the movement’s original principles, often associated with localized and
re-embedded food systems. This brings to the fore

1067

different forms of analyzing this “organic paradox.” For some time, theoretical thinking revolved
around limiting polarized conceptualizations based
on alternative/conventional pairs. The conventional
organic industry with its narrow meanings confined
to production standards contrasts with an alternative
organic food system, encompassed by broader meanings of organic food (from environmental, through
food aesthetics, to ethics). The latter would serve to
preserve the “alterity” of the organic food movement,
often encapsulating postorganic values beyond the
confines of regulations, notes Monica Truninger.
For grasping this complexity, influential theoretical perspectives have been used, notably political economy approaches, actor-network theory,
and conventions theory. The latter two have greatly
contributed to a move beyond the dichotomized
theoretical framing of conventionalization and
bifurcation, facilitating unpacking the varied and
juxtaposed multiscalar spaces of organics and its
plural qualities. This, according to Nick Clarke and
colleagues, served to critically scrutinize organic food
by defetishizing its meanings, namely, by challenging
its association with ecological sustainability (that the
food miles and the local food debates contributed to
unmasking) and by revealing the unethical working
conditions of some corporate organic operations, the
vested interests of certain organic certification agencies that compromise the organic label, and the high
cost of organics that exclude low-income consumers
from access and participation. But Kevin Morgan
and colleagues argue that it also served to position
organic food within an enmeshed food network that
moves in and between processes of delocalization and
relocalization, where the alternative-conventional
boundaries are blurred and shaped by diversity and
contingency within consumption-production spaces
and cultures.
Monica Truninger
See also Actor-Network Theory; Alternative
Consumption; Convention Theory; Food Scares;
Political and Ethical Consumption

Further Readings
Clarke, Nick, Paul Cloke, Clive Barnett, and Alice Malpass.
“The Spaces and Ethics of Organic Food.” Journal of
Rural Studies 24 (2008): 219–230.
Conford, Philip. The Origins of the Organic Movement.
Glasgow, UK: Floris Books, 2001.

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Orientalism

Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic
Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004.
Morgan, Kevin, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch.
Worlds of Food—Place, Power, and Provenance in the
Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Truninger, Monica. “Organic Food Market in Portugal:
Contested Meanings, Competing Conventions.”
International Journal of Agricultural Resources,
Governance and Ecology 7 (2008): 110–125.
Willer, Helga, and Kilcher, Lukas, eds. The World of
Organic Agriculture—Statistics and Emerging Trends
2010. Bonn, Germany: International Federation of
Organic Agriculture Movements and Research Institute
of Organic Agriculture, 2010.

ORIENTALISM
Until the late 1970s, Orientalism was taken to
refer to a cultural or intellectual interest in the East.
Orientalist scholars achieved expertise in the culture, literature, and arts of the region, and cultural
fashions of Orientalist design came and went in
Europe. However, in his pathbreaking 1978 book,
Edward Said argues, following Michel Foucault, that
Orientalism is not an innocent form of knowledge
of a certain part of the world; rather, it is a form of
power/knowledge that divides the world into two
spheres—a binary imaginary geography of inside
and outside, Occident and Orient. This means that
the concept of difference between East and West is
a geopolitical division written throughout the texts
of Western culture, whether travel writing, political
texts, paintings, or academic discussions. To Said, all
of the cultures of northern Africa east to Southeast
Asia and the South Seas have been lumped together
by the Western geographical imagination into a singular “Orient.” The space of the Orient was defined
by texts that preceded experience.
Said argued that Orientalism was comprised of
a series of discourses that explained the inherently
different natures of Orient and Occident, and the
relationship between these two geographical areas.
These discourses were based around a series of
unequal binary pairs. Said (1978, 72) has suggested
that in Orientalism, Orientals “are always symmetrical to, and yet diametrically inferior to, a European
equivalent, which is sometimes specified, sometimes
not.” Taxonomies of difference in the history of

Western thought have not allowed the existence of
“different but equal.”
Said argues that Orientalism is central not just to
the West’s understanding of the rest but, more importantly, the West’s understanding of its own identity.
Frantz Fanon (1967) had earlier argued that Europe
was created not only by the third world both in a
material sense of the extraction of labor and materials from the colonies supporting the development
of modern European societies but also—and this is
what is so important about Said’s contribution—by
the epistemological division of the world into categories of inside and outside. The existence of an
irrational, timeless, and traditional East reinforced
the mirror image: the rational, dynamic, and scientific Europe.
Said argued that Europeans looked to the Orient
for confirmation of their superiority: discourses of
progress and evolution suggesting that the West
was more advanced than the East. It was “the white
man’s burden” to intervene and save the Oriental
from degeneracy or helplessness (an idea that can
be seen to continue in much contemporary development discourse). At the same time as representing
the Orient through revulsion, a Western fascination
with the East was insinuated throughout consumer
culture. Writers in Victorian Britain warned of the
sexual depravity of the Orient but enjoyed it voyeuristically through paintings and the displays of
goods and people of empire in the great exhibitions
of the time. Many Orientalist paintings represented
women reveling in pleasure in wild sensuality, which
would have been impossible to depict of respectable
European women at the time (although workingclass women were often represented in similar ways
to Oriental women in much bourgeois culture of
the period). Paintings focused on the erotic and on
excess, and male fantasies played out in sites of languid opulence. While most Europeans would never
experience the Orient for themselves, vivid accounts
of travel to the East were incredibly popular, being
outsold only by religious texts in nineteenth century Britain. Such travelers’ tales wrote the Orient
as a space of danger within which heroic explorers
proved themselves through trials of hardship. Their
illustrated talks around the country packed in crowds
on lecture circuits to the amateur geographical societies, which arose in the nineteenth century, while the
Royal Geographical Society in London was one of
the most fashionable London societies.

Orientalism

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a
parallel cultural movement linked to the West’s view
of the Orient, Romanticism. Rather than viewing
the Orient as the source of degeneracy, it viewed a
nobility in the simpler life believed to be enjoyed
by non-Western peoples. This view emerged from a
concern over the effects of modernity and urbanism
on Europe, which had removed people from their
roots. Icon of Romanticism was the noble savage,
a non-Western figure in touch with the rhythms of
nature. This feeling was only intensified by the end
of the age of exploration. With the end of blank
spaces on the map as the world had been explored
by Westerners, mapped and brought under the control of colonial powers, the spaces of danger and
excitement that had drawn in the colonial imagination were lost forever.

Contemporary Orientalism
The significance of Said’s argument was that despite
the end of colonialism, the imaginary geography of
Orientalism has persisted. For example, although we
witnessed the rise of multiculturalism in Britain, the
1980s also saw the Thatcher government draw on
the rhetoric of empire. This was mirrored by what
has been noted as a backward-looking cultural
turn, an unparalleled production of films conjuring a romanticized account of the colonial experience, most especially the experience of colonialism
in India, such as The Jewel in the Crown, Passage
to India, and Gandhi. In addition to depoliticizing
colonialism, these films were outside productions
“speaking for” Indian history. Indian history was
being retold by the colonizers themselves. During the
colonial period, the British extracted value from the
material produce: textiles, tea, and other goods from
India. In the case of the films in the 1980s, it was cultural resources that were being exploited, extracting
value from Indian history and culture.
This consumption of the Orient is not, however,
confined to Europe. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
(1994) explain how the rise of U.S. cultural hegemony and spending power has meant that from
the mid-twentieth century onward the definition
of Occident has become centered there. They focus
on the representational power of Hollywood while
others have looked to different parts of U.S. culture.
Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins (1993) explain the
role that National Geographic had in representing

1069

the world for a North American audience. They
show how the magazine presented a nonconflicting
image of the world led by the United States—again
deploying evolutionary narratives about societal
progress. This colorful imagined geography rendered
difference as nothing more than aesthetics: the exotic
as something that sells. Much of the difference was
identified through a narrative of dress and clothing,
suggesting local difference at the level of aesthetics
and a timelessness rather than an interpretation,
which would suggest that there were structural (neocolonial) connections between places.
Perhaps the form of consumption most directly
associated with Orientalism is travel. Travel to places
that have been Orientalized in the Western imagination is directly about consuming difference, primarily
through the eyes (through the tour and taking photographs) and the stomach (“exotic” food). Travel was
initially only an elite pursuit. The nineteenth century,
however, witnessed the establishment of package
tours (introduced by Thomas Cook). During the
twentieth century, the rise of middle-class wealth and
culture meant that the numbers of those involved in
travel increased further, but it was not until after the
Second World War that there was the rise of mass
tourism. Over the last twenty or thirty years, tourists have increasingly looked to destinations in the
Global South.
The experience of travel to places different from
home is thought by many to transform a person
(Bruner 1991). This Romantic view that writes
tourism as a search for an authentic culture, which
has not been overlain by Western culture, has been
described as the salvage paradigm. The processes
of colonialism, globalization, and capitalism are
viewed as corrupting a patchwork of authentic and
natural cultures around the world. Such different
cultures are seen as becoming more homogenous as
a result of global processes. This is seen in terms of
loss. Orientalism persists in tourism that promises
consumers places unchanging for centuries or living
at a different pace from the hectic modern life from
which they seek respite.
While Said’s views have been highly influential, they
have also been critiqued for a number of oversights.
Feminist critics have highlighted the use of gendered
images, which effectively reinforced the patriarchal
idea that it is men who are active and capable and
women are passive and unable to represent themselves. Feminists have argued that Western women

1070

Othering

travelers to the Orient produced ambivalent accounts
of the Orient due to their dominant racial positionality but subordinate gender. Furthermore, Said
has been accused of homogenizing all of European
culture into the Occident in the same way as he has
accused others of Orientalism. Suzanne Marchand
(2001, 472) has, for example, highlighted Said’s focus
on English and French colonialism to the exclusion of
German studies of the Orient, in which “platitudes
invoking oriental stagnation were repeatedly challenged by those who now admired the East’s resilience as against the constant revolutions of fortune
in the West.” Said’s account has also been critiqued
for emphasizing historical continuity to the extent of
overshadowing the changes that have occurred.
Joanne Sharp
See also British Empire; Civilizing Processes;
Colonialism; Identity; Othering; Postcolonial Theory;
Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
Bruner, Edward. “Transformation of Self in Tourism.”
Annals of Tourism Research 18 (1991): 238–250.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York:
Grove, 1967.
Lutz, Catherine, and Jane Collins. Reading National
Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago University
Press, 1993.
Marchand, Suzanne. “German Orientalism and the Decline
of the West.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 145 (2001): 456–473.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism.
London: Routledge, 1994.

OTHERING
Othering insists that any concept of self or identity
requires the establishment of a distinct and external
other against which it is defined. This implies that
rather than thinking of identity as a concept that
unites people who have something in common, it is
something essentially linked to the identification of
difference. It refuses to accept essentialist or natural
definitions of identity, instead seeing all identities as
being socially constructed. Thus, categories of identity are not fixed, timeless, or preexistent but emerge
through social practice at particular times and in

specific places. This is a binary form of thinking,
which considers self and other to be complete and
bounded opposites.
The concept of the other originates in the work
of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
who saw the binary between master and slave as
being a relationship of dependency, a model from
which many view the development of Karl Marx’s
views of the historical materialism of class struggle.
Continental feminist philosophers such as Hélène
Cixous and Luce Irigaray interpret gender relations
in a similar fashion. For them, man is dependent on
the figure of woman embodying everything rejected
from masculinity (weakness, emotion, subjectivity, and so on) to reflect himself back as complete.
Psychoanalytic theorists posit the stage in early
childhood of an understanding of the difference
between self and other as the key moment in the
development of individual subjectivity.

History of the West’s Others
Historically, the most significant form of othering
is Orientalism. This is Edward Said’s (1978) critical
term for a binary imagined geography that divides
the world into inside and outside, Occident and
Orient. This geopolitical division, he argued, is written throughout the texts of Western culture. The
inherently different natures of Orient and Occident
were based around a series of unequal binary pairs
within which the Western character was always
inscribed with value and power.
Said argued that from the Enlightenment onward
the achievements of science were seen to make all
the clearer the difference between European man
and peoples of the Orient. Science, and its practical application in such forms as medicine and engineering, seemed to demonstrate the separation of
European man from nature. Whereas Europeans had
conquered nature through mining and agriculture,
conquered space and time via new forms of transportation, and were on their way to conquering the
body through the application of medical science,
Oriental peoples were, according to this view, still
subject to the forces of the natural world, trapped
in place, and ignorant of the workings of the human
body. Thus, non-Europeans were excluded from civilization, placed in the nature they could not control,
and therefore under the stewardship of Europe along
with nature. Moreover, new forms of science could

Othering

be used to demonstrate the fundamental difference
between the West and other in more direct ways.
Said has been critiqued for presenting too homogenous a picture of European Orientalists, and some
have argued that there were different responses to
non-Europeans with Indian culture, for instance,
receiving more respect than Africa (see Cohn 1996).
Nevertheless, later into the nineteenth century the
“science” of race used “objective” measures to establish racial categories “because nineteenth century
Europeans believed that machines, skull size, or ideas
about the configuration of the solar system were culturally neutral facts, evaluative criteria based on science and technology appeared to be the least tainted
by subjective bias” (Adas 1989, 145–146). Racial
categorizations, which placed European man at the
top, placing other races in a taxonomy of difference
defined by their deviance from this norm, were created by measurements of skull size, face angle, and
other bodily measurements.
The end of the colonial period and the rise of
the United States to global hegemony suggested to
some that the Orientalist system of othering might
come to an end. However, Carl Pletsch (1981) has
demonstrated the ongoing binaries of self and otherness that run through the three world concept,
which emerged post–World War II. He argued that
the second world became the other to the West in
political terms and that, while it was a developed
realm, its technological developments and modernity had deviated from the Western norm because
of the influence of ideology. The third world was
other to the developed realms of first and second
worlds because of its perceived lack of modernity.
Thus, once again, the role of the third world was
to affirm the first, and it became an intellectual and
material battleground over which the first and second worlds fought.
During this period, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) became the West’s other. The anxiety about the Soviet other was perhaps all the more
acute, however, because, unlike the other during the
colonial period, communists were not necessarily
marked as different; they were much harder, even
impossible, to identify and mark as other. Hence,
in political and popular culture alike there arose
a number of “red scares,” fears of a subtle Soviet
infiltration of the United States, where unsuspecting
Americans had been seduced by communists who
had hidden their political leanings. This became a

1071

strong theme in popular culture, especially films, and
was reconfigured into science fiction stories where
aliens threatened the world by hiding their otherness
(e.g., Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
The end of the Cold War has seen the location of
otherness for the West shift once more. After a period
of uncertainty, the rise of political Islam provided a
figure (or, some have argued, was created as a figure)
of otherness. Neoconservative leaders in the United
States influenced by Samuel Huntington’s (1993)
clash of civilizations theory, which argued that there
were inherent differences between civilizations that
would inevitably lead to conflict, saw Islam as the
other to U.S. dominance. After the terrorist attacks
in New York in September 2001, the Al Qaeda network has been represented in the United States as
a presence so threatening, powerful, and culturally
incompatible as to present a complete other to the
United States. As was the case during the Cold War,
state policies of security have been focused around
protecting citizens from the threats posed by dangerous others “outside” the nation’s borders. As many
critics have noted, the creation of external threats
can be used to create a sense of common purpose
within states, uniting people who might be divided
by domestic issues against a common enemy.

Folk Devils and Moral Panics
In parallel to these civilizational definitions, there
exist other, smaller-scale otherness. “Folk devils”
arise from time to time in all societies. Such groups,
which are outside mainstream society—immigrants,
single mothers, religious fundamentalists, or unruly
youth—are labeled as different and threatening.
Stanley Cohen coined the term moral panics “to
explain the public outcry caused by clashes between
‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ in England in the mid-1960s”
(Valentine 2001, 181), but this is a concept that is
useful in understanding the construction by the
dominant culture of outsider groups as criminal or
deviant. However, such processes are not confined
to Western societies as, for example, the vilification
of albinos in some cultures in eastern and western
Africa has recently demonstrated.
Mary Douglas developed psychoanalysis to
understand othering as a social rather than individual process and showed how social outcasts become
associated with dirt—who were thus to be expelled
from normal society, whether by the placing of

1072

Outsourcing

people with mental health problems in asylums on
the outskirts of cities, displacing traveler communities
to designated sites, or through the recent use of antisocial behavior orders (ASBOs) to impose curfews
on youth in the United Kingdom. The “purification”
of public space of other groups has, however, faced
challenges. Gay Pride marches have challenged the
othering of alternative sexualities by celebrating difference in parades through city centers. Artists such
as Krzysztof Wodiczko have challenged the ways in
which the homeless have been made invisible with
public interventions.
However, at the same time as a feeling of disgust
arises toward the other, there is often also a titillating sense of fascination—we are both horrified by
the other and allured by it. In the United Kingdom,
tabloid newspapers are quick to spread not only the
fear of these others but also a desire to read more
about deviance and difference. Their sensationalist
accounts highlight well the simultaneous feelings of
revulsion and attraction stimulated by such figures.
While othering is usually held up as a process of
exclusion, it can also form the basis of an identity
politics or a politics of resistance. Recognizing the
contingent nature of identity and the work required
to maintain the boundaries between self and other
has opened up a space for resistance and subversion. Youth cultures, for instance, are often formed
around fashions and music that identify them as outsiders. Overt nonconformity can be the basis for a
visual politics of rejection of the dominant culture,
for example, punk, hip-hop, and gothic fashions.
Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha bases his theory
of resistance to colonial power/knowledge regimes
on the production of hybrid identities, which renders
the existence of a binary system of identity formation
impossible.
Joanne Sharp
See also Citizenship; Cold War; Colonialism; Douglas,
Mary; Enlightenment; Identity; Orientalism;
Postcolonial Theory

Further Readings
Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measures of Man. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Huntington, Samuel. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign
Affairs 72 (1993): 22–49.

Pletsch, Carl. “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social
Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–1975.” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 565–690.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Valentine, Gill. Social Geographies. New York: Prentice
Hall, 2001.

OUTSOURCING
Outsourcing refers to the subcontracting or transfer
of activities (production processes or services) previously performed within the unit under investigation
to an external provider. In economic studies, the unit
of analysis is normally a business, or sometimes a
nation, so outsourcing refers to the subcontracting or
transfer of activities previously performed within the
business or nation to an external provider. In studies
of consumption and consumer culture, in contrast,
outsourcing is normally discussed in relation to the
household as the unit of analysis, so outsourcing
refers to the transfer of activities traditionally performed within the household on a self-servicing basis
to external providers. Examples are domestic help,
restaurant and take-out meals, daycare for children,
and services in the realms of dog walking, personal
shopping, lawn maintenance, tax preparation, and
even changing the car oil.

The Rise of Domestic Outsourcing
In the post–World War II period, perhaps the dominant family structure throughout the Western world
was the male breadwinner model. In most households, women were first and foremost housewives,
while the husband provided the family income. The
use of external services as substitutes for domestic
labor was seldom considered. Instead, the wife was
deemed responsible for nearly all domestic and caring tasks. Only affluent families would hire live-in
servants for tasks such as domestic cleaning, and
domestic outsourcing was predominantly viewed as
a sign of wealth rather than a strategy for enabling
the wife to enter the formal labor market.
Since World War II, however, the composition of
households has markedly changed, with significant
rises in the relative number of dual-earner and single
households. Given that dual-earner households
face time pressures due to the competing claims of
work and family and single households face the

Outsourcing

responsibility for household and caring tasks alone
with no help, the purported outcome has been an
increase in domestic outsourcing.

Outsourcing: Contemporary Issues
For singles, outsourcing is commonly used due to the
absence of help. For dual-earner heterosexual couple
households, meanwhile, outsourcing is more a coping practice adopted due to the failure of men to take
greater responsibility for the domestic workload or
even to help out. Despite the widespread entry of
women into the labor force in recent decades, that is,
the participation of men in domestic work has shown
only a minor increase. The slightly more equal gender division of domestic labor now apparent within
households is simply because women are doing
less domestic work rather than men doing more,
notes Jonathan Gershuny (2000). This reduction in
women’s domestic workload has been achieved by
outsourcing.
Although the outsourcing literature often implicitly assumes that work is being externalized to commercial providers, in practice, external providers take
many different forms operating under diverse work
relations and for a multiplicity of motives. First, there
are external providers who are commercial services
operating in the for-profit market sector. Second,
however, households sometimes outsource to closer
social relations, such as kin living outside the household, neighbors, friends, and acquaintances either on
an unpaid or a paid basis, and if paid, such work
can be conducted for financial gain and/or for the
purposes of redistribution or reciprocity. Third, outsourcing might also be provided by voluntary and
community organizations in the third sector or even
public sector organizations, and fourth and finally,
tasks can be outsourced to external providers working in the underground economy where some or all
of the activity is not declared for tax, social security,
or labor law purposes. Until now, little was known
about the proportion of domestic outsourcing that
goes to each of these external providers.
Neither is it known how much domestic work is
outsourced nor whether the proportion of the total
domestic workload that is outsourced is growing,
static, or declining. Instead, according to Michael
Bittman and colleagues, the growth of outsourcing has tended to be assumed rather than demonstrated or measured. This belief that the market is

1073

colonizing the unpaid domestic realm reflects the
wider modernization thesis that over the long run
of history, the market and state increasingly absorb
activities previously conducted by households and
communities. Yet the evidence is sparse. Although
the growth in the number of domestic help is often
cited as evidence of this trend, the problem is that
households employing domestic help might be also
doing more self-provisioning, albeit different tasks.
The only way of knowing whether a greater proportion of the domestic workload is being outsourced,
therefore, is to examine time-use diaries of how people spend their time. These find little evidence of a
trend toward outsourcing over the past half century,
reports Gershuny (2000).
For some commentators in consequence the argument has been that the trend is not toward outsourcing but its opposite, namely, insourcing, by which
is here meant the transfer of activities from external
providers to the self-service economy. For Gershuny
(1978), this is occurring in major part due to the
availability of cheap manufactured goods that raise
household productivity (e.g., convenience foods,
dishwashers, washing machines). In a study of the
reasons for insourcing, however, Colin C. Williams
identifies a multitude of reasons for engaging in
do-it-yourself activity beyond simply the fact that
it is cheaper and more efficient to self-service. On
the one hand, there are “willing” self-servicers who
“insource” either to save money (reflecting a rational
utility maximization model), for pleasure (a choice
model), or to seek self-identity from the end product
(a postmodern portrayal). On the other hand, there
are “reluctant” self-servicers who insource either for
economic reasons (an economic determinism model)
or due to problems with finding and using tradespeople (a market failure model). A fuller and more comprehensive explanation will perhaps need to move
beyond treating them as rival competing theories and
toward using them all to understand the diverse and
multifarious reasons for insourcing.
Alongside these contemporary debates on whether
outsourcing or insourcing is occurring and why, there
is also a normative discussion revolving around the
implications of outsourcing. There is a strong current
of thought that argues that outsourcing creates lowpaid, low-skilled, and exploitative work and results
in the rebirth of the master-servant relationship and
the transfer of domestic work from more well-off
to less well-off women, meaning that the question

1074

Outsourcing

of the redistribution of domestic tasks between men
and women is sidestepped.
Despite these concerns, many governments in
the Western world have actively pursued policies to
encourage outsourcing. Exemplifying this is France,
where the state has introduced the chèque employservice universel to subsidize and support the use of
paid domestic services by households.

Domestic Outsourcing: Perspectives
Toward the Future
Various visions of the future of outsourcing exist. On
the one hand, adherents to modernization believe
that the future will be marked by a formalization and
commodification of everything once produced in the
home. An example is Phil Ruthven (1994, 5) who
predicts that in the next century, kitchens and laundries in the home “will become ‘museum pieces’ or
fade into history.” Indeed, for many commentators,
the belief is that the jobs created in this domestic services sector can soak up the unemployment deriving
from the decline of manufacturing and more traditional service industries.
On the other hand, however, there are commentators who envisage a future that lies not in the
formalization of the domestic sphere but rather in
a process of informalization. As Gershuny (1978)
asserts, and reversing Ruthven’s vision, households
might well eschew formal and market services and
substitute such formal services with greater levels of
self-servicing, or insourcing.
The future, however, is not simply an either/or
choice of either a process of insourcing or outsourcing.
Rather than continue with this debate over whether
the future of the domestic sphere is universally one of
outsourcing or insourcing, there is a need for greater
recognition that the trends are not unidirectional.
Some domestic tasks will be increasingly outsourced
and others increasingly insourced. Different population groups, moreover, might well move in different
directions with some shifting toward outsourcing and

others toward insourcing. Future studies will need to
unravel this more complex picture and explain the
varying trends in different realms.
Colin C. Williams
See also Commodification; Do-It-Yourself; Domestic
Division of Labor; Domestic Technologies;
Households; Self-Service Economy; Service Industry;
Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings
Bittman, Michael, George Matheson, and Gabrielle
Meagher. “The Changing Boundary between Home and
Market: Australian Trends in Outsourcing Domestic
Labour.” Work, Employment and Society 13 (1999):
249–273.
Cancedda, Alessandra. Employment in Household Services.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the
European Communities, 2001.
Gershuny, Jonathan. After Industrial Society: The Emerging
Self-Service Economy. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in
Post-Industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Doméstica: Immigrant
Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of
Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
Ostrander, Susan. “Women Using Other Women.”
Contemporary Sociology 16 (1987): 51–53.
Ruthven, Phil. The New Age: What It Is, and the
Implications for Business. Melbourne, Australia:
Integrated Business Information System (IBIS), 1994.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American
Housework. New York: Henry Holt, 1982.
Williams, Colin C. “Rethinking the Motives of Do-ItYourself (DIY) Consumers.” International Review of
Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 18 (2008):
311–323.
Windebank, Jan. “Outsourcing Women’s Domestic Labour:
The Chèque Employ-Service Universel in France.”
Journal of European Social Policy 17 (2007): 257–270.

Editorial Board
Editor
Dale Southerton
University of Manchester

Advisory Board
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania

Frank Trentmann
Birkbeck College

Karin Ekström
University of Borås

Alan Warde
University of Manchester

Peter Jackson
University of Sheffield

Rick Wilk
Indiana University

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Contents
Volume 3
List of Entries vii
Entries
P
Q
R
S
T

1075
1185
1193
1241
1427

U
V
W
Y
Z

Index 1557

1493
1501
1515
1547
1555

List of Entries
Acculturation
Actor-Network Theory
Addiction
Adornment
Adorno, Theodor
Advertising
Aestheticization of Everyday Life
Aesthetics
Affluent Society
Age and Aging
Air and Rail Travel
Alienation
Alternative Consumption
Alternative Medicine
Althusser, Louis
American Dream
Americanization
Anomie
Anorexia
Anthropology
Antiques. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets;
Collecting and Collectibles; Material Culture;
Nostalgia; Object Biographies; Reuse/
Recycling
Appropriation
Architecture
Art and Cultural Worlds
Asceticism
Attitude Surveys
Attitude Theory
Audience Research
Authenticity
Autoethnography
Automobiles

Baudrillard, Jean
Beauty Myth
Belonging
Benjamin, Walter
Bicycles
Binge and Excess
Body, The
Body Shop, The
Bollywood
Bounded Rationality
Bourdieu, Pierre
Branding
Braudel, Fernand
Bricolage
British Empire
Broadcast Media
Buzz Marketing. See Markets and Marketing
Capitalism
Car Cultures
Carbon Trading
Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets
Caribbean and the Slave Trade
Carnivals
Celebrity
Channels of Desire
Charity Shops. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea
Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Reuse/
Recycling; Voluntary Associations
Childhood
Christianity
Christmas
Cinema
Circuits of Culture/Consumption
Citizenship
Civil Society
Civilizing Processes
Clothing Consumption
Clubbing

Bakhtin, Mikhail
Barbie Dolls
Barthes, Roland
Bataille, Georges
vii

viii

List of Entries

Coca-Cola
Coffee
Coffee Shops
Cognitive Structures
Cold War
Collecting and Collectibles
Collective Consumption
Collective Identity
Colonialism
Comics
Commercialization
Commodification
Commodities
Commodity Fetishism. See Body Shop, The;
Commodification; Commodities; Marxist
Theories; Obsession; Philosophy; Reification;
Simulacrum
Communication Studies
Companies as Consumers
Comparing Consumer Cultures
Confectionery
Conspicuous Consumption
Consumer Anxiety
Consumer Apathy
Consumer Behavior
Consumer (Freedom of) Choice
Consumer Co-Operatives
Consumer Culture in Africa
Consumer Culture in East Asia
Consumer Culture in Latin America
Consumer Culture in the USSR
Consumer Demand
Consumer Dissatisfaction
Consumer Durables
Consumer Education
Consumer Expenditure Surveys
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies
Consumer Interviews
Consumer Moods
Consumer Nationalism
Consumer Policy (China)
Consumer Policy (European Union)
Consumer Policy (Japan)
Consumer Policy (United States)
Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)
Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare
Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism
Consumer Protest: Environment
Consumer Protest: Water
Consumer Regulation

Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Consumer Rights and the Law
Consumer Socialization
Consumer Society
Consumer Sovereignty
Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies
Consuming Nature. See Consuming the
Environment; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption
Consuming the Environment
Consumption and Time Use
Consumption in Postsocialist China
Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern
Europe
Consumption in the United States: Colonial
Times to the Cold War
Consumption Patterns and Trends
Content Analysis
Convenience
Convention Theory
Conversation Analysis
Cool Hunters
Cosmetic Surgery
Cosmetics
Cosmopolitanism
Counterfeited Goods
Craft Consumer
Craft Production
Credit
Cultural Capital
Cultural Flows
Cultural Fragmentation
Cultural Intermediaries
Cultural Omnivores
Cultural Studies
Cultural Turn
Culture Industries
Culture Jamming
Culture-Ideology of Consumerism
Cyborgs
Cycles of Production and Consumption
Dandyism
Databases and Consumers
de Certeau, Michel
Debt
Decommodification
Delocalization
Dematerialization
Department Stores

List of Entries

Design
Desire
De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling
Diaspora
Diderot Effect
Dieting
Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down
Dining Out
Discount Stores
Discourse
Discourse Analysis
Disney
Disorganized Capitalism
Disposal of Goods. See Reuse/Recycling; Waste
Division of Labor
Do-It-Yourself
Domestic Division of Labor
Domestic Services
Domestic Technologies
Douglas, Mary
Downshifting
Durkheim, Émile
Eating Disorders. See Addiction; Anorexia;
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies
Eco-Labeling
E-Commerce
Econometrics
Economic Indicators
Economic Psychology
Economic Sociology
Economics
Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS)
Electronic Video Gaming
Elias, Norbert
Elites
Embodiment
Emotional Labor
Emotions
Energy Consumption
Engel’s Law
Enlightenment
Entrepreneurs
Environmental Footprinting
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption
Ethnicity/Race
Ethnography
Ethnology/Folklore Studies
European Union

Experimental Economics
Externalities
Fair Trade
False Consciousness/False Needs
Families
Family Meal
Famine
Fans
Fascism. See Consumer Nationalism; Italian
Fascism and Fashion
Fashion
Fashion Forecasters
Fashion Industry
Femininity
Feminism and Women's Magazines
Feminist Movement
Financial Services. See Credit; Debt; Network
Society
Fine Arts
Flaneur/euse
Focus Groups
Food Consumption
Food Scares
Franchising
Freud, Sigmund
Friendship
Galbraith, John Kenneth
Gambling
Gardening
Gender
Gender Advertising
Gender and the Media
Gendering of Public and Private Space
Generation
Geography
Ghettos
Gifts and Reciprocity
Glastonbury/Woodstock
Global Cities
Global Institutions
Globalization
Glocalization
Goal-Directed Consumption
Goffman, Erving
Governmentality
Gramsci, Antonio
Grand Tour
Great Depression (U.S.)

ix

x

List of Entries

Habits. See Habitus; Rituals; Routines and
Habits; Theories of Practice
Habitus
Hair Care/Hairdressing
Happiness
Harried Leisure Class
Health and Fitness. See Alternative Consumption;
Body, The; Health Care; Leisure; Obesity;
Recreation; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being
Health Care
Hedonism
Hegemony
Hierarchy of Needs
Higher Education
Hinduism
Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods
Historical Analysis
History
History of Food
Hobbyists and Amateurs
Hollywood
Home. See Appropriation; Architecture;
Do-It-Yourself; Ethnology/Folklore Studies;
Gardening; Gender; Gendering of Public and
Private Space; Households; Souvenirs
Home Computer
Homogenization Versus Hybridization. See
Americanization; Delocalization; Diaspora;
Globalization; Glocalization; Japan as a
Consumer Culture; Multiculturalism; Tourism
Studies
Homosexuality. See Pink Pounds/Dollars; Queer
Theory; Sexuality
Horkheimer, Max
Household Budgets
Households
Hyperreality
Identity
Imaginative Hedonism
Implicit Attitudes. See Attitude Surveys;
Psychology
Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions
Income
Individualization
Industrial Society
Inequalities
Informal Economy
Informalization
Information Society

Information Technology
Informational Capital
Infrastructures and Utilities
Inheritance
Innovation Studies
Internet
Interpellation
Inventing Tradition
Islam
Italian Fascism and Fashion
Japan as a Consumer Culture
Jeans
Kant, Immanuel
Keynes, John Maynard
Keynesian Demand Management
Kyrk, Hazel
Labor Markets
Lasch, Christopher
Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix
Lefebvre, Henri
Leisure
Leisure Studies
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
Licensing of Clothing Brands
Life Course
Life(style) Politics
Lifestyle
Lifestyle Typologies
Likert Scales
Liminality
Linder, Staffan Burenstam
Locality
Longitudinal Studies
Luxury and Luxuries
Luxury Taxes
Lyotard, Jean-François
Mandeville, Bernard
Marcuse, Herbert
Marketing Diversity. See Markets and Marketing
Marketing Social Change. See Markets and
Marketing
Markets and Marketing
Marshall, Alfred
Marx, Karl
Marxist Theories
Masculinity

List of Entries

Maslow, Abraham
Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)
Mass Observation
Mass Production and Consumption
Mass Tourism
Material Culture
Materialism and Postmaterialism
Mauss, Marcel
McDonaldization
McLuhan, Marshall
Mead, George Herbert
Measuring Satisfaction
Measuring Standards of Living
Measuring the Environmental Impact of
Consumption
Media Convergence and Monopoly
Medieval Consumption
Memorials
Memory
Men’s Magazines
Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture
Methods of Market Research
Metropole
Metrosexual
Migration
Mimesis
Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age
Mobile Phones
Modernization Theory
Money
Moral Economy
Moral Geography
Moralities
Mortgages. See Credit; Debt; Economics
Motivation Research
Multiculturalism
Multiple Correspondence Analysis
Multisited Ethnography
Multivariate Analysis
Museums. See Collecting and Collectibles
Narcissism
National Cultures
Needs and Wants
Neo-Tribes
Network Society
Neuromarketing
New Right
Nostalgia
Novelty

xi

Obesity
Object Biographies
Obsession
Opinion Leaders
Opinion Polls
Opium Trade
Ordinary Consumption
Organ and Blood Donations
Organic Food
Orientalism
Othering
Outsourcing
Packaging
Participant Observation. See Anthropology;
Autoethnography; Ethnography;
Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Methods of Market Research;
Multisited Ethnography
Patten, Simon Nelson
Performing Arts/Performance Arts
Personals/Personal Ads
Philanthropy
Philosophy
Photography and Video
Pink Pounds/Dollars
Planned Obsolescence
Pleasure. See Dining Out; Emotions; Happiness;
Quality of Life; Seaside Resorts; Tamed
Hedonism
Political and Ethical Consumption
Political Economy
Political Science
Popular Culture. See Mass Culture (Frankfurt
School); Popular Music
Popular Music
Porcelain
Positional Goods
Possession. See Appropriation; Collecting and
Collectibles; Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable
Possessions; Material Culture; Positional
Goods
Postcolonial Theory
Post-Fordism
Postindustrial Society
Postmodernism
Post-Structuralism
Potlatch
Poverty
Preference Formation

xii

List of Entries

Price and Price Mechanisms
Print Media
Product Loss Leaders
Product Placements
Production of Culture
Promotional Culture
Prosumption
Protestant Ethic
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Public Goods
Public Sphere
Pubs and Wine Bars
Quality of Life
Queer Theory
Radio
Rationalization
Rationing
Reality TV
Reception Theory
Recreation
Reification
Religion. See Christianity; Desire; Hinduism;
Islam; Protestant Ethic; Sacred and Profane
Renewable Resources
Resistance
Responsible Consumption
Retirement
Retro
Reuse/Recycling
Risk Society
Rituals
Romantic Love
Rostow, Walt Whitman
Routines and Habits
Sacred and Profane
Satiation
Scarcity
Science and Technology Studies. See ActorNetwork Theory; Electronic Video Gaming;
Information Technology; Innovation Studies;
Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age;
Network Society; Social Shaping of
Technology; Sociotechnical Systems
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Seaside Resorts
Second Life

Secondhand Goods. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea
Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material
Culture; Reuse/Recycling; State Provisioning
Seduced and Repressed
Self-Interest
Self-Presentation
Self-Provisioning. See De-Skilling, Re-Skilling,
and Up-Skilling; Do-It-Yourself; Outsourcing;
Self-Service Economy; Systems of Provision
Self-Reflexivity
Self-Service Economy
Semiotics
Senses
Service Industry
Sex
Sex Tourism
Sexuality
Shopping
Silverstone, Roger
Simmel, Georg
Simulacrum
Single-Person Households
Slow Food Movement
Smith, Adam
Smuggling and Black Markets
Sneakers/Trainers
Soap Operas and Telenovelas
Sociability
Social and Economic Development
Social Capital. See Civil Society; Informational
Capital; Network Society; Sociability; Social
Movements; Social Networks; Sociology
Social Class
Social Distinction
Social Exclusion
Social Mobility. See Social Class; Status
Social Movements
Social Network Analysis
Social Networks
Social Norms. See Acculturation; Anthropology;
Sociology
Social Shaping of Technology
Socialism and Consumption
Sociality. See Sociability
Sociodemographic Trends. See Age and Aging;
Consumption Patterns and Trends; SinglePerson Households
Sociology
Sociotechnical Systems
Sombart, Werner

List of Entries

Souvenirs
Spaces and Places
Spaces of Shopping
Spas
Spatial Analysis
Spectacles
Spices
Sports
State Provisioning
Status
Store Loyalty Cards
Structuralism
Style
Subaltern
Subculture
Suburbia
Subversion
Sugar
Sumptuary Laws
Supermarkets
Supermodels
Surplus Value
Surrealism
Surveys
Symbolic Capital
Symbolic Value
Symbolic Violence
Systems of Provision
Taboo
Tamed Hedonism
Taste
Tea
Techniques of Persuasion. See Advertising; Channels
of Desire; Desire; Markets and Marketing
Teenage Magazines
Telephones
Television
Temporalities. See Consumption and Time Use;
Convenience; Harried Leisure Class; Linder,
Staffan Burenstam; Time-Use Diaries;
Work-and-Spend Cycle
Textiles
Textual Poachers
Theories of Practice
Theory of Planned Behavior
Thrift
Time-Use Diaries

Tobacco
Totemism
Tourism Studies
Tourist Gaze
Toys
Trade Standards
Trademarks
Transaction Data. See Electronic Point of Sale
(EPOS); Store Loyalty Cards
Transgression. See Carnivals; Liminality;
Obsession; Queer Theory; Resistance;
Sexuality; Subversion
Transnational Capitalism
Trust
T-Shirts
Tupperware
Typologies of Shoppers
Urban Cultures
Urbanization
Value: Exchange and Use Value
Veblen, Thorstein Bunde
Vegetarianism. See Consumer Protest: Animal
Welfare; Food Consumption; Organic Food
Virtual Communities
Visual Culture
Voluntary Associations
Voting Behaviors
Walkmans and iPods
Walmart
Waste
Weber, Max
Weddings
Welfare State. See Collective Consumption;
Consumer Regulation; State Provisioning;
Systems of Provision; Well-Being
Well-Being
Wine
Women’s Magazines
Work-and-Spend Cycle
World Exhibitions
World-Systems Analysis
Youth Culture
Zoos and Wildlife Parks

xiii

P
PACKAGING
The practice of packaging goods dates back to preindustrial society, where packaging was commonly
used for cereals, teas, and oils, although arguably
the origins of packaging date back further than this.
Around 300 BC, the Phoenicians invented the glass
blowpipe, which was used to inflate glass into a hollow shape. The glass bottles that were produced
using these blowpipes were some of the earliest
forms of packaging and were critical to the containment of fluids, which otherwise obviously could not
be transported or handled. Today, many different
types of packaging exist, including paperboard cartons and boxes, metal cans, and plastic and glass
bottles and jars, to name a few. Whatever type of
packaging is used for a particular product, it must
be effective in performing three key functions for
the product and consumer: protection, containment,
and identification. In some respects, protection and
containment are the most basic functions of packaging, and those that originally made packaging necessary to handle and transport goods; however, today
it is perhaps the identification and communication
aspects of packaging that are of greatest importance
to consumer culture.
The importance of packaging increased greatly
during the nineteenth century, particularly in the
United Kingdom and the United States, as goods
began to be produced and sold on a larger scale,
thus requiring packaging for protection during
transportation. This importance increased toward

the end of the nineteenth century, with the introduction of trademarks for the purposes of identifying
goods, with packaging being used as a device to
carry such identifying markings on goods. During
the twentieth century, the importance of packaging
increased further due to the growing importance of
brands, trademarks, and advertising to consumers
and their choices.
The use of packaging by consumers to identify
different brands and products makes packaging
a key tool for organizations, as it can be used to
influence consumers’ purchasing behaviors. Indeed,
as far back as the 1950s, E. Ditcher identified the
important effects packaging could have on consumers, describing it as a “silent salesman,” and in the
modern supermarket retail environment in which
consumers purchase so many goods, this ability of
packaging to sell the product and gain consumers’
attention is of great significance, as discussed in the
following section. However, while packaging is of
critical importance, it has received relatively little
attention in the academic literature, and there is a
need for research into this topic.

Contemporary Relevance of Packaging
Packaging is used in many product categories and
industries; around 75 percent of all finished goods
require packaging. However, it is of particular
importance in the fast moving consumer goods
(FMCG) industry, where it plays a key role in product success. The FMCG industry consists of three
sectors: food, drinks, and household goods (such as

1075

1076

Packaging

shampoo and household cleaning products). While
packaging is of key importance to the success of
products within the FMCG industry as a whole, it
is of particular importance in the food and drinks
sectors due to its role in preserving food and preventing risks of contamination. The importance of
packaging in the FMCG industry today has largely
developed through the growth of supermarkets as
the main retail outlet where consumers purchase
these goods. For example, Leon Schiffman and
Leslie Kanuk, as far back as the 1990s, noted that
in modern crowded supermarkets, consumers are
frequently exposed to thousands of products and
all kinds of other stimuli; however, the consumer
perceives only a small number of the total stimuli,
and therefore, according to Rod Sara, the marketer
may have less than one second to get the customer’s
attention. The growth of supermarkets and hypermarkets has therefore made packaging an important
part of consumer culture.
A number of cultural changes have affected
packaging, its importance, and some key packaging developments. Cultural changes in recent years
have seen increasing shifts toward healthful eating
among consumers in developed countries; likewise,
there is also evidence of growth in products that
are organic and ethical. These changes have further
raised the importance of packaging to consumers,
who are paying increasing attention to label information as a result of their concerns about health
and nutrition. For example, drink manufacturer
Innocent used the labeling on its smoothies, which
is relatively simple and portrays the outline of a fruit
that is made to look like it has eyes and a halo, to
portray its products as being simple and pure. The
company also made improvements to the packaging
itself to enable the fresh fruit product to achieve a
long shelf life beyond what would have previously
been possible for a mixed fruit juice–based product.
This highlights that both the material purpose of the
packaging and the visual cues to the consumer are of
critical importance.
Changes in modern culture have seen consumers
placing greater emphasis on the environment, notes
Gerard Prendergast and colleagues, and this has also
affected packaging. Indeed, many organizations have
switched to recyclable packaging in recent years.
Likewise, product manufacturers have also been
switching their emphasis toward reducing packaging on products, in response to consumers becoming

more aware and concerned about environmental
issues and the reduction of waste. Consumers are
becoming increasingly dissatisfied about the extensive, and sometimes excessive, use of packaging
(British Market Research Bureau [BMRB]/Mintel
International Group 2006). However, despite these
negative perceptions and the negative press packaging has received, packaging plays key roles for products and consumers, particularly with respect to its
role in protecting products. The role of packaging
in protecting products provides some justification
for the prevalence of packaging, particularly in the
food and drinks industry where it is key to reducing food waste by increasing product shelf life and
preventing spoilage. However, consumers’ awareness
of these benefits of packaging is still relatively low;
thus, many continue to have negative perceptions
of packaging.

Significance
Packaging’s three key functions of protection, containment, and identification are all of critical importance to consumers. While it is tempting to focus on
the communication and identification elements of
product packaging, the importance of effective containment and protection must also be recognized.
For example, consumers can become frustrated by
poorly designed packaging that is hard to open,
packaging that breaks or splits when it is opened,
or packaging that will not effectively reseal. Thus,
effective packaging design can be key to consumer
satisfaction, loyalty, and consumption choices. In
addition, when one considers the growth of the packaged food sector, particularly packaging that allows
food to be microwaved or oven cooked in it, it is possible to see the key role of packaging in improving
convenience for the consumer.
Arguably, more important than the convenience
packaging can offer to the consumer is the protection it can provide. For example, in the 1990s,
producers and retailers experienced commercial
terrorism in their own stores, with a number of
consumer claims based on products being tampered with prior to their purchase, which led to
an increase in the use of tamperproof packaging.
Baby food was a particular target, and manufacturers such as Cow & Gate and Heinz were pioneers
in developing tamperproof packaging. Their food
products are now sold with tamperproof packaging,

Packaging

such as jars featuring pop-up disks showing when
the jar has been opened, warning consumers not
to purchase the product. Similarly, in the United
States in the 1980s, the painkiller Tylenol saw sales
collapse after some of these drugs were deliberately
contaminated with the toxic chemical cyanide; this
brand was rescued with the introduction of tamperproof packaging.
The role of packaging in identifying products and
communicating with the consumer can be critical to
gaining consumers’ attention and influencing their
consumption behavior. In this respect, packaging
represents an important opportunity to convince
shoppers and influence their purchase decisions at
the point of sale. Indeed, Carl McDaniel and R. C.
Baker have suggested that packaging represents the
final opportunity to convince buyers to purchase a
particular brand. Thus, packaging is of great significance to the consumer and clearly affects their consumption behaviors. For example, Bo Rundh found
that Absolut vodka’s success in becoming the second
largest brand in the vodka market was in part due
to its unique packaging design, including both the
bottle and labeling.
Packaging’s role in communicating with consumers spreads beyond its ability to influence their
purchase decisions, as packaging and its design can
also help consumers to make brand associations.
For example, the packaging of a food product can
provide consumers with cues about the quality of
a potential purchase prior to their consumption of
the product. Therefore, according to William R.
Green, packaging can affect consumers’ evaluations of key aspects of a product, such as product
quality, and can be of significant importance to the
perceived positioning of products. In the case of the
wine industry, for example, the packaging of wine
is considered to provide a key cue contributing to
defining the consumers’ expected quality of the
product. For example, wines packaged in bottles
with flatter bottoms and taller, thinner necks tend to
be associated with lower value, less traditional wines
by consumers.
The importance of packaging to consumers’ perceptions of products and their positioning show that,
as far as the consumer is concerned, the product and
its packaging are inextricably linked. Indeed, Olga
Ampuero and Natalia Vila suggest that the concept
of product positioning actually originates from packaging, as aspects such as size, color, and shape are

1077

used by consumers to assess products and compare
them to competitors.
Chris Simms
See also Advertising; Branding; Design; Environmental
Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption;
Planned Obsolescence; Reuse/Recycling;
Supermarkets; Waste

Further Readings
Ampuero, Olga, and Natalia Vila. “Consumer Perceptions
of Product Packaging.” Journal of Consumer Marketing
23, no. 2 (2006): 100–112.
British Market Research Bureau (BMRB)/Mintel
International Group. Food Retailing. London: Mintel
Group, 2006.
Ditcher, E. The Package and Label. London: Packaging
Carton Research Council, 1957.
Green, William R. The Retail Store: Design &
Construction. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1986.
McDaniel, Carl, and R. C. Baker. “Convenience Food
Packaging and the Perception of Product Quality.”
Journal of Marketing 41, no. 4 (1997): 57–58.
Nancarrow, Clive, Len Tiu Wright, and Ian Brace. “Gaining
Competitive Advantage from Packaging & Labelling in
Marketing Communications.” British Food Journal 100,
no. 2 (1998): 110–118.
Prendergast, Gerard, and Leyland Pitt. “Packaging,
Marketing, Logistics & the Environment: Are There
Trade-Offs?” International Journal of Physical
Distribution & Logistics Management 26, no. 6 (1996):
60–72.
Rundh, Bo. “The Multi-faceted Dimension of Packaging.”
British Food Journal 107, no. 9 (2005): 670–694.
Sara, Rod. “Packaging as a Retail Marketing Tool.”
International Journal of Physical Distribution &
Logistics Management 20, no. 8 (1990): 10–21.
Vazquez, Delia, Margaret Bruce, and Rachel Studd.
“A Case Study Exploring the Packaging Design
Management Process within a UK Food Retailer.”
British Food Journal 105, no. 9 (2003): 602–617.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
See Anthropology; Autoethnography;
Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying
Consumer Culture; Methods of Market
Research; Multisited Ethnography

1078

Patten, Simon Nelson

PATTEN, SIMON NELSON
(1852–1922)
Simon Nelson Patten was an American economist,
social scientist, and educator. Born in Illinois and
educated at Northwestern University and Halle
University, Germany, he was a founding member of
the American Economics Association (AEA) and a
member of faculty (later chair) of Wharton Business
School, University of Pennsylvania (1888–1917).
An economist and theoretician, Patten was one of
the earliest proponents of the economic importance
and benefits of a mass consumption society. Critical
of the harsh conditions created by industrial capitalism, Patten’s theories of a “social commonwealth” as
an ideal state devoid of economic and social pain preempted much of the consumerist thought of the New
Deal and postwar period. Yet Patten was equally as
concerned with restraint and moderation as he was
with a mass consumption economy, what he termed
a pleasure economy. During his forty-year career,
he wrote more than twenty books and many more
articles and devoted as much space to the importance
of consumption as he did to how Americans could
purge themselves of their vices—among them smoking, drinking, poor morals, and poor nutrition—and
embrace a life enriched by communal living, abandonment of intense partisan politics and nationalism,
and a transition from a pain to a pleasure economy.
Major publications include The Theory of Social
Forces, which laid out his ideas for a social commonwealth, and The New Basis of Civilisation, which
was his most popular and influential work.
Patten’s theory of consumption was premised on
the notion that by the late nineteenth century, the
United States was passing from a pain to a pleasure
economy, from scarcity to abundance. While this
transition brought many benefits, Patten’s concern
was that these would be concentrated at the top of
the social scale rather than evenly distributed. The
answer to this was the construction of a social commonwealth, a new form of social and economic organization and value system that was focused on the
achievement of a high standard of living for all rather
than for the few. At the same time, Patten hoped
that this prized abundance would not be destroyed
by humans’ baser instincts. For this reason, a key
component of the social commonwealth was that

these instincts were restrained by intermediate social
institutions such as church and social clubs and by
individuals accepting responsibility for the greater
good. Such restraint was the only way that people
would be able to prosper and move to a higher state
of progress. He opposed class divisions and politics
and favored economic welfare, increased wages for
workers, and other socially progressive measures
that were very much in tune with those advocated by
other key social reformers of the late-nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Writing at a time of vast
inequalities in wealth and living conditions, Patten
made a profound contribution to the fields of social
work, social science, and professionalized economics
at a time when these fields were flourishing.
World War I shattered Patten’s dream of a social
commonwealth; he opposed the war on the grounds
that the prolonged conflict would endanger the promise of an economy of abundance. He stood behind
U.S. involvement in the war in 1917, but his former
antiwar stance and his views on social reform had
damaged his standing at Wharton, and he was retired
from the faculty. Until his death in 1922, he remained
convinced that abundance for all could be realized if
Americans adopted new values and new restraints.
Although they were not recognized until after his
death, Patten’s theories on the political economy of
abundance made a significant and exciting contribution to the field of consumer economics at a time
when that field was in its infancy. Patten was almost
alone in arguing that consumer demands, wants, and
desires were central to a robust, healthy economy as
well as a healthy, happy citizenry, yet his ideas influenced the thoughts of New Deal luminaries, such as
Rexford Tugwell (who, like Frances Perkins, was
a student of Patten’s in later years), and preempted
much of the consumerist thought that would become
so important during the New Deal and postwar
period.
Eleanor Capper
See also Affluent Society; Capitalism; Economics;
Happiness; Industrial Society; Inequalities; Mass
Production and Consumption; Scarcity; Well-Being

Further Readings
Fox, Daniel M. The Discovery of Abundance: Simon N.
Patten and the Transformation of Social Theory. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Performing Arts/Performance Arts
Horowitz, Daniel. “Consumption and Its Discontents:
Simon N. Patten, Thorstein Veblen, and George
Gunton.” Journal of American History 67 (1980):
301–317.
Patten, Simon N. Consumption of Wealth. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1889.
Patten, Simon N. The Theory of Social Forces.
Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 1896.
Patten, Simon N. The New Basis of Civilisation. New
York: Macmillan, 1907.

PERFORMING ARTS/
PERFORMANCE ARTS
Performance, in everyday life, refers to acts done
to obtain a result. Performing arts refers to live art
events executed by one or more performers. They
can comprise theater, musical comedy, dance, and
opera: art forms that create art through the performances of people rather than by creating objects,
forms of art that still have a continuing appeal even
in the media age (film, television, and the Internet)
where usually one hears or assists at reproductions
of live events via a medium.
Performing arts have mainly a “social”
appeal—they collect people around the happening,
whereas the Internet, in contrast with television, has
shifted the focus toward subjective and (identity)
issues: Facebook and YouTube subscribers and communities are often used as means to confer “distinction” (Bourdieu 1984) to everyday people. If in the
television age, the public was often a passive spectator of programs of all kinds, then in the Internet
age, the public has acquired a more active role in the
choice of its entertainments and interests.
Given the ambiguous state of the term art, we
may state that, as distinct from “canonical” aesthetic
art, performing arts comprise art forms that were
not previously given the status of art, such as forms
of popular arts (pageants, mummery, pantomimes,
circus arts) and “happenings” performed on the
street by street artists, musicians, actors, even jugglers, attempting to catch the attention of passersby
with their craft, or performed in other nontraditional
places. Those forms of art aimed at provoking the
reaction of the public rather than its admiration
could be described as committed performing arts,

1079

and to mark this peculiarity, they have been called
“performance arts” (Goldberg 2001). Ideological
engagement and the politicization of art are, in this
case, the characteristics of the kind of affirmative,
committed distance that performance art takes both
from entertaining performing arts and other canonical performing art forms.
Performances are social events. They are “embodied” live events performed in front of a public,
and they entail, in addition to presence of the
performer(s), the presence of an audience. The audience is the target of the event and its presence is meant
to be a participatory one. The audience is made part
of the live event and renders the happening a unique
experience. The fact that the audience can directly
intervene distinguishes performing arts from even
the same performances once they are reproduced via
media (e.g., TV, computer, and video). The media, by
rendering the live event reproducible and thus shareable by all, places it in a context where the public cannot directly interact with the performer, thus shifting
the performance into the realm of “representation”
rather than keeping it in that of a happening. The
implicit positive effect of the media is nevertheless its
diffusion and circulation.
The major changes in the performing arts can be
witnessed in the theater. Starting from the 1960s,
theorists began to object that theater performances,
in particular, often conveyed elitist values unrepresentative of the new ethnic, class, and gender minorities that were claiming their own right to authorship
and representation. Therefore, during this period,
the passage from so-called universal aesthetic performances, comprising operas, musicals, and ballets, to
an increase of community-based performances was
felt to be more democratic and egalitarian (Schechner
2007). In this sense, even a director’s culture-specific
rereading of a play is an instance of performance
art: in this case, the actual, historical moment of its
production becomes dominant and determines the
emphasis on topical cultural issues. Rather than producing the supposed original play, directors may create happenings even out of traditional performances:
theatrical productions meant for the time being and
as a means for critique and historical commitment
(the various time- and place-specific performances of
Shakespeare’s Othello are an example). Nevertheless,
all other performing arts—music, dance, and opera—
have followed suit in dealing with less universal

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Performing Arts/Performance Arts

matters. The advent of pop music and the evolution
of melodrama and the ballad opera into the musical
(theater) are cases in point.
In an art performance, the happening, the one-off
performativity of the event, is of primary importance and determines its genre specificity. Indeed,
this distinctive trait marks the chosen nonuniversal
character of this type of art and distinguishes performance art from performing arts in general: the
time-, space-, and audience culture-specific reception
is here in the foreground. Thus, each performance
is something new and different, depending on the
specific time, place, performer, and public’s culture.
In performance art, the historical paradigms are
paramount and actively deconstruct any presumed
universal “truth” often claimed as being present in
canonical works of art. A performance lives solely
in its improvisation (or studied improvisation, as
in the Italian commedia dell’arte) or in its actualization. In a performance, that is to say, performer
and viewer are both important, the viewer even
more so than the author or performer, according to
Roland Barthes. The accountability of the decoding is of primal importance here. Performances are
always live experiences: transformative, interactive
encounters, according to Erika Fischer-Lichte; but
Hans Robert Jauss notes that performance art by
focusing on the “relative” culture-specific happening forces the audience to a subjective—even if still
unavoidably a culturally determined one—reception.
The aim of the event is thus often the dialogue with
one’s cultural unconscious, a move that proponents
of high art in search of universal values may dismiss
as irrelevant. This emphasis on reception underlines
the committed dimension of all types of performance
arts (in all its various musical, operatic, or dance
genres). Performance arts, therefore, call attention
to the policies of representation and, by foregrounding this issue, emphasize the ideological paradigms
inevitably present (but often unrecognized ones) in
everyday life.
The underlying contention of the difference
between aesthetic performing arts and committed
performance arts is that art, far from being “disinterested” and universal (Kant 1790/1928), is, as are
the media, a powerful vehicle for the construction of
identity and reality. Arts and the media “perform”
and offer models of possible “identifications.”
Accordingly, in performance art, the emphasis is
always on the actual body—the site of the unavoidable

marking traits of identity (gender, ethnicity, class, and
age)—which speaks out loudly of its own rights (cf.
body art and its emphasis on the body’s uniqueness
and nontypifying quality). Performance art aims at
extolling all the possible active “performativity” of art
by staging the cultural, social, and political aspects of
all kinds of body-politics (Crane 2000; Butler 1999).
Performance arts therefore do not aim at becoming
high, canonical, or aesthetic art performances because
they do not claim validity beyond their provisional,
time-specific performed happening.
Performance arts have thus become the preferred
channels for subcultures and popular art forms
typically excluded from the high-art canonical sites
(national theaters and national music halls). They
shun high culture: they use performances and the
body as the perfect markers and symbols of unavoidable historical change and of the relative, unique
identity that time, space, and society create. The protean forms the body takes in the performance point
also to the provisionality of all critical interpretations
that need constantly to be remade (cf. fluxus artists).
In this respect, performance art can be seen as the
embodiment of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s conception of the “demise of art,” here of the high and,
so thought, universal art. Body art in particular, as
well as all live instances of performance art, defines
the importance of art for the time being and as a timebeing interpretation of a specific historical time, in the
construction of which the performer and the audience
are both equally involved and accountable for.
Performance art, art being here more than elsewhere a metaphor for reality, focuses thus on the fact
that life can, through the active participation of the
people, be changed. The meaning of the audience’s
presence lies in the actual possibility one has of intervening. Happenings are so called in that something
happens and, as an effect, that people can react to
it, as in Bertold Brecht’s innovative and ideologically
“performative” theater.
Yvonne Bezrucka
See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Audience Research;
Body, The; Broadcast Media; Cultural Studies; Elites;
Embodiment; Identity

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image,
Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1977. First published 1967.

Personals/Personal Ads
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Originally
published as La distinction. London: Routledge, 1979.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution:
An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”
Theater Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–531.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999.
Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class,
Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2000.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transforming Power of
Performance: A New Aesthetics. London: Routledge,
2008.
Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo. Performance and
Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in
Australasia. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art 1909 to the
Present. 3rd ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.
First published 1979.
Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on
Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975. First published 1832.
Huxley, Michael, and Noel Witts. The Twentieth-Century
Performance Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. First
published 1996.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.
Translated by T. Bahti. Brighton, MA: Harvester, 1982.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by
James Creed Meredith. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1928. First published 1790.
Kaprow, Allan. Assemblage, Environments, and
Happenings. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1966.
Pavis, Patrice, ed. The Intercultural Performance Reader,
London: Routledge 1996.
Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An
Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2007.
Shevtsova, Maria, and Christopher Innes. Directors/
Directing: Conversations on Theater. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.

PERSONALS/PERSONAL ADS
Personals are advertisements placed by individuals
in print or online media to signal their availability
and desire to meet with others for romantic encounters or relationships. Historically, their growth has

1081

paralleled that of the print media. For example, in
the Northwest United States in the 1800s, advertisements in newspapers were common for mail-order
brides. In eighteenth-century Britain, personal ads
were a feature of matrimonial columns in national
newspapers. Their popularity really mushroomed in
the second half of the twentieth century in Western
societies. Studies have looked at their usage in print
form in North and South America, eastern and western Europe, and in Australia and New Zealand.
However, since the mid-1990s, online personals have
overtaken their printed forerunners as a global facility for engineering social encounters. There has been
a mass exodus away from print formats and, according to Anna Mulrine, currently, over half the single
U.S. adult population visits such sites each month. As
a result, many prominent newspapers are seeking to
establish partnerships with online sites.
Personal ads can be viewed as a subcategory of
classified ads. They typically contain a range of fields
or categories covering personal, demographic, and
physical information coupled with leisure and lifestyle preferences. The online versions have the added
advantage of carrying more information, including
photographic and video materials, as well as allowing advertisers to update and edit their profiles. In
theory, this should lead to a greater “fit” between
advertiser and respondent. Most print and online
ads require payment. In the case of print, it is usually the respondent who pays to leave a voice mail.
Online sites typically charge membership fees to both
advertisers and respondents for a fixed time period,
although trial periods and browsing facilities are not
uncommon. They often offer premium priced membership for supplemental features such as advanced
searching and matching functions. There are a variety of response modes for online audiences. These
range from selecting one of a range of avatars signaling level of interest in the advertiser to writing an
e-mail to online chatting.
Online personals sites are being increasingly targeted at specific subpopulations based on ethnicity,
sexual orientation, age, or special interest. Their
remit now extends from identifying potential marriage partners, through friendship, to facilitating
casual recreational encounters, and their popularity underscores the growing numbers of singles and
formerly married adults in Western societies. They
also signal that transferring the private search for a
partner to the public domain has come of age.

1082

Personals/Personal Ads

Personals have developed into a distinct textual
genre. Euphemisms and hyperbole abound. So too
do abbreviations and acronyms (ISO = in search of,
WSF = white single female); a modicum of personals literacy is therefore needed to decode and decipher them correctly. Profiles are typically phrased in
the third person singular, and there is considerable
intertextuality—use of song lyrics, catch phrases
from movies and TV programs—in both profile
names and text. The tone of the open profile section
tends to be humorous and upbeat with an admixture
of self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation. Most
sites and printed versions either allow or encourage anonymity for both advertisers and responders.
This anonymity, coupled with more liberal social
attitudes, may explain why the content of personals
has become significantly more explicit over the past
three decades.
Most of the academic research on personals has
centered on differences between males and females
in terms of what they offer and what they seek.
Results have remained quite stable across countries
and time periods. For example, Rosemary Bolig and
her colleagues found that, in keeping with traditional
sex role expectations, men seek out younger partners while women prefer older males, and Richard
Koestner and Ladd Wheeler found that status and
financial security were offered by men and sought
by women whereas attractiveness was offered by
women and sought by men. This illustrates how
social norms are implicitly understood by advertisers of both sexes. However, there are signs that this
may be changing and that, in line with the growing
economic parity between the sexes, men now feel
they also have to offer physical attractiveness; witness the current $6 billion market for male cosmetics.
Interestingly, research by Celia Shalom suggests that
attractiveness and status are of lesser importance in
the case of same-sex personal ads.
The personals section of classified ads in newspapers were often referred to as the “Lonely Hearts”
columns, a term that suggests that they were primarily for the socially inadequate and the isolated
and that those who went public on their need for
social contacts had difficulty in securing them
through traditional methods. This negative image
has been replaced by an acknowledgment that they
are functionally suited to the “work-centred, timepressured and mass-mediated nature of modern
life” (Coupland 1996, 190). That said, attitudes to

personals remain somewhat mixed. Users harbor
suspicions of being exploited sexually or financially,
and there is a widespread perception that deception
and dissemblance pervade both newspaper personals columns and online sites. Deception is facilitated
by the ability to edit, omit, and eliminate nonverbal
cues, and research by Catalina Toma and colleagues
suggests that it is widespread (81 percent), subtle, and
intentional—men tend to exaggerate their height,
women to underestimate their weight—although the
magnitude of the deception is quite modest.
Apart from their role in forming relationships,
personals also reflect and affect how consumers’
self-images evolve. Both advertisers and responders can come to believe that the categories and key
descriptors in these sites and newspaper columns are
what count in a person, and in turn, this can affect
how they see themselves and others. In a related way,
preference and pastime questions on these sites can
influence consumer choice for an array of products
and services: movies, cuisine, vacation destinations,
fashion, sports, décor, and television viewing.
A number of authors have claimed that personal
advertisements afford a valuable insight into what
the marketing concept itself is about. At its core, marketing is about exchange, and in personals, advertisers pay to present themselves as products, bundles
of positive resources, offered to another in the hopes
of reciprocal exchange. This viewpoint draws on
social exchange theory, where reciprocity is seen as
underpinning all social exchanges. It could be argued
that online personals facilitate this exchange better
than their predecessors in print; they allow advertisers to say more, say it their own way, and, as a result,
expect a larger number of potential matches fitting
their stated requirements.
A further feature of this exchange, of interest
to consumer behaviorists, is that participants are
increasingly employing filters or minimum “cutoffs”
in evaluating each others’ resources. Bolstered by
anonymity, these filters are often stated in a direct
and “up-front” manner. For example, those below a
certain height, above a certain weight, or belonging
to a certain ethnic group are informed that they need
not reply. Interestingly, consumption of certain products such as alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is increasingly featuring as such a filter.
More recently, two further theoretical perspectives
have been proposed to explain the exchange process
in personal ads. First, evolutionary psychology claims

Philanthropy

that men seek attractiveness in female partners simply to optimize their chances of reproductive success. Similarly, they offer them financial security
because they know that is what females seek. Men
are genetically programmed to behave in this way.
At the other end of the spectrum is feminist theory.
Far from being genetically programmed, gender
is socially constructed and not set in evolutionary
stone. Thus, gender roles and the criteria employed
in personals by males and females are learned. The
attractiveness and physical beauty sought by male
advertisers and aspired to by female respondents
have been dictated to a considerable degree by the
fashion and advertising industries. Indeed, the categories and specifications of attractiveness on personals sites can themselves be seen as perpetuating
this process.
Future research might seek to explore the relative
explanatory power of these theories in the area of
personal ads. It also seems reasonable to suppose
that the existing technology underpinning online personals will become more accessible and more sophisticated in coming years, with each advance affecting
both ad content and process. Indeed, the full impact
of the current move from mass to online media by
personals has yet to be fully investigated
Darach Turley
See also Advertising; Beauty Myth; Friendship; Gender
and the Media; Promotional Culture; Romantic Love;
Self-Presentation; Sex

Further Readings
Bolig, Rosemary, Peter J. Stein, and Patrick C. McKenry.
“The Self-Advertisement Approach to Dating:
Male-Female Differences.” Family Relations 33 (1984):
587–592.
Cockburn, John. Lonely Hearts: Love among the Small
Ads. London: Futura, 1989.
Coupland, Justine. “Dating Advertisements: Discourse of
the Commodified Self.” Discourse and Society 7, no. 2
(1996): 187–207.
Hirschman, Elizabeth E. “People as Products: Analysis of a
Complex Marketing Exchange.” Journal of Marketing
51 (January 1987): 98–108.
Koestner, Richard, and Ladd Wheeler. “Self-Presentation in
Personal Advertisements: The Influence of Implicit
Notions of Attraction and Role Expectations.” Journal
of Social and Personal Relationships 5, no. 2 (1988):
149–160.

1083

Mulrine, Anna. “Love.com: For Better or for Worse, the
Internet Is Radically Changing the Dating Scene in
America.” U.S. News & World Report, September 29,
2003.
Murgolo-Poore, Marie E., Leyland F. Pitt, and Pierre
R. Berthon. “Three Theoretical Perspectives on One of
Marketing’s Most Fundamental Exchanges: Propositions
on Personal Relationships.” Marketing Theory 3, no. 2
(2003): 235–265.
Rose, David, ed. “They Call Me Naughty Lola”: The
London Review of Books Personal Ads: A Reader.
London: Profile, 2006.
Shalom, Celia. “That Great Supermarket of Desire:
Attributes of the Desired Other in Personal
Advertisements.” In Language and Desire, edited by
Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom, 186–203. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Toma, Catalina L., Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Nicole B.
Ellison. “Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination
of Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating
Profiles.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34,
no. 8 (August 2008): 1023–1036.

PHILANTHROPY
The root of the word philanthropy means “love of”
(philo-) “mankind” (anthropos), but in practice, it
has a more restricted definition: the voluntary giving
of private wealth for the public good.
The novelty of modern philanthropy is its impersonality; while people have helped their kin and
neighbors for as long as human societies have existed,
the voluntary transfer of money to strangers is quintessentially modern. Historians have documented the
existence of personal almsgiving back to the ancient
Egyptians, and every major religion encourages philanthropy. However, the institution of philanthropy
did not gain legal status until the Charitable Uses
Act of 1601 in Tudor England, and its widespread
popularity was not secured until the Victorian era,
when philanthropy became a prominent means of
responding to the needs of the new urban poor that
resulted from the Industrial Revolution.

Contemporary Relevance of Philanthropy
Modern philanthropy has reached its current apogee
in the United States, where most of the world’s largest charitable foundations are located. According to
the Charities Aid Foundation, in 2006, the United

1084

Philanthropy

States had the highest level of giving as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP); at around
2 percent per annum, it is more than double the next
most generous society, the United Kingdom, where
philanthropic giving hovers around 0.7 percent of
GDP. However, even in the United States, levels of
philanthropic spending are low in comparison to the
amount that individuals spend on goods and services
for their own consumption and in comparison to
government expenditure on public services. Yet the
quantity of philanthropy is arguably less significant
than the qualities it represents. Modern consumer
societies are characterized as governed by self-interest
and profit maximization; therefore, nonmarket
driven actions are of particular interest and importance. One commentator likened the emergence of
philanthropy to another strange and improbable
creature, the giraffe—in both the literal jungle and
the jungle of capitalism, neither could possibly exist,
and yet they do.
Philanthropic gifts are often designed to be permanent to maximize their impact and to ensure the
donor’s enduring legacy. For example, philanthropists in previous centuries have built many of the
public facilities still in use, including schools, hospitals, libraries, parks, and theaters, and philanthropic
funding of scientific and medical advances benefits
later generations. Contemporary philanthropy continues to facilitate the private funding of a vast and
diverse array of activities in areas ranging from the
arts to social welfare to educational provision given
via one-off gifts, regular donations, philanthropic
foundations, and charitable bequests.

Theories and Debates
Economists have a particular interest in the “puzzle”
of philanthropy because it challenges the fundamental tenets of a science based on assumptions regarding self-interested behavior. The incorporation of
philanthropy into neoclassical economic models has
been achieved by claiming that philanthropy is like
any other form of consumption that people have a
taste for. The axiom of rationality that is central to
economic theory is maintained by emphasizing the
“purchase” of donor benefits, such as a desire for
more of the service that is funded. This proposition was first articulated in the public good theory
of philanthropy. Examples of consumption philanthropy include donating to a church one attends or

supporting medical research in a disease one might
someday contract. Some philanthropy involves neither tangible nor potential benefits, notably support for international development, which requires
stretching the definition of consumption to include
intrinsic benefits, such as the satisfaction and pleasure gained by making a gift.
Sociological studies emphasize alternative interpretations of philanthropy, linking it more closely
to the rise of individualism and the role that being
philanthropic plays in creating and communicating
a certain identity. For example, Thorstein Veblen
described charitable giving as “conspicuous waste”
intended to provide evidence of the donor’s wealth,
and Pierre Bourdieu considered charitable support
for arts and cultural activities as a means to demonstrate the possession of cultural capital and personal
distinction. More recent studies emphasize the role
that philanthropy plays in the pursuit of a moral and
purposeful life, especially in richer societies where
basic needs are easily met, and people have come to
realize that money is a means, not an end, to finding
happiness and fulfillment in life.
The pursuit of self-actualization through giving
raises a debate about whether philanthropy is primarily a self-interested activity driven by donors’
needs or a selfless act driven by altruism. This debate
appears irresolvable, being dependent on ultimately
unknowable motivations, but it is historically typical for philanthropy to advance the welfare of both
benefactors and beneficiaries, and the paradox of
philanthropy is that it involves an “uneasy juxtaposition of private interests on public needs” (Frumkin
2006, 3).
A further paradox of philanthropy is that the proceeds of the pursuit of self-interest are used to advance
other-directed goals, because wealth must be accumulated before it can be distributed. However, despite
popular assumptions of a causal link between the possession of wealth and being philanthropic, money is
necessary but not sufficient as an explanatory factor:
the capacity to give must be coupled with the desire to
do so. Philanthropy is therefore more accurately conceived as a social act, involving relationships between
donors, charities, recipients, and other donors, rather
than a simple financial transaction.
Philanthropy can also be understood as a transformative process that contributes to the reinvention of individual identity (e.g., from robber baron
to benefactor), the recasting of economic success

Philosophy

(transforming mundane money making into meaning
making), and the rewriting of relationships between
rich and poor (neutralizing antagonism through
a degree of redistribution). Philanthropic acts are
therefore an effort to shape the world around the
donor while also transforming their self-image and
how they hope to be perceived by others.

Future Directions
Since the turn of the millennium, many claims have
been made regarding the revival and reinvention of
philanthropy; belief in a new age of philanthropy
has gained common currency, and the term new
philanthropy has entered popular usage. New philanthropists are described as younger, richer, more
likely to be self-made, and living a cosmopolitan lifestyle. They are said to support new types of causes
and emerging issues such as global health problems
and climate change. They are also said to conduct
their giving in novel ways—bypassing existing charities, setting up their own foundations and projects,
and demanding greater evidence of impact through
measurable outcomes. The foremost example of the
new philanthropist is Bill Gates, whose foundation
(enhanced by Warren Buffett’s multibillion dollar
contribution, announced in 2006) is the largest act
of philanthropy in history. Gates and Buffett are also
prime examples of what has been termed philanthrocapitalism, which involves taking a businesslike
approach to giving by transferring skills and attitudes from the for-profit to the nonprofit sector.
Although the terminology is new, philanthropy is
arguably no “newer” at the start of the twenty-first
century than in any previous era. The role of the philanthropist has continually been reinvented to reflect
contemporary needs, dominant values, available
wealth, technological developments, and the broader
sociopolitical context. Philanthropy is therefore
always embedded in time and space. The widespread
acceptance of the existence of new philanthropy may
be due to a preference for novelty, which is a defining
feature of late modernity and a distinctive mark of
modern consumerism.

The Study of Philanthropy
The voluntary nature of philanthropic acts creates
problems for the accurate capture of data, and much
of our knowledge is restricted to donations that
appear in official records, such as tax returns and

1085

legacies, or to self-reported accounts that are susceptible to false recall and exaggeration. However,
knowledge about philanthropy has advanced since
the establishment of philanthropic studies in the
United States in the 1970s, and increasingly, it has
become a subject deemed worthy of academic inquiry
in universities around the Western world. However,
philanthropic studies still lack a disciplinary home,
and it is a field that remains “in flux” and “ripe for
systematic thinking” (Frumkin 2006, 4).
Beth Breeze
See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Conspicuous Consumption;
Gifts and Reciprocity; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings
Bishop, Mathew, and Michael Green. Philanthrocapitalism.
New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Damon, William, and Susan Verducci, eds. Taking
Philanthropy Seriously. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006.
Frumkin, Peter. Strategic Giving. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
Odendahl, Theresa. Charity Begins at Home: Generosity
and Self-Interest among the Philanthropic Elite.
New York: Basic Books, 1990.
Ostrower, Francie. Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of
Elite Philanthropy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995.
Payton, Robert L., and Michael P. Moody. Understanding
Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008.
Schervish, Paul, and Andrew Herman. Empowerment and
Beneficence: Strategies of Living and Giving among the
Wealthy. Boston: Social Welfare Research Institute, 1988.
Schneewind, Jerome B. Giving: Western Ideas of
Philanthropy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996.

PHILOSOPHY
The relationship between philosophy and consumption influences the ways in which researchers
approach the study of consumer culture. This entry
outlines the few thinkers that contemporary scholars
owe their allegiance of thought to in recent literature
on commercial culture. Consumption studies do not
merely entail the consumption of goods and services
but also encompass different facets of the process

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Philosophy

of consuming such as marketing strategies, discursive production of goods (such as ethnically inspired
goods and services), the experience of consumption
itself, and so on. More importantly, all these aspects
of consumption do not stand in isolation. They overlap each other and are constitutive with the nature
of how we consume things. In this light, a study of
object, particularly object-subject relations, would be
instructive in tracing the theoretical influences that
define contemporary commercial culture studies.
Following Daniel Miller, “a general perspective on
the relationship between people and things” (1987,
4) is necessary to determine the philosophical positions of scholars and their approaches. The concept
of objectification is explored through the theoretical inflections of G. W. Hegel, Karl Marx, Marcel
Mauss, Georg Simmel, and Colin Campbell. Each of
the above thinkers has different ways of theorizing
subject-object relations and therefore consumption.
Limiting these theoretical discussions to the above
authors does not give justice to the vast amount
of theoretical influences and philosophical debates
present in contemporary commercial cultural studies, but it is hoped this entry provides a concise outline of the philosophical roots of our understandings
of modern consumption.
This entry starts with the exploration of Hegel’s
works and especially of the Phenomenology of
Spirit (1977) where Hegel’s dialectical reasoning is
discussed in terms of how we understand commercial cultures. It is imperative for us to understand
Hegelian thought before engaging with Marxist
perspectives, partly because the process of objectification can produce opposing “endpoints” and
means different things between the two theoretical
standpoints and partly because Marxist thought was
greatly influenced by Hegel’s works. Following these
two thinkers, Mauss’s work is explored in terms
of how objects are conceptualized in terms of their
relation to social and cultural meanings and relations. Simmel’s work, The Philosophy of Money
(1978), provides an extensive examination of the
ways in which a highly monetized society is synonymous with high degrees of abstractions. To Simmel,
objectification intensifies with the process of modernization. This entry ends with a brief discussion
of Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism (1987) to explore Campbell’s
historical conceptualization of the rise of consumerism and its linkages with the Romantic ethic.

G. W. Hegel
The Phenomenology of Spirit (or “Mind” in other
translations) by G. W. Hegel is conceivably one of
the most pivotal texts in Enlightenment philosophy
and theory and has influenced major works by thinkers such as Marx, Simmel, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who
have assimilated much of Hegel’s ideas in developing
their own. Yet to be fair, proclaiming Hegel as the
inception of many of these ideas would be an inaccurate claim since many of them have been developed into their present forms by philosophers such
as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and many thinkers before
him. Given the breadth of this entry, our discussion
here seeks only to draw out a few elements in Hegel’s
work and examine them in relation to consumption
and how they influence the study of commercial cultures while ignoring a large part of his theoretical
discussions. To start our discussion, it is important
to examine the Hegelian dialectic that has been controversially attributed to Hegel. The famous triadic
of thesis-antithesis-synthesis might be better thought
of in Hegel’s terminology of abstract-externalizationsublation. Hegel’s approach to philosophy is based
on an ontological totality of what he terms as Geist
(or spirit), and this represents his belief of a universal
ideal or ordering that can arguably be considered to
be synonymous with the notion of “the divine truth.”
It is important now to consider subject awareness,
or reason, that moves (in Hegelian analysis) toward
a universality that transcends the individual in the
collective(s). Subjects are to gain accumulative awareness of a singular totality that rises above all forms of
collectivities realized through externalizations. Two
examples of these forms of externalizations are religion and art, revealing Hegel’s inclination toward
aesthetics and the perception that these forms represent stages of consciousness closer to the totality.
Unity in this case can be attained only through the
incorporation of those forms in the subjects, by processes Hegel terms as sublation.
For Hegel, distancing (or externalizing) is a necessary step before understanding (or sublation):
To put the matter otherwise, self-consciousness is
only something definite, it only has real existence, so
far as it alienates itself from itself. By doing so, it
puts itself in the position of something universal, and
this universality is its validity, establishes it, and is its
actuality. This equality of the self with all selves is,
therefore, not the equality that was found in the case

Philosophy

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of right; self-consciousness does not here, as there,
get immediate validity and acknowledgment merely
because it is; on the contrary, its claim to be valid
rests on its having made itself, by that mediating
process of self-alienation, conform to what is universal. The spiritless formal universality, which characterizes the sphere of right, takes up every natural
form of character as well as of existence, and sanctions and establishes them. The universality, which
holds good here, however, is one that has undergone
development, and for that reason it is concrete and
actual. (1977, 297)

is defined as the externalisation of society in history,
through which it is enabled to embody and thus
reproduce itself, objectification and culture may be
defined with respect to one another” (33). Therefore,
objectification can be seen as a mechanism by which
individuals relate to one another, and in the process,
culture asserts itself. Objectification thus reveals culture as a process in which externalizing the self (or
self-alienation) is necessarily involved in the progress
of individual consciousness.

The Hegelian approach to history is in a sense a
form of progressive philosophy where consciousnesses are moving toward a complete unity. To
achieve that, self-consciousness must first posit
itself in relation to the other, an act which can be
termed as externalization. Only through the creation
of the external can the self gain a definite sense of
awareness, an idea that its existential being belongs
in relation to its externalities. Consequently, the
process of sublation, of establishing a universality or unity, allows the consciousness to undergo
development through incorporating these differences
and therefore becoming real and achieving actuality. In Hegelian terms, objectification is the process
whereby self-consciousness externalizes its abstract
forms into concrete differences in forms that may be
related to any agency of human externalization, be it
through objects, art, institutions such as religion, and
so forth. It is through sublation, of internalizing all
these human externalizations, that the self becomes
developed and achieves actuality and moves closer
toward a total unity that Hegel posits.
In looking at objectification in Hegelian terms, we
can understand why it plays an important role in the
study of consumption. Objectification (though from a
political-economic perspective is often associated with
alienation) becomes a progressive moment for the
self-consciousness. It allows the self to achieve more
awareness of a common consciousness and posit a
possibility of incorporating these forms to develop
itself more. In this light, consumption becomes more
than just using and ingesting products; it becomes an
act of sublation, where products are incorporated into
the self and developing the self into more than what it
was before. Objectification can therefore be intended
as the “foundation for a theory of culture” (Miller
1987, 33), and it is not hard to see that “if culture

Understanding Hegelian reasoning allows us to better understand how scholars of Marxist perspective
(loosely grouped) theorize consumption. Marx more
explicitly discusses consumption in his work:

Karl Marx

Consumption, as a necessity and as a need, is itself
an intrinsic aspect of productive activity. . . . An
individual produces an object and by consuming it
returns again to the point of departure: he returns
however as a productive individual and an individual who reproduces himself. Consumption is thus a
phase of production. (1857/1973, 81–111)

By theorizing consumption as an intrinsic part of
production, Marx demonstrates the ways in which
consumption is rallied into the “cause” of production
and merely acts for the “decisive factor,” which is
production (1857/1973). It is no wonder that critical
works on consumption “have been largely characterized by a ‘productivist bias’ in which consumption
is derived from characterizations of modes of production or the industrial order” (Slater 2003, 151).
This assertion leads us to comprehend the emphasis
Marx places on the “relations of production [which]
constitutes the economic structure of society, the
real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite
forms of consciousness” (1857/1973). Consumption
behavior as part of the “definite forms of consciousness” becomes implicated in production. What is
definite in Marxist thought is the overwhelming
influence of the relations of production on the economic structure of society. Self-alienation becomes
axiomatically negative from this perspective, and
mass consumption that exploits mass labor to produce the “objects” for people to consume becomes
demonized and, in a way, inverts Hegel’s progressive
philosophy of history.

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Philosophy

Marx’s theory of objectification relies on a particular view of labor. Jean Baudrillard makes a compelling
critique in examining how Marxist thought in itself is
made up of signs and symbols that supports itself like
a complex system of language. He points out that the
use value of labor-power is an invented sign needed to
command the entire operation of political economy.
Use value is a “code effect, the final precipitate of the
law of value,” and without this generic definition of
labor-power, “there is no political economy” (1975,
51–52). Marx’s analysis of capitalism is dependent
on a specific understanding of labor power. What
arose out of such a perspective is the ways in which
consumption becomes embroiled in the productive
capacity of individuals. In a high consumerist society,
individuals are alienated from the products of their
labor. For “commercial cultures” where they are
typified by high levels of consumption and production, self-alienation would then become a chronic
symptom. “Useful objects only become commodities
because they are the products of the labour of individuals or groups of individuals working independently
of one another” (Marx 1930, 46).
Marx informs many scholars on the critique of
consumption via the ways in which objects turn into
commodities through the abstraction of labor value
reflected in the value of the commodities. He highlights that the value relation between the products of
labor have “nothing whatever to do with the physical
properties of the commodities or with the material
relations that arise out of these physical properties”
(1930, 45). It is in this light that human relations are
increasingly demystified in the marketplace because
social relationships between individuals are increasingly mediated by the marketplace through the labor
value within commodities and money. This specific
conception of commodity is termed commodity
fetishism and is crucial in Marxist analysis because of
the connection it makes between the subjective values of the products of labor and the economic values
of commodities. Commodity fetishism thus forms
important aspects of studies on commercial cultures
given the specific inquiries scholars can make into
products or commercial objects and their relation to
the wider political economy.

Marcel Mauss and Georg Simmel
In the study of commercial cultures, it is easy to
engage Marxist perspective while ignoring the

nature of commodities or objects as more than
bridled with only economic value. As a student
of Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss has a particular conception of the exchange of objects (or gifts)
between groups and how this exchange builds relationship between humans. Mauss draws from the
works of Bronislaw Malinowski, who studies the
Kula ring exchange present in the Polynesian economies. To Mauss, gifts have specific value in their
ability to promote social solidarity, and a theory
of gift is a theory of human solidarity. He sets off
to explore the inherent nature of gifts that causes
people to reciprocate and that also produces specific hierarchies of relations between receivers and
givers. It is in this light that we can see how the
notion of the free gift is an oxymoron given Mauss’s
theorizations. The gift cycles explored in The Gift
(1990) fixate the individuals within preset systems
of social relationships that reflect the social structures of the communities. Within this discussion
lies the currency that the gift has for contemporary
commercial cultures scholars. One aspect of commercial cultures that a theory of the gift has contributed to greatly is in the area of consumer behavior.
The specific motivations and desires in which individuals consume and the gift economies that arise
out of commercial cultures are aspects that scholars
have researched prolifically. Within the discussions
set forth by Mauss, we can see that objectification
is a process whereby the gift is produced vis-à-vis
particular social structures and situated within the
exchange economies of individuals and their motivations. This exchange economy becomes the mechanism whereby social solidarity within and between
societies (for an examination of intersocietal gift
exchange system, read Nancy Munn’s work on the
Gawa island subjects of Australasia, 1983) is “accumulated.” For Mauss, the gift is a reflection of the
inner workings of a vision of society as an organically growing entity. Here, we see the resonant of
Hegel’s model reflected in the progressive philosophy present in Mauss’s approach—that objects or
gifts shape the nature of reciprocity, the inherent
connections between different self-consciousnesses
toward fuller understanding albeit in a wider
structural-societal context. In understanding how
social relations are mediated through objectification as a process, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy
of Money can be read as an approach in which
modernity redefines the social mediation of human

Philosophy

relationships through increasing abstraction in a
highly monetized society.
The tremendous importance of money for the understanding of the basic motives of life lies in the fact
that money embodies and sublimates the practical
relation of man to the objects of his will, his power,
and his impotence. . . . I am here concerned with the
relation of money to the totality of human life only
insofar as it illuminates our immediate problem,
which is to comprehend the nature of money
through the external and internal relationships that
find their expression, their means or their effects in
money. (1978, 211)

To Simmel, money is the mediating form that promulgates the impersonal relations between individuals. Simmel links modernization of a society with an
increasingly monetized regime and recognition that
the explosion of products within a modernized society denotes a sense of an ever-expanding field of externalizations that the self-consciousness cannot fully
and adequately absorb. In a sense, Simmel recognizes
and acknowledges the effects of Marx’s commodity
fetishism and the ways in which it could intensify
self-alienation for a highly monetized society. His
analysis of the modern consumption paradigm is not
a specific critique of capital, but he does engage with
the alienating tendencies of modern industrial societies. What Simmel employs as well in formulating the
transformation of society within a political economy
of increasing monetized social relations is a specific
Hegelian conception of history. Namely, modernization is a phase in human progress, and the increasing
array of products specifies the development of the
ability of the human consciousness to externalize its
being. Money in this instance becomes not only a
distancing tool between individuals, but also it can
and has the potential to command and promote the
ability of the self-conscious to internalize all these
differences exemplified in the expansion of products
in a modern consumerist world. Money in relation
to objectification becomes more than just a tool to
intensify the latter; it also becomes a medium by
which social relations and cultural politics are played
out. In this instance, Simmel’s approach to culture is
not merely that of material cultures but a systematic
understanding of the self-consciousness developing
and becoming.
In this light, modernization has the potential to be
a phase in the progressive development of the unity of

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our consciousness but not definitively so. Therefore,
Simmel’s critique of modernity cannot be considered
as a disquisition on money because it leaves the discussion on the prospects of monetization open ended and
the socialities that exist within commercial cultures
even more so. Simmel’s remodeling of the concept of
objectification has transformed the idea of culture as
a force by which individuals are socialized as actors of
any given society. And in a similar strand, Campbell’s
article titled “The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism” (1997) provides a detailed
historical examination of the evolution of desires and
its linkages with modern consumer experiences and
motivations: “My endeavours were thus not directed
at explaining all aspects of contemporary consumption but at eliciting the mechanisms which accounted
for its distinctly ‘modern’ dynamic” (40).
Indeed, “modern” consumer culture is the specific subject of Campbell’s analysis. His inquisition
into the cultural change in the 1960s is supported
by a detailed understanding of eighteenth-century
Romantic ethic and its transition to a modern selfillusory hedonism that he terms the spirit of modern
consumerism. Critics have pointed out the highly
specific nature of Campbell’s analysis and that it
cannot be replicated in understanding other consumer cultures outside of England. But the ways in
which Campbell’s work contributed to the study of
consumption is the fact that desires and consumer
behavior are historically produced and that modern
consumerism is a specific ethic of consumption that
is contextually developed.

Concluding Thoughts
The above discussion has briefly outlined the theoretical inflections of some key thinkers that influenced the study of commercial cultures. This entry
is by no means a comprehensive discussion of all the
theoretical influences within the study of commercial
cultures because that would be an impossible objective in this short essay. Specifically, the ways in which
objectification and the production of consumerism
as a specific way of life are being informed by the
works of these thinkers were discussed.
Vincent Song
See also Alienation; Commodification; Gifts and
Reciprocity; Marxist Theories; Material Culture;
Modernization Theory; Money; Political Economy

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Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. New York:
Telos, 1975.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Campbell, Colin. “The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism: Reflections on the Reception of a
Thesis Concerning the Origin of the Continuing Desire for
Goods.” In Experiencing Material Culture in the Western
World, 36–48. London: Leicester University Press, 1997.
Hegel, G. W. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977.
Marx, Karl. Capital. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 1973. First
published 1857.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. London: Routledge, 1990.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Munn, Nancy. Gawan Kula: Spatiotemporal Control and
the Symbolism of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Slater, Don. “Cultures of Consumption.” In Handbook of
Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson, Mona
Domash, and Steve Pile, 147–164. London: Sage, 2003.

PHOTOGRAPHY

AND

VIDEO

Photography and video constitute a burgeoning
leisure activity with a wealth of associated consumables; a source of images that can represent,
reproduce, and persuade; and a means of perceiving
the world. As such, the production and consumption
of photographic and video images is a fundamental
aspect of consumer culture. Use of photography and
video is also increasingly common in research methods designed to investigate everyday life.
Although the theory of concentrating light through
a small hole to project an image had existed for centuries, French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first chemically fixed photographic images
in the 1820s. Following Niépce’s experiments, the
men credited as the inventors of photography proper,
Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot, independently developed more effective methods for creating
lasting photographic images. The following decades
saw a series of improvements to camera and printing

technologies such that by the 1850s there was a
thriving commercial market for professional photographic portraits. However, the technical complexity
of the photographic process limited its impact as a
popular pastime.
The advent of mass consumer photography is customarily traced to 1888 and inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman’s introduction of the low-cost
handheld Kodak box camera. By selling the camera
preloaded with 100-shot film rolls that were sent
back to the factory for processing, Eastman effectively removed the need for home development laboratories. The Kodak camera was also the subject of
a highly successful marketing campaign that emphasized the shift to consumer photography with the slogan “You press the button—we do the rest.” In this
way, Eastman helped transform an expensive hobby
demanding high levels of technical skill into a popular
leisure activity. The 1880s also saw the introduction
of printing technologies that allowed for the economical mass reproduction of photographic images. For
the first time, the photographic image became a practical and appealing medium for advertisers.
Over the next century, the popular market for still
and moving photography increased in importance.
Although professional and serious amateur photographers remained an important market for specialist
publications and equipment, photographic manufacturers more often emphasized the suitability of their
mainstream products for family “snapshots” and
home movies. Kodak in particular, long an innovator in the technology and marketing of consumer
photography, placed great emphasis on the userfriendliness of their cameras and the role photography could play in capturing happy memories.
The most recent major technological change to
photographic practice came with the advent of digital photography. The first consumer digital cameras
appeared in the late 1980s and became widely popular toward the end of the 1990s. As digital cameras
have become smaller, cheaper, and more effective, the
use of film cameras has steadily declined. Where film
sales were previously a major revenue stream for the
photographic industry, the popularization of digital
photography has seen the exponential growth of
the consumer market in image-editing software and
photo printers.
It is not yet clear if the ability to easily produce,
store, and circulate photographic images constitutes

Photography and Video

a new kind of engagement with photography or
simply a reworking of older practices. “Point and
shoot” cameras featuring simplified controls remain
the most popular consumer models, and family and
social events are still the primary subjects of home
photography. However, image-editing software
has moved complex darkroom processes back into
the home of the average photographer. Moreover, the
inclusion of cameras in mobile telephones and the
introduction, in the mid-1990s, of digital cameras
capable of recording video footage has encouraged
greater expansion of the camera’s possibilities.
Online photo-storage and social networking sites
now make it possible for people to share images with
a wide audience. Indeed, the ability of photographers
to quickly capture and transmit images has created
the possibility for “citizen journalists” to move into
the once almost exclusively professional realm of
creating and selling news footage.

Theoretical Debates
Photographic images saturate news and advertising; subsequently, theoretical debates about the
significance of photography often refer to the photograph’s persuasive power and its possibilities for
shaping consumer desires and behaviors via the
depiction of idealized bodies, families, and visions of
the good life.
Images of the family have long been crucial
to advertising at the same time as the family and
family events, such as holidays, have remained
primary subject matter for amateur photography.
Subsequently, an important field of critical debate
concerns images of family life. For example, photographic critic and commentator Don Slater has
argued that the conventions of domestic photography and the constraints of consumer technology
have commoditized the family and inhibited the
development of a more politically engaged and
creative popular photography. Corollary to these
concerns is the assertion that both amateur and
professional family photos help entrench a particular normative vision of nuclear family life. It is in
this context that Richard Chalfen has described the
growth of a Kodak culture in which people learn
how to be appropriate photographic subjects and
how to use and interpret domestic photographs and
home movies. However, Chalfen describes Kodak

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culture as broadly expressing and reinforcing norms
of family life rather than determining them.
There is also considerable theoretical debate concerning the camera’s ability to allow or compel particular ways of seeing and representing the world.
One of the most influential early writers on photography, Walter Benjamin, argued that printing and
photographic technologies made previously static
and restricted images available to a mass audience.
For Benjamin, the new portability of images opened
them to a variety of uses and to multiple interpretations. However, other commentators are less optimistic about the democratic potential of portable
and decontextualized images and note that it allows
advertisers to use virtually any image—no matter
what its original intent—for advertising almost any
product.
Benjamin (1931/1980) also suggested that the
camera could capture the optical unconscious: visual
information not otherwise perceivable to the naked
eye. This made the camera particularly suitable
for depictions of a fast moving urban society and
opened the world to new scrutiny. Speculation about
the effects of the seeming ubiquity of photographic
devices and recent interest in citizen journalists
echoes many of these arguments as amateur photographers and moviemakers can use the technology to
represent and reveal otherwise disregarded or misunderstood aspects of contemporary life. However,
Susan Sontag has argued that the increasing predilection for viewing the world through a camera lens
potentially objectifies the photographic subject while
creating the illusion that the photographer knows the
photographed world.
These theoretical concerns about the effects of
photographic images and the act of photography
coalesce around tourist photography. Since the
early twentieth century, advertisements for photographic equipment have featured images of travel
even as advertisements for tourist destinations rely
on attractive images to sell the desirability of specific places and of travel itself. Theorist of travel
John Urry argues that photography and tourism are
intrinsically linked, with images of tourist destinations inspiring travel that is then structured by tourist desires to photographically capture the people
and places that attracted them in the first place.
However, critics of Urry argue that tourist photography revolves as much around the depiction and

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Pink Pounds/ Dollars

enactment of social relationships with family and
friends as it does the consumption of picturesque
places and peoples.

Photography and Video as Research Methods
The importance of images in everyday life in the
industrialized West is mirrored by the increasingly
prominent role of photography as a research method
for understanding contemporary life. In addition
to the long-standing photo-documentary tradition, photographic elicitation interviews and focus
groups—in which the researcher uses photographs
to prompt discussion—are an increasingly common
research method. The anthropologist John Collier
first used photo elicitation techniques in the 1950s,
but the method has become increasingly popular in
the last two decades. Proponents argue that photographic images can elicit a more reflective discussion and can access deeper emotional states than can
words alone. Many practitioners also suggest that
the technique is particularly effective when working
with children, many of whom possess a greater facility with images and image production than they do
with verbal expression.
A common variant of the elicitation technique
entails research participants producing still or moving photographs for discussion rather than using
already extant photographs—such as family snapshots—or images provided by the researcher. The
technique has its origins in mid- to late-twentiethcentury ethnographic filmmaking but also has
antecedents in community development projects
intended to enable participant self-expression.
Consumer researchers sometimes refer to this practice as autodriving, because the interview is ostensibly “driven” by research participants’ reflections
on their self-photographed consumption behavior.
A related technique elicits participant-produced
video diaries in which research participants speak
directly to the camera. These diaries can allow
access to otherwise private reflections and are seemingly easy for participants to identify with because
the practice resembles both the written diary and
the video diaries commonly used in reality television. Given the ubiquity of photographic and video
images in contemporary society, it seems likely that
use of such methods will become increasingly relevant and widespread.
Stewart Muir

See also Broadcast Media; Cinema; De-Skilling,
Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Leisure; Memory;
Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture;
Tourist Gaze; Visual Culture

Further Readings
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, 219–253. London: Jonathan Cape,
1970. First published 1936.
Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.” In
Classic Essays on Photography, edited by A.
Trachtenberg, 199–216. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island
Books, 1980. First published 1931.
Chalfen, Richard. Snapshots: Versions of Life. Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1987.
Haldrup, Michael, and Jonas Larsen. “The Family Gaze.”
Tourist Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 23–45.
Harper, Douglas. “Talking about Pictures.” Visual Studies
17, no. 1 (2002): 13–26.
Moran, James M. There’s No Place Like Home Video.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Slater, Don. “Consuming Kodak.” In Family Snaps: The
Meanings of Domestic Photography, edited by J. Spence
and P. Holland, 45–59. London: Virago, 1991.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1977.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on
Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.

PINK POUNDS/ DOLLARS
The pink pound, or pink dollar, refers to the spending power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
(LGBT) community in Britain, the United States, and
other countries. In Britain, the value of this market
has been estimated at £10 billion, while in the United
States it is estimated to be in excess of $600 billion.
The relationship between gay and lesbian consumers
and the market can also be called the pink economy.
A pink economy is most developed in democratic
nations in which homosexuals have gained increased
levels of legal equality and social integration. In
countries or regions where homosexuality remains
criminalized or where strong social or religious pressures marginalize or even condemn homosexuality,
the pink economy, if it exists at all, remains small and
largely underground.

Pink Pounds/ Dollars

Commercial interest in the pink economy has
long been based on the perceived affluence of gay
and lesbian consumers, particularly that of homosexual men. With households that often include
two incomes and are less likely to include children,
gay men and lesbians have been found by successive marketing surveys to have higher discretionary
incomes and to spend more on social and leisure
activities and on consumer goods. Homosexuals are
also characterized as early adopters, technologically
savvy consumers eager to explore new products and
services. They are also associated with high levels of
brand loyalty, particularly to businesses that have
demonstrated support for gay and lesbian causes.
Advertisers may seek these consumers by creating
ads that include homosexuals, speak to uniquely gay
and lesbian issues and concerns, or appear in media
directed at the LGBT community.
Historical research suggests that a nascent pink
economy existed from the late-nineteenth century.
Appearing only in major urban centers, it remained
marginal and almost completely underground,
restricted to a limited number of pubs and clubs,
publications, and erotica. This was the case for much
of the twentieth century as gays and lesbians were
forced by legal prohibition and social exclusion to
hide their sexualities. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, with the advent of gay liberation, the pink
economy grew to include more mainstream products
and services. Increasing commercial interest in gay
and lesbian purchasing power also contributed to the
development of commercial and residential neighborhoods, or “gay villages,” in large urban centers.
Awareness of the pink economy and discovery of this
market expanded rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s
as businesses sought to harness this market segment
that had remained largely untapped. Clubs and bars,
magazines, clothing manufacturers, and brewers and
other producers of alcoholic beverages were the first
to seek the patronage of gay and lesbian consumers. The pink economy has now grown in both value
and acceptance to such an extent that cars, vacations,
banking, and consumer goods and services of all
sorts are now all directly and openly marketed to the
LGBT community.
Mainstream interest in the lucrative potential of
a gay and lesbian market emerged with the collapse
of many legal restrictions on homosexuals, increased
visibility of LGBT subcultures, and growing social
acceptance of gay men and lesbians. In Britain, the

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decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967
allowed gay men greater freedom to express their
sexuality without the threat of prosecution. In the
United States, New York’s 1969 Stonewall riot by
homosexuals against police raids and persecution
became a national event that served to foster the
sense of a shared community and identity for gay
men and lesbians. These changing legal and social
conditions helped create an environment that fostered the growth of self-identified gay and lesbian
communities and increased public visibility. This
cohesion and visibility also opened up greater opportunities for marketers and retailers to identify and
advertise to the pink market segment.
In the wake of gay liberation, some of the earliest businesses and services to be directed at the
LGBT community were gay-owned themselves.
Early magazines such as The Advocate (United
States, 1967) or Jeremy (United Kingdom, 1969)
similarly tapped into this growing market segment
by providing a forum for homosexual issues and
a site for advertisers to directly access this newly
available market. Using this strategy, The Advocate
became the first U.S. gay magazine to rely exclusively on advertising and the cover price to fund its
production. Advertising in magazines such as these
initially comprised gay-owned businesses and business “allies,” or friends, of the LGBT community,
such as bookstores, clothing stores, and even pornography. By the early 1970s, however, the advertising trade press was highlighting opportunities
offered by the pink market and advocating unique
campaigns to speak directly to these consumers.
Within the decade, marketers and advertisers seeking national distribution and a relatively untouched
market segment began advertising in the emerging
gay press.
Absolut vodka was among the first mainstream
companies actively to court gay and lesbian consumers in specialized publications. Beginning in 1979,
Absolut began to advertise in The Advocate. Since
that time, its marketing strategy has successfully
accessed the pink dollar and gained loyalty among
LGBT consumers by supporting or sponsoring gay
causes, AIDS memorials, and the Gay & Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media
Awards. Absolut has further reinforced these associations with ads in the gay media showing its iconic
bottle headlined with the words “Absolut GLAAD,”
“Absolut Out,” and others.

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Pink Pounds/ Dollars

Since Absolut vodka’s appeals to gay and lesbian
consumers, many other products and services have
been directed in whole or in part to appeal to the
homosexual market. Many of these ads have relied
on a strategy called gay vague, which uses coded or
suggestive references discernable to LGBT consumers
while remaining inoffensive to mainstream heterosexual consumers. For example, same-sex pairs may
be read as couples by gay and lesbian consumers and
simply as friends or roommates by heterosexual consumers. Suggestive glances or touches, camp humor,
or subcultural references can all suggest homosexuality to some while remaining innocuous to others.
Other ad campaigns may be more explicit in their
display of same-sex couples and intimacy. The use
of triangles and rainbows as symbolic referents to
homosexuality or words like pride and out that rely
on references to “gay pride” and “coming out” all
speak specifically to gay and lesbian consumers.
Among the most powerful actions to demonstrate
the economic power of gay and lesbian consumers
has been the boycott. Calls came even in the early
1960s for boycotts against antigay newspapers in
Britain that characterized homosexuals as perverts,
with supporters arguing that such action could drop
tabloid circulations by hundreds of thousands of copies. Most notable, however, was the 1977 boycott of
Florida orange juice. The boycott was in response to
homophobic remarks by Florida Citrus Association
spokeswoman Anita Bryant and her campaign
to repeal antidiscrimination ordinances in Dade
County, Florida. It is unclear to what extent orange
juice sales may have declined, but the Florida Citrus
Commission was faced with a national public relations crisis and ultimately chose not to renew Bryant’s
contract. Her singing career was also permanently
damaged by the boycott. More recent LGBT boycotts
have included those against the Bank of America,
Coors, and Marlboro cigarettes. These episodes demonstrate the economic power of gay and lesbian consumers independent of products identified as “gay”
and highlighted for marketers the existence of a viable
and valuable LGBT market and pink economy.
Commentators have remained skeptical of business interest in the pink pound and pink dollar. They
have critiqued stereotypes of the male homosexual
consumer that they claim overestimate his affluence
and are unrepresentative. Market information, they
claim, has been based on the readerships of higherend publications directed at gay men, a group whose

demographic information cannot be extrapolated to
the entire LGBT community. And lesbians, subject to
the same economic and employment disadvantages
of many other women, may not exhibit the higher
discretionary spending power that many marketers
suppose.
Others criticize corporate interest in gay and
lesbian consumers as having a negative effect on
the LGBT community. They find correlations
between struggles for equality and the emergence
of target marketing to gays and lesbians. Increased
public attention to AIDS, marriage debates, and gays
in the military appear not only as moments when
homosexuals gained greater attention in the public
sphere but also as moments when they were identified as a desirable target market. This market interest
in gay and lesbian consumers has had the effect of
validating homosexual communities and increasing
the visibility of homosexual causes. For this reason,
some see marketers’ interest in LGBT consumers
as one means for promoting positive social change.
Others, however, see it inhibiting that change.
From its earliest examples, advertising to the
LGBT community has also tended to emphasize
young, affluent gay men rather than women, homosexuals of color, older gays and lesbians, or other
diverse groups that compose the LGBT community.
This has led commentators to criticize business interest in the pink economy not as positive and validating
but instead as potentially divisive and fragmenting.
Increasingly, however, advertisers have realized that
LGBT consumers represent every age, ethnicity,
income bracket, and geographical region and that
marketing strategy will need to acknowledge this
diversity as the pink market attracts increased attention from competitors.
Justin Bengry
See also Advertising; Gender; Identity; Queer Theory;
Sex; Sexuality; Social Exclusion; Subculture

Further Readings
Chasin, Alexandra. Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian
Movement Goes to Market. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Gluckman, Amy, and Betsy Reed, eds. Homo Economics:
Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Lukenbill, Grant. Untold Millions: Positioning Your
Business for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer
Revolution. New York: Harper Business, 1995.

Planned Obsolescence
Sender, Katherine. Business, Not Politics. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004.
Strategic Market Intelligence for the Professional: The Pink
Pound 1998. London: Market Assessment, 1998.
Wardlow, Daniel L., ed. Gays, Lesbians, and Consumer
Behavior: Theory, Practice, and Research Issues in
Marketing. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press,
1996.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
Planned obsolescence is the outcome of “a deliberate
decision by suppliers that a product should no longer be functional or desirable after a predetermined
period” (Cooper 2010, 4). The term obsolescence,
originally derived from the Latin soleo (to be used
to) and ob- (away), refers to a state or condition of
having fallen into disuse. Planned obsolescence is
widely viewed negatively on the grounds that, with
deliberate intent, it causes consumer dissatisfaction
or environmental damage. It is also defended as a
stimulant to innovation. A common explanation is
that producers increasingly faced with saturated markets and under pressure to generate replacement sales
are forced to reduce product life spans. It is manifest
throughout the industrialized world.

Origins of Debate
Concern about planned obsolescence began in the
United States during the consumer boom of the
1950s. Debate was stimulated by frustration among
some industrialists at a perceived decline in the quality of products, which surfaced in research published
in the Harvard Business Review. Popular debate followed publication of The Waste Makers, the third
in a series of critiques of consumer culture by U.S.
journalist Vance Packard.
This debate had been foreshadowed during the
Great Depression, when shorter product life spans
through regular changes in style were often advocated as a means of stimulating economic activity.
The expression planned obsolescence first appeared
in 1932 in a pamphlet titled Ending the Depression
through Planned Obsolescence in which Bernard
London proposed that governments should impose
maximum product life spans in times of mass unemployment and require people to turn in their used
goods to government agencies. Such an approach

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has been echoed in recent car scrappage schemes
in which governments in Europe and the United
States have offered financial incentive to consumers to update their vehicles in periods of economic
downturn.
Early evidence of obsolescence being “planned”
is often traced to industrial design and, specifically,
to a trend in the car industry in the 1920s, spearheaded by General Motors, toward periodical
changes in style. By the early 1930s, designers Roy
Sheldon and Egmont Arens were promoting “obsoletism” as a “device for stimulating consumption.”
Brooks Stevens, another designer, is often reported to
have first introduced the term planned obsolescence
into public debate in 1954, describing it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little
newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary”
(quoted in Adamson 2003, 4). It was some twenty
years before Victor Papanek posed an alternative
view of the role of designers.
The debate faded during the global economic
problems of the 1970s and was only briefly revived
following an investigation by the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
in 1982. In recent years, however, interest in product life spans has been revitalized in the context of
debate on sustainable consumption and production, prompted by a report by the U.K.-based New
Economics Foundation, Beyond Recycling, and
a book about an initiative led by designers in the
Netherlands, Eternally Yours.

Planned Obsolescence in Context
Obsolescence takes different forms. Absolute obsolescence is when a product reaches the end of its technical life because its durability is expended and it is
no longer able to withstand wear and tear from use.
It reflects the product’s “design life,” the specification that determines its intrinsic durability. Relative
obsolescence, by contrast, is the result of technological, psychological, economic, and other influences on
product life spans, which may or may not be intentionally planned by producers.
Technological obsolescence results from innovation and is thus planned but is often justified on
grounds of improved utility. Economic obsolescence, an example being when a broken product is
not considered worth repairing, arises from market
conditions that are shaped by industry strategies

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Planned Obsolescence

but cannot in general be controlled by individual
companies. Criticism is most frequently targeted at
psychological obsolescence (described by Packard as
“obsolescence of desirability”), which arises through
fashion and changes in style. Obsolescence may also
have other causes, such as when owners’ circumstances change.

Planned or Unplanned?
Opinions differ as to the prevalence of planned obsolescence. Firm evidence of companies deliberately
and systematically reducing product life spans has
proven elusive, but it is clear that many products
could be made to last longer. For example, producers
adopt changes in fashion to encourage consumers to
replace functional items (for example, watches, spectacles, and clothing accessories) and, in the market
for consumer electronics in particular, exploit minor
technological developments to the same end. Other
products once considered to be consumer durables
are sold in ever-greater quantities in “disposable”
form on grounds of convenience or hygiene, including cameras, diapers, pens, razors, and tableware.
Products with shortened life spans may also result
from a business strategy without this outcome necessarily being the deliberate intent. For example,
companies may seek to reduce prices by cutting
production costs while aware that this will involve
compromises in quality.
Consumers are at least compliant in the apparent
trend toward shorter product life spans. Many functional products are replaced in order that their owners can obtain a pristine new item in the latest style
or with the most advanced features. Although highquality products with potentially long life spans may
be available, consumers are often unwilling to pay
a premium price for such items, preferring instead
to use the money thereby “saved” to purchase other
goods and services.

Current and Future Trends
As it is now widely accepted that consumers influence product life spans, as well as producers, the
debate on planned obsolescence has broadened into
one of appropriate product life spans.
Among designers, interest is focused less on intrinsic durability than on “product attachment” and the
ability to design products that consumers will want
to keep for a prolonged period, or “emotionally

durable design.” A range of policy measures for
encouraging consumer demand for longer lasting
products has been advocated, from improved labeling to fiscal incentives for products with longer
guarantees, together with stricter product standards,
either voluntary or compulsory.
The primary focus of past research into planned
obsolescence has concerned market structures
and, specifically, whether companies are inclined
to exploit monopolistic power by raising prices
or reducing product life spans. A broader body of
research is warranted to deepen understanding of
the respective roles of producers and consumers in
determining how long products last. A lack of published data on product life spans has long been of
concern to researchers in this field and needs to be
addressed.
Tim Cooper
See also Consumer Durables; Environmental Social
Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Packaging;
Reuse/Recycling; Waste

Further Readings
Adamson, Glenn. Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks
Stevens Shaped Your World. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003.
Cooper, Tim, ed. Longer Lasting Products. Burlington,
VT: Gower, 2010.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD). Product Durability and Product-Life
Extension: Their Contribution to Solid Waste
Management. Paris: OECD, 1982.
Packard, Vance. The Waste Makers. Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, 1963.
Papanek, Victor. Design for the Real World. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1972.
Slade, Giles. Made to Break. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006.
Stewart, J. B. “Planned Obsolescence.” Harvard Business
Review 37, no. 5 (1959): 14–174 passim.
van Hinte, Ed, ed. Eternally Yours: Visions on Product
Endurance. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: 010
Publishers, 1997.

PLEASURE
See Dining Out; Emotions; Happiness; Quality
of Life; Seaside Resorts; Tamed Hedonism

Political and Ethical Consumption

POLITICAL AND ETHICAL
CONSUMPTION
The terms political consumption and ethical consumption (also called political consumerism) are generally interchangeable. The phenomenon is defined as
the use of the consumer market for political or ethical
purposes. This form of consumption involves considerations that go beyond the traditional economic
perspective of the relationship between the price
and material quality of consumer goods. It includes
such matters as human and workers’ rights, gender
equality, use of nature and natural resources, animal
treatment, relationships between the developed and
developing world (so-called North and South dilemmas), and other related topics that concern values
about the politics behind products and the politics of
consumption. Most of the values involved in political
consumption are not readily visible in shelf products.
They are made visible in advocacy campaigns conducted by civic groups and now even government
and corporations. In some geographical areas, as the
United Kingdom, the term ethical consumption is
preferred to political consumption because it distinguishes the phenomenon from the consumption of
politics as illustrated by the growing use of consumer
choice in welfare provision and privatization and the
role of market logic in political campaigns.
The term political consumption, or political consumerism, is of rather recent origin and first appeared
in Denmark as part of the public debate about the
popularity of the Shell boycott over the Brent Spar
conflict in 1995. However, the phenomenon itself
is centuries old. Over the years, the world has witnessed politically motivated boycotts of a large number of common consumer goods, including tea, sugar,
grapes, batteries, cotton, paper, shoes, fruit, coffee,
wine, cheese, and computers—and even transportation systems, brand names, corporations, and individual countries. There are also historical instances
of campaigns to get people to use their political and
moral values to buy designated goods produced in a
particular way, that is, so-called buycotts that often
rely on labeling schemes to promote certain values.
Earlier examples are “no slave” products marketed
during the grand antislavery movement of the 1600s
to 1800s and the anti-sweatshop “white label” on
cotton clothing from the early 1900s. Deliberate

1097

choice not to buy certain goods for political and ethical reasons—that is, consumer boycotts—played a
vital role in the struggles for colonial independence
in America (mid-1700s) and India in the early 1900s.
Other important examples are the Montgomery bus
boycott (1950s) in the United States, California grape
boycott for workers’ rights (1960s), the global boycott of South Africa to protest apartheid that started
up in the late 1950s, and the Nestlé boycott from the
1970s and continuing today against the marketing
of infant formula in the third world. More recently,
consumers in the Middle East have boycotted
Western corporations, as forcefully illustrated by the
boycott of the Danish dairy group Arla, to express
their criticism of cartoons featuring caricatures of the
Prophet Muhammad that were published in 2006 in
a Danish newspaper and not criticized strongly by
the Danish government. As shown in the anti-Semitic
Don’t Buy Jewish campaign that gained momentum
in Europe in the 1930s and the Ku Klux Klan’s activities in the United States to promote racism, political consumption can also threaten democracy and
endanger human rights. The less democratic forms of
political consumption are difficult to investigate and
have not been studied systematically, empirically, or
theoretically.
However, most political consumption focuses
on solving a variety of ethical, environmental, and
human rights problems associated with the production and consumption of common commodities that
are purchased in large number. These goods include
soaps and other cleaning agents, food and drinks,
clothing and other manufactured goods, and office
equipment and paper as well as forest and marine
products. Climate change is an emerging focus.
Recent examples of political consumerist activism are
the environmental boycotts of tuna, paper, fast-food
chains, and tropical wood, all of which target misuse
and overuse of common pool resources (marine life,
forests, and waterways), and the boycotts against
well-known garment and shoe corporations (Nike,
The Gap, Walmart, and others) to call attention to
how factory workers manufacturing their products
are treated in both industrialized and developing
countries. Other examples are the role that consumer
power has played in promoting labeling schemes for
organic food, fair trade products, environmentally
friendly household goods, and sustainable forestry
and marine life. Socially responsible investing (investing in more environmentally friendly and ethical

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Political and Ethical Consumption

stocks) is another example of political consumerism
that has long historic roots. The social movements
and networks that publicly and openly promote and
mobilize consumers into political consumption argue
that mainstream or conventional industrialized and
globalized commodity production is environmentally
harmful and detrimental to global human rights.
They claim that conventional production threatens
biodiversity, farm animal welfare, workers’ rights,
and sustainable development and leads to climate
change. Today, political consumerist activism and
institutions focus on deforestation, overfishing, and
the environmental and social justice problems found
in industrialized global agriculture and manufacturing. A number of groups are now establishing to
draw attention to the negative effects of high levels of
consumption for sustainable development and general well-being.

Theoretical and Empirical Investigations
The phenomenon of political consumerism is studied theoretically and empirically through a variety of
scientific methods. It is investigated at the individual,
group, institutional, and global level by a large range
of academic disciplines. Scholars view it as both a
form of political consumer practice and as an institutional setting for regulation and global standard setting. Thus, either the focus is on the actors in political
consumption or its structures and institutions. The
most prominent disciplines in the field are anthropology, political geography, sociology, political science,
history, business study, and media and communication. From these different disciplinary perspectives,
scholars examine individual decision-making processes and the sources of information and inspiration that encourage consumers to use their wallets
to express preferences on the politics behind products in boycotts and buycotts. Research at the group
level focuses on how collectivities (social movements, interest organizations, Internet networks,
etc.) engage in and promote political consumerism.
The traditional focus on boycotts and buycotts is
complemented with research on two other forms of
political consumption that have emerged strongly
in the past ten years. Discursive political consumerism concerns the communication of values as a distinct form of politicized consumer activism. It differs
from traditional political consumer actions because
it does not require the act of shopping (buycotts)

or refusing to shop for particular goods (boycotts).
Rather, concerned consumers use communicative
tools as activism. Discursive actions range from
efforts that involve consumers and activists in communicating values to corporate actors, retailers, and
other citizens in e-mails and postcard campaigns, to
efforts at negotiating with and lobbying firms, to the
more confrontational and flamboyant acts of culture jamming and ad busting. Anti-sweatshop activists used culture jamming to target Nike, The Gap,
and other big clothing brands in their efforts to raise
consumer consciousness and to convince the corporations that sweatshops were their responsibility.
Similar efforts by animal welfare and animal rights
groups have focused on McDonalds and other fastfood chains to call attention to the animal welfare
problems involved with how these chains have procured eggs and meat. Lifestyle political consumerism is a personal commitment to allow certain values
to rule one’s public and private life. Examples are
downsizing private consumption (also called voluntary poverty and simplicity) and veganism that commits followers not to use animals for any human
consumption. Four reasons explain the growing
importance of discursive and lifestyle political consumerism: (1) consumer boycotts are at times a difficult and risky form of activism; (2) a lack of labeling
schemes for some important consumer goods has led
activists to invent other platforms to put pressure on
corporations; (3) the Internet and social media have
opened up a wide variety of options for communicative and lifestyle actions to make a statement on
the politics behind products; and (4) consumption
and consumer culture, as noted in the popular book
No Logo by Naomi Klein, have become more associated with individual social identity and therefore as a
more significant force in contemporary society.
The phenomenon of political consumption
challenges the social sciences. Because of its growing importance globally, scholars are developing
new theories about citizenship, consumers, political responsibility, political activism, and regulatory
politics. An important concept, citizen consumer,
involves two important theoretical claims: consumers must view their private consumption as involving
public (that is, citizenship) considerations about how
the world is governed today, and citizens should use
their latent consumer power to promote better global
governance. Other scholars have pondered the role
of consumers, corporations, and the state in taking

Political and Ethical Consumption

political responsibility. Iris Marion Young took inspiration from anti-sweatshop university student activism against the treatment of workers in garment
manufacturing to formulate a new conceptualization of political responsibility. Scholars of political
steering, public policy, and political institutions
view voluntary labeling schemes (e.g., organic food
and fair trade labeling, forest and marine stewardship certification, and eco-labels) as new regulatory
tools in global governance and develop theory about
“soft law” institutions and nonstate market-driven
governance systems to investigate how consumeroriented labeling schemes gain political legitimacy
and rule-making authority. They also investigate the
goals, structures, ideologies, and interest conflicts
that characterize labeling schemes; inquire into their
relationship with traditional forms of government
regulation; and ask if they work better in certain
production sectors than others. Scholars of the corporate world focus on the business side of political
consumption. They investigate the reasons business
decisions are made to engage in corporate social
responsibility, formulate codes of conduct, decide
to invest in certification and labeling, and engage in
multistakeholder ventures with political consumerist
activists and why certain corporations and certain
industrial sectors have been more pioneering than
others. Among their contributions are theories of
corporate citizenship and empirical findings on how
corporations manage political consumerist activism
and learn to adapt to consumer-oriented pressure for
corporate change.
A span of scientific methods is employed to
study political consumption. Some scholars—particularly anthropologists and sociologists—conduct
ethnographic studies to understand how consumers
integrate their concerns with sustainable development into their everyday lives as consumers in the
Western world. Others employ the same methods to
study producers in the developing world who work
for fair trade and other political consumerist labeling schemes. Political scientists survey individuals
through questionnaires to map trends in political
consumption as a form of political participation.
Included in their studies are the importance of socioeconomic resources, various democratic and societal
values, and levels of trust in political institutions for
explaining why individuals decide to politicize their
role as a consumer and use the market as an arena for
politics. An interesting case of political consumerism

1099

is Addiopizzo, which is a network developed by
students to fight the Mafia in Sicily. The case study
approach is prominent in investigating the intersections among the four forms of political consumerism and for detailed analysis of the mobilization of
consumers into organic food, fair trade, and other
kinds of political consumerist networks that materialize in local to global geographic space. Scholars
use social movement theory to study how the different kinds of political consumerist activism mobilize
support for boycotts, buycotts, discursive action,
and lifestyle choices. They understand political consumerism through the sociological theories as risk
society, subpolitics, reflexivity, structuration, and
cultural practice and theories of governance and
postmaterialism. Historians use archival material
and secondary research to study how consumption
played a role in large political and social struggles in
the past. Social scientists have applied their knowledge in attempts to develop policy mechanisms for
corporate change. A large research program titled
Cultures of Consumption had political consumption
as one of its focuses.
Important findings from the accumulated research
on political consumption include observations about
the individual, group, and institutional levels of
analysis. From comparative survey research, political scientists find that more women than men are
political consumers, and political consumers include
more people with higher education, higher income,
sympathy with left-leaning politics, and general
interest in politics. Interestingly, they also find that
political consumers are concerned about commodity
price and material quality and that many people are
involved in political consumerism for self-regarding
reasons, for example, personal health. Thus, political
consumers are not necessarily all altruistic but consider how they can use the politics beyond products
to improve the quality of their own lives. Studies
also show that activists are aware of the power of
self-regarding reasons and craft their campaigns with
the self-interested and/or self-reflexive consumer in
mind. This occurred in the famous grape boycott
mentioned earlier and is now occurring within civic
groups advocating vegetarianism as a way to combat
maltreatment of farm animals and climate change.
Scholars also find that political consumerist
activist networks appeal to citizens to use their consumer role in four distinct ways. First, as illustrated
in the South African boycott and many trade union

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Political and Ethical Consumption

appeals, consumers are asked to boycott goods as
a way of showing support for a particular political
cause. Second, increasingly, civic groups ask consumers to buy designated goods to create a critical
shopping mass that can be used to promote corporate endeavors to invest in good human rights and
environmental practices. They even imitate corporate
marketing when they advertise their ethical products and labeled goods during the holiday season.
Third, consumers are called on as a spearhead force
to pressure buyer-sensitive logo brand name corporations (as in the case of Ingrar Kamprad Elmtaryd
Agunnaryd [IKEA] home furnishings, Nike, Home
Depot, McDonald’s, and others) to promote sustainability in their commodity chains, that is, corporate
social responsibility. Finally, a growing number of
relatively new political consumerist advocates mobilize consumers to become a paradigmatic force for
societal change. As shown by vegan, downshifting,
slow food activism, and such new groups as the
New American Dream, the goal is for consumers to
develop a new consumer lifestyle and relationship to
consumer culture.

Future Research
Important topics on the agenda for future research
in the field of political consumption include examination of cases of political consumption that do not
promote democracy and sustainable development.
Researchers also need to concentrate on the evolution of political consumerism as a form of political
engagement to gauge the effects of its marketization on its ideology. They should spend more time
examining carefully if, how, and why political consumption is an effective solution to the globalized
problems associated with production and consumption. As the middle class is an important group in
consuming cultures and focus for political consumerist advocacy, another important research task is to
study the presence of political consumption in newly
industrialized countries with burgeoning middleclass populations in geographical areas outside the
Western hemisphere.
Michele Micheletti
See also Alternative Consumption; Culture Jamming;
Eco-Labeling; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Fair Trade; Inequalities;
Life(style) Politics; Social Movements

Further Readings
Boström, Magnus, Andreas Føllesdal, Mikael Klintman,
Michele Micheletti, and Mads P. Sørensen. Political
Consumerism: Its Motivations, Power, and Conditions
in the Nordic Countries and Elsewhere. København,
Denmark: Nordisk Ministerråd, 2005.
Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-Standards,
Product Labelling and Green Consumerism. London:
Palgrave McMillan, 2008.
Breen, T. H. “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and
Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century.” Past
& Present 199 (May 1988): 73–104.
Cashore, Benjamin, Graeme Auld, and Deanna Newson.
Governing through Markets: Forest Certification and
the Emergence of Non-State Authority. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Clarke, Nick, Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass.
“The Political Rationalities of Fair Trade Consumption
in the United Kingdom.” Politics and Society 35 (2008):
583–607.
Forno, Francesca, and Catharina Gunnarson. “Everyday
Shopping to Fight the Italian Mafia.” In Creative
Participation: Responsibility-Taking in the Political
World, edited by Michele Micheletti and Andrew S.
McFarland, 101–124. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009.
Holzer, Boris. Moralizing the Corporation: Transnational
Activism and Corporate Accountability. Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2010.
Isenhour, Cynthia, and Matilda Ardenfors. “Gender and
Sustainable Consumption: Policy Implications.”
International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable
Development 4, nos. 2–3 (2009): 135–149.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2000.
Lyon, Sarah. “Fair Trade Coffee and Human Rights in
Guatemala.” Journal of Consumer Policy 30, no. 3
(2007): 241–261.
Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping:
Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action.
2nd ed. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Micheletti, Michele, Andreas Follesdal, and Dietlind Stolle,
eds. Politics, Products, and Markets Exploring Political
Consumerism Past and Present. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2006.
Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds.
Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002.
Sassatelli, Roberta A. Consumer Culture: History, Theory
and Politics. London: Sage Publications, 2007.
Shah, Dhavan V., Douglas M. Mcleod, Lewis Friedland,
and Michelle R. Nelson. “The Politics of Consumption/
The Consumption of Politics: Introduction.” Annals,

Political Economy
American Academy of Political and Social Science 611,
no. 1 (May 2007).
Trentmann, Frank, and John Brewer, eds. Consuming
Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories,
Transnational Exchanges. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

POLITICAL ECONOMY
Political economy refers to the study of the conditions
under which production and consumption function
and can be organized for the benefit of the community. The first appearance of the term dates from
1615 when Antoyne de Montchrétien in his Traité de
l’économie politique [Treatise on political economy]
criticized ancient political works for not having taken
into consideration economic factors. He argued that
what matters most for a community’s fate is neither
its religious devotion guided by its clergymen nor the
courage and military skills of its noblemen but the
occupation of the common men. What men produce
and consume, how they organize their work, and the
creativity of artisans and merchants are what affects
society most. In its contemporary application, political economy refers to the interactions among social
institutions, power relations, representations, structures of meaning, value systems, distribution of roles,
rules of conduct, the exchange of goods and ideas,
and patterns of production and consumption.
Consumption is inextricably bound to a whole
political economic system. To understand consumption, one should not just study consumption patterns,
consumption cultures, and consumption trends focusing on a few superficial contemporary factors one can
identify; rather, a more conceptually and historically
grounded approach is required. Societies are complex
systems in which the new arises from the old as the elements of the systems alter their relations. Within societies, the way production, consumption, wealth, and
power relate has to be a political and ethical issue and
not just an economic one. How different social groups
gradually change their focus of attention, redistribute
their occupations, and take their desires in a new
direction cannot be studied without careful attention
to multiple series of concatenated events, ideas, and
propositions. New political actors appear; new interpretations are discussed within different networks.
Consumption is—probably more than ever—a central
issue that affects today’s normativity, politics, and

1101

ethics. Consumption researchers play an active role
in the process. To be scientific in their approach, they
must be attentive, circumspect, cautious, and conscientious and pay attention to the role they play in
the process. Among other things, they need to pay
attention to the expansive nature of the Western consumption model and to the cross-cultural debates it
gives rise to.

The Emergence of Political
Economic Thinking
A multiplicity of factors led to the prevailing role of
political economic thinking and of political economic
government. When the term political economy was
given utterance for the first time, political and social
theory was saturated with doctrines drawn from the
sphere of ethics and religion. The concepts of nation,
class, interest, utility, and market had radically different meanings. Social morality was the province of the
church. Social cohesion—and consumption—had
to be religious and the focus was not on the immanent social bond but on God’s transcendent mercy.
Economic phenomena were not worldly but instead
expressed in terms of moral conduct. Only when
economic acts and science were released from the
transcendent ethics could political economy become
the catechism of a new social order and part of a
whole new anthropology in Europe.
It is a radically new understanding of man that
political economic thinking promoted. What was
formerly considered to be humankind’s evil part
became humankind’s natural condition. The problem
became the positive solution: human beings’ desire,
lack of gratitude, and craving for acquisition—their
propensity for selfishness and not wanting to share
became the foundation not only of economic relations in particular but also of social relations in
general. Not only was the system of values reorganized, but the priorities concerning knowledge and
experience were also. This meant a new conception
of humankind. Economic human was emerging
with economic science—this science that first and
foremost was a new normativity. They were both
results of the joint transformations that affected religion, ethics, and politics and that led to a mutation
of the social bond. The result of this mutation was
a new dynamic between production and consumption, which still acts on today’s consumption and our
perception of it. This mutation affected the whole

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Political Economy

of society and was the origin of management, the
modern consumer, and marketing. The establishment
of political economy is one of the main expressions
of this upheaval of the social bond. This upheaval
was grounded in relations of worldly mutual utility
in this world rather than transcendental religious
commandments. Political economy is part of a new
normative system that builds on the joint ideas of
individual and public interests. Political economy is
the representation and instrumentalization of a new
way of being together in society in which production
and consumption are given the decisive role because
of a new moral and political interpretation. It is not
only about the increase in the exchange of goods,
the evolution of productive forces, and the broader
range of consumer goods. Political economy is just
as much about contemporary moral and political
choices to enact these developments. It proceeds from
the mutation of social relations, from the unfurling
of a new mythology, that is to say, of a new conception of people’s interaction with themselves and their
environment. The grounding of this restructuring is
a new conception of human behavior that no longer
aims at faith in God but at being useful to society.
Motivation formerly considered as the most base
of emotions was now open to being systematically
encouraged to serve this new end. As a result of this
inversion, not only will the market sector expand,
but trade relations will also gradually affect all kinds
of human groups and permeate every domain of
everyday life. Whereas any policy in principle formerly had to submit to the logic of religious devotion, it will now progressively follow an economic
utilitarian logic. On the basis of this understanding
that human motivation is grounded in interest, politics will now consist in trying to transform society
into a machine. The structures of this machine serve
the purpose of government in its goal to enhance the
country’s productive capacity.

Political Economy and Power
Technical progress and the emergence of an economic
sensibility unquestionably marked this general evolution of society, which will end up at the supremacy
of economics first over the religious and then over
the political. However, the use of technical advances
and the discussion of new possible interpretations of
the state of things and the meaning of life were not
restricted to new classes and social groups. Those

who sought to establish or maintain their power and
those who reflected on the issue of power played a
key role in the process. They were the ones who had
motivation, time, prestige, legitimacy, and intellectual competences to do so. For a long time, struggles
for influence and legitimacy had taken place between
religious and secular power-holders, and they had
fueled theoretical discussions on role distribution
and power motivation. It is in connection with the
theological-political establishment of national sovereignty and the sacred nature of royal power that
elites began to think about the role that production,
distribution, and consumption of wealth actually
played and could play in the building up of powerful states. Power and wealth were now going hand
in hand. Reflecting on human relationships could
now be accomplished without alluding to one point
of reference outside of society. God was no longer
central. What mattered now was a vast number of
relations the principles of which it could be interesting to get to know better. One had to pay attention
to those and try to identify and characterize them
on the basis of accumulated historical and psychological knowledge. During the seventeenth century,
much effort was made to seek the rules of collective
behavior. This search did not build on tradition and
lean on a transcendent norm. It was built on practical experiences and observations as well as on the
theories that can be drawn from those. Consider the
works of David Hume and Jeremy Bentham to mention but a few. Much attention was given to the link
between state power and private individuals’ wealth.
It was now most desirable and valuable to achieve
the greatest possible knowledge about human and
social behavior as it actually is without reference to
how it should be from the religious viewpoint. What
mattered was to make systematic use of what can be
observed and known to maximize the prosperity of
the state. If behaviors were to be influenced, it would
be for that purpose.
The great success of physical sciences made it possible to come up with the idea that systems of forces
could be identified within the moral order. Isaac
Newton’s law of universal gravitation inspired the
law of interest; that is, just like planets, individuals
attract and repel themselves. This interest principle
came to be presented as the key to the human sciences.
Politics consists of handling interest to enhance—and
soon to maximize—power and wealth. According
to Albert Hirschman, political economy came to be

Political Economy

the science of interest, a fundamentally amoral but
normative science that not only leans on the passions
and the interests but also tries to animate them.
Thus, it is not only that “society was given a naturalistic instead of religious explanation” (Tawney
1980, 21); but it is also that the common good was
no longer understood as that which is naturally given
to all in common but is the result of an integration
process that has to be managed. The common good
was no longer the point of departure; individual
interest was. Each individual interest has to be integrated in such a way that they result in the common
good. This management of the common good is the
purpose of the emerging state. “The state is therefore
a schema of intelligibility for a whole set of already
established institutions, a whole set of given realities”
(Foucault 2007, 286).

Political Economy: Order and Control
It is not only the appeal from the new economic
interest that made the difference. But also, this economic interest became part of a political strategy
that transformed people into individual political economic subjects. To establish, maintain, and expand
their domination, the new states made systematic use
of scientific knowledge with the aim of assessing and
influencing the behavior of their subjects. And they
do so by assuming that people’s behavior is mainly
motivated by interest. Government now consciously
wants to deal with the interests of individuals to serve
its own interest. Political economics consists not only
of observing people’s self-interested behavior but
also of promoting it. The main issue in the politics of
states is to figure out ways to anticipate what might
happen to influence economic expansion. The new
politics not only goes together with a reflection about
the interest of the state but also implies that those in
power have to think differently about their individual
roles in relation to and about the way their personal
motivations fit with the raison d’état. Each state also
has to evaluate its interest in relation with all other
rival states. Thus, the new arithmetic of interests
applies at all levels of society. Political government
by means of people’s interests and everybody’s selfgovernment by means of an interested conduct are
but two aspects of the same new theory and practice
of the modern state.
The political situation at the European level
served the link between the issues of interest with

1103

that of political power. In Europe, the new nationstates had to face rival and common interests at the
same time. (In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia virtually put an end to the age of religious struggles. It
was motivated by the emerging nation’s respective
interest for mutual protection and the convenience of
mutual assistance.) This situation of interdependence
and competition was also a significant factor for
state development and for the development of political economy as a government tool and as the basic
principle of a new normativity. To compete, each
state must be wealthier. It had to evaluate and sustain
ways of raising economic efficiency. This meant a scientific interest in its subjects’ interactions to identify
existing and potential ways of maximizing the country’s national wealth. This is what political economy
is about. Political economy builds on and contributes
to building the modern state and the modern subject with its new rationality and normativity within
which individualism, utility, and efficiency become
central.
Political economists have come to stress the role
of factors influencing economic growth. The importance of consumption, luxury, and circulation of
money has been stressed since the very beginning of
political economic thinking and the pursuit of luxury
for economic growth. Bernard Mandeville was one
of the first to do so in his The Fable of the Bees from
1715. Adam Smith did likewise sixty years later in
his The Wealth of Nations, which is often referred to
as the founding work of political economy. It is this
process and the plurality of logics at work in it that
have most relevance for understanding consumption
and not so much the economic models that political
economists produced.

Conclusion
Political economy is often defined as the theory
and study of the role of public policy in influencing
economic and social welfare. Many concepts from
the economic field are today used in consumption
research. They are part of a conceptual apparatus
that has been developed not only scientifically but
also politically. Consumer researchers ought therefore to question the conceptual frameworks they use
or refer to and try to spot emerging ways of reacting
to and making sense of the new challenges and experiences that some of the phenomena they are studying are an expression of.

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Political Science

What could be called economic consumption
seems to be the expanding morality of our times just
as religion once was. It seems to spread utilitarian
political economic thinking all over the world and
affects all kinds of human activities. Still, there are
signs of resistance. Even within the brand system,
consumption is more than just what is accounted for
in political economy and involves more than utility.
Taking a close look at the nuances of today’s consumption, bearing in mind yesterday’s ethical and
political challenges, might help consumer researchers
identify what is now at stake as new forms of consumption unfold and new institutional interactions
with consumption bind and knit. Among the most
revealing factors of social change today are the new
overwhelming role of brands as a new kind of subject, the importance of consumption communities in
playing an active political role, the way international
movements of capital and goods challenge the power
of the nation-state, the emergence of the new nongovernmental organizations acting on a global level
with greater means at their disposal than almost any
state, the reappearance of religious conflicts within a
territory, and the resurgence of the reference to a transcendent code: that of nature perceived as the limit to
human consumption. Four hundred years ago, what
was formerly considered to be humankind’s evil part
became humankind’s natural condition, establishing
the grounds to unlimited consumption. Today, we are
experiencing a new shift from nature being perceived
as an unlimited consumption resource to nature as
humankind’s sacred partner.
Dominique Bouchet
See also Economic Sociology; Economics; Enlightenment;
Happiness; Moralities; Smith, Adam; Social and
Economic Development

Further Readings
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the College De France, 1977–1978. London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2007.
Gunn, John A. W. Politics and the Public Interest in the
Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge, 1969.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests.
Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Hobbes, Thomas. Man and Citizen [De homine and De
Cive]. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. First published
1642–1658.

Laval, Christian. L’homme économique. Essai sur les
racines du néolibéralisme. Paris: Gallimard (Collection
les Essais), 2007.
Le Goff, Jacques. Your Money or Your Life: Economy and
Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: Zone Books,
1990.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Whitefish,
MT: Kessinger, 2004. First published 1690.
Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1924. First published 1715.
Montchrétien, Antoyne de. 1615. Traité de l’économie
politique [Treatise on political economy]. Paris: Plon,
1889.
Smith, Adam. 1776. The Wealth of Nations. Vol. 1,
bks 1–3 and vol. 2, bks 4–5. Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 2004.
Tawney, R. H. 1938. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:
A Historical Study. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin
Books, 1980.

POLITICAL SCIENCE
Not until recently has consumer culture been a
dominant area in the discipline of political science.
Traditionally, scholars have studied consumer politics theoretically and empirically through the dominant paradigm in political science that focuses on
the inputs, outputs, and outcomes of political action.
This paradigm implies careful study of the role of
civil society and the state in representing and protecting consumer interest. On the input side of politics,
political scientists have studied the role of citizens,
social movements, and interest groups in lobbying
government to enact laws to protect consumers and
to promote consumer rights. This field of investigation has involved theoretical and empirical analysis of how interest groups and social movements
mobilize the interests of consumers and lobby government. Interviews with organizational leaders, surveys of ordinary consumers and citizens, analysis of
organizational documents, and event analysis form
the empirical materials and methodology common
to these studies. Political scientists have also traditionally studied political party platforms to discern
differences among political ideologies on the role of
government in protecting consumers and regulating
industry. Frequently, such studies are part of larger
ones involving textual analysis of several policy areas
found in party platforms and policies. Common

Political Science

research findings are differences between left and
right parties in how far they want to regulate business (with the left having as its goal more regulation
and the right less) to promote the interests of consumers. Studies of the output side of politics evaluate governmental consumer policy. Legislative voting
on consumer policy making and the stipulations
included in legislative acts are studied in a public
policy analysis framework. Textual analysis of policy
documents helps to typify policy to map the magnitude of government regulation of industry and the
economy, how and how well public policy protects
and promotes the interests of consumers, the character of regulation (mandatory or voluntary), governmental resources (funding, employees, etc.) allocated
to implement consumer policy, and the establishment of governmental regulatory consumer agencies. Consumer product safety policy and policy on
commercial advertising has, for example, been studied in this fashion. Political scientists also engage in
cross-country comparisons (e.g., between the United
States and European countries) or subgovernmental
levels (e.g., the states in the United States) on these
key aspects of governmental policy of relevance for
consumer protection. More recently, they have compared government in the United States, European
countries, and the European Union on deregulation
of the energy market and genetically modified food
policy. Consumer information and consumer mobilization has been one focus in this research. The consumer ombudsman in the Nordic and other countries
has attracted political science attention as a sign of
governmental commitment to the protection and
promotion of consumer interests and rights. The mission and organization of consumer cooperatives has
also been investigated. At times, it can be difficult to
distinguish political science research on these topics
from that conducted in the fields of sociology, history, business study, and law and society.
After decades as a rather dormant research area,
the discipline’s different subfields (political theory,
comparative policy, international relations, political
communication, public administration and policy,
development studies, and citizen participation in politics) are more interested in studying consumers, consumer policy, and even now consumer culture. Five
reasons explain this development. First, a consumer
orientation is now central for global governance in
sustainable development. Climate change and the
role that transnational corporations play globally

1105

turn scholarly attention to the role of consumers and
levels of private consumption, a problem for politics
at the global level. Change in how and changing how
consumers perceive the significance of consumption
in their lives is seen as an important area for public
policy and global problem solving. The opportunities
or lack of opportunities that government, civil society,
and business provide for consumers to develop and
practice more sustainable private consumption is an
important research agenda in political science. Second,
student, environmental, and international humanitarian civic groups increasingly target consumers and
consumer goods in their attempts to raise consciousness about transnational problems associated with
production and consumption. Associated with this is,
third, increasing scholarly interest in the role of consumer identity in politics. This interest is represented
by the concept of lifestyle politics, which shows how
the public sphere of politics is meshed with the private
sphere of consumption in such holistic movements
as downshifting consumption (voluntary simplicity),
slow food, and veganism. Fourth, there is both a conscious and incremental interweaving of governmental and nongovernmental policies on human rights,
environmental protection, and consumer protection
in the world today and particularly in Europe and
North America. This policy development recognizes
consumers as important actors in politics and gives
consumer-oriented civic groups opportunities to play
innovative policy-making roles. Fifth, changes in governmental policy, particularly in the fields of social
welfare, energy, and transportation, turn scholarly
attention to the shift from the rights of citizens to
the free choice of users that consume privatized or
deregulated public utilities and welfare state service.
An underlying commonality in these five reasons for
heightened scholarly interest is the role that the logic
of market capitalism plays in crafting citizenship and
politics in the contemporary world.
Given these developments, it should not come as
a surprise that political scientists theoretically and
empirically are now beginning to conceive of consumers as important political agents and the market
as an arena for politics. This is a considerable shift
from the discipline’s traditional view of politics and
political participation as involving input, output, and
outcomes of state-centered political action and institutions. The shift has theoretical and methodological implications. Scholars of international relations,
political institutions, and policy making investigate

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Political Science

nonstate market-driven regulatory arrangements,
which are not based on government regulation (hard
law) but instead on multistakeholder certification of
a variety of consumer goods and consumer-oriented
labeling schemes as a form of soft law governance.
They analyze eco-labeling, organic food and fair
trade labeling, and forestry and marine stewardship
certification as voluntary regulatory tools for environmental, consumer, and human rights protection.
Scholars of citizen engagement in politics investigate
the pressure group politics that lead to the establishment of these new regulatory platforms and why
and who makes these kinds of politicized consumer
choices. Included in their studies are the role of political events and consumer-oriented networks in calling
attention to the politics of products and how they
use consumer boycotts to raise citizen consciousness
about the politics behind ordinary consumer products—coffee, furniture, chocolate, affordable clothing, bananas, office paper, and so on—and pressure
corporations to change their codes of conduct and
corporate practices.
Political scientists are modifying survey questionnaires to include politically, environmentally, and
ethically motivated shopping choices (boycotts and
so-called buycotts) in their battery of items on political participation. In the field of political communication, scholars focus on how policy deregulation
has given politics a more marketlike character and
how this development affects the communication
between politicians and citizens. They analyze, for
instance, how political parties increasingly appeal
to voters as a consumer constituency and employ
public relations, customer management, and other
corporate strategies and tactics to rally their support at election time. Along with social movement
scholars, they investigate so-called logo campaigns
that use corporate brand names to communicate the
politics of products and change the public’s perception of the role of private consumption in public
life. Events such as culture jamming and ad busting (e.g., the Nike e-mail exchange) as well as animated films that mimic blockbuster films to discuss
consumption-oriented problems (e.g., the film The
Meatrix about factory farming) help them develop
further ideas about how politics is communicated
in society. They also examine the significance of the
Internet for how transnational networks mobilize
people as “citizen consumers” and into “political
consumerism.”

The five above-mentioned reasons about the
evolution of politics are also duly noted by political
theorists. These scholars of ideas receive important
impulses from citizen-consumer protest activity to
conceptualize political responsibility suitable for
global governance and the role of citizenship in global
society today. One such model, the social connection
model of political responsibility formulated by the
late political philosopher Iris Marion Young, takes
its point of departure in the human rights violations
involved in manufacturing of affordable clothing
for the consumer market and formulates norms of
responsibility for both corporations and consumers
alike. Other scholars, focusing on ecological and
sustainable citizenship, infuse theory on citizenship
with consumer-related activities and responsibility.
In sum, political science is developing a multifaceted
research agenda on consumer culture whose topics
interface in innovative ways with classical concerns
about the role of government in private life, the role
of free choice in politics, and the actors and arenas
responsible for ensuring that politics promotes equality among citizens, peace and security, and protection
for coming generations.
Michele Micheletti
See also Citizenship; Consumer Policy (European Union);
Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Life(style) Politics; Political and Ethical
Consumption; Social Movements

Further Readings
Cashore, Benjamin, Graeme Auld, and Deanna Newson.
Governing through Markets: Forest Certification and
the Emergence of Non-State Authority. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Forno, Francesca, and Catharina Gunnarson. “Everyday
Shopping to Fight the Italian Mafia.” In Creative
Participation: Responsibility-Taking in the Political
World, edited by Michele Micheletti and Andrew S.
McFarland. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009.
Meier, Kenneth J. “The Political Economy of
Consumer Protection: An Examination of State
Legislation.” Western Political Quarterly 40, no. 2
(1987): 343–359.
Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping:
Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. 2nd
ed. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Micheletti, Michele, and Dietlind Stolle. “Vegetarianism—A
Lifestyle Politics?” In Creative Participation:

Popular Music
Responsibility-Taking in the Political World, edited by
Michele Micheletti and Andrew S. McFarland. Boulder,
CO: Paradigm, 2009.
Scammell, Margaret. “The Internet and Civic Engagement:
The Age of the Citizen-Consumer.” Political
Communication 17 (2000): 351–355.
Young, Iris Marion. “Responsibility and Global Justice:
A Social Connection Model.” Social Philosophy and
Policy 23 (2006): 102–130.

POPULAR CULTURE
See Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Popular
Music

POPULAR MUSIC
In its broadest sense, popular music is an umbrella
term referring to a vast range of commercially
mass-marketed musical genres contrasting with
classical or art music and intended for mass consumption (e.g., rock, rock and roll, hip-hop, grunge,
heavy metal, rhythm and blues, punk, soul, techno,
funk, rap, house). This wide-ranging term encompasses a plethora of musical styles involving various
rhythms, vocal styles, instruments, and technologies.
Characteristically, popular music is a global cultural
phenomenon and an accessible form of commercial
music aimed at a worldwide audience. Traditionally,
British and American forms of popular music have
tended to dominate the industry. Corresponding to
social, economic, and technological change, popular music is intimately linked to the identity of musicians, performers, or artists, as well as audiences
and fans.
Popular music is ubiquitous; from shopping malls
and advertising to gymnasiums/fitness classes and
political campaigns, popular music is a common
feature of people’s everyday lives and a significant
aspect of consumer culture. For fans and enthusiasts,
popular music can be a leisure-time pursuit occurring
on evenings or weekends; alternatively, it can constitute a lifestyle, or way of life (e.g., Deadheads—a
group of fans of the American band Grateful Dead
who saw the band at as many gigs and festivals as
possible from the 1970s onward). For many people,
the consumption of popular music is a significant

1107

means of identification, affiliation, and belonging.
Different forms of popular music can create pleasure
and excitement for some and moral panic and dread
for others; it is a much debated and important realm
of cultural life with significant implications for our
understanding of consumer culture.
Providing a concrete and tangible definition of
what constitutes popular music has been the subject
of much academic debate. As Richard Middleton
contends, attempting to define popular music is
“riddled with complexities” (1990, 3). Studies of
popular music encompass a range of approaches
from musicological, whereby music is commonly
analyzed as a text, to sociological, which tends to
focus on the social uses of popular music and the
dynamic and interactive relationship between popular music, culture, and society. Popular music is
commonly understood as being intrinsically linked
to popular culture. Sociological studies of popular
music audiences tend to use either questionnairebased survey methods; ethnographic approaches,
such as participant observation and in-depth interviewing; or a combination of the two. Through survey research, tastes in popular music are understood
as being shaped by a person’s gender, age, social class
background, and race/ethnicity.
To a certain extent, sociological approaches to
studying popular music stem from cultural studies,
an offshoot of sociology developed primarily in the
1970s at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, England, led by
Richard Hoggart and later Stuart Hall. A number of
notable popular music theorists worked at the CCCS,
including Dick Hebdige, Iain Chambers, Angela
McRobbie, and Paul Willis. A major focus of the
CCCS was the study of youth culture and subcultural analysis; subsequently, popular music was perceived as central to adolescent resistance, understood
as key to the development of a sociology of youth,
and viewed as a crucial realm of youth consumption
practices and identification. Thus, popular music
research since the 1970s has tended to focus on
teenagers and groups of youths that coalesce around
particular music styles.
Few academic studies of popular music existed
pre-1970, and the subject received relatively little
scholarly attention during the 1970s and 1980s,
with the exception of aforementioned theorists that
worked at institutions such as the CCCS and key
theorists such as Lawrence Grossberg in the United

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Popular Music

States and Simon Frith in the United Kingdom. Since
the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of survey
research, theoretical material, and ethnographic
work concerned with the production and consumption of popular music and particularly its reception
in society.

The Production of Popular Music
Thomas Edison invented sound recording in 1877
in the United States; as a result, the era of recorded
music began. The emergence of many popular music
genres during the twentieth century can be linked to
technological advancements of the same period. The
rise of recorded music together with more stringent
copyright protection laws facilitated the development of the music business in capitalist society and
more specifically the centralization of the American
music publishing business and songwriters in an area
of New York known as Tin Pan Alley in the lateninteenth century. The Tin Pan Alley era initially specialized in ballads and novelty songs but later began
to incorporate popular styles of the period, including ragtime, jazz, and blues. Significant technological innovations such as the widespread use of radio,
the increasing quality and affordability of the gramophone, the introduction of the microphone in the
1920s, and the inception of amplification and electric recording paved the way for new musical styles
to emerge, such as rhythm and blues and rock and
roll, leading to a surge in popularity of record buying, particularly in Britain and America but also on
a global scale.
Theodor Adorno, a critical theorist and leading member of the Frankfurt school in Germany,
coined the term culture industry in his critique of
mass culture that made specific reference to popular
music. The majority of Adorno’s account is based
on his views of popular music produced in the Tin
Pan Alley era and jazz standards of the 1920s and
1930s. For Adorno, popular music is standardized,
repetitive, and unequivocally contrasts with “serious” music:
A clear judgement concerning the relation of serious
to popular music can be arrived at only by strict
attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization. The whole structure of
popular music is standardized even where the
attempt is made to circumvent standardization.
(1941, 302)

Thus, in Adorno’s view, popular music fails to negate
the dominant social order, encompass an oppositional stance, or express critical thought. Instead,
popular music is “rigid” and “mechanical.” This is
unlike serious music, which is “nonstandardized,”
and “[every] detail derives its musical sense from the
concrete totality of the piece” (1941, 303–305).
For Adorno, popular music is not only standardized, but also it standardizes responses and reactions
on behalf of the listener. It promotes habituated
impulses and leaves the listener devoid of spontaneity. Moreover, popular music entails pseudoindividualization, referring to the idea that cultural
products intended for mass consumption, such
as hit songs, are undifferentiated in their musical
frameworks. The listener is merely given an illusion
of choice in regard to the types of popular music
they can appreciate and listen to. Adorno contends
that the standardization of popular songs leads to
compliant consumers because songs are heard in
accordance with other standardized popular songs.
Essentially, popular songs do their listening for them.
Simultaneously, pseudo-individualization propagates
compliant consumers because the audience is made
to forget that this is the case, the listener misled
into thinking that what they listen to is new and is
not listened to for them, or “pre-digested” (1941,
308). The effects of standardization and pseudoindividualization on the listener are, according to
Adorno, escapism and diversion: “Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment
which does not demand attention either” (310).
During the twentieth century, a vast number of
musical genres and styles emerged, particularly during the postwar period. Critics of Adorno’s work
have commented on his tendency to ignore the rise of
rock and roll and ensuing popular music genres that
could be considered to negate the dominant social
order and offer nonstandardized musical frameworks (e.g., see Frith 1983). The first solid-body electric guitars were mass produced in the 1950s, such
as the Les Paul Gibson and the Fender Esquire. The
electric guitar was a crucial instrument in the development of rock and roll in the 1950s and subsequent
genres such as rock and its various offshoots in the
1960s and 1970s (e.g., progressive rock, psychedelic
rock, blues rock). The electric guitar’s sound was
increasingly distorted and modified and led to genres
such as heavy metal and punk, which entailed a doit-yourself (DIY) ethos and emphasized that anyone

Popular Music

could pick up an instrument, regardless of skill, and
become a pop star. In the 1980s and 1990s, sampling
technologies and digitalization led to the emergence
of genres such as rap and hip-hop and electronic
dance music (EDM) genres, such as house, techno,
and trance to name a few.
The organization of the popular music business
entails a number of major and independent labels.
As of 2010, there are four major record labels that
dominate the industry and popular music output
internationally: Warner Music Group, Electric &
Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI Group), Sony Music,
and Universal Music Group. Popular music is an
international multibillion dollar industry that has
been dominated by the United States, with some
important contributions from the United Kingdom
and, more recently, Japan and Europe.
Sociologists of popular music have made several
attempts to theorize the production of popular music
and the organization of the music industry. Richard
Peterson (1976) proposes a production of culture
perspective in his analysis of the development and
organization of the music business during the postwar period. Peterson and David Berger suggest that
the period 1948 through 1973 is characterized by
cyclical phases of concentration in the music industry
and outbursts of competition and diversity driven by
consumer demand. In a later study, Peterson (1990)
identifies six factors that constrain or assist the production of popular music: organizational structure,
industry structure, occupational careers, markets,
technology, and law or regulation. Howard Becker
coined the term art world to refer to the social organization of people involved in the sphere of art production, commission, promotion, and sale. This term
has been appropriated into popular music studies
by theorists such as Frith (1996), who contends that
three art worlds exist within the music industry: the
art music world, the folk music world, and the commercial music world.

The Consumption of Popular Music
Historically, popular music has been consumed in
a multitude of ways. The consumption of popular
music may entail purchasing recorded music on
vinyl, cassette tape, or compact disc (CD); listening to
the radio; watching music videos on television channels, such as MTV; home tape/CD recording; and
more recently, downloading music from the Internet.

1109

Simultaneously, people may read the music press,
go clubbing, or see bands perform live at gigs and
concerts. The popular music press, including Melody
Maker and the New Musical Express (NME) in the
United Kingdom and Rolling Stone in the United
States, has played a major role in the popular music
charts, propelling bands and artists to major chart
success and influencing young people with regard
to the latest music and fashion trends. During the
postwar period, popular music has been viewed as
central to teenage consumption and identity formation. From mods to rockers, punks to clubbers, the
consumption of popular music is widespread and has
become increasingly diverse as popular music genres
have evolved.
Sociological readings of popular music have
tended to focus on the social uses of popular music,
particularly in relation to the collective action of
people forming music scenes and using music as a
means of identification and expression of a sense of
self. In the 1970s, subcultural theorists, such as Paul
Willis, gave attention to popular music consumption
as a signifier of a group’s style, outlook, and focus.
Willis advocated a structural homology evaluation
“concerned with how far, in their structure and content, particular items parallel and reflect the structure, style, typical concerns, attitudes and feelings of
the social group” (Willis 1978, 191). Thus, for Willis
and other subcultural theorists, it was argued that
a “fit” was evident between specific fashions and
styles—in respect to popular music and clothing—
and a group’s identity and sociocultural values and
beliefs.
A crucial concern for subcultural analysts was the
issue of juvenile deviance and resistance and the various ways British working-class youth cultures used
music and associated fashion styles and cultural practices to express themselves (see Hall and Jefferson
1976). Hebdige’s seminal study of punk culture in
Britain focused primarily on these issues and exemplified the homology between the consumption of
popular music and particular social groups. Popular
music was perceived as being closely linked to cultural politics, and hippies and “bike boys” of the
1960s and punks of the late 1970s were understood
as representative of this view. The consumption of
popular music was recognized as being symbolic of
a person’s social class background, gender, and race
and ethnicity. It was viewed as a highly significant
realm of culture, defining assemblages of individuals

1110

Popular Music

bound by their affiliation to a particular musical style
and coupled with style, dress and appearance, recreational drug experiences, and cultural practices.
Subcultural theory has incited numerous criticisms since its inception during the 1970s. Some of
these include its focus on groups of young males and
neglect of girls and their relationship with youth subcultures (see McRobbie 1980), its inherent rigidity
and fixedness, and the apparent absorption of socalled underground subcultures into the mainstream.
Sarah Thornton attempts to rework the term into her
analysis of dance music cultures in Britain by using
the phrase club cultures and discussing the significance of subcultural capital in the EDM world.
In contrast to subcultural approaches, the use
of the term scene featured in many popular music
studies of the 1990s onward endeavoring to redefine
popular music communities. Will Straw uses the term
to describe “that cultural space in which a range of
musical practices coexist, interacting with each other
within a variety of processes of differentiation, and
according to widely varying trajectories of change
and cross-fertilization” (1991, 373). A music scene
is created as “coalitions” and “alliances” coalesce
around musical styles, convey “a sense of purpose,”
and form boundaries signifying who is “in” and
“out” and therefore forming and maintaining social
groups (373).
The term scene denotes an increasing sense of fluidity in music cultures, and Andy Bennett provides
an interpretation of urban dance music communities
in Britain that takes into account the necessity for
less rigid accounts of groups of popular music fans.
Bennett coins the term neo-tribes to describe groups
of young dance music fans. He suggests that the club
setting can be viewed as one of the many forms of
temporal engagement through which neo-tribal associations are formed because it provides a space for
expressions of “togetherness” based on articulations
of fun, relaxation, and pleasure. Clubbing appears to
be regarded less as a singularly definable activity and
more as a series of fragmented, temporal experiences
as clubbers move between different dance floors and
engage with different crowds.

Researching Popular Music: Future Directions
Researching popular music requires numerous theoretical and methodological approaches due to its fastchanging and progressive nature. The focus on youth

cultures in studies of popular music is now being
questioned as academics have begun to recognize the
longevity of popular music genres and aging popular music fan base. Similarly, concerns with popular music consumption as representative of cultural
values and a form of political resistance have been
challenged by research that concentrates on the significance of popular music in our everyday lives to influence moods and offer routine (e.g., De Nora 2000).
The rise of disc jockey (DJ) culture and subsequent blurring of the production and consumption
of popular music in accordance with technological
developments have led to an increase in studies of
clubbers and EDM fans, which contest the privileging of rock music and live gigs in traditional popular
music research. Defining popular music is highly
problematic, and there has been a blurring of popular forms of music and classical in recent years as
classical music has been commoditized and mass
marketed through groups such as the Three Tenors.
Certainly, it is vital to note that what constitutes
popular music is subjective and often culturally and
historically dependent.
A major contemporary concern within popular
music research and the popular music industry is
the impact of the Internet on producing and consuming popular music. On one hand, some perceive the Internet as a threat to the music business
involving dramatic financial losses due to piracy and
peer-to-peer file sharing. On the other hand, others
celebrate the freedom the Internet affords as bands
and artists are able to share their music without
being signed to a particular record label and consumers can illegally obtain music for free or pay relatively
little amounts to download singles and albums.
Fundamentally, the production and consumption of
popular music is a highly complex cultural practice
intrinsically linked to technological, sociopolitical,
and cultural change and of great significance in many
people’s everyday lives.
Lucy Gibson
See also Adorno, Theodor; Cultural Studies; Culture
Industries; Glastonbury/Woodstock; Lifestyle; Mass
Culture (Frankfurt School); Radio; Subculture; Youth
Culture

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W. “On Popular Music.” In On Record:
Rock, Pop and the Written Word, edited by S. Frith and

Porcelain
A. Goodwin, 427–440. London and New York:
Routledge, 1990. First published 1941.
Becker, Howard. S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.
Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music,
Identity and Place. London: Palgrave, 2000.
De Nora, Tia. Music and Everyday Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics
of Rock ‘n’ Roll. London: Constable, 1983.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular
Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London:
Hutchinson, 1976.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Methuen, 1979.
McRobbie, Angela. “Settling Accounts with Subcultures:
A Feminist Critique.” In On Record: Rock, Pop and the
Written Word, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin,
55–67. London: Routledge, 1990. First published 1980.
Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia:
Open University Press, 1990.
Peterson, Richard A. “The Production of Culture:
Prolegomenon.” American Behavioral Scientist
19 (1976): 669–684.
Peterson, Richard A. “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent
of Rock Music.” Popular Music 9 (1990): 97–116.
Peterson, Richard A., and David G. Berger. “Cycles in
Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music.”
American Sociological Review 40 (1975): 473–487.
Straw, Will. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change:
Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural
Studies 5, no. 3 (1991): 368–388.
Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge &
Keenan Paul, 1978.

PORCELAIN
Porcelains (and ceramics generally) offer an opportunity matched only by textiles to study changing
conceptions of consumption over long periods at
the level of global exchange. The word porcelain
derives from a term for cowrie shells in various medieval European Romance languages, suggesting early
associations with both a material surface and an
exchange medium. Today, it is generally understood
as a high-fired (usually above 1200°C), vitrified, and
translucent white earthenware made with kaolin

1111

(gaolingtu, ideal: Al2Si2O5[OH)4]) and petuntse, or
pottery stone (cishi, a pegmatite composed of feldspar [Al2O32SiO2K2O], and quartz [SiO2]), but
this varies according to time and place in relation
to exchange, imitative, and consumption practices.
Desirable qualities include plasticity of form before
firing, resulting in remarkable hardness and durability, while high-temperature glazes allow for surfaces
of detailed texture, painting, and writing. Often,
porcelain serves both as a consumer object and as a
medium of consumption—for drugs and spices, for
heated drinks (notably coffee and tea), inks and cosmetics, and meals. Imported porcelains interact with
more widespread but harder to exchange folk- and
proto-industrial ceramic traditions, pulling regional
consumers into broader fashion systems and international styles while localizing such fashion systems
within regional designs.
After a period of development from Shang
dynasty high-fired stoneware (ca. 1400 BCE) to
pre-Tang dynasty white wares (ca. 600 CE) with
relatively modest production levels, porcelains
became an important medium and played a significant role in consumption practices (defined
broadly) among the elite in East Asia from the Five
Dynasties (907–960) period. By the ninth century,
Arabic and Persian writers in the Persian Gulf region
called high-fired earthenware chini-ye faghfuri (from
Middle Persian bagpur, “son of god”), suggesting tributary gift exchange with the Tang imperial
court (618–907) and consumption practices at Tang
Chang’an. Imitations in tin-glazed earthenware from
Persia to the Levant became available for broader
consumption, ultimately impacting the development
of European majolica. During the Mongol Yuan
dynasty (1279–1368), more prosaic export wares
and the possibility of special orders like Persian script
on drug jars (albarellos) emerged. More generally,
archeological finds suggest widespread use of many
kinds of porcelains from the Yuan and Ming (1368–
1644) dynasties in the Indian Ocean basin, from
Java to Kenya, with significant surviving collections
at the Ardebil Shrine in Iran (now in Tehran) and
at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The Jianwen emperor
(1399–1402) established an imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen, a gesture repeated in Korea at
Punwan in the 1460s. The blue-and-white motif on
many Ming porcelains, reminiscent of Yuan Dynasty
links to the trade in Persian cobalt, became a staple of
imperial and elite households in the fifteenth century

1112

Porcelain

as well as southern Chinese exports and encouraged
the growth of private and regional kiln complexes,
including several in Vietnam. The Ming saw a sharp
increase in forgeries (notably using old reign marks)
aimed at wealthy merchant and gentry collectors and
a developing language of connoisseurship among the
elite to define authenticity and antiques.
From the seventeenth century, and because of
their role as a medium for the spread of coffee, tea,
chocolate, and sugar, porcelains begin to appear in
the urban societies of Europe and Japan in literature and plays (Shakespeare), domestic inventories,
paintings (Dutch still life and Japanese albums),
retail infrastructures (china shops, teahouses, coffeehouses), and a wide variety of other contexts. Usage
of woodblock illustrations from Chinese encyclopedias and novels for designs tied porcelains into other
consumer goods such as books and printed fabrics.
New Japanese porcelains produced after 1616 at
Arita encouraged further copying in both Europe
and China, an important stimulus for the hybridized
styles of chinoiserie. Among Jesuits, attempts were
made to define porcelain universally in terms of a
manufacturing process and in terms of desired qualities. Louis Le Comte (Nouveaux memoires, 1696)
made the most influential list of the latter, arguing
that porcelain should be judged in terms of transparency (or thickness), hardness, whiteness, smoothness,
politeness (brightness), painting, and color. This language encouraged experimentation to achieve particular effects desired by consumers, paradoxically
making the variety of aesthetic modes of consuming
porcelain simultaneously more uniformly internationalized and more localized.
In eighteenth-century Europe, royal ventures, such
as Meissen (1708), Dresden, Sévres (1736/1756),
and Lomonosov (1744, Empress Elizaveta), competed with each other initially for an aristocratic
market, while private ventures, such as the English
potteries of Bow and Chelsea, or French ones, such
as St. Cloud and Chantilly, aimed at a middling
market between delftware and Qing export wares.
Advertising cards for china shops appear from the
early eighteenth century, marking some of the earliest appeals to a shopping experience. The combination of copperplate engraving and transfer printing
made European customers able to custom order
their own designs (from armorial wares to political
cartoons) at Guangzhou from the 1720s and then
elsewhere for a wide variety of settings including the

tea table, dinner services, wares for clubs, toiletries,
housing decoration, and so forth. Porcelain figurines
of birds, bodhisattvas, landscapes, and other sculptural pieces frequently decorated the tops of furniture
and mantle pieces (as in Hogarth’s Marriage à la
Mode) as “domestic idols” or collectible “toys” or
“baubles,” suggesting a desire for more purely “useless” consumption. From 1770, first in England then
Germany (Thurgingia), porcelain doll heads helped
define emerging concepts of children as different
kinds of selves and childhood as a distinct period of
consumption.
The nineteenth century saw greater use and concentration of factory production designed to satisfy
both domestic and export markets, especially in
Europe, Japan, and later the United States. Wares
fired at lower temperatures fell out of favor among
middle-class consumers. Around 1820, at Kutani,
new large-scale export-oriented porcelain facilities
began to be developed in Japan. The English firms
of Doulton and Minton used technical innovation to
expand production during the 1850s and 1860s, and
they were followed by others such as Doccia (Italy),
Pillivuyt (France), Villeroy and Bosch (Germany),
and Zsolnay (Hungary), challenging the more expensive and traditional productions of Sèvres, Limoges,
and others. Applied art schools and museums helped
shape porcelain designs, and by the late-nineteenth
century, department stores emerged as schools of
taste. Large exhibition shows (e.g., London in 1851;
Paris in 1855, 1867, and 1878; Vienna in 1873;
Philadelphia in 1876; Melbourne in 1880; Chicago
in 1893) served as crucibles for producers and
consumers, playing important roles in introducing
new Japanese and Ottoman ceramics to European,
American, and Australian consumers.
The sanitary ware industry began in Britain in
the late-eighteenth century in an effort to improve
on the chamber pot but became only directly linked
with porcelain manufacture from the 1870s with the
development of comprehensive water and sewer systems. In the rapidly growing cities of the United States
such as Chicago and New York, porcelain became
the sanitary surface—sinks, toilets, tiles, fixtures—
mediating mass consumption of water. Porcelain
bathroom fixtures symbolized health, luxury, and
domesticity and led to the shaping of the toilet as a
consumer space in the Gilded Age. Simultaneously,
porcelain’s properties as an insulator made it into a
different kind of protective barrier for electric wiring

Positional Goods

systems (and automobile spark plugs), thus mediating the mass consumption of electricity before the
development of plastics. Finally, porcelain specifically
made for new kinds of functional leisure settings in
this period (large hotels, department stores, trains,
steamships, etc.) helped familiarize, standardize, and
sanitize those spaces.
Porcelain’s role as a mediator of sanitation and
other complex systems associated with mass urbanization as well as its presence as a ubiquitous and
ready-made “article of life” helped give it an iconic
status in high art, notably in Marcel Duchamp’s
“Fountain” (1917, replicated 1960s) and later in
the high-art kitsch sculptures of Jeff Koons. The
ubiquity of porcelains in the twentieth century led to
an increasingly naturalized sense of its place within
a consumer economy while plastics from the 1920s
supplanted some of its more particularly attractive
qualities to consumer economies and increased the
sense of kitsch attached to porcelains generally.
Robert Batchelor
See also Coffee Shops; Collecting and Collectibles;
Consumer Culture in East Asia; Design; Fashion;
History; Sugar; Tea

Further Readings
Batchelor, Robert. “On the Movement of Porcelains:
Rethinking the Birth of the Consumer Society as the
Interaction of Exchange Networks, China and Britain,
1600–1750.” In Consuming Cultures: Global
Perspectives, edited by John Brewer and Frank
Trentmann, 95–122. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Berg, Maxine, and Eger, Elizabeth. Luxury in the
Eighteenth Century. London: Palgrave, 2003.
Beurdeley, Michel. The Chinese Collector through the
Centuries. Rutland, VT: Charles Tuttle, 1966.
Blaszczyk, Regina. Imagining Consumers: Design and
Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Caiger-Smith, Alan. Tin-Glazed Pottery in Europe and the
Islamic World. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.
Charleston, Robert J., ed. World Ceramics: An Illustrated
History. Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1977.
Fay-Hallé, Antoinette, and Mundt, Barbara. Porcelain
of the Nineteenth Century. London: Trefoil Books,
1983.
Finlay, Robert. “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain
in World History.” Journal of World History 9, no. 2
(Fall 1998): 141–187.

1113

He, Li. Chinese Ceramics: A New Comprehensive Survey
from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. New
York: Rizzoli, 1996.
Tuchscherer, Michael, ed. Le commerce du café avant l’ére
des plantations coloniales: espaces, reseaux, sociétes
(XVe-XIXe siècle) [Coffee before the era of colonial
plantations, spaces, networks, society (15th–18th
century)]. Paris: Institut français d’archéologie orientale
[French Institute of Oriental Archaeology], 2001.

POSITIONAL GOODS
Positional goods were defined by Fred Hirsch as
those goods whose value for the consumer who
owns them depends more on how they compare
with the goods consumed by others than on their
direct utility. According to Hirsch, as the level of
average consumption rises, so does the relevance—
though also the negative side effects—of positional
consumption. In the material economy, said Hirsch,
the production of goods can be increased through
technological innovations without loss of quality,
but things are different for the positional economy.
Here, people’s relative position is measured by the
access to and possession of goods that are scarce
or become scarce as an effect of social competition.
Competing for rare antiques and works of art, for
leadership positions, for secluded leisure land and
exclusive city center apartments, or for fashionable
goods and services are different ways of obtaining
positional outcomes. Rising affluence has made
these goods and activities more accessible, but it
will never fulfill people’s positional desires. Since
positional goods are, by definition, in given supply, the increased demand simply translates into an
increase of their prices, with the effect that more
effort is devoted to obtaining them with no individual gain realized. Just as at a football match
when everybody stands up to see better, so one person’s move cancels another’s out. The result is social
waste that cuts into individual welfare and aspirations and reinforces rather than loosens the social
hierarchy of positions. The remedies that Hirsch
envisaged had to do with a reformed social ethic
that puts the social interest first. To this end, collective means may be necessary to implement individual ends, though the real extent of collective action
and its efficiency is difficult to quantify, as Hirsch
himself recognized.

1114

Positional Goods

In his Choosing the Right Pond, Robert Frank
develops Hirsch’s framework further and offers some
suggestions for measuring the scope of the positional
economy. Demonstration effects for Frank are stronger for those goods that can be readily observed,
such as cars, houses, and clothing, as well as highstatus jobs. These become the consumption platform
where positional expenditures most concentrate.
Fewer resources are devoted instead to “invisible”
budget categories such as saving, leisure time, safety
devices, or insurance. This underconsumption of the
invisibles is stronger for low-income consumers for
whom the returns to status gains are higher. To slow
down the positional treadmill, where, as per Hirsch,
competing for a fixed number of favored positions in
some hierarchy leaves the original relative positions
unchanged, Frank suggests changes in individual
incentives through a system of taxation that imposes
higher costs on positional activities.
Hirsch and Frank introduce a new twist in the
economic literature on the social dimension of
consumption. The wants of social distinction and
superiority are related to wants that, contrary to the
basic needs for material comforts, are considered
insatiable. As such, they become the source of that
unlimited demand that is the necessary stimulus to
a growing economy. In the alternative approach
just discussed, these same insatiable wants become
a hindrance to economic growth and the search for
individual gains translates into a social loss. The reason is, as economist Tibor Scitosvky explained in an
extensive review of Hirsch’s book, that their demand
has become nonfillable because of their unexpandable supply.
That positional competition can be the source of
misallocation of resources and of welfare losses has
also uncovered an additional dimension to Thorstein
Veblen’s view of social competition as conspicuous
display. Still, two elements are missing from this story.
The first is that competition is an innovative process
and that even when competing for status, individuals
can be highly innovative in overcoming both absolute
and social scarcity. Indeed, scarcity is binding if the
contestants bid only for additional quantities of the
same sort of positional goods. But things are different
when consumers compete for quality and differentiation, for variety and novelty. Here, there is room
for innovation and creativity. This is immediately
visible in many consumption practices. The history
of collecting, for example, offers numerous instances

of discovering—or rediscovering—the up-until-then
overlooked, where the discriminating element often
is not price but ingenuity and skills. The same is true
of urban change, as when inner cities are rediscovered
and revitalized often by less rich artistic or intellectual
elites. Changes in fashion too are creative ways of
coping with the progressive erosion of novelty that
occurs when fashions spread. In fact, from the arts to
design, from furnishing to holidaying to gardening,
the crowding of one mode of consumption invariably
supplies incentives to explore different ones.
The second consideration has to do with the utility that is associated with the consumption of positional goods. Positional goods, it is argued, provide
a direct or intrinsic utility that is linked to their use
value and an indirect, extrinsic utility that conveys
their symbolic value of membership and distinction.
Yet in arguing how consumption contributes to the
structuring of social relationship, it is the second type
of utility that prevails, never the direct enjoyment one
can take in social forms of consumption. Consider
education, an example that recurs often in Hirsch’s
analysis. Education is clearly valuable in itself, but
it has also a signaling property in the process of job
selection. As more people reach for higher education, the value of the filtering process associated with
education decreases, as do the returns to investment
in education. These are the negative externalities of
social crowding that the author stresses. But the positive externalities of increased knowledge and selective abilities that education accrues still remain, and
in the end, it is difficult to see which one prevails.
In many of the economic models inspired by
Veblen that explore the dynamics of fashions and
fads, we find the same view of consumption as simply
a mark of positional distinction that trickles down
through diffusion, with the hierarchy reinstated in
the next cycle. In Pierre Bourdieu’s approach, where,
on the contrary, it is position in society that determines the shape of individual tastes, differences in
consumption become embedded in the different
forms of individual and social capital. Yet consumption continues to have no real autonomy and remains
instrumental to some other practice such as distancing, belonging, or display.
Alternative views of consumption, however, mostly
coming from sociology, anthropology, psychology,
and material culture studies, have started to stress the
multifaceted dimension of consumption and the positive pleasure associated with them. In The Meaning

Postcolonial Theory

of Things, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has shown how
it is still possible to achieve self-expression even in
mass-produced goods, through their careful selection
and recombination. In this context, consumption
allows for psychological growth and learning and the
appearance of something genuinely new.
Scitovsky was the first among economists to
discover the relevance of the creative dimension of
goods as a source of pleasurable stimulation and the
value of consumption in sharing and communicating
knowledge, memories, narratives, and discoveries.
Much recent consumer research has also focused
on consumers’ autonomy and their ability to be active
choosers and users. There is a new emphasis on the
selectiveness exercised by consumers, whose choices
are seen as displaying multiple varying, intersecting
hierarchies, as well as horizontal rather than vertical
social divisions. Consumption practices, as shown by
Daniel Miller, become a process of self-creation and
objects of the intermediaries of relationships.
Marina Bianchi
See also Affluent Society; Conspicuous Consumption;
Elites; Happiness; Material Culture; Object
Biographies; Satiation; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Andreozzi, Luciano, and Marina Bianchi. “Fashion: Why
People Like It and Theorists Do Not.” Advances in
Austrian Economics 10 (2007): 209–230.
Bianchi, Marina, ed. The Active Consumer. Novelty and
Surprise in Consumer Choice. London: Routledge,
1998.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton.
The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Frank, Robert H. Choosing the Right Pond. Human
Behavior and the Quest for Status. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits of Growth. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976.
Mason, Roger. The Economics of Conspicuous
Consumption: Theory and Thought since 1700.
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1998.
Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity,
2008.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture, History, Theory and
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Scitovsky, Tibor. “Growth in the Affluent Society.” In
Economic Theory and Reality: Selected Essays on Their

1115

Disparities and Reconciliation, 97–108. Aldershot,
UK: Elgar, 1995.
Warde, Alan. “Changing Conceptions of Consumption.” In
The Changing Consumer, edited by Steven Miles, Alison
Anderson, and Kevin Meethan, 10–24. London:
Routledge, 2002.

POSSESSION
See Appropriation; Collecting and Collectibles;
Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions;
Material Culture; Positional Goods

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Postcolonial theory remains a diffuse term; it is
frequently used to describe research ranging from
economic analyses to literary studies. While the
divergences and variety within postcolonial theory
are significant, for most postcolonial theorists the historical period 1492–1945 is of key importance. This
is the general time span in which direct rule of overseas territories by primarily western European states
commenced, intensified to cover much of the world’s
landmass, and then began to end with relative rapidity. More than just a continuation of historic human
conquests, this era is seen as marking the development of truly global forms of governance, power, and
influence, which remain in many evolving forms to
present day. Thus, despite its post- prefix, postcolonial theory has to a large extent involved a critical
reconsideration of the colonial past, often to better
understand and act on current political, economic,
social, and cultural conditions.
Of increasing significance due to rapid growth
in communication and transportation technologies, postcolonial theorists also overwhelmingly
recognize that practices of colonialism did not
have significant impacts only for those who were
colonized. Long-standing histories of diasporic
movement between imperial centers and colonized
spaces, as well as flows of goods, services, information, and cultural products, have ensured effects on
all. Former colonizing countries and current world
power centers are often stratified in ways that
exploit and disempower internal groups as well as
those defined as outside. Thus, groups who have

1116

Postcolonial Theory

suffered oppression within many parts of the West,
such as women and minority ethnic groups, have
learned much from the strategies and concepts of
anticolonial and postcolonial theory.

Marxism and Anti-Imperial Struggles
Variants of Karl Marx’s theory of capital, which was
developed and popularized during the height of the
colonial period, were foundational frameworks for
critiquing colonial oppression during direct rule and
after it ended. Marxist theories could be applied contextually in different regions yet also provided universal concepts, which could unite various peoples
around issues of not only their material, economic
exploitation but also the social and cultural forms
of oppression. The success of communist revolutions
in Russia (1922) and then China (1949) helped to
provide global leadership and support for socialist resistance groups in various colonial settings.
Other anti-imperialist networks of support were
formed across the Atlantic between African, AfricanAmerican, and African-Caribbean intellectuals and
resistance groups, as seen in the Negritude and panAfrican movements of the early to mid-twentieth
century. The cultural turn in Western Marxism during this historical period was thus also being considered and developed in the colonial and postcolonial
“peripheries.” Many twentieth-century anti-imperial
theorists and leaders in the developing, or third,
world were influenced by a combination of Marxism
and a nationalism, which at least in part aimed to
restore and renew aspects of indigenous culture, that
had been repressed or marginalized during colonial
times. These leaders included Che Guevara and Fidel
Castro in Cuba, Leopold Senghor in Senegal, Kwame
Nkrumah in Ghana, Frantz Fanon in Algeria, Ho
Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya
to name but a few.
As many liberationist movements discovered soon
after their state independence was granted, however,
the end of political subjugation to external powers
did not necessarily equal economic freedom. In most
postcolonial societies, enduring neocolonialism by
indirect, or direct, Western control over local and
international business and finance was evident. A
number of different theoretical approaches to understanding this continuing inequality were advocated.
As Robert Young argues, on the left, theories of
dependency and world-systems predominated, with

a debt to Marxism, while on the right, Keynesianism,
monetarism, and, currently, neoliberalism have
been put forward. Dependency and world-systems
theories, through various case studies, have sought
to illustrate the ways in which Western economic
growth has been achieved by a process of deindustrializing many developing countries. Periphery economies are kept in an underdeveloped state, so these
countries are primarily suppliers of raw commodities
and cheap labor, whereas substantial profits tend to
be confined to developed metropoles and small numbers of periphery elites.
During the cold war period, newly independent,
postcolonial states had options of siding their politics and economies with the capitalist West or the
communist bloc or attempting a third option of
nonaligned development with other third-world
nations. Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the
breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and China’s
gradual shift toward authoritarian capitalism during
the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
the positions available to the postcolonial world
have narrowed. Capitalism has achieved ever-greater
dominance through many means, including multinational corporate expansion, new monetary and
financial liberalization, global institutions, and cultural practices.

Said’s Orientalism, Colonial Discourse,
and Postcolonial Studies
The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in
1978 represented an important new direction for
research on colonial histories and the politics, economies, and societies of postcolonial states. Influenced
by Michel Foucault’s work on histories and practices
of power and knowledge in particular societal sectors, Said launched a critique of the ways in which
power and knowledge developed during the colonial period and continued after it. Consistent and
repeated ways of categorizing and understanding
“others” in the vast regions of the colonies were historically developed in the West, according to Said,
and acted to regulate what it was possible to know
and say about these diverse areas, which were often
lumped together as the Orient. These descriptions
and enactments of Western superiority over and right
to control much of the colonial world were allegedly evident in a wide variety of different writings
and institutional acts. Like Marxism before it, the

Post-Fordism

concept of colonial discourse thus provided a useful
general approach, in this case, for studying a large
range of colonial and postcolonial texts and institutions. Said’s foundational question of “How can we
know and respect the [colonial] other?” has been
enthusiastically taken up, prompting the establishment of many postcolonial studies departments,
particularly in Western universities. This will-toknowledge would in itself constitute a form of “colonizing” discourse or actions, according to Said.
The volume of research prompted by Orientalism
is immense, and among these are numerous critiques
and reworkings of its concepts. An important point
of contestation has been Said’s acknowledgment that
there can never be a single “right” way to understand
the diversity of the colonial world, which sits uneasily with his detailed illustrations of how Orientalist
discourses have somehow misrepresented it. Homi
Bhabha, one example of many postcolonial theorists
who have built on and critiqued Orientalism, has
emphasized the complexity, ambivalence, and fluidity
of colonial and postcolonial Orientalist stereotypes.
His concept of the colonial mimic-hybrid, identities
practiced by colonized subjects, who adopt some
attributes of the colonizer and the stereotypes applied
to the colonized while contesting others, offers a
means of understanding colonized subjects that recognizes their agency and ability to resist subjugation
and oppression in diverse ways. This recognition that
“in the very practice of domination the language
of the master becomes hybrid” (Bhabha 1994, 33)
highlights that interactions between the West and the
Orient have profound effects on how the West constitutes itself as well as how an Oriental “other” identity is constructed. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, inspired by the deconstructive approach of
Jacques Derrida, proceeds in a complementary fashion, devoting attention to colonized voices and stories
that have traditionally been silenced by more powerful Western discourses, particularly on less frequently
discussed issues of gender and race.

Current Theoretical Debates
While they have similar broadscale concerns at
present—notably a critical response to the widely
proclaimed benefits of global, Western-driven neoliberalism—Marxist-influenced anti-imperialism
and postcolonial discourse analysis after Said retain
significant areas of difference. For many postcolonial

1117

discourse analysts, Marxist or nationalist approaches
regularly end up adopting the very totalizing, modernist frameworks that they are seeking to challenge,
thereby effacing important social, cultural, and political differences among postcolonial states and within
their populations. For those focused on issues of economic and political dependency, which they believe
to be paramount, recent postcolonial discourse analyses are often seen as fragmenting important historical trends into many small studies of heterogeneity,
primarily focused on culture and texts. These multiplicities are seen as co-optive by capitalist forces and
out of sync with the continuing demands of many
disempowered groups for material rights of development, such as health care, political rights, environmental protection, and jobs. As Ilan Kapoor argues,
however, this continued debate can help to keep
postcolonial theory, broadly defined, holistically oriented toward the many complex and often contradictory issues that make up the current postcolonial
yet, many would argue, still imperial, world.
Caitlin Patrick
See also Colonialism; Diaspora; Discourse Analysis;
Globalization; Orientalism; Othering; Subaltern;
World-Systems Analysis

Further Readings
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Kapoor, Ilan. “Capitalism, Culture, Agency: Dependency
versus Postcolonial Theory.” Third World Quarterly 23,
no. 4 (2002): 647–664.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books,
1994. First published in 1978.
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical
Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

POST-FORDISM
The term Fordism derives from the methods of
success of the Ford Motor Company in respect of
the mass production and selling of its Model T car
in the early decades of the 1900s and is typically
understood to originate in the work ethic and labor

1118

Post-Fordism

organization that was first seen in the car assembly
lines. Fordism became the model for mass production—an organizational strategy to meet emergent
mass consumerism and the democratization of consumer society that accompanied the emergence of a
newly enriched working class. The ideas of Fordist
production and consumer culture in the last century
are inseparable.
On a microlevel, the worker placed at the conveyor belt and repeatedly engaging in the same activity or drawing on the same area of expertise (even if
that particular job requires little expertise) optimizes
production. Workers working in unison can maximize speed: distractions and downtime are minimalized; pressure to continue to work is exerted by all on
all—an unauthorized break by one worker effectively
stops all the other workers on that conveyor belt. The
workforce can be easily monitored and the speed of
the conveyor belt raised when necessary. Fritz Lang’s
film Metropolis, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times,
and Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds all reflect
these working conditions as an absolute, unenviable
enslavement; the worker is driven by the machine—
in a perverse reversal of industrialization. These
critiques echo the Fordist prehistory of slave labor
and unchecked industrialization: the appropriation
of William Blake’s term “dark Satanic mills” in the
late 1700s to describe early steam-powered factories, Karl Marx’s noting of the alienation endemic
in capitalist labor as the worker finds ever-greater
distance from his work and the products created, and
Wilhelm Reich’s theorizing of the diminishment of
the biological potency of the exploited worker.
These inhuman conditions were eventually
deemed mostly unacceptable for the Western worker,
and the assembly line factory model was exported
elsewhere—to developing countries, where new
workers, lacking alternatives, would step up to the
job. Apologists for this export, and sympathetic historians of American industry, note that the Fordist
regime guaranteed a higher wage—indeed, it struck
a bargain with the worker, a capitalist “new deal”
that ended the Great Depression. On a macrolevel,
the Fordist approach comes to define—in the sense
of both structure and characterization—the symbiotic relationship between the individual worker
and the nation-state: thus, General Motors’s CEO
Charles Wilson was reputed to have famously said
that “what was good for the country was good for
General Motors and vice versa.”

The possibility of the export of Fordism can be
understood to occur with the increased education
and specialization of Western workforces, unionization of labor, and the formalization of demands for
safer and nonexploitative workplaces and a reluctance of the Western worker to accept the conditions
imposed on his predecessors (with the increased
wealth in the West after the years of World War II
scarcity). The emergence of new forms of labor in the
upwardly mobile working classes strata, forms that
could not be exploited on the assembly line, also rendered the factory model inappropriate. The worker
demanded freedom both from the conveyor belt and
from the factory—to be the master of his own time
and to exert creative control over his work.
Fordism came to denote an economic philosophy
as much as a mode of production; post-Fordism is the
phase that breaks with the historical and prescriptive
manifestations of Fordism while retaining—indeed,
advancing—the exploitation of the workforce formerly achieved in the Fordist formulation. This
break or advance occurs with both a new economic
philosophy and the emergence of new forms and
modes of labor.

Transitions in Work and Consumption
It is difficult to date the moment at which the worker’s demand for an exit from the factory, or factory
conditions, occurred. That vanguard of workers
whose success exerts a centrifugal force on the work
environment as others begin to aspire to and engage
in their model of working seems ever present. The
need for post-Fordist work practices arguably exerted
a pull on the workforce too, enabling or quickening this partial exile. This can be seen in its most
dynamic early phase in the West in the 1950s, at the
end of postwar austerity. With the rise of the service
sector, of industries of media and entertainment, of
consultation and outsourcing, came the demand for
mobility for the worker. This necessitated an erosion
of the set hours of work (on the understanding that
the worker would be relatively unchecked) and the
ability of the worker to service multiple locations of
work or to meet specific and changing needs in different locations and to possess a widened set of skills as
autonomy was gained. In these new circumstances,
a transition from the old certainties of a stocked
warehouse as ensuring the potential to meet upward
fluctuations in demand (“just in case”) to a greater

Post-Fordism

flexibility in the business model and eradication of all
overheads not deemed immediately essential (“just in
time”) occurred. The latter philosophy, which would
have once seemed foolhardy, actually empowered
the consumer: the possibilities for a personalization
of services and products became a reality. To work
against a deadline and to meet the absolute known
quantity of demand allows for the consumer to be
let into the production process, to have a say in what
is supplied, and to be freed from the constraints of
mass consumption.
The rise in a market for information and advice,
for services and entertainments, for insurances and
underwriting, or the selling of a location (as with
a holiday) or a status symbol (such as going on a
certain holiday) also called into being a new kind of
work to service these new consumer scenarios. In
edging toward the creation and delivery of immaterial goods for such a market (immaterial over the
palpable or material product), the working environment as had previously been understood was often
dissolved and often ever-further enmeshed in the
new environments of consumer culture. At its cutting
edge, and only for a select few, work became play
and play became work.
These new forms and modes of work effectively
revised ideas of what constituted work or productive
labor: what was once considered a leisure-time activity for the worker suddenly emerges as an activity
ready for exploitation. The history of information
technology (IT) exemplifies such a moment: from
the academic research into electronic applications
seemingly without any use and the 1970s computer
enthusiast writing code on a machine in his garage,
surrounded by half-built circuit boards, to the application of such technology to accounting, writing,
and communicating, and from there to the position
of IT as the very lifeblood of almost all industries.
(For an overview of this particular trajectory, see
Cringely 1996.) However, the social, political, and
even sexual ruptures of 1968, as major Western cities
were momentarily paralyzed by a wave of strikes,
occupations, and acts of civil disobedience, can be
understood to be the moment in which patterns of
work were necessarily (i.e., by industry, at the behest
of the workers in revolt) redefined. Ten years later,
Régis Debray wrote:
Industrialization had to be given a morality not
because the poets were clamoring for a new one but

1119

because industrialization required it. The old France
paid off its arrears to the new. . . . The France of
stone and rye, of apéritif and the institution, of oui
papa, oui patron, oui cherie, was ordered out of the
way so that the France of software and supermarkets, of news and planning, of know-how and
brain-storming could show off its vitality to the full.
. . . This spring cleaning felt like a liberation and, in
effect, it was one. (1979, emphasis in original)

Here, Debray discusses what seems to be a
post-Fordism paradigm as an entirely—organically
even—capitalist event: the final stage of industrialization. Likewise, in Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri’s analyses of post-Fordism, it is industry that
followed the worker in this respect, freeing its slaves
but—and it is here that the notion of post-Fordism
seems to be anything but a liberation—freeing them
only to reenslave them in a fuller exploitation. That
is, as factory work was increasingly replaced by tertiary sector work, manual labor shifted to forms of
labor that can be understood to sell the experience as
much as the product: affective labor. And if this no
longer necessitated the locations—let alone the heavy
machinery—of the old industry, then new forms of
control over the worker (in Marxist terms, new ways
of exploiting, ever further, the activity of the individual, whether understood as work or otherwise),
sophisticated in the sense of supple and all-pervasive,
were needed.
Despite a number of recent studies, theorizing post-Fordist labor remains a contentious issue.
The political Right tends to suspicion; media and
IT-related jobs seem devoid of traditional skills and
outcomes and without products and therefore seem
not to map onto the traditions of a “Protestant work
ethic” and the idea of a fair day’s wage for a fair
day’s labor. The bursting of the IT bubble in the late
1990s confirmed and consolidated such concerns
and in turn prompted financial aid to more traditional industries, and it informs the general animosity toward higher education programs that prepare
students for such work (particularly media studies).
More orthodox Leftist currents tend to express skepticism to such theorizing of new forms of labor, particularly in respect of Hardt and Negri’s work; with
a history of struggles for workers’ rights, the trade
union power base seems inextricably wedded to
the notion of a mass of workers generating discernible products—“strength through numbers”—and

1120

Post-Fordism

auditable via union subscriptions. Theorizing on the
radical Left, however, and particularly in respect of
the use of Michel Foucault’s 1970s work on the body
as subject to the disciplines and liberations of society,
has been more amenable to newly emergent modes
of labor with a view to identifying new global fronts
against globe-enveloping market capitalism.

Commonplace Environments of
Post-Fordist Labor
What is, precisely, affective labor? And what is the
landscape of labor in the post-Fordist paradigm
that places such a high premium on it? In its crudest
terms, the cheery sign off of “have a nice day!” from
the North American waitress can be understood to be
as important to her customers as her role as a taker
of orders and server of food. The waitress facilitates
the nature of the environment in which the food is
served; her pleasantries become the point of real contact between the customer and the business that owns
and runs the prepared food outlet (and so in this
respect, she is the brand); friendships she may strike
up with customers come to shore up the commercial
base of the café, even extend her working hours (if
she is loathe to throw the regulars out five minutes
before closing time). The resultant pleasant environment of the café effectively reinvents the role of the
café in society. Thus, the Starbucks chain café (on
which this theorizing is not modeled) was originally
conceptualized as being the “third place”: neither the
place of work nor the place of leisure—but a location
to which the worker brings his coworker to socialize
as well as talk business or brings his partner to meet
other coworkers. The Starbucks environment, with
furniture style neither office nor home, food neither
fast nor slow, and free wireless internet access, can
be read in just this way. In this context, the waitress
can be understood to engage in all-important affective labor: creating this environment, so that the
environment agreeably insinuates itself into everyday
life and becomes the area for commerce. The move
from blue collar to white collar is a move ever further
toward affective labor. The waitress engages in standard material labor (food preparation and serving),
but it is her immaterial labor (smiling, chatting) that
becomes crucial—particularly at the point of hire.
In this café, the waitress might engage with “nocollar” workers (i.e., no office dress code; the ease of
the T-shirt, collar free, favored by cultural workers

and IT workers), who in turn will be socializing or
talking business with their clients. If self-employed,
they have no need for an office—and the café effectively functions as an appropriately informal meeting place for those who work in industries that have
no more need of the formal spaces (offices, conference rooms) of their predecessors. Or the no-collar
worker might be spending the afternoon away from
the office, dealing with e-mails from the café rather
than the workplace. In this environment, he or she
would be more inclined to work harder and less
inclined to compensate the loss of freedom associated with a nine-to-five regime by spending swaths
of time chatting with colleagues at the water cooler
or surreptitiously texting friends. For the worker,
the absence of the boss lowers the intensity of the
work experience, and so, in addition to answering
e-mails, they may use social networking sites unimpeded and text freely. But in the analysis of postFordism, this itself is understood as a new frontier of
work: the social connections the worker makes are
also affective and exploitable and further connect
the company and the worker to the world outside—
via friendships rather than mailshots or the usual
and mostly ineffective (and costly) ways of soliciting new business. And if the worker remains free to
work at home and so has no need to pay for a child
minder, then is it surely the case that this privilege
has been granted in order for the worker to work
more effectively? Likewise, the sexual relationships
he or she may enter into with other coworkers, as
The Invisible Committee point out in their discussion of contemporary working conditions (2009),
effectively expand the working day—allowing for
continued concern for work and development of
interpersonal skills, long outside of the designated
working hours.
The Invisible Committee, which is seemingly an
anonymous collective of political activists given over
to analysis of contemporary society and directions
for civil disobedience, talk of the post-Fordist worker
with contempt, decrying the self-satisfaction of the
figure who believes he has overcome the alienation
of labor associated with the Fordist phase by becoming his own boss. The price of this liberation is an
increasing infantalization of the professional workforce. The post-Fordist worker, afforded all creative
comforts, has no need to enter into the harsh realities of the adult world. Meanwhile, those in the café
kitchen or—more probably—those on café-supplying

Postindustrial Society

warehouse food assembly lines are increasingly subject to precarious working conditions. As suppliers
undercut one another in the scramble for contracts as
larger companies increasingly outsource elements of
their operations (such as sandwich assembly, cleaning, the actual building and decoration of the café),
companies come to effectively rely on gray-collar
workers. For these illegal immigrants, who have
no choice but to accept underpaid, nonunionized,
security-free jobs, the freedoms of the Fordist phase
for blue-collar workers (with, at least, pension provision, some token bonuses, and access to finance
for houses and cars) must seem like a Golden Age.
In terms of the supplies of raw materials (the coffee beans, the coffee machines, food packaging, and
so on) and the desire to further minimize overhead
costs, the outsourcing reaches out to workers in the
developing world where the labor conditions remain
resolutely and substantially pre-Fordian.
Benjamin Halligan
See also Capitalism; Emotional Labor; Industrial Society;
Information Technology; Leisure; Lifestyle; Mass
Production and Consumption; Modernization Theory

Further Readings
Ash, Amin, ed. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell,
1994.
Cringely, Robert X. Accidental Empires: How the Boys of
Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign
Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date. London:
Penguin Books, 1996.
Debray, Régis. “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and
Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary.” New Left
Review I/115 (May/June 1979). Available at: http://
www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=354.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. London:
Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.
Wigfield, Andrea. Post-Fordism, Gender and Work. Surrey,
UK: Ashgate, 2001.

POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
The term postindustrial society has been used in
a variety of contexts and senses, but it reached

1121

prominence only in the 1970s. The most significant text on the subject, providing a substantial
analysis with a weight of background data and conceptualization, was Daniel Bell’s The Coming of PostIndustrial Society, published in 1973. This was the
culmination of a substantial body of work, not least
that conducted for major U.S. commissions—the
National Commission on Technology, Automation
and American Progress (1964–1966; exploring
the implications of automation for employment),
and the Presidential Commission on the Year 2000
(1966–1968). The term postindustrial society signified a fundamental shift in the socioeconomic ordering of affluent societies, undermining the traditional
relationship between work (production) and identity
and thus opening new avenues for the expression of
identities through consumption.
Bell argued that the industrial society was being
displaced by a postindustrial society, which represented a new social formation in several key respects.
Most obviously, perhaps, was the shift from manufacturing to service industries, which was readily
observable in statistics on employment. Though
the United States led here, most industrial countries
were in the 1970s following a similar path, and this
became increasingly evident over the last decades of
the twentieth century. This is the key feature of the
“service economy,” as spelled out by many commentators—but Bell considers social as well as economic
dimensions of postindustrialism.
Another feature of the postindustrial society, as
seen by Bell, was the centrality of knowledge as an
“axial principle” of social structure and development. Among the most important industries are those
based on new areas of science and technology—and
Bell paid a great deal of attention to computing and
information technologies in this respect. (Indeed, he
is also often hailed as a pioneering analyst of information society.) Among the most important occupations are those involving high degrees of knowledge,
in industry and public service alike. Technical elites
grow in number and importance. The growth of
service jobs meant that concerns about loss of
manufacturing jobs as a result of automation are less
salient than they would be otherwise. Indeed, hard
physical labor was being displaced by white-collar
work, interactions with heavy machinery and raw
materials by interactions between people. Lifestyles
were changing, reflecting the declining of the identities and affiliations that come from manual work

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Postindustrial Society

(be it dangerous or routine), and the need for more
educated and sophisticated employees.
In earlier work, Bell had written of an “end of
ideology” brought about by the decreasing relevance
of the traditional (manufacturing) proletariat and of
the (industrial) bourgeoisie, the two great classes of
industrial society, whose conflict underlay the great
ideologies of much of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. While this theme was stressed less in his
later formulations of postindustrialism, the idea that
new service classes were much less bound to traditional political extremes was still present.
This differentiated Bell, and many other American
commentators on postindustrialism, from those
social theorists in Europe who had also advanced
similar perspectives. For example, Alain Touraine’s
The Post-Industrial Society (English publication
1974) was subtitled Tomorrow’s Social History:
Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed
Society, hinting at how far this account is from Bell’s
meritocratic and even harmonious vision. (Touraine
went on to publish studies of the May “evenements” and the antinuclear movement in France.)
In later work, such as The Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism (1976), Bell focused on how capitalist
consumer societies were undermining themselves—
with hedonic consumerism eroding the values behind
high culture and undermining the work ethic itself.
The term postindustrial society has remained
fairly popular. This is despite its denoting a new
formation in terms of its predecessor rather than its
own characteristics and despite a succession of competing terms: not least, the information society and
the knowledge economy. Perhaps one reason for this
popularity is that it does not involve adopting the
theoretical baggage of such terms, or of others such
as post-Fordism and postmodernism.
This is not to say that Bell’s formulations have
been without criticism. Many left-wing commentators have reacted against what they see as a politically
conservative slant in his work, especially in foreseeing
an end of ideology (the various new political movements of the last thirty years, whether welcome or
not, were seen as a sharp riposte to this viewpoint—
though Francis Fukuyama was proclaiming “the end
of history” in 1992).
Other lines of criticism focus more on the drivers of postindustrialism. Jonathan Gershuny in particular saw Bell as claiming that the shift to services
was driven by changes in consumer demand. Briefly

put, demand for material goods might be satiated,
and in increasingly affluent societies, most material
needs were being satisfied. In a manner reminiscent
of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the emphasis of
demand would shift to less tangible aspirations—
health, education, entertainment, and the like—that
services would meet. But Gershuny argued that while
there might be shifts in the particular types of demand
that consumers might seek to satisfy, this need not be
reflected in a shift of weight from goods to services.
Many aspirations can be satisfied in various ways—
for example, one may prepare one’s own food from
raw ingredients, heat up convenience food, take
away fast food, or eat at a restaurant. Examining
data indicating that the price of manufactures typically declines faster than that of services, Gershuny
hypothesized that as consumers seek to satisfy their
aspirations, they might find it cheaper to shift from
buying services (public transport, theater tickets,
etc.) to buying goods (automobiles, TVs, etc.). He
described this as an emerging “self-service society”
in contrast to the “service economy.” In addition to
the cost considerations, he also suggested that “selfservices,” while sometimes involving work on the
part of the consumer (e.g., driving the car, putting
clothes into the washing machine), are often chosen
because they are more convenient—they can more
often be accessed when and where the consumer
wants. Technological innovation in goods, too,
means that many goods are being rendered more
convenient in this way, as well as being enhanced in
quality in other respects (more comfortable and safer
cars, higher definition TVs, and the like).
The long-term trend has, however, been a complex one. Convenience foods have not substituted for
restaurants; indeed, dining out and fast food have
grown massively in popularity, for example. On
the other hand, the volume of consumer equipment
with which people can produce their own services,
or at least have them delivered electronically to the
home, has grown substantially. There is little sign of
a saturation of interest in material goods, even if the
purposes for which they are acquired are continuously evolving. The manufacturing industry has continued its relative decline in the advanced industrial
world—at faster or slower rates in different countries, so that most affluent countries are nowadays
service economies or postindustrial societies in terms
of employment and economic output. In part, this
reflects “deindustrialization”—the offshoring of

Postmodernism

manufacturing industries to, and the rise of new
manufacturing powerhouses in, the emerging economies such as China and India (who seem to be following trails blazed by Japan and Korea in earlier
decades). In part, it reflects the growing productivity
of manufacturing so that a diminishing workforce
can continue to produce an expanding level of output. In part, too, it reflects a growing division of
labor across industries, so some activities that would
historically have been seen as part of the manufacturing sector are now seen as constituting business
services—manufacturing firms now often buy many
services such as logistics, cleaning, design, and the
like, which would have been carried out by their own
employees in the past.
Whether this really constitutes a postindustrial
society is thus a moot point. Some commentators
will point to the industrialization of many service
activities—from banks to fast-food chains—to suggest that we actually live in a hyperindustrial society,
where greater areas of life are subject to an industrial logic. Some will argue that the manufacturing
industry itself has changed, away from “Fordism”
to a more flexible and knowledge-intensive activity,
so that industrialism itself has changed. As might be
expected, these perspectives are liable to differ, too,
concerning whether it makes sense to talk of a “service class,” of “knowledge workers,” of the decline
in political confrontation and ideology of the sort
that characterized earlier industrial society. Views
are equally contested as to whether we are seeing
the sorts of evolution in consumer demand that Bell,
Gershuny, and others sought to document. What is
clear is that postindustrial society remains a potent
piece of terminology and continues to resonate in
much public discourse.
Ian Miles
See also Consumer Demand; Hierarchy of Needs;
Information Society; Lifestyle; Post-Fordism;
Postmodernism; Self-Service Economy; Social Class

Further Readings
Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology. New York: Free Press,
1960.
Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A
Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books,
1973.
Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
New York: Basic Books, 1976.

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Kleinberg, Benjamin S. American Society in the
Postindustrial Age: Technocracy, Power, and the End of
Ideology. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merril, 1973.
Kumar, Krishan. Prophecy and Progress: Sociology of
Industrial and Post-Industrial Society. Harmondsworth,
UK: Pelican, 1978.
Smart, Barry. Post Industrial Society: SAGE Key Debates in
Sociology. London: Sage, 2010.
Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s
Social History: Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the
Programmed Society. London: Wildwood House, 1974.

POSTMODERNISM
Strictly speaking, the postmodern is alleged to be a
historical departure from the modern owing to the
supposed collapse of the latter. Postmodernism is,
in effect, a cultural and aesthetic style, or theory,
thought to be necessary to the alleged postmodern
dispensation. Postmodernism is, thus, put forth as a
deviant parallel to late modernism and is to be distinguished from avant-garde modernism. In respect to
consumer culture, it is possible to say that the avantgarde is one attempt to salvage a high modernist aesthetic from the fragmenting effects of mass culture,
which is often assumed to be a prominent postmodern effect if not aesthetic. Properly speaking, one may
use “alleged” to modify “postmodern” not because
there is no merit to postmodernism but because it is
too early in the history of its development to assess
its staying power.
Whether the postmodern can be the basis for an
“ism” remains therefore an open question. There
are, to be sure, many who think of postmodernism as
a uniquely French-influenced brand of social theory
and, thus, as a theoretical if not a purely ideological
practice. Others contend that this attitude is sincerely
held but illogical, therefore, mistaken. For there to
be a post to the modern, there needs be an honest
account of what the modern is (or was) and especially so for those devoted to postmodernism as a
successor to modernism.
The first rule of postmodernism, the theory of
an alleged historical departure, is that postmodernism is not what one may think in two respects. It is
not what people think it is, and it is not a matter of
thought (or theory). Nothing can be mere thought.
Thoughts, hence theories, are always and necessarily
historically conditioned. Thought, to be sure, reaches

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beyond historical fact, but its reach can never exceed
its grasp. As a result, postmodernism always depends
on the historical question of the postmodern, as the
postmodern hinges, historically, on the history of the
modern. What is (or was) the modern? When did it
begin? Why would anyone suppose it may be ending? If ending, is it really coming to its end or merely
transforming itself into something else?

Theories of the Modern
To start, the modern was the new that began to
appear, mostly in Europe, sometime around 1500,
give or take a few centuries. Some such as Immanuel
Wallerstein suggest that the modern that began in
the long sixteenth century was a new kind of worldsystem, one based on methods of rationalized trade
that permitted efficient control of global colonies and
markets. Others, like Andre Gunder Frank, argue
the economic side of the world-system to the extent
of claiming that the European system was neither
the first nor the most important global world-trade
system. Eastern and central Asia were, said Frank,
until about 1800. Those who would emphasize the
importance of ideology or culture to the modern
might agree that 1800 is a good date for the beginning of the high modern West, give or take a half
century. This view emphasizes the centrality of the
Enlightenment to the rationalizing elements of the
modern. There are many proponents of this view,
but their arguments are difficult to reconcile because,
though the Enlightenment was mostly a movement
in the eighteenth century, it was never merely what
today would be called a cultural movement in the
sense of a set of ideas that came to preoccupy modern thinking as such.
The modern, though obviously economic and cultural, was also political hence the popular view that
the modern began at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648
when a system of treaties made the modern nationstate out of well-bounded territories over which
national political institutions would exercise legitimate authority. Still, ideas are important to political
agreements of this kind. So theoretical historians of
the modern have also to account for René Descartes
and Thomas Hobbes, among others, who were closer
to Westphalia and the Dutch and English revolutions
in the seventeenth century than to eighteenth-century
Enlightenment philosophers and the French and
American revolutions.

Then, too, there is the importance of the lateeighteenth-century French and American revolutions,
usually taken as the definitive ones in the formation
of a truly, as opposed to philosophically, modern
state. Then again, the issue arises that the French
Revolution was an unstable process until well into
the nineteenth century, and though the American system was more or less fixed in place by 1790, it was
not until the conclusion of its Civil War in 1865 that
the continental United States would assuredly be an
enduring modern state. Wallerstein, among others,
argues that if one must fix a nineteenth-century date
as the beginning of the truly and institutionally modern period, that date would be 1848, when the radical and conservative ideologies of European America
were defeated to make way for the liberal era of the
market-based ideologies of the modern. One would
do just as well to push the date forward to the 1860s
when industrial capitalism came into its modern
form—the factory system of mass production that
broke the back of the peasantry and the remnants on
the feudal order.
When, in respect to consumption, one seeks to
define the modern—or the theory of its nature and
beginnings—one could do far worse than to begin at
mid-nineteenth century. The convenience of such a
date is that 1848 and 1867 are the dates of the two
most important foundational theories of the modern—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto
of the Communist Party and Marx’s first volume of
Capital. The former is famous for many things, but
as it concerns consumption as central to the modern
era, no single passage is more apt than its characterization of the modern as a bourgeois revolution
that, in effect, consumes everything in its path: “The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby
the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society” (Manifesto of the Communist
Party, chapter 1). Subsequently, in 1867, the first
two parts of Capital provided the argument that
demonstrated just how economic wealth could not
be explained on the surface of a market’s distribution
of commodities tied to consumer demands. Instead,
said Marx, the capitalist mode of production must
be understood as a consuming machine that eats up
human labor power and natural resources to create
products that, in time, must create markets that, in
turn, must create desires that have nothing necessarily to do with use values or real human needs.

Postmodernism

Without Marx, Max Weber would have been left
with little to prove in Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (1904–1905), his theory of the origins
of the modern. What Marx, before Weber, did was to
demonstrate the insufficiency of market values that,
since the Scottish and English Enlightenments, were
taken for granted to be the natural values of all men.
Free markets, like nature, call forth the best in the
enlightened individual who survives qua an individual in pursuit of his best interests that in the end are
the varieties of wealth by which he proves himself.
But neither the political economists nor Marx could
satisfactorily answer the practical, ethical question,
To whom does one prove his or her worth? Weber’s
answer was, in effect: God and, by necessity, statusconscious neighbors. And how is personal human
worth certified? The discipline of this-worldly devotion to hard work was Weber’s famous argument.
The modern, thus, is the unintended disenchantment
of other-worldly mysteries that in modern times are
redirected toward this-worldly horizons. The supernatural worlds are temporal. The natural worlds are
spatial. The modern is the discipline of work on the
ground where the risks are no less terrible, if only
because, either way, the individual’s soul is at stake.
The former cannot be certified. The latter can be but
only by progress in personal and collective careers
from one imaginary point to another—from, that is,
place to place toward a horizon on which the sun
never sets because the time of progress, whether
personal or social, is time measured across imagined
social space, which is to say that ultimately progress
is unrelenting speed, hence its voracious consumption of everything in its way.

Theories of the End of the Modern
If, in a nutshell, these are the basic, if not exclusive,
theories of the nature and origin of the modern,
then why would anyone suppose the modern may
be receding before a postmodern? There are at least
three important historical arguments for the idea
that the modern has fallen into a crisis of its own
making. One is economic—that the modern capitalist world-system has outrun its human and natural
resources. Capitalism, since 1991, is indubitably the
only important global economic system, and fully
modern capitalism depends on cheap labor markets, exploitable natural resources, hyperefficient
production technologies, and the externalization of

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real costs. Correspondingly, capitalism’s failure is
predicted by wage rates too low to support human
life on a global scale, depletion of fuel resources and
raw material supplies, postmechanical efficiencies
that further devalue human labor, and unbearably
high tax rates excised to cover the social costs of
economic development and environment protection.
A second claim about the end of the modern is
somewhat more ideological or, some would say, cultural—that the liberal ideology of market freedoms
as the essential condition of human progress has,
over time, failed to generate the progress necessary
to support the political ideology on which modern
culture depends.
A third argument, and perhaps the oldest one, is
social, historical, and sociological—that the natural
history of the modern leads unexceptionally to the
replacement of production-oriented social institutions (such as trade unions and management elites)
by consumption-oriented ones (such as loose credit
regulations that encourage passive leisure-time activities that in the end impoverish qualities of life).
Each of these arguments has its own prima facie
plausibility. None is empirically sufficient unto itself.
As a result, the postmodern cannot be asserted on
empirical grounds. Still, the evidence for, if not conclusively for, a decline in the modern encourages
attempts to judge the prospects for a postmodern era.

Distinguishing Between the Modern
and the Postmodern
The postmodern, however, cannot be divorced, as
noted, from the modern; all serious arguments for
and against the postmodern are framed relationally.
If the modern is ending, then is it really coming to
its end or merely transforming itself into something
else? As with all questions of the sort, there are but
four possible positions to take: (1) no, not really;
(2) perhaps, but only in form; (3) yes, cautiously;
(4) yes, enthusiastically. Roughly, these positions
can be labeled: (1) nostalgic or revisionist modernism, (2) radical modernism, (3) strategic postmodernism, and (4) radical postmodernism. As is often
the case, the first and fourth positions are of lesser, if
not quite negligible, value either to empirical research
or theoretical critique. They serve to frame debates
that would evaluate the relations between the modern and the postmodern. Still, all four, taken together,
suggest the complications entailed in any attempt to

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Postmodernism

distinguish the postmodern from the modern. Each
can be represented by reliable, if not always persuasive, theorists.
Nostalgic or Revisionist Modernism
Nostalgic or revisionist modernism is common
among political, religious, and some liberal cultural
leaders. As such, it is a crude argument that the
modern in and of itself is the fulfillment of human
history. Whatever the failures of the modern, they
are assumed to be short-run failures to achieve the
correct technical solution to social problems. At the
same time, there are completely serious revisionist
modernisms—ones that take the postmodern, or its
equivalent, as a serious, if not definitive, historical
phenomenon. The more prominent of these are associated with Marxism and one or more post-Marxist
developments, such as cultural studies. This is partly
because Marx’s critique of the modern was, for
those persuaded by his ideas, so devastating that, in
a sense, it is not too far wrong to suggest that his
filleting of modern capitalism laid out the flesh of the
postmodern. Hence, many consider David Harvey’s
The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) and Fredric
Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1991) to be reliable guidebooks
to postmodernism whereas others consider them to
be revisionist Marxist critiques of the postmodern.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000)
can also be included as a later version of the same
kind of critique.

in favor of a postmodern dispensation, but what it
amounts to is in effect a radical transformation, but
not destruction, of the modern. Other theories associated with transformationalism are in David Held
et al.’s influential Global Transformations (1999).
One of the more interesting transitional positions
in the debate is Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
(2000) and other writings that are radically modernist
in the sense that the speed and liquidity of dissolving
social institutions late in the twentieth century and
since are, in effect, the emergence of the deep structural elements of modernity’s destructive consumption of the human and natural worlds that Marx first
criticized. Bauman’s liquidity theory of modernity
illustrates the ambiguity of the line between the modern and the postmodern—an uncertainty other radical modernists wanted to dismiss as no more than
a transformation. The originality of Bauman’s writings is most evident in the contrast with one of the
best known radical modernists, Juergen Habermas,
who has significantly contributed to the German
critical theory tradition of renewing the project of
Enlightenment, hence, modernism. Habermas allows
simultaneously for the stark failures of the modern
era (the Holocaust, for prime example) and the lingering possibility of universal principles of reason,
discourse, and emancipation. In the end, Habermas,
like Giddens, is contemptuous of postmodernism,
whereas Bauman has been known to accept, if not
embrace, the label.
Strategic Postmodernism

Radical Modernism
Radical modernism is a term coined by Anthony
Giddens in Consequences of Modernity (1990),
among other writings, in which he laid the theoretical foundations for what became the transformationalist theory of globalization. Giddens, in
Consequences, has said that radicalized modernity
“sees high modernity as a set of circumstances in
which dispersal is dialectically connected to profound tendencies toward global integration” (150).
In other words, the modern insofar as it was based
on the integration of nation-states and capitalist
economies around a series of powerful political and
economy centers (such as the British Empire) may
be fragmenting but, according to Giddens, globalization involves new forms of global reintegration.
The key point is that there is something to be said

Strategic postmodernism includes writers who
are more or less falsely assumed to be the source of
postmodernism as a social theory, notably Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, neither of whom was
eager to identify his ideas as postmodernist. What
they had in common, in spite of substantial differences otherwise, was that both meant to do more
than critique the modern.
Foucault, whose thinking changed importantly
over the years, was intent on rethinking with everincreasing intensity not only the nature but also the
cultural categories of the modern. In many works,
notably Discipline and Punish (1975) and History
of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), Foucault came
to his influential reconfiguration of the social theory
of power. Biopower was, as he says at the end of the
last-mentioned book, the “indispensable element in

Postmodernism

the development of capitalism” (141)—by which he
meant that capitalism before it became an instrument
of production and profit had first to be a system of
control over the bodies and lives of workers and consumers. Herein is one of the more poignant illustrations of the difficulty of distinguishing the modern
from the postmodern. On the surface, the modern
is presented as benign knowledge that would guide
the self-interested, but moral, actions of individuals.
Underneath, as Marx first fully argued, the modern
world consumed human life in its appetite for efficient
economic growth. Yet Foucault was not so much a
prophet of a new world as a historian of the already
existing modern one. In an important sense, Foucault
completed the critique of the modern that Marx
had begun. Modern progress consumes humanity;
but why do modern humans subject themselves to
the certain death of being consumed by capitalism’s
productive machinery? Foucault’s answer was that
modern power is deployed through knowledge.
Hence, his famous concept power/knowledge closed
the circle of consumption in the modern world: men
and women subjected themselves to subjugation
to a consuming system. They are waste in a deadly
process in which productive workers are turned into
the fecal matter their children and children’s children
consume in spite of its worthlessness—bottled water,
widgets, cell phones, Barbie dolls, and more fodder
for the landfills.
Foucault, then, was a historian of the modern, as
Derrida was a literary and philosophical critic of the
modern. Deconstruction is not a method so much
as an attitude by which Derrida meant to reread the
key cultural texts of the modern era to expose their
silences (in Foucault’s word and one Derrida would
not have objected to) as to the ways the modern
era disciplined moderns to give themselves over to
a series of centers of power that subjected them to
the control of deadly knowledge that only seemed
benign.
Is this postmodernism? Or is it fundamentally a
severe criticism of the modern? Insofar as writers
like Foucault and Derrida meant to challenge and
change the methods of modern thought, they situated themselves outside, thus, in a sense beyond, the
modern. Yet as Derrida most famously put it early in
his career, the whole point was to put the language
and concepts of the modern under erasure. We have
to use the languages we have been taught in spite of
their silences—even when they serve as, in Weber’s

1127

phrase, the iron cages that limit our free play until
we are consumed by modernity’s consuming machinery. Gilles Deleuze, whose book with Felix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus (1980), is in but not of the
lineage of thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida,
best illustrates the strategic elements in strategic postmodernism. More forthrightly than anyone before,
Deleuze and Guattari put forth a new method for
writing and thinking that seeks entirely to escape the
limits of a cultural or political center. They define
(if that is the word) the world as a series of assemblages without root—as rhizomatic growths from
point to point, eventually, in principle, from and
to all points in a world that lacks any centering or
nourishing taproot able to organize life and death.
Their method (again, if that is a postmodern term)
is neither subversive nor productive so much as strategic. Gingerroot and crabgrass, familiar rhizomes,
are opportunistic life forms—they move where they
must and may without respect for ordering tap roots
much less legal boundaries between backyards and
nation-states. Rhizomatic life is pure consumption.
Radical postmodernism, like nostalgic or revisionist modernisms, is a boundary exception that proves
the rule of the indefiniteness of the postmodern.
Radical postmodernism, to put it simply, takes the
idea of society as pure consumption to an intriguing
extreme. The distinguishing characteristic between
strategic and radical postmodernisms is that while the
former comes up short of proclaiming the postmodern, the latter takes it as a given. Part of the radical
postmodern effect is rhetorical—writing as if what
cannot be known is known. Yet there is a serious
conviction underlying radical postmodernism, which
is the idea that the modern world, after a certain
point, ceased to be what it claimed it was. The locus
classicus of radical postmodernism, if there is one,
would be Guy Debord’s Society as Spectacle (1967),
which opens with the following: “In societies where
modern conditions of production prevail, all of life
presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles [in which] everything that is lived has moved
away into a representation” (2). The most notorious
illustration of the position is Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that theme parks, such as Walt Disney World,
are ultimately the only worlds there are—by which
he meant that representations of reality are necessarily make-believe and, by extension, that make-believe
is the only reality there is. We pay the price of admission to consume the hyperreal worlds that are, like

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all of television and nearly all cinema and it seems the
internet as well, all the worlds there are. Go to places
such as Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a state
formerly of the Soviet Union, and what you see and
live with are the ghosts of the Soviet Union, people
(and institutions) speaking not their national language but Russian, moving aimlessly among buildings and monuments that represent a failed reality
that never was and never will be again, even though
they are trying. In effect, the people in such a state of
affairs live in some kind of postmodern realm, a reality they purchase at the cost of lives of their own. The
hyperreal can only be consumed. There is no product
there, at least none that permits an exchange with
objects of any definite, enduring, or necessary value.
Baudrillard, at the end of System of Objects (1968),
says that “there are no limits to consumption” and
that “consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack” (224, emphasis in original). Needs are produced against scarcities;
wants are consumables meant to fill a void.
As nostalgia reminds us that some past was once
real, so radical visions pull us toward realities that
may be real only in their effects—and both lend zest
to attempts to understand the history of the present,
which itself can never be understood in the present.
What the boundary cases do is to suspend the question of the modern’s relation to a postmodern up
in the air, which among other consequences means
that any and all attempts to classify the ideas and
authors are permeable, even plastic. Are Hardt and
Negri revisionists or radical moderns or even radical
postmoderns? And is Bauman radically modern or
strategically postmodern? Are Deleuze and Guattari
strategic or radical? When put this way, it could be
said that postmodernism will always win the classificatory game because the very question of its differences from the modern hinges on the instability of
all analytic categories; or it could be said that when
it comes to thinking about historical ends and beginnings, the concepts and theories are never anything
more than representations of realities that cannot (at
least not yet) be lived—they are, that is, consumables
without limit, save for the mountains of waste they
produce.

Relation of Consumption to the Postmodern
This short history of the lack on which the postmodern depends uncovers a yawning symptom of the

modern—its abiding concern over the loss of its original productive energy to the overwhelming irrepressibility of consumption. From at least the beginning of
the industrial era of modern capitalism, consumption has always presented itself as the necessary if evil
twin of production. But to take this point in, it is necessary to do as Marx did—to understand consumption and the culture it relies on as much more than
a superficial market dynamic. Consumption is the
very nature of the modern’s insatiable appetite for
progress, which is to say for economic growth that
requires ever and endlessly cheaper labor, resources,
and consumer products. Modern productivity is, as
Marx put it, constantly revolutionizing the mode
and means of production and, therefore, of society
itself, which is to say humanity itself. If capitalism
is a consuming machine (as, among others, Deleuze
and Guattari have said), then, even when the cultural
concerns about mass consumer culture are directed
at the degraded nature of the products offered for
sale, the deeper concern is that those who live off the
commodity market will themselves be consumed.
Once again, the philosophically broad and historically acute question of the consummation of human
life finds its origins in Marx and Weber—the one
diagnosed the destructive force of capitalism’s ruthless avarice; the other could not see how the truly
human spirit could avoid being destroyed in the iron
cage of capitalism. Neither could have failed to have
noticed, outside the factory system and the bureaucratic machine, the implications of the technology
of iron construction and shopping. In the Arcades
Project (1982), Walter Benjamin leads with an essay
on Paris, “Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in
which he quotes a nineteenth-century tourist guide to
Paris: “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial
luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors
extending through whole blocks of buildings . . . [lined
on] both sides [by] the most elegant shops, . . . which
get their light from above, so that the passage is a
city, a world in miniature” (3). Hence, he described
today’s enclosed shopping malls—a century and a half
before the fact. A few years after Benjamin wrote this
fragment in 1935, Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception” (1947) was published with its
devastating conclusion that mass consumer culture is
“the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural
commodities which, at the same time, they recognize
as false” (136).

Postmodernism

Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899) was the first full-blown theory of conspicuous consumption to plant the kernel of the moral
concerns that would not be well articulated until
the 1950s. “Conspicuous consumption of valuable
goods,” said Veblen at the beginning of his essay on
the subject, “is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure” (63). This was 1899, well before
the evolution of the post–World War II middle class
in America and, later, in Europe and the rest of the
world. Still, the line captures the issue that Weber
would make famous. The modern man of early capitalism was one imbued with an ethic of productive
labor—not a consumer but a producer. By 1950,
when in the United States there was a remarkable
excess of affluence, the middle and working classes
had themselves become part of a new leisure class in
which consumption, not productive labor, was the
sign of, in Veblen’s word, reputability.
The opening salvo in the cultural criticism of consumption as a way of life and meaning was David
Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) that identified
the concern many saw as an abrupt change in the
American national character, from inner-directed
work to other-directed leisure. A close reading of
the book shows the extent to which Weber’s entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism was taken for granted
as the moral standard for American and modern
culture. After Riesman, success and personal worth
were increasingly associated with leisure (as distinct
from work) and consumption (as distinct from
productivity). Consumption goods became, in the
eye of the cultural critics as well as consumers, the
signs of the postmodern human—personal worth
bought at the cost of conformism. When (following Weber) in the eighteenth century, God ceased to
be the object toward which the hard-working and
inner-disciplined man directed his energies, there
was no one left to judge that worth but the neighbors in new leisure-class dwellings from Levittown
to Greenwich. The old money remained in buildings
on Park Avenue. The humbler leisure classes were
branded for what they were thought to be in Vance
Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) and other popular books expressing a similar complaint about what
could only be called (even though it was not) postmodern culture. From the 1950s down to the present, diasporic moderns worried about the collapse
of modern civilization. The collapse, it was thought,
would surely follow on the consumer culture that

1129

drew individuals out into an ethic of conformity to
the expectations of neighbors and then, soon after,
led to a pitiful isolation. The sequel to The Lonely
Crowd was, in a sense, Robert Putnam’s Bowling
Alone (2000), one of a number of books and essays
at the turn of the twenty-first century that bemoaned
the rise of a shallow individualism in which the lack
by then was doubly damning: consumers, no longer
producers; individuals, no longer even members of a
vital community.
Variations on the theme of consumption as a fatal
corruption of the modern were addressed in books
such as John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent
Society (1958), W. W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic
Growth (1960), and Daniel Bell’s The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society (1973). None of them was
primarily an argument for the postmodern, but all
of them (and others) were liberal or conservative
diagnoses of various aspects of the crisis of the modern. Rostow’s Stages was, in many ways, the definitive economic theory of modernization. Yet among
Rostow’s stages was the unsettling final stage, the age
of high mass consumption. It would hardly matter
what Rostow, in particular, meant, were it not that
his overall theory of economic modernization was,
like Riesman’s theory of the inner-directed national
character, basically a Weberian theory of the modern—that modern humankind was meant to be a
producer, not a consumer. Still, today, Rostow’s
theory stands behind the leading global theory of
economic development exemplified by the World
Bank—the poorer countries deserve economic support from the wealthier, but the purpose of loans is
not to make lives easier so much as to develop an
indigenous capitalist spirit. The moralism in modernization theory is that the poor regions of the world
are failed Norways, unable for want of hard work to
move toward capitalist productivity. Mass consumption in such a scheme is both the sign of entrepreneurial success and the fatal flaw of the modern.
Theorists of the postmodern, whether radical
modernists like Habermas or reluctant postmoderns
like Foucault, focus the question of consumption on,
in effect, the masses. In this respect, they carry forward the classical ideas of both Marx and Weber. For
Habermas, following the line established by Adorno
and Horkheimer, consumption culture has the effect
of colonizing everyday life, making it (in locution
Herbert Marcuse made famous) one dimensional. For
Foucault, the masses were victims of the economic

1130

Postmodernism

and social power of the dominant classes but willing victims who simultaneously resisted the power of
consumption culture even as their consuming behaviors affirmed it. Among these major positions, one
finds an important literature on consumer culture
and the postmodern, of which the locus classicus is
widely thought to be Mike Featherstone’s Consumer
Culture and Postmodernism (1991/2007)—a book
that is especially helpful in summarizing the ways
that postmodernism (in its many varieties) helps us
better to understand the state of aesthetic cultures in
our time. For example (2007, 11),
Postmodernism is of interest to a wide range of artistic practices and social science and humanities disciplines because it directs our attention to changes
taking place in contemporary culture. These can be
understood in terms of (1) the artistic, intellectual
and academic fields (changes in modes of theorization, presentation and dissemination of work . . .);
(2) changes in the broader cultural sphere involving
the modes of production, consumption and circulation of symbolic goods . . . ; (3) changes in the everyday practices and experiences of different groups.

At all these levels, Featherstone adds, culture, once
a marginal consideration, has become the central
issue in artistic practices, social theory, and everyday
life. However culture is defined, there is a wide
consensus as to centrality of consumption culture,
which is, just as widely, seen as a threat to aesthetic,
scientific, economic, and everyday life judgment.
The literature on these themes is now enormous but
illustrate the whole. Giddens in writings in the 1990s
invents the idea of “disembedding”—the dislocation
of individuals from local spaces. Giddens is essentially hopeful (being a radical modernist) that even
digitalized cultures allow for a “reembedding” in
new relations that can be real in human terms, even
if at a distance. Yet as Giddens continued to think
about it in later writings, he allowed for the possibility that one of the tribulations of the self is that it, and
the individual, are commodifed—becoming, in effect,
consumable products of their own desires. In the
same place, Giddens (1991, 198) favorably quotes
Zygmunt Bauman to the effect that “individual needs
of personal autonomy, self-definition, authentic life
or personal perfection are all translated into the need
to process, and consume, market-offered goods.”
One can see this idea of consumer culture morphing
into Bauman’s writings of the 2000s in such works as

Liquid Modernity, in which consumer culture essentially eats up and liquefies everything solid—both
material and immaterial. Some (Elliott and Lemert,
for example) even go to the extreme of suggesting
that as globalization aggravates the spread of mass
consumption, the new individual is, in effect, vulnerable to eating up his or her own self by a series of
futile personality and body makeovers.
In conclusion, two things should be noted. The
first is that the association of a mass culture of consumption with the postmodern is just as indefinite as
are the four comparative categories of theories, the
relations between the modern and postmodern, and
hence the reason that postmodernism is not what
one may think. It is not about theories; and if it were,
it is too early to discern the historical evidence that
might support any particular theory. The second is
that, since 2000, postmodernism has begun to fade
away to be replaced by a variety of no less contradictory theories of globalization. In this, the eventual
disappearance of the term postmodernism will not,
however, relieve the debate over the postmodern,
which as pointed out is really an attempt to assess the
fate of the modern. All globalization does is up the
ante in the game.
Questions of the postmodern, by whatever name,
even “globalization,” are not likely to go away anytime soon. The modern, however it is defined and
whenever it began, still presents global problems of
its own making: it is a waste machine that devours
the resources it needs for economic growth; its
growth has not generated any realistic prospect that,
globally speaking, the liberal theory of modern progress can deliver on its promise of a better world for
all, or even most; and third, the modern era, for those
who do benefit from its promises, has turned away
from its original values and toward raw consumption, which neither capitalism, its economic system,
nor liberal market principles, its cultural system, can
sustain or justify.
Charles Lemert
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Affluent
Society; Capitalism; Conspicuous Consumption;
Cultural Turn; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Modernization Theory; Post-Structuralism

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects. London: Verso/New
Left Books, 1996. First published in French in 1968.

Post-Structuralism
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity,
2000.
Bell, Daniel. Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York:
Basic Books, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999. First published in
German in 1982.
Debord, Guy. Society as Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black and
Red Press, 1977. First published in French in 1967.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987. First published in French in 1980.
Elliott, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New
Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization.
London: Routledge, 2006.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. Rev. ed. London: Sage, 2007. First
published in 1991.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: An Introduction.
New York: Random House, 1978. First published in
French in 1976.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the
Prison. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1979.
First published in French in 1975.
Frank, Andre Gunder. Re-Orient: Global Economy in the
Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998.
Giddens, Anthony. Consequences of Modernity. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell/John Wiley, 1989.
Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and
Jonathan Perraton. Global Transformations: Politics,
Economics, and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
edited by Gunzelin Schmid, translated by Edmund
Jephcott, 94–136 (page numbers for quotations from
1947 edition). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002. First published in German in 1947.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991.
Lemert, Charles. Postmodernism Is Not What You Think:
Why Globalization Threatens Modernity. 2nd ed.
Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005.

1131

Riesman, David (with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney).
The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American
Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950.
Rostow, W. W. Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004.

POST-STRUCTURALISM
As regards the study of consumers and the consumption of everyday culture, post-structuralism signifies
a significant departure from the structuralist analyses
that it succeeded. Whereas in a structuralist analysis of consumption the patterns of consumption are
ascertained through the revelation of some deep
structure, in post-structuralist analyses of consumption, emphasis is placed on the minutiae of socially
produced meanings, habits, practices, and normative
common sense that govern consumption. Indeed, a
post-structuralist analysis of consumers will necessarily place emphasis on the position of the consumer
as a “subject” who is endlessly reconstructed by his
or her particular historical, social, and cultural environs. For consumption, post-structuralism meant
that the consumer, advertiser, marketer, seller, retailer,
or producer could no longer be considered in a static,
autonomous, and decontextualized way as per structuralism.
Post-structuralism is the label given to a loose
collective of thinkers and theories that originated in
continental Europe, especially in France, during the
middle and latter half of the twentieth century. As
its name implies, post-structuralist analyses depart
from the order of structuralist analyses by bringing
features of cultural specificity, subjective engagement, metalanguage, and metaphysics to the fore.
In the middle of the twentieth century, a variety of
French thinkers were grouped under the label of
post-structuralism, particularly by the American
scholarly journal Yale French Studies, and some
of these thinkers included Roland Barthes, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida,
Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.
Post-structuralism is sometimes seen as an intellectual attempt to respond to the concerns that were
borne out by the student and worker riots in Paris

1132

Post-Structuralism

during May 1968 that were, in some ways, targeted
at the prevailing discourse of structuralism in the
universities.
Post-structuralist analyses initially drew on the
critique of ideology, Marxism, phenomenology,
semiotics (the study of meaning/s), and the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure to emphasize the
critical rereading of texts and make the claim that
no text could be read the same way twice. This
link to Saussure shows that post-structuralism has
its genesis in the study of language, linguistics, and
the study of literature, literary studies. Yet as a
method of critique, post-structuralism has emerged
in the methodological and epistemological debates
of other disciplines and fields such as philosophy,
history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, various
feminisms, ethnography, the critical philosophy of
science, and audience research to name but a few.
Some critics suggest that post-structuralism is distinct from post-modernism despite both emphasizing a common cultural and subjective relativism in
their analyses of the subject of discourse that makes
all “meaning” relative to one’s cultural immersion
and status or individually held beliefs. Other critics
note that post-structuralism signals a “loss of nerve”
in contemporary thought, opting for the interminable torment of relativism wherein one never “gets
the whole story” because all truths and meanings
are “half full,” always partial to cultural constructions and/or subjective interpretation. Whatever the
criticism, it is undeniable that post-structuralism has
always retained what Barthes, at his 1977 inauguration to the chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège
de France, called “a certain individual labor, the
adventure of a certain subject” (Barthes 1999, 471,
emphasis added).

The Influence of Saussure
The grounds of post-structuralism’s initial emergence in France were a fertile blend of Saussurian
linguistics, phenomenological investigations, existential analyses, and the psychoanalytic clinic. From
1910 to 1911, Saussure held his Course in General
Linguistics in Geneva, Switzerland. What made
Saussure’s approach unique at the time was his
move away from the traditional interpretation of
language through phonology (the study of sounds
or phonemes) toward a more analytic approach
that favored an understanding of the written and

spoken word as signs. Saussure distinguished these
signs between two categories: the signifier and the
signified. The signifier is the sign itself, the written
or spoken word in its graphic or spoken form. The
signified, however, is the meaning that, of itself, is
distinct from the signifier although deeply connected
to it at the same time. Saussure’s innovative shifting
of linguistic analysis allowed for a consideration of
all language as an arbitrary system of denotation and
connotation. The word tree, for example, does not
have any necessary connection with any living tree
but is rather the way language signifies “tree” and
nothing more. The meaning of the signifier tree is
learned through language rather than through treating the external world as a heuristic index. This
shift enables a post-structuralist analysis of the consumption of television shows to focus on the ways
a consumer signifies these shows in a discourse, be
it written or spoken, rather than a statistical measuring of how often they watch the shows. Such a
radical reimagining of the study of language opens
up the possibilities to discuss not just language but
also language as a social product and the place of the
individual therein.

The Impact of Phenomenology
While Saussurian linguistics offered both structuralist and post-structuralist analyses an opportunity
to examine the structures and horizons of signification, another prevalent movement in France during
the early part of the twentieth century was a branch
of philosophical inquiry known as phenomenology.
The phenomenology that was studied in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s was collected under the
banners of existential philosophy and phenomenological psychology. While the members of the former,
such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,
enjoyed fame for their radical conceptions of freedom and the subject, the latter phenomenologists,
such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, emphasized the
place of language and the phenomenology of perception. A general understanding of phenomenology, as it emerged in Merleau-Ponty’s work, suggests
that phenomenology is the study of how the world is
endowed with a conscious evaluation that, in a certain sense, makes it visible to the consciousness of
the observer. This type of phenomenology places particular emphasis on the production of meaning in the
subjectivity of the human subject as it manifests in

Post-Structuralism

our physical embodiment that allows us to perceive
the world in the ways we do. Merleau-Ponty’s The
Phenomenology of Perception and posthumous The
Visible and the Invisible are two works that significantly capture the spirit of French phenomenology in
the middle of the twentieth century, especially with
their references to perception and the body. Many
so-called post-structuralist thinkers such as Barthes
were exposed to phenomenological thinking, and we
can observe this in many post-structural theorists’
references to the embodiment of meaning and language by the human subject.

Existentialism
Existential philosophy, or existentialism, was another
important feature of post-structuralism’s intellectual
constellation in France during the twentieth century.
Existentialism was a label attributed to many thinkers across Europe and in neighboring regions during
the 1940s and 1950s, such as Albert Camus (who
rejected the label), Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber,
Karl Jaspers Miguel de Unamuno, and Lev Shestov.
Existentialism contributed a series of key claims to
post-structuralist analyses that centered on the meaninglessness of existence that confronts subjectivity in
its doom to be free. Such a view, in turn, perceived
“meaning” as a form of self-deception that made
every action absurd and emotional states the guilty
afflictions of the all-too-human delusional dream
of assuaging the nothingness at the core of the lived
life. Existentialism’s concerns ranged from facticity
to alienation, self-deception to the ideality of values,
and authenticity to the absurd, anxiety, and nothingness. Whereas Saussurian linguistics and phenomenology offered post-structuralist discourse a way into
language and the body, existentialism undercut any
belief that our place in the world was ensured. Some
post-structuralist discussions, particularly those by
Barthes, Louis Marin, and Paul de Man, explicitly
emphasize this existential concern with the alienation
of the individual in the world by the very linguistic
structures purported to make some sense of it.

Psychoanalysis: Freud in France
Aside from the influence of existentialism, linguistics,
Marxism, and phenomenology, post-structuralism
was also greatly affected by the theories of psychoanalysis. Psychology and neuroscience found their
bases in France to be in the universities and mental

1133

hospitals, notably the Sorbonne and the Salpêtrière,
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, traveled
to Paris in October 1885, to observe the seminars
and demonstrations of Jean-Martin Charcot at the
Salpêtrière. In his later reflections on the experience,
Freud reports that Charcot’s demonstrations were a
catalyst for the change that guided him away from
neuroscience and toward medical psychopathology.
This type of more analytic research, psychopathology, has been a common feature to many well-known
psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed
thinkers who have studied or trained in France and
who have had an impact on post-structuralist theory,
sometimes being grouped under the banner of poststructuralism itself by various bibliographies, encyclopedias, and intellectual histories. Some of these
thinkers include but are not limited to Félix Guattari,
Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan. The influence of
psychoanalysis on post-structuralism allowed for a
discussion of the psychodynamics of texts, reading,
and interpretation. This allowed for a change in the
language of analysis from “surface and depth” to
“structure and symptom” or “surface and the fold.”
The diversity of psychoanalytic perspectives, even in
the names listed above, makes it difficult to reduce
the impact of psychoanalysis on the generation of
post-structuralism to a handful of effects. However,
some thinkers such as Barthes have noted the tendency toward the pair Freudianism-and-Marxism in
some post-structuralist discussions and analyses during the 1970s that imposed a variety of different limits on the discussions through their epistemological
and conceptual frame of reference.
What all these influences indicate is that during
the twentieth century, a collection of largely Frenchspeaking thinkers were trying to grapple with significant changes in the anthropology of the human
subject in the wake of the failure of structuralism,
the demise of cultural innocence, and worldly optimism in the face of two horrendous world wars and
numerous other bloody conflicts (notably the Iranian
revolution), and the triumph of global capitalism as
the normative conditions that governed relationships
between people, their worlds, and the things that
mattered to them. Every aspect of the human subject
elucidated by post-structuralist analysis, discussion,
and theorization revealed an extremely fluid, relativistic, and multiple human being that announced
its “humanity” in a multitude of language structures

1134

Post-Structuralism

and discourses. No longer was a human subject a
mere individual consumer; instead, the context in
which the consumption took place became incredibly
important to how the construction of consumption
could take place and have any cache of meaning.

Barthes and Reading
Barthes was a central figure for the new ventures
of post-structuralism. His dissections of the myths
of contemporary society, semiotic analyses of high
and popular culture, and diagnoses of the death of
the author and the triumph of the reader were vital
in establishing post-structural tenets around cultural relativism, semiotics, and the production of
meaning. Barthes devoted much of his intellectual
prowess to an investigation of the new mythologies that were springing up in French culture with
the oversaturation of advertising and the consumption practices of an advanced capitalist society. He
also lifted “the text” from the conceptual limits of
literature imposed on it by tradition and gave it a
new license of meaning in the busy mediatized landscape of twentieth-century Paris. Like many scholars
of his day, Barthes wrote and published in a variety
of forums and formats, including academic scholarship, journalism, and literature reviews. His book on
the myths of Paris and its consumption in the 1940s
and 1950s, Mythologies, is composed of fifty-four
short articles written for the left-leaning magazine
Les Lettres Nouvelles. These articles are written with
brio and strength and examine everything from hairstyles and car commercials to burlesque and dinners.
Barthes is important to consumption studies for his
explicit engagement with consumer culture, consumerism, and the production of value and meaning in
these milieus.
The semiology of Barthes is one of the hallmarks
of his intellectual mode and one reason why many
sources place him in the post-structuralist lineage.
Drawing on the lessons of critical literary studies,
Saussurian linguistics, and semiotics, Barthes brought
the processes and dynamics of reading and writing to
a new self-realization: the author was dead. From the
moment of its final output, any literary work or artistic creation is subject to the tyranny of the viewer’s
consciousness. And not only this, but also the works
themselves were no longer isolated objects. Instead,
Barthes’ semiology drew out the intertextuality of all
cultural objects, a sign of their embeddedness in a

social milieu and process of signification. Further, the
viewer’s consciousness became akin to a node in a
network of culturally constructed meanings, values,
and language. After Barthes, no book, advertisement,
or other cultural artifact can be considered the same
when just any person is consuming it because the
specific contextual and relative relation that is generated between the reader-consumer and the text is
particular and specific in the utmost.

Foucault, Historical Genealogy, and Discourse
Michel Foucault is perhaps the best-known master of
the critiques of discourse, languages’ tension between
authorship, history, and power within and beyond
the reading circles of critical literary studies that are
familiar with Barthes and the sociologies of medical
psychiatric history. To say that Foucault or Barthes is
included under the banner of post-structuralism is to
say too little of the massive influence that the work of
these two thinkers had on twentieth-century thinking and scholarship. In some respects, the early work
of Foucault is exemplary of the trend of many poststructural analyses’ departure from structuralism. His
works, such as Madness and Civilization, The Order
of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, the first
volume of his History of Sexuality (Knowledge and
Power), and his lectures at the Collège de France during the 1970s on psychiatric power, are all examples
of a critical rereading of ideas through their historical genealogy. Historical genealogy, in the sense
given to it by Foucault’s unearthing of the historical
mutations of ideas in their social, cultural, medical,
and political settings, allows an analysis to directly
show the constructions that limit the conceptual
framework of any discourse. Foucault’s History of
Sexuality, for example, demonstrates that the ideas
and practices that we use to define sexuality today
are the creation of vocations devoted to scientifically studying its “natural state” in the bourgeois
European societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries that are directly linked to the political control of birth and death rates, hygiene, and a bourgeois rationalization of what constitutes knowledge,
pleasure, and power. Foucault’s influence on poststructural debates gave them an acute sensitivity to,
for example, the genealogy of a historical emergence
such as that of the psychiatrist and author Sigmund
Freud and the discourses or ways of dis/empowering
through language-concepts that are not only words

Post-Structuralism

and their meanings but also rituals, behaviors, practices, politics, and a swath of other processes that
build up the discourse of psychoanalysis that Freud
instituted. The potency of post-structuralism’s cultural relativism owed a lot to Foucault’s genealogical
approach to concepts, language, and power.
Although Foucault’s late works are a departure
from the genealogical approach–particularly the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality:
The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self—the
impetus of his early work straddled both history and
philosophy and gave some of his followers cause to
reread Foucault himself as an archaeological artifact
of history or philosophy. Often, studies of consumer
culture prefer a reading of Foucault as a critical social
theorist rather than as a sociologist or philosopher of
power. The ramifications of Foucault’s work for poststructuralist consumption studies were far ranging
indeed, and his emphasis on the historical relativity
and genealogy of any category, such as consumption
or consumer, remains an important epistemological
problem for any study of consumer culture.

Derrida and Deconstruction
The final post-structuralist theory explored in this
entry is that of deconstruction as promulgated by
the work of Jacques Derrida. Derrida was not native
to France, hailing instead from the troubled French
colonial region of Algiers. Derrida’s work is clearly
indebted to existentialism, critical literary studies,
phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Deconstruction
was Derrida’s name for his method of reading the
contradictions and intractable aporias, or puzzles,
within given texts. Perhaps the best known target
for his deconstructive approach were the dialogues
of Plato in Derrida’s Dissemination, where the coincidence of opposites in the term pharmakon (translated as artificial color, charm, drug, medicine, paint,
philter, poison, recipe, remedy, spell, and substance)
allow for an infinite indecision about the meaning
of the term except by way of a deconstruction of
its ambivalent double meanings and a subsequent
reconstruction through the subject-position (the
subject in context) in regard to the term pharmakon and the doubleness of its different meanings,
what Derrida calls “the difference of difference.”
Ultimately, Derrida’s point is that the clarification
of the meaning of pharmakon is impossible because
it always defers to its ambivalent double, and that is

1135

its aporetic truth or differánce. The eminent virtue
of deconstruction is that it allows the voice of the
other to become visible, and therein, it allowed poststructuralist discussions to play with and effectively
subvert the dominant conventional readings of a text
or language construction.
Deconstruction and consumption are an obvious
couple when examining fan cultures, cult followings,
or translations of books to films. Rather than psychopathologizing “the fan” as yet another commodity fetishist, deconstruction allows for an analysis of
the different difference asserted by an active fan base
that appropriates, extends, and reimagines a canonical text. It also offers a reply to the ambivalence of
mainstream audiences and the negation of difference
by conservative or traditional interpretations.
As can be noted from the above, post-structuralism is a difficult term to accurately define because it is
a historical label, an intellectual constellation of ideas,
and an inconsistent grouping of thinkers and theories.
The influences that gave rise to post-structuralism
in France during the period from the 1950s to the
1970s were multifarious, and those canvassed here
are but the tip of the iceberg. The importance of poststructuralism to the study of consumption cannot be
understated, but it can also render consumption a
most unwieldy thing to discuss unless one is willing to
scrupulously examine the importance of language, the
sociohistorical context, and the contradictions inherent in any construction of the truth of consumption.
Daniel Hourigan
See also Audience Research; Commodities; Discourse;
Discourse Analysis; Fans; Postmodernism;
Rationalization

Further Readings
Barnard, Malcolm, ed. Fashion Theory: A Reader. London:
Routledge, 2007.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang,
1972.
Barthes, Roland. “Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France.”
In A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, 457–478.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethics and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. New York: Blackwell, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York:
Pantheon, 1965.

1136

Potlatch

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the
Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Discourse of Modernity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Harari, Josué, ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1979.
Mort, Frank. Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and
Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Woodward, Ian. Understanding Material Culture. London:
Sage, 2007.

POTLATCH
Potlach is a noun used in anthropology and other
social sciences to designate a feast, ceremony, or system of gift exchange, collective consumption, and
the destruction of wealth. The less common verb to
potlatch signifies the activity of hosting or participating in such a feast. The term potlatch derives from
the Native American Chinook words for “gift” and
“giving.” Potlatches are chiefly associated with the
indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast
of America, including the Tlingit, Haïda, Tsimshian,
Nuxalk, Kwakiutl, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Coast
Salish. Similar practices and institutions have also
been studied in other parts of the world, for example, in eastern Siberia and Melanesia. Among the
most influential examinations of potlatch are the
works of Franz Boas, Helen Codere, Philip Drucker
and Robert F. Heizer, Marcel Mauss, and Abraham
Rosman and Paula G. Rubel.

Key Aspects
Although potlatch practices differ from group to
group, Boas, Codere, and Mauss have identified
several more widespread characteristics. Potlatch
gatherings consist of elaborate ceremonial events
typically accompanied by music, dance, and dramatic speeches. They revolve mainly around gift
exchanges, which distribute and circulate wealth
among transactors and establish social ties between
them. Moreover, potlatches involve the lavish consumption of food by the group as well as acts of pure

destruction of riches. Giving and accepting goods
and services, reciprocating gifts with large interest, and engaging in property destruction is socially
obligatory. It is imperative to respond to an invitation to a potlatch by hosting another one soon after.
Many scholars emphasize competition and hostility
as a defining aspect of potlatch expenditure: participants seek to outdo each other in the grandiloquence of their presents and in the amount of wealth
they destroy. It is reported that combat through
property has regularly led contestants to spend all
they have.
Potlatches are usually conducted not only by
chiefs, who act as representatives of their clans and
families, but also by other individuals of social rank.
Potlatching requires no special occasion, yet groups
normally hold potlatches at socially significant times
such as childbirth, initiations, weddings, and funerals. The offerings of the potlatch include blankets,
canoes, baskets, food, jewelry, masks, dress, and
copper plates, which are variously exchanged and
collectively consumed or burnt, broken, and thrown
into the sea. Formerly, potlatches also witnessed the
exchange and killing of slaves. “Grease feasts,” where
“enormous quantities of fish oil” were “consumed
and burnt,” were traditionally the most expensive
potlatches (Boas 1966, 93). In the nineteenth century,
as Codere as well as Drucker and Heizer point out,
Western consumer articles and money began to form
part of the ceremonies.

Social Significance
Anthropologists agree that the potlatch is highly
important to the groups that practice it. However, its
exact social significance and function beyond wealth
redistribution and the forging of social alliances
have been debated. According to Boas and Mauss,
expenditure is primarily a tool to demonstrate wealth
and power to acquire honor and social rank. Giving
extravagant gifts (e.g., an excessive number of blankets) or destroying greater riches than one’s rival (e.g.,
breaking a more precious copper plate) displays superior wealth. This enables one to “flatten” one’s adversary: to undermine their position, distinguish oneself,
and validate one’s own status or claim to promotion in the social hierarchy. Conversely, if one fails to
respond to another’s expenditure competitively, that
is, to give or destroy an equal or larger amount, one
shows one’s inferiority and loses face and influence.

Potlatch

Codere states that by around 1849, the Kwakiutl
largely accepted wars with property instead of physical violence as the dominant tool for settling hierarchy disputes. Referring to numerous case studies,
Rosman and Rubel also interpret North American
potlatches as devices for asserting and obtaining
rank. What they deem anthropologically decisive,
though, is that a society’s social structure preconditioned and limited the ways in which rivals could
conduct potlatches and hence the manner in which
potlatches could validate or manipulate social status.
By the same token, potlatch practices provide instructive expressions of the structures that determined the
social relations of indigenous groups.
Challenging much of the anthropological literature, Drucker and Heizer argue that the potlatch was
largely a friendly ceremonial for declaring social
positions and having them publicly confirmed.
Expenditure could neither alter a person’s status
nor otherwise influence existing rank systems. Even
“rivalry potlatches,” which were the exception, were
mainly tools for announcing competing claims to
a position. The expenditures’ size was merely one
among many factors deciding the conflict. Only gifts
and destructions that functioned as “rivalry gestures”—which should neither be conflated with potlatch ceremonies as such nor be seen as their central
components—were overtly inimical and capable of
destabilizing another’s status.
While the potlatch is most frequently linked to
competition and social hierarchy, anthropologists
highlight several further dimensions of its social significance. Mauss argues that ceremonial expenditure
constituted a sacrificial gift to nature, the dead, spirits,
and the gods in exchange for their generosity. Mauss
also reads the circulation and sumptuary destruction
of goods as manifestations of the collective notion
that objects have a spirit, which demands that they
be passed around or returned to nature. The obligation to respond to expenditures with greater gifts
has led scholars such as Boas, Codere, and Mauss
to accentuate the economic importance of the potlatch as a system of credit, debt, and interest-bearing
investment.

Controversies
Codere as well as Drucker and Heizer have examined the potlatch in the context of colonial history.
By the late 1800s, the European administrations of

1137

America had developed strong disapproval of the
First Nations’s potlatches, condemning the potlatch as an “uncivilized” institution that contradicted the principles of modern production and
commerce. Following calls for their abolition, the
Canadian Indian Act of 1885 made the conduct of,
and participation in, potlatches punishable criminal offences. Potlatching was subsequently suppressed by American Indian agents and later by the
mounted police. The United States adopted similar
measures. Yet although potlatches remained illegal
in the United States until 1934 and in Canada until
1951, some groups managed to resist colonial pressure and continued holding potlatch ceremonies.
This was partly because antipotlatch legislation was
badly defined and difficult to enforce, partly because
aboriginals circumvented the law by carrying out
secret potlatches and transforming them into practices more acceptable to the oppressors.
According to Christopher Bracken’s critical reading, the European-Canadian legal discourse on the
potlatch constituted above all an effort to define
aboriginal peoples as “others” characterized by barbaric acts of squander. The aim of this endeavor was
to distinguish a pure European identity and to designate Europe as a superior civilization. However, the
European discourse was haunted by a persistent predicament. The term potlatch continuously attracted
opposite meanings, defining the phenomenon it
was supposed to signify simultaneously as wasteful
expenditure and interest-bearing investment. Its contradictory sense prevented the word from addressing
a referent that could have been identified as a real—
and judged as a criminal—social practice. Hence, the
concept of potlatch needed to “purvey” its meaning
through legal and other discourses to obtain a referent in social reality. This operation enabled the term
to assist colonial law in its pervasive regulation of
aboriginal communities.
Georges Bataille’s interpretation of the differences
between capitalism and potlatch systems decisively
inspired his influential critique of capitalist society.
Societies conducting the potlatch embraced the
consumption and destruction of wealth for no productive purpose and considered such extravagant
expenditures a source of prestige. Thus, these societies expressed and answered what Bataille frames
as a fundamental economic need of every society:
the need to spend excess resources nonproductively.
Capitalism, by contrast, rigidly follows the principle

1138

Poverty

of utility. Wealth is either accumulated or consumed
for the maintenance and growth of productivity,
whereas wasteful expenditure is forbidden. The
ensuing inability to meet the basic requirement for
squandering surplus creates the danger that resources
will be channeled into war.
Matthias Benzer
See also Anthropology; Bataille, Georges; Baudrillard,
Jean; Conspicuous Consumption; Gifts and
Reciprocity; Mauss, Marcel; Positional Goods; Rituals

Further Readings
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Vol. 1,
Consumption. New York: Zone Books, 1989.
Boas, Franz. Kwakiutl Ethnography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966.
Bracken, Christopher. The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial
Case History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997.
Codere, Helen. Fighting with Property: A Study of
Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare 1792–1930.
American Ethnological Society, Monographs no. 18.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950.
Drucker, Philip, and Robert F. Heizer. To Make My Name
Good: A Reexamination of the Southern Kwakiutl
Potlatch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific:
An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the
Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange
in Archaic Societies. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Rosman, Abraham, and Paula G. Rubel. Feasting with
Mine Enemy: Rank and Exchange among Northwest
Coast Societies. New York: Columbia University Press,
1971.

POVERTY
Our Western consumer culture is replete with promises of material opulence, and many people have
fallen prey to its enticements. As a result of this perspective, most of the models that guide researchers’
understanding of the marketplace concentrate on
how to navigate this abundance to make satisfying
exchange decisions. A primary driver involves coping mechanisms consumers employ to help process
the endless parade of media messages designed to

influence them. The term information overload was
coined to describe this dilemma, masking the underlying tenet of opportunity overload. Thus, the consumer challenge is to make good decisions under the
implicit assumption that our ability to conduct such
transactions is ensured.
Some authors view this unspoken premise of
widespread marketplace exchange capability to
match unlimited opportunity as misguided. From
early ethnographic research to consumer investigations of poor African Americans to the modeling of
consumption vulnerability, interested parties have
received fair warning of the differences in consumer
behavior both within and between societies. For
example, the United Nations finds that the wealthiest
20 percent of the world’s population has an income
fifty times greater than the bottom 20 percent,
with the poorest 40 percent living on less than US$2
per day.
The disparate scholarship on restricted consumer
behavior has a history that reaches back to early
social science researchers with an interest in the way
poverty manifests across cultures. These pioneers
believed that Western media project an image of
consumption that fails to recognize the widespread
poverty that exists even among advanced economies,
such as in the United States. In this same vein, others
found that about 12 percent of the U.S. population
lives below the poverty line, with an overrepresentation by people of color, single mothers, rural dwellers, and the elderly. Recent investigations show
that about 25 percent of the entire nation is unable
to engage adequately the material culture, with
almost half of the world’s inhabitants considered
truly poor.
This entry explores the ways in which impoverished American citizens experience the larger material world to understand the consumer culture of
poverty. The data that inform this perspective involve
five different subgroups including homeless adults,
homeless women and children, impoverished juvenile delinquents, welfare mothers, and rural dwellers
in former coal mining towns. The qualitative investigations conducted are part of a stream of research
by Ronald Paul Hill. Composites of these five subpopulations encapsulating the lives of particular individuals summarize findings. Some interpretation is
provided next, containing a description of restricted
consumption experiences via a series of seven interrelated thematic categories.

Poverty

Interpretation
Loss/Lack of Familial/Friendship Love
What is striking about discovery across these ethnographic representations is the central role played
by the loss/lack of intimate, as well as other-centered,
love on consumption adequacy. In most cases, this
situation is exacerbated by the experience of othercentered disdain or hostility. The quality of life of the
focal characters, their families, and their community
members are significantly reduced as a consequence,
resulting in a variety of negative emotional reactions
and behaviors that often fail to improve their circumstances in the face of this adversity.
The starting point of their emotional and material
demise is the loss/lack of familial and friendship love.
For example, Jack, a homeless man in his late twenties, exhausts his inner circle of friends and family to
the point where none will have further contact with
him. In desperation, he seeks respite at a municipal
shelter in an effort to secure basic foodstuffs and a
safe living arrangement for the night. As a teenager
in the early 1990s, Eddie also suffers from emotional
and physical abuse as well as material neglect at the
hands of his father, and he turns to his peers for solace. Unfortunately, they encourage his juvenile delinquency to advance their material status, and Eddie
eventually is incarcerated.
Helplessly Falling Into Greater Poverty
The characters representing various impoverished
subpopulations initially experience their descent into
poverty as something that is beyond their control.
This is not to say that they hold themselves completely blameless for their situations or that they
place the blame elsewhere, nor does it suggest that
they came from locations in our society of relative
affluence and face economic constraints for the first
time. Instead, they are caught up in circumstances
originating much earlier that set the course toward
increasing poverty and the loss of cherished possessions. They often are aware of several pivotal events
that sent strong signals of their material demise, but
they are at a loss as to what to do about them. It is
as if they are adrift on a lifeboat moving out to sea
without an oar.
One of the primary instances of this downward
spiral involves the process of becoming homeless.
Most individuals/families who become homeless do

1139

not find the experience to be sudden or unexpected.
Typically, the person or persons move from a selfsufficient dwelling, such as an apartment, because
they can no longer afford to pay the bills, to doubling up with friends or relatives. However, after a
while, they may “overstay their welcome” due to
overcrowding or other interpersonal problems and
are forced to move to government-controlled housing, public or private homeless shelters, or the streets.
Once they exit their own homes, they find it difficult
to shape their living conditions or control their destinies. Many newly homeless people become anxious
and withdrawn as they face the inevitable erosion of
personal property and freedom.
Consumption Restrictions and
Meager Possessions
Impoverished consumers face a number of significant restrictions that impede their ability to fulfill
basic needs. From clothing to foodstuffs to shelter,
these individuals often consume goods and services
that would be deemed unacceptable to people under
ordinary conditions. The term secondary consumers describes their material lives, and it includes a
lengthy list of scavenging and recycling activities to
acquire discarded items. Examples include eating restaurant meals from trash bins, living in abandoned
apartment buildings, and wearing donated clothing
from local charities.
One result of such material restrictions is that the
homeless often are limited to a few cherished or utilitarian possessions that they are able to find safe storage for or keep with them at all times. While the lack
of income always is an issue, institutional or logistical constraints also make accumulation of such items
problematical. This is particularly true over time as
the individual or family must move from one location to another seeking accommodation.
Role of the Media
The media play a role in communicating the
standards for material accumulation within our consumer culture. Soon after impoverished children learn
from the media what is available within the larger
world, they develop a great sense of need or desire
for a wide variety of goods and services. Over time,
they establish a baseline standard of living against
which they measure their relative affluence. In Hill’s
ethnographic contexts involving children, they come

1140

Poverty

up short, with no indication that the future may
offer a substantial improvement in typical consumption opportunities. For instance, Tammy, a middleaged woman living in rural Appalachia, expresses
concern about how her children will respond to
the decaying condition of their coal mining community given their beliefs about what is available
elsewhere.
Zoë also comes to comprehend her restricted consumer existence when compared to media portrayals
of family meals as she “hunts” throughout the home
as a child of a drug-addicted mother looking for
something to eat. Anita, once on welfare and with
an adult understanding of consumer restrictions,
attempts to blunt her children’s developing interest
in the material world. For example, she ends their
regular trips to a local shopping mall, one of the few
enjoyable distractions from their otherwise grueling
lives, because of their insistence that Anita buy them
products she cannot afford. However, she does not
succeed in stemming their demands because media
images of the joys from material abundance during
childhood are widespread, lending credibility and
authenticity to their requests.
Reactions to the Loss/Lack of Support
The men and women in these stories experience
primarily negative emotional reactions to the loss/
lack of support from significant as well as distant
others. They are typically caught up in powerful
circumstances originating much earlier that set their
course toward increasing poverty. Focal characters
feel trapped in a downward spiral, unable to return to
their previous (inadequate) material lives. However,
rather than eliciting altruism from society, they are
forced to join a stigmatized group, such as the rural
poor, branding them as unworthy of respect. The
result is greater restrictions on their ability to consume or provide for their families.
Taken together, these feelings include deprivation,
anger, frustration, shame, humiliation, inferiority, and
loss of control that lead focal characters to become
increasingly alienated from mainstream consumer
society. As a child growing up in a poor community,
Eddie goes from excitement to numbness to anger
over the material abundance paraded before his eyes
by the media, eventually stealing cars to acquire what
he cannot otherwise have. Zoë is anxious and confused by the lack of help she experiences, and she

becomes livid at the treatment received after acquiring the label homeless.
Fighting a Deviant Label and
Community Support
Once they have the opportunity to reflect on their
situations, many among the poor eschew their deviant label and engage in activities that restore selfesteem. Sometimes, this change emerges from anger
or rage at the circumstances that entrap them; other
times, it is spawned by a renewed sense of pride in
the fundamental building blocks of who they are and
from where they came. Regardless, impoverished
consumers often experience a metamorphosis that
results in a redefinition of the self, empowering them
to adopt a new set of attitudes and behavior patterns
they had not considered previously. With this arsenal
as the basis for their self-definition, they are prepared
to reengage society on their own terms.
While the poor may seek to restore themselves psychologically as well as materially through their own
resources, they often find this task nearly impossible.
The pervasive sense of isolation and desolation that
permeates their living environments exacerbates their
poverty, and the institutional support services that
are designed to buoy them in times of severe stress
often fail to do so. Nonetheless, a spirit of community may help provide the needed support for their
rise from the collapse of consumption opportunities
and freedoms. Leadership in this regard comes from
the joining together of people like themselves or from
outsiders who are committed to seeking and finding
solutions to poverty. Reciprocity plays a central role
among these individuals, and they often share with
each other to create a critical mass of needed goods
and services.
Tenuous Present/Uncertain Future
Even if the poor are able to marshal the full power
of the resources of their communities, their ability
to prosper materially remains in doubt. The fact is,
these resources are severely limited, suggesting their
most creative use and development would still leave
poor community members with unmet essential
needs. As a result, many current efforts eventually
fall short, demonstrating that the ability of the poor
to survive, much less thrive materially, is unlikely.
With the tenuous nature of present consumer lives,
the opportunity to envision a positive future is

Poverty

constrained. At best, the prospect of living a material life similar to their more affluent counterparts
is uncertain; at worst, their future is as restricted as
their past, and they begin to feel like they are falling
back into self-defeating patterns of behavior.
The closing section of Eddie’s story provides
a glimpse into the tenuous nature of the material
lives of the poor from a long-term perspective. At
eighteen, Eddie returns to a restricted living environment that lacks the ability to support his material
needs in a socially acceptable fashion. Eddie initially
experiences great difficulty adapting to life within
the reform program. The strict regimen and the loss
of personal freedoms are disconcerting to him, and
he feels a sense of panic now that his former peers
and material possessions are no longer available for
support. He rebels against this system on a few occasions, but he eventually follows the rules to avoid dismissal and transfer to a more rigid detention facility.
As Eddie increasingly engages this insular community, he begins to experience successes that bolster his
sense of self and his perception of his potential in the
larger society after release. Unfortunately, resources
of the community to which he is returned are inadequate, and Eddie is drawn back to a life of crime.

Closing Remarks
The beginning of the consumer-behavior process is
linked to felt need associated with physiological, psychological, and/or sociological causes. Traditional
models posit that when such feelings reach a critical
point, the search process for satisfying alternatives
is triggered. An underlying premise is that the items
that previously met these needs were freely chosen,
used, and discarded at the discretion of their owners. Under conditions of serious restriction, however,
consumers are required by uncontrollable situational
factors to constrain the quantity and quality of material possessions at their disposal, and many of their
former belongings are lost prior to full use.
Accordingly, emotional reactions to and consequences of felt need under restricted consumer
behavior are distinct from the affect described in the
models mentioned above. Buyers who have the luxury to control and manage their material landscapes
are able to connect with the marketplace in positive
and emotionally fulfilling ways. Consumers characterized by consumption-as-restriction experience
little control over their material worlds and suffer

1141

from a loss of self-esteem and a lack of self-efficacy
in the marketplace. Their present circumstances are
inhibited in that they are without many items that
hold significant instrumental and symbolic value
to them. The future often is just as bleak given that
they are unable to create exchange relationships that
will allow them to acquire replacements of equal or
higher value.
Felt need often leads to a search for and acquisition of acceptable goods or services that will return
the body and mind back to or beyond the status quo.
One of the negative consequences of search is information overload, which results from the unending
series of persuasion attempts as well as the proliferation of alternatives. The basis for this argument
is that the supply side of transactions is necessary
and sufficient to the understanding of consumptionoriented activities by consumer culture scholars.
Thus, the capacity to look for and acquire products
is posited to be without significant limits, ignoring
the majority of the world’s peoples who suffer from
economic constraints.
Consumption-as-restriction informs our orientation toward the selection process as well. While an
excess of choices typifies our image of the buyer/
seller condition, restricted consumer behavior is
defined as a lack of access by traditional means to
this abundance. As a consequence, individuals are
required to seek alternative ways of creating suitable
exchanges that are outside our theoretical conceptions of acquisition. Furthermore, such consumers
often modify their beliefs about what is an acceptable
product since it may be necessary to substitute what
is perceived as worthless or contemptible under ideal
conditions as within the set of appropriate options.
As such, marketing messages that concentrate on specific wants and the differentiated products designed
to meet them may be irrelevant to those with the
greatest unfulfilled needs.
Yet restricted consumer behavior does not preclude
the search for and acquisition of goods and services
that signal personal worth as well as group status.
While survival may loom large for consumers who
experience serious constraint, they are able to reconfigure portions of their identities by maintaining a
small number of their original belongings tied to a better past or by obtaining novel items that enhance their
sense of self. Once again, our consumer-behavior
models imply unbridled access to possessions after
purchase, without oversight from external sources in

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Preference Formation

most cases. Consumption-as-restriction may require
consumers to keep items from public view and consume them in fleeting private moments, which may
act to increase the intrinsic value to their owners.
Consistent with more typical consumption environments, some subset of sought-after goods and
services attained by consumers facing serious restrictions must serve needs beyond mere utility. The
close connection between who we are and what
we consume has been clearly established, including under circumstances of great distress. In point
of fact, restricted consumption and its concomitant
negative impact on one’s sense of self may increase
the importance of those possessions with the capability of restoring some semblance of dignity. While
public consumption may be a necessary ingredient,
their acquirement may subject consumers to a variety of hazards. Nonetheless, getting and consuming
them allows individuals to exert the human yearning
for control.
The subfield of marketing and public policy, along
with its associated journals and conferences, has long
examined the consumer vulnerability of a number of
populations. Yet the poor are often neglected unless
they have other attributes such as being too young or
too old to survive alone. The model for aid is decidedly cultural and built on the belief that most adults
should acquire their own goods and services through
personal labor and the market system. Yet many
among us, in the developed as well as the developing world, lack the backgrounds, support systems,
and infrastructures to be able to do so. Policymakers
and the wealthy elite have choices with regard to
how such people are to be treated: allow them to live
below standards acceptable for the rest of us or seek
to give everyone access to at least a reasonable share
of the world’s abundance.
Ronald Paul Hill
See also Ethnicity/Race; Ghettos; Inequalities; Needs and
Wants; Political Economy; Seduced and Repressed;
Social and Economic Development; Social Exclusion

Further Readings
Chakravarti, Dipankar. “Voices Unheard: The Psychology
of Consumption in Poverty and Development.” Journal
of Consumer Psychology 16, no. 4 (2006): 363–376.
Hill, Ronald Paul. Surviving in a Material World: The
Lived Experience of People in Poverty. Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

Hill, Ronald Paul. “Consumer Culture and the Culture of
Poverty: Implications for Marketing Theory and
Practice.” Marketing Theory 2 (September 2002),
273–294.
Hill, Ronald Paul, and Jeannie Gaines. “The Consumer
Culture of Poverty: Behavioral Research Findings and
Their Implications in an Ethnographic Context.”
Journal of American Culture 30 (March 2007): 81–95.
Lewis, Oscar. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the
Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1959.

PREFERENCE FORMATION
The concept of preference formation deals with
two questions that are basic in social psychology
and philosophy, of some importance in consumer
research and political science but of explicit disinterest in mainstream economics: how preferences are
acquired and how they are modified. Preference is a
concept that assumes a real or imagined “choice” or
active selection between alternatives according to a
rank ordering based on their respective values or utilities. Preferences are defined as primarily affectively
based behavioral phenomena and a major source of
motivation. Preferences exhibit themselves not so
much in what the individual thinks or says about
the object but how he or she acts toward it—that is,
approaches it, buys it, and uses it.
Most of the literature on preferences has a strong
cognitive emphasis. In consumer decision models,
the antecedents of preferences are attitudes. These
can be formed without affective supports (such as
parental reinforcement, social conformity pressures,
identification with the group) solely by means of
cognitive factors, for instance, consumer information from credible sources. This also reflects the view,
dominant in psychology until recently, that cognition must precede affect. This view has lately been
challenged by neuroeconomics and behavioral studies in emotions. Attitudes will usually involve both
cognitive and affective components. Knowledge or
cognition without affect and emotion lacks its motivational drive.

Preference Formation in Consumer Research
Preferences are, most prominently, analyzed in
consumer research on attitudes, impression formation, and decision making. The literature offers a

Preference Formation

continuum where preferences range from consistent,
meaningful, and relatively long lasting to nebulous,
spontaneously constructed, and unreliable.
In cognitive consumer theory, preferences are conceptualized as the subjective counterparts of object
utilities. Both preferences and utilities are understood
by decomposing the overall utilities into elementary
complements. A preference of X over Y can here be
fully explained by the weighted preferences for the
components of X and Y. To change a given preference, it is first necessary to identify the features of
the object and then try to influence the person’s
evaluation of these features. Following this tradition,
preference formation is seen as a crucial step in the
multistage process of consumer decision making: to
make a choice from an assortment of product or service alternatives, the key is that consumers have welldeveloped preferences regarding attribute levels and
have formulated tradeoffs on the relative importance
of these attributes.
A contrasting view suggests that consumers do
not have well-developed preference functions prior
to entering the market, except for some basic and frequently encountered products. Instead, they usually
construct their preferences at the moment of choice
and herewith succumb more or less voluntarily and
knowingly to a variety of contextual factors and
stimuli. The truth lies probably in a synthesis: one
can view consumer preference as a combination of
context-independent (“inherent”) preferences and
context-dependent (“constructed”) preferences. The
former are based on long-term dispositions underlying these inherent preferences, assumed to reside
within a person over an extended period; they are
rather stable and change only slowly over time; the
latter, by contrast, change rather quickly, sometimes
just due to a stimuli at the point of sale.
Constructed preferences are the focus of behavioral economics. A mass of empirical (mostly experimental) evidence suggests that people do not act
“rational” in the sense of following their well-defined
preference functions but that they are highly prone to
biases such as priming and framing effects, decide on
the base of simple heuristics, are weak in their selfcontrol, and succumb to the power of defaults and
contextual influences (Richard H. Thaler and Cass
Sunstein: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health,
Wealth, and Happiness, 2008). Moreover, a great
deal of research has confirmed that a preference for
an object can be radically changed with experience or

1143

even mere exposure of the object—while its properties remain constant. The mere exposure effect, that
is, the enhancement of positive affect toward a given
object, arises merely as a result of repeated stimulus
exposure.
On the other hand, preference formation is
influenced by individual predispositions. These are
formed through genetics, early childhood experiences, needs, and personal goals and values and
represent the physical and psychological makeup of
a person. These dispositions may drive the formation of inherent preferences. Often, these predispositions are at odds with their true preferences: For
instance, addicts are often predisposed to crave and
overuse certain goods, to compensate for unfulfilled
psychological needs, or to escape from uncomfortable responsibilities or problems. While inherent
preferences are stable, they do change with age and
maturation: Younger and older people have often
systematically different preferences and preference
formation paths. Preferences and attitudes acquired
in infancy and childhood are formed primarily on an
affective basis. For instance, food tastes are acquired
through habituation, familiarization, and positive
reinforcement from the social surroundings and not
by means of persuasive information. Preferences
developed later in life—for example, for furniture or
high culture—are based on a rich cognitive structure.
Hence, to change an attitude that has evolved primarily from affective sources may require methods
different from those needed to change an attitude
based largely on cognition since it will have to challenge the affective predisposition.

Preference Formation in Other Disciplines
Inquiries into preference formation have not made
much headway in economics. In standard microeconomic analyses, the essence of rationality is choosing
in line with one’s well-defined, stable wants. For purposes of analysis, preferences are constructed as being
fixed and stable, similar among people, and revealed
through choice (“revealed preferences”). Changes
in preferences, or explorations of their origins, are
explicitly left to other disciplines. They are hence
exogenous to the system being considered (exogenous preferences). Preference formation occurs, but
its study is neither useful for economics nor properly economics. With such an approach, however,
the main motive force for participation in markets

1144

Preference Formation

is ruled out as a noneconomic question. Preferences
are referred to as mere subjective “tastes,” for which
there is no accounting. While new schools of economic thought (institutional economics, information
economics, political economy, humanistic economics, socioeconomics) have loosened this axiom and
do see the process of formation as being decisive for
the preferences themselves, mainstream economics
largely adheres to its dogma. Economists claim that it
is essential for the purity of analysis; in fact, however,
its consequences are less innocent since the assumption of “untouchable” preferences heavily impacts
political thought and governmental action.
As opposed to economic models, preferences
in cultural theory are endogenous, that is, internal
to organizations, so that they emerge from social
interaction. People discover their preferences by
evaluating how their past choices have strengthened
or weakened their relationships with other people.
Social feedback and reinforcement teach them what
to prefer, since what matters most to people is their
relationship with other people.
Based on a richer understanding of economics,
socioeconomics has developed more encompassing
models of consumer preferences. Socioeconomics
challenges the tradition of standard economics and
proposes an alternative model of preference formation, which is built on four selves that correspond
to four types of preferences: actual preferences,
metapreferences, true preferences, and unrestrained
preferences. Actual preferences reflect the capacity
to use and appreciate goods, named “consumption
capital.” The idea of a “refinement of tastes” or
enhancement of consumer capital has already been
aired by the classic John Stuart Mill and later by Gary
Becker. Consumption capital develops through past
consumption experience, training, and exposure to
external influences that condition attitudes. Ideally,
consumers become experts about their own tastes
by learning their preferences through self-feedback.
Metapreferences are one’s preferences about one’s
actual preferences and derive from reflection, moral
reasoning, and intuition. They reflect the normative
judgments and moral values of a higher-order self.
The idea that persons have two or more contradictory selves or a preference vying for control has been
discussed vividly since the 1970s. Harry Frankfurt,
Amartya Sen, Jon Elster, Harvey Leibenstein, Amitai
Etzioni, and Thomas Schelling are among the most
prominent philosopher-economists to discuss why

(long-term, farsighted, morality-seeking) metapreferences and (myopic, pleasure-seeking) actual preferences do conflict and what strategies people apply to
overcome these conflicts, such as self-binding commitment strategies. True preferences are the preferences one would have if one were perfectly informed
and in the pursuit of becoming a self-realized, enlightened human being. They represent a person’s core
values or life mission. Since it is not easy to know
one’s true preferences, let alone to transform them,
religious and spiritual traditions and techniques, such
as meditation, offer paths to personal development.
Unrestrained preferences are preferences that do not
consider needs of other people; it is our passions or
desires, unrestricted by morality or ethics. Clearly,
these preferences cannot be reconciled with ethical or
sustainable consumption.
If there are true preferences, then there are also
“false” preferences, which should be suitably corrected. This idea is fiercely rejected by liberal neoclassical economics, where all revealed preferences
are “true”—whether beneficial to the individual
and society or not—and rational action is defined as
following one’s preferences. In contrast, humanistic
economics proposes that behavior can be considered
rational only if the choice is really beneficial for the
individual.

Policy Implications
Preference patterns are also shaped by external influences. These external influences range from a supportive social environment to access and exposure
to beneficial consumption alternatives to social messages spread in the media. For decades, the power of
advertising and marketing to shape consumer preferences has been discussed. Although the extent of
the actual influence is still unclear, there is empirical
evidence that the external effects of children’s food
marketing are detrimental (i.e., adding to childhood
obesity). The social costs, however, are not internalized by marketers.
A modern consumer policy should be understood as one that fosters consumers’ capacities for
attaining quality of life from their consumption,
hence to increase their “productive” capacity: in
other words, to foster self-development and selfregulation, to support consumers detecting their true
preferences, to moderate their unrestrained preferences, and to empower them to reduce the conflicts

Price and Price Mechanisms

between their actual preferences and metapreferences. Instruments in this case are effective consumer
education, information, and advice, which can take
place in many formal and informal ways, as well as a
liberty-preserving—“libertarian”—paternalism that
designs a benign choice architecture, which subtly
molds actual preferences toward the true preferences.
Although this might have a paternalistic smack for
some, it is important to note that instances of encouraging and discouraging certain types of preferences
and hence consumption are a broadly accepted government action—from curbing smoking to wearing
seat belts. Such an approach can be justified by assuming that there is some commonality of true preferences
among people (e.g., having a healthy life) that could be
inquired in deliberative processes within societies.
Lucia A. Reisch
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Moods;
Consumer Sovereignty; Economics; Motivation
Research; Psychology; Routines and Habits; Taste

Further Readings
Frank, Robert H. Passions within Reason. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.
Kivetz, Ran, Oded Netzer, and Rom Schrift. “The Synthesis
of Preference: Bridging Behavioral Decision Research
and Marketing Science.” Journal of Consumer
Psychology 18 (2008): 179–186.
Payne, John W., James R. Bettman, and Eric J. Johnson.
The Adaptive Decision Maker. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.

PRICE

AND

PRICE MECHANISMS

Price is the value of a good or service in the market. Price mechanisms are strategies that impact and
guide consumption by altering the price of the good
(or service) relative to its substitutes.
Price is a key component of economic analysis due
to its relation with quantity consumed in a demand
curve. The term price refers to the market valuation
of the good or service, and it does not indicate the
specific valuation of the good to the consumer or
the producer. Price represents the equilibrium point
where demand meets supply, and it corresponds to
the value where willingness to pay (WTP) equals
willingness to accept (WTA). The importance of

1145

price stems from its role as cost to the consumer, and
it determines the total amount of goods that he or
she can afford to purchase given his or her budget
constraint. In fact, consumers with identical preferences decide how much of an item to buy depending
on its value (price) and the amount of money they
can allocate to the good (the budget constraint).
In the analysis of consumer behavior, the price of
a good equates to the sum of the single value of each
of its attributes. In particular, from the perspective
of Kelvin Lancaster, the amount of each attribute
contained in the products in a market represents
the equilibrium between the demand and supply of
each attribute. Essentially, from this perspective, consumers do not have a demand for a product but the
demand for individual attributes that constitute it.
The final WTP corresponds to the sum of the valuation of each attribute that characterizes the good,
and choices reflect the comparison of different attribute bundles. Consequently, consumers choose the
final product that represents the best value for money
for the whole set of attributes available.
The importance of price includes not only an economic perspective, but also price plays an important
role in the heuristic process of ex ante evaluation of
the quality of the good. In fact, since quality is costly
to supply, higher prices can be an indication of higher
quality, although the price-quality correlation is
imperfect (producers manufacturing the same level of
quality at the same cost may have different markups).
Nevertheless, since price indicates the value of the
product in the market, consumers commonly use this
information as proxy for quality in markets when this
cannot be easily evaluated ex ante. Moreover, prices
not only proxy for quality but also influence consumer
perception of the good: Hilke Plassmann and colleagues found that price activates the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for
the communication of pleasure during an experiential
task. Consequently, consumers are driven in the choice
of product not only by the highest value for money
(i.e., the best quality given a price range), but also they
perceive more expensive products as performing better, a mechanism similar to a placebo effect.
To change patterns of consumption, it is possible
to intervene to change the market price of the good
or service targeted using price mechanisms. These
can be made at an institutional level, using taxes or
subsidies, or privately, using discounts. These instruments change the price of the good both in absolute

1146

Price and Price Mechanisms

and relative terms: taxes increase the price of a good,
making its substitutes relatively cheaper; on the other
hand, subsidies and discounts decrease the price of a
good, which is now relatively cheaper than its substitutes. Institutional price changes targeting inputs
at the manufacturing level work in the same manner,
and the value of the tax or subsidy is entirely passed
on to consumers: a tax of x units to the manufacturer
will determine an increase of the same amount in the
price of the final good.
Consumer response to a price change will depend
on the price elasticity of the good. This value indicates in percentage points how much quantity consumed will decrease (increase) as a consequence of a
1 percent price increase (decrease). Using a unit reference point, products with elasticity higher than one
are considered luxury goods on nonnecessities, since
their demand will fall more than proportionately. On
the other hand, goods with elasticity below one are
considered necessities, since consumers will tend to
retain their consumption despite the price change,
hence limiting the impact of the change.
Whenever prices change, consumers tend to have
an adaptive behavior, trying to adjust their consumption patterns to the new conditions. Within a product
category, price mechanisms act on consumers at three
main levels: delaying market participation, directing
brand choice, and determining quantity purchased.
In economics, these three effects are grouped into
two categories: the income effect, that is, the household is poorer and consumes less or less often; and
the substitution effect, that is, consumers switch to
cheaper alternatives. The dominant effect depends on
the product category in analysis.
The first consequence of a price change is the
decision of whether to purchase anything within a
category or not (market participation, or market incidence). Since discounts appear cyclically in certain
categories, consumers may delay their purchases to
adjust for price increases, waiting for recurring offers.
The price increase (decrease) might lead to favoring
(disfavoring) the demand for substitutes (e.g., buy
less beef and buy more chicken or buy less meat and
buy more beans), leading to more sporadic participation in the market category. Second, consumers will
tend to favor the choice of the brand that maximizes
their utility, with a preference for those brands that
are less affected by the price change. However, the
degree of brand loyalty in the market will determine
the extent of the brand-switching behavior. Finally,

consumers will take advantage of price decreases by
purchasing more units of the good, maximizing their
inventory, while buying less as a consequence of a
price increase.
The effect of price changes may fail to take place
or may dissolve after some time. Taxes and subsidies
may have a weaker effect compared to similar exogenous prices changes, because they create a monetary
link between behavior and actions that reduce intrinsic motivations, a phenomenon called motivational
crowding out. Similarly, persistent price changes
alone appear to be ineffective in driving changes in
the long run in the absence of structural intervention
instead reversing to the initial quantity demanded
after an initial adjustment period. Despite this, price
remains a key factor in consumer choice, and price
mechanisms are widely used in retail and governmental intervention because of the strong short-run
effect they have on final consumption.
Luca A. Panzone
See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Behavior;
Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer
Sovereignty; Economics; Markets and Marketing;
Preference Formation; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Dellava, Jocilyn E., Cynthia M. Bulik, and Barry M.
Popkin. “Price Changes Alone Are Not Adequate to
Produce Long-Term Dietary Change.” Journal of
Nutrition 140, no. 10 (2010): 1887–1891.
Frey, Bruno S., and Reto Jegen. “Motivation Crowding
Theory.” Journal of Economic Surveys 15, no. 5 (2001):
589–611.
Gupta, Sunil. “Impact of Sales Promotions on When, What,
and How Much to Buy.” Journal of Marketing Research
25, no. 4 (1988): 342–355.
Lancaster, Kelvin J. “A New Approach to Consumer
Theory.” Journal of Political Economy 74, no. 2 (1966):
132–157.
Plassmann, Hilke, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio
Rangel. “Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural
Representations of Experienced Pleasantness.”
Proceeding of the National Academy of Science 105,
no. 3 (2008): 1050–1054.
Rao, Akshay R. “The Quality of Price as a Quality Cue.”
Journal of Marketing Research 42, no. 4 (2005):
401–405.
Rosen, Sherwin. “Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets:
Product Differentiation in Pure Competition.” Journal
of Political Economy 82, no. 1 (1974): 34–55.

Print Media
Shiv, Baba, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely. “Placebo Effects
of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They
Pay For.” Journal of Marketing Research 42, no. 4
(2005): 383–393.

PRINT MEDIA
As an extension of stone carvings, calligraphy, and
hand-painted illustrations, printing began as a means
of disseminating cultural and religious artifacts to elite
audiences, but it soon developed larger readerships as
it both benefited from and fostered more widespread
literacy. This entry traces the development of printing, from its initial role as the first consumer-oriented,
mass-production process capable of creating identical copies using interchangeable parts to that of a
facilitator and promoter of the Industrial Revolution,
mass consumer culture, advertising, marketing, and
the eventual enthronement of upper-middle-class personal lifestyle as the epitome of culture and taste.
Although many in the West think of Johannes
Gutenberg as the inventor of the printing press, printing, even with movable type, has an older provenance
in Asia. Around the time of Augustus Caesar, the
Chinese had been taking paper rubbings of engravings of their classic texts on commemorative stone
slabs or pillars. In the sixth and seventh centuries CE,
they began reproducing images and spells on silk and
later on paper, another Chinese invention. Somewhat
later, the technique of printing booklets from carved
wooden blocks was developed, reaching its height in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
This technique, called xylography, was well suited
to cultural artifacts of iconic significance and a script
consisting of tens of thousands of characters. Still,
the Chinese worked assiduously on the problem of
printing with movable characters that could be used
in more than one work. Further development moves
to Korea, whose first king, T’aejo (1392–1398),
published a series of xylographic books and whose
successor, T’agong, decreed in 1403 the casting of
movable characters in bronze and lead. The height of
Korean typography was reached under King Sejong
(1418–1450), who was responsible for the creation
of a Korean alphabet, achieved in 1441, so as to
spread the written word among the people.
While the Chinese developed their own system
of movable types soon after this, they remained

1147

attached to xylographic books, and even in Korea,
King Sejong’s democratizing intentions went unrealized until the twentieth century. No large consumer
market for books emerged before then in Asia,
largely because of the aristocratic and conservative
mind-set of reading and learning, fostered not only
by the Confucian educational system but also by the
difficulty of learning the Chinese script. In addition,
King Sejong undermined his own efforts by prohibiting the sale of books printed in the palace, which
left them in the hands of the social and administrative elites.

Printing in the West
But at the same time, in the West, the use of a phonetic alphabet with more radically democratizing
potential was encouraging the spread of knowledge,
first in manuscripts produced in monasteries and
then in the universities. Eventually, technological
innovations managed to solve the problem of how
to reproduce large numbers of copies of works in
increasing demand by growing bourgeois markets.
Printing in Europe began much as it had in the
East, with the use of wood blocks. The first xylographic prints on paper that can be dated are from
the years 1417 to 1437, and the many documentary
references at the time indicate widespread dissemination. Of the some ten thousand prints that have
survived, 80 percent of them represent religious subjects, to illustrate manuscripts or printed pamphlets
or to be hung on the walls of residences (Martin
1994, 211). More secular applications included playing cards; depictions of the Nine Worthies of the
pagan, Jewish, and Christian traditions; allegories of
death and the ages of man; satirical images; and such
practical items as tables for recognizing counterfeit
coins. The vast majority of surviving examples are
religious items produced by monasteries for personal
devotions and pilgrimages, but their spread is closely
connected to the rise of commercial activity in the
growing cities.
Engravers began to include words in their prints
such as those spoken by the persons in illustrated
scenes or the kinds of labels viewers were used to
seeing in stained glass windows and frescoes. By
the fourteenth century, increased piety and a growing taste for images created a demand for portable
illustrated religious manuscripts, which xylographers
were eager to fulfill with their own block books.

1148

Print Media

These were devoted to teaching prayers, the commandments, and other parts of scripture, both as
first communion gifts and in priory schools. They
were also useful as guides to clergy, many of whom
had a less than robust grasp of Latin, and found
useful in dealing with scripture, such a work as the
Biblia Pauperum Prædicatorum, or Bible for poor
preachers, which had circulated in manuscript from
the early fourteenth century. There were a variety
of other similar works, the demand for which the
appearance of Gutenberg’s printing press did not
diminish and may even have increased.
From the latter part of the 1430s through the
middle of the 1450s, a number of inventors in
several European cities were working on devising
means of printing texts with movable types, but
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (ca.
1398–1468) of Mainz, Germany, was responsible for
the breakthroughs that made it possible. The most
renowned product of Gutenberg’s press is the fortytwo-line edition of the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome,
printed between 1452 and 1455, known also as the
Mazarin Bible. However, this was not the first product of Gutenberg’s printing shop, as it was preceded
by other, more easily marketable texts, possibly Latin
grammars, as well as indulgences, or certificates,
sold by the Church to shorten the time souls spent in
purgatory. In 1457, Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer
published the Mainz Psalter, the first work dated and
attributed to its backers.
The early products of the printing press addressed
many purposes and markets. Paying jobs that
included broadsheets, pamphlets, posters, chapbooks,
and other “consumables” are often overlooked in
favor of more highly preserved bound volumes for
elite markets, but they played an important economic
role in helping printers amortize their fixed costs by
keeping the presses rolling between more prestigious
projects, helping to pay the bills, and even subsidizing expensive work aimed at narrower markets. Still,
the printing press made it possible finally to realize
the goals of universities, Renaissance humanists, and
the growing ranks of literate merchants, lawyers,
administrators, artisans, craftsmen, engineers, tradespeople, household stewards, and other bourgeois
alike in preserving the accumulated knowledge in
their fields, leading to a knowledge explosion that
continues through this day.
By 1501, over 250 cities and towns were centers
of the print trade. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean

Martin estimate that twenty-seven thousand to thirty
thousand editions comprising between 8 million and
12 million copies were produced for a European population of just under 100 million people. Marshall
McLuhan observes that the printing press created the
first mass-produced, assembly-line consumer product
with repeatable parts, and for four centuries, books
were the only such products, serving as the model for
those that would follow. What Elizabeth Eisenstein
calls the printing revolution served not only as the
model for the Industrial Revolution but also as its
facilitator. It fostered the expansion of technologies
and techniques by making it possible to learn existing crafts by reading rather than by depending on
the traditional master-and-apprentice model of oral
explanation and example. Thus, there emerged an
expanding reading public that became both a necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of a
mass-market consumer society, built on a burgeoning
capitalist spirit.
Eisenstein also notes that printer-publishers
intensified the latent capitalist tendencies of the later
Middle Ages and Renaissance, both by their dependence on existing enterprises requiring large capital
investments such as mining and papermaking and
by their own need to ascertain and develop markets
for their products. They were major capitalists themselves, who needed to maximize the productivity
of their own major capital investments in presses,
type fonts, labor, and paper. This required them to
develop techniques of marketing and promotion far
beyond those contemplated by anyone involved in
the prior piece-by-piece trade in manuscript books.
There occurred a major shift from a retail trade in
manuscripts to a wholesale trade on an industrial
scale, leading to the establishment of the first industrial trade show: the annual book fair at Frankfurt,
which began in the sixteenth century and continues
to this day. Printers and booksellers depended on the
creation of large, formalized distribution networks
built at first on existing trade and shipping routes
and then expanding as demand for print products
grew.
Both competition and the need to engage new
markets prompted them to create handbills, circulars, and trade catalogs to support the promotional
efforts of book peddlers and jobbers. Such efforts
encouraged printers to enhance and advertise the
virtues of their products, emphasizing a greater consumer orientation, through more readable texts and

Print Media

better proofreading and editing than the competition.
By contrast, hand-produced manuscripts had been
more producer oriented, owing to the difficulty and
expense of producing individual copies, which had
been rife with abbreviations, ligatures between letter
pairs, and more cramped lettering. The uniformity
of printed copies also made it possible to surpass
prior attempts by scribes to create navigational aids
to readers consistently throughout a large number
of copies, via page numbering, tables of contents,
indexes, and title pages. Manuscripts had no front
title pages, although customarily scribes added a
colophon at the end of a volume saying who copied
the text and where. Printing fostered the creation of
opening title pages, particularly because books were
printed and bound without covers, so they needed to
be identifiable when lying in stacks, and title pages
soon took the form of full-blown advertisements
identifying not only the title and author but also,
even more importantly, the printer, who benefited
most from the publicity.
The repeatability of printed texts also made it possible to produce successive editions with greater and
greater accuracy, benefiting from feedback by readers
who could easily refer to and identify errors by page
number. In addition, readers of map volumes, herbals, technical manuals, and other scientific texts were
encouraged to feed back new and more precise information to printers, who would add it to their texts.
Eisenstein notes that such efforts not only halted the
proliferation of errors in hand-copied manuscripts,
known as scribal drift, but also positively reversed it.
This further enhanced the consumer orientation of
those publications.
The expansion of the reading public created new
demands for different kinds of printed materials, and
thus arose two genres of print media that have grown
to rival and even surpass in size the book trade today:
newspapers and magazines.

Newspapers
Similar to printed books, printed newspapers had
their predecessors in handwritten work transmitted over distribution networks initially serving the
needs of educated elites in the informal Republic of
Letters. Beginning in the late-fifteenth century, under
the sponsorship of the Holy Roman Emperor, the
Thurn and Taxis family established a large private
postal network that connected most parts of Europe.

1149

But states were quick to develop postal systems of
their own, serving merchants, bankers, diplomats,
and others interested in matters involving exchange
rates, commodity prices, and other financial news.
Handwritten newsletters were distributed regularly
between commercial centers, but it wasn’t until the
beginning of the seventeenth century that publicly
available news of widespread interest printed at least
weekly was available. The first newspapers may have
been published in Strasbourg and Wolfenbüttel, near
Hannover, in 1609, and within the next two decades,
weeklies were appearing throughout Europe. Most
of them took the form of court gazettes beholden to
the favor of ruling classes.
In the European colonies, none was more
advanced in the development of newspapers, literacy, and public schooling than New England.
In 1690, Benjamin Harris published a four-page
paper—Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and
Domestick—which he intended to be monthly, but
it was banned by the governing council. In 1704,
John Campbell, Boston’s postmaster, who was in the
habit of sending an occasional handwritten newsletter to the governor of Connecticut and other officials, began printing the weekly Boston News-Letter,
which established a pattern for papers in New York,
Philadelphia, and elsewhere, produced by either postmasters or government printers. These first papers
focused on news from abroad, mostly England, little
about the domestic scene, and certainly nothing critical about local politics.
This pattern changed around 1720, when competitive papers prompted the first public debates
in the press, and again starting in 1765, when the
colonial press began to participate in open, partisan
politics. After the Revolution, partisanship became
even stronger with the growth of political parties
during the Federalist period, when many papers
were the organs of either political clubs or parties,
and those who published them depended on paying
work printing official forms, bills, statutes, and other
governmental publications.
Politics was then largely a matter for the ownership class, and the primary content of newspapers consisted of news addressing the interests of
merchants, lawyers, industrialists, functionaries,
and tradesmen. The number of copies printed was
small, and papers were purchased mostly by presold subscriptions, which were relatively expensive.
Advertising was subdued, mostly denoting the kinds

1150

Print Media

of goods for sale and where they could be obtained,
and largely consisting of business-to-business goods
and services. “Consumer” items were mostly absent,
not only because of the limited readership but also
because they were not available in mass quantities.
Items for everyday use were either commodities
made available in local markets or handcrafted for
household use or trade.
It was not until the 1830s, with the rise of the socalled penny press, that newspapers became the primary engine driving a burgeoning market economy,
spreading at first within regions and then nationally and internationally. Newspapers had a symbiotic relationship with the growth of the Industrial
Revolution, the expansion of canal and rail transport
systems, the expansion of mining and agriculture,
and the development of department stores and other
organs of mass consumerism, from before the Civil
War through most of the twentieth century. Not
only did journalism benefit from the explosion of
advertising such activity engendered, but newspapers and their owners were also active boosters of
economic expansion and Manifest Destiny, facilitated by the national government with favorable
postal rates.

Magazines
The consumerist potential in magazines can be
glimpsed in the etymology of the word, which comes
from an old Arabic word meaning storehouse.
Magazine was initially used to describe a publication
containing a miscellaneous variety of articles, stories,
poems, sketches, and so forth. But in the modern era,
beginning in the later nineteenth century, and particularly in North America, the magazine came into
its own as a primary vehicle of consumerism, in both
its mass and specialist senses.
In England, the first magazine, The Review, was
written and published by Daniel Defoe. He was
soon followed by Richard Steele’s Tatler and The
Spectator, edited by Joseph Addison, introducing
to English publishing the short, informal essay and
the fictional short story. At first, magazines, like
newspapers, looked much like books, but formally,
they differed in being published periodically as single broadsheets. But magazines were distinguished
from newspapers by offering comment rather than
reportage. They were vehicles for essayists, satirists,

political commentators, literary reviewers and critics, and other purveyors of thought to literate elites
congregating in coffeehouses and salons.
The American colonies depended initially on
imported journals from the mother country, but
in 1741, there appeared in Philadelphia Andrew
Bradford’s American Magazine, or A Monthly View
of the Political State of the British Colonies, followed
three days later by The General Magazine, and
Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations
in America, published by Benjamin Franklin. While
advertising appeared in magazines from the start,
before the mid-nineteenth century, it was similar
to that in newspapers, and circulations were modest. But with the expansion of industrialization and
manufacturing, producers sought expanding ways to
expose their products to larger national audiences,
and magazines were the perfect medium. The development of the railroads, favorable postal rates, vast
technological improvements in printing and graphic
technologies, and an increasingly literate audience all
facilitated the burgeoning of the magazine as the premier engine of consumerism, long before the advent
of television.
From the Gilded Age through the 1950s, magazine publishing grew by developing larger and larger
circulations and being able to deliver audiences to
advertisers at economically attractive rates per thousand readers. The magazine publishing empires of
Cyrus Curtis, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce,
Robert J. Collier, and others were built on the formula
of attracting as much general consumer advertising
as possible by promoting mainstream, middle-class
values to wide audiences. While many magazines
thrived by concentrating on significant audience submarkets or focusing on the desire for news commentary, business insight, intellectual pursuits, or other
matters of taste, the foundation of the industry was
laid on mass-market consumer advertising.
But the arrival of television and the breakup of the
post–World War II social consensus during the 1960s
undermined the economic model of large-circulation,
general interest magazines and hastened their demise.
In their place arose a plethora of magazines more
sharply focused on particular psychographic profiles
and interests, leading to the burgeoning variety of periodicals available today. While some magazines maintain high circulation figures by manufacturing and
exploiting curiosity about celebrities, others such as

Product Loss Leaders

Modern Maturity, TV Guide, and Reader’s Digest fulfill roles satisfying widely shared social, demographic,
and media interests. According to David Abrahamson,
the formula of success for most magazines has been
to fragment the mass audience into narrow interest
and affinity groups and being able to charge advertisers higher advertising rates by delivering prequalified readers through emphasis on passion for hobbies
and interests. Thus, magazines have become a major
means for mass audiences both to learn about and
validate their identification with models of personal
consumption in thought, lifestyle, and leisure.
James C. Morrison
See also Advertising; Audience Research; Broadcast
Media; History; Industrial Society; McLuhan,
Marshall; Men’s Magazines; Women’s Magazines

Further Readings
Abrahamson, David. Magazine-Made America: The
Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations
in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the
Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800. 3rd ed.
Translated by David Gerard. London: Verso Books,
2010.
Man, John. Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World
with Words. New York: Wiley, 2002.
Martin, Henri-Jean. The History and Power of Writing.
Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making
of Typographic Man. Toronto, ON: University of
Toronto Press, 1962.
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History
of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books,
1978.
Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of
Modern Communication. New York: Basic Books,
2005.
Steinberg, S. H. Five Hundred Years of Printing. New ed.,
revised by John Trevitt. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll
Press, 1996.
Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in
America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991.

1151

PRODUCT LOSS LEADERS
Product loss leaders—also called “loss leaders” or
simply “leaders”—are items that manufacturers
or retailers sell at or below cost to consumers or
business customers. Manufacturers often use the
strategy of product loss leaders when trying to penetrate the market with a new technology that could
significantly shift customers’ buying or usage habits. Furthermore, manufacturers that make accessories or components or that provide postsale service
for a loss leader often rely on sales of these ancillary goods to generate profits. IBM used this strategy in 1999 when it switched its distribution of
desktop computers to an online-only option. David
Thomas, head of IBM’s personal computer (PC)
systems group, noted that he expected to make only
about three cents per dollar in profit for each desktop PC sold. However, he expected that sales of
related goods, such as “services, software, financing and other extras . . . would add a further 50
cents in revenue and nine cents in profit” (Hansell
1999, C20). Similarly, in 2009, Microsoft priced
the Xbox 360 such that the firm was losing around
$150 on each gaming system it sold. However,
the company anticipates that increased demand
should reduce manufacturing costs and that it will
also generate a highly profitable revenue stream
from royalties received from game publishers
(Keating 2009).
Major firms in a particular industry might also
agree to adopt a loss-leader strategy to spur the
phaseout of products or services and encourage the
adoption of innovations. A recent example involved
firms that agreed to heavily discount radio frequency
identification (RFID) technology, which assigns a
unique identifying number to an item by using radio
signals and is attempting to supplant other identifier
technologies, such as scanners and magnetic credit
card strips. Furthermore, the recording industry as a
whole prices CDs as loss leaders in the hopes of spurring interest in particular recording artists and then
recouping profits on more lucrative offerings such as
concert ticket sales.
Three promotional activities—loss leaders, in-store
specials, and double couponing—account for almost
100 percent of the price-based promotional strategies used by supermarkets (Walters and MacKenzie

1152

Product Loss Leaders

1988). Retailers use loss leaders to try to build store
traffic and attract new and existing customers, especially during times of high-volume purchasing. For
example, one loss-leader strategy that grocery retailers often employ is drastically discounting the price
of turkeys during the Thanksgiving season. Retailers
assume that consumers who buy turkeys are likely to
cook a large holiday dinner and will need to buy the
many necessary ingredients for that meal. So retailers
offer this particular product as a loss leader to entice
more high-profit, seasonally oriented customers into
their stores.
Loss leaders often figure prominently in retail
advertisements. Advertisers often use the terms featured items or features to signal to consumers that
retailers have earmarked specific items as loss leaders. Typically, retailers offer only a particular loss
leader for a limited amount of time because this
tactic is designed to create a sense of urgency in consumers and because retailers typically do not want
to incur losses on the same item over a prolonged
period. Furthermore, in 1971, the Federal Trade
Commission ruled that retailers were not allowed
to advertise sale items unless they could stock them
in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Although
stores can offer consumers “rain checks” if they
run out of stock during any specific promotion,
the retailer is supposed to anticipate the increased
demand for these products and have them in stock,
so as not to upset customers.
In addition to featuring loss leaders in advertising, retailers also typically prominently display these
products in configurations such as end-aisle displays.
Grocery stores and convenience stores are the most
common types of retailers to employ the loss-leader
pricing strategy. Convenience store retailers often
offer popular impulse-purchase items such as candy
bars or sodas as loss leaders. Any additional purchases of products that typically have high markups
often more than compensate for the lack of profit
on these popular items. Sometimes, an entire retail
category will become associated with a particular
loss leader, which can have the effect of permanently
altering consumers’ expectations regarding the price
they typically associate with an item. For example,
retailers in the auto parts sector have sold motor oil
at a loss for so many years that consumers no doubt
would resist the attempt to mark the product up to a
price that would actually cover retailers’ costs for the
product.

The loss-leader pricing strategy engenders controversy because selling items below cost to attract
customers is sometimes equated with predatory pricing, a practice that is prohibited by law. However, the
difference is that regulators perceive the loss-leader
strategy to benefit consumers, whereas predatory
pricing strategies are thought to be deliberately
harmful. Specifically, predatory strategies are used
when a major retailer attempts to undercut competitors’ prices across the board, in an attempt to drive
these competitors out of business. Since loss-leader
pricing is typically restricted to a relatively few items
within a merchandise assortment, this strategy is not
considered pervasive enough to be understood as
predatory.
Some manufacturers also prohibit retailers from
offering their items as loss leaders. Their reasons
can range from attempting to protect the image of a
brand to preventing any specific retailer from undercutting the profits of another strong retailer that
might sell the brand to trying to control the demand
of the product by not reducing prices so low that
the firm cannot meet the required manufacturing
capacity. For example, the president of the Nine West
shoe company warned several retail suppliers that
they had to adhere to minimum-price policies established by the manufacturer if they wanted to receive
promised shipments of merchandise. Complicating
the issue was the fact that “although it was illegal
for Nine West and some of its retailers to agree on
minimum prices, it is legal for Nine West to demand
that its price lists be followed—and to stop doing
business with those [retailers] that violate its policy”
(Berman and Evans 2001, 562).
Cele C. Otnes
See also Advertising; Economics; Markets and Marketing;
Planned Obsolescence; Price and Price Mechanisms;
Shopping; Supermarkets

Further Readings
Berman, Barry, and Joel R. Evans. Retail Management:
A Strategic Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 2001.
Bradley, Anusha. “RFID Firms Sell Tags as Loss-Leaders.”
Supply Management 10, no. 21 (2005): 12.
DeGraba, Patrick. “The Loss Leader Is a Turkey: Targeted
Discounts from Multi-Product Competitors.”
International Journal of Industrial Organization
24 (2006): 613–628.

Product Placements
Hansell, Saul. “The Strategy for I.B.M.: Loss-Leader
PC Sales.” New York Times, October 25, 1999,
pp. C1, C20.
Hess, James, and Eitan Gerstner. “Loss Leader Pricing and
Rain Check Policy.” Marketing Science 6 (Autumn
1987): 358–374.
Keating, Tom. “Xbox 360 as Loss Leader?” VoIP &
Gadgets Blog. Available at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/
tom-keating/video-games-gaming/xbox-360-as-lossleader.asp (accessed January 5, 2009).
“Loss Leader.” 30frames. Available at http://30frames
.blogspot.com/2008/01/loss-leader.html (accessed
January 5, 2009).
Walters, Rockney G., and Scott B. MacKenzie.
“A Structural Equations Analysis of the Impact of Price
Promotions on Store Performance.” Journal of
Marketing Research 25 (February 1988): 51–63.

PRODUCT PLACEMENTS
Product placement, or brand placement, is a form
of marketing communication intended to heighten
brand visibility or drive sales by inserting branded
material into entertainment, educational, or informational content. The definition has evolved to reflect
the changing practice. Early definitions, coined in the
1980s, referred to paid inclusion of products within
a specific medium, usually film. Ironically, the oftcited example of Reese’s Pieces candy in the 1982
film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial presents a case where
the company used bartering, not payment, for the
placement. In exchange for six minutes of film featuring its candy, Hershey’s paid one million dollars
for advertising the candy and film. Sales of the candy
increased by 65 percent (Lehu 2007). Contemporary
definitions are less restrictive, recognizing that the
method of “payment” may vary; the products are in
reality branded material, services, or social ideas; and
the media are virtually unlimited.

History
Although the term product placement was not used
until the 1980s, the practice began nearly a century
earlier in France. Filmmakers Auguste and Lous
Lumière partnered with Francois-Henri LavanchyClarke, a distributor and promoter for U.K.’s Lever
Brothers’s soap. The filmmakers received film distribution in Europe and the United States in exchange
for featuring the Lever Brothers’s Sunlight Soap in

1153

films such as the 1896 Washing Day in Switzerland.
Shortly thereafter, Thomas Alva Edison, U.S. inventor
and founder of the Motion Picture Patents Company,
helped turn product placement into a business by
routinely entering into agreements that reduced production expenses while offering promotional services
in the form of product appearances in films for businesses, including his own; for example, the 1905
film Streetcar Chivalry features transit advertising
of Edison phonographs. Subsequent partnerships
called tie-ins developed between moviemakers and
manufacturers in the 1920s onward, where product
appearances in movies were offered in exchange for
manufacturers’ promotions of the films.
The practice, initially orchestrated through agents,
evolved into a full-fledged industry with a trade
association in 1991. In the last decade, advertising
agencies have formed their own entertainment divisions, which offer promotional services including
creating content for brands. Product placements
have expanded beyond film with radio and television developing differently across countries due to
broadcast regulations. Further expansion of branded
content into video games, music, plays, and even
textbooks has occurred due to a changing media
environment that includes audience fragmentation
and ability to ignore or skip advertising. Although
the practice began in France and developed into an
industry in Hollywood, it is now global.

Compliments and Critiques
Product placement is considered advantageous
for marketers, media producers, and audiences.
Marketers reach a potentially vast audience with a
branded message the audience is unable to skip. The
brand is placed in a “natural environment” virtually
free of other advertising and often benefits from the
implied endorsement of a celebrity. Similar to the
earliest days of product placement, contemporary
content providers benefit from the monetary allocation used for cutting production costs and from
the cobranded partnership. Finally, audience members may get a reduction in price, learn about new
products, and appreciate the realism that branding
affords mediated content.
However, critics have long questioned the overtly
commercial nature of embedding brands into content, especially when commerce co-opts artistic
integrity. The increasing use of product placement

1154

Production of Culture

suggests a commercialization of content that drives
materialism and hyperconsumption. Because the
brand is integrated into the content, audiences may
not recognize the subtle persuasion attempt. Thus,
product placement has been referred to as a form of
stealth marketing. Critics call for labeling of all paid
product placements within the content. Finally, the
placement of certain products, including cigarettes,
alcohol, and medical products, has been criticized
due to the potential to bypass regulations on audience exposure and product warnings.

Research
Research on product placement has focused on its
prevalence, audience attitudes toward and interpretations of the practice, and its persuasion. Studies have
shown that the use of branded content has increased,
supporting a media commercialization critique.
Audience attitudes are generally favorable to product
placement, believing that brands offer verisimilitude.
Persuasion is gauged by exposing participants to the
product placement and then assessing memory or
attitudes. Placements can be categorized according
to modality, plot connection, duration, and number
of occurrences. Studies have shown that prominent
or high-plot placements and those with a greater
duration and exposure are typically remembered to
a greater extent than their more subtle counterparts.
However, persuasion can occur without recall of the
product placement. Future research should use theoretical frameworks to better understand the implicit
effects of product placement.

Future
There is likely to be more branded content in
new and old media, including the use of product
placement to fund mobile content. Old media uses
virtual placements to digitally insert brands into
previously produced content. Ironically, although
real brands offer verisimilitude, fictional brands are
also interesting. Marketers have capitalized on this
reverse product placement where a fictional brand
such as Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans candy in the
Harry Potter books and films is then launched as a
product.
Michelle R. Nelson
See also Advertising; Branding; Broadcast Media;
Commercialization; Hollywood; Markets and

Marketing; Product Loss Leaders; Soap Operas and
Telenovelas

Further Readings
Galician, Mary-Lou. Handbook of Product Placement in
the Mass Media: New Strategies in Marketing Theory,
Practice, Trends, and Ethics. Binghamton, NY: Best
Business Books, 2004.
Karrh, James. “Brand Placements: A Review.” Journal of
Current Issues and Research in Advertising 20, no. 2
(1998): 31–49.
Lehu, Jean-Marc. Branded Entertainment: Product
Placement & Brand Strategy in the Entertainment
Business. London: Kogan Page, 2007.
Miller, Mark Crispin. “End of Story.” In Seeing through
Movies, edited by M. C. Miller, 186–246. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1990.
Newell, Jay, Charles T. Salmon, and Susan Chang. “The
Hidden History of Product Placement.” Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic Media 50, no. 4 (2006):
575–594.
Russell, Cristel A. “Investigating the Effectiveness of
Product Placement in Television Shows: The Role of
Modality and Plot Connection Congruence on Brand
Memory and Attitude.” Journal of Consumer Research
29 (December 2002): 306–318.

PRODUCTION

OF

CULTURE

The expression production of culture identifies a
perspective or approach originally developed in the
field of industrial sociology in the 1970s and 1980s,
mainly through the work of the late Richard A.
Peterson, then professor of sociology at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville. The recording industry, jazz,
and especially country music originally provided the
empirical ground for the development of this perspective, which Peterson has carefully and successfully generalized beyond the narrow boundaries of
his own case studies. Over the years, the original
proposal has developed as an intellectual movement,
strongly influencing the formation of a specialized
subdiscipline of sociology devoted to the study of culture, that is, the sociology of culture (sometimes also
called cultural sociology). The production perspective has some resemblances and historical links with
other influential approaches advanced in the same
years, for example, the art world approach developed by Howard S. Becker, the sociology of culture

Production of Culture

elaborated by the British cultural critic Raymond
Williams, and the sociological analysis of cultural
production set forth by Pierre Bourdieu. While the
art world concept is focused on interpersonal ties
and networks, the production perspective focuses
on mesolevels and macrolevels of institutional life.
Peterson’s perspective shares with both Bourdieu’s
and Williams’s a focus on social structure but is
less critically oriented, less theoretically organized,
and more open to historical and ethnographical
contingencies.

Focus and Relevance
As envisioned and practiced by Peterson and his
close followers, the perspective focuses on the ways
in which the content of symbolic elements (or cultural objects) is significantly shaped by the environments within which they are created, distributed,
evaluated, taught, preserved, and even consumed.
Indeed, albeit originally conceived of as a tool for
studying the intentional production of cultural items,
the perspective has been extended to situations, environments, and places where cultural production is
not consciously sought, for example, the production
of identities and lifestyles by common (and usually
young) people through the recombination of cultural
industries’ products in highly original and sometimes subversive ways—in this manner launching a
bridge with cultural studies’ researches on forms of
resistance to the dominant culture. The idea of “production” referred to in this approach is therefore
a very large one, and it includes all these processes
and actions that contribute to molding the cultural
object, including the production of meanings through
appropriation by consumers, also called autoproduction by Peterson.
The cultural objects that have been investigated
under the aegis of this perspective are many and different and drawn from different historical epochs. If
the initial focus was on expressive symbols such as
art works, scientific reports, popular culture’s items
(such as songs and soap operas), religious practices
and doctrines, legal judgments, news, novels, and so
forth, then along the way, the perspective has been
increasingly applied to symbolic structures and forms
generated not by purposeful action by some professional or organized cultural producer but existing
as a by-product, or unintended effect, of the collective activities of meaning-making even by common

1155

people in their everyday life, be they organized in
subcultures or networks.
The historical, intellectual relevance of the production of culture approach lies in its challenge to
the long dominant idea in the social and human sciences that culture (mainly conceived as values and
norms) and social structure mirror, or reflect, each
other, a view subscribed to by most Marxists and
functionalist sociologists, including the prominent
social theorist Talcott Parsons, but that spread also
in the humanities. Breaking with this well-established
reflex, or mirror, model, the production perspective
conceives of “culture” and “social structure” as
interdependent but relatively autonomous spheres in
an ever-changing “patchwork.”

Features
One of the main features of the perspective, which
has strongly contributed to its success, is its catholic gaze and its openness toward theories and methods used in other branches of sociology and even
humanities. Historical, quantitative, and ethnographic techniques have all been used by practitioners
of the approach, as well as conceptual tools drawn
from a wide range of intellectual traditions, including industrial economics, structural anthropology,
neo-Weberian theory, ritual theory, even some
Marxism. Concepts borrowed from symbolic interactionism, neoinstitutional theory of organizations,
and European sociological and cultural theory (as
Birmingham’s subcultural theory and Bourdieu’s
generative structuralism) have contributed to the
development of the perspective, making it theoretically more sophisticated and attentive to both
microinteractions and large historical forces. It is
a central insight, and not some preferred method
or even a complete theory, to define the production of culture perspective, setting its boundaries
vis-à-vis other schools or ways of studying culture.
The approach’s distinctiveness is to be found in its
focusing on the organizational features of social
activities conceived of as factors influencing the
structure and form of cultural items. Every method
and tool that can help in exploring and studying
these features is good for its practitioners.
In a more narrow sense, however, the production
perspective could be described as the creative application mainly of organizational theory, institutional
economics, and more recently network analysis to

1156

Production of Culture

the study of cultural objects intended as more or less
explicit and intended products of the concerted activities of persons acting in organizations, industries,
and social circles, all conceived for this endeavor
as “systems of cultural production.” The central
tenet of the approach is that the variations of these
systems are the key for explaining variations in the
cultural objects. As put by one of its more influential
representatives,
The main thrust of the POC [Production of Culture]
approach is that, for studying sociologically any
cultural object or event, we need to understand the
causal links among the cultural object/event and the
factors which have contributed to its production.
According to Peterson, there are four areas in the
production of culture which should be examined by
scholars: (1) gatekeeping (i.e. the processes and
mechanisms of selection/filtering of personnel and of
items); (2) reward systems (i.e. the manner in which
rewards and their forms affect the motivation of artists/distributors/managers); (3) market and industry
structures (i.e. the number and size of firms/organizations operating in certain sectors of the field of
cultural production, as well as the types of administration adopted by those organizations); (4) career
structures (i.e. the way occupations which comprise
an art world or a cultural field are organised, according to norms, roles and technical requirements).
(DiMaggio 2000)

As variation in cultural production is a major
focus, it is not surprising that historical change is
at the heart of the perspective, both as topic and as
testing device. Cultural production systems normally
change slowly, but rapid change drastically altering
the aesthetic principles of some cultural form is also
possible, as illustrated by the pioneering 1965 study
on French impressionism by Harrison White and
Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers. Peterson contributed to the study of cultural change mainly with
his research on the Nashville music industry, whose
major outcome is the 1997 book Creating Country
Music: The Fabrication of Authenticity.
As underlined, the production of culture is a perspective and not a formalized theory. The closest we
have to the latter is the so-called six facets model
set forth by Peterson in a series of contributions.
According to this model, six factors could be identified as relevant in the process of cultural production. These include law and regulation, technology,

industrial structure or field, organizational structure,
occupational careers, and the consumer market.
These six facets are not strictly theorized in their differential relations and priorities but considered all
together as parts of an interdependent production
network, whose structure has to be described and
assessed locally. The praise of contingency is in this
sense one of the main features of the approach, which
distinguishes it from old functionalism, Marxistoriented cultural theory, and even Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production.
Law and regulation impact the ways in which
creative fields develop. For example, copyright laws
have often influenced the kinds of fiction and songs
that are published, while notions of intellectual property influence the range of cultural expressions, both
inhibiting (when restrictive) and propelling (when
enlarging). One of the major forces here is censorship, which has a direct impact on cultural content,
while regulation of ownership (e.g., of newspapers)
as well as TV and radio deregulation may influence
the degree of diversity and product variety.
Technology identifies the tools and means with
which people and institutions communicate; changes
in technology profoundly affect the culture that may
be produced providing new creative opportunities
or making obsolete previous ways of producing.
Technology includes innovations such as radio, phonograph records, movies, television, electric musical
instruments, and digitalized communication, as well
as premodern and modern ones such as writing and
printing.
As far as the cultural production that occurs in
organizations, both organizational structures and the
larger organizational fields (or industries) in which
they are embedded can influence the cultural product’s form and content. For instance, there are variations in the cultural items according to the degree
of concentration and form of organization of their
producing industries, for example, many small competing firms producing a diversity of products versus
a few vertically integrated oligarchic firms that mass
produce a few standardized items or for-profit organizational forms (typical of cultural industries specialized in large-scale production) versus nonprofit
organizational forms, commonly adopted in the high
arts to reduce commercial pressures and to create a
ritual boundary with respect to the market.
As emphasized by Howard Becker in his 1982
book Art Worlds, work is a crucial factor in

Promotional Culture

production, and the ways in which work is organized
also impact cultural contents. Occupational careers,
just like occupations, could be diverse (e.g., creative,
craftlike, bureaucratic, entrepreneurial). Careers tend
to be more or less standardized, and chaotic careers
tend to generate innovation insofar as they attract
creative people prone to break conventions and rules.
Finally, there are consumer markets, typically
conceived of as constructed by producers to organize
and make predictable and knowledgeable consumer
tastes. It is characteristic of the approach to account
for consumers’ subjectivities from the point of view
of producers, as “product images” elaborated to
make sense of those subjectivities.

Criticisms
One of the central criticisms advanced against the
perspective is its relative neglect of the cultural basis
of cultural production, that is, the symbolical dimension of the organizational environments where cultural items are fabricated (Negus 1997) and the
aesthetic dimension of the same production process
(Fine 1992). This research line is currently pursued by
production studies, which recently emerged in media
studies also capitalizing on the sociology of cultural
production. A major criticism has been advanced by
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, which read the
perspective as a major epitome of what they label
“weak programs” in the sociological analysis of culture, conceived of as those research programs that
study culture as dependent from, and contingent on,
social structure. This is only partially fair, as people
working in this tradition (Peterson included) have
been sensitive to cultural structures and texts, even
while focusing on contexts and environments.
Marco Santoro
See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Cultural Studies; Culture
Industries; Cycles of Production and Consumption;
Popular Music; Semiotics; Social Networks

Further Readings
Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. “The Strong
Program in Cultural Theory: Elements of a Structural
Hermeneutics.” In The Handbook of Sociological
Theory, edited by Jonathan Turner, 135–150. New
York: Kluwer, 2001.
Crane, Diana. The Production of Culture: Media and the
Urban Arts. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.

1157

DiMaggio, Paul. “The Production of Scientific Change.”
Poetics 28 (2000): 107–136.
Fine, Gary Alan. “The Culture of Production: Aesthetic
Choices and Constraints in Culinary Work.” American
Journal of Sociology 97, no. 5 (1992): 1268–1294.
Griswold, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing
World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1994.
Mayer, Vicki, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell, eds.
Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media
Industries. London: Routledge, 2009.
Negus, Keith. “The Production of Culture.” In Production
of Culture/Cultures of Production, edited by Paul
DuGay, 67–118. London: Sage, 1997.
Peterson, Richard A., and N. Anand. “The Production of
Culture Perspective.” Annual Review of Sociology
30 (2004): 311–334.
Ryan, John. “The Production of Culture Perspective.”
Chap. 26 in 21st Century Sociology: A Reference
Handbook, edited by Clifton Bryant and Dennis L.
Peck, 22–29. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.
Santoro, Marco. “Producing Cultural Sociology: An
Interview with Richard A. Peterson.” Cultural Sociology
2 (2008): 1.

PROMOTIONAL CULTURE
The term promotional culture was coined and developed by Andrew Wernick in his groundbreaking
book, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology
and Symbolic Expression, published in English by
Sage in 1991. Anticipating the precipitous rise and
subsequent dominance of branding and marketing
activities in the West over the past twenty years,
Wernick breaks with traditional views of advertising, production, and consumption as conceptually
distinct areas of consumer culture, arguing that
the commodity form cannot be separated from its
promotional form and that consumption activity is
bound to the production of promotional meanings
and brands. Promotionalism names the extension of
market values and commodity relations in all areas
of life.
Promotionalism has been on the rise in the West
since the beginning of the mass production of goods,
addressing the need to advertise and market those
goods to consumers. Locating the first successful
branding exercises in the development of the distinct style of Wedgwood pottery in the mid-1700s,
Wernick notes how the style and look of Wedgewood

1158

Promotional Culture

products became central to their brand identity and
to how they were promoted. In this early moment
of industrial capitalism, then, we see the rise of
“market-oriented design,” whereby “production and
promotion (are) integrally co-joined” (1991, 15).
What is promoted cannot be disentangled from what
promotes it; the commodity form produces its own
promotional skin, becoming a “commodity sign.”
There can be no doubt that promotionalism is
now a dominant cultural condition. We see the rise
of branded goods, branded corporations, branded
politicians and political parties, branded nations and
cultural events, even branded individuals (Oprah™,
Tiger™, Michael Jordan™). Our clothes, our cars,
our homes, even our own senses of self are intricately
bound up with the logic and meanings of corporate
brands and promotional messages. But how is a promotional message distinct from any other form of
communication?
Echoing the work of other post-structuralist theorists, such as Jean Baudrillard, Wernick argues that
a promotional message makes for a unique mode
of communication; it is a complex group of signs,
which simultaneously represent, advocate on behalf
of, and eventually come to displace the commodity
being promoted. Promotion entails a rearrangement
of the relation between sign and referent, whereby
the sign comes to dislodge the material object to
which it refers and, in this way, acquires a kind of
agency: “in this integrated system of production/
promotion, the commodity and its double—the commodity sign and the promotional sign—are deployed
together in a mutually referring and self-confirming
way” (1991, 16). Goods come to be designed less
for their direct usefulness and more for the meanings
and myths they are able to mobilize and represent.
For Wernick, promotion is a speech act, a form
of rhetoric, which must be judged not by its content
but by its performativity, its ability to incite action;
promotion works to perpetually persuade. A culture
marked by the ubiquity of promotional discourse is
a truly postmodern one, signaled by a lack of trust
in language. Here, what matters most is not “meaning” per se or “truth” or “reason,” but “winning”—
attention, emotional allegiance, and market share.
Promotional rhetoric, as a foundational component
of commodity exchange and of most contemporary
social discourse, is thoroughly instrumental; its function is to bring about some form of “self-advantaging
exchange” (1991, 181).

Promotionalism is always already political but
not only because it involves speech acts that seek to
make something happen by orienting interlocutors
to certain sets of interests. Wernick argues that the
overall impact of the communicative processes of
promotion is a kind of instrumentalization, or deep
commodification, of culture, whereby our values
and commonly used symbols are colonized by the
market and put to work to sell. As a result, even as it
might be of semiotic complexity, promotionalism is
a homogenizing cultural force; it flattens distinctions
between people, social relationships, and things, as
all are awash in a sea of “dereferentialized” signs
and symbols subject to the same logic of market
exchange. The dominance of promotional discourse
gives us strict and delimited terms within which to
constitute our senses of self, community, relationships, and values. So while marketers work to produce uniqueness and distinctiveness for individual
commodities in and through branding and advertising, as the culturally dominant form of signification,
these practices become the medium through which
culture “impresses the same stamp on everything”
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1999, 32).
As we increasingly come to see our selves, relationships, political candidates, and social issues in
terms of this logic of promotion, we can no longer
determine, or read, genuinely expressive intent or
determine what is truth as opposed to a lie, what is
authentic as opposed to “spun.” In a population so
acclimatized to the constant sell, how can we recognize or construct legitimate authority? What is
the impact of the generalized public acceptance of
“spin” and promotional politics on the democratic
process? What is the difference between promotion
and propaganda? In the end, Wernick argues, the
logic of commodities and their promotional signs,
also known as advertising and marketing, comes to
dominate and structurally condition all other forms
of political expression and power relations.
Wernick’s formulation, “promotional culture,”
has proven to be prescient. Indeed, promotional
practices, such as branding, marketing, and advertising, are now core activities of post-Fordist capitalism. Many economists have noted the rise of the
information-based, or knowledge, economy, which
relies heavily on the production and consumption
of knowledge and symbolic products, emphasizing
packaging, image, design, branding, and marketing over concrete material production. The work

Promotional Culture

of “promotional intermediaries” (Davis 2006, 149)
has become central to the maintenance of capitalist democracies; in 2002, in the United States, over
one million people were employed in the marketing
and public relations fields and over $144 billion was
spent on advertising (149). In 2009, brand names
(promotional objects par excellence), such as CocaCola or Disney, have become a value-generating
form of property in their own right. Given these
developments, we could claim that promotionalism
is the dominant symbolic language and mode of
expression of advanced corporate capitalism; promotionalism is where commodity relations literally and
figuratively become culture.
At the time of its release, Wernick’s conceptualization of promotional culture did not seem to catch on
within academic circles. This might have been due
to the fact that forms of postmodern criticism and
media ethnography, which celebrated textual polysemy and audiences’ critical capacities, were popular at the time. Many critics within cultural studies
and media studies tended to downplay the political
impact of promotional culture, arguing that consumers were generally too savvy to be heavily impacted
by promotional practices or that texts themselves
were polysemic and therefore open to multiple
interpretations. Others argued that the production
processes of advertising were far more creative and
flexible than Wernick allowed or that, like other
kinds of communication, forms of promotional culture had minimal impact on individuals’ consumer or
political behavior. All of these positions failed to connect to the critical force of Wernick’s formulation,
often insisting that rather than being a detriment to
democracy, promotional culture “has become fundamental to properly functioning democratic and market systems” (Davis 2006, 159). Although all critics
agree that promotional culture is culturally dominant, debate about its political and cultural impact
will no doubt continue to rage.
Perhaps due to the increased visibility and
ubiquity of branding, marketing, and commodity
capitalism, the formulation of promotional culture
has enjoyed a resurgence in cultural and media
studies in recent years. Scholars have applied the
conceptual frame of promotionalism to examine a
wide variety of topics, including sports, health science practices, children’s culture, anti-imperialist
struggles, reality television, and personal finance, to
name only a few.

1159

Future work in the area of promotional culture
will continue to explore its links to processes of
social change and politics, most likely examining the
spread of market relations and increased consumerism in developing nations around the globe. Again,
some critics will continue to insist that the freedom
to consume commodities is directly linked to political
freedom. Others, however, will argue that the realities of environmental degradation and disease, the
persistence of labor inequities, and rampant political apathy serve as potent indicators of the very real
limits of the West’s preoccupation with perpetual
consumption and the self-advantaging promotional
logic that accompanies it.
Alison Hearn
See also Advertising; Authenticity; Commodities;
Globalization; Markets and Marketing; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Self-Interest

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Chap. 2
in The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by
Simon During, 30–41. London: Routledge, 1999.
Aldridge, Alan. “Engaging with Promotional Culture:
Organised Consumerism and the Personal Finance
Services Industry.” Sociology 31, no. 3 (1997): 389–408.
Bishop, Peter. “Caught in the Cross-Fire: Tibet, Media and
Promotional Culture.” Media, Culture and Society
22 (2000): 645–664.
Bunton, Robin, Sarah Nettelton, and Roger Burrows. The
Sociology of Health Promotion. London: Routledge,
1995.
Davis, Aeron. “Placing Promotional Culture.” In Media
and Cultural Theory, edited by James Curran and David
Morley, 149–162. London: Routledge, 2006.
Gruneau, Richard, and David Whitson. “Upmarket
Continentalism: Major League Sport, Promotional
Culture and Corporate Integration.” In Continental
Order? Integration North American for Cybercapitalism,
edited by Vincent Mosco and Dan Schiller, 235–262.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Hearn, Alison. “John, a 20-Year-Old Boston Native with a
Great Sense of Humour: On the Spectacularization of
the ‘Self’ and the Incorporation of Identity in the Age of
Reality Television.” International Journal of Media and
Cultural Politics 2, no. 2 (2006): 131–147.
Kline, Stephen. “The Play of the Market: On the
Internationalization of Children’s Culture.” Theory
Culture and Society 12 (1995): 103–129.

1160

Prosumption

Lury, Celia. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy.
London: Routledge, 2004.
Wernick, Andrew. Promotional Culture: Advertising,
Ideology and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage, 1991.

PROSUMPTION
Prosumption, according to George Ritzer and Nathan
Jurgenson, involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production)
or the other (consumption). Prosumption involves
the blurring of production and consumption. The
prosumer is one who consumes that which one produces and/or produces that which one consumes.
The term can be credited to Alvin Toffler, who
discusses “the rise of the prosumer” (1980, 265) in
his book The Third Wave. Recently, the term and
the ideas associated with it (such as “cocreation,”
“peer-production,” “wikinomics”) have received
much attention. While prosumption is a contemporary term, it would be a mistake to view the blurring
of production and consumption as something that
has occurred only recently. For example, peasants
on preindustrial farms often produced that which
they consumed. Toffler and Ritzer argue that the
Industrial Revolution divided production and consumption into separate spheres.
Many examples of prosumption can be given.
Toffler discusses prosumption with respect to the
do-it-yourself (DIY) industry where consumers selfassemble and repair goods on their own. Toffler
also discusses the rise of the self-help phenomenon
as well as the trend toward self-service in electronic
banking and grocery stores—all fueling his view that
consumers are increasingly active producers. Since
Toffler’s writings, there has been a proliferation of
ATMs, self-checkouts at grocery stores, and electronic kiosks in hotels, movie theaters, airports, and
so on. Colin Campbell wrote about the productive
“craft consumer,” and Ritzer (1996) discusses how
McDonaldization often means “putting customers
to work.”
Another example is of market research, which
looks to individuals to help produce the products
that they consume (for example, Adam Arvidsson
discusses how consumers produce brands). In the
realm of media, it can be noted that the popularity
of reality TV (e.g., American Idol), amateur pornography (e.g., Girls Gone Wild), “citizen journalism”

(e.g., Cable News Network’s [CNN’s] iReport) and
user-created television (e.g., Current TV) all indicate
that consumers are increasingly also producers of the
content they consume.
Today, it is the explosion of user-generated content online that has made prosumption, as a concept,
increasingly relevant. The “user-generated Web”—
what has come to be known as Web 2.0—marks a
massive proliferation of simultaneous production
and consumption. Examples include the fact that
consumers are also the collaborative producers of
the operating system Linux; web browsers, such as
Mozilla Firefox; and other open source software.
Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, is collaboratively produced by those who consume it.
The same can be said of the reviews of products on
Amazon.com and on Yelp.com about shops, restaurants, bars, and so on. Social networking sites
(SNS), such as MySpace and Facebook, are largely
created by the users who consume them, as are blogs
and the blogosphere (including the microblogging
tool, Twitter). Online digital environments, such as
Second Life and to a lesser extent World of Warcraft,
are created by those who consume them. This also
holds true for the markets on eBay and craigslist and
the media on sites such as YouTube and Flickr.
This expansion of prosumption online signals
the great relevance of this concept and its potential
applications. The concept can be applied usefully
when focusing more on consumption than production and vice versa. Thus, Ritzer (2009) argues that
prosumption should be seen as a continuum where
pure prosumption is the midpoint between pure
consumption and pure production. Ritzer also differentiates between the producer as consumer and the
consumer as producer. For example, consumers can
also, in part, produce a product’s design and market
and determine how it is used. Consumers can also
produce themselves and their identities in the process of consumption (what Mark Coté and Jennifer
Pybus call “immaterial labor 2.0”). Producers consume raw materials in the production process, and
many workers consume their identities and selves
while on the job.
Prosumption has also been the subject of debate
regarding whether it marks a moment of consumer
empowerment or exploitation. On one side is Ritzer’s
idea that prosumption is “unpaid labor.” Christian
Fuchs states that sites such as Facebook make a
profit off users’ unpaid contributions. Arguing from

Protestant Ethic

a Marxist framework, he concludes that exploitation
on these sites is “infinite.” However, some others
have also focused on the nonmonetary gains users
achieve from prosumer activities, such as socializing
and building community, “to feel a part of something
larger” (Coté and Pybus 2007, 95).
Finally, the implosion of production and consumption into prosumption has been analyzed from
the point of view of neo-Marxian theories of labor
and value and Foucauldian notions of government.
Ritzer and Jurgenson theoretically situate prosumption within the literature on consumer capitalism and
postulate a prosumer capitalism.
Nathan Jurgenson
See also Craft Consumer; Cycles of Production and
Consumption; Do-It-Yourself; Industrial Society;
Marxist Theories; Mass Production and Consumption;
Network Society; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media
Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Campbell, Colin. “The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft and
Consumption in a Postmodern Society.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 5 (2005): 23.
Coté, Mark, and Jennifer Pybus. “Learning to Immaterial
Labour 2.0: MySpace and Social Networks.” Ephemera
88 (2007): 88–106.
Fuchs, Christian. “Class, Knowledge and New Media.”
Media, Culture & Society 32 (2010): 141.
Humphreys, Ashlee, and Kent Grayson. “The Intersecting
Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective
on Co-Production, Co-Creation and Prosumption.”
Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 963–980.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Rev. ed.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1996.
Ritzer, George. “Focusing on the Prosumer: On Correcting
an Error in the History of Social Theory.” Paper
presented at the Prosumer Revisited Conference,
Frankfurt, Germany, 2009.
Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. “Production,
Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism
in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer.’” Journal of
Consumer Culture 10 (2010): 13.
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: William
Morrow and Company, 1980.
Zwick, Detlev, Samuel K. Bonsu, and Aron Darmody.
“Putting Consumers to Work: Co-Creation and New
Marketing Govern-mentality.” Journal of Consumer
Culture 8 (2008): 163.

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PROTESTANT ETHIC
The Protestant ethic is a fundamental cultural form
crucial to the study of consumer culture. At its most
basic, it is a moral injunction that endorses the individual’s duty to create wealth and achieve success
by hard work, thrift, saving, and investment. To
perform this function, it was necessary for a revised
system of values and norms to promote competitive
individualism, entrepreneurialism, and productivity
as it also discouraged the ostentatious and perhaps
socially toxic display of wealth and worldly pleasures. An investigation into the balance of the tension
between these positive drives and negative restraints
can inform the crucial debate on whether consumer
culture is propelling us along the road to progress
and happiness or catastrophic decay.
The Protestant ethic came into being as early
Puritan groups in sixteenth-century Europe redirected and intensified the Christian tradition of
asceticism, which valorizes self-control, the deferral of gratification, the denial of worldly pleasures,
and the methodical planning of the individual’s life.
These virtues were regarded as antidotes to the moral
incoherence, worldliness, and corruption that were
threatening Christianity under the stewardship of the
Catholic Church. Confined by Catholicism to the
monasteries, these virtues did not permeate everyday
life, where cycles of sin and repentance flourished
under the confessional system. Protestants argued
that using the monasteries in this way was equivalent
to the church evading its responsibilities and failing
to distribute the means of salvation; strict ascetic
regulation should pervade the whole population.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, Max Weber surveyed the Protestant
Reformation’s relationship with the early development of capitalism. Protestantism released the
monastic virtues into everyday life, notes Anthony
Giddens, energizing each individual with the rationalist principles that were to prove useful to the growth
of capitalism. Wealth-creation and the improvement of environments by hard work, investment,
enterprise, technical innovation, and productive
efficiency were to be encouraged. Excessive leisure,
personal consumption, and the conspicuous display
of consumer symbolism were to be discouraged and
sacrificed for the sake of constant economic growth.
This metaproject required a fundamental change in

1162

Protestant Ethic

the character of individuals, many of whom were
inclined to leisure and concerned about the potentially deleterious social effects of the single-minded
pursuit of wealth. The Protestants cast aside these
reservations and linked wealth-creation to salvation.
Whereas the refusal to work hard, create wealth, and
save money became sinful, performing these tasks
diligently with a view to expanding the economy was
a sign of God’s blessing and ensured salvation. Under
the Calvinist doctrine of fides efficax, faith could be
proven only in the performance of these objective
tasks. Calvinism also preached predestination; only
the salvation of a minority was ensured, which tended
to foster anxiety and social ambition alongside existential loneliness and the gradual “disenchantment”
of the world in the mind of the individual.
Protestantism gave ethical justification to the
functional requirements vital to the acceleration of
capitalism’s development. The subsequent division of
labor into specialized occupations and the conversion
of functional tasks into ethical duties all became signs
that humans were glorifying God. The principal ideal
was to create a population of ambitious yet ascetically
regulated, law-abiding individuals devoted to business, work, saving, and the expansion of the economy, the great vocation that was to allow humanity
to practice God’s will on earth and transcend the
brutal chaos of Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature.”
However, the project was from the outset
wracked with tensions that became more apparent as
it matured. The influential Calvinist movement had
placed individual ambition and the energetic production and acquisition of wealth above humility and
the renunciation of worldly pleasures. Consequently,
the achievement of elite status by creating wealth
also placed pressure on entrepreneurial individuals to symbolize publicly their hard-won status in a
faux-aristocratic fashion. Conspicuous consumption
quickly became a hallmark of the new regime as
industrial magnates competed with the old aristocracy
and landed gentry for positions of social distinction.
This gathered pace in nineteenth-century Europe and
the United States. As expanded consumption became
increasingly important to economic development, the
desire to consume at a considerable level above basic
needs was intensified by the escalating social valuation of status symbols. The capitalist economy made
a rapid transition from the realm of necessity to the
realm of desire, where it became difficult to prolong
economic growth if individuals continued to regard

the regulatory mechanism of Protestant asceticism
with too much reverence.
Revisionist theory posited Protestantism as a necessary ethical afterthought, contrived to justify the
economic functions, politics, social relations, desires,
and personalities that were already being established
by early capitalism’s economic processes. Greed and
acquisitiveness were timeless, as Weber had noted, but
capitalism was the first system to systematically promote these powerful drives and harness them directly
to economic growth. This was bound to change ethical life, but Weber also argued that Protestantism’s
rational tempering of greed became the distinguishing
feature of capitalism’s accompanying culture. Adam
Smith also warned that without a stringent ascetic
moral insulation maintained carefully by sociocultural and politico-legal institutions capitalism would
become socially unstable and decadent.
However, operating energetically underneath the
rational “ascetic priests” were the speculators, buccaneers, and adventurers, prone to sharp practice,
irresponsibility, narcissism, and the ostentatious
display of consumer symbolism. Romanticized in
literature, they performed pioneering functions in
the prelude to full-blown industrial capitalism and
exerted an increasing influence on popular culture
in the twentieth-century Anglo-American world.
This cultural group, prominent in La Belle Époque
(beautiful era) at the turn of the twentieth century,
cared far less about rational restrictions placed on
the ostentatious display of wealth. In the postwar era
of mass consumption, the ability to indulge in conspicuous consumption was democratized, becoming
the primary goal of many individuals. The ensuing
shift of worship from God to the self, the ostentatious entrepreneur, and the celebrity have fostered a
culture of narcissism, decadence, irrationality, and
puerility, notes Benjamin Barber. Thus, a central
topic of current consumer research is the possibility
that consumer capitalism’s new economic needs to
transcend ascetic virtues, commercialize all aspects
of cultural life, and release unpredictable drives and
desires have eroded the vital productive ideals and
ascetic restraints put in place by the Protestant ethic
at the beginning of the capitalist project.
Steve Hall
See also Affluent Society; Asceticism; Capitalism;
Commercialization; Conspicuous Consumption; Needs
and Wants; Thrift; Weber, Max

Psychoanalysis

Further Readings
Barber, Benjamin. Consumed. New York: W. W. Norton,
2007.
Giddens, Anthony. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. Criminal
Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton, UK:
Willan, 2008.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of the Moral Sentiments.
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1984. First published
1759.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class.
London: Dover, 1994.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. London: Unwin, 1967.
Wood, Ellen M. The Origin of Capitalism. London: Verso,
2002.

PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis is a subject of interest to investigators
of consumer culture since the theory suggests that
there are unconscious imperatives in our psyches that
help explain our behavior in many realms, including
the purchasing of products and services. The focus
in this discussion is on Sigmund Freud’s theories and
their relevance to understanding consumer cultures.

Freud’s Theories
In his 1922 essay “Psychoanalysis,” Freud explains
the different areas of interest to psychoanalysis
(reprinted in Philip Rieff: Character and Culture
1963, 230):
PSYCHOANALYSIS is the name (1) of a procedure
for the investigation of mental processes which are
almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method
(based upon investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information gradually being accumulated into a
new scientific discipline.

Freud stresses that psychoanalysis is an “art of
interpretation” and that it focuses on material in
people’s minds of which they are unaware. He notes
that the ideas that there are unconscious mental
acts in people—material that is both mental and
unconscious—seems absurd to many people. Many
of Freud’s theories are quite controversial, and a

1163

number of psychologists have developed theories and
concepts that move beyond Freud’s original notions,
though his basic ideas about the primacy of the
unconscious and the importance of sexuality are at
the core of modern psychoanalytic theory.
Freud believed that dreams were the royal road to
the unconscious. He suggests that dreams are generated by unconscious impulses we experience and are
based on wish fulfillments that are repressed during
the day but which arise when we dream. This wishfulfillment theory, like many other theories of Freud,
is controversial and has been criticized by some psychologists. Freud maintains that dreams are full of
symbols that dreamers don’t recognize but that disguise our desires and thus avoid our being wakened
by what he called our dream censors. Freud’s theories
about symbolism strike some people unfamiliar with
psychoanalytic theory as far-fetched.
Freud believes that neurotic symptoms are connected to traumatic experiences people have in their
early sexual lives. He enlarged our understanding of
sexuality to include other phenomena not connected
with the sexual act: the oral, anal, and genital stages
in our sexual development. He also suggested that the
Oedipus complex is at the core of human neuroses.
This illness is named after the mythic hero Oedipus
who, unaware of what he was doing, killed his father
and married his mother. Those who are not able to
master the Oedipus complex in a suitable manner
are troubled with various neurotic symptoms in later
years.
We prevent ourselves from recognizing the significance of our thoughts and actions by various means
such as repression and regression. As proof of the existence of neurotic symptoms, Freud mentions the phenomenon of transference, in which patients develop
powerful emotional relationships with their therapists,
which therapists can use to help heal their patients.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory maintains that the
human psyche has three levels, one of which—the
unconscious—is not accessible to us on our own. This
is what is known as Freud’s topographic hypothesis.
As he wrote in his essay “Psychoanalysis,” its key
achievement was to recognize that all “mental acts
of normal people” had a meaning. The notion that
we are aware of everything found in our minds is an
illusion, for there are “unconscious mental acts” that
we do not and cannot recognize.
We can picture the human psyche as being like
an iceberg. We can see, floating above the water, a

1164

Psychoanalysis

small part of the iceberg that corresponds to what
Freud calls consciousness. For five or six feet below
the waterline, we can see, though not clearly, part
of the iceberg and that represents what Freud called
the preconscious. This part of our psyches is still
accessible to us. Finally, there is most of the iceberg
that we cannot see, a large area, masked in darkness,
which represents the unconscious.
From the iceberg analogy, we learn that most of
what is in our minds is not accessible to us, without
help from an analyst. The crucial insight that psychoanalytic thought offers us is that our unconscious
shapes our behavior in many ways. That is, our rational minds do not completely control our behavior,
and we are vulnerable to emotional and irrational
appeals, such as those found in advertising that tap
into the unconscious area of our psyches.
Later in his career, Freud developed another
hypothesis about the functioning of the human mind,
his structural hypothesis. If the metaphor for the
topographic hypothesis is that the mind is like an
iceberg, then the metaphor for the structural hypothesis is that there is a continual battle in our psyches
between three elements—the id, the ego, and the
superego. If we are dominated by our ids, we may
have an enormous amount of energy, but because we
are controlled by a desire to take care of our instinctual needs, we dissipate this energy and do not use it
effectively.
The superego is the force that opposes the id. The
superego affects the way we function morally and
most commonly can be understood as being tied
to our consciences and our sense of guilt. Charles
Brenner describes the superego in his book, An
Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, writing that
it involves
(1) the approval or disapproval of actions and
wishes on the grounds of rectitude; (2) critical selfobservation; (3) self-punishment; (4) the demand for
reparation or repentance of wrong-doing; (5) selfpraise or self-love as a reward for virtuous or desirable thoughts and actions. Contrary to the ordinary
meaning of “conscience,” however, we understand
that the functions of the superego are often largely
or completely unconscious. (1974, 111–112)

Our ids seek sexual and other forms of gratification and possess great energy, but we cannot allow
our ids to dominate us because we must submit to
the demands of the societies in which we live. On

the other hand, if our superegos control us, we lack
energy and become paralyzed by guilt and doubt.
The ego is that element in the psyche that tests
reality and stores up experiences in the memory. The
ego uses this material to balance the id and superego
forces in our psyches and helps us avoid neurotic
compulsions. An overly powerful id or superego is
held to be the cause of many psychological problems
people experience.
Psychoanalytic theory posits a number of defense
mechanisms that the ego uses to maintain a balance
between id and superego forces in our psyches. They
are listed in alphabetical order.
Ambivalence: Feeling both love and hatred toward
someone
Avoidance: Being unwilling to pay attention to
disturbing subjects
Denial: Blocking something from consciousness
Fixation: Being obsessively preoccupied with or
attached to something or someone
Projection: Denying hostile feelings one has by
attributing them to someone else
Rationalization: Excusing our behavior by offering
spurious reasons
Reaction formation: Suppressing one element in
our psyches and overemphasizing its opposite
Regression: Dealing with anxiety by returning to
an earlier stage in our development
Repression: Barring wishes, memories, desires from
our consciousness; for Freud, the most basic
defense mechanism
Sublimation: Transferring desires and sexual
impulses into other kinds of activities such as
various forms of creative arts
Suppression: Consciously putting out of our minds
upsetting things; considered the second most
important defense mechanism

These defense mechanisms function not only in
our daily lives, but also they are found in the behavior
of characters in narratives found in the mass media,
put in there unconsciously because they exist in the
psyches of the writers and creators of these texts.
For Freud, symbols play an important role in our
daily lives and in our dreams. Technically speaking,
a symbol is anything that stands for something else.
We find symbolic phenomena in dreams where they

Psychoanalysis

mask sexual content, and this masking protects us
from being wakened by our dream sensors, which
are agents of our superegos.
Freud described some of the more common symbols found in dreams in the tenth lecture of his A
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1953),
particularly of genitalia and sexual intercourse, suggesting that such symbols help to disguise our sexual
desires and fulfill unconscious wishes that we have.
As Freud explained in his masterwork, The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1965, 386), symbolism pervades our daily lives:
Symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular, among
people, and is to be found in folklore, and in popular
myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom
and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in
dreams.

Relevance to Consumer Culture
Many print advertisements and television commercials as well as films and other mass-mediated texts
contain images that are symbolic in nature and activate unconscious sexual impulses in those who are
exposed to these works.
One way that corporations exploit unconscious
needs and desires in people is through the development of branding. Consumers develop emotional
attachments to brands, which reassure them, and
with certain kinds of products such as clothes and
fragrances, which help them consolidate their identities. Once consumers decide to purchase a particular
brand of soap or cereal, they escape from “the agony
of choice” and other anxieties they might have about
the choices they have to make. Consumers have to
discriminate between a multitude of brands on the
basis of price and quality and other features. Once
they choose a particular brand, they spare themselves
the energy needed to make a choice, especially since
there are often dozens of brands of any products or
services of interest to them.
Ernest Dichter, the father of motivation research,
suggests that what motivation research does is discover the unconscious imperatives that shape people’s behavior when it comes to purchasing goods
and services. As he writes in The Strategy of Desire
(1960, 12),
Whatever your attitude toward modern psychology
or psychoanalysis, it has been proved beyond any

1165

doubt that many of our daily decisions are governed
by motivations over which we have no control and
of which we are often quite unaware.

He offers an example of the role of the unconscious in his discussion of cigarette lighters. At the
conscious level, he explains, we use lighters to light
cigarettes. At the preconscious level, we can say that
these lighters help us deal with our desire for mastery
and power. Finally, at the unconscious level, based
on research evidence, he maintains that cigarette
lighters are connected to notions of sexual potency
and sexual union. He writes that “the working of the
lighter becomes a kind of symbol of the flame which
must be lit in consummating sexual union” (1960,
341). These findings are based on depth analyses
conducted by psychologists who work for him.
The psychoanalytic perspective on the human
psyche may help explain the behavior of shopaholics.
Using Freud’s structural hypothesis, one may posit
that the ids in shopaholics completely dominate their
superegos and egos. This leads to continual shopping sprees and out-of-control consumption. From
a psychoanalytic point of view, this affliction can be
overcome by the strengthening of ego and superego
elements in the psyches of shopaholics.
A French literary scholar, René Girard, uses his
concept of mimetic desire to explain why people
purchase things. What we do, when we buy things
advertised by celebrities, movie stars, and heroes, he
argues, is imitate their desire. Mimesis is the Greek
term for “imitation.” Girard uses this concept to
interpret Shakespeare’s plays but suggests it also
applies to consumer behavior.
A related technique is psychographics, which deals
with the values and beliefs of consumers, in contrast
to demographics, which focuses on race, religion, age,
gender, and other socioeconomic matters. Advertisers
use psychographics to reach their potential customers by exploiting their needs and desires. One
important psychographic approach is the Values and
Life Styles (VALS) typology developed by Stanford
Research Institute (SRI) International in Menlo Park,
California. SRI used a thirty-question survey to gain
insights into the values and attitudes of people. The
VALS typology lists nine categories of consumers:
Need Driven: Survivors, Sustainers
Outer-Directed: Belongers, Emulators, Achievers
Inner-Directed: I-Am-Me’s, Experientials, Socially
Conscious, Integrateds

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Psychology

SRI developed a second VALS typology because
it found that it didn’t adequately connect consumer
motivations with the economic resources of the
people in each group. There are many other marking
organizations that focus on psychological concerns
in an attempt to better understand consumer motivations and choices.
Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, offers a much
simpler typology. He divides people into maximizers
and satisfizers:
Maximizers

Satisfizers

Must have the best
High expectations
Anxious

Good enough is okay for them
Low expectations
Relaxed

Maximizers are always plagued by the feeling they
could have gotten a better deal if they were more
patient or a better product if they looked around
more, so they become anxious and experience a great
deal of stress. Schwartz discussed his theory in his
book The Paradox of Choice and suggests that being
a satisfizer is the better approach to shopping.
Psychoanalysis offers us a theory that focuses on
the unconscious elements in the human psyche that
influence our behavior in many ways and in many
areas of thought and behavior. For those interested
in consumer cultures, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories help explain why people make the
choices they do and the way marketers and advertisers attempt to use symbols and other aspects of the
human psyche to sell products and services.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Advertising; Consumer Behavior; Consumer
Illnesses and Maladies; Freud, Sigmund; Identity;
Mimesis; Motivation Research; Psychology

Further Readings
Berger, Arthur Asa. Ads, Fads & Consumer Culture:
Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society.
3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Brenner, Charles. An Elementary Textbook of
Psychoanalysis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.
Dichter, Ernest. The Strategy of Desire. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday. 1960.
Freud, Sigmund. Character and Culture. Edited by Philip
Rieff. Reprint ed. New York: Collier, 1963.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated
by J. Strachey. New York: Avon, 1965. First published
1900.
Hinsie, L. E., and R. J. Campbell. Psychiatric Dictionary.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

PSYCHOLOGY
The foundations of consumer psychology in a broad
historical sense can be traced back to the rapid
industrial growth witnessed in the latter part of the
nineteenth century in the United States, where the
productivity that characterized the new industrial
age enabled the expansion of consumerism on an
unprecedented scale. With such growth in the range
and availability of consumer products came a parallel
expansion in the emerging advertising industry and,
of course, an even keener interest in understanding
(and harnessing) the psychological impact of advertisements on the consumer. The early growth in consumer psychology was therefore driven by a mixture
of basic practical and economic concerns.
In the early stages of development of the embryonic advertising industry, the dominant school of
thought was based around essential principles of
rationality and derived, in the main, from economic
theory. From this (in retrospect) somewhat naive
rational perspective, advertisements were viewed
simply as an informational tool for the consumer. As
described by David Schumann, Curtis P. Haugtvedt,
and Edith Davidson, the consumer was thought to
be making a series of rational decisions with regard
to consumption, and it was thought that they would
be unwilling to make a particular purchase unless
the product satisfied their expectations of quality
and value. Hence, if these expectations were in any
way not fulfilled, then, as a rational processor of
information, the consumer simply would not buy
the product. However, by 1910, a second and different school of thought with roots more firmly in
the new emerging science of psychology was starting
to emerge, to later become the advertising industry’s
dominant theory. Rather than focusing exclusively
on principles of rationality, the focus of this new perspective lay much more on the “nonrational” side of
the human character, where it was believed that the
“emotions of the public could be manipulated and
that people could actually be persuaded to purchase

Psychology

goods” (2008, 5). It is possible to argue that this
transition from one psychological set of understandings of the essential nature of man (and woman) as
consumer to another was really set in motion with
the first systematic application of psychological
principles to the field of advertising in the work of
Harlow Gale in 1900 and Walter Dill Scott in 1903.
Following the mentalist (or in modern parlance
“human information processing” or “cognitive
psychological”) approach of their eminent teacher
(and indeed the founder of the first psychological
laboratory), Wilhelm Wundt, Gale pioneered the
investigation of the ways in which advertisements
impact readers’ attention, and this work was followed shortly afterward by that of Scott, who wrote
a number of articles on the psychological aspects of
advertising, which applied mentalist concepts, such
as attention, suggestion, and emotion, to the world
of advertising. Over the next few decades, however,
this mentalist approach was to be challenged by the
emerging behaviorist perspective, which explicitly
rejected the influence of inner processes in psychological theorizing (following the behaviorist tradition of a reductionist stimulus-response approach
to explaining behavior) and instead claimed that
actual purchasing behavior was the only real indicator of advertisement effectiveness and thus the
only relevant variable for the science of advertising.
Eventually, the relative advantages and disadvantages of both the mentalist approach and the behaviorist approach set the climate for the emergence of
dynamicism in which the stimulus-response model
evolved into the stimulus-organism-response model.
From this point onward, the motivations, drives,
and needs of the consumer that guide his or her
behavior became the center point of much of consumer psychology, and this was linked into both the
cognitive processing and the emotional processing of
products, brands, and advertisements.

Consumer Attitudes
One could argue that we, in the West, are living in
societies driven by consumption, and indeed, many
individuals from Western societies seem to define
themselves by their patterns of consumption and
the kinds of products they buy. Yet the very idea of
a consumer culture seems to suggest a social flux,
an unstoppable force where consumption has permeated every aspect of society, evoking images

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of “the masses,” and when authors write about
“mass consumption,” “mass marketing,” or “mass
production,” such concepts seem to leave little room
for a focus on the central role of the individual. The
psychology of consumer culture changes this focus,
however; attention is now directed at the individual rather than at the masses. But in addition to
this change in focus, the psychological approach
attempts to drill down into the psyche of the consumer to gain access to the core individual and social
processes that underpin every aspect of consumer
behavior. Rather than viewing “the consumer” as a
homogenous group or as a mixture of broad groupings, the psychological approach reminds us that it
is as individuals that we make choices; therefore,
there is probably a great deal of complex psychology
underpinning the individual choices that consumers
make. If we are to understand exactly what drives
consumer behavior at this level of explanation, then
it is necessary to turn to explanatory variables with
good predictive power. One such variable is not only
one of psychology’s core concepts, but also it has
become one of marketing’s most important concepts. It is the concept of the attitude. As noted by
J. Jacoby, “though consumer researchers study a
wide variety of psychological phenomena and topics, some have dominated. Attitude theory has
enjoyed sustained popularity for more than three
decades” (2001, 2677).
In 1935, Gordon Allport, probably the most eminent social psychologist in the history of the subject,
defined the attitude as “a mental and neural state of
readiness organised through experience, exerting a
directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s
response to all objects and situations with which it
is related” (810). In other words, our attitudes influence every choice and every decision that we make,
essentially guiding us through the overwhelming
number of possible options that we are continually
presented with in our everyday encounters:
Without guiding attitudes the individual is confused
and baffled. . . . Attitudes determine for each individual what he will see and hear, what he will think
and what he will do. To borrow a phrase from
William James, they “engender meaning upon the
world”; they draw lines about and segregate an otherwise chaotic environment; they are our methods
for finding our way about in an ambiguous universe.
(Allport 1935, 806)

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Psychology

For this reason, it was (and is) an essential concept
for consumer psychology to draw on, and a central
concern of consumer psychology is to understand
how these attitudes might constrain and shape our
actual consumer choices. Some psychologists would
say that this is all essential if psychology is to understand and explain consumer behavior in any real way.
The concept of attitude in consumer psychology has,
however, undergone a number of significant transformations in the course of its history, so researchers
need to understand how the concept developed in
the first instance and why and how it has changed
subsequently.
Allport, from the beginning, viewed the concept
of the attitude as the central concept of the new
developing social psychology. According to Allport’s
definition, an attitude is an internal state of mind
affected by what we do, which influences our behavior toward the world around us. In 1935, Allport
announced proudly that this concept of the attitude
was social psychology’s “most distinctive and indispensable concept” (798). Of course, there is nothing
in Allport’s formal definition that formally excludes
a possible unconscious component to the attitude.
Indeed, Leonard Doob, another scholar of attitude,
working in the years shortly after Allport, had defined
an attitude as “an implicit, drive-producing response
considered socially significant in the individual’s society” (1947, 136), and in 1992, in a communication
in which he looked back at the early development of
social psychology, he wrote that in the 1940s and earlier, the notion of attitudes operating unconsciously
was quite acceptable to many researchers.
In Allport’s classic chapter, and despite his personal qualms about depth psychology (because it
seems Sigmund Freud himself tried to psychoanalyze
Allport when Allport went to visit him in Vienna; see
Beattie 2010, 23), there is considerable awareness of
the possible unconscious dimensions of an attitude
and indeed great sensitivity displayed to the possible
unconscious aspect. When he talks about the early
German experimentalists from the Wurzburg school,
he points out that they believed that attitudes were
neither sensation, nor imagery, nor affection, nor
any combination of these states. Time and again
they were studied by the method of introspection,
always with meagre results. Often an attitude
seemed to have no representation in consciousness,
other than a vague sense of need, or some indefinite

or unanalyzable feeling of doubt, assent, conviction,
effort, or familiarity. (Allport 1935, 800)

Some psychologists clearly thought that attitudes
were represented in consciousness through imagery,
sensation, and affection, but Allport himself seemed
to hold quite a different view. Thus, he wrote that
“the meagreness with which attitudes are represented
in consciousness resulted in a tendency to regard
them as manifestations of brain activity or of the
unconscious mind” (1935, 801).
So in this classic chapter, not only does Allport
display explicit recognition of the significance of the
unconscious dimensions of an attitude, but he also
praises Freud’s contribution to this concept and specifically applauds him for endowing attitudes with
“vitality, identifying them with longing, hatred and
love, with passion and prejudice, in short, with the
onrushing stream of unconscious life” (1935, 801).
This all came from a man who had been personally
put off by Freud’s attempt to psychoanalyze him in
his office some fifteen years previously.
But his chapter has a historical time line underpinning it, and as we get toward the middle and end of
the chapter, the unconscious is mentioned less and
less, and by the final section, the focus has moved
away entirely from the unconscious to the conscious—in effect, to what can be measured with the
greatest ease. He seems impressed by Rensis Likert’s
research, which looked at white people’s attitudes
toward “Negros,” which revealed that scales could
be used to determine the extent to which they were
in favor of the rights of “Negros.” The Likert scales
were measurement devices that pick up on conscious
thoughts, sometimes thoughts that maybe we are
not that happy with but conscious thoughts nonetheless. Allport seems in awe of the work that had
been done on intelligence testing, despite the fact
that there was still huge disagreement about what
intelligence actually was. He wrote about the domain
of intelligence, “where practicable tests are an established fact although the nature of intelligence is still
in dispute (804) (and, of course, he is alluding here
to the debate then raging about how to define the
concept of attitude). These intelligence tests yielded
vast amounts of quantitative data which, in his
view, were clearly of practical value to an emergent
nation. He saw the same practical application for
attitude measurement, and he concluded that “the
success achieved in the past ten years in the field of

Psychology

the measurement of attitudes may be regarded as one
of the major accomplishments of social psychology
in America. The rate of progress is so great that further achievements in the near future are inevitable”
(832). As soon as he found himself in the domain
of intelligence testing and Likert, the unconscious
dimensions of the attitude seems to have been forgotten, and it remained forgotten for a significant period
of time. Allport wanted to measure attitudes with
precision and reliability, so he went for introspective paper and pencil–type tests. He clearly had his
own objection to hypothesizing scientifically about
unknown and unknowable forces affecting our lives
through the unconscious, and given Allport’s influence on the developing field of social psychology,
the focus turned away from the unconscious to the
conscious and therefore to self-report-type measures.
It stayed there for the next half century and more
in psychology, consumer psychology and marketing,
and related disciplines.

The Unconscious in Consumer Culture
The explicit self-reported attitude (with the concept
of the unconscious component conveniently put
to one side) and attitude measurement (following
Allport 1935) were invaluable concepts and tools
in consumer research and in many early attempts
to understand consumer behavior. Early theorists
understood the consumer to be “active, rational
processors of the vibrant environment, consciously
parsing information, deciding about what to attend
to, discarding irrelevant or extraneous information,
and weighing what is left over in order to optimize
value and facilitate attitude creation” (Perkins et al.
2008, 464). The underlying assumption was that
as consumer decision making was a rational and
conscious process, it could therefore be measured
and understood in the way that Allport and others favored. Attitudes were usually measured with
instruments such as Likert scales, and given that consumers were thought to behave in a rational manner, then it was believed that consumer behavior
would inevitably map onto the attitudes explicitly
espoused and reported by the individuals in question.
But did these explicit self-report measures really turn
out to be the reliable indicators of something deeply
held and good predictors of subsequent behavior?
Many hundreds of articles suggest perhaps not or, at
the very least, not that good in many domains (see

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Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, and Banaji 2009).
As noted by John F. Kihlstrom, social psychology
has traditionally relied heavily on self-report measures, not just for their ease of implementation but
also as an artifact of embracing “the twin assumptions that people were aware of the attitudes, beliefs,
and values that guided their behaviour, and that
they would be willing to reveal them if asked appropriately” (2004, 195). However, recent theorizing
from Anthony G. Greenwald and colleagues (buttressed by the development of new technology and
the pioneering of new methodologies, in particular,
the Implicit Association Test, or IAT) would argue
that much of our “attitudinal readiness to act” is,
in fact, unconscious and not reportable in the normal way and that this unconscious component of
the attitude may, in fact, not relate that closely (or
indeed closely at all) to the component that is available to conscious reflection. Others such as Aiden
Gregg have suggested that because explicit attitudes
are, by their very nature, reflective, intentional, slow,
and, importantly, subject to conscious control, then
if people are unwilling to report their real underlying
attitude, perhaps due to social desirability concerns,
then they can easily prevent themselves from expressing it (unlike, say, unconscious attitudes, which may
be harder to inhibit). Furthermore, according to
Frédéric F. Brunel, Brian C. Tietje and Greenwald,
people may, on other occasions, be unable to report
their underlying attitude because they are actually
unaware of holding this attitude in the first place.
In either case, the potential validity and reliability
of the very construct of an explicit attitude has at
times been called into question. Some have argued
that researchers cannot simply rely on what people
state explicitly about their underlying attitude in the
domain of consumer psychology, or in any other
domain, because such statements “often illuminate
only a partial picture of consumers’ underlying cognitions” (Perkins et al. 2008, 461). Instead, researchers
must gain access to those attitudes operating under
the radar of consciousness, attitudes that, despite
being outside of conscious control, appear to influence our behavior nevertheless. These unconscious
or “implicit attitudes” have now emerged not only
as a core psychological construct but also as a major
intellectual strand within psychology itself, with
major implications for adjoining disciplines and, of
course, for any interdisciplinary research on consumers and their behavior.

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Psychology

However, the very mention of the word unconscious in consumer psychology may set alarm bells
ringing in some, given that the role of the unconscious
has a somewhat controversial history in consumer
psychology and in advertising in particular, which can
be traced back to the advent of so-called subliminal
advertising. In the 1950s, the public became aware
of marketing ploys to “sell to the subconscious,” and
indeed, nothing has “captured the public imagination quite like the notion that consumers can be persuaded outside of their conscious awareness to buy”
(Vargas 2008, 477, emphasis in original). In 1957,
James M. Vicary unveiled the “invisible commercial”
to great public outcry, claiming that after presenting
subliminal messages (messages presented below the
threshold levels of conscious awareness) to people
at a New York cinema, which told them to “drink
Coca-Cola” and “hungry? Eat popcorn,” subsequent sales of popcorn and Coca-Cola at the cinema
significantly increased. For the American public, the
idea that its behavior could be influenced without the
individuals’ conscious awareness by appealing solely
to their subconscious (which they have no direct control of) was an extremely disturbing idea. (Maybe as
disturbing an idea as that of communism, and the
two were not as unconnected as may at first appear.
After all, if desires and longings for certain commercial products can be created by using subliminal
advertising, what other feelings and inclinations can
be established in an unsuspecting audience with these
new techniques?) For this very reason, subliminal
advertising was banned by the American networks
in 1958, and despite Vicary later refuting his original
claims, the controversial legacy of subliminal advertising and the fear of stimulating the subconscious or
unconscious mind has remained.
The concept of the unconscious in today’s consumer psychology has, however, moved away from
its somewhat sinister beginnings in the hands of
subliminal advertising. Instead, there has been a new
wave of research where the focus has turned to the
influence of unconscious or implicit attitudes on consumer behavior. This intellectual shift from the conscious to the unconscious in attitude research signals
a departure from traditional principles of social cognition and rational or semirational decision making
and a rapid move away from the traditional methods
developed for measuring attitudes. Implicit attitudes,
like explicit attitudes, are thought to be evaluations
that can be positive or negative, but, importantly,

these underlying implicit evaluations are automatic
processes, which are thought to elude both introspection and conscious control. Our implicit attitudes,
according to some, are fast, automatic, and, crucially,
are not therefore subject to bias in the same way that
explicit attitudes are. Therefore, they may, in many
domains, be far better predictors of actual behavior.
But how do researchers measure attitudes that elude
conscious introspection in this way? Toward the end
of the twentieth century there were, for the first time,
techniques readily available to lay these unconscious
processes bare. The principal technique, the Implicit
Attitude Test (IAT), was introduced by Greenwald,
Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz in an
article published in 1998.
The IAT is a computerized classification task
used to measure a person’s implicit attitudes toward
a given target concept. In the original article,
Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz outlined the IAT
as measuring the strength of attitudinal preference
between two target categories and two attributes, so
in one of the original IAT experiments, the opposing
target categories used were black and white names
and the associated attributes used were pleasant and
unpleasant. Over seven trials, participants assign
word items into these target categories and attributes. The response latencies for these trials are then
measured. Faster response latencies occur when associated target categories and attributes share the same
response key, whereas when categories and attributes
that are not associated share the same response
key, there are slower response latencies (and more
errors). In the original IAT, when it came to implicit
attitudes toward race, participants were faster at categorizing black and white names with pleasant and
unpleasant words when the target categories were
grouped “white/pleasant” and “black/unpleasant”
than when they were grouped “white/unpleasant”
and “black/pleasant.” In other words, most people
have a positive implicit attitude toward white people
and a negative implicit attitude toward black people
(even, it seems, black participants). What Greenwald,
McGhee, and Schwartz uncovered here was genuinely startling, indeed, something unexpected and
uncomfortable in today’s society where racial prejudice is considered a thing of the past. Using the IAT,
Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz found that
while the majority of white college students in their
study explicitly said they had no racial preference
with some even explicitly indicating a preference for

Psychology

black names, only one participant (out of a possible
twenty-six who expressed an explicit indifference
or a preference for black names) held an implicit
preference for black names. The majority of these
supposedly “nonprejudiced” white students actually demonstrated a strong implicit preference for
white names compared to black names. According to
Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, it may be that
these students were attempting to mask their real
attitudes due to social desirability concerns in such a
sensitive domain, or it may be the case that they were
completely unaware of holding such attitudes in the
first place. Some have concluded on the basis of this
and similar research that the IAT has the remarkable
ability to “cut through the fog of consciousness to
what people really think and feel” (Gregg 2008, 764).
The introduction of the IAT led to a new wave
of psychological research across a wide range of
psychological domains, all with the shared focus of
uncovering the potential influence of our underlying implicit attitudes on behavior. Perhaps one of
the most sensitive applications of the IAT to consumer behavior to date (sensitive because it again
involves issues of race) was conducted by Brunel,
Tietje, and Greenwald. They investigated implicit
attitudes toward advertisements with white and black
sportspeople as the celebrity endorser. As one would
expect, when measured explicitly, there did not
appear to be any hint of prejudice, yet when attitudes
were measured implicitly using the IAT, a very different picture emerged. The overall pattern indicated
that when measured implicitly, people demonstrated
a strong implicit preference for the advertisements
that used the white spokesperson. In addition, when
the subgroups of white and black participants were
considered separately, it appeared that white participants explicitly stated having no preference yet
implicitly demonstrated a strong pro-white preference, whereas black participants who explicitly
indicated having a pro-black preference showed no
preference either way at the implicit level. Indeed, it
was found that the method of attitude measurement
and the variable “ethnicity” significantly interacted
with one another, suggesting that people have a
general positive bias toward advertisements with a
spokesperson of the same ethnic background to one’s
own. Of course, in such a socially sensitive area, one
would not necessarily expect to find any explicit
signs of prejudice; therefore, the ability of the IAT
to dig deeper and uncover underlying preferences or

1171

biases (in this case a preference toward using people
of one’s own ethnicity in advertisements) is extremely
important. Given that these underlying implicit attitudes can potentially tell a very different story from
those that can be masked at the explicit level, the
IAT has become an invaluable tool throughout many
areas of psychology.
One of the first applications of the IAT to the
prediction of consumer behavior was conducted by
Dominika Maison, Greenwald, and Ralph Bruin,
who studied implicit consumer attitudes toward a
variety of food and drinks. In one study, they focused
on “simple” attitudes toward products “for which
there are no inherent to the product reasons to
believe that consumers experience some internal conflict or ambivalence toward the product” (2001, 2).
The stimuli used in this experiment consisted of
juices and sodas as the experimenters expected these
products not to be associated with any internal conflict. When measured explicitly, participants demonstrated a preference for juices over sodas (because
presumably they are healthier), and there was also
a preference for juices over sodas when the preferences were measured implicitly. In other words, both
measures, explicit and implicit, seemed to converge.
Furthermore, the implicit measure was significantly
correlated with both behavior (“frequency of drinking”) and with behavioral intention (“I have at home”
and “I often drink”). Therefore, this first study demonstrated that in the absence of any internal conflict
or “dissociation,” explicit and implicit attitudes
toward a product can converge and, in addition, both
explicit and implicit attitudes correlate with actual
consumer behavior. The second study, however, went
on to explore the potential differential influence of
explicit and implicit attitudes toward products that
may generate conflict or dissociation. Here, highcalorie and low-calorie foods were chosen to be the
target products as it was assumed that, for women
(and almost certainly for men as well, but they were
not included in the study), there is often a conflict
between wanting yet not choosing low-calorie foodstuffs, which are healthy but often not as “nice” as
the high-calorie alternatives. Eating the high-calorie
option may feel good but may well be associated
with feelings of genuine guilt. When explicit and
implicit attitudes were tested in this domain, it was
found that on the explicit measures, participants did
appear to demonstrate a high degree of attitudinal
ambivalence. On the one hand, low-calorie products

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Psychology

were viewed as being “healthier” and “more fashionable” (two important attitudinal dimensions in
this domain), but they were also viewed as being
“less tasty” and “less nice” (two other important
dimensions) compared to high-calorie products. In
other words, the explicit attitudes showed a complex, and contrasting, pattern rather than being
uniformly positive or negative toward the product.
The IAT, however, revealed that implicit attitudes
were, in fact, uniformly more positive for the lowcalorie products than the high-calorie products (it
seems that we all know implicitly what is good and
what is bad). Moreover, it was found that implicit
attitudes were correlated with eating habits, meaning that those with strong implicit attitudes toward
low-calorie products actually ate more low-calorie
products, avoided high-calorie products, and were
more calorie-conscious generally when supermarket
shopping. Implicit attitudes were also correlated with
feelings of guilt linked to eating high-calorie foods.
In addition, those women who held the strongest
implicit attitudes toward low-calories products also
demonstrated the highest levels of high-calorie food
avoidance and greater consumption of low-calorie
products.
This study has a number of important implications. Maison and her colleagues had successfully
applied the IAT to the measurement of consumer
attitudes and illuminated the possible influences of
the IAT on consumer behavior, thus paving the way
for future extension of the IAT across the domain of
consumer psychology. But critically, they also demonstrated that when people are asked about their
attitudes toward a product, this may, on occasion,
be fine but only when there is no discernible reason
for internal conflict or ambivalence toward a given
product, because it is only in such cases that explicit
and implicit attitudes correlate and both types of
attitude predict consumer behavior. However, when
internal conflict or ambivalence could arise (and this
may occur in a whole host of domains in the area
of consumer psychology and elsewhere), attitudinal
dissociation may also emerge. In these cases, it is the
unconscious, underlying implicit attitude that may
prove to be the driving force behind any subsequent
consumer behavior. In other words, the IAT may
well prove to be of greatest value in the consumer
domain, where there is the potential for explicit and
implicit attitudinal dissociation as a result of internal
conflict or ambivalence.

Changing Consumer Culture
to Save the Planet
An important new twist has arisen in the past few
years with respect to the psychology of consumer culture, and that is how to motivate consumers to change
their patterns of consumption—or indeed to restrict
their overall level of consumption to reduce the carbon footprint in order to do something about climate
change (see Beattie, McGuire, and Sale 2010). Some
see this as the critical issue of our age. “Individuals,
as citizens and consumers, will determine the planet’s future. Although an increasing number of people know about climate change and believe action
is needed, too few make it a priority, and too many
fail to act when they have the opportunity” (World
Bank 2010, xxi). The obvious question becomes, why
do so many people not make it a priority, even when
they could, for example, by modifying their everyday
patterns of consumption? Some would view this as an
essentially psychological question and a psychological
question that must draw on the latest developments
in the field. After all, using traditional methodological
tools in consumer psychology (i.e., self-report measures), it would appear that consumers are indeed
primed and ready to act in a more sustainable way.
Thus, according to Phil Downing and Joe Ballantyne,
78 percent of consumers say that they are willing to
alter their patterns of consumption to help reduce the
impact of climate change. But as is now clear from
recent research conducted by Geoffrey Beattie and
Laura Sale, psychology/psychologists simply cannot
rely on what people explicitly say, particularly in such
a socially sensitive domain, where attitudinal dissociation is not just possible but highly probable given the
social desirability of appearing to be green. Despite
this, few studies have attempted to measure implicit
attitudes in the domain of environmentalism and sustainability (but see Beattie and Sale 2009).
In the first investigation into explicit and implicit
attitudes toward the carbon footprint, Beattie and
Sale created a carbon footprint IAT, which revealed
that in a sample of consumers in the United Kingdom
in 2008, most participants did actually show a positive implicit attitude toward low carbon footprint
products. However, there was another significant
feature of this particular data set, namely, that there
was no significant correlation between explicit, selfreported attitudes and implicit attitudes. Indeed,
there appeared to be a level of attitudinal dissociation

Psychology

that, without the IAT, would not have been obvious.
It seems that a significant proportion of individuals were much greener on the explicit measure than
they were on the implicit measure, but sometimes,
the converse also appeared (see also Beattie 2011). In
other words, some consumers appear to exaggerate
their green credentials, whereas others appear to be
genuinely unaware of just how green they actually
are at the implicit level. This research thus provided
the first experimental indication of attitudinal dissociation in the context of sustainability, but what are
the implications of this “dissociated mind” for actual
consumer behavior in this critical area?
One possible implication is that the implicit
measure may predict sustainable consumer choices
in some situations better than others (and explicit
attitudes might predict behavior better in other situations). In a recent experiment, Beattie and Sale gave
participants a choice between a high carbon footprint goody bag or a low carbon footprint goody
bag, and, importantly, this choice was either made
under time pressure or under no time pressure. It was
found that the explicit measures did not significantly
predict choice of a high or low carbon goody bag,
however, the implicit measure did. Furthermore, this
study also revealed that the condition under which
the behavioral choice was made (i.e., under time
pressure or no time pressure) was related to choice.
When under time pressure, participants were more
likely to choose the high carbon footprint option,
and under time pressure, it was the implicit attitude
that predicted behavior (the implicit attitude of those
choosing the high option was significantly different
from that of those choosing the low; explicit attitude
showed no difference). This finding has implications
for supermarket shopping, which, unfortunately
from this point of view, is an activity often conducted
under a great deal of time pressure. It would appear
that the likelihood of consumers actually choosing
the “green option” would be significantly reduced
under these conditions, if their implicit attitudes are
not sufficiently green in the first place. If humans
are to genuinely produce a green revolution in consumption, then the critical concept of implicit attitudes must be kept firmly in focus, and it may well
be a matter of urgency to consider how to augment
implicit attitudes to green products and, in addition,
to ensure that these implicit attitudes translate to
actual consumer behavior, for example, by designing carbon footprint symbols that can impact the

1173

implicit system. One potentially important practical
step in this regard may be to think about the design
of carbon labels themselves. The detailed carbon
footprint information currently being introduced
on labels might work if consumer choice were a
slow, reflective process directed by explicit attitudes. However, if consumer choice is much more
automatic and unconscious and indeed conducted
under conditions of time pressure, as it appears to be,
then different labeling systems, which can impinge
on these more automatic processes, are required. At
present, research from Beattie, McGuire and Sale
would suggest that the current system simply does
not capture consumer attention within the critical
time frame needed in the context of supermarket
shopping. In other words, core attentional processes,
which are a fundamental part of human cognition,
need to be a core focus in consumer psychology. For
example, policymakers may need to use something
such as a traffic light approach, with red symbolizing
“high carbon footprint” or “danger” (hence producing relatively more right frontal cortical activation).
Traffic signals might well influence consumer choice
guided by these implicit processes in a way that the
current system does not. If societies are to combat
climate change by providing consumers with carbon
footprint information, then policymakers will need
to consider much more carefully how to make this
carbon footprint information significantly more
salient, because if the carbon label is not “seen” in
the right time frame (and new research seems to suggest that it is not), then it simply cannot be effective.

Conclusions
Psychology has potentially a good deal to offer in
helping researchers understand consumer culture.
It moves them away from the notions of mass consumption and mass marketing to a focus on the
individual trying to make sense of all the choices
available to him or her. It attempts to lay bare some
of the core cognitive social and emotional processes
and introduces concepts such as the attitude to help
them understand and predict consumer behavior. Many of the current theoretical perspectives
have gained a formidable history, and it is interesting to remember that the current focus on implicit,
or unconscious, attitudes in consumer psychology
would not have surprised psychologists working
nearly one hundred years ago. For perhaps seventy

1174

Psychology

years, the unconscious may have been out of fashion,
but it has reemerged with a vengeance (principally
because researchers now have ways of measuring it
reliably, quickly, and cheaply). The current position
of psychology in the understanding of consumer culture is vibrant because it has allowed researchers to
tackle some of the core issues without some of the
inhibitions of the past (nothing is considered out of
bounds on an a priori basis, not even the unconscious
mind). Understanding a human being’s predisposition to act, involving, as it seems to, both conscious
and unconscious components, has a critical role
to play in helping to understand consumer culture
and in helping to shape consumer culture, not just
by way of generating new consumer markets (very
much the motivation behind the original explosion in
research in consumer psychology) but perhaps even
to restrict consumer markets and overall patterns of
consumption, to make life more sustainable. Some
psychologists would say that this latter issue is one
of the greatest challenges for the future. But regardless of possible futures, psychology will have a critical role to play because the individual, with all his or
her peculiar and individual preferences, habits, and
predilections, is, in the end, the most basic and fundamental unit of consumption.
Geoffrey Beattie and Laura Sale
See also Advertising; Attitude Surveys; Attitude Theory;
Bounded Rationality; Cognitive Structures; Consumer
Behavior; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Theory of Planned Behavior

Further Readings
Allport, Gordon W. “Attitudes.” In Handbook of Social
Psychology, edited by Carl Murchison, 798–884.
Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1935.
Beattie, Geoffrey. Why Aren’t We Saving the Planet? A
Psychologist’s Perspective. London: Routledge, 2010.
Beattie, Geoffrey. Get the Edge: How Simple Changes Will
Transform Your Life. London: Headline, 2011.
Beattie, Geoffrey, Laura McGuire, and Laura Sale. “Do We
Actually Look at the Carbon Footprint of a Product in
the Initial Few Seconds? An Experimental Analysis of
Unconscious Eye Movements.” International Journal of
Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social
Sustainability 6 (2010): 47–66.
Beattie, Geoffrey, and Laura Sale. “Explicit and Implicit
Attitudes to Low and High Carbon Footprint
Products.” International Journal of Environmental,

Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability 5 (2009):
191–206.
Brunel, Frédéric F., Brian C. Tietje, and Anthony G.
Greenwald. “Is the Implicit Association Test a Valid and
Valuable Measure of Implicit Consumer Social
Cognition?” Journal of Consumer Psychology
14 (2004): 385–404.
Doob, Leonard. “The Behavior of Attitudes.” Psychological
Review 54 (1947): 135–156.
Downing, Phil, and Joe Ballantyne. Tipping Point or
Turning Point? Social Marketing and Climate Change.
London: Ipsos MORI, July 24, 2007. Available at http://
www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/publications/
publication.aspx?oItemId=1174.
Greenwald, Anthony G., and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “Implicit
Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and
Stereotypes.” Psychological Review 102 (1995): 4–27.
Greenwald, Anthony G., Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan
L. K. Schwartz. “Measuring Individual Differences in
Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998):
1464–1480.
Greenwald, Anthony G., T. Andrew Poehlman, Eric
Uhlmann, and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “Understanding and
Using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-Analysis of
Predictive Validity.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 97 (2009): 17–41.
Gregg, Aiden P. “Oracle of the Unconscious or Deceiver of
the Unwitting?” The Psychologist 21 (2008): 762–766.
Jacoby, J. “Consumer Psychology.” In International
Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences,
edited by N. J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes, 2674–2678.
Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2001.
Kihlstrom, John F. “Implicit Methods in Social Psychology”
In Handbook of Methods in Social Psychology, edited
by Carol Sansone, Carolyn C. Morf, and A. T. Panter,
195–212. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Maison, Dominika, Anthony G. Greenwald, and Ralph
Bruin. “The Implicit Association Test as a Measure of
Consumer Attitudes.” Polish Psychological Bulletin 2
(2001): 1–9.
Perkins, Andrew, Mark Forehand, Anthony Greenwald,
and Dominika Maison. “Measuring the Nonconscious:
Implicit Social Cognition in Consumer Behaviour.” In
Handbook of Consumer Psychology, edited by Curtis
P. Haugvedt, Paul M. Herr, and Frank R. Kardes, 461–
475. New York: Erlbaum, 2008.
Schumann, David W., Curtis P. Haugtvedt, and Edith
Davidson. “History of Consumer Psychology.” In
Handbook of Consumer Psychology, edited by Curtis
P. Haugvedt, Paul M. Herr, and Frank R. Kardes, 3–30.
New York: Erlbaum, 2008.

Public Goods
Southerton, Dale. “Squeezing Time: Allocating Practices,
Co-ordinating Networks and Scheduling Society.” Time
& Society 12 (2003): 5–25.
Vargas, Patrick T. (2008) “Implicit Consumer Cognition.”
In Handbook of Consumer Psychology, edited by Curtis
P. Haugvedt, Paul M. Herr, and Frank R. Kardes,
477–504. New York: Erlbaum, 2008.
World Bank. World Development Report 2010:
Development and Climate Change. New York: World
Bank, 2010. Available at www.worldbank.org.

PUBLIC GOODS
The term public good denotes things, including
products, services, and conditions, that could affect
all or anyone anywhere, for better or worse. Put differently, public goods are things that are in the public domain.

Key Characteristics
Economists distinguish two main categories of
goods: private goods and public goods. The main
characteristic of private goods is that they are, or can
be made, excludable. Clear property rights can be
attached to them, and others can be prevented from
consuming them. Examples are houses and cars that
can be locked or land that can be fenced in. Many
private goods are also, in economists’ speak, rival in
consumption, meaning that a person’s consumption
of the good, say, a glass of milk, diminishes or eliminates its availability for others.
Public goods, in contrast, are nonexcludable, and
often, they are also nonrival in consumption. Just
think of a light. Many people can look at a light, and
still, its brightness remains the same. Also, it would
be difficult to exclude anyone, say, from benefiting
from a street light at night. It is nonexcludable and
nonrival in consumption.
Public goods that have both these properties are
called pure public. If a good possesses only one of
these characteristics, it is said to be impure public. The
atmosphere, for example, is impure public: nonexcludable but rival in consumption. Thus, an increasing
volume of CO2 emissions changes its gas composition
and over time gives rise to global warming.
Public goods are being further differentiated
according to the reach of their effects. These can be
local, national, transnational (regional and global,

1175

that is, worldwide), and intertemporal, affecting several past and present generations. As more and more
countries have entered on a policy path of economic
liberalization and reduced at-the-border barriers,
global public goods (GPGs) have gained in importance, for two reasons.
First, greater national openness requires a certain
amount of policy and infrastructure harmonization,
notably on the part of not-so-powerful nations, so
hitherto nationally shaped public goods (e.g., taxation systems or human rights norms) became more
standardized—globalized. Second, greater porosity
of borders has fostered a growing volume of crossborder movements such as international trade, investments, travel, and communication. These movements
have often been accompanied by a growing volume
of unintended spillover effects from abroad, such as
communicable diseases, financial contagion effects,
or crime and violence, and thus led to a further globalization of public goods such as public health or
law and order.

Publicness and Privateness as a Choice
Publicness and privateness are often not innate properties of a good. They are the result of a choice, social
or political. In fact, since the mid-1980s, when more
market-oriented thinking began to sweep the world,
many goods were shifted from the public domain
into the private domain, the marketplace. Take, for
example, television waves. They were once fully public. By now, technologies exist to scramble them so
that many programs need to be purchased as a private good. Similarly, many insurance products have
shifted from the public into the private sphere. In
earlier years, governments launched international
commodity programs to protect their countries
against price fluctuations in international commodity markets. Now, farmers and governments turn
to financial markets to buy such private goods as
weather insurance or commodity futures and options
contracts.
While some goods have shifted altogether from the
public to the private domain, others have remained,
at least partially, public in consumption but are no
longer fully state provided. Many are now multiactor products. States provide regulatory frameworks, set norms and standards, or offer incentives.
But the products and services as such are privately
provided and need to be purchased more or less as

1176

Public Goods

private goods. For example, many hospitals now
function as a private firm, and patients and their
insurance companies have to pay. As a result, the
number of public goods with access problems has
increased in number in many social service fields.
These goods are there for all who possess the private
means, notably money, to afford them. Just think
of toll roads, swimming pools and parks (where
entrance fees are being charged), and the Internet (for
which one needs to be able to buy the services of an
access provider).
But some goods have also moved from private
to public. This notably holds for GPGs. Because,
when viewed from a worldwide perspective, conventional nation-states, maintaining relatively closed
borders and strictly upholding the norm of noninterference into their national affairs, can be viewed
as having quasi-private, namely, excludable properties. Conversely, greater openness and the resultant
globalization can be seen as a special dimension
of publicness. So the growing importance of GPGs
signals a move of goods from the more particularistic, quasi-private national domains into the global
public domain.

Provision Challenges
Because of their publicness, their being there for all,
public goods, if left to the market alone to provide,
tend to be underprovided. Individual actors may
hesitate to reveal their true preference for a good lest
they be asked to pay for its provision. They may let
others step forward, realizing that when the good is
available, they too will be able to enjoy it—free of
charge. This free-riding problem plagues many public goods.
Nationally, the state is expected to help us to
break through such collective-action problems and
“protect” us against too severe an underprovision
of public goods. For this purpose, states have been
granted special coercive powers, notably taxation
authority. Because of the traditionally strong role of
states in the provision of goods such as health and
education, social insurance, road construction, or
peace and security, many continue to refer to public
goods as state-provided goods, although most are
today multiactor provided.
Perhaps it is due to this lingering perception of
public goods as state provided that many people do
not perceive themselves as consumers of these goods.
Public goods barely figure in people’s thinking about
the composition of their consumption basket. This

occurs although many private possessions can easily be lost when the public domain is understocked
with adequately provided public goods—when war
ravages the country, pandemics claim lives, or excessive financial volatility destroys one’s savings or, put
differently, when there is no peace, public health, or
financial stability.
The provision of public goods is often viewed as a
distant matter, at best, a matter of participating, if we
can, in elections. But few people follow the work of
politicians closely or examine carefully to which purposes their tax money goes. Our focus as consumers
is primarily on private goods. One reason might be
the free-riding temptation, but another might be the
strong—and often not very transparent and accountable—traditional involvement of states in public
good provision. Many of us are not used any longer to perceiving ourselves and acting as concerned
consumers of public goods. This is in large measure
left to a few social activists such as civil society organizations concerned about atomic energy, logging,
foreign investments, or immigration.
The provision challenges intensify in the case of
GPGs such as global warming, nuclear nonproliferation, international financial crises, global health, or
poverty challenges. The reason is that when appearing internationally, states are quasi-private actors:
pursuing particular, namely, predominantly national
goals. And they, too, behave like private actors: they
also may attempt free-riding, notably, when the issue
at stake has GPG properties or the issue concerns
externality management such as the reduction of
greenhouse gas emissions.
GPGs thus suffer from the failure of economic
markets and from that of international cooperation.
In addition, many of us may perceive them—erroneously—as being even more distant than national
public goods. We as consumers often allow governments to go slow on the provision of these goods.
Consequently, the world is increasingly getting
caught in an ever-denser web of global crises—crises
that make us realize that, after all, globalness means
border transgressing, not far away. Many of us,
even if we are innocent bystanders, may suffer, if the
underprovision of a GPG assumes crisis proportions.

Putting Public Goods Into Our
Consumption Baskets
But signs of change are multiplying. While intergovernmental negotiations are progressing only
hesitantly, socially responsible private production and

Public Sphere

consumption is slowly gaining momentum: product
labeling has become more widespread and so has
recycling of materials. Awareness of the human environmental footprints and looming resource scarcity is
growing, encouraging a search for cleaner and more
sustainable sources of energy and enhanced energy
efficiency. Carbon-neutral conferences and holiday
travel are evermore prominent. Production chains of
multinational companies are being screened by civil
society organizations and made more transparent
by, for example, firms participating in reporting and
scorecard mechanisms such as the United Nations
Global Compact. More and more private goods are
satisfying our individual needs while also contributing to meeting public good concerns, especially GPGtype challenges, including human rights and labor
standards such as “no child labor.” And increasingly,
one can hear even the question of how much growth
and consumption is desirable. Happiness is emerging
as a field of economic study.
But not all challenges can be met through the
design of such joint products: goods that simultaneously generate private and public benefits.
Governments may need to stimulate even the production and consumption of these goods, at least
initially, nationally and internationally.
Thus, a less crisis-ridden process of globalization
and, to this end, an enhanced provision of public
goods including especially GPGs would require that
we, the public, place these goods more deliberately
into our consumption baskets, view our tax payments as payments for the purchase of public goods,
and demand of policymakers more transparency
and accountability for how our tax money is being
spent—which public goods does it help finance and
at which cost and benefit to whom. Irresponsible
production and consumption needs to be addressed
because our welfare and well-being depend on private goods as well as public goods.
Inge Kaul
See also Collective Consumption; Consumer Behavior;
Eco-Labeling; Environmental Footprinting; Fair Trade;
Globalization; Public Sphere

Further Readings
Cornes, Richard, and Todd Sandler. The Theory of
Externalities, Public Goods and Club Goods.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kaul, Inge, and Pedro Conceição. The New Public Finance:
Responding to Global Challenges. New York: Oxford

1177

University Press, 2006.
Kaul, Inge, Pedro Conceição, Katell Le Goulven, and
Ronald U. Mendoza, eds. Providing Global Public
Goods: Managing Globalization. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

PUBLIC SPHERE
Public sphere is a normative and historical concept
that refers to the politically significant space(s) in
society created by public discourse. This discourse is
concerned with debating social and political issues of
moral importance to the public and is both “rational”
and “critical” in nature. As discussed in the work of
German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, the public
sphere is said to be declining in modern society due to
the spread of consumer culture. In the modern, massmediated public sphere, the public consumes culture
rather than debates it. Relationships of consumption
are therefore taking over a number of spaces in society, including spaces for public discourse and political participation. Habermas suggests that in modern
societies the “citizen role” is declining, and the “consumer role” growing. This process, known as colonization, has been made the focus of political struggle
by the new social movements (NSMs).

Theoretical Background
The public sphere is a key concept in Western democratic theory. Citizens meaningfully participate in the
political process by the extent to which they engage in
rational-critical public debate. Through their participation, they construct public opinion (also referred
to as critical publicity) on social and political issues.
Public opinion influences democratic politics in three
ways: it provides a counterbalance to state authority, governments are called to account for the legitimacy of their actions, and citizens generate pressure
for political reform. The public sphere is therefore a
mediating institution between the interests of citizens
in a society and the interests of the state authority.
As a concept in democratic theory, it has a long and
controversial history. Contemporary social science
debates on the public sphere are, however, predominantly concerned with the work of Habermas.
Habermas is the key theorist of the public sphere,
with dedicated volumes debating his ideas (Calhoun
1992; Crossley & Roberts 2004) and notable
attempts to critically rework his theory of the public

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Public Sphere

sphere (Negt & Kluge 1972) and its relationship to
civil society (Cohen & Arato 1992). As a student
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the
Institute for Social Research in Germany, Habermas
formed a second generation of the Frankfurt school.
His influential text, The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (1962/1989), was the culmination
of Habermas’s PhD work, and it was not translated
into English until 1989 after his other major theoretical contribution, The Theory of Communicative
Action (published in two volumes 1984, 1987).
The themes of both works converge in presenting
Habermas’s theory of modernity and, in particular,
his arguments regarding the pathologies and potential of the modern age. In viewing modernity as ridden with both problems and potentials, Habermas
breaks with the pessimism attached to his Frankfurt
school predecessors. He argued that despite the
undemocratic tendencies of modern societies, represented, for example, by the growth of bureaucracy
and consumer culture, the Enlightenment promise of
emancipation could nevertheless be realized within
modernity itself. Modern societies have developed
with two processes of rationalization, not one. While
instrumental rationality may have grown (and created the “iron cage” talked about by Max Weber or
the “totally administered society” referred to by the
early Frankfurt school), so too had communicative
rationality.
Communicative rationality is a type of rationality
that is built in to the nature of language. It grew out
of the process that Weber had referred to as “disenchantment.” As tradition and religion weakened
in their ability to structure social life and determine
societal norms, spaces opened up in which action
had to be coordinated on the basis of a mutual
understanding and agreement reached in discourse.
In discourse, people engage in arguments with one
another, presenting reasons for their position, considering the reasons of others, and coming to a mutual
decision (a process known as argumentation).
Habermas develops the significance of this process
for democratic politics in Between Facts and Norms
(1996). Essentially, he argues that if communicative
rationality can be extended in advanced capitalist
societies, then the conditions for a democracy rooted
in public deliberation could be realized. This is where
the concept of the public sphere acquires a position
of centrality in Habermas’s work. Through public
discourse, citizens construct moral positions on

social and political issues, which can be rationally
justified. For instance, if public discussion includes
everyone, gives equal weight to different voices, and
is free from domination and force (what Habermas
called an ideal speech situation), then a genuine public opinion can be formed and can be used to exert
influence over the polity.

The Origins of the Public Sphere
In The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, Habermas traced the origins and trajectory
of Offentlichkeit (meaning public sphere or publicity). He argued that as a historical concept the public
sphere arose out of a certain set of social conditions
in eighteenth-century European bourgeois society.
Eighteenth-century Europe was characterized by a
thriving “civil society,” a private domain of commodity exchange and labor, which operated outside of state control. In civil society, the bourgeoisie
flourished as private entrepreneurs. Common interests and growing wealth led to new forms of cultural
engagement and sociality among the bourgeoisie. In
public places such as the salons of France and the
coffeehouses of England, members of the bourgeoisie would meet regularly to discuss and debate their
private interests. It was in these public places that
Habermas found the origins of the public sphere.
While discussions and debates initially concerned literary and cultural matters, for example, art, music,
literature, and theater, they quickly turned to common political interests over levels of taxation and the
protection of private property.
As the bourgeois public sphere became more inclusive, the boundaries of public debate grew beyond the
salons and coffeehouses and required a new medium
of transmission: the media. Early newspapers and
political journals provided key discursive spaces in
which bourgeois interests could be debated relatively
freely. This was a new function for the press. While it
had previously been used to transmit information or
exert social control, it was now being used as a space
for critical discussion and public opinion formation. For the first time in history, citizens had come
together to exercise their capacity for rational-critical
discourse, and as a result, they formed a genuine
public opinion on social and political matters. The
public sphere in this context was crucial to democratic politics as it acted as a mediator between the
private bourgeois interests of civil society on the one

Public Sphere

hand and the state authority on the other. Indeed,
from their “public use of reason,” the bourgeoisie
were able to formulate political demands and put
pressure on governments to enact reforms.
Habermas’s historical concept of the public sphere
has been widely criticized. Marxist and feminist writers argue that he ignores the “proletarian” public
sphere and overlooks the extent to which the bourgeois public sphere was exclusive. The normative
conception of the public sphere rests upon the ideal
speech situation in which all voices are included and
carry equal weight in discussion. This was clearly
not the case in the bourgeois public sphere. Here, the
participants involved in public discourse were male
property owners. While Habermas acknowledges this
class bias, he says less to satisfy feminist critics, who
argue that he underplays the gender relations underlying the bourgeois public sphere, as well as more
fundamental issues regarding gendered conceptions
of the citizen and the public and private. If the public
sphere excludes, or underplays, the voices of significant social groups, then the opinions it constructs
cannot be said to be genuinely public. Some feminist
critics therefore converge with postmodernist critics
of Habermas, who argue that a discursive process
cannot be the source of political decision making
and legitimacy in liberal democracies. Neither should
procedures to establish a universal morality, detached
from the particular identities and differences of
the participants involved, be desirable. In contrast,
feminists have pointed out that social identities are
formed in the first place through public discourse and
are a key stake in it. Other feminist critics, however,
have attempted to reconstruct a basis for processes
of argumentation in politics leading to much debate
over Habermas’s “discourse ethics.”

The Decline of the Public Sphere
In The Structural Transformation, Habermas traces
not only the origins of the bourgeois public sphere
but also its almost immediate and rapid decline. His
argument is that in advanced capitalist societies, the
space for rational-critical public discourse has contracted significantly. Subsequently, what operates
as the public sphere and public opinion today is a
downgraded version of the past.
A key reason for the decline of the bourgeois public
sphere relates to the mass media. The construction of
public opinion, which as the bourgeois public sphere

1179

grew was largely achieved via debate in newspapers
and political journals, has been undermined by the
commercialization of the mass media and the growth
of consumer culture. Increasingly, newspapers, TV,
radio, and magazines have turned to advertising for
revenue, and this has created a commercialization
of media content. Large sections of the mass media
have been commodified, that is, turned over to selling products and services for profit. Habermas states:
When the laws of the market governing the sphere
of commodity exchange and social labor also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a
public, rational-critical debate had a tendency to
be replaced by consumption. (The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989, 161)

In the face of market forces, the space provided by the media for public debate on social and
political issues has therefore declined significantly.
Furthermore, due to the overlap between media ownership, wealth, and political power, a normative consensus on cultural and political matters is no longer
achieved by the public use of reason but is influenced
instead by private interests. In this context, public
opinion no longer refers to a consensus that has been
freely constructed through argumentation but to one
that has been influenced by money and power, or
further still, one that has been “manufactured” and
“manipulated” by public relations (PR) professionals
and public opinion polls. The end result is “staged”
rather than “critical” publicity.
The public sphere has therefore been subject to
a historical process of dumbing down. In place of
rational-critical debate about important social and
political matters, there are consumer relationships
oriented to buying and selling products in a capitalist marketplace. Habermas argues that this has created a shift from a public that debates culture to a
public that consumes culture. This shift denotes a
wider trend characteristic of modern consumer culture, where the citizen role becomes replaced by the
consumer role. This is true of the practice of politics
itself. Rather than viewing political participation in
terms of our engagement as citizens in public debate
on issues of moral importance, we view politics
with a consumer attitude. We are encouraged to do
so by the state, which mimics the model of interaction found in the private sector, where customers
are seen to exercise agency by making decisions and
choices about their consumption. This consumerist

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Public Sphere

redefinition of the citizen role has depoliticizing
effects. We predominantly interact with the state via
impersonal and apolitical bureaucracies, through
which we demand and consume the various services
and benefits that have been bestowed by the welfare
system. The room for meaningful political participation by citizens is thus restricted. This is reinforced at
election time, when politics and parties are packaged
and sold to the voter public on the basis of personalities, sound bites, and slogans rather than argued for
through public discussion. This “personalization” in
the political arena also takes place in culture, where
debates in the mass media are dominated by celebrities, the personal lives of stars, and individual biographies rather than issues of moral importance to the
public. The end result for Habermas is a situation
where both our mass-mediated culture and our idea
of political participation are reduced to the practice
of consumption. Habermas’s assessment of the mass
media and consumer society is therefore similar to
the early Frankfurt school and its ideas on mass
culture and the culture industry. In this respect, he
has been criticized for wrongly interpreting the role
played by the mass media in public discourse.

Possibilities for the Rejuvenation
of the Public Sphere
In The Theory (volume 2, 1987), Habermas referred
to the process in which areas of communicatively
rational action are increasingly eroded in contemporary societies as the colonization of the lifeworld
by the system. The system and the lifeworld refer
to two distinct realms of interaction for Habermas.
By lifeworld, he means those areas of everyday life
(e.g., the family, leisure, education) that are reproduced through communicative rationality. Here,
actions have to be coordinated via discussion and
debate aimed at achieving a mutual understanding. The system, on the other hand, refers to state
and economic interactions that are instrumental, or
strategic, in nature and are coordinated via money
(the market) and political power (state bureaucracy).
Habermas argues that in advanced capitalist societies, the system has begun to take over the lifeworld
and to steer actions previously coordinated through
public discourse via the market and state bureaucracy. He calls this process the colonization of the
lifeworld. It has two key elements: a juridification
of everyday life (e.g., an extension of legal sanctions

and bureaucracy) and a commodification of everyday life (e.g., the spread of the market and consumer
relationships into areas such as education and health
care). The result is the erosion of communicatively
rational action, that is, of spaces of rational-critical
discourse aimed at achieving a normative consensus.
The decline of the public sphere, in which this discourse can be publicly harnessed for political ends,
is therefore part of a wider decline of spaces for
communicatively rational action in advanced capitalist societies.
The important point about this later work, however, is that it breaks with the pessimism of his earlier
conclusions about the wholesale decline of the public
sphere. In contrast, The Theory provides some hope
for a rejuvenation of the public sphere by linking
the colonization of the lifeworld to the rise of NSMs
and a resurgence of moral debate about political
issues. NSMs refer to the movements that emerged
in Europe in the 1970s, such as feminism, environmentalism, and peace movements. They were “new”
according to Habermas because they were concerned
with issues of identity and lifestyle rather than the
economic issues expressed by the “old” labor movement. More specifically, NSMs sought to defend the
lifeworld of communicatively rational action from a
takeover by the market and state bureaucracy. For
example, environmental groups campaigned against
the commodification of the natural environment,
where natural resources were bought and sold for
short-term gains in profit rather than long-term
sustainability. Through their campaigns, NSMs
instigated moral debates about important social and
political issues, such as nuclear weapons and gender equality. In providing spaces for public debate,
NSMs contributed toward the rejuvenation of the
public sphere. Their discussions repoliticized important social issues, called governments to account for
their actions, and remoralized the nature of public
debate. Again, however, Habermas’s account has
been subject to criticism, not least by overstating the
new role played by social movements since the 1970s.
In relating only new movements to the rejuvenation
of the public sphere, he ignores the ways in which
social movements related to labor have contributed
and continue to contribute toward a public sphere of
debate on key moral issues (Edwards 2004).
More recent work on new media and independent
media center (IMC), or Indymedia, has suggested
further potential for the rejuvenation of the public

Pubs and Wine Bars

sphere or what Nancy Fraser (1990) refers to as the
establishment of a range of “counter-publics.” For
example, John Downey and Natalie Fenton see the
Internet as a promising tool for the establishment of
new virtual public spheres, where discourse can be
more open, more equal, and more critical than is possible in the highly commodified media zones of TV,
radio, and newspapers. Concerns remain, however,
about the quality of online communication, which
is largely anonymous and fragmented and does not
necessarily measure up to Habermas’s ideal conception of rational-critical debate. It has also been suggested that public spaces on the Internet may be as
prone to colonization as other public spaces. Lincoln
Dahlberg, for example, talks of a “corporate colonization” of online communication and the increasing
tendency for participants to be turned into “consumers” of cyberspace. While new social movements and
new media technologies may therefore suggest some
potential for the rejuvenation of the public sphere
in advanced capitalist societies, this revival will continue to take place in the face of colonization and,
in particular, the challenge presented by the steady
growth of consumer culture.
Gemma Edwards
See also Adorno, Theodor; Commercialization;
Commodification; Culture Industries; Mass Culture
(Frankfurt School); Rationalization; Social
Movements; Weber, Max

Further Readings
Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community
and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.
Cambridge: Polity, 1992.
Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato. Civil Society and Political
Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Crossley, Nick, and John Michael Roberts. After
Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Dahlberg, Lincoln. “The Corporate Colonization of Online
Attention and the Marginalization of Critical
Communication?” Journal of Communication Inquiry
29 (2005): 160–180.
Downey, John, and Natalie Fenton. “New Media, Counter
Publicity and the Public Sphere.” New Media and
Society 5 (2003): 185–202.
Edwards, Gemma. “Habermas and Social Movements:
What’s New?” In After Habermas: New Perspectives on

1181

the Public Sphere, edited by Nick Crossley and John
Michael Roberts, 113–130. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and
Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Cambridge:
Polity, 1989.
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.
Garnham, Nicholas. “The Media and the Public Sphere.”
In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig
Calhoun, 359–376. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992
Meehan, Johanna, ed. Feminists Read Habermas:
Gendering the Subject of Discourse. London: Routledge,
1995.
Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and
Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1972.

PUBS

AND

WINE BARS

Pubs and wine bars are businesses that sell alcoholic
drinks for consumption on and off the premises. It is
not always easy to distinguish them from places offering accommodation (hotels or inns), food and nonalcoholic drinks (restaurants and coffeehouses), or
entertainment (dancehalls and clubs), but pubs and
wine bars are fundamentally dependent on the sale
of alcoholic drinks. This is significant because alcohol
has a place in one of the classic accounts of consumption, in Thorstein Veblen’s suggestion that drunkenness demonstrated the pecuniary strength of the
drinker. The Temperance movement also represents
an early example of a modern consumer campaign.
This entry therefore focuses on drinking places
and particularly those of Europe and North America,
though there are parallels around the alcoholdrinking world (such as the Japanese izakaya). It
concentrates on the consumer culture of these places
rather than on the wider place of alcohol within
society or questions of production and systems of
provision.
Drinking places evolved out of two sorts of early
modern European institution. The first type (the inn,
auberge, or Tafern) was devoted to the succor of
the traveler. The second (the alehouse, cabaret, or
Wirtshaus) covered private houses, which sold ale or
wine for consumption by friends and neighbors, and
it is with these that this entry deals. (The vocabulary

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Pubs and Wine Bars

of drinking places is complex and confusing; taverns were wine shops for the urban elite in Britain
and inns in Germany. Beat Kümin provides a useful glossary.) However, the differences between the
two types grew over the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, as authorities began to distinguish houses
that provided food or accommodation from those
that didn’t. Drinking places became increasingly
specialist enterprises: rural alehouses and urban taphouses began to purchase ale and beer from a declining number of brewers in sixteenth-century Britain
rather than brewing their own. The bar counter
became increasingly important as private homes
became retail institutions, domestic hospitality giving way to more formal relations.
Public drinking has been considered in two main
ways. The most obvious (but perhaps least interesting) is as a problematic form of consumption,
injurious to health, morality, and social order. The
alternative approach rejects this pathologizing attitude to alcohol and seeks to establish its place and
meaning within society. Mary Douglas suggested
that we should consider drinking to be constructive, constitutive of social relations, creating feelings
of commensality, or fellowship at table, as well as
divisions and hierarchies. The first approach concentrates on questions of supply and sale, as some other
ways of thinking about consumption; the second is
more interested in demand and consumer practice.
Taking these in turn illustrates the different ways in
which they conceptualize drink, drinkers, and drinking places.
Studies of pubs and bars that consider them as
sources of problem drinking tend to frame it as a
question of oversupply. British examples of this
include the Gin Craze (1720–1751) and peaks in
alcohol consumption in the 1830s and 1870s. Paul
Chatterton and Ray Hollands hold contemporary
binge drinking to be a consequence of the strength
of the nighttime economy, particularly when it is
enlisted to redevelop rundown city centers. In Britain,
for example, government strategy is seen as a neoliberal policy, relaxing controls on the sale of alcohol
(the 2003 Licensing Act) while strengthening controls on drinkers (the 2004 Alcohol Harm Reduction
Strategy for England). While there is little evidence
for a uniquely British drinking culture—there is too
much historical change and local variation for that—
it is still routinely compared with a more civilized
“Continental” attitude toward alcohol, which favors

drinking with meals. At present, there is some concern that European drinking cultures and policies are
converging, which might suggest that binge drinking
and the neoliberal strategy are both spreading, but
the evidence remains contradictory.
While there is much that is of interest in this
approach, it does tend to follow a “production of
consumption” argument, assuming that alcohol producers and retailers entice drinkers to consume to
excess. The culture of drinking places matters little
for this argument.
The alternative—treating drinking as constructive of social relations and meanings as Douglas
suggested—allows us to investigate the association
of drink with commensality, the sharing of food and
drink and the welcoming of guests. Toasts, pledges,
and other customs enact reciprocity and communitas
meaning that “the ceremonials of drinking construct
an ideal world” (Douglas 1987, 8). In nineteenthcentury Britain, buying someone a drink meant more
than an offer of cash because “with beer one thanks,
but with money one pays” (Harrison 1971, 55).
Madelon Powers’s analysis of the meaning of “treating” (buying drinks for others) in late-nineteenthand early twentieth-century U.S. saloons draws
similar conclusions.
These qualities are at the heart of Ray Oldenburg’s
sense of drinking places as “great good places,”
sites for essential hospitality and conviviality within
anonymous cities. The full name for a pub is public
house, an English term first recorded in 1669; Beat
Kümin argues that the public sphere originated in
drinking places rather than coffeehouses and at an
earlier period.
Of course, we also have to consider the exclusive
nature of drinking places. We commonly think of the
pub as a masculine space, and it has been suggested
that both women and elite men gradually withdrew from drinking places over the modern period.
However, Kümin’s 2007 review of the evidence suggests that both groups were active in European drinking places as owners, managers, and customers from
the sixteenth right through to the eighteenth centuries. Arguments about the desirability or otherwise
of women’s and elite men’s presence in pubs suggest
that these were important issues, but it does not seem
likely that drinking places became largely masculine
and plebeian before the nineteenth century.
Still, drinking does divide. In twentieth-century
Britain, wine bars came to be thought of as more

Pubs and Wine Bars

exclusive than pubs (the association of wine with
higher status groups has a long history). The internal divisions of drinking places also allowed social
groups to differentiate themselves from one another.
The attractions of company in early modern Europe
created problems when social groups mixed and
clashed; this is probably why English urban taverns
began to provide booths in the eighteenth century.
The Victorians took this to new extremes in the
second half of the nineteenth century, with compartments, snugs, and other forms of semiprivate space
clustering around the bar, particularly in London,
as James Kneale demonstrates. Women used these
compartments and women-only rooms to avoid censure or worse, and “Gents-only” bars persisted until
the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Even after British
pubs began to open up again, the division persisted
between “public” bars or vaults, on the one hand,
and lounge, parlor, or saloon bars, on the other. In
the 1930s, for example, in The Pub and the People,
published by Mass-Observation in England, mass
observers noted the contrast between these two kinds
of rooms in terms of class, gender, and sociability.
The vault was spartan, and most drinkers stood; the
lounge offered tables and chairs, aspidistras, and
pianos:
The vault is nothing like home. It is an exclusively
male gathering. . . . To the vault you go singly, to the
lounge in groups. . . . You come to the lounge with
your social group, ready made, and sit at a table,
having no especial intercourse with people at other
tables. (1943, 105–106)

While these divisions might reflect British prejudices, it is clear that French critics of nineteenthcentury café sociability were also concerned that a
dangerous mingling of patrons was inevitable. In
fact, Paris’s cafés were divided up much like London’s
pubs in the 1880s; in one, the moderately well-off,
the almost destitute, and the homeless all used different rooms.
Drinking places are fascinating consumer sites,
producing identities and social relations as well as
the social problems we associate with alcohol. Pubs
and bars represent convivial, hospitable places, but

1183

they also allow for the reproduction of class, gender, and other forms of identity through complex
forms of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, there
are surprising similarities between drinking places
across Europe and the United States that transcend
national boundaries, as well as a good deal of local
differences.
James Kneale
See also Addiction; Binge and Excess; Coffee Shops;
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Food Consumption;
Hedonism; Mass Observation; Veblen, Thorstein
Bunde

Further Readings
Chatterton, Paul, and Ray Hollands. Urban Nightscapes:
Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power.
London: Routledge, 2004.
Douglas, Mary. “A Distinctive Anthropological
Perspective.” In Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on
Drink from Anthropology, edited by M. Douglas, 3–15.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café: Sociability
among the French Working Class, 1789–1914.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Harrison, Brian. Drink and the Victorians. London: Faber,
1971.
Kneale, James. “‘A Problem of Supervision’: Moral
Geographies of the Nineteenth-Century British Public
House.” Journal of Historical Geography 25 (1999):
333–348.
Kümin, Beat. Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social
Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Mass-Observation. The Pub and the People. London:
Victor Gollancz, 1943.
Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee
Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other
Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York:
Marlow, 1987.
Powers, M. Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the
Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New
York: Macmillan, 1899.

Q
QUALITY

OF

Parfit’s Three Theories

LIFE

The question of the good life (well-being, or quality
of life) is one of the classical questions in philosophy.
This question has been formulated in somewhat different ways, for example, What makes a life good for
the person who lives it? or What ultimately makes a
life worth living?
To clarify this question, philosophers have formally defined the notion of well-being (quality of
life) in terms of what has final value for a person.
There are three important aspects of this formal definition. First, to claim that a certain life is good, or of
high quality, is to evaluate it in a positive way. The
question of the good life is an evaluative question,
not an empirical question that can be answered by
empirical methods. Second, the type of value that is
of relevance in this context is value for (prudential
value). When we say that someone has a good life,
we do not mean that her life is, for example, morally good but prudentially good or good for her.
The question of the good life is about what kind of
life is good for the person who lives it. And third,
the relevant prudential values are final rather than
instrumental. Not everything that makes a life good
for a person belongs to her quality of life as such, for
example, having a decent income. The reason for this
is that money is only good for us as means, that is,
instrumentally valuable. However, a person’s quality
of life is constituted by those things (states of affairs)
that are good as ends, that is, have final value. To
have a good life is to have a lot of positive final value
(and little negative final value) in one’s life.

The different answers to this question can be classified in somewhat different ways. Most of the modern
discussion of well-being is based on Derek Parfit’s
distinction between three kinds of conceptions of
the good life, namely, hedonistic theories, desirefulfillment theories, and objective list theories.
On the hedonistic theory, the good life is identical
with the pleasant life. The only thing that has positive final value for a person is pleasant experience
(to feel good), and the only thing that has negative
final value for a person is to feel bad. The prudential
value of a life is a function of how much pleasure and
displeasure it contains.
According to the desire-fulfillment theory (desire
theory, preferentialism), someone has a good life only
if she has the kind of life that she herself wants to
have. The only thing that has positive final value for a
person is that her intrinsic desires are fulfilled, and the
only thing that has negative final value for a person is
that her intrinsic aversions are fulfilled, that she gets
what she does not want. The desire theory is commonly regarded as a formal rather than a substantive
theory of well-being. Instead of making substantive
claims about what is good for us, it specifies a formal
criterion that helps us determine what is good for us,
namely, that something has final value for a person
if and only if (and because) she desires it intrinsically, as an end. (It is worth noting that even though
hedonism is almost always regarded as a substantive
theory, it has also been conceived of as formal, e.g.,
by various economists. On the formal interpretation
of hedonism, prudential value is not attributed to the

1185

1186

Quality of Life

pleasant experiences themselves but to the different
objects in which the subject takes pleasure.)
Finally, according to objectivist pluralism (the
objective list theory), there are several objective values besides pleasure that make a life good for a person, independently of what she herself thinks of the
matter, and to have a good life is to have these values
present to a high degree. Classic examples of such
values are knowledge, friendship, love, freedom, to
function well (e.g., virtuously), personal development, and meaningful activity.

Subjectivism and Objectivism,
Internalism and Externalism
A somewhat different classification has been proposed by S. Kagan, who suggests that theories of
quality of life should be classified as subjective versus
objective, on the one hand, and as internalist versus
externalist, on the other.
The difference between subjective and objective
theories is a difference that concerns the source of prudential value rather than what objects have final value.
Subjective theories make our well-being wholly dependent on our own evaluations, desires and aversions,
likes and dislikes. Objective theories reject this claim
and hold instead that “various things are objectively
good for a person to have, whether or not he realizes it,
and whether or not he desires it” (Kagan 1992, 170).
A fully developed objectivist view cannot simply
reject the subjectivist idea that the source of well-being
is in our values and preferences, however; it also has
to offer a positive account of the source of well-being.
Such accounts typically claim that the source of prudential value is located somewhere in our common
human nature—for example, in our basic needs or (as
Aristotle suggested) in our human ergon—that is, the
characteristic activity that distinguishes us from the
other animals and makes us human.
The difference between internalist and externalist
theories of well-being is a difference with regard to
content rather than source. Internalist theories claim
that a person’s level of well-being depends solely on
“facts internal to this person,” physical or mental. A
theory of well-being is externalist if it makes a person’s quality of life directly dependent on other kinds
of facts as well, namely, on “facts external to the
person” or on “relational facts” (Kagan 1992, 188).
Internalist theories are typically mental state theories, that is, theories “which hold that an individual’s

Table 1

An Illustration of How Parfit’s and Kagan’s
Classifications Are Related to Each Other

Internalism
Subjectivism

–

Objectivism

Hedonism

Externalism
The desire theory
qua formal theory
The objective
list theory

well-being consists solely in the presence of the relevant kinds of mental states” (169).
If we compare Kagan’s two distinctions to Parfit’s
three theories, then we can note that it is not just
the objective list theory that is objectivist in Kagan’s
sense: hedonism is objectivist as well (see Table 1).

Happiness Theories of the Good Life
Another way in which the question of well-being can
be approached is to start from the common idea that
quality of life equals happiness. In the pure happiness
theory, a person’s quality of life is dependent on one
thing only, namely, how happy he is. What this means
depends on what conception of happiness is adopted.
That happiness should be conceived of as a mental
state is clear, but there are different views on what kind
of mental state happiness is, for example, whether it is
best regarded as a feeling or as an attitude.
In the life satisfaction view, happiness is a positive
attitude toward one’s life as a whole. To be happy is
to regard one’s own life favorably, and the relevant
positive evaluation need not be accompanied by any
pleasant feeling. The difference between the happiness theory that incorporates this conception of happiness and the desire theory is that the former does
not make a person’s well-being depend on the state
of the world. It is sufficient that the subject believes
that his life is going the way he wants it to go. That
his life is actually going the way he wants it to go is
not essential for well-being.
In the pure affective view, happiness is some
kind of affective state. To be happy is to feel happy.
There are several versions of this view, but to Bengt
Brülde (2007), affective happiness is most plausibly
regarded as an overall state of feeling: to be happy is
to feel good on the whole. If happiness is understood
in this way, then the pure happiness theory coincides
with hedonism.

Queer Theory

In the hybrid view, happiness is regarded as a
complex mental state, both attitudinal and affective.
A person’s happiness level is a function of two things,
namely, how satisfied he is with his life (as he himself
perceives it) and how good he feels on the whole. If
this view is incorporated into the happiness theory
of well-being, then the resulting theory is partly
hedonistic, but it also makes a person’s quality of life
depend on her life satisfaction.
There are also modified happiness theories, however: the idea, for example, that a life cannot be really
good for the person who lives it unless her happiness
is authentic. In these views, the presence of a happy
mental state is necessary but not sufficient for maximal well-being. For example, a state of happiness is
more valuable if the relevant value judgment (the life
satisfaction) is informed and autonomous (Sumner
1996) or based on true beliefs about the person’s
own life (Brülde 2007).
Bengt Brülde
See also Desire; Happiness; Hedonism; Measuring
Satisfaction; Measuring Standards of Living;
Moralities; Well-Being

Further Readings
Brülde, Bengt. The Human Good. Gothenburg, Sweden:
Acta Universitatus Gothoburgensis, 1998.
Brülde, Bengt. “Happiness Theories of the Good Life.”
Journal of Happiness Studies 8 (2007): 15–49.
Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and
Moral Importance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Kagan, S. “The Limits of Well-Being.” In The Good Life
and the Human Good, edited by E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller
Jr., and J. Paul, 169–189. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984.
Sumner, L.W. Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996.
Tatarkiewicz, W. Analysis of Happiness. The Hague, The
Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. First published
1962.

QUEER THEORY
Queer theory is an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective whose core subject matter is the analysis of
the heteronormative structure of social order, that is,

1187

the institutionalized normative assumptions about a
binary order of gender (that humans fall into either
a male or a female gender category) and about heterosexuality as the only normal and “natural” form
of sexuality. Rather than being a standpoint theory
of queers or about queer sexualities, it aims to investigate how heteronormativity operates in all areas of
social life including areas that are normally not seen
as terrains of sexuality. Consequently, such a perspective also opens up consumption and consumer culture
to queer analysis.
However, queer perspectives in the study of consumer culture are not well developed as yet. Equally,
queer studies have only recently begun to engage with
consumer culture. This has initiated debates on the
relationship between queer culture and consumer capitalism, the role of the market in sexual subcultures and
the consumption cultures of queers. Thus far, queer
theory has not been consistently applied to the field of
consumer culture. The following discussion reviews
these debates before synthesizing key questions for a
more thoroughly queer analysis of consumer culture.

Background to the Concept
Queer theory evolved since the early 1990s from several strands of theoretical thought and fields of study,
especially feminist, gay, and lesbian studies; social
constructionism, post-structuralism, literary and film
studies, and cultural history. It followed the emergence of queer activism in the wake of the AIDS crisis and the neoconservative backlash against gay and
lesbian emancipation in the late 1980s and 1990.
Geographically, most centers and proponents of
queer theory and queer studies are located in North
America, Australia, and Europe.
Queer theoretical perspectives have also been
established in social science disciplines and led, for
example, to a queer critique in classic sociology and
social theory: in particular, of the failure to address
how intricately tied up the history of Western modernity and colonialism was with the heterosexualization of bodies, desires, and identities and with the
formation of a reproductive growth economy linked
to the Oedipal household and repro-narrativity—a
narrative of generational succession—as the key ideology of a meaningful life (Warner 1991, 7).
In contrast to gay and lesbian studies, which
focused on the lives and identities of gays and lesbians, queer theory/sociology sets out as a more

1188

Queer Theory

general social analysis. This is based on the argument
that heteronormativity underpins the whole cultural
and institutional fabric as well as social ideologies of
Western societies. What is oppressive is not merely
outright homophobia but the regimes of heteronormality built, among others, into gender and family arrangements, the state and social institutions,
public speech and culture, reproductive politics, and
cultural norms of the body.
By considering sexuality a central category that
structures virtually all realms of social life, queer
theory parallels feminist theory. Queer theory does
not take sexual identity categories as unproblematic
starting points but turns them into units of analysis.
Its core argument is that a heteronormative social
order is maintained through safeguarding the difference between binary gender (male/female) categories
and binary sexual categories constructed as normal on
the one hand (heterosexuality) and as deviant on the
other (homosexuality). According to queer theorists,
the binary gender order and the dichotomy of heteroversus homosexuality organize the regulation of social
institutions, social relations, and processes. They confer social position and classify bodies, pleasures, and
desires. Queer theory problematizes identity and sex/
gender categories and deconstructs the notion of sexual subjectivities, such as the “homosexual.” Identities
are seen as disciplinary and regulatory structures and
as reductionist: naming through a single characteristic
such as sexuality silences other ways of framing one’s
self. The objective of queer theory is therefore the critique not of heterosexuality itself but of its institutionalization as the norm (heteronormativity) maintained
through invoking and setting itself off from homosexuality as its devalued other. This critique targets the
boundary work between hetero- and homosexuality
that organizes ways of knowing bodies and desires
and that naturalizes gender and sexual identities.
This theoretical objective corresponds to political
strategies that depart from minority and assimilationist politics, which aimed for equality and toleration
of gays and lesbians. Queer politics challenges the
taken-for-granted heteronormativity of social life and
social institutions, often by means of symbolic strategies, carnivalesque spectacles, or parody. The aim
is not to celebrate gay or lesbian identity or to
present acceptable images of queer but to symbolically resist “regimes of the normal” (Warner 1991, 16)
in representations or in public spaces to prepare the
grounds for a safe public existence and visibility of

queers—for the “freedom to be public” (Berlant and
Freeman 1993, 201).

Queer Sexualities and Consumer Culture
It has been argued that the market has played a pivotal role in the “construction of queer sexualities”
and that the institutions of lesbian and gay scenes
have been strongly market mediated. This includes
bars, nightclubs, restaurants, cafés, shops, bathhouses, travel agencies, newspapers, phone lines,
web domains, and more. In certain metropolitan
areas, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual,
or queer (in short, LGBTQ) consumers can now—
given sufficient economic resources—access almost
a full service market that offers, in addition to the
above services, legal, medical, financial, and communication services provided by LGBTQ-run businesses
and tailored to this clientele. This, however, is largely
restricted to liberal metropolitan conurbations with
a high share of LGBTQ inhabitants. LGBTQ scenes
are commodified spaces for lifestyle consumption;
yet they are more than just that. They also involve—
in varying degrees depending on geographical context—nonprofit organizations, social networks, and
political or alternative cultural initiatives. Despite
the pivotal role of the market, LGBTQ labels are not
merely market products or commodified identities.
The relationship of queer culture to consumer culture is a contentious issue in current debates. The lines
of argument oscillate between two poles: a critical
view, sometimes a moralistic denigration, of consumerism in queer scenes as an expression of the cultural
logic of late capitalism; and a more positive view celebrating queer interventions into consumer culture as
an oppositional or subversive social practice.
Critical views of queer consumerism were aired
amongst others by Rosemary Hennessy. In her
analysis of the political economy of sexuality in late
capitalism, Hennessy traced the connections between
cultural forms such as sexual identities and the logic
of commodification. She argued that postmodernist reconfigurations of subjectivity as more flexible
and ambivalent have made possible the emergence
of queer counterdiscourses on gender and sexuality
on par with the flexible character required by late
capitalism. She criticized queer activism/theory for
failing to address how closely the cultural visibility
of (queer) sexualities is tied up with processes of commodification. Indeed, to be “out” manifests itself in

Queer Theory

commodified form—through investment in fashion,
body style, and other cultural and symbolic goods
and through participation in sexually codified spaces,
such as cafés, bars, and clubs. Consequently, recognition and status “on the scene” are strongly tied to
ideal models of body look, fashion, and style besides
age and able-bodiedness. In addition, an out lifestyle
and belonging to LGBTQ scenes depend on economic
and cultural resources that are not equally available
to all. From this perspective, the forging of publicly
visible sexual identities for, among other things,
mutual recognition, came at the cost of (homo)normative regimes of embodiment, relating, for example,
to hairstyle, body form, and muscle toning or to
adopting certain fashion styles and brands. Like other
critical discourses on consumer culture, such accounts
also point to the commodification of social and sexual
relations and the consumerist ethic underpinning, for
example, sexual promiscuity. Finally, queer consumerism is cast as a mere escapist compensation for the
lack of social rights in heterosexist society and as an
ersatz activity in lieu of political campaigning.
Although commodification and normalization are
significant processes, this kind of critique also has
its shortcomings. First, it presents queer consumers
as uniformly affluent, ignoring that a large share of
them are women, working class, people of color, or
elderly. Second, it usually targets particular lifestyle
segments within the young, urban middle classes and
partly evokes stereotypical images of contemporary
gay lifestyle as mobile, flexible, hedonistic, promiscuous, individualistic, and stylistically sophisticated.
It thereby plays into the hands of marketers who
promote similar ideals. It fails to account for the
manifold and complex ways in which an out status
is achieved and maintained by many queers over and
above or even without buying into consumerism or
participating in the lesbian and gay market and scene.
Sometimes, such perspectives also latch on to clichéd
views of consumer culture and materialism, assuming that economic interests and commercial relations
automatically hollow out culture, values, and politics. This tends to ignore the empowering effects that
consumption rituals can have for constructing and
affirming shared values, for actively shaping cultural
life forms, and for creating social bonds, public presence, and visibility. It also disregards that consumption
is a field of social and political contestation, which
can become a site for emancipatory struggles. In this
respect, the “pink” economy, apart from supplying

1189

job opportunities, can be seen as an important step
of collective self-affirmation and as a liberation from
the closets erected daily in heteronormative markets
and consumption spheres, which either ignore queer
consumers or require of them careful calculations
of secrecy or disclosure to escape either outright discrimination, distorting stereotype, insulting scrutiny,
or offensive interpretation of bodies (on the “closet”
see Sedgwick 1990, 68). Of course, a queer analysis
would view market making in the pink economy more
skeptically and investigate the extent to which it fortifies or destabilizes the hetero/homo binary.
The second strand of debate stresses precisely the
significance of the pink economy for the expression
of gay economic power. It also draws attention to the
critical engagement with consumer culture by queer
activism, which recognizes the fact that public culture
in commercial spaces is a central arena for the consolidation of sexual norms and identities. Queer interventions into the taken-for-granted heteronormativity in
everyday life and consumption embrace culture jamming tactics such as the queering of commodities and
representational codes or the symbolic contestation of
consumption spaces (e.g., “mall visibility actions” by
organizations such as the Queer Shopping Network
New York or the Suburban Homosexual Outreach
Program of San Francisco [SHOP]). These and other
acts aim to destabilize the hetero/homo binary that
insulates the straight mainstream from gay subculture
by confronting consumers with unexplored sexual
desires and identifications (Berlant and Freeman
1993). Not to forget—apart from such collective
action, the queering of the consumer sphere occurs in
less spectacular forms in everyday consumption practices of individuals who transgress the gender codes
of commodities or the heteronormative exchanges in
shopping spaces. After all, commodities are used not
only to fit into heteronormative or homonormative
models of identity but also to fit into queer heteronormative ideals of gender.
Several objections have been raised against such a
positive reading of queer articulations into consumer
culture. First, Hennessy criticized the unquestioned
investment in commodity fetishism in a queer cultural
politics of consumption, which reduces the commodity to a cultural signifier and leaves intact a classspecific, masculine, and white disregard of the social
relations and the division of labor that sustains (queer)
consumption (space). Another point of contention is
the liberal view of consumer citizenship that is built

1190

Queer Theory

into the assumption that the commercial power and
the public visibility of queer consumers can prepare
the path toward more social recognition and full legal
rights. There is a degree of skepticism about the fact
that this model bases the right to participate in society
on the capacity to consume and conflates consumption with social recognition and inclusion.
What transpires from this discussion so far is the
need to distinguish more clearly between different
facets of the relationship between queer cultures and
consumption. Queer activism that explicitly aims to
politicize consumption and public culture through situationist, culture jamming tactics cannot be lumped
together with a normative consumerism in certain
parts of the LGBTQ scenes in which consumption is a
central means for constructing identity, membership,
and social status in much the same way as in other
contexts. The pink economy and the incorporation of
queer cultures into mainstream consumption spheres
are yet other dimensions in need of consideration.
As for the latter, intensive debate has unfolded in
recent years about the mainstreaming of gay, lesbian,
or queer sexualities. As queers have become a visible consumer niche and even objects of consumption in the media, film, and urban gay villages, does
this signal an erosion of the heteronormative order?
Since the early 1990s, gay and lesbian populations in
several Western societies have been courted not only
by the pink economy but also by marketing initiatives of mainstream companies. The gay and lesbian
niche market was dubbed the dream market because
of the estimated, but partly exaggerated, purchasing
power of these consumer groups. It also became a test
market for new commodities. However, marketing
to gay and lesbian consumer niches as well as media
representations were criticized for normalizing onedimensional images of gay and lesbian lifestyle and
for presenting a certain segment of white, middle-class
gays/lesbians as representative of the whole constituency. Such distorted representation indicates a partial
acceptance at best and a continuing marginalization
of those who are not assimilable to this fetishized
image. Furthermore, the ways in which this reflects
back on the LGBTQ scenes themselves have turned
out as a current issue of analysis, in particular, as to
whether the images fetishized in mainstream culture
also become norms in LGBTQ contexts or provoke
alternative images of “desirable queers” or critical
distance to such ideals altogether. The mainstreaming
of gay lifestyle has mainly been discussed in relation
to gay villages and sexually codified consumption

spaces in gentrified urban centers. As these became
increasingly attractive to straight audiences and critical voices in the LGBTQ scenes warned of homonormative self-ghettoizing in gay spaces, businesses have
tried to launch queer and mixed spaces. However, for
fear of heteronormativity taking effect once again,
measures are often adopted to maintain a “queer”
sign value, for example, by admitting certain quotas
of visibly queer, that is, gay and lesbian visitors. The
queering of gay and lesbian consumption spaces,
therefore, is sometimes fraught with ambivalence.
While social mixture and heterogeneity destabilize
heteronormative identity thinking, the fetishization
of particular images of homosexuality and the sexual
categorization of visitors cannot easily be foreclosed.
This points to an aporia: queer consumption space,
while it may emerge in practice provided social actors
deactivate their heteronormative categorization, cannot easily be produced without codifying and essentializing queer.
We can finally synthesize key questions for a queer
analysis of consumer culture and indicate some directions for future research. The broad questions arising from a queer theoretical viewpoint would be,
how does the hetero/homosexual binary operate in
consumer cultures? In what ways do consumer cultures erode or reproduce heteronormativity? To what
extent is consumption (and the theorization of consumption) tied in with the making up and the activities of sexualized subjectivities and sexual identities?
Consumer culture is not simply a medium for the reinstitutionalization of heteronormativity. It also transcends heteronormativity and its sociocultural norms
in certain respects and offers opportunities for queer
self-expression more than other social institutions.
Certain spheres of consumer, media, and popular
culture, such as fashion, feature queer gender-bender
or androgynous aesthetics, shape “homospectatorial
looks” (Fuss 1992), or commercialize queer styles for
the mainstream; whether this molds alternatives to
heteronormative gender ideals or merely reconfigures
the patriarchal gender system, or both, requires analysis. Despite all the challenges to heteronormativity,
however, consumer cultures are still deeply entrenched
in it given the stereotyping of gender identity, the naturalization of heterosexuality through romance narratives, the heterosexualization of bodies or the repro
family ideology in advertising and marketing, the gendering and sexualization of commodities, the default
assumption about consumers’ heterosexuality, and
the heteronormative ordering of shopping spaces and

Queer Theory

of people’s relation to goods. A queer study of consumer culture needs to stay attuned to the ambivalent
entwinement of the deconstruction and reconstruction
of heteronormativity.
Addressing the above questions requires, first, a
broader understanding of consumption as comprising more than advertising and shopping. Apart from
consuming in the market, consuming public services
(e.g., housing, health, and care services) demands
more attention. Apart from leisure, media, popular
culture, fashion, and lifestyle, the whole range of
(mundane) commodities needs to be considered, for
example, housing, banking, and insurance; legal,
health, and care services; craft and small trade; and
tourism, catering, and other cultural goods. Second,
queer study of consumer culture should not exclusively focus on the lifestyles and cultures of queers but
should delve into the social analysis of consumption
more generally. A queer perspective means studying
all the practices through which bodies, desires, acts,
identities, social relations, and social institutions are
hetero- or homosexualized. This also calls for more
empirical research into the institutions, knowledge,
social actors, practices, objects, and spaces that
organize consumption: for example, the practices of
“knowing” the market and of objectifying consumer
groups; the formatting of goods and consumer needs;
the sexualized sign valuing of goods and the making
up of (sexualized) consumer subjectivities and spaces;
the use of goods for the performative doing of identity,
for the making of social bonds, or for marking divisions; and finally, the ways in which such uses consolidate or blur the hetero/homo binary. In conclusion,
a queer study of consumer culture is not primarily
concerned with the consumption practices of queers,
but about how specific consumer cultures remake or
destabilize hetero- and homosexuality as categories of
knowledge and social classification.
Silvia Rief
See also Citizenship; Commercialization;
Commodification; Culture Jamming; Metrosexual;
Sexuality; Social Movements

1191

Further Readings
Bell, David, and Jon Binnie. “Authenticating Queer Space:
Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance.” Urban Studies
41, no. 9 (2004): 1807–1820.
Berlant, Lauren, and Elizabeth Freeman. “Queer
Nationality.” In Fear of a Queer Planet, edited by
M. Warner, 193–229. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Binnie, Jon. “Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and
the Production of Queer Space.” In Mapping Desire:
Geographies of Sexualities, edited by Daniel Bell and
Gill Valentine, 182–199. London: Routledge, 1995.
Chasin, Alexandra. Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian
Movement Goes to the Market. New York: Palgrave,
2000.
Clark, Danae. “Commodity Lesbianism.” Camera Obscura
25/26 (1991): 181–201.
Fraser, Mariam. “Classing Queer: Politics in Competition.”
Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 107–131.
Fuss, Diana. “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look.”
Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 713–737.
Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities
in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2000.
Jackson, Peter A. “Capitalism and Global Queering.” GLQ
15, no. 3 (2009): 357–395.
Kates, Steven M. “The Protean Quality of Subcultural
Consumption: An Ethnographic Account of Gay
Consumers.” Journal of Consumer Research 29, no. 3
(2002): 383–399.
O’Dougherty, Maureen. “Segmented Subjects: Framing
Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in US Consumption and
Marketing.” Reviews in Anthropology 32, no. 1 (2003):
69–89.
Sears, Alan. “Queer Anti-Capitalism: What’s Left of
Lesbian and Gay Liberation?” Science and Society 69,
no. 1 (2005): 92–112.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Seidman, Steven. “Introduction.” In Queer Theory/
Sociology, edited by Steven Seidman, 1–29. Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1996.
Warner, Michael. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.”
Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17.

R
RADIO
The culture of consumption in radio is the product of
a three-way relationship between audiences, broadcasters, and technology. Although in the contemporary West radio is typically thought of as an
entertainment medium, over its long history the
nature of radio consumption has changed extensively.
Nineteenth-century experiments focused on direct
communication, and it was not until the early twentieth century that the notion of broadcasting—from
the center to a body of listeners—became widespread.
From being the preserve of amateurs, the technology
then saw extensive military use in various countries
in the period around the First World War, which
consolidated its national regulation and localized
consumption.
In the 1920s, radio became a social medium, and
organizations and companies began to form in the
United States and Europe to offer services via radio. In
Europe, radio was dominated by state-owned organizations, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC), in contrast to the dominance of private
enterprise seen in the United States from the 1930s.
These organizations were complemented in different
national systems by smaller broadcasters covering
religious, political, and community groups and the
unlicensed “radio pirates,” culminating in the huge
volume of radio stations we have today. Radio’s reach
is international; radio broadcasts are transmitted in
almost every country, and it is often possible to receive
broadcasts and webcasts from elsewhere in the world.

Radio consumption can be functionally divided
into three primary categories: technology, content,
and message. The first category refers to the way that
consumption is driven and supported by innovation
in the ways sound is encoded and decoded for overthe-air and Internet distribution. The second refers
to the consumption of the music, talk, and so on
that forms the mainstay of broadcast, webcast, and
podcast content. The last category refers to the purposes of radio, achieved not only primarily through
entertainment, information, and advertising but also
through the health, educational, and moral messages
that appear to varying extents around the world.

Technology
The consumption of radio technology is set in a
broader debate that has as its poles technological determinism and voluntarism. From one perspective, new
technologies encourage certain behaviors, determining
what people do; from the other, people use technologies voluntarily to do certain things, and the direction
of technological development is an outcome of their
choices. Irrespective of which position a commentator
takes, all would agree that radio technology is hugely
important in radio consumption. A great deal of consideration has been put into the design of radio receivers over the years, both in technological terms and
also in the sense of visual appeal. Buyers select devices
that most suit their needs (some amassing extensive
collections), and receivers have changed in character,
incorporating fashion and technological advances.
Originally conceived of as furniture at the centerpiece

1193

1194

Radio

of the parlor, the technology to receive radio broadcasts can now be found in the car, in portable devices
including cell phones, music players, and clocks.
Changes in radio technology have at least in part
been responses to consumer demands. The increasing desire for mobile radio in the 1940s was initially
served by (heavy) portable tube radios, but the advent
of transistor radios in the 1950s meant radio receivers
became progressively smaller and lighter. The growing market led to lower prices, wider ownership, and
more individual devices, often closely identified with
the newly affluent teenagers. Demands for higher
fidelity were met in the 1970s with the advent of frequency modulation (FM) broadcasts and receivers;
more recently, the arrival of digital radio and the various radio-related experiments on the Internet have
responded to a wide selection of perceived audience
requirements. Though technological breakthroughs
made these systems and devices possible, they had
little commercial value without a substantial consumer base that wanted to pay for them.

Content
Issues of content and of message highlight another
relationship in radio consumption. Radio content,
most obviously in the commercial sector, has one
primary purpose—to attract and keep an audience—
and it is configured to be as close as is realistically
possible to what the largest and wealthiest audience
will accept. Substantial efforts are made to capture
and to understand audience responses to content, and
Arbitron and Nielsen in the United States and Radio
Audience Joint Research (RAJAR) in the United
Kingdom produce reports that explain who listens to
what content at what time and for how long.
Over the years, content has altered dramatically.
Radio initially served the heart of the household,
through broad programming covering the majority
of the genres to be found in modern television. As
television became the primary domestic medium,
radio had to attract new listeners, and radio programming changed, shifting to a stronger focus on
music by the 1950s in America (and by the 1970s
in Europe) and serving an increasing number of
niche audiences. Radio airplay became the primary
driver of music buying, reflected in the prevalence
of radio edits of longer songs. As broadcasters grew
to understand their audiences better, the advent of
radio formats, cascaded across networks, prompted

a strong degree of conformity in mainstream radio
broadcasting. Yet localness remained important, and
radio networks ensure localized content goes some
way toward satisfying the desire among audiences
that content be immediately relevant to them.
Although radio remains a primary form of entertainment in the car, it is in the home and office where
more and more people are seeking entertainment
online—in the radio-like experiences offered by services such as Last.fm and Spotify, streamed “radio”
or podcasts. This has led to extensive debate about
the extent to which these various online experiences
qualify as radio in any sense.

Message
Radio broadcasting ultimately has a purpose, realized through the communication of a message. The
dominant purpose is to maximize profit (most often
through selling advertising), and the broadcaster seeks
the most profitable balance of desirable content and
less- or undesirable message, pushing the audience to
the limit of their tolerance but not beyond. The commercial broadcaster must create a group of listeners
and transform them into a market for advertisers.
Radio for social, public, or community purposes
takes a number of forms. A government or charity
may target an audience with a message to stop smoking, perhaps, or to help with economic development.
Regulators may insist on local or “culturally uplifting”
programming. Alternatively, community radio stations (as distinct from local radio stations) may wish
to produce content for a geographical community or
a community of interest or to involve members of a
community in the participatory act of communication.
Debates about radio tend to be dominated by essentialist notions of the nature of the medium and the
form of its consumption. Radio is often described as
a “secondary” medium characterized by “distracted”
or “background” listening. Often, however, the “primary” activity is of debatable dominance—eating,
for example, or running—suggesting that to consider
radio an entirely secondary medium is too general. On
the other hand, it is often suggested that, as a “blind”
medium (although perhaps “invisible” is better), radio
demands a particular creativity from its producers and
consumers.
Radio is a medium driven by consumption.
The radio audience represents a large market, and
that market is a commodity attracted to consume

Rationalization

content by broadcasters, sold to advertisers and to
funders, and capitalized on by technology companies. Where broadcast radio audiences are moving
to Internet models, the broadcasters are following
them, bringing familiar content and styles to the
online space, and offering additional services in
an attempt to capture fan activity, such as message
boards and Facebook pages. These modern shifts
mean that radio and the consumption of radio
technology, content, and messages remain topics of
contemporary importance, both to academics and
to policymakers.
Governments worldwide are instituting a shift in
their broadcasting policies and infrastructure, from
analog to digital technologies (both in television and
in radio). A variety of digital audio broadcast standards have been adopted, employed in patchwork
fashion across the globe, with HD (formerly hybrid
digital now a trademark) Radio, Digital Audio
Broadcasting, and Digital Radio Mondiale the best
known. Satellite radio has also come of age, supporting a greater number of channels and delivering them
on a continental scale. Online, radio has adopted a
diversity of forms. A number of broadcast stations
offer the ability to listen to time-shifted content and
this, along with podcasting, allows the audiences
of web radio to consume the content they want at
a time of their choosing. The return for the broad/
webcaster is an accurate indication of popularity in
the records of network traffic, and indicators of preferences tied to individuals allow content and, more
importantly, messages to be precisely targeted.
Nick Webber
See also Audience Research; Automobiles; Broadcast
Media; Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age;
Popular Music; Television; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Berland, Jody. “Radio Space and Industrial Time: The Case
of Music Formats.” In Rock and Popular Music:
Politics, Policies and Institutions, edited by Tony
Bennett, Simon Frith, and John Shepherd, 104–118.
London: Routledge, 1993.
Chignell, Hugh. Key Concepts in Radio Studies. London:
Sage, 2009.
Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and the American
Imagination. New York: Random House, 1999.
Hendy, David. Radio in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity,
2000.

1195

Lewis, Peter M., and Jerry Booth. The Invisible Medium:
Public, Commercial and Community Radio. London:
Macmillan, 1989.

RATIONALIZATION
Rationalization refers to a historical process in which
one form of reasoning or rationality—instrumental
rationality—grounded in a distinction between means
and ends and based on calculation comes to predominate. The spread of instrumental reason is closely associated with intellectual developments in Europe since
the Reformation and is thought to be embodied in and
borne by such key social institutions as the modern
(rational) legal system, the state governed by the rule
of law (the Rechtsstaat), bureaucracy, and rational, as
opposed to adventure or robber, capitalism. The term
rationalization is most closely associated with Max
Weber, but was adopted for use in critical theory as
a key element in its critique of domination, of capitalism, and of instrumental reason. Rationalization
remains a central concept in the analysis of modernity.
Consumption (in the shape of mass consumption)
was taken, by critical theorists, to be a symptom of
rationalization, whereas in more recent literature, consumption is understood as an object of rationalization.

Weber on Rationalization
Underlying the rationalization thesis is a set of distinctions Weber drew between different orientations
to the world, forms of social action, and ways of conducting our lives.
At the level of the individual, action that is not
simply habitual (traditional action) or emotional
(affective action), can be governed either by considerations of value (or absolute ends) or by a strict
calculation of ends and means. This is the famous distinction between Wertrationalität (value rationality)
and Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality). In
the realm of ethics, the corresponding distinction is
between an ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik), in
which the actor is concerned with doing right in terms
of some absolute standard with little regard for the
consequences of his or her moral choices, and an ethic
of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), in which the
actor is concerned with the actual outcomes of his or
her decisions and actions. The agents who embody
these orientations have a divergent orientation to the

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Rationalization

world (Gesinnung) and are quite different types of
subjects with distinct ways of conducting their lives
(Lebensführung). In brief, they occupy quite different
socially constructed worlds.
At the level of social institutions, instrumental
rationality can be found, in premodern contexts,
within certain religious orders and in military drill
and, in a modern context, in the bureaucratic state
governed by the rule of law and in the capitalist firm.
Weber traces the origins of modern forms of rationality and rational discipline to premodern—almost
“total”—institutions (the cloister and the army):
“Army discipline is the mother’s knee of discipline as
such. The second great educator in discipline is the
large economic enterprise” (Weber 1922/1972, 686).
The institutions that embody instrumental rationality have a mechanical quality and are technically
superior—for example, in terms of efficiency—to
institutions organized along other lines: “The decisive
reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization
was from the start its purely technical superiority
over all other forms” (561). Weber goes on to identify
the technical basis for the superiority of professional
bureaucratic administration, namely, the optimization of “speed, clarity, exact record keeping, continuity, discretion, uniformity, strict subordination,
savings on friction and on material and personnel
costs” (561–562).
At the societal level, the spread of instrumental
rationality is accompanied by “secularization” and
“disenchantment” (Entzauberung). Rule takes the
form of “bureaucratic domination” and is legitimized in legal-rational (as opposed to traditional or
charismatic) terms, that is, with reference to rules and
their uniform and objective application rather than
to persons or sacred custom. The dominant values
and virtues—those that are socially sanctioned and
selected for—are efficiency, self-discipline, responsibility, calculability, reliability, precision, objectivity,
and so on. The leading figures in such societies—for
example, the entrepreneurs and politicians to whom
Weber occasionally ascribed heroic qualities—should
ideally embody to the highest degree that subset of
these virtues appropriate to their vocation (Beruf).
While Weber’s attitude toward rationalization
sometimes appears pessimistic—as in the iron cage
(or rather, steel-hard casing) metaphor that makes its
appearance toward the end of The Protestant Ethic—
as the above quote on bureaucracy and his admiration for those who embody the ethic of responsibility
suggest, he also views rationalization as a necessary

component of modernization: as contributing to a
world in which economy competition between individual capitalists and competition between nations
produces an outward looking attitude, increases
efficiency, and generates economic and/or national
“greatness.”

Critical Theory
Ambivalence toward rationalization—as both constraining and enabling—is largely absent from critical theory, which harnessed the rationalization thesis
to a critique of domination. For Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, the central figures in the
early Frankfurt school, “a technological rationale
is the rationale of domination itself” (1944/1972,
121). From this perspective, Weber’s failure to question the validity of the means-ends distinction and
his argument that socialism can only tighten the grip
of bureaucratic domination by weakening the forces
that, in a liberal capitalist regime, act as a balance
or check on it and align him with the technocratic
and ultimately positivist perspective to which critical
theory was intended to be an alternative.
It is also in critical theory that we first find a
systematic connection being made between rationalization and consumption via the notion of the
“culture industry.” Here, not merely the disciplined
and rationalized production process of the factory
but also mass consumer culture (radio, film, popular
music, and popular entertainment generally) are said
to express the power of technocratic rationality and
lead to “the predominance of the effect, the obvious
touch, and the technical detail over the work itself—
which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated
together with the idea” (Adorno and Horkheimer
1944/1972, 125). Substantive rationality—in this
case the artistic “idea”—becomes subordinated to
technical considerations: to technical aspects of its
reproduction, to effect, to performance in a narrow
sense. By stripping the cultural object of its original
idea (and thus meaning), mass culture can be instrumentalized as a means of reconciliation to a given
reality and art loses what, for Adorno especially, was
its prime function: a by no means comforting critique
of reality and an image of a not yet realized alternative. Mass consumption is, to use a term from a
different context, the “soft power” of a system that is
inherently totalitarian. Not, as for Weber in his more
optimistic moments, liberal capitalism but totalitarianism (extended from the context of European

Rationing

fascism to apply to the logic of capitalism as such) is
taken to be the ultimate expression of rationalization.

Rationalization and Contemporary
Developments in Production
and Consumption
While the contemporary analysis of consumption is a
reaction against the moralism of the critique of mass
consumption (see Rief 2008), the connection between
consumption and rationalization has continued to be a
core concern and appears in a variety of guises. Within
Marxist analysis, the social geographer David Harvey
made the influential argument that the more “flexible
accumulation” of contemporary (“post-Fordist”) capitalism produces spatial and temporal compression,
which blurs the boundary between production and
consumption. Products come to be tailored to “different situations, functions, and ‘taste cultures’” (Harvey
1989, 76). It is no longer the factory and mass production but the service industries and firms whose
production is geared to respond to changes in consumer taste (Benetton was the commonly used example) that came to exemplify capitalist production and
consumption. A similar argument—though cast more
explicitly in the language of rationalization—has been
popularized by sociologist George Ritzer under the
label “McDonaldization.” Whereas Weber’s original
rationalization thesis was applied particularly to the
increasingly rational forms of work in mass production (Fordist) factories (so-called Taylorism), Ritzer
argues that the kinds of rationalization processes
exemplified and refined by McDonald’s and similar
companies can now be found everywhere, from museums to universities, from theaters to publishers of student textbooks.
Recent technological innovations, above all the
Internet, have accelerated the rationalization of consumption by blurring the distinction not only merely
between production and consumption but also
between producers and consumers. The latter are
increasingly being drawn into the production process
whether as individuals who must perform tasks that
were once provided as services (Internet flight booking, e-banking, etc.) or collectively, for example, as
user groups feeding into product design or as “ethical consumers” shaping markets. As another social
geographer, Nigel Thrift, has noted, “Consumers
have become involved in the production of communities around particular commodities which
themselves generate value, by fostering allegiance,

1197

by offering instant feedback and by providing active
interventions in the commodity itself” (2006, 290).
Whereas any form of “self-service” (from pushing
the supermarket cart to Internet shopping) replaces
the labor of the employee with that of the consumer
and can thus be viewed as an embolic form of consumer recruitment into the production process and
further stage of rationalization (see du Gay 2007,
chap. 4), these newer practices take both commodification and rationalization onto a new plane.
Alan Scott
See also Adorno, Theodor; Capitalism; Culture
Industries; Horkheimer, Max; McDonaldization;
Modernization Theory; Weber, Max

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. London:
Verso, 1972. First published 1944.
du Gay, Paul. Organizing Identity: Persons and
Organizations “After Theory.” London: Sage, 2007.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989.
Rief, Silvia. “Outlines of a Critical Sociology of
Consumption: Beyond Moralism and Celebration.”
Blackwell Sociology Compass 2, no. 2 (2008): 560–576.
doi:10.1111/j.1751–9020.2007.00085.x.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: An
Investigation into the Changing Character of
Contemporary Social Life. Rev. ed. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Pine Forge, 1996.
Thrift, Nigel. “Re-Inventing Invention: New Tendencies in
Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35,
no. 2 (2006): 279–306.
Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen,
Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972. First published 1922.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002. First published 1920.

RATIONING
Rationing is commonly understood as the allocation
of a fixed allowance of a commodity such as food,
clothing, or fuel to consumers by their government
during times of war or shortage, although economists
use the term as a synonym for resource allocation.
The popular notion is closely associated with civilian
experiences during World War I (1914–1918) and

1198

Rationing

World War II (1939–1945) when war induced shortages forced belligerent and neutral states to ration
essential and semiessential consumer goods. Although
the methods employed closely resemble those used to
distribute famine or disaster relief, rationing implies
that the community coping with shortages, and not
an external agency or authority, organizes its own
supplies and distributes them. Consumer rationing
has two purposes: the equitable distribution of scarce
goods and when combined with price controls as it
usually is, the restraint of inflation. The distribution
of rationed goods obtained outside official channels
is labeled black market and subject to legal sanction.

Origins of an Idea
The modern notion of rationing can be traced to
the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870–1871. The Prussian Army invested Paris in
September 1870, lifting the siege four months later.
With supplies cut and calls from the left for the introduction of requisitioning and rationing, the national
and municipal governments took steps to control the
distribution of food, fixing food prices and then requisitioning wheat, flour, cattle, and horses before rationing civilian consumption of meat and finally bread.
There was nothing new about the Parisian rationing system. The book of Ezekiel, thought to have
been written between 593 and 571 BCE, records the
prophet enacting the siege of Jerusalem and surviving
on food and water rations. When under prolonged
siege, city-states could, and sometimes did, ration the
entire urban population and not just the urban poor,
but this was rare. If a siege seemed likely, then a town’s
garrison was more likely to expel “useless mouths.”
There are few instances of rural and urban communities, as opposed to individuals and households,
rationing themselves during famines and in the wake
of natural disasters. Such events overwhelmed smallscale communities who could not draw on resources
from outside the effected area. A community’s chances
of survival depended on membership of larger imagined communities to whom it could appeal for aid.
Military, naval, and civilian expeditions practiced rationing too, determining the volume of supplies necessary to sustain an expedition for a given
period of time. There was nothing new in Napoleon
Bonaparte’s much quoted observation that “an army
marches on its stomach.” In fact, the logistics of food
supply had always been central to military treatises.
American and European expeditions to the polar

regions, the greater ranges, and other remote destinations drew on this expertise. For this reason, the
organizing committee of the British Everest expedition of 1953 appointed the army staff officer John
Hunter, a climber of moderate ability, as expedition
leader over the mountaineer Eric Shipton, who had
led the earlier reconnaissance expeditions.
What was new about rationing in besieged Paris
during 1870–1871 was the way in which the experience was understood and the number of people
being rationed. Besieged political economists, such
as Gustave de Molinari, and foreign commentators
thought about the problem in terms of supply and
demand, providing the intellectual justification for
price fixing and rationing by showing that without
these measures the poor would starve as the wealthy
drove the price of basic foodstuffs upward. Although
this analysis of food supply under siege had no lasting impact on the political economy of war, which
continued to concern itself with issues of war finance,
it refamiliarized Europeans with the idea of rationing
and popularized the term, which entered the English
vernacular around this time. Thirty years later, the
sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking during the Second
Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) underlined the importance of civilian rationing while reinforcing the view
that it was only of relevance as an emergency measure
in besieged urban areas. These experiences ensured
that there was a vocabulary of rationing to be mobilized by the combatants once the military planners’
vision of a short war of movement evaporated.
On the eve of World War I, European military
planners failed to recognize the importance of this
historical precedent. The British planned to impose
a continental blockade, much as they did during the
Napoleonic wars, but trusting in the Royal Navy did
not anticipate their own supplies being reduced or
cut. German strategists planned for a short war of
movement on two fronts. There would be no need
to conserve and ration supplies. Rationing continued
to be viewed as an emergency measure for provisioning urban areas coping with local shortages in
essential goods. As a consequence, central governments empowered local and regional authorities to
introduce rationing. The inadequacies of this system
forced administrators to realize the need for an integrated system of consumer controls at national level.
This administrative experience established a pattern that policymakers elaborated on during World
War II. Prompted by their experiences during World
War II, North American and British economists

Rationing

developed a body of microeconomic theory about
rationing during the 1940s. There was a revival of
interest in rationing theory from the 1970s onward
when economists recognized its relevance to public
and environmental economics, fix-price macroeconomics, and international trade quotas.
Outside of wartime, communist and socialist states used rationing to cope with intended and
unintended shortages of consumer goods throughout
the twentieth century. Here, we can discern a second
legacy of the Siege of Paris: the experience convinced
Communards and students of Paris Commune, such
as the Bolsheviks, that consumer rationing could permanently replace rationing by the purse. This provided a useful justification for Stalin’s reintroduction
of rationing during the period from 1929 to 1935,
the real purpose of which was to cope with food
shortages caused by collectivization and to redirect
resources from consumption to investment during
a crash program of industrialization. For similar
reasons, the Chinese communists introduced urban
rationing in 1955 during the Great Leap Forward.
Here, urban rationing continued until 1993 and continues to be used as a way to cope with occasional
shortages of basic goods at a local level.
During the 1990s, rationing became a live issue
in North America and Western Europe once more.
Policymakers concerned by rapidly increasing healthrelated expenditure attempted to control costs by
rationing health care—the first and most important
extension of the idea to cover social goods. Their
attempts to do so prompted medical professionals
to make explicit the allocative principles that had
long been implicit in health care provision. In countries with socialized health care, such as the United
Kingdom, the impetus was to limit public expenditure
while maintaining a high standard of care. In countries where private health care provision was more
important, such as the United States, the pressure for
reform came from those advocating affordable health
care for all. The resultant debates prompted experts
to consider what essential, semiessential, and nonessential services meant in a health care context before
considering who should deliver them and how those
defined as social goods should be rationed.

The Why and How of Rationing
As a policy instrument, rationing when combined with
price controls and subsidies prevents shortages creating an inflationary spiral that prices the poor out of

1199

the market for goods. It allows the rationing authority to direct scarce goods to those who need them.
There are three types of rationing, quasi-rationing,
coupon rationing, and permit rationing, the most
familiar of which are coupon and permit rationing.
Quasi-rationing or priority rationing is an officially
sanctioned version of under-the-counter favoritism.
The rationing authority determines who has first call
on available supplies. Permit rationing and coupon
rationing are more sophisticated. Under permit rationing, consumers apply for a buying permit to purchase
a fixed amount of a rationed good. Consumption is a
privilege and not a right. It is the most draconian form
of rationing and, due to hassle and uncertainty associated with making an application, has the effect of dissuading any but the neediest from applying. Coupon
rationing is more egalitarian. The rationing authority
issues all consumers with a number of coupons that
allows them to purchase up to a fixed amount of a
rationed good. The coupon is an entitlement. This
entitlement might vary between groups of consumers
and as such provides an interesting insight into a society’s ideas about distributive justice.
There are three principal varieties of coupon
rationing, the most familiar form of rationing:
specific or straight rationing of an individual commodity; group rationing of a related basket of commodities, often by points; and general or expenditure
rationing. General rationing of purchasing power
by issuing a second coupon currency has never been
attempted. The U.S. Federal Food Stamp scheme
and its equivalent in Sri Lanka are the closest thing
to general rationing. Straight rationing and group
rationing schemes have been used frequently since
World War I. Group rationing by points, or points
rationing, gained in popularity during World War II.
Originally a German idea, British economists developed the concept, instituting a comprehensive points
rationing scheme for clothes and footwear in 1941.
Under the scheme, the British government issued
points to consumers that they could spend on a range
of goods within the scheme. The government set the
points value of these goods. Consequently, overall
consumption could be fixed while allowing consumers a modicum of choice. This became the preferred
approach to rationing and is the model behind proposed schemes for personal carbon rationing.
In theory, rationing shouldn’t work, but it has
and does. Given that no state has possessed or possesses the resources to enforce consumer regulations
in the face of public opposition and assuming that

1200

Reality TV

consumers are rational and self-interested economic
agents, black marketeering should be widespread
and rationing schemes short-lived. Although there
is evidence of black market activity under all forms
of rationing, these illegal markets never realize their
full potential. Also, many schemes have proved surprisingly durable. The likelihood and costs of being
caught, the lack of opportunity, and the paucity of
information go some way to explaining this surprising
fact. This can be seen most in the history of British
black market activity after World War II when there
was no patriotic imperative to obey the regulations.
Ultimately, the success of postwar British rationing
schemes rested on public consent. This was contingent
on official entitlements being roughly in line with popular notions of distributive justice; the invocation of
these notions in propaganda, which forced consumers
to justify their black market dealings in these terms;
and the schemes being seen to be administered fairly.
Mark Roodhouse
See also Luxury Taxes; Moral Economy; Scarcity;
Smuggling and Black Markets; Socialism and
Consumption; State Provisioning; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings
Bradbury, Jim. The Medieval Siege. Woodbridge, UK:
Boydell & Brewer, 1992.
Chickering, Roger. The Great War and Urban Life in
Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster, eds. Great War, Total
War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front,
1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
De Molinari, Gustave. “L’alimentation de Paris pendant le
Siège.” Revue des deux mondes, January 1, 1871.
Gao, X. M., E. J. Wailes, and G. L. Cramer. “Partial
Rationing and Chinese Urban Household Food Demand
Analysis.” Journal of Comparative Economics 22, no. 1
(1996): 43–62.
Hessler, Julie. A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade
Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Milward, Alan S. War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Neary, J. Peter. “Rationing.” In The New Palgrave: A
Dictionary of Economics, edited by John Eatwell,
Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, vol. 4, pp. 92–96.
4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Roodhouse, Mark. “Popular Morality and the Black
Market in Britain, 1939–55.” In Food and Conflict in
Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, edited by
Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Winter, Jay, and Robert, Jean-Louis, eds. Capital Cities at
War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.

REALITY TV
The genre currently known as reality television
emerged with the broadcast of the first series of Big
Brother in the Netherlands in 1999. The concept
merged audience surveillance and manipulation of
participants, or “housemates,” and the celebrification
of the ordinary (made celebrities out of the ordinary)
as the content consists of the nominally routine activities of nonactors. While broadcast media includes a
long history of consumer involvement and the incorporation of the everyday into entertainment, reality
TV introduced new production methods and direct
consumer participation. These new patterns of production and consumption persist through variations
such as the Idol and Top Model programs over time
and have been adopted on a global scale through local
syndication. Theoretical implications of these developments draw in theories of surveillance, democracy,
celebrity, and culture as the expectations and practices
of consumption intersect with concurrent technological developments.
Boundaries between media space and ordinary
space have long been blurred, as consuming audience members have appeared on television in crowd
shots, vox pop segments, game and talk shows, and
live studio audiences. The contemporary Funniest
Home Videos has its origins in Candid Camera, first
broadcast in the United States in the late 1940s, and
talk and game shows have gradually increased studio
audience participation. There are two primary differences between these incidental appearances of the
ordinary and orchestrated audience participation and
reality TV. The first is a shift in production values,
which elevates the ordinary and creates the appearance of the democratization of televised entertainment. Graeme Turner describes this as the demotic
turn, emphasizing the misleading nature of production methods that exploit the cultural value of fame
and celebrity. The second is the nature of audience

Reality TV

participation in the form of voting, with complex
ramifications beyond the phenomenon of reality TV.
For example, voting for reality TV contestants is the
first experience of democracy for Chinese consumers, and text messaging with mobile phones was
uncommon in the United States before reality TV
encouraged its use. Both shifts are profit driven, as
one reduces production costs and exploits product
placement while the other generates profits through
partnerships with telecommunications companies.
The recruitment of nonactor members of the
public represents a production cost saving as the
remuneration of professional actors is replaced by
the award of sponsored prizes and the promise of
fame for contestants. Settings such as the Big Brother
house offer product placement opportunities, and
the selection and elimination of contestants can be
incorporated into the content, such as the audition
segments common in the early phases of many series.
These selection processes can represent considerable
savings, particularly where several episodes consist
of video auditions produced by potential contestants. Televised selection processes contribute to the
appearance of the democratization of entertainment,
while continuing to discriminate on the grounds of
photogenic and personality qualities. The cultural
desirability of fame and celebrity ensures the supply
of “talent” while the phenomenon of reality TV itself
perpetuates the impression that fame is a realistic
expectation.
Winning contestants are routinely offered prizes
in the form of recording contracts, broadcast appearances, or other promotional activities beyond the
series; however, these rarely evolve into careers.
Promotional exercises using winners rarely extend to
the next season, let alone beyond. With a new season,
a celebrity series, or the production of a new reality TV concept, consumer attention turns to a new
aspect of ordinariness, and the promise of celebrity is
extended to a new round of contestants.
The regular televised appearance of ordinariness
converts the everyday into content for consumption,
while elevating it into the extraordinary space of
media. Stephen Coleman draws on Michel Foucault
to argue that consumers become the instruments of
their own surveillance, particularly with reference to
the 24-hour surveillance of Big Brother housemates,
which normalizes the monitoring of private space.
The sinister aspects of Big Brother in George Orwell’s
novel 1984 are subsumed as contestants modify their

1201

behavior to meet the normative requirements of the
voting audience. Consumers thereby shape content
while contributing to the behavioral norms of untelevised private space, as behavior deemed unacceptable
in a domestic setting is punished with elimination from
the show. Coleman also notes the much larger proportion of votes cast in reality TV finals than in democratic elections. Similar observations have been made
in several democratic countries with voluntary voting
systems, opening new avenues of research in disciplines
not usually concerned with consumer culture.
Consumer participation in the form of voting
for contestants is only nominally democratic, however. Telecommunications companies profit from
text message and phone votes, which are generally
priced at higher rates than person-to-person communications. There is no limit on the number of
times a single participant can vote, and voting does
not have the potential to affect the conditions of life
beyond the current series. Reality TV was responsible for a shift in the behaviors of mobile phone use
in the United States and has offered a gateway to the
Internet through interactive and participatory elements of program websites. However, its impact on
other aspects of consumer culture are contestable.
Both Nick Couldry and Graeme Turner take a
critical perspective and theorize a connection between
broadcast ordinariness, the desirability of celebrity, and the do-it-yourself celebrity potential of the
Internet. Given access to the means of production
and the cultural value of fame generated partly by
reality TV, the production of mediated selves seen in
YouTube videos and Facebook profiles are understood to be related to the consumption of televised
ordinariness. With a focus on cultures of participation, Henry Jenkins argues the opposite. A case study
of “spoilers” found an online network of Survivor
fans working to identify the winning contestant
before the series final went on air. Their efforts were
so successful in earlier series that the producers were
forced to modify plans for later series, and a modicum of incidental fame accrued to the higher profile
spoilers that outlasted the fame of contestants in the
earlier series.
The long-established participatory aspects of
consumer cultures find a logical extension in reality TV, which requires consumers to participate as
content and to participate in the shaping of series
narratives. While one theoretical perspective finds
consumers falling victim to their own involvement

1202

Reception Theory

in surveillance and contestants being exploited for
profit, another views these as gateways to the means
of production and consumer participation working to undermine the previously privileged areas of
production. Both blur the distinction between production and consumption, as does reality TV itself.
When considering these perspectives, it is worthwhile
noting that the most successful reality TV series
rarely lasts more than a few seasons before consumer
numbers fall and producers are forced to devise new
shows based on different aspects of the ordinary,
from home improvement to cooking to grooming
and deportment. Given this consideration, consumption shapes the reality of reality TV more than reality
TV shapes patterns of consumption.
Lyn Calcutt
See also Broadcast Media; Celebrity; Consumer Behavior;
Fans; Mass Observation; Opinion Polls; Soap Operas
and Telenovelas; Television

Further Readings
Coleman, Stephen. “From Big Brother to Big Brother.” In
Young Citizens and New Media: Learning for
Democratic Participation, edited by Peter Dahlgren.
New York: Routledge, 2007.
Couldry, Nick. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach.
London: Routledge, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. New York: Random House, 1977.
Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual
Television. London: Routledge, 2005.
Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring
Participatory Culture. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.
Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage,
2004.

RECEPTION THEORY
Reception theory emphasizes the active role played
by the spectator in constructing and interpreting the
meaning of a text. In contrast to theories that understand the audience as passive, simply absorbing the
meanings and messages embedded in a text, reception
theorists argue that meaning emerges processually
in the interaction between the text and the socially
situated audience. Thus, through qualitative methodology, such as ethnography and in-depth interviewing, reception scholars seek to capture the concrete

ways in which audiences make sense of texts within a
particular historical and cultural context. Reception
theory is difficult to characterize, as it is interdisciplinary in origin and broad and diffuse in practice,
embracing many of the methodological and theoretical commitments of the Chicago school of sociology
and often defining itself in opposition to mainstream
mass communication research. Additionally, the
terms reception and consumption are often used
synonymously in the literature as most cultural texts
and objects are also commodities, bought and sold
on the market, and therefore must be consumed to
be received. Nonetheless, reception studies can be
loosely situated within two theoretical traditions
in the study of culture: British cultural studies and
American cultural studies and literary theory.

Theoretical Traditions
In the explicitly Marxist British tradition, which developed from the 1960s onward, theorists, most notably
Stuart Hall, view cultural texts as sites of political
struggle through which powerful groups encode texts
with dominant understandings of reality and thereby
attempt to legitimate the existing “institutional/political/ideological order” (Hall 1980/2002, 113). In this
tradition, the meanings and messages encoded in a
text are not transmitted seamlessly in the linear form
of “sender/message/receiver” (107). Instead, the
reception of a text is characterized as relatively autonomous from its production in the sense that there is
no guarantee that the audience will decode the text
as it was intended; rather, through discourse, meaning is continuously negotiated and contested. While
the encoding of a text certainly limits the range of
interpretations of a text, Hall stresses that communication is not a “perfectly equivalent circuit” (114) but
a process in which audiences can create negotiated or
even oppositional readings of texts. These alternate
readings are likely to occur when the contradictions
between the dominant ideology and the lived experience of a viewer are made visible, thus prompting the
viewer to deconstruct a message’s preferred code and
reconstruct the meaning within an alternative frame
of reference. Production and reception are thus two
linked but distinct moments in a political struggle
over discourse in which subordinate groups can, to
some degree, actively resist ideological domination.
On the other hand, the American cultural studies
and literary tradition was born of an interest in popular texts that appeal to a mass audience. Beginning in

Reception Theory

the 1970s, scholars in this vein shifted the focus of literary theory from the abstract, aesthetic criteria used
by elites to judge high culture to a reader-oriented
approach that took the experience of everyday consumers of popular culture into account. This initial
interest in the experience of readers has broadened
to include consumers of many forms of popular
culture, but scholars in this field remain united in
the belief that accessing the full meaning of cultural
objects—particularly those that are understood to
be low in status—requires understanding the subjective experience of the audience within a particular
time and place. This reader-oriented approach has
inspired many empirical studies of audience reception. In Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,
and Popular Literature, for example, Janice Radway
challenges the widely held belief that readers of
romance novels are passive dupes who simply absorb
the patriarchal messages embedded in these low
status texts. Ethnographically examining how real
women use and make sense of these texts in their
social contexts, she finds that for these women, the
act of reading itself symbolizes an escape from their
social roles as wives and mothers in which they are
expected to emotionally and physically nurture their
family members, often putting their families’ needs
before their own. Thus, simply claiming private
time to read “connotes a free space where they feel
liberated from the need to perform duties that they
otherwise accept as their own” (1984, 93). Radway
labels romance reading as “compensatory literature”
(95), a thoughtful and even resistant act that enables
women to temporarily deny the social obligations
placed on them by systems of gender inequality. Yet,
Radway concludes, romance reading does not unambiguously challenge traditional and unequal gender
roles because the heroines of these texts embody the
traits readers want to escape, namely, passivity and
dependence on men. In this seminal study of reception, Radway illustrates how personal, private acts
of reading take place within a wider political context.
While Radway writes from an American cultural
studies tradition, her work overlaps with British
cultural studies in its examination of how subordinate groups actively use culture both to resist and to
reproduce dominant ideology and practices. Indeed,
most empirical studies of reception blur the boundaries between these two theoretical trajectories,
examining how gender, class, race and ethnicity, and
nationality shape reader reception within particular
cultural and institutional frameworks. Fusing British

1203

cultural studies’ emphasis on the active, resistant
subject; models of cultural hegemony; and a growing interest in popular culture, one seminal work—
Andrea Press’s Women Watching Television—draws
on in-depth interviews with working- and middleclass female audiences from different generations to
understand the relationship between television viewing and gender identity. She finds that class and gender influence the types of criteria that women employ
to evaluate television in complex ways. For instance,
whereas working-class women understand televised
depictions of middle-class life as realistic and normal,
the middle-class women know from their own experiences that they are not; as a result, working-class
women often feel that their own experiences did not
meet societal definitions of a normal life. In the same
way, working-class women are less likely to identify
with the images of women on television, whereas
middle-class women defend and identify with them
in a positive way. Thus, working-class women use
class-based criteria to evaluate television, whereas
middle-class women pay more attention to gender,
showing how differently situated audiences activate
different aspects of their identities to make meaning
out of texts.

Research Approaches
Additionally, scholars have highlighted how the
meaning of race within a particular text is not predetermined but instead varies for viewers according to
context. JoEllen Shively, for instance, examines how
different social groups consume and appropriate
dominant culture. Shively surveyed and conducted
focus groups with white Americans, which she
termed “Anglos,” Native Americans living on reservations, and Native American college students to
compare their interpretations of the popular Western
film The Searchers. While she initially hypothesized
that people would understand movies based on their
cultural backgrounds, she finds that all of her respondents, regardless of background, liked Westerns
and identified with their heroes; however, Native
Americans found these movies meaningful because
of the fantasy of freedom and the familiar landscape
represented within them, whereas Anglos made sense
of these films as authentic portrayals of their own
pasts. Thus, while both groups interpreted the films
through the lens of their own situations—their value
conflicts, their ideals, and their ways of life—they did
not do so based simply on their ethnic identity. Only

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Reception Theory

the Native American college students, whose education and exposure to white society heightened their
ethnic awareness, critiqued Westerns for their false
portrayal of history.
Another important study of the relationship
between race and reception is Darnell Hunt’s “Raced
Ways of Seeing.” Hunt studied the reactions of different racial groups to the news coverage of the 1992
Rodney King case and the riots that erupted after the
verdict. Theorizing race as an emergent rather than
essential identity—that is, people are located within
a multitude of social categories that gain and lose
salience depending on the specific context—Hunt
finds that race, as opposed to gender or social class,
served as the primary identity from which different
groups received the events in question. In this study,
white racial groups were generally passive in their
reception of the media coverage of these events,
agreeing with the media’s depiction of reality; in their
dominant social position, whites felt disconnected
from the events and did not see them as personally
salient. Black viewers, on the other hand, were more
animated when watching the coverage, questioning
the assumptions embedded in the text, drawing on
past experience that had taught them to view race as
the most important lens through which to interpret
the events, and working to affirm racial solidarity.
Thus, Hunt illustrates that racial ways of seeing are
not inevitable; instead, particular contexts activate
particular identities, expectations, and solidarities at
the microlevel, which in turn reproduce power relations at the macrolevel.
Reception scholars also study cross-cultural variation in reception. For example, sociologist Wendy
Griswold compared the reception of the fiction of
Barbadian novelist George Lamming among readers from three cultures: the West Indies, Britain, and
the United States. Bridging production and reception,
Griswold argues that the meaning of a text emerges
primarily through the interaction between two factors:
the socially shared presuppositions of the audience and
the capacity of a text to engender multiple meanings
while retaining coherence. Because Lamming’s works
have both clarity and multivocality—allowing readers to agree on the major themes of the works while
simultaneously sustaining multiple interpretations—
readers were able to interpret his work through the
lenses of their own cultural preoccupations: race for
the American readers, literary qualities for the British,
and issues of identity for the West Indies Indians.

Thus, she grants both the cultural object and its social
reception relative autonomy, not reducing one to the
other, but instead calling for further research on their
interaction. This study, which drew on reviews of
Lamming’s work, sparked a methodological controversy when Norman Denzin argued that her theory
reified qualities in cultural objects and conceptualized
meanings as static, abstract, and extractable, rather
than contextual, processual, and indeterminate. In
response, Griswold proposed that sociologists interested in reception adopt “a provisional, provincial
positivism” (1990, 1581) that treats meaning as
somewhat discoverable; otherwise, there could be no
intellectual research or debate.
Additionally, reception scholars have addressed
the ongoing debate over American imperialism in
television and film. Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, for
example, explored the global export and reception
of American popular culture, asking whether viewers in Israel, the United States, and Japan understood
the same episode of the television show Dallas in the
same way. Rather than assume that texts imprint
messages on viewers in a homogeneous way, the
researchers found that decoding entails a process of
audience negotiation, in which the text activates different types of responses in different social groups:
the more traditional groups tended to view the program moralistically, while the more Western groups
viewed the program critically, focusing more on the
construction of the narrative than on its depiction of
reality. Katz and Liebes conclude that debates over
American imperialism need to be recontextualized,
arguing that in the absence of local television programs, American shows could be valuable resources
for those who import them in the sense that these programs can stimulate cultural negotiation, criticism,
and even political struggle among active audiences.
A different theoretical trajectory has investigated
the reception and consumption of high cultural
objects in their relationship to the reproduction
of social inequality. In his groundbreaking work
Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the tensions of modern capitalism are played out through
consumption rather than production. He draws on
survey data collected from different occupational
segments of the French population concerning cultural tastes and practices. Creating a map of lifestyle
categories, Bourdieu argues that there is a particular,
and class based, habitus that is expressed through
the ways in which people consume. In this analysis,

Reception Theory

power is conceptualized as the ability to classify culture, to define what is legitimate, and to create hierarchies based on consumption that appear natural
and, in turn, naturalize inequality. Bourdieu has been
criticized by sociologists such as Michele Lamont,
who found that in the American context, involvement with and consumption of high cultural objects
does not necessarily translate into the maintenance
of social inequality, concluding that Bourdieu exaggerated the class boundaries of consumption. Other
scholars studying the relationship between class
boundaries and consumption in the American context include Herbert Gans and Richard Peterson.
On a related note, scholarly and public debate
over the commodification of childhood has led to
studies of the ways in which people of different ages
and social classes use cultural objects as symbolic
markers of social belonging rather than social status.
Studying children’s consumption through in-depth
interviewing and ethnography, sociologist Allison
Pugh addresses the widely held public belief that
lower-class parents buy material goods for children
because they cannot resist persuasive advertising or
delay material gratification. She finds, however, that
while children’s consumption takes place within a
larger context of inequality and mass marketing, children understand cultural products such as Nintendo
Game Boys as symbols of social membership in their
peer cultures; thus, parents buy for their children
because the need for social belonging trumps financial concerns. Pugh concludes that public debates
over the growing commodification of childhood and
the spending habits of low income families must take
into account the powerful meanings attached to consumption for children and their families.
On a larger scale, the role of consumption in
American politics has also been a subject of inquiry.
Tracing the development of American consumer
culture, historian Lizabeth Cohen shows that after
World War II, merchants and advertisers moved
away from treating consumers as a homogeneous
group, seeking instead to “identify clusters of customers with distinctive ways of life and then set out
to sell them idealized lifestyles constructed around
commodities” (Cohen 2003, 299). Target marketing both reflected and indeed created particular
consumption patterns, defined not only by material
goods but also by cultural frameworks for how to
live. Cohen argues that Americans are currently in a
market relationship with the government, in which

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competing consumer groups act politically on behalf
of private rather than public interest, raising questions concerning the viability of democracy in a
nation fragmented by consumer interest.

Current Research
Clearly, the field of reception is broad and interdisciplinary, linking literary theory, culture, anthropology,
sociology, history, communications, and consumption studies. The field is united, however, in the belief
that understanding the reception of a cultural text,
whether in the form of books, television, movies,
music, or commodities, requires grasping the process
through which socially positioned audiences draw on
existing identities and knowledge within a particular
time and place to make meaning. Reception scholars
view meaning as emergent rather than static, asking
how the social location of the audience, in terms of
class, gender, race and ethnicity, or nationality, influences the way in which it interprets a text. Furthermore,
these scholars question the ways in which reception
and consumption both reproduce and resist existing
social hierarchies under capitalism. Currently, research
in the field is examining how global media industries
and new forms of communication—particularly the
Internet—change not only the ways in which audiences participate in both the production and reception
of cultural texts but also the very definition of what
constitutes a text in the first place. Additionally, cultural studies scholars have begun to shift from a focus
on how audiences reproduce and resist dominant ideology through popular culture to an examination of
how they use this cultural form to make sense of contemporary moral dilemmas (Illouz 2003).
Jennifer M. Silva
See also Audience Research; Broadcast Media;
Communication Studies; Cultural Studies; Cultural
Turn; Gender and the Media; Social Class

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Post-War America. New York:
Alfred Knopf, 2003.
Denzin, Norman K. “Reading Cultural Texts: Comment on
Griswold.” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990):
1577–1580.

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Recreation

Gans, Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture. New
York: Basic Books, 1974.
Griswold, Wendy. “The Fabrication of Meaning: A Third
World Writer’s Three Worlds.” American Journal of
Sociology 92 (1987): 1077–1117.
Griswold, Wendy. “A Provisional, Provincial Positivism:
Reply to Denzin.” American Journal of Sociology 95
(1990): 1580–1583.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media,
Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson,
Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–138. London:
Routledge, 2002. First published 1980.
Hunt, Darnell. “Raced Ways of Seeing.” In Cultural
Sociology, edited by Lyn Spillman, 120–128. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002. First published 1997.
Illouz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Katz, Elihu, and Tamar Liebes. The Export of Meaning:
Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Lamont, Michele. Money, Morals, and Manners: The
Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle
Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Peterson, Richard. “Understanding Audience Segmentation:
From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore.”
Poetics 21 (1992): 243–258.
Press, Andrea. Women Watching Television: Gender, Class,
and Generation in the American Television Experience.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Press, Andrea. “The Sociology of Cultural Reception: Notes
toward an Emerging Paradigm.” In Sociology of
Culture, edited by Diana Crane, 221–245. Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell, 1994.
Pugh, Allison J. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children,
and Consumer Culture. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,
and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1984.
Shively, JoEllen. “Cowboys and Indians: Perceptions of
Western Films among American Indians and Anglos.”
American Sociological Review 57 (1992): 725–734.

RECREATION
Recreation is a term applied to approved uses of leisure and ways of spending free time. Recreation (the
concept) belongs to a family of words. Its relatives
include games, play, sports, leisure, pastimes, arts,
and hobbies. Today, recreation as a concept is in the
doldrums. Academics have decided implicitly that

the term has ceased to do useful work. They rarely
use it, except when writing about times past or as a
value-neutral descriptor of particular sets of leisure
activities, mainly physical recreation and outdoor
recreation. Politicians rarely use the term recreation
in their speeches, and public agencies rarely have it
in their titles. They prefer to associate conceptually
(and ideologically) with sports, the arts, heritage,
and culture. Commerce does not use recreation in its
advertising. Organizations that retain recreation in
their titles thereby signal that they are rather old and
possibly old fashioned. The U.K. Central Council for
Physical Recreation (originally the Central Council
for Physical Training) was founded in 1935. The
U.S. National Recreation and Parks Association was
established in 1965. The World Leisure Organization
was originally (when formed in 1952) called the
World Leisure and Recreation Association.

Recreation in the Premodern Age
In the preindustrial, predominantly rural age, recreations were juxtaposed to pastimes. The latter (a game
of cards, for example) simply passed (and possibly
wasted) time. Pastimes could be useful but only in limited ways. They enabled people to relax and refresh.
They could amuse and divert minds from worry, sadness, and solemnity. Pastimes safeguarded against
boredom. Recreations did more than this. They did not
simply restore minds and bodies to their former condition. Recreations were improving. In medieval Europe,
jousting and archery were useful: they improved skills
that would be valuable in warfare. Hunting developed
skills of horsemanship. Arts and crafts honed skills that
could be used in industry, trade, and commerce.
Recreations are games at which people play.
Games have rules that define the field and other limits
of play—the tactics that can be used and any time
limits. The rules set games apart from the rest of life.
Games can be challenging, and simultaneously, they
can be fun. When playing games, people can take
risks. Defeat in an archery contest may be disappointing, but the costs are minor compared with defeat in a
real military battle.
In premodern times, people could engage in recreation when their work was done. Holy days (holidays), fair days, and feast days were occasions that
could be devoted to recreation. Improving forms of
play were encouraged by monarchs and their representatives. Success in recreation earned status and
prizes. Recreation was considered preferable to the

Recreation

tavern (a popular alternative). Thus, the meaning of
recreation was fixed long before the first countries to
do so industrialized and became predominantly urban.

Recreation in Industrial Society
The preexisting meaning of recreation survived into
the Industrial Age, though in most other respects the
changes associated with industrialization were revolutionary. There was a new rhythm of work and leisure. In industry, people worked according to clock
time, mechanical time, rather than according to the
seasons and other rhythms of nature. Work, as generally understood (that is, not including unpaid tasks
in households and elsewhere), was removed from
homes and moved into factories, mines, and offices.
The new organization of daily, weekly, and annual
life created leisure as a separate part of life, available to everyone not just a leisure class, where leisure
activities were not thoroughly interwoven into life in
general. Leisure became separate, one’s own time, in
the evenings, on weekends, and during holidays.
In the new Industrial Age, the distinction actually
hardened between wholesome, improving types of
recreation, and undesirable uses of free time (drinking, gambling, animal fights, and sexual impropriety). In nineteenth-century Britain, there was
a rational recreation movement led by representatives of churches, leaders of local authorities, and a
variety of voluntary associations. The term rational
recreation was specific to Britain, but there were
similar movements in all industrializing countries,
including the Soviet Union. The mission of rational
recreation was to civilize the urban masses. The
visions of nineteeth-century city planners are evident
in their legacies: parks, art galleries, libraries, concert halls, museums, and playing fields. The modern
sports that were invented in the nineteenth-century
were part of the drive for rational recreation and
so were new forms of outdoor recreation—hiking,
cycling, and, for the more affluent, mountaineering and skiing. Sports was considered especially
meritorious. Young males (girls were considered to
need a different, feminine kind of social education)
could learn about teamwork, leadership, disciplined
effort, how to win magnanimously, and how to lose
gracefully while vowing to improve and eventually to triumph. Education, in evening classes, was
regarded as an eminently desirable use of free time.
Hobbies—breeding pigeons or whippets or collecting things such as stamps and coins—were also

1207

considered beneficial. Church attendance, of course,
was exemplary. The youth movements that were
formed strove to involve young people in improving
uses of their free time lest the devil be allowed to
make work for idle hands.
At that time, recreation was promoted and
catered for primarily by voluntary associations and
government bodies. Moreover, these organizations
promoted only uses of free time that were meant
to be improving. Commerce was the enemy, and
in the early Industrial Age, commerce offered little
except light entertainment and in particular the pub
and the music hall. All that was regarded as good
and improving was not-for-profit. When broadcasting commenced, first by radio, which was joined
later by television, public service broadcasting was
noncommercial. Some countries, including Britain,
decided that commerce could not be trusted with this
new medium, and in 1927, the British Broadcasting
Corporation was given a monopoly.
However, by the end of the nineteenth century,
commerce was already widening its menu. It was
creating a holiday industry. Then, between the wars,
commerce introduced movies and the dance hall,
recorded music, and the beginnings of mass motoring. The world of leisure was changing.

Recreation Since the Mid-Twentieth Century
Since World War II, recreation has lost its former
status as a distinct and especially worthy set of leisure activities. The causes and processes have been
complex, but at their root lies the commercial sector,
which has been steadily expanding and broadening
its offer:
• The cinema has adapted to the age of television.
• The recorded music industry expanded hugely
during the second half of the twentieth century.
• Commercial broadcasters have been licensed to
operate under public service rules. However, all
over the world, most radio and television
broadcasting is now commercial, wholly
financed by advertisements and subscriptions.
• Tourism has become one of the world’s largest
industries.
• Commerce has developed “attractions”: pleasure
beaches, theme parks, gardens, buildings, and
sites of historical interest, even museums.
• Commerce has become a significant provider in
the participant sports market. Commerce always

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Recreation

produced sports clothing and equipment. It now
operates health and fitness gyms, tennis, squash,
and clubs offering additional sports.
• The disco/club scene has replaced the older
dance hall.
• Computer games have been added to older
board and table games.
• The Internet enables providers of cultural
products to operate outside terrestrial control.

Even more significant, commerce has become a
partner in voluntary and public sector leisure provisions. Arts and sports events seek (and receive) commercial sponsorship. Such sponsorship has become a
crucial part of the budgets for major events such as
the Olympic Games.
As the leisure industries have grown in size, local
and national governments have increasingly looked
to these industries to regenerate their economies,
typically in a context of employment declining in
older manufacturing and extractive industries. In this
process, governments have become not just tolerant
but keen supporters of leisure provisions that were
once considered of dubious value if not totally undesirable. Gambling is a prime example. Several countries and cities now license casinos to boost visitor
numbers and employment in their territories. Indeed,
many governments are now gambling promoters
with state lotteries generating funds for good causes
that governments are unable or unwilling to fund
through taxation.
Alongside and partly as a consequence of these
developments, the public has become less deferential, less willing to accept that governments and other
self-appointed guardians of standards know best.
Consumers are sovereign in commercial markets,
and as populations have grown more affluent, they
have become able not just to demand but to get what
they want. Affluent consumers can reject the entire
offers of the public and voluntary sectors if they wish
and satisfy their tastes within the commercial leisure
market. One response by the voluntary and public
sectors has been to compete, which has meant acting
as if they were commercial providers.
Finally, the rational recreation movement was a
failure. Having failed to “civilize” the urban masses,
by World War I the middle classes were in full flight
to the suburbs. Despite generous state patronage in
Britain, today, the audience for high culture is no

larger as a proportion of the population, and its
social composition is just as skewed (in favor of the
well educated) as in the 1920s.
Thus, older recreations have merged into the
wider leisure industries. As this has happened, the
term recreation has become less prominent than
other members of its family of concepts. Recreation
has become a value-neutral descriptor of particular
forms of leisure—mainly physical recreation and
outdoor recreation. Governments today support
the arts, sports, national heritage, and so forth, and
do so in partnership with the voluntary sector or
commerce, with little questioning as to whether
what is being supported has distinctly recreational
value.
Most of the old recreations remain alive and well.
Voluntary associations are as active as ever, still run
by enthusiasts, true believers who “know” that they
have the recipe for enhancing the quality of life.
Governments still tax “sin” and subsidize uses of
leisure of which they approve. Sometimes, an aim
is to strengthen national prestige and identity. In cities, the corresponding goal is enhanced civic pride.
Sometimes, an aim is to make access (to sports, the
countryside, the national heritage, and the arts, for
example) into rights of citizenship. However, there
is no longer an expectation that all or even most citizens will avail themselves of these rights. Stated aims
are more modest: involve some who would otherwise be socially excluded or improve public health
and fitness. Almost always, nowadays, the economic
costs and benefits are weighed. Will employment and
spending, especially spending by people from outside
a city, region, or country, be boosted? Voluntary
associations and governments now know that they
operate in societies where they must compete for the
public’s leisure time and money and that whether
people take up whatever is offered will depend on
their own motivations and expected benefits.
Ken Roberts
See also Hobbyists and Amateurs; Internet; Leisure;
Leisure Studies; Mass Tourism; Radio; Sports; Television

Further Readings
Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England.
London: Routledge, 1978.
Kraus, Richard. Recreation and Leisure in Modern Society.
Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear, 1978.

Reification
Malcolmson, Robert W. Popular Recreations in English
Society, 1700–1850. London: Cambridge University
Press, 1973.
Meller, Helen E. Leisure and the Changing City,
1870–1914. London: Routledge, 1976.
Sylvester, Charles D. “The Ethics of Play, Leisure and
Recreation in the Twentieth Century, 1900–1983.”
Leisure Sciences 9 (1987): 173–188.

REIFICATION
Reification is a term generally used to critique consumer culture. It describes the moment when people
mistakenly see objects of human creation (everything from ideas, to language, to material objects,
to our entire society) as real things or objects. People
thereby fail to recognize the human creation behind
these objects. Reification also refers to the act of
abstracting peoples’ actions from the people themselves so that human actions falsely appear to take
on a life of their own. Conversely, reification has also
been seen by some as a necessary social process that
maintains ongoing social relations or extends and
enhances the self.
Three disparate examples are illustrative of reification. People see other people falsely when they
regard individuals as “things,” “types,” or “services”
(e.g., “prostitutes,” “fast-food workers,” “surrogate
mothers”) rather than as human beings. People see
objects falsely when they turn them into commodities (e.g., when a house is turned into an “investment
property” rather than a “residence”; Bewes 2002,
4). People see their entire world falsely when they
refer to it as a natural entity out of their control. For
instance, when people refer to “society” as something with power, they have reified society. Society
cannot act, only people can.

Theories of Reification
Theorists from a range of disciplines have offered different explanations of reification. These include its
origins and location, why it occurs, and whether or
not it is unavoidable or even undesirable.
Nineteenth-century theorist and author of
Capital, Karl Marx, saw human labor as the
essential root of human social relations. He associated reification with the macroeconomic sphere

1209

of capitalist production and the social relations
of labor. He observed that private ownership and
exchange under capitalism created an unprecedented amount of commodities (something of use
made by human labor that can be traded). It also
transformed labor into a commodity, which workers (the proletariat) were forced to sell to capitalists for a wage. The separation of human labor
from laborer’s use (use value) and the selling of
it for a wage had caused people to become separated from their work and the objects they created.
Furthermore, the proletariat’s labor was effectively
hidden in the production process; the products they
created were separated from them and seen as more
valuable than their labor itself. Marx described this
process overall as alienation and commodity fetishism. Alienation is a three-part process begun in the
workplace whereby workers under capitalism are
separated from the end result of their own creative
labor, their coworkers, and, subsequently, their
own humanity. Commodity fetishism describes the
marketplace transformation of direct interpersonal
social relations into moneyed relationships around
the exchange of products that hides the real class
relations that produce these products. Here people
fail to see that human labor creates objects (and
their value). Marx thought these processes distorted
both workers’ and owners’ view of how the world
actually worked. He believed that this would eventually produce a revolutionized proletariat who
would overthrow private ownership, establishing a
collective system where people would together control economic production and realize their common
humanity in labor. Dereification would occur when
people clearly saw the entire process of production,
realizing themselves and their worlds as a mutual
creation (Bewes 2002).
Whereas Marx concentrated on the economic
roots of reification, philosopher and literary critic
Gyorgy Lukács in History and Class Consciousness
(1923/1971) extended this economic analysis into
the cultural and political spheres. Lukács believed
that the logic of exchange value produced a totalizing effect that replaced and dominated all relationships (from labor to intimate lives) and human
products (from art to philosophy). For Lukács, reification was so total that both workers and capitalists suffered from it. Lukács believed that this total
reification had interfered with the ability of the

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Reification

proletariat to become a revolutionary class with
a developed self-awareness. A dereified society would
occur only through a revolutionary “vanguard”
group.
Twentieth century neo-Marxists in the Frankfurt
school, especially Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer,
and Herbert Marcuse, extended the analysis of reification to the realm of consumption. For instance,
Herbert Marcuse, in One Dimensional Man (1964),
said that reification was assisted by an extremely
productive technologically advanced economic and
cultural system that manufactured and promoted
products purported to be filled with transformative
powers (e.g., to make people younger, sexier, richer).
This system simultaneously created false needs promoted through language, mass media, print, and
advertising. It also provided an illusion of choice,
appealing to sexuality, individualism, and the ability
to take part in societal advancements. It produced a
“happy consciousness” where people believed that
products rather than relationships would bring them
love, happiness, and satiation. It produced people
who believed that things were more real than people.
The mass ownership of things also quelled any social
protest as people viewed “negative features” such as
“overproduction, unemployment, insecurity, waste,
and repression” as inevitable “byproducts” of progress (1964, 225). In short, reification was a pervasive
and permanent phenomenon in advanced societies,
producing uncritical consumers who had no interest
in overthrowing a system that delivered goods.
Cultural studies scholar and founder of the Media
Education Foundation Sut Jhally draws on these
insights, launching a trenchant critique in film and
print against contemporary advertising. Jhally says
that advertising has “colonized the culture,” creating propaganda narratives that cause people to think
they can get happiness and human relationships
through things. He has also shown how these processes have interfered with free thought and democracy. Unlike followers of the Frankfurt school, Jhally
seems to believe that humans can combat reification,
concluding that human survival depends on critically
examining and/or rejecting these images.
For Marx, Lukács, the Frankfurt school scholars, and Jhally, reification hides instrumental and
exploitative relationships between people. It also
fundamentally changes how people view themselves
and others. These theorists seem to believe that a
dereified world preexisted the world that we now

live in. Not all scholars take this point of view. For
instance, phenomenological sociologists Peter Berger
and Thomas Luckmann, in their well-known work
The Social Construction of Reality (1966), use reification to describe an “extreme” process in human
interaction. They explain that humans daily actively
construct objective social worlds, which, in turn,
come to actively create human beings. People also
rely on the preexisting humanly built social world
(habits, patterns, institutions, etc.), which they
come to see as external, or residing outside of themselves. People reify when they regard this humanly
created phenomenon as “non-human or possibly
super human” (1966, 89). They cite marriage as an
example. People reify marriage when they see it as
naturally or divinely ordained or as a natural consequence of biological or psychological processes.
People thus fail to see that marriage requires “ongoing human production” (90). People may also reify
their social roles, feeling that they must act a certain
way as a father, mother, buyer, seller, and so on.
The process of reification may be false seeing, but it
also allows humans to experience a continuous
social world.
Marketing scholars and marketers address reification as part of a process that ultimately satisfies
human needs. For instance, Robert Wicklund and
Peter Gollwitzer suggest that when one experiences
low self-esteem, the addition of objects may be
viewed as a compensatory mechanism to restore a
more complete self. In other words, purchasing can
also provide a sense of purpose and worth, notes
Walter Benjamin. In addition, Russell Belk tacitly
views reification as a positive process of self-building,
creating what he terms an extended self. He envisions the extended self as one in which possessions,
persons, and places are incorporated into one’s
self-concept. In this view, both literally and symbolically, goods and commodities extend the self in both
potentially positive and negative ways. As a result,
today, humans often buy nonnecessities for distinction and self-definition.
Reification has been revitalized in several
twenty-first-century works. In 2005, philosophers
debated the concept of reification at the University
of California, Berkeley. This debate became the
subject matter for Axel Honneth’s 2008 book
Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Honneth
takes a critical approach to reification, critiquing
it as a social pathology, a forgetting of collective

Renewable Resources

human beginnings. Honneth veers from economic
explanations of reification, drawing on insights
from developmental psychology and philosophy.
He suggests that humans can overcome reification through a process of normative empathetic
engagement, which reestablishes collective human
connection.
Susan L. Wortmann and Jie Gao
See also Alienation; Capitalism; Commodification;
Cultural Studies; False Consciousness/False Needs;
Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School);
Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Belk, Russell W. “Possessions and the Extended Self.”
Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 2 (1988):
139–168.
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about
Book Collecting.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah
Arendt, translated by Harry Zhon, 59–67. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. The Social
Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Bewes, Timothy. Reification, or the Anxiety of Late
Capitalism. London: Verso, 2002.
Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Jhally, Sut. “Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse.”
Chap. 1 in Critical Studies in Media Commercialism,
edited by Robin Andersen and Lance Strate. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lukács, Gyorgy. 1923. History and Class Consciousness:
Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1971.
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964.
Marx, K. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Wicklund, Robert A., and Peter M. Gollwitzer. Symbolic
Self Completion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1982.

Websites
Media Education Foundation. http://www.mediaed.org.

RELIGION
See Christianity; Desire; Hinduism; Islam;
Protestant Ethic; Sacred and Profane

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RENEWABLE RESOURCES
Renewable resources are either resources that can
naturally regenerate at a rate comparable or faster
than the rate of human consumption or perpetual
resources that are abundantly available in nature.
Examples are solar radiation, wind, water currents
and tides, and biomass resources, all of which can be
used to generate energy for human consumption.
Renewable resources have long been used by
humans for energy consumption. The first fires
were made with renewable wood resources, and
for centuries, wind has been used for milling grains
and pumping water. In this respect, the contemporary calls for energy production and consumption
patterns that are totally based on renewable energy
resources could be regarded as a call to go back to
preindustrial times. The differences with those times,
however, lie in technology and societal scale.
The use of nonrenewable resources for modern
energy production started only recently in human
history. The exploration for and use of coal, oil,
gas, and—later on—uranium fueled the Industrial
Revolution in the nineteenth century and are still
the major fuels for energy in industrialized economies. The call to replace the use of nonrenewable
resources with renewable resources is motivated by
the expected depletion of exploitable reserves of oil,
gas, and uranium within the current century and by
global warming induced by the emission of carbon
dioxide as a by-product of fossil-based energy production and consumption.
From the use of fossil fuels over the last centuries, the world has inherited worldwide networks of
energy exploration and infrastructures of transport,
generation, and distribution toward final consumers. Apart from that, the functioning of economy
and society at large has become totally fossil energy
dependent. A turn toward the use of renewable
resources would therefore not mean a turn to preindustrial times but rather a modernization or makeover of our fossil-fuel based energy system. This
dilemma emphasizes the implications of such a turn
for energy consumption patterns and consumers.

Localization, Decentralization,
Distributed Generation
The implications of a turn to renewable resources
for consumer culture can be understood only if

1212

Renewable Resources

characteristics of an energy system based on renewable resources are compared to those of the current
fossil energy system. First, fossil fuels are of a rather
uniform nature if compared to the range of renewable energy resources available. Oil, gas, coal, and
uranium are drawn from specific sites all around the
world, while renewable resources can be either generated at very specific sites (hydropower, geothermal
energy) or are available all around the world (solar
radiation, biomass). In a similar vein, the infrastructures and technologies for fossil fuel energy
production and consumption are rather uniform as
compared to the renewable energy production and
consumption technologies. But perhaps the most relevant difference for the discussion of implications of
renewable energy resources for consumer culture is
that energy systems based on renewable resources
are so far much more localized and decentralized
than their fossil-fuel based predecessors. Biomass
resources, such as wood or harvest by-products,
are more often than not being used in local biomass
energy plants. Solar panels are mostly applied on
the roofs of their users. Notwithstanding the huge
wind farms that are now being constructed offshore
in northwestern Europe, most (99 percent, according to World Wind Energy Association [WWEA],
2009) wind energy is still being produced on land
and consumed in the region of generation. Whereas
fossil and nuclear based energy production fits into a
model of centralized supply over large energy grids,
renewable resources much more rely on decentralized modes of production and consumption. Hence,
the model that better fits the production and consumption of renewable energy is that of distributed
generation, defined as “electric power generation
within distribution networks or on the customer side
of the network” (Ackermann, Andersson, and Söder
2001, 201). In the case of distributed generation, the
main grid serves as a backup system providing or
receiving power to and from consumers.

New Consumer Roles
With such differentiation of energy resources and
the downscaling of production and consumption
close to where energy is produced, energy consumption patterns are on the move as well. Consumer
roles in energy systems change from being passive
receivers located at the very end of networks toward
coproviders of energy services. Solar panels may be
installed on one’s own roof, producing electricity

for one’s own use but probably also anybody else’s
use, as the collection of individual panels comprises a
downscaled, distributed energy generation plant connected to the main grid. The coproviding consumer
also emerges in many future scenarios for electricity provision labeled smart grids by T. J. Hammons,
in which electricity from various localized sources
of electricity generation (solar panels, hydrogen fuel
cells from cars, combined heat power generation in
homes) can be combined and smartly distributed to
timely match supply with demand.

Consumer Adoption and Use
Renewable resources may gradually be embraced by
utilities and governments, but how and why consumers appreciate their newly assigned roles in energy
provision and the renewable energy technologies
provided to them is much more complex than suggested by just a rational choice model of decision
making (Caird and Roy 2008, 328). Considerations
of environment rather than cost-benefit analysis have
motivated early adoptors to use renewable resources.
The slow uptake of renewable energy technologies
by larger groups in society can largely be attributed
to their price. Payback times on investments in solar
photovoltaic (solar PV) or wind energy systems are
still too long due to high investment costs and low (if
at all existing) feed-in tariffs, although this is changing due to emerging national subsidy programs and
longer term guaranteed feed-in tariffs all over Europe
(with Germany taking the lead). Apart from costs,
low adoption rates can also be attributed to the
design of renewable energy technologies, which may
not have taken into account usability and compatibility with consumer practices and lifestyles. Such
designs, according to Caird and Roy, often reflect a
regulatory driven, technocentric model of innovation
instead of a user-centered innovation process where
users may be the source of new products and systems. New technologies and especially new systems
like smart grids will be adopted on a larger scale
only if designers and regulators do not just aim to
instruct consumers on their usage but take into consideration the symbolic, aesthetic, and everyday life
implications of installing a new system in or attached
to consumers’ homes. What does it do to consumers
if they experience their hourly energy consumption
being regulated, closely monitored, and metered for
reasons of “smart” and efficient adjustment to larger
spheres of supply and demand? How can consumers

Resistance

trust and check the claims of energy providers that
their sources of green energy production are indeed
renewable? And why does it take so much more
effort and cost to choose renewable energy technology to heat or light one’s home instead of the regular
systems? Answers to such questions could be given
only if an end-user perspective in energy innovation
research were taken on board.

Future Research
What is underestimated so far in research and experimentation is a thorough elaboration of the role of
consumers as agents in the transition toward an
energy system based on renewable resources. The
new relations that are emerging between providers of energy services and citizen consumers should
get more focus. Aspects of such focus on relations
include the changing flows upon which such relations are built (for instance, the different flows
in either all-electric or all-gas based homes), the
increasing reciprocity in energy relations (consumers as coproviders of energy production, storage,
and distribution to the grid), the increasing number
and diversity of providers to which citizen consumers become related (i.e., heat provision by water
companies, hot water supply by energy companies,
and electricity provision by specialized national
and international providers of wind, solar, or biomass energy). The following questions for further
social scientific research on consumer culture and
renewable resources are therefore relevant to further
study: What citizen-consumer lifestyles are being
assumed or constructed by the new sociotechnical
configurations of renewable energy provision? What
are the implications of the emergence of decentralized energy services and the coproviding citizen
consumer for the governance of energy provision
at large?
Bas J. M. van Vliet
See also Energy Consumption; Environmental
Footprinting; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Industrial Society;
Infrastructures and Utilities; Innovation Studies;
Sociotechnical Systems; Systems of Provision

Further Readings
Ackermann, Thomas, Goran Andersson, and Lennart
Söder. “Distributed Generation: A Definition.” Electric
Power Systems Research 57 (2001): 195–204.

1213

Caird, Sally, and Robin Roy. “User-Centered Improvements
to Energy Efficiency Products and Renewable Energy
Systems: Research on Household Adoption and Use.”
International Journal of Innovation Management 12,
no. 3 (2008): 327–355.
Hammons, T. J. “Integrating Renewable Energy Sources
into European Grids.” International Journal of
Electrical Power & Energy Systems, no. 8 (2008):
462–475.
Van Vliet, Bas, Heather Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove.
Infrastructures of Consumption: Environmental
Innovations in the Utility Industries. London: Earthscan,
2005.
World Wind Energy Association (WWEA). World Wind
Energy Report 2008. Bonn, Germany: Author, 2009.

RESISTANCE
Resistance has been conceptualized in two ways in
relation to consumer culture. First, as symbolically
subversive practices that are largely autonomous
from consumer culture but susceptible to being
co-opted into consumer culture or transformed into
commodities. Second, as meanings and practices that
arise from within consumer culture, so that audiences
of mass media and consumers of commercial culture
are understood to be actively engaged in resisting or
negotiating with the dominant ideologies encoded in
the texts and commodities they consume.

Resistance Against Consumer Culture
The first definition of resistance emerged from the
initial forms of critical theory, the development of the
counterculture in the late 1960s, and the first studies of youth subcultures in the so-called Birmingham
school during the 1970s. The originators of critical theory, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, could
not conceive of resistance as emerging from within
consumer culture when it was in its nascent stages
during the mid-twentieth century. Adorno saw consumerism as the product of a manipulative culture
industry that churned out standardized and superficial forms of commercial entertainment in a manner that was no different from any other commodity
churned out on the assembly lines. Such products of
the culture industry expressed the reified culture of
capitalism while pacifying the exploited masses with
diversionary forms of escapism. Adorno believed that
the only cultural forms that expressed a negation of

1214

Resistance

the capitalist system and pointed the way to alternate
possibilities of social organization were to be found
in certain forms of “high culture” within modernist art and literature and what is now called “classical” music. By definition, these cultural forms were
beyond the purview of the culture industry and its
techniques of mass reproduction.
The development of the hippie counterculture and
youthful forms of social protest in the 1960s created
new possibilities for resistance, especially in their connection to rock music. The rock music of the 1960s
was clearly a commodity sold by the corporate music
industry to a massive demographic of young consumers, but the claims to rock music’s power of resistance
were made by denying or minimizing these aspects
of commercialization and consumerism. Rock was
sharply differentiated from popular music because
it was supposed to be created by artists who were
motivated to express personal and/or political sentiments rather than manufacturing hit singles using
standardized formulas for commercial success. Rock
was supposed to enlighten and empower its audience
rather than just give them something with a good
beat they could dance to, and rock audiences were
thought to comprise a community à la Woodstock
Nation. Therefore, the intrusions of the music industry were thought to dilute the resistant qualities of
the counterculture. The most infamous case in point
was an advertisement run by Columbia Records in
1968, which depicted youthful revolutionaries in
prison above the caption, “But the Man Can’t Bust
Our Music.”
In the 1970s, the concept of subculture that originated with the famed Chicago school of sociology
in the first half of the twentieth century was revived
by British scholars at the Contemporary Centre
for Cultural Studies (CCCS), better known as the
Birmingham school, to describe how youth cultures
including teddy boys, skinheads, mods, hippies, and
punks performed symbolic acts of refusal against
the hegemonic social order. The Birmingham school
proceeded from the humanist/Western Marxist idea
that culture, ideology, and consciousness are crucial
to the maintenance and reproduction of class power
and inequality, and so, therefore, the music and style
of youth subcultures are loaded with significant
possibilities for resistance. In relation to consumer
culture, one key idea that developed within the
Birmingham school was that subcultures take on a
spectacular form by appropriating commodities and

using them in innovative and unintended ways that
assign new subversive meanings to those commodities in the process of creating style. Since ideology
and hegemony operate at the level of common sense
in making power and inequality appear to be natural, timeless, and inevitable, symbolic resistance of
this sort disrupts those taken-for-granted meanings,
revealing them to be arbitrary and socially constructed and therefore subject to change.
The Birmingham school’s initial studies developed
the notion that the symbolic gestures of subcultures
provide imaginary or magical solutions to problems
or contradictions rooted in socioeconomic conditions. Writing about subcultures that emerged in
the decades after World War II, Birmingham school
scholars identified two main sources of structural
change: the decline of working-class communities
as a result of urban redevelopment and the evolution of mass culture, which threatened to supplant
traditional working-class culture. The identities of
youth were thus understood to intersect and overlap with those of social class, as subcultures not only
developed in a complex relationship to working-class
“parent cultures” that shaped the character of youth
culture but also provided their point of departure
insofar as these traditional class cultures were fracturing in the face of a mass culture that played a more
vital role in the lives of the young. Phil Cohen, for
example, observed that skinheads costumed themselves as ghosts of the hypermasculine, proletarian
past, while mods personified the pursuit of upward
mobility embodied in the emerging consumer culture. By the 1970s, the economic stability and liberal
consensus that had characterized British society since
the end of World War II was dramatically imploding
as a result of deindustrialization and mass unemployment, mob violence against immigrants, and a sharp
turn to the political right. Within the Birmingham
school, Dick Hebdige wrote about Britain’s first generation of punks as a symptom of this social crisis of
the 1970s, tracing a homology of disorder and defiance evident across the various forms of punk music,
styles of dress, and rituals of performance.
Subcultures were thus conceptualized as something that young people actively created on their
own, transforming banal commodities (e.g., the
safety pin by punks) in the process of fashioning an
original style that overturned the symbolic codes
of the hegemonic order. But when subcultural style
itself was commercialized and integrated into the

Resistance

mass market—as was the case with punk fashion by
the end of the 1970s—resistance was presumed to
be contained and the hegemony of capitalist society
secured. Hebdige thus lamented that “as soon as
the original innovations which signify ‘subculture’
are translated into commodities and made generally
available, they become ‘frozen’” (1979, 96). Here
again, we see that resistance is defined as something
that must be independent of the consumer culture, or
at least the mass marketed aspects of the consumer
culture represented by the department store and the
shopping mall. But in reality, the relations between
subcultures and consumer culture had always been
more complicated. As Angela McRobbie demonstrated in her research on the “ragmarkets” where
young entrepreneurs bought and sold secondhand
clothes that played a crucial role in the fashion styles
of youth cultures, the scholars of the Birmingham
school had systematically ignored the commercial
exchanges that were an essential aspect of developing
subcultures. Neglecting these sorts of market relations allowed scholars to maintain a romantic image
of subcultures in a way that equated resistance with
authenticity and drew on an enduring opposition
between art and commerce.

Resistance Within Consumer Culture
Other scholars who were also working within the
Birmingham school developed an alternative means
of understanding how resistance could occur within
the consumer culture instead of only outside it. This
paradigm generally evolved from studies of audiences
of mass media rather than those of subcultures and
youth. Stuart Hall, the longtime director of the CCCS
at Birmingham, argued that the creation of meaning
through the mass media involved two steps of encoding and decoding. Encoding refers to the ways that
the dominant ideology is represented in the media
so as to make the power of the ruling class appear
to be natural, commonsensical, and for the benefit
of society as a whole. Decoding, however, is a social
process in which audiences interpret those ideological messages, and Hall suggested that viewers might
retain dominant, oppositional, or negotiated readings of such messages depending on their social class.
In brief, those in a privileged social situation were
more likely to accept the dominant ideology, while
subordinate classes were more likely to reject it, but
Hall believed that most viewers fell somewhere in

1215

between by maintaining a negotiated reading of the
dominant ideology. The distinction between encoding and decoding set the Birmingham school’s theory of media reception apart from those of the mass
culture critics and members of the Frankfurt school
who assumed that audiences absorb dominant messages in an uncritical, passive fashion. More generally, it was consistent with the notion that hegemony
is always a contested process, the ideological power
of the ruling class is never total, and therefore, resistance is always taking place.
The Birmingham school’s media studies dovetailed with emerging theories in the field of literature
that put the emphasis on how readers interpret texts,
again emphasizing that the creation of meaning cannot be understood independently of audiences. Janice
Radway, for instance, interviewed women who were
regular readers of romance novels and, from a feminist perspective, concluded that they were not simply
duped by the patriarchal ideologies typically encoded
in those novels. Instead, she found that women usually turned to romance novels with a sense of dissatisfaction about men and marriage in their own
personal lives and that the novels offered a fantasy
about receiving love and nurturance in the same way
that women are typically expected to provide in real
life without sufficient reciprocation. Moreover, the
act itself of sitting down to read a romance novel
gave women a reprieve from the demands of housework or family and a rare moment of time for themselves. Radway thus concludes her study on a note
of complexity and ambiguity, for on the one hand,
romance novels can reaffirm patriarchy and rejuvenate women along the way to reproducing their
subordinate role, and yet it is clear that “women are
reading not out of contentment but out of dissatisfaction, longing and protest” (Radway 1991, 214).
Later scholars expanded the possibilities for resistance beyond the ways that audiences interpreted
media texts to encompass a whole range of practices
in which popular culture could be used in subversive
ways for pleasure and play. Foremost among these
scholars is John Fiske, who theorized various ways
in which the consumption of media and popular culture, and even shopping itself, could be conceptualized as acts of resistance. While powerful capitalist
interests control how commodities are produced
and ideologies are represented, the people who consume them are actively involved in creating meanings and appropriating products in ways that are

1216

Resistance

often unintended by their corporate producers. Fiske
drew on the work of Michel de Certeau and particularly his concept of everyday life, which de Certeau
theorized as a battleground where the powerless
are constantly engaged in a struggle to undermine
and take back the social spaces that are controlled
by the powerful. Another key influence was Mikhail
Bakhtin, whose analysis of the novels of Francois
Rabelais identified a “carnivalesque” tradition of
resistance where the oppressed ritualistically engage
in the symbolic defilement of their oppressors and
celebrate the bodily functions and pleasures that are
repressed in polite society. Fiske saw that these carnivalesque traditions were alive and well in myriad
forms of popular culture where discipline, morality,
and social control are mocked and degraded in favor
of the corporeal and the grotesque.
This definition of resistance expanded the
parameters of what could be understood as politics,
struggle, and conflict. The anthropologist James C.
Scott coined the term hidden transcripts based on his
studies of peasants in Malaysia to describe the more
covert forms of resistance that take place in everyday life and social interaction. Robin D. G. Kelley
applied Scott’s concept in his studies of the African
American working class, whose histories of footdragging, workplace sabotage, and stylish pursuit of
pleasure are chronicled so as to “suggest that some
of the most dynamic struggles take place outside—
indeed, sometimes in spite of—established organizations and institutions” (1994, 7). With regard
to consumer culture, Kelley includes an analysis of
Malcolm X’s autobiography that redeems the symbolic significance of the zoot suit and bebop culture
that Malcolm and so many other young black people
became immersed in during World War II. Kelley
then ends his book with an account of “gangsta rap”
in postindustrial Los Angeles, where massive unemployment and a repressive police state facilitated the
development of a musical style that condemned these
social conditions while drawing from long-standing
traditions of resistance in black music and culture.

Resistance Beyond Cultural Studies
In recent years, some critics have charged that the
extent and significance of resistance is overestimated
in these studies of popular culture. Thomas Frank is
among those who have lampooned cultural studies
that celebrate acts of resistance that in his view are

little more than individualistic expressions of consumer choice. Contemporary forms of post-Fordist
capitalism are more equipped to gainfully incorporate difference, authenticity, and even rebellion. The
most important change has been the heightened role
of culture in economic production, which multiplies
the value of the hip and the cool in everything from
leisure time experiences to new communications
technologies to brand name images. In a post-Fordist
economy, the role of the city has shifted from a center of manufacturing to a site for the production of
cool, with bohemian subcultures often taking root
in the same derelict neighborhoods and abandoned
buildings that had once been the nucleus of industry. Within consumer culture, the change in emphasis
from mass markets to niche markets idealizes individual differences and idiosyncratic tastes, while disparaging conformity and mass culture. Meanwhile,
the reorganization of the workplace resulting from
strategies of flexible accumulation have devalued
the organization man and intensified the competition for creative minds that can “think outside the
box” and live with insecurity and risk. In sum, postFordist capitalism promises meaningful work for
those repelled by the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. tedium of the
office, exotic and quirky consumer goods for those
fed up with the standardized fare of mass culture,
and postindustrial playgrounds of diversity and deviance for those bored by the notorious homogeneity
of the suburbs.
As a consequence of this restructuring of capitalism, expressions of difference and resistance are
more quickly and easily absorbed into niche markets
and idiosyncratic consumer tastes. But post-Fordist
capitalism is also laden with contradictions that
render it vulnerable to new forms of protest, particularly insofar as multinational corporations are
increasingly dependent on the symbolic value of their
brand names and corporate images. For instance, the
practice of culture jamming (Lasn 1999; Klein 2000)
turns the ubiquity of the brand name against itself
when activists alter corporate logos or advertising
messages for the purposes of parody and critique.
In a related development, college students have targeted apparel companies that employ subcontracted
sweatshop labor in a way that has threatened those
companies’ standing with the coveted consumer market of young people.
The development and increasing accessibility
of digital technologies of communication have

Responsible Consumption

enabled new possibilities for resistance. The use of
computers in the practice of political subversion
has come to be known as “hactivism,” and graphics editing programs, such as Photoshop, have
multiplied the opportunities for culture jamming.
Digital technologies make it not only easier to satirize and criticize the culture of corporate capitalism, but they can also facilitate the growth of an
alternative culture that is relatively autonomous
from the one manufactured by corporations. This
is consistent with the spirit of the do-it-yourself
(DIY) culture established by punk, which calls for
the commercially independent production of music,
record labels, fanzines, and radio (Moore 2007).
The opportunities to engage in this sort of DIY cultural production have expanded in recent years as
digital technologies and social networking websites
make it cheaper and more efficient to produce and
circulate music, video, photographs, and text. The
do-it-yourself spirit is applied from the virtual to
the real world in the case of Reclaim the Streets, a
movement that began in Britain during the 1990s
to stage impromptu street parties by creating temporary autonomous zones liberated from the corporations that have increasingly privatized space.
So although the past few decades have witnessed
an extension of corporate control, such power continues to breed new forms of resistance, and we can
expect that expressions of cultural opposition will
continue to emerge in the future.
Ryan Moore
See also Audience Research; Cultural Studies; Culture
Jamming; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Political
and Ethical Consumption; Social Movements; Style;
Subculture; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1968.
Cohen, Phil. “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class
Community.” In The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken
Gelder and Sarah Thornton, 90–99. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1989.

1217

Frank, Thomas. One Market under God: Extreme
Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic
Democracy. New York: Anchor, 2001.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural
Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 90–103.
New York: Routledge, 1993.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
New York: Routledge, 1979.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the
Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1994.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
New York: Picador-USA, 2000.
Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America.
New York: Eagle Brook, 1999.
McRobbie, Angela. “Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of
the Ragmarket.” In The Subcultures Reader, edited by
Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, 191–199. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Moore, Ryan. “Friends Don’t Let Friends Listen to
Corporate Rock: Punk as a Field of Cultural
Production.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
36, no. 4 (2007): 438–474.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,
and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991.
Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance:
Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1990.

RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION
Responsible consumption is a new concept that is
just starting to emerge within theoretical and policyrelevant discussions, as well as within wider popular
debates, about how to rethink consumer behavior in
the light of key events in the early twenty-first century: most notably, the global recession of 2009 and
global climate change. As such, it is a little early to
offer any final word on what this concept will ultimately come to signify in analyses of consumer culture. That said, it warrants brief consideration here
as it is slowly starting to gather currency and would
seem to reveal a growing sense of disillusionment
with so-called green, or ethical, consumption.
Simply put, responsible consumption represents
a belief that there is an urgent need to perceive of
our actions, our consumer choices, not just individually but also socially, cooperatively. The concept is
informed by, but at the same time distinct from,

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Responsible Consumption

debates and issues raised by green, or ethical, consumption. The difference in meaning is both nuanced
and revealing, as it illuminates contemporary concerns over the impact that consuming ethically can
have in meeting those challenges identified above. A
crucial difference between each of these three related
concepts is this, green, or ethical, consumption would
appear to some to have become a relatively unthinking, unreflexive act, co-opted by astute advertising
and marketing professionals who have identified—
not just a sign of global awareness and resistance
among informed citizens but also—something akin
to a rather lucrative niche market that can be targeted for profit-generating purposes. That is to say,
being an ethical consumer has essentially come to
mean simply buying those products and services
that have been appropriately labeled as such. For
products that fall into the “ethical” category, each
provides testimony of its ethical credentials from the
various agencies and organizations that have been
established for this purpose. And yet, with evermore
products and services seen to be experiencing the
process of greenwashing, the role of marketing and
advertising in the sphere of ethical consumption is
fast becoming both acknowledged and subject to
increasing criticism. As such, those well-meaning
individual consumers who are sensitive to the ethical
message can often find deciding what to buy problematic. And so it is within this somewhat fluid and
puzzling conversation that the concept of responsible
consumption is being heard.
In raising the possibility that ethical consumption is running the risk of becoming little more than
simply another marketing strategy, the notion of
responsible consumption implies that there are other
ways of making changes to identified patterns of
consumption that look beyond the individual and
the option to choose this particular ethical product
over that particular unethical product at the point of
purchase. That is, those practicing responsible consumption seek to move beyond the individualizing
process of making personal ethical consumer choices
to explore more social, cooperative, and communitybased alternatives to the requirement to consume as
individuals from private companies. This is, at least
in part, motivated by recognition of the fact that
consuming ethically is not an option available to
everyone. In short, one of the major ideas informing
responsible consumption is the possibility of consuming less from the marketplace and becoming far

more self-reliant as communities, something that the
act of choosing one product over another potentially
overlooks. Consuming less is a genuine option for
a far wider socioeconomic demographic than the
increasingly normative requirement to purchase—
often relatively more expensive—organic or fair
trade goods and services. This is a persuasive point:
it is surely problematic for all those who would heed
the message of needing to consume more ethically if
they nevertheless lack the necessary resources to be
able to afford to make those choices at the point of
purchase. This can be represented neatly as a fundamental tension between “values” (principles) and
“value” (price) and something that simply consuming less seeks to resolve.
Responsible consumption is an explicit attempt to
break out of what we might call, following Herbert
Marcuse, the “one-dimensional” role of the individual consumer as a passive user of goods and services and a proposal a move toward a new model
of coproduction—that is, the collective initiation of
projects on the basis of actual material needs of sustenance and quality of life and the implementation
of them jointly with producers. The basic approach
is to develop socially responsible consumer networks
to create a support group for the coproduction of
goods and services that will meet specific local needs.
A good example of this approach can be found in
the rising trend toward community-supported agriculture, as explored by Craig Thompson and Gokcen
Coskuner-Balli, as well as the networks established at
Freecycle and the Furniture Re-Use Network. What
stands behind each of these is the idea of re-skilling,
of individuals and community groups becoming
much more self-reliant, in the hope that they can rely
less on the rampant, “irresponsible” consumption of
the past and perhaps genuinely begin to move toward
a “postconsumerist” future (Soper 2007).
Responsible consumption is the practice of seeking to overcome the common process whereby individual consumers buy anonymous products from
anonymous producers. By collectively negotiating
production at a local level to meet local needs, the
aim is to reintegrate individuals into communities and foster collective values to promote social
cohesion—in essence, seeking an alternative to the
individualizing processes of private consumption,
something that simply purchasing ethical goods does
not necessarily address. By becoming more reflexive, by rationalizing individual acts of consumption

Retirement

through an exploration of the broader implications
of individual consumer choices and imaginatively
exploring alternative ways in which collectively to
meet the needs of individuals and communities,
responsible consumption implies that it is possible to
begin to reshape global societies for the greater wellbeing of all. In this sense, then, responsible consumption is a concept used by those who capture a variety
of existing and emerging practices that seek to overcome the one-dimensional approach that would see
market-based solutions as the only viable response to
the global challenges we face together. Simply being
able to buy fair trade products should not also mean
that individuals cease to ask the important wider
question, why isn’t all trade fair? And so, while undeniably recognizing the importance of continuing to
consume ethically, practitioners of responsible consumption move one step beyond the individualizing
logic of this approach and as such point to a potentially much wider and more radical shift in attitudes
and behavior. However, this new concept of responsible consumption, if it is to gain greater prevalence,
will require the overcoming of inherent conceptual
difficulties, particularly in the sense of what we
might mean by responsibility: to whom, about what,
and who is to be the final arbiter of what is and is not
responsible consumption? Where the concept goes
next will be determined by the various responses to
these provocative questions.
Mark Davis
See also Alternative Consumption; Downshifting;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Fair Trade; Life(style) Politics; Political
and Ethical Consumption; Self-Reflexivity; Social
Movements

Further Readings
Boyle, David, Sherry Clark, and Sarah Burns. Hidden
Work: Coproduction by People Outside Paid
Employment. New York: Joseph Rountree Foundation,
2006. Also available from http://www.jrf.org.uk/
publications/co-production-people-outside-paidemployment.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Soper, Kate. “The Other Pleasures of Post-Consumerism.”
Soundings 35 (March 2007): 31–40.
Thompson, Craig J., and Gokcen Coskuner–Balli.
“Enchanting Ethical Consumerism: The Case of

1219

Community Supported Agriculture.” Journal of
Consumer Culture 7, no. 3 (November 2007): 275–303.

Websites
Freecycle. http://www.freecycyle.org.
Furniture Re-Use Network. http://www.frn.org.uk.

RETIREMENT
Retirement is used to describe the status of a worker
who has stopped working, usually having reached a
determined age or by illness or by personal choice,
for example, having the ability to receive an adequate
pension. With the increasing number of older people
in the global economy, who are also living longer after
retirement, there is a clear link between the ability of
older people to exercise greater “gray power” and
consumerism in later life. On the other hand, there
will be a larger number of older people living in poverty and consuming more health services as a result.

Changing Aspects of Retirement
In most countries, retiring at a fixed age was
introduced during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries—before then, the absence of pension
arrangements meant that most workers had to continue to work until they died or were able to rely on
the support of family or friends. Today, most developed nations have systems to provide pensions on
retirement in old age, which may be provided by
employers or the state. In many poorer countries,
support for the old is still mainly provided through
the family. Germany was the first country to introduce retirement in the 1880s.
The retirement age varies from country to country, but it is generally between fifty-five and seventy.
In some countries, this age is different for males and
females, as discussed below. Many countries (such
as the United States and the United Kingdom) are
increasing the standard retirement age from sixtyfive to sixty-seven, and in Germany, it is already
sixty-seven.
Generally, a retirement with a pension is considered to be a societal right, and to this end, many
political, social, and cultural battles have been
fought. Retirement can be argued to be a major
life event that causes personal upheaval, but it has
wider implications for consumer society, with retirees

1220

Retirement

having more time but less money on which to spend
it. Many of the recently retired, however, continue or
increase their pursuit of consumption-based identities that were not possible for previous generations
of retirees. Early retirees, for example, may be able to
enjoy up to twenty years of consumer activity as life
expectancy continues to increase in many countries.
People who retired at the end of the twentieth
century were arguably able to access a much more
extensive material culture than ever before. Up until
this time, there was also a “blurring” of the economic transition into postworking lives. This can be
seen by the fact that in the United States, the 1968
income of postretirement householders (sixty-five to
seventy-four-year-olds) was half that of middle-aged
householders (thirty-five to forty-four-year-olds) and
just over half (60 percent) of that of young adult
householders (twenty-five to thirty-four-year-olds).
By 1998, however, their average income increased
to two-thirds that of middle-aged householders and
80 percent that of young adults. Leslie Hannah
(1986, 126) argues that “the generations retiring in
the 1960’s and 1970’s enjoyed a lifetime of continually improving standards in which their retirement
was truly a golden age.” Around this time, the phrase
gray power and consumer lifestyles into old age
began to be analyzed more closely.
Many governments have since then, however,
been grappling with their social security pension
systems facing long-term financial problems as
birth rates decline and medical advances mean that
people are living longer, and more retired people are
living in poverty and reliant on social security benefits. For example, people aged sixty-five and over
represent less than a seventh of the population of
the United Kingdom, but from 2003 to 2004, they
received nearly 60 percent of all benefit expenditure
(Blakemore and Griggs 2007). The observation that
older people are generally one of the largest groups
among the poor has resulted in the conclusion that
old age is a cause of poverty. However, A. Walker
argues that it is in fact social policies such as retirement policies that significantly contribute to dependency and poverty in old age. Again, those able to
take early retirement in the 1980s and 1990s often
received two-thirds of their salaries and continued
to be powerful consumers. It is only recently, since
around 2000, that there has been a “crackdown” on
final pension salaries in the public and private sectors
as many economies have declined.

There have been debates since 2000 in particular,
such as stated in the report Ageing Societies and the
Looming Pension Crisis from the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
in 2002, which identified the need to ensure the sustainability of pension systems by extending working
lives and reducing retirement provisions.

Gender Differences and Harmonization
As women’s patterns of work over their life course,
due to childbirth and child care, are more likely to
have periods of withdrawal from paid work and
working part-time because of caring commitments
or working in low-paid and part-time jobs, older
women are much less likely than older men to have
adequate pension provision and are consequently at
much greater risk of poverty (Joshi 1992). For example, women’s average income in retirement in the
United Kingdom is around 53 percent that of men’s
(Bennett 2005).
Older women are less likely to have an occupational pension, and if they have one it is unlikely to
yield the same benefits as men’s. However, studies in
Europe and the United States have shown that the
gap is to some extent narrowing as men and women’s
retirement ages equalize (Johnson, Sambamoorthi,
and Crystal 1999). Although women live longer than
men, they have on average only seven healthy years
of life after retirement compared with nine years for
men. In addition, life expectancy for both men and
women varies both internationally and intranationally, dependent on health, demographic area, housing, and so on. For example, in Glasgow, Scotland,
the average life expectancy can be as low as sixtynine years old, whereas in the relatively wealthy area
of Kensington and Chelsea near London, England, it
is over eighty-one years old. Life expectancy also differs according to ethnicity, for example, in the United
States, white Americans are expected to live until age
seventy-eight but black people only until age seventyone (Santrock 2007). There are therefore significant
differences in consumer power being yielded dependent on complex geographical, employment, and
interrelated factors.

International Similarities and Differences
In the United States, the retirement age is now sixtyfive and a half and will become sixty-seven for people born after 1960. Compulsory retirement at the

Retirement

age of sixty-five was made illegal in 1978, in contrast
with the United Kingdom where retirement at age
sixty for women and sixty-five for men was made
compulsory under the 1946 National Insurance Act,
and only recently, legislation is being considered to
change this. In Russia, the retirement age is sixty
for men, fifty-five for women. Many retirees work
beyond that to supplement their pensions, which
average the equivalent of about US$80 a month.
In Italy, the state pension system helped make
Italy one of the world’s most indebted nations, with
spending among the highest in Europe at around
15 percent of gross domestic product. In 2008, the
retirement age changed from fifty-seven to sixty for
women and remained at sixty-five for men.
In France, the retirement age for the private sector
is sixty-five, similar to that in the United Kingdom,
but likewise varies in the public sector, until recently
staying at sixty for both men and women who wish
to take “early retirement.” In 2010, France’s lower
house and the Senate approved a rise in the retirement
age from sixty to sixty-two. In November 2010, the
French president signed into law the new retirement
age of sixty-two (see http://www.washingtontimes.
com/news/2010/nov/10/sarkozy-signs-law-raisingfrench-retirement-age-62). Although the proposal
and the signing resulted in widespread protests in
France, a rise to sixty-two would still rank French
retirement among the earliest in Europe.
Japan provides somewhat of a contrast, with most
companies allowing retirement at sixty; however,
between 2005 and 2015, the number of people aged
sixty or older will increase by around 7.25 million,
while the younger population, between fifteen and
twenty-nine years old, will decrease by around 3.81
million. This in effect means that one in three will be
over the age of sixty by 2015.
In 2005, the European Union (EU) warned Greece
that within five years it would face a problem due
to increased aging of its population and indeed this
has contributed to its recent economic crisis, during
which there has been significant civil unrest and a
required “bail out” by members of the EU, who also
attached conditions to this. One of its problems is
that it has one of the lowest birthrates in the EU, and
under its current system, the basic retirement age for
men is sixty-five and for women, it is sixty.
The stability of pensions systems throughout the
world has decreased as birth rates go down and
countries, during a period of economic instability,

1221

have to review what they can afford to pay retirees.
It has been argued that the increasing individualization of risk—for example, choice of flexible working
and other “nonstandard” choices for employment—
means that overall incomes in later life are likely
to become more unequal in the future (Hills and
Stewart 2005).
In contrast, Mike Featherstone and Andrew
Wernick focus on the analysis of positive images of
later life and point out that much recent advertising
and marketing is aimed at the well-off older person
who may have retired early and has sufficient retirement income to exercise much gray spending power
and indeed be very healthy in later life. They argue
that the study of gerontology is preoccupied with positive aging, as a strategy for improving the status of
older people within an ageist society. Positive images
of aging, which society can see in healthy, early retirees who are leisure-and-tourist consumers may, for
example, be useful to stress that normal physiological
aging need not necessarily mean increased physical
or mental incapacity. In turn, this will challenge agerelated consumer stereotypes and encourage society
to see them as powerful consumers based around a
fit, healthy, and active leisure-based lifestyle.
Overall, any decisions that are made by policymakers to extend working lives will not be popular,
but some such as John Hills argue they are necessary.
On the other hand, Walker argues that policy related
to retirement has always been dominated by concern
with the narrow conception of cost in government
spending rather than with meeting the needs of
individual retirees. He also argues that resources to
overcome poverty in old age have been available for
at least the past fifty years—but the political will has
not. Despite this, as life expectancy increases, there
has also been a significant increase in the gray power
of consumerism and changing lifestyles for retirees,
which may contribute toward more positive images
of aging.
Gill Gillespie
See also Affluent Society; Age and Aging; Consumer
Society; Gender; Generation; Identity;
Individualization; Life Course; Material Culture;
Poverty; Risk Society

Further Readings
Bennett, F. Gender and Benefits. Manchester, UK: Equal
Opportunities Commission (EOC), 2005.

1222

Retro

Blakemore, Kenneth, and Edwin Griggs. Social Policy: An
Introduction. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press,
2007.
Featherstone, Mike, and Andrew Wernick. Images of
Ageing. London: Routledge, 1995.
Hannah, Leslie. Inventing Retirement: The Development of
Occupational Pensions in Britain. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Hills, John, Julian Le Grand, and David Piachaud. Making
Social Policy Work. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2007.
Hills, John, and Kitty Stewart. A More Equal Society?
Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2005.
Johnson, Richard W., Usha Sambamoorthi, and Stephen
Crystal. “Gender Differences in Pension Wealth:
Estimates Using Provider Data.” Gerontologist 39
(1999): 332–333.
Joshi, Heather. “The Cost of Caring.” In Women and
Poverty in Britain: The 1990s, edited by Caroline
Glendinning and Jane Millar. Hemel Hempstead, UK:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
Santrock, John. Life Expectancy: A Topical Approach to
Life-Span Development. New York: McGraw-Hill,
2007.
Walker, A. “Poverty and Inequality in Old Age.” In Ageing
in Society, edited by John Bond, Peter Coleman, and
Sheila Pearce. London: Sage, 1996.

RETRO
Retro is a term used to describe the revival and
revaluing of past styles that are usually less than one
hundred years old. It can be applied to almost anything from clothing, furniture, and interiors to music,
film, food, events, and advertising. It is a relatively
global concept, and cultural products or styles that
are categorized as retro appear in many different
contexts including in art galleries, on lifestyle television, and on the shelves of main street retailers, as
well as in fanzines, on the Internet, and in market
stalls. Unlike terms such as vintage or antique, retro
does not specify its origin and thus includes the old
and the new, the original and the reproduction, the
singular and the commodity, and high and popular
culture. Consequently, definitions and discussions of
retro style are dispersed across academic disciplines
and multifarious in their nature.
The term derives from the Latin prefix meaning
backward; however, it was first used to describe
French avant-garde cinema and items sold in flea

markets in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. It was
introduced into English shortly after; for example, a
shop bearing the name retro first appeared in London
in 1974 (Samuel 1994, 85). While the revival, reproduction, and reuse of old objects and styles has been
common throughout history, the arrival of retro
and the specific characteristics of the style have been
linked with postmodernism.
Both Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard have
suggested that retro style is a symptom of postmodern nostalgia. Drawing on films such as American
Graffiti, they both argue that although retro style
references the past, history is a “lost referential.”
According to Jameson, retro cultural products are
indicative of “the transformation of reality into
images,” of which one of the characteristics is pastiche (parody without a sense of humor), and “the
fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents,” which he considers evokes a condition similar
to schizophrenia. The schizophrenic self has a vivid
and material experience of the present, but is lacking
capacity to “retain its own past” and has thus lost
a cohesive identity (Jameson 1985, 119). Jameson
considers this, and the retro styles that are its symptom, to be negative and calls for a return to the ideals
of modernism. The arguments of both Jameson and
Baudrillard consider retro only as reproduction (as
pastiche and simulacrum). However, other theorists
such as Angela McRobbie have made this discussion more complex by exploring a wider range of
examples of retro style.
In Zoot Suits and Second Hand Dresses: An
Anthology of Music and Fashion, Angela McRobbie
argues that it is “unwise to place retro style unproblematically within the cultural terrain marked out
by Jameson” as retro should be seen in the context
of postwar youth subcultures (1989, 48). She uses
the examples of teddy boy jackets, the Laura Ashley
“tea dress,” Peter Blake’s sleeve for the Beatles’ Sgt.
Pepper’s album, and punk do-it-yourself (DIY) fashion, to argue that the production and consumption
of retro style should be seen as innovative rather than
nostalgic. Unlike Jameson, McRobbie argues that
schizophrenic or fragmented subjectivity can be positive. She suggests that retro style viewed in relation
to postwar subcultures is potentially subversive, as
it allows young women and working-class youth to
participate in the fashion scene. This is made possible by the availability of inexpensive retro clothing
at jumble, or rummage, sales and from mainstream

Reuse/Recycling

retailers and is illustrated by the new unofficial job
market that the rediscovery of old items and their
imaginative recreation can create. These arguments
are partly an outcome of McRobbie’s emphasis on
the consumption and production of retro style as
well as the qualities of cultural products themselves.
A similar methodological approach has been
adopted in more recent work on retro style. In an
ethnographic study titled Second-Hand Cultures,
Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe also locate the
production of retro style within alternative retail networks, such as rummage sales and retro boutiques.
In fact, they argue that the definition of retro is itself
bound up with the knowledge of retro retailers and
consumers: what gets identified as retro depends
on the individual doing the classifying. One retailer
may view an item as old-fashioned and not desirable
enough to be considered retro, whereas another may
consider it to be cutting edge and a highly salable
retro piece. In agreement with McRobbie, they also
question the extent to which the motivations behind
the production and consumption of retro are nostalgic. They argue that consuming retro style is similar
to other forms of consumption: it is shaped by “difference, taste and individuality” (Gregson and Crewe
2003, 11). Through empirical research, they find
that the distinction between retro originals and retro
reproductions is critical for producers and consumers of the style. Original objects frequently demand
higher prices and are considered more “authentic.”
When acquired, these are often viewed as adding to
the formation of a “credible, unique and authentic
self” (Jenß 2004).
Since these ethnographic studies, retro style
has become even more prolific and the knowledge
necessary for its production, distribution, and consumption more widespread. Media such as eBay
have disseminated the style, both raising prices and
making it easier to consume with the appropriate
income. In the United Kingdom, at least, the term has
been devalued, and this has meant many producers,
retailers, and consumers prefer to use vintage or midcentury modern to describe items to convey greater
authenticity. The wider implications of these changes
may be that retro style offers less democratic potential than it did when it was observed by McRobbie.
However, the practices that producers and consumers of retro style are involved in continue to be rich
for academic analysis, particularly in regard to current discussions of anticonsumerism. Interest in retro

1223

often means that less capitalist modes of exchange,
such as swap shops and rummage sales, are valued.
Consumers of retro style are also often involved in
reuse and renovation, perhaps making them less
likely to purchase newly produced goods. Thus,
while the popularity of retro style may represent a
different relationship with the past, it may also have
potentially positive environmental implications.
Sarah Elsie Baker
See also Authenticity; Baudrillard, Jean; Car-Boot Sales
and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles;
Nostalgia; Postmodernism; Reuse/Recycling; Style

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Gregson, Nicky, and Crewe, Louise. Second-Hand Cultures.
Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer
Society.” In Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster.
London: Pluto Press, 1985.
Jenß, Heike. “Dressed in History: Retro Style and the
Construction of Authenticity in Youth Culture.”
Fashion Theory 8, no. 4 (2004): 387– 404.
McRobbie, Angela, ed. Zoot Suits and Second Hand
Dresses: An Anthology of Music and Fashion. London:
Macmillan, 1989.
McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture.
London: Routledge, 1994.
Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1, Past and
Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994.

REUSE/RECYCLING
If consumption is understood as a process of selecting, purchasing, using, maintaining, and disposing
of goods and services, then it might be noted that
consumption studies have been largely biased toward
exploring the front end of consumption. Existing
studies have generated a wealth of insights regarding the ways in which goods are acquired, appropriated, and appreciated, but it is also important to
understand the ways in which goods are cast out,
abandoned, and disposed of. Reuse and recycling
are therefore instructive concepts for the study of
consumer culture insofar as they represent two possible strategies for dealing with the discards and
afterward of consumption. Understandings of reuse

1224

Reuse/Recycling

and recycling are also useful insofar as they allow
for consideration of the environmental impacts of
consumption and the relationship between consumption and waste. While reuse and recycling are related
processes, they have subtle differences that call for
or generate different understandings of consumption
and the social life of things.
Reuse is what happens once goods have been
through the first cycle of consumption, reached the
point of disposal, and entered a second (and third,
and forth, and so on) cycle rather than being sent
to the landfill or “wasted.” An important form of
reuse is secondhand consumption, which involves
a range of consumer practices and takes place in
a range of social spaces including (but not limited
to) charity shops, retro-retailers, flea markets, swap
meets, car trunk sales, and eBay. Unlike a lot of firstcycle consumption, it occupies a mundane location
in everyday life insofar as it typically involves the
exchange of ordinary goods in ordinary locations.
Nevertheless, it is an interesting topic that requires
completely different understanding of consumption
and exchange. For example, in first-cycle consumption, money serves to abstract the goods and services
being exchanged from the individuals undertaking
the transaction just as prices provide an external
measure of the item’s value. By contrast, the second
cycle of consumption is haunted by the first insofar
as an item is likely to carry traces of its previous use
(miles on a car, wear and tear on clothing, scribbling in the margins of a book), meaning that the
exchange—and more importantly, the value—needs
to be mediated by the individuals involved (for
example, haggling and bartering over price or part’s
exchanging). Similarly, the symbolic meaning of
goods exchanged and, indeed, the meaning accorded
to the practice of secondhand consumption needs
to be mediated in ways that are different from the
first cycle of consumption. Here, it is important to
note that secondhand consumption is a heterogeneous activity. For example, secondhand consumption can work to display highbrow tastes (in the case
of purchasing antique furniture in place of an item
from Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd [IKEA]
home furnishings store) or reflect individuality in
the face of the alleged homogenizing effects of mass
consumption (in the case of buying a vintage leisure
jacket instead of shopping at the Gap). However, it
can also work to capture economic value through
the thrill and skill of getting a bargain, but doing so

out of economic necessity is a very different thing
from doing so as a leisure activity. Indeed, secondhand consumption is very often practiced as a leisure
activity that supplements first-cycle consumption
insofar as it provides opportunities to pick up oneoffs and unusual gifts while enjoying alternative economic spaces and subverting the ordinary relations
of exchange.
The movement of goods between first and second
cycles of consumption does not necessarily involve
monetary exchange. Often reuse is enacted through
moral economies of various sorts. Consumer goods
are very often “handed around” and circulated
among significant others. For example, children’s
clothing—for which the possibilities of first-cycle
use are limited and the potential for second-cycle
use plentiful—tends to get “moved along” to other
mothers with younger infants. Similarly, larger or
more expensive items tend to get handed down to
significant others—for example, parents giving
a sofa to their children when they move into their
first apartment. These flows, however, do not just
move things from older generations to younger
generations; for example, it is not uncommon for
children to pass their discarded cell phones on to
their parents. In line with dominant analyses of
the gift, it is worth noting that the ways in which
things get handed down or around are performative and constitutive of social relations. For instance,
these movements depend on the existence of social
networks through which to recirculate things, and
often, the emphasis is on handing down/around to
“deserving” others. It is worth noting, however,
that not all forms of reuse are premised on these
social ties. For example, Internet forums, such as
Freecycle, make it possible to move discarded things
along by gifting them to persons to whom one has
no preexisting ties. Similarly, many items pass from
first to second cycle use via a charity shop, making it
highly unlikely that the first- and second-cycle users
will ever meet. Finally, there are forms of reuse that
involve no contact and no exchange—monetary or
otherwise. “Scavenging,” particularly in its modern
guise of “dumpster diving,” or freeganism, is a case
in point. Herein, individuals go through garbage to
find discards that they might be able to reuse.
Recycling is a particular form of reuse that
involves some form of material transformation
between the first- and second-cycle uses of an
object. It involves the processing of used materials

Risk Society

(postconsumer waste) such that they can substitute
the use of virgin materials in the production of new
goods. Strictly speaking, recycling should replenish
the supply of the material that is being recycled.
For example, recycling paper should involve taking used paper, processing it, and producing more
paper. However, in reality—for reasons of time,
cost, and energy—used materials tend to be broken
down, processed, and used in the production of different commodities. For example, recycled paper
might be used to make cardboard just as end-of-life
laptops may contain precious metals that can be
salvaged and used in the production of other electronic goods. While recycling is not a practice that is
unique to contemporary culture (for example, paper
was made from recycled rags for much of the nineteenth century), it has taken on a particular manifestation over the last twenty years. Today, recycling is
a highly visible theme in environmental campaigns,
and the emphasis is on individual consumers and
households disposing of things in ways that make
use of expanding recycling infrastructures. Typically,
the emphasis is on finding use for the discarded
by-products of consumer activity such as packaging, containers and bottles (although note, these are
also amenable to reuse as in the case of putting out
empty milk bottles for collection and refill) as well
as for things that have been used but can be easily
recycled such as newspapers and magazines. Until
relatively recently, recycling had not been an option
for more complex products such as cell phones or
laptops. Consequently, if consumers were unable
to move things along and enable their reuse, then
it was likely that these items would be disposed of
through the waste stream (or otherwise lingered in
the attic until a sufficient amount of time passed to
legitimate the wasting). However, there are now a
number of initiatives—sometimes charitable, sometimes commercial—that will find a use for complex
products by repairing/refurbishing them and distributing them to less developed countries or else salvaging materials and making new consumer goods.
Reuse and recycling are, as noted, ways of dealing with the discards and afterward of consumption,
but they are also ways of disposing of things without
wasting them. Empirical studies of the ways in which
consumers get rid of things indicate that consumers
will endeavor to reuse or recycle that which they have
discarded as opposed to simply throwing it away. In
turn, this suggests that there is nothing careless or

1225

carefree about the ways in which consumers dispose
of things. This is a particularly useful insight for the
study of consumer culture as there exists a popular
and academic tendency to suggest that consumer
societies are “throwaway societies” and in turn make
a number of spurious claims regarding the profligacy
of modern consumers. However, it does not necessarily follow that the prevalence of reuse and recycling
indicates that modern patterns of consumption are
becoming environmentally more sustainable. Indeed,
it is often argued that the energy used in transporting
and recycling materials outweighs the environmental
benefits of doing so. More substantively, empirical
studies of those who buy used goods suggest that secondhand consumption represents less of an alternative to—and critique of—consumerism than it might
initially appear insofar as it creates more consumer
choice and enables persons to get more for less such
that it ultimately entails more consumption rather
than less. Similarly, studies suggest that those who
hand down their furniture or electronic goods do so
to acquire newer alternatives and alleviate anxieties
about discarding them while they are still in working
order. What reuse and recycling do not do, then, is
offer up the possibility of consuming sustainably by
consuming less.
David Evans
See also Appropriation; Commodities; Environmental
Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Gifts
and Reciprocity; Material Culture; Object Biographies;
Thrift; Waste

Further Readings
Ferrell, Jeff. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban
Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking and
Street Scavenging. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.
Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. Second Hand Cultures.
Oxford: Berg, 2003.
O’Brien, Martin. A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the
Rubbish Society, London: Routledge, 2007.
Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: The Social History of
Trash. London: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

RISK SOCIETY
Over the past twenty-five years, the subject of risk
has received not only widespread attention within

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Risk Society

the social sciences, but also it has become a fixed
point in the vocabulary of daily life, following the
publication of the ominous text by Ulrich Beck that
pointed out how in contemporary societies stratification, politics, science, social movements, consumption, and identity are entwined with the social
definition of risks.
Deborah Lupton divides the main approaches to
the issue of risk into two main groups: (1) The realist perspective, developed and used first and foremost
in technical and scientific fields, such as engineering,
economics, epidemiology, statistics, and psychology.
All those fields are said to take the nature of risk for
granted: for instance, in the cognitive approach, the
key question is to understand—by treating risks in the
same way as objective facts—the reactions of ordinary
people from a behavioral and cognitive perspective,
without taking into consideration the process of definition of the risk itself. (2) The sociocultural perspective, which, by contrast, uses the definition of risk as a
starting point. This approach can be subdivided into
various strains such as (a) the cultural theory of risk,
pioneered by Mary Douglas and adopted by a range
of other scholars, which focuses on the metaphorical and symbolical uses of the body by the practices
and discourses concerning risk; (b) the governmentalism approach, which applies Foucauldian ideas to
the question of risk; (c) the approach that interests us
most here, that of risk society.
This term became common currency in academic
circles and beyond after 1986—in a period marked
by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reaction in the Ukraine (at the time, part of the Soviet
Union) and the Union Carbide gas tragedy in Bhopal
(India)—when Beck wrote Risikogesellschaft. This
key text would shape debate for decades to come and
has been translated into more than twenty languages.
It is available in English, translated as Risk Society
(1992). Over the years, several theorists have faced
this issue, developing different facets about the risk
theme, establishing what we can loosely call a risk
society school. Among these is renowned sociologist
Anthony Giddens.
Paradoxically, however, it would be misleading
to summarize Beck’s ideas on risk by using these as
one’s starting point. In fact, Beck’s theoretical, methodological, and analytical stance can be properly
understood only by considering and examining the
position of his risk society thesis within the context
of a range of connected concepts.

Theoretical Context
The basic first theoretical idea of Beck’s work, introduced in his 1986 volume (Beck 1992) and elaborated repeatedly in his subsequent studies (eventually
becoming the title of his 1994 book with Anthony
Giddens and Scott Lash) is that of reflexive modernization. Just as in the nineteenth century modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society
and produced the industrial society, so modernization today is dissolving industrial society and letting
emerge another kind of modernity. In other words,
we have to distinguish between the modernization
of tradition and the modernization of industrial
society—a process in which modernity turns on itself,
modernizing its inner elements of countermodernity,
which it itself produces. These
components . . . traditionality inherent in industrialism are inscribed in varied ways within the architecture of industrial society—in the patterns of “classes,”
“nuclear family,” “professional work,” or in the
understanding of “science,” “progress,” “democracy”—
and their foundations begin to crumble and disintegrate in the reflexivity of modernization. (Beck 1992,
14; emphasis in original)

In this continuum of the modernization process,
the production of wealth becomes intertwined
with the production of risks due to the large-scale
deployment of technical equipment and the incalculability of their consequences. As Beck says, we
thus move from a social situation in which people
unite and divide according to needs toward one in
which the basic logic underpinning social life is
that of insecurity, given that sooner or later risks
also affect those who produce them.
One important argument supporting the theory of
risk society is that of the knowledge dependence of
modernization risks. As Beck says, “while such things
as income and education are consumable goods that
can be experienced by the individual, the existence of
and distribution of risks and hazards are mediated
on principle through argument” (1992, 27; emphasis
in original). This implies an enormous weight on the
practices of defining the situation, of reflexivity and
speculation:
Along with the critical risk consciousness of culture
then, in almost all realms of everyday existence, a
theoretically determined consciousness of reality

Risk Society

enters the stage of world history. . . . The risk society
marks the dawning of a speculative age in every
perception and thought. (1992, 73; emphasis in
original)

This predominance of the cognitive and decisional
elements in the risk society—acceptable risks are
accepted as a result of a social construction—mean
that science on the one hand and politics on the other
are key elements in risk definition processes. They
thus open, respectively, new spaces for the scientization and politicization of risk. As regards science, we
are faced with a “feudalization of cognitive practice,”
in which science loses its social monopoly of the
truth, given that “the flood of findings, their contradictoriness and overspecialization, turn reception
into participation, into an autonomous process of
knowledge formation with and against science”
(Beck 1992, 167; emphasis in original). As far as
politics is concerned, Beck introduces the concept of
subpolitics—this is meant to denote the location of
the technoeconomic system “between politics and
nonpolitics. It becomes a third entity, acquiring the
precarious hybrid status of a sub-politics, in which
the scope of the social changes precipitated varies
inversely with their legitimation” (1992, 186; emphasis in original). A dedifferentiation thus takes the
place of the political system from other spheres such
as the media, social movements, and science (for
example, one could cite the subpolitical role of medicine regarding procreation or the definition of what
life and death are). These are all spheres of subpoliticization that dispossess the institutional political
sphere of its role as a guide within society.
The shift in the logic of distribution highlighted
by global risks is not, however, the only dimension
of risk society. The other major theoretical pillar on
which Beck’s theory rests is the concept of individualization (see also Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995).
This relates to the social, biographical, and cultural
risks that in advanced modernity “have disembodied
and reshaped the inner social structure of industrial
society and its grounded and basic certainties of life
conduct—social classes, familial forms, gender status, marriage, parenthood, and occupations” (Beck
1992, 87). Individualization thus creates a new form
of immediacy for individual and society. As Beck
says, “The individual himself or herself becomes
the reproduction unit of the social in the lifeworld”
(1992, 90). This does not denote, however, the

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centrality of a Promethean individual, freed from any
form of social relationship. In risk society, individualization goes hand-in-hand with the institutionalization and standardization of living conditions. If the
trend, therefore, is one of an erosion of “standard
biographies,” this is nonetheless made possible by
the dependence of post-traditional individuals on the
labor market and hence “on education, consumption, regulations and support of social laws, traffic
planning, product offers, possibilities, and fashions
in medical, psychological and pedagogical counseling
and care” (90). In a certain sense, in the new form of
social bond, the ties and checks of tradition (represented first and foremost by family and gender) are
replaced by those of secondary institutions. Thus, as
Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argues, we are increasingly
faced with a painful contradiction between the “individual de jure” (one cannot avoid choosing one’s
own “do-it-yourself biography”) and the “individual
de facto” (not everyone, however, disposes of the
same tools to construct this biography). From this
perspective, the conditions that shape individuals are
no longer simply those external events that impose
themselves “but also consequences of the decisions
they themselves made, which they must view and
treat as such. . . . Under these conditions, how one
lives becomes the biographical solution of systemic
contradictions” (Beck 1992, 136–137; emphasis in
original). In that sense, every decision taken by the
individual constitutes a biographical risk, from sentimental relationships, to sex life, to diet, to education
and career paths, to which outside experts should
be consulted to help us with those decisions that we
cannot make ourselves.
In the current decade, in addition to returning to
his main prior arguments to either correct or redirect them, Beck draws some conclusions from the
globalizing dynamics of risk already highlighted
in Risk Society by considering the formation of a
cosmopolitan society. As he says, global cosmopolitanization is a “historically irreversible fact,” the
umpteenth “secondary consequence” of reflexive
modernity, as a result of which, people are “living in
really existing relations of interdependence; they are
as much responsible for the intensification of these
relations through their production and consumption as are the resulting global risks that impinge
on their everyday lives” (Beck and Ciorin 2006, 9;
emphasis in original). Beck’s work has found favor
with a wide and varied range of social theorists. For

1228

Risk Society

example, Giddens developed his argument regarding
the risks produced by modernization by linking it
to the issue of trust. Indeed, in a certain sense, he
turns the perspective used to observe the question of
risk upside down, his contentions being based on the
basic argument that
the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up
with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems,
especially trust in expert systems. . . . It is a matter of
the calculation of benefit and risk in circumstances
where expert knowledge does not just provide that
calculus but actually creates (or reproduces) the
universe of events, as a result of continual reflexive
implementation of that very knowledge. (1990,
83–84; emphasis in original)

Given that, due to the process of disembedding,
the development of trust that is freed from interpersonal relations becomes fundamental in modernity:
the problem of contemporary risks is precisely that it
undermines that trust by exposing the limits of expert
opinion and ultimately diminishing the sense of ontological security. Giddens also outlines the possible
framework of personal adaptive reactions to this
existential condition. These can range from pragmatic acceptance, focusing on how to survive, to
radical engagement, by means of protest, to sustained
optimism and its corollary, cynical pessimism.
Along with Bauman, Giddens is one of the key
figures to have developed the theme of individualization and its associated risks by taking as a starting
point the progressive detachment of sentimental relations from any motivation or bond that does not lie
in the reciprocal and constant satisfaction and selfrealization of members of a couple within a context
of high reflexivity of the relationship—a situation
described by Giddens as “pure relationship,” which
is also the historically most ambitious and fragile type
of human bond. Following on from these, we arrive
eventually at those situations that involve a great
investment of time, resources, and energy dedicated
to the construction of one’s personal identity through
lifestyle choices (for example, the risks deriving from
diets, sporting activities, or more generally the search
for gratifying and enriching experiences.

Criticism
Nonetheless, the risk society theory has also come in
for criticism. In addition to allegations of empirical

weakness (a charge that appears unfounded given
the large amount of empirical work underpinning
his theoretical frame), there has also been criticism
of several key points in his theoretical argumentation (see Mythen 2007). These include, for example,
(1) the distinction between “natural hazards” and
“manufactured risks,” which according to some,
undervalues the role of natural disasters in contemporary society; (2) the exaggerated emphasis on
change in the logic of social distribution, particularly in the light of the greater “democratic nature”
of risks compared to the class structure of poverty;
(3) the continual reference to catastrophic risks and
their globalizing impulse, which is held to underplay the local and differential aspect of risks; (4) the
consideration of the perception or risk as homogenous, given that the identification of “risks” takes
place in specific sociocultural and historical contexts
(Lupton 1999); (5) the entirely negative reading of
the dimension of risk, which flies in the face of a long
historical tradition viewing risk also as a source of
potential opportunities and not merely in terms of
negative consequences; (6) finally, the overemphasis
on dynamics, which are almost entirely limited to
Western advanced capitalist societies, is said to invalidate the characterization of the contemporary world
as a “world risk society.”
In one of his most recent works, in English titled
World at Risk (2009), Beck returns to the question of
risk society. Beginning with a discussion of the contemporary phenomenology of risk (along with the
themes discussed in the book of 1986, he adds those
of genetics, finances, and terrorism), Beck not only
revisits the concepts of his previous work but also
devotes particular attention to the shift from a risk
society to a world risk society to rebut the criticisms
discussed above.
The peculiarity of the world risk society lies not so
much in the emergence of new dangers and insecurities as in the disappearance of the notion that these
threats can be combated and resolved at national
levels. In this sense, we find a synergy between Beck’s
theory of the global risk society and his recent work
on cosmopolitanism (in addition to that on the
defects of methodological nationalism in the social
sciences; see Beck 2006). To put it simply, Beck
argues that in the world risk society, the reflexivity
of uncertainty (understood as the production of new
insecurity due to the calculability of risks) and the
cosmopolitan impulse are increasing side by side.

Risk Society

In this most recent work, Beck introduces a series
of conceptual innovations and differentiations, such
as the distinction between risk and catastrophe and
that between risk and culturally varying assessments of risk, whose importance is increasing in a
globalized world. As far as the first distinction is
concerned, Beck states very clearly and forcefully
that risk and catastrophe should be kept distinct as
risk is the anticipation of the catastrophe. Or, to use
his words, “global risk is the staging of the reality of
global risk” (Beck 2009, 10; emphasis in original).
Engaging implicitly with a number of criticisms,
Beck also contends that, precisely because the distinction between risk and the cultural perception of
risk has blurred, risks are prone to being considered
differently according to different cultural perspectives. We therefore find at the level of global politics
a fundamental problem, which he terms “the clash of
risk cultures, the collision of culturally different risk
realities (i.e. perceptions of risk)” (2009, 12; emphasis in original).
Given the events that have occurred since
September 11, 2001, Beck argues that in the global
risk society there is a big difference between the “logics” of environmental crises, global financial risks,
and terrorist threats. In fact, “environmental crises
and economic threats due to global financial flows,
in spite of all their differences, exhibit a commonality: they must be understood in terms of the dialectic
of goods and bads” (2009, 13). With the new phenomenon of international terrorism, purpose takes
the place of chance.

Risk Society and Consumption
Above and beyond the criticisms that can be laid at
the door of the theory of risk society, Beck’s analysis
contains many important reflections relevant to the
question of consumption. First of all, the processes
of social definition of what is risky can have huge
implications for consumption practices. To cite just
two examples, think of the waves of panic linked
to crises such as those of avian and swine flu and
the related short-term changes in consumption of
specific goods or of the campaigns warning of the
dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, which in turn lead
to increases in sporting activities. Second, the issue
of individualization is central to the question of lifestyle changes and the role of consumption in the
construction of one’s own biography. Third, Beck’s

1229

observations on the process of subpoliticization and,
more generally, on the process of societal dedifferentiation provide us with illuminating insights into the
movements of consumers and, vice versa, into the
roles that consumption behaviors play within social
movements and the effects of ethical responsibility
on businesses and consumption. Finally, examining
global inequalities and the conflicts (whether current
or potential) that they produce in the light of the distribution logic between “goods” and “bads” can be
extremely stimulating if we think—to cite just one
example—about the extension of Chinese consumption markets and production in terms of environmental sustainability, labor rights, effects on other
economies, and so on.
As we can see from this brief account, it is clear
that from both epistemological and analytical perspectives, Beck’s theory and the works linked to it are
difficult to ignore for those interested in social theory
and consumption.
Mario De Benedittis
See also Cosmopolitanism; Disorganized Capitalism;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Globalization; Individualization;
Lifestyle; Self-Reflexivity; Social Movements

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Life in Fragments: Essays in
Postmodern Morality. London: Blackwell, 1995.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. London: Blackwell,
2000.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
London: Sage, 1992.
Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. London: Blackwell, 1999.
Beck, Ulrich. World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim.
Individualization. London: Sage, 2002.
Beck, Ulrich, and Ciaran Ciorin. The Cosmopolitan Vision.
Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive
Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the
Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1994.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1970.
Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame. Essays in Cultural Theory.
London: Routledge, 1992.
Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildawsky. Risk and Culture:
An Essay on the Selection of Technological and

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Rituals

Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity.
Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1991.
Lupton, Deborah. Risk. London: Routledge, 1999.
Mythen, Gabe. “Reappraising the Risk Society Thesis.”
Current Sociology 55, no. 6 (2007): 793–813.

RITUALS
Consumption rituals, according to Dennis Rook,
are events that are often planned, repeated over time
within a social group or culture, are performative,
and are characterized by the intensive and sometimes
excessive consumption of goods, services, and experiences. Furthermore, Grant McCracken (1988) notes
rituals are important symbolic activities in society
because they contribute to the movement of meaning
from consumer goods to individuals (e.g., a diamond
solitaire ring comes to mean “permanent love” to a
consumer because of its embeddedness in the proposal ritual). The most elaborate and visible types
of consumption rituals include holidays, rites of passage, and special occasions. Consumption rituals
are distinct from other similar types of consumption
activities because they occur infrequently, are typically highly symbolic, and are therefore meaningful
to participants. For example, while an ordinary family dinner might involve some elements of ritualistic
behavior (e.g., saying grace), a holiday dinner will
be understood as a ritual because it commemorates
an important cultural time, involves gatherings of
people not present at “everyday” dinners, features
special foods and beverages, and requires the use of
special objects (e.g., the holiday china) reserved for
such occasions.
The significance of ritualistic consumption within
consumer culture is mirrored by the dramatic increase
in the number and range of scholars who explore
the topic. Russell W. Belk, who is arguably the most
influential pioneer in the field of consumer culture
research, observes that a key thread pervading most
topics of interest in this subfield is the presence and
salience of rituals. This entry reviews the definitions
of ritualistic consumption, discusses its structural and
functional aspects, provides an overview of the main

topics of interest to scholars, and highlights emerging
research directions in the area.

Definition of Ritualistic Consumption
Early theorists exploring capitalism and consumption
presumed that consumption in premodern societies
was always embedded in ritual. However, the proliferation of goods, services, and experiences through
industrialization opened up the possibility of extensive consumer experiences outside of ritual contexts.
A few scholars began exploring ritualistic behavior
within contemporary-culture consumption contexts
in the early 1980s, in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and marketing. Yet the study of rituals within
the discipline of consumer behavior, which is arguably where most of the scholarship on the topic is
located, typically dates from Rook’s seminal article,
“The Ritual Dimension of Consumer Behavior,” in
the Journal of Consumer Research. Rook lays the
theoretical groundwork for the construct of ritualistic consumption, drawing on literature in cultural
anthropology and sociology, and describes the following structural elements as salient to consumption
rituals: ritual artifacts, ritual scripts, ritual performance roles, and the ritual audience. Ritual artifacts
include items that act as conduits of the symbolic
meaning of rituals. As such, they are often excluded
from everyday consumption, because any use alongside profane items could dilute their sacred nature
during ritual occasions. For example, wedding receptions often feature the use of dining chairs that are
uniformly decorated with elaborate fabric backing
and pads, although mismatched chairs could perform
the same function of providing guests with places to
sit. This example also demonstrates that ritual artifacts are essential in the creation of the aesthetics and
“atmospherics” (Sherry 1998) of a ritual event.
Governing the use of ritual artifacts are ritual
scripts, or the normative guidelines, that instruct participants on how to (properly) consume ritual artifacts. Scripts can range from informal and perhaps
even nonarticulated rules that “everyone knows” in
a social network (e.g., waiting for everyone to arrive
before opening Christmas presents) to the more formal and perhaps even codified (e.g., a book of toasts
used at a retirement ceremony). Similarly, ritual performance roles are the sets of behaviors delineated
as appropriate (or inappropriate) for each ritual participant to enact. In the formal ritual script described

Rituals

above, the person offering the retirement toast is
designated as “toastmaster,” and even the author of
the book of toasts, who may not participate in the
actual event, has a role as “supplier” of ritual-related
information. This analogy has interesting potential
for ritual scholars, as ritual performance roles are
now explored within the domain of the marketplace. For example, Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth
H. Pleck (2003) describe the role of the bridal salon
in women’s experiences of selecting their wedding
gowns. She finds that salons serve as schoolhouses by
educating brides on weddings, as storage facilities for
gowns, and as social settings to help make the ritual
of trying on gowns become public.
Furthermore, scholars such as Otnes, Lowrey,
and Shrum in their 1997 article “Toward an
Understanding of Consumer Ambivalence” also
focus on how “sociological ambivalence,” or the
conflict that arises between individuals who express
different social roles within a context, can be quite
prevalent in ritualistic consumption. In a more everyday example of a ritual, consumers might wish to
express the role of “customer” in a restaurant and
enjoy a quiet dinner. However, a restaurant might
decide it wants more active participation from its
diners and ask them to sing “Happy Birthday” to
strangers at another table. Customers’ emotions
could include both happiness at enjoying the food
and resentment for being drawn into a ritual that is
“embedded” into the strategic plan of the restaurant.
The ritual audience involves consumers who may
not be directly involved in the event being staged but
who nevertheless may be impacted by the activity.
Consider the size and composition of the audience
who experienced the death of John Lennon. Millions
of people around the world paused for ten minutes
of silence December 14, 1980, to remember him
while over 225,000 fans attended a vigil in New
York City’s Central Park. The memorial was covered
with flowers, candles, and other artifacts such as guitars and pictures. Thus, it is possible that a broad
audience for a consumption ritual can greatly exceed
the number of immediate participants. Nevertheless,
these tangential audience members can find the event
to be meaningful and can participate by purchasing
goods, services, and experiences related to the ritual.
Rook focuses more on the structural aspects of ritual than the actual efficacy of these events, although
he argues that for a ritual to remain vital in a culture, the four structural aspects need to be visible and

1231

resources must be devoted to maintaining each. To
understand the functional aspects of rituals, scholars
in consumer behavior often cite Tom Driver, who
describes the three “social gifts” of ritual as order,
transformation, and communitas. Order refers to the
ability of a ritual to provide structure to people’s lives
and actions. Furthermore, order is salient in the fact
that rituals are often characterized by a fairly fixed
sequence of activities. Consider the “wedding calendar” that appears in Bride’s magazine—or the schedule of events that a bride is supposed to complete,
beginning fifteen months before her wedding date.
Transformation refers to the ability of a consumption
ritual to change the participants in ways that range
from the fleeting and therefore often inconsequential to the dramatic and perhaps even permanent
and irrevocable. Julie A. Ruth, Cele C. Otnes, and
Frederic F. Brunel note how one informant describes
how his relationship was permanently ruined with
his coworkers because he believed they gave him a
used frying pan as a wedding gift. Not long after the
wedding shower, he quit his job at the firm. The final
social gift of ritual—communitas—is a term Driver
borrows from anthropologist Victor Turner. It refers
to the ability of a ritual to strengthen social bonds
with those in the participant’s immediate community
and perhaps with those in more peripheral social networks as well. For example, most consumers around
the world had inexpensive access to the soccer games
that made up the 2010 World Cup event—either by
watching these games on their own televisions or
in bars or retail establishments. The cost savings by
viewing the matches through those options were considerable compared to the costs of attending a game,
paying for tickets, parking, purchasing food and
beverages, and perhaps even traveling from across
the globe. Nevertheless, according to the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), about three million people attended the World Cup in South Africa
to celebrate with others from their home country at
the actual venue of the matches.
Having described the theoretical underpinnings of
ritualistic consumption, this entry offers an overview
of the specific topics and contexts explored by consumer culture scholars.

Gift Giving
One of the earliest consumption rituals that captured the attention of consumer culture scholars

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Rituals

is gift giving. Although this activity can act as a
stand-alone ritual, it typically pervades most elaborate holidays and special occasions. The study of
gift giving was originally of interest to anthropologists and sociologists with Mauss’s book The Gift
(1954), which remains a classic text in the study of
consumption, and interest among consumer culture
scholars predates the emergence of the consumer culture field in consumer behavior. For example, Belk
explored gift giving by conducting experiments and
surveys and relying on such theoretical frameworks
as balance theory to explain the impact of gift giving. However, the real catalyst for consumer culture
researchers interested in this topic was John F. Sherry
Jr.’s seminal article, “Gift Giving in Anthropological
Perspective.” Sherry offers a three-stage model of
gift giving consisting of (1) gestation (all activities
prior to the actual gift exchange, including the dropping of hints, gathering ideas for gifts, the contextual restrictions for gifts, and any preestablished
norms such as price limits); (2) prestation (all ceremonial aspects of gift exchange, including presentation, unwrapping, and the emotional reaction of
the recipient); and (3) reformulation, or the impact
of the gift on the relationship. Furthermore, Sherry
posited that gifts could strengthen, affirm, attenuate, or sever a relationship. Sherry’s work quickly
spurred a flurry of interest in gift giving. Scholars
have explored the social roles givers express when
they offer presents to recipients, how gifts impact
the relationship between the giver and recipient, and the ways third parties (e.g., those in the
social circles of the giver/recipient dyad) impact
gift-buying behavior.
Furthermore, the issue of how gift giving norms
and patterns differ across cultures is of interest to
researchers. Annamma Joy examines the ways gift
giving occurs among kinship circles in Hong Kong.
She finds that the framework that best describes gift
giving in that country is not the Western model of
immediate reciprocity, which was once thought to
be universal. Furthermore, the collective nature of
Hong Kong society also allows for a greater emphasis on children’s gift giving to their parents and
grandparents—a phenomenon that contradicts gift
giving patterns in North America. As gift giving has
become deeply ingrained as a topic in consumer culture research, other forms—such as inheritance and
bequests of inalienable wealth—have also become of
interest.

Holidays and Special Occasions
Consumer culture scholars have paid less attention
to the broader context of holidays in which activities such as gift giving typically occur. After a few
studies on specific aspects of Christmas, scholars
focused more of their attention on one holiday
that does not involve gift giving at all. Specifically,
Melanie Wallendorf and Eric J. Arnould explore
the nuances of the Thanksgiving celebration in the
United States and find it is a collective ritual that
people use to celebrate abundance through consumption. Furthermore, Robert Harrison explores
aspects of the Thanksgiving weekend holiday
by focusing on “Black Friday,” the Friday after
Thanksgiving when the U.S. Christmas shopping
season officially begins. Surprisingly, given the pervasiveness of holidays in most cultures, many highly
ritualized occasions, such as Valentine’s Day, days
celebrating national independence, and other meaningful cultural holidays such as the birthday of King
Bhumibol Adulyadej in Thailand remain underexplored. Furthermore, studies of Christmas—widely
considered to be the “granddaddy” of all holidays
in Western countries (and hugely popular in Eastern
countries as well, according to Belk and Kimura),
seem to focus on very specific aspects of the holiday rather than on the event as a whole, and also
have lost ground in recent years to the exploration
of more alternative types of rituals.

Rites of Passage
Of consumer culture studies examining the three
most entrenched rites of passage in all cultures—
birth, marriage, and death—those pertaining to weddings receive the most attention from scholars and
are discussed in this section. Furthermore, funerals
typically remain one of the most visible and costly
rites of passage, with average costs in 2006, according to the National Funeral Directors Association,
being $7,500; however, these occasions are typically
studied only selectively around the globe. For example, Samuel Bonsu and Russell Belk (2003) explore
the meaning of funerals in Ghana. There, the funeral
is an occasion for a reciprocal and continuing relationship between the living and the dead, can last
several days, can help the community to sustain itself
through the provision of ample food and beverages,
and can offer both the deceased and the living an
opportunity to create new social identities.

Rituals

Weddings typically are the most elaborate riteof-passage celebrations in most cultures in terms of
time, effort, and expense. In most Western societies, church weddings are the most popular variant
because of their association with the white wedding,
which features the bride dressed in a long white
gown, the groom in formal wear, a white multitiered
cake, attendants in matching outfits, and gold wedding rings. A formal reception and honeymoon are
also considered part of the standard package of this
wedding. Consumer culture has contributed greatly
to the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of aspects
of consumer culture, through the proliferation of
specialized media (e.g., bridal magazines, programs
about weddings, portrayals in advertising and films,
and coverage of royal and celebrity weddings).
Furthermore, global advertising campaigns, international box office hits, and an increase in foreign travel
have fueled interest in the white wedding across the
globe. In many countries, this variant has almost
totally supplanted native or subcultural traditions.
The nature of the artifacts involved in weddings
clearly depends on the religious and/or secular overtones of the event. For example, Christian weddings
may feature communion artifacts and unity candles
while Jewish weddings often include a chuppah, or
floral arch, under which the ceremony takes place.
In most religious ceremonies, however, the groom
gives a ring to the bride. Likewise, diamond engagement rings are now standard in many Westernized
cultures, with their popularity driven largely by De
Beers’ “Diamonds Are Forever” advertising campaign. Yet alongside the white wedding, many alternative forms exist, including “green” weddings, gay
weddings, “encore” (e.g., second or third) weddings,
ethnic weddings, and theme weddings. Furthermore,
the ceremony is only the focal event in a ritual nexus
that includes the proposal, extensive shopping for
products and services, gift registration, showers,
rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and postwedding activities. With the growth of the Internet, technology plays an increasingly important role in the
staging of weddings (e.g., couples register online with
department stores and create websites that feature
their gift “wish lists”).

Emerging Trends in Ritual Research
Most research has focused on consumers’ ritual
participation in the home. However, the role of the

1233

marketplace in crafting and supporting ritualistic
consumption has become an important topic
within the field. For example, Robert V. Kozinets
describes the importance of merchandise and conventions to Star Trek fans as they participate in ritual
activities that support this identity. The role of the
marketplace—or the rejection thereof—also figures in
the Burning Man ritual. Furthermore, “marketplace
rituals,” or those actually created by retailers and
service providers to enhance customer experiences
or achieve marketing-related goals, are an emerging
topic. Otnes and colleagues explore how firms use
rituals such as tours, greetings, partings, gift giving,
and ceremonies to try and increase the “stickiness”
of consumers to a brand or firm. Likewise, certain
retailers such as American Girl and the now-defunct
Marshall Field’s differentiate their stores by embedding rituals into their marketplace offerings. Another
topic of interest is rituals in the workplace. Ruth
explores how gift giving in that venue results in the
expression of new social roles. Kelly Tian and Russell
Belk (2011) study how rituals emerge during workplace consumption, as employees decorate their office
space with family pictures, install possessions, and
claim a space as their own to compensate for being
away from home. New rituals emerge continually in
consumer cultures, and the significance of existing
rituals can wax and wane. Thus, the evolution of
ritualistic consumption promises to remain a fertile
research area.
Cele C. Otnes
See also Christmas; Food Consumption; Gifts and
Reciprocity; Mass Tourism; Potlatch; Routines and
Habits; Spaces of Shopping; Weddings

Further Readings
Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, and John F. Sherry Jr.
“The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior:
Theodicy on the Odyssey.” Journal of Consumer
Research 16, no. 1 (1989): 1–38.
Bonsu, Samuel K., and Russell W. Belk. “Do Not Go
Cheaply into That Good Night: Death Ritual
Consumption in Asante, Ghana.” Social Science
Research Network [electronic journal] (2003).
Driver, Tom. The Magic of Ritual. New York:
HarperCollins, 1991.
Kozinets, Robert V. “Can Consumers Escape the Market?
Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man.”
Journal of Consumer Research 29, no. 1 (2002): 20–38.

1234

Romantic Love

McCracken, G. Culture and Consumption. New
Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer
Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1988.
Miller, Daniel. Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon,
Press, 1993.
Otnes, Cele C., and Elizabeth H. Pleck. Cinderella Dreams:
The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003.
Rook, Dennis W. “The Ritual Dimension of Consumer
Behavior.” Journal of Consumer Research 12 (1985):
252–264.
Ruth, Julie A. “Gift Exchange Rituals in the Workplace: A
Social Roles Interpretation.” In Contemporary
Consumption Rituals, edited by Cele C. Otnes and Tina
M. Lowrey, 181–212. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003.
Ruth, Julie A., Cele C. Otnes, and Frederic F. Brunel. “Gift
Receipt and the Reformulation of Relationships.”
Journal of Consumer Research 25 (1999): 385–402.
Sherry, John F., Jr. “Gift Giving in Anthropological
Perspective.” Journal of Consumer Research 10, no. 2
(1983): 157–168.
Sherry, John F., Jr. (ed.). Servicescapes: The Concept of
Place in Contemporary Markets. Lincolnwood, IL: Nike
Town Chicago Business Books, 1998.
Tian, Kelly, and Russell Belk. “Consumption and the
Meaning of Life.” Research in Consumer Behavior 10,
(2011): 249–274.
Wallendorf, Melanie, and Eric J. Arnould. “‘We Gather
Together’: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day.”
Journal of Consumer Research 18 (1991): 13–31.

ROMANTIC LOVE
Consumption habits are most salient when entwined
with a desired emotional experience that upholds a
valued social relationship. Throughout human history, there are few social relationships that have been
more deeply valued, albeit often in secrecy, than the
pair bond. The worldwide transformation from a
society that is family focused and family dependent
into a more individualistic oriented culture resulted
in the pair bond moving out of a culture’s shadows
into the public light and approval. In the process,
new forms of consumption, especially those concerned with specific feeling states, such as romantic
love, have been eagerly adopted that highlight the
pair bond as a cherished ideal.
Romantic, or passionate, love refers to any intense
attraction involving the intrusive thinking about one

person within an erotic context with the expectation
of the state enduring for some time into the future.
It also involves the reordering of personal priorities
that favor being with the loved one combined with
feelings of dependency.
Romantic love is not a modern subjective experience. As William Jankowiak (1995) shows, crosscultural research has found it to be near universal, being found in 174 out of 193, or 90 percent,
of known cultures. Moreover, the budding physiological research on the evolution of the mammalian
autonomous nervous system lends further support
to the interpretation that passionate love is a human
universal. Research by Stephen Porges finds that
humans have a neurophysiological substrate that
enables them to have certain kinds of emotional
experiences conducive for developing and sustaining a pair bond relationship. Porges further suggests
that “conditioned love with its enduring social bond
might require a prerequisite neurophysiological
state that might be conceptualized as an [emotional]
monogamy switch” (1998, 857). In a related study,
T. C. Burnham and colleagues found a link between
decreased levels of testosterone in men and men in
committed relationships. Clearly, hormones play an
essential part in the evolution of human behavior.
Recent endocrinology research is significant for
its evidence supporting the biological underpinnings
of pair bonding. If humans were by-products of just
cultural construction, then they would never have
evolved neurological adaptations such as oxytocin
and vasopressin designed to support maintaining a
pair bond relationship. Nor would the neurological
basis of love have so many similar biological underpinnings that range from the capacity to experience
sexual arousal to romantic love and deep attachment. It is the existence of these sex hormones and
related neurological mechanisms that accounts for
anthropologists noting similar labile psychological
responses that include “psychophysical responses to
the loved person that include exhilaration, euphoria,
buoyance, spiritual feelings, increased energy, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, shyness, awkwardness, . . .
flushing, stammering, gazing, prolonged eye contact,
dilated pupils, . . . accelerated breathing, anxiety”
(Fisher 1998, 32). Further research by Arthur Aron
and colleagues on brain wave patterning found that
sex and romantic love involve different brain systems. It is love’s unique behavior traits that enable
onlookers to readily recognize its presence.

Romantic Love

For the couple involved, however, what may be
most striking is their difficulty in keeping the twin
emotional states of love and arousal separate rather
than merging them as identical experiences (see
Jankowiak 2008). From a biochemical perspective,
this makes sense: sexuality and emotional bonding
are mutually reinforcing. Porges found that a sexual
orgasm (combined with prolonged physical caressing) can trigger an oxytocin release that further serves
to strengthen personal memory and attachment and
thus contributes to sustaining a love bond.
There have been efforts to institutionalize the
separation of love and sex. A notable example of
a culture’s efforts to separate love and sexuality is
medieval European courtly society. In courtly life,
the ideal form of love became an asexual or chaste
love. Sexual interest and desire were present. It was
now, however, embedded within romantic banter, or
an institutionalized verbal flirting. Don Juan, who
excelled at romantic flirtation, used his skills to
engage in repeated acts of illicit seduction. Clearly,
humans have difficulty separating love from sex.
The second example of a chaste love society is
the Marri Baluch. In this Afghanistan society, men
express their “love” for married women (a dangerous
undertaking), while denying their sexual interest. This
could be, as asserted, because the Marri Baluch men
do not have sexual thoughts, or it could simply be a
convenient trope for denying sexual desire. Shanshan
Du found a similar theme of chaste love among the
Lahu (of southwest China). After marriage, it is not
unknown for married women and men to sing love
songs about someone else. These love songs are
devoid of erotic content. If someone expressed erotic
feelings, then it would be deemed rude and vulgar.
However, Du reports, it is clear that erotic feelings
and behavior can be present. In this way, extramarital love discourse is restricted by norms of propriety
more than by the absence of erotic thoughts. This
may be what occurred among the Marri Baluch as
well. In our own culture there are periodic efforts to
uncouple sex from feelings of love that range from the
nineteenth century Oneida to the 1960s Kersita commune. None of these communes survived for more
than a few decades and individuals were in constant
dialogue with each other over their personal dilemma
and inability to readily keep sexual desire independent from feelings of love or the desire for exclusivity.
As of 2010, there was no known study that
sought to document the frequency of romantic love

1235

as it is experienced in weak as opposed to strong
love cultures. This distinction may provide a way of
synthesizing Charles Lindholm’s discussions on the
relationship between social structure and emotional
expression. In weak love cultures, passionate love
would be found but in a highly muted form, whereas
in strong love cultures, evidence of love should be
easily documented in a culture’s ideology and in individual behavior.
Romantic love can be muted, though never
entirely repressed, by cultural factors. Because
researchers have rarely studied the relative frequency
in which a person falls in and out of love, it is unclear
if romantic love is experienced with less frequency in
those cultures that deny or disapprove of the emotional experience. The relative frequency in which
members of a community experience romantic love
may well depend on that culture’s social organization
and ideological orientation.
It is instructive, for example, that Valentine’s
Day is being adopted by many non-Western urbanites. Global capitalism thrives whenever there is a
fetishization of consumption. The more successful
economic ventures are ones that intertwined an activity with a culturally sanctioned emotional experience.
Valentine’s Day, for example, a celebration most men
dislike, flourishes because of women’s desire to find
evidence of their boyfriend’s or spouse’s continued
emotional investment in the relationship. The speed
with which Valentine’s Day has been adopted in eastern Asia owes itself to (1) the elevation of the pair
bond over the extended family, and (2) the desire of
participants to objectify their “love” to themselves as
well as to one another.
The study of love, passion, and romance has
finally entered into mainstream cultural analysis.
The growing interest in understanding the depth of
conjugal intimacy is making it possible to write an
ethnography of love in all its variation as well as
uniformity.
William Jankowiak
See also Desire; Emotions; Families; Imaginative
Hedonism; Individualization; Sex

Further Readings
Aron, Arthur, Helen Fisher, Debra J. Mashek, Greg Strong,
Haifang Li, and Lucy L. Brown. “Reward, Motivation,
and Emotion Systems Associated with Early-Stage

1236

Rostow, Walt Whitman

Intense Romantic Love.” Journal of Neurophysiology
94 (2005): 327–337.
Burnham, T. C., J. F. Chapman, M. H. McIntyre, S. F.
Lipson, and P. T. Ellison. “Men in Committed Romantic
Relationships Have Lower Testosterone.” Hormones
and Behavior 44 (2003): 119–122.
de Munck, Victor C., and Andrey Korotayev. “Sexual
Equality and Romantic Love: A Re-analysis of
Rosenblatt’s Study on the Function of Romantic Love.”
Cross-Cultural Research 33 (1999): 265–277.
Du, Shanshan. Chopsticks Only Come in Pairs. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
Fisher, Helen. “Lust, Attraction and Attachment in
Mammalian Reproduction.” Human Nature 9, no.1
(1998): 23–52.
Hirsch, Jennifer, and Holly Wardlow, eds. The
Anthropology of Romantic Love and Companionate
Marriage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2003.
Jankowiak, William, ed. Romantic Passion: A Universal
Experience? New York: Columbia University Press,
1995.
Jankowiak, William, ed. Intimacies: Love and Sex across
Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Lindholm, Charles. “Lovers and Leaders: A Comparison of
Social and Psychological Models of Romance and
Charisma.” Social Science Information 27 (1988): 3–45.
Porges, Stephen. “Love: An Emergent Theory: Phylogenetic
Substances of a Social Nervous System.”
Psychoneuroendocrinology 23, no. 8 (November 1998):
837–861.

ROSTOW, WALT WHITMAN
(1916–2003)
Walt Whitman Rostow, born in New York City to
a Russian Jewish émigré family, was an American
economic historian and a pioneer of postwar
development economics. He taught at Oxford
and Cambridge before taking up a chair at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT
(1951–1961). In 1968 he joined the University of
Texas at Austin, where he remained and lectured
until his death in 2003.
A speechwriter for Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the
1960s, Rostow took an active part in U.S. politics.
Under the Kennedy administration, he was among
the architects of the Alliance for Progress. He was
later appointed National Security Advisor by

President Lyndon Johnson and helped with planning
the country’s foreign policy as well as determining its
strategy in the Vietnam War.
Rostow’s academic renown is mostly due to his
influential book of 1960, The Stages of Economic
Growth. This is a general theory of development
based on a comparative historical analysis of the
industrialization process in Western Europe, Russia,
and Japan. According to Rostow, economic development follows a five-stage path, leading a backward
country featuring the typical economic organization
of traditional societies (phase 1) through a phase
preliminary to the “takeoff,” the takeoff (i.e., the
outbreak of the Industrial Revolution), and the
“drive to maturity” phase, to an “age of high-mass
consumption.”
The stage-based narrative was not Rostow’s distinctive contribution—actually, it can be traced back
at least to Bruno Hildebrand (1812–1878) and the
German historical school. Rostow also drew on economic statistics and postwar sociological research on
modernization, mainly Talcott Parsons’s study of traditional and modern societies. The element of novelty lay rather in the ideological content imbued in
this conceptual framework, which was now intended
to be a celebration of free trade within a capitalist
system, as it is clear from the emphatic subtitle of
the book, A Non-Communist Manifesto. The model
soon became controversial and was often criticized
for being mechanistic, normative, and lacking
empirical validation. On the other hand, the largescale failure of third-world development policies in
subsequent decades would suggest that the idea of a
single development path for all countries was naive
and unrealistic.
The process described in The Stages can be considered from the point of view of either production
or consumption, as both perspectives are combined
in the analysis. Consumption, however, receives
no extensive coverage until stage five of the model.
This is due to the autarchic character of preindustrial economies, which can fulfill only basic needs,
ensuring subsistence and the physical reproduction
of the household at best. In such contexts, people act
according to a pre-Newtonian worldview, and they
lack the skills to manipulate the environment to their
advantage.
Treatment of the Industrial Revolution in its early
phase emphasizes the role of production (the changing pattern of savings and investment) as is typical

Routines and Habits

of mid-twentieth century historiography. Little attention is paid to the side of demand, which is somehow
taken for granted, though new, cheap commodities
such as the standardized cotton textiles were in fact
the engine of this process, not to mention the contribution that better and richer diet, which resulted
from the agricultural revolution between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had given to the
demographic transition.
According to Rostow, it was only in the twentieth
century that consumption, in the form of “high massconsumption,” became the main character of this
story. As per capita income rose in Western societies,
larger numbers of people gained a command over
goods other than those fulfilling the need for food
and clothing. Moreover, the existence of an output
surplus allowed those countries to allocate increased
resources to social welfare and security. The service
sector, in general, gained importance.
It is interesting to note that this picture of the
postmaturity stage, dominated by consumer sovereignty, was at odds with the representation given
by John K. Galbraith in his The Affluent Society of
1958. According to Galbraith, affluent society was
rather the twilight of consumer freedom due to the
transition toward organized capitalism. He saw the
growing demand for goods as an artificial phenomenon generated by the supply side through large-scale
advertising. The power of corporations would eventually undermine the public sector.
Francesco Boldizzoni
See also Affluent Society; Capitalism; Food Consumption;
Galbraith, John Kenneth; Industrial Society; Mass
Production and Consumption; Social and Economic
Development

Further Readings
Galbraith, John K. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1958.
Kindleberger, Charles P., and Guido di Tella, eds.
Economics in the Long View: Essays in Honour of W.
W. Rostow. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Rostow, Walt W. The Stages of Economic Growth: A
Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960.
Rostow, Walt W. How It All Began: Origins of the Modern
Economy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.
Rostow, Walt W. The World Economy: History and
Prospect. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978.

ROUTINES

AND

1237

HABITS

Behaviors that are repeated regularly in a consistent
context tend to become habitual and occur with little
or no awareness. This applies to many forms of consumer behavior and operates as a way of rendering
manageable the vast array of consumer choices (or
selections) that consumers face as they go about their
daily lives. Were consumers to consider every act of
consumption or rationally consider every product
selection while shopping, then consumption would
be both highly time consuming and near impossible.
Repetition in daily life may be the rule rather than
the exception. A community sample of members that
kept diaries reported that close to 50 percent of their
activities were performed almost daily and usually
in the same location (Quinn and Wood 2005). This
regularity implies that much behavior is of a habitual
kind. As early as 1890, William James emphasized
the importance of habits. Habits diminish the conscious attention with which our acts are performed,
leaving room for the development of new behaviors
to take place. This routine manner of performing an
act also renders it difficult to explain how it is performed. No one may be able to describe in which
order he or she dresses, although it is likely that the
order is pretty fixed. James also noticed that habits
are difficult to get rid of. Hence, it is important that
in particular young people develop good habits. Just
as we may become saints in the moral, so we may
also become drunkards.
In line with the view of habits that James represented, a modern definition of habits specifies that
“habits are learned sequences of acts that have
become automatic responses to specific cues, and are
functional in obtaining certain goals or end-states.”
(Verplanken and Aarts 1999, 104). Besides a stable
context and repetition, the functionality or rewarding consequences of performing a behavior also
support the development of habits. This is a characterization that fits well the consumption of many
everyday products. Since habits occur without much
awareness, little attention is given to the variety of
information that encompasses such products. For
example, Ulf Dahlstrand and Anders Biel found that
consumers who more regularly buy eco-labeled products become less sensitive to the price difference as
compared with nonlabeled alternatives. Consumers
also spend little time in choosing between everyday

1238

Routines and Habits

products and provide only a single reason for their
choice, according to Wayne Hoyer. Examples of
specific cues or rules of thumb that may guide the
consumer are price (buy the cheapest), the usual
alternative, a particular brand, or an eco-label.
Marketing and advertising may influence the
process of habit formation through perceptual categorization. Consumers that have not yet established
a preference could learn to associate, for example,
a particular pasta, or pasta brand, with exceptional
qualities with regard to qualities such as taste, function, price, exclusiveness, or effect. To the extent
that they experience the pasta as rewarding, they are
likely to continue to buy it. With repeated choice,
they will develop a direct link between the goal to
buy pasta, the goal-directed cue, the particular package, and the behavior to choose pasta.
Hence, the more frequently the choice is made,
the less cognitive resources need to be allocated to
weighing the pros and cons of the alternatives against
each another. Therefore, decisions made by habit or
routine imply that any subsequent changes in values
and attitudes are not reflected in consumers’ choices
of products. This also implies that any new information, which perhaps would cause a different evaluation of the available alternatives, is not considered
in making the decision and thus has no influence.
This can have many consequences for the consumer.
For example, consumers may remain unaware that
new, alternative products are retailed within a certain
product category or that existing products have been
improved.
To break an old habit implies that the link or
association between goal and behavior needs to be
disrupted. Marketing and advertising may also try to
influence the process of habit change in several ways.
A store could signal lower prices through discounts
or coupons. Attempts to influence consumers’ purchasing habits could also be made closer to the actual
product choice through different types of in-store
exposure or by offering tastes of new products.
Although people start practicing a new behavior,
old habits linger. Presently, little is known about how
to step out of old habits. However, recent research
offers some insight into how the likelihood of establishing new habits can be increased. For instance,
Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis showed that a mental association exists between travel goal and travel
mode. Some people regularly take their bike when
going shopping in the local store while others go by

car. Some commute by bus while others commute by
car. These habits may be hard to change. However,
new habits may be established when people move to
a new environment. They must now consciously plan
how to get around and, for example, go from their
new home to their new workplace. Some municipalities have been active and offered people who have
recently moved into town a monthly or season ticket
on buses and the subway. In this way, they wish to
establish an association between travel goal and
travel mode.
A change in the existing environment may also
create a mental “disruption” and evoke conscious
monitoring. During an eight-day closure of a freeway
in Osaka, drivers who changed to public transport
during the closure used public transport more frequently one year after the closure than drivers who
during the closure continued to take their car. In
addition, the former group also used public transport
more after the closure than they did before, according to Satushi Fujii and Tommy Gärling.
Habits may also change when people experience natural life changes. New values may become
important and conscious planning to reach a new
goal necessary. Thus, young mothers start caring for
their offspring and show an increased openness to
information about nutritious food practices, notes
Martina Schäfer and Sebastian Bamberg.
As James noticed, people may have a hard time
reflecting on their habitual behaviors. Still, it would
be useful if a measure of habit strength could be
developed. Such a measure would allow for discrimination between habits and reasoned actions and,
in turn, how attempts to change behavior should
be designed. A recent instrument, the self-reported
index of habit strength from Bas Verplanken and
Sheina Orbell, seems promising. The instrument
incorporates various features of habit such as a history of behavioral repetition, difficulty in controlling
the behavior, lack of awareness, efficiency in goal
attainment, and a self-identity element. Compared
with earlier attempts that have been more exclusively
based on behavioral frequency, the new measure
facilitates intervention strategies through knowledge about which components of a habit need to be
addressed.
Herbert Simon emphasized that people are fairly
rational within their cognitive limits. We fall back
on heuristics; we don’t understand the full range of
alternative choices open to us or the consequences

Routines and Habits

of each available choice strategy. Later research on
habits shows that we sometimes try to reach our
goals with a minimum of cognitive effort. Habits are
functional in this respect.
Anders Biel
See also Advertising; Bounded Rationality; Branding;
Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior; Consumer
(Freedom of) Choice; Eco-Labeling; Goal-Directed
Consumption; Habitus; Life Course; Markets and
Marketing; Price and Price Mechanisms; Taste

Further Readings
Aarts, Henk, and Ap Dijksterhuis. “Habits as a Knowledge
Structure: Automaticity in Goal-Directed Behaviour.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1 (2000):
53–63.
Dahlstrand, Ulf, and Anders Biel. “Pro-Environmental
Habits: Propensity Levels in Behavioural Change.”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology 7 (1997):
588–601.
Fujii, Satushi, and Tommy Gärling. “Development of a
Script-Based Travel Mode Choice after Forced Change.”

1239

Transport Research Part F. Traffic Psychology and
Behaviour 2 (2003): 117–124.
Hoyer, Wayne. “An Examination of Consumer Decision
Making for a Common Repeat Purchase Product.”
Journal of Consumer Research 3 (1984): 822–830.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1.
London: Macmillan, 1890.
Quinn, Jeffrey, and Wendy Wood. “Habits across the
Lifespan.” Unpublished manuscript, Duke University,
2005.
Schäfer, Martina, and Sebastian Bamberg. “Breaking
Habits: Linking Sustainable Consumption Campaigns to
Sensitive Life Events.” Proceedings: Sustainable
Consumption and Production: Framework for Action,
March 10–11, 2008, Brussels, Belgium.
Verplanken, Bas, and Henk Aarts. “Habit, Attitude, and
Planned Behaviour: Is Habit an Empty Construct or an
Interesting Case of Goal-Directed Automaticity?” In
European Review of Social Psychology, vol. 10, edited
by Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone, 101–134.
Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1999.
Verplanken, Bas, and Sheina Orbell. “Reflections on Past
Behaviour: A Self-Reported Index of Habit Strength.”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology 6 (2003): 1313–1330.

S
SACRED

AND

PROFANE

To utilize the notion of a sacred and a profane is to
suggest an explanation and ordering of the world
encountered that looks back to the Judeo-Christian
traditions often claimed as the foundations of
Western society. The term sacred and profane,
bound together often as a figure of speech, suggests
the defining differences between a number of oppositions: good and evil, Godly and Godless or diabolical, civilized and uncivilized or savage, worthwhile
and worthless, white and black, and so forth. The
absolute definition of such differences in relation to
each other effectively divides the world into two:
a “theory of everything,” which imposed a binary
view. The sacred and the profane thus becomes the
vector through which the world, as encountered, is
interpreted and processed: that which is worthwhile
is worthy of God’s creation, and therefore a sacred
endeavor, and can be said to be moral or ethically
just, even healthy; that which profanes God’s order
is understood as morally bankrupt, a corrupting
enterprise or influence, and is counter to all our best
intentions. Consumer culture has long been considered to be in this latter category, with money seen
as indexical to man’s order rather than God’s, and
material items—which belong exclusively to the
earthly and temporal realms—of no use, therefore,
to the soul. In Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane
Love (1513–1514), the bride is positioned between
the symbols of the transitory earthly love (that presumably overwhelm her on this, her wedding day)

and the eternal heavenly love. The lesson is clear:
only a love of God is sacred, and all other loves (of
others, of objects) are merely distractions.
Such an orthodoxy of absolute ideas held sway
during the years of theocratic and feudal governance and would only begin to wane with rationalism and the Enlightenment. Early battles between
science and religion (as with Galileo and Darwin)
can be read as attempts by the church to shore up
the sacred and profane dichotomy via a retention
and defense of a philosophical-theological binary
divide, in the face of the fraying borders between
the two caused by the advances in science. Any
finding of worth in the material world detracted
from the transcendental, metaphysical, mystical,
and otherworldly modes of religion. Even scientists
who sought to locate God’s handiwork in material
creation were accused of blasphemy—often with
fatal consequences. The wrath that met such modest proposals can be accounted for by an acknowledgment of the usurping of the absolutism of the
sacred and profane in favor of the idea of a dialectical relationship between the two: a thesis of the
sacred, an antithesis of the profane. And yet even
the scientific engagement with reality that informed
rationalism suggested, or became the foundation
for, a new religious impulse: that reality, even in its
fallen state, still speaks of God’s creation, and so the
possibility of transcending this realm of the fallen
and profane, to find the sacred, remains possible.
Therefore, if reality is not itself entirely redeemed,
it can be the site of grace, of learning, and of new
paths to God.

1241

1242

Sacred and Profane

The possibility of redemption is seen to lie in
the encounter with the profane. Evelyn Waugh’s
1945 novel Brideshead Revisited is subtitled The
Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles
Ryder. Waugh’s protagonist, an interloper who initially harbors a skeptic’s suspicions of the religious
beliefs of his friends and lovers from the Flyte family, eventually converts, proving the immanence of
God in all things, even in modern times, and even
in the darkest hours of modern times (the book
opens and closes with the protagonist preparing for
military deployment during World War II). Thus,
Waugh’s protagonist finally concludes, reflecting
on the twenty years between his youth and middle
age, while unexpectedly finding himself back in the
Flyte’s stately home,
There was one part of the house I had not yet
visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed
no ill-effects of its long neglect. . . . The art
nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar.
I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of
words. . . . A beaten-copper lamp of deplorable
design re-lit before the beaten-copper doors of a
tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw
from their tombs, which they saw put out; that
flame burns again for other soldiers, far from
home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. . . .
I found it this morning, burning anew among the
old stones. (Waugh 1959, 331–332)

Here Waugh equates the building (Brideshead)
with the body (the protagonist, speaking here)—
salvation is finally found in both, in a continuum
of an ancient tradition that makes sense of the otherwise nonsensical world and casts its travails into
relief, even when both building and body have been
the location of Godless and hurtful activity. For
Waugh’s protagonist, it is—perversely—in the very
aesthetic failings of the consumer objects of the
world encountered that an access to the spiritual is
spurred onward. In much the same manner, Piers
Paul Read’s monk protagonist, in Monk Dawson,
forsakes his priestly vocation to live in the fleshpots
of modern, hedonistic society, believing that his
mission of love for others is best served in this real
world, even in marriage, than from behind the altar
or via the chaste and removed existence of the cleric.
It is only from this latter perspective that he comes to
belatedly realize what he has lost and, overwhelmed
with that feeling of loss, retreats to his monastic

existence to live out the remainder of his days. This
lesson has been learned via his dalliance with the
profane. For Graham Greene, in his novels concerning such matters, faith remains acknowledged (if not
celebrated) as an untarnished constant beneath the
sometimes shabby veneer—as in The Power and the
Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948).
In these “religious” writers of the modern era, the
given is not only that our existence in the realm of
the profane can be redeemed, or offer redemption,
but also that it is with this existence that we typically
or ordinarily encounter the sacred, rather than in the
lofty and rarefied environs traditionally associated
with the presence of God.

Commercial Applications of the
Sacred and Profane
Even in the secular age, the dichotomy of sacred and
profane remains as an interpretive frame. Divested of
theological baggage, qualities understood as sacred
and profane can be seen to coexist in the passionate
person: someone who is both a mature parent and
passionate lover, someone who will chase after his
own desires, despite the council of others, and yet
quit a job rather than engage in ethical compromise.
Such a person is understood to be able to access the
qualities, good or bad, that once flowed from such
a binary reading of, and reaction to, the world—to
juggle with them as he sees fit; a desirable person, of
high endeavors and low drives (as with the quintessential Greene protagonist). Such characterization
can be bought into. Givenchy’s 2009 perfume Ange
ou Démon—Le Secret suggests an enhancement
of just such a persona. Gianni Versace’s use of the
“slutty” dress code of prostitutes and Miami street
roughs for the glamour of his expensive 1990s collections creates just such a teasingly ambiguous tension
too. Likewise, the sacred and profane maps readily
onto preconceived ideas of high art and low culture.
Moments of gravitas (e.g., a wedding or funeral) call
for ceremony, respect, classical music, smart dress;
moments of celebration or relaxation (a birthday,
a holiday) lend themselves to the instant gratifications of low culture, such as pop music, spontaneous
dancing, and junk food. Today’s pilgrims are said to
follow the sun and “live life to the full” by exercising their freedoms to indulge their desires within, or
even on the border of, legality—those modern-day
pilgrimages given over to the profane: the package

Sacred and Profane

holidays advertised as opportunities for sex and
excessive drinking rather than sight-seeing, or to
cities with notorious red light districts rather than
sites of historic interest. In some places, such as
London’s Soho or parts of Amsterdam, the two are
combined.
Moralists who despair of such things often share
the same intrinsic interpretation of those who capitalize on them: dividing the world into that which
is good and that which is bad. For the indulgers, the
very attractiveness of the qualities of an unapologetic
“sinning” resides in the way in which once prohibited or disapproved behavior remains sinful—not
sinful in the literal sense (resulting in an afterlife of
eternal damnation) but as endowed with a frisson
of sinfulness via engaging in forbidden or dangerous acts, experiencing emotions that are denied to
the everyman. People can boast of the ill-advised
nature of their intentions; they will abuse their body
beyond what they know is their limit—and therein
is the thrill and the social status that can be gained
from such proclamations and activities. Again, environs readily present themselves for this commercial
tendency: innumerable dance tracks that, in their
lyrical content, anticipate the coming weekend, as
played in bars and clubs that finesse opportunities
for rapid drunkenness (the “happy hours” of two
drinks for the price of one). The phenomenon of “car
crash television,” of “good girl gone bad” pop singers and formerly squeaky-clean female stars, or dangerously out-of-control but brilliant male artistes, is
pruriently picked over by the tabloid press and television programs such as The Jerry Springer Show from
just such a paradoxically moralistic position. The
reportage effectively celebrates, as well as copiously
illustrates, that which they condemn, disseminating
the idea (and images) of the very things preached
against. It is no surprise that pornography is often
strangely moralistic; women are both taken advantage of and condemned for their behavior, not least
in the typical dialogue.
This suggests that traces of the old dichotomy
live on through a commercial makeover for the
secular age: the financial potential of selling a full
immersion in the profane, especially now that the
masses are freed from the religious and moral codes
of yesteryear, seems considerable. In this respect—
which may be identified as a postmodern appropriation of the sacred and profane (where the form
lives on as a cultural point of reference, even as the

1243

content is long forgotten)—progress seems anything
but progressive.

The Sacred and Profane in the
Postmodern Era
However, a further secular use of the dichotomy,
through a synthesis of the sacred and profane, gives
rise to new modes of expression, indicated by cultural
artifacts that both reflect secularization and articulate an acknowledgment of, or even respect for, older
metaphysical concerns. Such a paradoxical “holding together,” rather than the dialectical “conversational” relationship between the sacred and profane,
is one well suited to music. The repetitions and allengulfing volume of shoegazer and post-rock groups
(such as My Bloody Valentine, The Telescopes, and
Mogwai), particularly in concert, work to induce
in the listener a heightened state of contemplation,
shutting off some senses while heightening others,
and seeming to stretch and compact time—in these
respects, as a kind of freeing of aspects of the body
and psyche from their immediate and material surroundings, a latter-day form of meditation. The same
occurs in rave culture, with Ecstasy and “acid house”
music sending the dancer into an altered, joyous state
of consciousness. On the 1994 Officium album, Jan
Garbarek’s saxophone playing (suggesting, in keeping with more traditional jazz phrasing, an individual’s yearnings and emotions) melds with the
Gregorian chant of the Hilliard Ensemble (suggesting
sung prayer at the “higher” end of religious ritual—
the Latin psalms and hymns of the monastic community). In this mix, the secular, earthly, individual
(in the sense of the sole soloing saxophonist) meets
and matches, and enters into a musical cooperation
with, the unearthly collective voices in sung prayer.
The music represents a synthesis of these seeming polar oppositions. A similar operation is found
in the 1968 psychedelic oddity Mass in F Minor by
The Electric Prunes (then better known for the more
straightforward psychedelic music of their previous
two albums); here the lengthy acid guitar jams, typical of the West Coast sound of this time, reinterpret
the music of the Catholic Mass, interspaced with the
group singing the Latin chants themselves. Part of
the album was used on the soundtrack to the 1969
countercultural film Easy Rider, which, while including the expected scenes of free love and drug use, also
gestures toward the transcendental and even spiritual

1244

Sacred and Profane

potential of these secular and bodily preoccupations.
A degree of self-awareness is achieved by the hippy
protagonists through their immersion in the world—
seemingly to the extent of the anticipation of imminent death. This self-awareness is not particularly
different from older religious traditions in the nature
of its enlightenment: the moral of the film seems to
be that North American society is in a self-induced
delusion, and that that drop-out path is one of truthfulness, self-knowledge, and enlightenment, and with
it comes a new form of living, closer to the natural
world and to one’s true nature.
Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus (made into a
film by Miloš Forman in 1984) fictionally dramatizes
the interaction between the sacred and profane in the
arena of music. Here the composer Mozart, despite
his wayward and crude behavior, is understood to be
the chosen vessel of God—a kind of second Christ
(the transcendental quality of his music is understood
to indicate nothing less)—and is pushed to the point
of psychological breakdown and premature death
by the jealous and mediocre composer Salieri. Salieri
blasphemously defies God, on the basis that Mozart
is such an unworthy beneficiary of such divine inspiration, and so—even as Salieri acknowledges the
ineffably divine qualities of his rival’s work—seeks
to scupper God’s plans. For this dramatic clash of the
sacred and profane, and synthesizing these themes
into the world of the play, the narrative unfolds in
the city slums and the palace, the insane asylum and
church, and the opera house and the whorehouse.
On the one hand, this dynamic reproduces the
classic structuring of the world along the lines of
right and wrong; it is possible to dwell on a subtext
of spiritual battle between good and evil—God versus man, Mozart versus Salieri. But Shaffer muddies
these waters. Salieri, an unrepentant sinner, effectively
enables Mozart to work—even to the point of taking
a dictation of the score for the Requiem Mass from an
ailing Mozart on his deathbed. So, on the other hand,
the realization comes that it is with an acknowledgment of such a synthesis of the sacred and profane
that the world, as encountered, is best understood—
even works, mysteriously, to sacred ends. Mozart’s
corpse is buried anonymously—tossed into a pit with
beggars and the nameless—but his music lives and, as
Salieri concedes, will live on. The idea of mortality, as
a final horizon of artistic expression has, as the work
of Damian Hirst also seems to indicate, remained
locked into notions of the sacred.

The postmodern sacred and profane necessarily
critiques earlier models. But what is the nature of the
critique, and what is the contemporary response to
the tyrannies of theology as was? Anthony Burgess’s
1980 novel Earthly Powers (which, in this context,
emerges as a revision of Brideshead Revisited),
despite satirizing the Roman Catholic Church, its
clerics, and its beliefs, and expressing relief on the
part of the protagonist at his freedom from this culture (he is a hedonistic homosexual English author
who relates the story of his relative: a Pope who, at
the outset of the novel, is under consideration by the
Vatican as a candidate for sainthood), still remains
a work that is unwilling to suggest that the human
propensity for belief can be diminished. It is Burgess’s
unlikely protagonist, a nonbeliever, who is called on
as a witness to the necessary miracle required for the
ascendancy to the status of saint. Thus, the book
begins with a series of comic collisions of the sacred
and profane, offered as a reflection on the nature of
modern life:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and
I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced
that the archbishop had come to see me. “Very
good, Ali,” I quavered in Spanish through the closed
door of the master bedroom. “Take him into the bar.
Give him a drink.” (Burgess 1980, 7)

Whereas Waugh finally reaffirms belief from the
position of a repentant skeptic, Burgess offers an
unrepentant skeptic as the final recorder and arbitrator in the progress of the sacred and profane.
Regrounding theology and belief in the material
realm in this manner, the profane excesses of the
sacred, in an age of fundamentalism and self-declared
imperial moral authority, can be seen as driven by
superstition rather than egalitarianism.
Benjamin Halligan
See also Asceticism; Enlightenment; Hedonism;
Modernization Theory; Moralities; Postmodernism;
Protestant Ethic; Rationalization

Further Readings
Burgess, Anthony. Earthly Powers. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1980.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion. Victoria, Australia: Harcourt Education, 1959.
Lynch, Gordon. Between Sacred and Profane: Researching
Religion and Popular Culture. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

Satiation
Papazian, Mary Arshagouni, ed. The Sacred and Profane in
English Renaissance Literature. Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2008.
Read, Piers Paul. Monk Dawson. London: Pan Books, 1978.
Rowland, Ingrid. From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and
the Profane in the Renaissance. New York: New York
Review Collection, 2009.
Shaffer, Peter. Amadeus. London: Penguin Classics, 2007.
Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The
Holy in Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. London: Penguin
Books, 1959. First published 1945.

SATIATION
“You only have to look around you at all the people who are dieting and jogging to realize that,
with respect to some needs at least, a large part of
the advanced countries’ populations have not only
reached but passed the point of satiety.” So noted
economist Tibor Scitovsky in his essay “Growth in
the Affluent Society” (1987/1995, 97).
Almost sixty years earlier, John Maynard Keynes
in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” had envisioned a not-so-distant future
society in which the economic problem, the struggle
for subsistence and absolute needs, would be solved.
The problem then, he stressed, would be to shed the
old habits belonging to that struggle and to embrace
“the new-found bounty of nature” (1931/1972,
328). Keynes anticipated that, with time and experience, this struggle too would be won, at which point
future generations might cultivate the “art of life
itself” rather than selling themselves for the “means
of life” (328).
Karl Marx and so, too, John Stuart Mill had
believed in similar future possibilities. In their imagined futures, technical progress would have made
readily available all of humankind’s basic needs, freeing workers from the mind- and character-destroying
narrowness of tasks that Adam Smith had associated
with division of labor. Instead, they would be free to
pursue any and all things that moved them, attending,
above all, to the development of the human spirit.
It is not difficult to agree with Tibor Scitovsky that
this future has arrived. Yet the realm of true riches,
comprising leisure and freedom to pursue the art of
living, does not seem to have engaged most of us.
How to explain this paradox?

1245

One possibility lies in a set of wants noticed by
Keynes but also economists before him, namely,
wants that defeat satiety because they are unrelated
to absolute physiological needs but rather to the
relative wants of superiority and status. But why are
these insatiable? The reason given by social critic Fred
Hirsch was that, in the positional economy, a relative advantage gained by one comes at the expense
of someone else. Competition for relative position
thus becomes an unending social game where, as in
an arms race, the stakes always increase and there is
no final winner.
Nor are these the only insatiable wants. As
Scitovsky reminded us, addictions and strong habits
generally may become the source of never-to-be-satisfied desires. Once a habit has been formed, both
the need to compensate for the loss of pleasure due
to habituation and the need to avoid the pain of
breaking the habit provide incentives to escalate consumption. According to this view, then, the economy
continues to grow but only to feed wants that provide no lasting individual or social gain.
Still, one can argue that not all insatiable wants
and desires have this self-defeating quality. There are
some forms of consumption that, for their complexity, internal variety, and combinatory relations with
other activities, are able endogenously to produce
change and become a source of ever-new, sustained
pleasure. Engaging in conversation and in the arts,
reading a novel, listening to music, though also
playing sports and facing intellectual challenges, are
forms of consumption and experiences that Scitovsky
called creative. They are not subject to satiety. They
can stimulate demand and feed the growth of the
economy without the welfare losses that habits and
status competition bring with them.
Yet the potential variety of creative activities is not
just given to us, it must be learned and discovered;
indeed, it increases with experience. Thus knowledge,
skills, and, most importantly, time must be devoted
to them. The problem, however, is that many other
activities compete for our time and skills. And some
are more seductive than others. Consider comforts.
Comfort activities—from consuming fast food to
driving a car—do not require special abilities to be
learned and enjoyed, but they easily lead to habituation and to that potential escalation of consumption that characterizes dependence. This fact brought
Scitovsky to conclude that creative activities are at a
systematic competitive disadvantage in comparison

1246

Scarcity

with more easy-to-learn forms of consumption. This
might be debatable, but Scitovsky was correct in
stressing the importance of education and skills for
the better enjoyment of creative activities. Creativity
is not the result of simple inspiration and insight,
as our romantic bias would lead us to believe, but
of talent, education, and knowledge, notes Teresa
Amabile.
There is then a new economic problem that represents the challenge of today. It is the problem of how
to consume and produce for a better quality of life,
a life that, as Keynes said, would allow us “to live
wisely and agreeably and well” (1931/1972, 328).
Only, the challenge to opt for this life has not been as
easy to embrace with time and experience as Keynes
had hoped.
Marina Bianchi
See also Affluent Society; Consumer Demand; Consumer
Society; Happiness; Keynesian Demand Management;
Needs and Wants; Positional Goods; Well-Being

Further Readings
Amabile, Teresa. Creativity in Context: Update to the
Social Psychology of Creativity. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1996.
Bianchi, Marinao. “Time and Preferences in Cultural
Consumption.” In Value and Valuation in Art and
Culture, edited by Michael Hutter and David Throsby,
236–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Hirsch, Fred. The Social Limits of Growth. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren.” In The Collected Writings of John
Maynard Keynes. Vol. 9, Essays in Persuasion,
321–332. London: Macmillan for the Royal Economic
Society, 1972. First published 1931.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology.
New York: International Publishers, 1970.
Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press, 1965.
Scitovsky, Tibor. The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of
Human Satisfaction. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992.
Scitovsky, Tibor. “Growth in the Affluent Society.” In
Economic Theory and Reality. Selected Essays on Their
Disparities and Reconciliation, by Tibor Scitovsky,
97–108. Aldershot, UK: Elgar, 1995. First published 1987.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976.

SCARCITY
Scarcity as an all-pervasive fact of our lives is dominant in academic and policy thinking. Indeed, climate change poses new challenges to resource
availability for human survival. Water wars, famine, and oil threats regularly appear as news stories.
Resource scarcity is linked with population growth
and growing environmental conflicts, and science and
technology or innovation is usually evoked as the
appropriate “solution.” But what is scarcity? Why
has blame been attributed to it for many of humankind’s woes, for centuries? The scarcity postulate (i.e.,
that human wants are unlimited and the means to
achieve these are scarce and limited) underpins modern economics. This entry discusses the legacy of the
scarcity postulate and demonstrates how understandings of scarcity have largely been naturalized and
universalized in a range of academic disciplines and
dominant policy debates, having profound implications for society/nature relations and the governance
of markets, technology, and institutions. This entry
also explores some alternative ways to conceptualize scarcity, which take into account often neglected
cultural, historical, institutional, sociopolitical, and
distributional issues that offer more just ways to look
at resource allocation.
Why is scarcity usually associated with economics? Many economists see scarcity as essential to
the definition of economics. For example, Lionel
Robbins’s famous and all-encompassing definition of
economics is still used to define the discipline today.
He wrote in 1932 that “economics is the science
which studies human behaviour as a relationship
between given ends and scarce means which have
alternative uses” (1932, 16). A quick glance at any
economics textbook makes it evident that economics
is still defined as the science that studies scarcity.
Authors such as Nicholas Xenos and Hans
Achterhuis have played a key role in demonstrating
that scarcity is a child of modernity and that prior to
the seventeenth century, it was not viewed as a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. For example,
Xenos, in the work Scarcity and Modernity, shows
how certain attributes of modernity have given rise to
the universal notion of scarcity and that several paradigms propounded by neoclassical economics make
scarcity out to be a ubiquitous and permanent feature of the human condition. The etymological roots

Scarcity

of the word scarcity go back to the Old Northern
French word escarsete, which meant insufficiency
of supply. Until the late-nineteenth century, scarcity
connoted a temporally bounded period of scarcity or
a dearth. Scarcity was experienced cyclically, dependent usually on poor yields. After the Industrial Revolution, which led to cataclysmic changes creating
new needs, desires, and the frustration of desires, the
concept acquired a new meaning, which culminated
in its “invention” in neoclassical economic thought
of the eighteenth century. From scarcities, which
were temporally bound and spatially differentiated,
came the scourge of scarcity, “a kind of open-ended
myth” (Xenos 1989, 35) from which deliverance
was sought. Scarcity, not a scarcity or scarcities, was
essentialized and its simplistic universalization led
to the obscuring of ambiguities and regional variations. A condition of natural scarcity is said to pervade because of an individual’s limitless wants and
necessities and the limited means available in nature
to satisfy them. Scarcity emerges both as the raison
d’être of society and as the basis of government since
there is the need for an external arbiter to establish a
system of rule and manage property either through
the means of the market or through formalizing
rights regimes.
But the scarcity postulate has been challenged by
both economists and noneconomists. Karl Polanyi has
critiqued the notion of the “self-regulating” market,
disembedded from social control and making market
forces dominant over society. He has also demonstrated how in nonmarket societies, people satisfy their
wants through a different logic, including reciprocity,
redistribution, and exchange. Marshall Sahlins, in
Stone Age Economics, questions the assumption that
material wants are limitless and can never be satisfied.
By looking at data from a range of hunter-gatherer
economies, he argues that these economies are the
“original affluent society” or “uneconomic man”
where material wants are easily satisfied. Thus, he
begins with the postulate that human wants can be
limited and few and that people can enjoy material
abundance with a low standard of living and are thus
free from market obsessions with scarcity.
Institutional approaches in economics and political sciences have also contributed significantly to discounting the scarcity postulate. The work of Elinor
Ostrom, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize
in Economic Science, stands out. Ostrom and other
common property scholars have also shown how

1247

Hobbesian notions of anarchy, where states, regions,
and people fight over scarce resources, may not be
an accurate or predictable scenario. Instead, through
detailed empirical studies from all around the world,
they have demonstrated that local and global actors
have a deep understanding of their immediate environment and cooperate with each other in times of
adversity to avoid high transaction costs attached to
their failure to comply.
Amartya Sen’s entitlements approach refers not
to rights in a normative sense (what people should
have), but rather to the range of possibilities that
people can have. Sen sees entitlements as “the set
of alternative commodity bundles that a person can
command in a society using the totality of rights and
opportunities that he or she faces” (1981, 754). This
means that a famine may occur even when there
is no decline in food supplies. This is attributed to
people’s lack of purchasing power, rather than a
physical dearth of food. Sen outlines the manner in
which such forces may play out to construct localized scarcities, in terms of people’s inability to gain
access to a given resource.
Sociopolitical perspectives of scarcity draw on a
variety of disciplinary approaches, including political
ecology and Foucauldian analysis, to demonstrate
how access to and control over resources is contested
at the local, national, and global levels. The analysis is thus both discursive and materialist, where the
nexus of power, ideas, and social relations is the centerpiece of inquiry. Such an analysis tries to marry
an ecological phenomenon (e.g., a shortage of food/
water) with political economy and focuses on both
the physical and socially generated aspects of scarcity (e.g., Mehta 2005; Ross 1996; Yapa 1996). Such
approaches offer powerful alternatives to studies
that make powerful links between resource scarcity,
population growth, and conflict (e.g., Homer-Dixon
2001), which tend to overstate the problem of scarcity and see it as a constant variable, ignoring that
the problem may lie in distributional issues, ethnic
rivalries, power politics, and so on.
Lyla Mehta’s volume The Limits to Scarcity (2010)
argues that scarcity rarely takes place as a result of
the natural order of things. Instead, it is usually the
result of exclusion and unequal gender, social, and
power relations that legitimize skewed access to, and
control over, finite and limited resources. Scarcity
is a relational concept that is often the result of
market forces dictating issues concerning demand

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Scarcity

and supply. It also demonstrates that there is a gap
between universalized and global portrayals of scarcity and the ways in which these are locally perceived
and experienced. Aggregate and technical assessments of resources rarely capture their multifaceted
nature and embeddedness in culture, history, and
politics. All this has a bearing on how resources are
valued and thus rendered scarce or not. For example,
water is simultaneously a natural element, or H2O,
essential for the ecological cycle; a spiritual resource
for millions who worship at holy river banks and
oceans; a commodity that can be mined, bottled,
sold, and traded; and a life-giving element without
which human survival is not possible. Generalized
notions of scarcity also tell us nothing about what
exactly scarcity means, who it affects most, who
creates it, and who benefits from this permanent
state of scarcity. They have also tended to evoke a
standardized set of market/institutional and technological solutions as the universal fix. Thus, although
not discounting that there are biophysical limits to
resources (e.g., dwindling groundwater levels) and
that much of humanity encounters some scarcities,
Mehta argues that it is important to contest the politics of allocation and governance arrangements that
support skewed resource use and abuse.
As we know from Aristotle, if you want satisfaction and happiness, you need limits to acquisitiveness
and growth to allow for human flourishing and the
good. The satisfaction of needs, wants, and desires
in the North has contributed to deprivation in the
South (Soper 2006). The fixation with commodities,
credit, markets, scarcity, and growth has delivered a
development model according to which almost 4 out
of 6.7 billion people live without basic entitlements
and the future of the planet is in peril. Thus, most
believe it is important for a new politics by which
resources are distributed equitably. One way to do
this is by challenging dominant notions of scarcity.
Lyla Mehta
See also Consuming the Environment; Economics;
Inequalities; Needs and Wants; Political Economy;
Poverty; Satiation; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings
Achterhuis, Hans. “Scarcity and Sustainability.” In Global
Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, edited by
Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed Books, 1993.

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by T. A. Sinclair.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1962.
Gronemeyer, Marianne. Die Macht der Bedürfnisse.
Überfluss und Knappheit [The power of needs.
Abundance and scarcity]. Darmstadt, Germany: Primus
Verlag, 2002.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. Environment, Scarcity and
Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001.
Mehta, Lyla. The Politics and Poetics of Water:
Naturalising Scarcity in Western India. New Delhi,
India: Orient Longman, 2005.
Mehta, Lyla, ed. The Limits to Scarcity. Contesting the
Politics of Allocation. London: Earthscan, 2010.
Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution
of Institutions for Collective Action. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political
and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1944.
Robbins, Lionel. An Essay on the Nature and Significance
of Economic Science. London: Macmillan, 1932.
Ross, Andrew. “The Lonely Hour of Scarcity.” Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism 7, no. 3 (1996): 3–26.
Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. New York:
Aldine, 1972.
Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on
Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981.
Soper, Kate. “Conceptualizing Needs in the Context of
Consumer Politics.” Journal of Consumer Policy 29,
no. 4 (2006): 355–372.
Xenos, Nicholas. Scarcity and Modernity. New York:
Routledge, 1989.
Yapa, Laksham. “Improved Seeds and Constructed
Scarcity.” In Liberation Ecologies: Environment,
Development, Social Movements, edited by Richard Peet
and Michael Watts. London: Routledge, 1996.

SCIENCE
STUDIES

AND

TECHNOLOGY

See Actor-Network Theory; Electronic
Video Gaming; Information Technology;
Innovation Studies; Mobile Media
Gadgets of the Analog Age; Network
Society; Social Shaping of Technology;
Sociotechnical Systems

Sears, Roebuck and Company

SEARS, ROEBUCK

AND

COMPANY

Established in 1893, Sears, Roebuck and Company
grew into America’s premier mass merchandiser
during the twentieth century, helping to create a
national market for consumer goods. Based in
Chicago, Sears remained the largest retailer in the
United States until the triumph of big-box retailers
like Walmart. Sears is important to the history of
consumer society because it extended the promise
of abundance to a large percentage of Americans,
first reaching consumers through mail-order catalogs and later through retail stores.
During the early nineteenth century, Americans
bought necessities and luxuries from small shopkeepers, rural general merchants, and roadside peddlers. These local retailers acquired processed foods
and manufactured products from urban wholesalers
that specialized in grain, textiles, crockery, hardware, and other lines. As goods passed through multiple hands, the transaction costs added significantly
to the retail price.
By the mid-1800s, some retailers recognized the
advantages of cutting out middlemen. Buying goods
directly from the factory would allow stores to lower
prices and expand the market. Several new types
of retailers pioneered this practice: the department
store, the chain store, and the mail-order house. In
The Visible Hand, the late Harvard Business School
historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. described the transformations wrought by these institutions as nothing
short of a “retailing revolution.”
These retailing pioneers served very different
markets. Department stores catered to urban shoppers, while chain stores targeted moderate-income
consumers in small cities and towns. By the late
1800s, mail-order specialists emerged. With the 1869
completion of the transcontinental railroad, a hightech transportation network stretched across the
United States, and Chicago grew into a great commercial hub that connected factories in the industrial Northeast and Midwest to consumers in the
agricultural hinterland. Dozens of mail-order houses
sprang up, benefiting from the low freight rates on
trains returning to Iowa hog farms and Texas cattle
ranches.
Chicago’s mail-order houses prospered by catering to the needs of rural consumers. U.S. Census

1249

Bureau statistics show that in 1880, 36 million out
of 60 million people lived in small towns and rural
settings. As farming mechanized, droves of people
moved to the cities, but the rural population continued to grow. By 1920, 51.5 million of 105.7 million
people still lived in the countryside. Between 1900
and World War I, rising discretionary incomes put
more purchasing power in their hands. Some farm
families channeled the extra dollars into agricultural
equipment, but many wanted consumer products
such as appliances, furnishings, carpets, toys, bicycles, and cameras.
In 1893, salesman Richard W. Sears joined
forces with watch repairer Alvah Curtis Roebuck
to form Sears, Roebuck and Company. Previously
in the watch business, the partners published a large
mail-order catalog filled with ready-made clothing,
bicycles, sewing machines, furniture, musical instruments, and wagons. The next year, the company
made a conscious effort to associate itself with the
emerging consumer society by labeling its semiannual catalog, the “consumers’ guide.”
Two federal initiatives gave a boost to mail-order
houses like Sears. In 1896, the U.S. Post Office initiated rural free delivery (RFD), which delivered
mail directly to farmers’ doorsteps. Recognizing an
opportunity, Sears showered consumers with catalogs. Between 1902 and 1908, the firm circulated
24.4 million free catalogs, or one for every three to
four people in the United States. Between 1913 and
1920, the Post Office introduced and expanded parcel post, adding packages to the list of deliverables.
The mail-order business skyrocketed. Sears’s sales
grew from $745,595 in 1895 to $10.6 million in
1900 and $40.8 million in 1908. By 1916, Sears was
America’s largest retailer, with $137.2 million in sales
(Emmet and Jeuck 1950, 117, 204).
In 1925, Sears diversified into the departmentstore business, opening eight stores in major metropolitan areas, from Philadelphia to Seattle. National
chains like JCPenney and W. T. Grant had grown
rapidly, attracting customers with low-priced “live”
merchandise. Like these chains, the Sears stores were
self-service, but they were distinctive in their locations, standing alone along suburban roads. Based
on market research, Sears introduced the world’s first
windowless store, a total shopping environment with
air conditioning. Eventually, it evolved a hierarchy
of stores, from Class A to Class D, whose size and

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Seaside Resorts

scope varied according to the local market. Robert
E. Wood, the executive who masterminded the store
initiative, summed up the rationale:
With a larger and larger proportion of the population
possessing automobiles, the problem of parking
space, traffic congestion and resulting inconvenience
to downtown shopping became more and more
serious. The automobile made shopping mobile, and
this mobility created an opportunity for the outlying
store, which with lower land values, could give
parking space; with lower overhead, rent and taxes,
could lower operating costs, and could with its
enlarged clientele created by the automobile offer
effective competition to the downtown store. (Cited
in Longstreth 1998, 119)

By 1931, the annual sales in Sears’s stores surpassed
the annual sales from the catalog.
By 1949, Sears had a chain of 628 department
stores across the United States. Net revenues totaled
$2.15 billion. Other retail executives took note of
Sears’ success in the suburbs. Suburbia became
a major strategic focus for retailing, as federal tax
incentives lured retailers to roadside strips and the
new, self-contained malls. Sears expanded store
operations, diversifying its merchandise to attract
more shoppers. By 1954, Sears had 699 stores, with
total operations generating $2.9 billion in sales and
$147.3 million in profits. These impressive figures
made Sears the nation’s number one catalog house
and department store (Tedlow 1996, 330).
The trying economic times of the 1970s and
1980s introduced new challenges, as discount chains
like Kmart and Walmart began to attract budgetconscious customers. Bitten by inflation, middle-class
Americans could no longer afford to shop at Sears,
Roebuck. Fast losing its place atop the retailing
hierarchy, Sears’s managers responded with major
restructuring efforts, discontinuing their unprofitable
general merchandise catalog in 1993. In 2005, Sears
combined with Kmart Holding Corporation to form
Sears Holdings Corporation, the fourth largest U.S.
retailer after Walmart, Home Depot, and Kroger.
The retailing landscape that Sears had helped to create had changed dramatically.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk
See also Consumer Demand; Department Stores;
E-Commerce; Methods of Market Research; Shopping;
Spaces of Shopping; Supermarkets; Walmart

Further Readings
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. American Consumer Society,
1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. Wheeling, IL:
Harlan-Davidson, 2009.
Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial
Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1977.
Emmet, Boris, and John E. Jeuck. Catalogues and
Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950.
Longstreth, Richard. City Center to Regional Mall:
Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los
Angeles, 1920–1950. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998.
Schlereth, Thomas J. “Country Stores, County Fairs and
Mail-Order Catalogs: Consumption in Rural America.”
In Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of
Goods in America, 1880–1920, edited by Simon J.
Bronner. New York: Norton, 1989.
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the
American Mass Market. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995.
Tedlow, Richard S. New and Improved: The Story of Mass
Marketing in America. Rev. ed. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1996.
Weil, Gordon L. Sears, Roebuck USA: The Great American
Catalog Store and How It Grew. Briarcliff Manor, NY:
Stein and Day, 1977.

SEASIDE RESORTS
In its modern guise, the seaside resort, as a recognizable kind of specialized coastal leisure settlement, came into being in Western Europe from
the early eighteenth century onward, originating
in England (perhaps in Liverpool, perhaps on the
coast of Yorkshire). It had antecedents in ancient
Mediterranean societies, especially in the Roman
Empire, and popular summer gatherings associated
with sea-bathing rituals and pleasures, although
ill-documented, were clearly common over a much
wider area. The novelty in the eighteenth-century
West was the development of sea-bathing, and the
enjoyment of seaside environments, into the basis
for seasonal businesses, the transformation of urban
economies, and incorporation into the rapidly
expanding consumer societies of the first Industrial
Revolution. The therapeutic use of the sea was
formalized under medical direction, while coastal

Seaside Resorts

environments (like mountains) were revalued as
desirable destinations under the aesthetic canons of
the romantic and the sublime.
From such beginnings, seaside resorts expanded,
proliferated, and spread to new parts of Europe
and the globe in the age of “Industry and Empire,”
the first communications revolution, and the first
globalization. During the century after 1750, they
multiplied along almost all the English coastlines,
especially within reach of London, and (alongside the
inland spa resorts, but increasingly overtaking them)
they became gathering places for landed society and
the rapidly expanding professional and industrial
middle classes of the “first industrial society.” In the
process, they became centers for ostentatious, public
consumption and display. As the main motive for
visiting the seaside shifted from health to pleasure
and emulation, shops and amusements proliferated,
and marine promenades and parks became arenas
for fashionable sociability and the intersection of the
searching, appraising gaze of the competitive consumer. The arrival of railways at British coastal pleasure resorts from the 1840s onward opened up more
popular markets, which were already becoming visible, and cheap trains brought the industrial working
classes to the seaside in growing numbers on summer
weekends and eased the path of middle-class families for longer visits, including seasonal commuting.
This brought rapid expansion to some resorts, and in
northern and midland England, traditional popular
holidays were adapted to seaside uses long before the
coming of holidays with pay (mainly in the 1920s
and 1930s). By 1911, over one hundred English seaside resorts housed nearly one and a half million permanent residents, and in the late-nineteenth century,
Blackpool became the world’s first working-class
seaside resort, with around four million annual visitors by 1913, drawn mainly from industrial northern
England. This was part of the wider development of
popular consumer culture, including cheap fashions,
fast food (fish and chips), and the rise of spectator
sport and popular entertainment industries. The seaside became a place to see, be seen, seek entertainment, spend money, show off, and (literally) “dress
up,” pretending through dress and presentation of
self to higher status than in everyday life. Seaside
“pleasure palaces,” which found room for all classes,
included copies of the Eiffel Tower, with entertainments in the base and grounds (especially the famous
Blackpool Tower of 1894); Winter Gardens; and

1251

pleasure piers offering fairgrounds, stalls, and dancing. But the beaches were also crowded. The Mitchell
and Kenyon archive of fairground films displays this
popular consumer culture in action at the beginning
of the twentieth century.
The seaside resort was already beginning to
spread across Europe by the late-eighteenth century,
beginning in France, where international elite resorts
developed at Deauville and Biarritz, and at Ostend
in nearby Belgium. The fashionable French Riviera
around Nice and Cannes was originally a climatic
health resort: not until the twentieth century did it
begin to focus more on the sea. The Mediterranean
lagged behind the colder and livelier seas of the
English Channel, the Atlantic coastline, and even the
Baltic, as climate and conditions were long held to
be less healthy. The first Spanish seaside resorts faced
the Atlantic surf of the Bay of Biscay, for example.
But until the decades after World War II, European
mainland resorts lacked the working-class presence
that made England, Wales, and Scotland distinctive,
despite the widespread introduction of paid holidays
from the mid-1930s. Trends toward growing informality, deregulated bathing, the display of the body
on the beach, the cult of the suntan (already emerging by the beginning of the twentieth century), and
the development of beachwear fashions were already
adding new dimensions to consumer culture, and
provoking controversy over modesty, morality, and
sexual stimulation, before the 1920s.
But it was in the United States, especially, that
popular consumer culture invaded the twentiethcentury seaside. Coney Island was prominent among
the pioneers, with its emblematic amusement parks
and enormous crowds on the beaches: in sheer visitor numbers, it was already overtaking Blackpool
at the turn of the century, although most came only
for the day or the evening, while Blackpool visitors
would stay for the week. Atlantic City took up the
running as a national capital of commercial popular
consumer culture in the early twentieth century, to
cede pride of place to the warmth and year-round
sunshine of Florida and the energy of California
with the advent of the age of the motor car and of
leisure aviation. The seaside resort as an institution
also followed colonial and postcolonial cultures to
Australia, Latin America, South Africa, and IndoChina; and everywhere it went, it hybridized and
adapted to new cultures and climates, while remaining essentially the same sort of consumer experience.

1252

Second Life

Australian cultures of the beach holiday, for example,
became identified with particular consumption styles
and with a distinctive version of national identity.
This cultural diversity was compromised by the rise
of so-called mass tourism to long-haul coastal and
“paradise island” destinations, orchestrated by international travel companies and resort chains, especially from the 1960s and 1970s onward. But even
within this framework, France’s Club Méditerranée is
very different from, for example, the seaside incarnations of Disney, and most seaside resorts still depend
heavily on small businesses, informal economies, and
the specific preferences of domestic demand. The
seaside may have become a global consumer culture,
but the local variations, in everything from architecture to entertainment, still stand out.
John K. Walton
See also Disney; Hedonism; Leisure; Mass Tourism; Spas;
Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze; Well-Being

Further Readings
Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Cross, Gary S., and John K. Walton. The Playful Crowd:
Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005.
Gray, Fred. Designing the Seaside. London: Reaktion, 2006.
Walton, John K. “Seaside Tourism on a Global Stage.”
Journal of Tourism History 1 (2009): 151–160.

SECOND LIFE
Second Life is an Internet-based virtual environment,
a virtual world, created in 2003 by American company Linden Research, Inc., more commonly known
as Linden Lab. It became increasingly popular following extensive media coverage in late 2006 and
early 2007. With the use of a free computer program
called the Second Life Viewer, the virtual world is
accessible to any person who has a broadband
Internet connection and sufficient computer performance. A graphical representation of the self, an avatar, is used to participate in Second Life. Participants
are commonly referred to as “residents.” Both the
virtual environment and the avatars are rendered
with three-dimensional graphics similar to massively
multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)
such as World of Warcraft. However, contrary to

such games where most graphics are provided by
game designers, Second Life consists mainly of usercreated content. The Second Life Viewer allows
residents to create basic geometrical shapes. These
shapes can be combined in infinite ways to create
complex virtual objects and are decorated with textures uploaded through the Viewer. Scripts can also
be embedded into the objects to make them interactive and increase their functionality. Some of the
more common objects are avatar accessories, houses,
furniture, and vehicles. Second Life has its own
economy and currency referred to as Linden dollars
(L$). Linden dollars are acquired either by exchange
for U.S. dollars (or other real-world currencies) or
by selling virtual objects, virtual land, or services to
other residents in Second Life. Some residents are
successful in their virtual business ventures, but the
majority spend more than they earn. Yet the market
has primarily been driven by residents. Several realworld companies have attempted to establish themselves in Second Life, but with limited success.
Though Second Life has a flourishing gift economy, production and consumption are central to
Second Life culture. As the virtual products are not
necessary for the survival of the avatar or the person controlling the avatar, their popularity has raised
questions about motives behind, and usefulness of,
their consumption. It would appear that Second Life
is a striking example of Jean Baudrillard’s dystopic
vision of consumer society, in which people are
caught up in a spectacle of symbols and alienated
from their own needs. However, the lack of use value
in virtual goods does not imply that their consumption is irrational or useless. According to Jennifer
Martin, virtual objects, as representations of status,
individuality, and belonging, hold significant meaning to those who use them. In consumer culture,
our body is our primary vehicle of identity and selfexpression, posits Mike Featherstone. This appears
to be the case for virtual bodies as well. Virtual-world
participants are often greatly distressed when their
avatars are lost, harmed, or otherwise compromised.
This phenomenon is referred to as “avatar attachment,” and arguments have been made that it should
be accorded the moral significance we give to reallife attachments that play a similar role (Wolfendale
2007). This raises questions related to governance
and the precarious conditions of ownership offered
to participants in Second Life and other virtual
worlds. The purchase of virtual items may appear

Second Life

more permanent than real-life purchases because, for
example, a virtual lipstick will not fade and virtual
clothes do not wear out. All the same, ownership of
the items and indeed one’s very existence in the virtual world are dependent on the goodwill (or profit
margins) of the virtual-world creators to keep the
world running.
Exploration of factors motivating consumer choices
in virtual worlds has only just begun. What we know
is that consumption is an essential part of the virtual
lifestyle. Acquiring and displaying virtual goods is
a means of gaining social status in Second Life and
a way of expressing affinity with the community,
notes Robert Boostrom. Lack of use value aside,
evidence from Second Life suggests fairly strong parallels between preferences in virtual and offline life.
Though avatars come in all shapes and forms, the
most preferred shape is human. Balancing motives
for a coherent and authentic yet enhanced self,
residents tend to customize their avatars to resemble
their offline selves but with moderate improvements,
found Paul Messinger et al. As a similar example of
real-life influence on aesthetic preference, there is no
harsh weather in Second Life, yet houses generally
have roofs and walls. That said, promises of excitement and new experiences unquestionably play an
important part in what makes Second Life attractive.
Pseudonymity, the ability to keep one’s online and
offline lives separate, allows for identity experiments
and bold social pursuits without risking negative
effects by stigmatization in real life. This has allowed
some subcultures that are distinctly marginalized and
hidden offline to prosper in Second Life. Belonging
to such subcultures generally involves consumption
of particular objects associated with them.
The supply and variation of commodities in
Second Life appears infinite, as do the options
for expression of identity through consumption.
Nonetheless, not all residents perceive Second Life
as a consumer’s utopia. Some products and services
remain controversial, despite attempts by Second
Life creator Linden Lab to move adult content to
separate spaces. Simulated child pornography, that
is, depictions of child avatars in a sexual manner, has
provoked a significant amount of complaints from
residents. It has also attracted attention from legislators worldwide, which, in 2007, led Linden Lab to
classify the participation in and promotion of such
acts as a violation of community standards. Sexual
torture is not prohibited, but the marketing of virtual

1253

objects intended for such use and the marketing of
slaves in the context of role play has been a source of
concern for feminists and antiracists in Second Life.
Feminist activist groups have also objected to what
they perceive to be a commodification of violence in
the fashion industry illustrated by the sale of avatar
skins with bruises and knife wounds.
To some extent, these conflicts reflect the complications that arise in a globalized consumer culture. Whereas slavery may be play to some, it may
remind others of a grim and not very distant reality.
These conflicts may also reflect the diversity of reasons for engagement in Second Life—engagements
that are connected with, but not distinctly driven
by, consumption. According to Tom Boellstorff, an
ideology of creativity is what fundamentally fuels
Second Life. Boellstorff accordingly suggests we label
Second Life’s social system “creationist capitalism.”
Similarly, for Thomas Malaby, the production of
gamelike spaces like Second Life is a testament to
the increasing influence of games in previously rigid
bureaucratic systems. Despite differences in theoretical focus among researchers, there seems to be some
consensus that Second Life exemplifies a diffusion
of cultural distinctions between work/play and producer/consumer. As such, Second Life provides an
interesting challenge for studies of consumer culture.
Åsa Rosenberg
See also Belonging; Electronic Video Gaming; Identity;
Internet; Postmodernism; Symbolic Value; Virtual
Communities

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and
Structures. London: Sage, 1998.
Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An
Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Boostrom, Robert. “The Social Construction of Virtual
Reality and the Stigmatized Identity of the Newbie.”
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1, no. 2 (2008): 1–19.
Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture.”
Theory, Culture & Society 1, no. 2 (1982): 18–33.
Malaby, Thomas M. Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab
and Second Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2009.
Martin, Jennifer. “Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and the Role
of Virtual Goods in Second Life.” Journal of Virtual
Worlds Research 1, no. 2 (2008): 1–21.

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Seduced and Repressed

Messinger, Paul R., et al. “On the Relationship between My
Avatar and Myself.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
1, no. 2 (2008): 1–17.
Wolfendale, Jessica. “My Avatar, My Self: Virtual Harm
and Attachment.” Ethics and Information Technology
9, no. 2 (2007): 111–119.

SECONDHAND GOODS
See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets;
Collecting and Collectibles; Material
Culture; Reuse/Recycling; State Provisioning

SEDUCED

AND

REPRESSED

The division between the “seduced” and the
“repressed” is to the consumer society what the division between the bourgeoisie (“the bosses”) and the
proletariat (“the workers”) was to the producer society (industrial capitalism). This terminology, coined
by Zygmunt Bauman, represents far more than a
semantic exercise in relabeling existing social classes.
It implies a fundamentally changed social structure,
arising from mass production’s reduced dependence
on mass labor, such that most members of advanced
capitalist societies engage with, and participate in,
economies as much, if not more, in their roles as
consumers than as producers. Those so engaged are
seduced into compliance with a system that requires
only that they act out the role of consumers, their
demand for goods, services, and experiences ensuring
that the expanded reproduction of consumer capitalism continues unabated. Those not so engaged—
“failed consumers”—remain subject to the same kind
of repression that kept “failed workers” in line with
an earlier social system—which, from their point of
view, may hardly appear to have altered very much.
Capitalism today, at least in portions of the globe
characterized as fully fledged consumer societies,
functions on the basis that “people are consumers first—and workers only a very distant second”
(Bauman 1997, 24). Such societies have witnessed
“a substantive change in the mode of domination
central to social integration” (Bauman 1987, 167).
Whereas the majority of people in a producer society were subject to a repressive mode of domination,
the majority of members of the consumer society

are seduced by the public relations that replace state
policies, and advertising comes to substitute for state
authority. The “stick” of repression has been widely
replaced by the “carrot” of seduction. A consumer
society works to promote a lifestyle based on choice
to the extent that the seduced have little choice but to
choose a consumerist lifestyle, which has become a
condition of membership within advanced capitalist
societies. Beyond the seduced majority is a substantial minority who, nonetheless, remain subject to the
same repressive mechanisms that once applied to the
majority. The repressed minority may appear insignificant, but they too are dominated by consumer
markets. While the repressive gaze of panoptic surveillance remains fixed on the repressed, the rest of
society’s members focus their attention elsewhere.
The cult of celebrity reverses the direction of the
notorious panoptic gaze, giving way to a “telepanoptic gaze” (Étienne Allemand’s term), whereby the
many watch the few: Endemol’s Big Brother gains
wider currency than George Orwell’s.
If the structure of consumerism is constituted by
the opposition between seduction and repression as
means of social integration and control, it is vital to
appreciate the way in which these two forms mutually constitute each other. Their duality ensures that
the repressed are not just the poor under a new
name: they are the “new poor” (Bauman 1998).
With poignant irony, the new poor are structurally
closer to the proletariat of ancient Rome than were
the massed ranks dubbed the “proletariat” by the
critics of industrial capitalism. Being out of work in a
producer society was bad enough—although flawed
producers could potentially be rehabilitated (and
were deserving of care if they could not)—and the
poor played a vital “inner-systemic role” as an industrial reserve army. But being poor in a consumer
society is a fate yet worse, because mass production
no longer requires “mass labour[,] and so the poor,
once a ‘reserve army of labour,’ are re-cast as ‘flawed
consumers.’ This leaves them without a useful social
function—actual or potential” (Bauman 1998, 2)—
except, that is, as an object lesson for the seduced
majority to be thankful for their lot. Little wonder
that the repressed—the victims or collateral damage
of consumerism—should be dubbed an underclass,
evoking an “image of an aggregate of people who
have been declared off-limits in relation to . . . the
class hierarchy itself” (Bauman 2007, 122–123,
emphasis added).

Self-Interest

Bauman’s critics regard the distinction between
the seduced and the repressed as cursory, querying
where the dividing line between the seduced and
the repressed lies (Atkinson 2008; Warde 1994).
Bauman’s point is that it is the division itself that is
significant. It is set by the viability of consumerism as
a mode of domination: “The Germans speak today
of a zwei-Drittel Gesellschaft [two-thirds society]; it
is no more fanciful to expect the coming of a onethird society” (cited in Clarke 2003, 216). Complex
patterns emerge from all structuring oppositions. For
example, Keith Hayward accepts Bauman’s distinction but outlines contradictory tendencies relating to
surveillance: closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras focus more selectively on the underclass than
many imagine, yet shoppers are routinely subject to
all manner of data surveillance. Bauman’s conception seems likely to gain in acceptance as the picture
it portrays becomes increasingly recognizable across
the globe.
David B. Clarke
See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer
Society; Identity; Inequalities; Lifestyle;
Postmodernism; Social Class; Social Exclusion

Further Readings
Atkinson, Will. “Not All That Was Solid Has Melted into
Air (or Liquid): A Critique of Bauman on
Individualization and Class in Liquid Modernity.”
Sociological Review 56, no. 1 (2008): 1–17.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On
Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals.
Cambridge: Polity, 1987.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Haunted House.” New
Internationalist (April 1997): 24–25.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New
Poor. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1998.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity,
2007.
Clarke, David B. The Consumer Society and the
Postmodern City. London: Routledge, 2003.
Hayward, Keith J. City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture
and the Urban Experience. London: Glasshouse, 2004.
Warde, Alan. “Consumers, Identity and Belonging:
Reflections of Some Theses of Zygmunt Bauman.” In
The Authority of the Consumer, edited by Russell Keat,
Nigel Whiteley, and Nicholas Abercrombie, 58–74.
London: Routledge, 1994.

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SELF-INTEREST
Self-interest is commonly defined as the explicit
concern for the wants and needs of the individual.
Typically, the expression is contrasted with other
terms, such as altruism or collectivism, which privilege the needs of others or the broader group unit.
Since antiquity, the topic of self-interest has been
hotly debated and contested in the Western intellectual world and beyond. It has spanned across many
academic disciplines and caught the attention of
such luminary figures as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza,
Max Stirner, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Ayn Rand, to
name a few.
One particularly influential reading of self-interest comes to us from the Western philosophical
tradition of psychological egoism. In broad terms,
what psychological egoists are said to advance is
the descriptive view that human beings are always
only self-interested. This is a point famously articulated by seventeenth-century English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes, who in his seminal work, The
Leviathan, contends that self-interest is an inescapable fact of human nature; so much so that human
beings, he writes, would destroy one another to
advance their own interests if not for some intervening force.
Classically, psychological egoism can be distinguished from its distant relative, normative egoism.
What this variant of egoism holds is that self-interest
is not assumed to be the only possible mode of
action—just that it ought to be. Normative egoism
can be broken down into two main strands: ethical
and rational. What differentiates these two types of
normative egoism is that whereas the former privileges self-interest in the sphere of ethical action, the
latter only tries to establish self-interest as the sole
criterion for rationality.
Self-interest has also been bound up in the discourse surrounding individualism, which, etymologically speaking, first arose in Western Europe around
the early nineteenth century. As Stephen Lukes
reports, one of the chief characteristics of individualist thought is the belief in self-autonomy. This is
the idea that individuals, by their own accord, can
change and direct their own destinies. Such a view
can be contrasted with the notion that it is the larger
whole of society that determines in toto how each
and every one of us will live. To be an individualist,

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Self-Interest

then, is to reject such deterministic and selfless ways
of thinking.
Individualism and egoism have typically been
associated with the modern capitalist project.
Because of this, self-interest has received much
attention from contemporary social thought, as it
has often been used to characterize—both approvingly and pejoratively—the actions of modern capitalist peoples. Broadly speaking, Adam Smith, the
eighteenth-century English philosopher, is credited
as one of the main thinkers responsible for forging
this link. His writings have been particularly influential in persuading people to believe that the pursuit
of one’s own self-interest can actually be beneficial,
not harmful, to the “common good” of a society.
Famously, this was captured by Smith’s concept of
the “invisible hand,” which Smith used to illustrate
his ethical egoist stance that self-interested behavior
could in the long run create more, not less, wealth
for societies on the whole.
In more recent times, however, many have
sought to show that this latter concern of Smith’s
philosophy has greatly diminished in its importance;
although self-interest is still a greatly prized quality in modern capitalist societies, whether or not
this leads to any benefits for the “common good”
no longer commands as much attention as it once
did. An area where this view has found particular
resonance is in the sociology of work and employment. Here, a number of sociologists, such as Ulrich
Beck, have emphasized how especially cutthroat
and individualized the job market in the West has
become since the latter half of the twentieth century. Correspondingly, Zygmunt Bauman (2003)
has written about how much the idea of utopia has
dramatically changed since the early modern period.
In contrast to times past when utopia was seen as a
collective project, nowadays in the early twenty-first
century, utopia has come to be seen as a more individualistic venture—one that highlights the possibility of only personal, not collective, salvation. Many
social thinkers like Bauman have put this down to a
number of recent social developments—in particular
the decline of the welfare state, as well as the overall
speed up of capitalist processes, which has resulted
in more uncertain employment conditions.
The rise of consumerism has also been named as
a culprit. This is because contemporary consumer
culture is thought by some to raise the value of accumulating material goods for one’s self over more

civic-minded pursuits. In part what this refers to is
the understanding that consumer culture has deep
and deleterious implications for how people are able
to relate to one another. In a society that uses consumption as a primary determinant for assessing a
person’s worth, so too, suggests Sue Gerhardt, do
people themselves become solely thought of as commodities that can be disposed of once they no longer
have any use.
And yet by contrast, there are those who dispute that a causal link between consumer capitalist
culture and self-interest exists. For one thing, some
believe that consumer society is not necessarily
worse than other types of society in promoting selfinterested behavior. Others have tried to emphasize
that it is possible in a consumer society for altruism
to flourish—a point that is thought to be thrown in
sharp relief due to the recent rise in fair trade and
environmentally friendly consumption practices. All
the while there have been those who have tried to
entertain the possibility of a more cosmopolitan form
of capitalism that can lift the notion of self-interest up
from the individual to the broader level of humanity.
Yet, what still perpetually haunts all these discussions is the issue of whether or not self-interest
has, in the first instance, been sufficiently defined
or properly delineated from other, similar concepts.
Two of the more notable places where this line of
thinking has come from are psychoanalytic theory
and phenomenology, which have been used to criticize the traditional dichotomy between the self and
the other. Another problematic that has haunted
contemporary theories of self-interest has been the
issue of where exactly the concept of self-interest can
be appropriately applied—in particular, if self-interested pursuits have been encouraged in all spheres
of modern life or just in certain ones and not others.
Daniel Bell notes that this reveals the contradictory
nature of the modernist enterprise.
Taken in tandem, what these challenges hint at
are the complexities that social thinkers face in discussing self-interest. But concomitantly, they also
speak to the likelihood of the term’s continued significance within and beyond the academy.
Eric L. Hsu
See also Bounded Rationality; Capitalism; Consumer
Behavior; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer
Society; Consumer Sovereignty; Individualization;
Political and Ethical Consumption

Self-Presentation

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Utopia with No Topos.” History of
the Human Sciences 16, no. 1 (2003): 11–25.
Beck, Ulrich. Power in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity,
2005.
Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
London: Heinemann Educational, 1979.
Benjamin, Jessica. Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity
and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge,
1998.
Droge, Cornelia, et al. “The Consumption Culture and Its
Critiques: A Framework for Analysis.” Journal of
Macromarketing 13 (2003): 32–45.
Durkheim, Émile. 1892. The Division of Labour in Society.
London: Macmillan, 1984.
Gerhardt, Sue. The Selfish Society. London: Simon &
Schuster, 2010.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre nous. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000.
Lukes, Stephen. Individualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1973.
Nicholls, Alex, and Charlotte Opal. Fair Trade: MarketDriven Ethical Consumption. London: Sage, 2006.
Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism. London:
Continuum, 1991.

SELF-PRESENTATION
Among the many definitions of the self that can be
found in the philosophical and sociological literature,
the most influential ones are those of William James
and George Herbert Mead. James (1890, 291) said
that “a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can
call his.” Charles Horton Cooley (1902/1964, 182)
insisted that the self is “simply any idea, or system
of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that
the mind cherishes as its own.” Mead (1934), however, stressed “reflexivity” and argued that the self is
the “reflexive objectivation” of one’s presence in the
world of others.
In these approaches—and in that of many others
too—the self is viewed as an object that is constituted
conceptually and used by an agent in the management
of his or her conduct. Erving Goffman, a follower
of these scholars, altered their view and adopted a
different strand. Instead of approaching the self as a
“concept,” Goffman viewed the self as being “constituted” and “presented” simultaneously to others.
Instead of a self that “is,” he developed a notion of

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a self that “does,” an active and energetic entity that
is constantly presenting itself to others using many
devices. He borrowed his imagery from the theater
and developed the argument that the self “dramatizes” itself to others. Such dramatization of self is
achieved by a variety of means. Goffman wrote of the
three components of the social front that individuals
creatively manipulate: setting, appearance, manner.
Goffman concentrated on the strategic components of “impression management,” the process
by which a self is “framed,” giving rise to an actor
who comes prepared to attain his or her goals more
so than simply to take the role of the other and to
modify his or her wants according to the shared
meanings that emerge. This does not exclude a real
concern for the other, for authenticity, and for moral
concerns. However, Goffman (1959, 9) explained,
a “veneer of consensus” is often exchanged among
individuals, giving the individual the response he or
she desires and concealing true feelings. Individuals
“temporarily” honor others’ claims in exchange for
the same courtesy, and to avoid conflict and achieve
what Anthony Giddens called “ontological security.”
To begin with, there is the management of appearance: one is seen as a self before he or she is heard,
as another dramaturgical sociologist, Gregory Stone,
argued, so that clothing—or costuming—becomes
important in social life. One uses it to present a self
and display the proper “demeanor” and “deference,”
to use Goffman’s terminology. In all social interactions, an agent must display the right demeanor and
show the warranted deference—the honor and respect
due to others. With these interaction rituals, one also
presents a “face” to others and saves the “face” of
others when it is threatened by one move or another.
Selves are presented not only visually but also verbally. Once the visual presentation of self is accomplished, one can continue to present a self through
“talk” or “discourse.” From simple response cries
to elaborate lectures, talk becomes a calculated performance. Here, again, Goffman took the lead and
discussed the form that talk can take in the presentation of self. Others have taken up this line of thinking and elaborated on talk as presentation of self.
Robert Perinbanayagam, for instance, has described
the way in which grammar, phonology, sign-systems,
and logical categorizations are used in what he calls
“discursive acts” to constitute and address a self to
others. One can, he contends, “speak a self” into
presence for others.

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Self-Reflexivity

The presentation of a culturally and socially appropriate self is regulated in society by custom, convention, and even law. Sumptuary laws once obliged
people to wear certain clothes appropriate to their
rank and forbade them to wear clothes suitable to
another rank. In traditional societies, strong sanctions
were the consequence of not following norms concerning self-presentation.
In consumer-oriented societies, fashion makes its
own rules, led by consumerist forces. Fashion brands
and the popular culture spread messages on a global
scale about what constitutes an accepted identity and
self-presentation. Social controls are now internalized where before they were imposed quite forcefully.
Consumer society becomes central in shaping an
accepted identity and self-presentation.
There is an ethos of individual freedom in this
age, variably referred to by theorists as modern,
high-modern, hypermodern, or postmodern society. People today believe that they can choose the
objects and instrumentations that define their selves.
In the fashion industry and fashion literature, it is
commonly held that consumers can and do make
their own choices, combining Chanel with H&M
or rejecting the mainstream brands entirely in favor
of emerging new designers, vintage, or eco-friendly
“green” clothing. But does the individual today
feel free? Certainly there is intense anxiety over the
body: anorexia and bulimia are terms that appear in
everyday discourse. Cosmetics and cosmetic surgeries are used as never before. Some surveys estimate
that up to seventy-five percent of American women
color their hair (Sherrow 2006). Men, who had some
time ago renounced beauty and decoration, are nevertheless having cosmetic procedures and are more
concerned with dieting, fitness, and maintaining or
achieving a more youthful appearance.
Far from being free of social regulations, one is
subject to constant surveillance by others. Paradoxically, gender is not fluid and flexible, even in an age
when identity is seen as open and fluid. There are
social consequences to not presenting oneself appropriately as male or female. Surveillance now operates
in the service of corporate and consumerist culture:
fitness, health, style, taste, and beauty operate under
the logic of capitalist enterprises that seduce the individual through marketed ideals of self-fulfillment
and happiness.
Veronica Manlow

See also Collective Identity; Fashion; Goffman, Erving;
Identity; Lifestyle; Promotional Culture; Seduced and
Repressed; Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings
Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social
Order. New York: Schocken Books, 1964. First
published 1902.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1991.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol 1. New
York: Henry Holt, 1890.
Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1934.
Perinbanayagam, Robert. Discursive Acts. New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1991.
Sherrow, Victoria. Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural
History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006.
Stone, Gregory. Appearance and the Self in Social
Psychology through Symbolic Interaction, edited by
Gregory P. Stone and Harvey A. Farberman. Waltham,
MA: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970.

SELF-PROVISIONING
See De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling;
Do-It-Yourself; Outsourcing; Self-Service
Economy; Systems of Provision

SELF-REFLEXIVITY
The notion of self-reflexivity is a relatively prominent
one in contemporary social science (and especially
sociological) debate, not least because a self-reflexive
or self-conscious attitude and disposition toward
everyday life is posited by a number of theorists to
be a defining characteristic of the late-modern condition. As Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott
Lash explain it, “the more societies are modernized, the more agents (subjects) acquire the ability to
reflect on the social conditions of their existence and
to change them accordingly” (1994, 174). Thus, it
is widely posited that in contemporary life-worlds,
agents are positioned with increasing capacities to

Self-Reflexivity

reflect on and take up a knowing, critical, and even
playful stance toward a range of issues, including
those relating to identity, intimacy, the body, health,
and consumption; indeed, agents may even do so in
relation to previously thoroughly naturalized and
apparently rigid categories of difference and differentiation, including those relating to class and gender. Roy Boyne, for example, has commented that
“structural contexts such as class, ethnicity, gender,
age, medical status, are now routinely and reflexively incorporated into conceptions of self-identity”
(2002, 119). Class cultures, for example, are now
marked by reflexive attitudes: “rueful, ironic, envious, reflectively proud” (119). As this quote from
Boyne implies, increased capacities toward reflexivity
in late modernity relate to shifts in the relationship
between structure and agency and to a reconfiguration of the social field. More particularly, increases
in reflexive capacities relate to a decline in the significance of sociostructural forms of determination or, as
it is sometimes termed, to a de-traditionalization of
the social field. According to Scott Lash, the decline
in the powers of social structure, as well as those of
authority and tradition, allows for a progressive freeing or unleashing of agency from structure; that is,
it provides the conditions that enable critical reflection on prevailing social arrangements, conventions,
norms, and expectations.

Self-Reflexivity in Consumer Culture
These tendencies toward self-reflexivity have been
noted to be particularly marked in regard to consumer culture. Mike Featherstone, for example, has
noted how contemporary consumer culture is connected to an intensification of reflexivity, not least
because of the aesthetic stance required for and
demanded by (much) contemporary consumption. More specifically, Featherstone outlines how
the development of mass consumption has encouraged a widespread adoption of particular techniques of the self aimed at cultivating an aesthetic
stance in relation to consumption, an adoption that
he links to the broad-scale process of the aestheticization of everyday life, visible in the stylization of
virtually every aspect of life, including clothes, the
body, leisure, eating, and even sexual preferences.
What is significant about the cultivation of an aesthetic stance is that the latter involves a controlled
decontrol of emotions, senses, and tastes—that is,

1259

the fostering of “sensibilities which allow us to enjoy
the swing between the extremes of aesthetic involvement and detachment” (1992, 285). Put differently,
the fostering of such a stance enables the enjoyment
of the pleasures of immersion and of detached distanciation. What is significant regarding the controlled decontrol required for the appropriation of
an aesthetic stance, and especially the emotional distancing involved in such a stance, is therefore that
it introduces possibilities for reflection, that is, for
reflexivity. In short, the appropriation of an aesthetic
stance in regard to consumption necessarily involves
increased capacities for reflexivity.
Yet it is not simply that the development of mass
consumption, and the associated widespread take up
of an aesthetic stance in regard to consumption, has
led to a generalized intensification in reflexivity in the
social field, but also that the take up of such a stance
relates to specific consumption practices. As Celia
Lury has noted, the take up of an aesthetic stance
in regard to consumption “facilitates the adoption
of playful or ironic ways of consuming” (1996, 76),
modes of consumption that are both increasingly
prevalent and demanded by contemporary consumer
culture and popular culture more generally. Examples
of the latter are legion. One can point, for example, to
films that expose and mock the genres, conventions,
and codes on which they are based and demand that
for sensemaking and viewing pleasure, audiences
instantly recognize such forms of self-referentiality,
that is, demand that audiences are in possession of
a cultural repertoire (or specific forms of cultural
capital) that enables such recognition. In this context,
Angela McRobbie has commented that consumption
of much popular culture now requires and presupposes an (ironic) familiarity with the tools and methods of cultural studies, including a familiarity with
decoding, deconstruction, and semiotics. One can
also point to advertisements that also assume such
a familiarity, for example, those that mock previous
attempts to link products—from cigarettes, through
cleaning products, to perfumes and aftershaves—to
conventional, idealized codes of masculinity and femininity. Such advertisements often address the viewer
as fully appreciative and knowing of these mockery
attempts, and of the humor attached to such naive
techniques of “selling,” especially their reliance on
outmoded, traditional categories and codes of gender.
Such reflexive modes of knowing are also at issue in
regard to consumer spaces, whose architectures and

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Self-Reflexivity

displays often ironically (and sometimes nostalgically) reference past patterns of consumption, including the civility and sociality historically associated
with consumption-related activities and spaces, a
civility that contributed to the production of a (now
increasingly hollowed out) public sphere. In short,
across the field of consumer culture, from products
through advertisements, to the spaces of consumption, we witness how reflexive consumption practices
and attitudes are in demand, indeed how participation in consumer culture increasingly requires such a
reflexive, knowing stance.

Critiques
But while reflexive sensibilities and habits may
be increasingly demanded and required for participation in consumer culture, this demand is certainly not unproblematic, and this is the case even
as such reflexivity appears to undo or, at the very
least, challenge a range of rules, traditions, and conventions associated with modernity. Put differently,
although the cultivation of reflexive habits and dispositions appears to be associated with processes of
de-traditionalization, this is by no means to suggest
that reflexivity should be understood as a progressive social force. Consider, for example, the aforementioned case of advertisements that ironically
reference techniques that attempt to link products
to conventional codes of masculinity and femininity and expose the conventions through which such
links are attempted. On the surface, such reflexive
forms of advertising position such techniques and the
gender conventions they rely on as outmoded, that is,
as arrangements and products of a previous time. In
so doing (and in contrast), such advertisements also
appear to position their own techniques of reflexivity
as both critiquing and moving beyond such arrangements. Yet a number of authors have questioned
the view that such reflexive techniques operate in
such a progressive fashion. McRobbie, for example,
raises such questions via a consideration of a 1990s
advertisement for Wonderbra, and specifically an
advertisement in which the model Eva Herizigova
cheekily admires her Wonderbra enhanced cleavage. McRobbie notes that the composition of the
advertising image self-consciously and provocatively enacts “sexist ad” dimensions and, in particular, observes that the image playfully references,
invites, and encourages an objectifying male gaze

via the model’s admiration of her own breasts. In so
doing, McRobbie suggests, not only does the image
assume some ironic familiarity with cultural studies
and especially with feminist critiques of advertising and visual culture, but the image also positions
feminism as a thing of the past. More specifically, in
provocatively and self-consciously playing with the
male gaze and with feminist critiques of the gaze, the
image suggests that advertising no longer requires or
operates via recourse to the conventions of sexism
and as a consequence that political critique of such
practices—crucially including feminist critique—is
now outmoded and redundant. In short, such reflexive advertisements contribute to a hollowing out of
a space for feminist critique and to the development
of what McRobbie terms a postfeminist popular culture. What is particularly problematic about such a
culture is not only is little, if any, ground available for
forms of critique (that the techniques of self-reflexivity contribute to the creation of a groundless ground),
but also it tends to reinscribe the conventions that,
on the surface, it appears to undo. Thus, although
advertisements such as those for Wonderbra appear
to move beyond and undo traditional conventions
of sexism, at the same time they allow such conventions to be rearticulated, albeit in an ironic, tonguein-cheek fashion.
Whereas McRobbie has demonstrated how
reflexivity in regard to consumer culture relates to
the hollowing out of specific forms of political critique and to a complex process of the reinscription of
categories of difference, Ann Cronin has considered
how reflexive modes of address relate to an emergent
politics of inclusion and exclusion in relation to consumer citizenship. Noting how advertisements for
consumer products increasingly demand and assume
a reflexive, knowing audience, Cronin demonstrates
how an ironic, self-reflexive mode of address is typically attributed to, and demanded by, advertisements
that are male targeted, whereas a literal, nonreflexive and non-ironic mode of address is far more
characteristic of female-targeted advertisements. Put
differently, Cronin shows that although a reflexive
stance is increasingly demanded in consumer culture,
advertisements address and position (particularly
young) men as reflexive consumers and address and
position women in nonreflexive terms. Given this
differentiation, and given not only that reflexive
modes of engagement are increasingly demanded but
also that a reflexive stance constitutes a privileged

Self-Reflexivity

position from which to participate in consumer culture, Cronin asks us to consider the extent to which
such a position may be gendered; indeed, how reflexivity enacted in regard to the visual field may provide grounds for gendered relations of privilege and
exclusion in terms of the political rights associated
with consumer citizenship. Far from a benign set of
practices, Cronin’s analysis alerts us to the possibility
that self-reflexivity in regard to consumption-related
activities may produce new and emergent forms of
social inequality that are replacing those associated
with work- and production-based societies.

Important Issues
A number of issues stand out from this body of literature as important. The first is how the practices
and techniques of self-reflexivity are increasingly
ubiquitous across the field of consumer culture and,
in many ways, may be said to be routine and habituated across this field. Although this may be so, and
although this ubiquity undoubtedly buttresses the
claim that the late-modern period is one marked by
intensified tendencies toward reflexivity, such reflexivity should not be understood to concern a simple
move away from the “bads” of modernity. Instead,
it has been argued that reflexivity should be understood and analyzed as a significant sociological process, not least because of the connections between
reflexivity and emergent forms of political human
rights, the relationship between reflexivity and the
hollowing out of spaces for forms of political critique,
and the connections between reflexivity and complex processes of difference making (Adkins 2002).
Yet a further issue might also be raised in regard to
the literature discussed so far, and this concerns the
relationship between reflexivity and the human subject. More specifically, in most of the literature and
research discussed so far, reflexivity is assumed to
reside in, or at least be a property of, the human subject. Indeed in general, social science literature tends
to assume that the capacity to critically reflect on
prevailing social conditions is a human competence,
and this is the case even when social scientists recognize that reflexivity cannot be reduced to a thinking consciousness but also involves embodied habit.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for example, has been
praised for offering such a noncognitive understanding of reflexivity and, in particular, for offering an
understanding of reflexivity as rooted in the habitus,

1261

that is, in our unconscious dispositions and habits.
Such an understanding is clearly of importance in
environments that demand a reflexive stance as a
matter of course, as is the case for consumer culture.
Yet, despite the obvious relevance of such an understanding for a range of contexts relating to consumer
culture and to the stance demanded by that culture, it
still delimits reflexivity to the human subject.
The latter point is of significance when we consider
that reflexivity is not an exclusive capacity of humans
but also resides in sociotechnical matter. As Patricia
Ticineto Clough has noted, in technological cultures
(especially those in which there is experimentation
with the creation of economic value and changing
processes of capital accumulation), there is an intensification of self-reflexivity, that is, an intensification of
processes turning back on themselves, to act on themselves. Such processes, Clough suggests, are evident
in information/communication systems; archiving
machines (including all forms of media technologies
and human memory); capital flows; and networks of
disciplining, surveillance, and control. Self-reflexivity,
Clough maintains, is increasingly internal to the
systems and functioning of these machines, flows,
and networks. Thus, in regard to processes of capital accumulation, rather than seeking and acting on
external phenomena in attempts to create value, value
is now created via processes internal to capital flows.
Consider, for example, the technology of the customer loyalty card issued by major supermarkets and
other large retail outlets. Although such cards may
provide consumers with potential benefits—including
discounts, rewards, and access to specific services—
they are also hardwired to new forms of value creation. This is so not simply because loyalty cards allow
for the recording of consumer tastes, preferences, and
lifestyles, but also because value can be (and is) harvested from the transactional data that the use of the
loyalty card produces. Thus, the data collected by the
loyalty card and related technologies are assembled,
disassembled, and reassembled by complex software
systems and used not only to create consumer profiles
and refine services and products but also to be sold
for profit. This form of the creation of value marks
a novel feature of contemporary capitalism, not least
because it delinks value creation and the extraction
of surplus from the human body. As Kevin Haggerty
and Richard Ericson frame it, in technological cultures, value is not necessarily tied to the exploitation
of human labor but refers to the profit that can be

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Self-Service Economy

derived from the “surplus information that different
populations trail behind them in their daily lives”
(2000, 616). Thus, there is a proliferating trade in
such information, not only by commercial corporations but also by governments and government
agencies eager to profit from the information stored
in official and quasi-official databases. In short, the
technologies, devices, and systems associated with the
recording, storage, aggregation, disaggregation, and
reaggregation of transactional data show how value
is being created in novel forms in consumer culture,
forms that defy a whole range of distinctions, including those between production and consumption,
nature and culture, bodies and machines. Moreover,
and inasmuch as the assembling, disassembling, and
reassembling of transactional data rely on and take
place in highly self-reflexive technological processes
and systems, this value creation is thoroughly reflexive
in character.
Yet at least one further feature of these developments is worthy of comment: in the technological
systems previously described, the transactional data
assembled are not simply inert or passive in character
or contained or containable in any straightforward
sense. On the contrary, and as Matthew Fuller has
argued, data are increasingly active and alive. Thus,
in informational systems, data increasingly feed
back, unpredictably with unexpected results, move,
flow, and leak beyond the systems and events in
which they originate. This liveliness of data should
be understood more broadly as part of a broad-scale
process whereby matter is becoming increasingly
dynamic, a dynamism that is reshaping our ways
of sensing and doing. Clough, for example, documents how increasingly dynamic matter relates to
a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities,
affects, and potentialities “assembled in genetic
codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles, and
preference listings, that is, in bodies of data and information” (2007, 19). Significantly, Clough argues that
such affective modulation should be recognized as
a new form of governance, one that does not operate through the internalization of norms via human
consciousness but through a post-human ontology
of matter operating at the molecular level of bodies,
a level not necessarily available to experience. Recent
developments in consumer culture, therefore, include
not only the creation of novel forms of value but also
the rolling out of new forms of governance and control. Crucially, both of these developments involve a
substantive transformation in reflexivity, one whereby

rather than an exclusive capacity of humans, reflexivity increasingly resides in sociotechnical matter.
Lisa Adkins
See also Advertising; Aestheticization of Everyday Life;
Citizenship; Cultural Studies; Governmentality;
Identity; Lifestyle; Social Class

Further Readings
Adkins, Lisa. Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late
Modernity. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press,
2002.
Adkins, Lisa. “Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender.”
Theory, Culture and Society 20, no. 6 (2003): 21–42.
Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive
Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the
Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Boyne, Roy. “Bourdieu: From Class to Culture.” Theory,
Culture and Society 19, no. 3 (2002): 117–228.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “Introduction.” In The Affective
Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto
Clough, with Jean Halley, 1–33. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007.
Cronin, Ann. Advertising and Consumer Citizenship:
Gender, Images and Rights. London: Routledge, 2000.
Crossley, Nick. “The Phenomenological Habitus and Its
Construction.” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 81–120.
Featherstone, Mike. “Postmodernism and the
Aestheticization of Everyday Life.” In Modernity and
Identity, edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman,
265–290. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Haggerty, Kevin, and Richard Ericson. “The Surveillant
Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4
(2000): 605–622.
Heaphy, Brian. Late Modernity and Social Change:
Reconstructing Social and Personal Life. London:
Routledge, 2007.
Heelas, Paul, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris.
Detraditionalisation: Critical Reflections on Authority
and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Lash, Scott. Sociology of Postmodernism. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. London: Routledge, 1996.
McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture and Social Change. London: Sage, 2009.

SELF-SERVICE ECONOMY
A self-service economy is one in which a substantial
and growing proportion of household expenditure is
invested in durable goods (such as tools, information

Self-Service Economy

technology [IT], and machinery) that enable consumers to produce services for themselves, rather than
outsourcing these services to external providers in
the service economy. For example, the advent of the
washing machine has enabled people to do the laundry themselves, and the emergence of the Internet has
allowed consumers to check in at airports, withdraw
money from banks, organize holidays, and so forth,
on a self-servicing basis. According to Jonathan
Gershuny, two processes are asserted to be encouraging this trend toward self-servicing: (1) technical
innovation that is leading to cheaper and simpler
capital machinery and (2) the rising labor costs of
service providers.

Historical Perspective
There is little doubt that goods that had been
made in the home or by local craftsmen for barter
and only occasionally for market exchange, have
been gradually replaced by goods production en
masse in factories. This led to a separation of home
and production. Those who previously made goods
for their own use increasingly purchased factorymade items.
In contrast, however, the transfer of service provision (rather than goods production) to external
providers has not been of the same magnitude. The
self-servicing thesis has argued that although goods
production has moved out of the household, the
emergence of cheap and mass-produced durable
goods has enabled households to produce services
for themselves. Indeed, there is a long history of
consumers having moved toward various types of
self-servicing activity rather than outsourcing these
service activities to external providers. For example,
consumers have long dialed a telephone number
themselves instead of using a telephone operator,
pressed a button in an elevator rather than using
an elevator operator, and pushed a shopping cart
around a food store rather than request a salesperson to collect each individual good for them from
behind the counter. While laundry, meanwhile, was
for many decades in the early and mid-nineteenth
century “sent out” to external providers, especially
among the middle classes, the advent of the washing machine has brought such a service activity back
into the home where it has been conducted on a selfservicing basis. Consequently, the assumption that
service provision has been, over the long run of history, replaced by external service providers has been

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increasingly challenged by drawing attention to the
growth of self-servicing.

Contemporary Issues
The subsistence “economy” (i.e., people and households relying on self-provisioning as their principal
source of livelihood) hardly exists in advanced economies. However, it is not universally the case that
households are providing fewer and fewer services
for themselves. Households still engage in a tremendous range of self-servicing activity from routine
housework, cleaning windows, cooking, gardening,
child and elder care through to car maintenance as
well as home maintenance and improvement activity.
The move of goods production into the marketplace,
therefore, seems to have been only partially followed
by the shift of service provision into this sphere, notes
Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank.
New technological innovations, moreover, are creating ever more opportunities for self-servicing. The
advent of IT, for instance, now provides consumers
with self-checkout at supermarkets with no cashier
present. If one wants to install a broadband connection in one’s home, one does it oneself. If one wants to
pay a bill by telephone or check one’s bank balance,
one does it oneself via an automated phone system;
if one wants to track packages, one does it oneself; if
one wants to manage one’s finances, one does it oneself online; if one wants to organize a holiday, one
does it oneself rather than go to a travel agent; if one
wants to go to the theater, one does it oneself; and if
one wants an airline ticket or to check in, one does
it oneself, including the selection of one’s own seat.
Indeed, the use of such technologies to facilitate selfservicing has rapidly transformed entire industries.
ATMs in the banking industry have moved cash
transactions in banks near enough entirely into the
self-servicing realm, as has e-commerce in the travel
industry resulted in consumers largely booking themselves by using online resources.
Until now, nevertheless, little is known about
what proportion of service delivery is conducted on
a self-servicing basis and how much is outsourced to
external providers, or whether the proportion that is
self-serviced is growing, static, or declining. Instead,
the growth of self-servicing is assumed rather than
demonstrated or measured.
Moreover, although there is an assumption that
the external providers who are being replaced by selfservicing activity are largely commercial providers,

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Self-Service Economy

external providers in practice take many different
forms. First, there are commercial services operating in the for-profit market sector. Second, however,
households have externalized to closer social relations such as kin living outside the household, neighbors, friends, and acquaintances either on an unpaid
or a paid basis, and if paid, such work can be conducted for financial gain and/or for the purposes of
redistribution or reciprocity. Third, they might externalize to voluntary and community organizations in
the third sector or even public sector organizations,
and fourth and finally, to external providers working
in the underground economy where some or all of
the activity is not declared for tax, social security, or
labor law purposes. Until now, little is known about
which types of external providers are being replaced
by self-servicing activity.
Explaining self-servicing is also becoming more
nuanced. Although Gershuny argues that selfservicing is, in major part, due to the availability
of cheap manufactured goods that raise household
productivity (e.g., convenience foods, dishwashers,
washing machines) and growing labor costs in the
service economy, a study of self-servicing by Williams
identifies a multitude of reasons. On the one hand,
there are “willing” self-servicers who self-service to
save money (reflecting a rational utility maximization model), to obtain pleasure (a choice model), or
to seek self-identity from the end product (a postmodern portrayal). On the other hand, there are
“reluctant” self-servicers who self-service either for
economic reasons (an economic determinism model)
or because of problems with finding and using
tradespeople (a market failure model). A fuller and
more comprehensive explanation will perhaps need
to move beyond treating them as rival competing
theories and toward using them all to understand the
diverse and multifarious reasons for self-servicing.
It is also emerging that self-servicing and commercial service provisioning are not mutually exclusive.
One recent trend is that external providers themselves are increasingly moving toward self-servicing,
such as by using automated self-service systems in
which the customers provide the labor.

The Future
Various visions of the future of self-servicing exist. On
the one hand, adherents to modernization believe that
the future will be marked by a decline in self-servicing.

An example is Phil Ruthven, who predicts that in
the next century kitchens and laundries in the home
“will become ‘museum pieces’ or fade into history”
(1994, 5). Here, the belief is that the jobs created in
this household services sector can soak up the unemployment deriving from the decline of manufacturing
and more traditional service industries. On the other
hand, others envisage the future to lie in a growth
in self-servicing. As Gershuny asserts, and reversing
Ruthven’s vision, households will increasingly come
to rely on self-servicing activity.
The future, however, is not simply an either/or
choice of either a process of self-servicing or externalizing provision. Rather than continue with this
debate over whether the future provision of services
is universally one of outsourcing or self-servicing,
there is a need for greater recognition that the trends
are not unidirectional or mutually exclusive. Some
household tasks will be increasingly externalized,
and others will increasingly rely on self-servicing.
Different population groups and services, moreover,
might well move in different directions, with some
shifting toward external providers and others toward
self-servicing. Future investigations will need to produce more nuanced and complex understandings of
the distribution of self-servicing and draw on wider
explanations for the varying trends in different populations and realms.
Colin C. Williams
See also Convenience; Domestic Services; Domestic
Technologies; Innovation Studies; Outsourcing;
Postindustrial Society; Service Industry

Further Readings
Bittman, Michael, George Matheson, and Gabrielle Meagher.
“The Changing Boundary between Home and Market:
Australian Trends in Outsourcing Domestic Labour.”
Work, Employment and Society 13 (1999): 249–273.
Cancedda, Alessandra. Employment in Household Services.
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the
European Communities, 2001.
Gershuny, Jonathan. After Industrial Society: The Emerging
Self-Service Economy. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in
Post-industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Ruthven, Phil. The New Age: What It Is, and the
Implications for Business. Melbourne, Australia: IBIS
Business Information, 1994.

Semiotics
Williams, Colin C. “Rethinking the Motives of
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Consumers.” International Review
of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research 18
(2008): 311–323.
Williams, Colin C., and Jan Windebank. “Acquiring Goods
and Services in Lower Income Populations: An
Evaluation of Consumer Behaviour and Preferences.”
International Journal of Retail and Distribution
Management 29 (2001): 16–24.

SEMIOTICS
Semiotics, the science of signs, has a long history. The
“father of medicine,” Hippocrates, was interested in
signs and their relation to medical symptoms; after
him, philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Saint
Augustine, and John Locke also wrote about various aspects of signs. Modern semiotics is said to have
started with the work of two authors: Ferdinand
de Saussure, a linguist at the University of Geneva,
who called his approach “semiology,” and Charles S.
Peirce, a philosopher at Harvard University, who
called his science “semiotics.” Saussure’s book Course
in General Linguistics, published in 1915, is made
of notes from his students that were collected and
put together by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.
Peirce produced an enormous body of writings on
semiotic theory that have been extremely influential,
and his term for the science of signs, semiotics, is the
one currently used by scholars in the field, whatever
their orientation. Its centrality to understanding consumer culture rests in its focus on understanding the
symbolic codes and messages embedded in consumer
goods, brands, advertising, marketing, and lifestyles.

Saussure’s Semiology
The root of both semiology and semiotics is the
Greek word for sign, sēmeîon. In his Course in
General Linguistics, Saussure described what he
meant by signs and explained their significance:
Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas,
and is therefore comparable to a system of writing,
the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite
formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most
important of these systems.
A science that studies the life of signs within
society is conceivable; it would be part of social

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psychology and consequently of general psychology;
I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeîon “sign”).
Semiology would show what constitutes a sign, what
laws govern them. (1966, 16)

Saussure explained that signs have two parts: a
sound-image or signifier and a concept or signified;
it is important to recognize that the relation between
the signifier and signified is arbitrary and based on
convention. Thus, the meanings of signs can change
over time. Saussure also suggested that signs can be
studied synchronically, at a given point in time, and
diachronically, as they evolve over time.
Saussure made another important point, namely,
that concepts are defined differentially. He explained
that it is signs’ relative position that determines their
meaning, not their intrinsic value. No sign, then, has
meaning in itself and its meaning is always a function
of the relationship between that sign and other signs.
In practical terms, what this means is that when dealing with concepts, because of the nature of language
we tend to think in terms of polar oppositions such as
cheap and expensive, rich and poor, happy and sad.

Peirce’s Semiotics
Peirce had a different approach to signs. He wrote
that a sign “is something which stands to somebody
for something in some respect or capacity” (Collected
Papers of C. S. Peirce, 1958, quoted in Zeman 1977,
24). He developed a typology that had three kinds of
signs: icons, which signify by resemblance; indexes,
which signify by causal connections; and symbols,
which signify by convention and have to be learned.
As he wrote:
Every sign is determined by its object, either first, by
partaking of the characters of the object, when I call
the sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its
individual existence connected with the individual
object, when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by
more or less approximate certainty that it will be
interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence of
a habit (which term I use as including a natural
disposition), when I call the sign a Symbol. (Quoted
in Zeman 1977, 36)

For example, photographs are iconic; smoke that
indicates fire is indexical; and flags and gestures are
symbolic.
Semiotics is a globally important field of study
and research, and important semioticians are found

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Semiotics

in England (Stuart Hall), Italy (Umberto Eco), France
(Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss), Russia
(Juri Lotman), Finland (Kristian Bankov), Canada
(Marshall McLuhan, Marcel Danesi), the United
States (Thomas Sebeok), and numerous other countries. Many semioticians combine Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics in their work, especially
in fields such as cultural studies.
Umberto Eco suggested in his book A Theory of
Semiotics that signs are anything that can be used to
substitute for something else. That something else
doesn’t have to exist or be somewhere, he adds, which
means that semiotics studies anything that can be used
to lie, for if something cannot be used to lie, it can’t be
used to tell the truth or communicate anything. Signs,
then, have a double valence and people can and often
do lie with signs—for example, women and men with
brown or black hair who dye their hair blonde or
women and men and women who cross-dress.

Application to Consumer Culture
Some semioticians, generally in academic institutions, focus their attention on semiotic theory and
the historical development of semiotics, but others
are more interested in applying semiotics, often in
combination with other theories, to culture and society. What semiotics does is examine how people find
meaning in various aspects of their everyday lives,
in the media to which they are exposed, and, when
it comes to consumer societies, to messages from
marketers and advertisers and from other aspects of
commercial culture.
As we grow up, we learn certain codes that tell
us how to interpret signs of various kinds. A French
marketing theorist, Clotaire Rapaille, wrote a book,
The Culture Code, that deals with the way children
become “imprinted” by their culture as they grow
up—that is, learn certain codes about all kinds of
things—and on the way these imprints influence us
at the unconscious level. Semiotics can be seen as a
way of decoding the way cultures use signs to generate meanings and shape behavior.
Marshall McLuhan was generally known as a
media theorist, but his 1951 book The Mechanical
Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man is really a semiotically informed study of American commercial culture. McLuhan writes, in his preface, that he wished
“to apply the method of art analysis to the critical
evaluation of society” (1951, vi). In the book, he

analyzes comic strips, the front pages of newspapers,
and a number of advertisements for such products
as Clark grave vaults, GE lamps, RCA radios, Thor
automatic gladirons, Mutual Benefit life insurance,
Squibb cod liver oil, and Life Savers. He deconstructs
these advertisements and explains how advertisers
manipulate people and capitalize on their basic values in an effort to sell products and services.
Roland Barthes was one of the most important semioticians of consumer culture. His book
Mythologies, published in French in 1957 and in
English in 1972, offered a semiotically informed dissection of French media and commercial culture. As
he wrote in the Preface to the 1970 edition:
This book has a double theoretical framework: on
the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the
language of so-called mass culture; on the other, a
first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics
of this language. I had just read Saussure and as a
result acquired the conviction that by treating
“collective representations” as sign-systems, one
might hope to go further than the pious show of
unmasking them and account in detail for the
mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois
culture into a universal nature. (1972, 9)

In his book, Barthes offered semiotic analyses of
topics such as soap powders and detergents, margarine, toys, wine and milk, plastic, and the new
Citroen. His point was to show how semiotics, in
combination with Marxist theory, could explain
how these products were being presented to the
French public and the mystifications and hidden
ideologies found in these presentations. The second
half of the book deals with myth, including his analysis of myth as a semiological system. Mythologies
is considered one of the classic examples of the
semiotic analysis of consumer cultures. Barthes
wrote many books in the course of his career and
was enormously influential in literary studies and
applied semiotic analysis.
An American semiotician, Marshall Blonsky, titled
his book American Mythologies, which suggests
that his book would do for the United States what
Barthes’ Mythologies did for France. Blonsky’s book
is highly self-reflexive, but it does deal with a number of aspects of consumer culture, such as clothing,
food, automobiles, and advertising.
All of these books apply semiotic theory to understand how marketers and advertisers shape demand

Semiotics

and influence decision making by consumers. One
of the more important ways advertising works is by
creating brands. Brands are the way manufacturers
differentiate their products from those of competing
products, and branding involves everything from the
design of products, the creation of logos for them,
and the advertising campaigns used to bring these
products to the attention of the public.
Saussure wrote that in language there are only differences. The same applies to products, and branding is the way that the manufacturers of products
attempt to differentiate their products from other’s.
Brands enable consumers who identify with certain
brands to have a sense of security about the products they purchase and brands also help confer a
sense of identity in people. Semiotics tells us that we
are always sending messages to others and receiving
messages from them. One of the ways we send messages about ourselves involves the brands we use—
brands of clothing, eyeglasses, watches, handbags,
and so on, that are advertised and help confer value
on these products and help give us our identities.
Semiotically speaking, our identities can be seen, in
large measure, as the sum of our logos and brands.
Many upscale brands have distinctive logos that
they put on products such as sunglasses, handbags, and watches, so others can recognize that
we are using that particular brand of that product.
Technically speaking, these brand logos are symbols,
for we have to learn what they mean. We learn to
identify brands and distinguish between brands
through advertising, which is approximately a three
hundred billion dollar industry in the United States.
A French scholar, Henri Lefebvre, has pointed out
that everything we purchase is given its value, in our
minds, by the advertising to which we are exposed,
and it is advertising that offers us all the ultimate
happiness—that of being consumers in consumer
cultures.
What advertising does, semiotically speaking, is
use figurative language such as metaphor, which is
based on analogy, and metonymy, which is based
on association, to influence our thinking and our
emotions. Advertising also uses images, along with
language, in print advertisements and narratives in
commercials to attract our attention, appeal to our
desires, and sell us things. We learn to interpret these
commercials by constant exposure to them from our
earliest years. Growing up in a consumer culture,
we learn to differentiate between different brands

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of products by their price and styles. Advertisers
use sports stars, movie stars, and celebrities to sell
expensive upmarket products. A French scholar,
René Girard, uses the concept “mimetic desire” to
explain how these endorsements work. In essence,
he argues, we imitate the desire of those who endorse
the products.
Another factor at work in consumer cultures
involves auras. When we purchase an upscale name
brand pair of eyeglasses or an expensive wristwatch,
for example, we are purchasing in large measure
the auras of designers and companies. The German
media theorist Walter Benjamin suggested that works
of art contain “auras” from their creators, and we
can say the same thing about designer eyeglasses,
pocketbooks, and all other designer products. There
are also many “knockoffs,” imitations of certain
name brand objects that we can purchase at just a
fraction of the cost, but because they are not authentic, they do not carry the auras of their designers.
Many people do not care about having originals
and content themselves with knockoffs because in
postmodern societies, such as we find in the Western
world since the 1960s, many people aren’t concerned
with authenticity. Semiotically speaking, people using
knockoffs are lying with signs, that is, appropriating
the signs of the expensive originals in imitations that
look like the originals.
What we call style, in fashion and in other areas
of life, can be seen, from a semiotic perspective, as
the construction of a collection of signs by which we
present ourselves to others and that others interpret,
in an attempt to understand, to “read” us, to learn
more about us. Generally speaking, we adopt a style
in which, our dress codes tell us, our garments and
accessories go together. That is, people wear certain
kinds of clothing and objects that don’t clash and
they don’t mix styles, unless they wish to do so for
ulterior purposes, such as to attract attention or
make some kind of a statement.
We learn about style from watching movie stars
and celebrities, reading certain magazines and looking
at the advertisements in them, and observing other
people. Our sense of style covers most of our purchases, for there are usually large numbers of competing products, whether they are mattresses, furniture,
automobiles, clothing, or anything else. The question
that semioticians ask themselves is this: why is it, with
a given amount of money to spend, a person chooses
one brand of product rather than another?

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Semiotics

From our observations and from the advertising
to which we are exposed, if we can afford to purchase what we want, we decide on everything from
our hairstyles, eyeglass styles, sunglass styles, watch
styles, kinds of clothing to wear, and styles of shoes.
We also communicate by our facial expressions and
body language. We have to be careful that the styles
we adopt are suitable for our status, the roles we
play, and the places in which we find ourselves. Most
people are not aware of the science of semiotics, but
when it comes to functioning in consumer cultures,
where there are all kinds of choices available to
people, they are all, though they do not realize it,
practicing semioticians.
When we talk about consumer culture, we are
mostly talking about material culture, which can be
defined as relatively simple objects showing human
workmanship. If you can photograph something,
and it isn’t too complex, it is part of material culture.
Semiotics, in conjunction with other disciplines, is the
most important means of determining the meaning
these objects have for people and the role they play in
society. That is because the objects are all indicators
of our taste and socioeconomic status, among other
things. Generally speaking, we do not purchase these
objects on the basis of need or price but on the basis
of aesthetics and their cultural meanings.
There is a question about what motivates people
in their purchases—is it an individual matter, based
on their personalities and taste, or is it something
else? A British social anthropologist, Mary Douglas,
has argued that there are four mutually antagonistic
“lifestyles” found in modern society—hierarchists
(elitists), individualists, enclavists (egalitarians),
and isolates (fatalists)—and it is our membership
in one of these lifestyles that shapes our consumer
behavior. As she writes in her article “In Defence of
Shopping,” culture determines our taste, and what
we purchase when we go shopping is not the expression of individual wants but membership to one of
the four lifestyles.
“Cultural alignment,” Douglas writes, “is the
strongest predictor of preferences in a wide variety
of fields” (1997, 23). She adds, “Shopping is agonistic, a struggle to define not what one is but what
one is not” (30). This passage is similar to Saussure’s
dictum that “concepts are purely differential and
defined not by their positive content but negatively
by their relation with the other terms of the system.
Their most precise characteristic is in being what the
others are not” (1966, 117).

What Douglas suggests is that consumer culture is
based on the desire people have to define themselves
by differentiating themselves from members of other
lifestyles, which means that shopping is, in effect, a
semiotic enterprise. Consumption, Douglas argues, is
not strictly a matter of individual choice but is tied to
our lifestyles and the unconscious imperatives generated by these lifestyles.
Semiotics provides us with an important tool for
understanding many different aspects of consumer
behavior, which explains why so many marketing
and advertising agencies are interested in applying it
as best they can and why so many scholars in areas
such as marketing, advertising, and cultural studies
are using it to better understand consumer culture.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Advertising; Branding; Cultural Studies; Identity;
Markets and Marketing; Material Culture;
Postmodernism; Symbolic Value

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang,
1972.
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” In Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald Mast
and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974.
Berger, Arthur Asa. Signs in Contemporary Culture: An
Introduction to Semiotics. 2nd ed. Salem, WI: Sheffield,
1999.
Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’til You Drop: Consumer
Behavior and American Culture. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
Blonsky, Marshall. American Mythologies. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Danesi, Marcel. Understanding Media Semiotics. London:
Arnold, 2002.
Douglas, Mary. “In Defence of Shopping.” In The
Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin
Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage, 1997.
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976.
Holdbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. The
Semiotics of Consumption: Interpreting Symbolic
Behavior in Popular Culture and Works of Art. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1993.
Johansen, Jorgen Dines, and Sven Erik Larsen. Signs in Use:
An Introduction to Semiotics. London: Routledge, 2002.

Senses
McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of
Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1951.
Peirce, C. S. The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Vols. 1–6
edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 1931–
1935; Vols. 7–8 edited by A.W. Burks, 1958.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Zeman, J. J. “Peirce’s Theory of Signs.” In A Perfusion of
Signs, edited by T. A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1977.

SENSES
Rather than physical channels conveying information about the external world to the internal system of the individual mind, the senses are skills for
embodied action and “avenues for the transmission
of cultural values” (Classen 1997, 401). Studying the
senses in culture and consumer culture requires abandoning the former, more common perspective, and
embracing the latter. An understanding of the senses
as active and reflexive modes of sensory communication (e.g., Finnegan 2002) is at the very core of what
some have begun to call a sensual turn in the social
sciences. Such sensual turn is marked by the following fundamental characteristics: (1) perception is
shaped by cultural dynamics; (2) ideas on how many
senses exist and which modes of embodied communication can be called a “sense” are deeply shaped by
contextual factors such as language, culture, and history; (3) different societies place varying degrees of
emphasis on the importance of certain senses, privileging some and undervaluing others; and (4) divisions such as those between the internal world of the
individual person and the external world of objects
and other people, or the division between body and
mind, between cognition and sensation, and between
behavior and perception, are but elements of an
obsolete dualist understanding of the world that an
embodied and sensual turn rejects.
The driving force behind the growth of a sensual
revolution is of anthropological origin. Since the
early 1990s with the publication of The Varieties of
Sensory Experience, a book edited by David Howes,
a growing number of anthropologists have begun to
focus their empirical and conceptual attention on the
meanings and the practices connected to different
sensations and sensory faculties. Throughout the late
1990s and especially after the turn of the twenty-first

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century, anthropologists of the senses have been
joined by other scholars such as sociologists, social
and cultural theorists, philosophers, and communication and cultural studies specialists. Recently, even
business writers, such as Martin Lindstrom, have
discovered the potential of exploiting the human
senses for the sake of building powerful brands and
crafting appetizing consumer products and services.
Together, these scholars have learned to examine
how “sensory meanings and values form the sensory
model espoused by a society, according to which the
members of that society ‘make sense’ of the world,
or translate sensory perceptions and concepts into a
particular ‘worldview’” (Classen 1997, 402).
One of the most common findings of postsensual
turn research on the senses is that of the dominance of
sight in Western culture and society. Sight is believed
to be the most dominant sense not only because of
the importance placed on the uses of visual sensations—think, for example, of acts such as reading
the written word, identifying persons through photographs, relying on images to sell and entertain, eyewitnessing to secure justice, and so forth—but also
because of the deep reliance of Western languages on
visual metaphors. To see is to believe, to understand,
to empathize. To frame is to contextualize, to take a
look is to examine and assess, to observe is to ponder
and reflect, and so on. Such dominance has not only
resulted in the elevation of visuality as the fundamental mode of experience, but also in the relegation of
most other senses to a secondary or even absent role.
Touch, for instance, is often associated with carnality, with contamination, with violations of privacy,
and voracity. Smell is regularly linked to disease,
putrefaction, danger, and the realm of the animal.
And taste, while appreciated by the connoisseur of
flavors, is seen as merely subjective, unscientific,
and unpredictable. Other senses—such as balance,
thermoception, proprioception, and nociception—
generally are not even deigned as important. Let us
take some space to outline the relevance of all of the
senses in the context of consumer culture, beginning
with the least explored senses.
The sense of balance—also referred to as equilibrioception or the vestibular sense—is the sense that
allows for the perception and regulation of direction,
acceleration, and postural equilibrium. Some of the
most obvious instances of the use of this sense in
consumer culture are found in the context of personal health/well-being and that of leisure. Yoga—a
practice imported from the East and repackaged

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Senses

for the needs and wants of Western consumers—is
centered on the search for bodily and spiritual balance. Postural equilibrium is also exploited—through
spectacular dramatization—in contexts such as acrobatics and the circus (one need only think about the
remarkable commercial success of Cirque du Soleil).
Acceleration is at the core of consumerism as well.
From potent motorbikes to fast sports cars, and from
thrilling roller coasters to daredevil sports such as
skiing and skateboarding, to accelerate is, seemingly,
to have fun and to live on the edge.
Thermoception is the sense that allows us to
perceive and regulate heat and cold. Consumerist
practices that cater to thermoception are legion. The
travel and tourist industry relies on the marketing of
balmy climates and sunny beaches, on warm waters
and winter getaways—or perhaps on soft powder
snow and cool, breezy summer mountain resorts.
The clothing and apparel industry is also equally
dependent on needs and wants to regulate bodily
temperature through comfy blankets and comforters,
waterproof hiking shoes and outdoor sports gear.
Cooling and heating, however, are perhaps the most
quintessential commercial expressions of thermoception-based culture. Indoor heating is as ancient
as fire, but the convenience associated with modern
ways of regulating home temperature during the cold
months of the year is profoundly typical of consumer
culture. And so is the energy waste that overheating
generates. Air conditioning is similarly symbolic of
how our comfort-seeking consumer culture attempts
to manage the sense of thermoception.
Proprioception is the sense that allows us to perceive and regulate our body’s movements in space.
The narrowest understanding of proprioception in
the context of consumer culture could be the business
of physiotherapy, but a broader conceptualization
of proprioception as all that pertains to kinesthesis soon leads one to realize that all sporting and
exercise—whether directly practiced or witnessed
in spectator mode—appeals to the proprioceptive
sense. Even the seemingly least commercial exercise in proprioception—walking—is subject to the
ever-growing expansion of consumerism. Walking
requires walking shoes, comfortable outfits, walking paths or park trails, water bottles, and more.
Walking may also be the source of pain, which leads
to the discussion of the next sense: nociception.
Nociception is the sense that allows us to experience
and manage pain. It is so easy to generate examples

of consumer practices and scientific-commercial
complexes that cater to sensations of pain, and the
human will to reduce pain as much as possible, that
there does not seem the need to do so here.
If an exploration of the commercial importance of
the more forgotten senses has been at all surprising,
an analysis of the relevance of the five best-known
senses in the context of consumer culture could be
downright overwhelming. From perfumes to cleaning
products, and from deodorizers to toothpastes, smell
plays a central role in the presentation of the self and
in giving the impression that places of dwelling are
comfortable, hygienic, and in good moral standing.
From songs to soundtracks, and from the performing arts to radio and television, hearing is essential to
mediated communication. Similar to hearing, sight
is quintessential in the context of all forms of mediated communication, but perhaps more revealingly,
the visuality of contemporary consumer culture in
the West is best expressed by advertising and conspicuous consumption. To advertise is to seduce into
buying by showing. And to consume conspicuously,
after all, is merely to show off to the envious sight of
others. The relevance of taste sensations in everyday
life is instead best epitomized by the commercialization of eating and drinking—practices that have
often been the subjects of study of sociologists and
anthropologists of food, but that have seldom been
treated in light of the centrality of the experience of
flavor. And finally, sensations of touch are subject to
commercialization and commodification in contexts
as diverse as massage, sex work, aesthetics, 3-D movies, video game-playing (one can think of consoles
such as the Wii, which simulate touch experiences),
and mobile communication devices such as Apple’s
iTouch and iPhone (which use screen touch to give
a heightened impression of interactivity). These are
only some of a multitude of examples of the relevance of the sense in consumer culture—a relevance
that is still in need of greater empirical attention, conceptualization, and understanding.
Phillip Vannini
See also Cognitive Structures; Commodification;
Consumer Behavior; Desire; Embodiment; Leisure;
Neuromarketing; Well-Being

Further Readings
Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in
History and Across Cultures. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Service Industry
Classen, Constance. “Foundations for an Anthropology of
the Senses.” International Social Science Journal 15
(1997): 401–412.
Finnegan, Ruth. Communicating: The Multiple Modes of
Human Interconnection. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Howes, David, ed. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A
Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Howes, David. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in
Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003.
Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual
Culture Reader. London: Berg, 2005.
Lindstrom, Martin. Brand Sense: How to Build Powerful
Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound.
New York: Kogan Page, 2005.
Synnott, Anthony. The Body Social: Symbolism, Self, and
Society. New York: Routledge, 1993.

SERVICE INDUSTRY
Service industry refers to an industrial sector comprised of firms or other organizations whose main
business is the provision of intangible products to
clients and customers; this may include provision of
access to the tangible products made by other sectors
(e.g., the retail trade provides access to manufactured
products). Service industries may provide their services to consumers (and the public at large), or to
businesses or other organizations.
Consumers not only consume goods like motor
cars, TV sets, canned foods. They also consume services—for example, garage services to support drivers, broadcasting services supplying TV content,
retail services stocking food. The act of consumption can also be seen in terms of consumers producing some of their own services—driving the car
produces a transport service, cooking food a catering
service, and so on. The service economy is usually
discussed in terms of the services produced through
paid work in the formal economy, so this discussion
begins here.
Some services involve physical changes in space
and time—such as moving people or freight from one
location to another, storing or repairing goods, cleaning offices and houses (and clothes, streets, and much
else), supplying refreshment and hospitality (e.g.,
serving meals). Some play more of an organic role,
such as medical services, surgery, dentistry, veterinary

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services, and even personal services such as hairdressing. As well as physical and organic transformations,
services can be informational. They are concerned
with the two-way flow of information (mail and
communications services) or with more one-way
broadcasting, cultural, and entertainment services
(radio and TV, museums and galleries, cinemas and
theaters), while others produce or process information for particular clients and consumers (consultancy, counseling, accountancy and legal services,
and a wide range of mainly business services supplying architecture, advertising, computer, engineering,
and other professional and technical services). Many
services have elements of each type of transformation. Informational features frequently accompany
other services—the air transport service provides
passenger announcements and in-flight entertainment, the health service provides dietary and lifestyle
advice, and so on.
As large organizations became prominent in activities as varied as banking, transport, and retail trade,
it became more common to think of many services
as being industries. “Industry,” initially describing
hard work, and coming to being applied mainly to
manufacturing activities and their organization, now
became a way of thinking about the organization of
any economic activity—especially when large scale
and technology intensive. Even so, the tendency to
consider services as unproductive activities regularly
surfaces. Public services have been particular targets
of criticism, as they are funded by taxes that take
money away from other parts of the economy, but
consumer services may be seen to divert expenditure
to consumption rather than investment (and to divert
time to leisure rather than production).
The service economy is typically defined in statistical terms as involving an economy in which the
majority of the workforce is employed in service
industries rather then in other sectors. By this definition, most Western countries became service economies in the second half of the twentieth century. In the
mid-twentieth century, statisticians put a great deal of
effort into developing ways of monitoring social, and
especially economic, development. In their efforts to
describe the structure and evolution of economies,
they built on traditions of thought going back at least
to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The
statisticians distinguished between numerous industrial sectors, which were grouped into three major
groups—primary industries (extractive industries like

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Service Industry

agriculture, mining, and fishing); secondary industries (manufacturing sectors, construction, and, in
most frameworks, the utilities of water and power
distribution); and tertiary industries (to some authors
these were simply a “residual sector,” but over time
they became most commonly known as the service
industries). The framework has undergone some
elaboration, with suggestions that quaternary and
even quinary sectors should be identified, and with
several rounds of reclassification of the sectors falling
within these broad groups.
The main classification schemes for grouping
industries that are employed round the world are
variations on the (I)SIC—(International) Standard
Industrial Classification—and the more recent
schema whose North American version is NAICS
and European version is NACE (Nomenclature
statistique des activités économiques dans la
Communauté européenne). In Revision 2 of this
system, service industries are organized into thirteen
major sections, each of which is then disaggregated
into numerous industries. They are labeled alphabetically as follows:
G

Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor
vehicles and motorcycles

H

Transportation and storage

I

Accommodation and food service activities
(researchers use the acronym HORECA to
cover hotels, restaurants, and catering)

J

Information and communication

K

Financial and insurance activities

L

Real estate activities

M

Professional, scientific, and technical activities

N

Administrative and support service activities

O

Public administration and defense;
compulsory social security

P

Education

Q

Human health and social work activities

R
S

Arts, entertainment, and recreation
Other service activities

There is a mixture of consumer, business, and
public and community services in this large range of
activities. These activities together now absorb the
greatest share of employment and create the greatest
share of economic output in most Western societies

(and many others). Any effort to define services in
positive terms—rather than in negative ones, as
not primarily producing raw materials or tangible
artifacts—has to confront this diversity. Some features
are shared by many service activities, however, or at
least are typically more pronounced in service industries than in manufacturing ones.

Features of Services
Many service industries have core products outputs
that are predominantly intangible. The product itself
is not something that can be put into a container,
stored, transported as freight, and the like. The production and consumption of the service are often
coterminous—to the extent that for some services,
it is hard to differentiate process and product. Trade
in services between countries is frequently very different from trade in goods, often involving the service supplier or client crossing borders. Tourism is a
case in point. (But there are exceptions—people may
consume radio or TV programs from other countries without leaving their living rooms.) Likewise,
services tend to be interactive—consumer-intensive
in some terminologies; the end user of the service
often has to participate actively in the service process. The consumer needs to travel on the train, visit
the museum or theater, sit in the dentist’s chair. The
quality of the service that is produced, the consumer
experience, is influenced by the inputs from the consumer. Many services are not mass produced but
are tailored or customized to the requirements of
specific consumers—a taxi journey may be unique
in terms of its start and end points (and the conversation between taxi driver and client may also take
new directions), a meal may be composed according to specific dietary and taste desires, and so on.
But while some services demand very active participation of the consumer (e.g., playing an online
video game, going on a diving expedition, receiving
psychotherapy), others may require little input (and
the TV program will continue to be broadcast even
if the viewers have all left their screens). Some services are highly standardized, whereas others are so
heavily adapted to specific requests that each service encounter is effectively producing something
novel.
There are thus many exceptions to this characterization of service industries as involving intangible and interactive products, and several forces are

Service Industry

blurring the differences between services and other
sectors. Management strategy often pushes standardization in services, so as to achieve economies of scale
and promote more division of labor. This has been
labeled the “industrialization of services,” moving
service activities toward the sort of highly routinized processes, with a substantial division of labor
and less reliance on skilled craft workers, that was
characterized by Taylorist or Fordist manufacturing.
(At the same time, some manufacturers adopt strategies of “mass customization,” so that their products are tailored to the perceived demand of specific
consumers. Manufacturers may also deliver services
alongside their material products, with some manufacturing firms transforming into service suppliers,
for example computer manufacturers becoming computer service providers.) But these trends—although
pronounced in some service sectors, such as fast-food
restaurants—are far from universal. Many service
firms stress their specialized customer service. Thus,
alongside standardized low-price hotels, for instance,
there are boutique hotels; many travel agents stress
that they are not providing packages but are tailoring holidays to the interests of individual customers.
A related strategy is to modularize elements of the
service product, so that they can be recombined to
make individualized service combinations for different customers.
New information technologies are heavily used in
many service organizations, partly to carry out backoffice work more efficiently. But the new technologies
are also widely applied to reshaping those services,
and elements of services, with a high information
content or communication demands. Software and
digital content can be stored on a disc or transmitted via the Internet (or mobile phone equivalents);
TV programs are broadcast and can be recorded by
the broadcasters and the intended consumers—even
if no one is watching them. For those services that
can be stored or delivered electronically, typically
the cost of the material container, or of using the
medium of transmission, is extremely low compared
to the expense of initially producing the information
or entertainment content. The same thing applies to
other efforts to add tangible elements to the service,
often to increase customer loyalty—a good example
being the various credit and debit cards that many
banks offer, and similar-appearing cards that are
used for membership, access, and other purposes
among many other service organizations. The costs

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of these tangible elements are usually minimal as
opposed to the costs of provision of the service itself;
the value of the service product does not lie in its
tangible component.
Service industries still typically involve more
customer interaction than manufacturing (although
manufacturing firms’ interactivity is growing as they
pursue more customer service, aftersales support,
etc.). Indeed, some new forms of interactivity are
appearing, one case being the websites that TV and
radio stations offer, where their audiences can offer
their own views on programs and programming.
The standardization of services may, in many cases,
restrict the ways in which the consumer can interact
with the service organization—telephone helplines
and e-commerce sites are often criticized as doing so
in clumsy ways—but customer inputs remain important for the production of most services.
Services vary in terms of how much and what sort
of interactivity is required—the taxi service differs
from the railway service, for example, budget hotel
rooms may be more or less standardized, and the
assistants and sales staff in trade services may perform routines that are highly scripted or much more
spontaneously generated in reaction to consumer
requests. The consumer may be more or less actively
engaged in consuming the service, too. At a cultural
event or entertainment performance, even when it
does not demand active audience participation,
the consumer may take an active part in cheering
or interjecting comments—or simply in observing
a performance quietly and reflectively, or chatting
with other audience members or with people elsewhere by mobile phone. Note that for some services
(public transport, entertainment and cultural services, tourism, etc.), the quality of the service to the
consumer is very much a product of the interaction
of other consumers with the service providers, as
well as reflecting their own interaction. This points
to another way in which services and manufacturing
typically differ. Whereas the consumption of both
goods and services typically requires inputs from
the consumer, the quality of goods is usually seen as
something that can be established independently of
specific consumer inputs, whereas for services this is
often not the case.
There is often an extensive service system lying
behind the service product—railway and broadcasting schedules will be met whether or not a particular
consumer uses the service. Even service systems that

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Service Industry

are less extensive than transport and communication services have a front office or front stage with
which the consumer interacts, and a back office or
back stage that is largely invisible to users of the service. The theater performance is a classic intangible
service that is consumed when it is produced. But
behind the specific performance lies much preparation and infrastructure, such as scriptwriting, casting,
rehearsals, and set design, not to mention marketing
and arrangements for sponsorship and the like.

Trends in Service Industries
The common features of service activities have to be
offset against the diversity associated with the wide
range of activities classified as services. Some services
are clearly oriented to different sorts of markets—
to consumers, to business, and to other organizations, or to nonmarkets in the case of many public
services. Some are more mixed: telecommunications
and banking services, for instance. In the latter cases,
large firms use their same infrastructure (branches,
networks) to deliver more or less differentiated services to consumers, and both private and public sector organizations.
Much of the early analysis of the growing economic importance of service industries related this to
shifts in consumer demand that follow on the process of economic development. Economists argued
that with economic development, basic consumer
requirements (for food, shelter, etc.) were being met,
and market demand would shift away from basics
toward more sophisticated and luxury items. This
was not just a matter of more costly foods and
more extensive and well-equipped housing, but also
growth in expenditure on services of one type or
another. The result would be a growing relative share
of service expenditure, output, and employment.
However, the evidence that the share of consumer expenditure going toward service naturally
increases with economic development proved to be
rather debatable. Examining trends in employment
and output, too, it is apparent that over the long
term, growth in consumer services—market services
mainly sold to private individuals—has been relatively limited as compared to other types of services.
There have been major waves of growth in some
consumer services; for instance the fast-food industry boomed—perhaps partly as a result of increasing women’s employment, resulting in less time for

household food preparation, and partly as a matter of innovative (and standardized) products and
processes and effective business models, as well as
reflecting increased leisure expenditure. Many other
consumer services display less vigorous growth, and
here the “Gershuny hypothesis” may be coming
into play. Simply put, this argues that the long-run
trend has been for manufacturing industries to display more rapid improvements in productivity than
was the case for service industries. The result would
be that the relative prices of goods would decline
as compared to services; and many consumer goods
offered the opportunity to provide one’s own selfservices at times and places of one’s own choosing.
The prediction was for a shift in personal and household expenditure away from service solutions for
requirements like household maintenance (e.g., from
laundries and launderettes to washing machines),
transport (from buses and trains to private automobiles), and entertainment (from cinemas and theaters
to TVs and audio equipment). Some evidence of
substitution was apparent, although the case of fast
food was something of an exception (fast-food and
take-out restaurants competing with microwaves
and prepared meals).
The growth in service industries’ employment and
output emerges in most Western countries as mainly
a matter of growth in nonconsumer services. Of
course, consumers make considerable use of many
public and community services, and lesser or greater
elements of these have to be paid for directly rather
than by taxation in different countries. Most consumers will engage directly with public health and
education, social welfare, and public administration
services, and many with defense and criminal justice
systems (although less often as a matter of choice).
The growth of public services is a matter of political
choice but has proved relatively resilient to efforts
to cut public expenditure. The political and cultural
implications of growing public sector employment
are clearly of considerable significance. In general,
the growth of service employment has often been
taken to signify the rise of a “service class” of mainly
office workers, a white-collar proletariat seen by
some commentators as fairly autonomous knowledge workers, by others as de-skilled workers in
office factories (or low-status retail and HORECA
work). Public and community services vary considerably among themselves, but industries such as
education and health services have very high shares

Service Industry

of professional workers with high educational
qualifications (e.g., doctors, teachers).
The other services with high levels of growth in
the second half of the twentieth century and beyond
have mainly been business services. These are market
services mainly sold in support of business processes
for private firms, self-employed individuals, and public and voluntary bodies. Some of the most dynamic
service industries here are knowledge-intensive business services (KIBSs), which are also characterized by
very high shares of professional and highly qualified
workers. They provide support in technology-related
activities (design, research, and testing services;
architecture and engineering; computer and software
services; etc.) and in more traditional professional
activities (accountancy; advertising, marketing, and
public relations; legal services; translation; etc.).
The growth of these industries has been particularly
marked, and they frequently feature demanding but
highly rewarded work whose products are largely
informational—designs, reports, presentations, and
so forth. Other informational business services,
such as secretarial and clerical services, typically
require lower levels of formal qualifications. Other
business services have more of a physical orientation. Operational business services carry out office
cleaning and catering activities that have parallels in
housework and HORECA. Wholesale services and
freight transport have clear parallels with the consumer services of retail and passenger transport. The
general trend, most noted with KIBSs, has been for
businesses and many public sector organizations to
focus on their core competences and outsource many
other business services. But most sectors of the economy display a growing share of white-collar work,
indicating that internal service provision is also vital
to primary and secondary sector organizations.
Service industries vary, then, in terms of the
markets they mainly address (most basically, consumer, business, and public sector) and the sorts of
transformative process they undertake (the physical,
biological, informational classification is a convenient
shorthand for this). This discussion has also touched
on variations in the service workforce, with some
services (especially physical services like HORECA,
retail, and transport) being dominated by low-skill
workers (in terms of educational qualifications),
and others (health, education, KIBS) being notable
employers of highly qualified workers. The picture
is complicated, but on the whole the latter service

1275

industries have grown more rapidly than the former
in recent decades, with all that implies about the
composition of the workforce. Many of these service
activities—especially public services and some parts
of retail trade and HORECA—also display relatively
high levels of female employment. The growth of
the service industries and the growth of women’s
employment have tended to march hand in hand in
Western societies: again with major implications for
consumer culture.
Consumption activity today typically involves a
mixture of goods and services, acquired from both
manufacturing and service activities. Often consumers also put in some of their own effort to create
self-services from goods (e.g., cars, PCs) and services (e.g., garage services, software) to satisfy their
own requirements. It can be difficult to disentangle
the contributions of goods, services, and consumer
inputs. The growth and transformation of service
industries have helped to shape the consumer experience, but these industries are themselves shaped by
consumer culture more generally.
Ian Miles
See also Economics; Households; Industrial Society;
Informal Economy; Information Society; Leisure;
McDonaldization; Postindustrial Society; Self-Service
Economy

Further Readings
Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-industrial Society. New
York: Basic Books, 1976.
Boden, Mark, and Ian Miles, eds. Services, Innovation and
the Knowledge Economy. London: Continuum, 2000.
Bryson, John R., and Peter W. Daniels, eds. The Handbook
of Service Industries. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2007.
Bryson, John R., Peter W. Daniels, and Barney Warf.
Service Worlds: People, Organisations, Technologies.
London: Routledge, 2004.
Cohen, Stephen S., and John Zysman. Manufacturing
Matters: The Myth of the Post-industrial Economy.
New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Fitzsimmons, James. A., and Mona J. Fitzsimmons. Service
Management: Operations, Strategy, Information
Technology. 6th ed. Irwin, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
Fuchs, Victor. Production and Productivity in the Service
Industries. New York: National Bureau of Economic
Research, 1969.
Gallouj, Faiz. Innovation in the Service Economy: The New
Wealth of Nations. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002.

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Sex

Gershuny, Jonathan I. After Industrial Society? London:
Macmillan, 1978.
Gershuny, Jonathan I., and Ian D. Miles. The New Service
Economy. London: Frances Pinter, 1983.
Greenfield, H. C. Manpower and the Growth of Producer
Services. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Miozzo, Marcela, and Ian Miles, eds. Internationalization,
Technology and Services. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar,
2003.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development. Innovation and Productivity in Services.
Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2000.
Pine, B. Joseph, II, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience
Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
Teboul, James. Service Is Front Stage: Positioning Services
for Value Advantage. New York: Insead Business Press,
2006.
Tordoir, Pieter P. The Professional Knowledge Economy:
The Management and Integration of Professional
Services in Business Organizations. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1996.
Vargo, Stephen L., and Robert. F. Lusch. “Evolving to a
New Dominant Logic for Marketing.” Journal of
Marketing 68 (January 2004): 1–17.

SEX
The term sex denotes a huge variety of phenomena.
One powerful semantic practice relates the term to
the anatomical and physiological differences that
refer to male or female physical bodies, contrasting with gender, which is regarded as socially constructed. A second meaning is gained by turning to
the use in everyday language of “having sex,” with
a range from masturbation to marital sexual intercourse and from hetero- to homosexual activities;
here, sex might often appear as opposed to love or
romance. A third bunch of meanings can be found
in combinations of sex with other words, as in sex
appeal, sex bomb, sex abuse, sex industry, sex sells,
among others. The history of the term sex alone
might reveal a process of compartmentalization and
rigidification of one aspect, which, in its “purity,”
seems to be quite new in the history of mankind.
A discussion of sex and its place in contemporary
consumer culture, therefore, has to decide on which
aspects to put the emphasis. This entry concentrates

on two: first, it treats the development of Western
codes regulating sexual behavior (courting, mating,
range of sexual techniques) from the comparatively
repressive society at the end of the nineteenth century
to the—again comparatively—liberated Westernized
world at the turn of the millennium; second, it concentrates on the aspect of commercialization and
mediatization of sexuality as a companion to the
development of a consumer culture, including the
impact of the shift toward a “consuming body.”

Sex and the Rise of a Permissive Society
Since the 1960s, social historians dealing with the
psychohistory of the family, childhood, and sexuality have provided a number of partly or completely
conflicting interpretations of the past. According to
Lawrence Stone, the sixteenth century brought the
rise of a new English bourgeois family ideal following the principle of “affective individualism” with
a more egalitarian partnership between the sexes.
For Philippe Ariès, the ideal of romantic love as the
marital basis for the invention of childhood developed in the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century.
In Michel Foucault’s view, early modernity was the
formative age for the disciplined body, but in The
History of Sexuality he also drew a different picture—one of the simultaneity of repressive practices
and liberalizing discourses. Peter Gay contradicted
what he regarded as a simplified myth of bourgeois puritanism steering the sex life of people in
the nineteenth century. Norbert Elias’s model of
a relatively unchecked, spontaneous joy of dominance and male sexual satisfaction at the expense
of socially weaker women in a society characterized
by an uneven power balance between warlords and
peasants denominates the “wild,” barbarian point
of departure in the High Middle Ages. “Civilizing”
means, in his account, that the power of these feudal lords met at medieval courts the even higher
power of princes and kings, or the equal strength
of peers and high-positioned women against whom
they had to restrain their once spontaneous affects.
The relationship between the knightly minstrel and
the high-ranking, married lady gave, for the first
time in the history of European upper classes, birth
to the model of “romantic love.” In Elias’s model,
therefore, inhibition and refinement of manners go
hand in hand. But how does it apply to twentiethcentury liberalization? The Dutch sociologist Cas

Sex

Wouters, in collaboration with Elias, coined the
term informalization for this new process. Its central formula is the “controlled de-controlling of
emotions,” gained from an extensive analysis of
manners books in four Western societies (Dutch,
German, English, and U.S.-American) and over a
whole century (Wouters 2004).
Edward Shorter’s account supports strongly the
sexual liberation view of the development of Western
culture. The puzzle to be solved is not the final triumph of sex (with “whole-body sex” as its biologically founded telos) but the long history of obstacles
delaying its arrival. Since the downfall of a more
tolerant Greek and Roman antiquity, Western culture was never able to detect the full neuronal potential of the brain to deliver the pleasure sensations
mediated by not only the genitals but the sensual
receptors of the tongue, the nose, the skin, and even
the muscles. Before the “great breakout” of straight
and gay sex since the second half of the nineteenth
century (with its avant-garde of artists and writers),
Christianity and poverty of the masses had been the
main obstacles to sexual fulfillment. But also control
by village elders, lack of urban anonymity, infectious
diseases, the ubiquity of early death, the brutality
of peasant men toward their obedient wives, their
heavy load of physical work, lack of hygiene, and
the fear of unwanted pregnancy proved to be main
hindrances on the road to sexual ecstasy. After the
1960s and in Western countries, these barriers were
finally removed with growing speed. Both straight
and gay sex discovered the sexual potential of all
body regions and integrated formerly deviant techniques (e.g., oral sex, sadomasochism, or fetishism;
Shorter presents convincing statistics) into the mainstream of sexual behavior.
In Wouters’s theory of the spiral process of informalization, the “expressive revolution” of the 1960s
was followed by the partial reformalization of the
1980s and 1990s. Referring to sex, he shows that
in all societies, but first in the United States before
World War II, younger generations removed their
courting from the surveillance of parents and the
older generation. The balance of power between the
sexes shifted in women’s favor. There were substantial changes in the codes regarding sexuality in terms
of the balance between sexual gratification (playing
an ever larger role) and the longing for lifelong intimacy. The balance of controls over sexual impulses
and emotions has shifted from external social

1277

controls to internal ones, and although the sexual
practices have become more varied and pleasure oriented, this does not mean anarchy or libertine chaos,
but complex new sexual regimes.

Desire, Sex, and Commercialization
Although we are familiar now with the idea of a sexual
revolution that has accompanied the rise of a capitalist consumer culture, interpretations and evaluations
of this epochal process still diverge naturally and will
probably not cease to do so. Two questions seem to
demand closer scrutiny: first, if it is true that the last
century saw a real sexual revolution, we would like
to know if and how it was affected by the spread and
more even distribution of material wealth; second, if
this same process was also one of commodification
of sex, we might like to know how the creation of
goods and symbols related to sexual practice (stimulating, compensating, enabling) has transformed or at
least shaped the experience of sexuality, including the
social settings in which sex occurs.
“Orality” is the basic concept both for Pasi Falk’s
notion of the consuming body and Christopher
Lasch’s of narcissism as the dominant social character of corporate mass-consumer capitalism. Authors
critical of this development point to its (sometimes
hidden) social costs: destruction of the family, visible
in divorce rates of more than 50 percent; lack of civic
and political involvement; and the growing pressure
on the individualized human being to present himor herself as an attractive player in both sexual and
economic competition. For the latter, sociologists of
the body, such as Chris Shilling, have collected systematic evidence. The “socially constructed body”
is a commodified body, a permanently presented,
clean and fragrant, expressively controlled body, and
is less a “disciplined” than a “mirroring” body and
is shaped and corrected by plastic surgery (even at
the female genitals), antiaging pills, and therapies
and may suffer from bulimia and anorexia nervosa.
The idea that mass consumption has overturned the
old order of economic scarcity might be premature,
even in terms of the money-price (expenditures for
cosmetics, physical training, psychotherapy, etc.) that
has to be paid for this socially constructed body.
Every discourse about the commercialization of
sex has, of course, also to mention prostitution, the
epitome of paid sex. Prostitution developed first in
urban, more anonymous, individualized societies; it

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Sex

was sometimes practiced as “sacred” and was most
of the time judged as morally wrong but as socially
necessary. Its history was also shaped by numerous attempts of aestheticization of the whore, fed
by deep desires and fantasies (O’Neill 2001). What
role now is played by advertising and other mediatized images of sex in the creation of new patterns
of sexual behavior? Fred Hirsch developed the idea
that the logic of cheap, mass-produced consumer
goods with the related expectations of rising levels of
satisfaction will have an infectious effect also on the
utility-expectations tied to intrinsically scarce goods,
the so-called positional goods (paintings by old masters, real estate, disposal of the efforts of servants or
people in the service economy). At best, only one half
of mankind can have a servant; if to be rich is defined
by having servants, it is logically impossible that all
can become rich. In a certain sense, sexual relations
can be seen as consisting between human beings who
provide precious goods for each other. Although
there are no logical reasons that prohibit the formation of self-satisfying couples enjoying sex and love
forever, empirical evidence shows that there have
always been strict limits of time, age, health, and
demands put by work and the raising of children.
In particular, the idealized combination of romantic
love and passionate sex is rather difficult to obtain. It
is not something that men would expect to get from
prostitutes. The inbuilt scarcity here seems now to be
overcome by the sheer mass of sex-related symbolic
representations characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. How inevitable is the kind of disappointment that is created by unrealizable illusions?
Falk sketched—in accordance with much other
literature—three stages in the genealogy of modern
advertising; from product-centered argumentation to
an emphasis of the experiential aspect of consumption; from information to seduction; and the shift in
communication from written symbols to pictures,
cinema, radio, TV, and, one has to add now, the
Internet. With Jean Baudrillard, we can infer that
the symbolic exchange value of brands has often
surpassed the use value of the goods themselves and
that the advertising industry, movies, and television
produce simulacra, symbols that map something
that does not really exist, thus creating a hyperreality
(Baudrillard 1983). Falk’s own analysis of pornography concentrates on the aspect of “faking”: whereas
male orgasms produce visible results, female orgasms
have to be guessed (“the female mystery”), although

the consumer wants to see something that transcends
mere “acting.” What Elias saw as a major component of the more “civilized,” more controlled way of
affective experience—namely, “lust of the eye,” the
partial transformation of lust gained from the direct
acting out of urgent needs into a postponed and
more indirect satisfaction secured by reading and
watching (he thought of novels, plays, and movies,
not of cybersex)— as a substitution for the real thing,
is now served by a major industry in the service of
mainly, but not exclusively, solitary production
of pleasure. Max Weber would not have thought
exactly of this when he coined the term erotic sphere
for the autodynamics of a development in contrast to
the world of hard work and rationalism. But it is by
no means sure that the contrast is as huge as the first
impression leads us to believe.
Helmut Kuzmics
See also Advertising; Body, The; Commodification;
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Emotions;
Informalization; Queer Theory; Romantic Love

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated from
German by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
First published 1939.
Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. London: Sage, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Introduction.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1981.
Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.
Vol. 1, Education of the Senses. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984.
Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976.
Lasch, C. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an
Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton,
1978.
O’Neill, Maggie. Prostitution and Feminism. Towards a
Politics of Feeling. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.
Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage,
1993.
Shorter, Edward. Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire.
Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England, 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1977.
Wouters, Cas. Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in
the West 1890–2000. London: Sage, 2004.

Sex Tourism

SEX TOURISM
Travel and tourism are major venues for modern
consumption. Together, these sectors employ close
to 8 percent of all workers and produce 9.4 percent
of the world’s gross domestic product (Brents et al.
2010). Sex tourism, a multibillion dollar industry,
refers to travel through tourist sectors and structures for the primary purpose of sexual relations
with residents at the destination. It can be categorized as domestic (within a country) or international
(across borders) and divided into commercial (prostitution) or noncommercial activity (acquaintance
sex). Globalization and the interconnection of world
markets combined with an international environment conducive to commodified sexuality have aided
its growth. So have online technologies, air travel,
ground transport, and supportive business infrastructures such as hotel and hotel-related industries.
Tourism, in general, provides the opportunity to
blend desires to escape ordinary time and familiar
space and geography with consumption. Thus, tourism fits squarely into a globalized consumer culture
as it allows the modern traveler to travel to a new
locale to purchase adventure, leisure, exotic location,
sun, fun, food, drink, goods, and services. In sex
tourism, consumption is extended to the purchase
of an affordable person(s) for a single or prolonged
interlude. Importantly, the international commercial
sex industry also promotes the person for purchase
as a particular commodity, a gendered and raced
exotic and erotic “other.” To be a sex tourist, therefore, is not only to purchase a sexual service, but to
consume a person (“a sex worker”) outside of one’s
experience and locality. For instance, Peter ChowWhite’s review of the discourse of sex tourist websites and discussion forums shows that international
sex workers are marketed as dependent, submissive,
and sexually available, in opposition to so-called
liberated Western women. Furthermore, the race/
ethnicity of international sex workers is advertised
as part of their supposed “natural” and “instinctive”
sexuality. Finally, to purchase a sex worker is also to
purchase the visceral experience of a landscape, or
what Jessica Jacobs and others have called an “emotional geography.”
Sex tourists may be men or women, although
research indicates that typically men are tourists and,
typically, women or girls are the sought commodity.

1279

Tourists and workers may be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered. Their “tastes”
and motivations vary—some seek women, some seek
men, and some seek children. They share the fact
that their travel involves the purchase of sexual and/
or relational services.
Some sex tourists make arrangements in advance
through online industries or social networks. For
instance, through websites they can access promotional videos, guidebooks, and discussion forums
where “consumers” discuss how to organize sex
tours, how to choose and interact with workers, and
where to experience the sexual encounter. Others
organize services at the destination or encounter
them situationally (e.g., on the beach). Importantly,
these transactions involve different power relationships: tourists have more socioeconomic power than
workers to purchase experiences, define their terms,
and leave the destination location. Indeed, Sheila
Jeffreys advocates the use of the term prostitution
tourism in place of sex tourism, saying that sex
tourism “normalizes” the phenomenon as “mutual
fun and entertainment” while hiding the “gendered
nature of the behavior” and the “harm done by it”
(2009, 131).

Sex Tourism Industry: Markets,
Issues, and Impact
Sex tourism is associated with many locations. These
include Southeastern Asian and South American
destinations such as Bangladesh, Thailand, the
Philippines, the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean,
Costa Rica, and Brazil. It also occurs in many other
regions and cities, including (but not limited to)
Kenya’s coast along the Indian Ocean; Thailand’s
Patpong region; several locations in Egypt’s Sinai
Desert; Holland’s Amsterdam; Cuba’s Havana; and
the U.S. area of Nevada around Las Vegas.
Formal legality and informal sanctioning of sex
tourism varies. Starting in the 1980s, brothel prostitution was legalized in Australia, the Netherlands,
Germany, and New Zealand (Jeffreys 2009), but
it remains illegal in many other locations. Local
enforcement may vary, however, in part, perhaps,
because of preestablished cultural patterns, ties to
tourism and profitability, or both. For instance,
Thailand provides an interesting example of a place
where prostitution is illegal, but brothels are a longstanding tradition. As Kevin Bales (2002, 214)

1280

Sex Tourism

puts it: “For a Thai man, buying a woman is much
like buying a round of drinks.” The sex trade in
Thailand has also been encouraged by global interconnections between countries: it grew during and
after the Vietnam War when the governments of the
United States and Thailand negotiated a contract for
American soldiers to be sent there for rest and relaxation (R&R). Macroeconomic events brought on by
a global world system and government intervention
(or lack thereof) have also increased and intensified
the number of tourists and workers in Thailand (and
other places) in the past twenty years. As Bales further illustrates, in the case of Thailand, rapid economic growth has led to the increase in urban Thai
men’s disposable income. Combined with a cultural
tradition of brothel usage, more money can mean
an increased demand for sex workers from local
men. Further, an influx of Westernized goods, even
in very poor rural areas such as northern Thailand,
creates consumer demand for products and need
for higher incomes. Many rural families living in
absolute poverty have seen an influx of Westernized
goods into their communities. They have sent children (especially daughters) to urban areas with
traffickers—sometimes knowingly, sometimes under
false pretenses—in exchange for money to purchase
these goods, according to Bales. A globalized, technologically enhanced world system of tourism has
frequently brought together these individuals and
international sex tourists.
Superficially, destination countries profit economically from international sex tourism: the U.N.
International Labour Organization reports that in
Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines,
the sex industry generates between 4 percent and
13 percent of the countries’ gross domestic product (Brents et al. 2010). In 1998, the International
Labour Organization reported positively about prostitution, citing its contribution to the gross domestic
product of selected countries (Jeffreys 2003). Many
studies, however, have indicated that sex tourism also
creates and intensifies countries’ infrastructural, environmental, and human social problems. For instance,
environmental damage can occur from depletion
of resources and the lack of physical infrastructure
(resources, sewer systems, law enforcement) to handle
an influx of tourists. Sex workers face a number of
problems such as coercion, rape, violence, and extortion from clients, pimps, and police; the spread of
AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases; and death.

Tourists may also be victims of crime or violence,
which may go unreported or may not be policed.
One major concern about sex tourism arises
from its links to human trafficking and child prostitution (the forcible movement of individuals
with the intent to use their services commercially).
ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child
Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for
Sexual Purposes), a global advocacy and monitoring
group working in sixty-five countries to end commercial sexual exploitation of children, reveals that
trafficking and entry into the sex trade is an all too
common coerced practice for children worldwide.
Children are often “dependent upon those who profit
from their exploitation” and are frequently taken to
tourism destinations to labor or beg. The tourists,
without an intermediary, may directly approach the
children for sex (ECPAT 2008, 22). Sex tourists’
access to children may also be indirectly (and sometimes inadvertently) supported by formal and informal tourism networks in areas ranging from rural
areas to five star hotels to red light districts. ECPAT
has worked with tourism industries worldwide to
establish a Code of Conduct to protect children,
including establishing ethical corporate policies,
training employees, repudiating contracts with those
who support sex tourism, making brochures and
information available to tourists, and annual reporting of practices.

Future Studies
Sex tourism continues to be a topic of scholarship.
Researchers are focusing on the importance of locality (international versus domestic) and commercial
(organized prostitution versus acquaintance sex) contexts. They are also reexamining gendered “choices”
and “exchanges” with attention to power and local
environments. Previous research emphasized a
gender-neutral analysis of sex tourism while debating
motivational differences between men and women
sex tourists. Some saw women tourists’ behavior as
a masculine-like quest of the exotic other, whereas
others saw it as a search for romance and courtship.
Research by Jacobs (2009) and Jeffreys (2003) shows,
however, that heterosexual women do not generally
view their sex tourism as prostitution because the
sexual encounters are not directly commercial. That
is, in lieu of direct compensation, women sex tourists
often instead provide gifts, clothing, and meals to the

Sexuality

local men with whom they have sexual relationships.
Jeffreys (2003, 2009) also pays specific attention to
the unequal racial/ethnic and gender dynamics of
women’s sex tourism. She concludes that although
heterosexual women sex tourists may have economic
(and often, racial/ethnic) privilege, the patriarchal
cultures in many of the destination locations prevent
them from exercising the gender and sexual privilege
that male sex tourists possess. For instance, Jeffreys
(2003) reveals that local governments often fail to
take seriously violence against women sex tourists
perpetrated by “beach boys” (male prostitutes).
Susan L. Wortmann and Lyndie Christensen
See also Commodification; Gender; Leisure; Sex; Social
and Economic Development; Tourism Studies

Further Readings
Bales, Kevin. “Because She Looks Like a Child.” In Global
Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie
Hochschild, 207–229. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.
Brents, Barbara G., Crystal A. Jackson, and Kathryn
Hausbeck. The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex, and Sin in the
New American Heartland. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Chow-White, Peter A. “Race, Gender and Sex on the Net:
Semantic Networks of Selling and Storytelling Sex
Tourism.” Media, Culture, & Society 28, no. 6 (2006):
883–905.
ECPAT International. Combating Child Sex Tourism: FAQs.
Bangkok, Thailand: ECPAT International, 2008. http://
www.ecpat.net/ei/Publications/CST/CST_FAQ_ENG.pdf.
Jacobs, Jessica. “Have Sex Will Travel: Romantic ‘Sex
Tourism’ and Women Negotiating Modernity in the Sinai.”
Gender, Place, and Culture 16, no. 1 (2009): 43–61.
Jeffreys, Sheila. “Sex Tourism: Do Women Do It Too?”
Leisure Studies 22 (2003): 223–238.
Jeffreys, Sheila. The Industrial Vagina: The Political
Economy of the Global Sex Trade. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky:
Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women
Worldwide. New York: Random House, 2009.

SEXUALITY
Sexuality involves more than sexual behavior or
sex. It refers to anything relating to the erotic, to
sexual desires, practices, relations, and meanings,

1281

and it underpins social institutions, kinship, and
living arrangements. In social science discourse,
sexuality is regarded as a social rather than a natural fact. Sexuality is not simply rooted in the body,
but in life-forms that are variably shaped by specific
historical, political, economic, cultural, and social
circumstances. The meanings of the sexual and the
experiences of sexuality change. Consumer culture
has been identified as a crucial backdrop to sexuality
in late-modern societies, and, in turn, sexuality serves
as a major engine of consumer culture. Sexual appetites are aroused to enhance consumers’ desires for
goods, and sex(uality) itself is commodified in manifold ways. Consumer cultures address consumers
as sexual subjects and feed their sexual desires with
fetishized images of body parts and forms; they shape
sexual styles and characters evoking stereotypes of
gender and race; and they ventilate sexual ethics, attitudes to, and meanings of sexuality. Consumer goods
mediate sexual relations and practices, for example,
by furnishing material landscapes in which sexuality can take on certain forms. The significance of
sexuality for contemporary consumer culture has to
be considered in the context of the sexualization of
social life propelled by consumer, media, and popular culture. This entry outlines more general theoretical perspectives on the relationship between sexuality
and capitalism as possible ways of framing sexuality
and consumer culture. Two broad strands of thinking are introduced: the “repressive” tradition, mainly
developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists, and
a “productive” paradigm in the context of Michel
Foucault’s and other historical studies on sexuality.

Capitalism and Desire
According to classical and modern social thought
(e.g., Karl Marx, Norbert Elias), modern capitalism
and civilization were tied to increasing control—
external and internal—over the body’s desires. In
their Marxist reading of Sigmund Freud, the critical
theorists of the Frankfurt school argued that human
instincts and passions are repressed and distorted in
modern civilization and capitalist society. In Eros
and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse maintained that
economic discipline in capitalism requires a higher
burden of sexual regulation and repression than any
other civilization. Technical progress has made possible capitalism’s capacity to manipulate libidinal
instincts for commodity exchange by engineering

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Sexuality

sexuality into individual needs. This remodeling of
consumers’ instinctual structure is highly ambivalent.
Marcuse referred to this as “repressive” or “institutionalized desublimation” (2002, 77), which intensifies sexual energy, but at the same time reduces the
erotic—the polymorphous and self-transcendent
quality of libido—to sexual satisfaction.
The German Marxist philosopher Wolfgang F.
Haug extended this line of thought. In his analysis of
“commodity aesthetics,” he highlighted commodity
culture as the prime domain of sexualization. Haug
sketched a double exploitation in capitalism’s “technocracy of sensuality”: it demands the deferral of
immediate gratification at work, but compensates
for this alienating self-discipline in consumption.
However, the sexual images and sexualized goods
provided by consumer culture create desire for more
rather than less. Instead of satisfying these unfulfilled desires, wishes, and anxieties, consumer culture exploits them and gears them to its own ends
by enticing customers to believe that commodities
are the real answers to their lust or unmet needs.
Haug vividly described how commodities are staged
as love objects, which, by means of their sensual
and sex appeal, throw “wooing glances” (Marx) at
potential customers and lend themselves readily as
instruments for the consumers’ own courtship rituals. A gendered and sexualized subtext clearly pervades his analytical notion of the relation between
the commodity and the consumer. The “malicious”
commodity, whose illusionary appearance promises
more than “she” is ever able to deliver, deceives,
bribes, and fobs off the (male) consumer, distracting
him from his true needs. Despite the fallacy of determinism in the technocratic modeling of sensuality,
both these accounts remain key texts for the study of
sexuality and consumption.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault adopted
a different starting point. Considering the contemporary preoccupation with sex in Western societies, he argued that the effect of power in relation to
sexuality was not its repression, but its permanent
invocation and inducement. In the frame of modern
“bio-power”—an essential element in the development of capitalism—sexuality had become a
prime concern of the governance of the population
and its welfare. At the subjective level, fostered by
medical-scientific discourses and a therapeutic confessional culture, sex was installed as the ultimate
truth and essence of one’s being. As Foucault’s and

other historical studies demonstrate, the making of
Western modernity and capitalism did not simply
center on the repression of desire, but was tied in
with the remaking of bodies and desires in such a
way that sexuality came to be seen as the cipher of
individuality.
Capitalism had “discovered” sexuality long before
the sexual liberation movements in the 1960s. The
sexualization of culture was not a linear development, but came in phases. From the nineteenth century onward, commodity culture and advertising had
become important domains for the social imagery
and the ideological consolidation of certain relations
of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Late-nineteenthcentury market economy in Europe and the United
States had pulled sexuality into the sphere of commercial entertainment, preparing the ground for a
non-procreative form of intimacy even as moral discourses still relegated sexuality to conjugal relationships. As Jeffrey Weeks argued, between the 1930s
and 1950s when mass consumerism of household
durables took hold in Western economies, the emphasis on the importance of sexual pleasure in marriage
lent support to domestic ideologies. As the agents of
private domestic consumption, women were key to
the consumer industries. The incitement to female
sexuality in the consumption sphere not only served
male desires, but wooed women with products to be
used for constructing an appealing femininity and
sexual desirability. This did not repress or “exploit
an essential sexuality; it was partially constructing
a female sexuality to accord with a series of major
social developments” (Weeks 1989, 258). With the
liberalization of laws, economic affluence, and the
countercultural shift of traditional values and sexual mores in the Northern American and Western
European context in the 1960s and 1970s, the eroticization of social life intensified. At the same time,
however, sexism in advertising met with increasing
critique from feminist campaigns. Historical studies add more complexity to the Marxist-Freudian
readings of capitalism and consumer culture. True,
the fetishization of the (female) sexual body was
much less significant in the communist German
Democratic Republic, as Dagmar Herzog suggests,
but the growing sexualization of the public sphere
was not only a response to the needs of capitalism,
according to Weeks. It was also entwined with socialdemographic and socioeconomic factors as well as
with legal reforms.

Shopping

The sexualization of culture—taking on different
forms and degrees in different contexts—is characterized by the preoccupation with sexuality; a proliferation of explicit sexual texts and (pornographic) images;
liberal sexual attitudes and new forms of sexual experience and repertoires (e.g., cybersex); a growth in the
provision of commercialized sex services; and a wider
accessibility of sexual representations and products,
facilitated by new information and communication
technologies. The sexualization of commodities and
the forms of sexual objectification are subject to
change. Although the promise of sexual pleasure has
mainly been connected to heterosexist images of the
female body, the male sexual body, too, has become
an object of fetishization. Outright sexism is still not a
thing of the past, but nowadays it appears more often
in a mode of retro- or “tongue-in-cheek” sexism and
is tied in with postfeminist discourses of femininity,
notes Feona Attwood. A recurrent issue of debate is
the question how consumer culture affects intimate
and sexual relations. Echoing Georg Simmel’s arguments on monetarization, Zygmunt Bauman provides an example of the more pessimistic view that
personal bonds are transformed through the cash
nexus and that “postmodern sensation-seekers” treat
each other as mere objects of consumption and pleasure. Ethnographic studies, however, such as Daniel
Miller’s A Theory of Shopping, suggest the contrary:
consumption can be a medium for the expression and
reconstruction of love and intimacy, for example, in
the act of shopping for others, in which the hedonistic
gratification of one’s own pleasure or the instrumentalization of the other is sacrificed in the name of love
and gift-giving.
Silvia Rief
See also Capitalism; Femininity; Gender Advertising;
Masculinity; Queer Theory; Sex; Sex Tourism

Further Readings
Attwood, Feona. “Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization
of Culture.” Sexualities 9, no. 1 (2006): 77–94.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human
Bonds. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics:
Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist
Society. Cambridge: Polity, 1986.
Herzog, Dagmar. Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality
in Twentieth-Century Germany. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.

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Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity,
1998.
Mort, Frank. Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and
Social Space in Late Twentieth Century Britain. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Reichert, Tom, and Jacqueline Lambiase, eds. Sex in
Consumer Culture: The Erotic Content of Media and
Marketing. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006.
Slater, Don. “Trading Sex-Pics on IRC: Embodiment and
Authenticity on the Internet.” Body & Society 4, no. 4
(1998): 91–117.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of
Sexuality since 1800. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1989.

SHOPPING
Shopping, sometimes humorously referred to as
“retail therapy,” is an important aspect of our economic and social life; this explains why it is of such
interest to social scientists. For shopping is connected
to producing goods and services, and thus plays an
integral part in our economy and the economy of
every society. If people don’t buy food, automobiles,
clothes, houses, and other things that are grown or
manufactured, economies spiral into recessions, and
in some cases, depressions. So, it is imperative that
people consume food that is grown, products that
are manufactured, and services that are offered, and
shopping is the way we do that. It is an integral part
of our everyday lives. A powerful industry, advertising, exists to convince us to shop in certain ways—
that is, to buy a particular brand of soap or watch or
toothpaste or automobile.
Critics of consumer cultures, where shopping
plays a major role in people’s lives, argue too much
emphasis is placed on personal spending and private
consumption and not enough on investments in
the public sector, which we can consider a form of
governmental shopping. Governmental expenditures
are, in essence, shopping done—in principle—for the
public good.
Sociologists such as Max Weber argued that
there is a religious aspect to our desire for goods.
In his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, Weber argued that John Calvin’s thought
justified our desire for goods. God, Calvin maintained, provided us with necessities but also with

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Shopping

things for our pleasure and delight. Weber explained
that for Calvin the unequal distribution of goods
was “a special dispensation of Divine Providence”
that justified the position of wealthy persons. It was
God’s grace that they were wealthy. Weber also
wrote that in America the pursuit of wealth reached
its highest development and had the character of
a sport. Although we may not be conscious of the
mythic or religious roots of our consumer culture,
it is possible to argue that there is an unconscious
sacred dimension to shopping.
Social scientists are interested in shopping because
it plays such an important role in our everyday lives.
For example, the things we buy are what social scientists call material culture, and anthropologists and
sociologists study these objects to gain insights into
a country’s technological development. There are
also ritualistic aspects to shopping. People’s behavior in supermarkets has been studied extensively and
supermarkets are designed to lure people from the
periphery, where basic foodstuffs such as dairy products, meat, fruits, and vegetables are sold, into the
interior aisles, where discretionary products, such as
dog food, detergents, soft drinks, and canned foods,
often with higher margins, are sold.
In the United States, where most people have large
refrigerators, it is not necessary to shop for groceries
more than once a week. In countries where people
don’t have refrigerators or don’t have large ones,
people have to shop more often. In some societies,
cultural codes play an important role and people
shop daily because of their desire for fresh vegetables,
bakery products, and other foods, even though they
have large refrigerators.
Shopping is an activity. Aside from our need to
buy foods and products to maintain our households,
many people find shopping to be a great pleasure,
for when we shop, we feel a sense of wonder at the
enormous number of products available to purchase.
We feel this way even when we are only window
shopping; we derive a certain amount of comfort
from seeing the wonderful things people have created
that are available, if we have the money to purchase
them, that is. There is a subliminal utopian, paradisical aspect to shopping that has to be recognized.
According to a Freudian psychoanalytic point of
view, when we shop we generally experience a certain amount of internal conflict, as the id elements in
our psyches want us to buy anything and everything
and the superego elements in our psyches remind us

that we have a limited amount of money and want to
restrain us from buying anything. Our egos have to
mediate this battle. Shopaholics, for example, cannot
restrain themselves when they go shopping and buy
things they don’t need and in some cases may not
even like. We can suggest that the id element in their
psyches is out of control and dominates the ego and
superego elements.
This sense of abundance and the longing for the
good things of life we experience when shopping
helps explain the development of malls. They are collections of stores—sometimes enormous in number—
that are designed to facilitate shopping and activities
related to shopping, such as dining in restaurants.
The design of stores plays an important role in
the shopping experience. A German social scientist,
Wolfgang Haug, argues that we should see shopping
in theatrical terms and thus stores are now designed
like theater stages where shoppers act out their roles.
Shopping, then, is a kind of theater and stores are
now designed to facilitate our sense that shopping is
a form of entertainment. Stores are now designed to
cater to our fantasies and overcome our resistance to
purchasing things.
Peter Williams, the chief executive at Selfridges
department store in England, said, “We are trying to
assault everyone’s senses in as many ways as we can.
We’re in the entertainment business to some extent.
It is not just the other retailers we are competing
with. We are competing for leisure time” (Financial
Times, “Department Stores Launch Counterattack,”
Dec. 23, 2003). Stores now recognize that they must
be designed to facilitate dreaming and fantasy life,
though their lighting, design, and music.
Marketing research corporations, such as the
Stanford Research Institute and Claritas, have developed elaborate typologies to categorize shoppers.
One of the most interesting typologies about shopping, from a theoretical point of view, was developed
by social anthropologist Mary Douglas. She argues
that in modern societies there are four lifestyles:
individualists, hierarchists (elitists), egalitarians, and
isolates (fatalists). She explains how she developed
these four groups in a seminal article, “In Defence of
Shopping.” Unlike other consumer typologies, hers
is not based on surveys but on the nature of groups:
whether they have strong or weak boundaries and
whether they have few or many rules. It is cultural
alignment—that is, membership in one of the four
mutually antagonistic lifestyles—that shapes what

Silverstone, Roger

we buy when we shop, not personal taste or psychological factors.
As she writes, at the end of her article, “Shopping
is agonistic, a struggle to define not what one is, but
what one is not.” That is, when we shop, we reject
the kinds of things people in the other three cultures
like, so it is the lifestyle that we belong to, even if we
aren’t aware of our membership in it that shapes our
behavior. “Cultural alignment is,” Douglas explains,
“the strongest predictor of preferences in a wide variety of fields” (1997, 30).
Shopping is not an important element in subsistence cultures, where people live off the land and
there is little to buy. It is, however, an extremely
important part of postmodern societies, which are
consumer cultures. Postmodernism, theorists of the
subject suggest, became dominant around 1960 and,
since then, societies have been dominated by mass
media, stylistic eclecticism, hyperreality, and, as the
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard suggests, a compulsion to consume. You shop because you sense that
you have a duty to buy. In postmodern societies, we
tend to make our lifestyles, as reflected in the things
we buy, the central organizing factor in our lives.
The language of shopping is interesting to consider. We tend to avoid the word buy because it
sounds so self-indulgent and use a number of other
terms such as get, found, and ordered. Shoppers
are fond of sales because they have the best of both
worlds—they spend money and they save money at
the same time. The psychological lifts we get from
buying things and the sense of empowerment that we
feel explain why the phrase “shop ’til you drop” is so
interesting. The phrase suggests that shopping is so
pleasurable and so exciting that it takes control of us,
and we cannot stop shopping until we “drop” from
fatigue. When we shop on the Internet, and it plays
an increasingly large role in our shopping, we don’t
shop ’til we drop but only until our fingers ache or
become numb and we can’t order anything else.
Arthur Asa Berger
See also Advertising; Branding; Protestant Ethic;
Psychoanalysis; Sears, Roebuck and Company; Spaces
of Shopping; Typologies of Shoppers; Walmart

Further Readings
Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’til You Drop: Consumer
Behavior and American Culture. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

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Berger, Arthur Asa. Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture. 3rd
ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Douglas, Mary. “In Defence of Shopping.” In The
Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin
Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage, 1997.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.
Underhill, Paco. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed
American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2005.

SILVERSTONE, ROGER
(1945–2006)
Roger Silverstone was a British researcher of mass
and new media, and communication studies more
generally. He was influential in the development of
these fields in the United Kingdom and contributed
several ideas and approaches that are likely to be of
lasting importance.
Having grown up in Birkenhead, Silverstone
studied geography at Balliol College, Oxford. He
worked briefly in publishing, and then as researcher
and director for London Weekend Television and
the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—at the
latter he was involved in programming concerned
with the Apollo moon landing. These experiences
gave him deeper inside knowledge of the broadcasting industry than many media academics. His PhD
research used sociological, anthropological, and literary approaches to examine television narratives. In
1985, Framing Science: The Making of a Television
Documentary explored TV’s representation of science through an ethnographic account of the shaping of a BBC documentary. In 1994, Television and
Everyday Life discussed how TV links private and
home life to wider communities and public spaces.
While Reader in Sociology at Brunel University,
he became active in the study of consumption of
new information technologies. He became the first
Professor of Media Studies at Sussex University in
1991, whose Silverstone Building is named in his
honor. He became the London School of Economics’
first Professor of Media and Communications in
1998, and in 2003 the LSE set up its Department of
Media and Communications under his leadership.
His widely read (and widely translated) Why Study

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Simmel, Georg

the Media? published in 1999, strongly defends
media studies against popular prejudice. In the same
year, he was founding editor of the journal New
Media and Society.
He made important contributions to analysis of
consumer issues in studies of the incorporation of
TV and new information technologies in everyday
life. He sees the appropriation of such media (and
by extension many other innovations) into everyday
life as a process of domestication in which innovations and social practices coevolve. This is a more
dynamic and subtle account than that represented
by the standard model of diffusion of innovations.
The adoption of innovations (often emerging from
industries such as consumer electronics, telecommunications, and broadcasting) involves integrating
them into everyday practices. The TV set is fitted
into a corner of the room, for example. Consumers,
learning about what activities the innovations can
and cannot readily support, reshape their own
behavior and their environments accordingly. Thus,
the living room is redesigned, meals and meal times
are reorganized to mesh with TV viewing patterns.
Information about these adaptations, in turn, influences industrial innovators and their designs for
subsequent generations of innovative goods and
services—TV sets that can fit into kitchens, special
TV dinners, for example.
Silverstone stressed that this is not just a matter of
physical properties of consumption goods; nor is it
just as the consumers’ search for more functionality
and convenience. Symbolic dimensions of consumption are also important: consumers give meaning to
the objects and practices of consumption, actively
configuring new products into their everyday lives
and identities (or rejecting them).
All media were once innovations, and their
domestication (and our shaping of lifestyles and
worldviews around this domestication) has been a
complex and contested matter. Domestication is far
from automatic, and consumers are far from passive.
There are many levels of negotiation (e.g., between
consumers and suppliers, and between the members
of a household). The rules of behavior within which
consumption takes place are negotiated; these rules
shape the goods and services that are available to
be purchased and how these are actually consumed.
Rather than take media, and media consumption, for
granted, Silverstone problematized these processes as
topics for inquiry and intervention.

Silverstone’s last work, in the posthumous Media
and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, foregrounded the ethical issues such analyses raise. The
“mediapolis” is the mediated public space in which
much political argument and action take place
and are represented, and in which media play vital
roles in framing our understandings of the world,
in drawing boundaries between “us” and “other,”
and in shaping views about how “others” should be
treated. It is important for media consumers to be
educated and informed about this role and how it
is performed. Just as regulation of the physical environment has been the subject of national rules and
international negotiation, so regulation of the media
environment is needed to confront the moral crisis of
global communication.
Ian Miles
See also Appropriation; Diffusion Studies and Trickle
Down; Domestic Technologies; Information
Technology; Innovation Studies; Moral Economy;
Social Shaping of Technology; Suburbia

Further Readings
Silverstone, Roger. Television and Everyday Life. London:
Routledge, 1994.
Silverstone, Roger. Communication by Design: The Politics
of Information and Communication Technologies.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

SIMMEL, GEORG (1858–1918)
Georg Simmel is a German sociologist and philosopher whose work has been influential on the Chicago
tradition of sociology and has recently been rediscovered by scholars of consumer culture. His production is vast, and besides pure philosophical works,
he wrote two key texts in sociological theory, often
called the Große Soziologie and the Kleine Soziologie,
as well as fundamental works on money (Philosophy
of Money), metropolitan lifestyles, and fashion (“The
Metropolis and Mental Life” and “Fashion” in On
Individuality and Social Forms). Simmel’s approach
to sociology can be seen as a reflexive attempt to
reject the organicist theories of August Comte and
Herbert Spencer. Like Max Weber, Simmel favored
an idiographic and interpretive method, namely,
one concerned with historically situated events and

Simmel, Georg

human subjectivities, rather than a nomothetic one
concerned with establishing general laws predicated
on variables abstract from ordinary experience. In
particular, he proposes that society consists of a web
of interactions and that it is the task of sociology to
study the forms of these interactions as they occur
in diverse historical periods and cultural settings,
something that today is the province of so-called
microsociology.
Consumption appears to Simmel as a culturally
ordered field of interaction rather than a threat
to social order, as his French contemporary Émile
Durkheim would have it. For example, to Simmel,
fashion is the outcome of two fundamental principles of social logic: the need for cohesion or
union and the need for differentiation or isolation.
In following fashion, we align ourselves with some
people and differentiate ourselves from others, but
at the same time we can enjoy expressing ourselves
in a common language that is widely understood.
While he tends to describe the social dynamics of
fashion as functioning only through imitation, with
a top-down descending movement (the so-called
trickle-down effect), for Simmel, fashion is also a
metaphor for the allure that the new exerts on the
modern subject in general, and on the bourgeoisie
and the middle classes in particular. In contrast to
the nobility, the bourgeoisie cannot rely on tradition
and established, long-standing styles and, unlike less
well-to-do classes, they hope to better their social
position and to find their own style. While periodical switches in dresses and aesthetic forms are as old
as history, according to Simmel, fashion characteristically holds to the modern, post-traditional spirit.
This is because it makes change, newness, and transitoriness the norm. Still, fashion and style provide
individuals with a “temporary anchor” that enables
them to approach things while maintaining a certain
distance that stresses subjectivity. Through adopting
a certain style, especially if it has been acceptable
for a while, we free ourselves from the “absolute
responsibility” for ourselves, we can experiment in
indirect ways, as if through a “veil,” demonstrating
our taste without having to keep steady “on the narrowness of mere individuality” (Simmel 1991, 68).
Furthermore, the variety of different styles that characterizes the material environment of the modern
subject provides again a space for individual originality, allowing for objects to be mixed and mingled
to “receive a new centre which is not located in any

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of them alone” (69), but coincides with the specific
combination contrived by the subject underlining
individual self-expression.
Simmel was also the first to notice that in modern societies the growing social differentiation and
specialization of relatively separated social and
cultural spheres was accompanied by a corresponding differentiation and growth of material culture.
This has been favored by the characteristically
modern form of exchange, that is, money, which
presents itself as a universal equivalent to be used
without the inertia inherent in barter. For Simmel,
though, consumption is a process of appropriation
unfolding against the background of the increasing dominance of the cash nexus. The modern
monetary economy heralds a new season in the
relationship between human subjects and material
objects, favoring particular visions of what it is
to be a subject, and what it should be. According
to Simmel, social actors move from a situation in
which their identity is, as it were, imposed by the
things that they happen to possess (i.e., their actions
are determined by bundles of objects corresponding
to a traditional and rigid distribution of roles and
resources), to a situation of “absolute potentiality.”
In a mature monetary economy, precisely because
objects have become commodities, because they
are exchangeable and equivalent, everything can be
bought and subjects are not able to fuse or coincide
with things; all objects remain in their hands for
a limited period only and are always encumbered
with their potential convertibility into money. We
do not so much live the rhythm of objects as in postmodernist visions, but, having freed ourselves from
them, we are forced to live day by day, in different
spheres and environments, to our rhythm. Modern
practices of consumption are, like modernity itself,
ambivalent phenomena that, placing emphasis on
subjectivism, do not free human beings from their
own being. Conceived as a whole, material culture
corresponds to a public domain of indifference,
which becomes meaningful only in the difference
made by subjective valuation. Modern material culture thus testifies to the relativity of value and no
longer bestows a difference on the individual who is
pushed to self-constitution.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Fashion; Flaneur/euse; Lifestyle; Material
Culture; Money; Sociology; Taste; Urban Cultures

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Simulacrum

Further Readings
Levine, Donald. The Flight from Ambiguity. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Muller, Jerry Z. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in
Western Thought. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
Nedelmannn, Birgitta. “Individualization, Exaggeration and
Paralysation: Simmel’s Three Problems of Culture.”
Theory, Culture and Society, 8 (1991): 69–94.
Sassatelli, Roberta. “From Value to Consumption. A SocialTheoretical Perspective on Simmel’s Philosophie des
Geldes.” Acta Sociologica 43, no. 3 (2000): 207–218.
Simmel, Georg. “The Problem of Style.” Theory, Culture
and Society 8 (1991): 63–71. First published 1908.

SIMULACRUM
The concept of the simulacrum, meaning image,
semblance, or appearance, has a long and complex
history. The term simulacrum derives from the Latin
simulare meaning to make like or simulate (plural form: simulacra), and the concept is central to
Platonic philosophy, to Judeo-Christian theology,
and to modern, critical thought, where the notion
has been applied to the media and consumer culture.
The simulacrum is often understood as constituting
a “problem” because it raises the issues of falsity,
fakery, and masquerade; simulacrum suggests mere
appearance, that which is lacking in substance or
true and essential qualities. For this reason, simulacra have long been associated with the devil and the
malefic, with women and their use of cosmetics and
artifice, and more generally with lies, distortion, and
error. In recent decades, the idea of the simulacrum
has been explored and debated with a new energy
because it provides a way of thinking critically about
consumerism, the media, and virtual reality. The
notion has influenced visual artists, such as Andy
Warhol, and science fiction writers and filmmakers,
notably the Wachowski brothers in their Matrix trilogy. The problem of the simulacrum has concerned
sociologists seeking to understand the nature of consumerism and media theorists who suggest that the
prevalence of images in contemporary society alters
perceptions of time and space, and of history, politics, and culture.
The problem of the simulacrum as false copy
is discussed at length by Plato, most fully in The

Sophist. Plato introduces a three-tier hierarchy of
things. First, and the foundation of his system, are
essential or ideal forms or “models.” Second are copies that resemble the model, and third are “copies
of copies” or simulacra. Assuming the existence of
an infinite, spiritual realm of pure models, Plato is
at pains to distinguish between “good” copies and
“bad” copies or simulacra. Simulacra are “bad”
copies because they do not resemble the model, or
resemble it only externally and in appearance; they
do not share in the spiritual essence of ideal forms
as “good” copies do. For example, the sophist is a
“bad” copy of the philosopher, using similar arguments but in a self-seeking fashion, whereas the true
philosopher is a genuine lover of wisdom. Platonic
philosophy raises the problem of the simulacrum as
dangerous, misleading, and potentially evil “false
copy”; the “phantastic” simulacrum or appearance
must be exposed.
Platonic philosophy profoundly influenced the
directions taken by Judeo-Christian theology and
Enlightenment philosophy. A central principle of the
Christian faith is that God made man (Adam) in His
own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26–27). Adam
and Eve are “good” reflections, yet through original sin—the tasting of the forbidden fruit—there is a
danger that they might become too similar to God by
attaining the knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis
3:22). Consequently, Adam and Eve are banished
from Eden, becoming mortals and only “poor”
reflections of God. As with Platonic philosophy, the
distinction between “good” and “bad” semblance is
vital because the true, essential, or “original” state is
divine, transcendent, and inaccessible. By contrast,
the simulacral image, that which does not share in
the divine, is censured or even declared evil: Judaism
prohibits the production of “graven images”
(Exodus 20:4) and lauds their destruction (Daniel,
Bel and the Snake, Apocrypha). Later, the Iconoclasts
smashed the religious icons (Greek eikon = image)
produced by the Eastern Church, seeking to embrace
the unrepresentable truth beyond the image.
Enlightenment thought tended to relegate the
problem of the simulacrum, associating it with
religion and superstition. However, a number of
influential thinkers have argued that this problem
returns with renewed force in modern society. Karl
Marx challenged prevailing Enlightenment thinking
by arguing that the capitalist system of production is
sustained by the “fetishism of commodities” (Marx

Simulacrum

1995, 42–50). Commodities, for Marx, are fetishistic
because their appearance or image, for example, in
a shop window or on a billboard, masks the actual
conditions of their production—the sweat and toil
of laborers. Commodities seem to take on a life of
their own, a “mystical” or “fantastic form” able
to inspire consumers to part with their money. The
image, as commodity fetish, plays a central role in
the capitalist system of alienation and exploitation.
Influenced by Marx, Walter Benjamin, in his famous
essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” argues that modern techniques of
mechanical and electronic reproduction undermined
the uniqueness or “aura” of the work of art, reducing great art works to copies or simulacra. However,
for Benjamin, this new situation held the promise of
a “politicization of culture”: a potential liberation
where those once excluded by religious or academic
authorities could produce and consume culture as
they saw fit.
For the Marxist tradition, the “problem” is one
of demystifying or unmasking the image, of unveiling the truth that the simulacra obscure. However,
for Friedrich Nietzsche, also extremely critical of
modern societies, the “problem” of the simulacra is
of a fundamentally different order. Nietzsche argued
that the long-standing opposition between a “real”
or essential world and the world of appearances or
representations, which links Platonism, Christianity,
and Enlightenment rationality, was finally coming to
an end. For Nietzsche, this is a joyous event because
in abolishing the opposition between real and apparent, we can embrace life here and now, no longer
restricted by a false dichotomy. Gilles Deleuze examines both Plato’s and Nietzsche’s arguments concerning the simulacrum, arguing that Plato attempted
to imprison, “hunt down,” or “banish” the simulacrum. Affirming Nietzsche’s position, Deleuze
argues “the simulacrum is not simply a false copy;
. . . it contains a positive power which negates both
original and copy, both model and reproduction.
. . . Neither can be assigned as original or as copy”
(1983, 51–53).
This understanding of the simulacrum, as powerful force capable of dissolving the long-accepted
opposition between original and copy, has been
developed and applied to consumer societies specifically by a number of critical thinkers. Guy
Debord and later Jean Baudrillard developed a far
more pessimistic view of the nature of culture and

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consumption in the modern age where images, copies, or “simulations” proliferate and the notion of
an “original” becomes meaningless. Debord termed
consumer capitalism “the society of the spectacle.”
He defined the spectacle as “an affirmation of
appearances and an identification of all human social
life with appearances” (Debord 1967, 9). The spectacle is a system of domination that occludes the nature
of social control through the selling of media events
such as coronations, news, and sporting events, yet
the spectacle is “real” in the sense that it generates
our sense of “reality.”
Baudrillard’s work addresses the problem of simulacra and their relationship to consumer culture
at length in his influential work Simulacra and
Simulation. Baudrillard sketches four successive
phases of the image or simulacra. First, he argues,
the image is taken as “the reflection of a profound
reality.” Then the image “masks and denatures a
profound reality” (Baudrillard 1994, 6). The first
phase Baudrillard associates with Platonism and
the second with Marxism. However, Baudrillard,
following Nietzsche, contends that the image also
“masks the absence of a profound reality” and even
that it “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it
is its own pure simulacrum” (6, emphasis in original). For Baudrillard, these are not historical stages
but tendencies within the image or simulacrum;
however, he does contend that the present media
age is dominated by the “pure simulacrum”: the era
of simulation and “hyperreality.” Baudrillard gives
a number of examples, from the Iconoclasts who
risked exposing that there was nothing “behind”
the images they destroyed, to the media’s love of
political scandals, to the Disneyland theme park.
According to Baudrillard, “Disneyland exists in
order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, and all of
‘real’ America is Disneyland. . . . It is no longer a
question of the false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no
longer real” (12–13, emphasis in original). In other
words, America, like Disneyland, is perceived and
understood through simulacra: news and documentary images, tourist images, film and TV images, and
the consumption of these images often precedes any
“real” experience of living in or visiting America.
The simulacrum becomes the “real”; there is no real
that is more “real” than simulacra, but simulacra
are socially and politically important because they
obscure this fundamental absence.

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Single-Person Households

As information technology develops and proliferates and virtual environments become ever more
popular and “real,” it is likely that the notion of
the simulacrum, particularly in the senses given it
by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and others, will
continue to generate new academic research as well
as influencing new trends in cultural consumption.
William Pawlett
See also Baudrillard, Jean; Benjamin, Walter; Disney;
Hyperreality; Information Technology;
Postmodernism; Semiotics; Spectacles

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Debord, Guy. La Société du spectacle [The Society of the
Spectacle]. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” October 27
(1983): 45–56.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A New Abridgement. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
The New English Bible with Apocrypha. Edited by Donald
Ebor. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Cambridge
University Press, 1970.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “How the ‘Real World’ at Last
Became a Myth.” In Twilight of the Idols/The AntiChrist, translated and edited by R. J. Hollingdale,
29–122. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1990.
Plato. The Sophist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986.

SINGLE-PERSON HOUSEHOLDS
The single-person household is a household that contains one person who lives alone. In a culture that
includes family and marriage as part of the American
Dream, the single-person household is a growing
demographic. As a result of the rise in divorce rates
since the 1950s, the increasing average age of marriage, and the choice of some to put off marriage
entirely, more and more people are opting to live by
themselves. Paul C. Glick reported that single-person
households grew by 120 percent between 1970
and 1992. That number has continued to increase
to include nearly 30 million unmarried men and
women who live by themselves (U.S. Census Bureau
2006), and that number is not expected to decline
any time in the near future. Such a household type

has a variety of implications in terms of public policy,
the marketplace, and even consumer culture.
As mentioned, the rise in living alone is, in part,
a result of various lifestyle choices such as divorce
or delaying marriage. This increase is also supported
by changes in the consumer marketplace. Glick
notes that individuals are better able to take care of
themselves while living alone as a result of technology such as the microwave oven and frozen meals.
Additionally, a variety of modern conveniences such
as easy financing, cleaning services, and fast-food restaurants make it possible for individuals to consume
in ways that negate the need for in-home help. In the
past, families were self-contained units where each
member of the family helped to see to the needs of
the family and the individuals in that family. Now, a
single person can look after him- or herself without
direct or indirect influence in the home.
The research dealing with the single-person household has often been more interested in the single person rather than the type of household. This research
is most often focused on how the single person seeks
to become un-single, paying attention to marriage
markets and dating rites. Under these circumstances,
to be single in America is to be defined by what one
is not. The government defines the single person as
anyone who is not married, regardless of romantic
involvement or noninvolvement (U.S. Census Bureau
2006); however, this definition includes any and all
people over the age of fifteen who are not married.
Additionally, the single person may in fact live with
other family members, a cohabiting romantic interest, or simply a platonic roommate. Bella DePaulo
provides a better definition but still identifies the
single person by what is lacking: the presence of a
serious romantic relationship.
Aubrey R. Fowler III also provides a definition
of the single-person household, defining it as “any
household in which a man or a woman who is not
currently married, not currently involved in a serious romantic relationship, does not have dependent
responsibilities (i.e., children, invalid relatives, etc.),
and lives with no other human being” (2008, 22). In
other words, the definition is concerned with individuals who do not have any direct influences living
within the household and, as such, constitutes the
most basic type of household.
This is an important distinction because consumption decisions are made based on the household
type. As J. L. Barkas and DePaulo both argue, the

Slow Food Movement

single person may be single through widowhood,
divorce, separation, or choice; and each one of these
may carry different consumption habits and cultural
norms with them. For instance, a man who is single
via divorce may have children who live, primarily, at
the ex-wife’s home and who will occasionally visit
their father. If their father lives alone, his is not technically a single-person household because he may
make consumption decisions based on the potential
presence of the children.
The single-person household, along with other
household and family types, is important in relation
to consumer culture theory. American culture places
great emphasis on the family and marriage, and
the marketplace reflects this emphasis. A trip to the
grocery store provides evidence of this in that most
food items are packaged with the family in mind,
leaving the single-person to navigate multiple servings of food in a single-serving household. Fowler
found that grocery shopping is not the only challenge
in the single-person household; meal preparation and
consumption are also a challenge because mealtimes
are inherently social rituals that single people often
find themselves engaging in alone. The social aspect
of mealtimes is so ingrained within American culture
that the single person is extremely reluctant to venture into a non–fast-food restaurant for a meal by
him- or herself for fear of social embarrassment.
The marketplace reflects and supports the values inherent within a culture and the people in that
culture, which affects the consumption patterns of
individuals, some of which are based on the single
individual’s living arrangements. For instance, many
single individuals do not engage in certain activities
in the marketplace such as going to the movies or on
vacation. The social embarrassment of doing such
activities alone becomes a barrier for single people.
Additionally, there are a number of marketplace and
public policies that favor household types other than
the single-person household. For instance, DePaulo
argues that the single-person household pays more in
taxes than a married couple household filing jointly
and earning the same amount of income. The singleperson household has also been criticized for “wasting” more resources by living alone (Glick 1994).
However, both Fowler and DePaulo found that
many individuals who live within the single-person
household also treasure their lifestyle, reporting that
they enjoyed the freedom to do what they wanted
without having to consider another person such as

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a spouse or a roommate. Ultimately, in a culture
that provides a great deal of social and commercial
support to married couples and families, the singleperson household is finding novel ways to maintain
its own health and happiness. Future research should
reflect this, examining not only how single people
seek to find companionship but also how individuals
living alone adapt to the marketplace.
Aubrey R. Fowler
See also Consumption Patterns and Trends; Domestic
Technologies; Families; Food Consumption;
Households; Life Course; Lifestyle; Outsourcing

Further Readings
Barkas, J. L. Single in America. New York: Atheneum,
1980.
DePaulo, Bella. Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped,
Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever
After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Fowler, Aubrey R., III. “Dinner for One: A Grounded
Theory of Grocery Shopping in the Single-Person
Household.” PhD diss., University of Nebraska,
Lincoln, 2008.
Glick, Paul C. “Living Alone in Middle Adulthood.”
Sociological Perspectives 37 (1994): 445–457.
U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey.
Washington, DC, 2006.

SLOW FOOD MOVEMENT
The Slow Food organization first came to public
attention in 1989, in association with protests over
the proposed opening of a McDonald’s in Rome’s
Piazza di Spagna. The name “slow food” (always in
English, despite its Italian origins) was thus defined
from the outset in opposition to fast food and
marked a rejection of both the homogenized cuisine associated with fast-food chains and the utilitarian mode of consumption associated with this
type of food (designed for eating “on the run”). In
November 1989, the nonprofit organization was
officially launched at a ceremony in Paris, attended
by representatives from fifteen countries who ratified the “Official Manifesto for the International
Movement for the Defense of and the Right to
Pleasure.” This manifesto, which advocated the
importance of pleasure in daily life and the threats
posed by modern civilization’s obsession with speed,

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Slow Food Movement

laid the foundation for an organization that has used
a staple of human existence—food—to critique modern methods of production and consumption while
at the same time celebrating taste, conviviality, and
hospitality. Slow Food also adopted the symbol of
the snail as an effective means of declaring a challenge to the orthodoxy that faster is better, which
remains prominent in the organization’s literature,
marketing, campaigns, and events.
Prior to the protests in Rome, a small group of
left-wing activists in Piedmont had begun to advocate the importance of local cuisine and the pleasures of the table in the mid-1980s. Led by Carlo
Petrini, the group originally called Arcigola hosted
food events and launched a newspaper supplement
on Italian wines that was highly successful and
would subsequently influence the direction of the
publishing arm of Slow Food, Slow Food Editore,
established in 1990. Today the Editore continues
to publish successful annual guides to wines and
restaurants in Italy, a quarterly journal Slow in six
language editions (Italian, English, French, German,
Spanish, and Japanese), books on slow food, and
a comprehensive website that charts the movement
around the world.
The early days of Slow Food established a
philosophical core that remains central to the organization. With an emphasis on the pleasures and
ethics of food and a critique of globalization in the
practices of food production and consumption, the
organization has launched a range of campaigns to
preserve local food cultures and to recognize the
“connections between plate and planet,” as Slow
Food puts it. From being seen as primarily a gastronomic organization, the organization subsequently
re-branded itself as “eco-gastronomic,” signaling
its commitment to sustainable methods of agriculture and food production. Under Carlo Petrini’s
continued leadership from his hometown of Bra,
in the Italian Piedmont, where the organization
is still based, Slow Food has hosted a number of
high-profile food events that showcase heritage cuisine and celebrate small-scale local producers from
around the world. Notably, Slow Food’s Salone del
Gusto (Hall of Taste), held in Turin every two years,
attracts over 100,000 visitors over five days and
has proved an effective way of publicizing the need
to protect artisanal food products. Similar biennial
events showcase cheese (in Bra) and fish (in Genoa),
with the purpose of taste education and bringing

artisanal producers and consumers together. In
2004, Slow Food launched an associated event,
Terra Madre, to be held in conjunction with Salone
del Gusto, that was envisaged as a meeting of representatives from food communities around the
world, many from developing countries, to develop
networks of what Petrini has called “virtuous globalization,” a coalition of expertise that it is hoped
may begin a process of challenging the dominance
of multinational agricultural corporations. Most
recently, Slow Food has launched a campaign called
“buono, pulito e guisto,” supporting “good, clean
and fair” food that marks its clearest articulation to
date of the connection between taste and ethics in
food production and consumption, explicitly linking animal welfare and environmental responsibility
with economic sustainability for producers, especially those in underdeveloped nations.
The idealism of Slow Food is matched only by the
organization’s penchant for grand gestures—as lavish
events such as Salone del Gusto or ambitious undertakings like Terra Madre demonstrate—and both
the organization and Petrini have attracted criticism
of the “style over substance” kind. Arguably, Slow
Food’s success at promoting its causes has directly
influenced the level of public debate on the politics
of food and may share some of the credit for the
increasing politicization around food that is detectable in Western middle-class culture. The growing
awareness of the connection between everyday food
practices, environmental sustainability, and global
politics that characterizes a range of “from the field
to the plate” campaigns may have been helped by
the brand awareness that the term slow food has
generated.
Although the founding strategies—publicityattracting protests and promotions—remain a feature
of Slow Food, and the charismatic Petrini remains
a dominant force in the organization, the movement perhaps functions most effectively at the local
level. The basic structural unit of Slow Food is the
convivium (“condotta” in Italy), the local chapter
that serves as the most immediate point of contact
for members. Each convivium is free to organize its
own agenda of activities and priorities, consistent
with the Slow Food philosophy, that typically take
the form of social events based on conviviality, “taste
workshops” to showcase local cuisine, projects to
support or publicize food producers in their region,
or educational projects to communicate the values

Smith, Adam

of Slow Food (such as the school gardens project,
which has been a priority for many chapters in the
United States).
Slow Food now has well over 100,000 members
around the world, with national offices in the United
States, Europe, and beyond, but its influence goes
beyond membership numbers and is due in no small
part to the enduring appeal of the organization’s
somewhat enigmatic name. Scholars in food studies, cultural studies, sociology, media studies, agriculture, and human geography have begun to turn
attention to Slow Food as a noteworthy instance of
an antiglobalization movement that brings lifestyle
politics, sustainable agriculture, and environmental
campaigns into a complex dialogue about cultural
capital, habitus, and consumption that warrants continued investigation.
Wendy Parkins
See also Alternative Consumption; Downshifting;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Food Consumption; Globalization;
McDonaldization; Political and Ethical Consumption;
Well-Being

Further Readings
Donati, Kelly. “The Pleasure of Diversity in Slow Food’s
Ethics of Taste.” Food, Culture & Society 8, no. 2
(2005): 227–242.
Parkins, Wendy, and Geoffrey Craig. Slow Living. Oxford:
Berg, 2006.
Parkins, Wendy, and Geoffrey Craig. “Culture and the
Politics of Alternative Food Networks.” Food, Culture
and Society 12, no. 2 (2009): 77–103.
Petrini, Carlo. Slow Food: The Case for Taste. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001.

SMITH, ADAM (1723–1790)
Scottish philosopher and social scientist Adam Smith
is usually considered as the founder of modern economics. His most famous work, An Inquiry into
the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776), has been misrepresented by conservative
economic and political thinkers as a critique of any
state intervention into the market. His most important economic theory, however, was that the value
of commodities is based on the amount of work
required for their production (labor theory of value).

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This was the foundation of Karl Marx’s theory of
capitalist exploitation (surplus value). The division
of labor increases productivity, lowering the prices
of commodities, and increases wealth. It requires
exchange in the market given that governments do
not restrict market operations by undue taxation and
protective measures. Smith was one of the founders
of the theory of revenue classes each of them appropriated: workers had their share of the value product
in the form of wages, stockowners as profits, and
landowners as rent. Each class had separate interests
and it was the role of government to procure conditions of growth for the wealth of the whole nation.
Smith’s work also advanced the idea that consumption and lifestyle have symbolic functions that are
important in maintaining and justifying social hierarchies, thus anticipating the key theme in sociology of
consumption.
Currently Smith’s most appreciated contribution
to modern social science is The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759, revised 1789), in which he argues
that social life is founded on sympathy: the human
capacity to feel what others feel and to see oneself
as if with the eyes of others. Moral sentiments are
founded on passions that are of three very different
kinds. First, the social passions of generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship, and
esteem naturally guide us toward love of the other.
Second, the unsocial passions of hatred and anger are
evoked when we are insulted or harmed. Third, the
selfish passions of happiness and sadness or joy and
grief motivate us to seek our own comfort. However,
none of the passions is adapted to social life. Only
when they are moderated by sympathy, our capacity
to judge the adequacy of the passions in each case,
can they become foundations of social life. The social
passions seldom hurt anyone, even when exaggerated, but expressions of kindness that, from others’
point of view are out of measure to the situation,
do not evoke admiration and may be interpreted as
false. The unsocial passions of hatred and anger are
the basis of our sense of justice, but they must be
appropriate to the situation from an outsider’s point
of view. If someone is hurt jokingly or by misunderstanding, a violent reaction of anger might itself
be considered unjustified. On the other hand, even
strong feelings of anger evoked by violence against
an innocent child, and consequent punishment of the
perpetrator, are considered just. The appropriateness
of our passions is judged by our capacity to assume

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Smuggling and Black Markets

the imaginary role of “an impartial observer,” the
“little man in the breast,” that represents the sympathy in us. Among the moral sentiments, the sense of
justice is most fundamental for social life, whereas
altruism based on the social passions is only an
embellishment of our interactions and makes them
more pleasant. Self-interest is also important, because
in commercial society it is the engine of progress
through competition.
Unlike earlier social philosophers, Smith and his
friend David Hume argued that societies need not
be held together by the state and its policing power,
and that there is no need for a theory of a social
contract between citizens and the monarch. With
his theory of sympathy, Smith is one of the most
important founders of modern sociology. This aspect
of his work has long been devalued because he, like
many Enlightenment thinkers before him, operated
with the concept of universal human nature and
the psychological or even biological view of social
life that this concept entails. For similar reasons, his
most influential follower in the early twentieth century, Edward Westermarck (1862–1939), has been
forgotten. Smith’s and Westermarck’s sociological
concern with human nature is being rediscovered by
new developments in evolutionary anthropology and
cognitive science.
Pekka Sulkunen
See also Capitalism; Commodities; Economics; Industrial
Society; Moral Economy; Self-Interest; Value:
Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Raphael, David Daiches, and Alec Lawrence Macfie.
“Introduction.” In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by
Adam Smith, Glasgow ed., edited by David Daiches
Raphael and Alec Lawrence Macfie. Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 1984.
Smith, Adam. Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. Vol. 1. Glasgow ed. Edited by Roy
Harold Campbell, Andrew S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
Smith, Adam. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Edited by Ronald
L. Meek, David Daiches Raphael, and Peter G. Stein.
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Glasgow
ed. Edited by David Daiches Raphael and Alec
Lawrence Macfie. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,
1982.

SMUGGLING

AND

BLACK MARKETS

Smuggling and black markets are two different
aspects of illegal trade. Smuggling is one of many
ways to feed black market demand for illegal goods
or services. Criminal entrepreneurs can also supply
wholesale and retail black markets through theft
and counterfeiting, to name but two alternatives.
Smuggling takes place across borders—for example,
migrant smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border—
but such boundaries don’t constrain black markets,
which can be local, regional, national, international,
or global in character. The variety of things traded
illegally includes stolen goods, ration coupons, passports, diamonds, drugs, guns, tobacco, alcohol,
human organs, sex, nuclear materials, information,
and much more. Traders and their customers are
just as diverse. The only thing these trades have in
common is their illegality. The reasons for outlawing
some or all aspects of a trade are as various as the
things subject to regulation or prohibition.
The best-known global black markets today are
the markets for illegal narcotics, such as cocaine
and heroin. Grown and processed in the developing world, these drugs are run by smugglers into
developed countries where the biggest retail markets
are found and the highest profits can be made. The
global traffic in humans receives almost as much
attention from law enforcement agencies and the
media. To distinguish between voluntary and forced
illegal migration, the United Nations splits the trade
into two categories: migrant smuggling and human
trafficking, respectively. The boundary between
these two trades isn’t always clear. The illegal trades
in drugs and humans, as well as that in arms and
munitions, are ones in which there is a rare degree
of international consensus as to the harm they cause
and the need for regulation if not prohibition.
Without government regulating or prohibiting
the production, distribution, or consumption of a
good or service, a black market, whether supplied
by smugglers, thieves, or counterfeiters, could not
come into being. The wording of the relevant laws,
their administration, and their enforcement create
opportunities for avoidance or evasion by leaving
loopholes in the edifice of control, determining the
chances of being caught and punished, and fixing
the penalties for breaking the law. As such, the past,
present, and future of smuggling and black markets

Smuggling and Black Markets

are inextricably linked to the fate of national and
international governance.
Smuggling of imports and exports has posed a
problem for political authorities for as long as they
have tried to regulate cross-border trade through
taxation, quotas, or embargoes. But British experience, filtered through the writings of British political
economists, has shaped contemporary ideas about
smuggling. Smuggling flourished in the British Isles
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, its
supposed golden age, when the British state raised
revenue by taxing foreign trade. The steep duties
imposed on imported tea, tobacco, and spirits, especially brandy, encouraged established traders and
criminal entrepreneurs to conceal imports from elsewhere in Europe, especially France and the Channel
Islands, so as to evade tax. Traders seeking a profit
could sell the goods for less than they fetched in
the legal “white” market and still realize a higher
return. War, a regular feature of this period, aided
these traffics, as the Royal Navy diverted ships to
guard the high seas at the expense of coastal patrols.
Smuggling and black markets always flourish in
such conditions, as protracted conflicts stretch government’s resources, reducing its capacity to administer and enforce the law. Geography also facilitated
the illegal trade.
Physical and social distance from authority
reduced the risk of detection, prosecution and conviction as did the length of the border to be controlled.
Rural communities on or near a long convoluted
coastline with many bays, inlets, or marshes, but not
too distant from an urban center, were well placed to
benefit from the trade. The image of the Cornish or
Suffolk smuggler reflected the economic advantage
that geography gave to smugglers operating in southwest England and East Anglia during the golden
age. The same pattern continues today, although
smuggling might take place across a convoluted land
border, as in Northern Ireland. Here, the doubtful
legitimacy of the border and the authorities patrolling it in local eyes has encouraged smuggling, which
is also facilitated by cross-border ties of kith and kin.
Running goods along the coast is the archetypal image of smuggling, thanks to poems like “A
Smuggler’s Song” by Rudyard Kipling and popular
novels such as Jamaica Inn (1946) by Daphne du
Maurier and The Moonstone (1954) by J. Meade
Falkner, but this focus on maritime smuggling during the “golden age” of British smuggling obscures

1295

the role that established merchants played and continue to play in the trade. The romantic image of
the smuggler, like that of the pirate or the bandit,
doesn’t dwell on the business of smuggling, nor does
it consider the more prosaic methods employed.
Mislabeling cargo that is imported openly or concealing smuggled goods inside a legitimate shipment
affords writers with fewer dramatic possibilities,
although the second season of the HBO TV series
The Wire looked at such practices on the Baltimore,
Maryland, docks. Falling into the category of whitecollar crime and tackled by law enforcement agencies
that often use administrative penalties, evasion of
this kind rarely makes the headlines. Aerial smuggling, necessarily a twentieth-century development,
receives limited attention too. With the expansion in
air travel after the war, couriers, or “mules,” traveling on scheduled flights posed a problem for customs
officials. Private flights in light aircraft to recognized
and unrecognized landing strips are another facet of
aerial smuggling.
The relationship between smuggling and black
markets is a close but not exclusive one. During
Prohibition, from 1920 to 1930, when the Eighteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed the
manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol,
legitimate businessmen and criminal entrepreneurs
on both sides of the 49th parallel recognized the
black market demand for alcohol, seizing the opportunity to realize a profit by cross-border smuggling
to feed the public’s appetite for booze. But domestic
production was a more important source of illicit
alcohol than smuggled drink, as people produced
alcohol for personal consumption or sale in both
small and large quantities.
Distributors of liquor during Prohibition, whatever the liquor’s origins, faced a problem familiar to
all black marketers whether they sold sex or guns:
how to balance the need to find customers with
escaping the notice of the authorities. Resolving this
problem gave rise to three different types of illicit
retail market: open markets in which buyer and seller
are strangers to one another, closed markets in which
buyer and seller know one another, and a hybrid semiopen market. Open markets tend to be outdoors near
busy thoroughfares that mask the illegal traffic and
make escape easier. Closed markets are more likely
to take place indoors as access is easier to control.
The number of customers is often smaller, although
the value of individual sales is frequently higher, in

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Sneakers/Trainers

closed marketplaces than open marketplaces. Sales in
clubs and bars represent a compromise between the
street corner sales and apartment sales of the open
and closed markets. Access is controlled, but strangers can come into contact so the potential for growth
is higher. Prohibition speakeasies pursued this hybrid
semi-open strategy with great success.
There is a tendency to see illicit trade as the mirror image of licit trade, which is, in large part, a
legacy of media representations of U.S. Prohibition,
particularly those of the Hollywood film studios
during the 1930s and early 1940s. The image of
criminal enterprise, in these films and since, reflects
the dominant image of legal enterprise. So, illegal
businesses are assumed to resemble the structures
of their legal counterparts. There is also a tendency
for law enforcement agencies to see their opponents
like themselves. This is the reason why the image of
the hierarchical organizations that run these markets
has so long dominated our understanding. Now
it is fashionable to think about loosely organized
criminal networks of smugglers, financiers, and distributors that might or might not function like an
established business. Scholars tend not to recognize
the way these things shape their perception, but of
course they do.
Although this discussion of smuggling and black
markets has focused on the economic and legal
aspects of these activities, the terms are also moral
categories. The English-language press coined the
term black market to refer to illegal currency dealings during the 1930s, extending its meaning to cover
illegal dealing in rationed goods during World War
II. In popular usage on both sides of the Atlantic, the
term frequently meant an economic transaction of
which somebody disapproved, whether it was illegal or not. Participants in today’s illegal trades reject
the views of those who brand them global outlaws.
While participants’ exculpatory accounts of their
motives, which emphasize material need or resistance
to illegitimate authority, help to maintain a nondeviant self-image, they also make future law breaking
easier and limit evasion to what people can justify to
themselves and others. It was ever thus. Golden age
smugglers referred to their dealings as “fair trade.”
Mark Roodhouse
See also Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Consumer
Regulation; Counterfeited Goods; Informal Economy;
Luxury Taxes; Moral Economy; Rationing

Further Readings
Eck, John E. “A General Model of the Geography of Illicit
Retail Market Places.” In Crime and Place, edited by J.
Eck and D. Weisburd. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice
Press, 1996.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1969.
Jones, Evan T. “Illicit Business: Accounting for Smuggling
in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Bristol.” Economic History
Review 54, no. 1 (2001): 17–38.
Nordstrom, Carolyn. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money and
Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2007.
Roodhouse, Mark. Black Market Morality: The
Underground Economy of Austerity Britain, 1939–
1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. Global Report
on Trafficking in Persons. Vienna: United Nations,
2009.

SNEAKERS/TRAINERS
Sneakers, or trainers as they are called in Britain, are
shoes that are a product of particular consumer histories grounded in youth, sports, and subcultures.
They are central to debates about the shifting meanings of fashion, popular culture, and consumption in
the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
A type of shoe that developed from sporting
wear created in the late-nineteenth century, sneakers now represent vastly different spectra of class
and national identities, as well as fashion mind-sets
and subcultural affiliations. Generalizations about
sneaker-wearers and sneaker-wearing tend to focus
on complaints about lazy or casual dressing, inappropriate attire for the aging, or exploitative conditions of production. Yet this article of attire, a truly
global phenomenon, is now ubiquitous and omnipresent. Something that was simply “casual wear”
can now be pursued as a “classic.” Public figures as
different as the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and
Prince William, heir to the British throne, appear in
public in sneakers. A category of hybrid shoes has
also developed for both men and women, in which
more conventional looking business shoes incorporate the heel and soft cell design of certain runners
that were designed for sports or jogging. The prominence of such shoes raises questions concerning the
role of fashion within liberal democracy. Do they

Sneakers/Trainers

offer endless choice, or few choices and an abrogation of taste and discrimination?
Sports shoes, trainers, runners, joggers, baskets,
kicks, and shits are just some of the words used to
denote what is widely known as the sneaker; one of
the most dynamic areas within contemporary design.
The Oxford English Dictionary describes the word
sneaker as a North American term for “a soft shoe
worn for sports or casual occasions.” In most cases,
a rubber sole would be essential, but beyond these
broad parameters it is nearly impossible to generalize
about what constitutes a sneaker. Sneakers emerged
from the rise of leisure in late-nineteenth-century life,
particularly North American life. As the design historian Gregory Votolato has argued, in the purchase of
cheap mass-produced garments, many newly created
for a segmented market in which youth and leisure
were new forces, people tried to create a better world
for themselves.
The question of what constitutes the first sneaker
is a matter of contention among experts. The more
common view, upheld by design historians such
as Alison Gill, is that sneakers were first produced
during the latter half of the nineteenth century in
England and America when the vulcanization process, whereby rubber is hardened to make tires, was
applied to strengthen the area between the canvas
upper and a rubber sole. These shoes, worn for
activities such as croquet, tennis, and boating, were
known as croquet sandals, sandshoes, and plimsolls,
although as early as 1870 the word sneaker was
being used in North America to refer to the little
noise they produced when wearing them. The sports
listed here were middle- or upper-class activities,
and this is an indication that the class dimension of
a material artifact such as a shoe shifts over time.
The auditory dimension is significant too, as shoes in
the early modern period were frequently characterized by tapping heels or heavy leather soles. Nancy
Rexford’s research into North American material
culture shows that the distinct association between
youth and rubber-soled canvas shoes was already
evident in America as early as 1900.
In the twentieth century, canvas sneakers such
as the Converse All Star, first released in 1917 and
still in production, became a mainstay for sport
and casual wear, especially among young men. By
1955, this style of footwear was worn so commonly
in America for sports and leisure that Converse
was claiming the All Star as the number one selling

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shoe in the country. By the late 1960s, sneakers had
become a global phenomenon, partly because of
the success of the Mexico Olympic Games of 1966
and partly because of the expansion of professional
sports. More brands meant greater choices. At the
beginning of the 1970s, the standard black or white
canvas designs were being challenged by leather
and suede sneakers, often in a tempting range of
colors, from companies such as Adidas and Puma
from Germany and Onitsuka Tiger in Japan. The
next major phase of the sneaker came about because
of the jogging and fitness booms of the 1970s
and 1980s, when brands like Nike and Reebok
were elevated to multinational status. Individual
sneakers were elevated to cult status through the
endorsement of a high-profile sports star such
as Michael Jordan, the basketball player who
endorsed the Air Jordan I, first released in 1985
by Nike. Although Jordan retired in 1999, new
models of the Air Jordan continue to be developed
annually in consultation with the legendary player.
The notion of sneakers as icons of style and fashion stems largely from their status within certain
youth and music subcultures. According to Neal
Heard, English sneaker authority, the three most
influential “trainer tribes” have been the English soccer fans, known as “casuals”; the hip-hop circles of
New York City’s South Bronx; and the skateboarders of Southern California—all youth cultures that
emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. The casuals
had a particular, although not exclusive, preference
for Adidas. Although hip-hop enthusiasts favored
many brands and models, they were frequently associated with shoes such as the Puma Clyde, Adidas
Superstar, and Nike Air Force 1. In the early days,
many skateboarders wore Vans sneakers because of
their extra thick soles and infinite choice of colorful
uppers.
The notion of a sneaker classic was well established by the early 1980s and reinforced by generations of youth who wore well-established models
such as the Converse All Star and Dunlop Volley
International. Many sneakers became “instant” classics coveted for their technical advances as well as
the striking design. Whether in the form of a vintage
original or an “old skool” reissue, models such as the
Nike Air Max 90 and the Reebok Pump are cherished by wearers and collectors. In 2004, hip-hop
musician Pharrell Williams and Reebok went beyond
a simple endorsement by jointly launching the Ice

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Sneakers/Trainers

Cream label under the RBK banner. Limited editions
of sneakers are sold in set quantities from as little as
fifty up to a few thousand. Generally based on a classic model, they can be given a discreet new detail, a
unique set of colors, or different fabrics and finishes.
In 2004, the Nike Laser Project reissued a group of
old skool models with intricate designs burned into
the surface of the leather. The Cortez, dating back
to 1972, was the first model in the series and limited to 200 pairs worldwide.
One of the fastest growing trends of the past few
years has been the many collaborations between artists, musicians, designers, and cult retailers who have
worked with a company to restyle and sometimes
transform older models and classics. The Japanese
artist and filmmaker Kenzo Minami virtually camouflaged the Reebok Pump Fury, 2005, with a minutely
detailed print and glossy patent finish. The Nike Air
Force 1 Premium, Year of the Dog edition, was a
collaboration in 2006 involving the Shanghai graffiti
artist and illustrator Himm and the designers PK and
Runyo Chen, featuring a “dog hair” heel cap.
Since the late 1980s, there has been an increasing
number of smaller, independent companies catering
to various niche markets, such as Troop in the 1980s
and Acupuncture and Royal Elastics of Australia in
the 1990s. Tokyo’s A Bathing Ape ignited the vogue
for cartoon-style bright colors and glossy patent
leathers. Known as BAPES, they were based on a
close approximation of the classic Nike Air Force 1.
The Marvel Bapesta, Hulk edition 2005, borrowed
the comic character’s raging colors and came suitably
packaged in clear plastic like an action toy.
Over the past decade, designers from other fields
have worked with sports shoe companies to create
some of the most inventive sneakers to date. Inspired
by the footwear of Russian cosmonauts, Marc
Newson worked with Nike to design the Zvezdochka,
2004, a radically new design that featured an upper
and sole molded into a seamless layer. This design
created another adrenaline rush when, in 2010,
Newson developed two new colorways to promote
his “Transport” exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery
in New York. The Philippe Starck range for Puma in
2004 also carried connotations of space travel with
its streamlined combination of high-tech materials.
Such shoes suggest that the wearers possess an almost
superhuman agility, an idea that reaches back to the
sandals of Nike in Classical Greece, who in sculptural
representations is probably removing her sandal to

sacrifice, as opposed to being a symbol of speed as
symbolized by the marketing of Nike shoes.
Sneaker customization has developed from
mainly a “private affair” to a practice that could be
compared to an artist working autonomously or a
tattooist developing ideas in consultation with a client. Melbourne’s Sekure D’s Daylight Hallucination,
2006, is painted in a style that draws on animation
and game culture as well as street art. Yakuza V,
2005, by DLV for Astoria VIII (Sydney) relates to the
client’s interest in full body suit tattoos.
Sneaker collecting, swap meets, and limited edition launches are eagerly awaited by many young
men, who often lend their collections to be displayed
in museums and write blogs and magazines about the
artifact. This is an important gendered connection
for the sneaker. Sneaker collecting probably took off
in the 1980s when connoisseurs started hunting for
“dead stock”—unsold sneakers with their original
packaging—in the hope of finding rare, forgotten, and
much-loved models. By the early 1990s, Australian
sneaker “fiends” could be found hunting at markets,
secondhand stores, and opportunity shops, while in
Japan prices for vintage sneakers were fetching from
100 percent to 1000 percent of their original retail
cost. Today, companies introduce ever more limited
and “hyped” releases, often as store, city, and country exclusives, all intended to drive a sneaker fan wild
with excitement. This enthusiasm has proved to be
no short-lived fad or marginal interest. Sneaker culture is rich, diverse, and part of the urban streetscape.
Over the past few years, there have been a number
of magazines, books, and websites devoted to the
subject, including the legendary Sneaker Freaker produced by Simon “Woody” Wood of Melbourne.
The sneaker is also bound up in international
debates concerning production and consumption.
The manufacturing of this piece of footwear has
been used to highlight issues of disrespectable global
trade and unethical behavior. Shoes have perhaps
been unfairly singled out for the outsourcing that categorizes production of many consumer goods today,
from fashion garments to mobile telephones. The
shoe industry fought back. “Sweatwash,” a pun on
“whitewash,” is the attempt by some manufacturing
companies to divert attention from the child labor
and sweatshop issues that might exist in their factories. Nike’s “Reuse-A-Shoe: program, initiated in
the early 1990s, concerned the “downcycling” of old
sneakers and, since 1988, Reebok’s “Human Rights

Soap Operas and Telenovelas

Award” repositioned the company as ethically positive in the face of criticism.
Peter McNeil and Roger Leong
See also Branding; Celebrity; Clothing Consumption;
Fashion; Social and Economic Development;
Subculture; Taste; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Bobbito, Garcia. Where’d You Get Those? New York City’s
Sneaker Culture: 1960–1987. New York: Testify Books,
2003.
Gill, Alison. “Limousines for the Feet: The Rhetoric of
Trainers.” In Shoes: A History from Sandals to
Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil,
372–385. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Heard, Neal. Trainers: Over 300 Classics from Rare
Vintage to the Latest Designs. London: Carlton Books,
2003.
Rexford, Nancy. “The Perils of Choice: Women’s Footwear
in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Shoes: A History
from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and
Peter McNeil, 138–159. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Sneakers: Classics to Customs. Exhibition catalog. Edited
by Roger Leong. Melbourne, Australia: National
Gallery of Victoria, 2006.
Unorthodox Styles. Sneakers: The Complete Collectors’
Guide. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.
Vanderbilt, Tom. The Sneaker Book: Anatomy of an
Industry and an Icon. New York: New Press, 1998.
Votolato, Gregory. American Design in the Twentieth
Century. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
1998.
Wood, Simon. Sneaker Freaker: The Book 2002–05. New
York: Riverhead Freestyle, 2005.

SOAP OPERAS

AND

TELENOVELAS

The television soap opera had its origins in American
radio serials in the first half of the twentieth century
and has since then been adapted and experimented
with around the globe as a highly popular television
format. Its generic features (subplots, unresolved
narratives, episodic structure), thematic attributes
(interpersonal and professional rivalries, family values, relationships), and not least its reception by
audiences, have all been the topic of much academic
research. Often considered a “women’s genre,” the
soap opera, or “soap,” has been derided by many

1299

for its stereotypical portrayals of women and often
also for its melodramatic style. However, soap audiences, like the readers of romance novels (see Radway
1984), have been seen to be active and involved viewers who derive pleasure from the genre, and who have
often been found to resist its dominant stereotypes.
As a popular televisual form, even as it has retained its
recognizability across linguistic and cultural boundaries, the genre has of late been seen to diversify across
platforms/formats, with fan communities now going
online, episodes now available on online downloads,
character destinies thrown open to fan polling right
until the last few episodes, and hybrid formats such
as sitcoms often borrowing elements from the soap
opera in terms of style and content.
The telenovela, a Latin American television format
similar to soaps, is a vastly exported form and has
even inspired global variations of the genre. Mexico,
Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela have produced
many leading telenovelas over the years. This genre
too is episodic in nature, although not as long running
as some Western soaps, for instance. Romance is a
central element in the telenovela genre, where marital
or relationship issues often define the central themes
in the narrative. Increasingly the form is seen to reflect
regional and cultural specificities and also adapts its
content to cultural changes over time. Genre analysis
has revealed the telenovela’s thematic playing with
national and social discourses, centering on issues of
development, health, corruption, gender, and homosexuality, besides its continuously morphing form
with a focus on melodrama, family life, “morality,”
financial independence for women, gender equality,
and so on. This is a form that travels across Latin
America and occupies dominant prime time slots.
Audience involvement with the genre is strongly
dependent on class, gender, professional accomplishments, and recent works include a focus on audience
reception and gendered readings, among other concerns (e.g., La Pastina 2004), with an emergent focus
on the Brazilian miniseries. Entertainment-education
has been the subject of much recent research in this
regard, with some academic research exploring the
use of telenovelas and television and radio soaps for
addressing societal problems, especially in developing countries.
Both soaps and telenovelas have been found to
reflect stylistic traits of diverse media and diverse
genres—for instance, the episodic style of nineteenthcentury serialized English novels, the heterosexual

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Soap Operas and Telenovelas

romantic content of novels that perhaps inspired
soap operas, the Latin American radionovela that
perhaps inspired the telenovela, and so on. Whereas
generic similarities such as open-ended plots, episodic narratives, and multiple central characters run
through the form of the genre almost everywhere
across the globe, marked differences prevail as well
across national and regional variations. British soaps,
for instance, have often focused on working-class
families with most events happening around a central geographical and social space (e.g., Coronation
Street), whereas U.S. soaps have often told stories
of powerful upper-class business families and their
personal and professional rivalries (e.g., Dallas). The
soap form is increasingly hybrid although retentive
of many stylistic similarities around the globe. The
Japansese dorama, for instance, themed around
romance, comedy, and so on, often short lived and
intensely woven through a small number of episodes,
could be taken to be a variation of the long-running
soap format. The Brazilian miniseries, with a fixed
number of episodes and a certain amount of predictability, is yet another form. An important difference
to note is the difference between series and serials,
where series have a fixed number of episodes and
will not perhaps run on endlessly.
While the thematic attributes and genre styles
of soaps and telenovelas have been researched significantly, soap audiences too have received much
academic attention. Diverse disciplines, including
psychology, sociology, communications studies,
and cultural studies have contributed toward multimethodological research on soap audiences over the
years. Fans and audiences, from being mocked for
being passive and mindless consumers of trash, have
been shown to be informed, intelligent, and active
interpreters of content. The genre has been seen to be
important to audiences for a number of reasons, with
audiences developing parasocial relationships with
central characters, identifying with them and locating
the genre within the contexts of their everyday social
worlds. Sonia Livingstone identified categories of viewing explanation in her study of British soap audiences.
The genre was found to be important for purposes of
escapism, realism, relationships with characters, critical response, problem solving, role in viewers’ lives,
emotional experience, and entertainment. Audience
reception is found to essentially be an act of negotiation, and the program itself is worthy of attention;
hence, visual imagery, representation of stereotypes,

dominance, and dependence (Liebes and Livingstone
1995) have to be accounted for as researchers explore
the sociocultural dynamics of reception. These dynamics offer resources that audiences use in their interpretation of content—so, for instance, in her work with
the reception of American soaps, Andrea Press noticed
differing strategies of recognition, identification, subversion, and pleasure among women from middleand working-class backgrounds. Although television
soaps have been researched most widely, some of the
earliest research on why audiences appreciate the soap
was actually carried out on the reception of radio
soaps in America. Herta Herzog’s research with listeners of daytime radio soaps demonstrated psychological pleasures, for instance, sympathy, catharsis, and
schadenfreude (pleasure from viewing the troubles of
other people).
Soap operas shape their content around themes
from peoples’ everyday lives and are interpreted within
the contexts of ordinary peoples’ everyday social
worlds. Hence, culture plays a significant role in what
the genre comes to mean for audiences. Diasporic
audiences often consume local soaps as windows into
another culture, interpreting themes in the light of
their own sociocultural resources. Tamar Liebes and
Elihu Katz’s work with viewers of Dallas in Israel is
one of the most notable works in this regard where
audiences from different ethnic backgrounds were
seen to interpret a single television program differently,
judging style and content against their own cultural
backgrounds. Primarily, though not solely, research
with audiences remains heavily focused on female
audiences and fans. With the turn of the century,
soaps and their audiences have perhaps had a drop in
popularity in academic research in Western countries.
Some research continues, however. Recent work with
British soap audiences conducted for the Broadcasting
Standards Commission (U.K.) by Andrea Millwood
Hargrave, classified viewer commitments into four
categories—fanatic, noncommitted, ironic, and dismissive; fanatics were primarily female and younger,
whereas dismissive audiences included older people
and men. In terms of soaps being vehicles for talking about social issues, British audiences maintained
that they must be factually correct and must take into
account feelings of any victims.
Telenovelas and soaps occupy a central spot in
the everyday lives of millions around the globe and,
as such, any discussion on these popular television
genres cannot be completed without taking into

Sociability

account national and international production and
flow dynamics. American soaps like Dallas or Days
of Our Lives or General Hospital have been widely
exported, leading to worries about media imperialism
in some quarters, although audiences have always
appropriated these divergently in different contexts.
Recently, however, the more important trend has
been the rapid growth of broadcasting channels in
many countries and in states and regions within
countries with an increasing number of domestic
soaps produced for local and national audiences.
India, Egypt, Korea, Latin America, and Australia
have programs in which the themes and content are
specific to local cultures, although they often show
similarities with products from other cultures. One
must also note that flow directions are now highly
diverse, with exports happening within continents
and not just from one part of the world to another.
The long-running British soaps like Coronation Street
or Eastenders remain strongly regional in their setting, and the content shifts with the times, reflecting
current societal concerns. Latin American telenovelas
have been exported heavily as well, with some broadcasters (for instance, Globo in Brazil) leading the way.
Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina have also been on
the list of telenovela exporters not only around the
globe but also throughout Latin America.
Soaps and telenovelas around the world, and all
their hybrid forms, are central to everyday practices of consumption. Audiences increasingly have
a wide range to choose from, in terms of not only
imported content but also a growing amount of
domestic content. The genre no longer exists on the
single platform of television. Soaps from one side of
the globe can be downloaded online on the other
side and discussed among fan communities formed
of fans from many different countries. Theme songs
travel in iPods, as characters are brought together
or separated based on the results of audience votes
and as the genre weaves its stylistic features into sitcoms and other hybrid formats. For these reasons,
among many others, soap operas continue to be an
important component of modern media cultures and
indeed interesting for academic researchers of content and audience reception.
Ranjana Das
See also Audience Research; Broadcast Media;
Communication Studies; Cultural Studies; Gender and
the Media; Hollywood; Reception Theory; Television

1301

Further Readings
Herzog, Herta. “What Do We Really Know about Daytime
Listeners?” Radio Research 43 (1942): 3–33.
La Pastina, Antonio C. “Telenovela Reception in Rural Brazil:
Gendered Readings and Sexual Mores.” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 21, no. 2 (2004): 162–181.
Liebes, Tamar, and Sonia M. Livingstone. “Where Have
All the Mothers Gone? Soap Opera’s Replaying of the
Oedipal Story.” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 12 (1995): 155–175.
Liebes, Tamar, and Elihu Katz. The Export of Meaning: CrossCultural Readings of Dallas. Cambridge: Polity, 1993.
Livingstone, Sonia. Making Sense of Television: The
Psychology of Audience Interpretation. Rev. 2nd ed.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Millwood Hargrave, Andrea, with Lucy Gatfield. Soap Box or
Soft Soap? Audience Attitudes to the British Soap Opera.
London: Broadcasting Standards Commission, 2002.
Press, Andrea L. Women Watching Television: Gender,
Class, and Generation in the American Television
Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

SOCIABILITY
The question whether human beings are to be
regarded as social by nature—that is, whether
they are naturally sociable and inclined to seek
social cooperation and satisfaction from each other’s company—was one of the central questions
that separated the philosophers of the European
Enlightenment. The meaning of sociability could
vary from the preference for one another’s company
to altruistic behavior. Both of these aspects can be
built into the consumption of goods and services—for
instance, when the presence of others constitutes the
value of the consumed object of service or when the
well-being of others guides an individual’s preferences.
The popularity of a restaurant or a cinema as a sign
of its value is an example of the first case (Schulze
1992). The shopping behavior of housewives, as
reported by Daniel Miller, who mostly have the good
of their family members in mind when shopping,
is an example of the second aspect. The interactive
nature of the modern means of personal communication is a good example of sociability understood

1302

Sociability

in its third meaning, as interactive reciprocity. This
third notion comes closest to Georg Simmel’s classical
sociological theory of sociability as exemplified particularly in the “artificial” social worlds of entertaining and social gatherings, as well as play and games.

Simmel’s Sociological Theory
In Simmel’s sociological thinking, the concept of
sociability had a specific position, central to his
whole program of formal sociology. He made a
distinction between the form and the substance of
social interaction. One and the same substance could
appear in different forms and, correspondingly, one
and the same form could serve different contents or
purposes. It was namely a pure form: in sociability—
and in sociability alone—the substance and the form
of social interaction coincided. Unlike other social
forms, sociability did not serve any external purpose. The social interaction occurred solely for its
own sake. That the concept of sociability was central to Simmel’s sociology was also related to the fact
that his sociology was basically aesthetic by nature.
Its main inspiration was philosophical aesthetics,
and Immanuel Kant’s third critique, the Critique
of Judgment, in particular. Typical of the aesthetic
reflection of beauty was that it, just like Simmel’s
sociability, had the form of purposefulness without
serving any external purpose.
In his essay “The Sociology of Sociability,” Simmel
wrote explicitly that in his sociology, the social forms
resemble art and play. Therefore, his sociology comes
close to aesthetics: “Within this constellation, called
society, or out of it, there develops a special sociological structure corresponding to those of art and
play, which draw their form from these realities but
nevertheless leave their reality behind them” (Simmel
1949, 254).
When they are abstracted from their particular
contents, a common element remains in both art
and play: satisfaction. The same is true of sociability:
even though social interaction always, or at least in
most cases, serves some particular social purpose—
like the satisfaction of needs or sexual pleasure or,
say, the realization of economic interests—it has an
element of satisfaction that stems from the pure fact
that in all cases social interaction has taken place.
Sociability—social interaction for the sake of social
interaction—resembles, therefore, l’art pour l’art (art
for art’s sake), pure art that is abstracted from all

contents that might otherwise disturb it: “Sociability
is, then, the play-form of association and is related to
the content-determined concreteness of association
as art is related to reality” (Simmel 1949, 255).
Sociability, as a play-form of association, can
therefore best be compared with art or even better
with play and games. In Simmel’s opinion, everything
that is true of art is true of sociability too: “Freed
from substance, through which these activities make
up the seriousness of life, play gets its cheerfulness
but also that symbolic significance which distinguishes it from pure pastime. And just this will show
itself more and more as the essence of sociability”
(Simmel 1949, 255).
Sociability as a pure form of social interaction—
interaction for the sake of interaction alone—
certainly is part of much of our day-to-day interaction
from small talk to nonofficial social gatherings that
we join to pass time. What is characteristic of all
these forms of interaction is that they are, in their
ordinariness, often trivial and without serious social
consequences. In most kinds of social interaction,
the seriousness of its substance—whether power,
profits, love, or hatred—overshadows almost totally
its inherent sociability. Therefore, Simmel suggests,
sociability could best be observed in an artificial
play-form of association. What this means is that
something must be abstracted from the “real” social
interaction or “real” social formations as they are
to be found in most social contexts and situations.
According to Simmel, in these social associations,
neither the most subjective nor the most objective
features or characteristics of the participants should
be allowed to interfere in the interaction. As examples of such external, disturbing characteristics,
Simmel mentioned wealth and social position on the
one hand and love and hatred on the other. In other
words, participants are, when entering such a playform of association where pure sociability reigns,
asked for the time being to leave behind them or to
forget both their own social positions and their inner
feelings and thoughts, in other words, both their
social and personal identities. In addition, sociable
social interaction must be reciprocal, at least in the
long run; that is, every participant both gives and
gets something from it. Every participant gives his
or her own input into the social intercourse by, for
instance, telling some interesting and elevating story
or a social gossip or by mediating interesting intellectual or literary news, and he or she is also expected

Sociability

to receive satisfaction from the inspiring conversation. What is common to all these conditions is that
for the interaction to be socially enticing and close to
the pure form of sociability, something is to be left
behind or abstracted from “real” social interaction.
In general, sociability presumes disinterested and
impartial social interaction.
The mutual parallel of sociability with play is best
shown in cases where someone uses power to turn
the intercourse into his or her own benefit, cheats, or
does not take it seriously enough, and thus spoils the
whole thing, not only for all the other participants
but also for himself or herself. Only by playing along
and following the rules can the play-form be kept
alive. On the other hand, as long as the participants
play the social game and the social interaction goes
on, all can partake in the feeling of mutual satisfaction. According to Simmel’s own “categorical imperative of sociability,” everyone is entitled to as much
pleasure as is in harmony with the gratification of
everyone else’s impulse of sociability.
That Simmel understood sociability in the terms
of the proto-Kantian aesthetics is best revealed by
the basic criteria that characterize it: it must be both
disinterested and formal, have the form of purposefulness without serving any external purpose.
Simmel formulated the basic principles of his sociology of sociability, and in fact his own sociology, for
the first time explicitly in 1910 in a talk at the first
meeting of the German Sociological Association. He
presented them explicitly as the rules of running a successful literary or intellectual salon, thus following a
genre that had been seriously discussed by many philosophers, Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher among
them, some hundred years earlier. Simmel turned
these instructions of salon keeping into the rules
of identifying—by the method of abstracting—the
proper or genuine object of sociology. It is not, therefore, an exaggeration to claim that Simmel’s own
salon was his social laboratory under the artificially
ordered conditions of which—alien to the world
outside it, which was inevitably always plagued by
many serious problems of life—the impulse of pure
sociability could flourish and could consequently be
observed as if in its pure shape.

Criticisms
It has been pointed out that due to the artificial
and limited nature of Simmel’s sociability, it is not

1303

of much value in studying ordinary social life with
all its inevitable injustices and inequalities. There is
little doubt that the world of sociability is artificial,
a fact readily admitted and explicitly pointed out by
Simmel. What could be better proof of this than the
close parallel Simmel drew between sociability, on
the one hand, and art and play, on the other hand?
Therefore, there is little doubt that Simmel’s maxim
of sociability—the reciprocal gratification of each
participating individual—could possibly be realized
only at the cost of the high abstractness of such social
intercourse. As Simmel explicitly stated in presenting the rules of his salon, such pure social interaction
that could be called sociable is possible only among
equals, like among the intellectual elite of Berlin of
his time, who visited his own exclusive salon on
the last Sunday of every month. In all other—more
ordinary—social worlds, such reciprocity could be
reached only by following explicit moral maxims and
ethical principles that only could effectively restrict
the suppression and exploitation of the other.
Niklas Luhmann has, for instance, criticized
Simmel for the unrealistic conditions presumed by his
sociability. As Luhmann explained, the pure social
interaction in the form of the sociability of a salon
and the cultivated social intercourse became in fact
ideals of the “high society” in early modern Europe.
In the cultivated world of the salon, it was possible to practice social interaction among equals as
if anticipating, in an ideal and artificial social world,
the coming social world of equals, which would not
have been possible at all under any more ordinary
or public social encounters in the strictly stratified
society in which they still lived in practice. The literary salon became in this sense an artificial island of
utopian bourgeois equality and freedom. This was
achieved only at the cost of cutting it off—artificially
and for the time being—from all, more serious social
concerns like politics, religion, or the accumulation
of capital. In Luhmann’s opinion, Simmel’s program
of formal sociology with its strong emphasis on
sociability was, as a matter of fact, a late remnant or
revival of this utopian dream and as such doomed to
failure: “Sociability [Geselligkeit] is understood as an
association [Sozialität] reduced to a pure form which
is practiced as an end in itself (and not because of its
contents or results)” (Luhmann 1980, 255). What is
wrong with such an attempt is that, out of necessity,
the very individuality of the participating individuals becomes restricted: they are in fact rid of their

1304

Sociability

real social and personal identities and exist only as
artificial representatives of the abstract human being,
which as such, and only as such, can enter the pure
social form of sociability.
Many concur with Luhmann’s criticism of
Simmel’s formal or aesthetic sociology as offering
the final solution to the antinomy between the individuality of human beings and their fully developed
human socialization, an antinomy that Simmel
understood to plague the modern individualized
society in the same way as many contemporary
neo-Kantian philosophers and critics of modern
culture did. As Luhmann pointed out, this conciliation was reached only at the cost of the artificiality of this ideal world of sociability, which was,
as a consequence, empty of any real meaning or
substance. In this respect, Luhmann came close to
Terry Eagleton’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s critiques of
the tradition of the European aesthetic philosophy
by claiming that it gave a false promise of social
harmony in a world characterized by great social
restrictions and divided by real inequalities due to
their real social positions.

Additional Interpretations
One could, however, interpret Simmel’s sociability—
and its role as the central concept of his sociology—
in another sense. The pure social form of sociability,
even though a rare or trivial and harmless form of
social interaction—best exemplified by the artificial
play world of a literary salon or, say, the conversation
among colleagues during a coffee break—is always
present in all kinds of social interactions, which are
in most cases “contaminated” by the hard realities
of social life. What Simmel had in mind was that an
aesthetic element—and the possibility of experiencing genuine aesthetic pleasure—is, or can be, associated with every kind of social interaction. There
is, in other words, an “impulse” of sociability—or
an element of play—potentially present in every
social encounter. By this, Simmel does not claim
that all human beings are social by nature or that
this makes them naturally inclined to enter and
form social associations, even less that they would
be naturally inclined to enter social cooperation.
He claims rather that interaction among individuals
is always also social by its nature. In the best cases, it
can thus give reciprocal satisfaction to its participators. One could also think about various forms of

social interaction as being more or less impregnated
by this impulse of sociability.
Emphasizing the element of sociability in Simmel’s
spirit means that it is important in all social interaction to pay attention to the fact that it can never be
explained or analyzed in functional or instrumental
terms alone. Eating is a good example, also referred
to by Simmel. It, if anything, serves a concrete physiological and basic goal, namely, the satisfaction of
our hunger. At the same time, eating events often
take place socially and are in all cultures regulated by
an etiquette that is not necessary for the promotion
of this basic physiological function. The sociability
of eating cannot thus be explained or analyzed starting from the basic function, or “contents,” of eating
but is rather something totally separate from it, an
independent social dimension, which forms the main
object of study of the sociology. The example of eating shows that even the most natural human needs
are always closely associated with various forms of
sociability. The closeness of the pure form of sociability to the “artificial” world of play makes it natural
to identify it in all kinds of social worlds that are
associated with our leisure time activities, like hobbies and games. One can also find “pure” forms of
sociability in the rapid development of the modern
information technology. For example, cell phones
offer a new means of being connected at any time
and any place, and the Internet, with its chat rooms
and social networking sites, creates and maintains
wide social networks. Just like eating, these activities develop their own etiquettes and rules of conduct
that are not necessary for the act of communication
and therefore cannot be reduced to the “contents”
of interaction but are typical of the kinds of social
interaction made possible by the modern information technology.
Jukka Gronow
See also Aesthetics; Belonging; Collective Identity; Kant,
Immanuel; Leisure; Simmel, Georg; Social Networks;
Taste

Further Readings
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990.
Gronow, Jukka. Sociology of Taste. London: Routledge,
1997.
Luhmann, Georg. “Interaktion in Obersichten: Zur
Transformation ihrer Semantik im 17. und 18.

Social and Economic Development
Jahrhundert” [Interaction in the upper classes: About
the transformation of their semantics in the 17th and
18th centuries]. In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik
[Social structure and semantics], Vol. 1. Frankfurt am
Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1980.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity,
1998.
Schulze, Gerhard. Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie
der Gegenwart [The society of inner experiences. A
sociology of culture of the contemporary world].
Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Campus, 1992.
Simmel, Georg. “The Sociology of Sociability.” American
Journal of Sociology 55, (Nov. 1949): 254–261.
Simmel, Georg. “Sociology of the Meal.” In Simmel on
Culture, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone,
130–136. London: Sage, 1997.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
There is no natural or rational definition of what
consumption is about and how and where social and
economic development should take place. Our contemporary conception of consumption and the way
it functions today in different parts of the world for
different groups of people is the result of many practical and political choices that were made over time.
One of the most influential choices was the institution of political economy, one of the core ideas of
which was to link social and economic development.

The Myth of Progress
This link happened in Europe where, starting from
the Middle Ages, growing attention was given to
improving the material life of the masses and making
better use of human labor. Gradually, political powers took a keen interest in the relationship between
the rise in productivity and social improvement,
thereby establishing a new understanding of what
social life should be about. Economic growth became
a concept as well as something to be measured. Later
it became something to be valued for itself. Unlimited
growth of production and of productive forces was
presented as being a crucial factor for successful
human existence.
Some countries experienced greater economic
growth than others. At first, however, many citizens
of countries with outstanding growth in production

1305

and consumption explained the economic gap in an
ethnocentric manner, often referring to a supposed
superiority of a so-called white race and suggesting
that other “races” or cultures were too “primitive”
to reach this higher stage of civilization and rate of
“progress.” Progress was a new myth that would
soon be exported worldwide. Economic growth was
thought to be to everybody’s advantage, as a world
market would favor an efficient division of labor
between regions of the world. The increasing wealth
of the dominating center (advanced capitalist societies) was supposed to bring progress in the form of
“civilization” and economic growth to the periphery (less economically developed societies). Some,
however, doubted this. During the second half of the
nineteenth century, many of those who characterized
capitalism as a system of exploitation subscribed to
the myth of progress. Even after the economies of the
center had experienced the “crisis of progress” in
the form of the Great Depression during the 1930s,
the main idea still persisted as the “myth of development”—to its believers as the only true alternative—to which every country of the world had to
subscribe. Countries of the center—that is, to say
countries with the greatest wealth and growth—did
not necessarily experience social progress along with
economic growth and wealth. The concept of development, thus, sounded more appropriate to those
managing the economy. Countries of the center were
signified as “developed” in the dominant discourses
of the time. However, to take further advantage of
growth, they needed to employ more appropriate
political economic tools that could correct the market’s perverse effects. On the other hand, countries of
the third world had not “developed” themselves and,
according to erstwhile ideology, they needed to initiate a stage of self-sustaining growth. Development
economics would have to address the procedures to
be followed to enter this stage. It was often assumed
that real social development could not be achieved
without joining the path of economic development.
Of course, many had pointed out the deterioration of the situation in the so-called third world
(which was called this with reference to the third
estate, which, before the French Revolution, could
not voice its demands). Slave trade and slave labor
had contributed to economic growth in the center.
International trade had a negative effect on local agriculture and crafts that could not compete and more
or less disappeared on local markets. The majority

1306

Social and Economic Development

of the population ended up having fewer opportunities to connect to a market than before. Still, this
deterioration was often perceived as the consequence
of an inability to join the program of growth. Only
a few thought of this deterioration as the damage
created by a single-minded pursuit train steamrolling
its way on an unsuitable roadbed. They stressed
that these periphery economies were the least protected against what they saw as the perverse effects
of industrialization, globalization, and urbanization
and which not only made it almost impossible for
them to “develop” but also dismantled the structure
of their societies. For all of the parties involved, the
issue was now to find ways to manage to get out of
it. Precisely this is referred to as social and economic
development. Still, the expression now includes more
parameters and calls on a larger variety of economic
and social interpretations.

The Significance of the Social
Long after the crisis of progress, most development
economists continued to focus on growth and the
reasons for lack of growth. Furthermore, growth was
measured not by what was external but by economists’ definitions. Whenever a new factor was identified, many economists would discuss whether and
how its cost could or should be internalized. Of
course, there were new methods of “demand” regulation through taxation, for instance. Thus, components that were not previously included in the
calculation of growth were now included. This also
instituted a new and different link between social
and economic development. Now, economists were
to deal with growth; politicians, with the social. Even
though most economists still recommended that politicians give the highest priority to a proper economic
policy, it became clear for many social scientists that
economic development comprised more than costs
and returns.
Socioeconomists point out that economic development cannot be studied without reference to social
and technological development. From their point of
view, economy is embedded in the social, and the
perception and conceptualization of the economic
and social situation have an impact on social and
economic development. What is taken into consideration and the understanding of the relationship
among different identified factors makes a difference.
Isolating a few of these factors as “economic factors”

while ignoring others as “external factors” came to
be viewed as hindrances to economic expansion.
Expansion was considered essential for not only
material growth but also economic and social development. An economic progress should no longer be
treated as a homogeneous flux of values, of which
the only relevant aspect would be that they can be
measured and ought to be maximized.
The first socioeconomists were inspired by sociologists like Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, Karl
Marx, and Max Weber, who clearly had stated the
social nature of the economic phenomenon. All of
them had contributed significantly to the study
of consumer culture. Among the first most influential socioeconomists were Joseph Schumpeter,
François Perroux, John K. Galbraith, and Albert O.
Hirschman.
Because of the plurality of factors, many fields of
research had an impact on the new understanding
of the social and economic development issue. The
notion of identifying a Newtonian force that economists could manipulate to boost the economy had
vanished. Debunked were the assumptions and pretensions inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, when technological advancements meant
global domination and a local feeling of superiority.
Ethnologists made it clear that Michel de Montaigne
had a point when, back in the 1570s, he denounced
European insularity, which condemned newly discovered Indians from the Brazilian coast as barbarous
merely because their consumption patterns (food,
clothing, etc.) were different.
More recently, an American scientist whose work
draws from a variety of fields expressed that from
his thirty-three years of working with New Guineans
in their own “undeveloped” societies, he perceived
them as “being on the average more intelligent,
more alert, more expressive, and more interested
in things and people around them that the average
European or American is” (Diamond 1998, 20).
Diamond’s aim is not only to debunk racist explanations: “Sound evidence for the existence of human
differences in intelligence that parallel human difference in technology is lacking” (19). It is also to
discuss current developments in creativity conditions
among different societies. “New Guineans may have
come to be smarter than Westerners . . . as they are
superior in escaping the devastating developmental
disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up” (21). Diamond is one

Social and Economic Development

of the many social scientists who are worried about
the consequences of passive entertainment for education and innovation, and thereby for the further
social and economic development of postindustrial
societies. Indeed, why then do Europe and America
continue to innovate as they do? One explanation
given today is that a whole network of social institutions and privileged cultural connections makes it
easier in those societies to keep selecting and bringing together competent people for the right job. For
instance, even though the percentage of Americans
who major in engineering is in steady decline (Cohen
2006, 133), the United States has no difficulty braindraining Indian and European engineers.
The importance of social institutions for economic
development has also been traced by historians who,
for example, pointed out that one of the main reasons
why Britain began to lag behind in leading technologies since the mid-nineteenth century was that “the
systematic application of the newly developing natural sciences was delayed by the survival of a tradition
of amateurishness and tinkering, and by the virtual
absence of technical education” (Mokyr 1990, 263).
Meanwhile, Germany and France were establishing
technical schools and managed not only to catch up
but to overtake Britain. Even though English public schools at that time had opened their doors to
members of the new industrial elite, education—and
the kinds of professions it led to—was still steeped in
the values, status, and norms of the old aristocracy.
One can compare this situation with how education
today functions in some parts of the world where
the prevailing values, status, and norms of the local
elites—like those of status obtained only through
consumption, for instance—can be just as unsuited
to respond to today’s local social and economic challenges as old aristocratic values were a century and a
half ago in Great Britain.
Worldwide media such as television, with its movies, sitcoms, shows, and ads, spread new images and
provide new frames of reference. Media may indeed
open new markets, but mainstream social scientists
note that media may not necessarily promote the
values and norms necessary for social and economic
development in all regions of the world. As a leading economist points out, “Economic development
nourishes new aspirations, just as it feeds on them. It
opens new possibilities without ascribing them to a
preordained agenda” (Cohen 2006, 123). The aspirations, the way they spread, and the impact they

1307

have on other factors of change warrant more careful
study, as does the role of consumer research. Future
areas of research could include research on the consumption of education in different parts of the world
and the impact new consumption patterns may have
on forms of solidarity and migration movements.
Working with economists, consumption researchers
can study whether the reduction of the cost of transportation and communication promotes wealth,
favors wealth polarization, or both. For example,
economists today know that when a railroad connects two towns, it is likely that the larger town will
prosper. Thus, breaking the isolation of a village or a
region can be troublesome. Small markets are most
likely to disappear. Those who leave might end up
in greater poverty, and social relations might become
dysfunctional. In the nineteenth century, the production capabilities in Europe were not sufficient to provide for its population; it was rich in people and poor
in land. Over thirty million Europeans migrated to
America between 1815 and 1900. This contributed
to the development of the new continent and had
an influence on the evolution of the value of land
and workers’ wages in different regions of the world.
People’s interactions in all of their relationships, with
each other and with land and work, had to change.

Diverging Opportunities and
Consequences of the Past
Among the issues discussed in relation to the subject
of social and economic development is the reason
why the fate of the Global South has been so different from that of the Global North since the neolithic
revolution. Today, earlier ways that people referred
to genetics or even to climate are no longer valid. It
is the presence of animals that could be domesticated
and of plants that could be cultivated that is now in
focus. Thus, the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East is
at the origin of a development chain with numerous
strong links such as agriculture, urbanization, writings, and empires. Yet, for Native American societies,
the odds for farming were not that good, which is
why the original migrants to the New World had no
knowledge of the domestication of plants or animals,
with the exception of dogs and llamas. It is now commonly accepted knowledge that “history followed
different courses for different people because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because
of biological differences among peoples themselves”

1308

Social and Economic Development

(Diamond 1998, 25). “It is just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more
favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do
other environments” (408).
As a result of social development, genetic factors
can end up being intertwined with social ones. When
Columbus landed in America in 1492, Eurasian societies enjoyed huge advantages in technology, writing,
food production, political organization, and, last but
not least, germs. The density of those societies and
their nearness to domesticated animals had allowed
them to develop antibodies to viruses that had developed in their specific environment. When they passed
on these viruses to others who had not developed the
antibodies, the results were fatal. It is today believed
that the quasi-extermination of the native southern American population, which happened within
a century after 1492, was due to epidemics such
as smallpox.
Sometimes, unintended consequences of political
developments of the past are the causes of significant
problems for later social and economic developments.
Thus, it has often been pointed out that the political organization of the Middle East at the time of the
Crusades (1096–1291) made it much easier for an
otherwise administratively less developed European
society to take control. Although so remote, a hereditary royal power could turn to its advantage the unremitting local internecine battles, precisely because the
local powers were not hereditary. This was the opportunity that the European invaders seized.
In the history of intellectual discoveries and conquests, chance is said to have played an important
role. However, it is also clear that scientific developments and social experiments that played a significant role in the emergence of capitalism in Western
Europe have been facilitated by specific power relations and theological debates.
Later, when new productive techniques were
available and machines were exported from Great
Britain from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
it was not only British rule that prevented Indian textile factories from becoming more competitive. The
social environment was much less favorable in India
than it was in the parts of the world where textile
industry thrived. Just like in the Middle East at the
time of the Crusades, a specific social situation was
not favorable for the locals.
Gregory Clark, who studied the economic history of the cotton mills, provides evidence that it was

neither because India could not import technology
or management skills, nor because of other problems that proved minor: “The new technologies of
the Industrial Revolution could easily be transferred
to most of the world, and the inputs for production
obtained cheaply across the globe. Yet the one thing
that could not be replicated so easily or so widely
was the social environment that underpinned the
cooperation of people in production in those countries where the technologies were first developed”
(Clark 2007, 13). He concluded that “the inefficiency
of low-wage labor must be the focus of any explanation of the underdevelopment of these countries”
(142). The balance of power between labor and
capital turned out differently in Britain and India,
for example. In Britain it favored productivity and
innovation, whereas in India wageworkers’ demands
from the onset did not contribute to the evolution
of local capitalism but blocked it. In India, workers’
aspirations were not turned into a productive force.
Daniel Cohen inquires, “Why were Indian capitalists
incapable of making this simple a priori discovery
themselves, to know that human work cannot be
made productive without consideration for what
people say of these aspirations?” (2006, 42).

Taking Multiple Factors Into Account
Again, understanding of situations, adherence to
principles, and adoption of procedures often depends
on cultural situations and social conditions that originally were not perceived as relevant by economists.
This made it difficult at first to realize the importance
of, among other things, prejudices, family structures,
nonmonetary exchanges, the quality of health, education, and social security. Also, it curbed the ability
to rethink and adapt techniques and procedures in
different social, cultural, and geographical contexts.
Economic and social developments are furthered
by the operation of a series of levers that raise one
another. The way they do varies from place to place
and from time to time. Sometimes, focusing too much
on one factor can prevent taking other important factors into consideration. This has long been the case
for the factor of wage. Scientific discussions across
disciplines indicate that development is not driven by
human labor alone. Production is not the only aspect
to be taken into consideration. To add consumption
is not enough either. For a successful understanding of
the human condition, complex systems of interactions

Social and Economic Development

among multiple economic, political, social, and cultural factors have to be considered (Bartoli 2000,
chapter 5; Castoriadis 1991; Passet 2010).
The way that factors are taken into consideration
also matter. An example of how the logic of economics still imbued development issues is that, for a
while, the human factor was most often equated with
the absence of an entrepreneur class. Then it became
clear that classes and markets are culturally specific
and, just as economic growth, cannot be introduced
to a country or superimposed on a country’s cultural
characteristics.
Still, it is now known that economic development is not just a question of importing “efficient”
existing production techniques and management
methods. The evaluation of efficiency is culturally
biased. Some techniques might do more harm than
good. Some can be adapted to local conditions, climatic and cultural. Previously, many would have
claimed that cultures just had to adapt to modern
conditions. Cultural differences were perceived as
anachronic obstacles rather than conditions or possibilities. Now, managing the cultural dimension in
relation with choice, adaptation, and adoption of
new techniques has become a central issue for most
companies and countries. One of the factors that
made this possible is that many international companies had to adapt to the diversity of consumption
around the world and within societies. Another is
the action of the United Nations, which not only
linked economic and social development with each
other but also linked these with human rights initially and then also with social rights.
Year after year, the United Nations’ World
Human Development Reports point out the same
themes: mass poverty, the widening gap of life conditions, corruption, and the expansion of a culture
enslaved to money threatening the identity and
diversity of cultures. The economic development
model, however, appears to have a poor capacity
for diffusing technical progress compared with its
propensity to impose an ideology of growth and
monetary relations. Developed countries today create technologies for the entire planet’s use and spread
a particular, arbitrary, and historically contingent
mode of production and consumption for the whole
planet to copy or at least envy. It orients the desires
of all humans. This seems to put the whole planet
on a “development” path toward more of the same,
be it of consumption or aspirations. The outcomes

1309

of such development are in contention. Some of
what is offered is generally considered to be a real
gift: research and development against malaria, for
instance. Some are often considered a curse, not a
blessing, such as the amount of pollution. Still what
now strikes many observers is that the kind of
development we are experiencing in the twenty-first
century not only enhances our possibilities but also
limits them and that it puts many nations on a track
they are just bound to follow whether they like it
or not—a track they did not build themselves and
that may prevent these nations from experiencing the
kind of development they would have produced, if
only they had been given the time.
Many issues of development are connected to
human liberty, creativity, and the environment.
The rationality of social and economic development is moving away from the issues of necessities
and means to that of values and ends. Nobel Prize
winner Amartya Sen stresses that enhancement of
human freedom is both the main purpose and the
primary means of development: “The ends and
means of development call for placing the perspective of freedom at the center of the stage. The people
have to be seen, in this perspective, as being actively
involved—given the opportunity—in shaping their
own destiny, and not just as passive recipients of the
fruits of cunning development programs” (2000,
53). Daniel Cohen remarks, “Development, as analyzed by Amartya Sen, consists of giving peoples and
societies the means to build destinies worthy of their
expectations. The problem of globalization up to
now is it has altered people’s expectations more than
it has increased their ability to act” (2006, 166).
The simple mechanical models of development
have been replaced by the multidimensional models
of system and complexity theories. Today, economists and sociologists try to take into consideration
all dimensions of life. They place great emphasis not
only on human freedom but also on the fragile ecosystem. It has become more evident to point out that
“embedded in the biosphere, economic organizations
have to respect its laws and regulatory mechanisms”
(Passet 2010, 906), and that “one cannot eternally
use trickery with the true nature of things. In essence,
economy has always been a multi-dimensional
activity linking together the individual, society and
nature” (895).
Dominique Bouchet

1310

Social Class

See also Capitalism; Colonialism; Desire; Economic
Sociology; Globalization; Inequalities; Political
Economy; Poverty; World-Systems Analysis

Further Readings
Bairoch, Paul. Econoomics and World History: Myths
and Paradoxes. Oxford: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1993.
Bartoli, Henri. 2000. Rethinking development. Putting an
End to Poverty. Paris: Economica & Éditions UNESCO,
2000.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy:
Essays in Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Clark, Gregory. “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?
Lessons from the Cotton Mills.” Journal of Economic
History 47, no. 1 (March 1987): 141–173.
Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic
History of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007.
Cohen, Daniel. Globalization and Its Enemies. Translated
by Jessica B. Baker. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History
of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. London:
Vintage, 1998.
Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity
and Economic Progress. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated
and edited with an introduction and notes by M. A.
Screech. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2003. First
published in French in 1580–1588.
Passet, René. Les grandes représentations du monde et
de l’économie à travers l’histoire. De l’univers
magique au tourbillon créateur. Paris: Les Liens qui
Libèrent, 2010.
Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York:
Anchor Books/Doubleday, 2000.
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of the Nations. Books I–III.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977. First
published 1776.

SOCIAL CAPITAL
See Civil Society; Informational Capital;
Network Society; Sociability; Social
Movements; Social Networks; Sociology

SOCIAL CLASS
The concept of class is widely used by social scientists, and especially sociologists, to explore the
unequal structuring of social practices, ranging from
collective activities (such as social and political movements and social networks) to individual behaviors
and attitudes (such as consumption choices or attitudes). It is now common to distinguish between a
classical class formation paradigm, associated with
Karl Marx and Max Weber and which predominated
until the 1980s, and a new cultural class paradigm
influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, which has
proved influential especially in European sociology
since the late 1990s. The study of consumption plays
a major role in this latter approach. The best overview of the development of class analysis that reflects
on the study of social class is Rosemary Crompton’s
Class and Stratification (3rd edition, 2008), as
well as the papers in Fiona Devine and colleagues’
Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyle
(2005), and Mike Savage’s overview in “Culture,
Class and Classification.”

The Classic Class Formation Paradigm
The classic paradigm focused on how social classes
could form as coherent groups in the context of the
dramatic social changes in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries that were associated with industrialization and urbanization. Attention focused on how
structural economic inequalities might give rise to
social, cultural, and political solidarities (for the best
collection of articles that lay out this classic paradigm,
see Giddens and Held 1982). Marx saw capitalism
as differentiating between a small class of bourgeois
property owners on the one hand, and a large wageearning proletariat on the other. He believed that
since the profits earned by the bourgeois class were
ultimately generated by extracting “surplus value”
from wage earners, there was an inherently antagonistic relationship between these classes, which led to
social conflict and oppression. He believed that capitalism would tend toward the accentuation of these
structural divisions. This would ultimately generate
class consciousness and political mobilization by the
working class so that they would move from being
a “class in itself” to become a “class for itself.” This
view was not shared by all Marxists, including the

Social Class

Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who felt that
without political leadership by a revolutionary party,
the working class would not become aware of their
oppression and would remain restricted to a form of
“trade union” consciousness.
The same concern with class formation was
developed sociologically by Weber, who argued, in
opposition to Marx, that there was no necessary
reason why “economic classes,” defined by common
labor market positions, would lead to the formation of social classes, who were closely bonded to
each other and felt common cause. Weber emphasized that status—based on honor and esteem—and
political mobilization could override class divisions,
and only in specific historical situations might one
expect to find class politics becoming central. Weber
was also more interested in the potential of different
middle-class groups to prevent any simple polarization of class relations on the Marxist model. His concerns with status have proved especially influential
in North American sociology, which has been less
enamored of the concept of social class as a means of
analyzing social stratification, in large part because
of its association with Marxism.
In Europe, however, this class formation paradigm dominated sociology for much of the twentieth century, and especially focused on what David
Lockwood identified as “the problematic of the
proletariat.” This was concerned with whether the
working class would remain a radical, possibly revolutionary, political force as they became more affluent and more incorporated into their nations as the
result of economic development and improved social
welfare provision. In Britain, this concern led to John
Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s famous study of the
social life, culture, and politics of affluent assembly
line workers in the 1960s, and to T. H. Marshall’s
reflections about how the working class could be
incorporated into citizenship rights through the provision of social welfare. An important aspect of this
lay in considering whether new forms of consumerism might undermine working-class radicalism. This
picked up on concerns raised by the Frankfurt school
regarding the role of the cultural industries in commodifying cultural values and weakening the potential for critique. This line of thought was developed
by Zygmunt Bauman, who developed his influential
thesis on the significance of consumer culture out of
his belief that the working class was being “seduced”
into contemporary capitalism.

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Although premised on the social, cultural, and
political organization of the working class, supporters of this classic paradigm became increasingly preoccupied from the mid-twentieth century with how
to interpret the rising numbers of middle-class occupations. Until the 1970s, it remained common to
argue that the “old” middle classes, such as the selfemployed, farmers, and white-collar workers, would
be proletarianized and downgraded into the working class. Influential American commentators such
as C. Wright Mills and W. F. Whyte saw this process
as related to the development of mass consumption,
which imposed conformist styles of dress, housing,
and lifestyle among middle-class groups who had
previously been characterized by their independence
and autonomy. Harry Braverman’s influential work
on Labour and Monopoly Capital, published in
1974, insisted on the general trend for workers to be
de-skilled as capitalism advanced.
From the early 1980s, however, with the unmistakable evidence that deindustrialization in all
advanced capitalist nations was weakening the manual working class and was leading to a marked shift
of employment toward the service sector, it became
clear that the proportion of professionals, managers, and other kinds of white-collar employees was
growing rapidly. This posed serious conceptual issues
for Marxist accounts, which had insisted on the
paramount class division between bourgeois property owners and de-skilled workers. Marxists such
as Guillemo Carchedi and Erik Olin Wright sought
to rescue the Marxist emphasis on the fundamental
division between capital and labor by arguing that
the middle classes could best be seen as occupying
“contradictory class positions,” as functionaries of
their employers whose interests they would protect.
However, as was the case with the labor theory of
value that underpinned the Marxist emphasis on the
inherently conflictual relationship between employers and workers, it appeared increasingly arbitrary
to distinguish productive from unproductive labor in
an increasingly complex and service-based economy.
These problems explain why John Goldthorpe’s
concept of the service class came to have considerable
appeal from the early 1980s onward. Drawing on
Austro-Marxist Karl Renner’s thinking, Goldthorpe
highlighted the distinctiveness of a class of professionals and managers who were given privileges by
their employers so that they could carry out delegated authority or expertise on their behalf. The

1312

Social Class

service class was hence a fundamentally conservative
grouping. Drawing on Weber, Goldthorpe argued
that because the service class recruited large numbers
from the upwardly mobile children of the working class, it would remain relatively heterogeneous
and was therefore unlikely to form as a distinctive
socially bounded class but that it would also increasingly become a conservative bastion that was committed to preserving the status quo.
This concept of the service class ran contrary to
that of other sociologists who detected a radical
potential among the middle classes. Alvin Gouldner
argued that the exposure to higher education of
many professionals allowed the “culture of critical discourse” to be generated, and this perspective
seemed borne out by the radical student culture of
the 1960s. Savage and his associates drew on this
liberal and radical outlook from some middle-class
groups to argue, against Goldthorpe, that the service
class was differentiated into a more conformist managerial wing and a more “cultured” and politically
radical professional wing. This argument was developed in part by using evidence on consumption that
demonstrated that managers did not have distinctive
consumption profiles, compared with professionals
who were more attracted to “ascetic” patterns, as
well as “hedonistic” lifestyles.
This debate led to research that explored differences in consumption patterns within the middle
classes, especially in the United Kingdom, and its
most recent articulation is in Tony Bennett and
colleagues’ study Culture, Class, Distinction. This
study found that in contemporary Britain, professionals and senior managers (many of whom were
university graduates) had the strongest likelihood of
being involved in legitimate cultural consumption
(such as going to art galleries, museums, classical
music concerts), and that lower level managers were
much more similar to the intermediate classes. There
is therefore clear evidence that class divisions remain
highly significant in the structuring of consumption
practices.

Cultural Class Analysis
From the early 1980s—with the emergence of neoliberal economic regimes, the decline of labor movements, the globalization of production, and the
emergence of large-scale precarious employment in
many third-world nations—the stakes involved in

class analysis changed. With the collapse of communist regimes during the 1980s and the weakening of overtly socialist politics, class became much
less visible as a political rallying cry. In this context,
the class formation paradigm appeared increasingly
redundant. Although it might hypothetically be
possible to imagine the possibility of social classes
forming as cohesive social blocs, with shared cultural values and political outlooks, it proved ever
more difficult to find such groups in practice. The
result has been a fragmentation of class analysis,
with numerous competing perspectives, including
rational choice and Durkheimian competing with
more familiar Marxist and Weberian concerns (see
the useful overview in Wright: Approaches to Class
Analysis, 2005).
Nonetheless, the decline of the class formation
paradigm ushered in a new kind of cultural class
analysis paradigm that made the lack of overt class
cultures one of its main analytical interests. Initially
based in the United Kingdom, this body of research
is now influential internationally. This approach
built on the recognition that many people actually
had only an ambivalent and uncertain awareness of
class. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s study,
The Hidden Injuries of Class, which showed how
American workers found it shameful to talk about
the emotional scars that the experience of class
had placed on them, was an influential exemplar.
Beverley Skeggs argued, on the basis of a longitudinal
ethnographic study of young working-class women
in the English Midlands, that that they mostly “disidentified” from class and placed more emphasis on
their respectability and femininity as a means of seeking to gain recognition. Similarly Savage et al., in a
study of 182 people’s views about their identity in
Northwest England, showed that only one third had
a strongly held sense of their class identity and that
most respondents wanted to identify as “ordinary.”
Insofar as people do hold a sense of their class identity, this is rarely seen to be membership of a social
collectivity and more as a marker of their individual
social mobility. Similar findings emphasizing the
extent of weak class consciousness were documented
in other nations. Politically, labor movements in most
nations were either radically restructured, as with
Tony Blair’s launch of “New Labour” as a means of
distancing itself from the trade union movement and
an overt working-class identification, or they lost
electoral support.

Social Class

Yet, although these trends pointed toward the
absence of social class as an overt class identity,
there is also no doubting the striking extension of
structural class inequalities. As a result of economic
neoliberalization, state deregulation, and the extension of financialized processes, the privileged wealthy
considerably enhanced their position during the latter decade of the twentieth century, while the working classes fell considerably behind in relative, and
sometimes in absolute, terms. These observations
generated the contemporary “paradox of class,” the
fact that in a situation of increasing structural divisions between classes, people appear not to interpret such differences in class terms. Accentuating
structural divisions goes hand in hand with weaker
class identities. Scholarly attention has therefore
focused on the reasons why marked economic class
divisions have not translated into cohesive social
and cultural blocs.
One reason frequently adduced is the rise of consumerism, sometimes linked to processes such as
individualization and globalization. Sociologists such
as Anthony Giddens argued that there was a shift
from a (class-based) politics of life chances toward
a more individualistic politics of lifestyle. Ulrich
Beck emphasized that a risk society, in which global
environmental risks could not be confined to specific
populations, encouraged individualized and reflexive responses from people regardless of their class
position.
The cultural class analysis paradigm therefore
turns the class formation paradigm on its head and
argues that the lack of overt class awareness or class
solidarity is in fact evidence for the enhanced power
of class to shape people’s lives in a way that they are
not directly aware of. Thus, what sociologists such
as Bauman, Giddens, and Beck took as evidence for
the decline of class is used by writers such as Skeggs,
Diane Reay, and Savage to precisely demonstrate
how the power of the upper and middle classes is
such that it prevents less advantaged groups from
realizing their social position. Such writers point
out that the experience of class is often indirect and
implicit, marked in oblique ways that need careful
unraveling by researchers.
A well-known example of this new kind of class
analysis is the argument of Stephen Ball and his associates regarding the power of middle-class parents
in the neoliberal educational systems. British government reforms of the 1980s and 1990s encouraged

1313

parents to view school choice as a market provision,
so that they could chose which school to send their
children to, and schools had to provide appropriate
evidence to allow these parents to act rationally. Such
reforms were supposed to allow all parents to make
better choices, but Ball notes that it was middle-class
parents who had the resources and skills to take
advantage of this marketization of educational provision, for instance, by using their social networks
to gain information, or in extremis by moving to be
close to a preferred school. Yet, such advantages are
gained not only by being middle class but by acting
as rational consumers and caring parents, and hence
class advantage “goes underground” and is not
openly recognized as such. This argument has been
elaborated by both Savage and Skeggs along the lines
that the contemporary rational individual is based on
covert middle-class conceptions.
Bourdieu’s sociology is theoretically central to the
elaboration of cultural class analysis, though it is
intriguing to note that he says relatively little directly
about class, preferring instead to focus on the three
concepts of habitus, capital, and field, each of which
is introduced into his work at a different time. From
his studies of French and Algerian peasants in the later
1950s and early 1960s, Bourdieu became interested
in the way that bodily deportment literally bears the
mark of class. Peasants’ functional dress, their physical strength, and their lumbering demeanor were
essential components of their classed nature. This
concept could lend itself to a reductionist reading of
people’s lifestyles and was supplemented, from the
mid-1960s, by Bourdieu’s interest in cultural capital.
Here, he was concerned with the way that the upper
and middle classes passed on their privileges to their
children not only through the inheritance of property but also by passing on the capacities for them to
do well in the educational system, from where they
could obtain better jobs. During the 1970s, Bourdieu
further innovated by deploying the concept of field,
which conceived social relations not as part of a fixed
structure but as akin to a sporting contest, with combatants contesting for position and advantage, which
might involve lifestyle politics in these struggles for
position.
Bourdieu’s key concepts can be seen as part of
wider concern to root class analysis in the framework
of capitals, assets, and resources. Whereas the classical “employment aggregate” approach rooted class
divisions in the large-scale division of labor, the new

1314

Social Distinction

paradigm is more oriented toward the microscale
in which social actors deploy their capitals to maximize their relative advantages and to solidify them
and convert them into advantages in other arenas,
or fields. The result is not to see class as given by an
“objective” social structure but rather as the more
fluid product of myriad agents’ strategic capacities
to mobilize, which can, in certain situations, result
in the formation of durable solidarities. This leads
to a greater concern with how class is performed, or
enacted. Here, interests in lifestyle and consumption
can play an important role.
This explains why the cultural class paradigm
gives specific attention to the way that divisions in
lifestyle and consumption are crucial ways in which
class divisions are enacted, though often obliquely
rather than in the name of class. For Bourdieu, forms
of consumption are central to making claims about
cultural worth and value and are therefore not just
minor epiphenomena of the class structure. It is in
this way that Bourdieu sees consumption as central
to the production of cultural capital. He distinguishes between the legitimate cultural practices of
the established cultural elite, who espouse the traditional canon of high culture in the area of music,
literature, and the arts, from the popular or working
classes, whose relationship to culture is functional
and pragmatic. Between these two key groups, he
also distinguishes the specific lifestyles of upwardly
mobile groups trying to announce their own social
advance by displaying their competence and skills in
emerging areas of cultural activity.
Although Bourdieu’s work has been widely
adopted in Europe, there are serious questions
about its applicability in other parts of the world,
where concerns with cultural distinction may be
less pronounced. Michèle Lamont showed that the
American middle classes were less concerned with
differentiating on cultural and aesthetic grounds than
were the French, and studies of Asia and Australasia
detect little evidence of elitist practices and a more
generally functional and instrumental approach to
consumption. In much of Asia, South America, and
Africa, Bourdieu’s focus on middle-class lifestyles
can appear peripheral compared to the survival
struggles of what has been called the “precariat,”
large numbers of people who are only loosely connected to secure employment and who struggle to get
by. For these large populations, older concerns with
proletarianization and class exploitation continue

to appeal, although it is still rare to find overt class
politics on the older socialist model. Nonetheless, it is
now clear that social class has reemerged as a central
sociological concern, and the comparative study of
the relationship between consumption and class will
emerge as a major international research topic in the
coming years.
Mike Savage
See also Collective Identity; Cultural Capital; Identity;
Risk Society; Seduced and Repressed; Social
Distinction; Status; Taste

Further Readings
Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva, Alan
Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright. Culture,
Class, Distinction. London: Routledge, 2009.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge, 1985.
Devine, Fiona, Mike Savage, Rosemary Crompton, and
John Scott. Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and
Lifestyle. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2005.
Giddens, Anthony, and David Held. Class, Property and
Power. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982.
Savage, Mike. “Culture, Class and Classification.” In The
SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, edited by Tony
Bennett and John Frow, 467–487. London: Sage, 2008.
Savage, Mike, James Barlow, Peter Dickens, and A. J.
Fielding. Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle
Class Formation in Contemporary Britain. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender. London:
Sage, 1997.
Wright, Erik, ed. Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.

SOCIAL DISTINCTION
What and how people consume are critical components of how individuals define themselves in relation to others. Yet, consumption practices are also
meaningful social signals that individuals use to categorize and evaluate others. As such, consumption is
not only a basis but also a marker of social identity
that can serve as a powerful source of social differentiation and stratification in interaction. Research
on social distinction focuses on analyzing two primary issues: (1) how individuals define and interpret the social, cultural, and/or material value of
individuals, objects, and organizations; and (2) how

Social Distinction

such classification schemes—including those based
on consumption—contribute to broader systems
of social inequality. This entry reviews key authors
and works relevant to the study of social distinction,
highlights key debates pertinent to the topic, and
describes current trends in research.

Key Authors
Max Weber
The writings of classical social theorist Max
Weber are integral to contemporary understandings
of distinction. In his seminal essay “Class, Status, and
Party,” Weber argues that social status—defined as
social estimations of worth, honor, and/or esteem—is
a key basis of societal power and social stratification.
According to Weber, status groups are social communities that share a quality or characteristic that
affords them a certain level of admiration from others; they tend to be bounded units that exhibit similar
lifestyle and consumption practices as well as a sense
of shared identity. Unlike economic classes, whose
power stems from ownership of property and/or control of production relations, status groups derive their
influence through social and symbolic exclusion. In
particular, status groups monopolize access to valued
resources, a process referred to as social closure. To
facilitate such exclusion, status groups tend to adopt
one or more “badges” of belonging, most commonly
physical markers such as dress, accent, or skin color,
so that group membership is clearly demarcated and
easily perceptible to all.
Thorstein Veblen and Norbert Elias
Building on Weber’s insights, Thorstein Veblen
and Norbert Elias provide in-depth analyses of the
badges that status groups use to demarcate membership. In Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues
that members of affluent classes engage in “conspicuous consumption” of costly or scarce goods and services to publicly communicate their elevated status
to others. Focusing more on behavior, Elias documents the elaborate etiquette and interaction rituals
common among premodern cultivated classes in The
Civilizing Process.
Pierre Bourdieu
Yet it is the work of Pierre Bourdieu that has
been the most influential in shaping contemporary

1315

understandings of distinction. Similar to Weber,
Veblen, and Elias, Bourdieu contends that status
signals play a profound role in social stratification.
However, Bourdieu’s work advances prior scholarship by articulating how processes of distinction serve
to reproduce economic inequalities, particularly with
respect to social class.
Forms of Capital

Bourdieu argues that in addition to economic capital, there are two nonmonetary resources that play
a crucial role in the maintenance of class inequality.
The first of these resources is what Bourdieu refers
to as social capital, or the size, strength, and status
of one’s social connections. The second is cultural
capital, or high-status cultural signals. According
to Bourdieu, cultural capital occurs in three forms:
the objectified state (e.g., material goods and possessions), the embodied state (e.g., individual skills
and knowledge), and the institutionalized state (e.g.,
credentials). Reminiscent of Weber’s notion of social
closure, Bourdieu contends that elite groups use both
social and cultural capital as “markers” of class
membership and bases for exclusion from valued
objects and opportunities. More than just status signals, however, Bourdieu asserts that these resources
are forms of capital in their own right; they are
valuable not only because of their association with
high-status members of society but also because possessors can theoretically use them to procure greater
material rewards. Consequently, although seemingly
nonmonetary in nature, social and cultural capital
represent subtler forms of economic capital. When
used as criteria of selection or exclusion, they serve to
veil the true economic basis of social differentiation
and make class inequality seem more legitimate.
Class Cultures

Individuals’ stocks of social and cultural capital
are heavily influenced by their position in a society’s
economic class structure. In Bourdieu’s model of
cultural reproduction, families and schools reproduce existing class relations by imbuing younger
generations with stocks of culture (e.g., attitudes,
tastes, knowledge, self-presentation styles, and consumption patterns) consistent with their social stratum of origin. The culture of different classes can be
categorized according to their distance from necessity. Concerned primarily with everyday survival

1316

Social Distinction

needs, members of the lower classes tend to prefer
objects, opportunities, and experiences that have
practical and immediate value. Freed from the material constraints of mere subsistence, members of the
upper classes, by contrast, gravitate toward goods
and practices that are more ephemeral, abstract, and
complex in nature. Moreover, they place a premium
on those that require significant investments of temporal, intellectual, and/or economic resources. In
Distinction, Bourdieu documents such differences in
consumption patterns in diverse cultural arenas ranging from theater to food.
Cultural Reproduction

Shared norms, values, modes of interpretation,
and experience—which Bourdieu collectively refers
to as the habitus—within each social stratum facilitate feelings of class identity and solidarity. However,
they also foster common goals and aspirations
among members, which serve to channel individuals into class-specific educational and occupational
trajectories. Compounding such self-selection, key
gatekeeping institutions such as the educational system reward only those cultural tastes and styles characteristic of the dominant classes, further barring the
less advantaged from attaining positions of power,
influence, and affluence within society.

Debates
Bourdieu’s writings on culture and stratification, in
particular those on cultural capital, have sparked a
tremendous volume of research across the social sciences. His work has been particularly influential in
sociology, education, and cultural studies. Although
seminal in many respects, his work has also been
met with strong criticism. In addition to challenges
regarding the empirical rigor of Distinction, researchers have argued that his model of cultural reproduction suffers from four key conceptual weaknesses.
First, critics have argued that Bourdieu overemphasizes the importance of early childhood
experience in predicting future educational and occupational attainment. A number of sociologists and
educational researchers have suggested that stocks of
cultural capital acquired later in life can have similar
if not more profound effects on educational attainment than those acquired in early childhood.
Second, researchers have argued that Bourdieu
overstates the importance of cultural distinctions

in the maintenance of modern-day class systems.
For example, Michèle Lamont argues that cultural
boundaries are a less salient source of class distinction than locally meaningful demarcations such as
race and nationality. Although she finds the use of
cultural boundaries to be particularly weak among
the American upper-middle class, which instead privileges moral qualities, Lamont even finds that cultural
boundaries are less salient markers of social class
than originally hypothesized in Bourdieu’s native
France. In addition to an overemphasis on cultural
boundaries in general, other critics have argued that
Bourdieu overstates the importance of highbrow culture in particular. In her study of the Toronto securities industry, for example, Bonnie Erickson finds that
it is the ability to draw from both “high” and “low”
cultural forms that is key for advancement within
the North American corporate world. This finding
is consistent with research in the “production of culture” tradition, demonstrating that in an increasingly
global world, more privileged members of society are
characterized by their cultural omnivorousness, or
familiarity with and/or consumption of both highbrow and lowbrow artistic forms. Together, such
studies imply that cultural breadth may be a more
potent marker of social distinction in the modern era
than cultural exclusivity.
Third, critics have argued that Bourdieu fails to
account for variation in how people engage in processes of social differentiation. Scholars have demonstrated that the relative strength and salience of
particular types of social distinctions vary both by
sociocultural context and key demographic variables,
such as gender and race.
Finally, the utility of the term cultural capital has
come under fire not only for doing too much work
but also for failing to predict future educational
and occupational attainment—central tenets of
Bourdieu’s reproduction model. Finally, whether class
distinctions—let alone social classes themselves—
remain a salient feature of contemporary Western
societies has been the subject of debate.
Partially due to such shortcomings, the study
of distinction post-Bourdieu has centered on the
concept of “symbolic boundaries.” Drawing
from Émile Durkheim’s fundamental dichotomy
between the sacred and the profane, work in this
vein analyzes how individuals conceptualize who is
above and below them in social structure or standing. Although the majority of work on symbolic

Social Distinction

boundaries has been cognitively oriented, focusing
on unpacking the content of cultural scripts individuals use when thinking about the overall worth
of specific groups, research on the topic is shifting
to analyze how individuals draw such social distinctions in real-life interaction and evaluation settings.

Current Trends in Research
Despite criticisms of Bourdieu, cultural sociology is
witnessing a revitalized interest in the relationship
between culture and classification. Part of the weak
explanatory power of cultural capital may be due to
how the term has been operationalized in the social
sciences—most commonly one’s degree of participation in “highbrow” artistic forms. Since the time of
Bourdieu’s writings, increased globalization, technological innovation, and credit expansion have helped
democratize access to formerly elite cultural goods
ranging from classical music to sushi. It may be that
the basis of distinction in the modern era has shifted
from cultural elitism to cosmopolitanism, suggests
Richard Peterson. As such, the status signals that
presently distinguish “the classes” from “the masses”
may no longer be those that are abstract and elusive
but rather those that have some level of popular resonance but that require long periods of what Annette
Lareau terms concerted cultivation. For example, participation in resource-intensive extracurricular activities, such as varsity athletics, is used as a criterion
of selection not only by elite university admissions
committees, as demonstrated by Mitchell Stevens,
but also by the nation’s highest paying employers on
graduation, as shown by Lauren Rivera.
Recent research on distinction has begun not only
to revisit issues of culture and classification but also
to investigate the role of actors other than the family
and primary education in the production of social
distinctions, including institutions of higher learning,
third parties such as rankings organizations, corporations, and national governments.
Finally, contemporary scholars are developing
more complex and nuanced understandings of the
role of consumption in social differentiation. First,
they are expanding the focus of inquiry from traditional artistic products (e.g., musical genres) to
include cultural objects ranging from luxury hotels
to sport-utility vehicles. Second, they are investigating how consumption contributes to types of social
distinction other than that based purely on social

1317

class. A new generation of researchers interested in
the intersection of networks and culture is analyzing
the relationship between cultural consumption and
social capital, addressing both how people’s social
ties affect their cultural tastes and consumption practices and how the latter can also influence the size,
density, and status of the relationships they develop
over time. Such studies hold the promise not only of
refining understandings of classic concepts such as
conspicuous consumption and social closure but also
of opening up novel areas of inquiry across disciplinary and methodological traditions.
Lauren A. Rivera
See also Collective Identity; Conspicuous Consumption;
Cultural Capital; Identity; Inequalities; Lifestyle; Social
Class; Taste

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and
Psychogenetic Investigations. Translated by Edmund
Jephcott. New York: Urizen Books, 1978.
Erickson, Bonnie. “Culture, Class, and Connections.”
American Journal of Sociology 102 (1996): 217–251.
Kingston, Paul. The Classless Society. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2000.
Lamont, Michèle. Money, Morals, and Manners: The
Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle
Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Lamont, Michèle, and Annette Lareau. “Cultural Capital:
Allusions, Gaps, and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical
Developments.” Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 153–168.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virag Molnar. “The Study of
Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of
Sociology 28 (2002): 167–195.
Lizardo, Omar. “How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal
Networks.” American Sociological Review 71 (2006):
778–807.
Peterson, Richard. “The Rise and Fall of Highbrow
Snobbery as a Status Marker.” Poetics 25 (1997): 75–92.
Rivera, Lauren A. “Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social
Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub.”
Qualitative Sociology 33 (2010): 229–255.
Schulz, Jeremy. “The Social and Cultural Work of the H2
Hummer.” Journal of Consumer Culture 6 (2006): 57–86.
Sherman, Rachel. Class Acts: Service and Inequality in
Luxury Hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007.

1318

Social Exclusion

Stevens, Mitchell. Creating a Class: College Admissions and
the Education of Elites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Modern Library, 1899.
Weber, Max. “Class, Status and Party.” In From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION
The concept of social exclusion has its roots and
most frequent field of application in sociology in general and in welfare studies in particular. As a starting point, it is necessary to define some necessary
prerequisites for using social exclusion. The idea of
inclusion and integration must take its starting point
from a society that has developed toward a differentiated and complex society, as noted by both Niklas
Luhmann and Anthony Giddens. Western society is
characterized by differentiation, which can be considered as a neutral state of things. Several phenomena
related to modern society generate differentiation.
Thus, when considering concepts such as integration, inclusion, and exclusion, it is important to ask,
inclusion in what or exclusion from what. Inclusion
is often interpreted as something positive, and vice
versa regarding exclusion. To be excluded from a
negative community, based on racism or criminality,
for example, can be seen as something positive. For
a more explicit and elaborated use of those concepts,
they need to be contextualized in some way.
The most common use of social exclusion is when
social vulnerability of some kind is addressed. One
of the most significant causes for exclusion is lack of
financial means. Concepts such as social marginalization and exclusion have been used to describe the
societal processes that restrict and deteriorate opportunities to live, work, consume, procure health care,
influence politics, and so forth, in accordance with
the dominant norms in society.
Since the 1980s, Western societies have undergone
changes that have resulted in increasing inequality
in several areas. These changes affect marginalized
groups, for example, those who are outside the labor
market and are dependent on welfare state support to
manage their maintenance. Within research on financially vulnerable groups, the concept of poverty has
dominated. Inequality has been seen from a vertical

or a hierarchical perspective, and income has been a
significant target to define the societal position of an
individual. This perspective can roughly be described
as a Marxian view of society, where the hierarchy in
the society is represented by different classes from
the upper class down to the lower classes. From the
1980s onward, another interpretation of inequality
has developed. This view emphasizes concepts such
as establishment, marginalization, inclusion, and
exclusion. Society is understood in horizontal terms,
focusing on one’s position with regard to the established society, whether inside or outside. Income is
still significant, but the emphasis on financial poverty
has been replaced by a more complex understanding of groups situated in vulnerable and exposed
positions. The focus is not just on financial issues
but also on life chances and living conditions in
other domains, such as opportunities in education,
establishment of the labor and housing market, and
participation in areas that enable opportunities to
influence and change one’s own situation.
According to Martin Kronauer, there has been a
shift from discussing financially vulnerable groups
in terms of poverty to using concepts such as social
exclusion. In addition, during the 1980s there was
a strong influence of neoliberal ideas in Western
societies, which has left visible traces, for example,
an increased individualization of the responsibility
for welfare and a deregulation and marketization
of several welfare services. The idea of society as a
market has gained a foothold, and market principles
have emerged within several areas. This could be
an empirical explanation for theories that focus on
exclusion rather than poverty. A reasonable consequence of the increased individualization of responsibility is widening gaps between those who have
and those who don’t. A more classic analytic view of
society, represented by scholars such as Karl Marx,
Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, understands that
societies, despite inequalities, are coherent and more
or less integrated. Other theories (e.g., Bauman 1998;
Luhmann 1996) problematize the image of a coherent society and choose instead to use concepts such
as society being inclusive or exclusive.

Different Dimensions of Social Exclusion
The concept of social exclusion emanates from a discussion to broaden the understanding of poverty and
its complexity. Such discussion illuminates additional

Social Exclusion

dimensions of social vulnerability other than just
the financial side. Several European studies on poverty from the 1980s and 1990s indicate that groups
with incomes beneath established poverty thresholds
not only faced financial hardship but had a vulnerable position in relation to several other significant
dimensions of life. Kronauer discusses how social
exclusion focuses not only on the meanings of being
excluded or included but also on how these circumstances decrease or increase the vulnerability of an
individual. He points out six types of exclusion that
together, with varying degrees for different individuals, constitute the foundations of social exclusion.
These types express the meaning of social marginalization and exclusion that is commonly used, and
they can constitute a fruitful starting point in relating
social exclusion to the field of consumption.
The first type concerns exclusion in the labor
market and pinpoints how financial and other forces
create hindrances and barriers for groups with less
education and competence to become established
in the labor market. Financial exclusion is the second type. Durable poverty, often depending on a
weak position in the labor market, often includes
financial dependency on welfare state support and
loss of opportunities to support oneself and one’s
family according to the dominant norms of society.
The third type, institutional exclusion, relates to
the fact that poor and unemployed people do not
have the same access to private institutions, such
as insurance companies and banks, as others have.
Social isolation is the fourth type, pointing to the
risk that poverty and social vulnerability lead to a
reduction or withdrawal from social networks and
that social relations tend to dissolve. The fifth type,
cultural exclusion, concerns difficulties in living a
life in accordance with socially accepted norms and
expectations, which indicates a risk of stigmatization and dissociation from the surrounding society.
Kronauer calls the sixth type spatial exclusion. The
types mentioned here result in a geographical concentration and segregation of individuals and groups
with limited financial resources. They often live in
communities with a poorer supply of infrastructure,
for example with regard to communication, retail
stores, and cultural amenities.
Kronauer elaborates on how the accumulation of problems constitutes a risk of ending up in
socially vulnerable positions. This way of operationalizing the concept of social exclusion reveals that

1319

financial vulnerability is a considerably more complex phenomenon than merely just having limited
financial resources. In addition, vulnerability can
include dimensions such as poorer health, shorter
average length of life, and more limited opportunities
for political influence.

Exclusion From Consumer Society
This elaboration of social exclusion opens up new
perspectives in understanding social vulnerability.
Several significant dimensions regarding an individual’s welfare could be added, including consumption and its increasing significance on how we see
and judge each other and ourselves. Perhaps cultural
exclusion (having difficulties living in accordance
with socially accepted norms and expectations) is
the type that is most appropriate with regard to
consumption. In a consumption-based society, significant components from social norms, codes,
and expectations concern how and what we consume. Several social scientists (e.g., Bauman 1998;
Ransome 2005) point to a shift in society concerning
the way we see and understand each other. If previous social criteria for judgment generally concerned
the earning of money (work) and the amount of
earning (income/wealth), an increasing part of those
judgments today concerns the way money is spent
(consumption). This process is not characterized by
an explicit turnover—occupation and income levels
are still significant, but what we do with our money
has become more important. Income and work are
still often necessary prerequisites for consumption.
In societies where basic and material consumption
is more or less taken for granted, the focus is on
affluence consumption, that is, consumption that
mainly considers social positioning in relation to
other individuals and groups. Incorporating symbolical and sociocultural values into consumption
makes consumption a significant part of identity
construction. One aspect with this development is
that the question about what individuals consume
is becoming less interesting than why they consume
certain items and services.
The reasoning concerns mainly exclusion and
marginalization from consumer society as a whole.
However, there is also a need to address the question
of exclusion and consumption in a more concrete
way. The position an individual holds in relation to
the labor market and the welfare security system is

1320

Social Exclusion

crucial for the opportunities to consume. A marginalized or excluded position in these areas also tends
to create barriers in the consumer dimension. The
mechanisms in the consumption dimension can
therefore be understood as related to those that
create processes of inclusion or exclusion in other
areas. For example, unemployment can be seen as a
marginalized position in the labor market that also
hinders consumption.
The consumer dimension also has its own mechanisms that create different possibilities for different
groups. For example, groups with scarce financial
resources face different mechanisms that restrict their
opportunities as consumers. For example, a lack of
certain qualifications (e.g., employment) can result
in difficulty getting access to credit. Another example
is that not having access to a car or the Internet can
restrict opportunities to obtain information about
and find transportation to buy goods or services at
lower prices. In addition, the supply of goods and
services is often poorer in low-income communities,
which means that people need to travel outside these
areas to be able to consume. An additional excluding mechanism is price, and as David Caplowitz
argues, the poor pay more. The consumption of the
poor seems to be more expensive than that of other
groups since they cannot take advantage of quantity
discount, sales, and good quality (e.g., clothes, shoes,
and goods of better durability), and they are often
forced to pay higher interest if they are able to secure
credit to buy durable goods.
Access to credit is an emerging dimension of social
exclusion in relation to consumer society. Increased
access to credit gives individuals expanding opportunities to consume, even those with a low or insecure
income. However, the downside is that the use of
markets to allocate resources to consume also transfers new risks to individuals as they now become
exposed to the combined forces of several markets.
The deregulation of the credit market has created
opportunities to borrow money, thereby increasing
wealth and prosperity, but at the same time increasing risks for material and social deprivation. The
debt crisis in Western societies during the 1980s and
1990s revealed a link between financial and social
exclusion, whereby limited access to financial services, for example caused by payment problems, led
to marginalization in areas such as the labor market,
social networks, and the ability to create and sustain
coveted lifestyles.

Another issue relating social exclusion to consumption is connected to norms and codes in the
area of consumption. There seem to be explicit dominating conceptions of how to consume in general
and how those with scarce financial resources in particular should consume. These conceptions emanate
from ideas on rationality and being economical. In
addition, dominating norms regarding consumption
also involve expectations of people being active and
mainstream consumers. In other words, marginalized groups experience pressure to express social
conformity through consumption. Consumption patterns or behaviors that correspond with dominant
norms also express “normality” and the ability to
live a respectable life as others do. Consuming in a
way that bears the sign of a poor or flawed consumer
tends to be stigmatizing and can result in feelings
of shame. Social exclusion encompasses more than
restricted opportunities: it also involves the shame
of being looked at as a failed consumer. For this
reason, there seems to be a paradox regarding the
way poor consumers “ought to” behave. On the one
hand, they are supposed be economical and not buy
anything that could be understood as unnecessary.
On the other hand, they are supposed to have a consumer pattern that expresses participation in, and
belonging to, the mainstream society.

Conclusion
Social exclusion is a concept that is relevant to consumption. Consumption can be considered as one
of the main areas in creating and sustaining welfare
to people. It is also an area where social comparisons and boundaries of mainstream, conformity, and
distinction are objects for negotiation. Consumption
is also closely connected to other significant areas
such as income, work, education, and housing. Being
in a marginalized position in these areas increases
the risk of being marginalized in the consumption
dimension. Consumption can, in addition, be seen as
a field where social polarization and social exclusion
become visible, since consumption—at least the symbolic and social dimensions—is a phenomenon that
mainly is on the surface, mirroring the sociocultural
position. This means that social exclusion is something that is created in several areas but is perhaps
most explicitly expressed in the area of consumption.
It is important to emphasize that social exclusion
usually involves intervention and regulation from

Social Movements

the state. Other areas that are important to welfare,
such as housing, education, work, and health, are
generally (even if differing among countries) subject
to governmental regulations as a means for promoting inclusion and preventing problems such as marginalization and exclusion. However, consumption
is fundamentally market based, and there are few
regulations to promote equality and inclusion. In a
society where consumption is one of the major factors in social positioning and identity construction,
there is reason to question the role of the welfare state
regarding issues such as inequality and marginalization. Consumer society reinforces social polarization
in different ways; for example, it reveals the tension
of living in scarcity in a society characterized by affluence. The requirements for being seen as an active and
respectable citizen include an appropriate behavior
as a consumer (e.g., Rose 2000). This encompasses
competences and resources to plan and make the
“right” choices, or in other words to act responsibly
and rationally. Not being able to do this (e.g., because
of financial reasons) means the risk of being seen as a
failed consumer and thus as a failed citizen.
Research in the field of consumption has not yet
made any substantial efforts to study social exclusion in the consumer culture. There seems to be a
need for research that uses analytical perspectives and
concepts from both literature on consumption and
welfare research. If this is done, consumption can be
studied as one field connected and integrated with
other societal fields.
Torbjörn Hjort
See also Consumer Regulation; Ghettos;
Individualization; Inequalities; Marxist Theories;
Poverty; Seduced and Repressed; Social Class

Further Readings
Apospori, Eleni, and Jane Millar. The Dynamics of Social
Exclusion in Europe. London: Edward Elgar, 2003.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New
Poor. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1998.
Byrne, David. Social Exclusion. Buckingham, UK: Open
University Press, 1999.
Caplowitz, David. The Poor Pay More. New York: Free
Press, 1963.
Ekström, Karin M., and Torbjörn Hjort. “Hidden
Consumers in Marketing: The Neglect of Consumers
with Scarce Resources in Affluent Societies.” Journal of
Marketing Management 25 (2009): 697–712.

1321

Giddens, Anthony. Constitution of Society: Outline of the
Theory of Structuration. Oxford: Wiley, 1986.
Kempson, Elaine, Claire Whyley, John Caskey, and Sharon
Collard. In or Out? Financial Exclusion: A Literature
and Research Review. London: Financial Services
Authority, 2000.
Kronauer, Martin. “Social Exclusion and Underclass: New
Concepts the Analysis of Poverty.” In Empirical Poverty
Research in a Comparative Perspective, edited by HansJürgen Andre␤, 51–76. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998.
Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
Ransome, Paul. Work, Consumption and Culture:
Affluence and Social Change in the Twenty-First
Century. London: Sage, 2005.
Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.

SOCIAL MOBILITY
See Social Class; Status

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Social movements are notoriously difficult to define
with any precision, at least for general purposes.
Definitions are either too narrow, such that they
appear to exclude certain obvious cases of what
we take to be movements, or they are too wide and
fail to exclude social forms that are not generally
thought of as movements. In general terms, however,
social movements emerge when social actors collectively oppose or resist some aspect of the status
quo, seeking to bring about change, or alternatively,
when they oppose change and seek either to preserve
the status quo or restore the status qua ante. Social
movements are networks of actors seeking either to
bring about or oppose social change. Although social
movements are not new to consumer culture, they
represent politicized forms of consumption that can
involve both direct and indirect means of protesting
against consumerism, and the mobilization of consumers to demand particular goods and services for
political or ethical purposes.
Insofar as movements raise and debate public
issues, that is, debates about what we as a collective should do and how we should live, they are not

1322

Social Movements

only social but also political forms. In addition, they
may enjoy some representation within parliamentary
political systems, where such systems exist. Social
movement organizations such as Greenpeace sometimes operate within parliamentary systems in a similar way to pressure groups, for example, and most
definitions of the environmental movement would
include within their remit green parties who seek
election and involve themselves directly in parliamentary politics. Most definitions of social movements
stipulate that they take form and operate outside
of parliamentary systems and states, however. This
might entail seeking to put pressure on the state by
way of protest activities, which signal and encourage public dissatisfaction, threatening a withdrawal
of legitimacy. But it might equally entail activities
that operate independently of the state altogether,
either by challenging other elites and opponents or
by seeking to construct alternative spaces within a
society that are relatively free of state regulation
or interference. In some cases, notably traditional
Marxist-influenced movements, it may also entail a
refusal to engage with a parliamentary system that is
deemed a part of the problem, preferring instead to
prepare for, cultivate, or even initiate revolutionary
overthrow of the state.
Some definitions of social movements include
among their criteria the claim that social movements
necessarily challenge elites or opponents. Although
this no doubt covers a majority of cases, it is problematic in at least two respects. First, some movements are primarily reflexive, in the respect that they
pursue self-change, and many movements include a
reflexive element. The men’s movement, for example, was not opposed to women but rather sought
to reconstruct masculinity from within, both as a
means of furthering the cause of feminism and of
adjusting to a new world where traditional masculinities were displaced. Similarly, the first wave of the
anti-psychiatry movement in the United Kingdom
consisted primarily of psychiatrists seeking to resist
and change the forms of practice instituted and
sustained by their own professional group. The
anti-psychiatrists sought, among other things, to
challenge their own practices and power as psychiatrists. And much of what they did centered on innovation and experimentation in therapeutic practice
and medical relationships.
This example shades into the second point, which
is Alberto Melucci’s observation that whereas social

movement research, on his reading, overwhelmingly
focuses on protest and confrontation, much of what
social movements actually do is about sustaining
alternative communities, identities, and practices.
The veracity of this point undoubtedly depends on
which movement(s) one is talking about and may
also reflect disagreements over the definition of
movements. Some of what Melucci calls movements
might not be so regarded by other writers. They
might be deemed countercultures or some such thing.
The evidence suggests that there is often a strong
countercultural aspect to social movements, particularly the more radical and challenging movements.
Thus, this issue remains a point of contention.
It is generally recognized that social movements
are organized as networks rather than formal organizations. This does not preclude formal organizations,
however, which are often involved in movements
and which are often the focus of social movement
research (not least because they are relatively easy
to access, compared to underground networks).
Movements may be networks of organizations (as
well as individuals). The significance of this is that
movements, in contrast to political parties and many
trade unions (which are formal organizations), cannot function as social actors. They cannot make
decisions or enter into binding agreements because,
in contrast to formal organizations, nobody is authorized to speak for the movement as a whole. There
is no official hierarchy, and those who may elect to
enter into agreements lack the means to enforce compliance from their “comrades.” This might be frustrating both for those involved in movements, who
would like to unite others behind a common line,
and for elites who seek to engage with or monitor
and control them. Lacking a “head,” movements are
not easily decapitated or corralled.
This potential for lack of coordination within
movements can also lead to tensions and schisms.
Not only do movements sometimes encounter
opposition from countermovements who challenge
them directly (e.g., fascists by antifascists and vice
versa; pro-choice by antiabortionist movements;
pro-hunting by antihunting movements, etc.), they
are also often subject to considerable internal disagreements over, for example, ideology and tactics.
Although all environmentalists champion the cause
of the environment, for example, their positions
(e.g., conservation vs. deep ecology) and tactics (e.g.,
petitions vs. ecotage) vary widely.

Social Movements

Much of the literature points to the solidarity that
movements draw from their networked infrastructure and from the collective identities that networks
often generate. Movements are not masses of atomized individuals (or unconnected organizations).
They are precisely networks. They recruit through
networks and often emerge out of preexisting networks. Activists interact and thereby build up shared
understandings and identities as well as solidarity.
How this squares with their internal disagreements
and factions is a variable matter, meaning that it varies not only between cases but also within cases over
time. There is a durability to movements. They preexist and outlive the flashpoints of protest with which
they are commonly identified. At the same time they
are volatile and dynamic social forms whose internal
organization and cohesion (qua networks) are complex and unstable.

Analyzing Movements
The sociology of social movements has approached
its subject matter, broadly speaking, from two distinct points of view. Some focus on the link between
social movements and central fracture lines in society. Marxist writing on class-based movements and
the historical/transformative role of the working
class exemplifies this tradition. Contradictions and
fracture lines that are central to the constitution of
capitalist society are said to give rise to one central
social movement (the labor movement), whose historical mission is revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Theorists of the new social movements sought
to revise this Marxist picture, arguing that capitalist societies had evolved, displacing the tensions that
gave rise to powerful labor movements but only
displacing them, such that new lines of fracture and
new movements emerged. Theories of new social
movements challenge the grand historical narrative
of Marxism, its identification of the central fault line
of capitalist societies, and its identification of the proletariat as the protagonist of changes to come. But
they only change the content of the narrative, not the
form. They seek to replace Marxism with another
grand narrative, focused on a different central fault
line and a different historical protagonist. More
recent writing on Empire and Multitude (Hardt and
Negri 2000, 2006), however much it differs from
traditional Marxism and theories of new social
movements, also continues this trend. It reflects on

1323

movements from the vantage point of a macrocosmic
picture of the central tensions of the society to which
they belong.
This tradition in social movement studies, however much it might seek to recognize heterogeneity within the movement sector of society, tends to
follow Marxism in looking for the movement that
characterizes a particular society or historical conjuncture. The second tradition, by contrast, is much
more pluralistic in scope. It is centered on the mechanisms of movements: what they involve, how they
work, what factors give rise to them, what contributes to their success or failure, and so on. Although
there is a tendency for such work to focus on progressive movements and movements that analysts
support, there is also a tendency for analysts to focus
on whatever movements, groups, and protests they
can find data for. The desire to find the movement of
the moment is usually absent, as is the concern to link
that movement to a grand narrative of sociohistorical
change. Interestingly, moreover, where analysis in the
first tradition often focuses on the key tensions and
grievances that are said to provoke activism, analysts
in the second have tended to argue that strains and
grievances are far from being sufficient causes of
activism and (somewhat more controversially) may
not even be necessary (at least in the respect that
grievances can be fabricated by existing movements
or “movement entrepreneurs”).
However different these approaches are, and
however different the questions that they ask, there
is no reason why they cannot be combined. The
work of Melucci, in particular, represents an important attempt to bring them together. Having sought
to locate the new social movements within a grand
historical narrative, as in the first tradition, Melucci
then turns to an analysis of the mechanisms of these
movements’ various manifestations and mobilizations, drawing explicitly on the second tradition (and
also adding considerably to its focus and analytic
toolbox).

Consumer Movements?
One of the broad social changes sometimes referred
to in the grand historical narratives mentioned earlier involves a shift away from an industrial society,
centered on production, toward a consumer society.
In this context, the shift to a consumer society entails
both a geographical movement of much production

1324

Social Movements

away from the developed world, into the so-called
Global South, and a decline of class-based identities and cultures, which are said to have been
replaced by consumption-based identities and cultures. Social actors, so the argument goes, no longer
define themselves by what they make. They define
themselves by what they purchase. And they no
longer identify and form communities with others
in similar occupations. Insofar as they form communities at all, they do so on the basis of shared
consumption practices.
This has led to pessimism and criticism in some
quarters regarding the future of social movement
activism and the health of political culture more
generally. Herbert Marcuse, for example, claims
that consumption generates an illusory happiness
through the satisfaction of false needs, effectively
inducing complacency and political indifference.
Workers’ subjective interests are trained on the latest
must-have items and, as long as they can afford to
purchase these items, they remain happy and politically passive. Likewise, Jürgen Habermas argues
that the consumer role is increasingly displacing the
citizen role in contemporary society, not least in relations with the state. Individuals increasingly engage
with the state as consumers of its services rather than
citizens. This is problematic, according to Habermas,
because consumption is a largely passive process,
which, if it entails complaint and protest at all, does
so only in a very narrow utilitarian format: consumers want more for themselves and (sometimes) stamp
their feet until they get it. This contrasts with the citizen role, which entails a disposition to engage with
wider political-moral agendas and make properly
political (i.e., public and moral) claims on the state.
The consumption role is inherently apolitical, for
Habermas, and the shift to state provision of services
for consumers is inherently depoliticizing.
Whatever the merits of these arguments, it is
clear that they do not tell the whole story. In Nick
Crossley’s 2006 work on mental health movements,
for example, he notes that neoliberal reforms of the
British National Health Service, which, among other
things, attempted explicitly to remodel “patients”
as “consumers,” actually facilitated protest.
Marketizing services challenged monopolies and the
power/authority they generate. In some cases this
process also allowed patient groups to devise and sell
their own services, buoying up the emphasis on selfhelp alternatives within the “survivor” movement

and legitimizing the claim of survivors to their own
form of expertise. Moreover, recasting the patient as
a consumer gave the patient a right and sense of felt
entitlement to challenge interventions perceived to be
harmful or inappropriate. However passive and disempowered the consumer may be, compared to the
citizen, the consumer is certainly more active than
the patient, as traditionally conceived.
The impact of these reforms is only a small part
of a much bigger picture. Patient activism predated
these reforms considerably. The reforms enhanced
activism but did not trigger it. Furthermore, there
was a general ambivalence regarding the consumer
role among campaigners. The radicals, in particular,
were often particularly skeptical (not least because
of the association of consumers with markets and
neoliberalism). In a Habermasian vein, they insisted
that they were political actors rather than consumers.
Notwithstanding this, however, the positive impact
of consumer culture on mental health activism clearly
challenges the claims of Habermas and Marcuse.
The growth of many other consumer movements,
both within and outside the framework of the (welfare) state, reinforces this basic point. Although some
of these movements, in some of their aspects, might
confirm Habermas’s fears by maintaining a narrow,
instrumental, and utilitarian focus on maximizing
their own individual consumer benefits, thus remaining below the threshold of properly political action,
there is no reason to believe that this is an exclusive
tendency. Consumption clearly can, in some respects,
spark political conflicts that result in social movement mobilization. Moreover, it would seem that in
some cases it provides a sufficient basis and focus for
the formation of the social networks and collective
identities involved in movements.
In a slightly different vein, it is clear that consumption can be politicized in social movement discourse
and, indeed, has been politicized within the discourse
of what is variously referred to as the “global justice,” “alter-mondial,” “anticorporate,” or “anticapitalist” movement. Although the moral focus of this
movement is generally focused on exploitative and
oppressive working conditions in the Global South,
this has led to a political focus on consumption in the
Global North, in particular to an effort to reconnect
consumers, morally, with those who produce the
products that they consume. Directly addressing the
depoliticization and commodity fetishism referred to
in Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional consumers,

Social Movements

activists have attempted to make consumers aware
of the conditions under which certain commodities
are produced and of their own role, qua economic
demand, in the reproduction of poverty and, in some
cases, virtual slavery.
Interestingly, this has also involved protest techniques directly related to consumption. Whereas the
public face of the global justice movement is often
associated with high-profile demonstrations and riots
in such places as Seattle, Genoa, and Washington,
DC, a considerable part of its activism before and
after these events has focused on attempts to change
patterns and practices of consumption. Activists have
called for boycotts of particular products (e.g., training shoes produced in sweatshops) and also buycotts;
that is, they have called on consumers to specifically
purchase from “approved” moral producers and/or
outlets (e.g., fair trade products and outlets). Like
any other protest technique, these techniques attempt
to force the hand of opponents by applying pressure;
in this case the pressure of the market. Protestors
bring sanctions to bear within the market mechanism, rewarding good behavior with purchases and
punishing bad behavior with a drop in demand and
economic revenue.
Such techniques are found not only within the context of the global justice movement. Environmental
and animal rights protestors have used their consumption practices as tactics of struggle for many
years, and there are many other notable examples
from recent history: for example, boycotts of South
African products and products of major companies
who traded with South Africa in the antiapartheid
struggles of the late 1980s.
In the related case of vegetarianism (which is
inspired, in many cases, by concerns for animal
welfare), one can see how success has the potential
to breed further success in relation to these protest
techniques. A growing number of vegetarians create
a demand for better provision from restaurants and
supermarkets. When this demand is met, that represents a double victory for vegetarianism. It represents
a concession from mainstream society, and it also
creates an environment in which it is easier to be a
vegetarian; an environment, that is, in which more
people are likely to convert to vegetarianism, further
increasing demand and so on.
These examples suggest a rather different picture
of the consumer from that suggested by Marcuse,
Habermas, and other critical theorists. They point to

1325

ethical and politicized consumers. Debates rage, of
course, as to the relative merits of boy/buycotts,
compared with more traditional protest repertoires,
and indeed about the claims to “activism” of those
whose only form of involvement is by means of their
consumption choices. In themselves, however, these
debates demonstrate the political nature of consumption. Consumption and its political potential are
issues on the activist agenda.
One final angle on the relationship between movements and consumption concerns the consumption
of movement activism itself. In the 1970s, certain
resource mobilization theorists claimed that protest
was increasingly professionalized and that popular
involvement often amounted to little more than
sending donations to social movement organizations
who would act on their behalf—so-called checkbook
activism (Zald and McCarthy 1987). In effect, rather
than directly fighting for whatever they believe in,
social agents pay others to do so; they purchase
the services of professional activists and organizations. These claims, which were repeated by Robert
Putnam (2000) in his celebrated account of the
decline of social capital in the United States during
the second half of the twentieth century, are clearly
overstated. One need only look to the mass protests
about global justice, the Western invasion of Iraq,
and the Israeli invasion of Gaza to see that direct participation in protest and social movement activism
is very much alive and well. Many of these protests
have enlisted massive direct support across the world.
However, there are clearly instances where concerned
citizens “purchase” the services of campaign groups
to pursue their preferred political goals, and this is
important. Given that this appears to run parallel
to more direct forms of engagement, and given that
participation in protest has probably always been the
preserve of a minority in most cases, some are not
inclined to perceive it, as Putnam does, as a decline
of political culture. To the contrary, some, such as
Crossley, suggest that it constitutes another way in
which in consumerism and activism overlap, another
politicized form of consumption.
Nick Crossley
See also Citizenship; Collective Identity; Environmental
Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption;
Lifestyle; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Political
and Ethical Consumption; Self-Reflexivity; Virtual
Communities

1326

Social Network Analysis

Further Readings
Crossley, Nick. Making Sense of Social Movements.
Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2002.
Crossley, Nick. Contesting Psychiatry. London: Routledge,
2006.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action.
Vol. 2. Cambridge: Polity, 1987.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2006.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London: Arc,
1986.
Melucci, Alberto. Nomads of the Present. London: Radius,
1986.
Melucci, Alberto. Challenging Codes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Touraine, Alain. The Voice and the Eye. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Zald, Mayer, and John D. McCarthy, eds. Social
Movements in an Organizational Society. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987.

SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS
How and what we consume, like our behavior
more generally, is shaped by our interactions and
relations with other people and by networks generated through interactions and relations between the
multiple actors in the various populations to which
we belong. There is a growing recognition in social
science that networks are central to a proper understanding of taste and consumption. This poses a
methodological challenge, however, as most standard
methods of data gathering and analysis are not well
suited to the analysis of relational data, that is, data
on relations between actors.
Social network analysis (SNA) is a set of techniques for handling, analyzing, and visualizing such
data. It is a structural method that is used to examine
the pattern of connection among a set of actors. As
a formal method, it can be applied to any type of
relationship and any set of actors. Researchers might
study relations within sets of individual human
beings, organizations, cities, websites, or any other
“node” capable of engaging in the types of relationships that are of interest to us. Likewise, the relations

in question might be relations of friendship, sexual
contact, economic exchange, bullying, aggression,
migration, URL connection, or acquaintance—again,
any type of relationship that is possible between
the specified entities and significant in terms of the
research questions and interests.
SNA emerged in an overlap among a number
of social science disciplines and a branch of mathematics known as graph theory. Over time, it has
extended into other social science disciplines and
has incorporated other mathematical aspects,
most notably statistics. In addition, the growing
popularity of the concept of networks and of graph
theoretical methods of analyzing them across the
academic field has led to various interdisciplinary debates (and turf wars), most notably with
physicists.
There are three primary types of network data
used in SNA:
• Ego-net data. An ego-net is the network that
forms around a particular actor. Typically, analysis
focuses on, or compares, the networks of various
egos. This requires that for each ego, researchers
derive a list of relevant alters and a list of all relevant relations between those alters.
• Complete network data. In this form of network analysis, researchers define a population,
specify the type of relationship they are interested
in, and investigate which members of the population have that type of relationship.
• Two-mode analysis. Typically the “modes”
in question are actors and some context where
actors might meet. The underlying idea is that
actors are connected through, for example, their
common participation in the same events, and
events are connected through the participation of
the same actor(s) in them. Technically two-mode
networks can be decomposed into two complete
networks: for example, research on the links
between people and places might produce a network of people (linked through places) and a
network of places (linked by people). Reference to
two-mode networks, however, generally suggests
an attempt to deal with both modes in the same
network.
SNA procedures differ in accordance with the
type of network being analyzed. In what follows, the
paradigm example is complete networks, unless otherwise indicated.

Social Network Analysis

Data Gathering and Network Representation
SNA is a method or set of methods of data analysis.
In most of its forms, it requires data that confirm the
absence or presence of a specified type of relationship between every possible pairing of actors within a
given population. As such, it presupposes a systematic
survey of that population. But that survey can be conducted by way of any of a wide range of traditional
social scientific methods of data gathering: for example, participant observation, archival analysis, secondary sources, questionnaire survey, and interviews.
The actors who are linked in a network are commonly referred to as “nodes” or, following graph
theory, “vertices.” SNA is a method for analyzing
the pattern of connection between a set of vertices.
This requires a means of recording and representing
such patterns. SNA has two basic means: adjacency
matrices and graphs. Table 1 is a hypothetical adjacency matrix.
In a simple adjacency matrix, the vertices are listed
both across the top row and down the furthest lefthand column. The presence or absence of relations
between them is indicated by way of 1s (present) and
0s (absent) where their rows and columns intersect.
A relationship between Dick and Sally is indicated,
for example, by a 1 at the intersection of his row
(row 2) and her column (column 3). Technically, if
we call this matrix A (the capital and bold face both
being conventional), the intersection is called a23,
using lower case to indicate that we are referring to
an element of the matrix, rather than the matrix itself,
and indicating in subscript the row number followed
by the column number (always in that order).
In many cases, it will be meaningless to ask if vertices have a relationship to themselves. In such cases,
by convention, the relations are recorded as absent.
It might be meaningful to ask about reflexive relations, however. We might, for example, want to
know if Sally likes the others in her group but also
if she likes herself. In this case, the diagonal becomes
operative and records genuine information.
Table 1

(1) Tom
(2) Dick
(3) Sally
(4) Harry
(5) Mary

1327

The matrix in Table 1 is basic. It records the presence or absence of relationships only. This can be
elaborated in a number of ways. Some relationships,
for example, are necessarily reciprocated and thus
undirected: if John lives with Jane, then Jane lives
with John. Other relations, however, such as liking,
e-mailing, or passing on a virus, are not necessarily
reciprocated. Where both the nature of a relationship and the method of gathering and recording
data allow for nonreciprocation, the relationship is a
directed relationship.
A further complication is weighting, which might
be either ordinal or interval. In a questionnaire, for
example, researchers might ask respondents to rate
their level of trust in others on a scale of 0 to 5, giving the researchers an ordinal score to include in their
matrix in place of the simple binary recording of
absence or presence. Alternatively, in an ethnography or archival search, the researchers may count the
number of recorded meetings (or letters or e-mails)
between two parties, giving them an interval measure
of (in this case) their frequency of interaction.
In the case of two-mode networks, an incidence
rather than an adjacency matrix is used. Here
researchers list actors down the first column and
events (or whatever) across the top row, indicating
participation (or not) with 1s and 0s. Most network software packages can either analyze this data
directly or convert it into two adjacency matrices.
A graph records the same information as a matrix
and sometimes further information too. In the simple
case, vertices are represented as circles and the absence
or presence of relationships between them is represented by the absence or presence of connecting lines
between them. Figure 1 is a graph of relations between
protagonists in the Manchester post-punk scene in
1980 (see Crossley 2009 for an analysis), drawn using
the free-to-download Pajek software package.
When relationships are undirected, they are
referred to, following graph-theoretic convention, as
“edges.” When they are directed, they have arrowheads indicating direction, and they are called “arcs.”

A Hypothetical Adjacency Matrix
(1) Tom

(2) Dick

(3) Sally

(4) Harry

(5) Mary

0

0
0

1
1
0

1
1
0
0

0
0
1
1
0

1328

Social Network Analysis

Odgie

Deaves

McGeocn

Robin
Woody

Naylor

Jackson
Spencer

Adamson

Random

Cassidy

Formula

Dickinson
Cookson

Wiggin

Koman

Diggle
Shelley

Cassidy

Cundalt
Devoto

Kerr

Moscrop

O’Hara

Jilted

Morley
Witts
CooperClarke

Saville

Rainford
Mitchel Bowers
Hopkins

Boon

Hook
Gilbert

Sumner

Wilson
Erasmus

Cummins

Hannett

Riley
Davies

Burns

SHanley

Kadmon

Devine

Bramah

KCaroll

Scanlon

Postman

Baines

Gretton

Morris

Hilton

Madely

Davenport
Nicholls
Finney

Perrin

Reilly
Barret
Ross
Garrity
Tomanov
Grantha

Wright
Sidebottom

Figure 1

Faal

Brotherdale

O’Boyle

Graham

Nance

Morrissey

Beattie

Rowland

Hucknall

Day
Rossi2
Bates
Crookes

Duffy

Leigh
Pawlett

Grey
Darbyshire
Hempsall

Friel

MESmith

TJDavison

Curtis

Sharp
Rowbotham

Trotter

Mason

McGann

PHanley

Mulvey

Tabac

Joyce

Middles

Callender

Burke

Garret

Johnson

Howells2
Howells

Savage

Garv

Maher

Topping
Terrell

Dickinson
CCarrol

AZero

Doyle

Smythe

Hilton
Murray2
Murray
Dyson

Williams
Standley
Wilks

Joyce
Smith
Moody
I urner

StantheMan

A Graph or Social Network Diagram

In some cases, a reciprocated directed relationship is
represented by two arcs, one moving in each direction between vertices. In other cases, there is a single
arc with arrowheads pointing in both directions.
Weightings are represented either by the thickness of
an arc/edge or a numerical label.
The position of the vertices on a graph is usually
irrelevant from an analytic point of view and may be
arbitrary or conventional in any case. The graph theory that SNA draws on operates with a different conception of space than our usual Cartesian conception.
“Distances” are measured in terms of “degrees,”
a degree being a connection. Whether two vertices
are next to one another on a graph or far apart is
beside the point. What matters is how many relations
(degrees) apart they are. Likewise, “positions” in a
graph refer not to standard spatial coordinates but
rather to patterns of connection. There are, for example, three basic measures of how “central” any given
vertex is in a graph. Researchers can measure how
many connections each vertex has, deeming those
with more connections more central (degree centrality). They can examine the chains of connection

linking every vertex with every other, deeming
those with the shortest paths to travel more central
(closeness centrality). Or, again focusing on paths,
researchers can examine who most often lies in the
path connecting other pairs of vertices (betweenness
centrality). This has nothing to do with being located
in the middle of the graph (or anywhere else).
Given this, various scaling techniques can be used
to, for example, position those vertices close to one
another who have a similar pattern of connection,
and researchers will often manipulate graphs (legitimately) in an effort to make patterns of connection
and the underlying structure of the network, as
revealed by other measures, apparent.

Network Measures
Analysis proper involves a range of measures that
describe the network or some aspect of it in numerical terms. Some measures describe the whole network. Some describe or identify subnetworks within
it. Some describe the positional properties of individual vertices.

Social Networks

The centrality measures referred to earlier
describe positional properties of individual vertices
and exemplify typical positional measures: each
vertex has a score for each of the measures, and
researchers can determine the most central, least
central, and so on, vertices from these scores. Each
vertex has a score that reflects something about its
position within the network. In the case of centrality,
this can be useful for identifying actors who are in
a position to exert influence, mobilize support, and
so forth, and also those who are less able. At the
level of the whole, various measures focus on the
extent of connection within a network and also its
degree of centralization, that is, the extent to which
the network is linked and thus held together by a
small number of central players. These measures are
important because research suggests, for example,
that well-connected networks enjoy higher levels of
solidarity and entail specific constraints and opportunities for both individual and collective action,
while high centralization often facilitates coordination and organization. There are various concepts
and measures in SNA that allow researchers to identify subgroups (e.g., cliques and cores). These are
important for exploring issues of integration, exclusion, and conflict.
Nick Crossley
See also Collective Consumption; Collective Identity;
Friendship; Social Movements; Social Networks;
Subculture; Taste; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
Becker, Gary. Accounting for Taste. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996.
Crossley, Nick. “The New Social Physics and the Science of
Small World Networks.” Sociological Review 53, no. 2
(2005): 351–358.
Crossley, Nick. “Small World Networks, Complex Systems
and Sociology.” Sociology 42, no. 2 (2008): 261–277.
Crossley, Nick. “The Man Whose Web Expanded:
Network Dynamics in Manchester’s Post-Punk Music
Scene 1976–1980.” Poetics 37, no. 1 (2009): 24–49.
Scott, John. Social Network Analysis: A Handbook.
London: Sage, 2000.
Warde, Alan, and Gindo Tampubolon. “Social Capital,
Networks and Leisure Consumption.” Sociological
Review 50, no. 2 (2002): 155–181.
Wasserman, Stanley, and Katherine Faust. Social Network
Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.

1329

SOCIAL NETWORKS
A social network may be defined as a set of actors
(generally individuals or organizations) linked by
social relations or ties of a specified type, such as
friendship, kinship, flow of resources, shared interests, or group membership, to name but a few.
Research carried out in various fields has shown that
social networks play a central role in determining the
way problems are solved, innovations are diffused,
and organizations are run; social networks also play
a role in the degree to which individuals succeed in
achieving their goals.
A social network may be represented as a map
of all of the relevant social relationships linking a
group of actors. Nodes and ties are often displayed in
a social network diagram, in which nodes represent
the actors and ties are the lines representing a particular social relation. To study any social network, it is
essential to examine the structure of the relationships
between the nodes analyzed. The measurement of
relationships between actors is called social network
analysis (SNA).
SNA has been used to describe networks of relationships and to trace the flow of information between
individuals and groups. This approach stands in sharp
contrast to other areas of social sciences, which, in
order to study attitudes, opinions, and behaviors,
have tended to focus on actors’ attributes—that is, the
characteristics of people, groups, and organizations—
rather than on actors’ relations.
Those interested in social networks have developed several tools and concepts—many adapted
from graph theory—to help reveal and characterize
network linkages. Through sociograms, researchers
are able to visualize structures, identify leaders, and
isolate individuals in groups to show asymmetry and
reciprocity. When looking at the map of relations
between nodes (or actors), the focus is usually on
(a) the overall network properties, (b) the nature of
links, and (c) actors’ positions.
Research has demonstrated the importance of
bridging contacts between groups. In this regard,
many studies have demonstrated that whereas strong
ties may be central to maintaining or reproducing a
group’s position and identity, weaker or bridging ties
have in fact proved more significant for spreading
information across group boundaries by facilitating
the linking of actors that would otherwise be isolated
from each other. As has frequently been shown by

1330

Social Networks

Mark Granovetter and Nan Lin, without weak ties,
information does not flow to outside the single group
or network. Network analysis can also be used to
study change within a group or among groups over
time. For example, economic transactions between
nations or specific economic groups could be measured at several points in time, thereby using the network perspective to study longitudinal changes.
The historical roots of SNA are to be found in the
work of German sociologist Georg Simmel, who, at
the turn of the twentieth century, sought to construct
a theory that explained how various social phenomena come about. Simmel’s famous writing on the
fundamental difference between the interactions in
dyads (two people) and triads (three people), as well
as his notion of urban systems being composed of
intersecting networks and circles, was the basis for
his “formal sociology,” which is often considered a
precursor to SNA.
Pioneers of SNA came from sociology and
social psychology (e.g., Jacob Moreno and Dorwin
Cartwright) and anthropology (e.g., John Barnes
and Clyde Mitchell). The first operationalization of a
social network was made by Jacob Moreno, who also
coined the term sociometrics to describe the quantitative study of interpersonal relationships. Although
rooted in the social sciences, SNA is an inherently
interdisciplinary endeavor, and the concepts of SNA
developed out of a favorable interplay of social theory and application, with its own formal mathematical, statistical, and computing methodology.
With the development of information technologies and computer-mediated communication, SNA
has taken on new directions. In particular, researchers, such as Han Park, have begun to analyze networks created by hyperlinks that webpages establish
between one another (so-called hyperlink network
analysis). From this perspective, an actor is a website belonging to a person, private company, public
organization, city, or nation-state, and hyperlinks are
relationships between the nodes. This line of research
is based on the assumption that websites represent
permanent settings of representation for groups, individuals, and organizations. As people make greater
use of computer networks to search for information,
organizations and individuals offering services, content, or an alternative forum for discussion tend to
put an increasing amount of effort and resources into
the construction of their websites. Links between
websites are able to facilitate a range of significant
new and old communicative functions, such as

information provision, organizational alliancebuilding, and message amplification. Moreover, the
“relational” quality of hyperlinks may allow actors
to build or “reinforce” alliances by connecting previously disparate groups and their potential audiences.
Studying networks (both virtual and real) has
helped to uncover specific dynamics and mechanisms
regarding patterns of influence, as well as of certain
important human and organizational activities,
including the adoption of new ideas, recruitment,
framing group interests, tactical adaptation of action
repertoires, and so on. Particularly noticeable are
the studies that aim to determine which mechanisms
make the diffusion of innovation possible, as was
the case of the research conducted by Everett Rogers
and others in three different countries (Nigeria, India,
and Brazil), in order to determine what influenced
the adoption of new agricultural practices among
farmers. To understand how new practices spread,
farmers were asked to name their three best friends,
the three most influential people in their community,
the three most influential people regarding various
farm innovations, and the best person with whom to
organize a cooperative project.
Social network analysis has also offered a set of
new analytic techniques for the exploration of the
determinants of taste and their expression in consumption patterns. Given that cultural goods and
performances serve as a bridge not only to sustain
current network connections but also to gain and
cement new ones, as Paul DiMaggio found, a network approach may be able to empirically study
the influence of social relationships on consumption. Moreover, if consumption styles are a means
of drawing social boundaries, including some and
excluding others, the formal aspects of networks may
serve to illustrate patterns of inclusion and exclusion.
Adopting a network approach, for example, has shed
light on the mechanisms that translate the mastery of
different types of cultural knowledge into integration
across distant social positions or even closure around
strong group boundaries.
Francesca Forno
See also Collective Identity; Families; Information Society;
Network Society; Sociability; Social Movements; Social
Network Analysis; Virtual Communities

Further Readings
DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.” American
Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440–55.

Social Shaping of Technology
Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.”
American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360–1380.
Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties: A
Network Theory Revisited.” In Social Structure and
Network Analysis, edited by P. V. Marsden and N. Lin,
105–130. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982.
Lin, Nan. “Social Networks and Status Attainment.”
Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 467–487.
Lizardo, Omar. “How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal
Networks.” American Sociological Review 71 (2006):
778–807.
Monge, Peter R., and Noshir S. Contractor. Theories of
Communication Networks. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Park, Han W. “What Is Hyperlink Network Analysis? New
Method for the Study of Social Structure on the Web.”
Connections 25, no. 1 (2003): 49–61.
Park, Han W., Mike Thelwall, and Randolph Kluver.
“Political Hyperlinking in South Korea: Technical
Indicators of Ideology and Content.” Sociological
Research Online 10, no. 3 (2005).
Rogers, Everett M., and F. Floyd Shoemaker.
Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural
Approach. New York: Free Press, 1971.
Scott, John. Social Network Analysis. London: Sage,
2000.
Wasserman, Stanley, and Katherine Faust. Social Network
Analysis: Methods and Application. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.

SOCIAL NORMS
See Acculturation; Anthropology; Sociology

SOCIAL SHAPING

OF

TECHNOLOGY

The social shaping of technology (SST) is a broadly
defined term used to identify the approaches that
emerged in the mid-1980s with the aim of understanding the significance of technology in society and
the influences of the broader social context on technological innovation. SST approaches developed as
a critique of types of technological determinism and
of linear models constructed to explain innovation.
They are thus characterized by considering technology
as the result of broader processes where technical, cultural, and social aspects are interwoven and
mutually influence one another. SST constitutes one

1331

of the traditions that make up the core of science and
technology studies (STS). It has also become popular
in other sectors, such as media and communication
studies, organization and work studies, everyday life
sociology, and social theory, and, more generally, in
many contexts where technologies are a crucial element. Especially since the beginning of the twentyfirst century, SST has also influenced scholars in
studies of consumption and material culture. Indeed,
SST approaches often underline the relevance of the
sphere of use and consumption, showing that people’s consumption practices are the result of negotiated processes; they also devote close attention to
materiality, often stressing the relevance of objects
and things in social interaction.

Origins and Different Approaches
From a theoretical point of view, SST approaches
mainly developed from British sociology of science
studies, sociology of scientific knowledge, and history of technology, becoming habitual international
reference points in the social studies of technology in the second half of the 1980s. SST criticized
traditional approaches to technology, which only
addressed its impacts and its effects on society, considering technological development as autonomous
to society. SST approaches are also characterized by
examining the content and the design of technology,
exploring a range of different factors involved in the
emergence of technology in society, including organizational, political, economic, and cultural aspects.
Adopting a strong constructivist perspective derived
from the sociology of science, SST stresses the interactive nature of the process of innovation and the
diffusion of technologies.
Although SST is often understood to be one particular theory, it does not represent a well-defined
approach and can be considered broad, gathering together a vast range of scholars and traditions
including, for example, industrial sociology, economic history, and the sociology of science. However,
two specific approaches are usually considered to be
the main reference points in the field of SST. The first
one is the social construction of technology (SCOT)
approach (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987), which
offers an interpretative model for the emergence of
technology in society as the result of a process of
negotiation between relevant social groups. During
the process of social construction, artifacts are characterized by an interpretative flexibility, and their shape

1332

Social Shaping of Technology

and uses can be influenced by different sociocultural
agents and factors. The process of negotiation of the
actual shape of technology ends with a closure of the
negotiation process and, therefore, with the closure of
the social construction of technology. The main focus
of the SCOT approach is on the design and development of technology, which is seen as a phase during
which artifacts embody the social relations between
the different agents and groups involved in their
design and use, thus encompassing the social interests
shared by social groups of reference.
One notable example is the case of the social
construction of the bicycle in the second half of the
nineteenth century, where authors have shown that
the definitive shape of the bicycle emerged from a
process of negotiation in which different kinds of
users and their divergent interpretations of its use in
society influenced the technical solutions adopted for
the bicycle’s evolution. This example became relevant for consumption because of its ability to address
how the sphere of consumption of everyday objects
influences the actual technical details of an artifact as
well as the more general sociocultural role of these
artifacts in society.
The second, more relevant, tradition in the
field of SST is the actor-network theory (ANT), an
approach developed by different authors from sociology and the anthropology of science, most notably by Bruno Latour. ANT developed at the same
time as the SCOT approach and from the same
context of science studies, but it assumed a different
vocabulary and a more radical epistemological position, especially in that ANT collapses any analytical
distinction between humans and things—referred
to as nonhuman actors—and therefore accords
a more effective agency to material objects in the
social processes. While SCOT and, more generally, approaches to SST often remained confined
to the study of technology and artifacts, ANT also
strongly contributed to establishing the study of science and technology as a relevant reference point in
social theory and in the epistemological debate.

Influences and Applications in
Consumption Studies
There are at least two issues that represent a crucial
terrain, where approaches to the shaping of technology and consumer studies have demonstrated a
recurrent reciprocal interaction: the centrality of the

situational use to the consumption of material artifacts and the tendency to recognize a relevant role in
the social context and interact with these same material artifacts. An early case of convergence between
consumption studies and SST is the work of historian of technology Ruth Cowan on housework and
domestic technologies. Cowan contributed to articulating the study of the relationship between technology and consumption processes, from a feminist
point of view, through the concept of a “consumption junction.” Indeed, she argued that focusing on
the consumer and on social relations in the home,
in which consumers are embedded, enables a better
understanding of the emergence of the process of
industrialization of the household and its tendency
toward a primary and privatized place of consumption in modern society.
This specific tradition in SST, which stresses places
and practices of consumption as crucial elements in
the emergence of technology, has been successively
developed in different directions. The role of users
and places of consumption has thus been recognized as a culturally contested terrain where users,
consumer organizations, designers, producers, and
salespeople negotiate and give differing meanings
and uses to artifacts and technologies (Oudshoorn
and Pinch 2003). Consequently, although the mainstream literature on consumer culture is not always
explicitly addressed by SST-related research, in these
works consumer-related issues are often addressed,
pointing out the crucial role of consumption in shaping the sociomaterial world.
Another emerging theoretical and empirical
interconnection between SST approaches and the
sociology of consumption regards the relevance
of the agency of material objects in the social processes. Adoptions of SST approaches in the field of
consumer studies underline the fact that objects and
things contain specific scripts or courses of action,
which are connected with the social relations and
representations that influenced the process of design
of material artifacts (Dant 2005). In so doing, SST
refers also to the fact that things cannot carry any
kind of social meanings, rather they present some
degree of obduracy, which is embedded into them
with the closure of their interpretative flexibility at
the design stage.
Since 2000, various convergences have emerged
from consumer studies and SST traditions, mainly
in relation to the consumption of technology in

Socialism and Consumption

everyday life and especially in cases where the influence of the object design phase on consumer practices
has been addressed. One example is the relevance
of the freezer in the household and its imbrication
in multiple everyday consumption practices (Shove
and Southerton 2000). Moreover, the tradition of
SST has also directly influenced the development of
theory of practice in consumption studies. Indeed,
Elizabeth Shove and colleagues appropriated many
of the SST standpoints to explain the relationship
between artifact design and consumer practices. For
example, they analyzed the consumption of digital
photography, showing how consumer practices are
dependent on knowledge, competences, and the
trajectories of consumer involvement in the use of
artifacts. Thus, considering specific competences
of use and technical knowledge as part of the consumption practice of photography, the authors
show that the organizational, social, and material
aspects inscribed in a technology directly influence
the stability, the re-creation, or the abandonment of
social consumption practices.
Paolo Magaudda
See also Actor-Network Theory; Bicycles; Diffusion
Studies and Trickle Down; Domestic Technologies;
Innovation Studies; Material Culture; Theories of
Practice

Further Readings
Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds.
The Social Construction of Technological Systems.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Cowan, Ruth. More Work for Mother. New York: Basic
Books, 1983.
Dant, Tim. Materiality and Society. Buckingham, UK: Open
University Press, 2005.
Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Milton Keynes, UK: Open
University Press, 1987.
MacKenzie, Donald A., and Judy Wajcman, eds. The Social
Shaping of Technology. Milton Keynes, UK: Open
University Press, 1985.
Oudshoorn, Nelly, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds. How Users
Matter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the
Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience.” Journal of
Material Culture 3 (2000): 301–319.
Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack
Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg,
2007.

SOCIALISM

AND

1333

CONSUMPTION

Socialist governments have sought to shape the
meaning of consumption for their citizens, as well
as to control the production and distribution of consumer goods. Ideological representations of goods,
services, and lifestyles aimed to prevent popular
unrest, to motivate people to work, and to demonstrate the justice and superiority of socialism in contrast to capitalism. This entry focuses on the ideology
of consumption. Although the emphasis here is on
the USSR, Soviet ideology served as a template for
many other socialist governments.

Necessary Inequality
Socialist ideology has wavered between justifying
and decrying consumer inequalities. Vladimir Lenin,
the architect of the Russian revolution, argued that
society first had to pass through a transitional stage
of socialism on the path from capitalism to communism. To consolidate power, Lenin argued, socialist
regimes must prioritize reorganizing relations of production over social justice in consumption. Goods
would be allocated based on work rather than needs.
Thus, the revolutionary slogan “Only the Red Army
will give us bread,” was tempered with Lenin’s
injunctions: “He who does not work shall not eat,”
and “An equal amount of products for an equal
amount of labor.”
Joseph Stalin cited Lenin to justify starvation
rations for peasants, whose labor contributions were
seen as less critical to building socialism than those
of skilled workers, army officers, or party leaders.
Amid widespread dearth, Stalin promised prosperity
was around the corner. Socialism was supposed to
yield an abundance of products for consumption by
all members of society and would lead to prosperous
and cultured lives. This potential was exemplified in
a baroque architectural style and in the production
of luxury goods such as champagne and chocolate.
This ideology of socialist luxury represented a dramatic shift from Leninist asceticism. Although in
short supply, the existence of such treats reinforced
the promise of a radiant future.
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, decried the
trend toward “excessive inequality.” The needs of
the lowest common denominator were asserted to
justify a priority on agriculture, wage and pension

1334

Socialism and Consumption

reforms, and a shift in style toward simplicity and
utility in architecture and design. Leonid Brezhnev,
on the other hand, returned to the doctrine of necessary inequality in introducing the ideology of
“developed socialism.” In this discourse, the USSR
had achieved great advances in production and social
unity, yet the socialist phase of development would
last much longer than previously anticipated and the
dream of equality must again be deferred.
Continuous improvements in living standards were promised despite persistent inequality.
Prosperity had become a universal right, at least
discursively. The Twenty-fifth Communist Party
Conference declared the importance of consumer
well-being to the development of the Soviet state,
and the Soviet media, in showcasing prototypes of
new appliances and consumer electronics, promised
an immanent “consumer revolution.” Statistics on
increasing per capita ownership of televisions, washing machines, and cars were rolled out so frequently
as to belie authorities’ fears that progress was not
entirely self-evident. Entitlements to housing, education, medicine, vacations, and pensions, as well as
to low and stable prices on basic goods, were also
invoked as evidence of socialism’s superiority over
capitalism. Cars and separate apartments were
simultaneously luxuries and entitlements for ordinary, hardworking people. Ritualistic criticism of
producers and shops in the Soviet press, as well as
publication of letters of complaint over poor quality
and service, also conveyed that the party-state cared
about consumers’ difficulties.
In exchange for caring for its citizens, the partystate expected gratitude and social quiescence. The
reality of persistent shortage for the masses and
hyperdevelopment of special supply for party elites
called into question whether existing inequalities
were either necessary or justified. This went beyond
the notion that inequality was a necessary evil to
assert that inequality on the basis of merit was a just
end in itself. In this respect, the ideological groundwork for a transition to capitalism—which market reformers, such as Gorbachev, claimed would
better connect worker productivity to consumption
opportunities—was laid.

Rational Consumption
Living standards under socialism were a major front
in the ideological battle with capitalism. In his speech

at the Conference of Farm Personnel of Provinces
and Autonomous Republics of Northwestern Part of
the Russian Republic (in Leningrad, May 22, 1957),
Khrushchev famously promised to catch up with and
overtake the United States in living standards within
fifteen years. In reality, of course, the USSR lagged
severely behind the United States in average living
standards and in investment in the consumer sector.
Socialism could be more favorably contrasted to capitalism by attacking the rationality and morality of
Western consumerism.
For Marx, one of the defining features of capitalism is “commodity fetishism,” in which people mistakenly believe that an object’s value is inherent in the
thing itself, rather than in the social relations of labor
required to produce the object. In socialist ideology,
people should develop a more authentic relationship to one another through a rational relationship
to goods. This ideology manifested in the famous
“kitchen debate” in 1959; when U.S. vice president Richard Nixon showed Khrushchev a model
American kitchen, Khrushchev responded that it had
no “useful purpose” and was therefore an irrational
approach to matters of household organization.
To manage expectations of living standards,
party leadership advocated a communist culture of
needs as an alternative to capitalist consumerism,
which was deemed a perverted relationship to the
world. Planners introduced “rational consumption
norms” into the planning process and advertised
them to citizens. For example, if rational norms had
been met, citizens could expect to consume eightytwo kilograms of meat and eight pairs of socks per
year. Planners asserted that norms took into account
“the reasonable demands of a healthy, culturally
developed people.” Women were the particular targets of propaganda on rational consumption, since
they were seen as more vulnerable to consumerism.
Advice columns provided guidance on the volumes
of clothing sufficient for everyday life, pointing out
the extra work that would accrue should any woman
possess too many items of clothing.
Consuming beyond these norms amounted to
irrational use of time and ungrateful insatiability in
a society that claimed to already be meeting a reasonable person’s needs. The Soviet press was filled
with accounts of people who lost jobs, relationships,
and even their lives in obsessive pursuit of irrational desires. This so-called malicious consumption
was harmful to society as well as to the individual.

Socialism and Consumption

A brochure for party activists was titled “Everyday
Life Is Not a Private Matter.” Civilian patrols provided a venue for such activism. Members sought
out disorderly behavior in the streets, shops, and
dancehalls. These groups singled out so-called stilyagi, young people wearing flashy and gender-bending
hairstyles. Stylish youth risked having their hair cut
off or their pants shredded and were framed in the
media as victims of Western influence. In his speech
kicking off perestroika, Gorbachev asserted that
economic stagnation and political cynicism had
spawned a growing concern with material goods
and consumerism. In official discourse, socialism’s
chief advantages over capitalism remained social
justice and the fulfillment of spiritual as well as
material needs.

Being Cultured
Injunctions against malicious consumption were contrasted with idealized images of cultured consumption. A cultured consumer enjoyed the prosperous
times in which he or she lived, while remaining cognizant of the political implications of consumption.
Modest meals where the emphasis was less on the
quantity and extravagance of food and more on conviviality were an example of cultured consumption.
Reading was also a hallmark of being cultured. A
popular slogan claimed: “The Soviet Union the most
well-read nation in the world!”
The injunction to “be cultured” (kul’turnost’) originated in the Stalin era. As ideology, being cultured
constituted a program for transforming peasants into
urban, modern socialist workers through hygiene,
manners, and cultural consumption. Soviet leaders
frequently spoke of raising the cultural level as well
as the material level of the masses, especially peasants, women, and national minorities. Consumption
practices were hallmarks of being cultured in Stalinist
ideology. Magazines and newspapers advised readers on how to eat, dress, and expend leisure time.
Films and novels also presented idealized images of
consumption, identifying heroes and villains by their
dress and tastes. Desirable goods were described as
useful, attractive, well-made, hygienic, and rational. Clothing should be smartly tailored, of natural
materials, and impeccably clean. The home should
be organized according to similar principles. Later, in
response to “jeans mania,” advice columns recommended a return to classic styles. Being a cultured

1335

Soviet consumer also applied to shopping. Shoppers
could not handle or grab merchandise in self-service
style. Instead, according to historian David Crowley,
only a narrow range of goods were placed in cabinets
so that shoppers could inspect them, allowing shop
clerks to instruct shoppers in cultured consumption.
Women were viewed as more inclined to be cultured than men, but also as more prone to malicious
consumption. Thus, they were subject to vague and
conflicting propaganda on style and fashion that
presented two contrasting models of Soviet womanhood. Rural women were most often presented at
work, with the radiant smiles typical in images of
peasant women. An urban woman, by contrast,
could be depicted getting her hair coiffed, with the
approving caption, “If you want to be beautiful . . .”
By the 1970s, attention to hair, makeup, and fashion were legitimate and even expected activities for
urban women.
A paradigmatic image of socialist ideals of beauty
can be found in the popular 1977 film Office
Romance. The heroine, Lyudmila, is the straightlaced director of a Moscow statistical office. Her
severe fashion sense matches her personality, which
a subordinate, Anatoliy, describes as “completely
dried up.” Deeply wounded, yet falling in love with
Anatoliy, Lyudmila asks her female coworkers to give
her a makeover. Her transformation suggests that the
model Soviet woman should be both a driven heroine
of labor and a well-coiffed object of male attention.
However, the film warns against fashion obsession.
Vera, Lyudmila’s flighty assistant, can be turned to
for advice on makeup and clothing, but has to be
repeatedly admonished to return her attention from
her nails to her work.
The regime presented cultured consumption as a
revolutionary lifestyle for the new Soviet man and
an alternative to Western consumerism. French
fashion fell out of favor in the 1930s. After World
War II, frilly doilies and pet canaries were demonized as symbols of bourgeois excess, and jazz was
suppressed as imperialist. Later, Western jeans and
imported rock music were the targets of anticonsumerism campaigns. Likewise, the cultured consumer
should reject the absurdity of abstract art in favor
of “real” (i.e., realist) art. Although cultured consumption was defined in contrast to Western consumerism, many recommended norms were adapted
from Western European conceptions of civility. The
historian Catriona Kelly locates the distinctiveness

1336

Socialism and Consumption

of Soviet ideology on lifestyle not so much in particular practices, but in the emphasis on the “collective
significance of individual behavior.” Pride in one’s
appearance was expected to spill over into productivity at work. Curtains and lampshades could create
an inner sanctum to facilitate cultured reading and
the cultivation of Bolshevik consciousness.

Free Time Is Not Time Free
From Responsibility
Although Soviet citizens were urged to “be cultured”
throughout the Soviet era, the regime began to also
produce more mass cultural programming of lowerbrow genres, such as game shows, romantic comedies, mystery novels, and fanzines about movie
stars. These developments were prompted by the
new technology of television as well as in response
to the influence of Western media. Soviet authorities worried that leisure time, which increased due
to urbanization and the introduction of the five-day
workweek, would become increasingly privatized
and thus undermine the ideological goal of personal
commitment to the collective.
At the Twenty-Fourth Communist Party Congress
in 1971, Brezhnev declared, “Free time is not time
free from responsibility for the society.” A discourse
on “active leisure” associated gardening and other
hobbies with the productive use of leisure time and
discouraged individualism and bourgeois values. The
state sought to rationalize the use of leisure time by
controlling the spaces in which that time was spent.
The growing vacation industry channeled people
into collective spaces such as summer camps for children and sanatoriums for adults. People were also
encouraged to spend their free time in the collective
by attending events at “palaces of culture.” Clubs
existed for interests ranging from driving to literature
to fishing. An ideology of “cultural enlightenment”
and equal access to culture governed these spaces.

The Effects of Ideology
Socialist propaganda on consumption may strike
the post-Soviet reader as absurd. Advice to homemakers to use white tablecloths in the 1930s was a
cruel irony when so many were starving. Later pronouncements on the need to elevate the “culture of
retail trade” seem incongruent with the reality of
the lack of goods for sale. In addition, invective
against capitalist consumerism and assertions of

a distinctive Soviet culture of consumption clashed
with the real fascination with Western consumer
culture. However, these incongruities should not be
simply chalked up to the absurdity of Soviet life.
Ideologies should be evaluated not based on the truth
of their claims, but based on the effects.
The Soviet ideologies on living standards and lifestyles were impossible to live out in practice. Claims for
the social justice of the socialist system were in a constant tension with the doctrine of necessary inequality
and the reality of elite privilege. And the regime’s insistence that consumption should be collectively oriented
was at odds with expanding opportunities for personal
consumption. Authorities were dismayed when sociological time-budget surveys found that attendance at
cultural events was poor. People preferred to watch
television or visit with friends. They thought of dacha
gardens as private retreats rather than cooperative
agriculture. When they did attend events and clubs at
the palaces of culture, these activities often lacked the
requisite ideological component.
The increasing privatization of daily life was not
a sign of mass disillusionment or indifference toward
official ideology—that ideology had actually encouraged it. Mass media programming proliferated even
as consumers were directed toward higher-brow
pursuits. Citizens were instructed to avoid consumerism, yet advice literature flourished on topics such as
fashion, grooming, cooking, and interiors. Promising
every family a separate apartment further reinforced
conceptions of the household as a private sphere.
Policies and ideologies on living standards and
lifestyles comprised a legitimation strategy to generate social quiescence, what scholars have labeled
an “implicit social contract.” Consumption policy
was plagued both by ideological contradictions
concerning consumers’ rights and duties to society,
and by economic failures to produce and distribute
promised goods. Yet the USSR survived for seventy
years, and for several decades after the easing of
Stalinist repression and terror. Discursive repetition of the state’s commitment to consumers and of
the citizen’s obligations to the state contributed to
an air of stability and inevitability. Citizens managed the incongruity between ideology and lived
experience by adopting an ironic distance from the
literal assertions of the state, which anthropologist
Alexei Yurchak labels “cynical realism.” Citizens
did not literally believe the content of official discourses, yet they ritually acknowledged them. What

Sociology

Sovietologists called stagnation was experienced in
daily life as simply ordinary. Many Russians now
fondly recall Brezhnev’s rule as the time of stability,
a stability predicated on both satisfying and controlling consumers’ sense of entitlement to higher living
standards and to expanded leisure opportunities.
Consumption was also an important symbol at
key moments in the disintegration of the Soviet system. Massive strikes by half a million miners were
triggered by soap shortages and food price increases.
Breakaway republics (most notably the Ukraine)
initially asserted their independence through protectionist policies in the name of consumers. Because
the plight of consumers played a symbolic (if not
determinative) role in the Soviet Union’s demise,
consumption became the yardstick by which citizens
have evaluated the success and legitimacy of postsocialist regimes.
Jane Zavisca
See also Citizenship; Collective Consumption; Consumer
Culture in the USSR; Consumption in Postsocialist
Societies: Eastern Europe; Inequalities; Marxist
Theories; Rationalization; State Provisioning

Further Readings
Birman, Igor. Personal Consumption in the USSR and the
USA. London: Macmillan, 1989.
David-Fox, Michael. “What Is Cultural Revolution?”
Russian Review 58 (1999): 181–201.
Dunham, Vera. In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class Values in
Soviet Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976.
Evans, Alfred. “Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology.”
Soviet Studies 24 (1977): 409–428.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism
and the Representation of Privilege and Taste.” In The
Cultural Front, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, 216–237.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common
Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s
Russia. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Hauslohner, Peter. “Gorbachev’s Social Contract.” Soviet
Economy 3 (1987): 54–89.
Kelly, Catriona. “Kul’turnost’ in the Soviet Union: Ideal and
Reality.” In Reinterpreting Russia, edited by Geoffrey
Hosking and Robert Service, 198–214. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
Kelly, Catriona. Refining Russia: Gender, Manners and
Morals from Catherine to Yeltsin. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.

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Pilkington, Hilary. Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A
Nation’s Constructors and Constructed. London:
Routledge, 1994.
Reid, Susan. “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the
De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union
under Khrushchev.” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002):
211–252.
Reid, Susan, and David Crowley. Style and Socialism:
Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern
Europe. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Roth-Ey, Kristin J. “Finding a Home for Television in the
USSR, 1950–1970.” Slavic Review 66, no. 2 (2007):
278–306.
Volkov, Vadim. “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the
Stalinist Civilizing Process.” In Stalinism: New
Directions, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, 210–230.
London: Routledge, 2000.
Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No
More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.

SOCIALITY
See Sociability

SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS
See Age and Aging; Consumption Patterns
and Trends; Single-Person Households

SOCIOLOGY
Sociologists studying consumer culture have asked
(1) how collective ideas influence the consumption
patterns of groups, (2) how social ties shape the consumption patterns of individuals and small groups,
(3) how ritual-like interactions bolster consumption
habits, (4) how the solidarity (consciousness of kind)
of groups is maintained through consumption,
(5) how consumers are manipulated through marketing and the spatial layout of stores, and (6) how
consumer culture corrupts cultural and economic
lives (or not). These questions conform to the paradigm of sociology as an interpretive social science
concerned with intergroup relations and meaningful
encounters.

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Sociology

How Collective Ideas Shape Consumption
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism reminds social scientists that economic
ideas influence consumption and savings practices.
To commit oneself to working hard affirmed one’s
sense of “calling” to one’s vocation and of doing one’s
work as if unto God. At the same time, the religious
notion of asceticism required that excess earnings
be saved rather than spent for superfluous objects
or for ostentatious display. These collective ideas
were shared across society and profoundly shaped
the consumption and savings practices enabling the
ethos of the capitalist economy to thrive.
Indeed, the “spirit of calculation” (Bourdieu
2000, 25) is not universal but a historically contingent understanding collectively shared in a society.
Economic behaviors that most people take for
granted (money, credit, saving, spending, wage
work, etc.) are embodied beliefs and economic dispositions that influence what and how people understand goods to be goods and what people do with
their money and their goods. In Pierre Bourdieu’s
investigation of Algerian workers after their country had been liberated from French colonization, he
excavated the “folk economics” of a cook to demonstrate that the economic ethos of modern capitalism
differs from the ethos of the earlier period and that
such dispositions as economic rationality and allocation efficiency (that minimizes costs and maximizes
profits) were historically constituted.
These collective ideas also restricted what should
be sold by whom and to whom. At the end of the
colonial period, for example, an honorable person
could not sell milk, exchanges among neighbors and
kin followed a gift/counter-gift logic, and the type of
relationship people were in dictated what would be
regarded as the appropriate medium (or media) of
exchange:
For example, the charka of an ox (in which a
peasant lends an ox for a predefined period in
exchange for a certain number of measures of grain
[a medium of exchange] can only be set up between
quasi-strangers . . . and is enshrouded in all kinds of
dissimulations and euphemizations intended to mask
or repress its mercantile potentialities. In most cases,
the two “contracting parties” prefer to agree to
conceal the arrangement, with the borrower trying
to disguise his destitution and make believe the ox is
his own, and the lender abetting him in this pretence

because it is better to hide a transaction that does not
strictly conform to the sense of equity. (Bourdieu
2000, 19)

The economic ideas of blind competition that disregard the national, ethnic, racial, or status identities
of buyer and seller are hostile and war-like in Kabyle
society. As such, the style of interaction, the media
used in the exchange, and the goods bought and sold
differ accordingly.
Viviana Zelizer (1989) argues that people engage
in social accounting as they orient their spending
practices toward their shared understandings about
what money earned by women “means” in the
context of the household’s budget (pin money) and
how money earned by husbands differs from that
earned by children. The ideas people have about
these monies affect the purposes to which the monies
may be put. And these ideas vary by class, gender,
time period, and society. A working-class woman’s
pin money is appropriately applied to groceries, children’s clothing, and other consumptive needs in the
household, while a man’s earnings are used for the
mortgage, investments, and appliances. That cultural
codes interact with gender and class to shape how
people use money has also been observed among
households receiving remittances from migrants.
A variant of social accounting is mental accounting, a social psychological concept whose unit of
analysis is the individual rather than the collectivity
in which the individual resides (Thaler 1999; Tversky
and Kahneman 1981). Mental accounting perspectives focus on the heuristic devices that individuals
use to make sense of how they should spend their
money. A windfall gain is spent more frivolously
than a periodically deposited salary. Two smaller
gains may be preferred to a slightly larger (but single)
gain. These examples highlight how money is not
fully fungible—one dollar is not fully equivalent to
another, because money is marked with meaning
depending on when, how often, from where, and to
whom it travels.

How Social Ties Shape Consumption
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes how
social networks and class position affect consumer
tastes, thereby placing aesthetics and revealed preferences squarely in the purview of sociological analysis.
At the core of distinction lay the dynamics of union
and segregation, consolidating within- and marking

Sociology

between-group boundaries. The dynamics of boundary work depended on the individual’s social ties to
other people and his or her class position relative to
the dominant class. Different class fractions made
different decisions about what constitutes a beautiful
photograph, good music, and tasteful home décor
not only because birds of a feather flock together
(social capital cemented by tastes) but also because
the power of the dominant class is recognized, even
if obliquely, by the dominated classes. Not understanding why a higher aesthetic is at all desirable, the
individual possessing a dominated aesthetic nonetheless acknowledges its value for people the individual reckons as “not-like-me” (segregation/fences
between groups).
Paul DiMaggio and Hugh Louch have demonstrated the importance of social ties for consumer
purchases in the United States by debunking the
notion that modern markets have eradicated social
ties as a means of searching for, selecting, and drawing satisfaction from goods in the modern capitalist marketplace. Although they bracket why people
demand the goods and services that they do, the
authors offer evidence that these purchases are
socially oriented.
Their analytic strategy extends transaction cost
economics, exemplified by Oliver E. Williamson,
to the realm of consumer demand. This extension
enables them to explain how people use social
networks instrumentally to search for (embedded
search) and purchase (within-network exchanges)
goods and services while protecting themselves
against the opportunism that arises with information
asymmetry, altercentric uncertainties, and the opportunism such situations make possible. Informal social
ties function as a form of insurance against the risks
buyers incur in an otherwise seemingly anonymous
marketplace. Informal social ties rank alongside
brand names and warranties as devices on which
consumers rely to protect themselves while making
transactions, for they minimize the cost of information and thereby reduce the likelihood of malfeasance
on the part of the seller.
DiMaggio and Louch suggest not only that
“birds of a feather flock together” but also that if
one bird coughs, her network neighbors will catch
a cold. Other social scientists have gone further in
demonstrating the viral nature of consumer preferences within the network structure. Along these lines
of research, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

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(2007) studied over 12,000 people and their networks from 1971 to 2003 and found that when one’s
spouse, sibling, or friend became obese, the linked
individual also became at risk for obesity. These findings suggest that the revealed preference for fatty
foods versus exercise spreads through network ties
like any other epidemic might. In a similar size study
(2008), the authors found that the decision to quit
smoking is a collective one that affects others within
the network by virtue of being tied directly or indirectly to individuals expressing a changed consumption preference.
In an earlier study, Howard Becker explained the
importance of the social activity in which a good will
be used for the likelihood that an individual will want
to consume it. He found that marijuana smokers
use their social ties with other smokers to learn why
smoking is enjoyable. The pleasure is neither always
obvious nor always physically based. From one’s
coevals, one learns what the physical indications of
pleasure might be and because socially relevant others are seen enjoying themselves, first-time users of
marijuana are more likely to try the substance in the
future even if they do not enjoy their first or second
experience with the good. Because marijuana is not
physically addictive like cigarettes are, it offers a
strong case in favor of social (vs. physical) bases of
demand.
Omar Lizardo suggests two ways for predicting
how social networks influence the revealed preferences for different types of goods and services.
In the first, he extends Bourdieu’s discussion of
(1) acquired, (2) niche, and (3) dominated tastes
as spheres of sociability in which the influence of
network ties on consumption varies considerably.
Although Lizardo does not discuss each of the three
specifically, a review of Bourdieu’s work suggests the
following: acquired and niche tastes correspond to
strong social ties; dominated tastes, a combination of
strong and weak ties. Acquired tastes require cultivation and the help of knowledgeable insiders so that
those acquiring the taste can learn how to enjoy what
might otherwise be un-pleasurable. Similarly, niche
tastes require great investments of time for people
to become familiar with symbols and usage customs
not widely understood outside of the niche.
Zelizer’s concept of the circuit goes beyond the
concept of the network and better encapsulates the
various dynamics described by Bourdieu. It is important to distinguish a network from a circuit to see

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Sociology

how the question of dominated aesthetics and asset
specificity necessarily constitute a circuit (but not a
network). A network is a set of sites connected to
one another through one- or two-way exchanges.
The circuit constitutes a set of sites (occupied by
individuals) whose linkages are dynamic, meaningful, and constantly negotiated, where the media
of exchange include money but do not need to be
restricted only to money, and these media (including
symbolic items that members of the circuits put into
circulation) enable different circuits to be connected
to one another across space and social settings even if
no material or physical link exists.
Zelizer depicts consumption preferences as reflective of market matches where individuals forge and
contest correspondences between categorical relations and socially appropriate media of exchange in
different types of situations. In other words, after the
purchasers have categorized how the good or service
will be used—as a gift, as a symbolic statement, as
an efficient means to a material end—they can assess
whether the price is too high, too low, or about right
for a person like herself. These evaluations are made
within “circuits of commerce, in the old sense of the
word, where commerce meant conversation, interchange, intercourse, and mutual shaping” (Zelizer
2005, 4).
In bounded family circuits, for example, how
the demand for different types of goods emerges
manifests itself as a means to maintain and honor
interpersonal relations. Zelizer shows, for example,
why an individual may decide to purchase a “fancy”
coffeemaker capable of compressing espresso ground
beans and steaming whole milk foam although a regular coffeemaker has satisfied the individual’s needs
thus far. She draws on Christopher Carrington’s
interviews with gay and lesbian households in the
San Francisco Bay Area to demonstrate how purchases become justified as a way to make a loved one
feel cared for. Federico Monterosa had resisted buying a fancy coffeemaker because the cheap one they
owned worked fine, but Federico’s domestic partner
convinced “Freddy” to do so as a way of working on
his relationship with his parents, especially his mom:
Freddy’s parents were coming to San Francisco and
were planning to stay with us. Freddy’s mom likes
coffee, and so I made the case that we should buy a
nice coffee maker to make her feel at home . . .
because it was kind of hard on her when Freddy

came out to her and all. With that, he agreed and we
went to Macy’s and bought a decent coffee maker.
(Carrington 1999, quoted in Zelizer 2006, 236)

In this example, the individual orients his action
not only toward his own needs or tastes but also
toward the different social relations that will be
built, maintained, or honored through the particular
purchase. In this way, his demand for the fancy coffeemaker is socially situated and would not be intelligible outside of the relationships he holds dear, the
informal sanctions that his partner’s (i.e., Freddy’s)
family might impose on him for not making Freddy’s
mother feel at home (disapproving remarks, the
“cold shoulder,” the “cold bed,” etc.), and what he
thinks the coffeemaker will symbolize for his mother.

How Rituals Shape Consumption
Randall Collins has revisited Erving Goffman’s concept of interaction rituals to explain social behaviors,
including consumption. Goffman recognizes that
many face-to-face interactions are ritual like. By this
he means that there is a pattern of greetings, conversational transactions, use of objects, and departure
greetings. Collins goes further by noting how one ritual interaction gains its strength from previous ritual
interaction rituals; there is an interaction ritual chain.
In each ritual interaction, there is an opportunity for
people to begin to see themselves as members of a
group as they develop a consciousness of kind. Over
time, they identify symbols relevant for the group,
internalize the norms of the group regarding how the
interaction should be carried out, and generate emotional energy (or emotional drains) during the course
of successful (unsuccessful) interactions. Emotional
energy itself is “a strong steady emotion [sentiment,
or affect], lasting over a period of time, . . . [that]
gives the ability to act with initiative and resolve, to
set the direction of social situations rather than to
be dominated by others in the micro-details of interaction, . . . [and] to be self-directed when alone”
(Collins 2004, 134). These differences in emotional
energy lead to such distinctions as the sacred and the
profane as well as the boundaries between in-groups
and out-groups. When the group’s norms are violated, its members feel a sense of righteous indignation and attempt to restore their community to its
rightful state.
For Collins, the demand for cigarettes is dependent
on ritual chains, not bodily addiction. Some cigar

Sociology

smokers, for example, wear smoking jackets, retire
to their smoking room, and relax with other smokers
at an informally designated time of day. There are
smoke breaks during which the smokers begin to feel
a sense of solidarity at their meeting point and generate emotional energy from their gathering. These and
other leisure rituals generate the emotional energy
that helps sustain the desire for smoking beyond
any physiological craving for tobacco; therefore, to
understand the demand for cigarettes (or any other
goods and services), one has to take into account the
patterned, ritual-like interactions during which consumers use, discuss, or eye such goods and services.
The ritual-like behaviors that generate and maintain demand for particular goods and services have
been theorized as responsible for the formation of
brand communities. These groups use their consumption of goods to establish symbols around which
the group can rally, and their rituals affirm who the
insiders and outsiders are. Greeting rituals among car
owners of a particular brand help maintain a sense
of solidarity. And odyssey rituals (stories about near
escapes and harrowing ordeals) affirm that loyalty
to a brand has concrete consequences (Muniz and
O’Guinn 2001). Car commercials amplify these
odyssey rituals as real customers testify to how they
nearly drove off the road were it not for their Saabs
that saved their lives. The brand takes on sacredlike qualities as a protection totem, and loyalty to
the brand has religious-like qualities of salvation and
redemption.

How Marketing and Spatial Organization
Shape Consumption
Another group of sociologists examine how marketing specialists, architects, and store directors manipulate consumers to make purchases. They argue that
consumers are manipulated for the sake of making money, and these manipulations often result
in changes to the culture of consumption. Take,
for example, what is now known as the American
breakfast. Before the 1920s, the American breakfast was a light meal of juice, toast, and coffee. The
Beechnut Packing Company, a large bacon producer,
had a financial interest in convincing American consumers that eating heavier meals with bacon (and
eggs) would be good for their health. The company
hired Edward Bernays to manipulate public opinion. Bernays’s expertise is evidenced in an undercited

1341

article in the American Journal of Sociology that he
authored. He identified a well-known New York
doctor who wrote asking his colleagues to verify
whether they thought a heavy or a light breakfast is
most beneficial for a person’s health. The newspapers
disseminated the collective opinion of these doctors
and sales soared. The American breakfast was born
along with the notion that nine out of ten authority
figures (e.g., nine out of ten dentists prefer Colgate;
nine out of ten dermatologists prefer product Y) prefer one product over others (see Tye 1998, 51).
The manipulation of consumers, some social scientists argue, starts from an early age. Juliet Schor’s
Born to Buy, for example, documents how marketers target children, teaching them how to want, what
to want, and how to orient their desires to the benefit
of companies peddling products in the commercial
market. By the time American children enter kindergarten, they can recognize about three hundred commercial logos, and by the age of ten, four hundred
brand names. Schor blames the intense marketing
and commercialization of childhood for the growing
psychological maladies afflicting young people. The
market has sapped their attention spans, unsettled
their sense of calm, revved them up to buy, buy, buy.
Daniel Thomas Cook (2004) argues that there is a
growing division of sizes and of age categories with
the rise of the department store. Children were not a
marketing demographic before 1890, when only one
factory specializing in children’s clothing existed. The
layout of department stores paid attention to how
children view the world and to the shopping experience. Younger children would become indoctrinated
into the styles of the older children they admired by
being forced to walk through the sections for teenagers before arriving at their own section.
Christine Williams extends this analysis of space
to discuss not only the spatial organization but
also the social organization of two toy stores. The
store personnel are assigned to different sections of
the store based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, class,
and demeanor. With almost all men manning the
stockroom, the sole woman assigned to that space
is rumored to be a lesbian. The electronics section
is staffed by Asian men. Latinos staff the floral/gardening section. When customers bring their children
into the toy store, those children are exposed to,
and internalize, these notions of how different social
identities fit different types of jobs and responsibilities. It is through routine shopping experiences that

1342

Sociology

notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class are made
manifest, experienced as natural, routine, everyday.

How Consumer Culture Corrupts
Social and Cultural Lives
George Ritzer argues that global capitalism results
in the globalization of nothing—the loss of authenticity. By nothing, Ritzer means that the local content has been destroyed and local autonomy has
been usurped. The destruction of local content and
autonomy renders the object a non-thing, and the
non-thing often rests in a nonplace and is handled
by nonpersons offering nonservices. For Ritzer a
nonplace is any space manufactured for the purpose
of selling goods that have no cultural significance
for people in the local community. A village teeming with artisans making handicrafts is a real place,
but a retail handicraft barn is a nonplace. Likewise,
artisans selling their wares are real people with emotional and historical attachments to their work, but
salespeople (dehumanized workers) in retail shops
are nonpersons in the sense that they follow a standard script and have no personal attachment to the
object. It could be an amulet, a widget, or a car tire
and it would be of no consequence for the salesperson. Ritzer contrasts the service provided by the artisan, who tells a story about how an object is made
and who can offer a demonstration of the process, to
the nonservice of having people select objects from
the shelves of the retail store without assistance from
a knowledgeable person.
Ritzer distinguishes glocalization from grobalization. In the first, meaningful local content and some
local autonomy remain, but the objects are being sold
in global markets. In the second, a central, powerful
authority monopolizes control over distribution and,
sometimes, design decisions. The intention of grobalization is to grow the power, economic profits, and/
or reputation of the central authority. The usual phenomenon is the grobalization of nothing, but Ritzer
notes that there is the possibility of the grobalization
of something, in the case of high-end museum exhibitions that travel the globe. Often the grobalization of
something (handicrafts and home décor items made
for niche markets) deteriorates into the grobalization
of nothing. This is especially the case during difficult
economic times in which the central authority insists
on changes in design and content so that overall
sales are rescued and so that the business survives. If

economic survival means the loss of authenticity, so
be it.
Sharon Zukin shares in Ritzer’s indictment of
capitalism for the loss of the authentic, autonomous
self. Like Marx’s description of the labor power
of workers being captured by the capitalist, Zukin
describes the symbolic power of artists, historically
meaningful places, and artisans being controlled and
usurped by property-owning capitalists. The artists
who make the depressed neighborhood come alive
find themselves displaced by wealthier people who
drive up rents. These wealthy outsiders move into the
neighborhood because the artists are there, but once
they arrive, the artists have to leave. The artists sow
the seeds of their own destruction.
Viviana Zelizer (2006) argues against maintaining
such a dim view of consumption and consumer culture. She emphasizes instead how cultural and social
meanings depend on the exchange of objects and
how people imbue their economic transactions with
meanings. Intimacy in relationships is made manifest
by the sharing of gifts and the greater “intrusion”
of money into the relationship. Purchases get used
relationally to mark sentiments of solidarity; furthermore, the places of purchase, production, and
exchange are amenable to sociological analysis just
as other arenas of social life (such as family, religion,
community) are.
Frederick F. Wherry
See also Capitalism; Collective Identity; Gender;
Globalization; Money; Political Economy; Social
Networks; Symbolic Value

Further Readings
Becker, Howard S. “Becoming a Marihuana User.”
American Journal of Sociology 59 (1953): 235–242.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Making the Economic Habitus.”
Ethnography 1 (2000): 17–41.
Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler. “The Spread
of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years.”
New England Journal of Medicine 357 (2007): 370–
379.
Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler. “The
Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social
Network.” New England Journal of Medicine 358
(2008): 2249–2258.

Sociotechnical Systems
Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.
Cook, Daniel Thomas. The Commodification of
Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the
Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004.
DiMaggio, Paul, and Hugh Louch. “Socially Embedded
Consumer Transactions: For What Kind of Purchases
Do People Most Often Use Networks?” American
Sociological Review 63 (1998): 619–637.
Lizardo, Omar. “How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal
Networks.” American Sociological Review 71 (2006):
778–807.
Muniz, Albert M., Jr., and Thomas C. O’Guinn. “Brand
Community.” Journal of Consumer Research 27 (2001):
412–432.
Ritzer, George. “Rethinking Globalization: Glocalization/
Grobalization and Something/Nothing.” Sociological
Theory 21 (2003): 193–209.
Thaler, Richard H. “Mental Accounting Matters.” Journal
of Behavioral Decision Making 12 (1999): 183–206.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing
Decisions and the Rationality of Choice.” Science 211
(1981): 453–458.
Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the
Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998.
Weber, Max. 1905. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002.
Williams, Christine L. Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping,
and Social Inequality. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006.
Williamson, Oliver E.. “The Economics of Organization:
The Transaction Cost Approach.” American Journal of
Sociology 87 (1981): 548–577.
Zelizer, Viviana A. “The Social Meaning of Money: ‘Special
Monies.’” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989):
342–377.
Zelizer, Viviana A. “Circuits within Capitalism.” In The
Economic Sociology of Capitalism, edited by Victor Nee
and Richard Swedberg, 289–322. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.
Zelizer, Viviana A. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1995.

SOCIOTECHNICAL SYSTEMS
Sociotechnical systems are assemblages of technological, material, cultural, political, and psychological

1343

components interwoven together. The operation of
technological systems that provide societal goods,
such as water, energy, transport, consumer products, and chemicals, depends on how humans process information about the world, interact with each
other and with technologies, and translate cultural
values into resource use. Technological systems can
influence consumption greatly through absorbing
social norms, practices, and relationships, helping
create the conditions for consumer behavior, and
increasing resource inputs. However, consumption
studies have seldom looked at sociotechnical systems
as an important player in driving and structuring
consumption (and vice versa).
The idea of “sociotechnical systems” first
appeared during the 1950s when Eric Trist and Ken
Bamforth at the Tavistock Institute in London studied why British industry had puzzlingly low productivity despite the advent of new technologies expected
to enhance labor output. They concluded that the
technologies disrupted existing organizational procedures, leading to worker discontent and higher absenteeism. Since then, researchers have focused on the
use of technologies inside organizations: when, how,
and why organizational elements such as employee
groups, training, operating procedures, and physical
layouts may influence technology performance. For
example, computer network designers did not take
into account how bank clerks balanced their running
ledgers day-to-day, so introducing a remote transaction system in the banking sector in Uganda in the
early 2000s failed in part because the clerks resisted
the dramatic changes in their work practices. Much
of this microscale research emphasizes maximizing
the efficiency of organizational use of technology.
From the 1980s onward, researchers in the science
and technology studies (STS) field have extended the
sociotechnical perspective to explain how a range of
societal influences, including consumption, can shape
the nature, trajectories, and impacts of entire technological systems and infrastructures. Using interpretive
methods, they explore how, why, when, and where
technology designers, customers, markets, financiers
and credit availability, regulatory and industry standards, and organizations can help generate, modify,
and challenge technologies. Sociotechnical systems
do not develop linearly or inevitably. Rather, their
specific features—such as gasoline engines, Internet
protocols, preferences for direct or alternating
current, or cell phone touch screens—grow out of

1344

Sociotechnical Systems

a succession of human and institutional choices in
particular historical moments. Technologies could be
(but often have not been) designed with environmental and resource use impacts in mind.
Energy and water are well-studied examples of
how sociotechnical systems affect consumption by
creating new commodities and market demand. For
instance, Thomas Hughes conducted a comparative
analysis of how the American, German, and British
electricity industries emerged and evolved in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He showed
that how companies approached the challenge of
selling a new product, electricity, to city governments, industry, and consumers was a key factor
shaping the geographical spread of the power grid.
David Nye investigated how the electrification of the
United States took place as a sociopolitical process,
and how electricity use became joined with new markets for lighting and appliances. Consumer products
have also been studied, especially lighting, bicycles,
plastics, and electronics. The social construction of
technology framework developed by Wiebe Bijker
includes different consumer groups (such as women,
young men, and older men) as one of the important
social groups influencing the bicycle’s development
through their demand for specific bicycle features.
Nonetheless, sociotechnical theories are relatively
undeveloped in their applications to consumers and
consumption. Technological systems play critical
roles in shaping consumption because they are at the
core of contemporary industrial economies. How
and why technological systems develop can affect
the rate of consumption, what kinds of consumption occur, the expansion of consumer values, and
the resource use stemming from consumption. The
nature of infrastructures may also influence the scale
and range of consuming activities, as well as resource
flows through economies and cities. Moreover,
changing consumption patterns can build or remake
technological systems.
Technological systems can help create new
demand for consumer products and for resource
use in manufacturing, supplying, maintaining, and
disposing of the products. They can also increase
consumption of resources through their growth and
operation. Which consumer products and industries
are favored has tremendous implications for how
much water, material, energy, and land are used.
The electronics industry has expanded in large part
because consumers are increasingly embedded within

intricate networks of communication and data that
they find difficult to avoid. Consumers identify with
higher and higher cell phone and computer use,
becoming more willing to buy new models every
year. As a result, electronics manufacturing demands
a greater share of world resource production, particularly rare metals and toxic chemicals. In turn,
supporting cellular systems and computer servers
requires more electricity, generally from fossil-fueled
generating units. This contrasts with more traditional
industries and products.
Technological systems often have built-in incentives to increase the rate of consumption. Their development occurs on the assumption that expanding
scales of economy, growing resource use, centralizing
production and distribution, consolidating industry
structures, and excluding environmental, health,
and social impacts will lead to “efficient” performance. Governments and industries have tended to
increase supply rather than encouraging greater efficiency using less resources, or meeting human needs.
Typically, large-scale systems are built to meet peak
demand and will function less efficiently if they run
under capacity. For example, water supply and irrigation networks were built around large dams in the U.S.
West, and pricing came to encourage greater water
use through lower costs. Throughout the twentieth
century, technologies, policies, business strategies, and
organizational forms were adapted to achieve such
outcomes, intensifying industrial throughput to reach
unprecedented levels. Declining consumption threatens the stability of established systems.
Consumer behavior can also reflect, and shape,
how technological systems work. The identity of
consumers often intertwines with technological systems. Consumers are buying not just products but
also outcomes such as access to warmth, lighting,
and comfort. In the case of electricity generation,
consumers may have cultural preferences for high
rates of electricity use, such as depending on air conditioning, large refrigerators, and halogen lighting.
They may be disinclined to adopt energy efficiency
measures. The extension of electricity systems across
a city may reflect perceived socioeconomic status,
creating energy poverty in which some consumers
cannot afford to buy electricity. The current resurgence of interest in electric cars presages the politics
of deciding what charging infrastructure and energy
sources to use. Some consumers may prefer to
charge their electric cars at home from renewable

Sombart, Werner

energy sources whereas others may favor charging
at stations in urban areas from coal-fired sources.
Changing preferences can feed back into technological systems.
Concurrently, technological systems can constrain the choices that consumers have in buying
or using goods and services. Demand does not
simply originate in the market; it may come from
the technological systems supplying the market.
Due to supply chain structures and manufacturer
choices, consumers may be able to buy only certain
consumer products, such as products that necessitate electricity use rather than animal power.
Manufacturers may have incentives to create new
markets for consumption, sometimes only in certain geographical areas or socioeconomic strata.
Hence soaps made from cheaper, mass-produced
petrochemicals came to displace more costly traditional soaps from animal fats, in part because
manufacturers sought to constrain consumer
choices.
Dominant technological systems may also be
inflexible, standardized, and dependent on ostensibly cheap inputs such as fossil fuels. Systems
can be built around service expectations (such as
the availability of reliable, long-distance transportation, the year-round availability of food, or the
availability of electricity at peak demand times) and
therefore enshrine these expectations even though
societal conditions change. Thus, alternative, potentially more diverse modes of consumption—such
as locally produced foods vis-à-vis globally sourced
foods, or using electric cars rather than gas-fueled
cars—become less viable as they must displace
existing modes or service expectations. Government
policies may allocate resources accordingly, further entrenching specific patterns of consumption.
Seeking sustainable consumption outcomes must
account for the inertia of many technological
systems.
Taking a sociotechnical perspective can highlight
the importance of structures and systems in shaping
the consuming behavior of humans. Far more attention can be given to influencing the sociotechnical
systems that underpin consumption. Targeting the
ways in which technological systems help propel
demand for products and resource use may be more
effective than policies and market-based certification
aimed at consumers.
Alastair Iles

1345

See also Bicycles; Cycles of Production and Consumption;
Energy Consumption; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption; Industrial Society;
Infrastructures and Utilities; Innovation Studies; Social
Shaping of Technology

Further Readings
Bijker, Wiebe. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a
Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1995.
Hughes, Thomas. Networks of Power: Electrification in
Western Society 1880–1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Nye, David. Consuming Power: A Social History of
American Energies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Princen, Thomas. The Logic of Insufficiency. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience:
The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg,
2003.
Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas Van Vliet.
Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of
Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar, 2004.

SOMBART, WERNER (1863–1941)
Werner Sombart is a German sociologist and historian whose body of work focuses largely on the
development of capitalism as specific economic
and cultural Western historical formation. His
main works are the two volumes of Der Moderne
Kapitalismus (1928), Luxury and Capitalism
(1913/1967), and Why Is There No Socialism in the
United States? (1906/1976), as well as a number of
essays on the interfacing of culture and the economy,
including works on Jewish culture and economic life
and the bourgeois spirit—the influence of which is
limited today by the absence of complete translations in the English language. Anticipating the current historical debate, Sombart explained the genesis
of capitalism through combining the factors of economic growth relative to production with those
relative to consumption. In his view, traces of the
development of a new type of society can be seen
back to the fourteenth century—above all in Italy
and later in Germany, Holland, and England. Here
the accumulation of capital saw a marked increase
and was no longer based on the feudal economy;

1346

Sombart, Werner

instead, it was based on trade with, and exploitation of, colonies, on the discovery of new reserves
of precious metals and money lending. To be sure,
the exploitation of the colonies and the needs of
armies and international commerce were fundamental to the development of capitalism since they
contributed to the total growth of commodities in
circulation and the frequency of their exchange.
Nevertheless, Sombart is adamant that we cannot
simply explain capitalism through geographical
enlargement or quantitatively through the market.
The development of the colonies and international
commerce were in fact initially linked to particular
commodities: luxury goods. On close examination,
a large part of the goods that make up the growth
in demand of early modernity are precisely those
goods that appeared on the European market for the
first time, nonessential goods that took on new and
refined roles that had previously been filled by more
simple resources—in particular, spices and drugs,
perfumes, dyes, silk and cotton, precious stones, and
then, from the late-sixteenth century onward, sugar,
coffee, tea, and cocoa.
In Luxury and Capitalism, Sombart maintains
that luxury has the capacity to create markets,
essentially because it concerns goods of high
value that promote and require capitalization and
economic rationalization, including a growing
availability of credit-providing devices. Thus, it is
the “nature” of these commodities that favored
capitalist formation: for Sombart, it is above all the
characteristics of a part of material culture—those
refined goods “of superior class” that go “beyond
the necessary” intended as the “common currency”
in a given “culture”—that promoted a new capitalist organization within commerce, agriculture, and
industry. In fact, the desire for luxury goods occupies an important position among the genetic factors of capitalism, materially as well as culturally.
Through stimulating commerce and production,
the consumption of luxury goods contributed to
the accumulation of capital, which constituted one
of the material prerequisites for the development
of modern industry. These forms of consumption
also signaled the spread of a hedonistic-aesthetic
attitude toward objects. According to Sombart, it
is above all from the eighteenth century onward
that a hedonistic attitude to go shopping developed. Thus, it was those shops selling luxury goods
that were the first to arrange themselves as places

of elegant entertainment; having reached notable
dimensions, they began to differentiate themselves
according to the needs they wished to satisfy and to
fuel (female toilette, soft furnishings, etc.), promoting the diffusion of fixed price and an increasing
depersonalization of the relationship between seller
and buyer. In Sombart’s view, economics, culture,
and politics contribute together to the development
of the capitalist way of life. The new models of consumption that stimulate capitalist production thus
correspond to a political model characterized by
the advent of the absolutist state. The Renaissance
courts of Italy had already developed a lifestyle that
anticipated modernity and played a crucial role
in stimulating the consumption of luxury goods
and the refining of tastes. These were followed in
the seventeenth century by the absolutist courts,
of which the French remains the most important
example: thanks also to a new relationship between
the sexes, refined material pleasures and their manners became social weapons, genuine place-markers
in the courtly game. It is from the court that desires
of consumption spread, gradually and then in
waves, throughout the rest of society. Initially it
was mostly the upper bourgeoisie, who had rapidly
accumulated capital through commerce or finance,
who represented the new and most important segment of consumption. They wanted to mix with
the nobility and used shrewd strategies of marriage,
as well as competing with the noble elite not only
with their pecuniary power but also through their
use of refined goods, to demonstrate their taste and
sophistication. In the final analysis, Sombart writes,
“The longing for luxury would not have descended
to wider strata of Europe within so short a time . . .
if it had not been for . . . the very great need for luxuries on the part of the nouveaux riches” and if the
nobility had not participated in the game of emulation, attempting to “equal the bourgeois parvenus
in ostentatious display” (1967, 80–84). Supported
and stimulated by the provision of financial services
and credit, this social game gave way to processes
of hybridization between a high culture of waste
and refinement and a bourgeois one of thrift and
prudence that is seen to underscore contemporary
consumer culture.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Capitalism; Civilizing Processes; Coffee;
Hedonism; Luxury and Luxuries; Spices; Tea; Thrift

Souvenirs

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the
Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things.
Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, edited by Arjun
Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Grundmann, Reiner, and Nico Stehr. “Why Is Werner
Sombart Not Part of the Core of Classical Sociology?”
Journal of Classical Sociology 1, no. 2 (2001): 257–287.
Muller, Jerry Z. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in
Western Thought. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory,
Politics, London: Sage, 2007.
Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published
1913.

SOUVENIRS
The souvenir is a type of object that is kept as a
reminder of a place, person, or event. As such, any
object has the capacity to perform the role of a souvenir as long as it has a physical or imaginative connection with the past it represents. It emerged as a
recognizable type of material culture in the British
home during the seventeenth century, particularly
during the expansion of the British Empire when the
practice of collecting “exotic” objects for display in
cabinets of curiosity became popular. Today souvenirs continue to form an integral part of the home
and are central to tourism practices. Although there
is a growing body of academic research analyzing
the role souvenirs play in both contexts, their significance is often negatively perceived or overlooked as
simply the “baggage” of tourism.
Nelson Graburn’s 1979 study was one of the first
major publications to pay serious attention to the
production of tourist souvenirs, examining their role
in commodifying culture in developing countries.
This understanding of tourism consumption has
been reinforced by John Urry’s notion of the ubiquitous “tourist gaze,” which analyzes how places and
people are converted into stereotyped representations that can be visually consumed. Both authors
have played a significant role in establishing the
academic significance of tourism research. Following
their work, souvenirs have tended to be interpreted
in a negative light for their degrading influence on

1347

“traditional” culture. Souvenirs have widely been
deemed “inauthentic” when produced intentionally
for the tourist market rather than local use. This
is premised on the assumption that culture should
remain unchanged by the influence of tourists and is
therefore fixed in place.
The notion of culture as fixed and unchanging
has been challenged throughout the social sciences,
leading to work in tourism studies to develop a more
sophisticated understanding of souvenirs and their
relation to place. In particular, Ruth Phillips and
Chris Steiner’s edited collection explores the processes
through which cultural identities are constructed,
appropriated, and traded through souvenirs. They
move away from interpreting how objects are produced and used by “local” people and question the
processes of authentication at play in the production and consumption of souvenirs, acknowledging
the fluidity of culture. Andrew Causey’s extensive
analysis of souvenir production in Sumatra also demonstrates how carvers are creative in the ways they
choose to work with tourists’ demands. He examines
how wood carvings are designed, produced, and sold,
highlighting the innovation required amid increasing
competition and copying in the marketplace. While
the design of objects in this context is dictated by
tourists’ desires, Causey depicts an industry where
change is necessary and beneficial as carvers create
new and unique versions of “traditional” forms.
In contrast to this body of work, the academic
study of souvenir consumption within the home has
focused on the significance of narrative remembering.
Much of this work follows Susan Stewart’s influential
study that focuses on the souvenir as appearing “out
of context” in the home. She describes how the souvenir maintains the trace of the past and requires the
invention of a narrative to bridge the gap to its present. Stewart (1992, 136) suggests that “the souvenir
is by definition always incomplete” because of its
incongruous presence in the space of the home. This
is key to an object’s capacity to work as a souvenir,
which inspires narrative remembering, substituting
the object for a set of increasingly abstract referents.
Stewart’s analysis is useful for directing attention
toward the significance and presence of the souvenir
in the space of the home. A great deal of work adopts
her phraseology and refers to the souvenir as directly
equivalent to a memory, representation, or narrative. However, this conceptualizes the souvenir solely
according to its metonymic function and removal

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Spaces and Places

“from the present flow of the events” (Stewart 1992,
150). Such an approach assumes souvenirs simply
are meaningful and neglects to consider how their
meanings might change or develop over time.
Given the significance of souvenirs within tourist
destinations, as well as their centrality to the home,
little research has traced the connections between
these contexts. As such, a method known as “follow
the thing” offers a way to extend our understanding of souvenir consumption and its intersections
with production. This is a multilocal ethnographic
research process to examine how the meanings
of objects change throughout their life course
(Appadurai 1986). Irean Ateljevic and Stephen
Doorne adopt this method to create an object biography for a particular type of souvenir, comparing how
its meanings differ for producers and tourists. This
offers a useful way to examine how notions such
as authenticity are negotiated as souvenirs become
“surrogates of human relations and representations
of identity” (Ateljevic and Doorne 2003, 123).
This method has also been adopted to explore the
complex relations souvenirs create between people
and places. Nissa Ramsay, for instance, examines
how souvenirs become meaningful within everyday
habitual practices, following how they are sold, purchased, displayed, and remembered. This approach
recognizes how any object has the potential to work
as a souvenir rather than simply assuming its meaning and representation are self evident. Employing
ethnographic research in multiple locations makes
it possible to consider the complex intersections
between souvenir production and consumption.
Areas for future research include the role memory
and forgetting play in the collection of souvenirs, particularly with ephemeral objects such as pebbles or
bus tickets. The souvenir also offers a useful vehicle
through which to explore the connections between
home and away. A number of studies are currently
exploring the mundane elements of tourism to move
away from a focus on the symbolic and discursive
meanings of tourism. Objects such as tickets, passports, guidebooks, tour brochures, and suitcases are
now recognized as integral to the everyday practices
of doing tourism and a limited amount of work,
particularly that of Adrian Franklin, has extended
this idea to souvenirs. Souvenirs offer the potential
to study the intersections between the everyday and
the extraordinary. There is further scope to explore
how souvenirs work as performative representations,

bridging the gap between the previously discursive
focus of tourism research and a current concern with
tourism as practiced. Overall, the study of souvenirs
can offer useful insights into people’s relations with
material culture. Their capacity to connect people
and place contributes to consumption studies within
tourism, the home, memory, and culture.
Nissa Ramsay
See also Authenticity; Mass Tourism; Memory; Object
Biographies; Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
Appadurai, Arajun, ed. The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Ateljevic, Irena, and Doorne, Stephen. “Culture, Economy
and Tourism Commodities: Social Relations of
Production and Consumption.” Tourist Studies 3, no. 2
(2003): 123–141.
Causey, Andrew. Hard Bargaining in Sumatra: Western
Travellers and Toba Bataks in the Marketplace of
Souvenirs. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003.
Franklin, Adrian. Tourism: An Introduction. London: Sage,
2003.
Graburn, Nelson H. Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural
Expressions from the Fourth World. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979.
Lury, Celia. “The Objects of Travel.” In Touring Cultures:
Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris
Rojeck and John Urry, 75–95. London: Routledge,
1997.
Phillips, Ruth B., and Chris B. Steiner, eds. Unpacking
Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and
Postcolonial Perspectives. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
Ramsay, Nissa. “Refracted Enchantment and the Habitual
Spaces of the Tourist Souvenir.” Social and Cultural
Geography 10, no. 2 (2009): 197–217.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature,
the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1992.
Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in
Contemporary Societies. London: Sage, 1990.

SPACES

AND

PLACES

By theorizing the concepts of “space” and “place,”
geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, planners,

Spaces and Places

psychologists, and several different kinds of specialized scholars have tried to bring within their fields the
recognition that the relationship between ourselves,
the others, and the surrounding environment is a crucial one. Things, such as objects, occur in space in the
same way that social relations do. To put it in other
words, situations take place, or, to follow one of the
major theorists of this topic, we consider “places not
as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space
and time; as spatio-temporal events” (Massey 2005,
130, emphasis in original). Consumption as a social
practice occurs precisely within places, some of them
specifically devoted to the multiple facets of consuming, like restaurants or shopping centers, but it is also
embedded in spatial terms because place, in itself, is a
commodity. People buy, trade, use, recycle, destroy, or
build places. Consumer culture may be then considered, above all, a culture of consuming (within) places.
Before reviewing the most recent and relevant issues
in spaces and places, this entry briefly retraces the role
played by the former in the history of thought, since
this category is neither new nor objective.

A Brief Overview of Space in Social Thought
The recognition of a dimension called “space” and
of a multiplicity of locales variously called “places”
is far from being recent in social thought. Aristotle,
for instance, considered space as the finite bound
of the bodily extensions, the sum of the embodied
experience of reality, whereas the advent of scientific
epistemology in modern thinking led Isaac Newton,
and later Immanuel Kant, to define an absolute space
both as a matter of reality and as an a priori category
of the mind. The phenomenological tradition carried
by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty also forcefully insisted on the space
as one of the main structures explaining the experience of “being-in-the-world” of people.
Within the philosophical traditions of those
who paid a constant attention to spaces and places,
Marxism holds a significant role. If one considers
The Communist Manifesto, the references to the
uneven spatial development of capitalism are constant and relevant:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its
products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

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The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of
the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to
production and consumption in every country. To
the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from
under the feet of industry the national ground on
which it stood. All old-established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and death question for
all civilised nations, by industries that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material
drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose
products are consumed, not only at home, but in
every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants,
satisfied by the productions of the country, we find
new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. (Marx and
Engels 1952, 46)

The manner in which Karl Marx described the
spread of world capitalism is intimately spatialized
and still holds a familiar feeling for the contemporary reader because of the acute perception of early
globalization processes. Its most prominent aspects,
namely, the tension between embedding and disembedding of relationships, is already highlighted
by the Manifesto, in which the issue of satisfying
the demand for consumption is closely tied to the
global production system. Within Marxism, space is
a conflicting surface, constantly built and destroyed
to create land value exploitation. Places are then the
result of this relentless spiral of space production.
The theoretical tradition that derives from Marx’s
acute observations has always been powerful in
social thought, and, among its prominent figures, a
special place is occupied by the French urban scholar
Henri Lefebvre.
Lefebvre, whose most notable work is The
Production of Space, sees space as both a product
and a producer: “In addition to being a means of
production it is also a means of control, and hence
of domination, of power” (1991, 26). The effects of
the built environment are at the level of its perception and at the level of the everyday practices that
take place within it. As an example, one can consider the production of the mall as a specific way that
late capitalism singled out to create profit through
mass consumption. The design of malls, with their
central aisle and the shops all around, the fountains,
the disposition of lighting and stereo-broadcasted

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Spaces and Places

music, the benches, and so forth, make evident and
available to everybody a text to decipher the kind of
expected legitimate use (the perception). Individuals
and people strolling around for their own amusement may incorporate this perception or subvert it
completely by avoiding benches, sitting on the floor,
or bringing ghetto blasters to listen their own music.
Lefebvre strongly insisted on this “right to the city,”
the subversion of the spatial order with spontaneous and lively appropriation of the public spaces, the
streets in particular, and the dimension of the everyday, the mundane, and apparently redundant world
also explored, a decade later, by Michel de Certeau.
For the former author, the type of resistance offered
by individuals through space can manifest itself in the
form of strategies or in the form of tactics. Strategies
imply a conscious, planned use of actions, guided by
a model. Tactics exploit and depend on opportunities, and what they achieve cannot be maintained.
They reside in blind spots, areas of silence, cracks
that open in the control and surveillance of power,
without radically challenging these powers but by
slipping in, carving out a space for independence.
The everyday of both Lefebvre and de Certeau
is a world where social actors, consumers, families,
underdogs, and anonymous citizens become visible
and active, trying to change the common sense of
the regulated order, be it merely for a single lapse of
time.
This perspective represented an original elaboration within Marxism (and beyond, in the case of
de Certeau) that can somehow be associated with
another relevant tradition such as interactionism. We
can draw, for instance, on the interactionist approach,
which takes inspiration from Georg Simmel’s ideas
on the “spatial ordering of society,” through to the
work of Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places
in particular. The Goffmanian space is the one resulting from the interaction order, the continuous making and unmaking of social situations through the
built environment. From this perspective, cities and
their public spaces are made possible by the constant
reproduction of situations and encounters; the city
is a “world of strangers,” people who hardly know
each other, rather than simply foreigners, and the
constant, ordered rapport between strangers and
urban spaces gives rise to patterns with which we are
all familiar because we practice them continuously.
An interactionist approach to the urban space
must, however, reckon with the many divisions and

differences that come into being in urban settings.
Spaces can differ radically, but in what ways?
First of all, built-up areas act, or function, as
a setting, a frame. In their old streets, parks, and
gates, renovated inner-city areas, middle-class
residential neighborhoods, or gated communities
all carry specific modes of decodification and use.
Constructing streets and buildings in a certain way
anticipates, in the mind of the builders, the interactions that will inhabit them. Just as Lefebvre and de
Certeau implied, the spatial order may be put under
critical revision. In view of this, together with the
built environment as a frame, we need to introduce
another concept, that of grammar. Drawing on de
Certeau, an analogy can be made between social
practices and linguistic practices: ways of talking
are to tactics as grammar is to strategy. Legitimate
language has its own grammar, whereas the use of
language is a constant process of “rhetorical alterations.” Any space implies grammars and ways of
talking.
Authors like Lefebvre and de Certeau, however,
gained a full legitimacy and success in the past thirty
years, where there has been both a healthy return to
spatial issues in social theory and a significant reconfiguration of them, fostered by the emergence of phenomena such as globalization, the commodification
of everyday life, and the transformations of Fordism.
Like Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones
have shown, we can observe several spatial turns in
the wide theoretical and empirical examination of
the previously mentioned phenomena, each of them
devoted to the concepts of territory, place, scale, and
network.
To rapidly summarize, the Fordist conception of
space that lasted until the end of the 1970s, valid for
both theory and the interpretation of the empirical
world, conceived this dimension as mainly fixed,
static, and preexistent. Time, rather than space,
dominated the theoretical imaginary because of the
progressive idea(l) of society. Space was not seen as a
process but rather as a structure, holding and hosting
the main processes that built societies, like the dialectics between capital and work; the ordered and functional ties within the family; the cultural, economic,
and political systems; or the democratic regulation
of conflicts through unions, parties, or communities.
Just like time itself, seen as a nonproblematic and
progressive dimension, space was often a taken-forgranted concept.

Spaces and Places

A crucial thinker that introduced Lefebvre in
Anglo-Saxon critical geography is David Harvey,
whose commitment to the Marxist tradition and to
new fields of inquiry pushed space to the forefront of
the theoretical agenda of the late-twentieth century.
Space and Place in Harvey’s Thought
Harvey is one of the key thinkers in the resurrection of space as a central element for the analysis of
the global world. His cultivation of the Marxist tradition within the critical geography framework shaped
the new urban sociology, as well as geography and
consumption studies. Together with the work of Ed
Soja and Allen Scott, Harvey’s contribution is tied to
understanding the inner logic of capitalism through
its spatial arrangements, the “permanent tension
between the appropriation and use of space for individual and social purposes and the domination of
space through private property, the state, and other
forms of class and social power” (1989, 177, emphasis added). One of the major concepts developed by
Harvey is the “spatial fix,” which is the productive
side of space by the investment in, and exploitation
of, land use. Capital is constantly fixed by building
infrastructures, rezoning urban areas, planning territories, relocating firms, and displacing the people
who have occupied these places. The reasons for
these fixes are, in the materialistic interpretation of
Harvey, both the logic of capital accumulation and
the response to the constant crisis and contradiction that is also a structural part of capitalism, be
it the classic or the late expression of it. The spacetime compression at the global scale makes the
whole world a sort of playground for capitalism
and increases the opportunity to build and destroy
constantly, to territorialize, de-territorialize, and reterritorialize. Historical time is also part of the analysis, since any given historical period reveals specific
spatial fixes. The space that is at stake here is not
only the built environment, with its own specificities,
but above all the natural environment and the ecological order. Consider the global struggle over water
sources control or the spread of ecological disasters
due to oil exploitation: both of them reveal specific
fixes throughout the world, by oil drilling platforms
as well as pipe systems, by dams and networks of
canals. Each of these spatial interventions entails
not only political agreements but also small-scale
armed conflicts, refugee flights, and supranational

1351

organization interventions. The physical surface of
the planet changes, while the social side of this coin
is a constant and marked set of effects, most of them
productive of additional consequences on individuals
as well as countries. Space is then a battlefield.

Space or Scape?
If space is made of objects, bodies, symbols, and
mobilities as well as fixities, is it precise enough to
speak of space in the singular? Furthermore, once
we shift to the plural “spaces,” does this concept
still grasp the ambiguity and complexity of this set
of phenomena? A possible, fruitful, solution is to
follow Arjun Appadurai’s suggestion of taking into
consideration scapes beyond the well-familiar landscape. His point of departure is the need to consider
global cultural flows through the restructuring of territories, in an age of increasing de-territorialization.
In the background of this line of argument, there is
the increasing interconnection brought at a planetary
level by globalization and the restructuring of political and territorial authorities like the nation-states.
People, media, technologies, finances, and ideas circulate around the world surface in separate and often
fractal ways. You can listen to web radios, broadcasting from the other side of the planet, while sitting
in your living room. Most of the music you’re consuming refers to cultural worlds you may be linked
to, but you’re also exposed to innovative ideas your
brand new Chinese player is exposing you to.
Consumption is then a crucial feature of this
spatial envisioning of flows because, in the words
of Appadurai, “when there is consumption there is
pleasure, and when there is pleasure there is agency”
(1996, 7). People move and consume through the
ethnoscape, being migrants as well as tourists, the
mediascape, where they share and produce information as well as representations of the world. Being
embedded in specific technoscapes allows or prevents individuals access to technologies, while the
financescape introduces us to the most common and
widespread dimension of globalization, the matter of
financial markets and currency flows. The ideoscape
is the last dimension detected by Appadurai, and it
reflects the production, consumption, and circulation
of ideologies and counterideologies, a sort of public
space where states and social movements face each
other to impose their political vision. Neighborhoods,
in Appadurai’s words, are the contextually produced

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Spaces and Places

localities, in other terms, the places that result from
the intersection of flows (178–199). Because of
the force and relevance of mediascapes and technoscapes, neighborhoods can also be virtual ones,
thus reinforcing the insight that space is not simply
the physical one we usually consider.

From Space to Place
Places may be defined as “a set of spaces where
ranges of relational networks and flows coalesce,
interconnect and fragment” (Urry, 2001). This definition is close enough to Appadurai’s world of scapes,
emphasizing that place is where space takes a situated form because of the togetherness of flows and
spatial practices. The “power of place” is one of putting flesh and blood into spatial analysis by connecting the everyday realm to the analytical dimension of
space. People live in places: they occupy apartments
and houses as renters, owners, squatters, guests, or
temporary users. In the streets they stroll, shop, walk
their dogs, demonstrate, and jog. Some of the spaces
they practice become intimately significant: they feel
attached to them, fear being evicted from them, and
are ready to fight to stay. Psychologically, places tie
the individual with the deeper feelings of belonging,
well-being, and safety.
This entry will briefly show how places are made
up, that is, the political economy of place, and will
distinguish several dimensions of place-attachment
and construction.
The Political Economy of Place
As John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch have
shown, in one of the most relevant books of urban
theory, places are a specific and relevant commodity that can be bought and sold, built and destroyed.
The ways by which places get their values and are
exchanged are economic—not in a simple neoclassical model, in which demand and supply find their
own balance, but rather in a political economy
model, where different actors are involved and
struggle constantly. “Each place has a particular
political or economic standing vis-à-vis other places
that affects the quality of life and opportunities
available to those who live within its boundaries”
(1987, 19), and this means that people interpret,
and act according to their interpretation, in order to
maintain or improve these standings. People are not
only the dwellers or the residents but the whole set

of actors who may have some attachment to place.
These attachments are not only psychological but
also economic, political, and social. A landlord may
have a different attachment to a neighborhood, or
the single block where his properties are, than his
renters. The political activist, the mayor, the local
deputy, the shopkeeper, and the entrepreneurs may
also agree or disagree on their interpretations and
goals toward the same neighborhood, and some of
them may find some agreement, act together, form a
coalition, and become part of the “growth machine”
that constantly creates the city. Of course, wealth
and power are two relevant resources that make a
huge difference between actors, and it’s likely the
case to see within the growth machine the real estate
entrepreneur rather than the political activist. But the
coalescence of actors is a historical process and has
to be constantly observed and analyzed, and places
are not the final result of the growth machines but
rather the whole process. Reality, and the urban
realm, is a flow, not a stable condition. Place-making
is the main issue in urban studies, and it involves the
commodification of homes as well as malls, streets,
saloons, neighborhoods, theme parks, or harbors.
The Power of Place
Logan and Molotch’s approach is universalistic
and is profitable for the urban analyst seeking to
understand how and why some places follow specific
paths of development or decay. If we take into consideration, however, the historical process of being
interested in urban landscape, for both economic and
intellectual reasons, this had a considerable boost in
the past decades and followed the transformations
of the whole society after “organized capitalism.”
Within place theory, a central issue is played by memory and the historical and emotional attachment that
make some places more historical than others. The
birth and reproduction of the ideology of historical
preservation, the fact that some places are more suitable than others to become historical sites, the role
played by architects, historians, urban critics, politicians, all of these factors suggest that some places are
empowered or already have the capability to develop
at a higher speed. The debate over Ground Zero (site
of the former World Trade Center) in New York City,
for instance, tells a lot about place-making.
To put it another way, places are the results of
conflicts, struggles, and political choices. In some

Spaces and Places

sense, then, any specific locale is a never-ending process of political activities, and what we see as “this
square” or “this neighborhood” refers also to what
isn’t visible, to the infinite set of possible political
results that did not come to fruition. The “power”
lies not only in grassroots activities, social movements, territorial politicians, and the government
but also in the professionals who design and build
up space following precise and historical patterns.
Some places have their own tradition of resistance
or passivity, as if they were capable of managing,
sharing, or inheriting power. Of course, some other
places may be empowered, whereas it is likely the
case that most of the portions of inhabited space
do not resist the forces and violence of the growth
machine.
Place and Gender
A critical and essential dimension to grasp the way
by which “space takes place” is gender. With this
term we address the social construction of the sexual
difference, in any of its possible expressions. What
is gendered is not only the appropriation of place
through space but also the way by which space is
designed and organized. Following Linda McDowell,
“places are made through power relations which
construct the rules which define boundaries” (1999,
4), and gender is a key feature in power relations.
Male architects and engineers shaping the urban
skyline necessarily put their own gendered vision of
space and social life into a project. In a similar manner, the uses of fitness space by men and women differ, and clubs, swimming pools, and urban parks are
heavily gendered according to their main users and
their ability/capability of shaping places. The body,
in itself, is a relevant place-maker and a specific tool
and project of space shaping. The social construction
of the body—the historical processes that define sizes,
shapes, normalities, and deviations—is also a definition of place. As Elizabeth A. Grosz has pointed out,
“if bodies are to be reconceived, not only must their
matter and form be rethought, but so too must their
environment and spatio-temporal location” (1995,
84, emphasis in original). Bodies are then located in
space, and their attachment to some specific localities
identify places. Identities are both incorporated and
refer to a body, and this makes the tie with attachments, specifically place attachment, deeper and
more significant.

1353

One of the most relevant gendered spaces is the
house, the most common set for household practices. Here the different roles and memberships have
specific culturally gendered entitlements and power
over space, be it in the structuralist analysis led by
Pierre Bourdieu of the Kabyle House, or in the poststructuralist view of “living room wars” by Ien Ang.
The intersection of media consumption, gender identities, place attachment, and social practices highlights
the complexity of everyday life in the domestic place.
Another relevant domain that intersects gender
with place is the making of specific urban cultures
in areas that are then identified as being gendered.
It is the case of the gay and lesbian neighborhoods
throughout most of the greatest cities in the world, be
it because of a specific landmark like the Stonewall
Inn in New York or because of the making of a gay
village in a specific area like the Marais in Paris. All
of these places are recognized as urban landmarks,
guidebooks devote several pages to them, tourists
spend their time and money within those streets, and
the result is the production of an urban discourse and
memory around these kind of places.
Place and Consumption
Consumption has always happened through
spatial environments and arrangements, and it can
therefore be considered a spatial practice. The difference between modern and contemporary times rely
on “the synthesis of leisure and consumption activities previously held apart by being located in different
sites, performed at different times or accomplished
by different people” (Shields 1992, 6). The combination of leisure places and consumption sites is what
characterizes the contemporary urban form, where
the mall is deeply embedded in the urban form as a
specific and well-integrated side of the daily routines.
Consuming is not a residual activity, separated from
work or leisure, but is part of our daily schedule.
This goes together with the transformation of the city
and its economy. According to Sharon Zukin, in the
present day, consumption has come to be as important as production, and this means that it is necessary to analyze the “symbolic economy” with closer
attention, as it concerns the production of space as
much as that of symbols, which are needed as a “currency of commercial exchange and a language of
social identity” that can be shared (1995, 24). The
quest for authenticity that our cities are undergoing

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Spaces and Places

is a quest for making place desirable, pleasant, and
likely to be consumed rather than crossed. A whole
symbolic economy develops to nourish the needs of
young, educated, urban middle classes looking for
the authentic Brooklyn fragrance or the quintessential Parisian experience. Creativity and authenticity,
however, do not prove to be productive and mold
breaking, except for the early beginnings of urban
renewal and place-making. The net result, as Zukin
maintains, “is homogenization. Because it is notoriously difficult to come up with new ideas, the
treadmill of competition condemns cities to keep
on using the same strategies to outdo each other’s
achievements. It’s aspirational production, with cities
producing more modern art museums, arts festivals,
hipster districts, and cafés because they want to look
different” (2010, 233, emphasis in original).
Moving from cities to the main social practice that
translates consumption into place and vice versa, we
shall examine the role of shopping. As Daniel Miller
and colleagues showed, “objects are social relations
made durable” (1998, 19), and the practice of being
in touch with objects—watching, selecting, acquiring, holding, and carrying them home—occurs in
places. Some of these are designed on purpose to
offer people the items of desire, like supermarkets,
shops, or malls, but many other locales are reshaped
to shopping activities because of the force of this
practice in contemporary society. If one considers
illegal or informal markets, door-to-door selling, fair
trade activities, ethical purchasing groups, virtual
shopping, charity shopping, and many other consumption and trading activities we are all involved
in, the traditional shopping space around a counter
rapidly changes its shape. If shopping teaches us
what a market society looks like, what is related is
also how to behave correctly in places of consumption, how to identify the good shopping place, and
how to transform an economic transaction into an
experience, be it urban or countryside-like.

Conclusion
The renewed interest in space and place by the social
sciences has made clear that any social analysis of
the world we live has to integrate the localizations of
events as well as the role played by place in shaping
experiences and producing reality. The social relations are then essentially sociospatial ones, and this
involves not only the dimension of place (P), but also

those of territory (T), scale (S), and networks (N),
as Jessop, Brenner, and Jones have suggested. The
framework proposed by these authors, named TPSN,
takes into consideration the multiple relations within
dimensions and allows us to consider that not only
do relations occur within places but they also belong
to specific territories, rely on a scalar hierarchy, and
involve networks of interconnected actors. Let’s consider an open-air market in a mid-size European
city. The sociospatial relations we can observe and
interpret are between shoppers and vendors, each of
them being embedded in specific networks (N). The
marketplace is part of a set of markets, both urban
and local, highly hierarchized (S), but it still keeps a
strong local identity that makes it a particular place
within the city (P). The rules, the laws, and the geographical specificity of the territory in which this
marketplace is based also play a considerable role
in shaping relations and identities (T). An analysis
that takes into account all these dimensions may be
fruitful for any interpretive account, still keeping in
mind that social phenomena occur also through the
time dimension, where history and the flow of social
processes transform space and place in the way we
see all around us.
Giovanni Semi
See also Consuming the Environment; Gendering of
Public and Private Space; Political Economy;
Shopping; Spaces of Shopping; Spatial Analysis;
Supermarkets; Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Ang, Ien. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media
Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge,
1996.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: The Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Kabyle House.” In Rules and
Meanings, edited by M. Douglas, 98–110.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
de la Pradelle, Michèle. Market Day in Provence.
Translated from French by Amy Jacobs. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the
Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free
Press, 1963.

Spaces of Shopping
Grosz, Elizabeth A. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on
the Politics of Bodies. London: Routledge, 1995.
Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990.
Jessop, Bob, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones. “Theorizing
Sociospatial Relations.” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 26 (2008): 389–401.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991.
Logan, John R., and Harvey L. Molotch. Urban Fortunes:
The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the
Communist Party. London: Penguin, 1952.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place:
Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Miller, Daniel, Peter Jackson, Nigel Thrift, Beverley
Holbrook, and Michael Rowlands. Shopping, Place,
and Identity. London: Routledge, 1998.
Semi, Giovanni. “The Flow of Words and the Flow of
Value: Illegal Behavior, Social Identity and Marketplace
Experiences in Turin, Italy.” In Lived Experiences of
Public Consumption: Encounters with Value in
Marketplaces on Five Continents, edited by D. T. Cook,
137–157. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Shields, Rob. “Spaces for the Subject of Consumption.” In
Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, edited
by R. Shields, 1–20. London: Routledge, 1992.
Simmel, Georg. “Space and the Spatial Ordering of
Society.” In Sociology. Inquiries into the Construction of
Social Forms, edited by A. J. Blasi, A. K. Jacobs, and M.
Kanjirathinkal, 543–620. Leiden, The Netherlands:
Brill, 2009.
Urry, John. “The Sociology of Space and Place.” In The
Blackwell Companion to Sociology, edited by J. R. Blau,
3–15. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell,
1995.
Zukin, Sharon. Naked City: The Death and Life of
Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010.

SPACES

OF

SHOPPING

Spaces of shopping are locales where consumers
browse for, and purchase, goods and services. They

1355

have also been called servicescapes, or places where
people, processes that shape the selection and acquisition of products, and physical attributes of the location interact. A more colloquial term is retail venue.
Throughout history, locales where people acquire
items to satisfy their needs and wants have become
increasingly elaborate, and different types of retail
venues have waxed and waned. Popular shopping
spaces around the world in the early twenty-first century include shopping malls, boutiques, open-air markets (e.g., farmers’ markets), themed venues, kiosks,
mom-and-pop shops (e.g., family-owned businesses),
franchised stores, supermarkets, discount stores,
regional shopping centers (including factory outlets),
and destination retailers. Of the spaces that have
declined in popularity, department stores are noteworthy because they dominated the retail landscape
in consumption-oriented countries throughout most
of the twentieth century. Furthermore, according to
Sharon Zukin, they legitimized consumer desire for
goods and services by embedding service with the
sale and by incorporating a high level of aesthetics
into the shopping experience.
The home also has been an important shopping
space throughout the history of consumer culture.
One major home shopping medium, the mail-order
catalog, was begun in the United States by Aaron
Montgomery Ward in 1872. Although catalogs’
competition includes brick-and-mortar stores and
e-commerce, consumers continue to find catalogs
desirable. As Robin Cherry notes, “people still like to
sit on their sofa and shop” (2008, 13). However, they
have evolved from more general merchandise forms
(such as the Sears catalog) to more niche-oriented
publications. In addition, consumers can shop from
their television sets via direct-sell commercials and
program-length offerings known as infomercials, as
well as from home-shopping networks. The three
largest television-shopping corporations—QVC (the
Quality, Value, Convenience Network), the Home
Shopping Network, and Value Vision (VV)—account
for billions of dollars in sales annually around the
world.
Shopping also takes place in the home through
home-shopping parties, where an organizer sponsors
an event to demonstrate goods offered by a particular
manufacturer (e.g., Tupperware, the Pampered Chef).
Consistent with the traditional delineation of shopping and ritual creation as “women’s work,” most
who attend these parties are women. Furthermore,

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Spaces of Shopping

according to Brenda Gainer and Eileen Fischer
(1991), the norms of social obligation and reciprocity that these parties engender within social groups
help these parties remain highly successful means
of selling goods, even as some consumers resent
being invited and being expected to buy. Moreover,
Internet home shopping has revolutionized the
retail landscape; indeed, it is now often the case that
Internet sales outpace those at traditional brick-andmortar outlets. For example, although most retailers
suffered sharp declines during the 2008 Christmas
shopping season, Amazon.com actually reported its
busiest Christmas season ever (Clark 2008). All of
these forms of shopping demonstrate the relevance
of the home as a key retail site, even as changes in
the workforce and increased concerns over crime
have diminished other home-shopping activities (e.g.,
door-to-door sales).

Key Trends in Shopping Spaces
The tenets of postmodernity—for example, playfulness, pastiche, hyperreality, fragmentation, and an
emphasis on aesthetics—have inexorably shaped the
design and execution of shopping spaces, and these
in turn have changed consumers’ expectations and
experiences within retail venues. One key trend is
the themed retail environment. M. Gottdiener notes
such environments are found in restaurants, malls,
airports, fast-food locations, sports venues, and
museums. He explains that themed milieus enable
retailers to offer consumers access to “entire symbolic worlds” that exist within cultural categories
(1998, 32). For example, Planet Hollywood is a restaurant that not only offers American fare but also
enables consumers to immerse themselves into highly
valorized cultural categories of celebrities and cinema while they dine, because of its theming through
memorabilia and menu items. Besides restaurants,
which often feature some of the most comprehensive
examples of theming, other successful theme enterprises include the Disney theme parks, the Mall of
America (with its Americana theme, complete with
culturally resonant locales such as “Main Street”
and “Broadway”), and the American Girl Place,
which opened its first themed flagship brandstore in
Chicago in 1998.
Related to themed flagship environments is the
notion that some spaces of shopping now provide as
much of an entertainment factor as they do a place

to acquire goods and services. Stores that differentiate themselves on the basis of their “retailtainment”
factor often incorporate activities such as shows,
demonstrations, classes, multimedia experiences,
musical entertainment, food and drink, and games.
For example, Damon’s, a popular restaurant franchise in the United States, features large televisions
that allow patrons to follow multiple sports events
and play interactive games consoles at their tables.
Finally, the “destination” retail outlet typically
features themed merchandise, aesthetics, and aspects
of retailtainment. Two attributes distinguish it from
all other spaces of shopping: an exceptionally large
retail space and a setting that is both stand-alone
and typically outside the perimeter of a major urban
area. The fact that consumers choose to sacrifice
time, money, and effort above and beyond what
they would normally expend on typical shopping
activities to visit these sites makes them destinations
in their own right. Such venues position themselves
by offering unique assortments of merchandise and
value-added amenities that are designed to surprise
and delight customers. One highly successful global
destination retailer is IKEA, which offers a unique
self-serve line of mid-quality furniture with a high
level of design, a Swedish restaurant, a grocery store
featuring Swedish-heritage food and gift items, a
game room for children, and a bargain level where
consumers are literally overwhelmed by a huge
assortment of low-priced choices for the home.
Another destination retailer—Cabela’s—on its website promotes one of its locations outside of Austin,
Texas, as a 185,000 square foot facility that features
a “décor of museum-quality animals,” a shooting
gallery, and a large aquarium.
The impact of these trends in retailing is visible
both in terms of marketing strategy and in the ways
consumers approach shopping. First, themed and
entertainment-laden venues afford opportunities for
marketers to increase consumers’ emotional attachments to retail stores and to the brands within them.
In many cases, retail spaces such as Nike Town and
The Gap sell only their own brands. These highly
themed and aesthetically laden venues therefore act
as “brandscapes,” to use John Sherry Jr.’s term, that
bind consumers to a particular brand, increasing
loyalty and commitment. Furthermore, according
to Millie Creighton, store aesthetics become “cultural wrapping” that affirms values that the consumer shares. For example, Nike Town serves not

Spaces of Shopping

only as an aesthetically pleasing place to acquire
athletic wear but also as homage to the importance
of sports, equality for women in that sphere, and
design.

Functions of Shopping Spaces
Spaces of shopping fulfill several key functions in
consumers’ lives. One of the most important is that
they can facilitate consumers’ ability to acquire
desired products. Store environments can provide
informational cues that help consumers select goods
and services, and if store environments become
familiar, consumers are able to shop in a more
habitual manner and rely on their familiarity with
the retail environment to improve the efficiency of
their shopping. Large, varied spaces such as planned
shopping centers (which originated in the 1930s) and
malls also improve the efficiency of consumers’ shopping trips by locating stores in the same proximity
that can meet a variety of needs. In addition, some
shopping spaces can help consumers overcome less
desirable aspects of their lives, such as high crime
rates or harsh weather, by providing relatively safe
and sheltered shopping opportunities. Furthermore,
Mona Abaza notes that in developing nations such
as Egypt, shopping malls provide resources such as
clean, cool air. Such retail sites also offer an alternative to the more densely populated shopping areas
such as street bazaars.
These instrumental views of shopping are supplemented by the realization that most shopping spaces
fulfill many more needs than just product acquisition. For example, “hanging out at the mall” is now
a key aspect of the adolescent experience for many
teenagers in contemporary consumer cultures. Ozlem
Sandikci and Douglas Holt observe that “teenagers
use the mall as a stage” on which to act out the dramas of their social interactions, while at the other
end of the spectrum, older consumers tend to use the
mall as a place to exercise. These authors note several mall consumption practices came to light as they
observed mall shoppers. These include browsing,
“product foreplay” (where consumers can interact
with the sensory aspects of products before committing to them), the use of the mall as a community
center where events such as fashion shows and visits
from Santa Claus are staged, voyeurism (or people
watching), and immersing themselves in the aesthetic
aspects of the mall.

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Spaces of shopping are often highly successful at
satisfying consumers’ emotional needs as well. One
key way they do so is the creation of strategic rituals,
or key performances, that are orchestrated to enhance
consumers’ experiences in the retail venue. These
rituals are often embedded into meaningful aspects
of consumers’ lives, such as holidays or special occasions. Therefore, the potential for consumers to create
associations of sentimentality and positive emotions
with these retail sites is high. When Marshall Field
& Co. was purchased by Macy’s in 2007, consumers
wrote long, angst-filled letters to the Chicago newspapers, bemoaning the fact that their rituals, such as
pilgrimages to the Christmas windows at Field’s, having tea in the Walnut Room, and visiting the bargain
basement and sales such as “Field Days,” had been
obliterated. Furthermore, consumers also mourned
the loss of brands and sales practices associated with
Field’s (e.g., notifying customers by postcards that
specific types of merchandise were on sale). Some
consumers build such an emotional attachment to
stores that they even enact their own rituals—such as
their weddings—within them.
A basic tenet of contemporary consumer culture is
that brands help consumers create and reinforce their
identity. Spaces of shopping can also contribute to this
goal by reinforcing key aspects of the brand through
the packaging, promotion, and physical attributes of
stores. As Peter Williams et al. note, in retail spaces
“the meanings ascribed to specific objects (and
shops) are seen to be created through performances
played out in particular spaces, . . . [thus] consumers
may improvise behaviors and competences that are
quite distinctive to themselves” (2001, 206). Visible
extensions of the retailer—such as Tiffany’s famous
powder-blue shopping bags and boxes—can serve as
symbolic expressions of consumers’ own identities
and, as such, of their values and tastes.
One key aspect of consumer identity that is often
reinforced through spaces of shopping is gender.
Traditionally, shopping has been gendered as a
feminine activity. Brenda Gainer and Eileen Fischer
(1991) find that contrary to intuition, it is not the
features of the store ambiance that help make a
specific retail site gendered masculine or feminine,
but rather the sex of the customers and the service
providers, and the perceptions of customers as
to who should be patronizing particular spaces.
Furthermore, spaces of shopping perpetuate gender
stereotypes not through their atmospherics, but in

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Spaces of Shopping

the signals that retail and service personnel offer to
customers that signify whether customers belong in
a particular retail setting. Yet as gender roles have
changed in contemporary consumer cultures, attitudes toward shopping as “women’s work” have
relaxed, and some shopping spaces have worked
diligently to accommodate male patrons. For example, at Kleinfeld’s Bridal Salon in New York City, the
largest in the United States, men can relax in recliners and watch television while their fiancées proceed
with gown selection and fittings. Furthermore, the
increase in metrosexuals—heterosexual males who
are interested in acquiring fashionable goods and
grooming products—has meant that retailers have
a renewed interest in learning how to create spaces
that will attract these types of shoppers.
Other key aspects of identity that spaces of shopping can illuminate pertain to race and social class.
Specifically, consumers often perceive that they are
subject to social iniquities in retail spaces. Both
Elizabeth Chin and Julie Ruth discuss in their respective works how black consumers in the United States
and South Africa, respectively, perceive that shopping
spaces contribute to their feelings of discrimination.
In South Africa, this situation was much more blatant because of restrictions placed on black consumers’ access to shopping spaces during apartheid. Even
as these restrictions have been lifted, however, the
unwillingness of retailers to locate to districts where
black consumers are the majority, as well as the difficulty of traveling to other retail sites and hostile
encounters within these sites, contributes to feelings
of discrimination. Likewise, Chin notes that stores,
merchandise, and personnel are often “enmeshed in
the understanding, maintenance, and resistance of
social inequality” (1998, 593), and consumers who
are in the minority with respect to class and race are
often highly cognizant of perceived discrimination in
these spaces.

Academic Interest in Spaces of Shopping
The fields of geography and environmental studies
were slow to embrace spaces of shopping as important research contexts in which to understand the
relationship between people and place. Some scholars observe that this reticence was due to the fact
that shopping was viewed as an activity tainted with
“commercial” (e.g., crass and mundane) overtones.
Early research on shopping spaces was typically

focused on “retail geography” and was typically
restricted to scholarship pertaining to the strategic location of retail stores through the use of such
technology as Geographic Information Systems that
could plot optimal future store locations within a
given set of parameters. Another stream of research
focuses on identifying the stages of retail development
within a culture, or the ways in which retail formats
themselves develop, grow, and eventually fade.
However, as evidenced by the research discussed
earlier, environmental geographers and marketing
scholars have now shifted their attention away from
understanding the strategic location-oriented aspects
of shopping spaces and embrace more sociocultural
approaches to understanding how the physical and
logistical features of these spaces contribute to the
meaning of shopping. As such, much of the more
recent research on shopping published within the
fields of environmental science and human geography is now ethnographic in nature and involves
understanding how consumers interact with the
retail environment to achieve their goals. Given that
understanding sociological aspects of shopping is
synergistic with the consumer culture theory paradigm in consumer behavior, it is also not surprising
that many marketing scholars embrace this ethnographic approach to shopping to explore the ways
retail sites are made meaningful by consumers (e.g.,
Sherry 1998). In fact, it is now common practice for
researchers to immerse themselves within a specific
retail context, such as Nike Town or the American
Girl Place, and conduct long-term, in-depth field
studies in those sites. Another approach is exemplified
in the work of Daniel Miller (1998), an anthropologist who conducted a yearlong ethnography of the
shopping experiences of 76 households on a street in
North London. One of Miller’s main findings is that
female consumers enact shopping in grocery stores as
sacrifices and acts of love for their families. Likewise,
a 2009 ethnography by Stefania Borghini et al. (2009)
explores the ideologies of Americanism, femininity,
and materialism that are supported by each aspect of
the American Girl Place. Furthermore, the research on
spaces of shopping seems to have come full circle, as
scholars and practitioners alike recognize that ethnographic research has viable and actionable strategic
implications with respect to store design, customersalesperson interaction, and merchandise assortment.
Cele C. Otnes

Spas
See also Body Shop, The; Department Stores; Discount
Stores; E-Commerce; Gendering of Public and Private
Space; Geography; Typologies of Shoppers; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Abaza, Mona. “Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and
the Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt.” Theory,
Culture and Society 18, no. 5 (2001): 97–122.
Borghini, Stefania, Nina Diamond, Robert Kozinets, Mary
Ann McGrath, Albert Muniz, and John F. Sherry Jr.
“Why Are Themed Brandstores So Powerful? Retail
Brand Ideology at American Girl Place.” Journal of
Retailing 85 (2009): 363–375.
Cherry, Robin. Catalog: The Illustrated History of Mail
Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Chin, Elizabeth. “Social Inequality and the Context of
Consumption: Local Groceries and Downtown Stores.”
In Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary
Markets, by John F. Sherry Jr., 591–617.Chicago: NTC
Business Books, 1998.
Clark, Andrew. “Amazon Deluge Fails to Make Up for
Sinking Main Street.” The Guardian, December 26,
2008. www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/26/
us-christmas-shopping.
Gainer, Brenda, and Eileen M. Fischer. “To Buy or Not to
Buy? That Is the Question: Female Ritual in Home
Shopping Parties.” In Advances in Consumer Research
18 (1991): 597–602.
Gottdiener, M. “The Semiotics of Consumer Spaces: The
Growing Importance of Themed Environments.” In
Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary
Markets, by John F. Sherry Jr., 29–53. Chicago: NTC
Business Books, 1998.
Gregson, Nicky, Louise Crewe, and Kate Brooks.
“Shopping, Space and Practice.” Environment and
Planning 20 (2002): 597–617.
Halter, Marilyn. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of
Ethnicity. New York: Schocken Books, 2000.
Jackson, Kenneth T. “All the World’s a Mall: Reflections on
the Social and Economic Consequences of the American
Shopping Center.” American Historical Review 101, no.
4 (1996): 1111–1121.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity,
1998.
Otnes, Cele, Behice Ece Ilhan, Jenny Yang, and Nicole
Tami. “Consumer Mourning and Coping with the Loss
of Strategic Rituals: The Case of Marshall Field & Co.”
Advances in Consumer Research 36 (2009): 688.
Ruth, Julie A. “Third-Party Effects in Servicescape
Environments: Insight from Urban Consumers in
Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa.” In

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Advertising and Consumer Psychology: Brick and
Mortar Shopping in the 21st Century, edited by Tina M.
Lowrey, 197–218. New York: Erlbaum, 2008.
Sandikci, Ozlem, and Douglas B. Holt. “Malling Society;
Mall Consumption Practices and the Future of Public
Space.” In Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in
Contemporary Markets, by John F. Sherry Jr., 305–336.
Chicago: NTC Business Books, 1998.
Sherry, John F., Jr. Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in
Contemporary Markets. Chicago: NTC Business Books,
1998.
Snepenger, David J., Leann Murphy, Ryan O’Connell, and
Eric Gregg. “Tourists and Residents’ Use of a Shopping
Space.” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 3 (2003):
567–580.
Williams, Peter, Phil Hubbard, David Clark, and Nigel
Berkeley. “Consumption, Exclusion and Emotion: The
Social Geographies of Shopping.” Social & Cultural
Geography 2, no. 2 (2001): 203–220.
Zukin, Sharon. “Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and
Standardisation in Spaces of Consumption.” Urban
Studies 35, nos. 5–6 (1998): 825–839.

SPAS
Spas dedicated to the promotion of health and wellbeing are found across the world. Originally their
function was based on therapeutic and pleasurable
usage of thermal and mineral springs for bathing and
drinking; they now are highly commercialized institutions playing a key role in tourism around the world,
a subject that is still underresearched. The term spa is
also widely used to refer to any facility that markets
itself as beneficial to health, beauty, and relaxation.
Many early modern spas originated in pilgrimage
sites and a belief in the healing power of their therapeutic landscapes, and the transformative nature of
the spa experience continues to play a part in spa culture. In the eighteenth century, many European and
American spas functioned as summer health and leisure resorts for the elite classes, contributing to the
spread of a market economy. Famous eighteenthcentury spas included Bath in England, Karlsbad in
Bohemia, Baden in Austria, Pyrmont in Germany,
and the Virginia Springs in America. In the nineteenth
century, “the golden age of the spas,” they continued
to be sites of fashionable display and entertainment.
Spas were important meeting places and are studied for
their contribution to the spread of a commercialized

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Spas

leisure culture, processes of class formation, and the
construction of regional and national identities.
Spa visits were recommended for all kinds of ailments, including gout, rheumatism, scrofula, and
phthisis (tuberculosis), and for complaints associated
with ill-disciplined and overindulgent lifestyles. In the
nineteenth century, investigations into the properties
of mineral waters led to a more disciplined usage and
in continental Europe, where greater state control
existed, there was intervention and reform in the way
the spas were run. The fashion for sea bathing and air
encouraged the development of seaside spas while the
influence of Romanticism encouraged inland spas to
present themselves as sites of natural healing and scenic beauty. Medicalization of spa culture led to great
specialization and diversification as climate theory
and hydropathy (“the water cure”) gained ground.
High-altitude resorts for respiratory disorders, particularly tuberculosis, were established from the 1870s,
and the expansion of tourism in the 1880s encouraged renovation and development in traditional spas.
Wiesbaden and Baden Baden in Germany, Aix-lesBains and Vichy in France, Meran in Austria, and
Saratoga Springs in the United States developed into
modern health and leisure resorts for the new bourgeois classes. Fashionable spas continued to attract
an international and cosmopolitan clientele (though
gambling was forbidden in German and Austrian
resorts). Spa cures were popular for patients suffering from eating-related and nervous disorders, such
as obesity, neurasthenia, and hysteria, which were
attributed to the excesses and stresses of modern life.
Spas were (and still are) businesses, the financial
success of which depends on attitudes toward the
body, the current state of medicine, natural-healing
philosophies, and the promotion of their treatments
as antidotes to modern lifestyles. Environmental
improvements heightened the contrast between tranquil spa parks and ugly, polluted modern cities. Spa
establishments distinguished themselves from their
competitors by promoting particular treatments—
homeopathy; grape, milk, and whey cures; wine,
mud, and herbal and hay baths. Modern treatments
incorporated electrotherapy and gymnastics. Like the
spas of today, they benefited from new health and life
reform movements and the opportunities these create
for the promotion of products, often associated with
particular cults such as Kneippism (associated with
Worishofen in Bavaria) and the sale and export of
bottled mineral waters.

In the interwar years, medically orientated spas
were incorporated into the health care systems of
European countries where spa medicine was highly
regarded for particular disorders. Elsewhere, fashionable spa clinics continued to cater to the elites desirous of fashionably slim, healthy bodies, although
many spa towns declined. After 1945, spas in the
Communist Bloc were nationalized with varying
degrees of success. Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia
became very popular with Russians. Subsequently,
the economic crisis of the 1980s and the collapse
of Communist regimes affected welfare regimes
in Germany and the Eastern Bloc, resulting in the
privatization of many spas that followed the general
trend toward the promotion and use of treatments
and products designed to boost and maintain beauty,
health, and well-being.
Contemporary spa culture raises issues about
the way it is dependent on, and appeals to, the
narcissistic elements in modern consumer culture
and peoples’ anxieties about their bodies. Spas sell
themselves as exclusive sanctuaries in which people
can recuperate from the harmful effects of stressful
modern lifestyles. An aspect of this is the widespread
influence of holistic and naturalistic philosophies and
therapies on spa culture. Many spas claim distinctiveness on the basis of their expensive and pampering
regimens, gourmet diets, and luxurious facilities carefully designed to enhance sensory experience and to
cocoon clients from the outside world. At the same
time, they remain highly commercial establishments,
often staffed by relatively low-paid personnel. The
spa trade plays a major part in the modern tourism
industry. In declining spa towns, renovated facilities
feature in the regeneration strategies designed to
attract visitors, while as part of the globalized tourism industry, the spa is subject to the ethical, environmental, and economic issues associated with its
development. Many new spas are situated in places
chosen for their natural beauty and exotic locations
and represent the growing strength of non-Western
economies and the changing lifestyles of their elites.
Jill Steward
See also Body, The; Leisure; Lifestyle; Narcissism; Seaside
Resorts; Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
Borsay, Peter. The Image of Georgian Bath from 1700–
2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Spatial Analysis
Chambers, Thomas A. Drinking the Waters: Creating an
American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Springs.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2002.
Lachmeyer, Herbert, Sylvia Mattl-Wurm, and Christian
Gargerle, eds. Das Bad, eine Geschichte der Badekultur
im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert [The bathroom: The history
of spa culture in the 19th and 20th century]. Salzburg,
Austria: Residenz Verlag, 1991.
Mackamon, Douglas. Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture,
Medicine and the Spa in Modern France. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Steward, Jill. “The Culture of the Water Cure in NineteenthCentury Austria.” In Water, Leisure and Culture:
European Historical Perspectives. Oxford: Berg, 2002.
Williams, Allan, and Vladmir Balaz. Tourism in Transition:
Economic Change in Central Europe. London: I. B.
Taurus, 2000.

SPATIAL ANALYSIS
Spatial analysis consists of quantitative, statistical
techniques of analysis applied to data with a spatial
dimension. An example of its application might be
an investigation into how consumption patterns are
similar in different neighborhoods associated with
similar socioeconomic profiles. Spatial analysis may
be used to explore how spatial factors interact with
other phenomena, or to control for spatial factors to
investigate other, nonspatial, factors. With the development of information technology and increasing
capacity of computers, spatial analysis has become
increasingly associated with geographic information
systems (GIS). In addition, the development of sensors and scanners, such as video cameras and GPS
devices, to capture spatial data and record the location of objects and phenomena has made spatial data
more available.
A brief introduction describes the growing importance of space to social scientists. Following this, the
concepts and methods used in spatial analysis are
explored, highlighting the criticisms and potential
problems of spatial analysis. The next section examines how spatial analysis has been developed and
applied to the investigation of consumer culture. The
final section discusses future directions in the spatial
analysis of consumer culture.
Until recently, social science was primarily interested in how social phenomena evolved over time, and
little attention was given to space or geography. Space

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tended to be seen as a passive receptacle containing
social phenomena largely shaped by time or history.
Therefore, spatial matters tended to be viewed as
playing only a minor role. However, with the work of
authors such as David Harvey, Doreen Massey, John
Urry, and Ash Amin over the past twenty or thirty
years, space has emerged at the forefront of discussion
in the social sciences. While space has great relevance
to the study of the consumer, spatial analysis’s association with a quantitative approach to research has
meant its appeal has been limited to particular sections of the academic community and to public sector planners and private commerce. With the recent
influence of critical theory in the social sciences, often
referred to as the “cultural turn,” academics interested in consumer culture have often opted for a more
qualitative approach. That is not to deny the great
progress that has been made, and the flourish of interest, in spatial analysis over the last two decades.

Concepts, Methods, and Criticisms
Spatial analysis includes a wide range of different techniques and methods that build on and augment the
quantitative statistical methods more generally applied
across the social sciences. Spatial data can require specific methods of analysis. Specialist spatial techniques
include spatial sampling, the use of grids and references, analysis of networks, spatial patterning, and
spatial interpolation. The development of GIS software such as ArcGIS has greatly improved the speed
and ease with which the techniques can be carried out.
GIS software requires boundary information on the
area under study. A number of different such data sets
at different spatial scales for the United Kingdom can
be downloaded online at Edina UKborders. National
censuses, national health services, police records, and
consumer surveys all provide useful data sources.
Some key concepts form the foundations of spatial analysis. One such concept is that “everything is
related to everything else, but near things are more
related than distant things” (Tobler 1970, 236).
Referred to as the “first law of geography,” this is
central to many methods for the analysis of spatial
data, according to Christopher D. Lloyd. In empirical terms, this is termed spatial autocorrelation: data
are not independent of one another, but values in
nearby places tend to be more similar than values in
locations that are far apart. Neighboring values tend
to be similar.

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Spatial Analysis

With more specific relevance to consumer culture,
Walter Christaller developed central place theory.
Central place theory seeks to explain the occurrence
of networks of human settlements and how different
settlements provide unique functions within a network or region. According to Christaller, each settlement provides a central location where consumers
and sellers of goods and services meet. A hierarchy,
based on the size of each settlement, evolves, providing different functions to an area. Larger settlements
provide hubs for goods serving the smaller surrounding areas. Central space theory is based on the premise that the higher the order, or price, of a good is, the
further consumers are willing to travel to purchase
it. Therefore, a higher order good is supported by a
larger threshold of consumers.
Related to central place theory is the gravity
model. Larger settlements consist of larger numbers
of people living in them, and according to the gravity model, larger urban settlements attract people,
commodities, and services more than smaller places.
Also, like gravity, the amount of “pull” a settlement
exerts on people is related to distance from the settlement. The shorter the distance is from the center of
the settlement, the stronger the pull becomes. Gravity
models have been used to predict different socioeconomic flows between cities according to their size
and the distance between them. Trade flows are an
example of interest to researchers studying consumption and retail location.
Spatial analysis, together with quantitative methods in general, has been criticized on epistemological
and ontological grounds. The proponents of quantitative research methods claim that their methods
provide an objective and universal view of social
phenomena. However, some argue that the quantitative methods cannot be objective but merely represent a particular (especially Western or Eurocentric)
point of view, a view that has an interest in securing
“objective” facts and knowledge to enforce power
relations. It is argued that scientific methods are used
in the West to maintain dominance over other peoples and countries. Whether or not one agrees with
this ontological attack on the scientific method, this
criticism can also be used to attack not just quantitative approaches but also qualitative ones. The ontological attack also implies that the scientific method
is the exclusive property of the West, or particular
elite groups of people, denying the rich contribution
that non-Western peoples have made to science.

Data used in spatial analysis tend to be observational rather than experimental and not produced
under controlled conditions. For this reason, it is
argued, theoretical and empirical models, such as the
gravity model, of social phenomena fail to capture
reality. In particular the concept of “economic man,”
according to which individuals act rationally to maximize their utility (or satisfaction), has been subject
to this criticism. It is argued that individuals do not
always act in a rational manner or do not have access
to the information with which to make a rational
choice. Much criticism made against models is aimed
at their oversimplification and generalization that, it
is argued, fails to capture the complexity and rich
difference of the real world. This criticism questions
not just spatial analysis but quantitative approaches
in general, and the scientific method, to study social
phenomena. Some criticism, however, is specific to
spatial analysis.
A potential problem related to spatial analysis
is termed the ecological fallacy, which refers to
the possibility of making mistakes when making
inferences about individuals from aggregate spatial data. It is a problem of overgeneralization. A
summary characteristic of a neighborhood does
not necessarily correctly describe every individual
living there. Whereas the mean income of a neighborhood might be high, there may be many individuals living in the neighborhood who are on low
incomes. Spatial analysis can provide useful summary descriptions of an area, but there is a danger that such generalizations cannot be applied to
every subarea or member of the population living
in the area of analysis.
Another problem specific to spatial analysis is the
modifiable areal unit problem. The results of spatial
analysis, and therefore the conclusions drawn from
them, are sensitive to how areal boundaries are
drawn. On the one hand, the results are sensitive to
where and how boundaries are drawn, but on the
other hand they are also sensitive to the geographical
scale or unit used (how big the area is). In addition,
establishing the boundary of a study area may be an
arbitrary process, or boundaries may be difficult to
determine, fuzzy, or blurred. Furthermore, choice of
location from which to study an issue can influence
the findings. Should an investigation into consumption take a consumer’s place of residence as the location for study or the place where a commodity is
purchased?

Spatial Analysis

Applications to Consumer Research
Although over the past two centuries issues of space
have not been at the forefront of social science, spatial dimensions have been studied. Spatial analysis
has tended to develop with many of the theoretical
and conceptual foundations of economics. Many
spatial models have incorporated concepts of the
market, supply and demand, and competition. Some
of the earliest examples of spatial analysis were
focused on explaining the location of phenomena.
Taking into account space and competition over it,
zonal models were developed, and these have been
refined to explain how different areas of space specialize in particular functions such as retailing. These
have contributed to an understanding of the social
and economic fabric of cities, the architecture and
culture, and how different neighborhoods and social
groups function within a broader network. This
research has important implications for those interested in consumer culture.
As the techniques of spatial analysis have been
developed, they have been increasingly applied in
commercial settings. Modern market research uses
many of the tools and models of spatial analysis to
identify markets and potential customers for commercial advantage. Location theory assists company
decision-making processes to determine the optimum
retail location. Geodemographic profiling enables
companies, but also noncommercial organizations,
to classify neighborhoods according to a range of
socioeconomic characteristics.
Much academic work on spatial matters examines the location of industry and how different social
groups become distributed and clustered within particular zones or regions. Production and social class/
group are very closely related to matters of consumption. Social class is said to be closely related to occupation, which determines income, and it is income
that has an important impact on consumption.
Industry is said to respond to consumer demand, and
this frequently plays an important role in determining location, especially in the case of retail industry.
Likewise, industry via its impact on labor markets
is highly influential in determining where employees
live, the kind of housing they reside in, and a number
of other consumption-related factors.
One of the earliest examples of spatial analysis
was undertaken by Johann Heinrich von Thünen in
the early nineteenth century. Although von Thünen’s

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ideas were not directly applied to retailing or consumption, his model became the basis for future
spatial models concerned with consumption. Von
Thünen’s model explains why similar agricultural
crops are grown by farmers within distinct zones surrounding a central market. According to the model,
the type of crop grown within a particular zone was
a function of the costs of growing the crop, the cost
of transporting it to the central market, and the price
of the crop.
The von Thünen model provided the foundation
for many other zonal models. Ernest Burgess and
the Chicago school provide more examples that
attempt to explain spatial patterning according to
function and “types” of people or social groups living in zones. Another related model was introduced
by Homer Koyt. Zonal models have been used to
explain urban space, its social fabric and architecture, and therefore have particular relevance to
investigations of consumer and retail behavior within
different spatial contexts. However, because these
models tend to draw heavily on the ideas of competition between individuals, they have been criticized
for making analogies between the natural, biological
world and the social world, and have been accused
of social Darwinism.
It is in the commercial world, in retailing in particular, where the techniques and models of spatial
analysis have been most widely applied, especially
in terms of retail location, market research, and
marketing. Location theory provides a systematic
approach to deciding where to locate a retail store
by evaluating supply and demand factors. For
example, on the demand side, an area’s demographic
characteristics are considered, such as market size,
age of population, income group, educational levels, and consumer tastes associated with particular
social groups. Such data are gathered from various
sources such as national censuses or specially commissioned surveys. On the supply side, the decisionmaker evaluates competition and its spatial location
in relation to a planned site. It is in this realm that
the gravity model may be relevant. Interestingly, local
and community opposition groups who are against
the siting of retail stores in particular localities have
rarely turned to spatial analysis to assess the impact
on local communities.
Market research as a scientific process became
established in the interwar period in the United
States, notably with the establishment of marketing

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Spatial Analysis

company The Nielsen Company in 1923. Marketing
and consumer research relies heavily on statistical
techniques to solve problems and gain commercial
advantage. A retail company with a better understanding of consumer patterns, behavior, and trends
will be in a better position to make commodities
more desirable to consumers. By identifying market
segments, a company may better target its potential
customers. And market segments are usually defined
in terms of space as well as in terms of other consumer characteristics.
A more recent example of the application of spatial analysis to investigate consumer culture is the
development of geodemographic profiling, which
describes areas or neighborhoods according to a
series of economic, social, and cultural variables.
Charles Booth’s study of London at the turn of the
twentieth century represents a pioneering example of
the use of scientific survey methods to profile areas
according to the inhabitants. Booth’s classification is
the forerunner of the modern geodemographic classification systems, but it focuses on consumer profiling and is applied in a marketing context. However,
geodemographic profiling has become popular not
just in commercial and marketing contexts but as a
tool used by policymakers to improve the monitoring of public service provision. Popular examples
of geodemographic classification systems based on
postcodes/zipcodes include Experian Mosaic and
Acorn. Another example has been developed by Dan
Vickers and Phil Rees of Sheffield University for the
U.K. Office of National Statistics, making use of the
smallest areal unit of the Census of England and
offering potential for academic and noncommercial
application.

Future Directions
Spatial analysis has made substantial contributions
to the scientific investigation of consumer culture.
Despite its potential to develop our understanding
of the subject, its influence within academia has been
limited. Future directions might seek to broaden its
application.
Researchers of consumer culture have tended to
be divided between those taking a more quantitative approach, applying spatial analysis, and those
relying on a more qualitative approach. Some argue
that the different positions represent two mutually
exclusive paradigms. However, future research into

consumer culture might attempt to bridge the divide,
taking advantage of a mixed method approach by
incorporating and integrating methods from both
approaches.
Recent times have seen growing opposition to
large retail chains locating stores, especially supermarkets, in local neighborhoods. A criticism of large
retail chains is that they represent unfair competition
and have negative impacts on local communities. It is
argued that small, independent traders cannot compete with chains and go out of business soon after the
arrival of such a store, leaving the chain store with
a monopoly and communities lacking services and
resources. Such arguments are not always backed up
with evidence. The theory and techniques of spatial
analysis, such as afforded by the application of the
gravity model, might allow a better evaluation of the
arguments for and against such criticisms.
Greater unity between the study of consumer culture and other sociological issues may be achieved
using spatial analysis. For example, social class and
consumer culture are very closely related issues.
Much work has been carried out on relationships
between social class, occupation, and income, and
how location of residence may be an important variable in social class and identity. At the same time, it is
evident that consumer culture is very much related to
household income, and these factors tend to exhibit
strong spatial characteristics. A better understanding
of how social class and consumer culture are related
could provide a fruitful avenue to explore and may
better integrate our understanding of structural concepts of social class based on occupation and those
based on identity. Geodemographic classification systems could provide a useful starting point for study
as they bring together a number of consumption
and occupational related factors that characterize an
area.
Mark Ramsden
See also Cultural Turn; Geography; Markets and
Marketing; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Methods of Market Research; Spaces and
Places; Spaces of Shopping

Further Readings
Bryman, Alan. Social Research Methods. 3rd ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
Butler, Tim, and Paul Watt. Understanding Social
Inequality. London: Sage, 2007.

Spectacles
de Blij, H. J., and Peter O. Muller. Geography: Realms,
Regions and Concepts. 10th ed. New York: Wiley,
2002.
de Smith, Michael J., Michael F. Goodchild, and Paul A.
Longley. Geospatial Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide
to Principles, Techniques and Software Tools. 3rd ed.
Leicester, UK: Troubador, 2009.
Furedi, Frank. Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and
Society in an Anxious Age. London: Pluto, 1992.
Haining, Robert. Spatial Data Analysis: Theory and
Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Knox, Paul, and Steven Pinch. Urban Social Geography: An
Introduction. 5th ed. Harlow, UK: Prentice Hall, 2006.
Lloyd, Christopher D. Spatial Data Analysis: An
Introduction for GIS Users. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010.
Plummer, Paul S. “The Modeling Tradition.” In A
Companion to Economic Geography, 3rd ed., edited by
Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes, 27–40. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005.
Rogerson, Peter A. Statistical Methods for Geography: A
Student’s Guide. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2006.
Savage, Michael, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst.
Globalization and Belonging. London: Sage, 2005.
Stutz, Frederick P., and Barney Warf. The World Economy:
Resources, Location, Trade and Development. 4th ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005.
Tobler, Waldo. “A Computer Movie Simulating Urban
Growth in the Detroit Region.” Economic Geography
46, no. 2 (1970): 234–240.
Vickers, D. W., and P. H. Rees. “Introducing the Area
Classification of Output Areas.” Population Trends
(Autumn 2006): 15–29.

SPECTACLES
The concept of spectacle, conceived as “not a collection of images, but a social relation among people,
mediated by images” (Debord 1994, Thesis 2), was
popularized (and politicized) through Guy Debord’s
work and the publication of his book, Society of the
Spectacle. Debord’s theory of spectacle challenges
Marxism to go beyond a focus on production to the
ways in which people become disconnected objects
that are identified through commodified images of
self and others.
Debord was not the first to describe the politics
of spectacle. Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion
of carnivalseque as a spectacle of temporary disruption of the social order. But unlike Debord, he saw

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that spectacle could create room for social change.
Associates of the famed Frankfurt school, such as
Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre, analyzed how
society was moving from the consumption of material goods to the consumption of fantasies and the
production of desires. Jean Baudrillard’s work in the
area of hyperreality, in which the image becomes the
reality, was produced at the same time as Debord’s
work but the political points each made with their
theories of hyperreality or spectacle were different.
It is important to analyze Debord’s work on the
spectacle within the context of his involvement with
the Situationalists International (SI) and the discontent in France that led to the Paris Uprising in 1968.
The SI used strategies of détournement—similar to
culture jamming—in an attempt to subvert the spectacle, if only for a moment. Détournement was a
deliberate action of disruption, such as rewriting a
speech or an advertisement to show the absurdity of
the “real” thing. The SI was credited by some with
being instrumental in the Paris Uprising. Graffiti
of SI slogans appeared all over the streets of Paris.
However, Debord never saw these disruptions as
eliminating the spectacle.
Debord pinpointed the beginning of the society
of spectacle to the 1920s. In Society of the Spectacle,
he argued that spectacle emerged in two main forms:
The concentrated spectacle refers to regimes, including the Nazis that engineered group viewings of Nazi
propaganda films. The concentrated spectacle is
based on a unitary vision and control center aimed at
manufacturing group identity, aspirations, and fear.
The diffuse spectacle is associated with “commodity abundance” (Thesis 65), in which consumption
becomes identity through the illusion of autonomy.
One buys goods (and services) that connect with
one’s identity, and this identity is constructed through
consumption.
Debord’s concentrated spectacle relied on a controlling center; however, there were aspects of life
and social relations that could not be controlled by
the spectacle. In 1994, he updated Society of the
Spectacle to encompass an even more dystopian
understanding of society, where there is no escape
from the integrated society of spectacle that combines elements of concentrated and diffuse spectacles.
But his new integrated spectacle relies on the occult,
which has no central leader or ideology.
Debord’s 1967 version of the diffuse spectacle
allowed for cracks in which one could momentarily

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Spectacles

escape the society of spectacle, but in 1988 he argued
that the diffuse spectacle controls every aspect
of social behavior. The integrated spectacle does
everything. A person’s identity, social relations, and
understandings of the world all happen within an
integrated spectacle that connects media and economic, political, and emotional industries to create
reality through scripted images. The spectacle is
not a carnival that takes us out of reality. It is reality because it is through the spectacle that memories
are created. Our memories are not separate from the
images we see on television or YouTube, for example.
Government and media have a great deal of control
in framing what we see as problems, whom we see as
problems, and what the solutions are.
The integrated spectacle, Debord argued, controls
all aspects of our social relations. It shapes the process
of identity production—what we remember of the
past and how we remember it—as we increasingly
live in the “eternal present.” A primary component
of the integrated spectacle, then, is the elimination
of historical knowledge, especially knowledge of the
recent past.
Theorists following from Debord, such as George
Ritzer, speak of “cathedrals of consumption,” which
include massive shopping malls and theme parks
like Disneyland. These experiences of desire are set
up to stimulate the visual senses to the point of awe
and immersion. Marketers manufacture emotional
experiences that create identity based on consumer/
lifestyle choices. The spectacle through this process,
Ritzer argues, dominates our public and private lives
and creates the illusion of participation and communication: “The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those
informed of them; moreover, they are lost in the
inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb
of the spectacular machinery” (Debord, Thesis 157).
In Constructing the Political Spectacle (1988),
Murray Edelman outlines spectacle as pivotal to the
construction of social problems. Images, along with
what he calls “condensation symbols,” frame how
we see constructions of democracy and children.
Few will argue, for example, that children should be
neglected; therefore, a government can invoke that
“we are being fiscally responsible for the children”
and show images of innocent children as part of a
spectacle that masks policies that result in cutting
back services that provide children with adequate
housing and nutrition.

One of the most written about televisual political spectacles was the Kennedy-Nixon presidential
debate in 1960. In polling done after the debate, those
who heard the debate on radio said they would support Nixon, and those who saw it on television said
they would support Kennedy. The reason suggested by pollsters and researchers was that Kennedy
appeared calm, photogenic, and in control, whereas
Nixon had a five o’clock shadow and seemed nervous. The Kennedy family image was carefully constructed to create an idealized image of political and
material consumption. Being a good politician meant
being a star. Debord stated: “As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people
can identify with to compensate for the fragmented
productive specializations that they actually live.
The function of these celebrities is to act out various
lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally
free manner” (Debord, Thesis 60).

Fandom and Politics
Spectacle provides the illusion of participating and,
thus, being in the know—an illusion that masks
secrecy within the realm of the public. Political sex
scandals, for example, give a well-worn narrative of
moral decay and the return to God. This personalization of politicians provides the illusion of democracy;
people can judge the politician as either wayward
and irredeemable or wayward but appropriately
contrite. This spectacle of democracy as celebrity or
fallen celebrity distracts from public debate about
decisions around education, health care, and foreign
policy. Spectacle teaches its audience that democracy is based on lifestyle choices, including how a
politician does or does not fit in with those lifestyle
choices.
Spectacle makes it appear that the powerful are
forced to be transparent and accountable—that
the life of a politician is an open book—as when,
for example, a politician tells stories of childhood
trauma or infidelity as part of a media redemptive
event. What spectacle provides is distraction from
the public realm by collapsing it into the private
realm. Spectacle provides the illusion of individual
empowerment and voice through spectacular forms
of noncommunication, such as consumer surveys
or polls that ask whether or not a political figure is
really sorry for his or her actions. Voice as psychological catharsis is central to spectacle.

Spectacles

The illusion of reality is intertexual. Reality
television shows such as Survivor and Big Brother
appear to be capturing “real life” rather than a
producer’s construction of a reality that will net
good audience ratings. The illusion is intertexual
because reality shows, whether Fox News, The
Bachelor, or a show such as Law and Order,
which derives its fictional dramas from news headlines, influence each other and the larger fields of
power. News shows often make reference to popular culture and, therefore, politicians also may
make use of popular references to maintain their
media presence and to appear current and “of the
people.” Life as mediatized also places demands
on public officials to display the constructed inner
self as a public performance. Performing the spectacle of a transparent, psychologically wounded
prodigal son can save a politician from having to
resign.
Politicians cannot merely state what they see as
reality. The reality must be constructed within an
ongoing spectacle that masquerades as common
sense. To appear outside of this constructed reality is to appear to be unreal. Viewing art, news, or
pop culture is not the point, but the circulations and
intersections of these spectacles construct reality for
both direct and indirect viewers. References to movies, for example, can become part of what politicians say in their speeches to either inspire hope or
create fear. Movies, combined with other mediatized
spectacles, can engage narratives of fear and connect with government policies on the necessity of
war. Central to a convincing spectacle is the erasure
of alternative discourses and contested memories.
Governments do not have all-encompassing power.
Some spectacles, known as counterspectacles, critique current government policies. Michel Foucault
was emphatic that surveillance, not spectacle, was
the issue. Others theorists have noted that spectacle
and surveillance are not opposing terms; instead,
they are connected, particularly in the digital age.
A person might watch spectacle on television while
being monitored with advanced technology that
allows corporations to record what he or she is
watching and for how long. Search engines such
as Google provide tools that allow users to experience and participate in multiple spectacles, but each
time a user clicks into a site, user information is collected that provides a venue for sophisticated niche
marketing.

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Digital Media and Miniaturization of Spectacle
In the digital age, spectacle no longer needs to be on
a scale as grand as televised debates. Digital media
have brought the opportunity for what Baz Kershaw
calls the “miniaturization of spectacle.” The miniature spectacle can be immersive and multiplatform (e.g., websites, online games, and television).
Spectacle no longer needs a public space; it just takes
the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger on a
mobile device. One can construct a virtual spectacle
through avatars, for example, and the virtual world
provides an illusion of total freedom to create and
choose. The line between producer and consumer of
media becomes blurred. Participants can seemingly
produce whatever they wish—the programming language that determines the parameters is hidden, as
are the algorithms that determine if these productions will be widely disseminated to others. Spectacle
is no longer an occasion; it is what we do every day.
We perform who we are in various digital and geographical landscapes.
Facebook and Twitter provide new venues for
traditional cultural, political, and economic players
to perform—creating spectacle that appears to be
grassroots but that has no central control. But digital
spectacle can also provide those with fewer resources
the ability to create spectacles that might not be covered by corporate media, or that might be covered
with a different narrative than desired by the producers. The spectacle of human rights violations in Iraq
or Afghanistan, for example, may be minimized or
ignored by corporate media but can circulate through
websites, Twitter, and blogs. Eventually some of the
images on these networked spaces may become part
of corporate coverage, but the narrative connected
to the images might be changed by media producers
and, in the process, generate a remixed spectacle.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s use of social
media during the 2008 presidential election campaign allowed for a sense of participation, but it also
depended on specificity, as he spoke to different people through niche campaigning. The spectacle was
performed on a massive scale—a televised election
campaign that was globally watched for more than
a year—but it was also miniaturized so Americans
could feel they were part of shaping the world based
on their particular issues of interest, such as education or the economy. The miniaturization of spectacle is central to building a global spectacle, while at

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Spectacles

the same intensifying its divisions. Given the power
of the United States in the global economy, the world
may be part of observing U.S. economic or political
spectacles, but what individuals choose to follow and
how they choose to persuade others is fragmented
into thousands of possible membership groupings
delivered through electronic media.
The miniaturization of spectacle can create an
illusion of the rise of a networked virtual grassroots
democracy. Corporate or political interest behind a
website can easily be masked. What is actually an
extension of marketing and building a customer base
may appear to be regular folks talking about the special lifestyle choices they want to share with others;
in this way visitors may become unwitting political
and consumer products.
Cyberactivist spectacle is used to gain active spectators/cultural producers for online and offline activities. Participants of a spectacle—such as Billionaires
for Bush, a grassroots organization in support of
the economic policies of the previous, George W.
Bush administration in the United States—can be
recruited online, and the event can be placed on a
video-sharing website such as YouTube. Youth and
others can also subvert such mainstream spectacles
as a fashion show through holding a fashion show
that points to the horrible conditions of sweatshops.
These spectacles are unlikely to make the evening
news, but they can still be played and replayed on
video-sharing sites.
Digital media allow people to create spectacles
that may have been banned by mainstream media.
Independent spectacles more often than not, however, draw on corporate media spectacles. Montana
Miller shows how the high school prom has become
a media event with red carpets that mimic Hollywood
and community members who video-record the
spectacle. Such videos may be disseminated on videosharing websites but sometimes end up being shown
on mainstream media. The event is not just a media
event but mediatized—it is constructed through
media immersion in what is a “great” prom, including norms of behavior and dress.
The first decade of the twenty-first century marks
the beginning of multigenre spectacle mixed with
multiplatform media. The rise of The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report (both satirical), as well as the grassroots conservative Tea Party
movement, became central to political discourse. The
mediatized Glenn Beck/Tea Party spectacle drew on

the nostalgia of traditional values and political organizing. Glenn Beck, a leader in the spectacle, used
his popular television show to question President
Obama’s “Americaness.” Blogs, websites, and
merchandise, such as T-shirts and bumper stickers,
connected Beck with the Tea Party and, thus, with
the 2010 mid-term elections. The Beck/Tea Party
spectacle made use of 24/7 digital media to present a
centralized message and to gain support for its traditional political rallies. Spectacle relies on representing
the past as antidote to the present. In response to the
Glenn Beck/Tea Party rallies, Stephen Colbert and
Jon Stewart held a rally in Washington, DC, in 2010,
in which they created a spectacle of political absurdity by showing a montage of mediatized spectacles.

Is There a Way Out of the Spectacle?
For Debord, there was no escape from the spectacle. The spectacle, for Debord, is the “affirmation
of appearance” and the “negation of life” (Thesis
10). Debord called attempts at resisting the spectacle
“spectacular rebellion’’ because dominant economic
forces will always find a way to co-opt resistance
into the spectacle. Furuhata Yuriko points to the
spectacle of a movie about the relationship between
North Korea and South Korea that allows the audience to feel they are revolutionaries within the comfort and the safety of their homes. Debord points out
that elites can always co-opt détournement, moving
a radical action to a dominant one.
Debord has been criticized, however, for treating
spectacle as simple and unidirectional, especially
given the blurred lines of audience and producer. An
individual can upload a video onto a video-sharing
website and attract thousands of viewers without
ever being part of a massive marketing machine.
Debord might argue that the content of such work, if
it becomes popular, is within the realm of the fantasies produced by consumer culture.
Activists utilizing strategies of détournement or
culture jamming, such as Billionaires for Bush, argue
that their actions might not change election results,
but they engage the audience as creators of spectacle
and not merely as passive, immersed spectators.
Cymene Howe analyzes what she calls “televisual
social justice” and uses a dramatic Nicaraguanproduced television spectacle to challenge repressive
state laws on abortion and homosexuality. Claire
Nally points to how the spectacle of burlesque in

Spices

the nineteenth century outraged elites and provided
women with a deliberate, embodied form of resistance to patriarchy. Others argue that such counterspectacles as Wikileaks can provide room for
challenging dominant political conversations and the
politics of exclusion.
Michelle Stack
See also Bakhtin, Mikhail; Commodification; Disney;
Hyperreality; Information Technology; Lifestyle;
Memory; Simulacrum

Further Readings
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York:
Zone Books, 1994.
Howe, Cymene. “Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary
Activism in Nicaragua.” Cultural Anthropology 23
(2008): 44–84.
Kershaw, Baz. “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the
Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 4
(2003): 591–611.
Miller, Montana. “Taking a New Spotlight to the Prom:
Youth Culture and Its Emerging Video Archive.”
Journal of American Culture 33, no. 1 (2010): 12–23.
Nally, Claire. “Grrly Hurly Burly: Neo-Burlesque and the
Performance of Gender.” Textual Practice 23, no. 4
(2010): 621–643.
Yuriko, Furuhata. “Desiring Resistance in the Age of
Globalization.” New Cinemas: Journal of
Contemporary Film 2, no. 2 (2004): 91–106.

SPICES
For much of recorded human history, the category
of spices has been a capacious one. Although largely
relegated to the realm of food preparation by contemporary consumers, spices were at least as likely
to be put to medicinal, sexual, spiritual, or ritual
uses prior to the dramatic expansion in their availability after the European overseas expansion in
the sixteenth century. Indeed, it is ironic, but nevertheless instructive, that spices were to diminish in
consumer importance precisely as they first became
affordable to more than just a small social or religious elite. For much of what made spices so desirable to our ancient and medieval ancestors, even to
the point of extreme and distasteful excess by modern standards, lay in their tremendous expense and
exotic, unknown origins. Yet vestiges of these older

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usages remain visible in modern languages, particularly in the language of the erotic. A spicy magazine
is not one fit for children, and a spiced-up event is
sure to be costly and extravagant. Even some of the
medicinal claims made for a wide variety of spices
in the past, based mostly on their aromatic qualities, are now substantiated by modern chemistry
on account of their preservative and antioxidant
properties.
What, then, are spices? Still a somewhat fluid
category, they are generally recognized to be those
aromatic and flavorful parts of plants (most often of
tropical origin) that are not otherwise designated as
herbs on the basis of their green color. Thus, leaves
and stems are herbs whereas roots, bark, seeds,
stigma, or fruit can be made into spices by drying, crushing, or other means of preservation. Just
as important, spices were, in the past, distinguishable by their tremendous expense and difficulty of
acquisition. For those in the European West, spices
were also inextricably linked with mysterious,
Eastern origins. Their aroma was widely believed
to be a sign of sanctity, a healing force in its own
right, but also a stimulant to sexual desire or other
excesses such as pride and gluttony. As such, spices
lived a complicated double life in the ancient imagination. They could cure and purify, but they could
also pervert and lead astray. Not surprisingly, then,
patriotic Romans and Christian intellectuals alike
can be found employing spices in their ostentatious
displays and ritual practices while, at the same time,
condemning their consumption as dangerous to the
body politic and the salvation of the soul.
In all cases, spice consumption was roundly condemned for its economic impact. It imposed ruinous
expense on the individual consumer and led to the
inexorable outflow of precious metals to parts east
and south. Roman coins are readily apparent in
Indian archeological sites dating up to the fourth or
fifth century AD, only disappearing with the collapse
of the Empire in the West. Promises of ending the
centuries-long drain imposed by spice consumption
on the public was a powerful stimulus to the royal
sponsorship of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da
Gama, and so many others, all of whom hoped to
make the spices their own to sell. In this regard, the
exorbitant cost of spices makes it nearly impossible
to sustain the myth that the over-spicing of food in
the Middle Ages was necessary for the preservation
of meat in an age of scarcity. Meat was comparatively

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Sports

cheap alongside the spices added to it for the sake of
dignity and display.
Although the total number of substances that have
been attributed as spices over time is in the hundreds,
the most important spices for both the history of
consumer demand and the evolution of global trade
networks can be limited to a critical few: pepper,
cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger (all of South
or East Asian origin). Saffron, cumin, and coriander
from the Mediterranean, and after the discovery of
the Americas, chili peppers, could be added to the list
as of the second rank. The rest of this entry focuses
on the patterns of demand and trade associated with
these substances, all of widespread continuing use for
everyday food preparation in the present.
Despite the distant (and, until at least the sixteenth century, entirely obscure) origins of the most
valuable spices, consumer demand for them and
the resulting trade networks to supply them can be
securely documented as far back as the eighteenth
century BCE. Cloves, which grew nowhere else in
the world except on five tiny islands (the northern
Moluccas or so-called Spice Islands) in the eastern
extreme of the Indonesian archipelago, have been
found in the remains of a house fire datable to circa
1721 BCE that burned in a small town along the
Euphrates River (in present-day Syria). Likewise, the
armies (and cities) of Alexander the Great, and those
of their Ptolemaic and Roman successors, counted
on regular supplies of pepper, leading those empires
to sponsor their own trade missions eastward in
addition to relying on westward-bound merchants
of Indian and Arab extraction. Pepper that began on
the Malabar Coast and made its way to Rome (and
from there out to the barbarian frontiers) traversed a
remarkable distance of over 5,000 miles. This trade
in pepper, along with that for other spices in lesser
amounts, precipitated the earliest and most sustained
economic and cultural contacts between the numerous far-flung communities of the Eurasian-African
Old World. These spices were also the major attraction for European overseas expansion. The “discoveries” of da Gama and Columbus were followed in
turn by the establishment of the monopolistic trade
networks and plantation colonies of the various
European East India Companies, most importantly
those of the Dutch and the English.
Such monopolies could not be sustained indefinitely, however. Competition between the European
naval powers, as well as subversive trading and

transplant cultivation by the temporarily suppressed
native producers and middlemen, led to a veritable
explosion in the world supply of spices. Pepper was
the first to see significant price drops, as early as the
late Middle Ages, but even clove and nutmeg trees
were eventually freed from their confinement to a
handful of tropical volcanic islands, making them
accessible for mass consumption by the end of the
eighteenth century. And once no longer rare, spices
lost their capacity to impress, leaving them with their
modern workaday function of making meals a bit
more interesting than they would otherwise be, but
best in moderation.
Anne McCants
See also British Empire; Coffee; Colonialism; Consumer
Demand; Food Consumption; History of Food; Sugar;
Tea

Further Readings
Dalby, Andrew. Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Freedman, Paul. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval
Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2009.
Keay, John. The Spice Route: A History. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007.
Kuster, Hansjorg. “Spices and Flavorings.” In The
Cambridge World History of Food, edited by Kenneth
Kiple and Kriemhild Cone Ornelas, 431–436.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Lawton, John. Silk, Scents, and Spice: Retracing the World’s
Great Trade Routes, the Silk Road, the Spice Route, the
Incense Trail. Paris: Economica, 2005.
Sidebotham, Steven. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime
Spice Route. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011.
Turner, Jack. Spice: The History of a Temptation. New
York: Vintage, 2005.

SPORTS
Once formally codified and standardized, the social
practice we now term modern sports was destined
to form part of consumer culture. In the twentyfirst century, we now find ourselves in a position
where sports—both in terms of activities that are
participated in globally by billions from elite to recreational levels, and also as spectacles watched by

Sports

billions more—can be regarded as a commodity
that is bought and sold within an increasingly global
marketplace. Arguably the most global of spectator
sports—Association football (commonly referred
to as soccer)—best represents the interdependent
relationship between sports and consumer culture.
Of particular significance are global sports events;
the television-sport relationship; endorsements and
sponsorship; commercialization of sports stadia; and
consumption of sports celebrities.

A Brief History of Sports
A brief history of sports can provide insight into how
they came to form a significant part of consumer culture. Sports participants, be they novice or expert,
and sports spectators, all from a plethora of sociocultural backgrounds (not just the elites of society),
now consume sports in a variety of interrelated ways
within a colossal business enterprise. Yet this was not
always the case. Various sporting pastimes, which are
different from the modern sports of today, have been
consumed by different cultures that have defined a
number of pivotal epochs throughout history, including Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Middle
Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and
Industrial Revolution. It is during the latter of these,
and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain
in particular, that the most popular modern global
sports, such as boxing, cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis,
golf, and many others that dominate our television
screens today, were first formally standardized, codified, and eventually spread to the masses. National
governing bodies for sports were first formed in
Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An
example is the Football Association (FA), which was
formed for the sport of soccer in 1863.
Although originally codified by amateurs of the
upper and middle classes, throughout the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth century, working-class members of society began to take hold of
modern sports and transform them into professional
businesses. For instance, the charging of spectators
was already common at soccer grounds in England
by the 1870s and the payment of working-class
players for time out of work (“broken-time” payments) was becoming common too. This led to the
FA being forced to formally legalize professionalism
in the sport in 1885 and the first “football league”
was established in England in April 1888. This was

1371

significant as far as the commercialization of soccer
is concerned, as it provided regular matches (rather
than cups and knock-out competitions alone) and
thus took advantage of the taste for competition and
local rivalries among spectators. Commercial considerations were clear in the setting up of the league,
as it initially allowed only one club per city in most
cases, meaning clubs now represented towns and
cities nationally for the first time. This engendered
large rises in spectator attendance figures as it also
coincided with the growth of working-class political rights involving reforms that led to an increase
in wages among the working-class population, especially in the 1890s; the introduction of the Saturday
half-day for workers; and the rise of railways built
for industry that could be used by fans to travel to
away games (before the popularization of cars).
Therefore, as David Russell notes, the popularity of
soccer among the working classes eventually resulted
in the domination of the professional game and the
definitive end of the hegemony of amateurism.
According to Richard Giulianotti and Roland
Robertson, the globalization of soccer in its modern
codified form really began to take off between the
1870s and the mid-1920s when it was diffused from
Britain at a grassroots level via a combination of the
following: expanding global business and industry
emanating from Britain; as part of education in overseas British schools; and through the organization
of sports clubs by locals through their interactions
with British military, educators, or industry workers. During this period, soccer became embedded in
many parts of the world, including Europe, South
America, and the Europeanized parts of Africa, Asia,
and North America.

Global Sports Events
The rapid growth of global interest in spectator
sport throughout the twentieth century was largely
assisted by Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s first modern Summer Olympic Games hosted by Athens in
1896 and subsequently held on a quadrennial basis
thereafter up to the present day (with exceptions
only around World Wars I and II). Soon after this,
from the early twentieth century, global bodies for
individual sports began to spread rapidly, such as
Fédération Internationale de Football Association
(FIFA) founded in 1904. FIFA created its own
global sports event in the form of the World Cup

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Sports

competition. The first soccer World Cup Finals tournament was hosted by Uruguay in 1930 and has also
been held quadrennially ever since (the only break
being between 1938 and 1950 due to World War II).
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games was the
first global sporting event to make a profit largely
from private corporate company sponsorship. This
stimulated massive competition between cities
vying to host future international sporting events to
maximize revenue from selling broadcasting rights
and advertising space. For this reason, events like
the Olympics or World Cup competitions are now
what John Horne and Wolfram Manzenreiter refer
to as sports mega-events. Such global sports events
not only epitomize the global reach of sports through
including national teams from around the world,
but they also demonstrate how sports have become
a gigantic business enterprise with stakeholders,
including the media and many corporate sponsors.

The Television-Sport Relationship
Attendance figures at sports events have always
been large, but the consumption of them became
truly global in scope with the invention of television and its rapid spread from the 1960s. American
cultural historian Christopher Lasch suggested that
television has negatively impacted the intrinsic values inherent in sports by transforming sports into
entertainment. This is a moot point, and it would
be relatively easy to argue that television has been
essential for the globalization of many sports and
the reason why they have become so popular. To
support Lasch’s point, however, to fit into the tightly
scheduled world of television programming, whose
primary function is to reach as wide an audience as
possible, many aspects of sports have been altered.
This includes the start times of matches, games,
and events accommodating television schedules and
prime-time viewing irrespective of whether it is convenient for the athletes involved. Advertising breaks
for commercial channels throughout the world often
take precedence over traditional sports formats. For
instance, American football’s Super Bowl runs for
far longer than any other game of American football
simply due to the breaks in play to accommodate
advertisements.
Garry Whannel, in Media Sports Stars, observes
that television is the dominant partner in its relationship with sports. It is the financial sponsor of sports

that outbids all others. Television has the capacity to
create drama out of sports, where the final outcome
of an event is uncertain and in many cases the game
itself is actually rather dull to watch. Whannel raises
a number of issues for further analysis, such as the
ongoing impact of television coverage on spectator
attendance figures as well as participation in sports
themselves, and that television does not merely provide coverage of a sports event but that producers
construct a “package” for spectator consumption.
Slow-motion replays, multiple camera angles, and
commentary and punditry turn “live” televised
sports events into soap operas in which, Gill Lines
suggests, players/athletes are cast as heroes, villains,
or fools to maintain audience interest.
Dedicated pay-per-view, cable, satellite, and digital
sports channels have also helped globalize sports for
spectator consumption. Examples include television
networks such as HBO (Home Box Office) in the
United States and BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting,
often abbreviated to “Sky”) in the United Kingdom,
which charge viewers annual subscriptions for packages of sports channels and/or one-off pay-per-view
prices for individual sports events, such as professional boxing world title fights. Such packages are
marketed beyond national borders to viewers around
the world. For instance, Entertainment Sports
Programming Network (ESPN) is a U.S. pay-perview channel showing “live” National Basketball
Association (NBA) games as well as English Premier
League soccer matches for an annual fee. Although
pay-per-view is vastly cheaper than the cost of purchasing tickets to attend such events in person, the
collective subscriptions generated across the world
from paying customers, coupled with the vast
amounts paid by advertisers to air commercials on
such channels, means broadcasters do not fail to
maximize revenues.

Endorsements and Sponsorship
Globally televised sports events have become prime
targets for transnational corporations to advertise
their brands to sports spectators. Opportunities for
endorsements and sponsorship relating to branded
sports equipment, paraphernalia, and merchandise
associated with athletes, clubs, and events all play
integral parts in the appeal of sports to global conglomerates. Such brands as Visa, Coca-Cola, and
McDonald’s, despite not being directly related to

Sports

sports themselves, have managed to effectively market their names globally via many sports events and
leagues. The globalizing process of sports through
television has generated a creative platform for
marketing in a variety of ways. Sports stars are, in
effect, on display for potential purchasers of their talents but also for sponsorship. Global corporations
also compete to sponsor domestic sports leagues
and teams. John Horne explains in intricate detail
Nike’s use of U.S. basketball star Michael Jordan in
the 1990s as the classical example of a sports star
becoming a commodity and endorsing a particular
sports clothing brand. This reciprocal endorsement
and sponsorship massively increased the actual earning power of Michael Jordan himself as well as creating huge potential in the branding of future sports
stars. It established Nike’s dominance in the sportswear market at that time. As commodities, sports
stars can gain leverage into a position in the market
and consolidate a foothold for sponsors. In essence,
attractive-looking sports stars in a global sport have
the potential to earn astronomical figures for themselves as well as for their sponsor.

Commercialization of Sports Stadia
Sports stadia provide pitch/field/court/rink/course/
circuit/track-side spaces for commercial exposure.
Electronic advances mean that old hoardings have
now been replaced with digital screens running the
full length of fields that change constantly throughout a game to advertise a plethora of products for
consumption. Olympic Games, Paralympic Games,
World Cup tournaments, world championships,
and world tours provide marketing opportunities
that are virtually incomparable in any other context. Understandably, the television rights for such
events in the twenty-first century are enormous,
with Olympic Games generating ten-figure sums,
according to Horne and Manzenreiter. Attending a
sports event has long gone beyond paying to watch
a match or game, and an understanding of the development of marketing has changed the experience
considerably.
U.S. sports stadium management led the way
in the marketing of sports events as an experience,
with prematch and other peripheral entertainment
being included in the price. Soccer has been slow to
catch up with this mind-set. Clubs in the top two
divisions of English professional soccer were forced

1373

to update their stadia during the 1990s following
the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which 96 football fans lost their lives, after overcrowding led to
their being crushed against a metal fence erected to
prevent pitch invasions. Lord Justice Taylor led an
inquest into the disaster and ordered a complete end
to the dangerous old terraced standing-only features
of previous soccer stadia in favor of safe all-seated
stands. These newly rebuilt multipurpose stadia also
provided more opportunities for consumption, as
they were not only designed to incorporate executive suites for selling corporate hospitality packages,
but many, such as Manchester United’s Old Trafford
stadium, also include retail shops, bars, conference
facilities, and even hotels.

Consumption of Sports Celebrities
The consumption of sport goes further still when
the vast market for sports celebrities is considered.
Spectators may not be able to grace the basketball
court or soccer field along with their heroes, but they
can look like them or at least make an attempt to look
like them. Varying customs such as rules and symbols that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred
to have transcended the ephemeral nature of clothing
and other accessories and become firmly established
in something rather more permanent in the form
of copycat body and facial piercings and lavish tattoos. The mass consumption of sports celebrities is
seen clearly among fans who celebrate the achievements of their heroes and strongly buy into sports
as a commodity by bearing copycat expressions on
their own bodies. There are varying degrees as to
the extent celebrities are prepared to go in developing their own personal brand, but Michael Jordan
and Dennis Rodman (both U.S. basketball players)
as well as David Beckham (U.K. soccer player) have
arguably been trendsetters and are celebrities beyond
the boundary lines of their chosen sports.
The celebrity sports star “sells” a way of life
that fans buy into as they often identify with the
meritocratic ideal—the rags-to-riches or American
Dream—that many sport stars epitomize. Although
starting from humble beginnings, David Beckham
and Michael Jordan became multimillionaires, not
simply from their natural talents within their respective sports, but with the successful global marketing
of merchandise bearing their names. Brand Beckham
was created by Simon Fuller, the manager of the

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Sports

former globally successful pop group The Spice Girls
in which David’s wife Victoria was a member. From
the United Kingdom to Europe to the global market,
positioning of the Beckham brand has been managed
effectively and has stretched beyond the confines of
soccer and more importantly beyond the playing
career of Beckham himself. His playing career with
English Premier League team Manchester United
established him as a household name. Sky TV’s
sponsorship of the English Premier League again
increased his profile worldwide. His subsequent
transfers to Real Madrid in Spain, LA Galaxy in the
United States, and AC Milan in Italy have benefited
those teams’ finances massively through allowing
them to market the Beckham brand alongside their
own club brands.

Key Points and Future Lines of Research
Although many like Lasch argue that the increasing
commercialization of sports has ruined their inherent
virtues, others such as Whannel have accepted that
increased exposure on the global medium of television has increased the popularity of sports beyond
belief. Soccer, perhaps the most global of spectator
sports, is now so firmly embedded within consumer
culture that it is almost impossible to imagine it without thinking about its business connotations. The
professionalism of soccer quickly led to its globalization, and commercialization soon followed. The latter shows little signs of decreasing as the appetite for
watching professional sport increases in more and
more areas of the world, the wages and sponsorship
deals for players/athletes increase alongside the cost
of ticket prices to attend live events, and the subscription fees charged by television companies to view
them also grow considerably. The fans are ultimately
the ones who lose out in the global business of sport
and the wealthy sponsors, broadcasters, and governing bodies/league owners go on increasing their revenues regardless.
This unhealthy imbalance within professional
sports has led to new areas of research into how
billions of fans and less privileged players/athletes
throughout the world are being exploited. English
soccer fans have revolted against takeovers of their
clubs by wealthy businessmen purely involved in
sports for capital accumulation. Perhaps one of the
best examples is Manchester United fans’ campaign
against the takeover of their cherished club by the

American Glazer family. This led to a large proportion of fans setting up their own independent club
FC United of Manchester in opposition. However,
such local campaigns provide little opposition for
the global reach of transnational corporations like
Manchester United, considering the majority of supporters are not British, let alone from Manchester,
and many will have never even visited the club’s
home stadium at Old Trafford.
Other new lines of research are concerned with
how fans are consuming sports like soccer via utilizing nontraditional practices and/or new media such
as the Internet and digital and mobile communications technology. Garry Crawford highlights the
diversity of fandom opportunities that now exist in
our media-saturated world—from attending matches
in person, to watching live streams of events on the
Internet, to digital gaming, to interacting via fan
forum message boards, to purchasing merchandise,
and even downloading ringtones or wallpapers for
mobile phones. Although everyday and banal for
many in wider society, for sports fans such consumption practices often inform their social networks and
identities and are significant and meaningful parts
of their lives. As Crawford puts it, “If we are to
understand the social significance of sport, then it is
essential that we understand the multitude of meanings that this can have in people’s everyday lives”
(2004, 160).
Tom Gibbons and Stuart Braye
See also Belonging; Commercialization;
Commodification; Fans; Globalization; Leisure;
Leisure Studies; Recreation; Spectacles

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Cashmore, Ellis. Beckham. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Crawford, Garry. Consuming Sport: Fans, Sport and
Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.
Giulianotti, Richard. Football: A Sociology of the Global
Game. Cambridge: Polity, 1999.
Giulianotti, Richard, and Roland Robertson. Globalization
& Football. London: Sage, 2009.
Guttmann, Allen. “The Development of Modern Sports.”
In Handbook of Sports Studies, edited by J. J. Coakley
and E. Dunning, 248–259. London: Sage, 2000.
Horne, John. Sport in Consumer Society. London: Palgrave,
2006.

State Provisioning
Horne, John, and Wolfram Manzenreiter, eds. Sports MegaEvents. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Lasch, Christopher. “The Degradation of Sport.” Chap. 5
in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age
of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1979.
Lines, Gill. “Villains, Fools or Heroes? Sports Stars as Role
Models for Young People.” Leisure Studies 20 (2006):
285–303.
Rowe, David. Sport, Culture and the Media. 2nd ed.
Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2004.
Russell, David. Football and the English: A Social History
of Association Football, 1863–1995. Preston, UK:
Carnegie, 1997.
Whannel, Garry. Media Sports Stars: Masculinities and
Moralities. London, Routledge, 2002.

STATE PROVISIONING
The purpose of state provisioning of social welfare
is to redistribute economic resources and thereby to
increase social and economic equality among populations. This task has been pursued in two major
ways by modern welfare states: by direct income
transfers from government and by public services,
such as health care, education, social services, housing, and so forth. For consumers and consumer cultures, the ways of welfare provisioning are important
not only in terms of economic resources, but also in
terms of social inclusion and the ability to choose
between goods and services in the market. According
to Zygmunt Bauman, people living in poverty in
consumer society do not have free choice over marketed goods and services and are therefore in danger
of becoming socially excluded. On the other hand,
social inclusion for everybody and alleviation of poverty are regarded as the main duties of modern welfare states, according to Gøsta Esping-Andersen.
In sociological studies, the connection between
welfare state and consumption is almost totally
neglected, although it is widely accepted that a
person’s social identity in postindustrial societies
is based less on social stratification determined by
employment position and more on consumption
and lifestyles. The connection between welfare state
and consuming public services, in turn, has attracted
more attention than the connection between the welfare state and private consumption, notes Terhi-Anna
Wilska. The studies of the welfare state have almost
exclusively focused on income distribution, poverty,

1375

public expenditure, and the welfare state’s equalizing capacity. Those studies only implicitly refer to
consumption, mainly when operationalizing poverty
lines or measuring “reasonable” expenditures and
subsistence minimum budgets for the assessments of
income support level.
The authority and equality of independent consumers and the development of consumer cultures
in different countries depend largely on the social
policy views of the state. This is why the connection between private consumption and welfare state
policy is crucially important.

Welfare States, Citizens, and Consumers
The mechanisms by which public services are organized and income differences are treated in different
societies are usually explained by contrasting social
policy views. Neoliberal and critical political economy views have different opinions about the role of
the state in service provision. According to the neoliberal view, state and market are incompatible, and
the large public sector reduces income and economic
growth. The political economy school emphasizes
the importance of public provision in the creation of
well-being. According to the political economy view,
state institutions should develop in tandem with private market forces.
Different welfare state model conceptualizations
are based on these different views of social policy.
There are several ways of modeling and categorizing
welfare states. In the 1970s, Robert Titmuss divided
welfare models into “residual model,” “industrial
achievement-performance model,” and the “institutional redistributive model.” In the 1980s, Walter
Korpi wrote about “marginal” and “institutional”
welfare types. In the 1990s, Esping-Andersen introduced his groundbreaking division into three welfare
regimes. The regimes are mainly based on the role of
employment and working life in the state’s extension
of citizen rights, as well as on the conditions of eligibility and the quality of benefits and services.
According to Esping-Andersen’s regimes, in the
Anglo-Saxon (or liberal) model, the role of the
market is central in social and health services and
the social support is targeted rather than universal.
The minimum levels of means-tested social benefits
are low, and they are associated with social stigma.
In the Scandinavian (or social-democratic) model,
there are both universal state social security and

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State Provisioning

social service system, and an income-related one.
The role of family in providing security is low, and
the state-supported public sector is large. In the
corporatist (or conservative) model, social security
is linked to work, and the role of the family in providing care and security is crucial.
The opposite poles of the welfare systems from
an individual consumer’s point of view are usually
regarded as the liberal and Scandinavian models. In
the liberal welfare state model, the often means-tested,
modest social benefits are targeted particularly to
those of low income. According to Esping-Andersen,
this is likely to cause “relative equality of poverty
among state-welfare recipients, market-differentiated
welfare among the majorities, and a class-political
dualism between the two.” In the Scandinavian
model, the majority of universal social benefits are
aimed at the large middle classes, ideally upgraded
to levels that would satisfy “the most discriminating
tastes of the new middle classes.” This develops a
universal solidarity to the welfare state. All citizens
benefit, and all are also dependent (Esping-Andersen
1990, 27–28).
In liberal welfare states, citizens are typically
treated as customers in separate markets. The state
is not a set of large organizations providing services directly to the public, but a body that plays an
enabling and ensuring role when services are marketed to the public. Yannis Gabriel and Tim Lang
argue that by turning citizens into consumers, the
state justifies the dismantling of the welfare philosophy, disowning the responsibilities of the welfare
state. As it is up to the citizens as consumers to decide
whether they want a service from the state, and what
quality they are prepared to pay for, the result is that,
for both citizens and consumers, rights have become
dependent on income and wealth. Bauman also criticizes the liberal welfare state from the consumers’
point of view. Bauman argues that as the (liberal)
welfare state is the last resort of the traditional work
ethic, those who are not working have not earned
their inclusion in the consumer society and should be
punished.
An interesting question is whether the definition of
consumer citizens really requires consuming individually chosen marketed services. In Scandinavian-type
welfare states, in particular, the number of people
whose consumption consists largely of free public
services provided by the state, such as education and
health services, is considerable. The demographic

groups that consume public services the most are
the elderly and the young, the elderly using mainly
health services and the young mainly child care and
education. The very young and very old age groups,
such as small children under five or old people living
in nursing homes probably wouldn’t be very active,
independent consumer citizens in any case, but there
are, of course, people who are dependent on public
services in all age groups. However, consumers’ independence and authority in different welfare states
depend much on the quality and universality of public services as well as on the relative value of social
benefits. If the benefits are inadequate and meanstested and the quality of the services is low, welfare
recipients can hardly be referred to as independent
consumers. However, if the services are good, the
opportunity to use free public services could well be
included in people’s consumption resources.

Dependence, Poverty, and Consumption
According to Bauman, the lack of economic
resources makes people socially excluded from
consumer society. The poor of a consumer society
have no access to a happy life (or even to normal
life) and are thus sentenced to “internal exile.” The
poor are defined as “blemished, defective, faulty and
deficient—in other words, inadequate—consumers.”
Bauman argues further that inaccessibility to consumer lifestyles is the most painful of deprivations
(Bauman 1998, 38). The problems of consumption,
poverty, and social exclusion are also connected to
the widely debated concept of underclass, which consists of heterogeneous groups of poor and socially
excluded. According to some theorists, such as
Rosemary Crompton, the underclass is mainly created by income support provision, which is usually
seen as the most inadequate and alienative form of
direct state provision.
Dependence on income support is one of the many
criteria for measuring and defining poverty in welfare states. There are many other methods, too, and
in welfare states the criteria are seen as relative to the
wealth, structure, and culture of the particular state.
The most common way of measuring poverty is the
so-called relative income method, which is officially
used in Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) countries. The method
defines as poor those households whose disposable income is lower than 60 percent of the median

State Provisioning

income of all households. With regard to consumption, this method has been criticized as being inadequate, as it tells more about income distribution
than real consumption resources and the standard of
living. The classical method, originally developed by
Seebohm Rowntree in 1901, is to assess a standard
budget, which is estimated to cover certain expenditures to maintain “reasonable” standard of living.
Households that cannot afford those goods and services are regarded as poor.
In his well-known work, Poverty in the United
Kingdom, Peter Townsend defines as poor those
who can’t lead the mainstream lifestyle in society.
Townsend aimed at developing an indicator that
would objectively measure if a household’s lifestyle
was in danger of being excluded from the standard
consumption style. According to critics, the main
weakness of this definition is the meaning of standard lifestyle. Who actually decides what a “standard” contains? Since objective measures are difficult
to create, it has been necessary to develop methods
that are based on subjective opinions. According
to Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley, poverty is an
involuntary lack of consensually accepted necessities,
necessities that households should have according to
the public opinion. This method is called the consensual deprivation method. Poverty rates can also be
evaluated by measuring expenditures of households
in the same way as incomes. However, the results
are not always the same. Consumption-poor are
not necessarily income-poor and vice versa. Some
people on low incomes may borrow, steal, or receive
money from other people and thus spend much more
than their own income. Others may lead a thrifty
lifestyle regardless of high income and save most of
their money. According to Stein Ringen, low income
or wealth is a necessary precondition for poverty;
nobody is poor if his or her income or wealth is average or high. However, the absolute standard of living must be low as well, which basically means low
expenditure.
Since low income correlates fairly well with low
expenditure according to various studies, it is generally accepted that both income- and consumptionbased methods are needed together when defining
poverty and the need for public provision. Although
in Western countries national poverty measures are
usually only based on low income, in most countries
eligibility for income support, for instance, is also
dependent on standard budgets defined by the state.

1377

Those budgets are usually based on the consensual
deprivation method. In Scandinavian welfare states,
the budgets usually aim to allocate “reasonable”
consumption. In liberal welfare states, the estimated
budgets follow a “subsistence minimum” or “lowcost level” consumption allocation. However, Wilska
found evidence that particularly in liberal welfare
states, such as the United Kingdom or the United
States, the state provision is regarded as too low even
for the subsistence minimum. As described earlier,
in modern consumer societies this is likely to cause
social exclusion, which is a more severe problem
than just low income would be.

State Provisioning and Consumer Cultures
Dependence on state provisioning inevitably affects
both the volume and structure of the consumption of
persons and households living on benefits. For poor
and dependent households, a much bigger share of
total consumption goes to necessities such as food,
housing, and energy than for independent households. However, on health-compromising items, such
as cigarettes and alcohol, dependent households usually spend relatively more than the average (Wilska
2001). Benefits-in-kind, such as living in public
housing or receiving coupons for certain products
and services rather than money, are also an important part of the consumer cultures of the dependent.
According to Gabriel and Lang, modern consumer
culture implies choosing, pleasure seeking, and selffulfillment, which may seem bizarre from the points
of view of those who are dependent on benefits, such
as poor single mothers. However, the structure of the
welfare state, and thereby the nature of economic
dependence, determines the positions, attitudes,
and self-esteem of dependent people at different lifecourse stages. In liberal welfare states, dependence
on state provisioning is typically long term by nature,
and it is also linked to low education, single parenthood, homelessness, permanent unemployment, and
other underclass characteristics. In Scandinavian
welfare states, dependent people are more typically
young, students, or short-term unemployed, whose
situation may improve in the future (Wilska 2001).
Consumption patterns of all consumers are
related to age, life-course stage, and type of household. Not only current income or socioeconomic
position, but also future expectations determine
people’s consumption habits. Goods and services

1378

State Provisioning

that are regarded as necessary also depend on age,
life-course stage, current consumer culture, and
the supply on the market. Nowadays audiovisual
technology and information and communications
technologies, for instance, are something that particularly young people spend relatively more on and
regard as necessary, even if they have low earnings
or live on social benefits. What makes consensual
deprivation standards also more difficult to evaluate
is the fact that for most products, there are alternatives in various price categories—both for new
and second-hand items. When a TV is regarded as
a necessity, the judgment does not take into account
the age, size, or type of the TV screen. Mobile
phones may vary from old, basic models to the latest
smart phones, and a car may be either shiny and
new or old and banged up.
In most developed countries, there is also a growing number of low-price shops and budget stores, as
well as an expanding second-hand market. Also new
kinds of informal social groups have been created
around different consumption styles and ideologies.
Those ideologies often mix with rational choice
and personal control and thereby they legitimize
“poor” lifestyles. Those groups of “alternative”
nonconsumerist lifestyles offer inclusion outside
the consumer society. Moreover, the popularity of
second-hand products and simplified lifestyles have
expanded among wealthy consumers as well, along
with green values and the ideas of de-growth and
voluntary simplicity. Therefore, although income
differences have increased in many Western countries, and current consumer society is economically
polarized, the differences in consumption styles
between social groups are not always so obvious.
Some consumption styles even make fun of poverty, or of traditional symbols of working-class and
underclass statuses. These “poor chic” styles include
consumption of popular culture, clothing, eating, or
even vacationing.
Despite the varying ideologies related to consumption, the key requirement for social inclusion
in consumer society is still the consumer’s ability to
choose between products and services. This means
that for full inclusion, state provisioning should be
adequate for the possession of many goods and services beyond the absolute necessities like food and
shelter. However, as mentioned earlier, in current
consumer society the necessities are difficult to determine, since consumption styles are more versatile

than before. It is thus clear that in most Western welfare states, the majority of consumers living on social
benefits can join some (non)consumer communities,
derive pleasure from inexpensive consumption, and
be socially included—if they choose so. Equally clear
is that many of the dependent will remain outside
the consumer society, particularly in those societies
where the level of state provision is low or nonexistent. The latter is the situation in many newly developed countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and South
America, which will create a growing global problem
in the future.
Terhi-Anna Wilska
See also Citizenship; Collective Consumption; Consumer
Society; Lifestyle; Measuring Standards of Living;
Needs and Wants; Poverty; Well-Being

Further Readings
Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New
Poor. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1998.
Crompton, Rosemary. Class and Stratification: An
Introduction to Current Debates. Cambridge: Polity,
1993.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. The Three Worlds of Welfare
Capitalism. London: Polity, 1990.
Gabriel, Yannis, and Tim Lang. The Unmanageable
Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its
Fragmentations. London: Sage, 1995.
Hanlon, Karen Bettez. “Poor Chic: The Rational
Consumption of Poverty.” Current Sociology 50, no. 4
(2002): 501–516.
Headley, Bruce. “Poverty Is Low Consumption and Low
Wealth, Not Just Low Income.” Social Indicators
Research 89, no. 1 (2008): 23–39.
Lobao, Linda, and Gregory Hooks. “Public Employment,
Welfare Transfers, and Economic Well-Being across
Local Populations: Does a Lean and Mean Government
Benefit the Masses?” Social Forces 82, no. 2 (2003):
519–556.
Mack, Joanna, and Stewart Lansley. Poor Britain. London:
Allen & Unwin, 1985.
Ringen, Stein. The Possibility of Politics: A Study of the
Political Economy of the Welfare State. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987.
Saunders, Peter. “Living Standards, Choice and Poverty.”
Australian Journal of Labor Economics 1, no. 1 (1997):
49–70.
Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need. New York: HarperPerennial,
1991.

Status
Schubert, Klaus, Hegelich Simon, and Bazant Ursula, eds.
The Handbook of European Welfare Systems. London:
Routledge, 2009.
Sen, Amartya. Inequality Reexamined. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992.
Townsend, Peter. Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey
of Household Resources and Standards of Living.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Wilska, Terhi-Anna. “The Role of States in the Creation of
Consumption Norms.” In Ordinary Consumption,
edited by Jukka Gronow and Alan Warde, 179–198.
London: Routledge, 2001.

STATUS
To understand social status, one needs to understand
Max Weber’s distinction between class and status.
For Weber, status and class are related but distinct
forms of social stratification, which could be linked
“in the most varied ways” (Weber 1968, 932). In
their work, Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe
argue that the Weberian distinction is not only conceptually cogent but also empirically useful. Class
and status have differing explanatory power in different areas of social life. Following Weber, Chan
and Goldthorpe understand the status order as a set
of hierarchical relations that express perceived and
typically accepted social superiority, equality, or inferiority of a quite generalized kind attaching not to
the qualities of particular individuals but rather to
social positions that they hold or to certain of their
ascribed attributes, for example, birth or ethnicity.
In contrast, Chan and Goldthorpe see the class structure as being grounded specifically, and quite objectively, in the social relations of economic life, that is,
in the social relations of labor markets and production units. Although typically generating differential,
and often extreme, advantages and disadvantages, a
class structure does not necessarily take on the consistently hierarchical form that is inherent to a status
order.
Social status in the Weberian sense has particular
relevance for understanding consumption. Given the
notions of perceived social superiority, equality, and
inferiority, individuals’ position in the status order
constitutes an important part of their social identity.
To signal status is to lay claim to group membership: to whom one has affiliations and from whom
one is different. Indeed, cultural consumption often

1379

takes on symbolic significance of this kind. When
asked why they do not go to pop concerts or classical music concerts, people might say, “I do not feel
comfortable in that setting” or “It is not for people
like me.” Such replies would suggest a status concern in the classical Weberian sense. Mary Douglas
and Baron Isherwood make a similar claim in relation to material consumption: “goods are neutral,
their uses are social; they can be used as fences or
bridges” (1979, 12).
But the term social status has also been used in
a less precise manner to mean simply a hierarchy in
which occupations or social groups could be ranked.
But what is the precise nature of this hierarchy? Just
what is being ranked? And how do we operationalize
the ranking? This confusing state of affairs can be
seen from the plethora of terms that have been used
as synonyms of social status: honor, esteem, occupational prestige, and socioeconomic status.

Occupational Prestige
Survey-based studies of social status began as
efforts to measure occupational prestige. Ronald M.
Hauser and John Robert Warren note that that the
first occupational prestige survey was carried out in
1947 by Cecil North and Paul Hatt of the National
Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University
of Chicago. Similar surveys have since been repeated
many times in different countries. In these surveys,
respondents were asked to grade a collection of occupations according to their “social standing,” and the
responses were then averaged to give each occupation a prestige score. Hauser and Warren found that
it does not matter much how respondents are asked
to rate occupations: different research protocols yield
similar results. Also, it does not matter much who is
asked to rate the occupations: different subpopulations as defined by gender, race, or social positions
generally give similar ratings. In a review of eightyfive occupational prestige studies from sixty countries, Donald J. Treiman reports a high degree of
cross-national commonality and over-time constancy
in prestige scores. Indeed, this finding has been
referred to as the “Treiman’s constant.” There is now
a Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale
(SIOPS) to facilitate cross-national comparison.
Although the empirical results of occupational
prestige studies are clear, the meaning of occupational prestige ratings is contested. Goldthorpe

1380

Status

and Keith Hope argue that prestige ratings are
“better interpreted as representing popular evaluations of the general ‘goodness’ (in the broad sense
of ‘desirability’) of occupations.” As they do not
involve notions of social superiority, equality, and
inferiority, SIOPS and its many variants, including Hope and Goldthorpe’s H–G scale, should be
distinguished from social status in the classical
Weberian sense.

Socioeconomic Index
One problem of occupational prestige surveys
is that there is a practical limit as to how many
occupational titles can be included in the questionnaire: typically dozens rather than hundreds. It is
in response to this constraint that O. D. Duncan
developed the socioeconomic index (SEI) as a way
to “fill in” scores for those occupations that are
not rated in prestige surveys. Specifically, where
occupational prestige ratings exist, they are used as
the dependent variable in an ordinary least squares
(OLS) regression where the independent variables
are some central tendency measures of the income
and education characteristics of the incumbents
of the relevant occupations. As it turns out, both
education and income are statistically significant
predictors of occupational prestige and they are
of roughly similar magnitude. The regression coefficients thus obtained are then used to generate
scores for those occupations that are not included
in occupational prestige surveys. In other words,
SEI was originally devised as a way to approximate occupational prestige.
The SEI score and prestige score of most occupations are highly correlated with each other
(Featherman and Hauser, 1976). A notable outlier is farmers, who tend to have relatively low
income and education, and hence low SEI score,
as compared to their prestige rating. To facilitate
cross-national comparative research, there is now
an international version of the socioeconomic
index, ISEI. But in developing ISEI, Harry B.
Ganzeboom, Paul M. de Graaf, and Treiman note
that they “have discarded the interpretation of SEI
as an indirect and therefore imperfect measure of
prestige” (1992, 8). Instead, they suggest that ISEI
captures those attributes of occupations that convert the main resource held by individuals (i.e.,
education) to their main reward (i.e., income).

Social Status and Intimate Associations
A different approach to estimating social status,
and one that is closer to the Weberian standpoint,
is that pioneered by Edward O. Laumann. Since
social status in the classical Weberian sense refers to
social superiority, equality, and inferiority, it should
be expressed primarily through patterns of intimate
association. Taking this as their starting point, and
drawing directly on the work of Laumann, Chan
and Goldthorpe (2004) have provided some evidence of the persistence of a status order in Britain.
Their approach involves two assumptions. The first
is that in modern societies occupation is one of the
most salient positional characteristics to which status attaches. Their second assumption is that close
friendship (and other forms of intimate personal relationships) implies a relation of basic equality between
individuals, one into which status differences are
unlikely to intrude.
Specifically, Chan and Goldthorpe use data on
close friendship from the British Household Panel
Survey to construct a contingency table, crossclassifying respondent’s occupation by close friend’s
occupation. They then subject this table to a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. In effect, the
occupations are scaled according to the degree of
similarity of their friendship patterns. Chan and
Goldthorpe have also examined this contingency
table with other analytical techniques, all of which
produced comparable results to their MDS analysis.
The results of this exercise show that the ordering of the occupations, on the first dimension of the
MDS exercise, largely reflects the degree of “manuality” of the work involved. Thus, nonmanual occupations rank above manual occupations, and within
the nonmanual range, professional occupations rank
above managerial occupations. Indeed, managerial
occupations in personal service or blue-collar settings are of rather low status given the typical income
and educational attainment of their incumbents. For
example, “managers and proprietors in services”
rank seventeenth out of thirty-one occupations, and
“plant, depot and site managers” rank eighteenth.
These occupations are found at the bottom of the
nonmanual range, ranking below many secretarial
and clerical occupations.
Chan and Goldthorpe argue that this ordering of
occupations indeed expresses social status rather than
homophily alone. This is so, first, because it provides

Status

rather clear “echoes” of the relatively explicit and
well-defined status order that prevailed in British
society from, say, the late-nineteenth through to the
mid-twentieth century. Sociologists and historians
appear largely to concur that the nonmanual-manual
distinction marked a major boundary within this
order and one that was strongly upheld even as the
distinction became less consequential in terms of
economic conditions and, further, that professional
employment was generally regarded as being socially
superior to managerial employment, and especially
to managerial employment in industry or “trade.”
A second argument supporting this interpretation
is that the second dimension and, to a more limited
degree, the third dimension of the MDS exercise are
also interpretable, in terms of occupational sex segregation and occupational status, respectively. Insofar
as these two dimensions capture features of the
occupational structure that affect the opportunities
for friendship formation, the first dimension, being
thus “purged” of these influences, should reflect
more directly the dynamics of friendship choice.
Given these considerations, Chan and Goldthorpe
believe that the first dimension of the MDS analysis can be most plausibly interpreted as representing
social status, in the Weberian sense. Starting from the
structuring of a relationship implying social equality,
a structure of status inequality can be inferred.
The status scale that Chan and Goldthorpe identify correlates sensibly with income and education.
That is, individuals in higher status occupations tend
to report higher income and education as well. But
these correlations are rather modest in magnitude.
And there are many occupations where the typical
level of income and education of their incumbents
are discrepant with their status. For example, “plant,
depot and site managers,” “protective service personnel,” and “skilled and related manual workers
in metal trades” all have notably low status relative
to their income, whereas the reverse is the case with
“numerical clerks and cashiers,” “secretaries and
receptionists,” “childcare workers,” “sales workers”
and “routine workers in services.” Further, when
social status is regressed on education and income,
only the former is statistically significant. In other
words, social status in the classical Weberian sense
is empirically as well as conceptually different from
socioeconomic status.
With regard to the empirical link between social
class and social status, Chan and Goldthorpe see a

1381

clear status gradient across class categories. In terms
of the median or the interquartile range, salaried people have higher status than the intermediate classes,
which in turn have higher status than the working
classes. However, the spread of status within classes
is often large, and there is a good deal of overlap
of social status between social classes. Thus, the
mapping of status onto class is far from perfect.
Practically, this means that social status and social
class can be used simultaneously as independent variables in multivariate analysis, without causing serious multicollinearity problems.

The Cambridge or CAMSIS Scale
At this point, it is relevant to consider the work of
Kenneth Prandy and his colleagues, who have also
applied Laumann’s approach to the British case.
In their initial work in constructing a stratification
scale, the Cambridge Scale, they also rely on occupationally linked data on friendship (Stewart, Prandy,
and Blackburn 1980). However, for the purposes of
a revision and updating of the scale, now called the
CAMSIS scale, they then abandon analysis of data
of this kind in favor of data on the occupations of
married couples, mainly because they can then draw
on samples of census data and gain the advantage of
working with large numbers of cases.
The empirical procedure that Chan and
Goldthorpe follow is similar to that of Prandy and
his colleagues. A rather fundamental conceptual difference sets the two apart though. For Prandy and
his colleagues, “the Weberian distinction of classes
. . . from status groups . . . is neither useful nor
necessary” (Stewart et al. 1980, 28). More recently,
Prandy maintains that “research has tended to eliminate the distinction between class and status, or the
economic and the cultural, which was once seen as
central analytically to conventional stratification
theory.” However, he sometimes takes up a weaker
position: “Of course, hardly anyone, from Weber
onwards, has ignored the close links between the
material, or economic, and the cultural, or social—
between, conventionally, class and status. . . . Even
accepting the argument that this is an important
analytical distinction that should be maintained, in
practice it is a difficult one to make.” The implication then is that the Cambridge or CAMSIS scale is
“a hierarchical structure of generalized advantage/
disadvantage related to the differential distribution

1382

Status

of resources of different kinds” (Prandy 2002,
594–595).
One problem with Prandy’s position is that it is
unclear what the generalized hierarchy of “stratification arrangements” is. But, importantly, the
Weberian class-status distinction is a conceptually
cogent one, and it is of potential empirical importance. Thus, instead of rejecting it by fiat, the questions of whether a status order is still identifiable in
contemporary societies and whether class and status
have differing explanatory power in different areas
of social life are matters for empirical investigation.

Explanatory Payoffs of the
Class-Status Distinction
To demonstrate the usefulness of the Weberian classstatus distinction and to validate the social status
scale that Chan and Goldthorpe developed, Chan
and Goldthorpe have sought to determine the social
stratification of cultural consumption in England.
In a series of papers, they have shown that newspaper readership—and the consumption of music;
of theater, dance, and cinema attendance; and of
the visual arts—are stratified primarily on the basis
of education and social status rather than on social
class. More precisely, because social class and social
status are correlated with each other, there is indeed
an association between social class and cultural consumption. However, such associations disappear
when social status is controlled for in the analysis.
The opposite pattern holds for economic security
and prospects. In other words, Chan and Goldthorpe
(2007a) found that it is social class rather than social
status that predicts outcomes with economic interests. These results are precisely what are expected
from the Weberian standpoint.

Cross-National Evidence
Chan (2010) reports cross-national evidence about
social status in six countries: Chile, France, Hungary,
the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. Several findings are clear from this study. First,
a social status scale in the classical Weberian sense
can be extracted in all these countries using data on
intimate associations of one kind or another (close
friendship, cohabiting partnership, or marriage).
Second, the status order of a society seems to be
shared by all subpopulations within it. Apart from
occupation, there are other bases for social status,

most notably ethnicity. But the occupation-based status ranking that Chan and Goldthorpe developed is
largely replicated within each ethnic group.
Third, the general contour of the status order is
similar across countries. In all six countries, occupations are ordered according to the degree of
manuality of the work involved. However, there is
considerable cross-national variation in the strength
of the correlations between social status on the one
hand, and education or income on the other. These
correlations are strongest for France and Hungary
and weakest for the United Kingdom.
Fourth, in multivariate analyses of cultural consumption, it is status rather than class that forms the
basis of the social stratification of cultural consumption (with the exception of the Netherlands, where a
multicollinearity problem prevents investigation of
this kind). Overall, the results Chan and Goldthorpe
report for the United Kingdom seem to have wider
applicability.
Tak Wing Chan
See also Collective Identity; Conspicuous Consumption;
Friendship; Lifestyle; Social Class; Social Distinction;
Taste; Weber, Max

Further Readings
Chan, Tak Wing. “The Social Status Scale: Its Construction
and Properties.” Chap. 2 in Social Status and Cultural
Consumption, edited by Tak Wing Chan. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chan, Tak Wing, and John H. Goldthorpe. “Is There a
Status Order in Contemporary British Society? Evidence
from the Occupational Structure of Friendship.”
European Sociological Review 20, no. 5 (2004): 383–
401.
Chan, Tak Wing, and John H. Goldthorpe. “Class and
Status: The Conceptual Distinction and Its Empirical
Relevance.” American Sociological Review 72, no. 4
(2007a): 512–532.
Chan, Tak Wing, and John H. Goldthorpe. “Social
Stratification and Cultural Consumption: Music in
England.” European Sociological Review 23, no. 1
(2007b): 1–19.
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of
Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.
London: Allen Lane, 1979.
Duncan, O. D. “A Socioeconomic Index for All
Occupations.” In Occupations and Social Status, edited
by Albert Reiss, 109–138. New York: Free Press, 1961.

Store Loyalty Cards
Featherman, David L., and Robert M. Hauser. “Prestige or
Socioeconomic Scales in the Study of Occupational
Achievement.” Sociological Methods and Research 4,
no. 4 (1976): 402–422.
Ganzeboom, Harry B., Paul M. de Graaf, and Donald J.
Treiman. “A Standard International Socio-Economic
Index for Occupational Status.” Social Science Research
21 (1992): 1–56.
Goldthorpe, John H., and Keith Hope. The Social Grading
of Occupations: A New Approach and Scale. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974.
Hauser, Ronald M., and John Robert Warren.
“Socioeconomic Indexes for Occupations: A Review,
Update, and Critique.” Sociological Methodology 27
(1997): 177–298.
Laumann, Edward O. Prestige and Association in an Urban
Community. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
Prandy, Kenneth. “Ideal Types, Stereotypes and Classes.”
British Journal of Sociology 53, no. 4 (2002): 583–602.
Stewart, Andrew, Kenneth Prandy, and Robert Martin
Blackburn. Social Stratification and Occupations.
London: Macmillan, 1980.
Treiman, Donald J. Occupational Prestige in Comparative
Perspective. New York: Academic Press, 1977.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968.

STORE LOYALTY CARDS
Loyalty cards appear similar to credit cards and
other membership cards: they are small plastic
cards that many people keep in their pockets and
use when purchasing goods at specific retailers. The
loyalty card is usually developed by a single retailer,
which offers the card to its customers: if customers subscribe to the card, they become cardholders
and receive rewards proportional to their purchases.
The card is therefore a high-tech promotional tool,
because it allows customer purchases to be registered in a database, to be analyzed, and eventually
to be rewarded.
The main reason many retailers all over the
world have launched loyalty card programs is their
usefulness in creating robust and reliable information about customers (customer knowledge), which
is then used to revise the product assortment, to
redesign the store layout and display, and to define
more effective and efficient marketing campaigns.
By crossing data taken from customers’ subscription

1383

forms with data taken from the same customers’ purchases, retailers can get insights to their customers’
behavior that go well beyond the products they buy
and how much they spend. Bundles of products in
consumer counts, evolution of brand choices, level
of brand loyalty, price elasticity of demand, and deal
proneness are only a few examples of the richness
of information provided by loyalty cards. Applying
sophisticated statistical techniques to data, retailers
are able to draw a complete profile of their customers, which explains why loyalty cards have relevance
for understanding consumption habits and culture.

Birth and Meaning of Loyalty Cards
The birth of loyalty cards can be traced back to the
early 1990s, when the largest grocery retailers in the
United States and in Europe began to test a new cardbased loyalty program. Loyalty programs had been
around for more than one hundred years, but, since
they had always been paper based, they had not been
considered a tool to create customer knowledge or to
manage customer relationship. A real innovation was
the plastic card tied to the loyalty program: instead
of the old system of collecting paper points, gluing
the paper points one by one on a promotional form,
and then giving back the completed paper form to
the store to get the desired reward, now customers
could subscribe to their store’s card by completing an
application form. From that moment, they became
cardholders, and each time they used their card, their
purchases were registered on the card and, at the
same time, the promotional rights related to the same
purchases were credited to the card.
If loyalty cards are intended to be used as a tool
for acquiring customer knowledge and for strengthening store loyalty, it is important, according to
Chiari Mauri, that holders keep using the card, that
is, that they become card-loyal. The inducement for
consumers to keep using the card appears to be the
promotional reward: the discounts, points, bonuses,
and prizes tied to specific behaviors. Consumers who
want to receive the rewards not only have to use the
card but also have to follow the retailer’s suggestions
about spending a certain amount, buying specific
product types, choosing certain brands, and visiting the store with a certain frequency, sometimes at
specific hours of specific days. The higher the cardholder’s compliance is with the retailer’s demands,
the higher are his or her rewards.

1384

Store Loyalty Cards

Cardholders can redeem the rewards they have
accrued in a given time period in different ways,
depending on the reward program scheme. They
can be redeemed for discounts in the same store,
vouchers in the same or different stores, items in a
catalogue, air miles, or other promotional currencies. One of the most successful reward schemes in
Europe is the Clubcard, launched by Tesco in the
United Kingdom in 1995. In its simplest form, the
Tesco scheme works as follows: Every time Clubcard
holders shop at Tesco stores or fill up at the gas station, they earn 1 point for every £1 they spend. Every
calendar quarter they receive a statement showing
their total points. If they have accrued 150 points or
more, they receive Tesco Clubcard vouchers of £1.50
to spend at face value in the store (both brick-andmortar and online) or at the gas station.
Cardholders can get more rewards in other ways:
they can earn extra Clubcard points on specific
products sold in Tesco stores or in other partner
stores; they can double the value of their vouchers
against a wide range of products in Tesco stores and
online; and they can increase the same value by up
to four times by trading them for a range of deals
with Tesco Clubcard partners, from restaurants and
theme parks to air miles, driving lessons, and even
university tuition.

Evolution of Loyalty Cards
Both to maintain consumers’ involvement in card
use and to influence their shopping behavior, the
reward plans associated with loyalty cards have
lasted for years and have become more complex
and sophisticated. On the one side, advances in
technology—magnetic/chip cards, card scanners,
software developments in database management,
and falling data processing costs—have enabled
millions of daily purchases in the same and different stores to be integrated, analyzed, tracked, and
rewarded; these data create a robust knowledge
platform on customer purchase behavior, which is
used to segment the customer base and to develop
marketing actions targeted to the different segments.
From this perspective, loyalty cards have become a
powerful tool that has allowed retailers to fully realize the often advocated “customer specific marketing” (Woolf 1996).
An example of such segmentation is an analysis of
purchase behavior of consumers at a large European

bookstore chain. Crossing three variables of consumers’ purchase behavior—purchase amount, shopping
frequency, and basket composition—cardholders are
grouped into five segments: Top, Hot, Average, Marginal, and Others. The resulting analysis found that
Hot customers are only 3 percent of the customer
base, but they generate 22 percent of the total sales;
whereas at the other extreme, “Other” customers
are 34 percent of the customer base but contribute
only 6 percent of the sales. This situation, which is
common across the retail industry, is evidence that
all customers are not equal and that retailers wishing
to improve their economic performance should differentiate their investments in customer relationship
management tactics rewarding the behavior they are
seeking from different segments. If the cardholder
base is large enough, one such tactic is the development of a portfolio of cards, targeted to specific
segments: “gold” or “plus” cards and loyalty credit
cards targeted to Hot and Top customers, baby
cards, student cards, and so forth.
The other side of the complexity of loyalty cards
is the transformation of most reward schemes from
pure loyalty cards to purchase loyalty cards (KPMG
2000), that is, from stand-alone cards to networks
of partners where cardholders can accrue and spend
currencies of many different sorts (i.e., card points,
air miles, gasoline credits, etc.). Cards have thus
evolved into a hub, a “point bank,” a marketing
platform between a group of banners, even a business related to, but independent from, the original
retailing industry.

Effectiveness of Loyalty Cards
After more than fifteen years since the birth of loyalty
cards, what is the situation and what do we know of
their effectiveness on customer loyalty? Research has
shown that (a) most large retailers have a loyalty card
program, (b) investments in loyalty cards in the 2000s
have raised retail sales revenues by 0.7 to 0.9 percent,
(c) a large majority of consumers participate in a loyalty program of some sort, (d) an average cardholder
participates in three to six loyalty card schemes,
(e) consumers perceive loyalty card schemes similar
to one another, and (f) most consumers seem not to
know the mechanics of the reward schemes in which
they participate. This evidence has raised some critical issues: Do loyalty cards really work? Does loyalty
saturation lead the way to the end of loyalty cards?

Structuralism

Empirical studies on the effectiveness of loyalty
cards, which have focused on retail economic performance, have not come to strong generalizations.
Results have shown that loyalty cards generate a
small positive impact on sales revenues and customer
share, but that they do not significantly improve
shopping frequency or customer lifetime value. Even
if these results seem to imply that loyalty cards should
be dismissed, retailers not only have not abandoned
them but rather have introduced important innovations in the reward schemes: this means that loyalty
cards produce positive results in areas not yet investigated with due depth. One of the most promising
areas is customer knowledge. In this perspective,
future research should investigate in more detail
how data collected through loyalty card programs
are stored and used and, above all, if and how much
loyalty cards improve retailers’ customer knowledge
and eventually their competitive advantage.
Chiara Mauri
See also Branding; Consumer Behavior; Economics;
Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Markets and
Marketing; Shopping; Supermarkets

Further Readings
Dowling, Grahame R., and Mark Uncles. “Do Customer
Loyalty Programs Really Work?” Sloan Management
Review 3 (Summer 1997): 71–82.
Hart, Susan, Andrew Smith, Leigh Sparks, and Nikolaos
Tzokas. “Are Loyalty Schemes a Manifestation of
Relationship Marketing?” Journal of Marketing
Management 15, no. 6 (1999): 541–561.
Humby, Clive, and Terry Hunt. Scoring Points: How Tesco
Is Winning Customer Loyalty. London: Kogan Page,
2003.
KPMG Consulting. Loyalty Cards: A Research Report on
Loyalty Cards in European Retailing. London: KPMG
Consulting, 2000.
Mägi, Anee W. “Share of Wallet in Retailing: The Effects of
Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty Cards and Shopper
Characteristics.” Journal of Retailing 79, no. 2 (2003):
97–108.
Mauri, Chiari. “Card Loyalty: A New Emerging Issue in
Grocery Retailing.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer
Services 10, no. 1 (2003): 13–25.
Meyer-Waarden, Lars. “The Effects of Loyalty Programs on
Customer Lifetime Duration and Share of Wallet.”
Journal of Retailing 83, no. 2 (2007): 223–224.
Verhoef, Peter C. “Understanding the Effect of Customer
Relationship Management Efforts on Customer

1385

Retention and Customer Share Development.” Journal
of Marketing 67, no. 4 (2003): 30–45.
Woolf, Brian P. Customer Specific Marketing: The New
Power in Retailing. Greenville, SC: Teal Books, 1996.
Wright, Claire, and Leigh Sparks. “Loyalty Saturation in
Retailing: Exploring the End of Retail Loyalty Cards?”
International Journal of Retailing & Distribution
Management 27, no. 10 (1999): 429–439.

STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a shared attitude among scholars
that designates the salient field of events and observations. This is the case in many disciplines, but it has
its most explicit statement in the human and cultural
sciences, where the object, society, or structure is not
visible. Any particular object, material or immaterial,
has a nearly infinite number of characteristics, and it
is the positing of a meaningful system that is the key
role of the organization of a field among researchers. In common usage, structuralism refers to a mode
of thinking and analysis by French intellectuals that
was, at least in part, a reaction to existentialism,
and became the dominant intellectual current from
the 1950s to the 1970s. Although not exclusive to
France or to culture, it is a term that is only loosely
applied by most of the key thinkers of the movement
and that is rarely defined with any precision. One
common way of defining structuralism is by making reference to structuralists, most often Michel
Foucault (history), Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropology), Roland Barthes (literature), and Jacques Lacan
(psychoanalysis). One trouble with this definition
is that, with the exception of Lévi-Strauss, none of
these thinkers was comfortable to be labeled as such.

Material Production and Consumption
Structuralism as a brand of social theory serves well
in thinking about consumption because it is evident
that tastes (as distinct from needs) are in some sense
“manufactured” by wider cultural and economic
mechanisms. Second, the often unacknowledged first
structural thinker in the human and cultural sciences
is Karl Marx, whose theories deal heavily with questions of material production and consumption. His
early writings, especially those with Friedrich Engels,
are not fully structural, but display the key characteristic of symbolic meaning to broader systems beyond

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Structuralism

the individual. In The German Ideology (1845),
Marx and Engels gave the famous structural statement: “Consciousness does not determine life: life
determines consciousness.” The smallest and most
personal thoughts are, at least in part, dictated by
structures external to the individual.
Marx’s structural appraisal of the modern world
includes the systematic alienation of the worker
by the capitalist, the fundamental contradiction of
capitalism. The worker is cut off from the value
produced by his labor. In his work Capital, Marx
develops a structural analysis of the precise mechanisms whereby the capitalist mode of production
systematically exploits the worker through structural
effects such as the prolongation of the working day
and the suppression of the wage rate—both allowed
by essential attributes of the factory system whereby,
again, the capitalist class owns the means of production, which requires the worker to submit to the
conditions set by the factory owner, who, in turn, is
moved by the structural logic of profit.
One of the most important elements of Marx’s
mature theory of the structures of capitalism is the
way he derives the contradictions of a structural
whole—in effect, the whole of the modern world’s
economic system—from the most elementary unit of
economic exchange: the commodity. Simply put, a
commodity is any thing (literally, res, as in reification
or “thingification”), whether material or immaterial,
that has exchange value on an open market. That
value may or may not be based on the commodity’s use value. In extreme drought, water, which is
normally free in nature, can be bought and sold at
a price because of its essential use value to human
life. On the other hand, a rare vintage of wine, with
little or no use value, can command a high price. This
strange fact of economic exchange entails a sociology of economic exchange. For any commodity to
be exchanged for a value, it must be different in
kind but equivalent in value. The modern measure
of equivalence between different commodities is the
money system, which is a structured social convention that must be well understood by the parties to an
exchange. The implication is that for the commodity
to have exchange value, it must, in principle, bear a
relation to all other commodities in the economy.
In Marx’s view, the general theory of exchange
values was the key to capitalism’s particularly
deceptive but vicious exploitation (or, in the term
of his youth, estrangement). One of the reasons

that exchanged commodities must be qualitatively
different but quantitatively equivalent is that the
qualitative difference is the only way to account for
profit, which Marx defined as surplus value. If all
exchanges, even between different commodities, are
between precisely equal values, then there is no way
to explain surplus value. In another of his famous
lines, Marx said that the capitalist (whom he sneeringly called “Mr. Moneybags”) “must be so lucky
as to find . . . a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of
value, whose actual consumption . . . is a creation of
value” (Marx 1978). That commodity is, of course,
the labor power of the worker, who, in the early factory system, is effectively forced to sell his labor to
Mr. Moneybags for wages the capitalist covers in
but a few hours of the working day, thereby leaving the balance of his labor time as surplus value for
the owner of the means of production. Obviously in
most, if not all, forms of mass production, wages will
be as low as possible, while the working day must
be as long as possible—otherwise, under capitalism,
there can be no surplus value and hence no profit.
Thus, the structural inequality of capitalism is based
on the general theory of exchange value, and workers are open to exploitation by the larger society.

Structural Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, is most often
credited as the founder of structuralism. He outlined
his theory of structural linguistics in a series of lectures published posthumously as Course in General
Linguistics (1916). These lectures challenged the
then dominant view of language that there was an
inherent and natural connection between words and
things in the world that they reference. For Saussure,
the bond between thing (signified) and the word
(signifier) is constructed through social convention.
Thus, his structuralist assertion, “If we could collect
the totality of word patterns stored in all those individuals, we should have the social bond which constitutes their language” (Saussure 1916/1974, 13).
Language is a social institution, a collection of individual elements, and must be viewed through a general theory of social and economic values he called a
semiology (the science of signs).
Semiology, the science of signs, was Saussure’s key
structural idea, and much like Marx’s, was centered
on the question of exchange. Saussure writes,

Structuralism

Even outside language all values are apparently
governed by the same paradoxical principle. They
are always composed:
1. of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the
thing of which the value is to be determined; and
2. of similar things that can be compared with the
thing of which the value is to be determined.
(Saussure 1916/1974, 116–117)

Or, more generally: “Sciences are concerned with a
system for equating things of different orders—labor
and wages in one and a signified and a signifier in
the other” (Saussure 1916/1974, 116). As in Marx,
the key to the exchange of values in human communities is different qualities assessed by a system
of equivalencies. Saussure is making a distinction in
the sign between the signifier (sounds, written text,
and images) and the signified (the image that the signifier refers to), which together make up the sign.
Signs have value, or meaning, through their place in
language.
Saussure makes a distinction between la parole
(speech/speaking) and la langue, which is language
itself. Speaking is the work of individuals in producing spoken statements, or signs that are observable
(literally, audible). Language, for Saussure, is a kind
of “collective intelligence” that extends beyond the
individual speakers ordering speech into meaningful statements. In this sense, language exhibits the
most difficult feature of structures: their invisibility.
Nobody has ever laid eyes on the English language,
yet we are able to draw on its rules of grammar and
syntax to engage in meaningful communication.
When these rules of language are used in everyday speaking, the rules are observed in their use.
Although the language is invisible, the individual
speaker has to have competence in it to produce
meaningful speech.
The social system of language, argues Saussure, is
thus radically arbitrary. This is not a form of nihilism, but rather that value and meaning are determined through social convention. The connections
between signs and their meanings are established
through difference. The primary mode of difference
for Saussure is binary oppositions: woman is constituted as a sign as distinct from man, hot from cold,
and so on. This entails the social proposition that
words (or, more generally, signs), thereby, cannot be
based in nature. If the English tree is innately correct,

1387

then there wouldn’t be the French arbe. Both are different signs for the same meaning. Likewise, within
a language, the exchange of meanings in speech
depends on the ability of speakers to recognize
similarities and differences. Tree has meaning for
competent speakers because it is different from other
words. In effect, words operate in spoken languages
just as do commodities in economies. Members of
the language community, like buyers and sellers in
economies, share community-wide conventions that
are used to determine values—money (usually) in the
case of economies, signs in the case of languages. The
value, or meaning, of a particular sign is determined
socially through repetitive use—in effect, through the
collective consumption of the word.

Structures as Objects
Following Marx and Saussure, much of structuralist
inquiry focuses, although not exclusively, on forms
of exchange, particularly of symbolic exchange.
Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the most
famous of all structuralists, and his work highlights
another focus of structuralism: that the structures are
proper objects in themselves, completely apart from
the individuals that take part in them. Other structural thinking follows this shift in focus away from
individuals to the collective pattern as a whole. He
argues, in contrast to classical anthropology, that the
task is not to find the best symbol for the job but
rather to use analysis to reduce down to the smallest units of culture. In The Elementary Structures of
Kinship (1949), Lévi-Strauss argues, in contrast to
classical anthropology, that the nuclear family is not
the basic unit, but rather that kinship is a system of
generalized exchange—namely, that marriage rules,
social class, and kinship are all representations of an
unconscious exchange system based on the law of
exogamy. Particularly, kinship is based around the
exchange of women. He writes, “The prohibition
of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the
mother, sister or daughter, than a rule obliging the
mother, sister or daughter to be given to others. It
is the supreme rule of the gift” (1949/1969, 481).
Thus, the exchange of women forms the basis of
society, governed by the rule of reciprocity.
For Lévi-Strauss, the task of structural anthropology is to search for the structure that makes sense
of seemingly unrelated events. He writes, “Behind
what seemed to be the superficial contingency and

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Structuralism

incoherent diversity of the laws governing marriage,
I discerned a small number of simple principles,
thanks to which a complex set of mass of customs
and practices, at first sight absurd (and generally held
to be so), could be reduced to a meaningful system”
(1975, 10). In his later work, Lévi-Strauss focused
on myths as a way of opening up cross-cultural comparison. Given that for each cultural object there are
an infinite number of relationships, Lévi-Strauss suggested that the myth is a way of realizing aspects of
elements that may not be directly present. For example, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Freud, there
are numerous versions of the Oedipus myth. By comparing the versions over time, Lévi-Strauss isolated,
among others, two recurrent mythemic elements:
Oedipus kills his father/Oedipus marries his mother.
He then interprets the elements as, in effect, signifiers
of a universal human conflict between hate and love
toward parents or, more formally, between underattachment to one parent and overattachment to the
other. At one point he proposed that his structuralism was meant to be a science of the human mind (by
which he meant esprit, human spirit or even culture).
He argued that myths and structural elements resided
in the unconscious of each individual.
More explicitly in the realm of consumption, LéviStrauss’s book The Raw and the Cooked (1964/1975)
follows in the vein of Marx and Saussure by unpacking a system of exchange. But instead of the commodity, or language, for Lévi-Strauss the key element
is how societies process food. In framing the division
between raw and cooked, he points to another key
aspect of structural investigation, which is difference.
For Saussure, a tree is a “tree” because of a system
of relations, or binary divisions. If we dig deep into
culture, we see that there is immense social meaning
to the process of cooking, which Lévi-Strauss argues
is a mediation between society and nature.

Cultural Symbols
Like Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes developed a mode
of investigation of the ways in which culture functions through the meaning of signs. As an eclectic
thinker, Barthes showed the ways in which signs
that are thought to be neutral are in fact imbued
with power. He developed Saussure’s semiology into
a full-blown investigation of the way in which cultural symbols are imbued with power. His structuralist book Mythologies investigates many different

aspects of French culture from advertising to the
Tour de France. His aim, however, was to decode the
process by which myths turn something that is cultural, and thus arbitrary, into something that is given
primary status of “natural.” One example of this
kind of analysis is one that he makes of a photograph
that appeared on the cover of the magazine ParisMatch, portraying a young black man in the French
national colors. In this, the historical operations of
an imperial France are portrayed as natural. Thus,
his structural method uncovers the political interests
that are hidden by the function of the myth.

Criticisms
One of the hardest lessons of structuralism is an
ironic principle: social and cultural structures create
subjects by means of their determining powers. We,
as subjects, cannot be (exist) without structured relations with others. These relations are sets of meaning
that are embedded in modes of consumption from
commodity, to language, sexual relations, and food.
These structures are visible because they endure over
time, but how is it that they come to change without some form of human agency? This is one of the
key criticisms pointed at structural thinking, that it is
overly deterministic. But there is the corollary argument, that invisible social structures can be presented
in such an overdetermined way to make visible the
political divisions that run right to the core of our
cultural practices.
Daniel Chaffee
See also Commodities; Marxist Theories; Political
Economy; Post-structuralism; Semiotics; Sociology;
Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill &
Wang, 1968.
Clarke, Simon. The Foundations of Structuralism. Sussex,
UK: Harvester, 1981.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1966.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton,
1977.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
Rev. ed. Translated from the French by James Harle Bell
and John Richard von Sturmer; edited by Rodney
Needham. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969. First
published 1949.

Style
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated
by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf.
London: Penguin Press, 1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated
by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New
York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Marx, Karl. “Capital, Vol. I.” In The Marx-Engels Reader.
Edited by Robert Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the
Communist Party. New York: Cosimo, 2005. First
published 1848.
Runciman, W. G. “What Is Structuralism?” In Sociology in
Its Place and Other Essays, 45–58. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics.
London: Fontana, 1974. First published 1916.
Sturrock, John. Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss
to Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

STYLE
Style is a concept used to describe the ways in which
certain consumers, or groups of consumers, assemble,
modify, combine, and act toward consumer objects
and activities. The concept is notoriously hard to
pin down since it is simultaneously used at different levels of abstraction and to denote a wide variety
of consumption activities, both within academia and
in everyday use. The most clearly defined use of the
concept is within literature dealing with subcultures,
but it is also applied within studies of fashion as well
as consumer culture studies more broadly.
Most of the time when style is discussed, it is
designated to those instances when an active stance
is taken with regard to consumption; style is intentional communication, according to Dick Hebdige.
Still, even the activities that are not driven by such
intentionality would typically lead to something considered a style. Moreover, to be identified as style,
consumption activities typically need to be perceived
as deviating from a more or less coherent idea of the
mainstream. Thus, Hebdige notes, it is a signifying
practice where the novel assemblage of elements into
style is a way of disrupting existing semiotic sign
systems. This having been said, most would agree
that also the mainstream has a way in which they
assemble, modify, combine, and act toward consumer objects and activities that would have to be
described as a style. In essence, it appears that one

1389

cannot not have a style. Whether a particular style
is good or bad, interesting or boring, in fashion or
out of fashion, or in essence stylish is, however, an
entirely different question.
The word style has been in use in the English
language for several hundred years and has typically
been associated with a distinct manner of expression
in writing or speech. This manner can either be formalized (as when an author is given a style guide to
use correct formatting or tone of voice in contributing a text to a book, journal, or magazine) or it
can be a personal manner of expression (as in the
Hemingway style of writing, i.e., the basic grammar
and the unvarnished descriptions). This distinction
between formalized and personalized expressions of
style is also prevalent in other key uses of the term—
for example, when it points to a distinctive manner
or custom of behaving or conducting oneself, or a
particular manner or technique by which something
is done, created, or performed. These latter uses are
more akin to the use of the word in consumer culture
instances.
Style expressions can also be viewed on a scale
ranging from the idiosyncratic to the collective.
On the latter end of the spectrum, we can imagine
expressions such as the Mediterranean style of cooking, suggesting certain commonalities among a large
collective. On a mesolevel, we can imagine the stylistic expressions of various subcultural groups, for
example, punk style. On the microlevel, there are
strictly personal expressions as when someone is
suggested to have exquisite style rather than being a
slave to fashion.

Theoretical Accounts of Style
The researchers at the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of
Birmingham have been most successful in trying
to theorize style. Much of the early work of CCCS
looked at the situations of white working-class males
and attempted to understand how they grappled
with changes in society, such as immigration and
youth unemployment.
Initially, the dominant interpretation of the CCCS
group was that specific subcultural styles, most notably in fashion and music, were developed to break
with the dominant social order of the parent culture.
As youth culture evolved and the number of distinct
subcultural groups existing in parallel—based on,

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Style

for example, different class or ethnic backgrounds—
increased, style increasingly became a means to carve
out a cultural space distinct from other youth groups.
Rebelling against the parent generation or fighting
a class war was de-emphasized, as style expressions were increasingly seen as a rather mundane
part of everyday life. Still, the political aspects were
emphasized, and style was interpreted by Hebdige
as homology, that is, the material expression of an
ideological set of values.
The group identity aspects of style, at the core of
the work of CCCS, have been complemented recently
by more individualized accounts of style expressions,
increasingly devoid of explicit political content. Even
early theorists of the emerging consumer society,
such as Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen, noted
a movement away from an entirely class-based taste
position toward a more individualistic expression. In
their respective studies of urban life, they noted that
the display of wealth through adornment and entertainment leads to an increased awareness of style and
that this term, rather than the term taste, best captured current practices of consumption. More recent
studies of consumer culture have also attempted to
see style less as resistance toward the dominant forces
in society by emphasizing that stylistic expressions
belong in all kinds of class positions. The more rigidly designated ideas of taste—an inherently coherent
class-based signification system—has been gradually
replaced by an emphasis on the aestheticization of
everyday life. This, according to Mike Featherstone,
implies that even the most mundane goods and practices can be stylized in the pursuit of a reflexive lifestyle. Much contemporary social theory focuses on
such individualized identity projects rather than the
collective—class-based—identity projects of counterculture and subculture in the 1960s and 1970s. In
the individual’s ongoing process to create a coherent narrative of the self, style reflexivity is said to be
an important ingredient. Style expressions have thus
been moved from a collective mode to a personal
mode of expression.
When trying to theorize style, as previously
mentioned, it is typically understood as the ways
in which certain consumers, or groups of consumers, assemble, modify, combine, and act toward
consumer objects and activities. The unique way in
which consumption is thus orchestrated becomes a
style. The communicative potential of style can be
explained through Roland Barthes’ basic semiotic

processes of selection and combination. In every
consumer culture, there is a wide range of available
options concerning, for example, clothing, and to
create an intended style, certain elements from the
overall range of apparel need to be selected and then
combined. A unique style is then created through
the reordering and recontextualization of objects to
communicate fresh meanings, within a total system
of significances, which already includes prior and
sedimented meanings attached to the object used,
notes John Clarke. Style can thereby be seen as bricolage, that is, the appropriation, innovative recombination, and ultimately perversion of readily available
signs and material culture. Hebdige, in his studies
of the punk subculture of the 1970s, showed how
the disassembling of pieces of apparel—by ripping
and tearing—and the subsequent reassembling with
the use of safety pins brought new meanings both to
the clothes and the household items. The style thus
created functioned to symbolically illustrate the “crisis of modern life.” Similarly, the teddy boys of the
1950s used pieces of clothing traditionally associated
with the upper class, such as drapes, and gave them
an entirely new meaning through the juxtaposition
of the neat and tidy appearance and the illicit delinquent identity of the teddy boys, involving an overtly
sexual and violent lifestyle.

Style in Popular Culture
Although style was a promising theoretical concept
in earlier consumer culture work, it has lost some
of its theoretical rigor in recent academic use. One
plausible reason for this is that style belongs to that
group of illusive concepts circulating back and forth
between lay use and academic use. In neither of these
sites does there appear to be any consensus on the
precise definition of style. Rather, the concept is used
in a taken-for-granted manner where disagreements
about what should be deemed stylish obscure the
lack of consensus over what dimensions should be
included in a theoretical rendition of style.
In contemporary consumer culture discussions,
style is omnipresent, especially in discussions of dress
and fashion. It has even been suggested by Dannie
Kjeldgaard that style can be regarded as a “folk
theory” of consumption. When the word is thus used
today, most political overtones are lost and discussions of class seldom surface. Instead, style has often
taken on a meaning as a counterbalance to fashion.

Subaltern

In these popular culture discussions, style is portrayed
as a unique, innate character of an individual. Style,
according to this mythology, cannot be acquired; it
comes with mother’s milk. A related mythology of
style is illustrated by a popular quote attributed to
the late Yves Saint Laurent: “Fashions fade, style is
eternal.”
It appears that the concept of style is virtually
unavoidable in describing and analyzing contemporary consumer culture. Should the concept really live
up to its potential, a serious theoretical discussion,
following the lead of the CCCS work of the 1970s,
probably needs to be undertaken.
Jacob Ostberg
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Cultural
Studies; Fashion; Lifestyle; Resistance; Social
Class; Subculture; Taste

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Noonday Press,
1973.
Clarke, John. “Style.” In Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall
and Tony Jefferson, 175–191. London: Hutchinson,
1976.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1991.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London:
Hutchinson, 1976.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Methuen, 1979.
Kjeldgaard, Dannie. “The Meaning of Style? Style
Reflexivity among Danish High School Youths.” Journal
of Consumer Behaviour 8, nos. 2–3 (2009): 71–83.

SUBALTERN
This entry discusses a few issues related to subaltern consumers. The original usage of the term subaltern in social sciences can be traced to the prison
writings of Antonio Gramsci, who used the term as
a disguise to refer to the working class. In a more
recent interpretation, the term is not confined to an
economic class and is used more broadly to connote

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subordinate groups. Some scholars have cautioned
against a broader interpretation of the term and
have argued that subaltern should be specifically
employed to refer to the most oppressed groups in a
society. This entry uses the term subaltern to refer to
the economically marginalized groups such as urban
proletariat and peasants, among others. In delineating a state of oppression, this entry briefly delves into
subaltern consumers’ material deprivation, subjectivity, and methodological challenges in interpreting
marginalized groups.

Subaltern Consumers and
Material Deprivation
Subaltern consumers are characterized by extreme
forms of poverty and material deprivation. The
World Bank estimates show that nearly 1.5 billion
people live below the poverty line, which is pegged
at US$1.25 per day (Shah 2010). Accordingly, nearly
half of the global population survives on less than
US$2.50 per day. A vast majority of these economically marginalized consumers live in South Asia, subSaharan Africa, and Latin America. The problem of
poverty of subaltern groups is further exacerbated
by rising levels of inequality across the globe. It is
estimated that the richest 20 percent of the world’s
population consumes 76.6 percent of the goods produced (Shah 2010). Scholars have argued that the
recent neoliberal trajectory of capitalism has contributed to a greater transfer of wealth from subaltern
to wealthier population groups. This has resulted in
a further immiseration of subaltern consumers, who
have reduced access to the basic necessities such as
food, clothing, health care, and shelter. For example,
neoliberal India has witnessed high growth levels
since the 1990s and has a burgeoning elite class; it
has also simultaneously experienced an increase in
poverty and reduction in per capita consumption of
food and clothing (Patnaik 2007). Such inequalities
produce popular discontent and create social conflicts, as witnessed in several parts of the world in
the past two decades. Traditionally, a welfare state
was considered a remedial antidote to these forces
of divergence and conflict. According to Giorgio
Agamben, because of neoliberal adjustments, private
corporations are increasingly replacing the state, and
material deprivation of subaltern groups across the
globe is maintained by creating more violent and
authoritarian governance structures.

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Subaltern

Living under conditions of severe economic hardships, subaltern consumers are only marginal participants as buyers in consumer cultures across the
world. Ronald P. Hill observes that such consumers
have meager possessions and their lives are defined
by restricted access to market-mediated consumption goods and services. Similarly, Rohit Varman
and Ram Manohar Vikas argue that subaltern consumers lack freedom in the domain of consumption.
Accordingly, disempowerment and oppression in
the domain of work contribute to severe restrictions
in the world of consumption. Although subaltern
groups hardly participate in exchange processes as
buyers, desire to buy objects of consumption has
become a far more universal phenomenon among
consumers with even limited purchasing power.
Moreover, several corporations such as Nestlé and
Unilever have designed product offerings to draw
subaltern groups into circuits of consumption. These
increasing consumer desires, in a world of subaltern
consumption that is characterized by low buying
power, often contribute to a state of turmoil or anomie. Here, Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of instigation
of consumer needs as a means of repression is particularly relevant. These interpretations of subaltern
consumers help to revise a celebratory understanding
of consumption or consumer culture that emerges
from the studies based in privileged consumption settings. The totalizing and commodifying influences of
capitalism in subaltern lives require a deeper systemic
understanding.

Subaltern Consumer Subjectivity
Some critical theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse,
place considerable emphasis on a unified subjectivity
of subaltern consumers. This constitutive feature of
subaltern subjectivity has been highlighted by several
theorists inspired by the Frankfurt school’s emphases
on the social control of thought and the commercial-cultural nexus. These theorists have critically
examined the relationship between advertising and
consumption practices in contemporary capitalist
society and have argued that marketers attempt to
create illusory images through distortions of reality
to help create false consciousness among consumers.
Similarly, drawing on Thorstein Veblen’s theory of
conspicuous consumption and emulation by subordinate groups, some authors have found evidence of
subaltern disciplining and control.

Several other scholars writing in the critical tradition have argued against a unified subject position
of subaltern consumers. These authors draw on
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Michel Foucault’s
post-structuralist interpretation of human subjectivity. Gramsci argued that hegemony in any social
group is incomplete, fractured, and fraught with
contradictions. Similarly, Foucault has argued that
human subjectivity is located in an interdiscursive
space that is constituted by contradictory forces of
power and resistance. Thus, despite facing extreme
forms of poverty and resulting social marginalization, subaltern consumers are heterogeneous subjects whose subjectivity is not singularized through
economic or social coordinates. This interpretation
implies that subaltern consumption discourses and
practices have to be concretely understood in their
multiple forms without privileging a specific notion of
social control. According to Oscar Lewis, subaltern
groups are aware of middle-class ideals but refuse
to be influenced and instead create their own institutions and agencies to overcome their constraints.
A good illustration of this approach is Douglas B.
Holt’s observation that subaltern consumers’ materialistic propensities, over more idealistic ones, stem
from their desire to transcend materially constrained
environments and are not necessarily rooted in imitations of the richer consumer groups. Another insightful illustration of this heterogeneity is provided by
Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Ronald P. Hill (2000),
who found that hedonic and aesthetic forms of
consumption became active sites of resistance in a
concentration camp and helped in psychic survival
of commoditized prisoners. These critical positions
on subaltern consumer subjectivity are not a celebration of fragmentation, bricolage, or pastiche; the
heterogeneity of subaltern subjectivity reflects social
contradictions and indeterminacy.

Interpreting Subaltern Consumers
Subaltern consumers have broadly remained at the
margins of consumer culture theory. Several factors
have contributed to this theoretical elision. First,
methodological challenges involved in accessing marginalized groups have contributed to this limitation.
Second, much of extant theorization in consumer culture theory is situated in the first world and overlooks
issues of poverty and oppression that are of greater
relevance to the third world. Third, there is a paucity

Subculture

of critical scholarship that ideologically situates subaltern groups at the center of its theoretical concerns.
Thus, a more critical engagement in consumer culture theory with subaltern consumers is required.
There are two epistemological challenges in generating knowledge on subaltern consumers. First,
as Gayatri C. Spivak argues, there is a problem of
representation of subaltern consumers in academic
writings. Accordingly, subaltern consumer groups,
because of their disempowered positions, do not
achieve a dialogical status and are problematically
represented through privileged vantage points of academic experts. Thus, researchers should adopt critical frameworks and decenter themselves as experts
to develop deeper insights on subaltern consumer
culture. Second, disempowered positions of subaltern
groups imply that many of their discourses and practices are concealed from open scrutiny. Therefore, as
suggested by James Scott, a deeper understanding of
subaltern consumers requires a closer attention to be
paid to their hidden transcripts that contain cultural
codes of resistance and multiple subjectivities.
Rohit Varman
See also Advertising; Conspicuous Consumption; Desire;
Hegemony; Inequalities; Materialism and
Postmaterialism; Poverty; Social Class

Further Readings
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Translated by Geoffrey N. Smith and Quintin Hoare.
New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Hill, Ronald P. “Consumer Culture and the Culture of
Poverty: Implications for Marketing Theory and
Practice.” Marketing Theory 2 (2002): 273–293.
Hirschman, Elizabeth C., and Ronald P. Hill. “On Human
Commoditization and Resistance: A Model Based upon
Buchenwald Concentration Camp.” Psychology &
Marketing 17 (2000): 469–491.
Holt, Douglas B. “Does Cultural Capital Shape American
Consumption?” Journal of Consumer Research 25 (June
1998): 1–26.
Lewis, Oscar. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the
Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books, 1959.
Patnaik, Utsa. The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays.
Gurgaon, India: Three Essay Collective, 2007.
Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

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Shah, Anup. Poverty around the World. http://www
.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-around-the-world#
WorldBanksPovertyEstimatesRevised (accessed June 25,
2010).
Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Varman, Rohit, and Ram Manohar Vikas. “Freedom and
Consumption: Toward Conceptualizing Systemic
Constraints for Subaltern Consumers in a Capitalist
Society.” Consumption, Markets & Culture 10, no. 2
(2007): 117–132.

SUBCULTURE
Subcultures are groups with shared features that
enable them to be distinguished from both the parent
culture and the dominant culture from which they
emerge. We may speak in social terms of a youth
subculture or a working-class subculture and so
forth, but it is the cultural norms, values, and symbolic practices of its members that give it expression.
The focal concern with consumer culture is central to
Max Weber’s notion of “styles of life,” according to
which consumption is of the conspicuous type and
gives rise to distinctions based on status. Subcultural
exclusivity, however, is usually achieved by members
defining themselves in opposition to dominant sets of
tastes. Subcultures are prevalent in industrially developed consumer societies, although most literature
has been relevant to the United States, Britain, and
Australia, often in the colonial context of migration
to these countries.
The subculture concept became current in academic circles in the mid-twentieth century, when it
was employed in American ethnographic studies of
criminal and deviant groups, from juvenile street
gangs to jazz musicians. Nonetheless, with clothing
and physical adornment being the most visible markers of consumption, the concept can be applied retrospectively to two forms of oppositional dress that
emerged in the eighteenth century as part of a distinctively modern and Western consumer culture. The
soberly understated dress sense of the male bourgeois
was taken to extreme forms of fastidiousness by the
Regency dandy who favored the refined restraint
of plain cloth and starched linen. By contrast, the
middle-class bohemian was romantic and overtly

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Subculture

flamboyant. Over the past two centuries, bohemians
have occupied the creative center of many major cities. Their forms of sartorial dissent range from early
ethnic exoticism—highly colored turbans, scarves,
shawls, kaftans, and flowing robes—through to the
black sweaters and jeans of the existentially inspired
1950s beatnik.
Late-nineteenth-century Britain noted the presence of a troublesome teenage subculture, the
“hooligan.” An Australian equivalent of the same
period was the Larrikin. A uniform of large boots
with bell-bottomed trousers was worn with a broad,
buckled, leather belt, while a muffler or scarf and
peaked cap worn over a donkey-fringe haircut completed the ensemble. The most visibly “spectacular”
forms of youthful sartorial dissent, however, were
those predicated on a post-1945 teenage leisure
market for fashion, music and magazines, coffee
bars, scooters, dance halls, and the like. The Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the
University of Birmingham, England, theorized in
the 1970s from a Marxist perspective how “spectacular” subcultures were formed by working-class
youth creatively appropriating and recontextualizing such commodities to connote new, oppositional,
meanings: a process known as bricolage. The resulting “look” was understood to be a coded form of
resistance to the dominant culture. Thus, the CCCS
adopted a form of semiotic analysis whereby subcultures such as teddy boys, mods, skinheads, and
punks could be decoded, that is, read like a language,
to reveal the hidden or latent meanings of the style.
The fastidious fashion sense of the early 1960s
mods, with their two-tone mohair suits and sartorial
obsession with such details as optimum cuff length,
number of vents, and correct number of buttons,
can thereby be read as a way of upwardly bridging the gap between a dream of affluent consumerism and the mundane reality of their working-class
existence. By contrast, the skinheads of the same
decade looked temporally backward and socially
downward. Their proletarian image of cropped hair,
collarless granddad shirts, braces, jeans, and workmen’s Dr. Martens boots enacted a symbolic reassertion of a traditional working-class culture correctly
perceived to be under threat. In a famous example of
this form of analysis, the 1970s punks were seen to
employ everyday utility objects such as plastic dustbin liners, safety pins, and dog collars in conjunction
with customized, ripped, torn, and graffiti-covered

T-shirts and items of school uniforms to connote
chaos and meaningless, all in homological harmony
with the punk ideology of anarchy.
This whole approach was criticized for being
focused predominately on white, male youths in
highly visible street-based subcultures. Black subcultures tended to be studied less on their own terms
and more on how their aspects were appropriated by
white youths. Both the 1960s mods and skinheads
had been stylistically influenced by the “rude boy”
subculture of Jamaica, a sharp gangster look comprised of items such as slim-fit trousers, loafer shoes,
tunic suits, shades, and stingy-brim pork-pie hats. An
example of ethnic cultural borrowing of the 1980s
onward is the wearing of dreadlocks hairstyles and
natural fabric accessories in the red, green, and gold
colors of the Ethiopian flag by white youths in homage to reggae music and its roots in Rastafarianism.
Females tended to be “written out” of these
analyses proposed by male researchers; where girls
did appear, they were portrayed merely as an adjunct
to the “core” male members. A feminist critique
addressed the extent to which girls had actually been
absent from subcultures or, alternatively, present but
rendered invisible by both the male members and a
masculine form of analysis. Feminist researchers eventually turned their attention from street-based subcultures to alternative forms of female consumption. A
bedroom-based consumption of teenage fandom artifacts, such as pop posters, romance novels, and glossy
magazines, was viewed as constructing a “culture of
femininity” in opposition to the official school curriculum but that nonetheless prepared young females
for their future domestic roles as wives and mothers.
The 1990s onward have witnessed a period of postsubcultural studies. A new generation of researchers
has rejected the Marxist theory of resistance along
with textual analysis and returned to ethnography
and qualitative inquiry. There have also been calls for
the abandonment of the subculture concept in favor
of “postmodern” alternatives, such as neo-tribe, that
more clearly capture the increasing flux and fluidity
of membership. Such approaches have collapsed the
theoretical dichotomy previously posited between
resistance and conformity, subculture and the mainstream. These shifts in emphasis can be seen in the
global phenomenon of clubbing. Contemporary
club culture evolved from raves: gatherings of young
people dancing to electronic beat-repetitive music in
spaces such as derelict warehouses, their experience

Suburbia

heightened by drugs like Ecstasy. Clubbing has been
theorized, variously, as a new psychedelic trance
bohemia, a disappearance into meaninglessness, or
a hard-nosed reflection of 1980s Thatcherism, the
practitioners, as much as outside influences, being
responsible for establishing the entrepreneurial element and commercial imperative of the movement.
David Muggleton
See also Bricolage; Cultural Studies; Identity; Lifestyle;
Popular Music; Resistance; Teenage Magazines; Youth
Culture

Further Readings
Gelder, Ken, ed. The Subcultures Reader. 2nd ed. London:
Routledge, 2005.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London:
Hutchinson, 1976.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Methuen, 1979.
Jones, Simon. Black Culture, White Youth: The Reggae
Tradition from JA to UK. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Muggleton, David, and Rupert Weinzierl, eds. The PostSubcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Redhead, Steve, ed. Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in
Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot, UK: Avebury,
1993.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and
Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and
Modernity. London: Virago, 1985.

SUBURBIA
Suburbs are geographical areas that are part of a
larger functional urban unit but located beyond the
central core of the city. The original usage of the
term suburb was associated with the cities of ancient
and medieval Europe, referring to those places outside the city walls, often associated with low-status
and marginalized social groups and with polluting
or dangerous activities, but also in some cases with
elite, semi-rural villas, situated a short distance from
the city. Such geographies were a common feature
of most premodern urban civilizations. However,
the modern sense of the suburb is closely associated with the remarkable expansion in population
and physical area of major cities in some parts of the

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Western world from the eighteenth century onward,
and particularly with vast extensions of zones of
predominantly private housing during the twentieth
century. The associated term suburbia connotes not
just a particular geographical environment but also
forms of culture and ways of life. Almost from their
inception, modern suburbs have been represented
and understood as spaces of consumption, and consumer culture has been regarded as intrinsic to their
character and analysis. A particularly long-running
and pervasive critique of suburbs in both academic
writing and in popular culture has treated them as
the locus of the worst excesses of shallow consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Such criticisms
of suburbia have drawn on a wide range of intellectual perspectives, ranging from conservative
attacks on the coarsening and trivializing effects of
mass society, through Marxian and leftist critiques of
commodity fetishism and the erosion of solidaristic
working-class communities, to feminist critiques of
the patriarchal entrapment of women in the domestic
order of the suburbs. Suburbia has been attacked as
both a betrayal of the vitality and civilizing power of
great cities and an environmental catastrophe covering the countryside with unsustainable sprawl. There
has been a lower-profile countertradition of writing
that has emphasized positive aspects of suburban life,
particularly in terms of domestic security, comfort,
and self-determination, and a more recent academic
reevaluation of their success and popularity, which
has emphasized the significance of mundane consumption practices.

History
Identifiably modern suburban developments
appeared first around London in the late-eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries as it experienced unprecedented urban growth. This was followed by similar
patterns of suburbanization in nineteenth-century
New York, Boston, Chicago, and other U.S. cities
as well as some cities in Britain and the British colonies. Although there were significant differences
between these cities, it is possible to identify a common Anglo-Saxon form of urban development in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that
was facilitated by new transport technologies, such
as the railway, streetcar, subway, and motorbus,
and characterized by extensive middle-class suburban housing developments. The most spectacular

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Suburbia

example of such suburban growth was found in
London between the world wars. London was
already the world’s most populous city, with extensive Victorian and Edwardian suburbs, and its conurbation grew in population by about 10 percent
between 1919 and 1939 (to around nine million)
but doubled in built area. This new suburban landscape was typified by semidetached private houses,
each with its own private garden. New public
transport technologies were also used in growing
European metropolises, such as Paris, Vienna, and
Berlin, and other rapidly modernizing cities like
Meiji Tokyo and Buenos Aires. However, when
compared with Chicago, London, Melbourne, or
New York, these cities remained relatively compact
and dense and had a markedly different structure to
their social geographies.
From the 1920s onward in the United States, automobility became a dominant influence on the growth
of suburbs, producing a further revolution in urban
form. Mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles was the
archetype of this almost centerless city of freeways,
strip malls, and automobile-based suburbs, characterized by complex patterns of long-distance commuting, but other U.S., Canadian, and Australian
cities experienced dramatic changes in urban extent.
For example, between 1950 and 1970, the contiguous urbanized area around Washington, DC, grew
from 181 to 523 square miles, while greater Miami
grew from 116 to 429 square miles. By the latetwentieth century, commentators were identifying
a further phase beyond suburbanization, as many
Americans were living and working in areas that had
many of the social and environmental characteristics
of suburbs, but that were further removed and more
disconnected from the functions of the older metropolises. These “exurban” developments were most
influentially discussed in Joel Garreau’s 1991 book
Edge City, which suggested that a new U.S. geography was emerging of dynamic low-density corridors
of dispersed industrial, retail, and residential zones,
independent of traditional urban centers.
Stricter planning controls and straightforward
shortage of physical space meant that European
and British cities did not experience similar physical growth in the second half of the twentieth century. However, rising car ownership meant that
an increasing proportion of the labor force commuted significant distances and that a growing
proportion of the population lived in areas that

were neither traditional cities nor rural areas, what
Thomas Sieverts has described as “cities without cities” or Zwischenstadts. Suburban developments, to
date, have not been a major feature in non-Western
societies, although rapid development and growing car ownership in, for example, parts of Brazil,
Turkey, and increasingly some Indian and Chinese
urban regions have produced extensive forms that
share features with contemporary Western suburbs
and exurbs. There is also a longer history of affluent enclaves of private houses and compounds on
the outskirts of non-Western cities, for local and
transnational elites. In part, the development of suburbia worked within the networks of imperialism;
for example, the seemingly parochial domestic environment of the interwar London suburbs drew on
models of housing and lifestyle that had been transplanted from Anglo-Indian society.
Sociologists and urban historians have attempted
to group this long and diverse history of suburban
development into various typologies. British sociologist David Thorns, in his 1972 typology of AngloAmerican suburbs, distinguished between planned
middle-class and working-class residential suburbs,
unplanned middle-class and working-class residential
suburbs, and further categories of factory suburbs
associated directly with industrial developments.
Other categorizations of suburbia focus on distinctions in density, architectural forms, landscapes, and
dominant transportation systems. Planned private
developments such as the nineteenth-century “romantic suburb” movement in the United States and the
early twentieth-century garden city movement in
Britain have an important place in suburban history,
and there were also important publicly owned suburban initiatives in twentieth-century Britain, notably the postwar “New Towns.” However, suburbia
has been predominantly associated with speculative
building for profit and the growth of home ownership. During the twentieth century, societies like the
United States, Britain, and Australia witnessed the
creation of a mass suburban property-owning middle
class, largely through long-term mortgage arrangements. These were backed by taxation breaks and
state insurance schemes like those inaugurated by the
U.S. Federal Housing Association in 1934. Although
the global credit crisis since 2007 has exposed fundamental vulnerabilities in this continuing expansion
of long-term loans, viewed historically, rising house
prices have put billions of dollars worth of equity

Suburbia

into the estates of suburban homeowners. This rise
in household equity and the consequent capacity to
secure further credit has been a critical element in the
development of consumption.
Anglo-Saxon suburbia has had a number of
archetypal characteristics: First, suburbs form an
intermediate environment between city and countryside, incorporating elements of both. Part of the
appeal of suburbia for millions has been a move to
an environment perceived as healthier, greener, and
more in touch with nature than the city. As signaled
by Australian “nature-strips” (narrow verges of grass
edging suburban streets), such connection with nature
is often highly perfunctory; nonetheless, the lawn,
hedge, and garden, and the park and outdoor leisure
pursuits have all been key components of suburbia.
Second, suburbs have been primarily residential. The
form and density of housing has varied markedly,
but the basic unit has been a single home designed
to accommodate a single nuclear family (though
often using paid domestic service) enclosed within
its own private yard or garden. Commentaries on
suburbia have emphasized the significance of familial private space and a related privatization of social
life. Third, suburbs have been closely associated with
commuting and with a marked separation, not just
geographically but also socially, between the worlds
of home and work. Fourth has been the ascription
of a clear gendering to suburban society. Although
even in the suburbs of mid-twentieth-century United
States, there were significant variations and complexities of gender order, the suburbs have been often
been approached through the theoretical framework
of “separate spheres,” suggesting that women were
increasingly restricted to a domestic sphere in which
their role as housewife-consumer became dominant.

Consumption and Suburban Culture
From its inception, modern suburbia has been
closely associated with consumption. Remarkably
long-standing tropes have connected suburbia with
conspicuous and competitive displays of consumption. Such critiques were well established long before
Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899), with its recognition of “conspicuous consumption” and “pecuniary emulation.” The Theory
of the Leisure Class was firmly located in the world
of the U.S. suburban middle classes, particularly in
its analysis of the significance of lawns and garden-

1397

ing as visible indicators of status, and its satire of the
mores of “country club” social life. By 1961, Lewis
Mumford, describing the modern suburb as “anticity,” placed this culture of consumption at the heart
of his criticisms; in the suburb, “life ceased to be a
drama, full of unexpected challenges and tensions
and dramas: it became a bland ritual of competitive
spending” (The City in History 1961, 494).
Mumford’s criticisms were aimed particularly at
the tract suburban developments of the 1950s, like
those of the Levitt & Sons company that effectively
turned the construction of suburban homes into a
form of mass production. The Levitts built approximately 140,000 houses, using standardized materials and construction techniques, including several
“Levittowns.” Such developments were homogenous
in architectural style, featuring a limited number
of basic house plans, often in Cape Cod cottage or
ranch styles. This marked a significant decline in
regional distinctiveness in U.S. housing but also indicated growing consumer demand for newness, not
just in products but also in their dwellings. The postwar tract suburbs were also characterized by social
homogeneity, often a consequence of strict zoning
regulations that effectively restricted the new suburbs to a narrow banding of age and class by placing
tight controls on density and land use. The building
companies also often operated strongly exclusionary
selling policies; in 1960, for example, there was not a
single black resident among the 82,000 population of
the Levittown on Long Island (Jackson 1985, 243).
The Levittowns and other tract developments of
the postwar period were the focus of a series of contemporary sociological studies, including William H.
Whyte’s The Organization Man (1965) and Herbert
Gans’s The Levittowners (1967), that claimed that
the architectural and social homogeneity of the suburbs was matched by a correspondingly conformist
and conservative lifestyle. These studies identified a
loss of the energy and diversity of traditional urban
areas, a move from wider social networks of community and extended family toward the nuclear
family, and a replacement of active associational
culture by domestic consumption. Mumford provides a succinct example of this composite critique
of built-form, social composition and lifestyle. The
new suburbia was
a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined
up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads,

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Suburbia

in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of
the same class, the same income, the same age group,
witnessing the same television performances, eating
the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the
same freezers, conforming in every outward and
inward respect to a common mold . . . the ultimate
effect of the suburban escape in our own time is,
ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from
which escape is impossible. (Mumford, 486)

This notion of suburbia as a form of entrapment
became particularly significant in feminist work
during the 1960s. In the influential The Feminine
Mystique of 1963, Betty Friedan argued that suburbanization and the power of mass consumer culture,
particularly as propagated through women’s magazines, had combined to produce a
mystique of feminine fulfilment . . . [at] the cherished
and self-perpetuating core of contemporary
American culture. Millions of women lived their
lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the
American suburban housewife, kissing their
husbands goodbye in front of the picture window,
depositing their stationwagonsful of children at
school, and smiling as they ran the new electric
waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked
their own bread, sewed their own and their
children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines
and dryers running all day. (Friedan, 11–12)

Friedan’s work played a critical role in popularizing a radical critique of suburban domestic femininity, but portrayals of suburban conformity and
repression were also powerful tropes in the mass
culture of the period. Hollywood films, like those
of director Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, emphasized
conformity and the limits to acceptable sexual and
moral behavior in the American suburbs. By 1975,
the misogyny of suburban life was being satirized in
the film adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The
Stepford Wives, with housewives replaced by compliant androids.

New Perspectives on Suburbia
Recent years have seen the emergence of significant
revisionist approaches that attempt to disentangle
the complexities of suburban life from the characteristics and values ascribed to them by earlier
academics and social commentators. In his study
of The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), John

Carey argued that characterizations of suburban
life as conformist and stultifying were often little
more than snobbish prejudices and fears about the
growing power and prosperity of a mass middle
class. A pioneering 1981 study of the English semidetached house, Dunroamin (a common whimsical
house-name), challenged its common architectural
castigation as cheaply built, ugly, and mundane;
viewed from the perspective of homeowners,
these were liberating spaces of self-expression
and self-development, particularly through the
consumption practices of interior design, home
improvement, and gardening. A landmark collection of essays edited by Roger Silverstone in 1997,
Visions of Suburbia, further developed this revisionist perspective, arguing for a focus on “suburban
modernity.” Moving beyond the straightforwardly
sympathetic approach of Dunroamin, this collection argued that suburbia must be treated as complex and contested. Instead of regarding suburbia
as a monolithic, monotonous counterpoint to the
diversity and energy of the modern city, it was
argued that concepts conventionally used to understand the supposedly distinctive characteristics
of urban modernity, such as creative destruction,
ambiguity, and fragmented experience, were also
applicable to suburbia. Consumption has been central to this reevaluation. For example, drawing on
Daniel Miller’s emphasis on consumers’ active use
and appropriation of commodities, Alison Clarke’s
work on postwar America analyzes Tupperware
(mass-produced plastic storage containers), one of
the most symbolic artifacts of Friedan’s deep suburban domestic femininity. Clarke argues that women
participating in the cascade selling of Tupperware
through parties were able to express their identities
and find new forms of sociability in ways that have
been overlooked in feminist accounts of suburban
anomie.
Social changes have also made reinterpretation
of suburbia necessary. The dominant image of suburbia as socially and racially homogeneous, a viable
generalization for mid-twentieth-century America,
now does no justice to its complex social geographies. Whereas twentieth-century African American
migration to the northern cities was an influence
on “white flight” to the suburbs, from the 1960s
onward there was a significant movement of the
black population into suburbia. More generally, by
the year 2000, racial and ethnic minorities made

Subversion

up over one-quarter of the suburban population
in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas
of the United States, with similar diversity in the
suburbs of Canadian, Australian, and British cities. Sociologist Wei Li coined the term ethnoburb
to describe new ethnic clusters that work within
distanced transnational networks, for example, of
Chinese communities spread in suburbs around the
Pacific Rim. Such formations not only disrupt conventional models of urban sociology and geography like those of the 1930s Chicago school, which
interpreted suburbanization as a powerful force for
assimilation, but also indicate novel forms of suburban lifestyle and consumption cultures. Suburbia
has also been transformed by profound changes
in gender divisions of labor and in household and
family structures.
The reevaluation of suburbia has touched even
its most consistently hostile opponents in architecture and planning. During the 1990s, both the New
Urbanism movement in the United States and the
call for Urban Renaissance in Britain drew on long
traditions of antisuburban rhetoric in calling for a
return to vibrant city living, an end to “sprawl,”
and a move toward more European-style urban
environments. However, in 2006, British architect
Richard Rogers, one of the leading figures in the
Urban Renaissance initiative and until then a consistent critic of suburbia, acknowledged its popularity
and success. His call for “intelligent suburbs” indicated the key challenge for the future of suburbia:
to retain those characteristics that have proved so
desirable for millions, while lessening their dependence on fossil fuels and their wider environmental
impact.
David Gilbert
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Identity; Leisure;
Lifestyle; Ordinary Consumption; Spaces and Places;
Tupperware; Urbanization

Further Readings
Breuegmann, Robert. Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and
Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentia, 1880–1939.
London: Faber and Faber, 1992.
Clapson, Mark. Suburban Century: Social Change and
Urban Growth in England and the USA. Oxford: Berg,
2003.

1399

Clarke, Alison. Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s
America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1999.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton,
1963.
Harris, Richard, and Peter Larkham, eds. Changing Suburbs:
Foundation, Form and Function. London: Spon, 1999.
Jackson, Alan A. Semi-detached London. 2nd ed. Didcot,
UK: Wild Swan, 1991.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The
Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
King, Anthony D. The Bungalow: The Production of a
Global Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984.
Mumford, Lewis. The City in History. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
Oliver, Paul, Ian Davis, and Ian Bentley. Dunroamin: The
Suburban Semi and Its Enemies. London: Barrie and
Jenkins, 1981.
Palen, John J. The Suburbs. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Sieverts, Thomas. Cities without Cities: An Interpretation
of the Zwischenstadt. London: Spon, 2003.
Silverstone, Roger, ed. Visions of Suburbia. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Thorns, David. Suburbia. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972.
Wei Li. From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian
Communities in the Pacific Rim. Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
Wiese, Andrew. Places of Their Own: African American
Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004.

SUBVERSION
In a general sense, subversive consumer practices are
practices that challenge the stylistic canons of consumer culture by using and/or combining consumer
goods in unintended ways. These practices become
subversive in the sense that they undermine the evident desirability of established symbolic rules by
presenting concrete stylistic alternatives. Famous
examples of subversive consumer practices in this
sense are the “punk” or “skin” styles that emerged
among British youth in the 1960s and 1970s. Such
subversive strategies remain often on the stylistic level,
but sometimes they go deeper. In those cases, such as
in the case of the hippie movement or of 1960s counterculture more generally, subversive consumption
enters as an element to a larger alternative cultural
universe with fairly precise political connotations.

1400

Subversion

However, subversive consumption does not necessarily contain a broader political dimension but can,
and often does, remain a purely aesthetic practice
where the challenge remains stylistic.
Subversion in this more limited, stylistic sense
has arguably been an integral element of modern
consumer culture throughout its history. Whereas
most consumers may be content using goods in ways
intended and presented by advertising and marketing, a smaller “vanguard” group has always seen
consumption as a field for innovation and creativity,
redefining the meaning of consumer goods and using
them in unintended ways. This is by no means a new
phenomenon; nineteenth-century proletarian consumers, like New York b’hoys, were famous for their
appropriation of bourgeois garments and their mocking subversion of established tastes in rearticulating a
provocative style of their own. After them, twentiethcentury youth cultures excelled in this kind of creative appropriation in their deployment of creative
recombination of established fashions in articulating
a style of their own, from the flappers in the 1920s,
through the zoot-suiters of the 1940s, to the punks in
the 1970s. Consequently, concerns about the supposedly subversive effects of consumer goods run as a
constant theme through the social science reception
of consumer culture, from nineteenth-century philanthropists worrying about irrational proletarian
consumption patterns, via Italian demographers in
the fascist period connecting the use of cosmetics to
infertility, to today’s concerns about online games or
Internet pornography.
Where does this inherently subversive element of
modern consumer culture come from? Whereas people in all societies seem to have used goods—objects
with one form of use value or another—to represent
or enact social relations, modern consumer practices
are more biased toward innovation. This does not
mean that premodern consumer culture was entirely
static, but it means that modern consumer practices
contain a greater element of innovation. There are
two reasons for this. First, the advancement of modern consumer culture is often coupled with a declining power of traditional identities. This means that
modern consumers have little choice but to create
such cultural frameworks anew. They are compelled
to agency and reflexivity. Second, modern consumer
goods are heavily mediatized; that is, they come
with a large array of symbolic and discursive meanings attached to them. This way, modern consumer

goods have an ability to enhance individual fantasy
beyond what is socially sanctioned, and by virtue
of their tangible materiality, they have the ability to
make real such subversive fantasies, institutionalizing them as tangible social facts, like new gender
roles or new conceptions of proletarian identity with
less disciplined and humble attitudes toward power.
Consequently, consumer goods become powerful
cultural tools. To use them in unexpected combinations can become a powerful expressive strategy.
Both of these factors—the fragmentation of inherited identities and the mediatization of consumer
goods—have expanded with the advance of modern
consumer culture, giving consumers in many situations no choice but to appropriate and elaborate the
meaning of goods and styles. In other words, if subversion has been the business of a small group of elite
consumers, it would seem that contemporary consumer culture tends toward an institutionalization
of, at least, stylistic subversion as a diffuse consumer
practice. There seems to be ample evidence of this in
studies of contemporary adolescent consumers, who
prove ever more resistant and critical toward advertising and marketing strategies, as well as among
contemporary educated middle-class consumers—
the so-called creative class—who appear to favor an
ethic of innovative and creative consumption, where
distinction is derived from the ability to innovate and
articulate original stylistic strategies.
As a response to this institutionalization of stylistic subversion as “normal practice” among wider
groups of consumers, marketing has changed its
view of subversive consumer practices. Modern or
Fordist marketing viewed subversive or unorthodox consumer practices as a problem that had to
be fought by different means to achieve the overall
goal of standardizing consumer tastes and habits.
Beginning in the late 1960s, however, marketing
began to discover how such subversive consumer
practices could function as a source of stylistic innovation in a situation where there was a strongly perceived risk of saturation of mass consumer markets.
This insight triggered a massive “conquest of cool,”
in which leading advertising agencies (principally in
New York) began to hire exponents of the subversive counterculture and incorporate its styles and
symbolic language as a new advertising rhetoric in
promoting goods from cars to alcoholic drinks. This
tendency was strengthened with the growth of the
youth market and the music and fashion industries

Sugar

in the 1970s. In that decade, market research also
developed new methodologies, like lifestyle segmentation and qualitative market research or “cool
hunting” that served to keep up with a constantly
developing and innovative consumer culture. These
efforts were further strengthened with the diffusion
of networked information and communication technologies that allowed a tighter and more detailed
control of consumer patterns and a quicker response
to transformations in consumer tastes. The result of
these transformations was that consumer subversion
gradually came to be considered a valuable source
of innovation to the extent that it became an integral part of product development in a number of
industries, principally fashion and music but also
electronics, games, and mobile communications. At
the same time, the political content of subversive
consumer practices declined, and, beginning perhaps
with the electronic music scene in the early 1990s,
consumption-based subcultures became less ideological and more open to cooperate with business.
Business, in turn, developed a growing interest in
sponsoring such subcultural events to acquire subversive or “cool” connotations for its products or
brands. Consumer subversion, from having been the
source of critical or antisystemic attachments, has
now become an integral element of a new “creative
economy” marked by new partnerships between
business and subcultures.
In parallel to the growing institutionalization of
consumer subversion within the creative economy
that has developed around contemporary brandcentered consumer culture, subversion has become
an increasingly important theme in contemporary
academic consumer research. Beginning with a “cultural turn” in the late 1980s, academic marketing
has incorporated large parts of the cultural studies
tradition, which in turn had developed to identify
and analyze subversive consumer practices as the
possible source of postindustrial political resistance.
As a result, academic marketing, in particular the
more sociologically oriented branch of consumer culture theory, contains a methodological bias toward
the identification of subversive consumer practices,
often in minute and detailed manifestations, and
their conceptualization as expressions of a more
general consumer “resistance.” At the same time,
actual empirical manifestations of such resistance
have become more strongly integrated as an internal functional element to the consumer economy.

1401

In recent decades, there has been an affirmation of
a number of bottom-up trends toward alternative
consumer practices, like ethical consumerism, fair
trade, and voluntary simplicity. These movements
are less charged with strong aesthetic and lifestyle
challenges to established consumer norms and are
often less confrontational in their approach. At the
same time, they have been able to mobilize a number
of actors, both corporate and noncorporate, around
tangible and concrete transformations of consumption and production systems. Rather than subverting
consumer culture, these tendencies point toward its
possible reform and redirection.
Adam Arvidsson
See also Cool Hunters; Diffusion Studies and Trickle
Down; Electronic Video Gaming; Innovation Studies;
Prosumption; Resistance; Style; Subculture

Further Readings
Arvidsson, Adam. “The Function of Cultural Studies in
Marketing: A New Administrative Science?” In Critical
Marketing, edited by M. Tadajewski and D. Brownlie,
329–344. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2008.
Emmison, Michael. “Social Class and Cultural Mobility:
Reconfiguring the Cultural Omnivore Thesis.” Journal
of Sociology 39, no. 3 (2003): 211–230.
Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Methuen, 1979.
Muggleton, David, and Rupert Weinzierl. The PostSubcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

SUGAR
The human affinity for sweet-tasting things appears
to be universal. Nonetheless, the consumption of
sweeteners, most notably in the form of processed
sugar, has not remained constant over human history. Broadly speaking, per capita sugar consumption has increased significantly over time from its
first documented usage in the early first millennium
BC in the Bengal region of northeastern India to our
sugar-saturated present. But this rise has not been a
steady one, nor has it always moved at the same pace
in different parts of the world. Indeed, the meteoric
increase in sugar consumption in the late-twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries has been heralded as

1402

Sugar

a global “epidemic” by many nutritionists. Scholars
who have studied the history and the economics of
this phenomenon have begun to question whether
a surge of this magnitude might be a supply-driven
response or if it is reasonable to posit a fundamental
shift in people’s tastes.
All plants store sugars (monosaccharide molecules) in some form or another, but the most
common source of processed sugar for human consumption, at least until the mid-nineteenth century,
was a tropical grass known commonly as sugarcane.
When steamed and pressed, it yields a viscous, dark
brown syrup that can be eaten raw or be further
refined. The application of more heat as well as beating the syrup produces, among other products, small
white crystals that are then easily added to food,
drink, or medicine, or can be rendered directly into
confections made entirely or mostly of sugar. In the
twentieth century, production of sugar from cane,
which is a water-intensive crop, was overtaken by
increased reliance on sugar beets for the manufacture
of refined sugar and on corn syrup for the sweetening of already processed foods. Other sweeteners are
derived from maple syrup, honey, and some fruits,
but all of these sources are small compared with the
sugar suitable for refining. It is this latter sugar that is
the focus of this entry.
By necessity of geography, all sugar production
from cane before the European age of exploration
was limited to those parts of South Asia and East
Asia with tropical climates. Sugarcane began to
migrate slowly from its home in the subcontinent to
the most southerly parts of China in approximately
the third century BC, but it did not really spread
widely until the later centuries of the first millennium
AD. Urban expansion (perhaps in conjunction with
the spread of Buddhism) in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries led to a rapid rise in sugar consumption.
Then, despite the tremendous increase in the Chinese
production of sugar for overseas markets across the
early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), domestic consumption did not begin to grow
appreciably again until the late-twentieth century. It
is only recently that per capita consumption in China
has even attained a third of what it is in the United
States and the countries of the European Union.
Aside from the current policy concerns about
the global health implications of the seemingly everincreasing consumption of sugar, the other issue that
looms large over the history of sugar consumption

is its strong association with the slave plantation
economies of the European colonial powers, a system not fully dismantled until the close of the nineteenth century, and with lingering implications for
postcolonial economies to the present. It has long
been assumed that sugar cultivation and production,
at least on a scale amenable to mass consumption,
was feasible only in the context of viciously exploited
labor. Recent work on Chinese sugar production,
however, shows that sugar cultivation and processing
for a global market could be successfully carried out
by smallholders as well. Chinese peasant production
in the mid-seventeenth century managed to supply
the export market alone with ten to fifteen million
pounds of surplus sugar annually, in comparison to
a total production figure for Portuguese plantations
in Brazil of forty-five million pounds over the same
period. Sugar was consistently the third most important Chinese export until the end of the nineteenth
century, just behind tea and silk in both volume and
value. This suggests that plantation slavery, although
successful at increasing supply, was not the sole prerequisite for doing so. The one limitation that seems
to have been imposed by the Chinese system of
small-scale peasant cultivation, where peasants were
also growing their own subsistence, was on peasant
consumption itself. By the nineteenth century, the
British working class was able to consume both more
sugar and tea than the typical Chinese producer of
either crop. The real beneficiaries then, of the sweat
of both Chinese peasants and Caribbean and South
American slaves, were the laboring and middle
classes in Europe for whom relatively, and then
absolutely, cheap sugar came to be an increasingly
important part of both the diet and the practices of
everyday life.
Historians of consumption have secured over the
past few decades increasing evidence from household
and institutional budgets, probate inventories, and
public excise tax records, that global groceries (sugar,
most importantly) had come to be in wide use in
Europe by the early decades of the eighteenth century, especially in the countries of the North Atlantic.
For example, as early as 1731, Daniel Defoe numbered English consumers of imported luxuries not in
the “hundreds or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but millions.” Quantitative verification of his
claim can be found in the work of Carole Shammas,
who estimates that sugar was an item of considerable consumption in Britain already at the close of

Sumptuary Laws

the seventeenth century, when approximately onequarter of the population could sweeten their food
and drink every day. By the close of the eighteenth
century, enough sugar was imported and the price
had dropped low enough that every inhabitant in
Britain could do so.
The fact that access to the daily use of sugar
came to be widely distributed is confirmed by the
evidence further collected from workhouse and hospital diets over the course of the eighteenth century.
All of the institutional budget data so far collected
for English poor relief facilities after the year 1700
allude to sugar purchases, even when the amounts
were too small to merit a specific financial record.
In similar seventeenth-century workhouse budget
data, sugar is not to be found at all. For the majority of the eighteenth-century cases that do record
exact expenditures, the typical English workhouse
devoted between 2 and 3 percent of its total dietary
expenditure to sugar. Similar evidence from the
Dutch Republic confirms this phenomenon. Anne
McCants’s work on the Amsterdam Municipal
Orphanage suggests that sugar had become so
much a necessary part of the ordinary diet by the
eighteenth century that even destitute orphans could
make claims on the public purse for its purchase.
The secular trend toward the greater use of sweeteners completely swamped any sensitivity of sugar
purchases to, first, increases in price and, later, to
declines in income. This can be indicative of the
increasing cultural importance attached to the consumption of sugar by the Dutch middle and working
classes over the early modern period.
Not all places in Europe took to sugar consumption as quickly or as completely as did the Dutch,
the Scandinavians, and the British. For example, the
French laboring classes of the nineteenth century
did not substitute away from their traditional fare
of bread with fat, be it butter, oil, or cheese. For
them, sugar continued to be understood primarily
as a medicine long after it had become a daily staple
elsewhere. Indeed, the contemporary French diet is
still more heavily weighted toward the consumption
of fats than it is to sugars. However, in this regard
France remains the exception rather than the rule.
Elsewhere, modern forms of sociability are completely dominated by sugar consumption whether it
is in the form of sweetened hot and cold beverages,
in candy, confections, and frozen treats, or in heavily
sweetened pastries and cakes.

1403

The transport revolution of the nineteenth century
and the green revolution of the twentieth, along with
the spread of new crops and industrial processing
methods, have combined forces to lower sugar prices
well below their then-revolutionary early modern
levels and increase the global supply by several orders
of magnitude. As Sidney Mintz has argued, sugar
was the laboring classes’ fuel of the British Industrial
Revolution. Current consumption trends suggest
that it remains on track to become the single most
important foodstuff of the postindustrial world.
Anne McCants
See also British Empire; Caribbean and the Slave
Trade; Colonialism; Commodities; History of Food;
Spices; Tea

Further Readings
Galloway, J. H. “Sugar.” In The Cambridge World History
of Food, edited by Kenneth Kiple and Kriemhild Conee
Ornelas, 437–449. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Glamann, Kristof. Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740.
Copenhagen: Danish Science Press, 1958.
Kiple, Kenneth F. “Sugar and the New Beverages.” In A
Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization,
163–183. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Mazumdar, Sucheta. Sugar and Society in China: Peasants,
Technology, and the World Market. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar
in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Shammas, Carole. The Pre-industrial Consumer in England
and America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Smith, Woodruff D. “Complications of the Commonplace:
Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism.” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 2 (Autumn 1992):
259–278.
Woloson, Wendy A. Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery,
and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

SUMPTUARY LAWS
The laws that, since medieval times, were created to
limit the consumption of specific commodities were
called sumptuary laws. These laws were mostly used
to regulate the consumption of clothes. In many

1404

Sumptuary Laws

cases, and especially in the Middle Ages, they also
included precise limits on how much people of different social classes could legitimately spend on ceremonies, especially important family rituals such
as weddings and funerals. A second feature of the
sumptuary laws was that they regulated not all types
of consumption, but only those that were deemed
to be excessive or superfluous (“sumptuous”) or not
suitable to the social status of the consumer: their
overall aim was to curb and control any manifestations of excess.
It might appear strange to us that for centuries
the governments of most European nations, and of
many other countries and empires around the globe,
regulated by law what people could or could not
consume. Clearly, moral concerns, as well as the welfare of the state, were in the legislators’ minds when
listing with precision the types of commodities to be
banned. Regulation of consumption is still with us
today, but it has lost its moral nature and has widely
different forms. Sumptuary laws were increasingly
ignored by the end of the ancien régime and often
repealed by the late-eighteenth century. Since then,
states have used the tool of taxation as a more effective means to guide people’s consumption while creating revenue for the state. In the West, regulations,
especially on dress, still exist, but they have been left
to the democratic decision-making processes of local
bodies. (Schools, churches, or even nightclubs might
impose dress codes, but their application is consensual.) The state today imposes limits on consumption
to protect the liberties and safety of its citizens (bans
on products that might harm or endanger them), and
more rarely is asked to legislate on forms of consumption with strong symbolic meanings such as the
wearing of religious symbols or the use of the veil.
Sumptuary laws were not uncommon in the
ancient world, but it was from the mid-twelfth century that they reappeared in England, France, and
Italy, as well as China, Japan, and Latin America
as pointed out by Alan Hunt. Between the twelfth
and the eighteenth centuries, they were to be found
in most European countries. In Italy alone, more
than three hundred sumptuary laws were produced
between 1200 and 1500. Because of their abundance
in Italy, Catalonia, and the southern parts of France
(Languedoc and Provence), followed only after the
fifteenth century by England and France, historians
suggest that sumptuary laws were more common
in economically dynamic parts of the continent,

especially where the population was rich enough
to display its wealth through dress and ceremonies.
However, a simple quantitative analysis cannot reveal
any meaningful pattern as it was not uncommon to
reissue sumptuary laws for the same cities or states
by revising or expanding the list of forbidden goods.
Why would a state want to control its citizens’
expenditure? This entry has already mentioned that
the moral and material welfare of the population
was at stake. Sumptuary laws were part of a series of
measures to prevent moral degeneration that in turn
would have created economic disaster and social
unrest. And this moral need was aimed not just at
the lower classes but also at those who governed the
city or state. The moral argument put forward by
legislators was supported also by priests, monks, and
other religious men who were equally worried about
how overindulgence in the mundane consumption
of dress or expenditure on ceremonies could divert
the attention of Christians away from the heavenly
world and therefore displease God. Both legislators
and preachers complained, for instance, that laws
were needed, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish virtuous ladies from common
prostitutes because they wore similar outfits. Church
and state agreed also that sumptuary laws could
instill correct behaviors by forcing people to fulfill
their civic and religious duties. By encouraging saving rather than wasteful spending, and by decreasing
the cost of weddings, young couples could more easily marry and have children.
Historians agree that sumptuary laws acted as
a tool of social control. The laws were a way of reestablishing the formal divisions between the different social ranks, each of which was allowed to
consume only specific things. Fifteenth-century
English sumptuary laws forbade the wearing of shoes
with long “pikes” (pointed toes) by anyone below
the status of lord. Even knights were forbidden cloth
of gold, purple silk, or double velvet, while esquires,
gentlemen, and wealthy burgesses were also forbidden to wear satins, velvets, embroidered clothing,
gold ornaments, or gemstones. The lowest classes
were forbidden most forms of ornament or precious
material. The insistence on regulating the dress of the
well-offs rather than the very poor underlines how
the main aim was to stop those who could afford it
from using expensive dress as a way to “better themselves,” to make themselves appear as part of a social
class to which they did not belong.

Sumptuary Laws

One final explanation for the existence of sumptuary laws should be mentioned. It was not the case of
forbidding all expenditure, but only certain forms of
it, especially on luxuries. In most European societies,
such luxuries were often imported goods: precious
silks from the Middle East, velvets from Italy, or
high-quality trimmings produced in specialized areas
of Europe. By targeting these products, legislators
were in effect reducing the importation of expensive
goods, privileging locally manufactured alternatives.
The sumptuary law had the effect of supporting the
internal economy, giving employment to local artisans who in turn with their taxes would support the
revenue of the state.
Who was at the center of attention in the sumptuary laws? In many cases the “super-rich,” the elite of
a city or state were excluded or dispensed from complying with the regulation of sumptuary laws. At the
opposite end of society, the very poor, especially those
living outside the urban spaces of towns and cities,
were not the main concern of legislators as it was
improbable that they could access any of the expensive commodities forbidden by the law. Similarly,
foreigners and non-Christians (in particular, Jews)
were not subjected to the laws. It was understood
that as noncitizens, their physical appearance was
governed by the laws or conventions of the city or
state that they came from, and therefore they were of
no concern for local government. Central to sumptuary laws were instead the wealthy merchants, minor
nobility, and citizens living in dynamic urban areas.
Women in particular were the main target of sumptuary laws, although in many cases they are not at
the center of the laws themselves. Many sumptuary
laws refer to women’s dress, or women are cited as
brides in ceremonies, but they were never regulated
in their own right: what they could or could not wear
or consume depended on the social ranks of their
husbands and fathers.
One of the problems of examining the contents
of laws is that it is not clear what impact they really
had on people’s behavior. The laws tell us more of
what legislators wished than what really happened in
the streets and houses of medieval and early modern
Europe. In some cases, as for Florence in the early
fifteenth century, the law stated that a fine of 50 florins was payable, and whoever paid it could wear
whatever he or she pleased for a year. Fines could
be imposed on both wearers and producers, and the
fear of incarceration could be an additional deterrent.

1405

Some European cities appointed a policing system
to uphold the sumptuary laws. In 1330, Florence
appointed the so-called Ufficiali delle Donne (Clerks
of Women) whose job was to fine women who did
not respect the ban on certain items of clothing.
They patrolled the streets, squares, and bridges and
had the power to stop people. The only escape for a
woman pursued by an Ufficiale was to take refuge in
a church, as sacred places could not be searched.
Documentary evidence suggests that, although
with major differences from country to country, few
people were prosecuted. However, there is no evidence to explain why this is the case. Some historians
have argued that disrespect of sumptuary laws was
treated as a minor offense and that it rarely led to
fines or convictions. One might argue that sumptuary laws were effectively disregarded, as suggested
by Giovanni Villani, who, in Cronica (1330), tells us
that “in spite of all these strong ordinances, outrages
remained; and though one could not have cut and
figured cloth, they wanted striped cloth and foreign
cloth, the most that they could have, sending as far as
Flanders and Brabant for it, not worrying about the
cost.” Other historians argue instead that it might be
the case that sumptuary laws were extremely successful at stopping people from indulging in forbidden
things and that would explain why so few prosecution cases are to be found. What remains clear, however, is that sumptuary laws remained, for over six
centuries, one of the main ways to control people’s
consumption across Europe.
Giorgio Riello
See also Binge and Excess; Christianity; Consumer
Regulation; Elites; History; Luxury and Luxuries;
Luxury Taxes; Moralities

Further Readings
Bridgeman, Jane. “‘Pagare le Pompe’: Why Quattrocento
Sumptuary Laws Did Not Work.” In Women in Italian
Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia
Panizza, 209–226. Oxford: University of Oxford
European Humanities Research Centre, 2000.
Harte, N. B. “State Control of Dress and Social Change in
Pre-industrial England.” In Trade, Government and
Economy in Pre-industrial England, edited by D. C.
Coleman and A. H. John, 132–165. London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1976.
Hughes, Diane Owen. “Sumptuary Law and Social
Relations in Renaissance Italy.” In The Italian

1406

Supermarkets

Renaissance: The Essential Readings, edited by Paula
Findlen, 124–150. London: Blackwell, 2002.
Hunt, Alan. Governance of the Consuming Passions: A
History of Sumptuary Laws. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1996.
Killerby, Catherine Kovesi. Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–
1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Phillips, Kim M. “Masculinities and the Medieval English
Sumptuary Laws.” Gender and History 19, no. 1
(2007): 22–42.

SUPERMARKETS
Supermarkets can be broadly defined as self-service
grocery stores offering a range of food and household goods that are organized and displayed according to product category. While supermarkets differ
widely in floor size and product selection, they are
historically differentiated from “traditional” counterservice grocery stores. They are differentiated also
from the more recently developed retail forms of
hypermarkets and superstores. Whereas retail theory works with specific definitions of supermarkets,
hypermarkets, and superstores based largely on
shop size and stock, there is in practice a continuum
between these retail forms, and in everyday discourse
supermarket remains the generic term.
Although now the dominant form of grocery
and household goods retailing in Western and other
affluent nations (and increasingly evident in developing economies), supermarkets are a relatively
recent phenomenon when compared with other
shopping environments such as arcades and department stores. The origin of the supermarket is generally traced to the 1930s, and its status as a retail
innovation lay in its contrast to the counter-service
grocery store. The grocery store has been seen as
a product of the so-called retail revolution of the
nineteenth century—particularly in Britain—which
was characterized by the consolidation of the retail
shop as the site of consumption at the expense of
markets, itinerant traders, and specialist producerretailers (Jefferys 1954). Although the emergence of
the counter-service grocery store was in fact a gradual rather than a revolutionary process, its presence
was certainly bolstered in the mid- to late-nineteenth
century by the rapid development of manufactured
and nationally distributed products; by the packaging, branding, and price-marking of goods; and by

the rise of retail chains that operated or franchised
large numbers of stores under one company banner.
This substantially reshaped grocery retailing, and
the interaction between customer and a professional
grocer remained a key element of everyday shopping
in countries such Britain, Canada, Australia, and,
to a much lesser extent, the United States until the
mid-twentieth century.
The rise of self-service in the grocery sector,
once again a gradual rather than revolutionary
process, fundamentally challenged this ethos of
interaction across a counter and was enabled not
only by further developments in manufacturing,
processing, and packaging, but by population
growth and urban expansion, and by technological developments in refrigeration, communications,
and especially automobile transport. Equally, selfservice expressed perfectly a consolidating Western
ideology of consumer choice, individualism, and
freedom.
The major, if not globally decisive, blow to
counter-service was represented by the rise of the
proto-supermarket in the United States. These
supermarkets were initially established by independent retailers to challenge the dominance of grocery
chains. Building on the concept of self-service grocery stores (originally franchised in the United States
in the 1920s under the name of Piggly Wiggly), the
King Kullen stores, operating from 1930 on, represented the first such challenge. Set up in old factories and warehouses on the emerging suburban
outskirts of New York, King Kullen stores were
filled with nationally branded and packaged products, offered no delivery or customer credit, traded
on the concepts of cheapness and abundance, and
courted the emerging car-using consumer (Tedlow
1990).
It was to be a commercially winning formula,
though ultimately for corporate retailers rather
than those who rivaled them. By 1935, there were
about three hundred supermarkets in the United
States trading under various banners, and the existing grocery chains were quick to begin conversion
and rationalization of their existing portfolio of
grocery stores to the supermarket concept. During
the 1930s and 1940s, long-established U.S. grocery
chains such as Atlantic & Pacific, Safeway, and
Kroger converted their stores to supermarkets while
simultaneously closing many of their small and less
profitable grocery shops. Thus, as the number of

Supermarkets

supermarkets in the United States grew and ownership of them became dominated by large chains,
the overall number of grocery shops fell. At the
same time, independently owned and operated grocery stores were made to compete with commercial
economies of scale they could not match, and many
independents thus closed down. After World War
II, supermarketing in the United States experienced
an even more rapid period of expansion, while the
size of supermarkets and the range of products they
offered grew significantly. At the beginning of the
1950s, supermarkets accounted for about 35 percent
of food sales in the United States. By the end of the
decade, supermarkets sold 70 percent of America’s
food for home consumption. Indeed, by the 1960s,
the major U.S. grocery chains collectively owned and
operated thousands of large supermarkets across the
United States (and in some cases internationally), the
largest of which were stocked with six to eight thousand different products (Humphery 1998).
Developments moved more slowly in other affluent economies. Unlike in the United States, the supermarket did not begin to take hold in countries such
as Britain, Australia, and West Germany until the
1950s and 1960s. This was in part because of slower
income growth, different patterns of urban expansion, and the prolongation of postwar rationing, but
also because of cultural differences in commercial
innovation and public expectations of the shopping
experience. However, by the mid-twentieth century,
retailers, in Britain especially, had become enthralled
with the modernity of the American supermarket.
Taking a lead from the United States, British grocery
chains such as Sainsbury’s and Tesco moved quickly
in the 1950s to convert their stores to self-service,
with both companies opening their first supermarkets
proper in 1955–1956. Where there were no more
than a dozen self-service food stores in Britain in the
late 1940s, there were nearly twelve thousand such
stores by the mid-1960s, with about one thousand
of them large enough to be regarded as supermarkets
(Fulop 1964).
While Australia and especially Canada experienced a similar supermarket boom, the rise of the
supermarket was less immediately marked in many
other affluent nations. Nevertheless, the expansion
and corporate consolidation of grocery retailing has
been a remarkably uninterrupted story during the
last half century. Supermarkets are now the overwhelmingly dominant distributive arena of food

1407

and household goods for Western populations.
They are dominant also in other affluent countries
such as Japan. Moreover, they are an increasingly
significant part of urban retailing elsewhere, particularly in Asia. The world’s leading supermarket and
hypermarket retailers (such as Walmart, Carrefour,
Tesco, Kroger, Safeway, and Sainsbury’s) are among
the largest retail corporations globally and have
moved over the past few decades to internationalize
their operations. Similarly, in many countries such as
Australia, the United States, Britain, and Germany,
a handful of supermarket chains overwhelmingly
dominate the national retailing of food and household goods.
The supermarket has always promoted itself
as offering convenience, cleanliness, and choice.
Although over time, consumers have seemingly
accepted this and supermarket retailers can claim
a key role in modernizing—and, in some respects,
demonstrably improving—systems of retail distribution, the supermarket remains problematic.
Supermarkets were virulently critiqued from their
inception, both for the form of shopping they instituted and for the corporate logic in which they
were to become embroiled. The role of corporate
supermarkets in undermining the viability of smallscale retailing was from the 1930s a central point
of contention, and it remains so today. From its
inception also, the supermarket was seen to institute an impersonalized form of shopping and, more
broadly, of being an iconic part of a postwar consumer culture of unrestrained, self-oriented, and
wasteful acquisition. It was embroiled also in gender
issues. Self-service was initially rejected by many
women’s organizations for effectively increasing the
labor of the housewife, while the supermarket sector
quickly moved to employ women as a cheap source
of nonmanagement labor. Of equal concern was
the increasing interdependence of large-scale food
manufacturing and corporate supermarketing, both
for the dangers this presented to local, small-scale
agricultural production and for the impact this was
to have on transforming national diets to a staple of
processed foods.
Many of these concerns have not abated. Indeed,
they have been resuscitated in the context of opposition to the forces of corporate globalization and
in light of increasing concerns about environmental sustainability, global inequality, and the apparent fragmentation of a sense of local community

1408

Supermodels

and social bonds in face of a dominant consumer
culture. Although many large supermarkets now
carry environmentally sustainable and fair trade
goods and the major chains have developed charters of social responsibility, this has been criticized
as tokenistic. For many contemporary critics, supermarket retailing in the twenty-first century remains
deeply implicated in the increasing corporate control
of world agricultural production, in the corporately
oriented restructuring of national and global distributive systems, in the maintenance of an unsustainable packaging and transport industry, and in the
continued threat to public health presented by diets
rich in manufactured fats, sugars, and salt (Lang and
Heasman 2003; Patel 2008). Equally, there has been
renewed emphasis given to the role of supermarkets
in extinguishing the viability of local, small-scale
production and retailing and in fostering a car-based
culture of shopping and homogenized consumer
choice.
Kim Humphery
See also Automobiles; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice;
Convenience; Food Consumption; Self-Service
Economy; Shopping; Urbanization

Further Readings
Bowlby, Rachel. Carried Away: The Invention of Modern
Shopping. London: Faber & Faber, 2000.
Charvat, Frank, J. Supermarketing. New York: Macmillan,
1961.
Fulop, Christina. Competition for Consumers: A Study of
Changing Channels of Distribution. London: Andre
Deutsch, 1964.
Humphery, Kim. Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the
Changing Cultures of Consumption. Melbourne,
Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Jefferys, James B. Retail Trading in Britain 1850–1950.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
Lang, Tim, and Michael Heasman. Food Wars: Public
Health and the Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets.
London: Earthscan, 2003.
Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle
for the World Food System. London: Portobello Books,
2008.
Tedlow, Richard, S. New and Improved: The Story of
Mass Marketing in America. New York: Basic Books,
1990.
Zimmerman, M. M. The Supermarket: A Revolution in
Distribution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955.

SUPERMODELS
The term supermodel refers to those few models who
consistently model for top luxury brands, appear on
high-profile fashion runways and magazines, garner
large paychecks, and are considered international
celebrities. The “birth” of the supermodels, as some
industry insiders call it, resulted from a unique confluence of factors that have not been seen before or
since, making the supermodel moment a rare one in
fashion history. Consequently, supermodels of today,
although well paid and frequently photographed,
rarely achieve the same hefty paychecks and saturation of exposure enjoyed by supermodels in the
1980s and 1990s.
Although the term supermodel has been bandied about since 1943, when model agent Claude
Dessner used the word in a model how-to book, the
supermodels who gave the term its current meaning
included Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy
Crawford, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, and,
“depending on your mood, Kate Moss” (Kuczynski
1999). Fashion photographer Steven Meisel, famous
as much for his rabbit fur hats and kohl-lined eyes
as for his photographs, hung out with and photographed Evangelista, Turlington, and Campbell so
often they became known as “the Trinity.” They
took the fashion scene by storm, sometimes refusing
to be booked separately, telling People magazine in
June 1990, “We’re only a third without each other”
(Colacello 2008, 354).
In the space of a few short years, the Trinity,
along with Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford,
and Claudia Schiffer, became so famous they
needed bodyguards “to protect them from the
mobs of fans waiting outside of shows” (Colacello
2008, 395). They dated rock stars (Seymour had
a volatile relationship with Guns N’ Roses lead
singer Axl Rose that ended in allegations of violence
on both sides) and prizefighters (Campbell dated
Mike Tyson), associated with royalty (Schiffer was
linked to Prince Albert of Monaco), and married
movie stars (Crawford married movie star Richard
Gere in Las Vegas). Whole issues of Vogue seemed
devoted to them (Gross 1995, 492). They posed
nude for Rolling Stone, appeared on celebrity
television shows like Entertainment Tonight and
MTV News, and lip-synched in George Michael’s
rock video, “Freedom 90.” As interest in models

Supermodels

and modeling—and the paychecks—grew, even
some men got into the game. Although Marcus
Schenkenberg and Mark Vanderloo garnered far
less attention or money, they were dubbed “supermodels” as well.
By the mid- to late-1990s, the supermodels’ place
in the celebrity pantheon was secure. In 1996, models Karen Mulder, Naomi Campbell, and Claudia
Schiffer were immortalized as action figure dolls.
Several invested in a restaurant, the Fashion Café in
New York City, temporarily making it the epicenter
of the public interest in supermodels (Tillotson 1995).
In 1997 and 1998, both Marcus Schenkenberg and
Veronica Webb published autobiographies. The
same year, two well-known authors published novels
about models: Model Behavior by Jay McInerney
and Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis. A series of
teen novels emerged with catchy titles such as Model
Flirt and Picture Me Famous.
A unique convergence of factors wrought model
superstardom. First, while 1970s tabloids tracked
every detail of model Christy Brinkley’s marital
problems, models played to paparazzi at Studio 54,
increasing interest in and publicity about models
as stars. Second, 1980s cable television’s need for
content fanned an interest in models’ lives outside
of the photo studio. Third, fashion’s consolidation
and transnationalization demanded faces that could
sell globally, a need exacerbated by the recession
that followed the 1987 stock-market crash. Fourth,
an upswing in mergers created media conglomerates that wanted to buy only media with proven
broad appeal. Fifth, cable television created new
markets for fashion images, broadening opportunities for modeling work in general. Suddenly, paying outrageous figures for a supermodel “brand”
began to make sense, since the new conglomerates
were launching “worldwide cross-platform campaigns to reach their newly expanded consumer
base,” emblazoning the model’s image “simultaneously across the pages of magazines, on billboards,
and on bus placards” (Koda and Yohannan 2009,
134). This ubiquity bred familiarity, and the “sheer
amount of exposure brought almost immediate
international name recognition and global celebrity
status to models” (134).
Finally, as Katie Ford told Vanity Fair correspondent Bob Colacello, at that time, “politically
minded Hollywood stars ‘wouldn’t do advertisements or be associated with fashion. So models

1409

took the place of actresses as icons of glamour’”
(Colacello 2008, 358). Similarly, Parisian model
agent Gerard Marie argued the supermodels’ popularity and fame got “so enormous in answer to the
sudden need of the time. Actresses started to hide
themselves, and people needed something else.
. . . So, next story came the models” (Gross 1995,
490–491).
Once the supermodels started getting attention,
they were able to command fame at astronomical
prices. Everybody wanted them. Their fees jumped
with every bidding war, exacerbating the winnertake-all tendencies of the modeling market (Frank
and Cook 1995). This concentration of demand was
evidenced by Gianni Versace’s decision to pay double
or even triple to be the only designer these models
worked for during the Milan fashion shows. Once
Versace started paying extra for exclusivity, “then
all the other designers said, I’ll match that. I’ll pay
you the same thing and you don’t have to be exclusive.” Turlington recalled, “It got bigger and bigger
because they were outbidding themselves. Every year
I thought, I can’t make more than this, but every year
I almost doubled my income” (Gross 1995, 492).
Her estimated income of $1.7 million in 1992 was,
as she said, “a ridiculous amount of money” (Gross
1995, 463).
The fees grew so great, Evangelista’s quip that she
and Turlington liked to say—“We won’t wake up for
less than $10,000”—was not far off base. Whereas
superstar models in the 1960s, such as Penelope Tree,
made $12 an hour and $60 a commercial, by the late
1990s, models of that caliber could make $50,000
in a single day (Bailey 1999, 139). In 1998, Cindy
Crawford’s earnings reportedly reached $8 million
(Woolley 1999, 236).
Other sources estimate even higher amounts,
reporting that Crawford, Turlington, Evangelista,
and Campbell all earned between $20 million and
$30 million by this time (Press 2004). Since the
supermodels’ heyday, despite the Victoria’s Secret
campaign to groom and promote their models
as “supermodels,” only Brazilian model Gisele
Bündchen has come close to these levels of fame
and remuneration. As one model agent, in an interview with Elizabeth A. Wissinger, put it, “I think
Gisele was probably the last supermodel; you know,
she’s from Brazil and she makes 25 million dollars a
year, and she’s married to Tom Brady and she’s . . .
the whole thing, you know, the whole situation. . . .

1410

Surplus Value

Will we have a supermodel era again? I would hope
so, but I don’t think so.”
Elizabeth A. Wissinger
See also Advertising; Body, The; Branding; Celebrity;
Fashion Industry; Globalization; Women’s Magazines

Further Readings
Bailey, David. Models Close Up. New York: Universe
Publishing, 1999.
Colacello, Bob. “A League of Their Own.” Vanity Fair
(September 2008): 354–359.
Frank, Robert H., and Philip J. Cook. The Winner-Take-All
Society. New York: Free Press, 1995.
Gross, Michael. Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful
Women. New York: William Morrow, 1995.
Koda, Harold, and Kohle Yohannan. The Model as Muse:
Embodying Fashion. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009.
Kuczynski, Alex. “Trading on Hollywood Magic:
Celebrities Push Models off Women’s Magazine
Covers.” New York Times, January 30, 1999.
Press, Debbie. Your Modeling Career: You Don’t Have to
Be a Superstar to Succeed. New York: Allworth Press,
2004.
Quick, Harriet. Catwalking: A History of the Fashion
Model. London: Octopus, 1997.
Schenkenberg, Marcus. Marcus Schenkenberg: New Rules.
New York: Rizzoli, 1997.
Tillotson, Kristin. “Supersaturated: Supermodels—They
Strike a Pose and America Can’t Resist.” Star Tribune,
June 7, 1995.
Webb, Veronica. Veronica Webb Sight: Adventures in the
Big City. New York: Hyperion Books, 1998.
Woolley, Scott. “High-Class Lookers.” Forbes, March 22,
1999.

SURPLUS VALUE
Surplus value is an instructive concept for the study
of consumer culture insofar as it provides a way of
thinking about the social and economic relations
underpinning the production of the commodities
consumed. In Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism and
class conflict, the creation and retention of surplus
value was positioned as the main source of profit and
the key mechanism through which the proletariat
are exploited by the bourgeoisie. Marx argued that
before the emergence of capitalism, exchange took

place as a means to an end insofar as a certain level
of exchange was necessary to ensure basic levels of
human subsistence. By contrast, capitalist production seeks to expand or add value and exchange the
commodities produced for a higher value than the
inputs to the production process. It seeks to increase
the rate at which the commodities produced can be
exchanged for other commodities, or put another
way, it seeks to maximize the price—exchange value
in Marx’s terms—of the commodities that it produces. It is through this process of expanding value
that profits become possible.
Crucial to an understanding of surplus value is
an appreciation of Marx’s labor theory of value. For
Marx, the exchange value (price) of a commodity
should be a reflection of the number of labor hours
going into its production and the level of skill associated with the work undertaken. So when Adam
Smith (1776, 1:ix) noted how, in industrialized or
“capitalist” economies, “the whole produce of
labour does not always belong to the labourer. He
must in most cases share it with the owner of the
stock which employs him,” Marx found the basis of
his critique.
In his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, Marx suggested that there are direct producers
who engage in productive labor and nonproducers
who do not and so live off the production of others.
Marx refers to the direct producers as the proletariat
and the nonproducers as the bourgeoisie and identifies an antagonistic relationship between these two
classes that arises as a result of the social mechanisms
through which the bourgeoisie appropriate surplus
labor from the proletariat. Under capitalism, argued
Marx, the means of production—the tools, machinery, and factories necessary to produce the commodities to be exchanged—are owned by the bourgeoisie,
and yet the bourgeoisie are not direct producers
themselves. The bourgeoisie must therefore employ
the proletariat to make use of the means of production and produce commodities for the purposes of
exchange and the pursuit of profit. The other side
of the equation is that the proletariat do not themselves have access to the means of production and
so must sell their labor and capacity to produce
commodities. Similarly, the proletariat do not have
access to the products of their labor, and so they are
dependent on their wages to gain access to the commodities required to meet their basic conditions of
survival. In this situation, the capitalist bourgeoisie

Surplus Value

have access to the products of the proletariat’s labor
and although they have not contributed to the production of these commodities, they are the ones in a
position to exchange these products in the pursuit of
profit.
Recalling that capitalist production involves the
expansion of value such that the exchange value of
a commodity is higher than the value of the capital
inputs, it can be noted that labor represents an input
to the capitalist production process for which workers receive a wage. To the extent that the worker provides labor that enables the capitalist to expand value
beyond the level of the wage the worker is paid, the
capitalist is said to be appropriating surplus labor
from the direct producers via the creation of surplus
value. To illustrate, imagine a worker who is paid
$100 a day but only taking half a day to produce
$100 worth of commodities. In Marx’s terminology,
this half a day’s work represents the socially necessary labor time because this is the time required to
produce commodities equivalent to her wage. If she
continues to work past lunch time, she is engaging
in surplus labor because she is producing commodities for which she will receive no payment. Assuming
that she is exactly as productive in the second half
of the day as she is in the first, the value of surplus
labor will be another $100. She would have produced commodities with an exchange value of $200
and yet she would have only received $100 for doing
so—the remaining $100 is retained by the capitalist
bourgeoisie as surplus value. Moreover, this surplus
value is the source of the capitalist’s profit. Indeed,
profit is what is left of the surplus value once the cost
of the raw materials and other capital costs—such as
wear and tear on the machinery—have been covered.
Marx argues that the capitalist has no right to this
surplus value because he or she has not contributed
to the productive labor that forms the source of the
commodity’s value. Consequently, the surplus value
retained by the capitalist is said to reflect the rate
at which the worker is exploited. This exploitation
arises because the capitalist occupies a commanding
position in the labor market by virtue of owning the
means of production and the products of the proletariat’s labor. Furthermore, Marx suggested that
the capitalist bourgeoisie seek to maximize profits
by maximizing the rate at which they appropriate
surplus value. A distinction can be drawn between
absolute and relative surplus value. Absolute surplus
value is maximized by extending working hours and

1411

working more hours beyond the point at which one
has produced commodities equivalent to one’s wage.
Looking at the preceding example, imagine that the
worker is forced to work an extra four hours per day.
If she is still paid just $100, the rate of exploitation
and the surplus value will increase by however much
she produces in those four hours. Of course, there are
limits to this insofar as there are only so many hours
in the day and workers are likely to get less productive if they work too many hours. As such, relative
surplus value can be increased by decreasing wages
or improving output per hour worked. This might be
done with increased mechanization and a highly specialized division of labor. By contrast, workers might
form a union to try to improve their position within
the labor market and reduce the rate of exploitation
by seeking higher wages, shorter working hours, and
improved working conditions. For Marx, the appropriation of surplus value was key to capitalist development, but it was also key to the fundamental class
antagonism that he felt would eventually bring about
capitalism’s downfall.
Although Marx’s account of surplus value is useful for thinking about the development of capitalist economies, there are some strong limitations to
the concept. For a start, it is premised on the labor
theory of value and the idea that value is determined
by the labor embodied in the production of a commodity. It would be hard to say for certain that this is
the case. On the one hand, the labor theory of value
is dependent on a subjective moral position that cannot be upheld by empirical evidence. Furthermore,
in a culture where services, experiences, and images
are consumed as much as commodities, it is hard to
imagine that a labor theory of value would provide
a particularly valid account of the ways in which
these things are valued. Similarly, from the point of
view of exploitation and class, it is clear that many
individuals whom we may consider middle class or
bourgeois—such as those in highly paid management
positions—do not own the means of production nor
do they necessarily have access to the products of
their labor. Similarly, they do not necessarily engage
in the productive labor that was valorized by Marx.
These individuals may be paid $1,000,000 a year
and yet generate ten times that amount for their
employers (or more accurately, shareholders), but it
would be hard to theorize their situation in terms of
the exploitation of the proletariat. The point is this:
it is hard to think in terms of a simple model where

1412

Surrealism

bourgeois capitalists own the means of production and the commodities produced, which in turn
enables them to appropriate the surplus value of a
proletariat workforce engaged in productive labor.
David Evans
See also Division of Labor; Inequalities; Marx, Karl;
Marxist Theories; Social Class; Value: Exchange and
Use Value

Further Readings
Callinicos, Alex. The Resources of Critique. Cambridge:
Polity, 2006.
Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical
Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital. London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1970.
Singer, Peter. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Smith, Adam. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Press,
1976. First published 1776.

SURREALISM
Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement that
originated in Paris in the 1920s. The key year was
1924, which saw the first issue of the review La
Révolution Surréaliste, as well as the founding of the
Bureau of Surrealist Research, and most famously of
all, André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. The movement had international ambitions and soon spread
across Europe to the Americas (Latin America, the
Caribbean, as well as the United States and Canada)
and to parts of Asia (particularly Japan). As is clear
from Breton’s manifesto, surrealism sought to radically reduce the involvement of the rational, conscious mind in the making of art. Surrealist art often
included an irrational juxtaposition of elements: elements that, although perfectly ordinary on their own,
together produced unsettling affects. One of the most
vivid examples of surrealism is Meret Oppenheim’s
Object (1936)—a cup, saucer, and spoon that have
been covered in fur. As the two elements (crockery and fur) meet, the utility of the object has been
destroyed, while the sexual aspects of both have been
brought to the surface.
For surrealists, dreams were seen as offering a
greater (and better) reality than the routine world of

bourgeois propriety and business profiteering and
state-sponsored nation building. If dreams were not
always available, then dream-like conditions could
be fostered through games, drunkenness, and other
forms of intoxication, “automatic” writing and
drawing, random instructions, and so on. Although
Freudian psychoanalysis was an important resource
for surrealists, it should be remembered that Freud
remained deeply skeptical about the value of surrealism. In its turn, surrealism might also remind us that
the goals of psychoanalysis are often normative in
outlook and aim, whereas the ambition of surrealism
was to unleash the power of the nonrational in the
name of a revolution of everyday life.
Although the connections between surrealism and
consumer culture may not seem obvious, it is worth
noting that the word surreal quickly entered everyday
vocabulary to denote strange coincidences, bizarre
juxtapositions, and a general sense of the uncanny.
This had less to do with the success of this avantgarde art movement and much more to do with the
way that surreal values and practices were deployed
in the fields of advertising and commercial culture
more generally. In a promotional world where breakfast cereals are seen to jump around kitchens and
young women shampoo their hair in tropical rainforests, a certain aspect of surrealism has been harnessed to the interests of consumer society. Although
this can be seen as simply commercial culture appropriating avant-garde culture to its own ends, the synergies between consumer culture and surrealism are
much more profound. In the first volume of Capital
(1867), Karl Marx drew our attention to the form of
the commodity through the example of a table. His
argument is that a table is an ordinary sensual object,
but once it becomes a commodity it enters a world
of illusion and starts dancing and has fantastic ideas
sprouting from its wooden brain. Whereas this is an
allegory of commodification, one only has to pick up
any furniture catalogue to get a sense of the fantasies
that commodity culture promises and to get a sense
of the ubiquity of the commodity’s dreamworlds.
The use of surrealist visual practices by advertisers, and the connection between the surreal and
the commodity form, might suggest that surrealism
is fundamentally complicit with the values of consumerism and commercial culture. But this was far
from true, and it is more helpful to see surrealism
as holding a critical dialogue with consumerism.
The best commentators on surrealism recognized

Surrealism

the danger that it could, indeed, be supplying
consumer culture with a new box of tricks to perpetuate the hypnotic draw of the commodity form
but that it also provided a critical perspective that
had the power to uncover consumer culture’s most
impoverished values, detonate its most cherished
presumptions, while bringing to the surface socially
repressed desires. For the critic Walter Benjamin,
writing in 1929, surrealism’s critical potential
was to be found in its use of a consumer culture
from a previous epoch. For many surrealists, the
junkyards, flea markets, and second-hand shops of
Paris and elsewhere were a treasure trove of infinite
richness. The commodities found there were outmoded, obsolete, and unfashionable; they reflected
the ethos and dreams of a different time. For an
artist like Max Ernst, the illustrations from nineteenth-century picture books could be rearranged
and collaged together to tell macabre, sexual tales
about a culture whose protocols of propriety are
shown to be a hypocritical sham. Although we may
laugh at the fashions from a previous decade, surrealism’s principal move was to see those fashions as
promising dreams that it would never deliver. Old
commodities (but this would be true for new ones
as well) are revealed as both shabby confidence
tricks and receptacles for storing society’s most
sacred desires. That the promise of the commodity,
for a more satisfying, easier life, never comes to
fruition is a lesson alerting us to the way that desire
(sexual and social) is constantly cashed in for the
short-term victory of profit.
Many of the philosophers, anthropologists, historians, psychoanalysts, and critical writers that
have shaped the intellectual culture of the twentieth century have, to a greater or lesser extent, been
influenced by surrealism. In many respects, surrealism would seem a natural ally of critical thought, as
both are premised on the need to kick those habits of
mind that stop us from finding fresh insights about
the world, and for interrupting inherited patterns of
practice that end up making us repeat received opinion. One particularly powerful current of thought
emerged around the figure of Georges Bataille and
the Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939) where surrealism was directed toward a general ethnography
of human culture. The “college” was no straightforward scholarly institution but was a loose confederacy of avant-garde writers and thinkers who would
use the findings of anthropology and archaeology to

1413

challenge the presumptions of the present. Practicing
what came to be known as an “anthropology of
the near,” members of the college re-found the rituals and beliefs of so-called primitive culture in the
abattoirs and shopping malls of contemporary Paris.
They called for a sociology of the sacred that would
refuse to recognize sacrificial and ritualistic practices
only in official religions: for them, the forces of sex,
death, and sacrifice were to be found at the heart of
consumer culture.
In the 1920s and 1930s, surrealists produced
poetry, painting, films, novels, magazines, theater,
performance, and instillation art. Its influence can
still be seen across myriad cultural forms: from
political activism to pop videos, from critical theory
to fashion. It still informs current art, and although it
is rare for contemporary artists to declare themselves
surrealists, much of contemporary art’s involvement
with our consumerist, bureaucratic world would be
unimaginable without it. More fundamentally, perhaps, the absurdist comedy of the past fifty years is
truly indebted to surrealism. If, at its most banal,
surrealism infuses the latest products of commercial
culture with a dubious mystique, then, at its most
glorious, surrealism provides the perspective for the
barbed humor that reveals the absurd, perverse, morbid, and irrational forces that lie at the heart of our
rational world.
Ben Highmore
See also Advertising; Aesthetics; Art and Cultural Worlds;
Commodification; Freud, Sigmund; Postmodernism;
Promotional Culture; Psychoanalysis

Further Readings
Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism.” In One Way Street and
Other Writings, 225–239. London: Verso, 1985.
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” In The
Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 117–151. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin
and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993.
Gersham, Herbert S. The Surrealist Revolution in France.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974.
Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. London:
Plantin Publishers, 1987.

1414

Surveys

Richardson, Michael, ed. Refusal of the Shadow:
Surrealism and the Caribbean. London: Verso, 1996.
Sas, Miryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese
Surrealism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999.
Walz, Robin. Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in
Early Twentieth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.

SURVEYS
A survey is a design for collecting data based on questions to individuals through a standardized instrument (questionnaire). It can be used within the more
general research designs following the quantitative
standard (experimental, quasi-experimental, nonexperimental designs). A fuller definition is as follows:
A “survey” is a systematic method for gathering
information from (a sample of) entities for the
purpose of constructing quantitative descriptors
[statistics] of the attributes of the larger population of
which the entities are members. The word “systematic”
is deliberate and meaningfully distinguishes surveys
from other ways of gathering information. The phrase
“(a sample of)” appears in the definition because
sometimes surveys attempt to measure everyone in a
population and sometimes just a sample. (Groves
et al. 2004, 2)

An example that may well depict this definition
is the Survey of Consumers that has been carried
out by the Survey Research Center at the University
of Michigan since 1946. Each month, a sample of
about five hundred adults is interviewed by telephone on consumption attitudes and behavior. The
survey’s main objectives are to measure changes in
consumers’ attitudes and expectations, understand
why such changes occur, and evaluate how they
relate to consumers’ decisions to save, borrow, or
make discretionary changes. A term similar to survey is (opinion) poll: some authors use these terms
interchangeably, whereas others believe that there
is a difference between the two. According to the
latter, the opinion poll is intended to answer questions (coming from a newspaper, a political party,
a company, etc.) through a simple analysis of data
collected on the basis of a short interview to a
sample of individuals; in contrast, a survey aims to

corroborate a more or less articulated theory, and
complex analyses are developed on those data collected through extensive interviews.

Data Collection
There are three important aspects to consider when
conducting a survey: the mode and the organization of the data collection, the sample design, and
the construction of the questionnaire. Regarding
the first aspect, it is possible to identify four major
modes of collection: face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, self-completed questionnaires, and
self-completed questionnaires via the Internet. This
typology is essentially based on two dimensions: the
presence or absence of an interviewer and the type
of support (via telephone or not in the case of the
interview, through the web or not in the case of selfcompleted questionnaire). Currently, researchers use
each of these different ways of collection, though in
different proportions. However, they have characterized different phases in the history of the survey,
reflecting the development of sampling techniques on
the one hand and technology on the other. Whereas
initially many individuals were interviewed through
self-completed questionnaires, mainly via postal service, developments in sampling theory have reduced
the number of individuals to be interviewed but have
increased the quality of the collection process. The
subsequent history of survey was instead marked by
technological developments: From the early 1980s,
the spread of the telephone, with its advantages in
terms of savings and lower invasiveness, has led to
an exponential growth in the use of telephone interviews. Lately, the diffusion of the web has revived
the self-completed questionnaires. Finally, almost all
of these modes of data collections are increasingly
computer-aided: the support of the personal computer (PC) is obvious to the self-completed questionnaires via the Internet, but it is pervasive also
for telephone interviewing and it is becoming more
and more widespread in face-to-face interviews.
One of the advantages of using computers is their
assistance in running the sequence of questions and
checking the compatibility between the codes keyed
in and those expected under the coding scheme of
responses, so completing the questionnaire becomes
faster and the chance of errors decrease.
The four modes of data collection described
in the previous paragraph can be distinguished

Surveys

according to three dimensions: the quality of the
process of administration, coverage and nonresponse
errors, and organizational aspects. The following
are general considerations that can result in significant exceptions in specific situations depending on
the particular characteristics of the sample to be
examined. Regarding the quality of the process of
administration, the best case is basically face-to-face
interviews where the interviewer can motivate the
interviewee—the simple interaction creates favorable
conditions for the involvement—and guide him or
her in filling out long and complex questionnaires.
In telephone interviews, the lack of personal contact
may lower interviewer commitment and interviewee
motivation, thus requiring some simplification of
the questions; the interaction as well tends to lose
importance more quickly, so the interview will generally be shorter unless the topic of the interview is
particularly relevant to the interviewee. These disadvantages are increased when the interviewer is completely absent. Here we must distinguish between the
classic self-completed questionnaires (such as postal
ones) and self-administration that is still supported
by an interviewer, as in group administration (e.g.,
school students) or on-site surveys (e.g., exhibition
visitors). In the first case, the lack of control over the
process of administration is complete, so there is no
certainty about the identity of the respondent. In the
second case, the support of an interviewer in some
way mitigates what was said before, though the
quality of the responses continues to depend on the
motivation and cognitive skills of the respondents.
Self-administration can be an advantage when the
questions relate to sensitive issues (sexual behavior,
drug use, etc.): in this case, in fact, the interaction
with the interviewer may influence the answers of the
interviewee.
The second dimension concerns the implications
of different ways of collecting data on coverage and
nonresponse errors. Face-to-face interviews, for
example, require sample designs compatible with
the spatial concentration of the sample in areas easily accessible to interviewers, but this requirement
is largely irrelevant to telephone interviews, postal
questionnaires, and those administered via the web.
On the other hand, the particular characteristics of
telephone (fixed and mobile) and Internet users—
characteristics in rapid change in recent years—pose
problems of coverage. In the case of fixed phones,
there is a problem controlling the selection process

1415

of the respondent among the individuals present at
home at the time of the interview: the underrepresentation of elderly and poorly educated people—which
is common in telephone samples—is due to the tendency of these groups to leave the phone to other
family members present in the house. The problem of self-selection—that only a few agree to the
interview and the choice to respond is not random
but associated with the particular characteristics of
individuals—is pervasive in all modes of data collection but is particularly relevant in self-administered
questionnaires. It can, however, be mitigated by the
presence of an interviewer during the administration
(as in group administration) or by an obligation to
return the questionnaire, a situation that is rather
rare. With regard to the self-administered questionnaire via the Internet specifically, at least two phenomena should be highlighted: on one hand, the use
of the tool is rapidly increasing; the other is the risk
that the share of so-called professional respondents
becomes nonnegligible. These are individuals who
have a stable relationship with research institutes
and are rewarded in some way for their participation
in the various surveys: these professional respondents could simply give “sensible” answers just to
continue their participation, rather than in a manner
corresponding to their own feelings, as is probable
with those who are sufficiently motivated to answer
without any reward other than the reaffirmation of
their identity.
Finally, the third dimension concerns organizational aspects. From an economic standpoint, the
most expensive mode of collection is the face-to-face
interview, followed by telephone interview, while the
self-completed questionnaire (via the Internet or not)
is usually the cheapest. From a time perspective, the
fastest ways for collecting data are via telephone and
the web: this explains their intense use in opinion
polls for the speed with which one can get the results
that can make an important point for polls purchasers. An important organizational aspect of telephone
surveys is the concentration of interviewers in one
place: this facilitates not only their preparation and
supervision but also group cohesion. This may be
important for improving the environment and thus
the quality of the work of interviewers. Whatever
data collection mode is chosen, pretest is a crucial
factor for survey success. Pretesting gives the research
group an opportunity to test every single question
and the questionnaire as a whole; it is also useful for

1416

Surveys

evaluating the duration of the interview. Although
this entry has discussed distinct modes of data collection, a combination of modes can be used within the
same survey, depending on the specific objectives and
organizational constraints.

Sample Design
When researchers choose the collection mode to
adopt in a survey, coverage and nonresponse errors
are an issue; when they choose the sample design,
sampling error, another important source of uncertainty about data, is a concern. Often, the research
question aims at studying a big population, but it
is simply impossible to survey all of the individuals
belonging to it. So it becomes necessary to draw a
sample from that population in a way that the small
sample will make a reliable representation of the big
population. Even if the population is not so big, it
may be convenient to sample the population: the
resources (money, time, organizational burden) saved
on quantity (interviewees) can be spent on quality
(of data collection). There are two kinds of sample
designs: if units have a known (and different from
zero) chance of selection, the sample design is probabilistic; otherwise, the sample design is nonprobabilistic. In other words, a sample design is probabilistic
if John (and every other population unit) has a chance
to be interviewed and this probability is known by
the researchers.
Simple random sampling is the basic probabilistic design. It requires the full list of the members of
the population that the researchers are studying: a
number is assigned to every unit in the list and then
numbers are randomly extracted. This way any
population unit has a probability to be sampled,
and that probability is the same for all members.
Although simple random sampling is not complex
as far as technical procedure and statistical theory
are concerned, it is employed less than expected. If
the population is big, it is difficult to get the full list
of the members; moreover, if the researchers plan to
use face-to-face interviews, it would be impossible to
reach a population scattered everywhere. A version
of simple random sampling is systematic sampling,
which is different only with regard to the technical
procedure of extraction. Units are in fact extracted
according to a sampling interval that equals the size
of the population divided by the size of the sample
(k = N/n). For example, if the researchers want to

draw a sample of 500 cases out of a population of
8,000, they have to extract a unit every 16 units
(starting from a random number between 1 and 16).
Systematic sampling is particularly useful since it can
be employed even if there is no list of the population;
for example, if the researchers want to interview the
customers of a supermarket, they could ask to interview every kth (according to the sampling interval)
customer coming out of the store. Stratified sampling
takes advantage of the fact that accuracy in sample
estimates depends not only on sample size but also
on the variance of the phenomenon under study.
Population is divided into strata according to one or
more variables connected to it (e.g., if the researchers want to estimate income, they could divide the
population according the profession); then, inside
each stratum a random sampling takes place. The
final sample is smaller than a standard simple random sample, and the estimates are as accurate, if not
more. Notwithstanding a complex theory and some
statistical disadvantages, multistage sampling could
be a suitable design when there is no list of the members of the population, when the population is scattered everywhere, or when it is necessary to save on
data collection costs. In this design, the population
is divided in hierarchical levels and at every level an
extraction is carried out; for example, if the researchers want to study the workers of a big chain of supermarkets, they could sample first supermarkets and
then workers.
Moving to nonprobability sampling, the most
discussed design is quota sampling. The population
is divided into strata, or quotas, like in stratified
sampling, but with the important difference that
inside each quota the selection of the individuals is
not random but delegated to the interviewer. Such
a nonrandom mechanism has been highly criticized
by most statisticians as a source of bias because
interviewers may tend to select individuals easier to
interview; some survey researchers confute it, maintaining that practical advantages overcome statistical
disadvantages. In the case of small populations, with
individuals scattered everywhere but in contact with
one another—as is often the case of “underground
populations” (illegal immigrants, homosexuals, drug
addict individuals, etc.)—a useful strategy could be
that of snowball sampling. The researchers start with
individuals selected in a particular way and ask them
to indicate other members of the population, and so
on: this way there is an exponential growing of the

Symbolic Capital

sample. The risk of this design is that the snowball
may take a particular direction, thus resulting in
the sample not being representative of the surveyed
population.

Questionnaire Definition
The last important aspect to consider when conducting a survey is the definition of the questionnaire. The questionnaire, compared to the questions
schemes used in other research designs, is so characterized: the definition of the issues to deal with
in the interview is specific; questions are the same
in the same order to all the respondents; and most
of the time, the respondent is not free to express
himself or herself but has to choose among alternatives. The questionnaire is usually structured in three
sections: initial, central, final. The initial section is
the most important because the researcher has to
persuade the sampled individual to give the interview: the potential respondent has to be reassured
about survey objectives and purchaser, anonymity,
and other aspects. Standard sociological questions
(gender, age, etc.) can be put at the beginning of the
questionnaire to be sure this information is obtained;
however, if the researcher is concerned that the
respondent could get bored or upset, standard sociological questions can be moved to the final section.
Difficult questions (related to delicate and scabrous
issues) can be asked in the central or in the final section: the researcher has to balance the importance
of the questions and the risk of the interviewee quitting the interview, which would result in the loss of
answers to the remaining questions. From a psychological point of view, the aim of the questionnaire
is to activate “optimizing” rather than “satisficing”
answer mechanisms: the respondent should give the
best answer and not an acceptable answer. There
are, in particular, two phenomena that can decrease
answer quality: social desiderability (the tendency to
introduce oneself in a favorable light) and acquiescence (the tendency to answer affirmatively regardless of the content of the question). To activate
optimizing answer mechanisms and to avoid social
desiderability, acquiescence, or both, question wording is extremely important. The usual norms apply:
statements must be clear, concise, straightforward,
and unambiguous; the vocabulary must be as simple
as possible, according to the cognitive skills of the
respondents; and so forth.

1417

Surveys are rich sources of information. Once the
survey project comes to an end, its data and results
can continue to be useful: the survey can be repeated
over time to study changes; data can be analyzed
according to different research questions; results can
be compared to reach stronger conclusions.
Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi
See also Attitude Surveys; Likert Scales; Longitudinal
Studies; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Methods of Market Research; Opinion Polls

Further Readings
Clogg, Clifford C., and Aref N. Dajani. “Sources of
Uncertainty in Modeling Social Statistics: An Inventory.”
Journal of Official Statistics 7 (1991): 7–24.
Corbetta, Piergiorgio. Social Research: Theory, Methods
and Techniques. London: Sage, 2003.
Couper, Mick. Designing Effective Web Surveys. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Dillman, Don A., Jolene D. Smyth, and Leah Melani
Christian. Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The
Tailored Design Method. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009.
Glass, Gene V., Barry McGaw, and Mary Lee Smith. Metaanalysis in Social Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage,
1987.
Groves, Robert M., Floyd J. Fowler, Mick P. Couper, James
M. Lepkowski, Eleanor Singer, and Roger Tourangeau.
Survey Methodology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004.
Groves, Robert M., Floyd J. Fowler, Mick P. Couper, James
M. Lepkowski, Eleanor Singer, and Roger Tourangeau.
Survey Methodology. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,
2009.
Kiecolt, K. Jill, and Laura E. Nathan. Secondary Analysis
of Survey Data. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.
Kish, Leslie. Statistical Designs for Research. New York:
Wiley, 1987.
Menard, Scott. Longitudinal Research. 2nd ed. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002.
Tourangeau, Roger, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski.
The Psychology of Survey Response. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.

SYMBOLIC CAPITAL
Symbolic capital is one of the forms of capital central
to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Although it is often
simply glossed as “honor” or “prestige,” it is important to note that the honor and prestige inherent in

1418

Symbolic Capital

symbolic capital is the outcome of the conversion of
other forms of capital. Bourdieu defines symbolic
capital as “the form that the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognized
as legitimate” (1989, 17; see also Bourdieu 1986).
Hence, although apparently conceptually existing
in Bourdieu’s work alongside the other “capitals”—
economic, cultural, and social—symbolic capital is
not a different form of capital, but rather should be
seen as the legitimated, recognized form of the other
capitals. In other words, for Bourdieu, any capital
may undergo a process of conversion so that it is recognized as legitimate “currency” or assets. Hence,
educational credentials, for example—forms of institutionalized cultural capital—can work as symbolic
capital because they are recognized as representing
legitimate prestige:
A credential such as a school diploma is a piece of
universally recognized and guaranteed symbolic
capital, good on all markets. As an official definition
of an official identity, it frees its holder from the
symbolic struggle of all against all by imposing the
universally approved perspective. (Bourdieu 1989,
21–22)

This, of course, points to important implications
for the arbitrary character of all capitals. If their
value relies on legitimation through conversion into
symbolic capital, then it follows that their value is not
inherent in the capitals themselves—in, for example,
the dispositions that allow the appreciation of forms
of art or music, or the links developed through friendship or kinship ties. Rather, as money has no inherent
worth but relies on a widespread recognition that it
is a legitimate form of exchange, so too, Bourdieu
suggests, cultural and social capital only “work”
when they are recognized as having value. This links
with the attentiveness to power, which is a feature of
Bourdieu’s work. Only some capitals “count”: only
some can be traded with—and this counting is an
outcome of symbolic struggles in which some groups
have acquired the power to name specific types of the
capitals as legitimate.
What this suggests is that there can be forms of
capital that are not converted or convertible into
symbolic capital. Whereas this aspect is rather underdeveloped in Bourdieu’s own work, Beverley Skeggs
uses and develops the insight to good effect in her
ethnography of young working-class women in the
north of England. Skeggs argues that these women

had sets of skills and dispositions that could be seen
as cultural capital. For example, they had skills to
know the (locally) correct codes of femininity and so
were able to develop this in their own persons. This
could be locally traded (to gain peer approval and,
potentially, sexual partners), but this femininity could
not be converted into symbolic capital. Femininity is
a restricted form of capital in that it is less readily
available to trade in an employment market; furthermore, these working-class women did not have easy
access to expensive signifiers of “classy” femininity,
which might be more easily traded.
Symbolic capital assumes a central role in
Bourdieu’s work. It has been described by Bourdieu’s
long-term collaborator and translator, Loïc
Wacquant, as one of his more complex ideas and as a
concept that shapes all of his work: “His whole work
may be read as a hunt for its varied forms and effects”
(Wacquant, in Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 119).
Bourdieu (1988) suggests that the origins of the concept of symbolic capital lies in his early work with
Algerian peasants. His analysis of the ways in which
social exchanges accrue honor and prestige among
the Kabyle proved the foundation for his explorations
of the ways in which honor and prestige are accumulated in more differentiated cultures. In Bourdieu’s
schema, honor, prestige, and distinction circulate as
valuable and scarce “objects,” so that people are not
simply chasing economic gain (although they may
be) but are also, or instead, pursuing the symbolic
capital that confers the privilege of the “natural,” the
naturally and universally recognized. In this respect,
one of the effects of symbolic capital is to disguise
its own status as capital. This, for Bourdieu, is precisely how legitimation works. As David Swartz puts
it, symbolic capital is “denied capital”; it disguises
the underlying “interested” relations to which it is
related by giving them legitimation” (1997, 43). The
social effects of the accumulation of various forms
of capital (e.g., through passing down cultural and
social capital through families) becomes magically
converted into an appearance of natural status, as if
the bearer has acquired such status, not from history
but from something innate in his or her character.
Thus, another layer of complexity is introduced
into the concept of symbolic capital as Bourdieu
considers not only how legitimation occurs but
the effects of such legitimation. Because symbolic
capital disguises its own status as a social product,
holders of symbolic capital are regarded as naturally

Symbolic Capital

distinguished. This is linked with two other key
concepts in Bourdieu’s work: his stress on relationality and his notion of the doxa. Symbolic capital
is inherently relational since it cannot simply be
claimed: it must be recognized and, in an important
sense, mutually agreed. Furthermore, it depends on
assumptions of common sense or naturalized distinction, which is enshrined in the notion of the doxa or
the unthought categories. The struggle over the recognition that confers value on symbolic capital—
that makes it symbolic capital—is a struggle to
define what “goes without saying.” In this respect,
the recognition that confers legitimacy on symbolic
capital is, in Bourdieu’s schema, more accurately
misrecognition—a central concept in his work and
one that he uses to theorize the denial of the power
and politics that underwrite relations of domination
so that they appear to be (they are misrecognized as)
natural and inevitable.
No doubt because of its disguised, misrecognized
character, symbolic capital brings access to symbolic
power, which is, for Bourdieu, a “world-making”
power: it rests on having “obtained sufficient recognition to be in a position to impose recognition”
(Bourdieu 1989, 23) and confers the ability to bring
into effect what it names—for example, the ability
to consecrate “legitimate” works of art or, more
generally, forms of good taste, or to instantiate new
movements and groups within the artistic, intellectual, or political fields. It is in this respect that the
concept’s roots in Weber’s notion of charisma or
the Durkheimian notion of mana become clearest
(Bourdieu 2001). Symbolic capital, transforming
capitals into legitimated forms, becomes like a magic
power:
Just as the sorcerer mobilizes the capital of belief
accumulated by the functioning of the magical
universe, the President of the Republic who signs a
decree of nomination or the physician who signs
a certificate (of illness, invalidity, etc.) mobilizes
a symbolic capital accumulated in and through
the whole network of relations of recognition
constitutive of the bureaucratic universe. Who
certifies the validity of the certificate? It is the one
who signs the credential giving licence to certify.
But who then certifies this? We are carried through
an infinite regression. (Bourdieu 2001, 51)

It is important to note the dynamic character of
symbolic capital. People’s location in social space is

1419

dependent on the volume and composition of the
various capitals (linked with their habitus) but also
on the development through time of the capitals.
Furthermore, symbolic capital is, at least in part,
the outcome of familial inheritance: the “passing
down” of legitimated forms of the other capitals.
Moreover, the search for “distinction” means that
those who possess, who regard themselves as holding a monopoly on, “the right ways of being and
doing” (Bourdieu 1998, 511) must constantly stave
off a popularization that would reduce “elite” taste
to commonplace taste. Bourdieu argues that the
struggle over symbolic capital entails a constant tension in the market for symbolic goods by which “the
possessors of distinctive properties [must] engage in
an endless pursuit of new properties through which
to assert their rarity” (Bourdieu 1998, 251–252).
Hence, symbolic capital cannot be achieved or
owned once and for all, though it is clear that familial inheritance gives elite groups a relatively enduring
grip on it. Furthermore, a radical change to the composition and distribution of symbolic capital would
require, as Bourdieu (2001; Bourdieu and Wacquant
2002) suggests, a symbolic revolution, in which ways
of knowing, understanding, and perceiving were
overturned.
Unlike the concept of cultural capital, symbolic
capital has been an aspect of Bourdieu’s work that
has been relatively neglected by later analysts. Yet
its emphasis on power and legitimation is crucial in
analyzing how some cultural goods and phenomena
get to be known and recognized as “right” and their
bearers recognized as legitimate holders of distinction. The arbitrary character of this symbolic “consecration” leads to social relations that are nevertheless
real in their effects.
Steph Lawler
See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Cultural Capital; Habitus;
Social Class; Social Distinction; Social Status; Taste

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of
Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education,
edited by J. G. Richardson, 311–356. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1986.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Vive La Crise! For Heterodoxy in Social
Science.” Theory and Society 17, no. 5 (1988): 773–787.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.”
Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25.

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Symbolic Value

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1998.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of
Action. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender:
Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.
Swartz, David. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre
Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

SYMBOLIC VALUE
Symbolic value signifies the immaterial value attributed to an object or an idea and communicates its
symbolic meaning. The meaning is highly dependent
on how it is interpreted and appropriated in a sociocultural context. For example, advertisements are
often interpreted differently depending on the sociocultural context. Benetton’s advertisements have
been perceived as controversial and received different
interpretations, acceptance, or reactance in different
cultures. A product’s symbolic value communicates
meaning beyond its material aspects, representing,
for example, status, trendy design, environmentally
friendly, and so on. Besides being a transportation
vehicle, a car can communicate symbolic value such
as status, safety, or both. The first person to recognize this in the field of marketing was Sidney J. Levy,
who wrote the article “Symbols for Sale,” published
in Harvard Business Review in 1959. He argued that
people buy products for symbolic meanings and not
merely for functional reasons.
The material value represents the material conditions, whereas the symbolic value is dependent on
interpretations in a sociocultural context. The material
value can therefore be more easily determined, measured, and exchanged in monetary terms compared to
symbolic value. For example, the price of art glass in
terms of its material value can be determined based on
raw material and cost of production. The price of art
glass in terms of symbolic value is much more dependent on societal expectations. An advertisement showing mineral water communicates its material value,
which is carbonated water. An advertisement showing
successful sportspeople drinking mineral water communicates that mineral water has qualities desired
by such people or that consumption of such mineral
water will give a person sporty appeal.

Different design elements contribute to symbolic
value. The use value (Karl Marx) or functional value
(Jean Baudrillard) of a citrus press is communicated
by how well it manages to press lemons into lemon
juice. The symbolic value of the famous Alessi citrus press designed by Philippe Starck communicates
its extraordinary design compared to other citrus
presses. It is probably perceived by many consumers as more appealing for its symbolic value, involving aesthetic elements, than for its use or functional
value.
Symbolic value should not be discussed only in
relation to products or services, but also in relation
to class or socioeconomic conditions. A person’s
income, education, work, and living area communicate positioning in society and often have strong
symbolic value for inclusion or exclusion in a social
group. Over time, consumption has become more
important as symbolic value for social success; for
example, emphasis on brands during the last decades.
Social emulation is particularly noticeable for visible
consumption, for example, neighbors influencing
each other to purchase status products such as cars
and decorative flower pots. Thorstein Veblen discussed, long ago, conspicuous consumption. Pierre
Bourdieu’s definitions of symbolic capital encompass
cultural, social, and economic capital. They can all
be said to represent symbolic value communicating
social signs.
When discussing symbolic value, it seems necessary to discuss the meaning of value. The economic
value or exchange value (e.g., Baudrillard 1996) is
often discussed in business situations rather than the
more elusive symbolic value. The economic value or
exchange value represents the value determined by
the market. Another value is customer value, defined
by Albert Lai (1995, 384) as “the buyer’s evaluation
at the time of a product purchase.” Glen L. Urban
and John R. Hauser (1993, 213) define customers’
concern for value as “the tradeoff between the benefits of a product and the price paid.” It implies that
the customer will choose the product with the most
utility per money paid. The economic, exchange, and
customer values focus on the purchasing moment. In
particular, the economic value focuses on monetary
appraisal.
It is also possible to identify affective, nostalgic,
and historical values. Affective value is a buyer’s evaluation of his or her sentiments toward something;
it symbolizes what a person feels strongly about.

Symbolic Value

Russell Belk coined the concept “extended self,”
meaning that objects can symbolically extend self.
For example, by wearing certain clothes, we can convince ourselves and others that we are different than
we are without them. Collectors often feel strongly
about their collections and, by showing their collections, they also show who they are and what they
value as important in life. Nostalgic value is related
to affective value and is a yearning to return to the
past. For example, collecting objects from childhood symbolizes that appropriation of objects from
this time in life is important. Historical value is an
appraisal of the past reinforced by being able to tell
the origin of an item. Antique dealers consider this
important; it also symbolizes value from times past.
Yet another value is experiential or hedonic value.
Elizabeth Hirschman and Morris Holbrook discuss
the experiential aspects of consumption or hedonic
consumption. They define hedonic consumption as
“the multi-sensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of
one’s experience with products, . . . including tastes,
sounds, scents, tactile impressions and visual images”
(1982, 92). Motivational research from the 1950s,
with Ernst Dichter as a founding father, considered
emotional aspects of products. In his book The
Hidden Persuaders from 1957, Vance Packard was
critical of motivational research and psychological
techniques used by advertisers to make people buy
products.
Baudrillard defines symbolic value as a value that
a subject assigns to an object in relation to another
subject; for example, a Christmas gift shows affection. He also refers to the sign value of an object,
which implies its value within a system of objects.
For example, a Christmas gift wrapped beautifully
signifies good taste relative to other packages.
Symbolic value is determined in relation to sociocultural contexts. It is dependent not only on how
it is perceived by the person appropriating symbolic
value to an item or idea, but also in relation to others. This leads us to discuss the agency of value. It
was mentioned earlier that economic and exchange
value is determined by the market, that is, the seller
and the buyer. Many of the other values discussed
here rest mostly on the buyer, but are also determined
in sociocultural contexts. The creation and transformation of values are given by consumers as buyers
and sellers, but value is also produced by the product itself. For example, wear and tear may represent
damage or beautiful patina.

1421

As society changes, the symbolic values change as
well reflecting the current time period. Daniel Miller
(2000, 78) writes, “Value is not something that the
exchanged objects are reduced to, but something created by the act itself. The implications of such studies
are that the definition of value varies according to the
context of transaction.” In the future, it is the process
of creating and transforming value rather than the
static condition that deserves more attention when
discussing symbolic value.
Karin Ekström
See also Advertising; Cultural Capital; Cultural Studies;
Identity; Positional Goods; Semiotics; Social
Distinction; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso,
1996.
Belk, Russell W. “Possessions and the Extended Self.”
Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 2 (September
1988): 139–168.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Ekström, Karin M. “Creation and Transformation of
Value.” In Little Monsters: (De)coupling Assemblages of
Consumption, edited by Helene Brembeck, Karin M.
Ekström, and Magnus Mörck, 107–128. Vienna: LIT,
2007.
Hirschman, Elizabeth C., and Morris B. Holbrook.
“Hedonic Consumption: Emerging Concepts, Methods
and Propositions.” Journal of Marketing 46 (1982):
92–101.
Holbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. “The
Experiential Aspects of Consumptions: Fantasies,
Feelings and Fun.” Journal of Consumer Research 9
(September 1982): 132–140.
Lai, Albert W. “Consumer Values, Product Benefits
and Customer Value: A Consumption Behavior
Approach.” In Advances in Consumer Research,
edited by Frank R. Kardes and Mita Sujan, vol. 20,
381–388. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer
Research, 1995.
Levy, Sidney J. “Symbols for Sale.” Harvard Business
Review (July–August 1959): 117–124.
Miller, Daniel. “The Birth of Value.” In Commercial
Cultures: Economics, Practices, Spaces, edited by Peter
Jackson, Michelle Lowe, Daniel Miller, and Frank Mort,
77–84. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David
McKay, 1957.

1422

Symbolic Violence

Urban, Glen L., and John R. Hauser. Design and Marketing
of New Products. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1993.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New
York: Macmillan, 1899.

SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE
In the work of Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence
denotes more than a form of violence operating
symbolically. It is “the violence which is exercised
upon a social agent with his or her complicity”
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 167, italics in
original). Examples of the exercise of symbolic violence include gender relations in which both men
and women agree that women are weaker, less
intelligent, more unreliable, and so forth (and for
Bourdieu gender relations are the paradigm case of
the operation of symbolic violence), or class relations in which both working-class and middle-class
people agree that the middle classes are more intelligent, more capable of running the country, more
deserving of higher pay. In terms of consumer culture, symbolic violence might be seen to be at work
through the definitional characterization of some
things (goods, tastes, lifestyles) as better than others
and as accruing rightly to those who deserve them.
In this context, Bourdieu’s characterization of working-class life as operating on a principle of closing
off possibilities (“that’s not for the likes of us”) is
relevant.
As Bourdieu notes, symbolic violence is a dangerous formulation: it leads to questions about whether
people desire their own domination, for example,
or, more forcefully, whether people are little more
than cultural dupes, acquiescing to social relations in which they are dominated. However, such
objections—although at first glance begged by the
concept—fail to do justice to its complexity. As with
all or nearly all of Bourdieu’s conceptual tools, symbolic violence has to be seen in the context of, and in
relation to, other Bourdieusian concepts—notably, in
this case, doxa, habitus, (mis)recognition, and, more
generally, Bourdieu’s theory of power. The development of the concept is linked with Bourdieu’s longstanding attempt to problematize the line between
freedom and constraint within relations of domination. Above all, it has to be seen in the context of his

attempts to understand how power works without
explicit coercion.
Bourdieu is at pains to stress that symbolic violence works with the tacit acceptance and complicity
of both those who use it and those who are subject to
it. Neither side is conscious of its operation. Hence,
it is not propaganda, influence, or hegemony. It does
not rely on deliberate actions on the part of those
who wield it. It is disguised, its violence hidden by
an apparent “inevitability” of social relations, the
inequality of which may itself be hidden. As with
so much of Bourdieu’s work, he is concerned with
showing how a social product (in this case, symbolic
violence) comes to be understood and perceived as
natural and inevitable. Because symbolic violence is
understood as legitimate, it is not recognized as violence. It may become apparent—for example, during
overt political struggles—but at that moment, it is
recognized for what it is (the exercise of domination)
and so ceases to be symbolic violence (Moi 1991).
What is key here is the exercise of the doxa. In
Bourdieu’s work, doxa refers to “an adherence
to relations of order which, because they structure
inseparably both the real world and the thought
world, are accepted as self-evident” (1998, 471).
Doxa are unthought categories: those categories and
relations that appear natural and inevitable. A doxic
society is one in which social rules are understood
as natural and self-evident. “What is essential goes
without saying because it comes without saying: the
tradition is silent, not least about itself as tradition”
(1977, 167, italics in original). When social actors are
embedded and enmeshed within social relations that
are normalized in this way, the workings of domination can become invisible. Power is misrecognized
so that it comes to be perceived not as power at all:
“Of all forms of ‘hidden persuasion,’ the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of
things” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 168, italics
in original).
Although, clearly, there are many examples of
power being used overtly through physical violence
and explicit coercion, Bourdieu’s concern in developing the notion of symbolic violence is with the ways
in which power may exist in relations that make it
misrecognized: that is, in which its power is unseen.
This is closely linked with his notion of habitus—his
term for the ways in which social relations and social
rules are literally embodied. In this way, they do not
simply exist “out there” but are part of who we are.

Symbolic Violence

Does this mean, then, that relations of symbolic
violence are always with us? Bourdieu is characteristically pessimistic about the possibilities of effective resistance, not because he characterizes people
as passive (“People are not fools” [Bourdieu and
Wacquant 2002, 130]) but because of the character
of relations of domination. His view can be summed
up in the following passage:
When the dominated quest for distinction leads the
dominated to affirm what distinguishes them, that
is, that in the name of which they are dominated and
constituted as vulgar, do we have to talk of resistance?
In other words, if, in order to resist, I have no other
resource than to lay claim to that in the name of
which I am dominated, is this resistance? Second
question: when, on the other hand, the dominated
work at destroying what marks them out as “vulgar”
and at appropriating that in relation to which they
appear as vulgar (for instance, in France, the Parisian
accent). Is this submission? I think this is an insoluble
contradiction. . . . Resistance may be alienating and
submission may be liberating. Such is the paradox of
the dominated, and there is no way out of it.
(Bourdieu 1990, 155)

Nevertheless, it is clear that within Bourdieu’s
schema, change can occur in the interaction of field
and habitus, so it would be mistaken to see his work
as locking us into endlessly repeating cycles of the
same forms of symbolic violence. Yet, unlike the
Marxist doctrine of false consciousness, it is not
something that can be sloughed off with the correct
analysis or the achievement of sufficient knowledge:
Because the foundation of symbolic violence lies not
in mystified consciousnesses that only need to be
enlightened but in dispositions attuned to the
structure of domination of which they are the
product, the relation of complicity that the victims of
symbolic domination grant to the dominant can
only be broken through a radical transformation of
the social conditions of production that lead the
dominated to take the point of view of the dominant
and on themselves. (Bourdieu 2001, 41–42)

This raises the question of whether Bourdieu
overemphasizes the efficacy of symbolic violence.
Do dominated groups really take the point of view
of the dominated? In the case of women, feminist
analysts have pointed out how ambivalently women
may inhabit “feminine” positions (see, e.g., Skeggs,

1423

1997). They may simultaneously accept and refuse
their location as other to a masculine norm.
But another question arises from this concept: if
symbolic violence is so naturalized, so legitimated
that we fail to see its workings as violence, how is
Bourdieu (or any other analyst) able to see through
it? As Bourdieu points out, intellectuals are steeped in
doxic relations and therefore unlikely to easily recognize symbolic violence. Indeed, they are likely, given
their legitimated status, to be involved in exercising it
(see Bourdieu 1988). The answer to this conundrum
would seem to lie in the distinctive form of reflexivity
that Bourdieu advocates throughout his work. This
reflexivity consists of a sociological investigation
of the location of the researchers in social space (in
relation to their class, gender, etc., but also in relation to their discipline, their university, etc.). More
profoundly, Bourdieu advocates a third form of
reflexivity: that which interrogates the “intellectualist
bias”—the unthought categories that govern specific
disciplines and the academic world in general—and
activity that, he argues, cannot be undertaken by the
researcher alone, but must be a collective endeavor.
For Bourdieu, then, one of the tasks of a reflexive
sociology is precisely to expose and to analyze the
hidden relations of domination encapsulated in symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002).
Aside from exegesis, symbolic violence has only
relatively rarely been taken up and used in any
extended way by other analysts. However, Angela
McRobbie provides a vivid and compelling account
of its use in contemporary British “makeover” television programs. As McRobbie points out, the programs only work because people (apparently freely)
submit themselves to the viciousness and nastiness of
the process, presumably in pursuit of some other goal.
Yet, the viciousness remains and is often a vehicle for
class-based insults and expressions of superiority on
the part of the presenters. Why, we might ask, would
anyone undergo this? In this respect, both participants and presenters indeed seem to be enmeshed
in a mutually complicit relationship of symbolic
violence that passes as entertainment through selfimprovement. McRobbie’s analysis gives flesh to a
difficult yet compelling concept.
Steph Lawler
See also Bourdieu, Pierre; False Consciousness/False
Needs; Gender; Resistance; Social Distinction;
Symbolic Capital; Symbolic Value; Taste

1424

Systems of Provision

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity,
1988.
Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays Towards a
Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1998.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Cambridge:
Polity, 2001.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
McRobbie, Angela. “Notes on ‘What Not to Wear’ and
Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence.” In Feminism after
Bourdieu, edited by Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs,
99–109. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Moi, Tori. “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and
Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture.” New Literary
History 22 (1991): 1017–1049.
Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender:
Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.

SYSTEMS

OF

PROVISION

Systems of provision is an approach to the study of
consumption that recognizes the social and economic
organization of the delivery of goods and services.
Essentially, it is a holistic approach that situates the
analysis of consumption in relation to processes of
production, distribution, and retail. Moreover, it
places consumption in historical context and so provides a useful way of thinking through changes in
patterns of consumption and, more broadly, socioeconomic change. It is most readily associated with
the work of Ben Fine and was initially developed in
The World of Consumption (1993), written in conjunction with Ellen Leopold. The systems of provision approach emerged as a critique of so-called
horizontal approaches to consumption in which
individual academic disciplines develop their explanatory accounts of consumption based on a limited
selection of commodities and make generalizations
about the consumption of all commodities across
all societies. The problem with this, according to the
systems of provision perspective, is that it overlooks
the importance of other explanatory factors as well
as the relationship between these factors and the differences that exist between different commodities by

virtue of the different systems of provision in which
they are located.
Eschewing the tendency to make generalizations,
the systems of provision perspective positions itself as
a vertical approach to the study of consumption. For
example, it would not offer explanations about the
consumption of peanut butter or blueberries based
on theories that have been developed to explain the
consumption of motor vehicles. Instead, it starts with
the idea that each commodity, or group of commodities, should be understood in terms of a unity of economic and social processes that varies significantly
from one commodity to another. As such, explanations of consumption are only ever specific to a
particular commodity or group thereof. These unities
of economic and social processes are best thought
of as the distinct relationships between the material
and cultural practices underpinning the production,
distribution, circulation, and consumption of the
commodities concerned. These factors and the relationships between them form a chain of activity that
represents the system of provision for a particular
commodity. It follows that each commodity should
be analyzed according to the interaction between the
factors that give rise to it. By way of example, Fine
and Leopold (1993) offer an in-depth analysis of
the food and clothing systems of provision, whereas
Fine, Michael Heasman, and Judith Wright (1998)
disaggregate their analysis of the food system even
further to explore the specific systems of provision
for meat, sugar, and dairy products.
Common to all these examples is the idea that
disparate elements across the supply chain serve
to configure the system as a whole such that more
conventional or horizontal explanations are seen as
failing to capture the complexities of socioeconomic
organization underpinning different commodities. In
this view, changes in food consumption would not be
sufficiently explained by the consumers’ love of variety or the need for convenience; rather, it would also
call for (among other things) a focus on agricultural
policies, relationships between various actors along
the supply chain, and international regulatory frameworks. Another theme in Fine’s analyses is that the
norms governing the rules of appropriate consumption with regard to any given commodity are structured vertically by the system of provision just as the
notion of consumer choice is a property of the system
underpinning the delivery of the commodity in question. For example, Fine suggests that the quantity of

Systems of Provision

food that is consumed by individuals has less to do
with individual choices and consumer sovereignty
than it has to do with the historical evolution of the
food system and the intersection between agricultural
policies and the interests of food distributors and
retailers. Given Fine’s grounding in Marxist theory,
it is perhaps not surprising that he suggests these systems serve to protect the interests of capitalism and
perpetuate the consumer society.
One of the main problems with the vertical
approach that the systems of provision perspective relates to the sheer difficulty of mobilizing it
for empirical research. Indeed, the study of today’s
consumer culture requires the recognition that we
live in a world where supply chains are as long as
the connections between the elements within them
are complex. As such, it is difficult to draw precise boundaries between sets of commodities just
as it is difficult to decipher the factors influencing
each link in the system. Nevertheless, the systems
of provision perspective represents a powerful and
dynamic framework for analyzing the changing
social and economic relations and organization
of production and consumption. More generally,
it situates consumption in social and economic
context and so offers a comprehensive account of
consumer culture. Rich are the accounts that focus
on what happens after purchase to highlight how
consumption is an active process by which consumers transform commodities into meaningful
cultural objects. Without denying the importance
of such approaches, the systems of provision perspective considers the importance of what happens
before purchase by addressing the conditioning
effects of production. To some extent, this chimes
with the tradition of getting past the fetishism of

1425

commodities by “following the thing” to explore
the conditions under which commodities are produced. Such insights are particularly useful when
considering the imperative to change patterns of
consumption. For example, contemporary concerns
about the environmental impacts of consumer culture and the pursuit of sustainable consumption are
drawing on a systems of provision perspective (see
Southerton, Chappells, and Van Vliet, 2004). Here,
the implication is that an understanding of where
unsustainable patterns of consumption have come
from is required and that systems of provision need
to change if consumers are to consume in ways that
are more sustainable.
David Evans
See also Commodities; Consumer Sovereignty; Cycles of
Production and Consumption; Economic Sociology;
Energy Consumption; Environmental Social Sciences
and Sustainable Consumption; Material Culture;
Theories of Practice

Further Readings
Fine, Ben, Michael Heasman, and Judith Wright.
Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of
Food. London: Routledge, 1998.
Fine, Ben, and Ellen Leopold. The World of Consumption.
London: Routledge, 1993.
Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on
the Geographical Imagination.” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990):
418–434.
Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas Van Vliet,
eds. Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of
Changing Infrastructures of Provision. London: Edward
Elgar, 2004.

T
TABOO
Taboo officially derives from the Tongan word tabu
but is also associated with the Polynesian word tapu
and the Hawaiian kapu. The word first appeared in
Western culture in the journal of Captain James Cook
in 1777. While taboo literally means “off-limits” or
“forbidden,” it was once associated mainly with the
superstitions and magic practices of certain “primitive” peoples. Early anthropologists, such as Crawford
H. Toy, suggest that some societies “have never got
beyond believing that the earth is flat, and in such as
these taboo still reigns. But the peoples of progress
have thrown off taboo as they have thrown off a hundred like things” (1899, 155). Current anthropologists believe that, far from being limited to such people
groups, taboos exist as societal prohibitions in all
human cultures. Taboos most typically involve but are
not limited to bodily practices and concerns, specifically in the areas of sex, food, and death—for example, incest, cannibalism, and the handling of corpses.
Renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud played
the most influential role in the popular usage of the
word taboo. In 1913 he published four essays, titled
Totem and Taboo, in which he outlines a theory of
evolutionary anthropology that posits that a culture
evolves in tandem with the psychological development of a given society. Naturally, Freud’s vision of
taboo is informed by, and consistent with, his theories
of psychoanalysis. Thus, he draws parallels between
the psychological dilemmas of childhood and the
cultural dilemmas of any society progressing toward
“civilization.” Under this model, cultural taboos can

be understood as similar to obsessional neuroses.
Although Totem and Taboo, like most works of evolutionary anthropologists, has been largely discredited, it remains a crucial factor in understanding the
historical development of the word taboo.
The elements of evolutionary anthropology pervasive in Totem and Taboo result from the influence
of James George Frazer, evolutionary anthropologist
and author of The Golden Bough. To Frazer, taboos
exist under the cultural presence of magic or the
fallacious belief in a mystical link between certain
metaphysically associated objects and practices. In
this case, the scientific study of “civilized” societies
has explained away magic and, likewise, the taboos.
Yet, as various sociologists and anthropologists
have shown, taboos continue to exist in “civilized”
Western cultures.
Anthropologists have increasingly shown that
taboos have a fluidity that resists the categories evolutionary anthropologists once used to describe them.
Most notably, Franz Steiner’s critical study, Taboo
(1956), presents all previously leading taboo theories
as arbitrary and limiting to the true nature of taboo.
Continuing along these lines, in Purity and Danger:
An Analysis of the Concepts of Polluting and Taboo
(1966), an analysis of Hindu and Jewish dietary
laws, Mary Douglas exposes the fluidity of seemingly universal taboos, such as those surrounding dirt
and purity. Similarly, in “Anthropological Aspects
of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”
(1964), Edmund Leach portrays the concept of taboo
as involved in the modern dilemma of boundary fluidity, especially as it pertains to self-definition. This
move toward understanding taboos as fluid elements

1427

1428

Tamed Hedonism

within the general fluidity of culture is consistent with
the ideas of postmodernist scholars about the fragmentation of societies.
This general fluidity of cultures and their taboos
has begun to impact and change postmodern consumer markets. In a cycle of give and take, taboos of
a particular society shape that society’s market just as
the market shapes taboos. Taboos are not “thrown
off” but rather change in response to changes in the
values of a particular consumer culture or else are
modified by the specific needs and desires of individual
consumers. Because taboos both shape and are shaped
by consumer needs and desires, taboos therefore shape
and are shaped by the markets that fulfill these needs.
Researchers, such as Craig J. Thompson, have
begun to show increasing awareness of the impact
that cultural values and taboos can have on consumers and their buying patterns. In 1995, Thompson
and Elizabeth C. Hirschman conducted a study of
the ways cultural values and taboos impact a consumer’s view of his or her body and how this body
image then shapes the consumer’s buying patterns.
This interdisciplinary approach to market research
shows how taboos can have an indirect impact on
consumer experience and purchasing.
Thompson further developed this correlation in 2002. In a study of the health food market,
Thompson and Maura Troester seek to incorporate
a sensitivity to the fragmentation of consumer values
in their data collection to develop “a richer theoretical
understanding of how individuals use these microcultural frames of reference to interpret their consumption experiences” (551). Thompson and Troester
demonstrate the ways in which the taboo placed on
“toxic” elements found in certain foods available on
the general market has shaped and contributed to the
growth of the specialized health food market. As this
study shows, research that incorporates knowledge of
cultural taboos contributes to a greater understanding
of consumer buying trends and market growth.
Consumer researchers are increasingly aware of
the great impact that cultural values have on the
desires, motivations, and behaviors of consumers.
Yet, there is room for more research regarding the
largely unstudied ways in which taboos specifically
impact consumer markets.
Noelle Davies
See also Anthropology; Body, The; Civilizing Processes;
Desire; Douglas, Mary; Freud, Sigmund; Markets and
Marketing; Postmodernism

Further Readings
Thompson, Craig J., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman.
“Understanding the Socialized Body: A Poststructuralist
Analysis of Consumers’ Self-Conceptions, Body Images,
and Self-Care Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research
22 (1995): 139–153.
Thompson, Craig J., and Maura Troester. “Consumer
Value Systems in the Age of Postmodern Fragmentation:
The Case of the Natural Health Microculture.” Journal
of Consumer Research 28 (2002): 550–571.
Toy, Crawford H. “Taboo and Morality.” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 20 (1899): 151–156.

TAMED HEDONISM
A number of works on the development of contemporary consumer culture have pointed to the new
hedonistic directions taken by puritan morality in
societies increasingly characterized by consumerism
and promotional culture. Some, such as Chandra
Mukerji, see a mixture of hedonism and asceticism as
a characteristic of the kind of materialist culture that
has fostered commercial modernity in Renaissance
cities. Others, like Colin Campbell, consider that
Romantic teachings, as developed from the late eighteenth century, have contributed to the birth of the
modern consumer defined by modern forms of “mentalistic” hedonism whereby commodities become the
prime matter for personal creative fantasy. Many others consider that it is from the dawn of the twentieth century and increasingly after World War II that
signals have become stronger, for example, through
the “therapeutic ethic of self-realization” that pushed
actors to try to develop themselves through commodities so that it became a virtual duty to enjoy oneself,
as suggested by T. J. J. Lears, and because of social
groupings such as the “new bourgeoisie,” which has
been considered the initiator of an ethical retooling
responding to a new consumerist economy, as posited by Mike Featherstone. Chronological disputes
notwithstanding, the notion of “tamed hedonism”
has been proposed by Roberta Sassatelli to capture the
hegemonic moral narrative of consumer capitalism in
contemporary society, and in particular the flexible but
essential compromises between hedonism and asceticism that consumers are required to manage.
This notion develops on the consideration that
individual autonomous choice has a central place
in consumer modernity. This points to continuity

Tamed Hedonism

between early and late modernity. Eighteenth-century
philosopher economist Adam Smith affirmed that not
only political order but also personal order became
possible through consumption. This happened not
just because individuals’ desires for pleasure and
acquisition were deemed to be socially positive but
also because the subject of desires became a rational actor. Modeled onto production, consumption
was tamed into a rational, self-interested, long-term
pursuit of personal gratification. Smith portrayed the
marketplace as an institution where subjects develop
the capacity to reflect on themselves as social actors,
to excel by the pursuit of a decent, commodious,
and well-ordered life. Merchants—as we all become
under market conditions—are not pictured as ascetic
monks: they do not disdain the decencies of life; they
are indeed good, well-behaved, rational consumers as opposed to the immoral, irrational, whimsical wasters impersonated by the declining nobility.
Under these conditions, the consumer-merchant
becomes the foundation of a new social and political
order: the sovereign whose desires the market shall
respond to and the sovereign of his own desires.
That the cult of self-control is crucial in the development of consumer culture may be found in the
way alcohol consumption has been discussed under
the rubric of diseases of the will since John Locke’s
famous example of the drunkard. Addiction remains
one of the most powerful stigmatizing strategies
against a variety of consumer practices. Likewise,
the consumer’s double-edged sovereignty remains
the driving force of discourses about consumption.
As the individual becomes the source of value, his or
her desires and pleasures become the foundational
horizon for commercial culture. Still, the satisfaction
of desires is viable as long as desires do not come into
conflict with individual autonomy and the self retains
its hold on them. Although pleasure testifies to the
realization of individual desires, it cannot guarantee
that the desires that are so obviously satisfied are
actually true to the self. Hedonism thus works as a
theory of correspondence between individual desires
and commodities. Yet, alone, it cannot deliver a selfpossessed self. There is the crucial need for some
management of desires through forms of detachment
that suggest convincing images of self. Pleasures have
to be both supported and neutralized: well-behaved
consumers must enjoy their lot and still find that their
deepest selves lie somewhere behind these pleasures,
so that they can still govern their desires. The rhetoric
deployed to support and regulate consumer practices

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in contemporary society thus relies on tamed hedonism in that “consumers must be after pleasure only
when pleasure is after them” (Sassatelli 2001, 100).
In all consumption there is the double necessity
to desire and to govern desires, so that a convincing
and strong image of the self can be projected. Model
consumers have to busily enjoy the commodities
they have chosen and, at the same time, they must
know that their deepest selves lie somewhere else.
Hedonism must thereby be domesticated or tamed
to work as the hegemonic legitimating narrative in
consumer culture. No matter how different they
may be, all consumer practices considered as “normal” have in common that they are viewed as both
the realization of desires and their containment:
they are presented and regulated as moral worlds
responding to autonomous and self-possessed selves.
The commoditization of dieting or of low-fat food—
goods that articulate self-control within choice or
offer pleasure without excess—may be taken as
an attempt at overturning the anxieties about the
corrosive nature of consumption, suggests Susan
Bordo. Likewise, Sassatelli presents the development of a market for body care and maintenance as
a telling example of how immediate gratifications
and longer-term projects of well-being that stress an
autonomous self are normatively articulated.
As a hegemonic narrative, tamed hedonism can be
stirred up by various marginal groups to legitimate
a host of practices at the fringes of consumer culture
as well as goods of ambiguous, even illegal, status. In
this case, reference is often made to self-experimentation, that is, the idea that dangerous goods that are
being consumed are only a way of testing oneself, that
the intense pleasure derived from consumption is just
“fun,” an inconsequential involvement in the present that does not jeopardize the self and can always
be given up. If successfully portrayed as entirely circumstantial (i.e., confined to a phase in one’s life, a
specific place, for a limited period), even the excess
and intoxication associated with drugs may appear
compatible with individual autonomy. This form of
domestication of pleasure is often found in contemporary films, songs, and books that deal with marginal youth experience. Also the provision of specific
spaces for the consumption of risky commodities
has been one of the most important strategies for
their social containment and, at the same time, for
their translation in a normalized format that may
be described as legitimate. The development of pubs
in Great Britain and Nordic countries, for example,

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Taste

coincided with the institutionalization of a series of
regulations and habits that didn’t just make consuming alcohol easier but also controlled its consumption
in prescribed forms. Such places, Pertti Alasuutari
found, enable customers to account for their drinking
practices, making reference to experiences and ideas,
like conviviality, that prefigure forms of domestication and qualification of individual desires.
To provide a normalized picture of consumption
referenced to altruism, sociability, and collective
goods—as well as to the individual’s capacity to take
care of him- or herself and plan his or her future—is
perhaps even more crucial. These codifications consolidate a picture of the self through time. They are
close to the classic Smithian view of the consumer as
a rational desiring animal, anchoring individual pleasures to long-term projects of well-being that embody
a vision of social order. They harmonize personal and
social benefit, translating individual self-realization
into a wider perspective. Reference to these may be
found in a number of discourses that reclassify the
repeated use of a good as part of an overall design,
a promise of the self to the self corresponding to an
original and autonomous will to get certain socially
commendable and synergic states of happiness, prosperity, welfare, and others. As suggested, discourses
on regime, regulation, and nature associated with
visions of both personal and social order have indeed
become important to provide legitimating grounds for
routine and ordinary practices. In particular, in practices such as fitness training one can see how hedonism and asceticism are articulated though notions of
well-being. Although fitness centers are encoded as a
means of self-expression for the individual consumer
who knows and must realize his or her most fundamental needs, training in gyms implies concentration,
discipline, the ability to follow rather strict rules, to
know one’s place, to get into the right mood, and so
on. While the gym testifies to the absence of real “free
time,” dealing with subjects who pay and can always
decide they no longer need the gym, fitness centers
must play up fun elements and subvert daily routines.
Articulated either as self-experimentation or
well-being, tamed hedonism works to normalize
consumption. Normalization, however, cannot be
predicated evenly in all social quarters. It is mostly
the consumption (deviant, but not only) of disadvantaged groups that happens to be stigmatized,
whereas privileged groups are more able to present
even their most disputable preferences as innocuous

forms of recreation from which they may maintain a
certain distance and a polished control. In this they
are helped by the possibility of using their economic,
cultural, and social resources to consolidate institutions and rituals through which consumption can be
framed as a separated sphere of action responding to
specific norms and rules.
Roberta Sassatelli
See also Addiction; Aestheticization of Everyday Life;
Asceticism; Consumer Sovereignty; Desire; Hedonism;
Promotional Culture; Well-Being

Further Readings
Alasuutari, Pertti. Desire and Craving: A Cultural Theory
of Alcoholism. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1992.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western
Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.
Lears, T. J. J. Fables of Abundance. A Cultural History of
Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of
Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983.
Sassatelli, Roberta. “Tamed Hedonism: Choice, Desires and
Deviant Pleasures.” In Ordinary Consumption, edited
by J. Gronow and A. Warde, 93–106. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory,
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Fitness Culture: Gyms and the
Commercialisation of Discipline and Fun. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave, 2007.
Sedgewick, E. K. “Epidemics of the Will.” In
Incorporations, edited by J. Crary and S. Kwinter,
582–595. New York: Zone, 1992.

TASTE
One of the central questions in sociological studies concerning patterns of consumption is to what
extent people share a common taste that guides their
actions and preferences, possibly even unifying their
choices in all or most fields of consumption and

Taste

everyday life, from housing to clothing, from food
to travel, from art to music, resulting in more or
less homogeneous lifestyles. Market research often
aims at identifying some common standards of taste
that unify different consumer segments and various
social groups while at the same time excluding others. Tastes and lifestyles are therefore closely related.

Theoretical Approaches
To Pierre Bourdieu, taste is the central theoretical concept of sociology. Taste classifies other persons and things and is an object of classification.
Importantly, taste not only classifies, excludes, and
includes but also places people and things in a hierarchical order, in which some are more valued than
others. Taste both creates and maintains inequalities
and, as such, is a means of power. The sociology of
taste has its origins in the classical philosophical aesthetics of eighteenth-century Europe. This tradition
of thought placed great hope in the human disposition of taste, which often reached almost utopian
dimensions. Taste did not concern only the beauty of
things; even less was it restricted to an instrument of
art critique. As several prominent proponents of this
school of thought proposed, taste united people in
communities, creating social order without suppressing the individuals’ subjective inclinations.
Friedrich Schiller argued that basically two
instincts guide human behavior. The first instinct is
sensual and has to do with the satisfaction of individual needs and wants; as such, it is necessarily egoistical. He called his second instinct the form drive.
It is basically intellectual by its nature and helps us
recognize universal human norms and laws. Both
of these instincts are equally strong and opposed to
each other. There is no means of reaching any compromise between them: either people follow their
subjective drives not paying attention to the social
order or they follow the common norms at the costs
of the satisfaction of their own basic instincts. All
universal norms and laws that we approve of using
our reason will, out of necessity, restrict the realization of our equally natural sensual instincts. In this
situation, the aesthetic play instinct comes to the rescue. In contrast to the two other instincts, this third,
play instinct has an important task of moderating
our two other kinds of instincts. It can teach us to
moderate our wants without the use of any force or
social coercion. Unlike the form instinct, it does not

1431

violate our wild, “animal” instincts. Unlike the sensual instincts, following it does not result in conflicts
or chaos. In Schiller’s construction, the aesthetic play
instinct, just like the law-giving form instinct, creates order and coordinates social interaction without
suppressing our sensual instincts. Social interaction
without adhering at least to some basic form of order
would not be possible.
Schiller’s program of aesthetic education of mankind had a strong utopian element. It exercised enormous influence on European humanistic thought for
decades. Schiller’s program was, despite its name,
not a program of art education in any ordinary
sense of the word but a social program with strong
social goals. In analyzing and characterizing the play
instinct, Schiller problematized and proposed a solution to the basic antinomy of human life, between
individual freedom and social order, following
closely Immanuel Kant’s ideas of philosophical aesthetics formulated in his third critique, the Critique
of the Judgment Power. Kant postulated a sensus
communis, or a community of taste, that likewise
mediated between the individual and the collective,
or rather reconciled the irreconcilable by overcoming the opposition between the subjective, purely
sensual preferences of taste and the universal validity
of our claims of beauty. Kant’s famous antinomy of
taste claimed that it was equally correct to say that
our aesthetic judgments are purely subjective and to
demand their universal validity. By exercising our
judgment power, we both express our genuine subjective likings and demand that other people join in
our judgments. This claim of universal validity is, in
fact, what separates a real aesthetic judgment from
any expression of purely sensual pleasure.
Kant’s argumentation becomes understandable when we recognize that he played two wellestablished and, in his opinion, equally justifiable
philosophical positions against each other, which
can be identified in the tradition of philosophical
aesthetics that preceded Kant. On the one hand, the
empiricist aesthetics relied on the presumption that
the human subjective preferences would largely converge since all—normal—human beings shared the
same natural taste dispositions. The classicist position claimed, on the contrary, that there are universal
laws and rules of beauty that are valid everywhere
anytime. Both positions could be equally defended
but led to obvious problems, too. If, as was all too
easy to show referring to our everyday experience,

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Taste

people’s taste preferences did not converge but
diverged, human taste offered little social guidance
to us. If, on the other hand, eternal and clear rules of
beauty guided our choices, it left little space for our
own personal judgment, a position that was equally
unsatisfactory to Kant.
One can interpret that Kant’s sensus communis,
or community of taste, had the same, almost utopian
function of bridging the gap between our subjective
sensual pleasures or instinctual preferences, which
obviously differed from one person to another, and
the need of social order and uniformity without,
therefore, postulating any universal laws of beauty
in the classicist tradition. The aesthetical empiricism
of taste, best exemplified by David Hume in this
tradition of philosophical aesthetics, can be said to
precede our empiricist sociology by generalizing the
right or good taste that it could find out de facto by
measuring people’s actual preferences and opinions.
The Kantian-Schillerian aesthetics of taste presented
a kind of a nucleus of sociological thinking of its
own, in some respects theoretically more challenging than the empiricist variant. In their search for a
“third way,” which could guide the social action of
man in between the individual interests and universal, moral laws, it put its trust in the human taste and
play forms of sociability. They thought that, if freed
from all social and personal constraints, human
beings would naturally share a common taste that
would enjoy universal validity without having to
rely on any objectified, general maxims of conduct.
This meant, however, that it would be possible
only under special conditions that abstracted from
all such possible elements, like private and social
interests, that could exercise stronger social, external pressure on the individual expressions of taste.
The strong emphasis put on the “play”—in a sense
artificial—nature of all such social forms and relations that would qualify as purely aesthetical and
therefore fall under the pure aesthetic taste followed
from this presumption.
One can see here the emergence of another
sociological tradition of thought compared to the
Durkheimian sociology with its strong emphasis on
social norms and values. Whereas one could say that
Émile Durkheim “sociologized” the learning of Kant’s
second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, by
postulating the necessity of taken-for-granted social
norms generally valid at least in a particular society
or community, which in the last instance integrated

social order. This other tradition, the main representative of which was Georg Simmel, received its
inspiration from Kant’s third critique, the Critique
of Judgment, instead. According to the Critique of
Judgment, social forms, the specific object of sociology, were aesthetic by nature, or they closely resembled aesthetic relations that are characterized by their
formality, disinterestedness, and reflexivity. Unlike
its philosophical predecessor, the aesthetic sociology
did not postulate a social sphere of aesthetic play or
aesthetic judgment power that would bridge the gap
between the individual and the social whole. Instead
it searched for the different, empirical forms of sociality that might fulfill this integrating role, having
aesthetic relations as its model of pure social forms.
The “real” secret of the social order was not to be
found in economic interests or in power relations, or
in the moral order but instead in the aesthetic or play
forms of sociation.
When Simmel presented the basic principles of
his sociological thinking to his fellow sociologists at
the first German sociological conference in 1910, he
formulated them as the rules or the social etiquette
of an intellectual salon. The intellectual salon was a
social microcosmos where, among equals and in an
orderly and reciprocal manner, one could cultivate
one’s pure instinct of sociability without any disturbing factors, which mostly and as a rule in the shape
of money, power, or private passions, interfered in
our social relations. In the artificial social world of
the intellectual salon, people would typically discuss
matters of taste, thus forming a sensus communis,
or community of taste that would, however, be in
constant movement, disappear and emerge again in
various, ever new constellations. Because of its artificial nature, abstracted from the heavy burden of
reality, the intellectual salon was the real laboratory
of sociology.
To Simmel, fashion was a good example of a typical aesthetic social formation. To answer in which
spheres of social life fashion could reign, it is enough
to ask whether things could just as well be otherwise since, in matters of taste, there cannot be any
objective or definite criteria or laws of goodness or
badness, or of superiority or inferiority. Things could
just as well be otherwise since they are only matters of taste. Fashion is a result of the simultaneous
process of imitation and distinction. It is both individually chosen and socially shared. In fashion, one
offers his or her own choices or judgments of taste

Taste

ideally for all others to join in and share. The shared
fashion is thus a real community of taste, albeit a
fleeting one that is in continuous change. It solved
the antinomy of taste, even if only empirically and
not principally. It is only a weak community—or a
“cloud of a community”—but it creates order in a
rapidly changing modern society.
The most prominent later sociologist of taste,
Bourdieu, was a close follower of both this tradition
of the philosophy of taste as well as its most vehement critic. What Bourdieu did, or claimed to do, in
his work Distinction was to reveal the “bluff” behind
the Kantian claim of the universal validity of our
pure aesthetic judgments. As Bourdieu claimed, the
pure aesthetic taste hid its real class character behind
its façade of disinterestedness and formality. The
taste of the cultural upper class of society was legitimated by its own claim of universality and the other
lower classes of society, the middle class in particular,
supported this claim by recognizing it as superior
to their own taste and by eagerly trying to adopt its
standards as their own. As Bourdieu showed, taste—
legitimate or good taste in particular—was an asset
at the disposal of only the ruling class in its struggle
for social status and power. By trying to imitate the
legitimate taste of the upper classes, thus legitimating it as good or better taste, the middle class only
petrified its own position as the ruled class in the
hierarchical social ladder.
According to Bourdieu, the lower classes cannot possibly ever adopt the taste of the upper class,
despite eagerly aspiring to do so. The reasons for this
are, to Bourdieu, basically the same as for his prominent predecessor, a critic of the taste of the ruling—or
leisure—class, Thorstein Veblen. It is important to
both of them that the legitimate taste and its expressions are totally useless. They do not serve any external purpose or goal. The idea that the pure aesthetic
taste of the culturally dominating class is not at all
instrumental gets its best expression in the ideal of
l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). Since the cultivation of one’s taste is an end in itself and does not serve
any practical purposes or fulfill any useful function,
only those circles of society who have excessive—leisure—time at their disposal, free from the everyday
worries of supporting themselves or their families,
can dedicate their lives to such “useless” occupations as the appreciation of fine art or music, playing
piano or tennis, eating five-course dinners or reading
and discussing literary works, or other activities of

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“highbrow” culture. Since the proper socialization of
practicing such things takes a long time, the achievement of the natural ease characteristic of a real connoisseur takes time and must therefore start early in
life to be successful; good taste is always, at least to
a degree, inherited and cannot be achieved by formal
education alone.
Even though “revealing” sociologically the real
class character of good taste and putting an end to
the utopian, social aspiration of the classical philosophical aesthetics, Bourdieu, like Simmel before
him, nevertheless shared with his predecessors the
central idea that taste is a natural disposition of
humans that unites—and distinguishes—people
without their own conscious effort. The everyday
communities of taste, like fashion or lifestyle communities, are something that people do not join
for any practical purpose, such as improving their
social or economic standing. Even though Bourdieu
revealed that taste, in the last instance, served social
power and suppression, he also admitted that people’s expressions of taste can be, and mostly are,
completely disinterested. Those who, for instance,
appreciate highbrow culture do so sincerely and
without any thoughts of social superiority. In fact,
the whole social mechanism of legitimate taste would
not work at all if its representatives started calculating the social or economic benefits they could receive
from it. That such calculating behavior undoubtedly
also takes place does not change this basic truth.
The good or legitimate taste of the cultural elite is,
in general and from the subjective point of view,
really disinterested. People who love ballet or opera
really love it, not because they think that they have to
show off their own superiority but because they have
developed a taste for it during their socialization. To
use Bourdieu’s own example: an academic careerist
who cared only for his own career could mostly not
succeed in his efforts of social climbing, whereas a
“real” scientist, who is only dedicated to his science
and motivated solely by his search for the truth, is
eventually—even though not necessarily—awarded
in the end with social fame, high status, and possibly even economic rewards. Paradoxically, Bourdieu
thus argued that in the sphere of culture, one serves
one’s own interests best by being as disinterested as
possible. To Bourdieu—at least in his Distinction and
the related works like the Rules of Art and Homo
Academicus—the most intriguing aspects of social
life worth all the efforts of real social analysis are

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Taste

those that do not follow in any straightforward manner from any private interests and peoples’ conscious
motives. The real moving forces of social life are hidden from everyday consciousness. It is typical that
Bourdieu, in Distinction, did not have much to say
about the taste of the working class compared to the
other two main classes, upper and middle, of society.
In his opinion, the taste of the working class or the
proletariat is determined by pure necessity. In other
words, it is functional and instrumental. There is
nothing mysterious about it, and therefore it is not
interesting to sociological analysis.
Bourdieu seems to have assumed—at least
implicitly—that actions motivated by economic
interests or pure aspirations of power have nothing mystical in them that should be analyzed or
explained. They are more or less transparent to our
everyday consciousness and to all those personally
involved. This is not the case with the autonomous
fields of art and culture and, in particular, not of the
upper-class taste and culture. They are, to Bourdieu,
the most challenging objects of study to sociology, at
least in modern Western societies.
Despite the great critical rupture caused by
Bourdieu’s sociologization of taste, he nevertheless
followed dutifully the aesthetic tradition in at least
two remarkable respects. First, taste, and taste alone,
classifies and is classified. By following their own
taste, people come to establish communities of taste
eventually recognized by others and excluding others.
Thus, even to Bourdieu, taste creates order in a society in a natural way. Second, the aesthetic disposition
is the primary model of understanding disinterested
social action as opposed to economic action, which
is guided by pure self-interest. Bourdieu’s realization
that other objective class interests are hidden behind
this subjective disinterestedness does not at all discredit the fact that social patterns cannot, in general,
be reduced to any economic interests or motivations
of private profit. They follow instead a logic of their
own, often totally contrary to the pure economic
logic, as is the case in the opposition between commercial and pure or high art and the diminishing
artistic value often caused by economic success or
popularity. Whether the sphere of culture follows an
“economist” logic, as suggested by Bourdieu’s idea of
cultural capital as parallel and complementary to economic capital, does not change this basic conclusion.
Only a theoretically informed sociological observer
can possibly explain the taste competition in the different fields of culture by claiming that people act as

if they maximized their cultural capital even though
they cannot possibly be aware of it themselves.
To Schiller and Bourdieu alike, the pure aesthetic—
nonsensual, distanced—appreciation of things and
people, best exemplified in highbrow culture and fine
arts, is the prime example of the constitution of an
autonomous social field or sphere in which people
can and do act orderly, not driven by private interests
and without any external force backed up by law
and power. That this is a utopia hopefully to be realized to one of them, and a social bluff and injustice
to be revealed to the other, does not change the fact
that this is the primary field of the pure social and the
sphere where we can observe it without the “disturbing” interference of other interests, like economic or
power politics.
That Bildung , as well as its carrier the
Bildungsbürger, emerged in Western Europe, in particular in Germany, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a relatively autonomous cultural
field as well as a social group who based its aspirations of social status and recognition on the “eigenvalue” of culture and learning and not on political
power and money can historically be explained by
the particular social constellation of the social
classes, in particular by the competition among the
various fractions of the higher and upwardly mobile
classes in the relatively closed society of estates. The
interesting sociological question is to what extent the
emergence and existence of the autonomous field of
culture depends on its strictly hierarchical nature as
part of permanent social competition and mobility.
If the taste competition were not part of the greater
constellation of social power and status, its character
would understandably change. Under such conditions, taste could become more individualized and
divide society into several separate and parallel, but
not necessarily competing, taste or lifestyle communities. Would taste lose its socially obliging—and at
the same time guiding—nature if it did not serve,
however indirectly, the needs of social power, or
could we think about an orderly social world that
would consist, for instance, of such frivolous but at
the same time binding social formations like fashion?

Recent Research
The question to what extent such clear cultural and
social dividing lines and hierarchies of taste and status can be identified in modern Western societies has
been the object of recent studies. In particular, the

Tea

relation among the social importance of the highbrow, middle brow, and lowbrow or popular cultures has been actively discussed and analyzed. Even
though the results of these studies vary depending on
the countries concerned, the time of the study, the
empirical data sets, ways of measuring, and methods,
most studies have come to the conclusion that the
previous social superiority of the highbrow culture as
well as the clear dividing lines between highbrow and
popular culture is, if not directly threatened, at least
seriously questioned. Moreover, other factors than
cultural and economic resources, such as gender and
age, can often play an equally important role as determinants of cultural taste and lifestyles. At the same
time, so far nothing seriously threatens the role of formal education as the single most decisive background
factor of taste dispositions.
Jukka Gronow
See also Aesthetics; Art and Cultural Worlds; Cultural
Capital; Cultural Omnivores; Lifestyle; SelfReflexivity; Sociability; Social Distinction

Further Readings
Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde,
Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright. Culture, Class,
Distinction. London: Routledge, 2009.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity,
1988.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: The Genesis and the
Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity, 1996.
Di Maggio, Paul, and Toqir Mukhtar. “Arts Participation
as Cultural Capital in the United States.” Poetics 32
(2004): 169–194.
Gronow, Jukka. The Sociology of Taste. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett, 1987.
Katz-Gerro, Tally. “Highbrow Cultural Consumption and
Class Distinction in Italy, Israel, West Germany, Sweden
and the United States.” Social Forces 81 (2002): 207–229.
Lahire, Bernard. La culture des individus: Dissonances
culturelles et distinction de soi [The culture of
individuals: Cultural dissonances and self-distinction].
Paris: Éditions la découverte.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing
Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American
Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907.

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Prieur, Annick, Lennart Rosenlund, and Jakob Skjøtt-Larsen.
“Cultural Capital Today: A Case Study of Denmark.”
Poetics 36 (2008): 45–71.
Purhonen, Semi, Jukka Gronow, and Keijo Rahkonen.
“Nordic Democracy of Taste? Cultural Omnivorousness
in Musical and Literary Taste.” Poetics 38 (2010):
266–298.
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
Simmel, Georg. “The Sociology of Sociability.” American
Journal of Sociology 55 (November 1949): 254–261.
Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In Perspective on Fashion,
edited by G. B. Sproles. Minneapolis, MN: Burgess,
1981. Originally published in International Quarterly
10 (1904): 130–155.
Van Eijck, Koen, and Wim Knulst. “No More Need for
Snobbism: Highbrow Cultural Participation in Taste
Democracy.” European Sociological Review 21 (2005):
513–528.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class.
New York: Random House, 1961.

TEA
Tea is a hot beverage brewed with boiling water and
the buds or leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant.

Historical and Geographical Context
All tea comes from two varieties of trees: C. sinensis, which is indigenous to western Yunnan in China,
and C. assamica, which was first discovered in the
Assam region of India. Leaves from individual trees
can be harvested three to five times a year, and the
quality of the tea is dependent on the season in which
it is picked. The first leaves of the year create the
highest quality tea. Both tree varieties are used to
produce four forms of tea: white, green, oolong, and
black. Flavor variety is derived from the length of
time leaves are fermented and oxidized.
According to Chinese legend, tea was discovered
by Emperor Shen Nung in 2737 BC. For many centuries only the Chinese knew how to process tea, and
it was in the finished form that the leaf was slowly
spread through Asia. In the sixth century, tea was
introduced to Japan by Zen Buddhist monks who
had studied in China and found the drink a revitalizing liquid during long meditations. Tea drinking in
Japan became common in the general population in
the eighth century when the Japanese began to cultivate the plant. By the eighth century, tea was also

1436

Tea

known in Tibet, although it was not until the Song
Dynasty (960–1279) that it was consumed in high
quantities. By the early fifteenth century, Chinese
merchants traded tea in present-day Vietnam, Java,
Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and the east coast of Africa.
Threatened by the Mongols and the Japanese in the
1430s, the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) turned to a
policy of isolation, remaining secretive about the cultivation and processing of tea, trading the substance
only under their terms.
In 1606, the Dutch were the first Europeans to
trade tea with China and were the main importers of
tea to Europe until the encroachment of the British
East India Company in 1678. At first, Europeans
used tea as a costly medical herb to cure fever, headache, stomach ailments, and giddiness. By the midseventeenth century, however, tea was drunk socially
as an invigorating beverage among the fashionable
set in Paris, made popular by Cardinal Mazarin of
France. In London, tea became a beverage drunk in
the royal court in 1622 when the Portuguese princess
Catherine of Braganza, a purported “tea addict,”
married Charles II of England. The beverage reached
North America by the 1690s when it was sold in New
England. Tea is especially important to Britons, and
Britain imports more tea than any other European
nation. Tea has created vast fortunes for traders and
the government and is considered a drink that defines
British national identity. Tea imports to England
increased rapidly: the first records in 1675 totaled
4,713 pounds per year, reached 2 million pounds
50 years later, and 187 million pounds by 1877.
The British had implemented taxes on tea imports
from the earliest days. By the eighteenth century, the
tax rate had reached 119% of tea’s wholesale price.
High tea taxes resulted in a considerable amount of
smuggling and adulteration. To curb smuggling, the
prime minister of England, William Pitt the Younger,
reduced the tea tax to 12.5% in 1784. A three-pence
tax on tea was also imposed in British America with
the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. This was a
controversial move that eventually led to the Boston
Tea Party, on December 16, 1773, during which colonists dumped tea crates into the sea, an event that
rallied support for the American Revolutionary War
(1775–1783). As a result of the War of American
Independence, the British were cut off from silver
supplies in Mexico that had been used to buy Chinese
tea. In 1758, the British parliament granted the East
India Company a monopoly for producing opium in

India, which they would exchange with the Chinese
for tea. This eventually led to the First Opium War
(1839–1842) and the forcible opening of Chinese
ports to the British.
In 1834, the East India Company lost its monopoly of trade in China. As a result, they created the
first tea plantations outside of China in India in 1839
using the C. assamica variety of tea. Today tea is
grown in fifty-one countries; the largest producers
are India, China, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Indonesia.
Tea is now consumed worldwide; India and China
drink the most tea, followed by the United Kingdom,
Japan, Russia, and Turkey. Global production of tea
has more than doubled since the early 1970s and
is now at over three million tons per year. Part of
the reason for increased tea consumption in modern
times is the convenience of tea bags, which were patented in the United States in 1903 and perfected by
the British Lipton Tea Company in 1952 with a flowthrough bag. Another important modern invention is
iced tea, which became popular at the 1904 St. Louis
(Missouri) World Fair.

The Consumer Culture of Tea
By the nineteenth century, tea had become part of
English national identity, appearing in the humblest
of homes and also in Queen Victoria’s lavish tea settings. But this was not always the case. The scarcity
and high cost of tea restricted its use to the aristocracy until the latter half of seventeenth century when
the British middle and upper classes could buy the
commodity at food stores. By the mid-eighteenth
century, servants could expect tea as part of their
wage, drinking two to three cups daily. As tea moved
down the social scale in the mid-1700s, prominent
Englishmen, such as Jonas Hanway, William Buchan,
Fredrick Eden, and William Cobbett, argued that the
poor should not drink tea because it was a corruptive luxury good, un-English, and did not have the
nutritional value of beer, the traditional workingclass drink. However, the beverage had taken hold of
the English populace and had become an important
part of high tea, the after-work meal of the working class, and low tea, a formal meal eaten by the
middle class named after the low tables it was served
on. In the mid-nineteenth century, tea had become a
luxury that even the poor could afford, although it
was often adulterated with English-grown herbs or
dustings from shop floors.

Tea

In the mid-seventeenth century, middle- and upperclass men tended to consume tea in coffeehouses.
The tea gardens (or pleasure gardens) that began to
open in the 1730s, such as Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and
Bagninne Wells, popularized tea drinking among
women. These public spaces allowed men and
women to enjoy tea while strolling along beautifully
landscaped promenades, sitting in alcoves, observing
menageries, and watching fireworks. By the end of
the eighteenth century, tea gardens slipped into disrepute and tea consumption largely moved to the private realm, where it became the purview of women
who hosted heterosocial tea parties that brought
together friends and family and aided in courtship.
Women’s special relationship with tea became obvious in the 1830s with the temperance movement.
Anti-alcohol campaigners (nicknamed teetotalers)
promoted tea as “the cup which cheers but not inebriates.” In Scotland, tearooms became popular during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Miss
Cranston’s tearooms, famously decorated by Charles
Rennie Mackintosh, became popular spaces for
ladies to lunch. Tea moved back to the public sphere
in 1894 when J. Lyons and Co. opened the largest
chain of tea shops in the world.
Tea was also important for Chinese and Russian
national identity. In China, tea has been integrated
into daily life as a social beverage drunk for pleasure
since the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The beverage is
now considered one of the seven daily necessities of
life (along with rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and
firewood). The ceremonies surrounding tea help to
maintain traditional hierarchies within the country.
The beverage is served as a mark of respect and
submission; young people serve older relatives, and
workers serve their bosses. Drinking tea is also an
important ritual during wedding ceremonies; the couple serves tea to their in-laws and family as thanks for
their support, and the family drinks the tea to show
their acceptance of the marriage. Although tea drinking in Russia does not have as long a history as in
China, tea has been an important part of daily life in
Russia and serves as its unofficial national beverage.
Tea first arrived in Russia in 1638, as a gift to Tsar
Michael I, and in 1689 the Tea Road was created to
bring the leaves from China into Russia, where tea
was popularized as the beverage for the rich. By the
1790s, leaves were imported in such quantity that
even the lower and middle classes could afford the
beverage. In Russia, tea is a sweet drink, served with

1437

lemon and sugar or jam. Russian tea is made to be
strong and then diluted with boiling water, sometimes including milk. The potency of the tea served
represents the hosts’ generosity.

Tea Studies
Overall, the literature about tea has mainly been
popular history that covers every possible angle from
production, to social etiquette, to politics and taxation. There is little analysis in these works about the
meaning or significance of tea for the various cultures in which it is produced and consumed. There
are a few notable exceptions, such as the history of
tea and adulteration by Erika Rappaport and tea and
gender in Victorian England by Julie Fromer. The best
ways to expand the literature would be to do more
specific microstudies of tea: the meaning of tea in the
temperance movement; analysis of tea in eighteenthcentury painting; material culture of the tea bag;
poverty and exploitation of tea laborers; tea as an
element of imperial conquest; comparative studies
of tea rituals in Japan and China; tea and religion
in Japan. Historians of tourism or entertainment
could also explore the rise and fall of tea gardens.
Contemporary studies of tea might obtain oral histories from tea workers in under-researched African
plantations such as Kenya.
Ariel Beaujot
See also Coffee Shops; Consumer Nationalism; Consumer
Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Gendering
of Public and Private Space; Opium Trade; Public
Sphere; Smuggling and Black Markets; World
Exhibitions

Further Readings
Buckrell Pos, Tania M. Tea and Taste: The Visual Language
of Tea. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2004.
Faulkner, Ruper, ed. Tea East and West. London: V&A,
2003.
Fromer, Julie E. A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian
England. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.
Kinchin, Perilla. Tea and Taste: The Glasgow Tea Rooms
1875–1975. Wendlebury, UK: White Cockade, 1991.
Martin, Laura C. Tea: The Drink That Changed the World.
Tokyo: Tuttle, 2007.
Moxham, Roy. Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire.
New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004.
Rappaport, Erika. “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and
Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party.”

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Teenage Magazines

Chapter 6 in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge
Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by
Frank Trentmann. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Roth, Rodis. Tea Drinking in Eighteenth Century America:
Its Etiquette and Equipage. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1961.

TECHNIQUES

OF

PERSUASION

See Advertising; Channels of Desire; Desire;
Markets and Marketing

TEENAGE MAGAZINES
Ever since Seventeen magazine appeared in the
United States in the 1940s, teen magazines have
been one of the most successful type of magazines,
in the United States and all over the world. Bravo in
Germany, Belles Filles in France, Cioè in Italy, More
in the United Kingdom, and Faze in Canada are just
a few examples of the several magazines aimed at
teenagers, especially girls. In fact, a teen magazine
intended for teenage boys does not really exist; unlike
the adult-to-teen crossover of women’s magazines
(Cosmogirl from Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue from
Vogue), spin-offs of men’s magazines have not been
successful (MH-18, which was a spin-off of Men’s
Health, folded within a year). Adolescent boys usually read magazines targeting older male audiences,
or magazines targeting particular interests, such as
music or video games. Adolescent girls are instead
avid readers of teen magazines; according to several
surveys, approximately 70 to 90 percent read them.
Indeed, it should come as no surprise that social
studies have begun to identify teen magazines as one
of the most important sources for discovering how
teenage girls build their identity.
One of the most analyzed aspects is the representation of girls’ sexuality. According to some scholars,
the representation of sexuality in teen magazines is
too limited because it almost always covers only heterosexual issues. Moreover, the sexual message to teen
girls is that boys should govern the sexual relationship and that girls’ sexuality rests only on being goodlooking and appealing. According to other scholars,
the representation of sexuality is not so chauvinistic
and poor. Scholars such as Angela McRobbie argue

that magazines created after the 1980s in particular
portray more assertive girls; they are not only a passive figure in the sexual relationship, and they are able
to be treated equally by men. This change in the typical representation of teenagers is also explained by a
general turn of conscience on the part of teen magazine journalists. Many of them have been influenced
by feminism and they see themselves as part of the
community they write for, notes James Curran, David
Morley, and Valerie Walkerdine.
Moreover, through the magazines, teenagers can
obtain sexual information, even on health problems,
that can be difficult to obtain in other ways and can
be embarrassing if sought from parents. Rather than
a repressive and passive representation of sexuality,
these magazines may offer an oppressive and active
sexuality, compelling girls to a frantic pursuit of pleasure, even when they do not want it. In fact, it is possible to argue that the representation of this new girl
has probably gone too far; examples of articles from
the most unscrupulous magazines include “Sleazy!
I’m 15 and addicted to Group Sex!” “School Bully
Slept With My Mum,” and so on (Nice 2007). This,
of course, raises concerns about the sexualization of
the young readers of these magazines, who in some
cases could be as young as nine. In fact, apart from
the classic teenage magazines, generally aimed at
readers aged between thirteen and seventeen, a new
type of magazine, aimed at readers between nine and
twelve, the “tweens,” has recently appeared. These
new magazines face the same criticism that classic
teenage magazines faced, with the aggravating circumstance that no longer is the targeted audience
adolescent boys and girls but rather pre-teen children.
Teenage magazines are, however, not devoted
only to sexual issues. Each issue usually covers fashion, gossip, relationships (problems with friends and
parents), and even some social issues. Some scholars, such as Dawn Currie, have shown how, despite
fashion and gossip being the most common topics,
several teenage magazines offer a subtext of political discourse and can even promote resistance to the
dominant values of patriarchy and consumerism.
According to several studies, beauty and fashion
are still some of the most questionable aspects of
teenage magazines; they offer images of a thin, perfect, unreal body that risks creating anxiety in the
young reader. It is possible that teenage girls look at
the pictures of supermodels not just with envy but
also with pleasure and enjoyment, but it is undeniable

Telephones

that these representations can affect young readers’
images of their body and, in extreme cases, lead to
health problems like anorexia or bulimia.
Teenage magazines have also been criticized for
the lack of representation of ethnic minorities. Some
scholars claim that minorities, such as Asians or
blacks, are underrepresented or portrayed differently
from whites. In fact, this was true until the 1980s;
after that period, notes Lisa Duke, several studies have
shown how minorities have had increasing representation in both magazine articles and advertisements.
When one considers the effect that these kinds of
magazines can have on a teenager’s life, one has to
consider the frivolousness and the irony with which
they are read. These magazines tend to be read quite
superficially: girls often read only the article titles,
and often they read the magazines in the company
of other girls. Moreover, irony and lightness are not
only characteristics of how teenage girls read these
magazines but are also characteristic of the structure
and style of the magazines themselves. Almost every
study that ascribes apocalyptic negative effects to
these magazines usually neglects this aspect, basing its
conclusions only on an interpretation of the text.
Despite earlier forecasts, it does not appear that
the Internet has threatened the sale of teenage magazines. Almost every teen magazine has its own website, which is used to display readers’ reactions and
to build a devoted following. Teenagers tend to read
the print version first and then go online for more
information, to do quizzes, and to answer magazine
surveys.
Oscar Ricci
See also Audience Research; Beauty Myth; Cultural
Studies; Feminism and Women’s Magazines; Print
Media; Reception Theory; Sexuality; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Curran, James, David Morley, and Valerie Walkerdine.
Cultural Studies and Communications. London: Arnold,
1996.
Currie, Dawn H. “‘Going Green’: Mythologies of
Consumption in Adolescent Magazines.” Youth &
Society 26, no. 1 (1994): 92–117.
Duke, Lisa. “Get Real! Cultural Relevance and Resistance
to the Mediated Feminine Ideal.” Psychology and
Marketing, 19 (2002): 211–239.
McRobbie, Angela. “More! New Sexualities in Girls’ and
Women’s Magazines.” In Cultural Studies and

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Communications, edited by James Curran, David
Morley, and Valerie Walkerdine, 190–209. London:
Arnold, 1996.
Nice, Liz. “Tabloidization and Teen Magazines.”
Journalism Studies 8, no. 1 (2007): 117–136.

TELEPHONES
The basic telephone has become a taken-for-granted
part of our everyday life, but when it first appeared,
its role was far from clear. This entry charts that
early history and subsequent development, before
outlining some of key social research relating to this
technology. In doing so it becomes clear that it is
important to look beyond the narrow details of the
“use” of a technology to appreciate how the experience of telephony, its differentiated and evolving
consumption, relates to wider social practices and
relationships.
Telephony provides an example of how difficult it
is to point to a first “inventor” of a new technology
given that several researchers were working in this
field. Some of these researchers were trying to improve
telegraphy, by enabling it to carry more traffic, when
they discovered how sound could be sent over wires.
However, the telegraphy industry was not interested
in developing this line of innovation because from
its perspective the telegraph left a permanent record,
which a sound message would not, and the development of automatic telegraphy for sending telegrams
had led to one telegraphic vision of a telegraph going
into every home and business. Even when first promoted by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone, for
many observers at that time, had no obvious use—it
was perceived as being a toy, notes Sidney Aronson.
Partly because of some technical limitations on
the quality of two-way communications, there were
early experiments using telephony for broadcasting
music, drama, and news as a way of popularizing
the technology. However, Bell had a long-term vision
of point-to-point telephony replacing telegraphy and
campaigned for this, including using advertisements
that taught the general public how to use the telephone, in terms of telephone etiquette, and for what
purposes it might be used.
The early focus of the telephone industry was
on commerce and the telephone as a business tool
only, but as telephony spread and became cheaper, it
moved into professional homes. Although Bell had

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Telephones

foreseen socializing by phone, the industry initially
concentrated on promoting more functional uses
(e.g., shopping by telephone) and was generally critical of social chatting, seen as an inappropriate use
of the technology, according to Patrice Flichy. The
social use of the phone was noted as early as 1909
in a survey but only appears more substantially by
the 1930s, constituting an innovation coming mainly
from the actual practices of telephone users.
In the early years of the telephone, as was later
to happen with the Internet and other innovations,
there were various visions of the wider social impact
the telephone might have but also of what social
issues it might raise. For example, discussions among
the engineering community speculated about how
the new possibilities of communication by telephony
might facilitate world democracy, overcoming social
difficulties, creating and supporting new communities. But the technology also threatened to make the
private world public, becoming a channel for revealing personal information. It could make children’s
contact with outsiders more difficult to supervise by
parents, and it had the potential to support criminal
activities.
Since its introduction, telephony has undergone
many changes. Technical landmarks included the early
development of automated exchanges, long distance
and then worldwide coverage, the use of satellites,
and the shift to digital telephony, with related innovations such as mobile telephony and telephony over
the Internet. There has been innovation in terms of
what the phone is used for and the services it supports
(including its use as a channel for Internet connection). And the industry itself has undergone profound
transformations, for example with the breakup of the
AT&T monopoly in the United States and, in many
other countries, the privatization of a service that was
for many decades run by the national government–
controlled postal systems. This led to a reconfiguration of the industry in many countries with both new
entrants and takeovers and new product packages
(e.g., companies offering mobile phone, landline,
Internet access, and TV subscription combined).
In terms of research, although there were some
histories of telephony, until the late 1980s the domestic phone was a medium neglected by the social science community. Whereas some of the subsequent
telephone research emerged from academic interests,
it was in part spurred on by the plethora of new
and potential telecom services and equipment, the
privatized telecom companies’ greater awareness of

the importance of home users as a market, and these
companies’ perceived need to know their markets in
a more competitive environment.
Understandably, much of the first research involved charting phone use and (types of) users. This
involved identifying “heavy” and “light” users, as
well as psychological factors that shaped those patterns of use. There were classifications of call types,
initially with the binary division of “instrumental”
and “intrinsic” (i.e., social) calls (e.g., Moyal, 1989)
but also with more detailed and differentiated typologies and motivations for calling. That early research
also explored the issue of who is called (e.g., friends,
family, acquaintances), the frequency of calls (including when the phone is only for emergency use), and
short- versus long-distance calling.
As for the sociodemographics of users, gender
received the most attention in the early stages in
studies relating telephone use to women’s wider
social roles. A qualitative study in the United States
underlined how women held together the fabric
of communities, while a combined qualitative and
quantitative research in Australia emphasized the
importance of contact between mothers and daughters and among networks of women friends (Moyal
1989). By the late 1990s, the picture became more
refined, showing the complexities of how gendered
calling patterns change over the life course for both
males and females (Claisse 2000).
There was some, albeit limited, research on telephony and class (socioeconomic status), as well as
the use of the phone in relation to working at (or
from) home and its significance for the unemployed.
In terms of age, there were a number of early studies
on elderly people’s phone use and a few on youth.
One German study by Peter Büchner explained
children’s telephone use in relation to the changing experience of childhood in the later part of the
twentieth century, mainly focusing on the decline of
street culture, where interaction had previously been
more spontaneous with peers who happened to live
nearby. Since this led not only to more home-based
leisure but to more free time being spent at a distance
from the home, both in after-school institutions (e.g.,
sports, clubs) and also in the homes of friends, the
phone becomes more and more essential for arranging meetings and for organizing logistics of transporting children. Some youth participating in a 2000
French study by O. Martin and F. de Singly referred
to domestic tension as “the war of the telephone,” a
conflict between the pressure on youth to be attentive

Television

to the family and to their studies versus the demands
by youth themselves for a zone of liberty of movement and expression.
Other research included the influence of social
network size on the patterns of telephone use, the
influence in households of changes over the life
course (e.g., the reorientation of social ties, and hence
telephone calls, after the birth of the first child), and
the (non-)use of the telephone by particular communities, most notably the resistance of the Amish in the
United States to telephony.
The mainly qualitative domestication studies that
started in the early 1990s examined the role of the
telephone in people’s life alongside the role of other
information and communication technologies (ICTs).
This also asked how use changed over the long term,
exploring what this technology meant for cohorts or
generations who had lived their lives through different
eras. Part of that interest, reflected in a quantitative
study, dealt with how household members managed
calls, controlling incoming and outgoing calls, as well
as the privacy of calls. Several subsequent studies also
moved away from treating the phone in isolation, for
example, in research examining the emotional and
subjective ways people felt about the phone compared
to other ICTs and exploring how and why people
choose between different communications channels.
Although there are studies that continue to look at
fixed line telephony, more so in this comparative way,
the technology has been somewhat eclipsed by more
interest in newer ICTs, especially the mobile phone,
which for some time has generated a much larger
research literature.
Leslie Haddon
See also Advertising; Gender; Information Technology;
Internet; Leisure; Mobile Phones; Social Shaping of
Technology; Youth Culture

Further Readings
Aronson, Sidney. “‘Bell’s Electrical Toy. What’s the Use?’
The Sociology of Early Telephone Usage.” In The Social
Impact of the Telephone, edited by Ithiel de Sola Pool,
300–310. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.
Büchner, Peter. “Das Telefon im Alltag von Kindern” [The
telephone in children’s everyday life]. In Telefon und
Gesellschaft [Telephone and society], edited by U.
Lange, K. Beck, and A. Zerdick, vol. 2, 263–274. Berlin:
Volker Spiess, 1990.
Claisse, Gerard. “Identités Masculines et Féminines au
Telephone. Des Rôles, des Pratiques, des Perceptions

1441

Contrastés” [Masculine and feminine identities on the
telephone: Their roles, practices, and contrasting
perceptions]. Réseaux 18, no. 103 (2000): 51–90.
de Sola Pool, Ithiel, ed. The Social Impact of the Telephone.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.
Fischer, Claude. America Calling: A Social History of the
Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992.
Flichy, Patrice. Dynamics of Modern Communication: The
Shaping and Impact of New Communication
Technologies. London: Sage, 1995.
Haddon, Leslie. Information and Communication
Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction
and Research Guide. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Martin, Olivier, and François de Singly. “L’Évasion
Amicable. L’Usage du Téléphone Familial par les
Adolescents” [Friendly avoidance. The use of the family
telephone by adolescents]. Réseaux 18, no. 103 (2000):
91–118.
Marvin, Caroline. When Old Technologies Were New:
Thinking about Communications in the Late Nineteenth
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Moyal, Ann. “The Feminine Culture of the Telephone:
People, Patterns and Policy.” Prometheus 7, no. 1
(1989): 5–31.

TELEVISION
Television, a media technology, revolutionized all
aspects of culture by allowing viewers a window on
the world from the comfort of their homes while also
offering marketers a direct pipeline into the home. It
has been described as a central cultural storyteller, a
plug-in drug, and has been accused of functioning as
a vehicle for amusing ourselves to death. Although
such claims likely do not overexaggerate the cultural
significance of television, understanding the precise
nature of television’s role or influence has remained
elusive to those who study it. Nevertheless, the importance of television as related to its role in advancing
consumer culture and consumption can hardly be
underestimated.
The significance of television as a communication medium was tied at its start to its ubiquity
and accessibility. As in the case of radio before it,
television technology quickly swept into homes and
contributed to massive cultural shifts from public- to
domestic-based entertainment. Ownership of a television was rapidly viewed as an essential domestic
technology—a development aided by simultaneous

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Television

shifts from inner-city, multigenerational dwellings to
suburban, nuclear family constructions—particularly
in the United States. Although the cost of purchasing
a set was considerable, the hours of “free” entertainment (to the degree that advertiser-supported content
does not exact a fee for use) offered considerable utility for this initial expense that likely contributed to
the medium’s rapid adoption. According to Nielsen
Media Research, by 1960, 87 percent of U.S. homes
owned a television.
Television was introduced and rapidly adopted
in most Western industrialized countries following
the end of the World War II, although some experiments preceded the war. Its initial adoption and configuration followed a decisively different path in the
United States from much of the rest of the world.
Following on the norms established at the introduction of radio in the early 1920s, the United States
adopted a commercial mandate for its television system, largely turning operation of the medium over
to private companies—in this case, those who were
running the radio networks—namely NBC and CBS.
Western Europe also followed the precedent it had
established for radio, but the television system was
predominantly organized by a public service mandate
supported by tax dollars. The difference of these central goals led to considerable divergence in the early
years of the medium in various global contexts. Some
60 years after its introduction, these divergences are
much less pronounced, as those national television
systems that launched with a public service mandate
now overwhelmingly feature “mixed” public and
commercial channels. Even U.S. television added a
public service system in 1969.
Given the television system’s long-standing commercial mandate in the United States, one could
say that the promotion of consumption has been a
crucial component of television’s existence since its
origin. Regardless of the economic models that have
supported it—which include techniques as varied
as sponsorship, the “magazine-format” advertising
of multiple advertisers, and product placement—it
becomes effectively impossible to separate television
programming from the goal of encouraging the consumption of these underwriters’ goods and services.
The varied models for advertiser support have
led to different norms of the medium. The era in
which sponsorship dominated (the dawn of television
through the early 1960s) featured far greater program
control by the sponsoring company and the advertising agency than the network. Given the considerable

sums required for sponsorship and the level of integration between programming and sponsor message,
much of this programming sought to advance a
particular corporate image or company voice rather
than extolling the qualities of a particular good or
putting a hard sell on the audience. As corporations
spread their advertising budget across commercials
inserted in a variety of programming, this messaging
strategy gave way to more product appeal–centered
approaches—either selling the audience on the characteristics of the good or trying to sell a lifestyle
associated with the good. Throughout television
history, commercial time in television programming
has steadily expanded, and the more recent growth
in in-show product placement without any decrease
in commercial time has renewed concerns about the
amount of overt commercialism that is characteristic
of the medium. These concerns involve both worry
about the growing commercialism of television as
well as distress about the decreased effectiveness of
commercial messages in such a heavily saturated
environment.
Importantly though, television’s relevance to
commercial culture and consumption extends well
beyond its advertising messages and strategies. Given
its commercial mandate, the primary goal of television programming is to reach as broad an audience as
possible (so as to expand the range of possible viewers for those advertising messages). As a result, television programming tends toward reproducing visions
of life and lifestyle to which audience members might
aspire. Television tends not to offer visions of how
life is for the great majority of its viewers but how it
might more ideally be. Although researchers remain
uncertain about precisely how television messages
work and in what instances, various research traditions regard television’s power as developing from
how much it comes to inform our vision of our world.
Television’s role in culture—at least the role of any
piece of television—has grown less certain in recent
years as the vast proliferation of channel services,
and the fragmentation of audiences among them,
have led many to reconsider television’s previous
role as a medium for reaching vast, heterogeneous
audiences. Although television use remains as high
as ever, the many messages that have become part of
the medium, as it has grown from a handful of channels to hundreds, have meant that audiences for any
particular message have grown smaller and smaller.
Programmers, advertisers, and cultural critics alike
increasingly think about television as a narrowcast

Textiles

medium, or one whose increasingly specialized channels are best used to reach niche audiences with
specific tastes. Such transformations are not uncommon in the history of media (as precedents in radio,
magazines, and newspapers illustrate); however, the
lack of a new mass medium to replace this role of
television has led to greater uncertainty.
Amanda D. Lotz
See also Advertising; Branding; Broadcast Media;
Commercialization; Communication Studies; Leisure;
Markets and Marketing; Mass Culture (Frankfurt
School); Radio

Further Readings
Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987.
Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1983.
Gray, Jonathan. Television Entertainment. London:
Routledge, 2008.
Lotz, Amanda D. The Television Will Be Revolutionized.
New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the
Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.

TEMPORALITIES
See Consumption and Time Use;
Convenience; Harried Leisure Class;
Linder, Staffan Burenstam; Time-Use
Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle

TEXTILES
Textiles were among the first articles of human manufacture and trade primarily because of the wide
availability of raw materials and the many uses of
fabric—utilitarian, symbolic, aesthetic. Lengths of
cloth can be used as clothing or for ornamentation,
but typically fabrics undergo further transformation
before consumers buy them. Creating textiles involves
a sequence of processes from preparing raw materials
through fabricating and finishing the resulting cloth.
Yet over five millennia, textiles have experienced
repeated changes in virtually every respect—primary
materials, production methods, manufacturing centers, and regulations.

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The long history of making, trading, and using
cloth reveals the ways in which new and hybrid
products and styles are created in numerous locations by all kinds of groups and individuals for a
dizzying array of purposes. Textile products and
practices have consistently traversed borders of all
kinds: the process now termed “globalization” has
occurred repeatedly in the past. Historical analysis of
textiles likewise emphasizes how regulation—formal
and informal, state-imposed and market-based, secular and religious—has shaped consumption and how
fashion, expressed first and most durably in clothing,
became central to the understanding of, and a dominant motive for, consumption in the modern period.
Studying textile consumption underlines the fact that
production and consumption, far from being separate spheres of activity, form a broad network of constant interaction and mutual modification.
Until recently, most textiles were destined for
those who made them. Yet often the same individuals
who made simple fabrics from local raw materials
for their own use also purchased fancy textiles, made
from non-local materials, in the market. As a result,
the textile trade has been one of the largest sectors of
commerce since early antiquity and remains so today,
encompassing not only finished fabrics but fibers,
styles, techniques, tools, and even workers. The diffusion of textile knowledge has therefore occurred
for as long as the circulation of the goods made with
that knowledge.
For many centuries, textiles were woven, knitted,
knotted, crocheted, felted, or otherwise fabricated
by hand, usually employing inherited techniques and
tools. Traditional technologies were not changeless,
however; many innovations from horizontal looms
to spinning wheels were introduced to improve productivity, quality, or uniformity. But because most
machines depended on human muscle, textile production was carried out either in the home or in small
workshops. The development of machines powered
by wind or water, and later by steam and electricity,
changed all that. As early as the Middle Ages, some
finishing processes moved into buildings with central power sources, followed in eighteenth-century
Britain on a much larger scale by spinning and weaving, setting off the momentous and eventually global
transformation known as the Industrial Revolution.
Textiles remain central to development policies today,
due to the historical mobility of textile skills and
knowledge, the relatively low capital requirements
of most textile production, and the ongoing strong

1444

Textiles

demand for cloth throughout the world. Even though
most nations engage in some textile manufacture
(whether handicraft or industrial) within their own
borders, cloth and products made from it remain vital
to international trade.
Natural fibers—chiefly cotton, flax, hemp, silk,
and wools—have dominated textile production
throughout the world. Sometimes this supremacy
reflects the fact that similar plants are found in disparate regions of the globe: cotton, for instance, was
indigenous to both Asia and the Americas. But plants
and animals have also been widely diffused, a process that began in remotest antiquity and continues
today. The cultivation of cotton was introduced into
West Africa between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE; sheep were brought to Western Europe in
remote antiquity and into Australia at the end of the
eighteenth century; alpacas, native to Andean regions
in South America, are now being raised in Europe
and North America.
Textiles are versatile and varied. They can be made
into all sorts of products for all sorts of uses; the
same fibers can be fabricated into expensive or into
inexpensive goods depending on the cost of the labor,
other raw materials, and techniques chosen; they are
relatively easy to imitate, counterfeit, and smuggle.
Hence formal regulations issued by governments, professional organizations, and even religious authorities
have targeted cloth production and consumption. At
times, manufacturers have been supervised to protect
consumers against shortcuts in the production process
like inferior materials, fraudulent workmanship, or
improper measurements. But regulations have equally
sought to shield producers against competitors, or to
facilitate collecting taxes from them.
Protective laws seek particularly to ban competition—domestic as well as foreign—that might harm
nascent or important industries. As calicoes became
wildly popular in Western Europe in the late-seventeenth century, for instance, many nations barred
calico import, manufacture, or printing, to preserve established silk and woolens industries. More
recently, governments in Europe and North America
have tried, in the annually negotiated Multi-Fibers
Agreement, to defend existing cloth and clothing
manufacturers by instituting quotas on imports from
developing countries.
Equally common are rules directed at consumers
for social, moral, economic, or even political reasons.

Sumptuary laws are best known. They sought to
prevent subordinate groups from wearing expensive
fabrics or apparel (thus, a 1720 law in French West
Indian colonies threatened fines if enslaved people
donned garments made of anything but rough linens
and cottons) or specified proper apparel for other
groups, such as the distinctive “habits” assigned to
members of religious orders.
Informal interventions have often affected textile
consumption. The market accomplishes much of this
type of regulation, whether by advertising or pricing.
Historically, too, moralistic appeals, like the prolonged debate in early modern Europe between proponents and critics of fabrics and sartorial practices
that smacked of “luxury,” have strongly conditioned
consumer behavior. The amalgam of attitudes, images,
and practices called “fashion” is especially influential.
Rules of fashion once dictated conformity to conventional styles. But beginning in fifteenth-century Italy,
and growing as capitalist market economies spread
globally, fashion has come to signify change and novelty. An entire industry has arisen to create and diffuse
distinctive clothing defined not only as innovative but
necessary; fashion’s effects are felt yet more widely
through knockoffs that it inspires. Not all buyers can
attend to or afford high fashion. But it imparts a sense
of dynamism to all textiles and, through them, to
broader consumption activities.
Since antiquity, formerly separate textile cultures
have repeatedly been linked together, giving consumers access to an ever-wider universe of fabric and
fashion suppliers. In the eighteenth century, cottons,
once restricted mainly to Asia, Africa, and parts of
South America, achieved worldwide popularity.
Initially, new demand benefited traditional producers. But soon the new machines of industrializing
Europe massively outproduced and undersold traditional handicraft centers, whose cotton manufactures withered. The global empires of the European
states, which opened colonized areas to inexpensive,
factory-made cloth, largely completed the destruction of prior-existing textile industries in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Yet the apparent triumph of European cloth and
fashion proved short-lived. New textile cultures
have constantly emerged around the world, innovating hybrid styles and fabrics subsequently diffused
far beyond their birthplaces. Producers continue to
seek new efficiencies and reduced costs by moving

Textual Poachers

to low-wage regions. Their success is facilitated by
the mobility of ideas, skills, and techniques that has
always characterized textiles, not to mention by
broader improvements in transport, communications, and finance. The invention of artificial fibers
and finishing agents has likewise transformed textile
consumption in the last century. Throughout most
of human history, textiles were based on natural
fibers, dyestuffs, and finishing. But from the nineteenth century, chemists have developed an array of
both new ways to process fibers and altogether new
fibers, derived from petrochemicals. Often, synthetics
rapidly supplanted natural materials. In Italy, once a
leading silk producer, rayon (originally called “artificial silk”) was initially marketed in 1917 as a wartime
substitute; by 1925, Italy’s rayon industry was the second largest in the world. And the universe of textiles
never stops changing. In the past few years, environmental concerns have engendered renewed interest in
natural products, culminating in the United Nations’
proclamation of 2009 as the Year of Natural Fibers.
At the same time, constant innovation in materials
(glass, ceramics, metal) and in production methods
(computerized design and manufacture) ensure that
cloth will remain significant in technological change
in the future as in the past.
The late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have also opened a new phase in textiles’
ongoing mobility. Even before January 1, 2005,
when the Multi-Fibers Agreement expired and all
quotas ended, much production had relocated to
low-wage districts in Asia, Oceania, and Eastern
Europe. Developed nations, where factory production of textiles was born, have become mainly
importers of inexpensive and mid-priced cloth. Their
remaining manufacturers focus on niche markets,
high-technology design, expensive fashion goods,
and products where fast turnaround between design
and sale, and nearness of producer to consumer, are
paramount. But most of these specializations can be
learned relatively quickly. Mobility of production is
therefore sure to continue and textiles to remain at
the forefront of globalization, as they have been since
the beginnings of recorded trade in consumer goods.
Robert S. DuPlessis
See also Clothing Consumption; Consumer Regulation;
Fashion; Fashion Industry; Globalization; Luxury and
Luxuries; Sumptuary Laws

1445

Further Readings
Allsen, Timothy. Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol
Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Collins, Brenda, and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds. The European
Linen Industry in Historical Perspective. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Guy, John. Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.
Harris, Jennifer, ed. Textiles, 5,000 Years: An International
History and Illustrated Survey. London: British Museum
Press, 1993.
Jenkins, David, ed. The Cambridge History of Western
Textiles. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
Kriger, Colleen. Cloth in West African History. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Lemire, Beverly. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and
the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Riello, Giorgio, and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds. The
Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles
1200–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Schevill, Margot, Janet Berlo, and Edward Dwyer, eds.
Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: An
Anthology. New York: Garland, 1991.
Schoeser, Mary. World Textiles: A Concise History.
London: Thames and Hudson, 2003.

TEXTUAL POACHERS
Textual poaching is a term popularized by scholar of
fandom Henry Jenkins and used to articulate the processes by which dedicated fans respond to popular
media. In this formulation, fans are not simply passive consumers of popular texts but “become active
participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” (Jenkins 1992, 24). Fans, often constructed as mere dupes of the official culture industry,
are in fact savvy, subversive readers operating outside
of the cultural industry’s paradigms—especially since
they are not only readers. Jenkins emphasizes fans
as producers of new cultural material: fans “poach”
their favored texts to create a variety of new analytical and creative works. These works include message
board and blog posts, self-published zines, fanfiction,
art, films, “filk” songs, and fan “vids”—clips from
televison shows or films set to music.

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Textual Poachers

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de
Certeau describes popular readers in terms of poaching: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands
belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching
their way across fields they did not write, despoiling
the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (1984,
174). This articulation of reading practices forms the
theoretical basis for Jenkins’s discussion of fandom;
he argues that de Certeau’s theories enable us to discuss the ways in which those outside the realm of
official cultural institutions partcipate in interpretation and production of meaning. Jenkins provides
a workable description of the process of fannish
acivity; he also argues that “speaking as a fan is a
defensible position within the debates surrounding
mass culture” (Jenkins 1992, 23)—a position taken
up by later fan scholars, or “aca-fans”—and that
fannish readings of media texts are both worthwhile
in and of themselves and useful to academic critics of
those media texts. Of particular interest is that fans,
unlike de Certeau’s isolated nomadic readers, operate
within a community context: the fandom. Fans do
not simply create new works from their spoils but
also circulate those works; these fan productions
inspire other fan productions, in turn.
Of all the forms of textual poaching engaged in by
fans, fanfiction has received the most attention, likely
because it is nearly identical to long-recognized practices within the literary world. Fanfiction uses other
creators’ characters and settings—specific characters
and settings, from a particular preexisting work, that
the reader is expected to recognize as such—to tell a
new story. This, of course, is a well-attested practice
within published literature, even after the advent of
modern copyright law; recent examples include Tom
Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, and Geraldine Brooks’s
Pulitzer Prize–winning March. The only practical difference between fanfiction and these literary works
is that fanfiction circulates unofficially. This is often
due to legal restrictions—most of the fanfiction in circulation is for in-copyright texts, and therefore fans
stay on the right side of the law by not publishing
their work for profit. Historically, this was not always
the case; David Brewer, discussing the development
of copyright law in the eighteenth century, describes
the competing discourses of the “economy of scarcity”—basically, that circulation of an author’s characters outside of that author’s text would diminish
their value—and the “economy of abundance”—that

circulation would in fact increase value. Both of these
discourses are still in evidence today.
Among fanfiction genres, “slash”—fanfiction
that posits a romantic or sexual relationship between
two characters of the same gender—has received a
great deal of attention. The term slash refers to the
punctuation mark separating two characters’ names
in a story description: Kirk/Spock. This label indicated that the major romantic pairing was homosexual; stories of heterosexual Star Trek romance
were labeled “ST” or “adult ST” (Penley 1997,
102). Although later fandoms adopted this punctuation mark for all romantic fanfictional pairings—for
example, Mulder/Scully, the main characters of the
TV series The X-Files—the term slash stuck, retaining its original meaning of homoerotic romance.
Much of the scholarly discussion has focused on
the supposed oddity that most writers of male/male
slash are women and has emphasized the ways in
which these female fans interrogate received ideas
about heteronormativity and gender; much of this
scholarship lauds slash as “resistant” or “oppositional” readings. However, scholars like Sarah
Gwenllian Jones, drawing on queer film criticism,
argue that focus on slash as “resistant” can risk
downplaying considerations of of the source texts as
potentially queer.
Fanfiction and slash, like all fan practices, have
become far more visible since the mainstreaming
of the Internet. Jenkins’s argument that fans are
legitimate analyzers and critics of popular media has
become even more relevant in an era in which fan
responses to media texts are not confined to a small
subculture but are freely available for anyone with
Internet access to see and participate in—including
the creators of media texts. This has resulted in some
friction; for example, in the early 2000s, Warner
Brothers sent out several cease-and-desist letters to
Harry Potter fan websites, including several run by
children and young adults. The resulting publicrelations flurry caused Warner Brothers to rethink
their strategy. Since then, the usual practice of copyright holders is to adopt a “live and let live” attitude;
as long as fan work remains in the realm of the nonprofit, corporations have little to gain from policing
the work of their most dedicated consumer base—
most seem to have agreed to the premises of the
“economy of abundance.” Some creators have established close relationships with their poaching fanbase; television series such as Lost and Supernatural

Theories of Practice

are well known for high levels of interaction between
showrunners and fans. Jenkins has described this
closing of the distance between creators and fans as
“convergence culture.”
Although Jenkins’s work is widely respected
within the field of fandom studies, some have questioned the “poaching” analogy for its suggestion of
illegality. Mafalda Stasi points out that “poaching
is an illegal appropriation, a theft” and argues that
this language sets up a hierarchy of authorship, with
fans as “illegitimate” glossers of the “legitimate”
original texts; moreover, from a literary standpoint,
“the poaching metaphor focuses on the fans’ actions
rather than the text, which is seen as the object of an
action, rather than the subject of a process” (2006,
119). Other scholars, particularly in literary studies,
have likewise called for a greater focus on fan works
as artistic productions in and of themselves rather
than as the products of poaching. Abigail Derecho
has commented on the value judgment inherent in
the use of terms such as appropriative and derivative
for texts that are based on other texts; she instead
proposes the term archontic literature to account
for the entire body of literature that consists of
texts, like fanfiction, that are extensively based on
preexisting texts. Slash scholars, in particular, have
increasingly argued that too much focus on fan practices as practices—poaching—can have the effect
of delegitimizing their readings, which will then be
characterized as the idiosyncratic misreadings of a
marginal group.
Overall, the formulation of textual poaching has
proven immensely useful for a deeper, more nuanced
discussion of the myriad ways fans participate and
interact with media culture. The vast majority of
contemporary fandom studies springboard from
this conception, as it recognizes fans’ agency and
creativity in a way that previous understandings of
fandom did not. Textual poaching as a metaphor is
also starting to be used in spaces outside of fandom
and media studies, particularly in literary fields that
focus on audience, such as children’s literature; as the
consumer world becomes ever more interactive and
customizable, this understanding of how particular
sets of consumers relate to popular texts will become
even more relevant.
Catherine Tosenberger
See also Appropriation; Audience Research; Bricolage; de
Certeau, Michel; Do-It-Yourself; Fans; Queer Theory

1447

Further Readings
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a
History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction.” In Fan
Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet:
New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina
Busse, 61–78. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Green, Shoshanna, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins.
“‘Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking’: Selections
from the Terra Nostra Underground and Strange
Bedfellows.” In Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture,
and Identity, edited by Cheryl Harris and Alison
Alexander, 9–40. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and
New Media Collide. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.
Jones, Sarah Gwenllian. “The Sex Lives of Cult Television
Characters.” Screen 43 (2002): 79–90.
Kustritz, Anne. “Slashing the Romance Narrative.” Journal
of American Culture 26, no. 3 (2003): 371–384.
Penley, Constance. NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex
in America. New York: Verso, 1997.
Stasi, Mafalda. “The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash
Palimpsest.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the
Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 115–133. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2006.

THEORIES

OF

PRACTICE

Practice theory is a collection of contemporary theories about the constitution and workings of social life
that center on the notion of practices.

The Intellectual and Disciplinary Context
Practice theory is a family of theories in contemporary Western social thought. These theories tend to
be resolutely multidisciplinary in nature, drawing on
ideas developed in disparate disciplinary contexts.
They also tend to be as philosophically informed, as
are any theories in social thought. The disciplines that
have most prominently contributed to practice theory
are philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and science
and technology studies. Theories of practice have
come to be increasingly applied to understanding

1448

Theories of Practice

consumption, as consolidated in Alan Warde’s article
“Consumption and Theories of Practice.” Of particular significance is the recognition that consumption
occurs in the course of carrying on practices. This
recognition implies that, to understand properly how
people consume or how consumer culture changes,
social theory needs to take full account of the development and organization of practices in daily life.
The initial—and core—practice theories arose
in the 1970s and 1980s. They were united by two
general themes, one concerning the nature of human
activity and the other concerning the character of
society (see next section). These core theories also
arose in opposition to specific types of theory that
were prominent at the time, above all, semiotics,
structuralism, post-structuralism, cognitivism, and
individualism, including rational choice theory.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, practice theory has
come to encompass a much more diverse collection
of accounts. These accounts are unified by nothing
more than the centrality they accord practices. Even
their conceptions of practice vary considerably.

Core Practice Theories
The theories that originally and still today are most
widely identified as practice theories are strongly
philosophical or sociological-anthropological in
character. Two general themes unite them. The first
is the aim of conceptualizing human activity tangentially to certain great either-ors of modern philosophy. The second is the idea that practices are central
to conceptualizing human society, or social life.
The first theme is of philosophical origin.
Beginning in the 1970s, certain theorists appropriated the term practices to articulate theories of
human activity that transcend the subject-object
dualism that had dominated philosophical discussions of human life since the seventeenth century.
According to philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus
and Charles Taylor, to conceptualize human activity as practices is (1) to highlight the role of skills,
practical understanding, or nonpropositional knowledge in human action (nonpropositional knowledge
is knowledge whose content cannot be linguistically
formulated) in human action; and (2) to claim that
activity, thought of as grounded in such phenomena, both is conceptually prior to and underlies the
traditional division between mind and world. For
these thinkers, explanations of activity that cite skills
or practical understanding partially replace and

otherwise specify the scope of venerable explanations
of human conduct that cite mental phenomena such
as reason, will, consciousness, and goals. Standing
behind these theorists’ accounts of human activity were the ideas of the eminent twentieth-century
philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin
Heidegger. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger stressed
the importance vis-à-vis human activity of practical
knowledge, or know-how (to use the famous term
of the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle), as opposed
to propositional knowledge, or know-that. They also
held that acknowledging this importance undermines
modern subject-object pictures of human life.
Core practice theorists who were more social scientific in background and interests likewise affirmed
this theme. One of these theorists was French
sociologist-anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose
theories are perhaps more strongly associated with
the label “practice theory” than are those of any
other thinker. Bourdieu shared Dreyfus’s and Taylor’s
conviction that something nonpropositional underlies human activity. For Bourdieu, this something is
habitus. Habitus is arrays of dispositions: arrays of
subconscious bodily structures that generate activity,
thought, and perception. In positing the existence of
habitus, Bourdieu elided the either-or of two types
of theory that were dominant in France in the 1950s
and 1960s: subjectivist theories that attribute human
activity to subjective will, for example, the phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre; and objectivist theories that portray human activity as necessitated by
objective social phenomena, for example, economic
systems, social structures, and class arrangements. A
prominent example of objectivism is the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
A second social theorist who shared the intuition
that the theme of practices implicates an alternative account of human activity is English sociologist
Anthony Giddens. Giddens claimed that human
activity is governed by a triumvirate of agencies:
discursive consciousness, practical consciousness,
and the Freudian unconscious. Whereas discursive
consciousness is what a person knows and can say,
practical consciousness is what a person knows but
cannot say. Of these three agencies, practical consciousness is most responsible for human activity.
This is because it supplies the human ability unreflectively to respond appropriately to circumstances
and intelligibly to others. Giddens also argued that
practical consciousness—what one knows but cannot say—is an unformulable grasp of rules (and of

Theories of Practice

resources, such as specialized knowledge, coordinated actions, and wealth); rules that are tied to the
structure of practices: (1) all the actions that compose
a given practice draw on the same set of rules (and
resources), (2) these rules are grasped in the practical
consciousnesses of the actors performing the actions,
and (3) in being drawn on by all these actions, the
rules involved are reinstated and thus reaffirmed as
the structure of the practice. A practice is an array of
actions that draw on and reinstate a set of rules that
are grasped in actors’ practical consciousnesses.
As mentioned, core practice theories are linked
not just by the endorsement of noncognitive conceptions of activity but also by the affirmation of the
centrality of practices to both the constitution of
and the causality responsible for society. The constitution of society is what there is to, what makes
up—the “stuff” of—social phenomena. Practice
theories thus form an alternative to social theories
that promulgate other phenomena as central to the
makeup and explanation of social life. Examples of
such other phenomena are individuals, interactions,
language, signifying systems, the life-world, institutions/roles, structures, and systems. Indeed, practice
theorists maintain that phenomena such as these are
best analyzed by reference to practices. Bourdieu and
Giddens offered the two most influential practice
theories in this regard.
Bourdieu conceived of society as a realm of practice. To conceptualize this realm, he introduced the
concept of a field. A field is a bounded domain of
activity, for instance, cooking, agriculture, politics,
recreation, or education. Activities in a given field
are governed by a habitus that, among other things,
(1) people acquire in growing up under the objective
conditions characteristic of the field, and (2) generates actions that perpetuate the field’s practices and
conditions. The actions that habitus produces, moreover, are those and only those that are possible given
the field’s objective conditions. In addition, specific
matters are at stake in a given field, and actors draw
on particular capitals (material, symbolic, cultural) in
pursuing those stakes. Bourdieu also contended that
the different fields of practice in which a given people
lives are organized homologously and that practice
fields thereby form a whole that resembles what
social theory has traditionally called a “society.”
Giddens, meanwhile, conceptualized social institutions as composed of practices and held that analyses and classifications of institutions should focus
on their constituent practices and these practices’

1449

structures and interconnections. He showed, further,
how a wide variety of prominent topics in social
thought, such as social reproduction, contradiction,
power, ideology, and social change, can likewise be
analyzed by reference to practices, their structures
and interconnections. Systems, too, in his eyes are
composed of practices, just as the principles that
govern systems concern the structures of and connections among the practices involved.
Core philosophical practice theorists shared the
intuition that practices are central to society. Taylor,
for example, wrote that social reality is practices.
He claimed, moreover, that the actions out of which
a given practice is composed are correlated with
the language spoken there and that practice action
and speech together articulate a “semantic space,”
a field of meaning, that envelopes everything that
composes or is encountered in the practice. Social
reality thus comprises myriad nexuses of actions,
words, and semantic spaces. Theodore Schatzki has
more recently outlined a related picture, arguing that
nexuses of practices and material arrangements—a
practice being an organized open manifold of doings
and sayings—compose the site of the social, the place
as part of which all human coexistence, interrelatedness, and collective being transpire. A related position is found in Dreyfus.

Broader Practice Theory
In the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, diverse theorists beyond the previously mentioned core ones have appropriated the term practices
and can be called practice theorists. It is important to
stress that just two ideas unite these scholars. The first
is the second theme common to core practice theories: that practices are constitutionally and causally
central to the social phenomena studied. Presently,
in fact, practice theory can be described simply as a
trend toward social investigators approaching their
topics of study through, or on the background of,
the notion of practices. The second unifying idea is
the notion, understood vaguely by many of its advocates, that practices are bundles of activity. All in all,
practice theorists hold that bundled activities are central to their topics of study.
In this way, talk of practices signals the conviction that certain phenomena that previously had not
been construed either as forms of, or as rooted in,
human activity, are best theorized thus. Examples
of these phenomena are identity, language, gender,

1450

Theories of Practice

science, and social organization. Talk of practices,
consequently, is a reassertion of an older certitude,
namely, that human activity is the fundamental subject matter of social investigation. It is worth mentioning that most other affirmations of this insight
are versions of individualism, of the idea that human
activity in general can be conceptualized as a set of
discrete actions, each of which can be exhaustively
explained by features of the people performing
them. An example is rational choice theory. Practice
theorists typically hold, by contrast, that the activity
bundles that they call practices cannot be analyzed as
sets of such actions.
As mentioned, practice theory today encompasses
a range of theories that take practices as central to
their chosen topics of study. Examples of the topics
that have been addressed through the lens of practices
are the nature of reason; the constitution of identity,
including gender identity; the development of individuals; the character of normativity and of meaning
and language; embodiment; the dynamics of scientific
research, power, social organization, and order; the
micro-macro relation; communication and learning;
and space and time as dimensions of human life and
society. Under practice theory this widely construed,
both French historian-philosopher Michel Foucault
and French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard qualify as practice theorists: their talk of practices signals
the idea that language is discursive activity as opposed
to structure, system, or abstract discourse. Certain
students of science and society, such as English sociologist Andrew Pickering and American philosopher
Joseph Rouse, also qualify as practice theorists, as
both depict the overall field where human life transpires as a nexus of practices. Where they differ from
other practice theorists is in construing the activities
that compose practices as activities not of humans
alone but also of nonhumans such as machines and
the objects of scientific investigation. Of course, all
practice theorists acknowledge that practices are
mediated by the nonhuman entities in relation to
which the constituent activities of these practices proceed. It is a further, “posthumanist” step to conceive
these entities as actors coeval with humans.
It is important to reiterate that nothing more joins
this broader range of practice theorists than (1) the
central use they make of the notion of practices in
conceptualizing and explaining their subject matters, and (2) their understanding that practices are
bundles of activities. These theorists greatly differ in
their analyses of human activity, in their accounts

of how activities connect, and in the constitutional
and causal significance they accord practices vis-à-vis
their subject matter. This multiplicity notwithstanding, the prominence of talk about practices bespeaks
a renewed consciousness of the fact that a vast range
of phenomena examined by social theorists are matters of, or rooted in, human activity.

Methodological Issues
The method of practice theory, as of all theory,
is thought. The type of thought involved is of the
systematic, abstract, and general variety. The methodological dangers of this sort of thought include
oversimplification, irreality, ignorance of pertinent
facts, distantiation of elements from context, the mistaking of historically or culturally limited generalization for universal truth, and banality. As for practice
theory–informed empirical research, the considerable
differences that exist among practice theories guarantee that the methodological issues such research
faces are diverse. Despite this diversity, two methodological problems are common to such research.
The first is that of identifying practices empirically. As a form of thought, practice theory enjoys
constrained liberty in specifying and elaborating
ideas—abstractly and generally—about the character, organization, and interrelatedness of practices.
Any empirical investigator who works with a given
theory will have difficulties identifying specific practices. This difficulty arises because the phenomena by
reference to which practices are distinguished—for
example, skills, rules, dispositions—are nonobservable in nature. As a result, an investigator typically
has insufficient evidence for precisely identifying
practices and cannot be sure that she or he has successfully done so. Historians are in even a worse
position. Further investigation helps, but the likelihood that social life is composed of an immense set
of practices raises the possibility that practices cannot be unambiguously and confidently identified.
Partly coming to the rescue in this regard are the
languages spoken by those carrying on the practices;
languages contain words and expressions for a presumably large subset of the practices people carry on.
Investigators can also talk to the people they study,
learn from what others have uncovered, and develop
techniques for inferring the existence of practices.
The second methodological problem concerns
social change. The line between carrying on an existing practice differently and beginning a new practice

Theories of Practice

is ill defined. Practices always harbor possibilities of
transformation, of being continued in ways that differ from the ways in which people have been carrying
them on. When, however, is a different way of doing
something a perpetuation of the past as opposed to
the beginning of something new? What’s more, when
is a different way different and not just the same way
in different circumstances? These questions require
both conceptual and empirical responses, for answering them requires the refinement of such concepts as
existence, difference, newness, and change as well as
the discernment of fine differences both in what is
going on and in the broader contexts in which it does
so. Any practice theory must work out a clear position on this problem.

Future Research Directions
The development of practice theory can take many
forms. It is unknown whether the future will bring
new conceptions of activity bundles that the excogitators involved will call practices. What is highly
likely to continue are the practices (1) of using the
term practices to refer to activity bundles, (2) of
treating practices as central to subject matters, and
possibly (3) of self-reflexively referring to these first
two practices as practice theory.
As mentioned, these three practices today focus on
a wide range of topics of interest to social scientists.
This fact suggests that the most important direction
of practice theory–informed research in the near
future will likely be the further dissemination and
diversification of the use of practice theory concepts
and conceptual nets to investigate particular social
phenomena or realms. Consumption and consumer
culture is one such realm. Practice theory–informed
research was undertaken specifically to examine consumption and consumer culture soon after the start
of the twenty-first century. Some researchers have
produced practice theoretical studies of consumption
by conceptualizing consumption as practices or collections thereof. This, for example, is the approach
adopted by Elizabeth Shove. Another tack is to construe consumption, not as a manifold of practices but
as an aspect or moment of a wide variety of practices.
This approach is favored by Warde. Investigators
can also borrow specific concepts from practice
theories to analyze particular aspects of consumption. An example is Richard Wilk’s appropriation
of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to explain the transformation of wants into needs. Of course, there are

1451

other ways of drawing on practice theory to study
consumption. The variety of practice theoretical conceptions of activity and practice, together with the
vastness of past and present phenomena of consumption, guarantee that there is considerable room for
diverse practice theoretical accounts of the features,
dynamics, varieties, transformations, and interrelationship of these phenomena.
Theodore R. Schatzki
See also Actor-Network Theory; Anthropology;
Discourse; Habitus; Individualization; Material
Culture; Philosophy; Sociology; Structuralism

Further Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by
Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on
Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Edited by Colin
Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1983. The Differend: Phrases in
Dispute. Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Ortner, Sherry. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.”
Comparative Study of Society and History 16 (1984):
126–166.
Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency,
and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995.
Schatzki, Theodore R. The Site of the Social: A
Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life
and Change. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2002.
Schatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von
Savigny, eds. The Practice Turn in Contemporary
Theory. London: Routledge, 2001.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience: The
Social Organization of Modernity. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Taylor, Charles. “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.”
In Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical
Papers, vol. 2, 15–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.

1452

Theory of Planned Behavior

Warde, Alan. “Consumption and Theories of Practice.”
Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 2 (2005): 131–154.
Wilk, Richard. “Consumption, Human Needs, and Global
Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change
12, no. 1 (2002): 5–13.

THEORY

OF

PLANNED BEHAVIOR

Theory of planned behavior is one of the most successful theories in social psychology; the theory aims
to explain people’s behavior in various domains—
among them consumer behavior—by four psychological variables: intentions, attitudes, subjective
norms, and perceived behavioral control.
The theory was introduced in an article by Icek
Ajzen in 1991 and builds on the social psychological tradition of attitude research. It is an extended
version of the preceding theory of reasoned action,
developed by Ajzen and Martin Fishbein in the
1970s. Whereas the theory of reasoned action
proved to be insufficient in many situations, the
theory of planned behavior received strong empirical
support since its publication and is still relevant for
the explanation of consumer behavior. Although the
theory was developed in the cultural context of the
United States in the 1980s, extensive cross-cultural
research confirmed that the basic structure of the
theory is stable over time and cultures (e.g., Kalafatis,
Pollard, East, and Tsogas 1999). However, the relative importance of the different aspects the theory
covers changes between cultures and even situations.
The theory is general in nature and has been successfully applied to a wide array of different domains,
including health behavior, ecological behavior, consumer behavior, leisure activities, and deviant behavior. It was developed to explain all kinds of actions
that are performed deliberately, which means that
performance of a behavior is preceded by a period
of active weighing up of costs and benefits of an
action and its alternative(s). Within the domain of
consumer behavior, the theory applies to all kinds of
purchase or consumer decisions that include active
consideration of different types of costs and benefits,
which includes more than monetary costs.
The theory of planned behavior has two basic
assumptions: The first is that if people are given
enough resources, in terms of cognitive capacity and
time, they make a rational choice. It stands, therefore,
in the tradition of rational choice theories, which
assume that people integrate all available information

about possible wins and losses of a behavioral alternative and choose the best possible alternative within
this evaluation framework. However, rational choice
does not imply that a decision for the objectively
best alternative is made, because people might not
have access to important pieces of information or
may evaluate wins and losses or their probabilities
incorrectly.
The second basic assumption of the theory of
planned behavior (see Figure 1) is that the driving
force behind an action in the domain of deliberate
behavior is an intention. Having formed an intention
signifies having broken the threshold between still
weighing up benefits and costs and starting to plan
how to perform the action. The intention, therefore,
mentally represents the decision for just one alternative and the will to perform that behavior. The
intention is automatically formed in a rational choice
process considering three different aspects: attitudes,
subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.
An attitude toward an action is a general measure of how favorable a person considers the general
outcome of this action. The attitude variable in the
theory of planned behavior, therefore, subsumes the
influence of evaluated information a person holds
about an action and its alternatives. This measure of
favorability is formed in a process of adding up all
relevant positive and negative outcomes the person
mentally connects to the action. These different single
components are called behavioral beliefs. An attitude
is, therefore, the sum of all accessible beliefs about the
behavior in question. A belief consists of the assumption that a positive or negative aspect is related to an
action multiplied by the probability that this outcome
occurs. A moderately negative belief could thus be the
result of an extremely negative outcome multiplied
by a low probability or a moderate negative outcome multiplied by a high probability. Not all beliefs
a person has about an action are accessible in every
situation; usually just a subset of beliefs is activated,
depending on the situation. This means that an attitude toward an action can vary even if the beliefs do
not change.
Subjective norms are a measure for the social influence on a decision. The theory of planned behavior
assumes that an intention is based on not only the
combination of beliefs about the action but also the
need of people to comply to the expectations of other
people. A subjective norm can be considered to be
a measure of social costs for violating expectations
of relevant other people (e.g., social exclusion, bad

Theory of Planned Behavior

Attitude

Subjective
Norm

Intention

Behavior

Perceived
Behavioral
Control

Figure 1

The Theory of Planned Behavior

Source: Ajzen, I. “The Theory of Planned Behavior.”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
50 (1991): 179–211.

conscience) as well as social benefits when complying with their expectations (e.g., social appraisal or
support). The expectations of people that are more
important weigh stronger in this process than the
expectations of people that are only weakly connected to the decisionmaker. The mental representation a person has about expectations of others is not
always correct; the person acts on his or her normative beliefs, which are subjective representations of
expectations of other people. Considering subjective
norms in the process of forming an intention can lead
to people deciding against the behavior they hold the
most positive attitudes for if the social pressure by
relevant persons is strong enough.
Perceived behavioral control is a measure for the
amount of control people perceive to have over performing behavior. If people perceive that their behavior is totally determined by situational conditions,
they do not form intentions to try to do something
else. Perceived behavioral control is, again, based on
control beliefs and hence subjective, not objective,
control. Perceived behavioral control has a special
status in the theory of planned behavior, as it not only
has an influence on forming an intention but also a
direct impact on behavior. Even if a person adjusted
his or her intention to a limited amount of control,
it could still be that the execution of an intention
interferes with perceived control in a certain situation. More recent versions of the theory (e.g., Ajzen
and Fishbein 2005) do not assume a direct influence
of perceived behavioral control on behavior but a
moderating influence of perceived behavioral control on the relation between intention and behavior:
Intentions only translate into behavior if perceived
behavioral control is high enough. How strong the

1453

relative influence of attitudes, subjective norms, and
perceived behavioral control on the intention is varies over time and between situations.
An application of the theory of planned behavior to a purchase decision might help illustrate the
assumptions. If a person buys an MP3 player produced by a certain company, he or she has first
formed the intention to buy it. This intention is
influenced by the positive and negative attributes
the person believes this type of MP3 player has (e.g.,
good sound, ease of use, long-lasting batteries).
Additionally, the person includes the expectations he
or she thinks relevant other people (such as friends or
family) hold about this purchase decision. Is a certain
brand an item that leads to social appraisal? Finally,
perceived control is important in the decision: Can I
afford the player? Is it available in the shops? When a
decision has been made, perceived behavioral control
can still interfere with the decision: the player might
unexpectedly be sold out in the store.
Although the theory of planned behavior has
received a lot of empirical support, it has been criticized for being incomplete. In particular, the theory
does not account for the aspects of habitual behavior,
which involves not rational choice but automated
choice, and the aspect of personal norms, hence the
influence of a personal value system that might be
independent of the social setting (see Klöckner and
Blöbaum 2009 for a discussion). Habits seem to be
an additional moderator of the intention-behavior
relation and, on some occasions, an independent
predictor of behavior parallel to intention. Personal
norms seem to be an independent additional predictor of intentions. Future developments of the theory
point in the direction of a more complete theory that
covers domains that are highly moral in nature or
highly characterized by behavioral routines.
Christian A. Klöckner
See also Attitude Theory; Cognitive Structures; Consumer
Behavior; Economic Psychology; Preference
Formation; Psychology; Routines and Habits

Further Readings
Ajzen, Icek. “The Theory of Planned Behavior.”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes 50 (1991): 179–211.
Ajzen, Icek, and Martin Fishbein. “The Prediction of
Behavior from Attitudinal and Normative Variables.”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 6 (1970):
466–487.

1454

Thrift

Ajzen, Icek, and Martin Fishbein. “The Influence of
Attitudes on Behavior.” In The Handbook of Attitudes,
edited by Dolores Albarracín, Blair T. Johnson, and
Mark P. Zanna, 173–221. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum,
2005.
Kalafatis, Stavros P., Mike Pollard, Robert East, and
Markos H. Tsogas. “Green Marketing and Ajzen’s
Theory of Planned Behaviour: A Cross-Market
Examination.” Journal of Consumer Marketing 16, no.
5 (1999): 441–460.
Klöckner, Christian A., and Anke Blöbaum. “A
Comprehensive Action Determination Model—Towards
a Broader Understanding of Ecological Behaviour Using
the Example of Travel Mode Choice.” Journal of
Environmental Psychology 30, no. 4 (2010): 574–586.

THRIFT
The usual understanding of the word thrift links it
with “sparing use or careful expenditure of means”
(Oxford English Dictionary). This comes close to the
meaning of the word frugality, understood as moderate expenditure or use of assets. It might be easy to
think of thrift simply as a form of being passive in
relation to the world of goods. Instead of accentuating the idea of negative restraint, this entry emphasizes thrift as active management of everyday life: it
is a way in which household economies are sought
to be made thriving. In this entry, thrift is analyzed,
first, with a historical glance at its role as a liberal virtue that was transformed with the emergence of welfare regimes; and second, by discussing the current
forms of thrift evident, in particular, in shopping.

Historical Context
In the Western world, classical liberalism from the
late-eighteenth century onward understood liberty
as the freedom to choose how to manage one’s life
while not causing harm to others. As François Ewald
has shown, such an idea of freedom led, simultaneously, to emphasize its reverse side: individual
responsibility. Prudence and foresight emerged as
the main virtues in liberal thought. Instead of living only in the present moment, one should plan for
the future. Consequently, thrift was understood to
be a key economic practice corresponding to liberal
virtues. At the same time, a need for new forms of
thrift emerged as a result of urbanization and industrialization, as ever more households started to earn

their living through salaried work. Indeed, thrift
in the contemporary understanding of the word is
more linked with the specific ways of using—or not
using—money than with the aims of prolonging the
useful lives of objects.
Savings banks and private insurance companies
were among the institutions that aided in making the
ethos of thrift concrete. The aim was to master time
through regularly putting aside some money and thus
create additional room for maneuver for individuals
and families. Pat O’Malley claims that by the end of
the nineteenth century in Great Britain, “industrial
life insurance had become the principal institution
for governing working class thrift, and few households were not enlisted in this regime” (2002, 100).
As working-class and middle-class families engaged
in private life insurance, this business started to be
encouraged by public powers as well, despite early
ambivalence and moral reticence (due to the potential connection with gambling) toward a form of
governing life that relies on calculations of probability (Zelizer 1983).
The establishment of social security during the
twentieth century transformed the idea of thrift at the
level of governmental practice. Similarly to the original liberal ideas, welfare politics placed an emphasis
on being prepared for future risks with respect to
life’s necessities. Yet the expansion of welfare policies
was based partly on a new distinction, first made by
Sir William Beveridge, between “compulsory” and
“voluntary” thrift. According to O’Malley, Beveridge
emphasized that thrift was so important from the
point of view of the public good that it would be
irresponsible to rely on private initiative on this matter. Instead, state technocrats should take care of
the compulsory part of saving through taxation and
with the help of scientific forms of governance. An
extreme case of modern public intervention on practices of thrift is measures taken in wartime, when a
population may be submitted to intensive pressures
to save, either voluntarily or involuntarily, to finance
the costs of fighting. Of course, it has remained a
hot topic in political debates throughout the twentieth century to determine how much of the total
saving should be accomplished by statutory regulation. Indeed, the so-called neoliberal turn in Western
politics from the 1970s onward was backed by the
contestation of the state apparatuses’ major role in
saving; instead, claimed the neoliberals, private persons and households should have the freedom to

Thrift

decide what and when to consume, save, and invest
and how to be prepared for the future.
While the establishment of welfare systems
changed the conditions of thrift on an institutional
and conceptual level, at the same time, everyday
practices of thrift at the level of households also went
through a transformation with the advent of the consumer society. For most of human history, poverty
and scarcity of means have constantly forced—and,
in large parts of the world, still do force—people
not only to consider carefully what they buy but
also to take care of and mend the already existing
material goods they have. It might be easy to connect
thrift with poverty and claim that its role diminishes
with the rise of the standard of living, and certainly,
many modes of attending to goods and prolonging their useful lives have become obsolete with the
era of mass consumption. Yet thrift in itself has not
disappeared. Rather, its forms have changed as the
capitalization of everyday life has created a new need
for differentiating between various types of money
(Zelizer 1994).
In fact, it can be claimed that thrift as a way of
being prudent about current expenditure is placed at
the core of capitalism. Namely, in most definitions
of capitalism, one idea is constant: the insistence on
the unlimited accumulation of capital, that is, on the
continuous drive to reinvest the gains to receive even
more profit. There is no horizon of satisfaction, no
standard for contentment, according to Luc Boltanski
and Ève Chiapello. Consequently, capitalism is oriented toward future potentialities, away from the
present enjoyment, and thus encourages thrift. In
addition, it is worth noting that as economics is often
defined as the science for studying the allocation of
scarce resources, at the core of this definition is the
idea that scarcity prevails even in the midst of abundance. It is clear that one can arrive from many premises at the same conclusion that in the contemporary
consumer way of life, often depicted as the “throwaway culture,” thrift is central.

1455

to more serious research, the two basic things that
people do while shopping are, first, create and reproduce relationships with the ones they love and, second, save. The argument is based on an ethnographic
fieldwork in northern London.
According to Miller, shopping as thrift takes many
forms. To begin with, there are practices of restraint.
More importantly, Miller claims that even spending
is often experienced as saving. For instance, some
people search for “savers,” items that are known to
have a relatively low price, such as supermarkets’
own-label goods. Others go for big packs: “buy three
for the price of two.” Or they purchase products that
are marked down for a limited period. Miller stresses
that “it is possible for shoppers to regard virtually
the whole of the shopping expedition and the purchase of almost any specific item within that expedition, not as an act of spending at all, but as an act of
saving” (1998, 56). The sense of being thrifty is not
necessarily linked with careful comparisons of actual
prices. Some people are keen to buy at an ostentatiously inexpensive bargain seller, whereas others
value “rational” calculations to strike the perfect balance between price and good value, the latter understood in terms of style and durability. According to
Miller, “although the forms of thrift differ considerably across class and income group, thrift itself is as
important a factor in shopping for the wealthy as it
is for the poor” (61). In Miller’s account, thrift is, in
the final analysis, an end in itself for most consumers.
Drawing on Miller’s study, one may be left to wonder whether thrift is just the same as saving. In contrast to thrift as a way of using and reusing resources,
it might be easy to link saving simply with hoarding
assets and, especially, passive abstaining from using
them. Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen and Mika Pantzar’s
research on the issue has revealed that “saving” as a
practice implies multiple forms of activity. From the
point of view of social research, the two terms remain
difficult to distinguish clearly from each other.

Thrift and Consumption
Thrift in Shopping
The centrality of thrift is also one of the main points
in Daniel Miller’s book A Theory of Shopping, which
is perhaps the single most important contribution
to consumer research on this theme. Miller argues
that, contrary to the common presupposition shared
by most journalistic accounts of shopping but also

All in all, thrift can be related to consumption in three
different ways: first, simply as restraint and passivity
in relation to consumer goods; second, as an end in
itself; and third, as a way of postponing consumption.
In these three ways, thrift can be related to pleasure
as well. Thus, there is no real opposition between
hedonistic consumption and thrift. First, the ability to

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Time-Use Diaries

restrain oneself and not to succumb to temptation can
bring satisfaction in itself. Second, as Miller’s informants testify, much of what is understood as skill in
shopping is related to the ways in which people are
able to save while spending, and idioms such as “the
thrill is in the bargain” show that there is pleasure
to be had in this skill. Finally, Colin Campbell, and
Lehtonen and Pantzar, have shown that, by practicing
thrift, one can intensify the experience of consumption
and create possibilities for anticipatory pleasure—for
instance, when fasting before a seasonal feast or when
saving for a bigger future purchase or a touristic trip.
Thus, in most cases, consumption and thrift should
not be analyzed as being antithetical to each other.
Rather, they tend to lead to each other.
Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen
See also Credit; Debt; Economics; Happiness; Luxury and
Luxuries; Need and Wants; Rationalization; Satiation;
Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings
Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. Le nouvel esprit du
capitalisme [The new spirit of capitalism]. Paris:
Gallimard, 1999.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Ewald, François. L’État providence. Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1986.
Garon, Sheldon. “Luxury Is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings
and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan.” Journal of
Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 41–78.
Lehtonen, Turo-Kimmo, and Mika Pantzar. “The Ethos of
Thrift: The Promotion of Bank Saving in Finland during
the 1950s.” Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 2 (2002):
211–231.
Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity,
1998.
O’Malley, Pat. “Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thrift, and Life
Insurance in Britain.” In Embracing Risk: The Changing
Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, edited by T.
Baker and J. Simon, 97–115. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.
Zelizer, Viviana A. Morals and Markets: The Development
of Life Insurance in the United States. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Books, 1983.
Zelizer, Viviana A. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin
Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, & Other Currencies.
New York: Basic Books, 1994.

TIME-USE DIARIES
Time-use diaries are a means of collecting structured
sequential information on the activities that people
do throughout the day. Since many of these activities
are themselves consumption activities (e.g., eating,
shopping, going to the cinema), and since time itself
is, in some accounts, regarded as an increasingly
pressured consumption resource, time-use diaries
have an important contribution to make to the study
of consumer culture. Time-use diaries are considered
to be a more reliable way of estimating the amount
of time that people spend in different activities than
are survey questions that ask the interviewees to retrospectively estimate this time. In addition, because
the information is collected in the form of a diary, it
is also possible to analyze sequences of activities as
opposed simply to their duration.
Time-use diaries have their origins in studies of
time use undertaken in response to the rise of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century. Most
of the pre–World War II time-use diary studies originated in the Soviet Union, Western Europe (including Britain), the United States, and Japan. Time-use
diary studies have been increasingly adopted since the
mid-1960s, when the landmark Multinational Time
Use Study was conducted in 12 countries, helping to
raise awareness of the possibilities of time-use diaries
(Szalai 1972). Large-scale time-use diary surveys
with nationally representative samples are still most
common in the industrialized countries, in North
America, Europe (both Western and Eastern), Japan,
and Korea. In many of these countries, nationally
representative time-use diary studies are collected
at regular intervals (every five or ten years or so).
Increasingly, time-use diary surveys are also being
undertaken in developing countries.
In the time-use diary, respondents usually record
their daily activities on a sequential basis onto precoded diary spreadsheets in units of time varying from
ten minutes to a half hour. The diary spreadsheet is
traditionally paper based, like a booklet, but increasingly, diary spreadsheets are available to respondents
on computers. The idea is that respondents will
record their activities if not exactly contemporaneously then at least during the same day, thus avoiding
the recall bias involved in asking people to remember
how much time they spent on a particular activity the
previous day or the previous week. In addition to the

Time-Use Diaries

diary itself, basic socioeconomic and demographic
information is collected from respondents about
themselves and their families; indeed, many diaries
are used as attachments to large-scale social survey
instruments that provide a large amount of additional
information about respondents and their households.
The many different types of diary that have been used
over the history of the methodology may be broadly
classified into “light” and “heavy” types. Light diaries
are characteristically single-day diaries that involve
recording only a single precoded main activity for each
unit of time. Their advantage is that they are cheaper,
quicker, and, when properly administered, can yield
high response rates. Heavy diaries, on the other hand,
may involve the recording of both main and secondary activities over several days or even a week. They
may also include additional information, such as the
social context of activities (whether anyone else was
present during that activity), the location of activities,
and even the subjective state of the respondent while
he or she was doing those activities. Heavy diaries,
therefore, yield much more useful information but are
more burdensome for the respondent, leading generally to lower response rates. Medium-heavy diaries
completed by several members of the same family
contribute the most useful information for research,
since they allow the calculation, for example, of what
proportion of the overall household domestic work
each spouse contributes, how much time partners and
children spend together in leisure activities, and how
much they enjoy those activities.
As more nationally representative time-use diary
surveys have become available, cross-national and
sequential data harmonization has become an important utility for researchers. In the mid-1980s, the
Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) archive was
established, not only to provide an archive resource
of current and past time-use diary surveys but also
to construct a harmonized (i.e., containing the same
variables) set of cross-national time-use diary data.
The most recent MTUS version contains over forty
time-use diary surveys from fifteen countries, several
of which have sequences of time-use data stretching
from the 1960s to the early years of the twenty-first
century. The Harmonised European Time Use Survey
(HETUS) contains data from fifteen European
countries from 1998 to 2002, collected according
to guidelines standardized by the European Union,
with new surveys commissioned by participating
European nations from 2008 onward. Most recently,

1457

the long sequence of time-use diary surveys available
from the United States from the 1960s to the twentyfirst century has been put into harmonized form—in
the shape of the American Heritage Time Use Study
(AHTUS).
The first major research applications of time-use
diaries were in national-level comparisons of the
amount of time spent in different main activities,
primarily in paid and unpaid work. Such comparisons were made between different socioeconomic
and demographic groups, such as between men and
women of different ages, those with different kinds
of jobs, those in and out of employment, those with
young children and those without young children,
and others. As more countries collect national-level
time-use data and with the development of the harmonized data files, international comparisons of this
information can increasingly be made. In addition,
the development of harmonized sequences of timeuse diary studies within single countries (such as the
AHTUS) enables a focus on changes in the use of time
over time. For example, it is now possible to analyze
changing patterns of child care over a thirty- to fortyyear period for several countries of the industrialized
world (e.g., Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006).
At the macrolevel, time-use diary data have been
used to assess contributions to national production
through estimations of the monetary value of unpaid
work, the informal sector, and self-provisioning (e.g.,
Gershuny 2000). Another main area of microlevel
research in time use has been inspired by the growth
of gender studies. This signaled a new use for timeuse diaries, which are now increasingly used to provide reliable information on gender inequalities and
change over time in the division of domestic activities such as housework and family care, contributing
to wider research on gender inequalities and change
(e.g., Sullivan 2006).
Research on leisure, using time-use diaries, had an
early start in the United States with the Westchester
County survey of the early 1930s, the results of
which were published as Leisure: A Suburban Study
(Lundberg and Komarovsky 1934). In the main,
however, issues of leisure and consumption have
received relatively little attention compared to the
enormous volume of work using time-use diary data
that has been generated in the areas of paid and
unpaid work. Perhaps one of the most significant
contributions has come in the form of the analysis
of “free” time as an increasingly scarce consumption

1458

Tobacco

resource for the “income-rich, time-poor” of latemodern societies (e.g., Robinson and Godbey 1999).
Nevertheless, there is great potential within time-use
diary studies for research into consumption and leisure, in particular if researchers take into account
the opportunities available from some of the more
ambitious diary and analytic structures: for example,
the enjoyment of leisure activities (from subjective
information about activities); combinations of different leisure/consumption activities (from information
on multiple activities); the “pace” of leisure activities
(from analyses of sequences of activities); the social
context and location of consumption activities (from
“who were you with” and “where were you” information); and whether one can discern clusters of
people whose leisure behavior is similar (from information on clustered sequences of leisure activities).
Oriel Sullivan
See also Comparing Consumer Cultures; Consumption
and Time Use; Consumption Patterns and Trends;
Domestic Division of Labor; Informal Economy;
Leisure; Methodologies for Studying Consumer
Culture; Self-Service Economy

Further Readings
Bianchi, Suzanne, John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie.
Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. New
York: Russell Sage, 2006.
Gershuny, Jonathan I. Changing Times: Work and Leisure
in Postindustrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Lundberg, George A., and Mirra Komarovsky. Leisure: A
Suburban Study. New York: Columbia University Press,
1934.
Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life: The
Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. 2nd ed.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
Sullivan, Oriel. Changing Gender Relations, Changing
Families: Tracing the Pace of Change Over Time. New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Szalai, Alexander. The Use of Time. The Hague: Mouton,
1972.

Websites
American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS). http://www
.timeuse.org/ahtus.
Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS). https://
www.testh2.scb.se/tus/tus.
Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS). http://www
.timeuse.org/mtus.

TOBACCO
One product that is emblematic of the entire consumer culture is tobacco. Grown in the new world,
its cultivation was crucial to the building of empires.
Already an item of mass consumption in many
European countries by the eighteenth century, its
price inelasticity has placed it at the heart of the fiscal
policies of modern states. Packaged and commodified as the cigarette, tobacco seemed to be at the forefront of the Second Industrial Revolution and all its
associated features, including branding, advertising,
and salesmanship. Long celebrated in fiction, film,
and photography, by the latter half of the twentieth
century tobacco’s dangerous health effects helped
secure the authority of new forms of scientific expertise (epidemiology) while for millions of addicts trying to give up smoking it signified much of people’s
troubled relationship with both the pleasures and the
perils of consumption.
The origins of tobacco use lie in the ceremonial
functions it played in Native American culture.
Strong, dark, high-nicotine based, and consequently
mind-altering, tobacco was crucial to the performance of shamanistic ritual and social ceremony.
On its discovery by Europeans, tobacco was held
by many to be a global panacea, a new herb that
could be incorporated into Western medical traditions and celebrated as an almost universal curative.
Nicolas Monardes of Spain in the late-sixteenth century claimed that tobacco alleviated hunger, acted as
a relaxant and a painkiller, and was even a cure for
cancer. Railing against him were a number of vociferous opponents of tobacco, of whom the most notorious and most quoted in the English-speaking world
was James I of England and his Counterblaste to
Tobacco (1604). Faced with such obstacles, tobacco’s
acceptance into Old World culture was assisted by
aristocratic and regal patronage, as it was introduced
to the courts of Catherine de Medici in 1559 by Jean
Nicot and Elizabeth I in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh.
But the real impetus to smoking came from sailors, returning from all over the Americas to various
ports throughout Europe. They brought the habit
back with them. Tobacco quickly became an item
of mass consumption and production. Pipe manufacture consequently spread throughout Europe and,
thanks to the culture of the coffee- and alehouse,
meant that Dutch towns such as Gouda could support the existence of 350 pipe manufacturers by the

Tobacco

end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, snuff
also proliferated, often rivaling smoking as the dominant form of tobacco consumption and producing
such fascinating quirks as the oversized pockets of
Frederick the Great of Prussia. In southern Europe,
the great state-owned tobacco factories of Cadiz
and Seville ensured the continued popularity of the
cigar, though it was not until the Peninsular Wars
(1808–1814) that military officers would begin to
popularize it in Britain. Beyond Europe, the hookah
spread throughout Persia and into India, eventually
reaching China, Southeast Asia, and many parts of
Africa by the end of the seventeenth century.
If smoking was not a global phenomenon by the
end of the nineteenth century, the rise of the cigarette ensured it soon would be. Originally sold as an
expensive, handmade luxury item for the urban elites
of Europe, cigarette manufacture was revolutionized
by the patenting of the Bonsack machine in 1880
in the United States. It was quickly put into use by
the dynamo of the modern cigarette industry, James
Buchanan Duke. He was followed in other countries
around the world, and the ensuing “tobacco war”
between Britain’s Imperial Tobacco and Duke’s
American Tobacco Company gave rise to the modern
multinational corporation. As part of a negotiated
truce, the British American Tobacco (BAT) Company
was formed in 1902 to carve out the world’s market
for itself. In 1999, although Philip Morris (makers of
Marlboro) had marginally overtaken it, BAT nevertheless produced over 800 billion cigarettes per year,
making it the world’s third largest tobacco company
(since the China National Tobacco Corporation still
had a firm grip on the biggest national market).
The success of the cigarette helped revive antitobacco movements in France, Australia, Britain,
Canada, and the United States, although World War I
quickly put an end to the critique of young men’s cigarette smoking. Cigarettes were easier to smoke than
pipes in the trenches of the Western Front and tobacco
companies, the military, governments, and newspapers organized the constant supply of cigarettes to
the troops, an official recognition of the importance
of tobacco in offering immediate relief to physical
and psychological stress.
The war transformed smoking habits, which
meant the first half of the twentieth century was the
golden age of the cigarette. By 1950, around half the
population in most Western states smoked, although
such averages hide the fact that in countries such as
the United Kingdom up to 80 percent of adult men

1459

were regular smokers. Smoking was an acceptable
form of social behavior in all areas of life—at work,
in the home, in bars, and at the cinema. Not only
was the cigarette habit popular across all social
classes but increasingly among women as well, for
whom the older associations of deviant sexuality
gradually faded in the 1920s and 1930s. This had
less to do with the efforts of advertisers and more
to do with how the cigarette was glamorized on the
Hollywood screen; onscreen smoking by American
film stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall,
and Marlene Dietrich suggested sophistication and
lofty independence.
Within this culture, there was little room for opposition to tobacco, except in the privately financed
publications of such anti-smoking advocates as
Henry Ford and the eccentric whims of Hitler,
although the latter’s state-sanctioned attack on the
people’s habit did lead to some pioneering work on
the links between smoking and cancer. The widely
discussed work in 1950 of Ernst L. Wynder in the
United States and Richard Doll and Austin Bradford
Hill in the United Kingdom therefore came as a considerable shock to many, and smokers were reluctant
to give up their habit. Of course, their decisions were
influenced by physical addiction, advertising, and
the denials of the tobacco industry, but even after
the reports of the U.K. Royal College of Physicians
(1962) and the U.S. Surgeon-General (1964), many
smokers were unwilling to quit. And of those who
have quit, the overwhelming number have been
professional, affluent men, making smoking today a
health problem increasingly associated with women
and poverty.
More recent evidence against environmental
tobacco smoke has turned attitudes against smoking, and the charge against the individual’s liberty to
smoke has been led by the United States, although
much of Europe has now followed the lead taken by
California to ban smoking in public places. Changing
attitudes to public health, as well as the great success
of litigation, were a threat to the profits of the major
tobacco companies. But as markets declined in the
West, globalization opened up new markets in the
developing world.
The strong grip smoking has in the world’s popular culture suggests tobacco will persist in playing
a crucial role in society. While smoking is increasingly frowned on in a health-conscious age, and the
smoker might feel marginalized and harassed, its
suppression has only made it ever more the symbol

1460

Totemism

of individualism and resistance. All this suggests that
smoking is as likely to remain entrenched in modern
global society.
Matthew Hilton
See also Addiction; Branding; Colonialism; Commodities;
Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Hollywood; Luxury
Taxes

Further Readings
Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall,
and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined
America. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History: The Cultures of
Dependence. London: Routledge, 1993.
Hilton, Matthew. Smoking in British Popular Culture,
1800–2000. Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press, 2000.

TOTEMISM
Totemism refers to a specific set of practices within
mainly indigenous religions and spiritualities where
an object, animal, or plant is idolized as the protector
and watcher of a clan or individual. Whereas some
earlier theorists, such as Émile Durkheim, claim that
totems served as the foundations for religion, others, such as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, contend
that totems are social instruments that govern moral
boundaries based on the Oedipus complex. Claude
Lévi-Strauss offers a different interpretation, suggesting that totems of clans or tribes are actually outward
signs or symbols of the group’s uniqueness to others.
Within contemporary consumer culture, these theoretical insights, grounded in anthropological research,
are significant in understanding the consumption and
use of material objects.
The word totem is derived from the Ojibway, or
Chippewa, tribes of North America, who utilized
the term to identify the specific species of animals
that the clans were named after. They also serve as
a spiritual tool for both the clan and the individual.
Within this culture and others, such as the indigenous culture of Australia, totems are protectors and
guides and as such are considered sacred. Due to the
value of these, taboos often are placed on the killing
and consuming of the animals that are represented as
the clan’s totem. Furthermore, totems are often the
object of worship and ascend to the status of deity.

The word totem, however, was not extensively used
across native cultures. Rather, it began to be used by
Western disciplines to describe the connection of the
clan spiritually to the natural world.
The problem of totemism as Lévi-Strauss
describes, begins with English anthropologists
J. F. McLennan, W. Robertson Smith, and Sir James
Frazer when they began to compare primitive cultures
against more supposedly advanced Western cultures.
These early thinkers attempted to establish the origins
of totemism by seeking to reveal a theoretical reasoning to what appeared to be an abnormal practice to
the Westerner (Poole 1973). Yet, it was this need to
explain the practices of the primitive cultures that
led to the invention of the term totemism. As a result
of this, a substantial range of analytical work on the
subject emerged, particularly in the early 1900s.
French sociologist Durkheim provided, for
instance, one of the most informative discussions
on the use of totems in his book The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life. Using Robertson Smith’s
earlier ethnography on the spirituality of Aboriginal
Australians, Durkheim sought for a sociological
explanation for religion. He believed that using these
primitive cultures as an empirical guide would allow
the theorist to come closer to the origins of religious
thought. From here, Durkheim argued a now famous
distinction, that of the sacred and the profane. The
sacred was not, however, just gods and spirits; rather,
it could be seen in the way cultures worshipped animals, objects, and people. Durkheim believed that
these things had no “inherently sacred” (1912/1995,
84) value but rather acquired their higher status
through cultural expression. Sacred objects, for
instance, sustain sacredness only through rituals and
rites that bring the collective together in large groups
and generate positive feelings that are attributed to the
sacred object. Thus, for Durkheim, the sacred object
requires continual ritual activity and separation from
the profane world to maintain its high value.
Totems, for Durkheim, play an important role in
the religious nature of primitive cultures in this sense.
Cultures that use totems repeatedly used rituals to
worship their animal god and also developed specific
taboos that prohibited the profane use of the totem
or the animal it depicted. In some cases, this meant
not harming or eating the animal that the totem was
modeled after. However, the collective worship of a
totem was not about the supernatural for Durkheim.
Rather, he made the claim that totemism served

Totemism

the purpose of social and moral order. In actuality,
totems were signs or emblems of the clan itself and
as such, when worshipped, the clan unknowingly
was worshipping itself. Durkheim made this proposition by arguing that individuals in primitive societies desired moral guidance and authority. When in
large groups, social and moral norms are encouraged
but primitive cultures are not able to identify where
these emerge from. As such, they attribute this social
order to a higher being, and thus totems are created. Subsequently, totemism is not the worship of
a supernatural order but an unknowing worship of
a social order. Modern-day examples of this can be
seen in the patriotic worship of the flag as a symbol
of higher sacred values of duty that are clearly linked
back to social order.
Another key figure in the discussion of totems was
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who, in 1918, wrote
the book Totem and Taboo. In this book, split into
four chapters, Freud recounts anthropological work
from key figures such as Frazer. He claims that
totems serve, as Durkheim also claimed, to unite
social clans. However, unlike the latter, Freud argued
a pointed psychological motivation behind totemism. In particular, he contends that the taboos surrounding totems that include exogamy, the practice
of forbidding marriage within tribes, are primitive
manifestations of the Oedipus complex. Based on
the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, Freud proposed
that the totem itself is a manifestation of the father
of the clan, which is worshipped as an alleviation of
the guilt for the desires of males for patricide and
sexual relations with mothers. The forbidden practice of intra-clan marriage was a key illustration for
Freud of the Oedipus complex in effect. However,
the discussion of the totem by Freud demonstrated
the power of the object on an individual psyche. The
object here has a distinct moral capacity, defining
social boundaries that have an impact on behavior
and the ego.
Lévi-Strauss was another key figure in the development of theoretically understanding totemism.
The need to discover underlying human conditions
that underpinned the creation of totems, he argued,
was a fallacy and an illusion. In his book Totemism
(1973), Lévi-Strauss calls into question much of the
intellectual work accomplished on totemic religion,
including Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious
Life. He argues, unlike his counterparts, that totems
were in essence a form of classification. On one

1461

hand, they are used to classify the natural world into
distinct categories. On the other, these classifications
are then used to represent the clan itself to differentiate it from other clans. Totemic emblems and symbols are used by cultures to claim some individuality
from the whole of human race, such as nationalities
or surnames. As such, totemism is the representation
of group identity.
The important agreement between the three,
however, is that the object has a symbolic value that
underpins its functionality. An item from consumer
culture can be sacred, requiring ritualistic type protection from outside influences, as Durkheim may
propose. Or it may serve to connect to deeper psychological forces that define social boundaries and
morality (Freud 1918/1950). Or, in the case of LéviStrauss, it may also serve to distinguish social groups
from others, such as the football jersey or school
uniform. In recent times, however, these conceptualizations of totems are apparent within consumer
culture research.
For instance, Irene Meijer, in her 1998 article
“Advertising Citizenship,” argues that consumer
advertising can create positive outcomes through
the construction of “civic capital.” From a “performative perspective,” she contends that advertising
has the power to “tell valuable stories of the good
life” in postmodern culture. Brands become icons
of collective identities, which have an impact on the
psychology of the self in ways similar to those of
Durkheim’s or Freud’s subjects of analysis. In other
instances however, such as critic Christopher Lasch,
the organization of the consumer brand as a totem
of modern culture is a symptom of the lamentable
state of modern society. It serves to fill an unfulfilled
need for personal satisfaction. Yet, as Mary Douglas
and Baron Isherwood and Celia Lury have argued,
consumer objects that act like totems serve to connect others socially, as well as hold deep psychological
meaning for the self.
Nick Osbaldiston
See also Anthropology; Branding; Collective Identity;
Durkheim, Émile; Identity; Lévi-Strauss, Claude;
Structuralism; Taboo

Further Readings
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of
Goods: Toward an Anthropology of Consumption.
New York: Norton, 1982.

1462

Tourism Studies

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
New York: Free Press, 1995. First published 1912.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward. Theories of Primitive Religion.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of
Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and
Neurotics. London: Routledge, 2001. First published in
German in 1913.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin
University Books, 1973.
Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Meijer, Irene. “Advertising Citizenship: An Essay on the
Performative Power of Consumer Culture.” Media,
Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (1998): 235–249.
Poole, Roger. “Introduction.” In Totemism, Claude LéviStrauss, 9–63. London: Penguin University Books, 1973.
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred. Structure and Function in
Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses. London: Free
Press, 1965.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and
Politics. London: Sage, 2007.

TOURISM STUDIES
Tourism studies refers to a still evolving, multidisciplinary academic field that examines various dimensions of travel, ostensibly for leisure purposes. In the
sense that tourism is a discretionary “mass” leisure
practice of the developed world, is built on technological capacities, and has largely flourished as a
liberating practice within capitalist societies, it can
be seen as both a product and a project of modernity. Tourism studies have emerged over the past
forty years and can be characterized as a complex
field that mirrors the increasing complexities of both
domestic and international tourism. Tourism studies covers scholarly interests relating to three interrelated dimensions of tourism. First, it focuses on the
movements, motivations, behaviors, practices, and
performances of people as tourists. This extends to
the relationships that emerge between tourists and
the host communities. In this sense, tourist studies
draws heavily on sociological and anthropological
traditions to interrogate these relationships. Second,
tourism studies examines the changing physical and
organizational structures and institutions that allow
tourism to take place. Broadly speaking, tourism is
used as shorthand for a diverse number of sectors of
production that collectively, though not exclusively,

constitute the tourist experience. The economic realities of tourism as a source of revenue and employment, and as an instrument of development, has
imbued tourism studies with a strong leaning toward
economics, business management, and international relations. Third, tourism studies increasingly
addresses the represented and mediated forms of
peoples and places that constitute the experience of
the tourist and that problematize concepts of space,
identity, and social relations. In seeking to bring
together these three dimensions, and with a focus
on issues relating to leisure, taste, exchange, and the
commodification of places, peoples, and pasts and
resultant symbolic economies, tourism studies draws
on a central understanding of the consumptive process and the cultures in which consumption operates.
This inevitably takes us into the realms of “crosscultural” consumption as tourists continually negotiate, re-negotiate, confirm, and challenge not only the
boundaries of the represented world but the “real”
world as experienced, performed, and practiced,
together with the boundaries of self and “other.”
At one level, given the sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of tourism, not only as a major form of
mobility but also as an increasingly significant sector in a majority of economies in the developed and
developing world, it is not surprising that it has
become the focus of scholarly attention. On another
level, it remains the case, in some quarters, that tourism studies struggles for academic legitimacy and is
all too easily characterized as somewhat frivolous,
attracting some resistance from more established
and classical academic interests. Criticisms relate, in
part, to the novelty of the field, its sheer scope, and
the ways it shifts between disciplines, subdisciplines,
and methodologies. Nonetheless, tourism studies has
managed to assert itself over the past forty years or
so in parallel to the democratization of international
travel and the period when the patterns, processes,
and impacts of tourism were being firmly established
and enacted.
Indicators of the extent and influence of tourism studies are imprecise and fragmentary and, to
an extent, mirror the diversity and the fluidity of
approaches, which in turn reflect the realities of
tourism as an amalgam of structures and practices.
A starting point is to reflect on the forecast by the
United Nations World Tourism Organization that,
by the year 2020, international arrivals are expected
to reach over 1.6 billion. This figure will comprise
1.2 billion intraregional arrivals and 0.4 billion

Tourism Studies

long-haul travelers. Europe is scheduled to be the top
receiving region with 717 million tourists, followed
by East Asia and the Pacific with 397 million, the
Americas with 282 million, and Africa, the Middle
East, and South Asia. Above-average growth regions
are predicted to be East Asia and the Pacific, South
Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Despite recent
economic downturns, the overall upward trends
remain, with some shifts in interregional travel and
some destinations capturing markets from others. In
addition to these international tourist figures, there
are also significant volumes of domestic tourism
(tourists within countries) that vary considerably in
terms of their contributions to gross national product
levels. It is the case that sustained growth in tourism
and attendant political recognition of tourism as a
mechanism of growth, development, and diversification have been a key driver in establishing the field
of tourism studies. Importantly, the focus of study
reaches far beyond the idea of the tourist as a conventional consumer of tangible goods. Initially, tourists
consume vacations to destinations without directly
encountering such destinations and effectively are
consuming the vast spectrum of mediated representations of places and peoples. While on vacation, tourists consume some goods and services in the same
way they would at home; others they will consume
differently. But the focus on tourists as consumers
is only part of a wider picture. The tourism sector
as a vast, overlapping, and “messy” agglomeration
of public organizations and private businesses, large
companies, and small enterprises also engages in the
practices of consumption—both real and symbolic.
Moreover, tourism studies not only engages with
the study of tourists and the tourism sector but
extends to consider the relationships with those who
do not engage in tourism. John Urry suggested that
we are all tourists all of the time, but the reality is
that although most of the world has been touched by
tourism, the majority of the world’s population does
not engage in tourism but increasingly is cast into
the role of “hosts” for tourists. This points to the
inherent global asymmetry within any conception of
international tourism, but here, again, it is tourism
that is widely heralded as a means to redress global
economic and social imbalances. Hence, we have
witnessed, over recent years, the rise of pro-poor
tourism, not only as a practical mechanism through
which disadvantaged and marginal communities
with limited resources can participate in the development process but also as a symbolic demonstration

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of the linkages that exist between environmental degradation, social injustice, and poverty and the ways
to tackle these.

Economic Beginnings and an
Obvious Cultural Turn
Michael Hall and Stephen Page trace the study of
tourism as a collective and organized form of leisure
travel (as opposed to elite and more individual travel
and exploration) to the development of the social sciences (in an Anglo-American context) in the 1920s.
Certainly in the development of post-1945 economic
and human geography, tourism and the spatial patterns and changes generated by tourists attracted
increased attention as land use and transportation
networks shifted from solely serving the productive
industries and instead were directed to the service/
leisure economy. Although rarely explicitly mentioned, and with some retrospective interpretation,
tourism is implied within wider conceptualizations of
late capitalism, ideas surrounding the postindustrial
economy, and considerations of global culture and
globalization and postmodernism.
The development of tourism studies has inevitably
reflected its role as a driver for economic development and its capacity as an instrument of diversification for deindustrializing economies and regional/
local regeneration. Emphasis on understanding the
economic impacts of tourism (positive and negative)
drawing on conventional macro- and microeconomic theory, together with a prominence given to
the management of tourism directed toward maximizing its economic impact, still pervades much of
tourism studies. Over the years, elements of critique
have been widely introduced into tourism management programs in recognition of wider concerns
relating to the environment, social justice, fair trade,
and so on, while still reflecting an overall businessoriented ethic. This ameliorated approach is arguably the dominant model in tourism studies and has
been widely transferred to the mega economies of
East Asia as well as to postsocialist Eastern Europe.
However, in addition to what could be referred to as
a “softening” of tourism studies through economic
critique, there has also been a more considered and
incremental move toward a more philosophical and
transdisciplinary approach to tourism studies.
A key influence in allowing tourism to surface as
a field of scholarly activity was Dean MacCannell,
who made tourism wholly explicit as an important

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Tourism Studies

element in modernity. MacCannell examined the
ways in which “things” are transformed into tourist
products and effectual signifiers of culture and identity, and, in doing so, he made an important linkage
between tourism as a function of economy and tourism as embedded in, and shaping of, culture. At the
same time, MacCannell’s work highlighted an ongoing tension between economy and culture, which
continues to constructively feed the study of tourism.
On one hand, any so-called cultural turn in tourism
studies can be seen in counterpoint and as a form of
resistance to the hardwired economy of tourism. On
the other hand, a more inclusive and more humanistic
approach would seem an inevitable move from the
economic abstractions of reality toward reality itself
and the complexities of the tourists as people and
their interactions with the world and “other” peoples.
In seeking to understand the emergent humanistic
nature of tourism studies and drawing on the work
of Marie-Françoise Lanfant and Nelson Graburn,
tourism can be positioned as an “international
social fact.” Lanfant and Graburn draw on Émile
Durkheim’s notion of the social fact and consider the
“total” social fact as an activity that resonates with,
and carries its effects through, societies and across the
realms of economics, politics, and religion. Tourism
draws together various aspects of social life, its
material and immaterial dimensions, and organizes
and influences distinct institutions, practices, and
performances. Conceptualizing tourism in this way
highlights the ways in which its interrogation can
be seen to cut across various disciplines. However,
it would seem fair to say that tourism studies has
struggled to weave together multiple disciplinary
strands into any coherent whole. An approach that
could be likened more to a series of “interventions”
from well-established disciplines continues to run
parallel to any semblance of what Chris Rojek and
John Urry refer to as a process of institutionalization.
Such interventions are clearly visible in the academic
press and at conferences.
There have been a number of generally inconclusive discussions that have sought to articulate
the value of tourism studies and the relationships
it shares with other disciplines. A majority of these
seem to demonstrate, at the same time, the strength
of tourism studies as a field and its insecurities. In
works by the likes of Charlotte Echtner and Tazim
Jamal, Chris Ryan, and John Tribe, there emerges
a questioning of the field of tourism and the

relationships it shares with other disciplines. This is
far from being a negative observation but rather indicates a genuine reflexivity within the field. In part,
mobilizing the term tourism studies implies the status
of a discipline or, at the very least, the aspiration to
become a discipline. This perceived position tends
to invoke reactions from the traditional disciplines,
ranging from wholesale appropriation—where the
study of tourism is said to have always been a feature
of inquiry and subsequently can never be “owned”
outside of a particular methodological approach and
must be interpreted via the accepted canonical literature of that discipline—to refusal to deal with tourism without selectively reconstructing it so that it can
fit as an appendage of more salient and “worthy”
phenomena. As mentioned earlier, tourism studies is
not unique in this respect. The same debates have
raged with regard to leisure, management, cultural,
environmental, and development studies.

Ever-Expanding Complexity and
Holistic Approaches
Tourism exists as a modern, vast, and unwieldy category under which most forms of leisure travel and
related practices and experiences can be situated. It
works on the idea and the technological reality that
different parts of the world can be connected, allowing flows of people to move from home to destination. Over and above reasons of trade and military
interest, the vast majority of the world is interconnected by airlines moving people around for leisure
purposes. In addition, a highly complex system of
telecommunications also binds the world together,
and although we may speak of the “virtual” in this
regard, we are bound to the multimaterialities that
make international tourism possible. More than ever,
our mobile phones, laptops, cameras, and banking
machines remind us of the extensive hardware networks that underpin international tourism. Although
we are frequently unaware of the systems that connect us, they exist; are organized, regulated, and
maintained; and cut across, and at points even undermine, national, political, and cultural boundaries.
Jens Jacobsen calls these “complicated abstract systems,” that, apart from enabling tourism, also provide
the tourist with some semblance of familiarity.
This hardwiring of tourism, as a well-ordered set
of structures that make mass leisure mobilities possible, allows us to imagine, and talk of, a tourism

Tourism Studies

industry, or a tourism sector. In turn, this potent imagery of the large, the organized, and the increasingly
efficient persists in inferring notions of uniformity and
homogeneity. Despite calls for a systems approach in
tourism studies, surprisingly little work has been conducted on the vast superstructures that make tourism
possible. In part, this relates to the practical problems
of both knowing and accessing the points of ingress
to a complex and often opaque global system. But
although we cannot fully understand the complexities
of some mega transnational system on which tourism
is layered, we do experience this system every time
we check into the airport or use a credit card in some
restaurant on the other side of the world. We cannot
easily conceptualize the patterns and connections, the
wires and the microchips that allow us to be mobile,
but we are mobile. The spaces through which we
move as tourists are part of one global interconnected
ecosystem that functions above and beyond any tourist needs. In essence, and with some exceptions, we
don’t move through “tourism space”; rather, we move
through space as a tourist. This is meaningful space,
not abstract but real space we can participate in, feel
part of, and shape, in line with Michel de Certeau’s
notion of space being a practiced place.
In counterpoint to the impersonal, global interconnectedness of tourism, together with the immense
time dimensions across which it operates, the activities, behaviors, and experiences of the tourist are
complicated, intimate, bounded in time and space,
and personally, socially, and culturally meaningful.
Here is the great paradox of tourism: the complex
systems that have transnational reach, that cut across
vast spaces, and that are symbolic of technological
and communicative power are necessary but not
sufficient for tourism to take place. Rather, they are
distant in the background to a point where they are
largely incomprehensible and irrelevant to the ordinary tourist.
The doing of tourism within social space (and
acknowledging the dynamics of normative social
interaction) is centered on a series of intimate experiences, some of which are shared and some of which
are not. In a similar dialectical frame, some tourism
relates to the experiencing of the extraordinary while
some is rooted in ordinary and habitual patterns of
behavior. The experiences of tourists also work in a
series of unique oppositions between, for instance,
being at home and being away from home, between
moments of confidence and moments of angst, and

1465

between moments of responsibility and moments of
abandonment. Such intimate experiences, which we
can say are particular to the being of a tourist—that is,
in a mobile, temporary, liminal condition—constitute
something that, de facto, lies outside of ordinary life,
although it invariably carries traces of it. A further
layer of complexity is added to all of this in the form
of the multilayered processes of mediation and representation. The tourist is “transtextured,” in a sense,
as he or she travels, having learned and having been
exposed to the accumulated knowledge of peoples,
places, and pasts as communicated through various
narrative forms.
As Krzysztof Przeclawski, Neil Leiper, and Mike
Robinson and Tazim Jamal, among others, have
argued, we need to conceptualize tourism in a more
holistic way and to acknowledge its interconnectedness with the multiple spheres of the natural and
human environment. The milieu of real and direct
experiences, alongside the richness of the human
imagination and its myriad projections generating
myriad expectations, constitutes the doing of tourism. While recognizing the clear existence of some
larger materialistic system that allows tourism to
happen, and thus a vast diversity of intimate experiences to take place, if there is a universal at work
here, it would seem to be humanity itself. This should
continue to direct the attention of tourism studies
toward a holistic and humanistic approach to the
understanding of tourism. As Rudy Koshar suggests,
this should not necessitate the generation of some
grand narrative or explanatory model of tourism,
but rather it should point to “a set of useful heuristic
constellations, whose relationship with one another
remains to be elucidated” (2000, 13).
Mike Robinson
See also Consuming the Environment; Globalization;
Grand Tour; Leisure; Postindustrial Society;
Postmodernism; Spaces and Places; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Echtner, Charlotte, and Tazim Jamal. “The Disciplinary
Dilemma of Tourism Studies.” Annals of Tourism
Research 24 (1997): 869–883.
Hall, C. Michael, and Stephen J. Page. The Geography of
Tourism and Recreation: Environment, Place and Space.
London: Routledge, 2005.

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Tourist Gaze

Jacobsen, Jens K. S. “The Tourist Bubble and the
Europeanisation of Holiday Travel.” Journal of Tourism
and Cultural Change 1, no. 1 (2003): 71–87.
Koshar, Rudy. German Travel Cultures. Oxford: Berg,
2000.
Lanfant, Marie-Françoise, and Nelson H. H. Graburn.
“International Tourism Reconsidered: The Principle of
the Alternative.” In Tourism Alternatives: Potentials and
Problems in the Development of Tourism, edited by
Valene L. Smith and William R. Eadington, 88–112.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Leiper, Neil. “Why ‘The Tourism Industry’ Is Misleading as
a Generic Expression: The Case for the Plural Variation,
‘Tourism Industries.’” Tourism Management 29, no. 2
(2008): 237–251.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the
Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
Przeclawski, K. “Tourism as the Subject of Interdisciplinary
Research.” In Tourism Research: Critiques and
Challenges, edited by Douglas Pearce and Richard
Butler, 9–19. London: Routledge, 1993.
Robinson, Mike, and Tazim Jamal. “Tourism Studies—Past
Omissions, Emergent Challenges.” In The SAGE
Handbook of Tourism Studies, edited by Mike
Robinson and Tazim Jamal, 693–702. London: Sage,
2009.
Rojek, Chris, and John Urry. Touring Cultures:
Transformations of Travel and Theory. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Ryan, Chris. “Academia-Industry Tourism Research Links:
States of Confusion.” Pacific Tourism Review 5, no. 3
(2001): 83–96.
Tribe, John. “Tourism, Knowledge and the Curriculum.” In
An International Handbook of Tourism Education,
edited by David Airey and John Tribe, 47–60.
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1994.
United Nations World Tourism Organization. Tourism
2020 Vision. www.unwto.org/facts/eng/vision.htm.
Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.

TOURIST GAZE
Tourist gaze expresses the dynamics associated with
construction of tourist experience, the complexity of
the social organization of tourism, and the systematic
nature of these processes. It allows us to articulate
what separates tourist experience from everyday living and to illuminate ways in which production and
consumption of tourist goods and services have wide
implications for social relations. The social organization of these processes encompasses a number of

elements, including carefully chosen images about
places to see; narratives that speak about the uniqueness of their history, culture, and heritage; varieties of
performative practices through which tourist experiences are embodied; and a network of professionals
and institutions providing services to ensure that particular tourist experiences can be generated. These
developments are closely related to the emergence of
mass tourism, consumerism, and commodification of
places and cultural practices. The gaze is an organizing principle that structures encounters among tourists and people and places visited at multiple levels;
it helps to create experience that is felt as extraordinary and, in this way, memorable and also implicates
people into an ongoing and systematic set of social
relations through competition for tourist attention.
The tourist gaze suggests that tourist experience involves a particular way of seeing. Images
and myths about what to see tend to be distinctive,
striking, unusual, and extraordinary. Such visual
and narrative depictions of tourist destinations are
strategically promoted by the marketing industry
to contrast with people’s daily routine and work
schedules at home. These imaginaries are captured
through signs that signify a particular fantasy. A
photo of a couple kissing on the streets of Paris is not
meant to capture simply youthful behavior on a busy
urban street but rather the idea of romantic Paris.
Similarly, a photo of the Grand Canyon does not
simply signify an unusual geological formation but
rather the idea of unmatched natural beauty. Such
gazes help create anticipation in travelers about what
they will encounter during their trip, and these gazes
fuel desire to experience these particular imaginaries.
Varieties of gazes organize anticipations of a wide
range of experiences, from romance and pleasure to
health and education. Organization of such experiences also implies different kinds of socialities, from
private and solitary to collective involving festivity
and conviviality. The tourist gaze signifies something
distinctive about tourist experiences that come to
be endowed with importance and significance, and
remembered by the tourist as unique.
In historical terms, the tourist gaze emerges from
changes in the organization of travel, innovations in
communications technology, developments of travel
infrastructure, transformations of the economy,
and the changing tastes of travelers. On their trips
for pleasure and cultural purposes, the elites of
Imperial Rome made use of a network of roads and
various providers of hospitality. By the late Middle

Tourist Gaze

Ages, a network of hospices and mass production of
religious handbooks encouraged the spread of pilgrimage so that in the fifteenth century, historians
already note the existence of regularly organized
tours from Venice to the Holy Land. What is known
as the Grand Tour flourished among the sons of the
aristocracy a century later. They traveled to prepare
themselves for political leadership at home by educating themselves about the languages and ways of
life in faraway places. Starting with the sixteenth
century, historians begin to note a gradual transformation from traveling for knowledge through
opportunities for conversations to traveling for the
purposes of seeing something with one’s own eyes
through eyewitness observation. The development
of the idea of scientific knowledge—coupled with
the growth of professional classes, availability of the
rail system, proliferation of guidebooks, spread of
packaged tours, and the invention of the camera—
facilitated the emergence of scenic tourism and the
practice of sightseeing. These become the basis for
the emergence of the tourism industry, as discretionary income grows across the population and travel
becomes available to ever larger numbers of people.
Throughout the past century, the scale of tourism has
continued to grow, entering what is known as the
global economy.
Tourism has become a central component of the
processes of globalization, subsuming ever larger
numbers of travelers in most every part of the globe,
including, recently, outer space. From small towns
to metropolitan centers, from the most remote parts
of the globe to areas that have long been placed
prominently on the tourist map, places compete for
the growing flow of tourists by inventing and reconfiguring themselves to be able to attract visitors.
The most unlikeliest of places have developed tourism infrastructure, from concentration camps, jails,
and military occupation sites, to places associated
with mass murder and sacrifice, poverty-stricken
neighborhoods, and defunct and dilapidated industrial sites. Such places and their populations enter a
worldwide network of restaurants, museums, tourist
information centers, tour operators, tourist agencies,
tour guides, marketing enterprises, transportation
corporations, mass media outlets, and TV travel programs. In hopes to be able to enter the global order
through tourism, the cultural and social life of people
and their places becomes commodified.
In the most basic terms, commodification of places
and people involves their ability to be effectively

1467

represented through images and myths in such a way
that they can attract tourist attention. Tourist representations are based on selected elements of history,
heritage, culture, ways of life, and various features
of townscape and landscape. These are captured
through photographs, maps, film, documentaries,
news, novels, postcards, souvenirs, travel blogs, and
the like. Such media enable this particular way of seeing a tourist destination to be endlessly reproduced
and globally disseminated. As more and more spots
around the globe compete to become tourist destinations, tourist gaze becomes an ever more perfected
marketing effort to maximize the potential of a destination. This effort involves an array of specialized
institutions and services, including consultancy firms,
university departments, professional conferences,
and various research centers. Such professionals
work together to develop signs that seek to transcend
the simple gaze captured through tourist images and
narratives and produce a carefully constructed destination concept. This process of concept construction
is referred to as destination branding.
In a highly competitive and overcrowded global
tourism market, tourist destination branding is an
agenda to create a distinct and compelling destination identity that is clearly and confidently differentiated from all other competitors. These efforts
include continuously perfecting criteria that evaluate the effectiveness of a particular brand, actively
pursuing venues to push the brand to the forefront
of people’s attention, and vigilantly devising procedures and measures to protect the brand from losing
its appeal. City and state governments are actively
participating in the efforts to pursue such opportunities. This is perhaps most visible in the fierce bidding
competitions to host highly visible global events such
as the Olympics, the World Cup, or World Expos.
Governments see such events as opportunities to
build, restore, or redesign their social and physical
environments to make them compatible with the
concept of tourist identity they are promoting. As
the world’s attention is focused on the brand, dissent
from these practices often remains invisible. Poor and
crime-ridden neighborhoods are heavily policed to
demonstrate to the global audiences that a particular
country and its urban areas are a safe place to visit.
The tourist flow is engulfed by surveillance technologies and security procedures to preempt possible acts
of violence against tourists and, in this way, ensure
uninterrupted tourist flows. Tensions over which
aspects of history, heritage, and culture are to be

1468

Toys

included in the brand are pushed away from global
media coverage, as are struggles over whether or not
their locales should even become a tourist destination. Also downplayed are power struggles over how
state branding efforts should shape identities of local
minorities, particularly the racialized, the indigenous,
and the poor.
The concept of the tourist gaze has proven to be
highly influential. Nevertheless, critics suggest that
its emphasis on representation and the power of the
visual may have a Western bias. What is needed are
historical-comparative and cross-cultural studies
of the processes of construction of tourist experiences that pay close attention to the dynamics of
practice and acting in different tourism contexts.
At the local levels, detailed ethnographic attention
to performative practices and framing activities may
generate insights into possible cross-cultural differences in how the tourist experience is embodied
and with what emotions. It may also broaden our
understanding of the varieties of social relationships
such interactions may have a potential to create, not
only among the tourists but also between the tourists and the locals. At the global level, a historicalcomparative approach to tourism practices may be
able to illuminate how the dynamics surrounding the
construction of tourist experiences have been changing over time in different sociocultural contexts and
suggest to what extent cultural variations have been
able to withstand the homogenizing tendencies of
the tourist gaze in the global economy. The challenge
remains to show in comparative empirical terms
how, through tourism experiences, conditions are
created for self-reflection, group empowerment, and
visions of alternative modernities.
Vida Bajc
See also Commodification; Embodiment; Globalization;
Grand Tour; Leisure; Photography and Video; Spaces
and Places; Tourism Studies

Further Readings
Adler, Judith. “Origins of Sightseeing.” Annals of Tourism
Research 16 (1989): 7–29.
Bajc, Vida. “Christian Pilgrimage Groups in Jerusalem:
Framing the Experiences through Linear Meta-Narrative.”
Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel
Writing 7, no. 1 (2006): 101–128.
Bruner, Edward. Culture on Tour. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005.

Edensor, Tim. Tourists at the Taj: Performance and
Meaning at a Symbolic Site. London: Routledge, 1998.
Larsen, Jonas. “Families Seen Sightseeing: Performativity of
Tourist Photography.” Space and Culture 8, no. 4
(2005): 416–434.
Lee, Young-Sook. “Tourist Gaze: Universal Concept?”
Tourism, Culture & Communication 3, no. 2 (2001):
93–99.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the
Leisure Class. New York: Schocken, 1976.
Robinson, Mike, and David Picard, eds. The Framed
World: Tourism, Tourists, and Photography. Farnham,
UK: Ashgate, 2009.
Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.
Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002.

TOYS
In its broadest sense, toy refers to a plaything, an
object regarded as providing amusement or pleasure, commonly associated with children. In its
conceptual application, the term toy has no fixed,
unitary meaning. Rather, an object’s recognition as
a toy depends on its setting, the prior experience of
the user, and culturally derived associations. Toys
are matters of cultural and economic importance,
operating in a multibillion-dollar global industry,
including vast secondary markets based around
adult collecting cultures. Indeed, some toys have
reached the status of cultural icon, such as Barbie,
attracting a majority share of academic and popular
attention (Rogers 1999).
Yet, toys constitute a restricted field of study. This
is evidenced in the disparate nature of toy research,
which spans disciplines as varied as psychology,
education, history, anthropology, communication
and media studies, gender studies, and geography.
While these studies are identifiable with one another
through categorical association, little work has been
done to put these fields into critical conversation
or situate them in relation to wider theories of consumption and consumer culture.
This undue neglect of toys may be accounted for
by the low credibility accorded to children’s culture
within academia and toys’ explicit association with
play, which is placed in opposition to the rational
concerns of Western societies. Drawing on personal
childhood experiences and engagement with toys
through parenthood, people often present themselves

Toys

as an authority on toys without feeling the need to
defer to academic scholarship.

Toys as Training Tools
Traditionally, the study of toys centered on concerns
with child development. Inspired by canonical cognitive models from, for example, Jean Piaget and Lev
Vygotsky, developmental psychologists and social
philosophers have examined the role of play in children’s development and, subsequently, the role of
toys in children’s play. Here toys are recognized as
objects children act on, causing their character to be
abstracted. They are categorized according to typologies, such as social (e.g., playing cards) and isolate
(e.g., puzzles), and used as markers in developmental progressions of play, gradually disappearing in the
sequential transitions that demonstrate a child’s social
and intellectual advancement. Within this framework, different toys are deemed appropriate, and in
some cases necessary, for different stages of development. This basic categorization of toys as “good” or
“bad” continues to permeate popular understandings. A preoccupation with cognitive development is
witnessed in this work’s quantitative character, its reliance on measurements and modeling tactics, and its
focus on preschoolers or children in their first years of
primary education as subjects of study.
In contrast, an alternative wave of scholarship
has addressed toys as instruments of socialization,
reading them for their ideological content. According
to this scholarship, toys are viewed as reproducing
society’s most troubling features, such as racism,
sexism, and a preoccupation with war and violence. They are deemed important because children
engage with them before they can read or understand
spoken language. This structural approach to children’s culture has been predominantly developed
through feminist theory’s concern with how gender
is constructed through children’s texts and toys. In
assuming the effects of toys in a priori manner, this
structural approach employs a narrow definition of
consumption that understands consumer behavior to
be stipulated by production.

Toys as Commodities
Since the late 1980s, there has been a marked shift
in the conceptualization of toys. Growing recognition and concern about the increasing integration of
toys and media in the commercial marketplace and,

1469

by extension, children’s lives have prompted attention to toys as commodities. Scholars with interests in
psychology and communication have examined the
effects of using televisual media as an integral part
of a commercial strategy on play. This work places
toys in the context of a highly intertextual culture
of fantasy, far removed from concern with training
children for adulthood. Critics argue that children are
no longer able to engage in authentic, spontaneous,
imaginative play because narratives and scenarios are
presented to them preformed. Stephen Kline suggests
that these media-driven toys incite consumerism and
naturalize acquisitive behavior. Moral panics have
emerged around this perception of children as unsuspecting victims of a drive for profit, with play increasingly viewed as fertile ground for the shallow and
meretricious. The profanity of consumerism is seen
to conflict with a notion of childhood as sacred. This
has resulted in moralistic judgments being levied at a
toy industry portrayed as ruthless and manipulative.
Gary Cross notes that an ironic nostalgia for a
way things never were and for an alternate sense of
being that can never be recaptured plays a powerful
role in criticism of mass culture and children’s consumption. It is also evidenced in adult cultures of toy
collecting and the recent growth of retro toys. This
nostalgia obscures continuities in the history of the
toy industry. Historical studies illustrate how industrial developments are read in isolation from the
changing structure of postindustrial economies and
the changing values of society. Historically, toys have
shared an intimate relationship with commerce: dolls
began their long history as advertisers of the latest
women’s fashions. Commercialization and integrated
marketing strategies alone cannot be held accountable for the burgeoning array of mass-marketed
toys available for purchase. A changing discourse of
childhood and a shift to a child-centered approach
to parenting has allowed children their own material culture of play and contributed to the rise of the
“I want” acquisitive culture.
A small but growing number of studies are now
situating toys within a broader understanding of
consumption as an active process, conceiving child
consumers as competent social actors in their own
right. In these studies, there is an emphasis on children’s ability to absorb, combine, and rework media
in their play culture, using preformed scenarios as
inspiration for new narratives. Jeffrey Goldstein,
David Buckingham, and Gilles Brougere note that

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Toys

children’s culture depends on energetic activity as
children are continually engaged in the development
of the “multiliteracies” necessary to move flexibly
between different kinds of “text” in the modern
media-saturated world.

Application to Theory and Public Debate
Through the study of toys, we can investigate more
thoroughly the historical development, social significance, and technological innovation of the modern
consumer society. The history of the toy industry
reveals significant developments in manufacturing,
marketing, and retailing. It details the rising dominance of large corporations in global markets, the
rise of a new consumer market, the development of
comprehensive marketing strategies, and a shift to
warehouse outlets away from department stores and
independent shops. In particular, toys bring into focus
the growth of integrated marketing strategies based
on brand licensing and character merchandising.
This industrial expansion reflects a general neoliberal commitment to unrestrained markets and constant change. Toys emphasize the inherent dynamism
of consumer culture through their association with
fast-paced entertainment product cycles. As a key
arena for fads and crazes, they showcase the role of
novelty in consumer society. Consumption is shown
to have not only extended geographically (including
the export of consumer capitalism to many regions
of the third world) but also intensified temporally.
Moreover, toys forcefully express an ongoing tension between a simultaneous desire for novelty, on the
one hand, and stability and continuity, on the other.
Contemporary moral tensions surrounding marketing and consumption are an expression of distaste
toward the consumerism of modern capitalist societies. In this regard, the study of toys recounts the
reproduction of consumerist sensibilities and moral
values across generations. Further, the influence of
Japanese popular culture on global toy markets offers
another perspective on the recent re-centering of globalization, including the expansion of new consumer
markets and the commodification and consumption
of cultural difference.
The study of toys sheds light on the social significance of consumption through its relation to other
social domains, such as education and technology.
Toys express the blurring boundaries between entertainment and education, with the development of
media literacy emerging as the implicit curriculum of

toy culture. These developments speak of a modern
cultural concern with progress and entrepreneurship
and divulge particular notions and social moralities
of child development and the commodification of
the self.
Furthermore, the historical development of toys
is bound up with the advancement of mechanization that gave rise to automata, the advancement of
artificial intelligence through interactive playthings,
and the development of computing by stimulating
the user friendliness of technology. Toys play a crucial role in bringing technological innovations into
public consciousness.

Methodological Issues and
Future Directions
Greater attention needs to be paid to experiences and
meanings of toys in more-than-cognitive everyday
life-worlds. This requires a shift from a concern with
reading toys for ideological content to a concern with
playing with toys, namely, empirical examinations of
how children make sense of and form attachments
with these commodities and the role toys play in family life and peer cultures. This shift addresses the gap
in ideology and reception inherent in approaches that
reduce toys to texts, thereby ensuring that toys do not
disappear too readily into adult theoretical discourse.
We need to attend to embodied uses and affective
responses offered by their materialities. Children’s
primary engagements with toys are concerned with
their operationality as material things. Finally, attention to adults’ consumption of toys would facilitate
greater appreciation of the role of nostalgia, play, and
imagination in our practices of consumption.
Tara Woodyer
See also Appropriation; Barbie Dolls; Childhood;
Consumer Socialization; Disney; Material Culture;
Nostalgia; Novelty

Further Readings
Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006.
Clark, Beverley L., and Margaret R. Higonnet, eds. Girls,
Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and
Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999.
Cross, Gary. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of
American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997.

Trade Standards
Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence
and Modern American Children’s Culture. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Goldstein, Jeffrey H., David Buckingham, and Gilles
Brougere, eds. Toys, Games and Media. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum, 2004.
Gottfried, Allen W., and Catherine Caldwell Brown. Play
Interactions: The Role of Toys and Parental
Involvement in Children’s Development. New York:
Free Press, 1985.
Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s
Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. London: Verso,
1993.
Rogers, Mary. Barbie Culture. London: Sage, 1999.
Woodyer, Tara. “Playing with Toys: The Animated
Geographies of Children’s Material Culture.” PhD diss.,
Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010.

TRADE STANDARDS
Trade standards are the “rules of the game” for trade
in international goods and services, essential for the
maintenance and reproduction of consumer culture.
The process of evolution of these trade standards
has been long and torturous. T. N. Srinivasan, while
discussing the historical development of the World
Trade Organization (WTO), provides a succinct history of this process. In 1930, facing a recession and
bowing down to the consequent domestic pressures
for protection, the United States passed the SmootHawley tariffs. As other countries retaliated, the
average worldwide tariff rate rose to 25 percent by
1933 (Krugman and Obstfeld 2009, 230). These high
tariffs and other trade restrictions led to a dramatic
fall in world trade and decline in total world production, which contributed to the deepening of the
American recession into a global depression and to
the outbreak of World War II. This bitter experience
showed the world, and especially the United States,
that restricting global commerce was a costly mistake
and made a strong case for liberalizing international
trade worldwide. Indeed, in 1934, in an unsuccessful
attempt to remedy this mistake, the U.S. Congress
passed the Reciprocal Tariff Act (RTA). The RTA
was enacted to facilitate bilateral trade agreements
between the United States and other nations and thus
roll back the earlier protectionist stance adopted by
the United States. After the end of World War II,

1471

this trend toward trade liberalization was continued
under the leadership of the United States, and multilateral negotiations to facilitate international trade
liberalization began between the representatives of
44 nations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. There
were calls for the formation of an international body,
to be called the International Trade Organization
(ITO), under whose aegis these multilateral negotiations for trade liberalization would be conducted. In
1947, as a temporary measure until the ITO formally
came into existence, trade negotiations between
these countries started under a provisional set of
rules that became known as the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Meanwhile, the idea
for the ITO ran into severe political opposition in
the United States, and the charter for the ITO was
never ratified. The ITO never emerged as the international trade body that it was supposed to become.
In its place, the GATT, which was initially designed
as a purely provisional agreement, became the de
facto arrangement under which trade negotiations
between nations began to be conducted. After several unsuccessful attempts to create an international
body to monitor world trade, and building on the
organizational structure of the GATT, the WTO was
finally established in 1995. Although the ambit of
the WTO is vastly extended compared to GATT, the
GATT rules concerning trade in goods also remain
in force under the WTO. However, besides GATT,
which covers agreements between nations on trade
standards related only to goods, the WTO standards cover standards for trade in services (GATS)
and standards for intellectual property rights (TRIPs)
as well. Authors Bernard Hoekman and Michel
Kostecki give a detailed account about the content,
structure, and the process of development of these
trade rules or standards. All the existing WTO standards are outlined in the WTO agreements. These
agreements are the result of the 1986–1994 Uruguay
Round of negotiations of the WTO. The WTO legal
texts contain four annexes that outline the general
principles and the substantive trading rules governing
member countries. Annex 1 has three parts. Annex
1A contains the extended GATT 1994 (the original
GATT agreement of 1947, which was amended in
the Uruguay Round of 1994). Annex 1B contains the
GATS. Annex 1C contains TRIPs. Besides these main
sections, which serve to facilitate negotiation and
effective implementation of multilateral trade agreements and trade standards among nations, there are
also provisions in the agreement for resolving trade

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Trade Standards

disputes between nations; these provisions appear in
Annex 2 (DSU—Dispute Settlement Understanding),
which contains standards or procedures for settling
trade-related conflicts between member nations.
Finally, Annex 3 contains standards for monitoring trade policy under surveillance procedures given
under the Trade Policy Review Mechanism.
These GATT/WTO rules can be viewed as codes
of conduct for trade policy. The GATT/WTO contains a set of specific principles that serve to guide
and regulate the trade policies or the trade standards of member states. According to Hoekman
and Kostecki, there are five key principles under
GATT/WTO that form the core of all existing and
future trade standards that must be followed by
all member states. The roots of most of the existing trade regulations can be traced back to one
or more of these principles. These principles are
Non-discrimination, Reciprocity, Enforceable
Commitments, Transparency, and Safety Valves.
In practice, the principle of nondiscrimination
is implemented in international trade rules via two
constituent standards that all members must abide
by. These are the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) and
the National Treatment (NT) standards. The MFN
standard for trade implies that a product made in
one member country cannot be treated less favorably
than a like product originating in any other country.
MFN is a basic standard of trade under GATT/WTO
rules. It applies unconditionally on all member countries and is not contingent on reciprocal trade concessions by other countries. Disputes can be brought
before the WTO Dispute Settlement Body by any
country alleging de jure or de facto violation of the
MFN standard by any other country. The closely
related NT standard states that having once passed
the national border of any country, imported products cannot be treated less favorably than similar
domestic products in terms of either internal taxation
and/or non-tax policies (e.g., technical regulations
that these products may have to satisfy).
The second principle, reciprocity, requires that
countries have to give each other reciprocal concessions for (increased) access to each other’s markets.
This is not exactly a standard that is implementable
in the form of a trade rule; rather, it is more a
negotiating standard that trade partners must offer
each other so that there are mutual or reciprocal
gains from trade liberalization for both partners.
These mutual gains can make the process of trade

liberalization, which is politically sensitive, more
politically saleable.
All of the previously discussed standards would,
of course, be useless unless they were enforceable.
The GATT, therefore, also lays down procedures and
standards that govern enforceability of trade commitments made between nations. Members are required
to fix their tariffs at (pre)negotiated rates and publish
these tariff commitments in lists known as Schedules
of Concessions. Thus, in addition to the process of
lowering the tariff rate through multilateral negotiations, tariff ceilings are effectively established above
which members cannot raise tariffs in the future. The
GATT/WTO rules also allow all member nations
unrestricted access to the information on the trade
regimes (laws and legal procedures) of member
countries. Internal transparency is required, which
means that members are required to officially publish
their national trade regulations. External transparency is enforced through multilateral surveillance of
trade regimes of member countries by means of periodic country reports prepared by the GATT/WTO
Secretariat through the so-called Trade Policy Review
mechanism.
The final principle pertains to the general standards that govern exceptions that can be allowed
from existing trade regulations. Governments are
allowed the freedom to restrict trade through tariffs,
quotas, and so on, only under specific circumstances.
Governments can restrict trade to attain noneconomic objectives, such as protecting public health or
preserving national security, or for economic reasons,
such as protecting domestic industries that are in
danger of serious injury from import competition.
Countries can also levy countervailing duties on
imports that have been subsidized by exporting governments or impose antidumping duties on imports
that are being sold at very low prices. Moreover, if a
country faces severe economic hardship in the form
of a balance-of-payments crisis or wants to protect
and support a nascent (infant) industry, it is allowed
to do so under existing GATT/WTO rules.
Effectively, the standards or rules based on these
principles or guidelines now regulate the trade
policies of all WTO member countries. Customs
tariffs for nonagricultural goods are the only form
of protection allowed (if MFN rules are followed),
since quantitative restrictions are relatively inefficient and hence outlawed. For agricultural goods,
the standards are more relaxed. GATT rules permit

Trademarks

quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports if
similar measures are also adopted for domestic agricultural production or if emergency situations like a
food shortage warrant adopting such a measure (this
is also imposed on a MFN basis). Voluntary Export
Restraints are banned outright. There are also rules
regarding subsidies. Only particular classes of nonspecific subsidies (i.e., subsidies not targeted toward
a specific industry or firm) that do not have any effect
on export performance are allowed. The standards
are again a bit lenient for agriculture: export subsidies on primary agricultural products are permitted
as long as this subsidization does not lead to a large
share of the world market for that agricultural product for the subsidizing country.
There are also rules regarding product standards,
technical standards, and systems of certification
for traded goods. Product standards are voluntary
in nature (these are usually implemented to remove
informational asymmetries regarding product quality
between producers and consumers), whereas technical standards (sometimes also known as technical
regulations and standards) are legal requirements that
are imposed to protect public health or because of
environmental concerns. These standards are usually
mediated by international standardization bodies like
the International Organization for Standardization
and are binding on all member countries.
For trade in services, the core principles and hence
the standards are essentially the same as for trade in
goods. Each country is supposed to accord MFN status to foreign service providers for any service sector.
This requirement for MFN, however, is not as strict
as the standards imposed under GATT. A country
may choose not to open up certain sectors to trade
and can seek waivers from the MFN status at the
time that it accedes either to the WTO or when it
agrees to GATS regulations.
Apart from the standards in services, there are also
rules governing trade in intellectual property such as
patents, copyrights, and so forth. There are comprehensive standards for the protection of intellectual
property that apply to all member nations. Member
countries have to follow international norms for each
category of intellectual property. These standards are
outlined in the provisions of several conventions. For
example, with regard to copyrights, WTO members
are required to comply with the provisions outlined
in the Berne Convention for the protection of literary
and artistic work. Under WTO, the reach of some of

1473

these agreements has been extended and their provisions have also been strengthened. The agreement
also prescribes procedures and standards for domestic, that is, within-country, enforcement of intellectual
property rights and lists the general legal obligations
and other requirements (like enforcement norms and
standards for compensation) that such procedures
need to satisfy.
Jibonayan Raychaudhuri
See also Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization);
Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law;
Economics; Great Depression (U.S.); Luxury Taxes;
Trademarks

Further Readings
Hoekman, Bernard, and Michel Kostecki. The Political
Economy of the World Trading System: The WTO and
Beyond. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001.
Krugman, Paul, and Maurice Obstfeld. International
Economics: Theory and Policy. 8th ed. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson, 2009.
Srinivasan, T. N. Developing Countries and the
Multilateral Trading System: From the GATT to the
Uruguay Round and the Future. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1998.

TRADEMARKS
Trademarks are commercial symbols to which
legally enforceable rights are attached, which are
intended to protect businesses’ brand value (known
as “goodwill”) and protect consumers against confusion about the source of goods or services caused
by deceptive branding practices.

Key Concepts
Trademarks are adopted by businesses and then recognized as private property through the operation
of law. Trademarks are the legal side of branding.
Whereas a brand operates like the personality attaching to goods and/or services for marketing purposes,
a trademark is the legally recognized form of the
brand that can be protected against unauthorized
use by others. Whereas brand meaning resides in the
minds of consumers, the law attributes the meaning
and value of trademarks to their owners.

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Trademarks

Trademark law governs many aspects of branding practice. Trademarks give legal recognition and
protection to brand icons. This typically involves
the registration of a sign as a trademark, which its
owner can then protect by invoking the legal system.
Often “well-known marks” from overseas are also
protected, as are special types of trademarks such as
“geographical indications” that signify areas where
goods are produced (e.g., Champagne). In some
jurisdictions, unregistered trademarks are protected
through the doctrine of “passing as” and may be
indicated by the ™ symbol. These laws give private
monopolies over certain uses of communicative symbols that are recognized as trademarks.
Trademark regimes exist in almost all countries,
and all World Trade Organization (WTO) member
states must include minimum levels of trademark
recognition and protection in their laws. What qualifies as a trademark varies between jurisdictions but
includes words, slogans, logos (devices), shapes,
colors, tastes, sounds, and smells that are used in
relation to specified goods, services, or both. Typical
trademarks include company and product names
(e.g., Coca-Cola), logos used to signify products and
services (e.g., the Nike “swoosh”), and celebrities’
names and images. Not all brand icons are trademarked, but all trademarks are legally intended to
operate as brands that indicate the source of goods
and services. Trademarks are among the most valuable assets of many businesses.

History
Legally regulated branding systems have existed since
time immemorial in the form of branding animals,
tribal markings, heraldry, and the application of creators’ marks such as pottery marks and hallmarks on
precious metals. These indicated ownership, affiliation, or source.
Modern trademark regimes arose during the
Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in Europe and the United States, when developments such as mass manufacturing and long distance transportation led to the sale of goods outside
their local areas of production. As consumers’ personal relationships with producers were displaced by
relationships with trademarks that signified products’
sources, consumer loyalty gradually shifted from producers to brands. This gave new significance to indicia of reputation such as the cutlers’ marks, clothiers’

marks, printers’ marks, hallmarks, and so on, issued
by various guilds. Although early mention of disputes
relating to traders’ marks can be traced as far back as
the 1618 English case of Southern v. How (involving
the infringement of a clothier’s mark), it was not until
1875 that the British government decided to introduce a system of registering trademarks. The purpose
of the register was to simplify the problem traders
had in proving ownership of a “common law” (i.e.,
unregistered) mark. In the United States, the first
federal trademark law was passed in 1870 but then
overturned as unconstitutional. Its replacement, the
Trademark Act of 1881, added trademark registration to the duties of the U.S. Patent Office.
Early trademark registration principles emerged
in nineteenth-century Europe and reflect the liberal ideology of that time and place. They spread
throughout the world as colonies adopted the legal
systems of their masters and independent states
adopted trademark obligations by acceding to international treaties such as the Paris Convention for
the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883. More
recently, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property of 1994 standardized minimum
levels of trademark protection throughout WTO
member states. These treaties, as well as bilateral
trade agreements and the Madrid System of international trademark registration (governed by the
Madrid Agreement of 1891 and Madrid Protocol
of 1989), have helped to standardize trademark systems around the world. Meanwhile, the Community
Trade Mark (CTM) is a harmonized trademark system operating alongside national trademark regimes
within the European Union. These multiple agreements promote similar rules and standards of protection within signatory states and provide mechanisms
by which the rights of a trademark holder in one
jurisdiction can be extended internationally.

Contemporary Relevance
A brand’s value is intimately connected to the
strength of its associated trademarks and the extent
to which trademark rights can be enforced by law.
Thus, trademark theory primarily concerns the scope
and use of trademarks and is closely associated with
the practical operation of trademark law.
Although trademark laws vary between jurisdictions, similar underlying principles allow the following generalizations to be made.

Trademarks

Registration
Trademarks can be registered when a sign is
being used to indicate the source of goods or
services—known as “trademark use”—or when
there is a bona fide intent to use the sign as a trademark. Registration is generally administered by a
national registry office. The Office of Harmonization
for the Internal Market administers registration of
CTMs, while the Madrid System of international
trademark registration is administered by the World
Intellectual Property Organization. Throughout the
world, trademark registration processes generally
occur in two stages:
1. Examination of “absolute grounds” for
refusal of registration, focusing on whether the
mark meets procedural and technical requirements.
During this phase, the registry office typically
checks to ensure that the proposed trademark is
depicted graphically; is distinctive (i.e., not descriptive of the type of goods or services with respect to
which it is being used); is not immoral, offensive,
disparaging, or scandalous; is not contrary to law;
is not a proscribed sign (e.g., national flags, Olympic
symbols, names and symbols of certain international organizations); and is not liable to deceive or
cause confusion. The goods or services with respect
to which a trademark is to be used must be identified by the applicant and classified according to the
Nice Agreement Concerning the International
Classification of Goods and Services for the Purposes
of the Registration of Marks of 1957.
2. Examination of “relative grounds” for
refusal of registration, also known as a search for
“conflicting marks,” during which the proposed
mark is assessed relative to existing trademarks.
Registration may be denied if an identical or similar trademark already exists with respect to identical or similar goods or services to those for which
it is proposed that the new mark will be used.
Much legal debate surrounds the proper location
of the boundaries between individual trademarks.
In some jurisdictions, relative grounds examinations are conducted by the registry office. Elsewhere,
these assessments are left to the owners of existing
trademarks who may oppose the registration of a
sign that they believe would conflict with their
rights.

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Signs that pass examination may be registered as
trademarks for around a decade (the length of time
varies between jurisdictions) and repeatedly renewed
if the trademark is being used appropriately and has
not become generic (i.e., descriptive of the type,
rather than brand, of product). Registered trademarks may be identified with the ® symbol.
Exploitation
The trademark owner is awarded legally enforceable monopoly rights to use the trademark in certain ways. These typically include rights to use the
trademark in relation to the goods and services in
respect of which the trademark is registered, such as
assignment (i.e., sale) of the trademark itself; assignment, importation, or storage of goods bearing the
mark; licensing (i.e., authorizing others to use the
trademark); and the right to sue for infringement.
Debate about the extent to which monopoly rights to
use a trademark extend has been played out in court
cases in several jurisdictions, with questions about
whether noncommercial uses of trademarks amount
to infringement having particular freedom of expression implications.
Infringement
Infringement occurs if a trademark owner’s rights
are used without authority or defense. Courts assess
infringement claims by considering the degree of
similarity between the trademarks and between the
goods and services and whether consumers are likely
to be confused by the allegedly infringing use.
“Counterfeiting” is a form of intentional infringement in which perpetrators produce or distribute
commercial quantities of goods bearing trademarks,
or signs substantially identical or deceptively similar
to trademarks, that they are not authorized to use.
The existence of counterfeits (often referred to as
“fakes,” “copies,” “clones,” or “replicas”) infringes
the legal rights of a trademark proprietor and can
damage associated brand reputation if the quality of
the counterfeit goods is inferior to those provided by
the owner, its licensees, or both. In some jurisdictions,
purchase or possession of counterfeits by consumers
is a criminal offense. However, this is contentious, as
counterfeits may perform a complex semiotic role,
with the wearing or possessing of counterfeits being a
form of self-expression that carries cultural meaning

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Trademarks

beyond the trademark function of indicating the
source of goods. Laws controlling the production,
sale, and use of counterfeits may therefore affect
cultural evolution, although concern about this has
probably been expressed more by sociological and
cultural studies theorists than by legal commentators.
Defenses
Typical defenses to infringement allegations
include that the trademark was used in a manner
authorized by its owner; was used fairly and in good
faith (e.g., use as one’s name or to indicate the kind,
quality, quantity, intended purpose, value, geographical origin, or some other characteristic of goods
or services); or was used in legitimate comparative advertising. These defenses limit a trademark
owner’s ability to interfere with unauthorized uses of
trademarks for functions other than indication of the
source of goods or services.

Some of the most interesting recent work in trademark law and theory has drawn on anthropological,
sociological, and semiotic analyses of trademarks,
and this trend seems likely to continue.
Globalization—involving greater standardization and reciprocity between trademark systems
worldwide—is leading to interesting critical analyses, particularly with respect to the proper scope
and use of trademarks in cross-cultural and subcultural settings.
Significant future discussion seems likely to focus
on the role of consumers in creating trademark meaning; whether non-owners should be recognized or
rewarded for contributing to trademark meaning,
and how; possible distinctions between “trademark
meaning” and “brand meaning”; and the degree to
which costly policing of private trademark rights
should be the responsibility of owners or public
enforcement agencies.
Alexandra George

Enforcement
Enforcement of trademark rights is generally the
responsibility of its owner, who may sue suspected
infringers. In many countries, owners can register
requests with customs authorities to seize items
bearing infringing trademarks that are being transported across national borders. Under criminal laws,
police, local authorities, and consumer protection
agencies may also be authorized to seize suspected
counterfeits and arrest those responsible for such
items. Trademark theory increasingly considers the
socioeconomic effects of enforcing trademark laws,
including issues such as whether the onus and cost
of policing private property in trademarks should
be borne solely by the owner or shared between the
owner and the state to prevent social harms resulting
from counterfeiting (e.g., consumers being poisoned
by counterfeit pharmaceuticals or injured in accidents caused by counterfeit electrical goods).
Remedies
Remedies for trademark infringement may include
injunctions to prevent further infringing behavior,
compensation for losses, an account of the profits
accrued by the infringer, or all of these.

Future Directions
Trademark theory increasingly adopts the interdisciplinary perspectives found in branding literature.

See also Authenticity; Branding; Consumer Policy (World
Trade Organization); Consumer Rights and the Law;
Counterfeited Goods; Global Institutions;
Informational Capital; Licensing of Clothing Brands

Further Readings
Aoki, Keith. “How the World Dreams Itself to Be
American: Reflections on the Relationship between the
Expanding Scope of Trademark Protection and Free
Speech Norms.” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment
Law Journal 17 (1997): 523–548.
Blackett, Tom. Trademarks. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1998.
Dreyfuss, Rochelle. “Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as
Language in the Pepsi Generation.” Notre Dame Law
Review 65 (1990): 397–424.
Kozinski, Alex. “Trademarks Unplugged.” New York
University Law Review 68 (1993): 960–978.
Mollerup, Per. Marks of Excellence: The History and
Taxonomy of Trademarks. London: Phaidon, 1998.
Phillips, Jeremy. Trade Mark Law: A Practical Anatomy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Schechter, Frank I. The Historical Foundations of the Law
Relating to Trade-Marks. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1925.
Sherman, Brad, and Lionel Bently. The Making of Modern
Intellectual Property Law. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Wilf, Steven. “Who Authors Trademarks?” Cardozo Arts
and Entertainment Law Journal 17 (1999): 1–46.

Transnational Capitalism
Wilson, Lee. The Trademark Guide: A Friendly Handbook
to Protecting and Profiting from Trademarks. New
York: Allworth Press, 2004.

TRANSACTION DATA
See Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Store
Loyalty Cards

TRANSGRESSION
See Carnivals; Liminality; Obsession; Queer
Theory; Resistance; Sexuality; Subversion

TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALISM
Although they are often used interchangeably, the
idea of transnational capitalism should be clearly
distinguished from the idea of international capitalism. International capitalism refers to the relations
between capitalist entities doing business within the
national economies of all the countries in the world
considered to be capitalist and between these countries (international trade). Transnational capitalism
refers to the sum of all the relations between economic agents whether they are state or private or of
other mixed forms, any part of which crosses state
borders. Whereas, for many practical purposes, the
world is still organized in terms of discrete national
economies, transnational capitalists conceptualize
their interests in terms of markets, which may or
may not coincide with a specific country or part of
it, and the global market. Domestic firms, defined as
those serving an exclusively sovereign state market,
employing only local co-nationals, whose activities
consist entirely of domestic services (notably finance
and marketing), components, and materials are now
a rapidly shrinking feature of contemporary economies. Most business, particularly big business, is now
transnational.
In practice, the distinction boils down to the analytic choice between an international (state-centrist)
analysis of capitalism and a transnational (globalizing)
analysis of capitalism, its economic actors, practices,
and institutions. This distinctive idea of transnational
capitalism comes from globalization theorists and

1477

researchers who have identified globalizing corporations and their local affiliates, those who own and
control them, and those in influential positions who
serve their interests as the dominant economic forces
in the world today, conceptualized as a transnational
capitalist class by Leslie Sklair. Theory and research
on transnational capitalism have focused on several
interrelated phenomena, increasingly significant since
the 1960s. The transnational corporations (TNCs)
have attracted an unprecedented level of attention
in this period, not only from academic researchers
but also from activists in the fields of human rights
in general and child labor, sweatshops, and environmental justice in particular. The ways in which, and
the consequences of how, TNCs have facilitated the
globalization of capital and the production of goods
and services, the rise of new global forms of organization of the capitalist class based on ownership
and control of TNCs, and transformations in the
global scope of the corporations that own and control the mass media are no longer the sole province of
international economists and trade specialists but are
now widely discussed throughout the social sciences
as well as in best sellers, notably by Naomi Klein,
read by students and concerned citizens alike. In this
respect, at least, the idea of transnational capitalism
has become popularized.
Interest in the rise of transnational capitalism—
more or less synonymous with an increasingly
globalizing capitalism dominated by TNCs—grew
perceptibly from the 1960s and has begun to replace
research on competing national capitalisms in the
international economy, the basis of theories of colonialism and imperialism. This is overlaid with several versions of the theory that capitalist states could
more or less successfully plan their own economic
futures, also known as the theory of the development
state. As direct imperialism and colonialism came
to an end in the latter part of the twentieth century
and as more and more large TNCs began to emerge,
attention began to shift decisively from international
to transnational capitalism and from the developmental state to capitalist globalization. This is the
gist of the influential argument of the international
relations scholar Susan Strange. Stirrings of this were
apparent in the sociology of development, where the
dependency approach to development and underdevelopment of Andre Gunder Frank and the related
world-systems approach of Immanuel Wallerstein
highlighted the systemic nature of capitalism as
a worldwide phenomenon over several centuries.

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Transnational Capitalism

Although both of these theoretical innovations can
be said to have prepared the ground for it, neither
entirely succeeded in establishing a coherent concept of transnational capitalism (or globalization).
Wallerstein’s analysis of core, semi-periphery, and
periphery in the world-systems approach is based
on national economies, although to some extent the
theoretically more ambitious concept of commodity chains that emerged in world-systems theory has
been elaborated in proto-globalizing terms, as explicated in the collection edited by Gary Gereffi and
Miguel Korzeniewicz.
The novelty of theories of transnational capitalism, in the sense used here, originates in the proposition that capitalism entered a new, global phase
in the second half of the twentieth century. By the
new millennium, the largest TNCs had assets and
annual sales far in excess of the gross national products (GNPs) of most of the countries in the world.
World Development Report (published annually by
the World Bank) for 2000 shows that only about
seventy countries had GNPs of more than ten billion
U.S. dollars. By contrast, the Fortune Global 500
list of the biggest corporations by turnover for 2000
reported that about four hundred fifty of them had
annual sales greater than ten billion U.S. dollars. This
comparison, however, underestimates the economic
scale of major corporations compared with sovereign
states, as TNC revenues are usually counted as part
of GNP.
The global scope of TNCs has also expanded
dramatically. Many major corporations earn more
than half of their revenues outside the countries in
which they are legally domiciled. This is true for
TNCs from countries with relatively small domestic markets (e.g., Switzerland, Sweden, Canada,
Australia), as well as for those legally domiciled
in the United States and Japan. Most of the biggest corporations are still headquartered in the
first world, although several dozen companies
originating in what is conventionally called the third
world (mainly the newly industrializing countries)
have entered the ranks of the Fortune Global 500.
As documented by Sklair and Peter Robbins, this
group has included the state-owned oil companies
of Brazil, India, Mexico, Taiwan, and Venezuela
(owned by the state but increasingly run like private
corporations); banks in Brazil and China; and the
Korean manufacturing and trading conglomerates,
like Hyundai and Samsung.

However, the concept of transnational or globalizing capitalism encompasses more than the economic
system of capitalism on a world scale, elaborating
the insights of decades of theory and research on
economic, political, and cultural globalization. In
this context, globalization may be fruitfully defined
in terms of four phenomena, of increasing significance since the 1960s: (a) the electronic revolution,
(b) postcolonialism, (c) the subsequent creation of
transnational social spaces, and (d) qualitatively new
forms of cosmopolitanism.
The electronic revolution, the technological base
of what Manuel Castells characterized as the rise
of the network society, is transforming most of the
material structure and infrastructure of the world,
ever-expanding cities, means of transport within and
to and from these cities, the construction of homes
and what fills the homes of those who are able to
afford them, the clothes we wear, the food we eat,
and the financial instruments (credit cards, bank
loans, mortgages) that keep the system moving. The
vast apparatus of retailing, marketing, advertising,
and mass media, in general, that ensures people continue buying and that fuels an apparently insatiable
appetite for debt—the sine qua non for the cultureideology of consumerism—presents a crippling problem for transnational capitalism in the era of capitalist
globalization, of which the financial crisis that began
in 2008 is only the most recent manifestation. Driven
by its shareholder-driven profit-growth imperative,
big business becomes obsessed with short-term success in the stock market and drags smaller businesses
along with it in a frenzy of consumerism and debt.
Postcolonialism works in two main ways for
transnational capitalism. In the first place, the happy
coincidence (for big business) of the electronic revolution and formal political decolonialization in Asia,
Africa, and the Caribbean in the decades after World
War II (earlier in Latin America) created sites for
offshore production, sourcing, or both. These economic transnational practices, whereby corporations
domiciled in one country relocate some or all of their
activities to another country, profitably reinvent the
traditional colonial practice of companies in the countries of the colonial powers extracting raw materials
from their colonies, turning them into manufactured
goods at home, and exporting some back to the colonies. Second, transnational capitalism has thrived on
what Edward Said famously labeled Orientalism, the
capacity of Western thinkers to create worldviews for

Transnational Capitalism

those in the Orient that inhibit their ability to throw
off the mental shackles of colonialism. Corporate
discourse, as a globalizing practice, reproduces for
the whole world standards and values that emanate
from the heartlands of capitalist globalization. As
in the case of the nineteenth century “knowledge”
producers that Said implicates in the production and
dissemination of Orientalism, in the twenty-first century occidental business experts may join forces with
their oriental counterparts (often trained in the same
or related business schools and TNCs) to produce a
global business-consumerist view of the world.
The creation of transnational social spaces is
predicated on the opportunities provided by the electronic revolution for relatively cheap and convenient
transnational communication in terms of moving
people and information, for example, in the relative
ease with which new immigrant communities can
re-create familiar spaces in host societies while, at
the same time, sustaining close relations with their
communities of origin. The hallmark of the material
transnational social space of transnational capitalism
is the invention of the shopping mall, with its ubiquitous chain stores and restaurants cleverly engendering intimations of modernity while taking advantage
of any elements of indigenous or traditional cultural
traits that can turn a profit. As this trend globalizes,
it is sold by the ideologues of transnational capitalism as “modernity in traditional societies,” as continual opportunities to indulge in a bourgeois lifestyle
for those who are rich as well as those who cannot
really afford to do so. These are the spaces where
the culture-ideology of consumerism and its lure of
the good life, invariably at the expense of the good
society, are made concrete.
The electronic revolution also facilitates the creation of transnational social spaces as top-down
legislation in the interests of those who control transnational capitalism moves freely, through the arcane
statutes of international commercial law and the regulations of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Transnational capitalism has created a series of social
spaces all over the world in which the values and
interests of those who control the system of international trade and investment literally and metaphorically bulldoze all those who try to resist them.
The historical genesis of cosmopolitanism in
social thought places it in a different category. The
common theme that runs through all these ideas is
the difficult necessity of building a world in which

1479

people live at peace with one another, accepting
differences without fear or hatred. Transnational
capitalism has laid its claim to provide a basis for
this, epitomized in the slogan that no two countries
with branches of McDonald’s have ever gone to war.
While war and violence have always been profitable
for some fractions of capital, the argument that the
culture-ideology of consumerism works best in a
peaceful, if competitive environment, suggests that
war and violence are not sustainable drivers of capitalist globalization.
Some scholars argue that transnational capitalism is a myth because most major TNCs are legally
domiciled in the United States, Japan, and Europe
and because they trade and invest mainly among
themselves. Against this conclusion, proponents of
the theoretical significance of transnational capitalism and/or the idea of capitalist globalization, such
as Sklair, argue that an increasing number of corporations operating outside their countries of origin see
themselves as developing global strategies of various
types, as is obvious from the contents of their annual
reports and other corporate publications. Although
all economies are clearly not equally globalizing, an
increasing volume of empirical research, notably in
the work of Peter Dicken, indicates that the production and marketing processes of most major industries are being de-territorialized from their countries
of origin and that these processes are being driven
by the TNCs. The central issue for debates around
the viability of the concept of transnational capitalism and its use in theoretically based research is the
extent to which TNCs domiciled in the United States,
Japan, Europe, and other countries can be more
fruitfully conceptualized as expressing the national
interests of their countries of origin (sometimes called
the globo-skeptic argument) or the private interests
of those who own and control them. Even if historical patterns of TNC development have differed from
country to country and region to region, it does not
logically follow that TNCs and those who own and
control them express any type of national interest or
national character.
The formal ownership of capital and the corporations has been transformed since the 1960s. The ownership of share capital has increased throughout the
world by means of greater participation (although still
a tiny minority in most communities) of the general
population in stock markets and the indirect investments that hundreds of millions of people, mainly

1480

Transnational Capitalism

in rich countries, have through their pension funds
and other forms of savings. However, formal ownership rarely means effective control over the capital,
resources, and decisions of TNCs. The globalization
of cross-border finance and trading can be fruitfully
analyzed in terms of the progressive weakening of
the nation-state and the growing recognition that
major institutions in transnational capitalism, notably transnational financial and trading organizations,
are setting the agenda for these weakened nationstates. The global financial crisis that began in 2008
appears to have persuaded all but the most resolute
state-centrists that capitalism is now transnational if
not actually global. Theory and research on this issue
has, not surprisingly, led to an increased interest in the
politics of transnational capitalism.
The politics of transnational capitalism is debated
intensely inside and outside the social sciences. Since
the disintegration of the Soviet empire in the late
1980s, the struggle between capitalism and communism has been largely replaced by the struggle
between the advocates of capitalist triumphalism and
the opponents of capitalist globalization. Many theorists, for example, William Robinson, have discussed
these issues within the triadic framework of states,
TNCs, and international economic institutions.
From this perspective, transnational capitalism is
dominated by the relations between the major states
and state-systems (the United States, the European
Union, and Japan), the major corporations, and
the international financial institutions, notably the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund,
supplemented in some versions by the WTO, other
international bodies, major regional institutions, and
so on. This has stimulated interest in who runs transnational capitalism.
One explicit approach to this large question
focuses on the concept of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) as formulated by Sklair. The TCC
may be analytically divided into four main fractions:
(1) TNC executives and their local affiliates; (2) globalizing politicians and bureaucrats; (3) globalizing
professionals; and (4) consumerist elites of merchants,
media, and advertising. The TCC is transnational in
several senses: its members have outward-oriented
global rather than inward-oriented national perspectives on a variety of issues, for example, support for
free trade and neoliberal economic and social policies;
and it includes people from many countries, more
and more of whom begin to consider themselves as
citizens of the world as well as of their places of birth

and residence (these might differ) who share similar
lifestyles, particularly patterns of higher education (in
cosmopolitan universities and business schools) and
consumption of luxury goods and services.
While Marxist and Marx-inspired theories of the
inevitability of a fatal economic crisis of transnational
capitalism appear to have lost most of their adherents
(at least until the global financial crisis that began in
2008 gave new life to the idea), Sklair argues that at
least two related but logically distinct crises can be
identified. The simultaneous creation of increasing
poverty and increasing wealth within and between
societies—the class polarization crisis—should not be
confused with Marx’s emiseration thesis, which failed
to predict significant increases in wealth for rapidly
expanding minorities all over the world. Although
there is a long way to go before consumer demand
inside the rich first world is entirely satisfied, the gaps
between the rich and the poor all over the world
appear to be growing. In addition to the profits lost
when poor people who want to buy goods and services do not have the money or even the credit to do
so, the increasing visibility of the new rich and the
new poor in an age of constant global media exposure directly challenges capitalist claims that everyone
eventually benefits from transnational capitalism.
The ecological crisis is also directly connected with
consumerism. In recent decades, most major TNCs
have formulated policies in response to the challenges of environmental harm and declining stocks
of resources essential for the maintenance of transnational capitalism and its apparently never-ending
addiction to growth (a central part of its ideology).
However, the persistence of problems of global
warming, pollution, environmental degradation, and
waste management intrinsic to the system suggests
that ecological crisis will be difficult to resolve within
transnational capitalism. In this context, the attempt
by TNCs and their supporters in governments, international bureaucracies, and the professions (globalizing politicians, bureaucrats, and professionals) and
the mass media to capture the idea of sustainable
development and to reconcile it with the progress of
transnational capitalism is worth further study. The
apparent lack of political will shown by the governments of the major powers to tackle the problem of
climate change seriously is but one of many examples
of the severity of the crises that beset transnational
capitalism.
Leslie Sklair

Trust
See also Colonialism; Consumer Policy (World Trade
Organization); Cosmopolitanism; Global Institutions;
Globalization; Marxist Theories; Orientalism;
World-Systems Analysis

Further Readings
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed.
Boston: Blackwell, 2000.
Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Transforming the World
Economy. 5th ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2007.
Gereffi, Gary, and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds. Commodity
Chains and Global Capitalism. Westport, CT: Praeger,
1994.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2000.
Robinson, William. A Theory of Global Capitalism:
Production, Class and State in a Transnational World.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,
1978.
Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Boston:
Blackwell, 2001.
Sklair, Leslie. Globalization: Capitalism and Its
Alternatives. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002.
Sklair, Leslie, and Peter Robbins. “Global Capitalism and
Major Corporations from the Third World.” Third
World Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2002): 81–100.
Strange, Susan. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of
Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Capitalist World Economy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

TRUST
Consumers’ trust in experts, regulatory agencies, and
corporate actors has received considerable media and
political attention in Europe over the past couple of
decades. Responses are expressed in sudden shifts in
demand, public opinion polls, claims made by advocates and organizations, and via political channels.
Within the American context, critique seems less
often framed as a matter of consumer distrust. Case
studies in countries like Russia and Vietnam, on the
other hand, indicate widespread distrust in regulatory institutions and business corporations, affecting everyday practices but apparently not disturbing
institutional actors enough to make them change.
This illustrates how trust may have a variety of
meanings, functions, and implications—for example,

1481

as belief in the accountability of public institutions,
an element of market exchange, and a basis for our
everyday routines.
Focus here is directed toward approaches that see
trust as social and relational. Trust and distrust are
products of consumer culture as well as influences on
it. Trust refers to a set of moral values, social cohesion, or a cultural community, according to Barbara
Misztal. The background has been formulated in
rational terms; Jon Elster regards trustfulness as the
expression of norms that makes everyone better off
than they would be without it. Norms guide social
action and contribute to social stability; they create
credibility to promises and threats, providing “the
cement of society,” without which “chaos and anarchy would prevail.” Trust here refers to their mutuality
and beliefs that other people generally live up to these
norms. Theorists who, at first glance, are quite divergent seem to share this idea of trust as fundamental
to social order but at the same time fragile, such that
distrust and disorder are a constant threat to society.
Recent contributions in this vein have focused on
issues like solidarity and cooperation. Confidence
develops slowly, starting early in life with basic, trusting personal relations, continuing into engagement
in social networks and organizations. Robert D.
Putnam claims that engagement in community activities, in sports, politics, or helping people in need,
enhances mutual trust. Trust is a form of “social capital” that can help in solving social problems as well
as representing a resource for the individual. Others,
like Niklas Luhmann, see trust as a mechanism that
helps to reduce complexity in modern societies. Trust
allows life to go on relatively freely without personal
knowledge or direct control. General predictability
and mutual obligations can make complex “systems,” like nation-states, global distribution systems,
or scientific knowledge, work better. System distrust,
on the other hand, reduces flexibility and efficiency.
Others are less optimistic, seeing increasing
complexity as a major source of distrust. Ulrich
Beck views contemporary distrust as a reflection of
growing individual uncertainty in association with
the emergence of “risk society,” the causes of risks
being societal rather than natural, often emerging as
unintended side effects of producing welfare (e.g.,
conflicts over genetically modified food). Attention is
directed toward imbalances of power in the production of scientific and technological knowledge and its
use in society. In this view, people have become more
skeptical, less deferential, less trusting of authority,

1482

Trust

and more likely to see it as their own responsibility
to make decisions about their personal actions, commitments, and careers. In such circumstances, says
Anthony Giddens, we see the emergence of a new,
reflexive type of trust that is more consciously and
actively negotiated.
But trust is also conceptualized in relational terms.
For Adam B. Seligman, a basic form of trust is the
simple reliance on the ordered working of existing
institutional arrangements. A feature of consumer
trust is the belief that suppliers live up to shared
norms and expectations. Reputation and experience
acquired through everyday activities become the
basis for new or enforced expectations and hence for
general confidence in the institutions that we interact
with and depend on. This is crucial; with increasing
differentiation, division of labor, and global markets,
we have to delegate the responsibility for meeting our
needs to others—often to a chain of strangers. When
buying a hamburger for lunch, we take for granted
its safety: with no opportunity to check directly, we
tacitly rely on farmers, slaughterers, processors, bakers, and outlet services, and more indirectly on food
technologies, nutritional scientists, and public regulatory systems, to provide us with “safe” food.
In contrast to theories emphasizing trust/distrust
as generalized, implicit, and culturally based, others
propose that trust hinges on citizens’ more rational
evaluations of institutional and political performance. Institutions performing well generate trust,
whereas those performing badly generate distrust
and skepticism. When people distrust a regulatory
agency, it is because the agency has handled its tasks
badly, not because people have not learned to trust.
Opinion surveys give some support to the relevance
of such processes; people tend to distinguish clearly
and consistently between trust in various types of
actors and types of issues, and there may be rapid
shifts in levels of trust. Fraud, disrespect of safety
hazards, or lack of transparency do matter.
Institutional economics tends to see organization
(as opposed to personal relations) as a way to reduce
uncertainty; better predictability means less reliance
on trust. Institutional arrangements may help to
ensure good performance, like programs to check
quality standards or help to trace problems in the supply chain. But for consumers, they can hardly relieve
basic uncertainties linked to their lack of power and
control. Any market exchange between suppliers and
consumers is characterized by asymmetries of power

and information. There is always the possibility of
misuse of power, both in terms of free riders and a
more general disregard of consumer concerns and
interests. The problem of showing “good intentions”
and acceptable performance is particularly the point
where other institutional actors, “third parties,” are
involved, such as audit and inspection bodies, interest organizations, experts, and the media (Luhmann’s
concept “institutionalization of distrust”).
Cultural and institutional explanations refer to
different social mechanisms of trust. Trust based on
cultural factors is stable and lasting. Trust derived
from institutional performance is more volatile and
contingent. Yet, the opposition should not be exaggerated. Norms, resources, and skills developed over
time may produce a buffer of positive expectations
when problems occur. When institutional trust fails
on a general basis, personal networks represent an
alternative, like sticking to a familiar butcher when
general distribution systems seem too risky and borrowing money from family and friends when banks
are too unpredictable.
Trust forms the basis of flexible everyday routines.
Believing in the good will of other people and the
predictability and acceptability of institutional procedures means that we can travel by air and demand
medical services without having to check the reputation of specific professionals. But profound and
generalized distrust can be subversive to cooperation
and governance by affecting the legitimacy of institutional arrangements. Some distrust is important and
constructive, however. Participation, activism, and
feedback from citizens, key features of democratic
societies, are founded on skepticism and distrust of
particular institutions and policies. Speculation and
fraud have evoked popular protest and skepticism
throughout history. The globally spread riots as a
response to insufficient measures against the food
crisis in the last years of World War I led to numerous new programs of rationing and price regulation.
Riots were eventually complemented by boycotts and
political protest. With complex technologies, globalized markets, and new distribution of responsibility,
consumers have more choices but also have become
more vulnerable. Nano-technology introduced into
textiles and cosmetics far exceeds most people’s general knowledge, and yet they will often have to use
these products at their own risk. Yet, against new
risks and new responsibilities, popular reactions
often seem complacent. Complex explanations are

T-Shirts

therefore needed to explain the dynamics of consumer trust, its role in consumer culture, and its place
in public and political discourse.
“Consumption” represents complex sets of practices involving a variety of norms and social relations. Different forms or mechanisms of trust are
involved, forms that are taken for granted as well as
contingent and reflexive, personal and institutional,
and abstract. Modernization may produce trust as
well as distrust. The only general conclusion is that a
consumer culture with too little trust is problematic,
but so is too much trust.
Unni Kjærnes
See also Citizenship; Consumer Regulation;
Modernization Theory; Opinion Polls; Political and
Ethical Consumption; Risk Society; Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
London: Sage, 1992.
Elster, Jon. The Cement of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Giddens, Anthony. “Living in a Post-Traditional Society.”
In Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and
Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, edited by Ulrich
Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, 56–109.
Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Luhmann, Niklas. “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust:
Problems and Alternatives.” In Trust: Making and
Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego
Gambetta, 94–107. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Mishler, William, and Richard Rose. “What Are the
Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and
Cultural Theories in Post-Communist Societies.”
Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 1 (2001): 30–62.
Misztal, Barbara. Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for
the Bases of Social Order. Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work: Civic
Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993.
Seligman, Adam B. The Problem of Trust. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997.

T-SHIRTS
The T-shirt is one of the most successful consumer
items in American culture. Over one billion T-shirts
are purchased annually in the United States. The

1483

popularity of the T-shirt stems from its capacity to
convey information and from the fact that it can be
produced rapidly and cheaply. The T-shirt was one
of the first types of garments to communicate both
verbal and nonverbal signals. Printing on shirts as
a means of identifying the wearer with an organization, such as a sports team, appeared in the
mid-nineteenth century and was being used by universities in the 1930s. The use of the T-shirt to communicate other types of information began in the late
1940s, when faces and political slogans appeared on
T-shirts, and, in the 1960s, with commercial logos
and other designs. Technical developments in the
1950s and 1960s, such as plastic inks, plastic transfers, and spray paint, led to the use of colored designs
and increased the possibilities of the T-shirt as a
means of communication. The use of verbal signals
on clothing, usually in the form of brand name logos,
has proliferated, in part, as a result of the ubiquity of
the T-shirt.
The steadily increasing popularity of the T-shirt
in the twentieth century can be interpreted on the
grounds that the garment is perfectly adapted to the
fragmentation of lifestyles and subcultures in contemporary media culture. Because it costs so little,
the T-shirt is available to consumers at all social levels. New versions can be manufactured on demand,
to fit all types of occasions, from Gay Pride parades
to patriotic souvenirs supporting the Gulf War or the
war in Iraq. Expensive versions of the garment are
profitable as status symbols for displaying upscale
brand names.
The T-shirt has been used to convey both rebellion and conformity, depending on the context and
the types of messages inscribed on the front or back.
Unlike “closed” texts, such as men’s hats and the
business suit, which have fixed meanings, the T-shirt,
along with jeans, is an “open” text that continually acquires new meanings as it is appropriated by
different social groups and worn in different social
contexts.
The variety of slogans and logos that appear on
T-shirts is enormous. The T-shirt expresses social
identity in many different ways, ranging from identity politics to lifestyle and leisure. Much of the time,
consumers consent to being co-opted for unpaid
advertising for global corporations selling clothes,
music, sports, and entertainment in exchange for
the social cachet of being associated with certain
products. Activists use T-shirts to indicate their

1484

Tupperware

support for social and political causes, groups, or
organizations to which they have made a commitment. Occasionally, the T-shirt becomes a medium
for grassroots resistance. Victims of gender-related
violence, such as rape, incest, battering, and sexual
harassment, have used T-shirts as venues for statements about their experiences that are exhibited on
clotheslines in public plazas. By contrast, some young
men use T-shirts to express hostile, aggressive, or
obscene statements denigrating women or to display
pictures of guns and pistols. Teens of both sexes use
them as a means of expressing their cynicism about
the dominant culture, particularly global advertising.
T-shirts speak to like-minded people. A particular
T-shirt may not be meaningful to those with different
views and affiliations. This reflects the fragmentation
of contemporary lifestyles, subcultures, and other
groupings whose members respond to the enormous
cultural complexity of their surroundings by orienting themselves toward those who are like, rather than
those who are unlike, themselves. A study of T-shirt
images in Hawaii, where the garment is standard
attire among the island’s residents, found that T-shirts
worn by different subgroups in the population—
locals, Native Hawaiians, surfers, and tourists—had
distinctive themes, images, and messages that reinforced social identity, political allegiance, and communal values while the island was being inundated
with products from other countries.
The significance of the T-shirt in Western culture
as a means of social and political expression is seen
by comparing its roles in Western countries with
the response to it in a nondemocratic country, the
People’s Republic of China. In 1991, a young Chinese
artist created T-shirts bearing humorous statements,
some of which could be interpreted as having mild
political implications. The T-shirts were enormously
successful with the public but were perceived as “a
serious political incident” by the Chinese authorities.
The artist was arrested and interrogated, and the
T-shirts were officially banned. Thousands of them
were confiscated and destroyed, but many Chinese
continued to wear them.
Although messages inscribed on T-shirts usually
express local themes and personal anxieties, the
garment itself is a global phenomenon, “a basic, allpurpose form of clothing which is universal in application” (Maynard 2004, 99). Because of its ubiquity,
the T-shirt epitomizes different stages of the global
clothing industry: farming cotton for material for
T-shirts, mainly in the United States; manufacture of

T-shirts, primarily in China; the role of export quotas
and other barriers to trade in the global economy;
and the final destination of T-shirts as used garments
sold by small entrepreneurs to clothe impoverished
populations in Africa.
Diana Crane
See also Clothing Consumption; Globalization; Identity;
Interpellation; Licensing of Clothing Brands; Lifestyle;
Semiotics; Subculture

Further Readings
Barmé, Geremie. “Culture at Large: Consuming T-Shirts in
Beijing.” China Information 8, nos. 1/2 (1993): 1–44.
Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Kelly, Marjorie. “Projecting an Image and Expressing
Identity: T-Shirts in Hawaii.” Fashion Theory 7, no. 2
(2003): 191–211.
Maynard, Margaret. Dress and Globalisation. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.
Rivoli, Pietro. Travels of a T-shirt in a Global Era: An
Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics
of World Trade. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009.

TUPPERWARE
Tupperware, invented in 1946 in the New England
region of the United States by amateur designer Earl
Silas Tupper, popularized polyethylene as a domestic
plastic used for food storage and as fancy goods in
the home. Using the party-plan direct-sales method,
Tupperware and Tupperware parties came to define
a new form of postwar sociality based around informal food consumption and conspicuous consumerism. The Tupperware party began in the United
States and expanded to Europe and Japan in the
1960s. Today, Tupperware remains a globally available product whose nomenclature has become the
generic term for plastic containers. Corporate statistics estimate that a Tupperware party takes place
somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds, and the
traditional home-based party has spread to Internet
distribution and virtual online equivalents. The
“cult” of Tupperware consumption and the nostalgia
invoked by its association with idealized domestic
1950s suburban lifestyle has led to its more recent
ironic appropriation by contemporary transgender,
gay, and alternative groups.

Tupperware

Feminist historians and sociologists initially considered the Tupperware phenomenon as indicative of
the capitalist creation of the optimal passive female
consumer, patronized and disempowered by corporate manipulation and advertising and duped into
selling and buying a product through exploitation
of her own grassroots domestic and social relations.
However, later scholarship in consumer history and
material culture (incorporating methodologies such
as oral history, ethnography, diary analysis) challenged this account of consumer culture as overly
simplistic, asserting instead a model for the understanding of consumption as a form of modernity and
the role of material culture in affecting, or mediating,
social change. Tupperware, despite the visual rhetoric of its early advertising campaigns (which depicted
exclusively white, married, middle-class mothers and
generic nuclear families), was sold and consumed by
an ethnically and socially diverse female population
for whom access to paid work, formal education,
and the postwar culture of consumption was otherwise denied.
In 1956, Tupperware, an injection-molded plastic object, was featured in New York’s Museum of
Modern Art (MOMA) permanent display of “good
design for 50 cents” and celebrated as the epitome
of modernist logic borne, technological determinism,
and rational design. Formal representations of the
product avoided mention of the feminized business
model of sales that underpinned the mass consumption of Tupperware in 1950s America or the cult of
consumption that made it so popular.
Despite its acclaim in reputable institutions such
as MOMA, the earliest advertising copy, packaging,
and representation of Tupperware actively avoided
the term plastic altogether, because the substance had
negative consumer associations. The DuPont chemical company, a main supplier of raw materials for the
Tupper Corporation, incorporated Tupperware into
its own advertising as it strove to expand its postwar
corporate profile as a supplier of domestic consumer
goods. Earl Tupper, who had developed the product during war-time experimentation sponsored by
DuPont, described the wares as being formed from
“Poly-T: Material of the Future” to avoid association with plastic as a culturally ambivalent material
that sat uneasily alongside the traditional ceramic
tableware of the average middle-class home. Despite
the ingenuity of the product’s semi-airtight seal, the
Tupper Corporation failed to sell its opaque white,
flexible, lightweight bowls and containers in any

1485

large quantity until 1949, when the party-plan sales
method—in which wares were sold to a collected
group of women in a volunteer hostess’s home—was
introduced.
While its aesthetic acclaim focused on its formal
adherence to a pure, modernist design, the success of
Tupperware was tied to cultural determinants rather
than those of functionally led food storage requirements. By 1951, Tupperware parties were a fashionable icon of modern living; over sixty thousand
parties were taking place across America each year.
Tupperware designs, such as “New Look TV tumblers” (named after Christian Dior’s opulent skirts),
revolving canapé dishes, and barbecue items embodied a new domestic modernity that elided cyclical
fashion change with home products. Tupperware
came in a array of pastel colors indicative of a fun
and conviviality far removed from the modernist austerity that MOMA sought to promote in its
“good design” propaganda.
By 1954, the marketing manager of Tupperware
Home Parties, Brownie Wise, a divorcée and single
parent who had turned “from rags to riches” through
selling Tupperware on the party plan, appeared
on the front cover of Business Week. Her slogan
“If we build the people, they’ll build the business”
encapsulated the model of positive thinking business
culture she had developed for a female workforce;
Tupperware dealers and hostesses became part of a
“Tupperware family” rather than operatives in an
alienating, bureaucratic corporation. Lavish annual
celebrations, or Jubilees, were held at the Tupperware
Home Parties distribution headquarters in Florida.
These “homecoming” events, meticulously choreographed by Wise herself, united Tupperware women
from national regions in a spectacle of ritualized gift
giving. In a typical Jubilee event, diamond rings,
mink coats, and other highly covetable artifacts of
popular female desire of the period were buried on
the headquarters grounds, and under the instruction “Dig for Gold,” Tupperware women dressed
as cowboys and Indians excitedly uncovered their
prizes. Such excessive displays, in which the female
employees were overtly romanced and rewarded by
the Tupperware Company, led to accusations that the
company might be subverting women’s traditional
familial roles as self-less wives and mothers. The corporation carefully oriented its promotional literature
to emphasize Tupperware’s support of women in
conservative roles, their hard-won earnings putting
sons and daughters through college or remodeling the

1486

Typologies of Shoppers

family home. Conspicuous and celebratory consumption underpinned the entire Tupperware enterprise,
but the particularity of the material culture involved
in the corporation’s reward culture (from cars to
silverware featuring the Tupperware rose insignia)
was (and remains) integral to the company’s social
salience.
Indeed, Earl Tupper had never viewed the
Tupperware bowl as a mere plastic container. He envisaged the “Tupperization” of American homes: kitchens transformed by an object borne of a Protestant
aesthetic of simple, pared beauty indicative of thrift. As
early as the 1930s, Tupper’s diaries railed against the
wastefulness of a burgeoning consumer culture based
on ceaseless change and gimmickry. At the height of
his financial success in the 1950s, despite being a selfdeclared inventor of innovative design, he occupied a
traditional New England house filled with antiques. By
way of contrast, Brownie Wise, during the same period,
occupied a contemporary flamingo pink–colored
Floridian lakeside home filled with the latest consumer
gadgets. Wise’s residence was used as the backdrop in
the numerous women’s magazine features promoting
Tupperware and hailing her as the first woman business genius; they also detailed her fashion whims and
obsessive eating habits. The gendered and historically
specific consumption cultures tied to the biographies of
Tupper and Wise are indicative of the broader moral
economy of consumption into which any new product
emerges. Tupperware embodied the contradictions of
thrift and excess that defined the postwar period, but
as a new form of domesticated technology, the product
also exerted its own agency on contemporary social
and gender relations.
By the 1960s, Tupperware had become a global
product with sales in over forty-two countries worldwide. The term Tupperware evolved to describe
plastic storage bowls or sandwich boxes in general.
The products were also popularized as “pickle keepers” in Korea and “kimono boxes” in Japan as they
were redefined and appropriated in various cultural
contexts. Tupperware, principally a grassroots
direct-sales enterprise, continues to depend on networks of female sociality. Since its inception, it has
expanded in sociogeographical areas that embrace a
drive toward modernity through consumption while
maintaining residual social networks and traditional
customs associates with familiar and kinship networks (in 2010 these included seventy-two countries
worldwide ranging from Argentina, China, Croatia,
Egypt, and India through to Turkey and Uruguay).

The academic study of Tupperware, beyond the
feminist rhetoric regarding 1950s suburban culture
(delineated by Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique),
crucially acknowledges the agency of women as consumers, the previous overreliance on middle-class
women’s narratives in the making of “feminist” and
consumer histories, and the significance of material
culture in the making of (rather than mere representation of) culture. Further comparative histories and
anthropologies of product cultures will deepen the
empirical and theoretical understanding of consumption as a lived practice rather than as a phenomenon
depicted through standard cultural studies or corporate histories.
Alison J. Clarke
See also Domestic Division of Labor; Food Consumption;
Gender; Material Culture; Moral Economy; Protestant
Ethic; Waste

Further Readings
Biggart, Nicole Woolsey. Charismatic Capitalism: Direct
Selling Organizations in America. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989.
Clarke, Alison. J. “Tupperware: Suburbia, Sociality, and
Mass Consumption.” In Visions of Suburbia, edited by
Roger Silverstone, 132–160. London: Routledge, 1996.
Clarke, Alison. J. Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in
1950s America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1999.
Rapping, Elayne. “Tupperware and Women.” Radical
America 6, no. 14 (1980): 39–49.
Taylor, Rex. “Marilyn’s Friends and Rita’s Customers: A
Study of Party-Selling as Play and as Work.”
Sociological Review 26, no. 3 (1978): 573–594.
Vincent, Susan. “Preserving Domesticity: Reading
Tupperware in Women’s Changing Domestic, Social and
Economic Roles.” Canadian Review of Sociology 40,
no. 2 (2003): 171–196.

TYPOLOGIES

OF

SHOPPERS

Typology refers to classification of a phenomenon by
the qualities essential to its identification. Typologies
of shoppers have been an object of interest for
decades. Shopping motives, shopping behavior, and
shopping environment have been the characterizations used in the classification of types.
The central thing in classification of shopper types
is to define the essential attributes of shopping and

Typologies of Shoppers

to achieve as large a generalization as possible. These
demands speak for the importance of the scopeemphasizing approach. The result is usually rough
characterizations of the basic orientation of shoppers
in a familiar, everyday supply environment.
On the other hand, shopping as a phenomenal
field is in constant change. This is due to new innovative shopping environments and consumer behaviors
that emphasize leisure, variety seeking, and the forms
of sociability found in shopping environments. The
rough classification of shopper types has occasionally been considered insufficient as an illustrator of
consumer culture. The scope-emphasizing classification has been challenged by a more profound interpretation of the specificity-emphasizing approach.
Typologies of shoppers have developed from the
types defined in Gregory Stone’s (1954) seminal
research on typologies that increasingly emphasize
experience and the multichannel nature of shopping.
This development is the basic scheme of this entry.
The purpose is to offer a short description of three
developmental phases in constructing typologies. The
first concerns the phase confirming Stone’s typology.
The second discusses the increase of significance
of the recreational orientation as a new, important
dimension. The third brings forth the question of the
significance of alternative shopping channels.
The validity of the classification of types is also
considered, with particular emphasis on the tensions
between the scope and specificity approaches. Scope
is important given the permeating and ubiquitous
nature of consumer culture. On the other hand, in
a fragmented society, profound, specific features
of consumer behavior are born, which can rapidly
become common and generate consumption subgroups. In constant change, persistence and new
developmental features are ever present.

The Main Dimensions of Typologies
Interest in describing shoppers grew during the
1950s as a consequence of the continued urban
concentration of retail and postwar economic development. Inspired by motive theories, the notion of
classifying shoppers according to their different orientations emerged, and Stone’s typology of shoppers
was born. According to Stone, housewives as buyers
could be classified according to the choice criteria
directed to their place of purchase. The most important criteria were related to economy, personality,
ethicality, and apathy.

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Stone asked respondents to justify their choice of
store. Even though the classification created in the
name of parsimony is simple, the different types
include holistic and discrepant values and motives.
Economy was associated with rational exchange
value (price) and personality with social relations
between the customers and sales clerks. Through
social relations, personality was also attached to
customers’ individuality. Ethicality related to moral
values defending, for example, locality against chainmanaged systems. Apathy was associated with those
buyers to whom buying mostly related to spatial
attributes like accessibility.
Stone’s research has been supported by more
recent research (Table 1). The shopper types, based
on the answers to Stone’s why-questions, have been
seen as orientation dimensions. These in turn have
guided the choice of statements in later studies.
Table 1 shows that economic orientation has a
strong status, as has the apathetic orientation. These
orientations signal that utilitarian shopping has predominated during this time and that the affective
orientation is not yet seen as a typological dimension.
This is true, unless Williams and colleagues’ results
presenting convenience and involved shopper types
can be considered as representatives of the affective
orientation. A partial reason for the rigidity and
persistence of typologies is that results from earlier
studies are easily used as the basis of new studies and
statements, which may jeopardize the consideration
of new dimensions.

The Emergence of the
Experiential Dimension
Subsequent to increasing economic welfare, researchers started to pay attention to the experiential aspects
of consumption. The process of urbanization led
to the establishment of big retail units. At the same
time, elements emphasizing pleasure, such as coffee
shops and restaurants, were constantly added to new
shopping centers. As shown in Table 2, the differently constructed typologies began to contain groups
interested in shopping itself. These groups were
mainly classified as recreationally oriented shoppers
and involved shoppers or those who are positively
oriented to the shopping process itself.
Table 2 describes, with a few examples, how
affective features can appear in numerous ways as
a new dimension of shopping. First, they can appear
as a counterforce to the utilitarian dimension, which

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Table 1

Typologies of Shoppers

Typologies of Shoppers Supporting Stone’s Findings

Authors/Date

Gender

Sample Size

Research Format

Shopper Types

Darden and
Reynolds
(1971)

Female

167

AIO
statements

Economic
Personalizing
Moralistic
Apathetic

Boone et al.
(1974)

Mixed
Unspecified

147
317

Factor
analysis

Economic
Personalizing
Ethical
Apathetic

Williams et al.
(1978)

Female

298

Cluster
analysis

Apathetic
Convenience
Price
Involved
Unclassifiable

Table 2

The Enrichment of Shopper Typologies by Experiential Shopping Dimension

Authors/Date

Gender

Sample Size

Research Format

Bellenger and
Korgaonkar (1980)

Female 69%
Male 31%

324

Questionnaire,
discriminant
analysis

Economic Recreational

Westbrook and
Black (1985)

Female

203

Questionnaire,
factor analysis

Shopping process involved
Shopping process apathetic
Choice optimizing
Apathetic
Economic Nondescript

Cullen (1990)

Female 75%
Male 25%

2484

Questionnaire,
factor analysis

Shopping affect
Economic
Apathetic
Shopping snob

is economic versus recreational. Second, affective
features can characterize a common, positive attitude toward shopping, whereupon it is indirectly
found in characterizations such as “shopping process
involved,” “shopping process apathetic” and “shopping snob.”
Paying attention to the single dimensions has led
to more accurate dimensions. For example, the utilitarian function of shopping has been made more precise by distinguishing the economic orientation and
the bargain-seeking orientation from each other. This
has also happened to the recreational orientation.

Shopper Types

When pleasure relates to spare time, social relations,
and mood management, more precise shopping orientations are born. These orientations do not relate
to immediate buying as much as to browsing and
planning behavior.
As new, leisure-emphasizing shopping centers are
becoming more universal and innovative consumption environments are born, the discovery of different
forms of experiential consumption and the consumer
types executing them have become more interesting.
Jason Sit, Bill Merrilees, and Dawn Birch have, for
example, defined entertainment-seeking shopping

Typologies of Shoppers

center patrons as follows: (1) “serious” shoppers,
(2) “entertainment” shoppers, (3) “demanding” shoppers, (4) “convenience” shoppers, (5) “apathetic”
shoppers, and (6) “service” shoppers. The seeking of
entertainment was emphasized in the shopping center,
especially within the groups of “entertainment” shoppers and “service” shoppers.
Besides the quantity emphasizing hedonism, there
has also emerged a modern hedonism, which concentrates on the quality of pleasures. Such behavior is oriented toward pleasure-seeking as purposeful in its own
right and laden with symbolic, more profound meanings and dreams. Besides the entertainment elements
behind the experience, there might also be aesthetic,
educational, or escapist elements (Pine and Gilmore
1999). The relationship to a versatile shopping center
can be structured aesthetically and atmospherically
in various ways. For instance, music, colors, and the
use of space can crucially affect people’s willingness to
enter and enjoy themselves at the shopping center.
The more profound meanings of shopping appear,
for example, in how shopping is experienced as a
leisure activity. Michael Guiry, Anne W. Mägi, and
Richard J. Lutz aimed to identify a “Recreational
Shopper Identity Scale” by utilizing consumers who
truly associate shopping with their leisure activities.
The people who connect their identity to this type of
behavior were given the name “shopping enthusiasts.”
Their share was 17 percent, while the share of “normal shoppers” was 56 percent and the share of “shopping aversives” was 27 percent (Guiry et al. 2006, 79).
The results show that, in the present consumption
culture, there is a significant number of people whose
self-concept is connected with spending spare time in
shopping environments. This observation is confirmed
by the fact that “shopping enthusiasts” are more
multichannel shoppers compared to other shopper
groups. This is in line with the earlier results indicating
that recreationally oriented shoppers are not usually
satisfied with a single shopping place but are eager to
shop in several stores and online.

Improving the Validity of Typologies
As already mentioned, the fundamental thing in creating shopper typologies is to parsimoniously control the scope of shopping. But it is equally important
to take into account the specificity of shopping that
appears in the variety of orientations in relation to
buying, services, experiencing the environment, and

1489

so forth. Denise G. Jarrat, for example, kept these
diversities in mind using Robert Westbrook and
William Black’s motivational approach as a base (see
Table 2).
As shown in Table 3, Jarrat’s motive-emphasizing
approach considers offer, service, and environment
as separate attributes. Therefore, it produces general
and rough typologies whose value for segmentation can be questioned. Here lies the challenge in
constructing typologies. It is hard to say something
relevant in terms of generalization and at the same
time say something relevant to modern consumer
behavior, which includes pleasure and antipathy in
the form of money, time, social relations, and energy.
Other researchers have added contextual factors
and orientation-related factors to typologies to create valid descriptions of shopper types. For example,
Kristy Reynolds and colleagues collected an extensive data set about shopping based on buyers of the
traditional model and the factory-outlet model. Both
models identified the same five types of shoppers in
addition to which the factory-outlet model included
a “brand seeker” shopper type (see Table 3).
By adopting new methods and allowing the retail
contexts and shopping times to vary, more detailed
descriptions of shopper types may be produced. A
good example of this comes from research conducted
in India by Piyush K. Sinha and Dwarika P. Uniyal,
which included observing shoppers in twenty different stores. The stores were chosen among both old
and new formats. From the one hundred forty distinctive “cues” that were observed, a classification of
the twenty-six most distinctive behavioral themes was
produced. The shopper types presented in Table 3
are the result of the classification of these themes. In
addition to having a high degree of specificity, the
themes identified also have a broad range. In other
words, both specificity and scope are controlled for.

Typologies of Shoppers Developing?
The information presented here is a compact description of the developmental phases of making typologies. The first phase was formed around Stone’s
seminal characterization of types and its testing.
During the second phase, the focus was turned on
new features for improving classification. The recreational orientation arose as its own, experienceemphasizing, typological dimension. This was
made possible by the birth of new shopping centers,

1490

Table 3

Typologies of Shoppers

The Diversification and Holisticity of Shopper Typologies

Authors/Date

Gender

Sample Size

Research Format

Shopper Types

Jarrat (1996)

Mixed,
unspecified

931

Questionnaire,
cluster analysis

Have to
Moderate
Service
Practical
Product oriented

Reynolds et al.
(2002)

Female 54%
Male 46%

1134
827

Factor analysis

Basic
Apathetic
Destination
Enthusiasts
Serious
Brand seekers/factory outlet mall

Sinha and
Uniyal (2005)

Female 43%
Male 55%

284

Theme
classification

Choice optimizer
Economizing
Premeditated
Recreational
Low information seekers
Seeking support

combining leisure and consumption. Finally, the
diversification of the supply structure through new
shopping venues and the Internet affected further
the development of multichannel shopping and fragmented consumer behavior.
This course of events roughly reflects the development of shopping. The increase in empirical knowledge has slowly generated an understanding about
which dimensions belong to the basic structure of
the typology and which to the characteristics of these
basic dimensions. Drawing the line between scope and
specificity isn’t always easy. Even regarding two experience-related basic dimensions, the utilitarian and the
experiential dimensions, several closely related valuebased benefits and associations between these have
been found by Ann Marie Fiore. Fiore’s value typology
shows how finely distinct the sensory, expressive, and
symbolic quality-based benefits behind the previously
mentioned basic orientations are.
The typologies of shoppers have usually been
constructed from an individual-psychological perspective. In these, motivational shopping orientation, shopping behavior, and shopping environment
constitute the frame of the analysis. Typologies have,
even on a rough level, worked well for explaining
the persistence or change of behavior. For example,

Martti Laaksonen showed that typologies have
explanatory power over the adaptation of consumers’ shopping behavior patterns to intense structural
changes in retail.
Alongside traditional grocery shopping environments are totally new environments, like the Internet
(e.g., Girard, Korgaonkar, and Silverblatt 2003), and
new forms of shopping, like shopping tourism (e.g.,
Westwood 2006). Researchers have successfully been
able to apply previously developed shopper typologies to these contexts. On the other hand, new contexts have opened views to completely new, specific
typologies. For example, regarding shopping tourism,
the typologies describing airport shopping (Geuens,
Vantomme, and Brengman 2004) or in the case of
online shopping, the typologies based on avatar roles
(McGoldrick, Keeling, and Beatty 2008), illustrate
how far this kind of specification can proceed.
Are there justifications for creating new, specific
typologies? Could the significance of typologies in
theory building be strengthened by paying attention
to the position of shopping as a part of a holistic lifestyle? Has too little attention been paid to the social
aspect, even though serious theoretical frameworks
are available? Or have the negative orientations
been given too little consideration? It is possible

Typologies of Shoppers

that dimensions related to, for example, apathy and
uninvolvement, have been understood as too simple
and rough. The different degrees of negative feelings,
including hatred, are seldom considered, even though
they often surface in shopping contexts.
Theoretical openings have been developed with
regard to sociocultural, experiential, and symbolic
aspects. For example, Fiore has presented a holistic
taxonomy for experience that is founded on valuebased benefits. Similarly, regarding the recreational
orientation, the possibility of defining the features of
shopping enthusiasts in a way that relates to the consumers’ identity has been considered by Guiry and
colleagues. Individual projects related to the construction of identity can be resourced in different supply
environments. Eric Arnould has suggested that, from
the perspective of consumer culture theory, at least
economic, utopian, lucid, and temporal resources
could be considered as a solution to consumers’
identity projects. Recalling the most common basic
dimensions presented in the tables, the connection
to the aforementioned four resource areas represents
fertile ground for future research.
Martti Laaksonen
See also Consumer Behavior: Convenience; Lifestyle
Typologies; Markets and Marketing; Motivation
Research; Shopping; Spaces of Shopping

Further Readings
Arnould, Eric. “Animating the Big Middle.” Journal of
Retailing 81, no. 2 (2005): 89–96.
Bellenger, Danny N., and Pradeep K. Korgaonkar.
“Profiling the Recreational Shopper.” Journal of
Retailing 56, no. 3 (1980): 77–92.
Boone, Louis E., David L. Kurtz, James C. Johnson, and John
A. Bonno. “City Shoppers and Urban Identification.”
Journal of Marketing 38, no. 3 (1974): 67–69.
Cullen, C. W. Shopping as Entertainment: Implications for
the Shopping Centre Manager. Institute of Retail Studies
Working Paper. Stirling, UK: University of Stirling, 1990.
Darden, William R., and Fred D. Reynolds. “Shopping
Orientations and Product Usage Rates.” Journal of
Marketing Research 8 (1971): 505–508.
Fiore, Ann Marie. “The Shopping Experience.” In Product
Experience, edited by Hendrik N. J. Schifferstein and
Paul Hekkert, 629–647. Oxford: Elsevier, 2008.
Geuens, Maggie, Delphine Vantomme, and Malaika
Brengman. “Developing a Typology of Airport Shoppers.”
Tourism Management 25, no. 5 (2004): 615–622.

1491

Girard, Tulay, Pradeep Korgaonkar, and Ronnie Silverblatt.
“Relationship of Type of Product, Shopping
Orientations, and Demographics with Preference for
Shopping on the Internet.” Journal of Business and
Psychology 18, no. 1 (2003): 101–120.
Guiry, Michael, Anne W. Mägi, and Richard J. Lutz.
“Defining and Measuring Recreational Shopper
Identity.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
34, no. 1 (2006): 74–83.
Jarrat, Denise G. “A Shopper Taxonomy for Retail Strategy
Development.” International Review of Retail,
Distribution and Consumer Research 6, no. 2 (1996):
196–215.
Laaksonen, Martti. “Retail Patronage Dynamics: Learning
about Daily Shopping Behavior in Contexts of Changing
Retail Structures.” Journal of Business Research 28
(1993): 3–174.
McGoldrick, Peter J., Kathleen A. Keeling, and Susan F.
Beatty. “A Typology of Roles for Avatars in Online
Retailing.” Journal of Marketing Management 24, nos.
3/4 (2008): 433–461.
Pine, B. Joseph, II, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience
Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
Reynolds, Kristy, Jaishankar Ganesh, and Michael Luckett.
“Traditional Malls vs. Factory Outlets: Comparing
Shopper Typologies and Implications for Retail
Strategy.” Journal of Business Research 55, no. 9
(2002): 687–696.
Sinha, Piyush K., and Dwarika P. Uniyal. “Using
Observational Research for Behavioural Segmentation
of Shoppers.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer
Services 12 (2005): 35–48.
Sit, Jason, Bill Merrilees, and Dawn Birch. “EntertainmentSeeking Shopping Centre Patrons: The Missing
Segments.” International Journal of Retail &
Distribution Management 31, no. 2 (2003): 80–94.
Stone, Gregory. “City Shoppers and Urban Identification:
Observation on the Social Psychology of City Life.”
American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 1 (1954):
36–45.
Westbrook, Robert A., and William C. Black. “A
Motivation-Based Shopper Typology.” Journal of
Retailing 61, no. 1 (1985): 78–103.
Westwood, Sheena. “Shopping in Satitised and
Un-Satitised Spaces: Adding Value to Tourist
Experiences.” Journal of Retail & Leisure Property 5,
no. 4 (2006): 281–291.
Williams, Robert H., John J. Painter, and Herbert R.
Nichols. “A Policy-Oriented Typology of Grocery
Shoppers.” Journal of Retailing 54, no. 1 (1978): 27–42.

U
URBAN CULTURES
The concept of urban culture refers to two distinct
aspects of social life. On the one hand, urban culture
expresses the impact of the city as a whole on the people and their lives; on the other hand, it refers to the
production of the city by its population. Moreover,
the concept of urban cultures, in the plural, highlights
the multiplicity of actors, dimensions, and processes
involved in the city fabric. To say that every city has
distinct urban cultures and to point out that cities
are produced by different urban cultures is to give an
adequate weight to the fact that any urban agglomerate is highly autonomous, that people’s interaction is
productive of distinctive social goods we usually call
cultures. To say it in other words, “culture is, arguably, what cities ‘do’ best” (Zukin 1995, 264).
The coin of urban cultures has two sides: the
production as well as the consumption of them. The
making of an art festival by the intellectual elite of
the city reveals the existence of a critical mass of
art consumers to which the festival is devoted and
made up. The absence of specific social groupings,
for instance, art lovers, in a specific place and time
consequently has the effect of underdeveloping some
urban cultures like art societies. A good question is,
then, which culture and which cities?

The Nexus Between Cities and
Urban Cultures
The discovery of the distinctive capability of the
city to produce culture makes sense if one takes into

account the famous German medieval saying, “The
air of the cities makes men free.” As it was early
recognized, living under urban conditions entails
profiting from one of the major assets of the city:
anonymity. Whereas rural living often implies close
and intimate social bonds such as kinship or community-based ties in which everybody knows each
other, the city is the quintessential environmental
expression of the freedom that anonymity brings to
society, as in the famous dichotomy by Ferdinand
Toënnies of Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft (community vs. society). All of this was clear to the
first urban sociologists, such as Georg Simmel and
Louis Wirth. Simmel, in his celebrated essay “The
Metropolis and Mental Life,” set forth his thesis of urban life and culture that may be summed
up like this: People in urban settings are exposed
to extreme environmental as well as psychological
and relational stimulations and, needful of reducing complexity, they develop a psychological “blasé”
attitude made of indifference to what is considered
not relevant. Moreover, money becomes the only
medium for deciphering social and urban life, and
people become subject to a world in which monetary exchange is the dominating force. The rational
calculation of city life was also, in Simmel’s thinking,
a matter of time calculation in which the individual
citizen excelled as an integrated, modern, urban type.
This wasn’t considered in a purely negative way by
Simmel, as it would have been by Marx, because the
birth of the citizen in the modern metropolis was
also a matter of leaving the traditional folkways of
the countryside to build up the singularity of a living. This happened through the primacy of an eye

1493

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Urban Cultures

rapidly acquainted to the multiple milieus of the city,
such as the opera, the university, or the newly born
department stores. The sociology of the city, of fashion, and of shopping starts with Simmel in the Berlin
of the early nineteenth century.
Wirth tried to distill the main urban and cultural
output some decades later, in the 1930s, when he
defined “urbanism as a way of life,” having in mind
Chicago and the intellectual framework developed
by his teacher, Robert E. Park. In the view of Wirth,
as a consequence of large population size, density,
and heterogeneity, the city (above all, the great cities)
produces a specific character of urban life: urbanism.
Wirth suggested taking into account three research
perspectives to grasp the nature of urbanism: (1) an
ecological perspective, (2) urbanism as a form of
social organization, and (3) urban personality and
collective behavior. The last two perspectives concentrate directly on the social life of individuals within
the city and called for a holistic view of people and
urban environment. Culture, in Wirth’s view, is still
underdeveloped, but urbanism is precisely what one
would define as the main effect of cities in cultural
terms. The city creates urbanism within its citizens; it
provides them with urban culture.
Both Simmel and Wirth wrote about the modern
city, one that received specific attention from critics,
artists, and novelists. Charles Baudelaire, for instance,
depicted the birth of the boulevard in Haussmanian
Paris through his prose poem “The Eyes of the
Poor,” in which a bourgeois couple discovers its own
intimate distance at the view of poor people staring
at them while standing at the café’s window. On the
one hand, Baudelaire tells his (urban) readers about
the dawn of the modern individual through the consumption of a typical urban facility, the café. On the
other hand, the great city, with its flow of people,
transportation, and lifestyles, poor as well as rich
ones, is portrayed by the poet. The same may be said
of the German literary critic Walter Benjamin, whose
descriptions of the Parisian shopping arcades as well
as his writings on cities like Marseilles and Naples
highlighted the autobiographical figure of the flaneur,
a kind of Simmelian individual strolling along the
sidewalks while consuming an aestheticized space.
The modern city witnessed major social changes and
for most of the authors, urban culture was a kind of
expression of the general zeitgeist so that Chicago
accounted for the American city, and Paris and Berlin
for France and Germany, respectively.

After World War II, especially in the United States,
attention went to the outskirts of the city, to its suburban areas facing the birth and growth of shopping
centers, to the growing flow outside the city and
toward a middle-class ideal type of society, with standardized mass consumption styles, steady jobs for
secure households, and clear-cut cultural boundaries within social groupings. On one hand, the focus
went to the suburban culture of the (white) middle
class fleeing the inner city; on the other hand, since
the 1950s up to the 1980s, scholars addressed what
was left to the city, especially the inner city: the urban
subcultures and their cultural products. The debate
on the culture of poverty, for instance, launched by
Oscar Lewis, prepared the ground for the appearance of the underclasses, with their clothing styles;
their ability to cope with WASP institutions, codes,
and manner; and their linguistic, and thus cultural,
reactions to the majority.
The black ghetto (and later, the Latino one) as a
spatial and social formation became the new urban
stage for the cultural expression of marginalized
minorities within the great cities. As it happened for
jazz music in the 1950s, turning from subcultural to
mainstream, the same was observed for soul, rap,
and hip-hop music in the decades afterward. All of
these styles are intimately urban, strongly related to
black communities of the great cities, but having an
extraordinary expansion outside the ghetto toward
the rest of the city, the national society, and, in many
cases, the global world.
The last decades of the twentieth century are
marked by a double movement, apparently contradictory, concerning the city and its cultural dimension. On one hand, since the end of the 1970s, the
widespread phenomenon of transformation of many
sectors of the inner cities in fancy hype districts for
young middle classes, also known as gentrification, brought attention to the rebirth of the city as
a producer of cultural goods, such as art and entertainment. On the other hand, the discovery of the
blurring of several modern boundaries, such as
the nation-state, race, or gender, together with the
increased spectrum of chances offered by globalization, led theorists, politicians, and citizens to think
of cities and urban cultures as tied together in a network where space was dominated by some places,
like the global cities depicted by Saskia Sassen. In
the first sense, culture was conceived as the basis of
what Sharon Zukin called the “symbolic economy,”

Urban Cultures

in a Western urbanized world where production was
rapidly overtaken by consumption. The urban environment became rapidly a fashioned and culturalized
object to consume, while strolling along an upgraded
park or square heading for a cappuccino or some
sushi. In the second sense, culture was conceived
as a global good, an asset that permitted the global
urbanite to perform urban lifestyles in Los Angeles,
London, or Tokyo.
The concept of urban cultures follows not only the
destiny of the city and of the discourse that continuously tries to grasp its inner spirit, but also the bumpy
trajectory of the concept of culture. For anthropologists, as well as for sociologists, culture has always
been a real theoretical threat because of the temptation of considering it a whole, homogeneous set of
defined values and beliefs, making individuals into
puppets or “cultural dopes.” On the contrary side,
once you adhere to a more fragmented view of cultures, be it relativistic or not, you commit yourself
to a never-ending quest for separate entities sharing
“something” likely known as culture. In the middle
stands a whole set of works whose authors wrote to
grasp both macrolevels and microlevels of cultures
in the city and of which we distinguish two perspectives: urban spaces of cultural production and urban
expressions of (sub)culture.

The Urban Spaces of Cultural Production
To grasp the nexus between the urban dimension
of societies and the fact that culture is basically an
urban product, since the 1970s we have witnessed a
growing interest in cities as specific environments of
cultural production. Some authors, such as Allen J.
Scott, wrote about the “cultural economy of cities,”
whereas others, such as Zukin, stress the rhetoric and
discursive side of the same phenomenon in talking
of the “symbolic economy” of cities, but all share
the broader approach of urban political economy
that may be found in the works of Henri Lefebvre,
Manuel Castells, or David Harvey. To sum up this
perspective, these authors share the belief that modern capitalism has turned to a new phase of postmodernism and post-Fordism, leaving behind the previous
“organized capitalism.” In our times, we are told, the
mass production of standardized goods that dominated the former model is becoming the manufacture
of aestheticized and culturalized objects (and services)
where the consumer is no longer considered as a

1495

simple interchangeable mass user. The consumption
here is not the end of a process but rather the starting
point, where individuals seek a personal toolkit relevant for building each specific and incommensurable
identity. Of course this isn’t thoroughly new, as it is
widely documented how the upper classes in the past
tried to differentiate themselves by collecting sophisticated items and goods. What is dramatically original
is the wide diffusion of the commodification of cultural products in a world where money and time, as
Simmel noted, are two critical and growing forces for
everyone.
Cities are central places for this new kind of capitalism for two relevant reasons: (1) they host a considerable critical mass of consumers who (2) foster the
cultural economy while fulfilling their consumption
needs. Even though production, in this flexible world,
may be decentralized and outsourced to distant production sites, like China or Eastern Europe, the cities,
and above all the global ones, acquire new strength
because of their capacity to be creative and build
consumerist settlements. Place becomes then a critical variable, since not all cities are equally relevant for
this economy, and not all the cities provide the same
cultural output in terms of creativity, innovation, and
vitality. As an example, consider the role of the fashion
industry for global and local cultural economy. The
cities of Paris and Milan maintained an important
place in the global world because of a mix of specific
events like fashion shows, of services like advertising agencies, and of spatial assets like several highly
reputed commercial streets. All of this permitted both
cities to maintain a concrete power and weight within
the global cities even if, in many cases, the headquarters of the fashion firms, as well as the production sites
of the luxury goods, were no longer in Paris or Milan.
Art, fashion, media products, publishing, but also
catering, festivals, and nightlife, serve the purpose of
supporting the urban cultural economy. For the tourist, the citizen, or the flaneur, the result is to enter into
an urban realm where the satisfaction of everybody’s
cultural needs is fast, cheap, and rich. For the political
actor, the entrepreneur, and more specifically the real
estate developer, culture becomes rapidly the keystone
for (uneven) urban development.

The Urban Expression of (Sub)Cultures
The former perspective, considering the deep relations to the neo-Marxist approach at the foundation

1496

Urbanization

of urban political economy, may be somehow hard to
swallow when one is a producer-consumer of a specific kind of urban culture. If one considers only music
subcultures from their point of view—such as mods
in London of the 1970s and how they created their
own place within the city, with their stores, brands,
bands, and events—it is true that they would share
little with either the rockers subculture or London’s
art world in the same period. All of them are part of
the cultural economy of this city, but they wouldn’t
sip a cup of tea together. This to say that it is worth
considering culture also from the genuine and relative
point of view of each cultural producer or, to say it in
another way, to take seriously what has been called
subcultures. This term has a long and controversial
history in the social sciences, mainly because of its
birth within the frame of deviant studies, criminology,
and, later, of poor and marginalized groups within the
city. From Frederic Thrasher’s early Chicago studies
on the social organization of the gang to Howard S.
Becker’s studies on deviant behavior in the 1950s and
1960s, a huge number of studies have been carried
out to show how each group developed its own set of
meanings, rites, visions of the world, beliefs, and values—in other words, its own culture. The often limited size and scope of these groups led many scholars
to think of subcultures as if they fit homogeneously
within a broader culture. Whether or not this is the
case, the urban context is the privileged stage for the
appearance of segmented group identities and belongings. In more general terms, when we talk about urban
cultures, our primary understanding goes precisely
to subcultures. We may identify an endless number
of subcultures, for example, urban graffiti painters,
urban political groups like black or feminist ones,
expressive and loose ensembles like punks or emos,
bikers and skidrows, literary circles, fan clubs, consumer groups, sport supporters, and so on. Musicians,
for instance, have been studied since Becker’s groundbreaking accounts of jazz players in Chicago up to
more recent works like Andy Bennett’s account of hiphop local culture in Newcastle, United Kingdom, or
David Grazian’s inquiry on Chicago’s blues clubs and
culture.
Urban cultures may be seen both as the greater
expression of a city conceived as a place of deep interaction among strangers and as the essential producers
of the contemporary cityscape. The study of urban
cultures as groups has been made possible by qualitative research techniques, like participant observation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups, whereas

the perspective dealing with the urban production of
cultures has been more varied, using both qualitative and quantitative data, because of the prominent
focus on the city rather than on individuals. In the
near future, a growing interest in these topics can be
expected because of the link between culture as a tool
for economic development and the increasing role
of cities as political, economic, and cultural actors in
a world where spatial reconfigurations are the rule
rather than the exception.
Giovanni Semi
See also Flaneur/euse; Ghettos; Global Cities;
Postmodernism; Production of Culture; Spaces and
Places; Subculture; Suburbia; Urbanization

Further Readings
Becker, Howard S. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of
Deviance. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963.
Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music,
Identity and Place. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Gans, Herbert. “Urbanism and Suburbanism as a Way of
Life: A Reevaluation of Definitions.” In People and
Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions, by
H. Gans, 34–52. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Grazian, David. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity
in Urban Blues Clubs. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:
Methuen, 1979.
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Scott, Allen J. The Cultural Economy of Cities. London:
Sage, 2000.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The
Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by K. Wolff, 409–424.
Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950. First published 1905.
Thrasher, Frederic. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in
Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927.
Turley, Alan C. Urban Culture: Exploring Cities and
Cultures. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005.
Wirth, Louis. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American
Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24.
Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell,
1995.

URBANIZATION
Urbanization is a term that describes the process of
movement of people from a rural area to an urbanized area. This phenomenon is closely connected

Urbanization

with migration flows, labor supply, and innovations
in the means of production. It had (and still has) a
strong impact on the physical shape of the urbanized
area and on the experience of urbanized people.
Urbanization is also related to the concept of
modernization. Through the observation of changes
occurring in the city during the Industrial Revolution,
philosophers and social scientists described the birth of
the modern era in many European and American cities.
Urbanization also brings diverse groups of individuals into a particularly intense daily contact,
producing the conditions for the achievement of
cityness, different forms of urbanities, and conflicts.
The density and heterogeneity of people also imply
the development of cultural disposition that, together
with the concentration and reproduction of capital,
has a strong impact on the development of consumer
culture. According to Max Weber, cities are, above
all, market settlements and places of commerce and
trade. In addition, according to Georg Simmel, cities
are centers for the promotions of culture and places
where self-expression could be possible.
Since urbanization began, it has continued to
evolve. It has changed its geography and proportion
according to the global relocalization of production systems, moving from Western cities (such as
Manchester and Chicago) to today’s main centers
for global economy in developing countries (e.g.,
Shanghai in China or São Paulo in Brazil), which
have registered unprecedented rates of urbanization.
According to the Global Urban Observatory at the
United Nations, the rate of urbanization has been so
considerable in the past fifty years that the majority of
the world’s population now lives in urban areas and it
is expected to reach five billion people by 2030.

Urbanization and Capitalism
Different phases of the history of capitalism led to
different urbanization phases. The term urbanization
originally referred to the First Industrial Revolution of
the eighteenth century, which took place in the United
Kingdom. This phase gave rise to the classical factory
towns (e.g., Manchester in the United Kingdom). The
Second Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth
century, mainly due to the rapid expansion of innovations in the industrial sector and to the development
of steam-powered ships and railway connections,
produced an increase in urbanization rates in North
European countries and North America. This phase
resulted in rapid urban growth (e.g., Chicago in the

1497

United States). Later on, the twentieth century witnessed the rapid urbanization of the world’s population, all basically bound to places where production
complexes and their associated labor markets were
localized. The rise of Ford’s mass production was
associated with the growth and spread of the large
metropolis (e.g., Detroit in the United States).
At this point, capitalism was driven by mass consumerism, and consumption starts to be considered
the engine that drives the economy of the Western
world. A good example is the massive shift to an
automobile-based service economy that accelerated the rate of suburbanization. A high number of
workers moved to the suburbs, and a phenomenon
described as “residential sprawl” became the new
trend in urban growth, fostered by investments in
high-speed motorways. This trend has been described
as a counterurban movement because one of the
reasons for moving away from the inner city is the
perception of the city as congested and unsafe.
With the advent of globalization, Western cities
experienced a changing state of economy that produced the birth of an emergent form of cognitive and
cultural economy. This new economy is tied to new
expectations concerning the living environment. In
particular, the cores of cities are becoming places for
enhancing the site-based experience that feeds the
economy of the postmodern consumer society. In this
context, new forms of reurbanization, such as gentrification, explain a new stage of capital reproduction
in the urban core. According to Adrian Smith, the
term gentrification describes a displacement of poorincome residents in the inner-city neighborhoods in
favor of emerging middle- and upper-class residents.
These latter residents are characterized by a demand
for entertainment, leisure, and consumption that well
portrays the contemporary desire of urban living.
However, reurbanization is not happening everywhere. Western cities such as Detroit (United States),
Manchester/Liverpool (United Kingdom), and Leipzig
(Germany) are shrinking: they are losing population,
businesses, and jobs as a result of deindustrialization
and disinvestment in the production sectors.
Meanwhile, the metropolitan areas of developing
countries (such as Mexico City, Mexico; Mumbai,
India; New Delhi, India; Beijing, China; Guangzhou,
China; São Paulo, Brazil; Lagos, Nigeria) have registered an unprecedented rate of urbanization, and
local governments are facing many difficulties in providing the minimal infrastructures and services for
the entire urbanized population.

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Urbanization

Effects of Urbanization
The effects of the urbanization have been manifold and have been treated by different branches of
knowledge: planning and urban theory, policy studies, urban studies, economic and consumer studies.
They all have in common the object of their observation (the city) and their attempt to address issues
related to the coexistence of different interests and
powers in a resources-limited system.
Urbanization constitutes the grounds for the birth
of modern planning, which originally produced utopian models: some of them celebrating the ideology
of the modern city and the bourgeois society (e.g., the
Haussmann Boulevard in Paris); others committed to
providing answers to working-class needs (e.g., the
Garden City of Ebenezer Howard).
Meanwhile, urban theorists have focused on
understanding human behaviors and feelings
regarding the modern metropolitan life. Among the
pioneering studies of modern life, Simmel’s “The
Metropolis and Mental Life” pictures the city as a
relatively exclusive society, with habits and selfreflexive urbanities. Members of the Chicago school
(e.g., Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth)
studied human interaction and behavior within the
urban environment. Their works have focused on the
so-called underworld, giving attention to patterns of
concentrations of disadvantages, minority groups,
and class struggles. In particular, Wirth, in “Urbanism
as a Way of Life,” tries to provide a sociologically
significant definition of the city as a relatively large,
dense, and permanent settlement of heterogeneous
individuals. With this definition, he tries to explain
how urbanism marks urbanities as a “distinctive
mode of human group life” (Wirth 1938, 4).
In the field of urban studies, many contributions
demonstrate that consumption increasingly saturates
every aspect of modern life. One of the most important contributions in understanding the impact of
urbanization in city life in terms of consumption is
Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City. In this work,
Lefebvre sees the city as a location where use value
and exchange value meet and are combined in a
relation of production. Starting from the historical
materialism of Karl Marx, Lefebvre insists on the
importance of concepts such as “commodities” and
“commodification” in explaining the spatial configuration of class conflicts. According to Parker, Lefebvre
was an “advocate for the need for social justice and
the overcoming of bourgeois domination,” and he
called the capitalist city “a bureaucratic society of

‘controlled consumption,’ a term which has become
popularized as ‘consumer society’” (Lefebvre, 1984,
quoted in Parker 2004, 20). Lefebvre’s writings have
inspired subsequent generations of scholars within
the so-called neo-Marxist school (such as David
Harvey and Manuel Castells).

Future Directions in Research
Contemporary urbanization must be viewed in the
light of globalization. From this perspective, it poses
different challenges in Western countries as well as
in developing countries. Developing countries are
nowadays the protagonists of urbanization and
are experiencing many problems concerning urban
and regional development. Issues such as the ruralurban labor transfer, poverty and the link between
urbanization and regional development are the
goals of many institutions and organizations working in this field. New research on the theme of sustainable development tries to illuminate these issues
and will likely frame future research in the field of
urbanization in developing countries. According to
the United Nations Human Settlements Programme
(UN-HABITAT), it is urgent that countries strengthen
their focus on the growing urban crisis and improve
the lives of slum dwellers.
New challenges are also rising for Western cities.
Shrinking cities are required to foster reurbanization.
In this context, urbanization shifts from a phenomenon that should be planned and governed by public
policy and institutions to something that should be
fostered by urban rhetoric and local development
projects to compete in the global arena. The issue of
exclusion and of the unequal growth of the city has
been surpassed by an idea of development that relies
on the eventually prosperous, vibrant, creative, and
exciting city.
Those polarities and global disparities advocate
for rebalancing the relationship among cities. Issues
such as global justice and the quality of urban living
in developing countries will determine the quality of
civilization itself.
Sandra Annunziata
See also Geography; Ghettos; Global Cities;
Globalization; Industrial Society; Modernization
Theory; Suburbia; Urban Cultures

Further Readings
Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Urbanization
Mumford, Lewis. “The Natural History of Urbanization.”
In Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, edited
by William L. Thomas, 382–398. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1956.
Parker, Simon. Urban Theory and the Urban Experience:
Encountering the City. London: Routledge, 2004.
Sachs, Jeffrey. Development Economics. London: Blackwell,
1997.

United Nations, Global Urban Observatory. World
Urbanization Prospect 2007. New York: United
Nations, 2008.
Wirth, Louis. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American
Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (July 1938): 1–24.

1499

V
VALUE: EXCHANGE
USE VALUE

AND

For Karl Marx, the value of a commodity consists of
two contradictory aspects: use value and exchange
value. Use value refers to a product’s utility in satisfying needs and wants as afforded by its material
properties. Exchange value is the “quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one
sort are exchanged for those of another sort” (Marx
1996, 46); that is, it is based on a product’s use
value for others, social use value. Both derive from
the expenditure of labor power—use value from the
qualitative aspect of work as transforming useless
matter into useful objects; exchange value from the
purely quantitative, commensurable side of work:
“abstract labor.” Exchanged products as use values
are qualitatively different, but as exchange values
they must be equal. Marx concluded that there must
be something identical in them that allows for quantitative comparison. He identified socially necessary
simple labor time as that common substance.
Use value can exist without exchange value as
material property of the product, but exchange value
can only be expressed by an opposition of use values. Although exchange presupposes homogeneous
labor substance, it is only possible as exchange of
heterogeneous use values. In turn, exchange value
realized in the market affirms the social character of
use value—the recognition function of consumption
can be located in this link between social utility and
exchange.

In the development of a capitalist economy, pure
exchange value (money and capital) comes to subordinate use value. Whereas both in simple and
in money-mediated commodity exchange (C-C,
C-M-C), use value is the beginning and end of the
process (producing use value for others in order
to obtain use values to satisfy one’s own needs), in
commercial and capitalist transactions (M-C-M),
exchange value is the driving force. At the heart of
this transformation is the commodification of labor
power. Labor power has the unique capacity to produce more value than it contains, and the capitalist
can retain and reinvest the surplus value created by the
exploitation of labor power bought from the worker.
Again, use value is subjected to exchange value: the
main use value of labor power now is its ability to
produce surplus exchange value—the production of
concrete use values becomes a mere means to this
end. The dominance of abstract exchange value and
the subsequent loss of the concrete and un-identical
are central in the Frankfurt school critique of consumer culture as driven by the culture industry. This
loss of qualitative distinction has been seen as one
of the defining characteristics of consumerism. Igor
Kopytoff, for example, pits “commodification” as a
force that homogenizes value against nonconsumerist “culture,” which he sees as “discrimination.”
Such dominance of exchange value plays a central role in Georg Simmel’s analysis of modernity,
although his account of value does not directly build
on Marx. For Simmel, the act of exchange objectifies value as a quantitative relation between objects.
Money as pure exchange value acquires the use value

1501

1502

Value: Exchange and Use Value

of the ultimate tool—the thing with which to achieve
everything. By making everything exchangeable
for everything, the universal use of money deprives
concrete objects of their unique character; they lose
the personal significance they used to have in premonetary times. An exchange value–dominated
culture will offer more individual freedom and opportunities to develop a personal style of life—but it will
also be more blasé and superficial.
Thinkers in the Marxist tradition have long
ignored the sphere of consumption. But in the early
1970s, some began to employ the category of value
to late-capitalist consumer societies. The most significant among them were Marxist Wolfgang F. Haug
and post-Marxist Jean Baudrillard.
Haug takes up motifs from Theodor Adorno’s
writing on the culture industry and music, such as
the notion of “use value illusion.” He sees consumer
culture rooted in the fact that capitalism is geared to
the accumulation of exchange value with the production of use values a mere means to this end. The need
for exchange value can never be fully satisfied, as
the accumulation of capital is an infinite process. In
contrast, needs and hence the demand for use values
have an absolute limit in human nature—which is an
obstacle to the accumulation of capital as the production of exchange value still needs to go through
the stage of use value production. For this reason, the
need for use values must be made infinite as well. To
accomplish this, use value is emptied out in several
ways. Utility is reduced by artificial obsolescence,
diminishing quality. It is replaced by use value promises that inevitably go unfulfilled. More significantly,
material use value is superseded by commodity
aesthetics, infusing low-utility products with symbolisms of youth and sex. By constant aesthetic innovation, material obsolescence is complemented with
symbolic obsolescence. The creation of value shifts
from industrial production to design and advertising.
While use value resides in the material substance of
the commodity, aesthetic value resides on its surface.
Baudrillard goes even further, claiming that use
value always has been secondary as only “an effect
of exchange value,” a mere tactical necessity in the
structure of exchange simulating a reference to a
reality outside that structure. In the end, this link
cannot be maintained and even the relatively abstract
exchange value is superseded by an even emptier
“sign value”—which, as signification of difference, is
completely self-referential, defining hierarchical positions within the system of exchange. Baudrillard’s

account essentially is an application of Thorstein
Veblen’s theory of conspicuous waste to the question of exchange and use value. Since products are
only there to mark position, labor is stripped of its
use value–producing character—it now produces
evidence of waste and, hence, is no more than vicarious leisure. Therefore, both use value (based on real
need) and exchange value (based on socially necessary labor) disappear. The break with reality triggers
a dynamic in which consumer societies spiral off into
a self-referential system of simulacra, imitations of a
reality, that no longer make reference to the imitated
reality.
Against the background of these critiques, insistence on use value has been identified as a potentially
subversive strategy. Robert Miklitsch sees retaining
nonproductive use value as a refuge of the unsubsumed, the meta-economical. Exchange value is produced according to the logic of modern bourgeois
rationalism, which has been identified as gendered,
racialized, and classed. In contrast, Beverley Skeggs
sees use value as the field where the denied affects of
the excluded can be expressed.
Those decrying the loss of use value, from Veblen
to Baudrillard, can only do so on the basis that
social signs and symbols have no real utility, that
they only have “secondary utility” (Veblen 1994,
154). Adorno, however, insists that this secondary
use value still carries a promise of happiness beyond
the relations of production, as it creates distance
from the immediate utility. From here it may make
sense to reevaluate aesthetic use value to include a
product’s ability to afford emotional attachment,
daydreaming, and self-transformation—imaginative
use value. Marx had made it clear that use value is
constituted by the satisfaction of any need, want, or
desire—however fanciful. Andrew Wernick therefore
suggests that “symbolic advertising” as “imagistic
production” contributes to a product’s use value.
Antonio Negri suggests that value affect as
an “investment of desire” becomes economically
relevant as a force that is at once innovative and
productive—and therefore always also subversive
and dangerous. For Negri, affect as nexus of production, value, and subjectivity is ultimately indestructible and may therefore act as a source of a successful
insurrection against the capitalist system. Failing that,
it can be argued that daydreaming and imagination—
once an obstacle to rationalization in the Fordist
factory—has become part of the exchange value–
producing labor power of the post-Fordist flexible

Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

and creative worker, a managed human resource that
“adds value.”
Matthias Zick Varul
See also Capitalism; Commodification; Commodities;
Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism;
Surplus Value; Symbolic Value

Further Readings
Adorno, Theodor W. “Veblen’s Attack on Culture.” Studies
in Philosophy and Social Sciences 9 (1941): 389–423.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign. New York: Telos, 1981.
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1976.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1993.
Marx, Karl. Capital I (MECW 35). London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1996.
Miklitsch, Robert. “The Commodity-Body-Sign.” Cultural
Critique 33 (1996): 5–40.
Negri, Antonio. “Value and Affect.” Boundary 2 26, no. 2
(1999): 77–88.
Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Skeggs, Beverley. “Exchange, Value and Affect.” In
Feminism after Bourdieu, edited by Lisa Adkins and
Beverley Skeggs, 75–96. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Varul, Matthias Zick. “Reciprocity, Recognition, and Labor
Value.” Journal of Social Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2010):
50–72.
Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1994.
Wernick, Andrew. Promotional Culture. London: Sage, 1991.

VEBLEN, THORSTEIN BUNDE
(1857–1929)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born in the United States
(where he lived and worked all his life) to Norwegian
immigrant parents, held faculty posts at Chicago,
Stanford, and Missouri universities. He was best
known for coining the terms conspicuous consumption and leisure class, as a founder of institutional
economics and evolutionary economics, and for his
satirical, polemic style of writing.
Contrary to the classical economics of his time,
Veblen argued that economic behavior, specifically
how businesses were run, was determined socially, not

1503

individually. He also argued that economic life, including forms of business organization, was in a process
of continuous evolution—that nothing could be relied
on to last.
Veblen was a fierce critic of the kind of industrial
capitalism that was becoming dominant in the United
States by the end of the nineteenth century. He was
critical of how ownership of major enterprises was
in the hands of a moneyed class (we would now call
them finance capitalists) who exploited the people
who worked, invented, and ran businesses. Veblen’s
view was that, alongside their virtues, markets generated waste, fraud, and, in America, had created idle,
parasitic elites, whom he called a leisure class.
Veblen’s first and best-known book, The Theory
of the Leisure Class, was originally published in
1899 and was an attack on the wasteful lifestyles of
America’s leisure class. Members were said to advertise their success through ostentatious display, the conspicuous consumption of manifestly useless objects
such as jewelry and gambling in casinos. Nowadays
we would call these objects “positional goods” whose
value rests on other people not possessing them.
Conspicuous consumption, in Veblen’s work, earned
status in a similar way to Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural
and symbolic capital.
As a founder of evolutionary economics, which
still has adherents, Veblen was confident that the
American capitalism of his lifetime would be temporary. He was not a Marxist. He did not anticipate
a proletarian revolution and the end of capitalism.
Rather, he hoped and expected that the human
instinct of workmanship would be reasserted.
Engineers were Veblen’s heroes.
Veblen was prolific. He published ten books and
scores of articles, but his immediate influence was
confined to narrow bands of followers in the subdisciplines that he helped to create: institutional economics and evolutionary economics. Although Veblen’s
work was sociological, it never became part of core
sociology courses. He was a lost theorist until interest
in consumption and leisure soared in the late-twentieth century, whereupon Veblen was rediscovered.
The term conspicuous consumption had previously
become detached from Veblen’s theory of the leisure
class in which it was originally embedded. The term
entered everyday use, and for most of the twentieth century, most users were probably completely
unaware of its first author. It is different today. Veblen
is sometimes claimed as a founding father, or forefather, of the contemporary study of consumption and

1504

Virtual Communities

leisure, but this claim is misleading, and it is possible
only in misunderstanding how Veblen used the terms
leisure class and conspicuous consumption.
The study of leisure since the 1960s has been about
the leisure of workers, not a work-free leisure class
that is able to live off the wealth created by others.
Today, fabulously wealthy individuals appear to be the
opposite of Veblen’s leisure class: their entire lifestyles
appear work centered. Veblen saw conspicuous consumption as an enemy of technological and economic
progress. Today, consumption, conspicuous and
inconspicuous, is typically regarded as a key driver of
the economy. An advertising industry manufactures
desire. High earners who are genuine workers make
their success known through the positional goods
that they are able to display, particularly their houses
and automobiles. Consumption is increasingly seen
as fundamental to identity development and maintenance in all social strata. This is neither what Veblen
wrote about nor what he envisaged for America.
Veblen’s ideas that have proved truly ahead of their
time were published in a long forgotten book, The
Higher Learning in America (1918). This book was
not warmly received at the time of its publication,
and in his lifetime, Veblen was never highly regarded
in the American academy. He did not fit comfortably into either economics or sociology. Maybe this
is one reason why the universities became targets for
his vitriol. Veblen indicted America’s universities for
becoming dedicated, above all else, to raising money,
mainly from rich patrons, and abandoning their true
intellectual mission. Today, this critique would not be
regarded as particularly controversial.
Ken Roberts
See also Conspicuous Consumption; Cultural Capital;
Economic Sociology; Industrial Society; Leisure; Mass
Production and Consumption; Positional Goods;
Status; Symbolic Capital

Further Readings
Mestrovic, Stjepan G. Thorstein Veblen: On Culture and
Society. London: Sage, 2003.
Reisman, David. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical
Interpretation. New York: Scribner, 1953.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning in America.
Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1918.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Instinct of Workmanship and the
State of the Industrial Arts. New York: Norton, 1964.
First published 1914.

VEGETARIANISM
See Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Food
Consumption; Organic Food

VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
The term virtual community was coined by Howard
Rheingold, in his 1993 book of that name, to refer to
those connections primarily forged between people
through the medium of their computers. Rheingold’s
book, subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic
Frontier, drew on his long involvement in the WELL
(Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), a group characterizing itself as “the birthplace of the online community movement.” Virtual communities center on the
use of various forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC), a novel phenomenon in the early
1990s but now a pervasive feature of life across large
parts of the world. The “affordances” of information
and communication technologies give rise to different forms of virtual community, some synchronous
(e.g., chat rooms), others asynchronous (e.g., e-mail
discussion lists). Of course, virtual communities
existed long before the Internet. The members of the
Royal Society in eighteenth-century England formed
a virtual community through their correspondence
on the scientific questions of the day. For all its centrality, the term community has proved to be one of
the most elusive and ambiguous notions in the entire
sociological lexicon. It is not surprising, therefore,
that virtual community has become a catch-all phrase
for the new forms of culture and sociality predicated
on Internet technologies. It is often associated with
consumer culture in two senses: as emerging to fill
the space left by the individualizing effects of consumer culture and as creating new markets and ways
of consuming.
Rheingold’s book is an important document for
students of the history and sociology of the Internet.
He identified some of the key issues for subsequent
studies. He saw how many features of online relationships were much the same as in real life, only
without the intermediary of the body so critical in
everyday, face-to-face conduct. He understood how
CMC radically concentrated time and space and led
to questioning of established social divisions and

Virtual Communities

sources of authority. He remained optimistic about
the potential of emergent virtual communities for
positive forms of online activism while recognizing
the threats posed by “disinformocracy.”
Virtual communities invite comparison with the
real kinds (Smith and Kollock 1999). The difficulty
in pursuing the comparison is that community is one
of those essentially contested concepts that lie at the
heart of the sociological tradition. Consensus about
its meaning is absent. Further, as politicians’ discourse constantly reminds us, community is a morally loaded term. Conventionally, sociologists have
regarded community as founded on geographical
propinquity, giving rise to shared interests between
people and the potential for common affective
responses and sense of belonging. Older definitions
emphasized geographical place, especially the neighborhood. Newer conceptions stressed how communities are based in common interests and identities
(e.g., through work, pastimes, and “communities of
practice”). The subjective, imaginary dimension, the
sense of being part of a “we,” has been an important
element of many communities, up to and including
the state. It was this element of human connection
that attracted Rheingold in 1993 to the term community. However, as he later admitted, if he had read
Barry Wellman’s work earlier, his book would have
been titled Online Social Networks.
The network notion captures the key disembodied
and de-territorialized aspects of virtual communities.
Since virtual communities typically lack the strong
social bonds typically found in locality-based communities, researchers have suggested that sources of
their social orderliness must be found in the more
ephemeral transactions occurring online. Many
Internet community studies researchers have found
Mark Granovetter’s (1973) “strength of weak ties”
hypothesis a fertile interpretive device: when information cannot be provided by family, colleagues, and
friends (strong ties), it is advantageous for people to
have recourse to information provided by acquaintances and strangers (weak ties). For example, there
is the “kindness of strangers” phenomenon: Technical
advice about computing difficulties is often sought
from virtual community members. It is treated as
trustworthy and reliable because inquirers recognize that the weak ties they consult are more diverse
and possess access to wider resources than sources
of assistance close to home (Constant, Sproull, and
Kiesler 1996).

1505

With the development of ubiquitous computing
and the commercial exploitation of the World Wide
Web, Internet communities have become important
markets and sources of information for the purchase
of consumer goods. As Allison Cavanagh (2009, 3)
observed, “The utopian loading of ‘community’ as
a concept makes it ripe for appropriation into commercial discourse.” The development of e-commerce
critically depends on the identification of a relevant
market fragment. Sales on the Internet allow sellers to identify a virtual community for their goods.
In the sphere of consumption and exchange, virtual
communities have empowered individuals against
the interests of large corporations through the
wealth of information provided by online consumer
reviews outlining the merits and shortcomings of a
range of consumer goods—holiday hotels, sports
shoes, electronic equipment, domestic goods, and
financial products. Indeed, sellers routinely seek
customer opinions about the quality of the goods
obtained (including the service provided in supplying them, an added layer of evaluation). In the
contest that sometimes emerges around these evaluations, commercial advantage vies with consumer
empowerment. The auction site eBay has democratized the process of selling. Although it is regulated,
its dependence on weak ties gives added force to the
old adage of caveat emptor. Overall, the affordances
of CMC technologies support the emergence of the
“smart shopper.”
The shifting character of consumption and
exchange sits well with Wellman and colleagues’
“networked individualism” thesis. In contemporary networked societies, social boundaries become
more permeable, interaction takes place with more
diverse others, and hierarchies are flatter. Social
networking sites are premised on these shifts, to
which they also contribute. The omnipresence of
CMC means that “it is the I-alone that is reachable
wherever I am: at a home, hotel, office, highway, or
shopping center. The person has become the portal”
(Wellman et al. 2003, 12). A major challenge for
future studies of virtual communities is to investigate the social and cultural shaping of real world
activities by life online.
Greg Smith
See also Belonging; E-Commerce; Electronic Video
Gaming; Individualization; Information Technology;
Internet; Markets and Marketing; Social Networks

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Visual Culture

Further Readings
Cavanagh, Allison. “From Culture to Connection: Internet
Community Studies.” Sociology Compass 3 (2009): 1–15.
Constant, David, Lee Sproull, and Sara Kiesler. “The
Kindness of Strangers: The Usefulness of Electronic
Weak Ties for Technical Advice.” Organization Science
7 (March–April 1996): 119–134.
Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.”
American Journal of Sociology 78 (May 1973):
1360–1380.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Smith, Marc A., and Peter Kollock, eds. Communities in
Cyberspace. London: Routledge, 1999.
Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase,
Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz,
and Kakuko Miyata. “The Social Affordances of the
Internet for Networked Individualism.” Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 8 (April 2003).
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html.

VISUAL CULTURE
Visual culture is a philosophical and epistemological stance that acknowledges visuality as central to
the constitution of the world. Visuality is the way in
which certain ways of seeing the world are created,
and how these creations are powerful because they
affect “how we see, how we are able, allowed, or
made to see” (Foster 1988, ix). Research on visual
culture tends to revolve around at least three complex
and wide-ranging concepts: representation, meaning, and culture. This complexity makes the as-yetinchoate discipline diverse in its aims and eclectic in
its methods, thus reflecting a radical interdisciplinarity. Visual culture, as a term, refers to both the visual
aspects of culture and to visual culture as a scholarly
discipline. Visual culture offers profound implications
for understanding consumer culture.
Visual culture, as a discipline, highlights the fundamental importance of the image in cultural life.
The pervasiveness and power of the image in Western
culture means that it is a central way to represent
issues in society—to the extent that Western intellectual thought in the late-twentieth century experienced a “pictorial turn,” where the image assumed a
privileged status in its ability to reflect and communicate the world. Martin Jay describes this growing

centrality of the visual to contemporary life as “ocularcentrism,” or “scopophilia,” where the practice of
looking helps us make sense of the world.
Yet despite massive interest in visual culture and
an abundance of theories on images, basic questions
still animate researchers: What is an image? How
does it work? Why is it powerful? This entry reviews
the growth of visual culture studies and provides an
overview of key questions of visuality, how they have
influenced research, and what the future directions
are for the field.

The Visual Turn
In the latter half of the twentieth century, social and
cultural sciences combed the world for seemingly
mundane images in people’s lives that spoke in powerful and subtle ways about the often hidden values
and tacit assumptions woven into societies, joining
efforts in many disciplines to democratize and appropriate popular, everyday objects for scholarly attention. Advertising, pasta labels, popular TV shows,
and children’s homework all became untapped
repositories of the tacit values, desires, and limits of
a particular culture. Such an enterprise formed part
of the so-called cultural turn in social sciences—a
period of thinking that involved a shift in emphasis,
methods, and research philosophy.
From this perspective, meaning was not just
something that was found or discovered, but it was
produced through the objects people bought, sold,
made, used and preserved, collected, discarded, and,
of course, saw. Such an insight had major implications for image research, as critically minded theorists
began to move away from the image-appreciation
domains of art history to methods that would show
how images carefully assembled their meanings to act
as ideological vehicles. At the same time, researchers
in consumer behavior and cultural studies turned
their attention to advertising images as representation, shifting focus on persuasion and effectiveness to
meaning and cultural importance.
By the mid-1980s, researchers agreed that cultural
objects were “multimodal”: they had a textual and
a visual component. For example, a bus ticket has a
text written on it, but it also has an important visual
dimension—its color, its typography, its shape, its
logo and images. Study commenced on the visual
dimension of artifacts such as sculpture, architecture,
advertising, film, product packaging, music video,

Visual Culture

painting, scientific maps, comic strips, and performance art. This research framework required new
techniques to accommodate both the shift in research
questions and the growing use of image technology.
Critical visual methodologies (e.g., visual sociology, social semiotics, and film theory) were developed, which addressed the cultural inflections of
the visual as well as the power relations that were
produced by different ways of seeing. Visual culture
emerged when it became apparent to scholars that the
traditional assumptions and tools of art history could
not accommodate contemporary visual production.
For example, body art, performance art, “happenings,” conceptual art, and installations often eluded
theories of art production and reception; often no
“object” of study was produced, and the attribution
to a particular artist or creator was not stable.
These visual and artistic productions often happened in a time frame, so the temporal and experiential element assumed central importance. Traditional
art history struggled with these forms of visual culture, and in the past several decades, new disciplines
emerged to address this aporia, including cultural
studies, material culture, media studies, performance
studies, photography studies, and visual culture. A
common thread that unites these disparate endeavors
is the assumption that vision and the ways of knowing and experiencing the world were inseparable.

The Paradox of the Image in
the Twenty-First Century
Vision in the twenty-first century is often seen as a
tyrannical phenomenology that forces itself on social
relations, marginalizing the experience of other
senses, such as touch or sound. It is a seductive, ubiquitous form of staging the world and everything in it,
which leads to fetishism, idolatry, and a general narrowing of the range of human life into a stylized and
false picture. And at the bottom of this den of iniquity is the advertising image, which is often seen as
an even more corrupt version of the corrupted form
of painting—a position that does not acknowledge
the complex, recursive trajectories between high art
and commerce, or between aesthetics and pleasure.
Like a snake in a straw basket, it is often assumed
that images are powerful, dangerous, and hypnotic
and should not be gazed on for too long.
At the same time, the intellectual tradition of the
West has often relegated the image to the margins

1507

of academic concern; images have been seen as lowstatus, inferior, less academic substitutes of writing.
This historical antipathy and denigration of the
visual in Western ontology has been linked as far
back as the Platonic tradition. Although Plato celebrated sight, it seems to have been the abstract sight
of “the mind’s eye” rather than, as Martin Jay puts
it, the illusory senses of the two eyes in one’s head.
Barbara Stafford suggests that looking at images has
a low academic status precisely because it is commonly equated with a “natural” trait and thus not
as worthy as written knowledge. This has led to a
neglect in developing a theory of visual culture. These
two contradictory modes of thought lead to the
strange status of images in intellectual thought. They
seem to be “magic,” in the sense that they powerfully
dominate the world yet are seen as worthless; they are
ubiquitous and yet they are seen as useless.

The Dimensions of the Image
Visual culture is a field that focuses on the many
loci of meaning in an image, incorporating a wide
range of theories, methodologies, and perspectives
from disciplines as diverse as sociology and psychoanalysis. It is important to remember, as Theo van
Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt note, that there are three
“sites,” or positions from which to investigate the
meaning of an image: (1) the site of image production, (2) the site of image consumption, and (3) the
site of the “text itself.” Visual culture concentrates on
the text itself, and generally pays less attention to the
sites of image production (the artist, creative briefs,
company/brand strategy, the technologies of image
production used, etc.), or the sites of image consumption (how consumers relate to the image, attitudes
toward the image, issues of display, etc.).

The Methods of Visual Culture
One of the most difficult methodological problems
in working with images is how to access information
from them. Of course, one of the major reasons for
this is that images do not render exact readings or
interpretations, thus posing problems for managerial
and positivist image studies that emphasize external validity, replication, and instrumental meaningmaking. It is important to remember the axiomatic
focus of visual culture: It is not a discipline that creates step-by-step methods to get the “answer” to an
image. Rather, it is perhaps better to think of visual

1508

Visual Culture

culture as a set of tasks performed on the image.
Visual culture research tries to problematize, to
demystify, to historicize, and to visualize the image.
To Problematize, Not “Solutionize” the Image
From images of colonialism, bodies in consumer
culture, corporate communication, and fashion
photography, one stated purpose of much visual
culture research is to interrogate dominant readings, to trouble singular meaning and to leave the
reader with the distinct feeling that ideologies can
work through seemingly innocuous artifacts. In the
past decade, visual researchers have been encouraged not to treat photographs and photography
as vehicles to discover truth but rather to turn to
photography to complicate and disrupt ways of
understanding visual consumption. For consumer
research, this implies shifting focus away from
decision making, buying behavior, and persuasion to looking, experiencing, and representation.
Thus, the visual culture perspective mandates paying attention to the questions certain ways of looking ask and the issues they seek to raise.
Such a philosophy focuses not on a “right” or
a “wrong” answer, but, as Stuart Hall reminds us,
“on equally plausible, though sometimes competing
and contesting meanings and interpretations” (1997,
9). This follows a commitment to what images can
mean rather than trying to demonstrate what they
“really” mean. In problematizing, the task of visual
culture is not to divine a truth from images. Instead
of merely repeating the meaning of an image in
written form, the task is to locate and question the
obvious, taken-for-granted assumptions we casually
make of the image.
To Historicize and Contextualize the Image
Intertextuality describes the way in which the
meanings of any image depend not only on their
essential, formal features but also crucially on the
meanings carried by other images that precede
or surround them. Following the work of Julia
Kristeva, the influential theorist Roland Barthes
(1977) argued that that the (visual) text was a
“tissue of quotations,” originating from sources
outside of the text. Images are thus stratified; they
contain layers of meaning. It is the task of the
visual culture theorist to investigate the cultural
and sociohistorical references of the visual text to

illustrate that certain visualizing strategies are not
exclusive to his or her primary material but resonate throughout other objects of visual culture, in
different eras, and in different contexts. This can
often have surprising results.
For example, Barbara Maria Stafford connects contemporary representations of technology
and the aesthetic of travel literature during the
Enlightenment; John Berger explores continuities
in visual representation from fifteenth-century oil
painting to commercial advertising in the 1970s;
Jonathan Schroeder points out genealogical links
between Golden Age Dutch group portraits and
strategic brand communication; and Susan BuckMorss (2000) draws fascinating parallels between
the cinematic image of King Kong and the dream of
a Utopian Soviet city. These connections underscore
basic premises of visual culture research by encompassing popular forms of visual representation
within scholarly work and bringing interdisciplinary
tools to bear on questions of visual consumption.
To Demystify the Image
Myth is the process by which images move from
being carefully constructed, politically motivated
ways of viewing the world to being viewed as the
natural, unquestioned reflections of reality. In one
of his most extended explications of myth, Barthes
famously describes an example of myth-making
activity—an image that he sees on the front cover
of a French current affairs magazine Paris-Match
depicting a black soldier in uniform saluting the
French flag. In his analysis, he describes myth in
this way:
The function of myth is to empty reality. . . . Myth is
depoliticised speech. . . . Myth does not deny things,
on the contrary, its function is to talk about them;
simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it
gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives
them a clarity which is not that of an explanation
but that of a statement of fact. (Barthes 2000, 143,
emphasis in original)

Thus, myth-production includes the way in which
images are presented as obvious and expected reflections of the world.
One crucial task of a visual culture approach is
to demystify, that is, to question the naturalness and
highlight the careful construction of any given reflection of reality. Many visual culture theorists implicitly

Visual Culture

or explicitly acknowledge that myth-production
operates pervasively in images, and their task is a
process of demystification, albeit in various methodological guises. Nicholas Mirzeoff (1999, 2), for
example, reminds us that “the visualisation of everyday life does not mean that we know what we are
seeing,” while Schroeder and Janet L. Borgerson
(2005, 581) argue that “marketing communication’s
ubiquity does not necessarily improve one’s capacity
to see—to actively engage one’s senses in reflective
analysis.” Recent work points out the complicated
processes of mystification at work in constructing
global celebrities, who serve as reference points for
questions of agency and desire. Visual analyst W. J. T.
Mitchell summarizes his entire career as an attempt
to “overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence
that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn
it into a problem, for analysis, a mystery to be unravelled” (2005, 337). Demystification is a task that can
involve many things. One practical task is to analyze
the way in which a certain image is constructed to
entertain and encourage certain ways of seeing.
The gaze is a technical term that describes the
ways in which we visually consume images of
people and places. It has been used most influentially in Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking work on
cinema. The gaze, she argues, is the way in which
the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting a particular framing of the world.
This is never a neutral position, but a power-laden
one, where a certain understanding of the world
is assumed, manifested in how the camera frames
places, bodies, and their interactions. In this way, to
gaze implies more than to look at—it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer
is superior to the object of the gaze. Strategic communication, for example, presents various gazes of
bodies, lifestyles, spaces, and places, inviting us to
gaze at objects of desire.
To “Visibilize” the Image
In recent years, visual culture analysis has also been
concerned with how abstract, ephemeral, or “invisualizable” aspects of the universe are brought into
visuality. In fact, one of the most significant things
about contemporary visual culture is the tendency
to visualize things that are not in themselves visible.
Technological processes and technological innovations
are two important “invisibles” that are aestheticized

1509

to produce competitive advantage. Many important
commercial organizations strive to be perceived as
“networked,” “global,” “high-tech,” and so on, but
little work has been done to investigate how organizational communication depicts such unvisualized characteristics. Thus, a task of visual culture is to examine
the ways the invisible is visualized for consumption.

The Direction of Visual Culture
The expanding scope of visual culture includes the
visual artifacts and conventions within the domains
of law, science, technology, and mathematics. These
are among the least deconstructed artifacts of Western
culture, and researchers in visual culture are beginning to realize that such images from “hard” sciences
are not apolitical but negotiated agreements of meaning. What is now becoming important is the deconstruction of visual systems pervasive in the world: the
generation and subsequent interpretation of passenger images in airport security surveillance systems,
in health care systems (DNA modeling, computed
tomography, sonography), in global satellite tracking,
and in so-called neuromarketing, which uses brainimaging technology to determine consumer preference
to advise marketing strategy. As the shape, location,
composition, and behaviors of people are increasingly
generated and portrayed as visual information, and
as consumption increasingly involves visual consumption, it is becoming vital to question what “truths”
these visions tell about the body in its visual culture.
Norah Campbell and Jonathan E. Schroeder
See also Advertising; Branding; Cultural Studies;
Gender; Promotional Culture; Semiotics; Spectacles;
Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Translated by
Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Jonathan
Cape. London: Random House, 2000.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting
Corporation/Penguin, 1972.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The
Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Foster, Hal. Vision and Visuality. Seattle, WA: Bay Press,
1988.
Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations
and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997.

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Voluntary Associations

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994.
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel. Iconoclash: Beyond the
Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Mirzeoff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture.
London: Routledge, 1999.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. What Do Pictures Want? The
Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In
Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast,
Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 746–757. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Rose, Gillian, ed. Visual Methodologies. London: Sage, 2007.
Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Schroeder, Jonathan E., and Janet L. Borgerson. “An Ethics
of Representation for International Marketing
Communication.” International Marketing Review 22
(2005): 578–600.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the
Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking:
An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd ed. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Van Leeuwen, Theo, and Carey Jewitt, eds. The Handbook
of Visual Analysis. London: Sage, 2006.

VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS
Voluntary associations (also called voluntary organizations, secondary associations, or just associations)
may be defined as groups that have some sort of formal organizational structure, made up of people who
come together of their own will to pursue a common
interest or goal.
Participation in associational activities gives members the chance to interact with others, with whom
they may exchange information and advice on a given
issue. Generally in associations, a network of social
relationships is created, based on trust and common standards of reciprocity, also known as “social
capital,” which can help facilitate processes of social
cooperation both economically and politically.
For almost two decades, scientific and public
debates have focused on the relationship between
participation in associations and the quality of
democracies. Scholars have concentrated particularly

on the complex relationship between forms of public
involvement in voluntary associations and the positive functioning of public institutions. This issue was
first raised by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 and later
taken up by Robert Putnam in 1993.
As stressed by the pluralist theorists of liberal
democracy, associations play a vital role in the
mediation of interests between citizens and the state.
According to Putnam, the connection between the
vitality of civic organizations and positive democratic
functioning may be achieved in two main ways: first,
by combining various demands of citizenship and
turning them into political ones via appropriate democratic forms; second, by providing citizens with a kind
of “school of democracy,” educating them toward collective action and civic engagement.
With regard to associations, many scholars have
emphasized how the organizational models they
adopt play a significant role in determining associations’ capacity for action and their members’ level of
civic orientation. A phenomenon that has been particularly closely studied is associations’ level of professionalism. For example, studying associations in
the United States, Theda Skocpol observed that the
expanded capacity for fundraising and the lobbying
of political institutions has led to a major decrease in
associations’ interest in strategies directly involving
the public as well as a general depoliticization of their
activities. An overall tendency toward the professionalization of associations has been noted in almost all
Western countries. On this point, scholars have often
argued how, today, the professionalization of associations may be read as of one of the causes behind
increasing political apathy among citizens (Eliasoph
1998; Lichterman 2006).
Individuals may join together in associations for
a number of different reasons. Secondary organizations have emerged to protect the rights of certain
special interest groups, as it is the case of workers’
unions, or to allow people to profess and practice
their own religious beliefs, as in the case of religious
and church-based organizations. People also join
together to take advantage of certain kinds of social
activities and opportunities, such as in the case of
sports associations, athletic and country clubs, popular music fan clubs, or car clubs. These are all voluntary activities that have also had an important impact
on the nature of consumer culture.
As far as consumption is specifically concerned, the rise of consumers’ associations has been

Voting Behaviors

particularly important, as they have helped to considerably increase citizens’ awareness of their rights
and responsibilities with regard to their consumption
practices.
Historically, consumer associations appeared
during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States in
response to the broadening impact of industrialization; the Consumers Union was established, and
the attempt was made to provide consumer representation in the federal government. After World
War II, consumer groups gradually also took shape
outside the United States. By the 1960s, three
major organizations had been founded in Europe:
Consumentenbond in the Netherlands (1951),
the Union Belge des Consommateurs (now the
Association Belge des Consommateurs) in Belgium
(1957), and the Union Fédérale des Consommateurs
in France (1961). Between 1947 and 1957, consumer
associations also developed in Denmark, the Federal
Republic of Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Kenya,
France, Hungary, and Italy: these were mainly consumer goods–testing organizations focusing on the
ways in which products were produced.
In general, consumer associations have proved
important in increasing people’s access to information to do with the goods and services available
on the market. Particularly in the wake of Ralph
Nader’s experience in the United States, consumer
protection associations significantly increased their
credibility in the eyes of the general public, establishing themselves as defenders of individual purchasing
power and promoters of the transparency of trade.
The strength achieved by consumer organizations
both in the United States and in many other Western
countries led to the recognition of a number of consumer rights.
Over the years this blend of civic consumerism
has remained bound to different national realities,
despite efforts to coordinate consumer associations
at the supranational level. Organizational patterns
have also always varied greatly in different countries,
and in some countries consumer organizations have
remained more fragmented and less institutionalized
than in others.
Whereas consumer associations have existed in
the United States, Canada, and Australia for many
years, in almost all European countries consumer
issues have traditionally been more institutionalized. In Northern Europe, for instance, stronger state
involvement in consumer protection measures has

1511

meant that consumers have not had to organize specifically consumer-based independent organizations
to achieve their goals. To some extent, this has been
because governments have taken the initiative on
many consumer issues. In other countries, especially
developing countries, business and commercial interests have clearly eclipsed consumer voices within
national public and private institutions, and thus largescale consumer organizations have never emerged,
and consumers have had little impact on economic
and social policy (Darley and Johnson 1993).
Francesca Forno
See also Citizenship; Civil Society; Consumer
Co-Operatives; Consumer Rights and the Law;
Philanthropy; Public Sphere; Social Movements; Social
Networks

Further Readings
Darley, William K., and Denise M. Johnson. “CrossNational Comparison of Consumer Attitudes toward
Consumerism in Four Developing Countries.” Journal
of Consumer Affairs 27, no. 1 (1993): 37–54.
Eliasoph, Nina S. Avoiding Politics: How Americans
Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Lichterman, Paul. “Social Capital or Group Style? Rescuing
Tocqueville’s Insights on Civic Engagement.” Theory
and Society 35 (2006): 529–563.
Putnam, Robert. Making Democracy Work. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
Skocpol, Theda. Diminished Democracy: From
Membership to Management in American Civic Life.
Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2003.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. London:
Fontana, 2000. First published 1835.

VOTING BEHAVIORS
Voting is a key feature of citizenship in modern democracies and a vehicle for the exercise of consumer choice
in political behavior. Parties present a range of policies,
and voters choose from those options. Rhetorically,
the voter-consumer is sovereign in the political marketplace because he or she decides who will be elected.
However, electoral choice is an imperfect form of
consumer sovereignty. In conventional models of
consumer choice, demand for a product can be conceptualized as the aggregate choices of individuals:

1512

Voting Behaviors

the more people there are who consume an item, the
greater the demand is for it. Political voting might
be thought of in the same way: the more individuals
who opt for party x, the greater the demand is for that
party to enter the government. However, political voting involves one decision (the vote) that encompasses
many different possible choices (the multiple policies
on offer from each party): most voters will almost certainly disagree with at least some policies of the party
they eventually vote for and may agree with some of
the policies of other parties. Furthermore, where there
are at least three choices on offer, no voting system can
achieve a definitive ranking of voters’ preferences: no
matter how the vote is conducted, there will always
be an alternative way of amalgamating preferences
to produce a different “winner” (Arrow 1951). This
contrasts with conventional consumer choice, which
involves a series of discrete decisions about whether or
not to purchase one item at a time. To see the difference, consider how a democratic voting model might
be applied to one’s weekly grocery shopping. Rather
than deciding which individual items—and how many
of them—to purchase, one would decide between different stores, each of which would offer a package of
goods, some of which one might want, and others not.
No substitution of goods within each package would
be possible, however, because having opted for a particular store to supply the groceries, one would have to
buy all of that store’s offered package. In a democratic
vote model, one would vote for the store whose package of goods most closely approximated one’s own
preferences, but almost inevitably, one would have to
buy some things that were not desired, too much of
some other items, and too few of yet others.
Rational choice theory applies an economic
model of consumer behavior to voting: voters seek
to maximize benefits and minimize costs, while parties try to maximize their vote. Models of two-party
competition predict party convergence on the ideological middle ground when (as is common in many
democracies) most voters are ideological moderates.
More complex models take into account multidimensional contests fought by many parties (Merrill and
Grofman 1999). Rational choice recognizes electoral
“markets” are imperfect: voters lack complete information, parties are relatively monopolistic (limiting
voter choice), and so on. Decisions are taken in conditions of bounded rationality, with voters relying on
heuristics such as partisan identification to simplify
their choices. Paradoxically, rational choice logic

applied to single elections implies that no one should
vote, since the costs of voting far outweigh the benefits, once the latter are discounted by the probability
(invariably very low) that participation in the election will be crucial to the result. In practice, however,
most electors do vote in major elections, a situation
that can be explained in rational choice terms by the
regular occurrence of elections: even if it is not strictly
rational to vote in the current election, it may still
make sense to cast a vote because that helps make
one’s party more viable in future elections and prevents conceding victory to undesirable parties.
Much empirical work on voting behavior draws
on social psychology and political sociology. The
best-known exemplar of the former is the Michigan
model. Originally developed in studies of the 1950s
U.S. electorate, the Michigan model has proved
both resilient and exportable to other polities
(Lewis-Beck et al. 2008). The model’s key concept
is partisan identification, conceptualized as a longterm psychological attachment to a party. Partisan
identification provides a heuristic through which
voters can make political choices. In an electorate
displaying strong partisan alignment, most voters
will identify strongly with one of the major political
parties and will vote for it in most elections. Even
strong partisans may occasionally vote for rival
parties, but over the long term they will return to
“their” party. Where partisanship is strong, parties
can rely on relatively stable aggregate levels of basic
support (the normal vote) and can thus concentrate
their campaigns on winning support from the relatively small number of undecided or floating voters. Partisan identity serves as a form of consumer
identity, therefore, and partisans display long-term
“brand loyalty.”
Accounts of voting drawing on the political sociology literature, meanwhile, emphasize collective
identities. Major social divisions generate political
conflicts, with parties mobilizing the support of those
on either side of the conflict. In an influential analysis,
Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein E. Rokkan (1967)
traced the major electoral cleavages in late-twentiethcentury Europe to two nineteenth-century waves
of revolutionary change: the national revolution
(leading to divisions between church and state and
between the national core and peripheral regions) and
the Industrial Revolution (setting agricultural interests against industrial interests and worker against
employer). The last of these divisions, the social class

Voting Behaviors

cleavage, has gained most attention and typically
describes a situation in which most working-class voters support parties of the center-left and most middleclass voter parties of the center-right.
Both partisan and class alignment invoke forms
of identity politics. However, their ability to explain
voting has weakened considerably since the 1970s
(Dalton 2006). The causes of this de-alignment are
complex. However, among the factors involved
are the following: increased education levels; social
mobility and embourgeoisement, linked to the
declining role of class—and associated political
ideologies—in voter mobilization; a less deferential
media; and disillusion with mainstream politics,
partly because of policy failures in some, if not all,
of the areas in which the contemporary capitalist state gets involved. As a result, political parties
have moved away from the “mass party” models of
the mid-twentieth century toward “catch-all” and
“cartel” parties, which are increasingly centralized
and professionalized and draw support from a relatively wide social base (Katz and Mair 1995). Voter
de-alignment does not imply growing public apathy
regarding politics, however. Another striking trend
since the 1960s has been the substantial growth of
single-issue political campaigns, often involving (conventionally conceived) consumer power as a tool, as,
for instance, in product boycotts and political and
ethical consumption (Dalton 2006)—as well as for
political parties that focus on a particular range of
policy areas, as with the Greens, the United Kingdom
Independence Party, and the British National Party in
contemporary United Kingdom.
The valence politics perspective, a major focus
of contemporary electoral research, explains how
voters choose in de-aligned electorates (Clarke et al.
2004). Conventional models of electoral competition
suggest voters choose between competing ideological
alternatives (as in traditional left-right competition
between parties advocating high taxes and a large
public sector and those advocating low taxes and a
small public sector). In contrast, valence issues such
as peace and economic growth are those on which
almost all voters and politicians are likely to agree.
In valence politics, therefore, the key issue is competence: voters support parties that are successful in
providing the outcomes all desire, but vote against
parties that fail to do so. For instance, most voters want governments to deliver prosperity, even if
they are unclear exactly how this might be achieved.

1513

A government’s economic record can therefore be
used to judge its general performance. Governments
presiding over economic booms tend to retain public
support, while those presiding over recessions tend
to lose it. This basic picture is complicated by factors
such as the following: attribution of responsibility
(e.g., governments will claim credit for growth but
blame recession on factors beyond their control);
retrospective or prospective evaluations (whether
voters base judgments on past performance or likely
future outcomes); and whether voters emphasize
their personal circumstances (egocentric voting) or
the general welfare of society as a whole (sociotropic
voting). However, the general conclusion stands: voters reward government success and punish failure.
The valence perspective reconceptualizes party identification as a running tally of evaluations of a party’s
performance, which will change over time, rather
than as a fixed long-term psychological attachment
(Fiorina 1981).
Promotional cultures play a key part in electoral
politics (Wernick, 1991). Parties seek to influence voters through their campaigns, which are increasingly
professionalized and centrally coordinated, employing market research techniques and communication
strategies both to assess the public mood and to present parties as effectively as possible (Norris 2000).
Not just substance but image is being constructed
and promoted. Much attention has focused on the
potential impact of political spin (news management
to present a party in the best possible light, and its
rivals in the worst), negative or attack advertising,
and targeted campaigning (which focuses attention
on particular strategic demographic segments of the
electorate and on contests in marginal constituencies). Campaigns affect election results by mobilizing
known supporters and winning over floating voters.
Conventional accounts of voting behavior rest
on an assumption of methodological individualism. However, this has been strongly challenged by
research that shows the importance of contextual
effects on the voting decision (Johnston and Pattie
2006). Voters take cues from their local environments and are affected by party campaigns, by local
economic conditions, and by the opinions of their
friends and peers. Much contemporary research has
been focused on unraveling these contextual effects.
Voting in democratic elections has clear similarities
with cultures of consumption. Consumers (voters)
choose products/stores (parties) based on preferences,

1514

Voting Behaviors

identities, and images, and, in doing so, they are
influenced by promotional cultures and activities.
However, the consumer analogy goes only so far: the
highly individualized and personalized choices implicit
in conventional accounts of consumer sovereignty do
not so readily apply in electoral markets, where voters
choose between highly aggregated collections of policies. In an individualized consumer world, democratic
voting remains, in important ways, a collective act.
This is not, however, an argument for democratic voting’s redundancy. On the contrary, expecting citizens
to make choices on many individual policy areas (via,
e.g., extensive use of referendums) is almost certainly
doomed to failure. Not only would such experiments
fall foul of Arrow’s theorem, but they would place
extremely onerous burdens on voter/consumers,
who would face the prospect of frequent and often
complex votes. Voter fatigue, and hence collapsing
participation, would likely ensue, with adverse consequences for the perceived legitimacy of government.
For all its problems, the constrained version of consumer sovereignty on offer in most elections remains
central to democratic politics.
Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston
See also Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Consumer
Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest:
Environment; Consumer Protest: Water

Further Readings
Arrow, Kenneth. Social Choice and Individual Values. New
York: Wiley, 1951.

Clarke, Harold D., David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart,
and Paul Whiteley. Political Choice in Britain. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Dalton, Russell J. Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and
Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies.
4th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.
Fiorina, Morris P. Retrospective Voting in American
National Elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1981.
Johnston, Ron, and Charles Pattie. Putting Voters in their
Place: Geography and Elections in Great Britain.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. “Changing Models of
Party Organization and Party Democracy: The
Emergence of the Cartel Party.” Party Politics 1 (1995):
5–28.
Lewis-Beck, Michael S., William G. Jacoby, Helmut
Norpoth, and Herbert F. Wiesberg. The American Voter
Revisited. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2008.
Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein E. Rokkan. “Cleavage
Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments.” In
Party Systems and Voter Alignments, edited by Seymour
Martin Lipset and Stein E. Rokkan, 3–64. New York:
Free Press, 1967.
Merrill, Samuel, and Bernard Grofman. A Unified Theory
of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Norris, Pippa. A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications
in Postindustrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Wernick, Andrew. Promotional Culture: Advertising,
Ideology and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage, 1991.

W
WALKMANS

AND IPODS

The Sony Walkman was invented in 1979, its digital
successor, the Apple iPod, in 2001. Both are portable
music machines permitting users to take and create
their own personalized sound worlds wherever they
go. The Walkman and Apple iPod are technologies of
sonic control; the placing of headphones around the
ears permits a dramatic reorganization of the user’s
sound world, in effect empowering the ears of the
user. Technology thus transforms the power of the
senses. Historically, the ears had always been considered to be a passive sense in so far as we are unable
to close them at will, unlike the eyes; the ears are
always open. The use of a Walkman or an Apple iPod
changes this—for the first time users can traverse the
noisy urban scene empowered precisely through filtering out the sounds of the city, replacing them with
their own private sound bubble provided by their
own choice of music. This capacity for individualizing
music consumption, together with the rapid diffusion
of these consumer goods has rendered Walkmans
and iPods emblematic of consumer culture.

From the Walkman to the Apple iPod
In the first instance, the Sony Corporation, the inventors of the Walkman, didn’t know what to call the
device—finally agreeing on the term Walkman, which
they trademarked. The name itself is instructive—it
was a “walking” machine—symbolizing a culture “on
the move,” the first truly mobile consumer technology

(Bull 2000). Other manufacturers were obliged
to use the generic term personal stereo to describe
their machines—yet this term was also instructive as
it illustrates the intimate and private nature of use.
The Walkman quickly became the object of choice
for millions of teenagers worldwide who wished to
take “their” music with them wherever they went.
The early machines used cassette tapes, either prerecorded or, more often than not, compilations made
by their owners to cater for a wide range of possible
uses. In this way, users began to sync music to mood
or place. In subsequent years, Walkmans were able to
play CDs and minidisks, much for the same purpose.
In the intervening years between the origins of the
Walkman and the development of the Apple iPod, the
mobile phone became the ubiquitous technology of
the mobile age, paving the way for the general acceptance of the private use of communication devices
in public (Katz 2006). When the Apple corporation
introduced the iPod in 2001, its buyers were initially
affluent and technologically sophisticated adults, only
later, with much advertising, did the iPod filter into
and dominate the youth market (Bull 2007).
With the development of the iPod, consumers
could now take thousands of songs with them and
the contents of the iPod could be arranged through
dedicated playlists that could be amended while on
the move or played at random in the shuffle mode.
The iPod permitted users to fine-tune their relationship to the environment and themselves through the
continual adjusting of their musical choice. It also
enabled users to stream their own personalized radio
channels with content downloaded from the Internet

1515

1516

Walkmans and iPods

or to listen to talking books. Users could access a
wide range of media; thus, the iPod represents the
next stage of consumer culture, one in which users
seek out individualized forms of consumption to be
accessed when and where they desire.
By 2007, over 50 percent of Western urban citizens were able to privatize their environment through
the use of MP3 technology—primarily through the
use of MP3 players (including those embedded in
mobile phones) and also on Apple iPods. The iPod
itself had spawned a whole commercial ecosystem of
over four thousand accessories made specifically to
accompany its use at home, in the automobile, or on
the person, according to a 2007 Apple press release.
The iPod appears to be the first cultural icon of the
twenty-first century; it is symbolic of a culture in
which communication technologies are increasingly
used to control and manage the daily experience of
users in multifaceted ways. It is a culture in which the
privatizing impulse in Western culture has come to a
state of maturity (Putnam 2000).

Aestheticizing the City
William Gibson, the science fiction writer credited
with thinking up the notion of “virtual reality,” commented on the radical transformative nature of the
Walkman:
The Sony Walkman has done more to change human
perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t
remember any technological experience since that
was quite so wonderful as being able to take music
and move it through landscapes and architecture.
(1993, 49)

Both Walkman and iPod users frequently describe
their experience of moving through cities as “filmic”
in nature. City streets take on the quality of the
music that they listen to. Users often choose music
that they considered would “suit” the environment
passed through, thus transforming users’ perceived
power over their environment. Historically, it was
thought that city dwellers were dependent on the
existing physicality of cities, for example, French
anthropologist Marc Auge had described cities in
terms of “nonspaces”—semiotically void of interest
by which he meant shopping centers, car parking
lots, and the like. Now, users can re-create meaning
for themselves mediated though the music listened
to. The use of Walkmans and iPods permit theorists

to increasingly understand the city as a privatized
audio-visual creation of the user and to reprioritize
the unique role that sounds plays in the construction of daily life (Bull 2000, 2007).

Mediated Living
Walkman and iPod users became increasingly used
for experiencing not just the world but also their own
cognitive states through the mediated sounds of their
machines. Mediation increasingly became a form of
“second nature” for many users: as one of Michael
Bull’s Walkman interviewees recounts, “I wear it all
the time, like a pacemaker! A life support machine!
It’s like I’m a walking resource centre” (Bull 2000,
17). The virtue of an increasingly seamless nature
from use enabled by the Apple iPod is commented on
by the following user: “I can’t overestimate the importance of having all my music available all the time. It
gives me an unprecedented level of emotional control
over my life” (2007, 123). Control of thoughts, emotions, and desires is central to the daily management
strategies of Walkman and iPod users. Music listened
to permits users to order their thoughts, feelings, and
outlook toward the world as desired. The choice of
personalized music, for example, frequently sets the
mood of the day as users leave their homes listening
to their chosen music. Through the use of these technologies, users create technologically mediated sanctuaries out of much of their experience, permitting
them to feel centered wherever they might be.

Mediated Others
German sociologist Georg Simmel famously
described the twentieth-century city as a place of
sensory overstimulation from which the urban citizen is obliged to withdraw to cognitively survive.
The use of Walkmans and iPods can be interpreted
as one response to this overstimulation as the following user demonstrates: “I’m locking myself in
a bit more. It [the Walkman] locks the rest of the
world out. You don’t feel anxiety. There’s less stress”
(Bull 2000, 22). These technologies permit users to
control the nature of their interactions with others,
assuming the equivalent role to sunglasses whereby
users are able to control the nature of eye contact
with others. Women users, in particular, find moving
through the streets, at least in daylight hours, to be
a more satisfying and secure experience with their
newly gained ability to ignore and deflect unwanted

Walmart

looks and advances (2000). To be listening to their
Walkmans and iPods is to be “otherwise engaged”
creating forms of “nonreciprocal” gazing—a new
urban strategy enabled by their use.
The untrammeled pleasure of taking your own
sound world with you resonates through urban and
cultural theory. It poses a set of theoretical problems
relating to the nature of public and private existence;
how do urban dwellers see and experience urban
spaces? Is the continuous use of these technologies
an act of liberation—giving users increased control
over their environments and themselves—or is to be
interpreted as an act of colonization whereby users
become increasingly dependent on the mediated use
of these technologies to satisfactorily survive their
daily routines?
Michael Bull
See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Branding;
Culture Industries; Flaneur/euse; Lifestyle; Mobile
Phones; Social Shaping of Technology

Further Readings
Apple UK and Ireland Public Relations. “100 Million iPods
Sold.” Press Release, April 9, 2007. http://www.apple
.com/uk/pr/library/2007/04/090407_100millionipods.html.
Auge, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to Anthropology of
Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995.
Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and
the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Bull, Michael. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban
Experience. London: Routledge, 2007.
Gibson, William. [Interview]. Time Out. October 6, 1993: 49.
Katz, James. Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and
the Transformation of Social Life. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2006.
Putnam, Roger. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival
of American Community. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000.
Simmel, Georg. Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, 1997.

WALMART
With annual revenues exceeding US$400 billion,
Walmart is a retail colossus and at present the world’s
largest corporation. Walmart is a budget retailer that
sells an unusually wide range of consumer goods in
its enormous big-box stores, which first appeared in
the U.S. South and Midwest in the mid-1960s. Since

1517

then, they spread rapidly across North America and,
in various guises, Walmart now operates throughout Europe, Asia, and in certain parts of Africa. This
rapid ascent has attracted a considerable level of
attention from both critics and admirers. Whether the
object of praise or blame, Walmart has attained an
iconic status. Alongside the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, Wall Street, Google, Nike,
and Facebook, Walmart features prominently in contemporary discussions about the organization, culture, and ethics of the global economy.
Walmart was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton
in Rogers, Arkansas. Walton pursued a budget
retail strategy from the outset, sourcing from only
the cheapest suppliers and locating Walmart stores
outside regional centers. Walmart’s organizational
culture bore the mark of its founder and its rural
origins. Walmart praised small-town and (to some
degree) Christian values, including loyalty, hard
work, conformity, and patriotism, and it maintained a gendered division of labor such that most
service-oriented employees were women while most
managers and executives were men. Although it
has changed significantly since its establishment,
Walmart continues to reflect important features of
its early beginnings.
Over the past fifty years, Walmart has grown rapidly such that it now employs upward of 2 million
people across the world in 8,692 stores. Were it a
national economy, Walmart would be roughly the
size of Sweden (though growing at a faster rate), and
it would be one of China’s leading trade partners.
While discussion about Walmart’s growth continues,
business analysts generally suggest three factors as
crucial to its success, namely, Walmart’s early adoption of advanced information and logistics technology, its capacity to restrain labor costs, and its skill in
micromanaging suppliers.
In contrast to its unqualified success in North
America, Walmart’s international performance has
been mixed. Although Walmart has been highly
profitable in the United Kingdom (where it owns
Associated Dairies [ASDA]), Walmart entered and
then abandoned the German and South Korean
markets, and its performance in Japan, Hong Kong,
and Indonesia has not met expectations. This uneven
record has caused analysts to question whether
Walmart’s business model can adapt to different kinds
of markets, particularly those characterized by unique
consumer cultures or regulated by higher labor

1518

Waste

standards than those typical in North America. This
question is likely to be answered in the near future
since Walmart has recently made significant inroads
into India and South Africa.
There is reason to question whether Walmart
deserves the degree of attention it has attracted. In
relative terms, Walmart is not the largest corporation
in U.S. history. As a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), Walmart is smaller than General
Motors was at its height during the mid-1950s.
Further, Walmart may have perfected, but it did not
invent, budget retailing. Many of the principles of
budget retail were formulated by Walmart’s competitors in the first decades of the twentieth century, and
the largest stores of that era dwarf Walmart’s much
maligned supercenters. However, Walmart is noteworthy for the dominance it has achieved within the
retail sector; Walmart’s current revenues are greater
than those of all its major competitors combined.
This achievement has been enormously consequential for North America, specifically its labor standards and the manufacturing sector in general.
Walmart signifies and is partly responsible for a
major shift in the structural organization of the global
economy. Until recently, the world’s most powerful
corporations were manufacturers. Their position
has been undermined by the agglomeration of retail
firms, such that a small number of retailers are now
responsible for the bulk of all sales. Walmart is the
poster child of this process. As the major supplier of
clothes, toys, sporting goods, and groceries to the
United States, Walmart exerts an enormous influence
on its supply chains, making crucial decisions about
what manufacturers produce, where their goods are
produced, and how they are produced, stored, transported, and so on. Because Walmart possesses market
data that are more accurate and timely than those of
its suppliers, many of which are leading transnational
firms in their own right, Walmart is well placed to justify the production-level demands it makes. In sum,
Walmart wields an unprecedented level of influence
on the global organization of manufacturing and on
the communities whose livelihoods depend on it.
To ensure the “everyday low prices” exalted by
the firm’s long-standing motto, Walmart maintains
high levels of labor discipline. In particular, it holds
wages and benefits at minimal sustainable levels. For
this reason, most Walmart employees (known in the
firm as “associates”) earn considerably less than the
employees of other retailers. Walmart contains wage

growth through a range of methods, most notably by
upholding the nonunion position that accompanied
its founding. The consequence of this labor policy is
that many U.S. employees of Walmart earn wages
below the poverty level, and a disproportionately
high number of Walmart employees and their families
qualify for various forms of welfare assistance.
It is for these and related reasons that commentators suggest that the Walmart business model is eroding the achievements of the New Deal and drawing
the United States into a “race to the bottom.” If U.S.
firms were once celebrated for balancing operational
efficiency with labor standards (such that entry-level
employees could sustain a middle-class lifestyle),
then the precedent set by Walmart is that operational
efficiency should trump all other concerns. The
deleterious effects of Walmart on labor standards
have been well documented in the United States, but
these effects have been mediated in other developed
nations by labor unions and government regulations. Walmart’s response to this now familiar set of
claims is that its low prices save consumers billions
of dollars annually. Furthermore, these savings are
particularly important for consumers with a lower
social class status, so justifying Walmart’s historical
claim to be performing a kind of Christian service.
Jensen Sass
See also Gendering of Public and Private Space; Global
Institutions; Globalization; Political and Ethical
Consumption; Price and Pricing Mechanisms;
Self-Service Economy; Shopping; Social Class;
Supermarkets

Further Readings
Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed. Wal-Mart: The Face of TwentyFirst-Century Capitalism. New York: Norton, 2006.
Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The
Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009.

WASTE
In its broadest sense, waste refers to the residues, leftovers, and discards of commodity production, consumption, and disposal. Where there are consumer
goods and consumer practices, there will always be
wastes, be these the materials expended and cast
out by the extractive industries or by manufacturing

Waste

processes, the residues of global transportation and
distribution networks, the leftovers of an activity as
mundane as the preparation and eating of a family
meal, or the immaterial wastes of accounting. Wastes
are as much part of consumer culture as the more
familiar TVs and fridges, PCs and PlayStations, and
iPods and mobile phones. Moreover, consumer goods
themselves become waste. Outmoded, broken-down,
irreparable, used-up, and expended, discarded consumer goods are the relics or fossils of consumption.
Labeled as “recyclables,” these fossils journey to countries in Africa and South Asia, as well as to China,
to be dismantled, shredded, mangled, and processed
for use as secondary materials, in conditions that frequently contravene Western labor and environmental
regulatory frameworks. Waste, however, is not just
the materials expended by consumption. It also relates
to the temporalities and spatialities of consumer culture; that is, it is generated by and within consumer
culture. Faster lives, more mobile lives, more distant
lives, and more tightly synchronized lives are enabled
by convenience and disposability. Yet convenience and
disposability go hand in hand with heightened waste
generation, a relationship encapsulated in the now
iconic disposable nappy, or diaper, as well as the paper
tissue, plastic bag, and the plastic bottle. Disposability,
though, is simultaneously about hygiene and risk cultures. The advent of sell-by and use-by dates on foods,
for example, has resulted in up to one-third of food
being thrown away in Western countries, whereas—
aided by discourses of health and personal hygiene—a
myriad of paper-based personal care products has supplanted reusable goods.
Underpinning contemporary consumer culture,
then, is its shadow: a largely invisible (to consumers)
waste management business that moves residue, discards, and leftovers out of our homes and our lives
and that, in so doing, enables us to keep on buying
and consuming. The scale of this business is vast. In
Britain, for example, in 2008, over fifty thousand
collection vehicles moved over eighty-five thousand
tons of municipal waste to collection centers and
transfer stations on a daily basis and thence to treatment centers and disposal sites, such as landfills and
incinerators. More than 100 square miles of the
country are given over to landfill sites, and the country’s 60 million inhabitants generate an estimated
16 million tons of waste per year. Notwithstanding
this, it is only recently that waste has begun to attract
the attention of consumer researchers across the

1519

social sciences and the humanities. From being the
concern primarily of environmental policy researchers and planners, where it was conceived as the end
point of consumption, waste research is now to be
found in human geography, sociology, anthropology,
social history, cultural studies, and philosophy and
aesthetics.

The Dimensions of Waste Research
Why has there been this turn about in waste’s fortunes? At least three reasons can be identified. The
first is policy related and a clear indication of how
certain policy interventions change lives. In the case
of the European Union member states, it is impossible
to overstate the transformations wrought by the 1999
European Landfill Directive. This directive imposed a
series of targets, and associated fines, on national governments for landfilling, with the overt intent of radically reducing the volume of materials sent to landfill
across the European Union. For countries such as the
United Kingdom, with very high levels of dependency
on landfill, this meant that waste management moved
from being in the twilight zone of policy to a key policy field. Subsequently, the rollout of a raft of recycling collection schemes across all areas of the United
Kingdom has meant that managing household waste
has impinged markedly on consumers. Household
waste is no longer simply a matter of lugging the trash
bin to the curbside but about the sorting, separation, washing, and accommodation of the excess of
consumption and consumer practices too. Suddenly,
waste has become much more visible to U.K. consumers, while doing things with and to these wastes has
meant that disposal has become integral to the conduct of consumer practices. Waste’s presence has disrupted old habits, while new collection schemes have
attempted to forge new ones in their place. As such,
in beginning to address waste, consumption research
can be regarded as mirroring social change: as both
consumers and researchers, we have had to start taking waste more seriously.
A second reason for waste’s contemporary prominence is more overtly political. Waste mountains, be
these of fridges, freezers, cars, TVs, or PCs, bring
home literally and materially the excess of consumer
cultures, the speed of the product cycle, the material
effects of product obsolescence, and the rapid transformations that have occurred in Western consumer
cultures since the 1970s. They are, seemingly, the

1520

Waste

evidence for the throwaway society. While previous
consumer cultures certainly did discard things, it is
the transience, as opposed to the durability, of contemporary consumer goods that sets contemporary
Western cultures apart from their historical predecessors. Moreover, a transient relation to things, along
with disposability, is apparent in growing numbers of
middle-class consumers in India and Southeast Asia.
Such trends pose serious questions of environmental as well as social justice and cause major trouble
for urban infrastructure in these parts of the world.
Waste mountains threatening to overwhelm humanity are potent symbols for arguments for slower,
more sustainable modes of consumption. To focus
on waste, then, is a means to move slower consumption up the agenda. It is a means of saying that waste
matters and that we should all pay attention not just
to what has gone into what we have bought (the
standard terrain of ethical consumption) but as well
to what and how much we throw out of our lives.
A third and final reason for waste’s invigoration
as a topic of intellectual inquiry is undoubtedly theoretical. One of the attractions of waste is its theoretical reach. It has the capacity to illuminate a range of
theoretical perspectives, including several that pertain
to the understanding of consumer cultures. One
such is in relation to debates over global commodity
chains, or global value chains, in which to focus on
remainder is to highlight value’s loss and potential for
recovery rather than the point of sale commodity. In
the realm of policy-oriented research, thinking about
waste management has been advanced by thinking waste through its governance, governmentality,
and modes of governing. Its concern is increasingly
with “the conduct of conduct,” normalization, and
routine, as well as the generation of new markets in
wastes. With regard to the practice and posthumanist turn in social and cultural theory, thinking about
wastes connects with thinking through networks,
flows, and assemblages. In such a way, waste becomes
not just about leftovers and discards but about a
plethora of actants, or nonhuman actors—sewers
and drains, tanks and filtration systems, collection
systems and receptacles, shredders and balers, methane and microbes, worms and plastic. At the same
time, waste has extended debates about vital materialisms to encompass the apparently inanimate as well
as the animate nonhuman, while to think in terms
of object repair, maintenance, wear and tear, decay,
abandonment, and loss has aided thinking about the
material practices of consumption, highlighting how

practices are held together through materiality as
much as sociality. Within the material culture tradition, to focus on consumer waste is to highlight the
social death of things as part of their social life, and to
show that social death is just as constitutive of social
relations as acts of acquisition and purchase. Perhaps
even more radically, though, to think through wastes
requires consumer researchers to think about things
(about objects): not nice, pristine, tightly configured,
designed objects but heterogeneous agglomerations,
the baled and compressed, the shredded and dismembered, as well as the putrid, decaying, and toxic. In
short, waste suggests a move beyond the object form,
and an engagement with material and material practices. At a more abstract level still, waste has been
thought about through disposal, order and disorder,
purification, the uncanny, and excess. Although
widely differing in their theoretical inspirations, what
brings these works together is their conjoining in
waste. Indeed, the kernel to all their arguments is that
to understand contemporary life and contemporary
civilization requires thinking hard about its wastes.

Substantive Foci, Geographical Applications,
Methodological Issues, and Directions
for Future Research
Together, these three motivations for waste research
map into distinctively different substantive foci for
empirical research with contrasting geographical applications. Research concerned with policy
and waste management in the European Union has
tended to focus primarily on those countries such as
the United Kingdom where radical changes have been
effected in day-to-day waste practices. Inevitably, the
emphasis here has been on major policy interventions and policy instruments, with recycling schemes,
recycling attitudes and behaviors, and the attempt
to grow markets in recyclables being key concerns,
alongside documenting reductions in landfill activity
and the workings of the landfill allowance trading
scheme (LATS)—an internal market for waste disposal authorities to trade in landfill credits, which has
clear affinities with carbon trading schemes. A major
finding of this type of waste research is that recycling initiatives at the policy level are seen more as a
means to divert materials from landfill rather than as
of value in and of themselves. Another is to begin to
recognize that what goes on within households (e.g.,
a lack of space to store collection bins and the inadequacy of various collection schemes for particular

Waste

housing types, notably high density forms such as
high-rise and deck-access flats) is of importance to
understanding recycling behaviors. Nonetheless, the
focus of the work remains firmly rooted in regarding waste as the end point of consumption and with
altering behaviors to accord with prescribed policy
norms. As such, there is a considerable gulf between
this type of research and its indicative understandings of the consumer and that which is found in most
research on consumer cultures.
For research that focuses on waste mountains, toxic
harm, and environmental and social justice, the more
pressing geographical focus is not the countries of the
Global North but the cities and waste infrastructures
of the Global South. Here, the politics of rubbish and
the presence (or, more correctly, absence) of allied
sewage, waste treatment, and water distribution systems profoundly affect well-being and qualities of life.
Indeed, the plastic (water) bottle entangles the politics
of waste with the politics of water, not only providing—for the most part—clean, drinkable water (for
those who can afford to buy it) but also constituting mountains of plastic waste, which in turn blocks
drains, leading to overflow as well as the buildup
of stagnant water. But waste in the Global South is
also a site and an object of work, far more so than
in the Global North where waste workers remain
largely invisible. The dumps on the edge of cities in
the Global South are the sites where the poorest of
the poor eke out an existence through scavenging,
selling their materials to businesses and “middlemen” dealing in secondary materials. Sorting and
separating recyclables from the residues that remain
is a major source of employment for large numbers
of Chinese and Indian women and underpins those
economic activities dependent on secondary materials. Both sets of activities testify to the widespread
transboundary movement of wastes. While one line
of this research has documented the scavenging life in
various sites around the world, another has focused
on public understandings of toxicity, contaminated
communities and their campaigns for social and
environmental justice, and the continued connections
between waste and social inequalities of race and
gender. Yet another concentrates on waste infrastructure and waste management systems, looking particularly at the disruptive presence of plastic within
these. Such research can also be seen as allied to a
strong tradition of work in urban and social history,
in which the underworld city of drains and sewers
figures as the counterpoint to the city in modernity

1521

and emerges as the critical backstory in the development of the first global cities, such as Paris, London,
and New York. While relatively neglected in most
studies of consumer culture, such studies point to the
dependency of consumer societies on the invisible
infrastructure of consumption—not just that connected with wastes but with the systems that move
consumer goods around the world and permit them
to work: container shipping, roads, distribution networks, electricity networks, the systems that in turn
control these, and an uninterrupted energy supply.
The challenges posed by research focusing on
the Global South are particularly apposite for
those areas of consumption research that have been
informed most closely by theoretical work on waste
and/or that have extended understandings of consumer culture to encompass waste, disposal, and
ridding. Located principally within traditions of
consumer research that identify consumption with
the consumer societies of the West and with Western
consumer practices, this research has focused empirically on northern European consumers in the main,
primarily in single-site locations within particular
countries. There are exceptions, of course, but it is
rare to find research on the Global South formulated in terms of consumer cultures. This criticism
does not apply to work that has focused on transnational movements of consumer items, notably
food and fashion. Yet research in the latter tradition
has largely ignored disposal and waste, continuing to see consumption as little more than acts of
purchase and exchange rather than as acts of use
and expenditure. Two key challenges for research
on consumer cultures, therefore, are to absorb the
lessons from research that sees waste and wasting as
central to consumer cultures and to recast this work
within the networks and flows of global commodity exchange that provide the geographical focus for
work on transnational consumer cultures. Another
challenge is to acknowledge that consumer goods
are not just benign, nor just about comfort, but—in
their remainders—about hazardous, life-threatening
concentrations of toxins. Finally, it is imperative that
research on waste as intrinsic to consumer cultures
shifts its geographical focus to include consumers
in southern and Southeast Asia, where the effects of
disposability, comfort, transience, and convenience
are already manifest.
In no small part, many of the criticisms outlined
above are indicative of key methodological challenges and particularly of the increasing gulf between

1522

Weber, Max

theoretical articulation and empirical possibility in
researching global consumer cultures. That research
on waste in contemporary consumer cultures has
focused on northern European consumers in single
sites is precisely because doing this kind of research—
even when it involves long periods of ethnographic
working—is both easier (and less costly to research
funding bodies) than conducting the multisited
global ethnographies that theoretical understandings
now require. Furthermore, there is a world of difference between writing about toxic wastes, or using
remainder as the theoretical muse, and conducting
the kind of empirical research that requires getting
up close and personal with hazardous materials in
deregulated conditions in the Global South. Leaving
aside the obvious problems of language, culture,
and “sharp” business practices, such work is dirty,
dangerous, and risky and has major potential consequences for researchers’ well-being and safety. It is
also rendered difficult in the extreme by the ethical
research codes that now frame the conduct of social
science research in the Global North. A key ethical question therefore is whether such research can
even be done by academic researchers from these
parts of the world. Or is it that such research will—
by default—have to be done by researchers living
and working in the Global South, raising yet further
questions of ethical burdens and responsibilities.
That it needs to be done is a different matter. The
focus for the full spectrum of labor rights and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
for campaigners and journalists, as well as filmmakers and visual artists, is the object of intense political
machinations, both within and between countries,
and a key part of the global economy. Estimated
that it is of equivalent value to the global trade in
drugs, waste requires academic investigation, and in
ways that—as with the first wave of consumption
research—acknowledge that consumer cultures cannot be understood through theoretical knowledge
alone. In short, waste is both too important to leave
to other writers and more, much more, than theoretical space. Just as with other facets of consumer
culture, writing about such things requires encountering it and the materials, practices, and norms of
its handling. To refuse the challenge that waste presents future research on consumer cultures would be
not only to abrogate responsibilities but also to let
waste perform its vanishing trick once more.
Nicky Gregson

See also Commodities; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and
Up-Skilling; Domestic Technologies; Environmental
Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption;
Globalization; Material Culture; Planned
Obsolescence; Political and Ethical Consumption;
Reuse/Recycling

Further Readings
BAN/Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The
Toxic Trashing of Asia, 2002.
Bullard, Robert. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and
Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1990.
Chappells, Heather, and Elizabeth Shove. “The Dustbin: A
Study of Domestic Waste, Household Practices and
Utility Services.” International Planning Studies
4 (1999): 267–280.
Davoudi, S. “Planning for Waste Management: Changing
Discourses and Institutional Relationships.” Progress in
Planning 53 (2000): 165–216.
Ferrell, Jeff. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban
Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking and
Street Scavenging. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.
Gandy, Matthew. Recycling and the Politics of Urban
Waste. London: Earthscan, 1994.
Gregson, Nicky. Living with Things: Ridding,
Accommodation and Dwelling. Oxford: Sean Kingston,
2007.
Gregson, Nicky, Alan Metcalfe, and Louise Crewe.
“Identity, Mobility and the Throwaway Society.”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
25 (2007): 682–700.
Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Hetherington, Kevin. “Secondhandedness: Consumption,
Disposal and Absent Presence.” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 157–173.
Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience:
The Social Organisation of Normality. Oxford: Berg,
2003.
Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.
New York: Owl Books, 2000.

WEBER, MAX (1864–1920)
Max Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology. Educated as a law historian and a political
economist, he has been recognized as possibly the
major architect of modern social science along with

Weber, Max

Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. Weber’s profound
influence on the sociological discipline stems from
his quest for objectivity, his historical-comparative
methodology, and his claim that social science
implies an effort in understanding human meanings and motivation for action. Weber is best known
for his much debated thesis, “Protestantism and the
Spirit of Capitalism”—which claims that the seeds
of capitalism as an economic attitude, or ethos, were
in the sixteenth century Protestant work ethic—and
for his sophisticated conceptual analysis of power
legitimation, bureaucratic organization, and status
stratification. As a methodological tool for sociology, Weber developed the ideal type—a classificatory
device intended to assist the scholar in the historical
and comparative analysis that constitutes the bulk of
social research. An ideal type—say, of bureaucracy,
of capitalism, of class, of economic action, and so
on—is a conceptual category that the scholar builds
from the radicalization and combination of various aspects of the diversified and complex historical
reality: it is ideal in the sense of being an analytic
abstraction, not a political or moral aspiration. His
elaborated typologies of power, administration, economic system, social structures, and so on, have had
a decisive impact on the development of subsequent,
more specialized sociological inquiries and are still
essential references for current social researchers.
Besides sophisticated conceptual analysis, Weber
devoted his creative mind and scholarship to the comparative analysis of the Western world, conceived of
as an extraordinarily exceptional, peculiar cultural
experience. Capitalism, the modern state, an abstract
organization of the arts, and a rational legal system
are just a few of the central features that characterize the West as unique according to Weber. To make
sense of this historical exception, Weber envisioned
rationalism as a central force shaping all Western
institutions. Extending from religion to law, economics, politics, music, architecture, and even sexuality,
rationalization means a historical drive toward a disenchanted (i.e., secularized) world in which “one can,
in principle, master all things by calculation” (Weber
1919/1946, 139). What makes modern capitalism a
rational mode of economic life is that it depends on
a calculable system of production made possible by
such institutional innovations as monetary accounting (including double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of control, separation of workers from the means
of production, discipline on the factory floor, and
so forth. The calculability of production is enforced

1523

also by the spread of rationalism in noneconomic
spheres such as law and politics with the development
of bureaucratic administration, the introduction of
formal equality in citizenship, the birth of an autonomous judiciary, a depoliticized professional bureaucracy, and so on.
Institutional rationalization was, for Weber, predicated on the rise of a peculiarly modern, rational type
of personality, identifiable as a “vocational person”
(Berufsmensch). This complex interplay of ideas,
motives, innovations, and interests produced modern rational Western civilization with its enormous
material and cultural capacity for world mastery,
encapsulated in a disenchanted, secularized approach
to life and nature. Rationalization was indeed for
Weber the fate of human history, which he captured
with the metaphor of the “iron cage.” However, the
bureaucratic “petrifaction” was also just one face of
the modern world that rationalization has brought
about, the other being a “polytheism” of value fragmentation and values contest: disenchantment was
the other side of a new spiritual enchantment.
Weber was not so much interested in consumption practices as in capital and work, that is, production. But his insights on the religious, irrational
foundations of economic action represent critical
foundations for contemporary understandings of
consumption as a meaningful order of action with
symbolic connotations. Moving from Weber’s famous
thesis, the British sociologist Colin Campbell has in
fact famously argued that Romanticism has strengthened the original Protestant ethos while changing it in
terms more open to the acknowledgment, and acceptability, of pleasure and joy in life—hedonism being
the sociopsychological condition of the rise of modern consumerism. More recently, the Weberian thesis
has been further elaborated by American sociologist
George Ritzer with his popular arguments on the
McDonaldization of society and the new cathedral of
consumption.
Marco Santoro
See also Capitalism; Lifestyle; McDonaldization;
Modernization Theory; Protestant Ethic;
Rationalization; Social Class; Status

Further Readings
Brubaker, Rogers. The Limits of Rationality. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

1524

Weddings

Hennis, Wilhelm. Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction.
London: Allen & Unwin, 1988.
Käsler, Dirk. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and
Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Marshall, Gordon. In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An
Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis. London:
Hutchinson, 1983.
Ritzer, George. Enchanting a Disenchanted World:
Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2005.
Schluchter, Wolfgang. The Rise of Western Rationalism:
Max Weber’s Developmental History. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981.
Swedberg, Richard, ed. The Max Weber Dictionary.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology, edited and introduced by H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–156. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1946. First published 1919.

WEDDINGS
Weddings are highly ritualized rites of passage that
have traditionally functioned to transform a single
man and woman into a husband and wife. Although
the restriction of weddings to heterosexual couples
is relaxing in some parts of the world, the debate
around this topic is highly controversial. A wedding
signifies to witnesses and to society in general that the
couple has made a commitment both to each other
and to the institution of marriage. Because few modern cultures retain rites of passage that signal the transition from adolescence to adulthood, the wedding
often serves to signify this change in stature as well.
Because of their great expense and the time required
to execute them, weddings are often the most sumptuous activities consumers will experience in their
lifetimes.
Weddings can either be civil (i.e., performed by an
officiant permitted by law to conduct a ceremony)
or religious (performed by a sanctioned religious
officiant). Increasingly, weddings may incorporate
traditions and scripts associated with multiple faiths,
notes Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Weddings occur in
many forms throughout the world. They can be as
simple as a ceremony where a man and a woman
essentially marry themselves by repeating preestablished or new vows. At the opposite extreme, some
wedding celebrations feature thousands of guests

involved in activities over many days. For example, it
is not uncommon in African and south Asian countries for entire villages or towns to be invited to a
wedding.
The ceremony is often merely a small part of
the ritual complex that may comprise the wedding.
Common subrituals include the proposal, the engagement party, gift showers that fete the bride (and
increasingly, the groom, as gifts have become less gendered and more elaborate), bachelor and bachelorette
parties, bridesmaid luncheons, the reception, and
the honeymoon. In addition, shopping for the wedding is a ritual itself; Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H.
Pleck estimate that those planning the type of lavish
wedding favored in North America may rely on as
many as thirty retailers to do so. For most brides in
contemporary cultures, the proposal entails the gift
of an engagement ring—typically a diamond—from
her fiancé, although it is increasingly common for the
bride to help select and pay for the ring. The engagement period is a socially vulnerable time because the
bride and groom occupy what Victor Turner calls
a “liminal condition,” or one where the couple is neither unattached nor married and where their roles
and identities are therefore unstable. In most of the
Western world, longer engagements have become
the norm. In the 1950s, when Bride’s magazine first
offered “engagement checklists,” the magazine typically allocated three months for planning. By the early
twenty-first century, the average engagement lasted
thirteen months, note Otnes and Pleck.
In countries spurred by the Industrial Revolution,
weddings have consistently grown more elaborate
among the middle and upper classes. The preferred
variant in Western developed nations is the lavish,
or “white” wedding, so named because it typically
features the bride in a formal white gown and the
ceremony in a church setting. Other key artifacts
of the lavish wedding include attendants, flowers,
church decorations, increasingly elaborate receptions
(e.g., sit-down dinners with dance floors and bands
or disc jockeys), an artistic wedding cake, fancy
modes of transportation such as limousines, and
gifts. The explosion in popularity of the white wedding was triggered by media depictions of the marriage of Britain’s Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in
1840. Before that time, women married in their best
dresses or in a nonwhite gown (e.g., in black dresses
in Sweden). But with national-circulation magazines
and faster modes of communication in place, pictures

Well-Being

of Victoria’s gown and ceremony were easily accessible to middle- and upper-class consumers. Media
depictions of society weddings in the early twentieth
century as well as ad campaigns by De Beers and
other retailers in the 1930s and 1940s continued to
fuel the growth of the wedding until the 1970s, when
feminism and countercultural movements diminished
the popularity of these events.
In 1981, the royal wedding of Prince Charles and
Lady Diana Spencer refueled consumers’ desires for
lavish weddings around the globe. Over 750 million
people watched the televised ceremony, lauded as
a fairy-tale event depicting a real-life prince marrying his Cinderella. By this time, many cultures had
relaxed the practice of endogamy, or the requirement
to marry within one’s ethnic or cultural subgroup.
In fact, many weddings today are cross-cultural
and feature traditions combined from very different
countries. This practice has increased the diversity of
wedding practices, making wedding planning more
complex. For example, in many Asian countries, the
bride and groom may change clothes several times
and wear costumes that depict not only Western
norms but also the traditional garb of their ancestors. Even in countries with few Christians, aspects
of the white wedding are integrated into ceremonies to signify modernity and social status. In short,
according to Otnes and Pleck, weddings appeal to
consumers because they deliver four key experiences:
magic, memories, romance, and the guilt-free pursuit
of perfection.
As social structures evolve, so do weddings—as is
typified by the increase in elaborate encore weddings,
featuring previously married brides and/or grooms.
Once stigmatized as shameful, encore weddings often
are as lavish as any first-time events.
Cele C. Otnes
See also Fashion; Liminality; Luxury and Luxuries;
Memory; Rituals; Romantic Love; Shopping; Women’s
Magazines

Further Readings
Bulcroft, Kris, Linda Smeins, and Richard Bulcroft.
Romancing the Honeymoon: Consummating Marriage
in Modern Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999.
Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. Wedding as Text. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum, 2002.
Nelson, Michelle R., and Cele C. Otnes. “Exploring CrossCultural Ambivalence: A Netnography of Intercultural

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Wedding Message Boards.” Journal of Business
Research 58 (2005): 89–95.
Otnes, Cele C., and Elizabeth H. Pleck. Cinderella Dreams:
The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003.
Pleck, Elizabeth H. Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity,
Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

WELFARE STATE
See Collective Consumption; Consumer
Regulation; State Provisioning; Systems of
Provision; Well-Being

WELL-BEING
Even if the pursuit of well-being can be traced to
the dawn of mankind—or maybe beyond, if one
considers, for example, the pleasure that apes
seem to derive from rubbing each other’s backs—
its commodification is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its meaning is nebulous, often being equated
with happiness, health, or prosperity, as well as the
term welfare. The latter sense of the word implies a
policy-oriented interpretation that well-being can be
assessed, quantified, and maybe even improved on
by investing various resources in key domains such
as nutrition, hygiene, or education. And yet senses of
well-being are highly subjective and a matter of personal experience, the markers of which may remain
imperceptible to even the most intimate onlooker.
In this respect, well-being is a subjectively perceived
feeling of harmony that may be experienced through
the congruence of several factors, from health to lifestyle, to philosophical and even spiritual aspects.

The Emerging Popularity of “Well-Being”
With respect to consumption, however, the concept
of well-being has been instrumentalized early on in
industrialized societies. It has been used implicitly
and explicitly to market almost anything: from cars
to washing machines, chocolate, face creams, fitness appliances, and kitchens—as can be witnessed,
for example, in 1950s’ advertisements portraying sashaying housewives celebrating the liberation

1526

Well-Being

brought about by the automated modern kitchen.
The emphasis here is not on holism, even if it is
sometimes suggested that a synergy of consumer
goods will produce even more well-being. Rather, in
this context, consumer goods represent a trigger supposed to catapult users into a state of material bliss.
It is only comparatively recently that well-being
has become commodified as such through its paradoxical relocation in the subjectivity of the body. A
messy convergence of sociohistorical developments
and eclectic intellectual contributions has enabled this
shift: from the phenomenological insights of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty to the emergence of psychophysiology or the cognitive neurosciences; from increasingly
hegemonic globalization and technologization trends
to the parallel rise of individualization, uncertainty,
and risk (as analyzed by, e.g., Anthony Giddens or
Ulrich Beck); from Foucauldian technologies of the
self to the increasing popularity of Eastern health
practices; from the loss of traditional religiosity
to the appropriation of more embodied forms of
spirituality; from the marketing of things to the marketing of senses and feelings. The demise of many
traditional certainties paired with ever accelerating
environmental changes has led many individuals in
Western(ized) societies to seek an ontological refuge
in the body’s well-being, transforming an instrumental relationship to corporeality into a “body project.” The most visible offshoots of this reanchoring
of well-being in bodily subjectivity are the fitness and
wellness ideologies, together with the lifestyle health
commodities that they have spawned.
First fitness then wellness were popularized in the
aftermath of World War II—initially in the United
States—as strategies to combat sedentary ills, to
emphasize the benefits of preventive versus curative
medicine, and to focus on environmental factors
influencing health as well as to shift responsibility
from the institution (be it the state, the hospital or the
company) to the individual. While fitness has tended
to emphasize outer bodily control and performance,
wellness seems to advocate a more subjectively
steered and even hedonistic approach to lifestyle regulation. At this point, a geographical differentiation
should be emphasized. Whereas in the United States
both ideologies soon enjoyed strong policy backing
on both the public and corporate health fronts—
before fitness and wellness products began to invade
the market, in Europe, it was the commercial aspect
of these currents that sealed their popularity, and
there was a distinct lag until public health institutions

and human resources departments began to show
interest. A number of historically shaped factors
shed light on the reasons for these contrasting trajectories. For instance, in Europe, strongly socialized
health care systems—providing basic physiological
monitoring while leaving little scope for individualized options or initiative—have only recently been
threatened with partial dismantlement and privatization. Moreover, the shadow cast by fascist regimes’
infamous hijacking of many holistic health ideologies
of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(such as the so-called Lebensreform movement or
various nudist cultures) also slowed the institutional
reappropriation and dissemination of many otherwise sensible tenets pertaining to healthy lifestyle
management.
Therefore, even if Europe is slowly catching up with
this development, it is initially in the North American
context that these well-being ideologies were gradually transformed into a new “voluntary” commercial
eugenics. Governmental agencies and corporations
soon realized that a minimal investment in health prevention and well-being promotion coupled with individual incentives represented the most potent antidote
to absenteeism. To parody Jeremy Rifkin discussing
biotechnology and “designer babies,” this new eugenics appears unthreatening: it “is friendly. It’s banal.
It’s commercial. It’s market-driven” (2001, 17).
As Brian Pronger puts it, the success of this type of
“soft fascism” lies in its perceived positive nature,
that is, productive rather than repressive. In essence, it
suggests that workers and consumers cannot remain
unconcerned with their well-being, that they are
indeed more than willing to invest in it, be it in terms
of energy, time, or money. In turn, this readiness spells
high returns on investment for both state and private
sectors since well individuals work better and consume more, thus actively contributing to the otherwise teetering sustainability of service economies.

The Commodification of Well-Being
Concretely, on the policy level, appropriate diet and
exercise, work-life balance, and risk and stress prevention as well as emotional and even spiritual harmony have been and are still intensively promoted
as the pillars of a new consumer health care awareness. They are mediated by a host of institutions and
individuals including governmental public health
institutes, health insurances, consumer associations,
general practitioners, health forums, various popular

Well-Being

health “gurus,” and so on. On the commercial level,
these concerns are mirrored in at least four specific
domains: nutrition, cosmetics, hybrid movement cultures, and alternative health practices. The evolution
and range of well-being products and services in these
domains continue to increase: every week, new functional and/or convenience foods, food supplements,
and naturally or “emotionally” oriented cosmetics
appear on the market. There are workouts—mainly
popularized through gyms or fitness studios—that are
tailored to every fitness level, age group, social class,
musical taste, or ideological persuasion (e.g., water
aerobics, Pilates, Zumba, or Tae-Bo). This development is coupled with the renaissance or the popularization of other, mostly Asian, disciplines (e.g., yoga,
qigong, karate, viet vo dao, etc.). Furthermore, these
trends cannot be dissociated from a variety of often
hybridized therapies (e.g., Feldenkrais, reiki, Bach
flowers, reflexology) offered in various holistic centers and private practices. Thus, in terms of investigating well-being, the commercial realm is perhaps even
more interesting than the policy realm since, beyond
the sophisticated mediation channels and techniques
used to market these goods and services, it is consumers who ultimately have the say about what is or feels
good for them through their decision to purchase
and/or use, their refusal to do so, or even through
their subversive use (cf. Michel de Certeau).
Beginning with the body as a privileged inroad into
lifestyle and maybe even into emotional and spiritual
harmony, what is it that has encouraged so many
consumers in postindustrial economies to invest in
well-being? Large-scale historical or sociological
investigation into individual motivations for buying
into well-being is difficult due to several factors. Two
prominent challenges are the confidentiality of corporations’ proprietary information and the high cost
of marketing reports compiled by private companies.
Another barrier is the ambivalence surrounding body
or holistic care in general. The general public is often
discreet about both its purchasing rationales and its
uses of well-being commodities. This may be due to
a culturally conditioned modesty or to taboos surrounding body or, more broadly, health care issues. It
could also be the consequence of a certain naturalization of care that has become so routine as to become
quasi invisible or unworthy of particular attention.
Nevertheless, statistics show that, starting in the
late 1980s, the size of the health and beauty markets have continued to increase, although there may
be discrepancies among estimates of fitness and

1527

wellness market share and growth potential because
of the various definitions of health products and
beauty products. These estimates are often a reflection of the institutional interests of the various state
or marketing agencies and professional associations
publishing them. For instance, the estimated market
size of the German wellness market in 1999 to 2000
was reported by numerous market research companies as ranging from 33 billion to 62 billion DM,
depending on the sectors included. Nevertheless,
beyond the difficulty of obtaining a precise assessment of the well-being market, even an overview of
industrial and service sectors engaged in marketing
healthier living reveals that well-being spending has
impacted a variety of Western consumer markets:
from the consumption of natural cosmetics to whole
foods, mineral water, fitness club memberships,
over-the-counter health products as well as travel—
to name but a few. Additionally, many of these products and services have been explicitly labeled and
marketed as fitness or wellness offerings.
These commodities did not just happen; they
were made in the merging between what producers
or mediators thought was the appropriate worth of
a product or service and what consumers were prepared to pay for a product or service. Since commodification entails a relatively arbitrary agreement about
value ascription—resting on notions such as scarcity,
need, want, luxury, and so on—the arbitrariness of
value ascription appears even more blatant in the case
of well-being commodification. Certainly, if in a given
society, relatively stable exchange values can be negotiated and decided on for a pound of rice, a plot of
land, or a computer, then who can claim to lastingly
define the relative worth of good health, a harmonious lifestyle, or serene emotions, since their value
oscillates between “cultural” and “natural” assumptions while remaining at the mercy of individual validation? Indeed, the trick with the commodification of
well-being is that it requires the subjective consent and
collaboration of consumers even more than “purely”
material goods do. While a washing machine may
remain a commodity even when stocked unsold in
a warehouse, well-being can only access commodity
status when consumers are willing to ascribe a relative value to it by metaphorically and literally buying
(into) it. In other words, well-being (as well as any
immaterial aptitude, emotion, or experience) is sellable only if consumers think it is worth paying for.
With the outsourcing of “Western” industrial production to transition and emerging economies, this

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Well-Being

particular form of commodification has been eagerly
embraced by increasingly service-oriented economies.
Because the cost of manufacturing in the West has
increased, Western(ized) economies have been forced
to shift “value-making” toward services and the marketing of subjective “consumer” experiences.
Thus, the historical emergence and seemingly
successful appropriation of the fitness and wellness
ideologies as emblems of the quest for well-being is
linked to a “new” perception of the body—a bodysubject, which is no longer a given but a perfectible
entity. This perfectibility is driven by both increased
technological feasibility and the commodification
processes described above. In parallel, though, late
modernity has also fostered the recognition that
the status of the body is essentially ambivalent and
fragile: whether it is object or subject, natural or cultural/technological, flesh or sign/text, pure biology or
holistic entity, machine/mechanics or consciousness,
resource or ecosystem cannot be satisfactorily or
definitively ascertained. This means that the pursuit
of commodified well-being—be it under the guise of
fitness or wellness—remains ambiguous.

Well-Being, Happiness, and Progress
A number of economic and psychological surveys that
seek to objectively measure subjective senses of wellbeing highlight the elusiveness of commodified wellbeing, and many suggest that modern economies have
failed to deliver it. Since well-being remains an essentially subjective value, any measure of subjectivity is
likely to preside over the selection of indicators: some
studies will distinguish between personal or social
well-being whereas others will correlate subjective
findings with economic factors, such as gross domestic product, or include environmental factors, such
as ecological or political dimensions. However, most
studies—regardless of chosen indicators—appear to
come to similar conclusions: that more goods, more
comfort or convenience, more affluence, or more ecological sustainability or political stability do not necessarily spell more happiness or well-being. Instead,
it appears that medium values for these factors and
a balance between them hold the greatest potential
for existential satisfaction. Furthermore, once survival concerns have diminished or disappeared, two
central factors in the evolution of subjective wellbeing in recent years are free choice (most likely to

occur in democratic societies) and self-expression
opportunities.
Correspondingly, the Happy Planet Index for
2010, for instance, which correlates life expectancy,
life satisfaction, and ecological footprint, showcases
Central America as the most promisingly serene
region in the world whereas the United States seems
to share the unsatisfactory perspectives of a majority of sub-Saharan African countries, with Canada
and most European countries trailing not far behind.
In a similar vein but over a much longer period of
time, the World Values Survey project has produced a
series of longitudinal studies measuring, among other
aspects, happiness or well-being as correlated with a
number of development factors. Covering the period
1981 to 2007, the World Values Survey reports
Denmark and Iceland to be two of the countries with
the best balance between subjective well-being and
high gross domestic product (GDP) and equal with
Puerto Rico and Columbia in terms of subjective wellbeing. Similarly, on a reduced European scale (with
many countries missing), the 2010 National Accounts
of Well-Being study, which takes stock of subjective
perceptions of personal, social, and professional wellbeing, highlights those countries with the greatest
economic power, such as Switzerland or Austria. But
it also shows that Scandinavia and Ireland are close
competitors, whereas other economic heavyweights
such as Germany, France, or Spain are comparatively
lagging. Finally, despite the difficulties entailed in
assessing the comparative well-being of nations, not
least because the perception of well-being is molded
by divergent cultural perspectives and values, these
studies demonstrate that material accumulation is certainly not the sole guarantor of existential satisfaction.
Gwen Bingle
See also Alternative Medicine; Body, The; Happiness;
Health Care; Materialism and Postmaterialism;
Measuring Satisfaction; Measuring Standards of Living

Further Readings
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards Another Modernity.
London: Sage, 1992.
Bunton, Robin, and Gordon Macdonald, eds. Health
Promotion: Disciplines, Diversity, and Developments.
London: Routledge, 2002.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Wine
Featherstone, Mike, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner,
eds. The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory.
London: Sage, 1991.
Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2005.
Green, Harvey. Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and
American Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986.
Grover, Kathryn, ed. Fitness in American Culture: Images
of Health, Sport, and the Body, 1830–1940. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
Hau, Michael. The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany:
A Social History, 1890–1930. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003.
Inglehart, Ronald, Miguel Basáñez, Jaime Díez-Medrano,
Lock Halman, and Ruud Luijkx, eds. Human Beliefs
and Values: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook Based on the
1999–2002 Values Surveys. Mexico City: Siglo XXI,
2004.
Inglehart, Ronald, Roberto Foa, Christopher Peterson, and
Christian Welzel. “Development, Freedom, and Rising
Happiness: A Global Perspective (1981–2007).”
Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 4
(July 2008): 264–285.
Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton,
eds. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1988.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.
Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
Pronger, Brian. Body Fascism: Salvation in the Technology
of Physical Fitness. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press, 2002.
Rifkin, Jeremy. “Technology: Genetics: Let Us Not Play God.”
Resurgence 208 (September–October 2001): 16–18.
Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage,
1993.

Websites
Happy Planet Index. http://www.happyplanetindex.org.
National Accounts of Well-Being. http://www
.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org.
World Values Survey. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.

WINE
Wine has the paradoxical quality of being both ordinary and special: a simple food item to be consumed
with a meal, it is also widely used as both a symbol

1529

in religious ritual and a means of changing human
mood or consciousness. As a result, wine often has
multiple meanings within consumer culture, connected to life and death, health and pollution, purity
and spirituality, and conceptions of order and disorder. Wine choices typically reveal social distinctions
of age, sex, status, culture, and even occupation.
Historians have suggested that patterns of consumption and the subsequent spread of wine production were linked to the symbolic requirements of
many religious cultures. The spread of Christianity
that accompanied European voyages between 1500
and 1750, in particular, facilitated the circulation of
wine as a global commodity. Viticulture and patterns
of wine consumption spread along with European
colonization and influence. It should be noted that
wine was made in many societies prior to this period
by fermenting the juice of fruit. But by the era of the
Enlightenment, the most successful global commercially marketed wine was based on grapes. Today,
those grapes are almost exclusively Vitis vinifera, a
hybrid developed in France and subsequently transplanted around the world. Wine and V. vinifera grape
vines are cultivated and consumed in a variety of
forms, from distilled alcohols, which are relatively uniform, to fermented drinks with remarkable variations.
The seventeenth century marked a turning point
in world wine consumption. Consumption of alcoholic beverages increased throughout Europe but,
particularly, among the urban poor. Fortified wines
and those with higher alcohol content met this new
consumer demand. At the same time that demand
expanded in Europe, a major wine market developed
in the Spanish colonies of South America and the
English colonies in North America and in Australia.
Capital was invested in production to improve overall
quality and to develop new wines to meet changing
consumer tastes. Some of these new wines—such as
champagne, port, and the new clarets of Bordeaux—
were expensive to produce and therefore out of the
reach of the mass of consumers. Historians have suggested that these wines appealed to the ruling classes,
in particular, as a means of symbolically preserving
their social position. At a time when other types of
wines and alcoholic beverages were increasingly
integrated into the daily diet, these new, expensive
wines were consumed by elites as part of an aesthetic
experience, a sign of connoisseurship, and a symbol
of their wealth, status, and prestige.

1530

Wine

Under the influence of the Enlightenment in the
eighteenth century, medical doctors stressed the
health benefits of wine to consumers and scientists
of various kinds who turned their attention to all
aspects of viticulture and wine making to improve
production techniques. France emerged in this
era as a leader in the development of wine culture.
Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu, noted
that in France there existed many wine models that
catered to a growing range of consumer tastes. These
wine models were imitated in other wine producing
areas.
Differentiating wines based on standards of quality became a preoccupation in the nineteenth century as wine prices dropped and consumer markets
expanded. The French remained a leader in wine
culture by developing a system of ranking in the early
1800s. Many of the most prestigious French wines
bore the name of the place where they were historically produced. Names of villages, provinces, or pays
were frequently used to designate a wine style—
Bordeaux, Burgundy, or Champagne—and its link
to a particular area of production. Wine writers and
taste professionals used these categories and ranked
wines within them. The first rankings were the result
of a consensus that there were a handful of Bordeaux
estates (Margaux, Latour, Lafite, Haut-Brion) that
stood apart from the mass of production. By 1855,
these rankings were made more explicit and detailed
for the Universal Exhibition in Paris. These standards
were adopted by consumers and remain in use a century and a half later.
The growth of rankings and consumer-oriented
wine writing signaled, in many ways, a more educated
and sophisticated middle- and upper-class consumer
of wine. Although the consumer market for undifferentiated, inexpensive wines continued to grow in
the nineteenth century, there was also a recognizable
consumer culture for upscale estate, or “chateau,”
wines. Increased urbanization and industrialization
over the course of the century produced a culture
of wine where the emphasis on the rural, provincial
roots of taste and quality became more pronounced.
Bottled wines from Europe as well as Canada and
Australia often stressed this linkage through the use
of the chateau label. The chateau as representative of
something solid and permanent appealed to consumers. Place represented consistent, reliable quality for
consumers and emerged as the key to wine marketing strategies. Consumer interest in regional wines

became so popular that chateau producers developed
wine cellar tours, and travel guides made vineyard
visits an essential part of the tourist itinerary. Wine
emerged by the end of the century as a central part of
a popular culture of ingestion.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, viticulture and wine production had become truly global
in scale and the links between wine, taste, and place
were the norm. Improvements in transport, new
processing techniques, and reduced production costs
made it possible to market formerly local specialty
wines—such as the Italian borolo, chianti, and barbaresco wines—to an ever-broader group of consumers. And there was a growing consumer market that
valued these wines and followed the advice of taste
professionals who touted these products as essential
to the art of eating and drinking.
In the twentieth century, the improving reputation
of so-called New World wines—from the Americas,
South Africa, and Australia—earned them a greater
share of the global wine trade and deprived the
European wine regions of their once dominant position with consumers. European winemakers sought
to retain their cultural dominance by stressing the
importance of place in the imaginations of consumers. This has primarily been achieved by adopting a
series of wine labeling practices based on the system
of French legal classifications known as Appellation
d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). This system, given
force through European Union regulations, prevents
the use of regional names like burgundy, sherry,
and rhine wine by producers outside those regions.
Consumers have come to recognize Old World
wines through regional appellations and recognize
New World wines by the varietal label (Pinot Noir,
Cabernet Sauvignon, etc.). The practice of varietal
labeling runs counter to the long-standing tradition
of stressing the importance of geographical location in the creation of notions of quality and taste.
Growing environmental consciousness among consumers since the 1970s, however, has revived interest in the “local” and the importance of place—the
terroir—has reemerged as a dominant identifier with
consumers.
The consumer constituency for wine has
expanded and may reflect a more general growth of
interest in food and drink in industrialized countries.
Consumers have created a market for an extensive
range of goods and services dedicated to wine.
Hundreds of books and scores of periodicals are

Women’s Magazines

dedicated to all aspects of wine. Wine paraphernalia,
such as specialized decanters, humidity controlled
cellars for the home, and tasting glasses, are widely
available. Vineyard tourism continues to expand, and
wine regions often have festivals, tastings, and museums to attract visitors. Wine, in this way, has a central
place in what is now a global culture of ingestion.
Kolleen M. Guy
See also Advertising; Branding; Christianity; Elites;
European Union; Geography; History of Food;
Locality; World Exhibitions

Further Readings
Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine
and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Paul, Harry W. Science, Vine, and Wine in Modern France.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Phillips, Rod. A Short History of Wine. New York:
HarperCollins, 2000.
Trubeck, Amy B. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey
into Terroir. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008.
Unwin, Tim. Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography
of Viticulture and the Wine Trade. New York:
Routledge, 1991.

WOMEN’S MAGAZINES
Women’s magazines are periodical publications
explicitly addressed to female readers. This kind of
press covers a vast range of topics: fashion, beauty,
romance, fitness, cooking, childbearing, politics,
traveling, and so forth. Social and historical accounts
of consumer culture call attention to the role of magazines in shaping and affecting the imagery and lifestyles of women from different social classes, races,
ethnicities, ages, geographical regions, and cultural
milieus. For at least three centuries, women’s magazines have instructed women to choose and consume
commodities to make “appropriate” female identitymarking purchases: improving their relationships
and their lifestyles; transforming their appearance,
especially to please others; and, implicitly, developing
a consciousness of their own femininity.
The first publications dealing with women’s
issues, such as the English Athenian Mercury (1691),
Female Tatler (1709), or Lady’s Magazine (1770),

1531

were addressed to upper-class ladies and advised
them on how to organize their leisure time or
improve their virtues. They were a mix of literary
readings, letters, and articles about personal concerns
or issues such as science and medicine. The beginning
of the nineteenth century witnessed the launching of
magazines explicitly aimed at amusing their readers
through pleasurable and practical visual elements.
Such periodicals contained a limited treatment of
public affairs and national and international news
but presented fashion and lifestyle topics.
A number of changes in the first decades of the
nineteenth century—including improvements in
printing technology, new marketing techniques, and
advertising, increased literacy among people, and better purchasing power of middle classes—contributed
to the rapid rise of women’s magazines and their proliferation within diverse socioeconomic milieus. They
appeared in almost every city or town large enough
to have a printing press, and they soon reached a
leading position in the industry. Setting the pattern
in the United States for expensive fashion magazines
was Harper’s Bazar (1867; Harper’s Bazaar after
1929), whereas Godey’s Ladies Book (1830) soon
became one of the most successful fashion magazines
of the nineteenth century as an analyzer of middleclass tastes and arbiter of etiquette, home economics,
and standards of propriety.
The expansion of manufacturing took the production of goods out of the domestic sphere, and
women of the growing urban middle-class were
assigned to tasks confined to the private world of
home. A clearly gendered division of labor significantly affected the lifestyle of the households: the
image of a couple where the wife managed the house
and cared for the children and a career-focused
husband who was the sole breadwinner gradually
became the model for middle-class families and—at
least theoretically—for working-class families too.
Women’s magazines both reflected these changes
and contributed to their acknowledgment in women’s imaginations, illustrating to their readers all the
virtues of the domestic domain. Because of this, in
the following century, feminist authors criticized
women’s magazines, denouncing the gendered division of labor as a way to keep women apart from
the public domain and to confirm their economic,
social, and cultural dependence on men.
During the twentieth century, magazine publishers continuously modernized their products in terms

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Work-and-Spend Cycle

of design and packaging to improve their competitive position. Target readerships became ever more
fragmented: upper-class magazines chronicling society, the arts, theater, and high fashion; middle-class
magazines giving advice on household management,
beauty, and fashion; and working-class magazines
offering fictions about romantic heroines with
impeccable virtues. In the post–World War II period,
the women’s magazine industry began to use demographic data, ranking women by economic status,
age, and marital status, to predict consumption patterns and to segment their readership attitude.
In the postwar period, the role of women as consumers has, arguably, underpinned the discourses
associated with commercial magazines aimed at
women. The principal commitment of this kind of
periodical was to educate the reader to be the decision maker and the spender in her household and
thus gain new status and control. An entirely new
knowledge about commodities such as domestic
technologies was required, and magazines were there
to dispense it. The features thus unveiled by this magazine-guided process of consumer education were
supposed to reflect the reader’s innate femininity and
the particular kind of individual she was. Besides, the
introduction of electronic devices was radically transforming housework, and women’s magazines often
provided guidelines on how to learn the contemporary style of house management.
This formula began to lose its appeal during the
1960s and 1970s. Commercial TV offered alternative forms of entertainment, while the feminist
movement overtly criticized most popular women’s
magazines. Although the content and readership of
women’s magazines changed as society changed,
women’s magazines were accused of reinforcing the
status quo and women’s submission within society
and the family. This interpretation has partly been
revised by post-structuralist and pop culture studies
stressing the polysemic character of this medium.
Ideas about a wider equality for women, upturning feminine codes and sexual liberation, gradually found a space in some women’s magazines.
The success of periodicals such as Nova (1965) or
Cosmopolitan (created in 1886 but renovated by
the mid-1960s) is evidence of the magazine industry’s ability to identify the needs and motivations of
women in the 1960s and early 1970s.
By the late 1970s, new marketing strategies found
further ways to boost sales. Motivational research
was replaced by lifestyle research, which represented

consumers as more diverse and changeable than
ever before, and emphasized differences between
consumer groups in cultural as well as economic
and motivational terms. At the same time, advertising gained an increasing importance in magazines’
financing, blurring the lines between advertising and
editorial content.
From giving advice to women through debating
the sexual revolution of the 1970s to the fueling of
independent women’s interests (such as body maintenance, health, fashion, relationships, and sex) in
the 1990s, women’s magazines have continued to
show their capacity to reflect on socioeconomic and
cultural changes in the feminine condition. Media
research emphasizes their undiminished role in the
public debate around the changing meanings of
femininity and in the definition of women’s tasks and
interests. Presenting topics in a pleasing, colorful, and
enjoyable way, women’s magazines still attract millions of readers, despite many predictions of future
downfall due to the increased commercial competition with the new media.
Rossella Ghigi
See also Consumer Education; Femininity; Feminism and
Women’s Magazines; Gendering of Public and Private
Space; Men’s Magazines; Print Media; Sexuality;
Teenage Magazines

Further Readings
Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and
Sandra Hebron. Women’s Worlds. London: Macmillan,
1991.
Gough-Yates, Anna. Understanding Women’s Magazines.
London: Routledge, 2003.
Hermes, Joke. Reading Women’s Magazines. Cambridge:
Polity, 1995.
Winship, Janice. Inside Women’s Magazines. London:
Pandora Press, 1987.
Zuckerman, Mary E. A History of Popular Women’s
Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

WORK-AND-SPEND CYCLE
The work-and-spend cycle is a phenomenon in
which people in affluent nations remain trapped
in a pattern of long hours of work and increasing
consumption spending that fails to generate lasting
improvements in well-being and plays a major role

Work-and-Spend Cycle

in ecological degradation. For the originator of the
concept, economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, it
is not only a matter of the tightening grip of consumerism on culture and consciousness. But also
work-and-spend is rooted in a bias in capitalist labor
markets toward long hours of work, which results in
labor productivity gains being channeled into rising
incomes rather than more free time. Employees get
accustomed to the higher income and the consumption it enables, until the next round of productivity
and income increases.
In her influential book The Overworked
American, Schor sought to explain why, despite vast
increases in output per hour of labor, work-time
reduction ground to a halt in the United States after
World War II, and, by the 1970s, hours of work
began to rise significantly. Neoclassical economics explains the outcome as a product of workers’
preferences for income over leisure. Schor rejects this
explanation and the idea that a functioning market
in work hours exists. She argues that employers, not
workers, have the dominant say over work hours,
which come tied to a given job. Full-time jobs with
benefits in the United States typically require at least
a 40-hour week, often more. Available shorter-hours
jobs usually come with disproportionate penalties,
including lower hourly pay, no health care or other
benefits, and diminished career prospects.
Schor identifies a number of reasons why capitalist employers prefer long hours of work. With
salaried employees, extending the workday—a
time-tested strategy for surplus-value extraction—is
a seemingly costless source of additional profit. Yet
even when workers are paid by the hour, and even
at premium overtime rates, employer incentives for
long hours persist. Fixed costs per worker—such as
employer-paid benefits, training, and hiring costs—
lead employers to concentrate work hours among a
limited number of people. Schor argues that a longerhours/higher-income combination increases the economic cost of job loss (the employment rent), which
facilitates employer control of the workforce and
increases labor productivity. Highly capital-intensive
industries also seek maximum operating hours and,
given the difficulty of finding additional workers of
comparable quality and experience, employers prefer to keep the machines running with fewer people
working long shifts.
As a result, employers would rather pass on hourly
productivity gains to workers through wage increases
than shorter hours. (This assumes that workers are

1533

able to stake a claim to their share in some form—a
safe assumption during postwar Fordism but less so
as neoliberal globalization took hold.) Although U.S.
workers repeatedly say in surveys that they would
give up some future wage gains for shorter hours,
Schor notes that as time passes, in most cases they
do not get the extra time. In fact, once they receive
a higher income, they generally resist reducing it to
gain free time. This asymmetry is, in part, a product
of habituation to higher consumption as the new
norm. It is also driven by relative consumption comparisons, or “keeping up with the Joneses”; as social
standards of consumption rise, people feel pressure
to keep up or risk a fall in relative status, making it
difficult to go against the current. Turning neoclassical economic theory on its head, Schor thus argues
that workers do not “get what they want” but come
to “want what they get.”
One implication is that, left unchecked, capitalist
dynamics generate too much private consumption at
the cost of other sources of well-being: family and
leisure time, public goods, savings, and environmental quality. To the extent that relative rather than
absolute consumption levels affect happiness once
basic needs are satisfied, the work-and-spend cycle is
a futile treadmill exercise. Since everyone’s consumption increases, no one is relatively better off.
Schor’s analysis contributed to U.S. debate over
the problem of overwork and overspending, its
extent, causes, and possible responses. A key question in this debate is, why has the work-and-spend
cycle been stronger in the United States than in many
other nations, notably in Europe that have opted for
more leisure/less consumption? In addition to the
strength of U.S. consumer culture, Schor highlights
the greater countervailing power of trade unions in
Europe, which kept work-time reduction on their
agenda long after American labor abandoned the
cause. Other researchers have confirmed that higher
unionization levels and more labor-market regulation, for example, workweek legislation and vacation
rights in Europe are key factors (Alesina, Glaeser, and
Sacerdote 2005). A complementary explanation is
greater income inequality in the United States, which
fuels more intense status competition or “Veblen
effects” (Bowles and Park 2005).
Academic critique of work-and-spend has contributed to efforts to escape the cycle. Much of that
effort in the United States has taken individualistic
forms, that is, downshifting or voluntary simplicity, but Schor’s analysis suggests an additional need

1534

World Exhibitions

for social action to reform the labor market, reduce
income inequality, and preempt the automatic
upward spiral of consumption. North American
initiatives to seek social solutions to the work-andspend cycle include the Center for a New American
Dream, the Take Back Your Time movement, and
the Vancouver-based Work Less party. Meanwhile in
Britain, shorter work-time policies have emerged as
a key element of green proposals for alternatives to
endless economic growth and to the social logic that
locks people into consumerism (Jackson 2009). The
quest for more satisfying and ecologically sustainable
ways of living promises to drive continued efforts to
escape the work-and-spend cycle in the years ahead.
Anders Hayden
See also Affluent Society; Conspicuous Consumption;
Consumption and Time Use; Convenience;
Downshifting; Environmental Social Sciences and
Sustainable Consumption; Harried Leisure Class;
Time-Use Diaries

Further Readings
Alesina, Alberto F., Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce
Sacerdote. “Work and Leisure in the US and Europe:
Why So Different?” National Bureau of Economic
Research Working Paper 11278. Cambridge, MA:
National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005.
Bowles, Samuel, and Yongjin Park. “Emulation, Inequality,
and Work Hours: Was Thorstein Veblen Right?” The
Economic Journal 115, no. 507 (2006): F397–F412.
De Graaf, John, ed. Take Back Your Time: Fighting
Overwork and Time Poverty in America. San Francisco,
CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2003.
Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth? The Transition
to a Sustainable Economy. London: Sustainable
Development Commission, 2009.
Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American: The
Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books,
1991.
Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Upscaling,
Downshifting and the New Consumer. New York: Basic
Books, 1998.

WORLD EXHIBITIONS
World exhibitions were popular venues for promoting and shaping consumer culture since at least
the middle of the nineteenth century. The Great

Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park in 1851 is generally recognized as the first world exhibition, although
it drew on earlier and less ambitious French examples, if not the longer-term history of the traditional
bazaar and potlatch. Later world exhibitions were
held in major European, North American, Asian, and
Latin American cities. Some of those were national
capitals, while others were industrial or manufacturing centers. It was not uncommon for capital cities
throughout the British Empire, for example, to also
host their own bold world’s fairs. Well through the
1960s, such shows entertained and educated millions
of men, women, and children.
Organizers and exhibitors were not bashful
about celebrating such large-scale events as opportunities to organize, buy, sell, advertise, and make
consumer goods of nearly all varieties, including
food, machines, clothing, furniture, and art. Visitors
were drawn to the exhibitions for many reasons, but
among them was the opportunity to observe and
consume that vast universe of goods that catered
to and shaped taste and beauty. Such goods held
many meanings at the exhibitions, including fantasy,
status, information, and power as part of consumerism. Major companies organized their own pavilions and courts for those and other reasons as they
sought to engage consumers and compete with other
companies. Among such buildings were those organized and occupied by General Motors at Chicago’s
Century of Progress and New York World’s Fair in
the 1930s.
One could reasonably conclude that the exhibitions made the apparently limitless, if not at times
overwhelming, world of material culture and the
ideas associated with such “things” comprehensible.
Exhibition categories, displays, guidebooks, and catalogs created order out of this spectacle of goods. Many
goods were also made immediately accessible, as some
events encouraged visitors to purchase and consume
goods right on the exhibition grounds themselves; at
other times, goods displayed at the exhibitions might
be available for purchase at neighboring department
stores. Such stores grew up and became popular alongside the great exhibitions during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, influencing one another. Among
many connections, department store and exhibition
displays often mimicked one another.
Exhibition participants promoted consumer
culture in ways that revealed a rather sophisticated understanding of not only the concept of

World Exhibitions

consumerism but also the various strategies to promote and manage consumption. This was done in a
surprisingly self-conscious and direct manner. Some
appealed to the dreams and fantasies of advertising,
thereby intentionally manufacturing consumerism;
others emphasized the demands of existing utility.
While many argued that all things under the sun
should be available for consumption at the exhibitions, others argued that the goods should be limited
by specific criteria such as whether or not they were
of the highest available quality or whether they were
made within the exhibition buildings. Those advocating goods of high quality suggested that consumption would develop taste. Matters of authenticity
and pricing essential to consumer culture were also
matters of debate, as was the question of whether
only local, national, and imperial goods should be
displayed or whether the event would be turned in a
more internationalist direction. Commissioners and
exhibitors also debated how to compare and evaluate
consumer goods. Formal competitions, evaluation
by jurors, and the awarding of prizes were common
outcomes of such discussions. In these and other
ways, world exhibitions were object lessons in both
the power of consumerism and the tensions inherent
within it. Most if not nearly all participants agreed
that exhibitions could be perceived as markets, or
ways to organize and manage, if not outright promote, consumerism, but they might disagree about
the particular characteristics of that market.
By noting and often celebrating the ephemeral
nature of exhibitions, men and women were suggesting that such shows were temporary spectacles and
also that consumerism was at the heart and soul of
the ways by which such shows shaped longer-term
political, cultural, social, and intellectual life, not
just the explicitly economic aspects of the public and
private spheres. The ability to observe, purchase,
and consume was a political and social statement as
much as a commercial one. Metaphors and object
lessons about the nation and society informed and
were drawn from characterizing exhibitions as spectacles of consumer culture. Those lessons might be
promoted by the inclusion of “Indian bazaars” at
world exhibitions in Calcutta (1883–1884), Paris
(1878, 1889, and 1900), and London (1862 and
1886), as well as by displays of Japanese, Italian,
and German goods at some of those and other
exhibitions. European and Asian consumer goods,
including ceramics and clothing, were notably

1535

popular at the Australian international exhibitions
held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880–1881
and 1888).
The ability to consume linked such consumers as subjects and citizens in vast social networks
both within their own particular societies, colonies,
and nations and also with a larger outside world.
Consumer culture helped define those internal and
external relationships, including differences and hierarchies among them. It was important to consumer
culture that visitors could observe south Asian artisans making traditional wares for purchase, including carpets; it was also important that visitors could
observe the blunt differences between themselves
and the laborers. In this way, consumerism suggested
relevant consumer connections and relevant social
distinctions. Those distinctions might be articulated
in class, race, religion, gender, or political terms and
coexisted sometimes uneasily with the promises of
equality and uniformity suggested by mass and public consumer culture.
Consumer culture at world exhibitions was also,
not surprisingly, about making money. The success of
an exhibition was often measured by such characteristics linked to consumerism. Among those might be
the number of goods bought and sold or the amount
of food consumed, highlighting appeals to mass and
not elite consumer culture. Advocates boasted that
exhibitions brought together in one site a greater
number of goods and a greater number of consumers than any other available site. In this way, they
potentially dwarfed the more permanent department
stores, and the ephemeral nature of the exhibitions
was seen to be a stimulus for future consumerism,
although the event itself was a momentary and passing one. That limited experience could be reproduced
later at future exhibitions, by purchasing goods in
stores and securing longer-term domestic and foreign
trade. Regional trade in horses, tea, art, and other
goods generated wealth as a result of displays and
exchanges at Australian and Indian exhibitions.
French, British, and American trade in machinery
and other goods expanded after participation in
major exhibitions. The importance of such connections was apparent to organizers, who boasted that
consumer culture at the exhibitions revealed potential and future consumption, hence future revenues.
Cognizant of such potential advantages, exhibitors
regularly lobbied for patent and antipiracy protection for their displays as well as for direct rail and

1536

World-Systems Analysis

maritime connections between host cities and major
trading partners.
Designers and promoters of world exhibitions took
consumer culture seriously enough to in part shape
the architecture of their exhibition grounds in ways
that would promote consumerism. This might mean
providing accessible venues for purchasing and consuming goods at the shows (such as wine bars and
teahouses), extensive advertising of the available
goods before, during, and after the shows (particularly
in the host city’s press), enough space for suitable display and sales (including trophies built from consumer
goods), and by the placing of similar goods side by
side for comparison (in special courts). The organizers established categories and catalogs to help assist or
manage that consumption, finding a variety of shared
criteria, including nation of origin, use, and genre.
The celebration of consumer culture also meant
introducing a sense of transparency in the relationship between production and consumption, if not a
direct connection. Unlike at the department stores,
visitors to many world exhibitions could observe
consumer goods being produced before their eyes,
whether by craftsmen or machines. Those goals
more often than not could be reconciled with some
of the more explicit political goals of the shows
when, for example, visitors to world exhibitions in
Australia, British India, and Britain itself participated
as subjects of and consumers in the British Empire.
Consumer culture provided one of the vital social
networks linking the colonies and Britain, thereby
coexisting with if not legitimizing imperialism. The
same might be said about the relationship at the
exhibitions between consumer culture and nationalism, as was often experienced at the French Universal
Expositions and the American world’s fairs.
World exhibitions peaked during the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, a period in which they
were influential in the development of consumer culture. They continued into the twentieth century and
are held periodically today, although their particular
influence on consumer culture waned as there were
so many other powerful influences, including mass
media, and alternative ways to participate in largescale public consumerism, such as shopping malls.
Peter H. Hoffenberg
See also Advertising; British Empire; Collective
Consumption; Department Stores; Mass Production and
Consumption; Potlatch; Social Networks; Spectacles

Further Readings
Benedict, Burton. The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San
Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of
1915. Berkeley, CA: Scolar Press, 1983.
Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New
Formations 4 (1988): 73–102.
Briggs, Asa. “The Great Victorian Collection.” In Victorian
Things, 52–102. London: Batsford, 1988.
Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions
Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs,
1851–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Gurney, Peter. “‘A Palace for the People?’ The Crystal
Palace and Consumer Culture in Victorian England.” In
Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace,
edited by James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers, and Eileen
Gillooly, 138–150. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2008.
Hoffenberg, Peter H. An Empire on Display: English,
Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal
Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001.
Lewis, Russell. “Everything under One Roof: World’s Fairs
and Department Stores in Paris and Chicago.” Chicago
History 12 (1983): 28–47.
Richards, Thomas A. “The Great Exhibition of Things.” In
The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:
Advertising and Spectacle, 17–72. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990.
Rydell, Robert W. World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress
Expositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Susman, Warren I. “The People’s Fair: Cultural
Contradictions of a Consumer Society.” In Dawn of a
New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939/40, edited
by Helen A. Harrison, 17–27. New York: New York
University Press, 1980.
Walton, Whitney. France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois
Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth
Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
World-systems analysis, previously known as worldsystem theory, is a broad approach to the interactions
and interrelations among various societies. It was first
developed by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in an
attempt to explain why some countries developed
and others either did not or did so much more slowly.
Wallerstein drew heavily from the work of the Annales
school in France, especially the work of Fernand
Braudel. In the intervening three and a half decades,

World-Systems Analysis

many scholars from all the social sciences have contributed to and critiqued this perspective. This entry
begins with a few cautions then turns to a discussion
of key terms. Then, it briefly outlines later elaborations. Throughout, there is an emphasis on how worldsystems analysis relates to consumer culture.
Some initial caveats are in order before turning to
basic definitions. First, as Wallerstein himself argues,
the world in world-system means self-contained.
The modern world-system became truly global only
in the nineteenth century. Second, a world-system
is a fundamental unit of analysis, not simply a system of connected states. Third, it seeks to explain
both how the overall system shapes its various
components—states, ethnic groups, regions, and so
on—and how those components shape the overall
world-system. The claim that the world-system is
a fundamental unit of analysis means that it serves
as a context for understanding interactions among
its various components. It does not mean that it is
only a top-down analytic approach. It can also be a
bottom-up approach. Indeed, a key idea here is the
interaction or interplay between local-level processes
and systemwide processes. Fourth, it is an intellectual approach that has given rise to many theories,
some of them contradictory, hence it is best referred
to as world-systems analysis, or a world-systems perspective. Fifth, the modern world-system originated
in Western Europe in the “long sixteenth century,”
1450 to 1640. Sixth, the modern world-system has
a specific historical origin. This raises questions
of what preceded it, and how it did arise. Several
scholars suggest that there have been many different
world-systems, which is why the term system takes
the plural in world-systems analysis.

Terminology
Some of the following terms have meanings in worldsystems analysis that differ significantly from their
popular meanings. The term world-system is properly hyphenated, though even that has been disputed.
The point is that it is not necessarily a system that
encompasses the globe. Rather, it is a “world” that
is more-or-less self-contained. Yet almost no human
groups are entirely isolated, so this is a relative term.
Wallerstein posited three types of world-system:
• World-economy consisting of an interacting
group of societies that remained politically
autonomous

1537

• World-empire consisting of an interacting group
of societies that were ruled by one society that
had conquered the others
• Minisystems, which were interacting sets of
nonstate societies

Wallerstein said little about minisystems, though
others have. He argued that before the advent of
the modern world-system, world-economies tended
to be conquered by one member state and develop
into world-empires. His point was that the modern
world-system was the first such system that has
remained a world-economy. Whenever any state
has tried to conquer the system, other members
cooperated to defeat that effort. Much historical
investigation finds that the claim is basically right,
even though a few ancient world-economies have
survived nearly as long as the modern world-system.
Documentation for these and subsequent claims is
available in the literature.
The modern world-system is unique primarily
because it is a capitalist world-system. By capitalist,
Wallerstein means a political economy that is dominated by processes of production in which workers
produce commodities for sale in a market by those
who own the means of production, that is, factories
and other capital. Where world-systems analysis differs is that it sees this as a characteristic of the overall
system. This approach explains why there can be
pockets of feudalism, peasantry, or slavery within a
larger capitalist system.
The world-system is made up of three types of
components:
• Core components, which are relatively wealthy,
have the most advanced science, political
organizations, and production arrangements in
the system and tend to dominate the other
components and extract wealth from them.
• Peripheral components, the opposite of the
former type, are relatively poor; have the least
advanced science, political organizations, and
production arrangements in the system; and tend
to be dominated by the other two components
and have wealth extracted from them.
• Semiperipheral components, which are
intermediate, are richer than peripheral areas but
poorer than core areas, have medium levels of
political organizations and production
arrangements, dominate peripheral areas and

1538

World-Systems Analysis

extract wealth from them, and are in turn
dominated by core areas, which extract wealth
from the semiperipherals.

World-system practice is such that states or
other units can be described as core, peripheral, or
semiperipheral whereas the entire set of such units
are called the core, the periphery, or the semiperiphery. A good deal of research on the modern
world-system does document that for over a century the world has had this tripartite structure.
There are several nuances that should be highlighted. First, the entire system is dynamic. Core,
peripheral, or semiperipheral states (or other units)
can and do change positions over time. Second, these
terms describe a complex set of relationships. Note,
these terms refer to these areas in aggregate. Specific
states may be exceptional to the overall pattern.
Third, each type of unit has its own typical political,
economic, and cultural structures that differ from the
others systematically. For instance, contemporary
core states tend to be formally democratic, are dominated by middle classes, and have the broadest level
of equality among citizens. Peripheral states often are
authoritarian, typically have a wealthy elite and quite
poor general population, and have thus considerable
inequality. Semiperipheral states often mix both sets
of characteristics and/or have intermediate levels of
organization. Fourth, the semiperiphery forms the
third leg of a system and thus helps maintain a modicum of stability.

World-System Processes and Dynamics
These structural accounts occasionally detract from
the dynamic aspects of world-systems. The interplay
between local and global levels of analysis is a major
concern in world-systems analysis. The history of
the modern world-system exhibits several trends and
cycles, which together produce a spiral of change.
The trends include commodification, proletarianization, state formation, increasing size of enterprises,
and capital intensification.
Commodification is a long-term process in which
more objects or services are exchanged for money
rather than for moral or personal obligations. This
means that more goods and services become consumer items over time. For instance, over time, more
individuals labor for wages rather than in response
to political force or moral obligations. Thus, more
individuals eventually become proletarian workers

rather than peasants. Gradually, the state becomes the
dominant form of social and political organization,
and citizenship becomes almost universal. By then,
corporations have grown in size and spread over
several states and even transcended state boundaries
becoming transnational corporations (TNCs). Some
TNCs are larger than many state economies. Many
TNCs, but far from all, specialize in producing consumer products and use their advertising to promote
consumption of many different kinds of products.
Capital, including human capital composed of training and skills, and physical capital in the form of more
complex machinery has become the major means of
increasing human productivity. Familiar examples
are the rapid spread of personal computers and the
Internet in business processes, especially in consumption. Capital intensification and increased production
of goods have accelerated demands on environmental
resources.
As in any system, the world-system exhibits many
cyclical processes. Best known is the Kondratieff
cycle, also known as K-waves, named for the Russian
economist who first documented its existence early in
the twentieth century. K-waves are forty- to sixty-year
cycles in prices. New technologies drive economic
expansion. As the market saturates and competition
increases, expansion slows or even drops until a new
technology develops.
The hegemonic cycle is related to, but different
from, the K-wave. Hegemony is a situation in which
one core state dominates the core. Hegemonic cycles
take about a century. They are interrelated with
K-waves in complex and disputed ways. Typically,
hegemony works through economic and political
power, rarely through overt coercion. When the
dominant state’s power peaks and begins to weaken,
the level of hegemony declines. Then, interstate
rivalry and competition increase significantly. A
hegemon usually arises through a world-system-wide
war. Currently, the United States is in a phase of
hegemonic decline, but decline is a relative term. This
does not mean that the United States is not the most
powerful country in the world-system. Rather, the
gap between it and its nearest rivals is now significantly smaller. This decline is visible when one compares the level of U.S. consultation with allies before
intensifying the conflict in Vietnam with the level of
consultation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Cycles of colonization, decolonization, war, state
formation, and social movements are shaped by
these basic cycles (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000).

World-Systems Analysis

K-waves and hegemonic cycles do not cause other
changes. Rather, they form a context that makes
other changes more likely. Research on cyclical
processes remains contested, as do the various interpretations of them. Still, the existence of cyclical processes suggests that social and political events must
be contextualized in world-system time, that is, not
only by a date but also by their relative positions in
the various cycles.
A key aspect of world-systems analysis is that it
builds on other approaches to development to highlight the role of exploitation of one area by another
in the development of the exploiter and the lack of
development, or even underdevelopment, of the
exploited. In short, the core is the most developed
precisely because it extracts wealth from the periphery and to a lesser extent the semiperiphery. The
periphery and, to a lesser extent, the semiperiphery
are at minimum slowed in any efforts to develop
economically or politically. Often, they are not only
blocked from developing but also pushed backward,
that is, underdeveloped. This is what economist and
social historian Andre Gunder Frank called the development of underdevelopment. This insight, now
supported by much empirical research, helps solve
the puzzle of why some states developed, or modernized, while others did not or did so more slowly
than core states. Again developed, undeveloped, or
underdeveloped are relative terms. Also, the entire
modern world-system has itself developed over its
entire existence. For instance, in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, textiles were seen as
a leading sector of industry, centering in England. By
the twenty-first century, textiles have become mostly
a peripheral enterprise, though to be sure some textile manufacturing does occur within core states.

Insights From World-Systems Dynamics
The dynamic of core development/peripheral
underdevelopment also helps explain why different
regions in the world have had very different social
structures. In the post–World War II era, many
sociologists and anthropologists (and other social
scientists) were puzzled about why social processes
that had one type of dynamic in some areas, typically core states, were either not present or worked
entirely differently in other areas, typically peripheral
states. The relationship between core and periphery shaped the social processes in each type of state
but in different ways. For instance, both core and

1539

periphery have different patterns of consumption.
Typical core areas seek to acquire cheap raw materials from peripheral areas and use them for markets
for cheap consumer goods. The imported raw materials are used in production of both capital goods
and consumer products.
As the world-system itself developed, an overarching world culture began to emerge but one that
was manifested in different ways in different areas.
State organization and educational systems are two
key examples. If a new state were to appear in the
twenty-first century, whether or not it was democratic, it would in broad strokes have the same type
of bureaucratic structure as other states (Meyer et al.
1997). Most educational systems in the world follow
a European-American model, especially at the postsecondary level, even where such models are inappropriate for their specific circumstances.
Of course, the most dramatic instance of this
world culture is in consumer goods. Again, however,
one must be cautious here. While a Big Mac is a Big
Mac in Los Angeles, Beijing, Hong Kong, Moscow,
Bangkok, or Kuala Lumpur, the meaning and role of
eating a Big Mac is not the same in all these places.
This is what many people mean by globalization
of culture and consumptions. Yet, except for Los
Angeles in this list, a Big Mac is “foreign food” in
all these places. Furthermore, all of them supplement
the main course with local flavors: pork burgers,
borscht, pineapple juice, and so on. This is what
many have come to call glocalization, global similarity tempered by local “flavors.” As it turns out, these
are processes that have characterized the modern
world-system throughout its five-hundred-year-plus
existence and, indeed, many earlier world-systems.
In short, many globalization processes are far from
new—even though those processes are much more
intense in the twenty-first century.
The roles of women in society and fertility patterns
are other examples. Kathryn Ward used world-systems
analysis to explain her findings that, generally,
development improves the status of women in core
countries, that is, gaining the right to vote, increasing
labor force participation, and even gaining moderate increases in pay. However, women in peripheral
countries were hurt by development, that is, experienced fewer political rights, decreased labor force
participation, or deteriorating quality of jobs and pay.
An associated trend was that in core countries, fertility rates generally declined, whereas they increased in
peripheral areas. Key to this difference is that in core

1540

World-Systems Analysis

countries, having more children hampered a woman’s
ability to participate in the labor force, whereas in
peripheral countries having and caring for children
and the home were primary avenues to status for
women. Of course, the situation is more complex
than this. The point here is that these differences
become more visible from the world-system perspective and in part can be explained only from a system
perspective. Since her initial research, there have been
complex changes in gender roles, but it remains clear
that world-systemic processes continue to shape,
though not determine, those changes. In terms of consumption, this also means that women who live in
core areas are much more involved in consumption,
whereas in peripheral areas, many women become
less involved. Furthermore, due to lack of direct
access to money, they often engage in subsistence
production or penny capitalism (growing, making, or
processing small amounts of consumer goods sold at
local markets). Thus, women in the periphery clearly
are consumers but are much less intensely involved in
market consumption.
Another, more controversial example is the abolition of slavery. In brief, Wallerstein argued that a
major impetus toward the abolition of slavery and
the slave trade came from the efforts to incorporate
African regions into the world-system. As European
countries colonized Africa, keeping Africans at home
to work and produce wealth, especially on plantations that produced raw materials for export, became
economically more valuable to some colonizers than
removing them from Africa to sell them into slavery.
At the “consuming” end of the slave trade, slaves
became increasingly expensive and were perceived as
a threat by wage laborers, especially in core areas such
as the United States. However, many peripheral and
especially semiperipheral areas continued to import
slaves well into the nineteenth century. Thus, even the
abolition of slavery was an uneven process. In short,
world-systems processes contributed to the timing of
the abolition of slavery. Again, this is far from a complete explanation. Clearly, abolitionists who argued
from moral positions played a role. Additionally, as
industry and agriculture became more mechanized,
slaves became less useful than wage laborers.

Incorporation Into the World-System
Wallerstein’s explanation for the timing of the abolition of slavery, whether one accepts it or not, contains another very important world-systemic process,

incorporation of new areas and/or peoples into the
world-system. Clearly, West Africa was part of the
modern world-system since the initiation of the slave
trade. However, the colonization of Africa was a
more intense phase of incorporation that entailed not
only war and exploitative trade but now also political and social control.
As European colonists developed plantations
to produce raw materials for export to core areas,
typically the home country, they needed workers.
Africans, most of whom had been involved in subsistence production, did not find monocrop plantation
work attractive. One means to force them into such
work was to impose various kinds of taxes, especially head taxes (a taxed based on the number of
persons in a household) that had to be paid in cash.
This forced African heads of households to acquire
cash to pay the taxes, thereby forcing them into wage
labor. This changed family and gender roles as men
had access to cash, and women did not. So women
expanded family roles of having and caring for children and producing subsistence crops to feed their
families, especially when men were absent in distant
wage-labor jobs. Later, women also developed penny
capitalism. The absent men had to use some of their
wages to supply their own needs. With long absences
from home, consumption of alcohol and use of prostitutes increased. The persistence of some of these
practices is one piece of the complex puzzle of rapid
and extensive spread of AIDS/HIV in Africa.
In the Americas, incorporation took a different
path. Colonists found that native peoples were often
not suitable as slaves, even where there were ancient
agricultural traditions, as in Mexico and Peru. First,
the spread of disease rapidly depleted the indigenous
populations. Second, in many areas, indigenous agriculture was far less intensive than what European
colonists wanted. Third, indigenous peoples knew
the areas well and could easily flee. These were some
of the main conditions that impelled colonists in
the Americas to import African slaves. Africans had
stronger immunities to European diseases. They often
had practiced more intensive forms of agriculture in
Africa, so they were easier to train for work on sugar
and cotton plantations. They could not escape to
home, though many did escape locally and mixed
with various indigenous populations creating many
Maroon communities. Because Africans looked different, it was easier to identify slaves, something that
was difficult to do with indigenous populations and
all but impossible to do for European indentured

World-Systems Analysis

servants. This focus on phenotypical differences is
one root of the far more intense racialized and racist
traditions that arose in the Americas.
In areas where agriculture was less intensive or
entirely absent, trade in furs became common. This
could not be done by slaves since it necessarily
entailed free movement of trappers. Essentially it was
subcontracted to indigenous populations. This would
seem to be a mild form of incorporation, but it had
massive effects on local populations and indirectly
aided industrial development in Europe. To capture
animals to obtain furs, best done in the cold season
when fur was most dense, trappers had to disperse
into the habitats of the hunted animals. This often
led to either curtailment or abandonment of horticultural villages and often broke up extended family
living arrangements. Again, it led to other changes in
family and gender roles. In some cases, women maintained the horticultural settlements and continued
agricultural activities that had been their traditional
roles. This again created some problems associated
with absent men. It also gave men greater access to
cash and trade goods. Where entire families trapped
during the cold seasons, villages were nearly emptied
for part of the year, and all the social practices associated with village living were disrupted.
On contact with Europeans, native peoples
quickly discovered the value of guns and other metal
objects. Guns made hunting more efficient. As the
fur trade expanded and conflict over access to fur
trapping territories intensified and turned violent,
guns became necessary for defense. Knives, axes, and
metal pots were also popular, though not always for
the reasons commonly assumed. A good flint knife is
often sharper than most metal knives. But it is brittle,
whereas metal knives and axes are more durable and
can be resharpened. The major advantage of metal
pots is also durability. A dropped cast iron pot seldom breaks, while pottery typically does.
As this trade continued and local competition
over access to fur-bearing animals increased and
mobility increased in pursuing them, guns and more
durable tools transformed from luxuries to necessities. As the trade increased, both sides developed a
number of “sharp” practices. Europeans often supplied guns and pots that had what today we would
call planned obsolesence. From the other side, native
peoples learned to prepare bales of furs with the
higher quality furs only on the outside of the bales
and even added rocks to the interior to raise the
weight (Kardulias 2007). Furthermore, indigenous

1541

peoples became dependent on access to these goods.
By the eighteenth century some leaders complained
that their young men could no longer use, let alone
make, quality bows and arrows (Dunaway 1996).
In an effort to gain fuller access to native fur suppliers, French fur traders often married into one or
more villages, ideally to a daughter of a leader or
prominent man. They often took wives in many
villages. While such polygyny was “immoral” by
European standards, it was an accepted practice
among many indigenous groups, especially for leaders or prominent males. This practice was so widespread that it gave rise to an entirely new group now
known as Métis. This, along with the competition in
the fur trade, and especially the ravages of diseases,
led to extensive restructuring of precolonial social
groups. It destroyed some, amalgamated others,
led many to move to different territories, and in a
few cases, enhanced the power of others, such as
the Haudenosuanee (League of the Iroquois), who
were able to capitalize on a middleman role in the fur
trade for a number of years.
On the European end, this ready market for guns
and other cheap metal goods provided an incentive
to increased efficiency of production and an outlet
for excess goods. Furs from the northern areas were
used primarily in conspicuous consumption, such
as beaver fur hats for the wealthier consumers. So
while extensive, this trade was somewhat fragile
since it was subject to fads in European consumption. However, southern areas of what is now the
United States exported large numbers of deer hides.
These were used in Europe to make various goods,
including tool belts and even some conveyor belts. In
some years, as many as one hundred thousand furs
per year were exported from one southern seaport
(Dunaway 1996).
In what was northern New Spain, much of which
eventually became the southwestern United States,
trade was often in slaves, albeit of a different kind
than in Africa. Initially, Spaniards tried to impress
native peoples into slavery. The settled peoples in
what is now the state of New Mexico, the Pueblos,
became involved in supplying grain and cotton blankets to Spaniards. By the early seventeenth century,
not long after Santa Fe was founded in 1610, horses
began to spread to native peoples. While local people
could not produce guns or metal pots, horses could
be bred and even could do so without human agency.
For the erstwhile hunting groups or horticultural
groups, horses quickly became highly desired goods.

1542

World-Systems Analysis

Yet these peoples had little besides bison hides and
dried meat to trade for horses. They quickly discovered that Spaniards had a strong desire for slaves. So
instead of following the tradition of either adopting
or killing captives, they traded them to Spaniards.
This had several major effects. First, conflicts among
various groups increased to acquire captives and
avenge their own people who had been captured by
enemies. This further increased the value of horses
and especially guns. The latter were difficult to obtain
since Spanish colonial policy tried to restrict them
to the military. Second, where sufficient supply of
horses or guns could not be acquired by trade, raiding became common. Third, this led some groups to
abandon farming because villages were fixed targets
for raiders and because hunting bison was a more
efficient way to acquire horses and guns. Although
these peoples became “nomadic,” this does not mean
they wandered randomly. Rather, they moved over
large territories, often in a regular pattern. Fourth,
this led to changes in family and gender roles as men
became hunters, raiders, and traders and women
became fur processors.
As the raiding-trading cycle intensified, Spaniards
intensified their attacks on nomadic groups. Captives
were most often women and children. As they developed families and interbred and often intermarried
with Spaniards, a new ethnic group called Genízaros
developed.
All these changes reshaped the distribution of
indigenous groups as some groups were destroyed
or amalgamated with other groups, or new groups
formed (e.g., Genízaros or Métis). The trading-raiding cycle increased the level of violence throughout
the region. Consumption patterns changed greatly;
bison and bison products were used more extensively
and traded widely. Guns and metal goods and especially horses became items of trade and/or raiding.
Although the nomadic groups were technically outside Spanish control, they were clearly incorporated,
albeit mildly, into the world-economy. Even this mild
degree of incorporation produced massive changes
(Blackhawk 2006; Hall 1989).
These studies of incorporation led to a friendly
critique of Wallerstein’s concept of incorporation,
extending it to include minimal contact. To a mild
degree, incorporation could be reversed or abated,
though the general tendency has been toward greater
incorporation. Still, even mild incorporation could
lead to major ethnic changes: the elimination of some
groups and formation of new ones (e.g., Maroons,

Métis, or Genízaros), a process known as ethnogenesis. Second, incorporation is not a one-sided process.
Incorporated groups often resist and even sometimes
can negotiate the terms of incorporation (Kardulias
2007). Third, low levels of trade can lead to major
changes in consumption patterns. Fourth, and probably least obvious, the effects of incorporation often
extend far beyond the zones of immediate contact.
For instance, Lewis and Clark, most likely the first
Europeans to enter much of the Louisiana Purchase,
encountered indigenous groups who possessed
horses and sometimes guns. Indeed, these points are
one of the avenues that prompted scholars to explore
the predecessors of the modern world-system.

The Move to Study Ancient World-Systems
In Wallerstein’s original analysis, trade was restricted
to trade in staples or bulk goods. A number of scholars noted, however, that trade in luxury goods also
had important effects and did constitute a form of
incorporation into the world-system. As scholars
explored these actions, they became more and more
interested in ancient world-systems, or what might
be called world-system-like relations. To do so, they
found it necessary to provide more general definitions
of key terms (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Denemark
et al. 2000; Sanderson 1995). They also reformulated
many of Wallerstein’s basic postulates as empirical
questions, which when answered would require new
theoretical approaches to world-systems analysis.
Building on the bulk versus luxury trade discussions, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall
argued that world-systems consisted of four types of
networks:
• Bulk Goods Network (BGN) defined the area
within which exchanges of low value to weight
goods were regularly exchanged.
• Political/Military Network (PMN) defined the
region within which regular and recurrent
conflicts and alliances occurred; typically larger
than the BGN.
• Prestige Goods Network (PGN) defined the
region within which regular and recurrent
exchanges of luxury goods occurred; much larger
than either the BGN or PMN.
• Information Network (IN) defined the region
with which regular and recurrent exchanges of
information occurred, of the same scale as the
PGN but seldom coinciding with it.

World-Systems Analysis

This reconceptionalization meant that worldsystems had multiple boundaries that only rarely
coincided. Second, the bounding mechanisms could
be mapped empirically. Third, incorporation could
occur along any of these boundaries. Fourth, worldsystems could merge, again along any of the four
network boundaries, most commonly along information or prestige goods networks. Fourth, the
defining characteristics of these things, bulk goods,
prestige goods, information, and political/military
interactions, are not solely properties of those things
but also of their roles in the system. These terms
need some definitive elaboration.
Bulk goods have a relatively low value to weight
ratio. The extent to which bulk goods can be traded
is shaped by transportation technology. Where water
transport is readily available, distances may be much
greater. In contrast, luxury goods, also called prestige goods, or preciosities, have a relatively high
value to weight ratio. They are called prestige goods
since in many ancient systems there were restrictions
on who could possesses, display, or trade in these
goods, which were often used to validate rank and
status. In short, their primary use was in conspicuous consumption, which validated status. While the
distinction between bulk and prestige goods sounds
absolute, it actually is relative.
As is now clear in the twenty-first century, information, which in this usage includes culture, can be a
very valuable commodity. Some types of information
can be difficult to exchange. Examples are the movement of Buddhism from India to China or the technologies of silk production. At other times, exchange
may be relatively easy. Two familiar examples are
the spread of stirrups and iron making. Once seen in
battle, stirrups can be copied easily. Iron making can
spread with only a modicum of special knowledge.
Such information exchanges have had a vast effect on
development across Eurasia for at least two millennia.
Finally, there are political and/or military networks. These involve more or less regular interactions.
Lief Ericson may have made temporary alliances
with indigenous people in Newfoundland, but these
did not persist. Yet the conquests of Alexander the
Great did lead to transfer of colonists and continued
exchanges for some time. The Mongol conquest in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries united all of
Eurasia in one political-military network. While that
is often seen as short lived, it is worth noting that the
Mongol Empire lasted almost as long at the United
States has.

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This new, broader concept of world-systems has
several additional points. First, more than one worldsystem can exist at the same time. Second, separate
world-systems can merge in a variety ways, and occasionally they can break apart. Third, these ancient
world-systems are the ancestors of the modern worldsystem. Fourth, the existence, the number of levels
between core and periphery, and their interrelations
remain a thorny empirical and theoretical issue.
New evidence suggests there are at least two other
types of cycles in ancient world-systems. There seem
to be cycles of rise and fall of states that are about
three hundred years long. Even more intriguing are
six hundred–year ecological cycles. In this cycle, as
states age, they degrade their environments eventually to the point they are no longer sustainable. This
can be due to overconsumption, especially of building materials, or to soil exhaustion. At some point,
the system collapses into a “dark age” (Chew 2008).
Such collapses are always detrimental to elites and
often to commoners. However, they do create time
and space for the environment to recover from overuse. Both types of cycles are suggestive of processes
that occur in the modern world-system. However,
the data remain sparse, and the existence and pattern
of these cycles are still seriously debated.
Any regularly interacting societies, states, or
chiefdoms can form a system. When the societies
in the system are different either in social organization or relative power or wealth this is called
core-periphery differentiation. But if and when
these relations become hierarchical, it is called
a core-periphery hierarchy. This latter set of relations bears some resemblance to the development
of underdevelopment, which is a key part of the
modern world-system. But not all instances of coreperiphery differentiation relations become hierarchical. Considerable research focuses on the causes, or
lack, of this transformation. A deeper theoretical
question is, was such a transformation inevitable?
Trade in prestige goods appears to be one important mechanism by which patterns and cycles of
change at long distance come into synchronization.
For instance, synchronization in changes in empire
sizes, city sizes, and to some extent population sizes
between eastern Asia and southwestern Asia (often
called the Near East) has occurred for at least two
millennia. The data on which these observations
are based are limited. Still, every time the data are
improved these relations remain. This is strong evidence that long-distance exchange, along with its

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World-Systems Analysis

associated consumption patterns, has long played a
role in world-systems evolution and social change in
general.
There are other lessons to be learned from the
study of ancient world-systems.

Lessons From Ancient World-Systems
for the Modern World-System
An obvious lesson is that much that is touted as new,
such as the modern world-system and/or globalization, is not all that new. These patterns are old.
Certainly, contemporary globalization is more intense
and more rapid. But is this change sufficiently large
to justify labeling it new? Two other broad lessons
are that interactions and historical process are vital
to understanding contemporary processes. History
has not ended. Indeed, we can be reasonably sure
that future changes will be at least partially rooted
in global interactions and derive from historical
relations. Fourth, the overall system itself remains
a fundamental unit of change. The system cannot
explain everything. But ignoring system-level changes,
processes, and effects, dooms any entirely localized understanding or planning to serious error and
mostly likely serious failure. Fifth, what will be the
consequences of a truly global world-system? Further
expansion is no longer a realistic possibility. Some
processes may intensify, but local limits can no longer
be overcome by expanding into new territory. Sixth,
exchanges of all sorts will continue to be important,
especially the varying roles and processes of consumption. The most glaring current examples come
from the complex roles of trade and consumption of
petroleum and its derivative products.
A possible candidate for the label new is the rise of
mass consumerism that continues to spread throughout the globe. Yet it is also producing its own countermovements. Glocalization is only one example.
Others are evidenced in efforts to support local farmers and to define narrower ecological regions, bioregionalism, and so forth. Finally, deeper understanding
of twenty-first-century consumption patterns requires
careful consideration of both historical processes and
world-systemic processes. World-systems analysis
cannot explain everything, nor does it attempt to do
so. However, it is a level of analysis that cannot be
ignored.
Thomas D. Hall

See also Cycles of Production and Consumption;
Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable
Consumption; Gender; Global Institutions;
Glocalization; Modernization Theory; Political
Economy; Social and Economic Development;
Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings
Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and
Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006.
Boswell, Terry, and Christopher Chase-Dunn. The Spiral of
Capitalism and Socialism: The Decline of State
Socialism and the Future of the World-System. Boulder,
CO: Lynne-Rienner, 2000.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher. Global Formation: Structures of
the World-Economy. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1998.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and E. N. Anderson, eds. The
Historical Evolution of World-Systems. New York:
Palgrave, 2005.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Salvatore J. Babones. Global
Social Change: Comparative and Historical Perspectives.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D. Hall. Rise and
Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997.
Chew, Sing C. Ecological Futures: What History Can Teach
Us. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008.
Denemark, Robert A., Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills,
and George Modelski, eds. World System History: The
Social Science of Long-Term Change. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Dunaway, Wilma A. The First American Frontier: Transition
to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Hall, Thomas D. Social Change in the Southwest,
1350–1880. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1989.
Hall, Thomas D., ed. A World-Systems Reader: New
Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous
Peoples, and Ecology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2000.
Hall, Thomas D. “World-Systems Analysis and
Globalization: Directions for the Twenty-First Century.”
In Theoretical Directions in Political Sociology for the
21st Century. Vol. 11, Research in Political Sociology,
edited by Betty A. Dobratz, Timothy Buzzell, and Lisa
K. Waldner, 81–122. Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2002.
Jorgenson, Andrew, and Edward Kick, eds. Globalization
and the Environment. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill,

World-Systems Analysis
2006. Republished, Chicago: Harmarket Books,
2009.
Kardulias, P. Nick, ed. Leadership, Production, and
Exchange: World-Systems Theory in Practice. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Kardulias, P. Nick. “Negotiation and Incorporation on the
Margins of World-Systems: Examples from Cyprus and
North America.” Journal of World-Systems Research
13, no. 1 (2007): 55–82.
Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas, and
Francisco O. Ramirez. “World Society and the NationState.” American Journal of Sociology 103 (July 1997):
144–181.

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Sanderson, Stephen K., ed. Civilizations and World-Systems:
Two Approaches to the Study of World-Historical
Change. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1995.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of European
World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York:
Academic Press, 1974.
Wallerstein, Immanuel, ed. The Essential Wallerstein. New
York: New Press, 2000.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Ward, Kathryn B., ed. Women Workers and Global
Restructuring. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1990.

Y
YOUTH CULTURE
Youth culture is a concept that refers to the collective cultural practices of young people who may use
elements of consumption as a means of establishing
an identity in contrast with, and perhaps in opposition to, the mainstream. Given that the academic significance of consumption arguably lies in its role as
a key arena within which elements of social change
are negotiated through the everyday, it follows that
youth culture constitutes an important element of
contemporary consumption studies. Consumption
arguably plays more of a key role in constructing
who or what a young person is than for perhaps any
other social group. However, there is considerable
debate as to whether the notion of youth culture is
still pertinent in a world in which young people are
apparently free to pick and choose their identities
from the vast options made available to them by a
pluralistic and stylistically diverse consumer culture.

The Emergence of Youth Culture and
the Role of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies
Young people’s experience of consumption through
youth culture is the product of a long history. The
relationship between young people and consumption
first came under the microscope in the post–World
War II years when young people were perceived to
be at the sharp end of an emerging consumer culture. From this point of view, Bill Osgerby describes

the “teenager” as a sort of ideological terrain “upon
which a particular definition of post-war change was
constructed” (1998, 37). Osgerby goes on to argue
that it was not until the 1950s and 1960s, notably
in the United States, that young people’s consumption habits began to take place in public arenas and
a commercial youth market emerged, not least in
the context of popular music. Subcultural movements such as the mods in Great Britain reflected the
upwardly mobile nature of working-class lifestyles.
For Osgerby, the mods were seen as the epitome of
classless consumerism and yet at the same time they
were reviled as the bête noire of the affluent society,
not least given moral panics regarding mod “invasions” of seaside towns, which affronted the moral
majority.
It was during the 1970s in the work of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
in Birmingham, Great Britain, that the broader significance of youth culture first came directly under
the sociological microscope. Basing its conception
of young people on what it is to be deviant, the
followers of the Birmingham school argued that
young people establish who they are through a process of labeling. The Birmingham school adherents
were interested in the ways in which young people
expressed themselves in opposition to a culture in
which their voice was rarely heard. Authors such as
Dick Hebdige therefore argued that young people
express their resistance to authority visually through
style as “a symbolic violation of the social order”
(1979, 19). At this stage, the changing role of
fashion was a particular concern of many authors

1547

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Youth Culture

interested in the apparently spectacular nature of
youth culture. Hebdige argued that resistant subcultural styles would eventually be exploited by fashion
and music industries, which would strip such styles
of any subversive meaning and repackage them for
the consumption of the broader public. The CCCS’s
deviancy-based conception of young people claimed
that the latent function of subcultures was to somehow magically resolve, at least in an imaginary fashion, the unresolved paradoxes of the parent culture,
suggests Stanley Cohen. The legacy of this work was
undoubtedly significant, but it is doubtful whether
the subtleties of contemporary youth cultures can be
adequately catered for within a Marxist framework.
This, and perhaps the fact that young people themselves appeared to be less and less likely to define
themselves through the sorts of all-encompassing
framework that the notion of “subculture” implied,
meant that the study of youth culture struggled
for direction in the 1990s. Arguably, the recognition that consumption played a key role in young
people’s lifestyles and in managing their relationship
with the parent culture, and that such a relationship
could just as equally support the status quo as symbolically challenge it, was key, as it strengthened a
position that saw consumption as an end in itself
rather than simply a means to some kind of classbased ends.

Young People’s Agency and Lifestyles
Many authors have sought to understand the role
of consumption in young people’s lives. Broadly
speaking, such discussions have noted a process in
which the oppositional force constituted by young
people has apparently been incorporated into the
dominant order so that subculture, for example, has
been “made palatable for popular consumption”
(McRobbie 1993, 411). The first important piece
of research to seriously consider the importance of
young people’s lifestyles beyond that of youth subcultures was probably by Paul Willis, who argues that
“cultural commodities enhance and greatly increase
the informal possibilities of cultural creativity and are
now inextricably tangled up with them” (1990, 131).
From Willis’s point of view, young people construct
their lifestyles in a creative and agentic fashion and,
in doing so, transform the politics of consumption
to their own ends. Thus, young people do not buy
consumer goods passively or uncritically but trans-

form, appropriate, and recontextualize meanings.
The degree to which young people are free to recontextualize such meanings is certainly debatable, but
Willis’s work was useful in placing young people’s
experience at the center of his analysis. In this context, there emerged an increasing emphasis on young
people’s freedom for self-expression and creativity.
Meanwhile, there remained an enormous chasm at
the heart of youth studies between a tendency, on
the one hand, to exaggerate the degree to which
young people’s transitions were out of their own
hands and, on the other, as demonstrated by Willis’s
work, to exaggerate the degree of agency that young
people enjoy.
In attempting to fill these gaps, Steven Miles, in his
book Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, developed the notion of young people’s lifestyles in arguing that lifestyles constitute the material expression
of an individual’s identity. The term youth lifestyles
is preferred to youth culture or subculture in this
respect insofar as it emphasizes questions of practice rather than a broader conception of the cultural
realm. Moreover, an overdependence on notions of
youth subculture tends to rule out the commonalities between subcultural groups while underestimating the impact of consumption on the lives of the
majority of mainstream youth. The argument is that
consumption represents a key arena within which
young people play out the relationship between
structure and agency and that they do so while trying to negotiate their everyday position in what is an
ever-changing world. This creates particular tensions
for young people.
Regardless of the creative nature of the meanings
young people invest in their consumer lifestyles, the
suggestion here is that social change has created a
particular form of consciousness among young
people which legitimizes conceptions of consumer
culture. Young people may get as much as they want
out of what they consume, but by its very nature
such consumption will inevitably buttress the status
quo. (Miles 2000, 149)

In effect, Miles argued that through the act of
consumption, young people position themselves in a
number of ways. Consumption offers them a sense
of comfort, a communal sense of belonging, while
simultaneously legitimizing consumerism as a way
of life, through the assertion of their rights as citizens
of consumer culture. Youth lifestyles offer young

Youth Culture

people a degree of flexibility, or indeed stability, in
what is essentially an unstable world: far from consumption offering young people a means to negotiate through the fragmented postmodern identities
that were apparently so much the rage in the 1990s,
young people could then be said to use their consumer lifestyles as a highly rationalized means of
stabilizing their everyday existence. Young people no
longer depend on subcultural affiliation for the construction of who or what they are but instead construct lifestyles that are as adaptable and as flexible
as the world around them. A key concern in this
respect is whether or not the young people of today
are more consumption oriented than the young
people of the past. Young people’s relationship with
consumption is therefore ambiguous. It provides
them with an arena within which they can endow
meanings that reflect their broader experiences of
living in uncertain times. Many authors have argued
that one of the key problems facing young people is
the fact that they experience increasingly uncommon
biographies so that the support mechanisms around
them are not as effective as they may have been in
the past. Consumption offers a degree of stability, a
common language, in such a context, but what it
cannot offer is any solutions to the problems of living an essentially insecure life. In effect, young people “use their lifestyles, which on the surface appear
to be fragmented or post-modern, as a highly rational and modernist way of stabilising their lives”
(Miles 2000, 159). This process has important implications for the development of youth cultures insofar as it implies that subcultural affiliation is no
longer as important as it was in the past, and that
young people’s consumer-based lifestyles have to be
as flexible as the rapidly changing world with which
they engage on a daily basis.
The increased role of consumption in how young
people define themselves reflects a broader situation in which there appears to be a diverse range of
youth cultures from which young people choose. In
this sense, there is no longer one unitary youth culture, and the role of consumption in the creation of
youth cultures has altered fundamentally insofar as
young people use it not as a means of establishing a
commitment to a specific and defined youth culture
but more commonly as an expression of taste that
will engender different dimensions of different youth
cultures, whether they be techno, indie, or goth, for
example. In this context, Andy Bennett has argued

1549

that in a so-called postmodern age, the concept of
subculture fails to account for the shifting and pluralistic sensibilities of style that characterize young
people in a consumer society. For Bennett, youth
styles are predominantly free-floating in nature and
are thus concerned with surface impression and
self-authentication. Young people use the consumption of music (and consumption more generally, of
course) as a means of constructing fluid notions of
identity. Bennett argues that the notion of “subculture” is unworkable in this context, as it implies a
class analysis that is simply too rigid to offer sufficient analytical value. Bennett goes on to present the
notion of the “neo-tribe” as an alternative theoretical
model for the study of youth and, in doing so, relates
it to the issue of lifestyles that reflect “the sensibilities
employed by the individual in choosing certain commodities and patterns of consumption and in articulating these cultural resources as modes of personal
expression” (1999, 607).
For Bennett, the concept of lifestyle is important
insofar as young people will often select such a lifestyle regardless of their specific class background; in
effect, consumerism offers individual ways of dealing
with class issues, but the individual is not determined
by them. From this point of view, the individual is
liberated by the mass society in which he or she lives
insofar as that society provides him or her avenues
for individual exploration and the ability to shift
between musical and stylistic preferences; a degree
of flexibility that demonstrates the changing role
of consumption in a late-modern consumer society.
David Chaney further considers the implications
of cultural change for the notion of subculture by
arguing that in a fragmented world, a simple and
unique identity no longer seems a realistic aspiration.
Arguing that notions of subculture offered a means
of understanding the ways in which largely inarticulate and nonintellectual youth invested in cultural
adaptation and parody in a public context, Chaney
suggests that subcultures are now superfluous in that
although the cultural is still political, it is no larger
appropriate to assume that elements in a dominant
culture can be successfully appropriated as a means
of countercultural revolt. In other words, distinctions
between “sub” and “dominant” cultures have been
eroded in a context in which culture has fragmented
into a world of consumer-driven lifestyle preferences.
This raises a debate as to whether young people
use consumption in a coherently collective way or, as

1550

Youth Culture

Alberto Melucci has argued, to construct a sense of
identity as consumers in isolation, given the fact that
young people have less-fixed reference points from
which they can plot their life course than they would
have had in the past. The concept of subculture
has always been problematic, and membership of a
subculture should not imply the adoption of a fully
fledged lifestyle. In other words, young people are
a little more pragmatic in their consumption habits
than such an approach implies.

Young People and Music Consumption
As a means of addressing the previously presented
issues, it would be useful to consider two specific
arenas of youth cultural consumption, namely music
and the Internet. A key arena for consumption
among young people is undoubtedly music. Music
styles offer young people a prime setting for considering collective identities and behaviors. The work of
Sarah Thornton on “club cultures” is worth considering in this regard. Thornton points out that music
is in fact the cultural form closest to the lives of the
majority of young people. Thornton describes the
role of the dance club in Great Britain in the 1990s
as a semiprivate environment that constantly adapts
and changes its relationship to fashion and, in doing
so, offers young people an escape from the mundane
problems of everyday life. Despite the fact the music
and clothes that were incorporated and indeed promoted by such venues were globally marketed, such
spaces offered young people a finely nuanced cultural arena within which, Thornton argues, young
people recognized the homogenous nature of crowd
concerned but not the fact that they themselves were
part of that crowd. Young consumers in this context are adamant that they are not part of what they
would describe as “the mainstream.” Rather, club
cultures provide young people with a classless world
of fantasy and escape that is largely defined through
consumption. As Thornton puts it, “Contemporary
cultures—high and low—are riddled with dynamics
of distinction” (1995, 163). From this point of view,
the popular cultural space that young people inhabit
is multidimensional, and young people use other
young people’s behaviors and forms of consumption
as a yardstick against which they can judge the depth
and style of their own cultural experimentation. “The
social logic of these distinctions is such that it makes
sense to discuss them as forms of subcultural capital
or means by which young people negotiate and accu-

mulate status within their own social worlds” (163).
But most importantly for Thornton, any understanding of youth culture should shift away from the study
of resistance to understand the complex politics of
contemporary youth culture, which are essentially
rich and original in nature and which, in turn, constitute just one component of a diverse and complex
world of distinction.
Some authors, including Thornton and Dan
Laughey, recognize the role of media in its diverse
forms in maintaining young people’s music consumption. It could be argued that the influence of the
media is such that the music audience is increasingly
diffused so that the nature of engagement operates at
a different level from that of the past. It constitutes
an element of everyday life, but young consumers are
not necessarily all-absorbed by such music. As such,
Laughey argues that young people are narcissistically
situated within a spectacle/performance paradigm
of which the main intention is to see and be seen.
Laughey’s argument is that such a paradigm is best
understood in the context of young people’s everyday cultural practices. Thus, our understanding of
youth cultural consumption of music should avoid
situating all acts of human agency within a dominant
cultural or hegemonic struggle.
Learning how to consume and produce music on an
everyday basis . . . occurs in localised contexts such
as schools and homes, and is articulated through
personal narratives either about the self or significant
others in which—even if global media appear to
dominate the agenda about what is available—
co-present influences ultimately shape literacies and
tastes. (Laughey 2006, 111)

To this end, argues Laughey, notions of habitus
are especially pertinent to understanding the ways
in which local and global influences interact.
Moreover, young people adopt everyday productive
tactics as a means of feeding into the production
process. In his ethnographic discussion of these
debates, Laughey points toward the pragmatic and
transitory nature of young people’s music consumption and the fact that young people’s practice in this
context is learned through familial and traditional
and, thus, largely social interactions as part of a
fluid process of self-identity and presentation.
Indeed, peer group music exchanging can be as
much about building relationships as it is about
“tactics.” Above all, according to Laughey, the

Youth Culture

relationship between everyday music media and
consumption and public music consumption is an
entirely interactive one. This reflects a situation in
which young people have a wide range of music
choices, both private and public, to make. As Rupa
Huq points out, the young people of today are a
media-saturated generation intimately familiar with
the practical experiences of intertextuality and selfreference, not least given the democratic way mobile
phones, palmtop computers, and PCs interact with
each other. Moreover, young consumers are simply
not prepared to accept that music is foisted on them
by the music industry multinationals; this further
demonstrates that young people’s consumption of
music is a form of social practice to be created as
well as a cultural text to be consumed. As Huq
argues, “Today’s youth musical cultures are beyond
strict territorially bonded units, beyond straight
individualist analyses, beyond the classifying system
of youth equating automatically with pop and
above all, beyond subculture” (2006, 167).

Young People, Technology, and Consumption
Technology plays a particularly important role in
young people’s shifting experiences of consumption,
and it has significant implications for understanding
youth culture. Young people are less and less tied to
subcultures either through a particular geographical
location or as an easily identifiable “member” of a
group. This is particularly so during a period in which
the electronic media plays such a pivotal role in the
nature of relationship building and interaction and in
which technology play such a key role in facilitating
what Willis describes as “proto-communities.” This is
an issue raised also by Sonia Livingstone, who argues
that the media not only occupy time and space in
young people’s lives, they actually structure and give it
meaning. Livingstone argues that we should be careful not to exaggerate the symptoms of social change
but that, nevertheless, a young person’s relationship
with new media is often a telling indication of increasingly individualized patterns of consumption.
As people construct lifestyles—and media preferences
and interpretations as a key component of these—to
identify and explain their social relations and sense
of oneself, this complicates and in some ways
undermines or re-frames the “forms of social
control” attempted by the mass media. Crucially,
insofar as the effect of this complicating process is in

1551

the direction of diversification—of preferences,
interpretations, identities—it is this effect which the
media industry, in attempting to manage and exploit
“kids’ culture,” is now chasing. (Livingstone 2002,
111–112)

Thus, Livingstone describes a process in which
the economics of the mass market are apparently
being superseded by multiple diversified markets,
and although popular fears regarding the homogenization of young people’s culture are still powerful,
the commercial imperative is one that emphasizes
the individualization of young people, which in turn
detaches young people from traditional family,
place, and class-based ties. This creates a complicated situation for young people in which their
endeavors to construct a meaningful and, if at all
possible, common biography with that of their
peers is complicated by the fact they have to negotiate between the local and the global through both
face-to-face relationships and electronic media.
According to Livingstone, the power of promotional culture is such that young people’s identity is
effectively rechanneled through consumption and
they belong insofar as they are consumers. However,
this is not to say that young people are unable to be
creative in this context.
Noting that youth cultures can no longer be
expected to be closely knit, territorially based groups
with a collective sensibility, Bennett (2004) suggests
that young people’s use of the Internet demonstrates
that youth cultures are increasingly cultures of
“shared ideas” whose interactions are virtual rather
than physical. Young people are freed up by the way
in which the Internet allows them to transcend the
limitations of social relationships founded in physical space. Nonetheless, for Bennett, the discourse
of identity developed online is likely to be framed
by everyday local experience. To this end, Bennett
quotes the work of Daniel Miller and Don Slater on
the consumption of the Internet in Trinidad in which
they argue that grounded notions of Trinidadian
identity play a key role in structuring young people’s
relationship to the Internet. The Internet operates,
from this point of view, as a creative resource for
young people’s negotiation of everyday life. The
Internet enhances young people’s experiences as
consumers, through, for example, fan-based chat
rooms that provide an “aura of exclusivity.” Bennett
discusses the ways in which skaters describe their
moves, while discussing topics of specialized interest

1552

Youth Culture

such as the nature of skate shoe design. In other
words, young people’s consumption of skating is
technologically enhanced by the Internet. According
to Bennett, a discussion of young people’s use of the
Internet is a further demonstration of how the notion
of subculture is now best understood as referring to a
reflexively constructed “lifestyle project” as opposed
to its more abstract analytical origins. This situation
offers more and more creative possibilities insofar as
computer software is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and in this sense the Internet arguably offers a
form of genuinely democratic cultural consumption.
Authors such as Anoop Nayak and Mary Jane
Kehily have argued that the consumption of the
Internet tells us a lot about what it means to be a
young woman at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. The Internet has apparently become an
important site for young women to discover themselves and to develop a collective identity and attitude, through, for example, electronic magazines
that help to redefine young women’s identities. But
young women’s relationships with technology and, in
particular, the Internet are undoubtedly paradoxical,
not least in the context discussions regarding pornography but also insofar as young women are often
positioned in this context as the ideal neoliberal subjects: flexible, technologically savvy, and in control of
their own destinies. The jury is still out with regard
to whether the Internet, through e-zines, message
boards, virtual communities, and the like, will move
beyond a situation in which the media seem to tell
them that they need to self-improve and transform
if they are to be successful in personal relationships.
Perhaps new technologies will offer young women
new ways of performing and articulating gender that
can challenge such perceptions.
An interesting additional angle by which to
address young people’s relationship to technology is
through the lens of the “straight edge” subculture.
Emerging in the United States in the 1980s from
within the punk movement, straight edge constitutes
something of a reaction to the perceived uncritical
and apathetic attitudes of mainstream America,
notably through an absolute disdain for recreational
drug use and sex, according to J. Patrick Williams.
Williams argues that the role of the Internet is crucial to any understanding of subcultural experience
and participation, particularly in the context of the
relationship between music, culture, and identity. As
such, he conducted an Internet forum-based ethnography into the straight edge subculture. Straight edge,

according to Williams, is interesting in that unlike
most other subcultures, its identity is based not so
much on shared “doings” but on shared practice. Of
course, straight edgers interact communally, but their
individual identities prioritize an ascetic lifestyle of
non–drug use and nonpromiscuity. Williams argues
that the Internet has served to dislocate straight edge
from its musical roots through the personalized ways
in which consumers have exchanged information via
the Internet and that even its countercultural heritage is undermined by a process in which drug-free
young people appropriate the straight edge label. In
developing a symbolic interactionist conception of
what constitutes straight edge identities, Williams
suggests that there is an increasing permeability
between physical boundaries made possible by the
Internet. Expressions of straight edge culture through
the Internet tend to downplay the role of music
insofar as the Internet not only reflects the young
people who communicate through it but actively
reproduces them and helps to circulate a particular
range of ideas, images, and ideologies, especially for
those young people who only engage with straight
edge via the Internet (as opposed to through faceto-face interaction). Williams found that these
Internet-based straight edgers consider themselves as
“authentic” as their face-to-face counterparts and, in
doing so, challenge what it means to be a member of
a subculture, further indicating the fluid, contingent,
and often consumption-based nature of subcultures
more generally.

Youth Culture, Consumption, and Class
It is tempting to come to the conclusion that the
apparently fundamental role of consumption in
young people’s lives has served to undermine traditional class relationships (thus undermining the
CCCS’s original conception of youth subculture).
But the truth is many authors have sought to demonstrate the continued significance of social class in
young people’s experience of youth culture. One such
attempt is evident in the work of Ken McCulloch,
Alexis Stewart, and Nick Lovegreen, who counsel against a more individualized understanding of
youth subcultures. Their argument is that young people’s subcultural affiliations are in fact less fluid than
authors such as Bennett (1999) might suggest and
that in turn, young people are less free to make the
sorts of choices that a discourse constructed around
the sorts of freedoms a fragmented consumer-driven

Youth Culture

society might offer implies. This approach challenges the common argument often raised in discussions around the social significance (or otherwise)
of consumption that class ties have weakened. For
McCulloch et al., a young person’s socioeconomic
position has a direct impact on the degree to which he
or she can make a “subcultural” choice. McCulloch
et al. undertook research that considered the relative
status of subcultural groups. They suggest that media
and commercial forces were particularly important
for the skaters among their sample. This group’s subculture was being appropriated by the media and
was losing its authenticity in the process, and yet
these youth still bought into the styles and brands
associated with the skating subculture. Although
members of the chav/ned subculture, constituted
by young people from working-class or underclass
backgrounds in the United Kingdom, were unified
by wearing particular brands of clothing and could
thus be perceived by outsiders to be homogeneous
and deviant, in reality, argue McCulloch et al., members of these groupings were more readily defined by
their sense of locality. This, they argue, demonstrates
a situation in which disadvantaged young people
are more likely to engage in localized subcultures
while being limited by broader social, cultural, and
structural factors. Moreover, membership in a group
such as chavs/neds may result in further marginalization. “Those that are not in this position are freer to
choose from a variety of ‘lifestyles’ or cultures, and
this is predominantly through individualised consumption” (McCulloch et al. 2006, 554).
The preceding analysis is interesting because it
demonstrates that the role of consumption can be to
limit choice as much as to provide it, and that the
membership of a youth culture can be constraining
for young people as much as it can be a source of
liberation. The freedoms of consumer-based choices
are more available to some groups of young people
than to others. Many young people are materially
excluded from forms of popular culture. In other
words, consumer choice is not all about the liberation of young people from long-standing structural
constraints through youth cultures but also about
how classed, raced, and gendered young people deal
with the contradictions inherent in a world defined
through consumer lifestyles in particular places and
at particular times in their lives. Thus is the appeal for
young men from particular social groups in stealing
cars to tap into forms of status, power, and excitement that would not otherwise be available to them.

1553

Conclusion
The status of contemporary youth cultures is clearly
contradictory in nature. But one thing is for sure:
consumption has a key role to play in how young
people see themselves, and it provides a means by
which young people from many backgrounds can
negotiate a situation in which their relationship to the
world in which they live appears to be ever changing.
By way of conclusion, it is worth dwelling briefly on
how marketers have sought to deal with these contradictions. The following quotation from employees
of Sputnik, a market research firm that specializes
in examining alternative youth cultures for clues to
tomorrow’s mainstream trends and markets, is particularly telling in this regard.
These new consumers have learnt to edit. To cut
through the clutter and find the content that speaks
to them personally. . . . This is the challenge for
marketers. . . . The rapid flow of ideas, the changing
street scenes, the fusion of cultures can create
confusion. Trying to find the next big idea has
become more complex. Entering from the right
avenues to get to this young consumer has become a
challenge. The solution, once again—learn to edit.
Learn to listen and sift though the excitement and
energy of what this young consumer is saying—get
to the content. There is always a unifying theme, a
consistent point of view that spreads throughout
youth cultures. (Lopiano-Misdom and De Luca
1998, 190)

The unifying theme spreading through youth cultures seems to be consumption itself. The way in
which young people engage with consumption is far
from straightforward. It may be that, in previous
years, sociologists of youth were too readily disposed
to generalize about the implications of youth culture
as expressed through consumption. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that any predisposition to problematize young people is potentially damaging and
that the time has come for a more focused discussion
on the pleasures that young people experience through
consumption. In particular, the suggestion here is that
the significance of youth cultural consumption is best
demonstrated in the consumption habits of young
people who do not readily identify themselves as
members of a subcultural group. A predisposition
to youth consumption as being somehow rebellious
or countercultural is inevitably flawed. The best
way to understand young people’s relationship

1554

Youth Culture

to consumption is to understand the pleasures they
derive from such consumption. Such a contention
implies a significant about-face for the profession of
sociology, which is limited by its own problematizing
mentality. Nick Barnham describes a world in which
young people are disconnected. But he describes
young people’s disconnectedness in a positive fashion. Barnham argues that young people’s active disconnection from the things that society wishes to
attach importance to (e.g., politics, business, and history) has not led to apathy as one might assume but
to creativity and influence. From this point of view,
youth cultural consumption offers young people a
valid focus, a recognition that there are choices out
there for them, however limited, without which they
would indeed suffer from a degree of aimlessness. As
Barnham puts it,
While it is easy to argue that every young generation
seeks to distance itself from the activities and beliefs
of the culture that it is inheriting, today’s disconnect/
zones are different from previous ones because they
tend to ignore, rather than reject, the laws and
morality that they feel are irrelevant, and replace
them with their own. They find places where they
can behave as they please, where they can have
influence and recognition . . . rather than pushing
against a system, they create places beyond that
system’s influence. (2004, 308)

To this end, young people’s consumption habits
serve as a device for the pursuit of diversity.
Consumption allows young people a degree of selfdiscovery and exploration that would not otherwise
be available to them. Young people are not fully
fledged citizens of a consumer culture, but consumption proffers them a space in which they can construct
a citizenship of their own making.
Steven Miles
See also Cultural Studies; Habitus; Internet; Lifestyle;
Popular Music; Postmodernism; Style; Subculture

Further Readings
Barnham, Nick. (Dis)connected: Why Our Kids Are
Turning Their Backs on Everything We Knew. London:
Ebury Press, 2004.
Bennett, Andy. “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Re-thinking
the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical
Taste.” Sociology 33, no. 3 (1999): 599–617.

Bennett, Andy. “Virtual Subculture? Youth, Identity and the
Internet.” In After Subculture: Critical Studies in
Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Andy Bennett
and Keith Kahn-Harris, 163–172. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Chaney, David. “Fragmented Cultures and Subcultures.” In
After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth
Culture, edited by Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris,
36–48. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The
Creation of Mods and Rockers. Oxford: Blackwell,
1980.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New
York: Methuen, 1979.
Huq, Rupa. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in
a Postcolonial World. London: Routledge, 2006.
Laughey, Dan. Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh, UK:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and the New Media.
London: Sage, 2002.
Lopiano-Misdom, Janine, and Joanne De Luca. Street
Trends: How Today’s Alternative Youth Cultures Are
Creating Tomorrow’s Mainstream Markets. New York:
HarperBusiness, 1998.
McCulloch, Ken, Alexis Stewart, and Nick Lovegreen. “‘We
Just Hang Out Together’: Youth Cultures and Social
Class.” Journal of Youth Studies 9, no. 5 (2006) 539–556.
McRobbie, Angela. “Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture
and Changing Modes of Femininity.” Cultural Studies
7 (1993): 406–426.
Melucci, Alberto. “Youth Silence and Voice: Selfhood and
Commitment in the Everyday Experience of
Adolescents.” In Moves in Modernity, edited by Johan
Fornas and Goran Bolin, 51–71. Stockholm, Sweden:
Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1992.
Miles, Steven. Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World.
Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2000.
Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An
Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Nayak, Anoop, and Mary Jane Kehily. Gender, Youth and
Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Osgerby, Bill. Youth in Britain since 1945. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and
Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
Williams, J. Patrick. “Authentic Identities: Straightedge
Subculture, Music and the Internet.” Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography 35, no. 2 (2006): 173–220.
Willis, Paul. Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in
the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Buckingham, UK:
Open University Press, 1990.

Z
ZOOS

AND

WILDLIFE PARKS

Zoos and wildlife parks are institutions that
specialize in the collection and public display of
wild animals, or what are described as wild animals. Many zoos and wildlife parks also display
domestic animals, and some include aquariums
with marine mammals and invertebrates, as well
as freshwater and saltwater fish.
The Vienna Zoo, which opened to the public in
1779, is widely regarded as the oldest existing zoo
in the world. The oldest “scientific” zoo (i.e., a zoo
where animals were both displayed and used for
scientific study) is the London Zoo, which was established in 1828 and opened to the public in 1847. The
word zoo is a late-nineteenth-century popular abbreviation for the London Zoological Gardens.
It was once the case that zoos and wildlife parks
were strikingly different from each other. Zoos tended
to be located in urban sites and often had small, completely enclosed displays with little or no landscaping.
By contrast, wildlife parks—many of which opened
after the 1960s—tended to be located in suburban or
rural locations and had larger, more open, and often
landscaped displays. Although the differences in the
overall size and location frequently remain, many
zoos now have naturalistic and immersive displays,
and these attenuate the contrast in the displays.
As conceived in the zoo industry’s predominant discourse, “naturalistic” exhibits are those that involve
more or less elaborate simulations of the zoo animals’
original habitats. Examples of the simulations include

African savannahs, Amazonian rain forests, and, in
the case of aquariums, acrylic tunnels that give visitors a sense of being underwater. Many such exhibits
may also be said to be “immersive” insofar as they
give visitors a sense of entering the physical space in
which the animals are displayed.
Naturalistic displays are often said to provide
environmental enrichment for the animals; that
is, they provide the environmental stimuli that are
thought to be necessary for the animals’ psychological and physiological well-being. Although this may
be true in certain cases, some zoologists are concerned that the design of contemporary displays is
biased in favor of the visitor experience and, thereby,
visitor expectations concerning animal welfare.
Many zoos also suggest that displays with environmental enrichment allow them to act as “modern
arks” that may enable the reintroduction of endangered species to their original habitats. This perspective has been contested by animal welfare activists,
who question both the premises of the idea and zoos’
past conservation record (see, e.g., Laidlaw 2001).
Zoo educators have also argued that naturalistic
displays provide for a more effective form of conservation education. There is, however, still relatively
little evidence that this is actually the case. To be sure,
a case can be made that the kind of merchandizing
found especially in the more commercial zoos contributes to the very consumer culture that, directly
or indirectly, has led to the loss of habitat and the
endangering of many species.
Despite these issues, it appears that naturalistic and immersive displays have helped zoos to

1555

1556

Zoos and Wildlife Parks

reverse the decline in visitor numbers that began
in the mid- to late 1960s and continued in many
cases until the late 1980s—the London Zoo was
nearly forced to close in 1991. According to the
World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, by
2005 several hundred million people were visiting
zoos and wildlife parks across the world each year;
press releases posted in the early to mid-2000s by
several zoos in the United States suggested that
their organizations were surpassing the record
attendance levels experienced in the early 1960s.
Given these developments, it might be assumed
that there is a thriving field of zoo studies in the
humanities and the social sciences. In fact, although
a number of sociohistorical accounts have been
published over the past decade (see, e.g., Hanson
2002; Mullan and Marvin 1999), few studies have
produced in-depth sociological, anthropological,
semiotic, psychological, or indeed interdisciplinary
analyses of contemporary displays. The dearth of
research is particularly evident where critical, empirical studies of visitor experiences are concerned;
although a number of studies have been produced via
in-house research (see, e.g., Moss, Francis, and Esson
2008), there is, as yet, very little published research
on the subject produced by independent researchers.
There are, however, some signs that zoos and
wildlife parks are starting to attract more sustained
research, some of which is directly or indirectly concerned with questions involving consumption (see,
e.g., Beardsworth and Bryman 2001; Davis 1997;

Lindahl Elliot 2006). Perhaps more researchers will
take an interest in a genre of popular culture that has
defied the many predictions of its imminent demise.
Nils Lindahl Elliot
See also Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Consuming
the Environment; Moral Geography; Moralities;
Spaces and Places; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings
Beardsworth, Alan, and Alan Bryman. “The Wild Animal
in Late Modernity: The Case of the Disneyization of
Zoos.” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 83–104.
Davis, Susan. Spectacular Nature. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.
Hanson, Elizabeth. Animal Attractions. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002.
Laidlaw, Rob. “Re-introduction of Captive-Bred Animals to
the Wild: Is the Modern Ark Afloat?” In Who Cares for
the Planet? The CON in Conservation, edited by Bill
Jordan, 64–80. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press,
2001.
Lindahl Elliot, Nils. “See It-Sense It-Save It: Economies of
Multisensuality in Contemporary Zoos.” The Senses &
Society 1, no. 2 (2006): 203–224.
Moss, Andrew, David Francis, and Maggie Esson. “The
Relationship between Viewing Area Size and Visitor
Behaviour in an Immersive Asian Elephant Exhibit.”
Visitor Studies 11, no. 1 (2008): 26–40.
Mullan, Robert, and Garry Marvin. Zoo Culture. 2nd ed.
Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1999.

Index
Entry titles and their page numbers are in bold.
A. C. Nielsen, 2:963
Aarts, Henk, 3:1238
Abaza, Mona, 3:1357
Abrahamson, David, 3:1151
Abramson, Paul, 2:921
Absolut, 3:1077, 1093
Acculturation, 1:1–3
Achterhuis, Hans, 3:1246
Ackerlof, George A., 1:292
Acquiescence, 3:1417
Actor-network theory, 1:3–5, 166, 359, 543,
2:650, 3:1332
Actual preferences, 3:1144
Ad hoc surveys, 2:963
Adam, Robert, 2:691
Adams, James Truslow, 1:40
Adbusters, 1:300
Adbusters (magazine), 1:406
Addiction, 1:5–7
consumer illnesses, 1:269–270
opium trade, 2:1062
Addiopizzo, 3:1099
Addison, Joseph, 3:1150
Adidas, 3:1297
Adler, Alfred, 2:902, 1002
Adler, Friedrich, 2:836
Adornment, 1:7–9
Adorno, Theodor, 1:9–10
aesthetics, 1:20
alienation, 1:34
Benjamin’s influence, 1:94
capitalism, 1:513, 523
culture industry, 1:65, 76, 211, 221, 403,
2:738, 743, 3:1128, 1213, 1502
Frankfurt School, 2:903–907
ideological control, 1:72, 166, 2:570, 897
influence of, 2:884, 3:1178
influences on, 2:742
Marxism, 2:896
mass consumption, 1:50, 2:837
popular music, 2:897, 904, 3:1108
rationalization, 3:1196
reification, 3:1210
use value, 3:1502
Advertising, 1:10–14. See also Branding
business of, 1:11
channels of desire, 1:152–153

childhood, 1:157–158
colonialism, 1:206–208
commercialization, 1:210–211
criticisms, 1:13–14
discourse analysis, 1:462
expenditures on, 1:10–11
exposure to, 1:10–11
gay- and lesbian-oriented, 3:1093–1094
gender, 2:634, 636–638, 684
impact of, 1:14
information technology, 2:789
Internet, 1:126
loss leaders, 3:1152
media content, 2:940
media power, 1:124
men, 2:637, 952
mimesis, 2:978
personalized, 1:126
personals, 3:1081–1083
program sponsorship, 1:124–125
promotional culture, 3:1157–1159
protests, 1:300
psychographics, 3:1165
radio, 1:124–125
reification, 3:1210
self-reflexivity, 3:1260
semiotics, 3:1267
sexual objectification, 2:636–638
sports, 3:1372–1373
subliminal, 3:1170
surrealism, 3:1412
symbolic value, 3:1420–1421
techniques, 1:11–13
television, 1:11, 12, 125–126, 3:1442
Advertising fee, 2:618
Advocate, The (magazine), 3:1093
Aestheticization of everyday life, 1:15–18
Diderot effect, 1:449–451
lifestyle, 2:861
self-reflexivity, 3:1259
style, 3:1389–1391
Aesthetics, 1:19–21. See also Art and
cultural worlds; Fine arts
cosmopolitanism, 1:370
cultural capital, 1:382
Affect infusion model (AIM), 1:276
Affective labor. See Emotional labor

1557

Affective value, 3:1420–1421
Affluent society, 1:21–23, 2:623–624.
See also Leisure
conspicuous consumption, 1:231–233
harried leisure class, 2:703–705
needs and wants, 2:1032
postmodernism, 3:1129
Africa
alternatives to tradition and the
West, 1:246
colonialism, 1:204–207
consumer culture, 1:244–246
creolization, 1:245–246
diaspora, 1:447
diffusion of luxuries, 1:244–245
economics, 1:244
local tastes, 1:245
racism, 1:246
world-systems analysis, 3:1540
African Americans
acculturation, 1:1
consumption, 1:547–550
ghettos, 2:656
segregation, 1:42
Agamben, Giorgio, 1:94, 3:1391
Age and aging, 1:24–30. See also
Childhood; Generation; Youth culture
dilemma of aging, 1:28–29
early ages, 1:26–27
leisure, 2:843–844
life course, 2:852–853
models of, 1:25–26, 29
old age, 1:27–28
retirement, 3:1219–1221
significance in consumer culture,
1:24–26
Aglietta, Michel, 1:359
Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 1:312, 522–523
Agreement on Technical Barriers to
Trade, 1:293
Agreement on the Application of Sanitary
and Phytosanitary Measures, 1:293
Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property (1994), 3:1474
Agriculture, community-supported, 3:1218
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 2:1039
Ahmed, Shamima, 2:667

1558

Index

Air and rail travel, 1:31–33. See also Tourism
Aitchison, Cara, 2:648
Ajzen, Icek, 1:497, 543, 3:1452
Al Qaeda, 2:1071
Alasuutari, Pertti, 3:1430
Albert, prince of Monaco, 3:1408
Albert, prince of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha, 3:1524
Alberti, Leandro, 2:690
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 1:6, 7
Alderfer, Clayton, 2:713–714
Alesina, Alberto, 1:562
Alexander, Jeffery, 1:172, 3:1157
Alexander the Great, 1:149
Alfonso XI of Castile, 2:946
Alger, Horatio, 1:41
Alienation, 1:33–35, 213, 3:1209. See also
False consciousness/false needs
Alison, Archibald, 1:312
Allport, Gordon, 3:1167–1169
Almond, Gabriel A., 1:168
Alternative consumption, 1:35–37. See also
Consumer (freedom of) choice;
Downshifting; Fair trade; Political and
ethical consumption; Responsible
consumption
Alternative medicine, 1:38–39
Althusser, Louis, 1:39–40, 73, 155, 201,
202, 394–397, 2:809–810
Amabile, Teresa, 3:1246
Amadeus (film), 3:1244
Amateurs. See Hobbyists and amateurs
Amazon.com, 3:1160, 1356
American Association of Humanistic
Psychology, 2:902
American Association of University
Women, 1:85
American breakfast, 3:1341
American Dream, 1:40–42, 45–46, 379
American Girl Place, 3:1356, 1358
American Heritage Time Use Study, 3:1457
American Indians. See Native Americans
American Magazine, 3:1150
American Psychological Association, 2:1041
American Society of Industrial
Designers, 1:439
America Online (AOL), 2:805–806
Americanization, 1:42–44, 227, 250, 408,
432, 558–559, 2:675, 730, 3:1204
Amin, Ash, 3:1361
Amin, Samir, 2:775
Amit, Vered, 1:553
Amnesty International, 2:667
Ampuero, Olga, 3:1077
Amselle, Jean-Loup, 2:674
Amusement parks. See Disney
Analysis of variance (ANOVA), 2:1017
Anderson, Benedict, 2:812, 974, 1027
Anderson, Brett, 2:970
Anderson, Chris, 2:807, 808
Anderson, Elijah, 1:548, 550
Anderson, Philip, 2:1048
Anderson, Rolph E., 1:259
Andrews Liver Salts Company, 1:207
Ang, Ien, 3:1353

Anholt, Simon, 2:1028
Animal welfare. See Consumer protest:
animal welfare
Annales (journal), 1:117–118
Annales School, 2:735
Anomie, 1:45–47, 481
Anorexia, 1:47–49
ANOVA (analysis of variance), 2:1017
Ansoff, Igor, 1:224
Anthropology, 1:49–57. See also
Ethnography
applied anthropology, 1:56
business anthropology, 1:365
consumer culture, 1:53–55
consumption studies, 1:49
critique of economics, 1:49–50
cultural studies vs., 1:50–51
economic anthropology, 1:51–52
ethnographic method, 1:55–56
evolutionary, 3:1427
exchange theories, 1:52
future directions, 1:56–57
globalization, 1:53
Lévi-Strauss, 2:849–850
material culture, 1:52, 2:916
philosophy vs., 1:50–51
structural, 3:1387–1388
Anticapitalism, 1:299–301
Anticonsumerism, 1:246
Antiques. See Car-boot sales and flea
markets; Collecting and collectibles
Antislavery movement, 1:143–144
Anxiety. See Consumer anxiety
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 2:603
Apathy. See Consumer apathy
Appadurai, Arjun, 1:52, 216, 371,
384–385, 2:611, 679, 877, 917, 985,
3:1351–1352
Applbaum, Kalman, 2:890, 892
Apple computer, 2:741
Applied anthropology, 1:56
Applied macroeconomics, 1:487
Appraisal tendency framework, 1:277
Appropriation, 1:58–60
bricolage, 1:119–120
reappropriation, 1:429–430
Apps, 2:808
Aquinas, Thomas, 1:160, 441, 2:945
Arbeitsgemeinschaft der
Verbraucherverbände, 1:326
Arcades, 1:63, 2:586, 607, 727, 3:1128
ARCH (Autoregressive Conditional
Heteroscedasticity) model, 1:488
Archaeology, 2:916
Architecture, 1:60–64
building types, 1:60
civic architecture, 1:64
domestic architecture, 1:64, 472
gender, 2:641
invented tradition, 2:811
retail architecture, 1:62–64
urban food supply, 1:61–62
Ardekani, Siamak A., 1:433
Arens, Egmont, 3:1095
Argentina, 3:1299, 1301

Ariely, Dan, 2:887
Ariès, Philippe, 3:1276
Ariès, Phillipe, 1:155
Aristippus of Cyrene, 2:708
Aristotle, 1:171, 219, 369, 441, 495,
2:604, 621, 683, 695, 977, 996,
3:1265, 1349
Armstrong, Gary, 1:237
Armstrong, John, 1:447
Arnold, David, 2:580
Arnould, Eric J., 2:759, 990, 994,
3:1232, 1491
Aron, Arthur, 3:1234
Aronson, Sidney, 3:1439
Arrian, 2:991
Art and cultural worlds, 1:65–66
aestheticization of everyday life, 1:15–18
aesthetics, 1:19–21
circuits of culture/consumption,
1:164–166
fine arts, 2:604–606
performing/performance arts,
3:1079–1080
popular music, 3:1109
Arundel, Earl of, 2:689, 690
Arvidsson, Adam, 2:891, 3:1160
Asceticism, 1:67–69, 3:1161, 1428–1430
Ascher, Francois, 2:613
Ashcroft, Bill, 1:208
Askegaard, Søren, 1:451
Assembly-line production, 2:910
Associations. See Voluntary associations
Associative system of human mind, 1:71
Astell, Mary, 1:531
Astrology, 2:906–907
Asymmetric information, 1:508
AT&T, 1:163
Ateljevic, Irean, 3:1348
Atkinson, Michael, 1:68
Atkinson, Paul, 1:552
Atlantic & Pacific, 3:1406
Attention, 1:189
Attitude surveys, 1:69–70, 2:866–867
Attitude theory, 1:70–72, 3:1167–1172.
See also Motivation research
Attitude-behavior studies, 1:542–543
Attitudes, 3:1142, 1170–1173, 1452
Attribution theory, 1:259–260
Attwood, Feona, 3:1283
Auclair, Hubertine, 2:602
Audience research, 1:72–74, 3:1079–1080,
1200–1201. See also Reception
theory
Augé, Marc, 1:31, 2:674, 3:1516
Augustine, Saint, 1:159, 219, 369, 441,
3:1265
Auras, 3:1267
Austen, Jane, 2:577
Austen, Ralph, 1:143
Austin, John, 1:401
Austin, Regina, 1:547, 550
Australia, 2:1042
Australia and New Zealand Association for
Leisure Studies (ANZALS), 2:848
Ausubel, Jesse H., 1:433

Index
Authenticity, 1:74–76
celebrity, 1:151
clubbing, 1:180
counterfeits, 1:372–373
crafts, 1:374–375
hyperreality, 2:750–752
souvenirs, 3:1347–1348
tourism, 1:76, 3:1347
Auto Network (Vancouver, British
Columbia), 1:241
Autodriving, 3:1092
Autoethnography, 1:77–78
Automobiles, 1:78–80
car cultures, 1:133–135
car-boot sales and flea markets,
1:138–139
life-cycle, 1:348
Soviet Union, 1:255
Autry, Gene, 2:825
Avatar attachment, 3:1252
Axelsson, Björn, 1:225
Ayer, N. W., 1:124
Aykroyd, Wallace, 2:580
Baaren, Rick van, 1:189
Babb, Sarah, 2:992
Baby boomers, 2:643–644, 799
Bacall, Lauren, 3:1459
Baddeley, Alan, 1:190
Baden-Fuller, Charles, 1:416
Badiou, Alain, 1:46, 2:1025
Baert, Patrick, 1:170
Baglia, Jay, 2:900
Bagozzi, Richard, 2:886
Bagwell, Laurie S., 2:879
Bailey, Maria, 2:639
Baker, Josephine, 2:729
Baker, R. C., 3:1077
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1:83–84, 147–148,
2:888, 889, 895, 3:1216, 1365
Balance, sense of, 3:1269–1270
Balance of payments, 1:492–493
Bales, Kevin, 3:1279–1280
Balfour, Eve, 2:1067
Bali, 2:812
Ball, Stephen, 3:1313
Ballantyne, Joe, 3:1172
Ballard, J. G., 2:620
Bally, Charles, 3:1265
Balsamo, Anne, 1:410
Baluch, Marri, 3:1235
Bamberg, Sebastian, 3:1238
Bananas, 1:145
Banania, 1:207
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 2:640
Bank of America, 3:1094
Bankov, Kristian, 3:1266
Bannister, Rosella, 1:263–264
Baran, Paul, 1:322
Barber, Benjamin, 1:156, 157, 158, 2:677,
3:1162
Barbers, 2:698
Barbie dolls, 1:84–85, 385–386
Barcodes. See Universal Product Code (UPC,
or barcode)

Barford, Anna, 2:775
Bargrave, John, 2:689
Barkas, J. L., 3:1290
Barnard, Malcolm, 1:153
Barnes, John, 3:1330
Barnett, Clive, 2:859
Barnett, J. R., 2:706
Barnham, Nick, 3:1554
Barrett, Michèle, 2:810
Barron, Lee, 1:151
Bartels, Robert, 1:227
Barter and trade, 1:60
Barthes, Roland, 1:86–87
automobiles, 1:134
colonialism, 1:141
cultural studies, 1:398, 400
discourse, 1:460
everyday life, 2:984
fashion, 2:588, 818
influence of, 1:396
influences on, 1:220
margarine, 2:751
material culture, 2:917
myth, 1:80, 3:1388, 1508
performance, 3:1080
photography, 1:395
post-structuralism, 3:1131–1134
semiotics, 2:960, 3:1266
structuralism, 3:1385, 1388
style, 3:1390
visual culture, 3:1508
Bartky, Sandra, 1:90, 369, 2:635
Bartlett, Frederick, 1:190
Bataille, Georges, 1:87–88, 89, 2:659–660,
875, 923, 3:1137, 1413
Bateson, Gregory, 2:684
Bathelt, Harald, 2:651
Batoni, Pompeo, 2:691
Batteux, Charles, 2:605
Baudelaire, Charles, 1:93, 421–422,
2:606–607, 3:1494
Baudrillard, Jean, 1:88–90
authenticity, 1:50
capitalism, 1:430
consumption, 1:166, 526, 558, 2:984
cultural studies, 1:398
elites, 1:516
exchange and use value, 3:1278, 1502
gift exchange, 2:658, 660, 923
hyperreality, 2:750–751, 3:1127–1128
influence of, 1:339, 2:649
influences on, 1:88, 94, 2:838
marketing, 2:890–891
Marxism, 3:1088
material culture, 2:917
needs and wants, 2:1032, 3:1392
promotional culture, 3:1158
retro, 3:1222
Second Life, 3:1252
shopping, 3:1285
signs, 1:153, 222, 323, 332, 2:593
simulacra, 1:372, 3:1289
spectacle, 3:1365
symbolic value, 3:1421
Baudrillart, Henri Joseph Léon, 2:875

1559

Bauer, Arnold, 1:249
Bauhaus, 1:439
Bauman, Zygmunt, 1:29, 78, 196, 199,
233–234, 329, 542, 2:607, 611, 614,
625, 637, 709, 754, 764, 852, 857,
986, 1030, 1035, 3:1126, 1130,
1227, 1254–1256, 1283, 1311, 1313,
1375, 1376
Baumohl, Bernard, 1:490, 492
Baumol, William, 1:534
Bayle, Pierre, 2:884
Bayly, C. A., 2:721
Beach, The (film), 2:739
Beal, Frances, 2:603
Beal, George, 1:453
Beattie, Geoffrey, 3:1172–1173
Beauty, 1:19
Beauty myth, 1:9, 85, 90–91, 452. See also
Body image
Beauvoir, Simone de, 2:602, 3:1132
Beck, Glenn, 3:1368
Beck, Ulrich, 1:38, 234, 308, 370, 371,
466, 541, 2:763–764, 854–856, 986,
3:1226–1229, 1256, 1258, 1313,
1481, 1526
Becker, Gary, 1:257, 333, 499, 2:831, 887,
3:1144
Becker, Howard, 1:65–66, 377, 397, 519,
552, 3:1109, 1154, 1156, 1339, 1496
Beckert, Jens, 1:361
Beckett, Thomas à, 2:944
Beckford, William, 2:691
Beckham, David, 2:969, 3:1373–1374
Beder, Sharon, 1:155, 157
Beechnut Packing Company, 3:1341
Beer, David, 1:404–405
Behavioral beliefs, 3:1452
Behavioral economics, 1:508–509, 3:1143
Behaviorism, 1:188, 3:1167
Bel Geddes, Norman, 1:439
Belize, 1:250
Belk, Russell, 1:194, 195, 238, 320, 451,
550, 2:920–921, 959, 1052, 3:1210,
1230, 1232, 1233, 1421
Bell, Alexander Graham, 2:1046, 3:1439
Bell, Clive, 2:604
Bell, Daniel, 1:2, 322, 2:788, 793,
3:1121–1122, 1129, 1256
Bell, David, 1:410, 411
Belonging, 1:91–93. See also Friendship
childhood, 3:1205
national cultures, 2:1026–1027
neo-tribes, 2:1034
virtual communities, 3:1504–1505
Benedict, Ruth, 1:392
Benetton, 1:300, 3:1420
Bengtson, Vern, 2:852
Benhabib, Seyla, 2:1005
Benjamin, Walter, 1:9, 93–94, 182, 194,
195, 221, 372, 403–404, 2:607, 727,
816, 896, 898, 3:1091, 1128, 1210,
1267, 1289, 1365, 1413, 1494
Bennett, Andy, 3:1110, 1496, 1549,
1551–1552
Bennett, Tony, 3:1312

1560

Index

Bentham, Jeremy, 1:378, 2:708–709,
3:1102
Berardi, Franco (aka Bifo), 1:398
Berg, Maxine, 1:311, 313
Berger, Arthur Asa, 2:914
Berger, David, 3:1109
Berger, John, 3:1508
Berger, Peter, 3:1210
Beriss, David, 1:456
Berkeley, George, 2:691, 883
Berlin Wall, 1:193
Berlyne, D. E., 1:258
Berman, Barry, 1:510
Berman, Marshall, 1:466
Bermingham, Ann, 1:140
Bernays, Edward, 2:620, 3:1341
Berne Convention, 3:1473
Bernheim, B. Douglas, 2:879
Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 2:689
Bernstein, Basil, 1:381
Bernstein, Deborah, 2:1028
Berry, Christopher J., 1:311, 531
Berry, Helen, 1:313
Beveridge, William, 3:1454
Bhabha, Homi, 2:1072, 3:1117
Bharatiya Janata Party, 2:671
Bhaskarananda, Swami, 2:717, 718
Bicycles, 1:95–96
Biel, Anders, 3:1237
Big Brother (television show),
3:1200–1201, 1254
Biggs, Simon, 2:644
Bijker, Wiebe, 3:1344
Billboard Liberation Front, 1:406
Billig, Michael, 2:1027
Billionaires for Bush, 3:1368
Binge and excess, 1:97–99
Bataille, 1:87–88
carnivals, 1:149
luxury, 2:875
potlatch, 2:659–660
Binkley, Sam, 1:176
Biomeasurement, 2:956–957, 965,
1040–1041
Biopolitics, 2:685
Birch, Dawn, 3:1488–1489
Birchall, Johnston, 1:242, 243
Birmingham school. See Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS), Birmingham
Bisexuality, 3:1092–1094
Bismarck, Otto von, 1:204
Bittman, Michael, 1:476, 2:1073
Black, William, 3:1489
Black box, 1:4
Black markets. See Informal economy;
Smuggling and black markets
Blackwell, Mark, 1:313
Blade Runner (film), 1:409
Blaikie, Andrew, 1:29, 2:852
Blair, Tony, 3:1312
Blake, Peter, 3:1222
Blake, William, 3:1118
Blanchot, Maurice, 1:87
Blimpies, 1:193

Block busting, 2:657
Blogging, 2:807, 3:1160
Blonsky, Marshall, 3:1266
Blood, Robert, 2:748
Blood donations. See Organ and blood
donations
Blumer, Howard, 2:586
Blundell, Henry, 2:691
Boas, Franz, 1:392, 552, 3:1136
Bobo, Lawrence, 1:546
Bode, Stefan, 2:956
Boden, Sharon, 2:758
Body, the, 1:99–103. See also Body image;
Embodiment
adornment, 1:7–9
Barbie dolls, 1:85
beauty myth, 1:90–91
consumption as embodied practice,
1:99–101
cosmetics, 1:367–369
cosmetic surgery, 1:366–367
cultivation of appearance/fitness,
1:101–102
cyborgs, 1:409–411
dieting, 1:452
fashion, 2:590
gender, 2:634–635
hair care/hairdressing, 2:697–699
immigrants, 2:972
men, 2:951–952
obesity, 1:102, 2:1049–1050
organ and blood donation, 2:1064–1066
performance art, 3:1080
senses, 3:1269–1270
sex, 3:1277
social meanings, 1:452
spaces and places, 3:1353
spas, 3:1359–1360
well-being, 3:1526–1528
Body dysmorphic disorder, 1:366
Body Heat (film), 2:1046
Body image, 1:452, 2:590, 601, 900,
3:1438
Body Shop, The, 1:103–104, 302
Bodybuilding, 2:900
Boehmer, Elleke, 1:204
Boellstorff, Tom, 3:1253
Bogart, Humphrey, 1:110, 3:1459
Bohemond, 2:944
Böhm, Steffen, 1:135
Boisguilbert, Pierre de, 1:442
Bolig, Rosemary, 3:1082
Bollywood, 1:105–106, 2:675
Boltanski, Luc, 1:331, 358–361, 3:1455
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 1:230, 3:1198
Bond, Christopher, 2:698
Bonsu, Samuel, 1:352, 3:1232
Boostrom, Robert, 3:1253
Booth, Charles, 1:266, 2:772, 962, 3:1364
Bordo, Susan, 1:90–91, 103, 202, 2:634,
3:1429
Borgerson, Janet L., 3:1509
Borghini, Stefania, 3:1358
Bos, Maarten, 1:189
Bosch, Hieronymus, 1:146

Boschken, Herman, 2:663
Boston Tea Party (1773), 3:1436
Bottero, Wendy, 1:101
Bounded rationality, 1:106–108
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1:108–109
aesthetics, 3:1304
body, 2:756
celebrity, 1:151
collective identity, 1:202
consumer anxiety, 1:234
consumer expenditure surveys, 1:268
consumer society, 1:322
consumption, 1:166, 232, 526
crafts, 1:377
critique of consumption, 1:558
cultural capital, 1:381–383, 2:625,
3:1313
cultural intermediaries, 1:389
cultural omnivores, 1:391–392
cultural production, 3:1155
cultural studies, 1:397, 398
cultural turn, 1:400
dining out, 1:457
discourse, 1:462
distinction, 1:522, 2:875
domestic analysis, 3:1353
economic ethos, 3:1338
elites, 1:515, 516–517
ethnography, 1:553
exchange, 2:993
generations, 2:643
gift exchange, 2:658
habitus, 1:100–101, 109, 151, 381, 426,
513, 2:695–697, 917, 3:1316, 1422,
1448–1449
lifestyle, 2:861
modernization theory, 2:985
new economic sociology, 1:501
philanthropy, 3:1084
practice theory, 3:1448–1449
reflexivity, 3:1261
rules and symbols, 3:1373
social class, 1:403–404, 545, 2:847,
3:1114, 1204–1205, 1310,
1313–1314
social distinction, 3:1315–1316, 1338
status, 1:50
structuration theory, 1:543
surveys, 2:957
symbolic capital, 3:1417–1420
symbolic violence, 3:1422–1423
taste, 1:20, 74, 100–101, 422, 518–519,
2:686, 3:1339, 1431, 1433–1434
Bourgeoisie, and public sphere,
3:1178–1179
Bové, Joseph, 1:300
Bowie, David, 2:970
Bowker, Geoffrey C., 2:788
Boycotts, 1:279, 301–302, 532, 2:921–922,
3:1094, 1097, 1099–1100
boyd, danah, 2:807
Boyer, Robert, 1:359
Boyle, Danny, 2:739
Boyne, Roy, 3:1259
Bracken, Christopher, 3:1137

Index
Bradford, Andrew, 3:1150
Bradshaw, Alan, 1:66
Brady, Tom, 3:1409
Brain scanning. See Neuroimaging
Brand, Ralf, 2:797
Brand communities, 2:992–993
Brand equity, 1:112
Brand placement, 3:1153–1154
Brand value, 1:114–115
Brand-building websites, 1:485–486
Branding, 1:109–117. See also
Franchising
Americanization, 1:43
Body Shop, 1:104
brand managers, 1:111
channels of desire, 1:153
contemporary brand management,
1:112–114
destination, 3:1467–1468
expansion of, 1:115–116
fashion, 2:589, 595–596
finance, 1:114–115
functions, 1:110–111
future of, 1:116
globalization, 1:111–112
history of, 1:109–110
Levi’s, 2:824
licensing, 2:850–852
lifestyle typologies, 2:862–865
marketing, 2:891–892
packaging, 3:1075, 1077
promotional culture, 3:1157–1159
psychoanalysis, 3:1165
semiotics, 3:1267
significance, 1:110
spaces of shopping, 3:1357
sports, 3:1372–1374
totemism, 3:1461
trademarks, 3:1473–1476
Brando, Marlon, 2:825
Braudel, Fernand, 1:117–118, 2:720,
887–888, 990, 991, 993–994, 3:1536
Braudy, Leo, 1:149
Braverman, Harry, 1:445, 3:1311
Brazil, 1:250, 3:1299, 1301
Brecht, Bertold, 1:93, 221, 3:1080
Breen, T. H., 1:142
Brembeck, Helene, 2:680
Brenner, Charles, 3:1164
Brenner, Neil, 3:1350, 1354
Breton, André, 2:837, 3:1412
Brewer, David, 3:1446
Brewer, John, 1:140, 310, 552
Brezhnev, Leonid, 1:253, 3:1334,
1336–1337
Brick-and-mortar stores.
See Fixed-location stores
Bricolage, 1:119–120, 429–430, 450,
2:849–850, 3:1394
Briggs, Asa, 2:908
Brim, O. G., 1:318
Brinkley, Alan, 2:692
Brinkley, Christy, 3:1409
Bristol, Earl of, 2:691
Bristol, Terry, 2:964

Britain. See also British Empire;
United Kingdom
art, 2:688–691
broadcast media, 1:125
car-boot sales and flea markets,
1:138–139
consumer revolution in eighteenthcentury, 1:310–313, 346
drinking, 3:1182–1183
food consumption, 2:613–614
grand tour, 2:688–691
seaside resorts, 3:1250–1251
soap operas, 3:1300–1301
supermarkets, 3:1406–1407
tea, 3:1436–1437
British American Tobacco Company,
3:1459
British Association for Fair Trade Shops,
1:145
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC),
1:125
British Empire, 1:121–122, 205–206
Caribbean and the slave trade,
1:140–145
economy, 2:966
grand tour, 2:691
opium trade, 2:1061–1062
Orientalism, 2:1068–1069
Broadbent, Donald E., 1:189
Broadcast media, 1:123–126
birth of, 1:124–125
effects and influence of, 1:72–74
future of, 1:126
key developments, 1:123–124
models, 1:124–125
radio, 3:1193–1195
television, 3:1441–1443
Brommel, Bernard J., 2:574
Brooks, Geraldine, 3:1446
Brotheridge, Céleste M., 1:521
Brougere, Gilles, 3:1469
Brougham, James, 1:144
Brown, Helene, 1:45
Brown, John, 2:875
Brown, John Seely, 2:1047
Brown, Stephen, 2:887
Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 1:146
Bruin, Ralph, 3:1171
Brummell, George “Beau,” 1:421–422
Brundtland Report, 2:938
Brunel, Frédéric F., 3:1169, 1171, 1231
Bruner, Edward, 1:76
Bruni, Carla, 1:169
Bryant, Anita, 3:1094
Bryce, Jo, 1:511–512
Bryman, Alan, 2:672
Brynin, Malcolm, 2:741
Buber, Martin, 3:1133
Buchan, William, 3:1436
Büchner, Peter, 3:1440
Buckingham, David, 3:1469
Buckingham, Duke of, 2:689
Buck-Morss, Susan, 3:1508
Budd, Lucy, 1:31
Budgets. See Household budgets

1561

Buffett, Warren, 3:1085
Buhler, Charlotte, 2:836
Buhler, Karl, 2:836
Bukharin, Nikolai, 2:896
Bulimia, 1:98, 103
Bund, 2:1035
Bündchen, Gisele, 3:1409
Burawoy, Michael, 1:553
Burckhardt, Jacob, 2:720
Bureau of Home Economics, 2:831
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2:831
Bureaucracy, 2:923–924, 3:1196
Burgess, Anthony, 3:1244
Burgess, Ernest W., 1:552, 3:1363, 1498
Burgess, Jacquelin, 2:609
Burke, Kenneth, 2:684
Burke, Raymond, 1:190
Burke, Timothy, 2:629
Burnham, T. C., 3:1234
Bush, George H. W., 2:805
Bush, George W., 1:281, 3:1368
Business anthropology, 1:365
Business life cycle, 1:415–417, 487
Buster, Helene Johns, 2:993
Butler, Judith, 2:603, 755
Button and lights era, 2:982
Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 1:144
Buy Nothing Day (BND), 1:300, 302
Buycotts, 1:300, 302, 2:921–922, 3:1097,
1099–1100
Buyer behavior. See Consumer behavior
Buy-side e-commerce, 1:485
Bylund, Carma L., 2:574
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 1:422
C-A-B model, 1:237
Cabela’s, 3:1356
Cable television, 1:126
Cadbury, 2:681
Cadbury Brothers, 1:230
Cadbury Schweppes, 1:302
Cain, Leonard, 2:852
Caird, Sally, 3:1212
Caldwell, Melissa, 2:675
Callon, Michel, 1:3–5, 166, 359, 360, 543
Calvin, John, 1:160, 3:1285
Calvinism, 3:1162
Calvin Klein, 1:300
Cambridge (CAMSIS) Scale,
3:1381–1382
Camerer, Colin, 1:495
Campbell, Colin, 1:141, 229, 232, 446,
478, 523, 2:590, 633, 708–709,
757–758, 1045, 1047, 3:1089, 1160,
1428, 1456, 1523
Campbell, John, 3:1149
Campbell, Naomi, 3:1408–1409
Camper, Pieter, 1:206
Camus, Albert, 2:984, 3:1133
Canadian Association for Leisure
Studies, 2:846
Candea, Matei, 2:1015
Cannistraro, Philip, 2:816
Canterbury, England, 2:944
Cantillon, Richard, 1:533

1562

Index

Capital. See also Cultural capital;
Symbolic capital
Bourdieu’s types of, 3:1315, 1418
meanings of, 2:792
Capitalism, 1:129–133
Adorno, 1:9
affluent society, 1:21–23
anticapitalism, 1:299–301
consumer culture, 1:2
contemporary, 1:132–133
crisis of, 3:1125
defined, 1:129
digital, 1:16–17
disorganized, 1:465–467
exchange value, 3:1501–1503
forms, 1:130–131
fund-manager, 1:432
gender and, 2:597
globalization, 1:408–409
international, 3:1477
Marcuse’s critique, 2:885
market society, 1:131
organized, 1:465–466
origins of, 1:522
print capitalism, 2:1027
production/exchange system,
1:129–130
Protestant ethic, 3:1161–1162, 1523
rational, 1:500
revolutionary nature of, 1:129
sexuality, 3:1281–1282
Sombart, 3:1345–1346
structuralism, 3:1386
surplus value, 3:1410–1412
thrift, 3:1455
transnational, 3:1477–1480
urbanization, 3:1497
use value, 3:1501–1503
Veblen, 3:1503
way of life, 1:132
work-and-spend cycle, 3:1533
world-systems analysis, 1:465–466,
3:1537
Caplowitz, David, 1:427, 3:1320
Capp, Al, 1:209
Car cultures, 1:133–135
Carbon footprinting, 1:536
Carbon trading, 1:135–138, 2:668
Car-boot sales and flea markets,
1:138–139, 197. See also Secondhand
goods; Thrift
Carchedi, Guillemo, 3:1311
Cardin, Pierre, 2:668
Care and home services. See Domestic
services
Caretakers, 2:760
Carey, John, 3:1398
Caribbean and the slave trade, 1:122,
140–145
ethical consumption, 1:143–145
historiography of, 1:140–141
sugar, 1:142–144
taste and diet, 1:141–142
Carlos, John, 2:1029
Carnegie, Dale, 2:692

Carnivals, 1:84, 97, 146–149, 2:888,
3:1216
Carr, David, 2:807
Carreira da Silva, Filipe, 1:170
Carrier, James G., 1:52
Carrington, Christopher, 3:1340
Carruthers, Bruce, 2:992
Carrying capacity, environmental, 1:536
Carson, Rachel, 1:23, 330, 539
Carter, Jimmy, 1:42, 525
Cartoons, 1:209
Cartwright, Dorwin, 3:1330
Casey, Emma, 2:598
Cassette recorders, 2:980
Castells, Manuel, 1:198–199, 2:789, 855,
1037–1039, 3:1478, 1495, 1498
Castiglione, Baldassare, 2:690
Castree, Noel, 1:217
Castro, Fidel, 3:1116
Category management, 1:511
Catherine de Medici, 3:1458
Catherine of Braganza, princess of
Portugal, 3:1436
Catholic Church, 1:427
Cattellino, Jessica, 2:993
Catterall, Miriam, 2:964
Cattle hormone ban, 1:295
Causey, Andrew, 3:1347
Cavanagh, Allison, 3:1505
Cayton, Horace, 1:548, 550
Celebrity, 1:12, 149–151, 163, 3:1201,
1366, 1373–1374. See also
Promotional culture
Censorship, 1:163
Centaur Film Co., 2:738
Center for a New American Dream, 1:42
Central place theory, 3:1362
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS), Birmingham, 1:119–120,
322, 394–398, 2:581, 711, 898, 984,
3:1107, 1214–1215, 1389–1390,
1394, 1547–1548
Certeau, Michel de, 1:15–16, 3:1216
Césaire, Aimé, 1:208
Cetina, Karin Knorr, 1:434
Chadwick, Simon, 2:962
Chaffey, Dave, 1:485
Chain stores, 2:693, 889
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2:711
Chakraborty, Chandrima, 1:68
Chalfen, Richard, 3:1091
Chamberlin, Edward, 1:563
Chambers, Iain, 3:1107
Chan, Tak Wing, 1:392, 3:1379–1382
Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., 3:1249
Chaney, David, 1:400, 2:861, 3:1549
Change, 3:1156
Channels of desire, 1:152–154
Chaplin, Charlie, 2:911, 3:1118
Chappells, Heather, 2:795
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 3:1133
Charitable Uses Act (England, 1601),
3:1083
Charities, 1:196–197. See also
Philanthropy

Charles, prince of Wales, 3:1525
Charles I, king of England, 2:689
Charles II, king of England, 3:1436
Chartier, Roger, 1:530
Charvak, 2:717
Chase, Stuart, 1:325
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 3:1542
Chatterton, Paul, 3:1182
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2:944, 945
Chavez, Hugo, 1:294
Chee-Beng, Tan, 2:813
Chen, Martha, 2:778
Chen, Runyo, 3:1298
Cheng, Shu-Li, 2:578
Chernin, Kim, 1:90
Chernobyl nuclear reactor, Ukraine, 3:1226
Cherry, Robin, 3:1355
Cheskin, Louis, 2:1003
Chiapello, Eve, 1:360, 3:1455
Chicago, Illinois, 2:656, 928–929, 972
Chicago School of Economics, 2:887
Chicago School of Ethnography, 1:552
Chicago School of Sociology, 1:539, 2:656,
971, 3:1214, 1286, 1363, 1498
Child labor, 2:834
Child Poverty Action Group, 2:1043
Childhood, 1:154–158. See also Youth
culture
collecting and collectibles, 1:194–195
conceptions of, 1:154
consumer culture, 1:156–158
consumer socialization, 1:318–320
marketing, 3:1341
reception theory, 3:1205
rites of passage, 1:154–155
sex trafficking, 3:1280
theories of, 1:155
toys, 3:1468–1470
Children’s Society, 2:1043
Chile, 1:251
Chin, Elizabeth, 1:53, 548, 3:1358
China. See also Consumer policy (China)
advertising, 1:182
Barbie dolls, 1:85
consumer nationalism, 1:279–281
consumption in postsocialist, 1:337–340
generations, 2:646
glocalization, 2:681
inventing tradition, 2:813
markets and marketing, 2:888, 893
porcelain, 3:1111–1112
printing, 3:1147
social life, 1:338
standards of living, 1:338–339
tea, 3:1435–1437
tea drinking, 2:813
trade, 1:122
China Consumer’s Association, 1:283
Chippendale, 2:691
Chisnall, Peter, 2:963
Chocolate, 1:230–231
Choi, Marina Sejung, 1:150
Chomsky, Noam, 1:187, 2:711
Chow-White, Peter, 3:1279
Christakis, Nicholas, 3:1339

Index
Christaller, Walter, 3:1362
Christensen, Olav, 1:557
Christianity, 1:158–160
asceticism, 1:67–68
Biblical teachings, 1:158–159
cosmopolitanism, 1:369
desire, 1:441
diaspora, 1:447
early church, 1:159
luxury, 2:874
medieval period, 1:159–160
modern period, 1:160
Protestant ethic, 3:1161–1162
simulacrum, 3:1288
Christmas, 1:161–162, 320
Chrysostom, John, 1:159
Chung-Hee, Park, 1:247
Cicero, 1:219, 2:874
Cinema, 1:162–164
Bollywood, 1:105–106
Hollywood, 2:738–740
Italian Fascism, 2:817
smoking, 1:110, 3:1459
Circuits of commerce, 2:992
Circuits of culture/consumption,
1:164–166, 217. See also Art and
cultural worlds
Cities. See Global cities; Urban cultures
Citizen consumer, 1:314, 316–317
Citizenship, 1:166–170
ecological, 2:855–856
national cultures, 2:1027–1028
world, 2:669, 856
Citizenship Studies (journal), 1:170
City branding, 1:115
Civic architecture, 1:64
Civil rights, 1:167
Civil Rights Act (1964), 1:546
Civil society, 1:171–172, 2:839.
See also Public sphere
Civilizing processes, 1:173–177
consumption skills and displays,
1:173–174
food consumption, 2:612
future research, 1:176–177
individuality, 1:174–175
informalization, 2:780
methodology, 1:175
Middle Ages, 3:1276
post-Elias research, 1:175–176
recreation, 3:1207
Cixous, Hélène, 2:1070
Claritas Nielsen, 2:863–865, 3:1284
Clark, Alison, 2:635
Clark, Colin, 1:363
Clark, Gregory, 3:1308
Clark, S. M., 2:991
Clark, Terry Nichols, 1:169
Clark, William, 3:1542
Clarke, Alison, 3:1398
Clarke, John, 1:119, 3:1390
Clarke, Nick, 2:651, 1067
Clarkson, J., 2:900
Clarkson, Thomas, 1:144
Class. See Social class

Class habitus, 1:381
Classical economics, 1:315
Clean Development Mechanism, 2:666
Clery, E. J., 1:312
Clifford, James, 1:385, 448, 553
Climate change, 1:135–138, 526, 2:666.
See also Global warming
Clinton, Bill, 2:805
Clore, Gerald, 1:276
Clothing, 1:8. See also Fashion; Sumptuary
laws; Textiles
brand licensing, 2:850–852
sneakers/trainers, 3:1296–1299
T-shirts, 3:1483–1484
Clothing consumption, 1:177–179
Africa, 1:245–246
conspicuous consumption, 1:232
fashion, 2:583–590
jeans, 2:824–825
Middle Ages, 2:944–945
T-shirts, 3:1483–1484
Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 3:1261, 1262
Club of Rome, 1:539
Clubbing, 1:179–181
Cluster analysis, 2:1019–1020
Coase, Ronald, 1:136, 508
Cobb, Jonathan, 3:1312
Cobbett, William, 3:1436
Coca-Cola, 1:43, 55, 56, 59, 181–183, 302,
2:674, 680, 1041
Cochoy, Frank, 1:360
Cocoa, 1:230–231
Codere, Helen, 3:1136–1137
Codex Alimentarius, 1:294
Coding of data, 1:354
Coen, Robert, 1:10
Coffee, 1:183–185
Coffee shops, 1:62–63, 185–187, 530–531,
2:724, 3:1178. See also Dining out;
Pubs and wine bars
Coffey, Amanda, 1:552
Cognitive psychology, 1:187–188,
2:1003–1004, 3:1143
Cognitive structures, 1:187–191
Cohen, Daniel, 3:1308, 1309
Cohen, Eric, 2:915
Cohen, Lizabeth, 1:349, 547, 549, 3:1205
Cohen, Phil, 3:1214
Cohen, Stanley, 2:1071, 3:1548
Cointegration analysis, 1:488
Colander, David C., 1:487
Colbert, Stephen, 3:1368
Colbert Report, The (television show),
3:1368
Cold war, 1:192–194, 2:670, 1046, 1071,
3:1116
Coleman, James C., 2:1057
Coleman, James S., 1:454
Coleman, Stephen, 3:1201
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1:12, 2:1061
Collecting and collectibles, 1:194–198.
See also Hobbyists and amateurs;
Object biographies
Britain, 2:688–691
car-boot sales and flea markets, 1:138–139

1563

history of, 1:194–197
hoarding, 1:271
inalienable wealth/possessions,
2:759–761
motivations, 1:195–196
sneakers, 3:1298
souvenirs, 3:1347–1348
Collective consumption, 1:198–200,
248–249, 255–256. See also Public
goods; State provisioning
Collective identity, 1:200–204,
3:1460–1461. See also Citizenship
Collective memory, 2:947, 949, 950
Collective narratives, 2:575
Collège de Sociologie, 3:1413
College of Leisure Sciences, 2:846
Collier, John, 3:1092
Collier, Paul, 2:774
Collier, Robert J., 3:1150
Collins, Jane L., 1:354, 2:1069
Collins, Randall, 3:1340
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi, 1:250
Colonial mimic-hybrid, 3:1117
Colonialism, 1:204–208. See also
Postcolonial theory
advertising, 1:206–208
British Empire, 1:121–122
capitalism, 1:465
Caribbean and the slave trade, 1:140–145
cultural representations, 1:206
defined, 1:204
historical perspective, 2:723–724
Latin America, 1:249–250
metropoles, 2:965–967
opium trade, 2:1061
Orientalism, 2:1068–1069
Colonization of the lifeworld, 3:1180
Columbia Pictures, 1:163
Columbia Records, 3:1214
Columbia University, 1:220, 2:837
Columbus, Christopher, 3:1369–1370
Comics, 1:208–210
Commercial distribution, 2:726–728
Commercialization, 1:210–212
higher education, 2:714–716
sports stadia, 3:1373
Committed time, 1:471
Commodification, 1:212–214. See also
Decommodification
blood and organs, 2:1066
cultural fragmentation, 1:386–387
everyday life, 1:17–18
food consumption, 2:611
higher education, 2:714–716
information, 2:789
male body, 2:952
modernization, 2:985
well-being, 3:1526–1527
Commodities, 1:214–218
flaneur/euse, 2:607
globalization, 2:680
surrealism, 3:1412–1413
toys, 3:1469–1470
Commodity chains, 2:651–652. See also
Circuits of culture/consumption

1564

Index

Commodity feminism, 2:640
Commodity fetishism, 1:215, 217–218,
2:649, 896, 897, 985, 3:1088, 1209,
1288–1289, 1334
Commodity networks, 2:652
Common Agricultural Policy, 2:1050
Commoner, Barry, 1:539
Communication studies, 1:219
consumption theories, 1:222
content analysis, 1:353–355
diffusion, 1:455
discourse analysis, 1:461–463
encoding/decoding model,
1:164–165, 221
historical and theoretical origins,
1:219–220
recent developments, 1:222
sociocultural analyses, 1:221–223
theoretical elaboration, 1:220–221
Communicative rationality, 3:1178
Communism, and leisure, 2:847
Community. See Belonging; Neo-tribes
Community Trade Mark (CTM), 3:1474
Community-supported agriculture, 3:1218
Companies as consumers, 1:223–227
Comparing consumer cultures, 1:227–229.
See also Consumption patterns
and trends
Complementary medicine. See Alternative
medicine
Compulsive buying, 1:270–271
Compulsive consumption. See Consumer
illnesses and maladies
Computer-mediated communication (CMC),
3:1504–1505
Computers. See Home computer
Comte, Auguste, 1:499, 3:1286
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 2:1062
Conca, Ken, 1:540
Confectionery, 1:229–231. See also Sugar
Confidence interval, 2:1059
Conford, Philip, 2:1067
Conjoint analysis, 2:1018
Connell, Raewyn W., 2:629, 899
Conrad, Frank, 1:124
Conrad, Joseph, 1:206
Conseur, Amanda, 2:901
Consistency theories of attitude, 1:70
Consoli, Davide, 1:108
Conspicuous consumption, 1:2, 231–233,
311, 319, 348–349, 516, 526, 2:875,
878–879, 920, 944, 3:1114, 1129,
1503. See also Affluent society; Luxury
and luxuries
Constable, John, 2:689
Constantine, emperor of Rome, 1:159
Constructionism, 1:75
Consumentenbond, 1:326
Consumentengids (magazine), 1:326
Consumer anxiety, 1:233–235
Consumer apathy, 1:235–237
Consumer associations, 3:1511
Consumer behavior, 1:237–238. See also
Preference formation
anxiety, 1:233–235

apathy, 1:235–237
bounded rationality, 1:107–108
branding, 1:112
cognitive structures, 1:189–191
consumer demand, 1:256–258
consumer expenditure surveys,
1:266–268
customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction,
1:259–260
desire, 1:440–444
econometrics, 1:489
economic psychology, 1:494–498
European Union, 1:561–562
friendship, 2:620–622
goal-directed consumption, 2:682–683
historical studies, 2:720
information technology, 2:791
motivation research, 2:1002–1004
psychology, 3:1167–1174
socialization, 1:318–320
sociotechnical systems, 3:1344–1345
theory of planned behavior,
3:1452–1453
typologies of shoppers, 3:1487–1491
voting behavior vs., 3:1511–1512
Consumer (freedom of) choice, 1:239–241.
See also Consumer sovereignty;
Decision making; Preference formation;
Rational choice theories
alternative consumption, 1:35–37
anxiety, 1:233–235
apathy, 1:235–237
bounded rationality, 1:106–108
consumer society, 1:322
goal-directed consumption, 2:682–683
identity, 2:765–767
New Right, 2:1042
rights and law, 1:315–316
theory types, 1:239–240
thrift, 3:1454
utilities, 2:797
Consumer Citizenship Network,
1:264–265
Consumer co-operatives, 1:241–243
Consumer culture. See also Comparing
consumer cultures
corrupting influences, 3:1342
food consumption, 2:610–611
friendship, 2:622
gender, 2:629–630
generations, 2:644–646
information society, 2:786–787
migration, 2:970–976
modern, 2:984–985
nostalgia, 2:1045–1046
origins, 1:2, 522–523
postmodern, 2:984
postmodernism, 3:1130
psychoanalysis, 3:1165–1166
psychology, 3:1167–1174
queer sexualities, 3:1188–1190
resistance, 3:1213–1216
self-reflexivity, 3:1259–1260
semiotics, 3:1266–1267
sexuality, 3:1281

social class, 2:724–726
sustainability, 3:1172–1173
unconscious, 3:1169–1172
world exhibitions, 3:1535–1536
Consumer culture in Africa, 1:244–246
Consumer culture in East Asia, 1:247–249
China’s consumer policy, 1:281–283
Japan’s consumer policy, 1:288–290
Consumer culture in Latin America,
1:249–251
Consumer culture in the USSR, 1:251–256.
See also Consumption in postsocialist
societies: Eastern Europe
access to goods, 1:252
economics, 1:254
ideology, 1:255–256
informal economy, 1:252–253
infrastructure, 1:252–255
socialism, 3:1333–1337
Consumer culture theory, 2:990,
994–995
Consumer demand, 1:256–258
Consumer dissatisfaction, 1:259–260.
See also Measuring satisfaction
Consumer durables, 1:261–263
Consumer education, 1:263–266. See also
Consumer socialization
Consumer expenditure surveys, 1:266–268.
See also Consumption patterns
and trends
Consumer hype cycle, 1:414–415
Consumer illnesses and maladies,
1:268–272
addiction, 1:7
anxiety, 1:233–235
apathy, 1:235–237
binge and excess, 1:97–99
Consumer interviews, 1:272–274,
2:959
focus groups, 2:608–610
photographic aids, 3:1092
types, 3:1414–1415
Consumer moods, 1:259–260, 274–278.
See also Emotions
Consumer nationalism, 1:279–281, 2:729.
See also National cultures
Consumer policy (China), 1:248–249,
281–283, 337–340
Consumer policy (European Union),
1:284–288
Consumer policy (Japan), 1:247–248,
288–290
Consumer policy (United States),
1:290–292
Consumer policy (World Trade
Organization), 1:293–296
Consumer Price Index (CPI), 2:831, 933
Consumer protest: animal welfare, 1:68,
296–298, 369, 3:1555
Consumer protest: anticapitalism,
1:299–301
Consumer protest: environment,
1:301–302, 484. See also Consuming
the environment
Consumer protest: water, 1:303–305

Index
Consumer regulation, 1:305–309. See also
Consumer rights and the law
contextualizing, 1:309
future research, 1:309
neoliberalism, 1:307
self-governance, 1:307–308
studies of, 1:306
uncertainties, 1:308–309
Consumer Reports (magazine), 1:326
Consumer research, 1:56
Consumer revolution in eighteenth-century
Britain, 1:310–313, 346
Consumer rights and the law, 1:314–318.
See also Consumer testing and
protection agencies
consumer education, 1:263–266
consumer policy, 1:291, 316, 327
environmentalism, 1:329
regulation, 1:305–309
sovereign consumer, 1:315–316
Consumer satisfaction. See Consumer
dissatisfaction; Measuring
satisfaction
Consumer socialization, 1:263–266,
318–320, 3:1469
Consumer society, 1:321–323
Consumer sovereignty, 1:314–316,
323–325, 3:1429, 1511. See also
Consumer (freedom of) choice
Consumer surplus, 1:508
Consumer testing and protection agencies,
1:325–328. See also Consumer rights
and the law
Consumer types, 1:314–317, 344. See also
Typologies of shoppers
Consumerism, 1:2, 2:589
Consumers’ Association (United Kingdom),
1:326
Consumers International, 1:264, 326
Consumers Purchases Study, 2:831
Consumer’s Research, 1:326
Consumers Union, 1:326, 327
Consuming the environment, 1:328–332,
2:935–939. See also Consumer
protest: environment; Environmental
social sciences and sustainable
consumption
Consumption
desire, 1:442–443
experience of, 1:557
identity, 2:755–756, 765–767
inequalities, 2:771–772
life histories, 1:555–556
standard of living measures, 2:933
Consumption, Markets & Culture
(journal), 1:238
Consumption and time use, 1:332–336
downshifting, 1:479–480
harried leisure class, 2:703–705
time-use diaries, 3:1456–1458
work-and-spend cycle, 3:1532–1534
Consumption in postsocialist China,
1:337–340
Consumption in postsocialist societies:
Eastern Europe, 1:341–345

Consumption in the United States: colonial
times to the Cold War, 1:345–350,
2:692–693
Consumption junction, 2:802–803
Consumption patterns and trends,
1:350–352
clothing consumption, 1:177–179
comparing consumer cultures,
1:227–229
consumer expenditure surveys,
1:266–268
cool-hunting, 1:364–366
societal megatrends, 1:412–414
Content analysis, 1:353–355. See also
Discourse analysis
Continuous surveys, 2:963
Convenience, 1:355–358
Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW), 2:604
Convention theory, 1:358–361
Convergence, 1:227
Conversation analysis, 1:362–364, 462
Converse, 3:1297
Converse, Philip, 2:1059
Cook, Daniel Thomas, 1:355, 2:574, 3:1341
Cook, Ian, 1:217, 2:834
Cook, James, 3:1427
Cook, Philip, 2:702
Cook, Thomas, 2:688, 1069
Cooke, Philip, 2:870–871
Cool hunters, 1:364–366, 2:592, 3:1401
Cooley, Charles Horton, 1:220, 3:1257
Coombs unfolding model, 1:69
Coop Italia, 1:243
Co-operative Group, The (United Kingdom),
1:241–242
Co-operative Wholesale Society
(United Kingdom), 1:242
Co-operatives. See Consumer
co-operatives
Coors, 3:1094
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 2:696
Copyright, 1:373, 2:941, 3:1473. See also
Intellectual property
Corax, 1:219
Corfman, Kim, 1:277
Corning Glass Works, 2:803–804
Correlation analysis, 2:1017
Correspondence analysis, 2:1009–1012,
1021
Cortés, Hernán, 1:230
Coskuner-Balli, Gokcen, 2:575, 3:1218
Cosmetic surgery, 1:8, 366–367
Cosmetics, 1:246, 367–369
Cosmopolitan citizenship, 2:856. See also
World citizenship
Cosmopolitan memory, 2:950
Cosmopolitanism, 1:369–371,
2:1007–1008, 3:1479
Coté, Mark, 3:1160
Cote d’Ivoire, 1:244
Cotte, Robert de, 1:531
Cottrell, Stephen, 1:66
Couldry, Nick, 3:1201

1565

Counterculture, 2:868–869. See also
Subculture
Counterfeited goods, 1:371–373,
3:1475–1476
Coupland, Douglas, 2:644
Coupland, Jennifer Chang, 2:574
Coupon rationing, 3:1199
Courbertin, Pierre de, 3:1371
Covert, Tawnya, 2:1009
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 2:721, 795, 796,
802, 3:1332
Cowles Commission for Research in
Economics, 1:487
Cozens, Alexander, 2:689
Cozens, J. R., 2:689
Craft consumer, 1:374–376, 446, 471,
3:1160
Craft production, 1:376–378
Craib, Ian, 2:755
Craig, David, 2:836
Craigslist, 3:1160
Craik, Jennifer, 1:411, 2:583
Crane, Diana, 1:177, 2:587, 594
Crang, Phil, 1:217
Craniometry, 1:206
Crawford, Cindy, 3:1408–1409
Crawford, Garry, 2:581, 582, 3:1374
Crawford, Michael, 2:990–991
Credit, 1:378–380. See also Debt
Credit cards, 1:408
Creighton, Millie, 3:1356
Creolization
Africa, 1:245–246
defined, 2:673
Latin America, 1:250
meanings of consumption, 1:44, 55,
2:893
Crewe, Louise, 1:195, 196, 217, 2:653,
834, 3:1223
Critical consumption. See Alternative
consumption
Critical discourse analysis, 1:460. See also
Discourse analysis
Critical philosophy, 2:827–828
Critical theory, 2:742, 896–897, 903.
See also Mass culture (Frankfurt
School)
Critique (journal), 1:87
Crompton, Rosemary, 3:1310, 1376
Cronbach’s alpha, 2:867, 930
Cronin, Ann, 3:1260–1261
Cross, Gary S., 1:349, 3:1469
Crossick, Geoffrey, 1:436
Crossley, Archibald, 2:962–963
Crossley, Nick, 1:101, 102, 3:1324, 1325
Crowley, David, 3:1335
Crusades, 2:944
Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly, 2:1051, 1054,
3:1115
Cultural capital, 1:109, 381–384, 2:974,
3:1313, 1315–1316
Cultural creatives, 1:375
Cultural delocalization, 1:432
Cultural economies, 2:790
Cultural flows, 1:384–386

1566

Index

Cultural fragmentation, 1:386–388, 2:861,
912–913, 3:1483–1484
Cultural hegemony, 1:395
Cultural imperialism, 2:739, 892
Cultural intermediaries, 1:109, 388–390
Cultural omnivores, 1:333, 391–392
Cultural pluralism, 2:673
Cultural studies, 1:393–399
as global project, 1:398–399
British tradition, 1:393–398
communication studies, 1:221
consumer education, 1:265
Gramsci, 2:711
overview, 1:393
preference formation, 3:1144
reception theory, 3:1202–1203
resistance, 3:1216–1217
Cultural turn, 1:400–402
Cultural values approach, 1:501, 542–543,
2:649–650
Culture
Gramsci, 2:710–711
historical analysis, 2:721
mixing of, 2:673
multiculturalism, 2:1005–1008
national cultures, 2:1025–1029
nature vs., 2:1031
network society, 2:1038–1039
postmodernism, 3:1130
production of, 3:1154–1157
socialism, 3:1335–1336
Culture industries, 1:402–405. See also
Production of culture
Adorno, 1:9–10
authenticity, 1:75
commercialization, 1:211
cultural worlds vs., 1:65
culture-ideology of consumerism, 1:408
Frankfurt School critique of, 2:903–907
Hollywood, 2:738–739
Horkheimer, 2:743
rationalization, 3:1196
social class, 3:1311
Culture jamming, 1:406–407, 3:1216–1217
Culture-ideology of consumerism,
1:407–409
Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, 2:759
Curran, James, 3:1438
Currie, Dawn, 3:1438
Curtin, Philip, 2:974
Curtis, Cyrus, 3:1150
Customer relationship management,
2:887, 962
Customer satisfaction. See Consumer
dissatisfaction; Measuring satisfaction
Cyborgs, 1:409–411, 2:981
Cycles of production and consumption,
1:411–419
business/industry life cycles, 1:415–416
circuits of culture/consumption,
1:164–166
consumer hype cycle, 1:414–415
Kondratieff cycles, 1:417–418
societal megatrends, 1:412–414
traditional economic cycle, 1:412

Da Gama, Vasco, 3:1369–1370
Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 1:162,
3:1090
Dahlberg, Lincoln, 3:1181
Dahlstrand, Ulf, 3:1237
Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The
(television show), 3:1368
D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 1:530
Dalton, Russell J., 1:167
Damon’s, 3:1356
Dandyism, 1:421–422. See also
Flaneur/euse
Danesi, Marcel, 3:1266
Dannefer, Dale, 1:195
Dant, Tim, 1:176, 2:919, 1063
Danto, Arthur, 1:20
Darmody, Aron, 1:352
Darwin, Charles, 2:696
Dasgupta, Sathi, 1:550
Databases and consumers, 1:423–425,
2:872, 907–908, 962
Davenport, Christian, 2:921
Davidson, Edith, 3:1166
Davies, Kate, 1:299, 2:633
Davis, Angela, 2:603
Davis, Darren, 2:921
Davis, Deborah, 1:283
Davis, Douglas, 1:563
Davis, Fred, 2:588
Davis, Jacob W., 2:824
Davis, Mike, 2:777
Davis, Teresa, 1:450–451
Davolio, Federica, 1:36
Day, Benjamin, 1:123–124
De Certeau, Michel, 1:425–426, 429–430,
2:582, 972, 3:1350, 1446, 1465
De Forest, Lee, 1:163
De Gaulle, Charles, 1:169
De Graaf, Paul M., 3:1380
De Grazia, Victoria, 1:559, 2:598
De la Tour Landry, Geoffroy, 2:945
De Luca, Joanne, 2:964
De Man, Paul, 3:1133
De Quincey, Thomas, 2:1061
De Singly, F., 3:1440
De Vries, Jan, 1:312, 2:720, 723
Dean, James, 2:825
Debord, Guy, 1:147–148, 3:1127, 1289,
1365–1366, 1368
Debray, Régis, 3:1119
Debt, 1:378–380, 427–428.
See also Credit
Decision making. See also Consumer
(freedom of) choice; Preference
formation; Rational choice theories
bounded rationality, 1:106–108
cognitive structures, 1:191
consumer sovereignty, 1:324–325
economic psychology, 1:495
families, 2:574
goal-directed consumption, 2:682–683
Decommodification, 1:428–431. See also
Commodification
Deconstruction, 3:1135
Defoe, Daniel, 1:378, 531, 3:1150, 1402

Deindustrialization, 3:1122–1123
Delemont, Sara, 1:552
Deleuze, Gilles, 1:424, 443, 3:1127,
1131, 1289
Delocalization, 1:431–432
DeLyser, Didia, 1:76
Demand, elasticity of, 2:894
Demand curve, 1:487
Demand management. See Keynesian
demand management
Demand price, 1:508
Demand system models, 1:489
DeMartini, Joseph, 2:644
Dematerialization, 1:433–435
DeMause, Lloyd, 1:155–156
DeMello, Marge, 1:101
Demeter label, 1:483
Demirdjian, Z. S., 2:886
Democracy
civil society, 1:171–172
memory, 2:950
public sphere, 3:1177–1178
spectacle, 3:1366
voluntary associations, 3:1510–1511
voting behaviors, 3:1511–1514
Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1:244
Deng Xiaoping, 1:279, 282
Denim, 2:824–825
Dennis, Kingsley, 1:135
Denton, Nancy, 2:656
Denzin, Norman, 2:808, 3:1204
Department stores, 1:63, 435–437,
556–557, 2:727–728, 1046,
3:1249–1250, 1517–1518
DePaulo, Bella, 3:1290–1291
Dependence techniques, of multivariate
analysis, 2:1015
Dependency theory, 1:465, 3:1116
Depression. See Great Depression (U.S.)
Derecho, Abigail, 3:1447
Derrida, Jacques, 1:88, 396, 400, 460,
2:603, 629, 658, 660, 923, 3:1117,
1126, 1127, 1131, 1135
Desaparecidos, 2:947
Descartes, René, 1:297, 518, 3:1124
Design, 1:437–439. See also Style
collecting and collectibles, 1:196
fashion forecasters, 2:591–592
material culture, 2:918
planned obsolescence, 3:1095
retro, 3:1222–1223
shopping, 3:1284
Tupperware, 3:1485
Desire, 1:440–444
anomie, 1:46
channels of desire, 1:152–154
consumption, 1:442–443
creation of, 1:2
Diderot effect, 1:451
imaginative hedonism, 2:757–758
imitation of, 1:12
mimetic, 2:978, 3:1165, 1267
modern perspectives, 1:443–444
research on, 1:440, 444
Western history, 1:440–442

Index
Desire-fulfillment theory, 3:1185
De-skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling,
1:445–446, 3:1218
DeSoucey, Michaela, 1:561
Dessner, Claude, 3:1408
Destination branding, 3:1467–1468
Détournement, 1:406, 3:1365
DeVault, Marjorie L., 2:575, 631
Development. See Social and economic
development
Devereux, Stephen, 2:580
Devine, Fiona, 3:1310
Dewey, John, 2:604
Dholakia, Nikhilesh, 1:18, 238, 351, 352,
464, 2:981
Di Tella, Rafael, 1:562
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-IV), 1:6, 47, 269
Dialectical thinking, 3:1086–1087
Diamond, Jared, 3:1306
Diamond, Peter A., 2:878
Diana, princess of Wales, 1:150, 3:1525
Diaspora, 1:447–449. See also Migration
Bollywood, 1:105–106
defined, 2:971
identity, 2:673
trade diasporas, 2:974
Diaspora (journal), 1:447
Diaz-Bone, Rainer, 1:361
DiCaprio, Leonardo, 2:739
Dichter, Ernest, 2:620, 1003, 3:1075,
1165, 1421
Dicken, Peter, 1:431, 3:1479
Dickie, George, 1:20, 2:604
Diderot, Denis, 1:449–450, 529, 530
Diderot effect, 1:449–451
Diener, Ed, 2:1026
Dieting, 1:451–453. See also Anorexia
Dietrich, Marlene, 1:110, 3:1459
Differentiation, 1:227
Diffusion of innovations, 1:453–454
Diffusion studies and trickle down,
1:453–455. See also Innovation
studies; Mimesis
conspicuous consumption, 1:232
cultural mixing, 2:673
elite consumption, 1:516
fashion, 2:585, 591
opinion leaders, 2:1057–1058
Digital capitalism, 1:16–17
Digital divide, 2:646, 805
Digital media, and spectacle, 3:1367–1368
Dijksterhuis, Ap, 1:189, 3:1238
DiMaggio, Paul, 1:383, 391, 3:1330, 1339
Dining out, 1:456–457, 2:613–614, 842.
See also Coffee shops; Pubs and
wine bars
Dior, Christian, 2:851
Disabled Peoples’ International, 2:667
Discount stores, 1:458–459, 3:1517–1518
Discourse, 1:459–461, 3:1134–1135
Discourse analysis, 1:355, 460, 461–463.
See also Content analysis
Discourse formations, 1:462
Discrete choice analysis, 1:487

Discriminant analysis, 2:1018
Discursive psychology, 1:460
Disney, 1:463–464, 2:672, 750
Disney, Walt, 1:463
Disorganized capitalism, 1:465–467
Disposable income, 2:934
Distributed generation, 3:1212
Division of labor, 1:467–469
domestic, 1:471–473
Fordism, 2:833
DLV, 3:1298
Dobson, Andrew, 2:855
Do-it-yourself (DIY), 1:469–471, 3:1160,
1217. See also Insourcing; Self-service
economy
Doll, Richard, 3:1459
Domestic division of labor, 1:471–473,
2:631, 641–642, 1073
Domestic services, 1:473–475, 2:631,
1072–1074
Domestic technologies, 1:476–477, 2:822,
842. See also Home computer
Doob, Leonard, 3:1168
Doorne, Stephen, 3:1348
Dophijn, Rick, 1:411
Douglas, Mary, 1:38, 50, 54, 202, 429,
444, 477–478, 541, 553, 2:865, 917,
1033, 1071, 3:1182, 1226, 1268,
1284–1285, 1379, 1427, 1461
Dove, 2:638
Dower, John, 1:288, 2:822
Downey, John, 3:1181
Downing, Phil, 3:1172
Downshifting, 1:36, 42, 236, 469,
479–480, 2:921
Doxa, 3:1419, 1422
Drais, Karl von, 1:95
Drake, St. Clair, 1:548, 550
Dreyfus, Hubert, 3:1448, 1449
Dreyfuss, Henry, 1:438
Driver, Tom, 3:1231
Drucker, Philip, 3:1136–1137
Drugs, 1:180–181
Du, Shanshan, 3:1235
Du Bois, W. E. B., 1:399, 2:1006
Du Gay, Paul, 1:165, 389
Du Maurier, Daphne, 3:1295
Duchamp, Marcel, 1:20, 119, 3:1113
Ducpétiaux, Édouard, 1:266, 528
Dudrah, Rajinder, 1:105
Duesenberry, James, 1:515, 2:762, 828
Duke, James Buchanan, 3:1459
Duke, Lisa, 3:1439
Dumazedier, Joffre, 2:847
Dumpster diving, 3:1224
Duncan, Greg J., 2:872
Duncan, O. D., 3:1380
DuPont, 3:1485
Durable goods, 1:261–263
Durkheim, Émile, 1:480–481
anomie, 1:45–47
citizenship, 1:167
culture, 1:402
division of labor, 1:129, 468
economic sociology, 1:498, 499

1567

individualization, 2:763
influence of, 1:234, 2:684, 922, 949
modernity, 2:988
morality, 2:1001
motivation, 2:1003
need, 2:1031–1032
sacred and profane, 3:1316
social norms, 3:1432
solidarity, 2:1034
totemism, 3:1460–1461
Dutton, Kenneth, 2:900
Dwyer, Rachel, 1:479
Eagleton, Terry, 3:1304
Earl, Harley, 1:134, 439
Early adopters, 1:454
Early majority, 1:454
Easey, Mike, 2:589
East Asia, consumer culture in, 1:247–249
East Bloc, 2:1046
East India Company, 1:121, 122,
205, 3:1436
Easterlin, Richard, 2:762
Eastlake, Charles Locke, 1:439, 2:688–689
Eastman, George, 3:1090
Easy Rider (film), 3:1243–1244
Eating disorders. See Anorexia; Bulimia;
Obesity
Eavis, Michael, 2:661–662
eBay, 1:198, 3:1160, 1505
E-business, 1:486
Echtner, Charlotte, 3:1464
Eco, Umberto, 1:398, 2:750, 3:1266
Eco-labeling, 1:483–484, 2:937
Ecological citizenship, 2:855–856
Ecological fallacy, 3:1362
Ecological footprinting. See Environmental
footprinting
Ecological modernization, 1:484
E-commerce, 1:484–486
auction sites, 1:198
emergence, 2:806, 889
home as shopping site, 3:1355–1356
new economy, 2:1038
Econometrics, 1:486–489
consumer behavior research, 1:489
defining, 1:486–487
Engel’s law, 1:528
history of, 1:487–488
multiple correspondence analysis,
2:1009–1013
multivariate analysis, 2:1015–1022
objectives of, 1:488
regression analysis, 1:488
Econometric Society, 1:487
Economic anthropology, 1:51–52
Economic development. See Social and
economic development
Economic indicators, 1:489–494
balance of payments, 1:492–493
calculation issues, 1:491–492
development of, 1:489–490
gross domestic product, 1:490–494
gross national income, 1:490–491
other indicators, 1:493–494

1568

Index

Economic man. See Homo economicus
Economic psychology, 1:494–498
consumer research vs., 1:496
current research, 1:495–496
experimental economics, 1:563–564
future of, 1:497–498
government-provided services, 1:497
history of, 1:495
saving and investment, 1:496–497
Economic sociology, 1:498–502
defining, 1:498
future of, 1:501–502
history of, 1:499–500
new economic sociology, 1:498, 501
Economics, 1:502–509. See also Capitalism;
Political economy
affluent society, 1:21–23
anthropological critique of, 1:49–50
behavioral, 1:508–509, 3:1143
classical, 1:315, 502–506
consumer demand, 1:256–258
convention theory, 1:358
delocalization, 1:431–432
entrepreneurship, 1:534
evolutionary, 1:107, 3:1503
experimental, 1:563–564
Galbraith, 2:623–624
government policies, 1:507–508
Great Depression (U.S.), 2:692–693
historical analysis, 2:720–721
income, 2:761–763
institutional, 3:1503
intertemporal choice, 1:506
Japan, 2:822–823
Keynes, 2:828–829
Keynesian demand management,
2:829–830
Kyrk, 2:831–832
Linder, 2:869–870
marginalism, 1:504–505
market failure, 1:508
Marshall, 2:894–895
Marx, 2:895–896
morality, 2:996–1000
neoclassical, 1:239–240, 315–316
neuro-, 1:496, 2:1040
new economy, 2:1037–1038
non-consumer research, 3:1143–1144
Patten, 3:1078
preferences, 1:503–504
price and price mechanisms,
3:1145–1146
production/consumption cycles, 1:412
scarcity, 3:1246–1248
standard of living measures, 2:932–934
substitution, 1:505
trade standards, 3:1471–1473
uncertainty and risk, 1:506–507
utility, 1:503–504
Economy-wide material flow accounting,
2:938–939
Ecuador, 1:250
Edelman, Murray, 3:1366
Eden, Frederick, 3:1436
Edensor, Tim, 2:1027

Edgell, Stephen, 1:231, 232
Edison, Thomas, 3:1108, 1153
Edison Manufacturing Company, 1:163
Edmunds, June, 2:643, 645, 646
Education
business in relation to, 1:157
consumer education, 1:263–266
higher education, 2:714–716
Education for sustainable development,
1:265–266
Edward III, king of England, 2:874
Edward VI, king of England, 2:690
Edward VIII, king of England, 2:908
Edwards, Tim, 2:952
Effective demand failure, 2:580
Egoism, psychological, 3:1255
Ego-nets, 3:1326
Egypt, 1:205
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 1:521
Ehrlich, Paul, 1:539, 2:580
Eigenvalue, 2:1019
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 1:221, 3:1148–1149
Eisner, Will, 1:209
Ekerdt, David, 1:30
Ekström, Karin, 1:319
Elaboration likelihood model, 1:237
Elasticity of demand, 2:894
Elder, Glen, 2:852
Electric & Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI
Group), 3:1109
Electric guitars, 3:1108–1109
Electric Prunes, 3:1243
Electroencephalogram (EEG), 2:957
Electronic point of sale (EPOS), 1:510–511
Electronic video gaming, 1:209, 511–512,
2:741
Elgin, Duane, 1:435, 479, 2:921
Elias, Norbert, 1:100–101, 135, 173–177,
513, 514, 522, 2:612, 620, 695, 723,
780, 971, 3:1276–1278, 1315
Elites, 1:514–517
Elizabeth Arden, 1:368
Elizabeth I, queen of England, 1:442,
3:1436, 1458
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, 2:657
Ellis, Brett Easton, 3:1409
Elmer, Greg, 1:423–424
Elster, Jon, 3:1144, 1481
E-mail, 2:806
Embodied competence, 1:99–100
Embodiment, 1:518–519. See also Body, the
geographies of consumption, 2:653–654
identity, 2:756
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1:433
Emissions trading. See Carbon trading
Emotional labor, 1:519–521, 3:1119–1120
Emotions, 1:522–524. See also
Consumer moods
emancipation of, 2:781–782
romantic love, 3:1234–1235
Smith, 3:1293–1294
Empedocles, 1:441
Empire. See Colonialism
Employee compensation, 1:491
Enabled consumer, 1:314, 317

Enclaves, 2:656
Encoding/decoding model of
communication, 1:164–165, 221, 396,
2:711, 3:1215
Encore weddings, 3:1525
Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert),
1:530
End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography
and the Trafficking of Children for
Sexual Purposes (ECPAT), 3:1280
Energy consumption, 1:525–527
carbon trading, 1:135–138
measuring, 2:935–937
renewable resources, 3:1211–1213
Engel, Ernst, 1:266, 350–351, 527–529
Engels, Friedrich, 1:129, 211, 2:569, 602,
895, 896, 3:1124, 1385–1386
Engel’s law, 1:351, 527–529, 2:744
Engle, Robert, 1:488
Enlightenment, 1:529–532
aesthetics, 1:19
characteristics, 1:529
economy, 2:1000
influence of, 2:742
luxury debate, 1:531–532, 2:874–875
simulacrum, 3:1288
sites of consumption, 1:530–531
wine, 3:1530
Ente Nazionale della Moda (ENM),
2:817–818
Entrepreneurs, 1:533–535, 2:974
Entwistle, Joanne, 1:100
Environment. See also Sustainability
automobiles, 1:80
carbon trading, 1:135–138
concept of, 1:330
consumer protest, 1:301–305
consuming the environment,
1:328–332
ecological citizenship, 2:855–856
transnational capitalism, 3:1480
Environmental footprinting, 1:535–537,
2:938
Environmental social sciences and
sustainable consumption, 1:538–544.
See also Sustainability
consuming the environment,
1:328–332
cultural values, 1:542–543
dematerialization, 1:434
discipline of, 1:539–540
eco-labeling, 1:483–484
ecological modernization, 1:540–541
everyday life, 1:543
measures, 2:935–939
neo-Marxism, 1:540
perspectives, 1:540–543
renewable resources, 3:1211–1213
research agenda, 1:543–544
responsible consumption, 3:1217–1219
reuse/recycling, 3:1223–1225
risk, 1:541–542
waste, 3:1518–1522
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 2:876–877
EPCOT Center, 1:464

Index
Ephemeralization, 1:433
EPOS. See Electronic point of sale (EPOS)
Epp, Amber M., 2:575
E-procurement, 1:485
Epstein, Edward, 1:354
Equal Exchange Trading Limited, 1:145
Equality Trust, 2:775
Equitrade, 2:568–569
Equitrends, 2:862
Equity theory, 1:260
ERG (existence, relatedness, growth) theory,
2:713–714
Erickson, Bonnie, 3:1316
Ericson, Richard, 3:1261
Erikson, Erik, 2:754, 852
Ernst, Max, 3:1413
Escobar, Arturio, 2:776
Esping-Andersen, Gøring, 3:1375–1376
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 3:1375
Estée Lauder, 1:368
Etherealization, 1:434
Ethical Consumer, 1:302
Ethical recognition, 2:1005
Ethics. See also Moralities; Political and
ethical consumption
advertising, 1:13–14
colonialism, 1:141–142
neuromarketing, 2:1041
organ and blood collection, 2:1065
slavery, 1:143–144
Ethiopia, 2:579
Ethnic entrepreneurship, 1:534–535
Ethnicity/race, 1:545–551. See also
Segregation
advertising, 1:206–208
Africa, 1:246
alienation, 1:546
attitudes toward, 3:1170–1171
class influences, 1:545–546
consumption case study, 1:547–550
cultural influences, 1:545
definitions, 1:545
feminism, 2:603
ghettos, 2:656–657
hair, 2:698
immigrants, 2:971
real estate, 2:656–657
reception theory, 3:1203–1204
recognition, 2:1005
reflexive turn, 1:552–553
spaces of shopping, 3:1358
suburbia, 3:1397–1399
teenage magazines, 3:1439
theories, 1:546–547
Ethnogenesis, 3:1542
Ethnography, 1:552–554. See also
Anthropology
autoethnography, 1:77–78
characteristics, 1:552
consumption and consumer culture,
1:553–554
contemporary, 1:553
“follow the thing,” 3:1348
history of, 1:552
market research, 2:964–965

material culture, 2:916–917
method, 1:55–56, 2:958, 960
multisited, 2:1014–1015
Ethnology/folklore studies, 1:554–557
Ethnomethodology, 1:362, 462
Etzioni, Amitai, 1:480, 3:1144
Euclid, 2:683
Europe. See also European Union
Middle Ages, 2:942–943
Orientalism, 2:1068–1070
European Commission, 1:284, 286, 287, 317
European Community of Consumer
Co-operatives, 1:243
European Court of Justice (ECJ),
1:285–286
European Landfill Directive (1999), 3:1519
European Recovery Program, 2:729
European Union, 1:558–562
accession to, 1:342
consumer policy, 1:284–288
European market, 1:293
future of consumer culture, 1:561–562
prerogatives, 1:559–561
U.S. consumer culture, 1:558–559
well-being, 3:1526
European Union Emissions Trading
Scheme, 1:137
Evangelista, Linda, 3:1408–1409
Evans, Joel, 1:510
Evans-Prichard, E. E., 1:477, 552, 2:958
Everett, Peter, 2:955
Everyday life
aestheticization of, 1:15–18
Diderot effect, 1:449–451
environmental practices, 1:543
family meal, 2:576–578
information technology, 2:789–790
money, 2:991–992
national cultures, 2:1027
opinion leaders, 2:1057
ordinary consumption, 2:1062–1064
resistance, 3:1216
routines and habits, 3:1237–1239
souvenirs, 3:1348
spaces and places, 3:1350
Evolutionary anthropology, 3:1427
Evolutionary economics, 1:107, 3:1503
Ewald, François, 3:1454
Ewen, Elisabeth, 1:152
Ewen, Stuart, 1:152, 1:349
Excess. See Binge and excess
Exchange. See Gifts and reciprocity
Exchange value. See Value: exchange and
use value
Excludability, of goods, 3:1175
Exhibitions. See World exhibitions
Existentialism, 3:1133
Expectancy disconfirmation, 1:259
Expenditure surveys, 2:841
Expenditures, standard of living measures
using, 2:933–934
Experian, 2:962
Experience sampling, 2:841
Experiential consumption, 2:682
Experimental designs, 2:955–956

1569

Experimental economics, 1:563–564
Experimental Economics (journal), 1:495
Externalist theories, 3:1186
Externalities, 1:17, 241, 508, 565–566
Eymard-Duvernay, François, 1:358, 359
F. W. Woolworth, 2:803
Faber, Ronald, 1:270
Facebook, 1:404–405, 455, 3:1160, 1367
Face-to-face interviews, 3:1414–1415
Factor analysis, 2:1019
Factories, 1:60
Fail, Noël du, 2:994
Fair trade, 1:35–37, 144, 145, 185,
2:567–569, 857, 997
Fairchild, Charles, 1:151
Fairtrade Foundation, 1:145, 2:567
Fairtrade Labelling Organizations
International (FLO), 2:567–569
Falk, Pasi, 1:478, 523, 2:577, 756, 3:1277,
1278
Falkner, J. Meade, 3:1295
Fallers, L. A., 2:585
False consciousness/false needs, 2:569–570,
1030, 3:1144. See also Alienation
Faludi, Susan, 1:91
Families, 2:571–576. See also Households
alternative views, 2:571, 574
consumer research, 2:574–575
contemporary status of, 2:571, 575–576
expenditure surveys, 1:266–268
future research, 2:575–576
inalienable possessions, 2:759–761
inheritance, 2:798–800
life course, 2:852–853
mealtime, 2:576–578
New Right, 2:1043
photography, 3:1091
public policy, 2:572–573
research methodologies, 2:575
Family meal, 2:576–578, 611–613
Famine, 2:579–581, 1049
Fanfiction, 3:1446
Fanon, Frantz, 1:208, 2:1068, 3:1116
Fans, 2:581–583, 3:1445–1447
Farmer, David, 1:225
Farnsworth, Philo T., 1:125
Farrell, Michael, 1:66
Farren, Anne, 1:410
Farrow, Mia, 2:668
Fascism. See Italian fascism and fashion
Fashion, 2:583–590. See also Clothing
consumption; Style; Taste
channels of desire, 1:153
conspicuous consumption, 1:232
consumers, 2:589–590
consumption, 2:588–589
cyborgs, 1:410
gender, 2:633–635
hyper-, 2:595
Italian Fascism, 2:816–819
language of, 2:587–588
meanings of, 2:583
modernity, 2:583–586
motivations, 2:584–585, 589, 592–593

1570

Index

Muslims, 2:815
Simmel, 3:1287
textiles, 3:1444
urban society, 2:586–587
women, 2:586, 630
Fashion forecasters, 2:591–592. See also
Cool hunters
Fashion industry, 2:592–596
beauty myth, 1:90–91
contemporary, 2:594–596
history of, 2:593–594
supermodels, 3:1408–1410
textiles, 3:1444
Fashion intermediaries, 2:803–804
Fast food, 1:245, 2:926. See also
McDonaldization
Fast moving consumer goods (FMCG),
3:1075–1076
Favereau, Olivier, 1:358
Fazal, Anwar, 1:326
Fazio, Russell, 1:71
Featherstone, Mike, 1:15, 30, 101, 432,
2:644, 788, 861, 3:1130, 1221, 1252,
1259, 1390, 1428
Febvre, Lucien, 3:1148
Federal Trade Commission, 3:1152
Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA), 3:1371
Federer, Roger, 2:668
Feelings-as-information approach to mood
effects, 1:276–277
Feher, Ferenc, 1:341
Feldman, Daniel C., 1:521
Femininity, 2:596–599
cosmetics, 1:368–369
women’s magazines, 2:599–601
Feminism
anorexia theories, 1:48
Barbie dolls, 1:85
beauty myth, 1:90–91
cosmetics, 1:369
first wave, 2:602
hair, 2:698
moral economy, 2:996–997
Orientalism, 2:1069–1070
origins of, 2:602
postfeminism, 2:604, 637
second wave, 1:91, 2:600, 602–603
suburbia, 3:1398
third wave, 1:91, 2:603–604
Feminism and women’s magazines,
2:599–601, 3:1438–1439, 1531–1532
Feminist movement, 2:601–604
Fénélon, François de, 1:531
Fenton, Natalie, 3:1181
Ferguson, Adam, 1:171, 2:873–874
Ferguson, Niall, 1:122, 427
Fern, Edward, 2:964
Ferrara, Alessandro, 1:75
Fetishism, commodity. See Commodity
fetishism
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3:1086
Field, James A., 2:831
Fields, 2:696, 3:1313
Figart, Deborah M., 1:520

File sharing, 2:806–807, 890, 942
Film. See Bollywood; Cinema; Hollywood
Fine, Ben, 1:240, 3:1424–1425
Fine arts, 2:604–606. See also Aesthetics;
Art and cultural worlds; Performing
arts/performance arts; Visual culture
Britain, 2:688–691
craft vs., 1:374, 377
cultural capital, 1:383
grand tour, 2:688–691
surrealism, 3:1412–1413
theories, 2:977
Finet, John, 2:690
Finkelstein, Joanne, 1:457
Fiore, Ann Marie, 3:1490, 1491
Fırat, Fuat, 1:238, 351
Firestone, Shulamith, 2:603
First wave feminism, 2:602
Fischer, Eileen, 3:1356, 1357
Fischer-Lichte, Erike, 3:1080
Fischler, Claude, 1:296–297, 2:577, 613
Fishbein, Martin, 1:71, 497, 542, 3:1452
Fisher, Mark, 2:701
Fisher, R. A., 2:1017
Fiske, John, 1:222, 395, 426, 2:582,
3:1215–1216
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1:41
Fixed-location stores, 2:889
Flags, 2:1027
Flaneur/euse, 1:385, 2:606–608, 3:1494.
See also Dandyism
Flea markets. See Car-boot sales and flea
markets
Flexible specialization, 2:912–913
Flichy, Patrice, 3:1440
Flickr, 3:1160
Flood, Gavin, 1:67
Florini, Anne, 2:669
Flusser, Vilém, 1:433
Focus groups, 2:608–610, 959–960,
963–964
Focused interviews, 2:836
Fogel, Robert, 2:1049
Folgers, 1:184
Folk devils, 2:1071
Folkes, Valerie S., 1:259
Folklore studies. See Ethnology/folklore
studies
“Follow the thing” method, 3:1348, 1425
Following Affective States Test (FAST), 1:278
Font, Jean de la, 1:530
Food availability, 2:1049
Food consumption, 2:610–614. See also
Fast food
challenges, 2:611
civilizing processes, 1:173–174, 2:612
consumer culture, 2:610–611
cost, 2:614
cyborgs, 1:411
dieting, 1:451–453
dining out, 1:456–457, 2:613–614
Engel’s law, 1:527–529
family meal, 2:576–578, 611–613
food avoidance, 2:612
history of, 2:732–735

how to eat, 2:612–613
Middle Ages, 2:943
organic food, 2:1066
pilgrimages, 2:943–944
public anxieties, 2:611–614
Slow Food movement, 3:1291–1293
spices, 3:1369–1370
sugar, 3:1401–1403
tea, 3:1435–1437
what to eat, 2:613–614
wine, 3:1529–1531
Food scares, 2:615–617
Football Association, 3:1371
Ford, Henry, 1:134, 348, 2:833, 910–911,
923, 3:1459
Ford, Katie, 3:1409
Ford, Tom, 2:594, 876
Ford Motor Company, 1:134
Fordism, 1:534, 2:729, 769, 833, 910–911,
3:1117–1118
Foreign direct investment (FDI), 1:493
Forest Stewardship Council, 1:483, 2:857
Forgas, Joseph P., 1:276
Forty, Adrian, 2:598, 630
Fossil fuels, 3:1211–1212
Foster, Harold R., 1:209
Foster, Robert J., 1:56, 183
Foucault, Michel
Bataille, 1:87, 88
body, 1:90, 367, 452, 3:1120
cultural studies, 1:398, 400
discipline, 2:971
discourse, 1:396, 460, 462,
3:1134–1135
gender, 2:629
governmentality, 1:112, 271, 2:685–687,
986–987, 3:1226
heterotopias, 1:464
history, 1:155, 156
influence of, 2:1068
language, 1:423
postmodernism, 3:1126–1127, 1131
post-structuralism, 3:1134–1135
power, 1:329
practice theory, 3:1450
self, 1:306, 2:755, 763, 810
sex and sexuality, 3:1276, 1282
structuralism, 3:1385
subjectivity, 3:1392
surveillance, 3:1201, 1367
Fourier, Charles, 2:602
Fournier, Susan, 1:259, 260, 449
Fowler, Aubrey R., III, 3:1290–1291
Fowler, James, 3:1339
Fox, William, 1:144
Fox Film Corporation, 1:163
Fragmentation. See Cultural fragmentation
Frame analysis, 2:684
France
domestic services, 2:1074
famine, 2:579
feminism, 2:602
food consumption, 2:613
leisure, 2:847
organ and blood donation, 2:1065

Index
Paris, 2:586–587, 606
retirement, 3:1221
seaside resorts, 3:1251
wine, 3:1530
Franchising, 2:617–619
Francis of Assisi, 1:159–160, 2:945
Franck, Egon, 1:149
Frank, Andre Gunder, 1:215–216, 3:1124,
1477, 1539
Frank, Robert, 2:702
Frank, Robert H., 1:480, 2:876, 878,
3:1114
Frank, Thomas, 1:153, 157, 158, 349,
3:1216
Frankfurt, Harry, 3:1144
Frankfurt School. See Mass culture
(Frankfurt School)
Franklin, Adrian, 3:1348
Franklin, Benjamin, 1:41, 3:1150
Fraser, Nancy, 3:1181
Frazer, James George, 3:1427, 1460
Frazier, E. Franklin, 1:1
Frederick the Great, king of Prussia,
3:1459
Fredman, Sandra, 2:853
Fredrickson, Barbara, 1:276
Fredriksson, Cecilia, 1:556
Free Labour Company, 1:144
Free trade, 2:724
Freecycle, 3:1218, 1224
Freedom of choice. See Consumer (freedom
of) choice
Freeganism, 3:1224
Freidberg, Suzanne, 2:834
French Communist Party, 2:837–838
Freud, Sigmund, 2:619–620, 3:1168
childhood, 1:155
desire, 1:443
happiness, 2:709
identity, 2:755
influence of, 1:87, 523, 2:696, 880, 904,
1002, 1044, 3:1133
narcissism, 2:1023–1024
needs, 2:712, 902
obsession, 2:1055–1056
pleasure, 2:884
psychoanalysis, 3:1163–1165
sexuality, 3:1281
surrealism, 3:1412
taboo, 3:1427
totemism, 3:1460–1461
Frey, Bruno, 1:495
Friedan, Betty, 2:598, 600, 602–603,
636–637, 3:1398, 1486
Friedman, Jonathan, 1:50, 54
Friedman, Milton, 1:257, 2:762, 1042
Friedman, Monroe, 1:301
Friedman, Thomas, 2:677
Friends Reunited, 2:1045
Friendship, 2:620–622, 3:1380–1381
Frisch, Ragnar, 1:487
Frith, Simon, 1:66, 3:1108, 1109
Fromer, Julie, 1:121–122, 3:1437
Fromm, Erich, 1:23, 33, 34, 523, 2:1024
Frost, Randy, 1:271

Fry, Joseph S., 1:230
Fuchs, Christian, 3:1160
Fujii, Satushi, 3:1238
Fukuyama, Francis, 2:988, 3:1122
Fulla doll, 1:386
Fuller, Buckminster, 1:433, 439
Fuller, C. J., 2:717
Fuller, Matthew, 3:1262
Fuller, Simon, 3:1373
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), 2:956, 965, 1040–1041
Fund-manager capitalism, 1:432
Funerals, 3:1232
Fur trade, 3:1541
Furedi, Frank, 2:702
Furlough, Ellen, 2:598
Furniture Re-Use Network, 3:1218
Fust, Johann, 3:1148
Gabriel, Yannis, 3:1376, 1377
Gadde, Lars-Erik, 1:225
Gainer, Brenda, 3:1356, 1357
Gainsborough, Thomas, 2:689
Gakugeibu, Asahi Shinbun, 2:822
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1:2, 21–23, 50,
2:623–624, 704, 878, 1030, 1032,
1047, 3:1129, 1237, 1306
Gale, Harlow, 3:1167
Galliano, John, 2:594
Galloway, Anne, 1:18
Gallup, George, 2:837, 962–963, 1058
Galton, Francis, 1:487, 2:1016, 1017
Galvanic skin response (GSR), 2:957
Galvin, Kathleen M., 2:574
Gambling, 2:624–626, 3:1208
Games, 3:1206
Gamson, Joshua, 1:150
Gandhi, Mohandas, 1:205, 280–281,
2:721
Gandoulou, Justin-Daniel, 2:675
Gane, Nicholas, 1:404–405
Gans, Herbert, 1:74, 3:1205, 1397
Ganzeboom, Harry B., 3:1380
Garage sales, 1:138
Garbarek, Jan, 3:1243
Garcia, Angela Cora, 2:808
García Álvarez, Ercilia, 1:392
García Canclini, Néstor, 1:250, 399
Gardening, 2:626–628
Gardial, Sarah Fisher, 1:259
Gardiner, Michael E., 1:18
Gardner, Burleigh, 1:111
Garfinkel, Harold, 1:362
Garhammer, Manfred, 1:561
Garland, Alex, 2:739
Gärling, Tommy, 3:1238
Garon, Sheldon, 1:228, 229, 248,
2:821, 822
Garreau, Joel, 3:1396
Gartman, David, 1:134
Gartner, 1:414–415
Gates, Bill, 3:1085
Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 2:1017
Gauss-Markov theorem, 2:1016
Gay, Peter, 3:1276

1571

Gay men, 2:969–970, 3:1092–1094,
1187–1191
Gaye, Marvin, 2:637
Gaze, the, 3:1509. See also Tourist gaze
Gazette de Leyde (journal), 1:530
Geertz, Clifford, 1:400, 553, 2:958, 984
Gelber, Steven, 1:470, 2:737
Gell, Alfred, 1:54, 2:886, 887
Gellner, Ernest, 2:1025, 1026, 1028
Gender, 2:628–636. See also Femininity;
Gender advertising; Gender and the
media; Masculinity; Men; Women
adornment, 1:8–9
body, 2:634–635
capitalism and, 2:597
consumer culture, 2:629–630
department stores, 1:437, 2:728
division of labor, 1:468
do-it-yourself, 1:469–470
domestic division of labor, 1:473
domestic technologies, 1:476–477
emotional labor, 1:520
fashion, 2:633–635
home, 2:630–631, 639
home computers, 2:741
household budgets, 2:744–745
income, 3:1338
leisure, 2:844
material culture, 2:635
personal ads, 3:1082
places, 3:1353
retirement, 3:1220
shopping, 2:632–633
significance of, 2:628
slash, 3:1446
social construction of, 2:628–629
spaces of shopping, 3:1357–1358
video gaming, 1:511–512
Gender advertising, 2:634, 636–638, 684
Gender and the media, 1:90–91, 512,
2:632, 638–640
Gendering of public and private space,
1:64, 2:630–631, 639, 640–642,
3:1179
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), 1:293, 559, 3:1471–1473
General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATs), 2:715
General intellect, 2:793
General Magazine, 3:1150
General Motors, 1:134, 348, 3:1095,
1118, 1534
Generalized affect-as-information model,
1:276–277
Generalized symmetry, 1:4–5
Generation, 2:643–646, 950. See also Age
and aging
Generation X, 2:643–645
Generation Y, 2:645
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs),
1:294–295
Genízaros, 3:1542
Gentrification, 3:1494, 1497
Genuine progress indicator (GPI), 1:494
Geodemographic profiling, 3:1364

1572

Index

Geographic information systems (GIS),
3:1361
Geography, 2:647–655. See also Spaces and
places; Spatial analysis
consumption practices, 2:653–654
cultural politics, 2:649–650
inequalities, 2:772
material culture, 2:650–651, 654
moral geography, 2:997–998
political economy, 2:648–649
production/consumption relationships,
2:651–652
relational, 2:651
rematerialization, 2:650–651
scholarship, 2:647–648, 654–655
sites and spaces of consumption,
2:652–653
smuggling, 3:1295
George VI, king of England, 2:909
Ger, Guliz, 1:451
Gere, Richard, 3:1408
Gereffi, Gary, 3:1478
Gerhardt, Sue, 3:1256
Germ theory of disease, 2:615
German Democratic Republic, 1:193
Germany, 2:1043, 3:1219
Gershuny, Jonathan, 1:228, 472, 2:1073,
1074, 3:1122, 1263–1264, 1274
Gerth, Karl, 1:248, 2:1028
Gertner, Jon, 1:493–494
Ghana, 1:244
Ghettos, 2:656–657
GI Bill of Rights (Servicemen’s Readjustment
Act of 1944), 1:41
Gibson, James J., 1:188
Gibson, William, 3:1516
Giddens, Anthony, 1:7, 38, 233–234, 370,
452, 541, 543, 2:625, 629, 754,
763–764, 854, 858, 986, 1063,
3:1126, 1130, 1161, 1226, 1228,
1257, 1258, 1313, 1318, 1448–1449,
1482, 1526
Giffen goods, 1:505, 2:894
Gifts, 1:52
Gifts and reciprocity, 2:657–660. See also
Philanthropy
Christmas, 1:161–162
complexity of exchange, 2:657–658
market exchange vs., 2:886
Mauss, 2:922–923, 3:1088
object biographies, 2:1053
potlatch, 3:1136–1137
reuse, 3:1224
rituals, 3:1231–1232
theories, 1:52, 2:658–660
Gilbert, David, 2:586
Gilborn, Craig, 1:181
Gill, Alison, 3:1297
Gill, Rosalind, 2:637
Gilleard, Chris, 1:28, 29
Gillespie, Gareth, 1:59
Gillespie, Marie, 2:680
Gilmore, James, 1:75, 412–413, 419
Gilroy, Paul, 1:397–398, 448, 2:756
Gini coefficients, 2:762, 772

Girard, René, 1:12, 443, 2:978,
3:1165, 1267
Girl power, 2:640
Giuliani, Rudy, 1:281
Giulianotti, Richard, 2:582, 3:1371
Givenchy, 3:1242
Gladstone, William, 1:122
Gladwell, Malcolm, 2:1058
Glam rock, 2:969
Glastonbury/Woodstock, 2:661–663
Glennie, Paul, 1:144, 2:987
Glick, Paul, 2:852, 3:1290
Glickman, Lawrence B., 1:349
Global cities, 2:663–665
Global commodity chain (GCC) analysis,
1:215–216
Global commons, 2:666
Global Ecolabelling Network, 1:483
Global Footprint Network, 1:536
Global institutions, 2:665–669
Global North
commodities, 1:216
consumption-oriented social movements,
3:1324
development, 3:1307
fair trade, 2:568
glocalization, 2:681
visual culture, 2:789
waste, 3:1521–1522
world-systems analysis, 1:215
Global public goods, 3:1175–1176
Global South
commodities, 1:216
consumption-oriented social movements,
3:1324
development, 3:1307
fair trade, 2:568
glocalization, 2:681
information technology, 2:791
tourism, 2:1069
waste, 3:1521–1522
world-systems analysis, 1:215
Global value chain (GVC) analysis,
1:216
Global village, 2:670
Global warming, 1:508. See also
Climate change
Globalization, 2:670–678
Americanization, 1:42–44
anthropology, 1:53
anticapitalism, 1:299–300
Bollywood, 1:106
branding, 1:111–112
capitalism, 1:408–409
characteristics, 2:670–671, 3:1478
citizenship, 1:170
consumerism, 1:2–3
cultural flows, 1:384–386
cultural fragmentation, 1:386–388
cultural hegemony/appropriation,
2:675–676
cultural mixing, 2:673
culture industries, 1:405
culture-ideology of consumerism,
1:407–409

delocalization, 1:431
dialectics of, 2:676–677
food consumption, 2:611
global cities, 2:663–665
glocalization, 2:678–682
heterogenization, 2:673–674
historical perspective, 2:723–724
homogenization, 2:673–674
industrial society, 2:770
interconnectedness, 2:671
Latin American consumer cultures,
1:250–251
life(style) politics, 2:855, 858
locality, 2:870–871
marketing, 2:892–893
McDonaldization, 2:926–927
men’s magazines, 2:952
multiculturalism, 2:1007–1008
new economy, 2:1037
reactions to, 2:676
regulation, 1:307
standardization, 2:671–673
tourism, 3:1467
transnational consumption,
2:674–675
Glocalization, 1:385, 2:674, 678–682,
3:1342, 1539. See also Locality
Gluckler, Johannes, 2:651
Goal-directed consumption, 1:106–108,
2:682–683
Godard, Jean-Luc, 3:1118
Godazgar, Hossein, 1:68
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1:19
Goffman, Erving, 1:201, 515, 520, 2:586,
634, 684–685, 754, 766, 807, 3:1257,
1340, 1350
Goldgerger, Arthur, 1:487
Goldman, Robert, 2:640
Goldstein, Jeffrey, 3:1469
Goldthorpe, John H., 1:392, 3:1311–1312,
1379–1382
Golliwog, 1:206–207
Gollwitzer, Peter, 3:1210
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, 1:363
Google, 1:169
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 3:1335
Gordon, David, 2:774
Gorman-Murray, Andrew, 2:654
Gottdiener, Mark, 1:32, 3:1356
Gottlieb, Roger, 1:160
Gouges, Olympe de, 2:602
Gould, Chester, 1:209
Goulding, Christina, 2:959
Gouldner, Alvin, 3:1312
Government of India Act (1858), 1:205
Governmentality, 2:685–687
brand management, 1:112
consumer illnesses, 1:271
consumer regulation, 1:308–309
materiality of consumption, 2:650
modernity, 2:986–987
Government-provided services, psychology
of, 1:497
Graburn, Nelson, 3:1347, 1464
Graham, Stephen, 2:795

Index
Gramsci, Antonio, 1:73, 394–398, 402,
2:570, 687–688, 709–711, 809–810,
896, 898, 3:1391, 1392
Grand narratives, 2:880
Grand tour, 2:688–691, 3:1467
Granero, Manuel, 1:87
Granger, Clive, 1:488
Granger causality, 1:488
Granovetter, Mark, 1:359, 501, 534, 2:887,
3:1330, 1505
Grateful Dead, 2:890, 3:1107
Gravity models, 3:1362
Gray, John, 2:637
Grazian, David, 3:1496
Great Depression (U.S.), 2:692–693, 3:1095
Great European Famine (1315–1317), 2:579
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of All Nations (London, 1851), 1:204
Greece, 3:1221
Green, William R., 3:1077
Green consumption. See Political and ethical
consumption
Greenacre, Michael, 2:1013
Greenberg, Clement, 1:20
Greene, Graham, 3:1242
Greenfield, Susan, 2:981
Greenhouse gases, 1:135–138
Greenpeace, 1:299, 330, 2:667
Greenstone, J. David, 1:199
Greenwald, Anthony G., 3:1169–1171
Greer, Blanche, 1:552
Gregg, Aiden, 3:1169
Gregory, Christopher, 2:886
Gregory, Gary, 1:450–451
Gregory, Jeremy, 1:313
Gregson, Nicky, 1:195, 196, 217, 2:653,
919, 3:1223
Grid-group theory, 1:478, 2:865
Griffiths, Gareth, 1:208
Griliches, Zvi, 2:1058
Griswold, Wendy, 3:1204
Grobalization, 2:674, 3:1342
Grocery stores. See Supermarkets
Gronow, Jukka, 1:228, 561
Gropius, Walter, 1:439
Gross, Neal C., 2:1058
Gross, Neil, 1:454
Gross domestic product (GDP), 1:490–494
Gross national happiness (GNH), 1:494
Gross national income (GNI), 1:490–491
Gross national product (GNP), 1:490,
491–492
Grossberg, Lawrence, 2:582, 3:1107
Grosvenor, S., 2:681
Grosz, Elizabeth A., 3:1353
Gruen, Victor, 1:63
Guattari, Félix, 1:443, 3:1127
Guérin de Tencin, Claudine-Alexandrine,
1:531
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 3:1116
Guha, Ranajit, 1:399, 2:711
Guiry, Michael, 3:1489, 1491
Gujarati, Damodar, 1:488
Gundle, Stephen, 2:816–817
Gurney, Peter, 1:242, 243

Gursky, Andreas, 2:876
Gutenberg, Johannes, 1:123, 3:1147, 1148
Guthman, Julie, 1:309, 2:1067
Gutmann, Amy, 1:167
Guttman scalogram analysis, 1:69
Gwatkin, Davidson, 2:775
H&M, 2:591, 595
Haavelmo, Trygve, 1:487
Habermas, Jürgen, 1:20, 184, 186, 398,
462, 2:641, 742, 828, 1008, 3:1126,
1177–1181, 1324
Habits. See Routines and habits
Habitus, 1:100, 109, 151, 381, 426, 513,
2:695–697, 917, 3:1316, 1422,
1448–1449. See also Lifestyle
Hacktivism, 1:406, 3:1217
Haddon, Leslie, 2:741
Hage, Ghassan, 2:1014
Haggard, H. Rider, 1:206
Haggerty, Kevin, 3:1261
Hagtvedt, Henrik, 2:604
Hair care/hairdressing, 1:8, 2:697–699
Håkansson, Håkan, 1:225
Halbwachs, Maurice, 2:725, 947, 949
Hall, Catherine, 2:966
Hall, Michael, 3:1463
Hall, Steve, 1:84, 155, 157, 2:1024
Hall, Stuart, 1:73, 164–165, 165, 221,
394–395, 448, 2:688, 711, 753, 756,
810, 898, 3:1107, 1202, 1215,
1266, 1508
Hall, Thomas D., 3:1542
Halton, Eugene, 1:434, 2:1053
Hamilton, Clive, 1:479
Hammons, T. J., 3:1212
Han, Sam, 2:808
Hand, Martin, 1:354–355
Handler, Ruth, 1:84
Handlin, Oscar, 2:970
Hannah, Leslie, 3:1220
Hannerz, Ulf, 1:55, 2:679, 1015
Hanson, Susan, 2:833
Hanway, Jonas, 3:1436
Happenings, 3:1079, 1080
Happiness, 2:699–703, 3:1186–1187.
See also Hedonism; Quality of life;
Well-being
Happy Planet Index, 1:343, 3:1528
Haram, 2:814, 815
Haraway, Donna, 1:409–410
Hardt, Michael, 1:373, 398, 3:1119, 1126
Hardy, R., 2:949
Hargrave, Andrea Millwood, 3:1300
Hargreaves, Duane, 2:901
Haring, Albert, 2:719
Harley, Robert, 1:531
Harmonised European Time Use Study,
3:1457
Harootunian, Harry, 2:821
Harper, Douglas, 1:486
Harper, Sarah, 1:24, 25
Harried leisure class, 2:703–705, 869
Harris, Benjamin, 3:1149
Harris, Daniel, 1:151

1573

Harris, Max, 1:146
Harris, Nigel, 2:674
Harris, Zellig, 1:461
Harrison, Carolyn, 2:609
Harrison, Robert, 3:1232
Harrison, Tom, 2:907–908
Hart, Keith, 2:672
Harvey, David, 1:133, 217, 2:607, 3:1126,
1197, 1351, 1361, 1495, 1498
Harvey, Mark, 2:612
Harvey, William, 2:690
Hasisi, Badi, 2:1028
Hatt, Paul, 3:1379
Haucap, Justus, 2:879
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 1:322, 3:1282,
1284, 1502
Haugtvedt, Curtis P., 3:1166
Hauser, John R., 3:1420
Hauser, Ronald M., 3:1379
Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 3:1498
Haute couture system, 2:584–585, 594
Havelock, Eric A., 1:221
Havens, Richie, 2:662
Hawley, Ellis, 2:692
Hay, Iain, 2:707
Hay, James, 2:686
Hayek, F. A., 1:2, 239, 2:1042
Hayles, N. Katherine, 1:410
Haynes, John-Dylan, 2:956
Haythornwaite, Caroline A., 2:790
Hayward, Keith, 3:1255
Health care, 1:38–39, 2:705–707
Heard, Neal, 3:1297
Hearing, 3:1270, 1515
Hearst, William Randolph, 3:1150
Heasman, Michael, 3:1424
Heath, Christian, 1:363, 2:919
Heath, Robert, 2:965
Hebdige, Dick, 1:119, 397, 545, 547,
2:581–582, 917, 3:1107, 1109,
1214–1215, 1389–1390, 1547–1548
Heckit models, 1:487
Heckman, James, 1:487–488
Hedonism, 2:708–709. See also Happiness;
Well-Being
clubbing, 1:180–181
imaginative, 2:757–758
quality of life, 3:1185
tamed, 3:1428–1430
value, 3:1421
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1:20, 33,
440, 441, 443, 2:742, 828, 895, 1070,
3:1080, 1086–1087
Hegemony, 2:709–711
cycles, 3:1538
false consciousness/false needs, 2:570
globalization, 2:675–676
Gramsci, 2:687, 898
Heidegger, Martin, 1:89, 376, 2:603, 884,
3:1349, 1448
Heirlooms, 2:759–761, 799–800
Heizer, Robert, 3:1136–1137
Held, David, 1:384, 2:855, 3:1126
Helena Rubinstein, 1:368
Helleiner, Eric, 2:991, 994

1574

Index

Helmholtz, Hermann von, 1:188
Hendrick, Harry, 1:155
Hendrickson, Carol, 2:681
Hendrix, Jimi, 2:662
Hennessy, Rosemary, 3:1188–1189
Henry VII, king of England, 2:874
Hepworth, Mike, 1:30, 2:644
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 2:1026
Heritage. See Inventing tradition
Heritage tourism, 2:812
Herizigova, Eva, 3:1260
Herman, Robert, 1:433
Hermes, Joke, 2:632
Hernandez, Aileen, 2:603
Herriman, George, 1:209
Herskovits, Melville, 1:1
Herzberg, Frederick, 2:713
Herzigova, Eva, 2:637
Herzog, Dagmar, 3:1282
Herzog, Herta, 2:837, 3:1300
Hesmondhalgh, David, 1:404–405
Heterogeneous engineering, 1:4
Heteronormativity, 3:1187–1188,
1190–1191
Heterosexuality, 2:899–900, 952, 968–969
Heterotopias, 1:464
Heuristics, 1:191
Heyman, Gene M., 1:269
Heyman, Josiah McC., 1:52
Hidden transcripts, 3:1216, 1393
Hierarchy of needs, 2:712–714, 902
Higher education, 2:714–716
Highmore, Ben, 1:426
Hildebrand, Bruno, 3:1236
Hilferding, Rudolf, 1:465
Hill, Austin Bradford, 3:1459
Hill, Ronald Paul, 3:1138, 1392
Hilliard Ensemble, 3:1243
Hillman, William, 1:95
Hills, John, 3:1221
Hills, Matt, 2:581, 582
Hilton, Matthew, 1:301, 2:630
Himm, 3:1298
Hindi films. See Bollywood
Hinduism, 2:717–718
Hines, Colin, 1:432
Hippocrates, 3:1265
Hire-purchase and rental goods, 2:718–719
Hirsch, Eric, 1:59
Hirsch, Fred, 1:515, 523, 2:704, 878–879,
3:1113–1114, 1245, 1278
Hirschman, Albert, 1:132, 240, 323,
3:1102, 1306
Hirschman, Elizabeth C., 1:237, 269–270,
3:1392, 1421, 1428
Hirst, Damian, 3:1244
Hirst, Paula, 2:1047
Historical analysis, 2:720–721
Historical change, 3:1156
Historical value, 3:1421
History, 2:722–732
birth of modern consumption,
2:722–723
Braudel, 1:117–118
class and consumption, 2:724–726

commercial distribution, 2:726–728
globalization, 2:723–724
inalienable wealth/possessions,
2:759–761
interwar consumption patterns,
2:728–729
inventing tradition, 2:812
mass consumption, 2:729–731
medieval consumption, 2:942–946
postmodern consumption, 2:731–732
History of food, 2:732–735. See also Food
consumption
spices, 3:1369–1370
sugar, 3:1401–1403
tea, 3:1435–1437
wine, 3:1529–1531
Hitchcock, Alfred, 2:620
Hitler, Adolf, 3:1459
Hjemdahl, Kirsti, 1:557
Hoarding, 1:271
Hobbes, Thomas, 1:171, 3:1124,
1162, 1255
Hobbyists and amateurs, 2:736–738, 802.
See also Collecting and collectibles;
Recreation
Hobsbawm, Eric, 1:321, 2:811, 1025
Hobson, Kersty, 2:649
Hoby, Philip, 2:690
Hoby, Thomas, 2:690
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1:357, 520–521,
2:575, 631
Hockey, Jenny, 1:30, 2:852–853
Hoekman, Bernard, 3:1471–1472
Hoffman, Donna, 2:682
Hofstede, Geertz, 2:1026
Hoggart, Richard, 1:394, 3:1107
Holbrook, Morris, 1:66, 237, 2:646,
3:1421
Holidays, 3:1232
Hollands, Ray, 3:1182
Hollingshead, Richard, 1:163
Hollywood, 1:106, 2:738–740, 3:1459.
See also Cinema
Holsti, Ole R., 1:353
Holt, Charles, 1:563
Holt, Douglas, 1:238, 429, 3:1357, 1392
Hölzl, Erik, 1:495
Homans, G. C., 2:620
Home, shopping from, 3:1355–1356.
See also Gendering of public and
private space; Households
Home computer, 2:740–741, 805
Home Depot, 3:1250
Homer, 1:149
Homer Laughlin China Company, 2:803
Homo economicus, 2:999, 1002, 3:1362
Homophobia, 2:900–901
Homosexuality, 2:969–970, 3:1092–1094
Honneth, Axel, 3:1210–1211
Hooke, Robert, 1:530
Hope, Keith, 3:1380
Hope, Thomas, 2:691
Horkheimer, Max, 2:742–743
alienation, 1:34
capitalism, 1:523

culture industry, 1:65, 76, 211, 221, 403,
2:738, 906, 3:1128
Frankfurt School, 2:903–904
ideological control, 1:72, 166, 2:570
influence of, 1:9, 2:884–885, 3:1178
Marxism, 2:896–898
rationalization, 3:1196
reification, 3:1210
Hormones, ban on cattle, 1:295
Horne, Howard, 1:66
Horne, John, 3:1372, 1373
Horowitz, Daniel, 2:693, 1031
Horse-drawn carriages, 1:347–348
Hoskins, Janet, 2:1053
Hospitals, 2:706–707
Houlbrook, Matt, 2:969
Household budgets, 2:743–745
Households, 2:745–749. See also Domestic
entries; Families
budgets, 2:743–745
changing patterns, 2:746
composition, 2:746–747
defining, 2:743–744, 747, 762
domestic division of labor, 1:471–473
domestic services, 1:473–475
domestic technologies, 1:476–477
gender, 2:630–631, 639, 640–642
home as domain of consumption, 2:749
immigrants, 2:972–973
income, 2:762
individual vs. household consumption,
2:747–749
outsourcing, 2:1072–1074
single-person, 3:1290–1291
Houses, 1:64
Housing, in China, 1:282–283
Houthakker, Bernard, 1:258
Hovis bread, 2:1045
Howard, Albert, 2:1067
Howard, Ebenezer, 3:1498
Howard, John, 2:1042
Howe, Cymene, 3:1368
Howes, David, 3:1269
Howson, Alexandra, 2:756
Hoyer, Wayne D., 1:259–260, 3:1238
Hu Jintao, 1:339
Hughes, Alex, 2:647
Hughes, Everett, 2:684
Hughes, Gordon, 2:1043
Hughes, Thomas, 2:795, 796, 3:1344
Hulanicki, Barbara (Biba), 2:587
Human Development Index (HDI), 1:494,
2:933
Human ecology studies, 1:539
Human Rights Watch, 2:667
Human-animal relations, 1:296–297
Humanistic economics, 3:1144
Humanistic psychology, 2:902–903
Humboldt, Alexander von, 1:132
Hume, David, 1:518, 532, 2:875, 883,
3:1102, 1294, 1432
Humphrey, Chris, 1:146, 147
Humphreys, Jeffrey, 1:546
Hundert, E. J., 2:884
Hungary, 1:193

Index
Hunger. See Famine
Hunt, Darnell, 3:1204
Hunter, John, 3:1198
Hunter, Katrina, 1:497
Huntington, Samuel, 2:1071
Huq, Rupa, 3:1551
Huss, Magnus, 1:6
Husserl, Edmund, 3:1349
Hutcheson, Francis, 2:883
Hutchings, Vincent, 1:546
Hutchinson, Andrew, 1:410
Hutt, William H., 1:323
Hybridity
defined, 2:673
diaspora, 1:448–449
glocalization, 2:679–680
Japan as consumer culture, 2:821–822
meanings of consumption, 1:44, 2:893
Hyperfashion, 2:595
Hypermodernity, 2:594
Hyperreality, 2:750–752. See also
Authenticity
IBM, 2:740, 3:1151
Ideal types, 3:1523
Identification, psychological, 2:977
Identity, 2:753–756. See also Branding;
Self; Subjects and subjectivity
aestheticization of everyday life, 1:15–18
African consumers, 1:244
belonging, 1:90–92
citizenship, 1:167
collective, 1:200–204
concept of, 2:753, 756
consumer anxiety, 1:233–235
consumption, 2:755–756, 765–767
diasporic, 2:673
ethnicity/race, 1:547
fashion, 2:584, 588, 589
gambling, 2:625–626
immigrants, 2:974–976
inalienable wealth/possessions,
2:759–761
interpellation, 2:809–810
invented tradition, 2:811
lifestyle, 2:764, 860–862
luxury, 2:876
money, 2:994
othering, 2:1070
partisan, 3:1512
style, 3:1390
theories, 2:753–755
T-shirts, 3:1483–1484
virtual communities, 3:1253
World Wide Web, 2:806–807
Identity crisis, 2:754
Identity politics, 2:670, 753–754, 756,
1006–1007
Ideology
Althusser, 1:39–40
critical discourse analysis, 1:460
culture-ideology of consumerism,
1:407–409
false consciousness, 2:569
interpellation, 2:809–810

socialism, 3:1336–1337
Soviet consumer culture, 1:255–256
IKEA, 3:1356
Illich, Ivan, 1:38
Imaginative hedonism, 2:757–758
Imagined communities, 2:812, 940, 974.
See also Inventing tradition
Imitation. See also Mimesis
desire, 1:443
fashion, 2:584–585
Immerfall, Stefan, 1:559
Immigrants. See also Migration
body, 2:972
community, 2:973–974
defined, 2:970
entrepreneurship, 1:535, 2:974
ethnicization, 2:971
homes, 2:972–973
identity, 2:974–976
Indian, 2:973–974
media, 2:976
Imperialism. See Colonialism
Implicit Association Test (IAT), 3:1169
Implicit Attitude Test (IAT), 3:1170–1173
Impression management, 3:1257
Inalienable wealth/inalienable possessions,
2:759–761, 800. See also Object
biographies
Income, 2:761–763
disparity, 3:1138
disposable, 2:934
gender, 3:1338
Income effect, 3:1146
Incomplete contracts, 1:358
Inconspicuous consumption, 1:526
Index of Consumer Sentiment, 1:495
India, 1:205, 280, 2:671
Indian Association of Consumers, 1:326
Indirect utility of money, 1:504
Individualism
capitalism, 1:132
methodological, 2:999
neo-tribes, 2:1035
new political culture, 1:169
self-interest, 3:1255–1256
Individualization, 2:763–767
belongings, 1:92
choice, 2:766–767
future research, 2:767
modernity, 2:763–764, 986
pseudo, 2:897, 905, 3:1108
reflexive, 2:764–766
risk society, 3:1227–1228
Industrial design, 1:438–439
Industrial Designers Society of America,
1:439
Industrial Revolution, 1:310, 374, 438, 467,
2:638, 720, 723, 768–769,
910–911, 3:1207, 1236–1237, 1497
Industrial society, 2:768–770. See also
Postindustrial society
Industrial sociology, 3:1154
Industry life cycle, 1:415–417
Inequalities, 2:771–774. See also Poverty
causes, 2:774

1575

consumption, 2:771–772
geography, 2:772
income, 2:762
methodology, 2:772, 774
post-Fordism, 2:912–913
pros and cons, 2:774
public policy, 2:774–775
socialism, 3:1333–1334
subaltern, 3:1391–1393
transnational capitalism, 3:1480
Inferior goods, 1:505, 527
Inflation, 2:830
Informal economy, 2:775–779. See also
Self-service economy; Smuggling and
black markets
car-boot sales and flea markets,
1:138–139
defined, 2:775
empirical evidence, 2:778
future research, 2:779
historical perspective, 2:776
postsocialist countries, 1:342
public policy, 2:779
Soviet Union, 1:252–253
theories, 2:776–778
types, 2:775–776
Informalization, 2:780–782
Information, asymmetric, 1:508
Information economy, 2:792
Information society, 2:782–787
Bell, 3:1121
consumer culture, 2:786–787
defined, 2:782
history of, 2:782–783
perspectives, 2:783–786
Information technology, 2:787–791
debates, 2:790–791
defined, 2:787–788
future of, 2:791
history of, 2:788
key issues, 2:788–790
methodology, 2:790
perspectives, 2:788
Informational capital, 2:792–794
Infotainment, 2:940
Infrastructures and utilities, 2:794–797,
1064. See also Sociotechnical systems;
Systems of provision; Water
Infringement, of trademark, 3:1475–1476
Inglehart, Ronald, 1:169, 542, 2:643, 713,
920–921
Ingold, Tim, 1:296
Inheritance, 2:798–800. See also
Inalienable wealth/inalienable
possessions
Innis, Harold, 1:221
Innocent (beverage), 3:1076
Innocent X, Pope, 2:689
Innovation
contributions to consumer society,
2:801–802
defined, 2:801
marketing, 2:802–804
sites, 2:801
strategic, 1:416–417

1576

Index

Innovation studies, 2:801–804
actor-network theory, 1:3–5
diffusion, 1:453–455
Innovators, 1:454
Insourcing, 2:1073–1074. See also
Self-service economy
Institutional economics, 3:1503
Instrumental rationality.
See Rationalization
Insurance, 3:1454
Intellectual property, 2:851, 3:1473.
See also Copyright; Trademarks
Intelligence tests, 3:1168–1169
Intention, 3:1452
Interdependence techniques, of multivariate
analysis, 2:1015
Interdisciplinarity, 1:393, 399
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), 2:666
Internalist theories, 3:1186
International Atomic Energy Agency, 2:668
International capitalism, 3:1477
International Civil Aviation Organization,
2:668
International Classification of Diseases
(ICD-10), 1:6, 47
International Coffee Organization, 1:184
International Co-operative Alliance (ICA),
1:243
International Energy Agency, 2:666
International Federation of Organic
Architecture (IFOA), 1:483
International Labour Organization,
2:667, 777
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 1:246,
2:774, 3:1480
International Olympic Committee, 2:1027
International Organization of Consumer
Unions (IOCU), 1:264, 326–327
International regime theory, 2:666
International Socialist Congress, 2:602
International socioeconomic index, 3:1380
International Sociological Association, 2:847
International Working Men’s Association,
2:895
Internet, 2:805–808
adoption, 2:805
advertising, 1:126
auction sites, 1:198
customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction,
1:260
cyborgs, 1:410
e-commerce, 1:484–486
future of, 2:808
globalization, 2:670
home computers, 2:741
market alternatives, 2:890
media convergence, 2:941–942
network society, 2:1038
personal ads, 3:1081–1082
popular music, 3:1110
public sphere, 3:1181
scholarship, 2:806–808
virtual communities, 3:1504–1505
youth culture, 3:1551–1552

Interpellation, 1:40, 202, 2:755, 809–810
Interpretive research, 2:958–960
Intertextuality, 1:462, 3:1508
Interviews. See Consumer interviews
Inventing tradition, 1:375, 377, 2:811–814
Invention, 2:801
Investment, psychology of, 1:496–497
Invisible Committee, 3:1120
iPhones, 2:982
iPods. See Walkmans and iPods
Iran, 2:1039
Iraq, 2:668
Ireland, 1:205–206, 2:579
Ireland, Norman J., 2:878
Irigaray, Luce, 2:603, 658, 659, 1070
Irony, 3:1259–1260
Isen, Alice M., 1:275, 276
Isherwood, Baron, 1:50, 477, 2:917, 1033,
3:1379, 1461
Islam, 2:814–815
asceticism, 1:68
credit, 1:379
Fulla doll, 1:386
othering of, 2:1071
Italian Communist Party, 2:687
Italian Fascism and fashion, 2:816–819
Italy
Gramsci, 2:687–688
grand tour, 2:688–691
retirement, 3:1221
Ito, Shunji, 2:982
J. Walter Thompson advertising agency,
1:110, 2:963
Jackson, Peter, 1:217, 449, 2:578, 647
Jacobs, Dany, 2:594
Jacobs, Jessica, 3:1279, 1280
Jacobs, Michael, 1:331
Jacobsen, Jens, 3:1464
Jacoby, J., 3:1167
Jakobson, Roman, 2:849
Jamal, Tazim, 3:1464, 1465
James, Allison, 1:30, 155, 2:852–853
James, Clive, 2:772
James, Oliver, 2:702, 774
James, William, 3:1237, 1238, 1257
James I, king of England, 3:1458
James Robertson and Son, 1:207
Jameson, Fredric, 1:400, 2:1046, 1047,
3:1126, 1222
Jankowiak, William, 3:1234
Japan, 2:812–813, 3:1221
Japan as a consumer culture, 1:247–248,
2:821–823. See also Consumer policy
(Japan)
Jarrat, Denise G., 3:1489
Jaspers, Karl, 3:1133
Jaumain, Serge, 1:436
Jauss, Hans Robert, 3:1080
Jay, Martin, 3:1506, 1507
Jayne, Mark, 2:648
Jay-Z, 2:662
JCPenney, 3:1249
Jeans, 2:824–825
Jefferson, Gail, 1:362

Jefferson, Tony, 1:119, 2:810
Jefferys, James B., 1:227
Jeffreys, Sheila, 3:1279–1281
Jencks, Charles, 2:880
Jenkins, Henry, 1:222, 426, 512, 2:582,
807, 941, 942, 3:1201, 1445–1447
Jenkins, Thomas, 2:691
Jenks, Christopher, 1:155, 157, 2:607–608
Jennings, Humphrey, 2:907–908
Jeremy (magazine), 3:1093
Jerusalem, 2:944
Jessop, Bob, 3:1350, 1354
Jesus, 1:159
Jevons, William Stanley, 1:257, 487
Jewelry, 1:8
Jewitt, Carey, 3:1507
Jews
anti-Semitism, 2:729
diaspora, 1:447
ghettos, 2:656
Jhally, Sut, 1:21, 3:1210
Jiang, Jason, 1:338
Jim Crow culture, 1:1
Jiménez, Manuel, 1:375
Jinrikshaws, 1:96
Joas, Hans, 1:361
John, Deborah Roedder, 1:318
John Paul II, Pope, 1:160
Johnson, Richard, 1:164–165
Jolie, Angelina, 2:668, 739
Jones, David, 1:95
Jones, Ian Rees, 1:28, 29
Jones, Inigo, 2:689
Jones, Martin, 3:1350, 1354
Jones, Sarah Gwenllian, 3:1446
Jones, Thomas, 2:689
Jönsson, Håkan, 1:557
Jordan, Michael, 3:1297, 1373
Journal of Consumer Culture, 1:238
Journal of Economic Psychology, 1:495
Journal of Leisure Research, 2:846
Joy, Annamma, 3:1232
Joyce, James, 2:928
Judgment and Decision Making (journal),
1:495
Judt, Matthias, 1:228
Jurgenson, Nathan, 1:149, 3:1160, 1161
Juvenal, 2:874
Kadar, Janos, 1:193
Kaelble, Hartmut, 1:559
Kafka, Franz, 1:93
Kagan. S., 3:1186
Kahneman, Daniel, 1:107, 191, 258, 495,
509, 563
Kalmus, Veronika, 1:344
Kalton, Graham, 2:872
Kamen, Nick, 2:637
Kang, Miliann, 1:520, 521
Kant, Immanuel, 1:19, 20, 219, 369–370,
518, 2:604, 742, 827–828, 883,
3:1302, 1303, 1349, 1431–1432
Kanuk, Leslie, 3:1076
Kapoor, Ilan, 3:1117
Karpik, Lucien, 1:360

Index
Katona, George, 1:495
Katz, E., 2:620
Katz, Elihu, 1:220, 396, 454, 2:583, 1057,
3:1204, 1300
Katz, Jack, 1:134
Katz, Stephen, 1:29, 2:853
Katz-Gerro, Tally, 1:391
Kaufmann, Jean-Claude, 2:613
Kaur, R., 1:105
Kautilya, 2:717
Kautsky, Karl, 1:465
Kavanaugh, John, 1:160
Kawamura, Yuniya, 2:583
Kearns, R. A., 2:706
Kedourie, Elie, 2:1025
Kehily, Mary Jane, 3:1552
Keller, Margit, 1:342
Kelley, Florence, 1:299
Kelley, Robin D. G., 3:1216
Kellner, Douglas, 2:739
Kelly, Catriona, 3:1335–1336
Kelly, Walt, 1:209
Keltner, Dacher, 1:277
Kemp, Simon, 1:497
Kendall, Laurel, 2:629
Kennedy, Barbara M., 1:410
Kennedy, David, 2:692
Kennedy, John F., 1:291, 316, 327, 3:1366
Kennedy, Michael, 1:341
Kenyatta, Jomo, 3:1116
Kerckhove, Derrick de, 1:221
Kernberg, Otto, 2:1023
Kershaw, Baz, 3:1367
Ketilson, Lou Hammond, 1:242, 243
Keynes, John Maynard, 1:256, 2:762,
828–829, 3:1245–1246
Keynesian demand management, 1:133,
256, 2:692, 829–830
Khomeini, Ruhollah, 2:670, 1006
Khrushchev, Nikita, 1:193, 254, 2:728,
3:1333–1334
Kidman, Nicole, 2:668
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1:219
Kihlstrom, John F., 3:1169
Kimura, Junko, 1:320
Kincaid, Harold, 1:271
Kinder, Marsha, 1:511
King, Anthony, 2:582
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 2:1029
King, Rodney, 3:1204
King, Stephen, 2:961
King Kullen, 3:1406
Kipling, Rudyard, 3:1295
Kircher, Athanasius, 2:689
Kirchler, Erich, 1:495
Kirzner, Israel, 1:239
“Kitchen debate,” 3:1334
Kitchener, Lord, 1:205
Kjaernes, Unni, 2:612
Kjeldgaard, Dannie, 3:1390
Klein, Lawrence, 1:487
Klein, Melanie, 1:201, 2:755
Klein, Naomi, 1:203, 372, 2:771, 891,
3:1098, 1477
Kline, Stephen, 3:1469

Klopp, Charlotte, 1:260
Kmart, 3:1250
Kneale, James, 3:1183
Knee, Derek, 1:227
Knockoffs, 3:1267
Knowledge
postmodernism, 2:880
risk society, 3:1226–1227
service industry, 3:1275
Knowledge economy, 2:785, 3:1158
Knutson, Brian, 1:278, 2:1041
Kocka, Jürgen, 1:465
Kodak cameras, 3:1090
Koestner, Richard, 3:1082
Kondratieff, Nikolai D., 1:417
Kondratieff cycles (K-waves), 1:417–418,
3:1538
König, Gudrun, 1:556
Koolhaas, Rem, 2:876
Koons, Jeff, 3:1113
Kopytoff, Igor, 1:216, 429, 2:1051, 3:1501
Korczak, Dieter, 1:428
Korea, 3:1147
Kornberger, Martin, 1:153
Kornfeld, Artie, 2:661
Korpi, Walter, 3:1375
Korzeniewicz, Miguel, 3:1478
Koshar, Rudy, 3:1465
Kostecki, Michel, 3:1471–1472
Kotler, Philip, 1:237, 2:886
Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, 1:311, 312
Koyt, Homer, 3:1363
Kozinets, Rob, 2:1040, 3:1233
Kraepelin, Emil, 1:270
Kraljic, Peter, 1:225
Krippendorff, Klaus, 1:353
Kristeva, Julia, 1:148, 3:1131, 1508
Kroc, Ray, 2:923
Kroeber-Riel, Werner, 2:956
Kroger, 3:1250, 1406
Kronauer, Martin, 3:1318–1319
Kuhn, Thomas, 2:1004
Kuipers, Giselinde, 1:561
Kulturkritik, 1:211
Kümin, Beat, 3:1182
Kurczy, Stephen, 2:805
Kurtz, Bruce, 1:13
Kuznets, Simon, 1:487, 490, 493
K-waves. See Kondratieff cycles
Kwik-Save, 1:459
Kyoto Protocol (1997), 1:136, 137, 2:667
Kyrk, Hazel, 2:831–832
La Rochefoucauld, François de, 2:884
Laaksonen, Martti, 1:278, 3:1490
Labor. See Division of labor;
Emotional labor
Labor markets, 2:833–834, 3:1518
Laboratory studies, 2:955–956
Lacan, Jacques, 1:156, 201, 202, 396, 443,
2:603, 629, 755, 1024, 3:1385
Laclau, Ernesto, 2:754
Lacy, Karyn, 1:547–549
Ladies’ Home Journal, 2:638–639
Lagerfeld, Karl, 2:594, 3:1296

1577

Laggards, 1:454
Lahire, Bernard, 1:392
Lai, Albert, 3:1420
Lallement, Pierre, 1:95
Lally, Elaine, 2:741, 789–790
Lambert, Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de
Courcells, Madame de, 1:531
Lamla, Jorn, 1:76
Lamming, George, 3:1204
Lamming, Richard, 1:225
Lamont, Michèle, 1:360, 547, 549, 3:1205,
1314, 1316
Lancaster, Kelvin, 1:258, 3:1145
Lane, Robert E., 2:622
Lanfant, Marie-Françoise, 3:1464
Lang, Fritz, 3:1118
Lang, Michael, 2:661
Lang, Tim, 1:243, 3:1376, 1377
Lansley, Stewart, 3:1377
Lardet, Pierre, 1:207
Lareau, Annette, 3:1317
Larkin, Brian, 2:675
Larson, Jörgen, 1:480
Las Vegas, Nevada, 1:464
Lasch, Christopher, 1:2, 3, 151, 523,
2:835–836, 1024, 3:1277, 1372, 1461
Lash, Scott, 1:38, 153, 370, 385, 389,
404–405, 466–467, 2:739, 791, 861,
3:1226, 1258–1259
Laslett, Peter, 1:29–30
Lasn, Kalle, 1:406, 407
Lassels, Richard, 2:689, 690
Last, Nella, 2:908
Latin America, consumer culture in,
1:249–251
Latour, Bruno, 1:3, 359, 360, 410, 543,
2:790, 3:1332
Laughey, Dan, 3:1550
Laumann, Edward O., 3:1380
Laurier, Eric, 2:919
Lauristin, Marju, 1:341
Lavanchy-Clarke, Francois-Henri, 3:1153
Law. See Consumer rights and the law
Law, John, 1:3, 359
Law of demand, 1:505
Lawrence, Thomas, 2:689
Lawson, Philip, 1:143
Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix, 1:72, 220, 2:609,
620, 836–837, 872, 1057
Le Breton, André-François, 1:530
Le Comte, Louis, 3:1112
Le Play, Frédéric, 1:266, 528
Leach, Edmund, 3:1427
League tables, 2:714
Lears, T. J. J., 3:1428
Lee, Ang, 2:661
Lee, Jennifer, 1:549
Lee, Martyn, 2:626
Lee, Raymond T., 1:521
Lee, Shirley, 1:271
Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy, 3:1524
Lee’s jeans, 2:824–825
Lefebvre, Henri, 1:18, 33–35, 88, 182,
2:570, 837–838, 3:1267, 1349–1351,
1365, 1495, 1498

1578

Index

Lehtonen, Turo-Kimmo, 3:1455–1456
Leibenstein, Harvey, 1:515, 3:1144
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1:219
Leichenko, Robin, 1:409
Leiper, Neil, 3:1465
Leisure, 2:838–845. See also Affluent
society; Recreation
casual vs. serious, 2:736
China, 1:338
communism, 2:847
conspicuous consumption, 1:231–232
defining, 2:838–840
do-it-yourself, 1:469
economic theory, 1:505–506
Elias, 1:513
fashion, 2:585–586
government intervention, 2:844–845
harried leisure class, 2:703–705
hobbyists and amateurs, 2:736–738
modern, 2:839
seaside resorts, 3:1250–1252
social divisions, 2:843–844
socialism, 3:1336
societal role, 2:844
study of, 2:840–841, 845, 846–849,
3:1457–1458
suburbia, 3:1397
time pressures, 1:333
trends, 2:841–842
uses, 2:842–843
Veblen, 3:1503
Leisure Sciences (journal), 2:846
Leisure studies, 2:840–841, 845, 846–849
Leisure Studies (journal), 2:847
Leisure Studies Association, 2:847
Lemert, Charles, 2:1006
Lemire, Beverly, 1:312
Lenin, Vladimir, 1:465, 2:710, 896,
3:1311, 1333
Lennon, John, 3:1231
Leo XIII, Pope, 1:160
Leon, David, 2:775
Leonardo da Vinci, 1:95
Leontief, Wassily, 1:487
Leopold, Ellen, 3:1424
Leopold II, king of Belgium, 1:205
Lerner, Jennifer, 1:277
Lesbians, 3:1092–1094, 1187–1191
Leung, Joe C. B., 1:282
Lever Brothers’s soap, 3:1153
Levi Strauss & Co., 2:824–825
Levin, Ira, 3:1398
Lévinas, Emmanuel, 2:660
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1:119, 396, 552,
2:659, 849–850, 923, 3:1266, 1385,
1387–1388, 1448, 1460–1461
Levittowns, 3:1397
Levy, Daniel, 2:950
Levy, Michael, 1:510–511
Levy, Sidney, 2:886, 1003, 3:1420
Levy, Sydney, 1:111
Lewin, Kurt, 2:1003
Lewis, Alan, 1:495
Lewis, Gail, 2:1043
Lewis, Meriwether, 3:1542

Lewis, Oscar, 3:1392, 1494
Li, Wei, 3:1399
Li Ning, 1:337
Liberation theology, 1:160
Licensing of clothing brands, 2:850–852
Liebes, Tamar, 2:739, 3:1204, 1300
Life course, 2:852–853
Life cycle, 2:852
Life insurance, 3:1454
Life(style) politics, 2:854–860
citizen-consumer roles, 2:854–859,
3:1098, 1105
ecological citizenship vs., 2:855–856
misconceptions, 2:854
political consumerism vs., 2:856–857
social practices, 2:857–859
Life-cycle analysis/assessment (LCA),
1:536–537, 2:937
Lifestyle, 2:860–862. See also Habitus
alternative consumption, 1:35–37
civilizing processes, 1:173–177
consumer regulation, 1:307–308
consumption patterns, 1:351–352
Douglas, 1:478, 3:1268, 1284–1285
downshifting, 1:479–480
fashion, 2:587–588
identity, 2:764
informalization, 2:780–782
men’s magazines, 2:951–952
politics, 2:854–860
sports celebrities, 3:1373–1374
T-shirts, 3:1483
typologies, 2:862–865
youth culture, 3:1548–1550
Lifestyle typologies, 2:862–865
Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs, 1:299
Likert, Rensis, 3:1168
Likert scales, 1:69–70, 2:865–867, 3:1168
Lily, The (magazine), 2:600
Liminality, 2:868–869
clubbing, 1:180–181
neo-tribes, 2:1035
weddings, 3:1524
Lin, Nan, 3:1330
Linden Lab, 3:1252–1253
Linder, Staffan Burenstam, 1:333,
2:703–705, 858, 869–870
Lindholm, Charles, 3:1235
Lindstrom, Martin, 2:965, 3:1269
Lindt, 1:230
Lines, Gill, 3:1372
Linguistics. See Structural linguistics
Linux, 3:1160
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 2:594
Lippmann, Walter, 1:220
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 3:1512
Lipton Tea Company, 3:1436
Lisbon Strategy (2000), 1:560
Littler, Jo, 1:36, 300
Live and Let Die (film), 2:982
Living Costs and Food Survey, 1:266
Living standards. See Measuring standards
of living; Standards of living
Livingstone, David, 1:205
Livingstone, Sonia, 2:609, 643, 3:1551

Livy, 2:874
Lizardo, Omar, 3:1339
Lloyd, Christopher D., 3:1361
Loans. See Credit
Lobbying groups, 2:667
Local Exchange Trading Systems,
2:992–993
Locality, 2:870–871, 3:1530. See also
Glocalization
Location theory, 3:1363
Locke, John, 1:171, 2:766, 3:1265, 1429
Lockie, Stewart, 1:36
Lockwood, David, 3:1311
Loewenstein, George, 1:495
Loews Incorporated, 1:163
Loewy, Raymond, 1:438
Logan, John R., 3:1352
Lohmann, Larry, 1:135
Loisir et Societe/Leisure and Society
(journal), 2:847
Lojkine, Jean, 1:199
Lombroso, Cesare, 1:206
London, England, 2:587
Long, D. Stephen, 1:160
Long, Elizabeth, 2:632
Longitudinal studies, 2:871–873
López Sintas, Jordi, 1:392
Lopiano-Misdom, Janine, 2:964
L’Oreal, 1:246, 302
Lorenz curve, 2:762
Loss leaders. See Product loss leaders
Lotman, Juri, 3:1266
Louch, Hugh, 3:1339
Louis XIV, king of France, 1:442, 531
Louvre, Paris, 1:371
Love. See Romantic love
Lovegreen, Nick, 3:1552
Lowe, Michelle, 2:647
Löwenthal, Leo, 2:837, 903–904, 906–907
Lowrey, M., 3:1231
Loyalty, customer. See Store loyalty cards
Luce, Henry, 3:1150
Luckmann, Thomas, 2:758, 3:1210
Luff, Paul, 1:363
Luhmann, Niklas, 1:501, 3:1303–1304,
1318, 1481, 1482
Lukács, György, 1:20, 34, 2:570, 838,
896–897, 3:1209–1210
Lukes, Stephen, 3:1255
Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 1:162, 3:1153
Lunt, Peter, 2:609, 643
Luomala, Harri T., 1:278
Lupton, Deborah, 2:635, 3:1226
Lury, Celia, 1:113, 153, 222, 405, 2:611,
3:1259, 1461
Lushington, Stephen, 1:144
Luther, Martin, 2:1023
Lutz, Catherine A., 1:354, 2:1069
Lutz, Richard J., 3:1489
Luxemburg, Rosa, 2:602, 896
Luxury and luxuries, 2:873–877. See also
Sumptuary laws
Africa, 1:244–245
attitudes toward, 2:873
British consumer revolution, 1:310–312

Index
conspicuous consumption, 1:231–233
contemporary issues, 2:875–877
counterfeits, 1:371–373
defining, 2:873–874
Diderot effect, 1:449–451
elite consumption, 1:514–517
Enlightenment, 1:531–532
historical perspective, 2:722–723,
874–875
Sombart, 3:1346
taxes, 2:877–879
Luxury taxes, 2:877–879
Luzac, Jean, 1:530
LVMH (Moët-Hennessy-Louis Vuitton),
2:875
Lynch, David, 2:1046
Lynd, Helen, 2:907–908
Lynd, Robert, 2:907–908
Lyon, David, 1:423
Lyons, Kristen, 1:36
Lyotard, Jean-François, 1:222, 2:649,
880–881, 3:1131, 1450
Maastricht Treaty (1993), 1:560
MacCannell, Dean, 1:76, 3:1463–1464
MacCulloch, Robert, 1:562
MacFadden Publications, 2:1057
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1:441, 2:690,
3:1255
MacInnis, Deborah J., 1:259–260
Macintosh computers, 2:674
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1:239
Mack, Joanna, 3:1377
MacKay, Hughie, 1:59
Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 3:1437
Maclachlan, Patricia L., 1:228, 229, 248,
289, 2:821
Maclaran, Pauline, 2:964
Macnaghten, Phil, 1:329, 330–331
Madge, Charles, 2:907–908
Madrian, Brigitte, 1:496
Madrid System of international trademark
registration, 3:1474, 1475
Maffesoli, Michel, 2:1034
Magazines, 3:1150–1151
men’s, 2:951–952
teenage, 3:1438–1439
women’s, 2:599–601, 3:1531–1532
Mägi, Anne W., 3:1489
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 2:956.
See also Functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI)
Maguire, Gregory, 3:1446
Mail-order catalogs, 3:1355
Maison, Dominika, 3:1171–1172
Maital, Shlomo, 1:495
Maiteny, Paul, 2:609
Major, John, 2:1042
Malaby, Thomas, 3:1253
Malady of infinite aspirations, 1:46
Malcolm X, 3:1216
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 1:52, 498, 500,
552, 2:916–917, 958, 1014, 3:1088
Mall of America, 3:1356
Malo, Rato, 2:1053

Maltby, Lucy M., 2:803–804
Malthus, Thomas, 1:22, 2:580, 1049
Maluccio, John, 2:744
Manchester United, 3:1373, 1374
Mandeville, Bernard, 1:258, 311–312, 531,
2:722, 874, 878, 883–884, 3:1103
Manga, 1:209–210
Maniates, Michael, 1:540
Manlow, Veronica, 2:595
Manners. See Civilizing processes;
Informalization
Mannheim, Karl, 2:643
MANOVA (multivariate analysis of
variance), 2:1017–1018
Manzenreiter, Wolfram, 3:1372, 1373
Mao Zedong, 1:282, 337
Maratti, Carlo, 2:691
Marchand, Roland, 2:639
Marchand, Suzanne, 2:1070
Marconi, Guglielmo, 1:124
Marcoux, Jean-Sébastian, 1:30
Marcus, George, 1:553, 2:1014
Marcuse, Herbert, 1:34, 155, 166, 211,
513, 523, 2:570, 742, 838, 884–885,
896–898, 903, 907, 1024, 3:1129,
1210, 1281–1282, 1324, 1392
Margarine, 2:751–752
Marginalism, 1:504–505
Mariátegui, José Carlos, 1:399
Marie, Gerard, 3:1409
Mariengolf, Anatolii, 1:422
Marin, Louis, 3:1133
Marine Stewardship Council, 2:857
Market failures, 1:324, 508, 565, 2:580
Markets and marketing, 2:886–893.
See also Branding; Methods of market
research
advertising, 1:10–14
alternative consumption, 1:36–37
architecture, 1:61–62, 64
attitudes toward, 2:886–887
blood and organs, 2:1065–1066
Body Shop, 1:104
British Empire, 1:121–122
capitalism, 1:131
car-boot sales and flea markets,
1:138–139
childhood, 1:157–158
children, 1:318–320
commercialization, 1:210–211
consumer apathy, 1:235
customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction,
1:260
famine, 2:579–580
fine arts, 2:605–606
gay- and lesbian-oriented, 3:1093–1094
globalization, 2:892–893
hierarchy of needs, 2:713–714
higher education, 2:714–716
history of marketing, 2:890–893
history of markets, 2:887–890
influence of, 2:892
information technology, 2:789
labor markets, 2:833–834
lifestyle typologies, 2:862–865

1579

metrosexuality, 2:969
money, 2:994–995
neurology, 1:158
neuromarketing, 2:1040–1041
noneconomic factors, 2:1000–1002
novelty, 2:1047
origins, 2:886
personal ads, 3:1082
promotional culture, 3:1157–1159
research, 2:802–804
sociology, 3:1341–1342
symbolic value, 3:1420–1421
utilities, 2:795–796
viral marketing, 2:942
Marks, Michael, 1:458
Marks and Spencer, 1:458, 2:834
Marlboro, 3:1094
Marsh, Alan, 2:921
Marshall, Alfred, 1:499, 502, 2:894–895
Marshall, Barbara, 2:853
Marshall, George, 1:192
Marshall, Leon C., 2:831
Marshall, T. H., 1:167–168, 3:1311
Marshall Field & Co., 3:1357
Martens, Lydia, 1:457, 535, 2:598
Martin, Henri-Jean, 3:1148
Martin, Jennifer, 3:1252
Martin, O., 3:1440
Martin, Pater, 2:1063
Martin, Peter, 1:66
Marvin, Simon, 2:795
Marx, Karl, 1:122, 2:884, 895–896. See also
Commodity fetishism
alienation, 1:33–34, 3:1118, 1209
appropriation, 1:58
capitalism, 1:129, 130, 211, 3:1128
commodities, 1:214–215, 2:570, 649,
985, 3:1412
commodity production, 1:164
consumption, 3:1087–1088
consumption theories, 1:50, 164
cultural turn, 1:402
economic sociology, 1:498, 499
exchange and use value, 3:1501
false consciousness, 2:569
future of socialism, 3:1245
Hegelian influence, 3:1086
influence of, 1:9, 89, 2:710, 742, 896,
904, 3:1306
informational capital, 2:793
labor, 1:445
materialism, 2:920
modernity, 3:1124–1126
money, 2:993–994
motivation, 2:1003
needs and wants, 2:1032
pace of life, 2:704
reification, 3:1209
social class, 3:1310
structuralism, 3:1385–1386
surplus value, 3:1410–1411
use value vs. exchange value, 1:211–212
Marxist theories, 2:896–899
alienation, 1:33–34
Althusser, 1:39–40

1580

Index

capitalism, 1:130, 465
Coca-Cola, 1:182
collective identity, 1:200
commodification, 1:213
commodities, 1:214–215
consumption, 1:15
contemporary research, 2:899
critiques of, 2:898–899
cultural studies, 1:393
exchange and use value, 3:1502
false consciousness/false needs,
2:569–570
Gramsci, 2:687
group/collective as emphasis of, 1:73
Hegelian influence, 3:1086
key theorists, 2:896–898
Lefebvre, 2:837–838
neo-Marxism, 1:540
political economy, 2:649
postcolonialism, 3:1116
reception theory, 3:1202
spaces and places, 3:1349–1351
transnational capitalism, 3:1480
Western vs. Eastern, 2:896
Masculinity, 2:899–901
men’s magazines, 2:951–952
metrosexuality, 2:968–970
Maslow, Abraham, 1:111, 542, 2:712–713,
902–903, 921
Mass culture (Frankfurt School),
2:903–907. See also Popular culture
acculturation, 1:2
Adorno, 1:9–10
alienation, 1:34
broadcast media, 1:123
collective identity, 1:200, 203
commercialization, 1:211
communication studies, 1:221
consumption theories, 1:166
critical theory, 2:896–897, 903
critiques of Frankfurt School, 2:904
cultural studies, 1:395
culture industries, 1:403–404
culture-ideology of consumerism, 1:408
exchange value, 3:1501
false consciousness/false needs,
2:569–570
fashion, 2:816
Habermas, 3:1178
Horkheimer, 2:742–743
interpellation, 2:810
key ideas, 2:904–905
Marcuse, 2:884–885
mass consumption, 2:905–907
rationalization, 3:1196–1197
reification, 3:1210
sexuality, 3:1281–1282
social class, 3:1311
subjectivity, 3:1392
Mass media. See Broadcast media; Media
Mass observation, 2:907–909, 3:1183
Mass production and consumption,
2:909–913
Adorno, 1:9–10
assembly-line production, 2:910

automobiles, 1:134
criticisms, 2:911
expansion, 2:911–912
Fordism, 2:833, 3:1117–1118
Industrial Revolution, 2:910–911
massification vs. fragmentation,
2:912–913
Mass tourism, 2:913–916
Massey, Doreen, 2:679, 870–871, 3:1361
Massey, Douglas, 2:656
Material culture, 2:916–919
actor-network theory, 1:3–5
anthropological approach, 1:52
consumption, 1:429
contemporary society, 2:919
cultural analysis, 2:916–917
defined, 2:916
dematerialization, 1:433–435
design, 2:918
gender, 2:635
geography, 2:650–651, 654
object biographies, 2:1051–1054
research methods, 2:960
social lives, 2:917–918
use of objects, 2:918–919
waste, 3:1520
Materialism and postmaterialism,
2:920–922
citizenship, 1:169
dematerialization, 1:433–435
generations, 2:643
Middle Ages, 2:945–946
Mattel, 1:84–85
Mattelart, Armand, 1:399
Mauri, Chiari, 3:1383
Mauss, Marcel, 1:52, 89, 500, 2:658–659,
875, 886, 922–923, 950, 985, 993,
1053, 3:1088, 1136–1137, 1232
Max Havelaar Foundation, 2:567
Maximizers, 3:1166
Maxwell House Company, 1:184
Mazarin, Cardinal, 3:1436
McCabe, Marita, 1:452
McCants, Anne, 3:1403
McClelland, David, 2:712
McClintock, Anne, 1:144
McCloud, Scott, 1:209
McClure, Samuel M., 2:956
McCormick, John, 1:330
McCracken, Grant, 1:450, 2:918, 1045,
3:1230
McCulloch, J. R., 1:312
McCulloch, Ken, 3:1552–1553
McDaniel, Carl, 3:1077
McDannell, Colleen, 1:160
McDonald, Colin, 2:961
McDonaldization, 1:43, 104, 187, 202, 432,
445, 2:619, 672, 680, 716,
923–927, 3:1160, 1197, 1523
McDonald’s, 1:13, 43, 283, 299–300, 302,
2:674, 675, 680, 707, 731, 923,
3:1291, 1479, 1539
McDowell, Linda, 3:1353
McElvaine, Robert, 2:692
McFadden, Daniel, 1:487–488

McFall, Liz, 1:389–390
McGhee, Debbie E., 3:1170–1171
McGovern, Charles, 1:228
McGregor, Sue, 1:265
McGuire, Alistair, 2:706
McGuire, Laura, 3:1173
McInerney, Jay, 3:1409
McKendrick, Neil, 1:310–313, 2:723, 890
McKeown, Patrick, 2:1038
McKibben, Bill, 1:328
McLennan, J. F., 3:1460
McLuhan, Marshall, 1:182, 221, 2:670,
805, 927–928, 3:1148, 1266
McMahon, Theresa, 2:831
McNay, Lois, 2:697
M-commerce, 1:486
McRobbie, Angela, 1:397–398, 512,
3:1107, 1215, 1222–1223,
1259–1260, 1423, 1438
Mead, George Herbert, 1:167, 220, 2:754,
928–929, 3:1257
Mead, Margaret, 1:552, 2:958
Meano, Cesare, 2:817–818
Measuring satisfaction, 2:929–931
Measuring standards of living, 2:932–934.
See also Standards of living
consumer culture comparisons,
1:227–229
consumer expenditure surveys,
1:266–268
economic indicators, 1:489–494
Engel’s law, 1:528
longitudinal studies, 2:871–873
Measuring the environmental impact of
consumption, 1:535–537, 2:935–939
Mechanical solidarity, 1:481, 2:1034
Media. See also Broadcast media; Gender
and the media; Print media; Television
branding, 1:111–114, 116
childhood, 1:156
cultural fragmentation, 1:387
development of, 1:220
domestication, 3:1286
immigrants, 2:976
leisure, 2:842
McLuhan, 2:927–928
mobile analog gadgets, 2:978–980
poverty, 3:1139–1140
public sphere, 3:1179–1180
Silverstone, Roger, 3:1285–1286
spectacle, 3:1367–1368
women, 2:638–640
MEDIA 2007 program, 1:560
Media convergence and monopoly,
2:940–942
Media education, 1:126
Media literacy, 1:126
Medicine. See Alternative medicine
Medieval consumption, 2:942–946
Mehta, Lyla, 3:1247–1248
Mehta, Raj, 1:550
Meijer, Irene, 3:1461
Meiksins, Peter, 1:480
Meisel, Steven, 3:1408
Melitta Bentz, 1:184

Index
Melody Maker (magazine), 3:1109
Melon, Jean-François, 1:532
Melton, James Van Horn, 1:530
Melucci, Alberto, 3:1322, 1323, 1550
Memorials, 2:946–948, 1027
Memory, 2:949–951. See also Nostalgia;
Retro
cognitive structures, 1:189–190
collecting and collectibles, 1:194–196
collective, 2:947, 949, 950
cosmopolitan, 2:950
cultural, 2:950
inalienable wealth/possessions,
2:759–761
memorials, 2:947–948
social, 2:947–949
souvenirs, 3:1347–1348
types, 2:947, 950
Men. See also Gender; Masculinity
advertising, 2:637, 952
body, 2:951–952
hair care, 2:698
metrosexuality, 2:968–970
public and private space, 2:640–642
Menell, Stephen, 1:456
Menger, Carl, 1:323
Mengistu Haile Mariam, 2:579
Men’s Health (magazine), 2:900
Men’s magazines, 2:951–952
Mental accounting, 3:1338
Menzel, Herbert, 1:454, 2:1057
Mercer, Kobena, 2:754
Meredith, Geoffrey, 2:645
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2:695,
3:1132–1133, 1349, 1526
Merrilees, Bill, 3:1488–1489
Merton, Robert K., 1:45–46, 2:609, 836,
837, 963
Messerschmidt, James, 2:899
Messinger, Paul, 3:1253
Mestdag, Inge, 2:578
Mestrovic, Stjepan, 1:45
Metaphor, 1:13
Metapreferences, 3:1144
Methodological individualism, 2:999
Methodologies for studying consumer
culture, 2:953–960
attitude surveys, 1:69–70
audience research, 1:72–74
consumer culture comparisons,
1:227–229
consumer expenditure surveys,
1:266–268
consumer interviews, 1:272–274
content analysis, 1:353–355
conversation analysis, 1:362–364
discourse analysis, 1:461–463
diversity of, 2:953
econometrics, 1:486–489
economic psychology, 1:494–498
ethnography, 1:554–557
fields/objects of, 2:954
focus groups, 2:608–610
historical analysis, 2:720–721
income-related, 2:762–763

inequality measures, 2:772, 774
interpretive/qualitative, 2:958–960
Lazarsfeld, 2:836–837
Likert scales, 2:865–867
longitudinal studies, 2:871–873
loyalty card data, 3:1383–1385
mass observation, 2:907–909
motivation research, 2:1002–1004
multisited ethnography, 2:1014–1015
multivariate analysis, 2:1015–1022
opinion polls, 2:1058–1060
positivist/quantitative tradition,
2:955–958
qualitative vs. quantitative, 2:954
satisfaction measures, 2:929–931
spatial analysis, 3:1361–1364
standard of living measures,
2:932–934
surveys, 2:957–958, 3:1414–1417
time use data, 1:333–336
time-use diaries, 3:1456–1458
Methods of market research, 2:961–965,
3:1414–1417
context, 2:961–962
data mining, 1:365
databases, 1:423–425
ethnography, 2:964–965
focus groups, 2:963–964
mathematical text analysis, 1:365
motivation research, 2:1002–1004
multivariate analysis, 2:1015–1022
neuromarketing, 2:1040–1041
opinion polls, 2:1058–1060
recent trends, 2:964–965
spatial analysis, 3:1363–1364
surveys, 2:962–963
Métis, 3:1541
Metonymy, 1:13
Metropole, 2:965–968
Metropolis, 2:966
Metrosexual, 1:9, 2:952, 968–970,
3:1358
Metz, David, 1:25
Mexico, 3:1299, 1301
Meyer, Birgit, 1:54
Meyer, Eugene, 1:95
Meyersohn, Rolf, 2:583
Meyrowitz, Joshua, 1:221
Michael, George, 3:1408
Michael, Mike, 1:410
Michael I, Tsar of Russia, 3:1437
Michaux, Ernest, 1:95
Michaux, Pierre, 1:95
Micheletti, Michelle, 1:36, 297, 2:856
Michigan model, of voting behavior,
3:1512
Mick, David G., 1:259, 260
Microcomputers. See Home computer
Microelectronics, 2:783
Microsoft, 1:169, 2:740, 3:1151
Middle Ages. See Medieval consumption
Middle class
African Americans, 1:547–549
department stores, 1:436–437
disorganized capitalism, 1:466

1581

domestic labor, 1:472
global cities, 2:664–665
new, 2:861
Middleton, Richard, 3:1107
Migration, 2:970–976. See also Diaspora;
Immigrants
consumer culture, 2:970–976
defined, 2:970
factors, 2:970
locality, 2:871
urbanization, 3:1496–1497
Migros, 1:243
Miklitsch, Robert, 3:1502
Milan, Italy, 2:587
Miles, Clement, 1:161
Miles, Steven, 3:1548
Mill, John Stuart, 1:258, 533, 2:602,
708–709, 3:1144, 1245
Millennium Development Goals, 2:775
Miller, Arthur, 1:41
Miller, Daniel, 1:50, 52, 58–59, 145, 161,
166, 183, 203, 214, 429, 470,
553–554, 2:675, 680, 758, 790, 918,
960, 994, 996, 1033, 1054, 3:1086,
1115, 1283, 1301, 1354, 1358, 1398,
1421, 1455–1456, 1551
Miller, Montana, 3:1368
Miller, Vincent, 1:160
Millet, Kate, 2:603
Mills, C. Wright, 1:322, 376, 3:1311
Mimesis, 2:977–978, 3:1165, 1267. See also
Diffusion studies and trickle down;
Imitation
Minami, Kenzo, 3:1298
Minh, Ho Chi, 3:1116
Minitel system, 2:783
Minor, Michael, 1:259
Mintz, Sidney W., 1:55, 142, 229, 2:577,
3:1403
Mirrlees, James A., 2:878
Mirzeoff, Nicholas, 3:1509
Mises, Ludwig von, 1:239, 323
Mishra, Vijay, 1:105
Misrecognition, 3:1419, 1422
Misztal, Barbara, 3:1481
Mitchell, Arnold, 1:268, 2:713
Mitchell, Clyde, 3:1330
Mitchell, Daniel J. B., 2:830
Mitchell, Juliet, 2:629
Mitchell, W. J. T., 3:1509
Mittelman, James, 2:676–677
Mitterrand, Francois, 1:371
Mix, Tom, 2:825
Mobile commerce, 1:486
Mobile media gadgets of the analog age,
2:978–980. See also Walkmans
and iPods
Mobile phones, 2:981–982
Mobile technology, 2:808
Modern amateurism, 2:736–737
Modernism
aesthetics, 1:19, 20
design, 1:439
postmodernism vs., 3:1123–1128
radical, 3:1126

1582

Index

Modernity
Baudrillard, 1:89
Bollywood, 1:106
collecting and collectibles, 1:194–196
consumer culture, 2:984–985
consumption patterns, 1:352
dandyism, 1:422
disorganized capitalism, 1:466–467
fashion, 2:583–586
gender, 2:629
hyper-, 2:594
indigenization of, 2:675
individualization, 2:763–764, 986
late, 1:352
leisure, 2:839
nature, 1:464
objectification, 3:1088–1089
organic solidarity, 1:468
rail travel, 1:31
reflexive, 1:38, 2:854–855, 986,
3:1226, 1258
Simmel, 3:1287
theories, 3:1124–1125
urbanization, 3:1497
Modernization theory, 2:983–989
consumption, 2:984–989
criticisms, 2:983–984, 988–989
ecological modernization, 1:484,
540–541
origins, 2:983
Mods, 1:119–120, 2:581, 1071, 3:1214,
1394, 1547
Molas, 1:375
Molinari, Gustave de, 3:1198
Molnár, Virag, 1:547, 549
Molotch, Harvey, 2:1052, 3:1352
Monardes, Nicolas, 3:1458
Monbiot, George, 2:772, 774
Money, 2:990–995
Aristotle, 1:495
future research, 2:994–995
globalization, 2:672
historical perspective, 2:990–992
identity, 2:994
income, 2:761–763
indirect utility of, 1:504
marginal utility of, 1:504–505
markets, 2:994–995
national identity, 2:991
objectification, 3:1088–1089
romanticism of, 2:758
Simmel, 3:1287
theories, 2:993–994
types, 2:992–993
Monopoly. See Media convergence and
monopoly
Monsma, Charles, 1:263–264
Montague, Read, 2:1041
Montaigne, Michel de, 3:1306
Montchrétien, Antoyne de, 3:1101
Monte Carlo simulation method, 1:487
Monterosa, Federico, 3:1340
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,
Baron de La Brède et de, 1:171, 532,
2:875, 3:1530

Montreal Protocol, 2:668
Moods. See Consumer moods
Moor, Liz, 1:36, 390
Moore, Gordon E., 1:433
Moore, Henry L., 1:487
Moore’s Law, 1:433, 2:783
Moraga, Cherrie, 2:603
Moral economy, 2:996–997
Moral geography, 2:997–998
Moral panics, 2:1071
Moralities, 2:998–1002. See also Ethics;
Political and ethical consumption
commercialization, 1:210–212
commodification, 1:212
consumer education, 1:265
history of, in economics, 2:998–1000
noneconomic market factors,
2:1000–1002
sumptuary laws, 3:1403–1405
Mörck, Magnus, 1:410
More, Thomas, 1:368
Moreno, Jacob, 3:1330
Morgan, David, 2:748
Morgan, Henry, 1:122
Morgan, Kenneth, 1:143
Morgan, Kevin, 2:1067
Morgan, Robin, 2:603
Morley, David, 1:73, 222, 2:632, 3:1438
Morris, J. Andrew, 1:521
Morris, Meaghan, 1:165
Morris, William, 1:376, 439, 446, 2:911
Morrissey, 2:970
Morton, Timothy, 1:141, 144
MOSAIC database, 2:962
Mosca, Gaetano, 1:514
Mosco, Vincent, 2:790
Moser, Kath, 2:775
Moss, Kate, 3:1408
Moss, Lawrence, 2:921
Most-Favoured Nation standards,
3:1472–1473
Motion Picture Production Code (Hays
Code), 1:163
Motivation research, 2:1002–1004. See also
Preference formation
Moulian, Tomás, 1:251
Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), 1:241
Mouvement Anti-Utilitarieste dans les
Sciences Sociales (MAUSS), 2:887,
923
Mowen, John C., 1:259
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 3:1244
Mozilla Firefox, 3:1160
Mukerji, Chandra, 1:141, 522, 3:1428
Mulder, Karen, 3:1409
Muller, Adam, 2:991
Müller, Hans, 2:1067
Mullins, Patrick, 1:162
Mulrine, Anna, 3:1081
Multiattribute theories of attitude, 1:70–71
Multiculturalism, 2:1005–1008
Multidimensional scaling, 2:1020–1021
Multimedia messaging services (MMS),
2:981
Multinational Time Use Study, 3:1456

Multiple correspondence analysis,
2:1009–1013
Multiplier effect, 1:256–257
Multisited ethnography, 2:1014–1015
Multistage sampling, 3:1416
Multivariate analysis, 2:1015–1022
Multivariate analysis of variance
(MANOVA), 2:1017–1018
Mulvey, Laura, 1:395, 3:1509
Mumford, Lewis, 1:434, 3:1397
Mun, Thomas, 1:531
Muniz, Albert, 2:992
Munn, Nancy, 3:1088
Murcott, Anne, 1:456
Murphy, Robert, 2:595
Murray, Charles, 2:1043
Murray, Pauli, 2:603
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
3:1485
Museums, 1:194–195, 2:1052
Music, and authenticity, 1:75. See also
Popular music
Muslims. See Islam
Mussolini, Benito, 2:816–817
MySpace, 3:1160
Mysyk, Avis, 1:271
N Generation, 2:645
Nabokov, Vladimir, 2:1052
Nader, Ralph, 1:291, 327, 439, 3:1511
Nairn, Tom, 2:1025
Nakamura, Lisa, 2:807
Nally, Claire, 3:1368
NAMEA (National Accounting Matrices
including Environmental Accounts)
systems, 2:938
Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon
Narcissism, 2:835, 1023–1025
Narrative, 1:77
National Accounts of Well-Being, 3:1528
National Blood Policy Act (U.S., 1974),
2:1065
National Bureau of Economic Research,
1:490
National Commission on Technology,
Automation and American Progress
(1964–1966), 3:1121
National Consumer Leagues, 1:299, 2:633
National cultures, 2:1025–1029
belonging and community, 2:1026–1027
citizenship, 2:1027–1028
consumer nationalism, 1:279–281
consumption, 2:1028
Italian Fascism and fashion, 2:816–819
money, 2:991
national character, 2:1026
nationalism/patriotism, 2:1027
nation-state genesis, 2:1025–1026
research directions, 2:1028–1029
National Geographic (magazine), 2:1069
National Income and Product Account
(NIPA) Handbook, 1:490
National Institute for Agricultural Research
(INRA), 1:360
National memorials, 2:948

Index
National Organ and Transplant Act
(U.S., 1984), 2:1065
National Organization for Women (NOW),
2:603
National Recreation and Parks Association,
2:846
National Rifle Association, 2:667
National Treatment standards, 3:1472
Nationalism. See Consumer nationalism;
National cultures
Nation-building, 2:812
Nationwide (television program), 1:73
Native Americans, 2:993, 3:1541–1542
Nature
consumption of, 1:328–332
culture vs., 2:1031
modernity and, 1:464
Nava, Mica, 2:630
Navdanya, 1:300
Nayak, Anoop, 3:1552
Nearly new sales, 1:138
Needs and wants, 2:1029–1033
anthropological approach, 1:51
concepts of, 2:1029–1030, 1033
consumer durables, 1:262
creation of wants, 1:2
critical theory, 2:897
desire, 1:440
exchange and use value, 3:1501–1502
false consciousness/false needs,
2:569–570
hierarchy of needs, 2:712–714
marketing, 2:890–891
nature vs. culture, 2:1031
pros and cons, 2:1031–1032
satiation, 3:1245–1246
scarcity, 3:1246–1248
uses, 2:1032–1033
Negativland, 1:406
Negri, Antonio, 1:373, 398, 3:1119,
1126, 1502
Negus, Keith, 1:389–390
Neighborhoods, 3:1351–1352
Nelson, Laura, 1:248, 249
Nelson, Richard, 1:108
Nenadi, Oleg, 2:1013
Neoclassical economics
consumer choice, 1:239–240
rights and law, 1:315–316
Neoliberalism, 1:133, 307, 2:624, 700,
986–987, 3:1318, 1375, 1391,
1454–1455
Neo-Marxism, 1:540
Neo-tribes, 2:868, 1034–1036, 1035,
3:1110, 1549
Netherlands, 1:141, 162, 334–336
Network analysis, 1:501
Network society, 2:1036–1040. See also
Virtual communities
culture, 2:1038–1039
defined, 2:1037
future research, 2:1039–1040
information technology, 2:789
new economy, 2:1037–1038
Neuroeconomics, 1:496, 2:1040

Neuroimaging, 2:956, 965
Neuromarketing, 1:158, 2:1040–1041
New consumer society, 1:321
New Deal, 2:692–693, 3:1078
New economic sociology, 1:498, 501, 534
New Left, 1:393, 394, 2:570
New middle class, 2:861
New Musical Express (magazine), 3:1109
New philanthropy, 3:1085
New political culture, 1:169
New Right, 2:1042–1043
New social movements (NSMs), 3:1177,
1180
New Urbanism, 3:1399
New York, New York, 2:587
New York Sun (newspaper), 1:123–124
New Zealand, 2:1042
Newson, Marc, 3:1298
Newspapers, 1:123–124, 3:1149–1150.
See also Print media
Newton, Isaac, 3:1349
Newton, Stella Mary, 2:944, 945
Ngai, Pun, 1:283
Nice Agreement Concerning the
International Classification of Goods
and Services for the Purposes of the
Registration of Marks (1957), 3:1475
Niche products, 1:387
Nicholls, Alex, 2:567–569
Nichols, Dan, 1:13
Nichter, Mimi, 1:452, 452–453
Nickelodeons, 1:162
Nicole, Pierre, 2:884
Nicot, Jean, 3:1458
Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 1:162, 3:1090
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1:87, 2:658, 742,
828, 3:1289
Nigeria, 1:244, 245
Nightingale, Carl, 1:548
Nike, 1:406–407, 2:638, 922,
3:1297–1298, 1373
Nike Town, 3:1356–1357
Nine West, 3:1152
Nintendo GameBoy, 2:980
Nisbett, Richard, 2:682
Nixon, Richard, 1:193, 3:1334, 1366
Nixon, Sean, 1:389, 2:634
Nkrumah, Kwame, 3:1116
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
1:172, 2:667–669
Nonplaces, 2:674, 3:1342, 1516. See also
Spaces and places
Nora, Pierre, 2:948
Nordau, Max, 1:206
Nordgren, Loran, 1:189
Normal goods, 1:505, 527
North, Cecil, 3:1379
Northern Ireland, 1:206
Nostalgia, 2:1044–1046. See also
Memory; Retro
collecting and collectibles, 1:194–196
postmodernism, 3:1126
souvenirs, 3:1347–1348
toys, 3:1469
value, 3:1421

1583

Novack, Thomas, 2:682
Novak, Michael, 1:2
Novelty, 2:1046–1048
Nüesch, Stephan, 1:149
Nye, David, 3:1344
Oaxacan wood carvings, 1:375
Obama, Barack, 3:1367, 1368
Obesity, 1:102, 451–453, 2:1049–1050
Object biographies, 2:1051–1054. See also
Collecting and collectibles; Inalienable
wealth/inalienable possessions;
Material culture
actor-network theory, 1:3–5
commodification, 1:213
souvenirs, 3:1348
Object relations, 2:755
Objectification, 3:1086–1089
Objectivist pluralism, 3:1186
Objectivist theories, 3:1186
O’Brien, Karen, 1:409
Obsession, 2:1055–1056
Occupational prestige, 3:1379–1381
O’Connor, James, 1:540
O’Dell, Tom, 1:557
O’Donnell, Owen, 2:933
O’Dougherty, Maureen, 1:250
OECD. See Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development
Oedipus complex, 3:1163, 1460, 1461
Office of Harmonization for the Internal
Market, 3:1475
Office of Price Administration, 2:831
Office of Radio Research, Columbia
University, 2:837
O’Guinn, Thomas, 2:992
Oldenburg, Ray, 1:186, 3:1182
Olive, Sarah, 2:578
Oliver, Richard L., 1:259
Olivier brothers (bicyclists), 1:95
Olympic Games, 3:1371–1372
O’Mahoney, Marie, 1:410–411
O’Malley, Pat, 3:1454
O’Neal, Shaquille, 1:337
One-dimensional society, 2:885, 898, 907,
3:1129, 1210
One Society, 2:775
Oosterveer, Peter, 2:857
Opel, Charlotte, 2:567–569
Open-ended interviews, 2:959. See also
Unstructured interviews
Open-source movement, 2:807
Opinion leaders, 2:1057–1058
Opinion polls, 2:837, 962–963,
1058–1060, 3:1414. See also Surveys
Opium trade, 1:122, 2:1060–1062, 3:1436
Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860),
1:122
Oppenheim, Meret, 3:1412
Opportunity costs, 1:504
Optical unconscious, 3:1091
Optimal choice, 1:503
Orality, 3:1277
Orbach, Susie, 1:90
Orbell, Sheina, 3:1238

1584

Index

Ordinary consumption, 2:1062–1064
Orford, Jim, 1:6
Organ and blood donations, 2:1064–1066
Organ Procurement and Transplantation
Network, 2:1065
Organic food, 2:1066–1067
Organic solidarity, 1:468, 481, 2:1034
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD), 1:294,
526, 538, 539, 542, 2:762, 784,
3:1095, 1376
Organisation for European Economic
Co-operation, 1:192
Organizational analysis, 1:501
Organizational fields, 3:1156
Organizational structures, 3:1156
Organized capitalism, 1:465–466
Orientalism, 1:58, 2:1068–1070,
1070–1071, 3:1116–1117,
1478–1479
Orléan, André, 1:358, 359
Orwell, George, 1:32, 3:1201, 1254
Osgerby, Bill, 3:1547
Ostrom, Elinor, 3:1247
Othering, 2:1070–1072
colonialism, 1:206, 207
Orientalism, 2:1068–1071
Otnes, Cele C., 3:1231, 1524–1525
Ottoson, Erik, 1:557
Ouellette, Laurie, 2:686
Outsourcing, 2:1072–1074
companies as consumers, 1:224,
226–227
discount stores, 1:458–459
Overindebtedness, 1:427–428
Overweight, 2:1049
Oxfam, 1:145, 196–197
Packaging, 2:891, 3:1075–1077
Packard, Vance, 1:322, 349, 439, 2:639,
3:1095, 1129, 1421
Paddock, Christopher, 1:36
Page, Stephen, 3:1463
Pahl, Ray E., 1:199, 2:621
Paid informal work, 1:474, 2:776
Pakistan, 1:205
Palestinians, 2:1028
Paley, Mary, 2:894
Palmer, Gareth, 2:686
Palmer, Sue, 1:157
Palmer, Volney, 1:124
Panayi, Panikos, 2:613
Panel Study on Income Dynamics, 2:873
Panel surveys, 2:872, 963
Panopticism, 1:423–425
Pantzar, Mika, 3:1455–1456
Papanek, Victor, 3:1095
Paper assets, 1:493
Paramount Decree (1948), 1:163
Paramount Pictures, 1:163
Parekh, Bhikhu, 2:1008
Parenting, 1:472
Pareto, Vilfredo, 1:257, 498, 500, 514
Pareto efficiencies, 1:507
Parfit, Derek, 3:1185–1186

Paris, France, 2:586–587, 606, 3:1198
Paris Convention for the Protection of
Industrial Property (1883), 3:1474
Paris Uprising (1968), 3:1365
Park, Han, 3:1330
Park, Lisa Sun-Hee, 1:550
Park, Robert E., 1:552, 2:656, 3:1494, 1498
Parkan, Celik, 1:510
Parker, Simon, 3:1498
Parks, 2:846
Parsons, Talcott, 1:167, 499, 500, 501,
2:994, 3:1155, 1236
Participation surveys, 2:840–841
Partner, Simon, 1:247
Pascoe, C. J., 2:901
Pasha, Isma’il, 1:205
Passeron, Jean-Claude, 1:381, 382
Passports, 2:1027
Pasteur, Louis, 2:615
Pastimes, 3:1206
Patai, Raphael, 1:182
Pathé Frères Company, 1:163
Patrick, Vanessa M., 2:604
Patriotism, 2:1027
Patten, Simon Nelson, 1:349, 3:1078
Pattillo-McCoy, Mary, 1:548, 550
Paul (apostle), 1:159
Paulus, Martin, 1:278
Pavoni Company, 1:184
Peace education, 1:265
Peace of Westphalia (1648), 3:1103, 1124
Peacham, Henry, 2:690
Peak experiences, 2:902–903
Pearson, Karl, 1:487, 2:1017
Pears soap, 1:207
Pei, I. M., 1:371
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 1:219, 3:1265
Peixotto, Jessica, 2:831
Pellegrino, E. D., 2:706
Pemberton, John S., 1:181
Penny press, 1:123–124, 3:1150
Pepsi, 1:182, 2:1041
Perceived behavioral control, 3:1453
Perceptual mapping, 2:1020–1021
Peretti, Jonah, 1:406–407
Performing arts/performance arts,
3:1079–1080. See also Popular music
Perfume, 2:891
Perinbanayagam, Robert, 3:1257
Perkins, Frances, 3:1078
Permit rationing, 3:1199
Perrot, Phillippe, 2:723
Perroux, François, 3:1306
Personal computers (PCs). See Home
computer
Personal growth movement, 2:902
Personality traits, 1:278
Personals/personal ads, 3:1081–1083
Pertschuk, Michael, 1:291
Peters, Peter Frank, 1:31
Peterson, Herbert, 1:74
Peterson, Paul E., 1:199
Peterson, Richard, 1:75, 391–392, 3:1109,
1154–1156, 1205, 1317
Petrini, Carlo, 3:1292

Petroski, Henry, 2:1052
Petty, William, 2:689, 691
Pham, Michel Tuan, 1:276–277
Phenomenology, 3:1132–1133
Philanthrocapitalism, 3:1085
Philanthropy, 3:1083–1085. See also
Charities; Gifts and reciprocity
Philips, 1:417
Phillips, Ruth, 3:1347
Philosophy, 3:1085–1089
Philpott, Thomas, 2:656
Phoenix, Arizona, 1:464
Phone Co-op (United Kingdom), 1:241
Phone sex, 1:16
Photographic elicitation interviews, 3:1092
Photography and video, 1:87, 3:1090–1092
Piaget, Jean, 1:155, 318, 3:1469
Pickering, Andrew, 3:1450
Pickett, Kate, 2:774
Pierce, Jennifer, 1:520
Piercing, body, 1:8
Pigou, Arthur C., 2:878, 894
Pilgrimage, 2:688, 943–944
Pin money, 2:992, 3:1338
Pine, B. Joseph, II, 1:412–413, 419
Pine, Joseph, 1:75
Pink, Sarah, 2:631
Pink pounds/dollars, 3:1092–1094,
1189–1190
Pinochet, Augusto, 1:251
Piranesi, Giambattista, 2:691
Pissarides, Christopher, 2:830
Pitt, William, the Younger, 3:1436
PK (designer), 3:1298
Place. See Nonplaces; Spaces and places
Planet Hollywood, 3:1356
Planned behavior. See Theory of planned
behavior
Planned obsolescence, 1:263, 349,
3:1095–1096. See also Product
life cycles
Plassmann, Hilke, 3:1145
Plastic surgery. See Cosmetic surgery
Plato, 1:149, 440, 441, 467, 518, 2:683,
874, 977, 3:1255, 1265, 1288, 1507
Pleasure. See Hedonism
Pleck, Elizabeth H., 3:1231, 1524–1525
Pletsch, Carl, 2:1071
Plog, Stanley, 2:915
Plotinus, 2:683
Plumb, J. H., 1:310
Point of sale. See Electronic point of sale
(EPOS)
Points rationing, 3:1199
Poland, 1:172
Polanyi, Karl, 1:131, 288, 500, 2:996,
3:1247
Political and ethical consumption,
3:1097–1100. See also Consumer
protest entries; Moralities; Responsible
consumption
alternative consumption, 1:35–37
anticapitalism, 1:299–301
apathy, 1:235–236
Body Shop, 1:103–104

Index
consumer durables, 1:263
consumer education, 1:264–265
criticisms, 3:1217–1219
discursive consumerism, 3:1098
eco-labeling, 1:484
fair trade, 2:567–569
geography, 2:649–650
historical instances, 3:1097
individual vs. social approaches, 2:859
key issues, 3:1097–1098
lifestyle consumerism, 3:1098
life(style) politics vs., 2:856–857
moral economy, 2:997
moral geography, 2:997–998
organic food, 2:1066–1067
responsible consumption,
3:1217–1219
sugar and the slave trade, 1:143–144
theoretical and empirical investigations,
3:1098–1100
Political economy, 3:1101–1104
defined, 3:1101
emergence, 3:1101–1102
geography, 2:648–649
order and control, 3:1103
places, 3:1352
power, 3:1102–1103
Political science, 3:1104–1106
Politics. See also Democracy; Political and
ethical consumption; Political
economy
advertising, 1:14
bio-, 2:685
cinema, 1:163
cultural fragmentation, 1:387
delocalization, 1:432
globalization, 2:855
historical analysis, 2:721
identity, 2:1006–1007
identity politics, 2:670, 753–754
life(style) politics, 2:854–860
neuroimaging, 2:1041
new political culture, 1:169
New Right, 2:1042–1043
opinion leaders, 2:1057
rights, 1:167–168
risk society, 3:1227
spectacle, 3:1366–1367
transnational capitalism, 3:1480
voting behaviors, 3:1511–1514
Pope, Harrison G., 2:900
Popkin, Barry, 2:1050
Poppe, Christian, 1:428
Popular culture. See also Mass culture
(Frankfurt School); Youth culture
cultural mixing, 2:673
fans, 2:581–583
franchising, 2:618
Glastonbury/Woodstock, 2:661–663
jeans, 2:825
style, 3:1390–1391
women’s magazines, 2:599–601
Popular music, 3:1107–1110. See also
Performing arts/performance arts
Adorno, 2:904–905

consumption, 3:1109–1110
defining, 3:1107, 1110
fans, 2:581–583
future research, 3:1110
Glastonbury/Woodstock, 2:661–663
Internet, 3:1110
portability, 2:980
production, 3:1108–1109
resistance, 3:1214
Walkmans and iPods, 3:1515–1517
youth culture, 3:1550–1551
Porat, Marc Uri, 2:784–785
Porcelain, 3:1111–1113
Porges, Stephen, 3:1234–1235
Pornography, 3:1278
Portable music devices. See Walkmans
and iPods
Portal sites, 1:486
Porter, Amy, 2:1028
Porter, Michael, 2:1047
Porter, Roy, 1:140
Portugal, 1:249–250
Positional goods, 3:1113–1115, 1503
Positive buying, 1:302
Positivist research, 2:954–958
Positivity bias, 2:930
Postcolonial theory, 1:208, 3:1115–1117
contemporary debates, 3:1117
cultural studies, 1:399
Gramsci, 2:711
Marxist theory, 3:1116
Orientalism, 3:1116–1117
Postcolonialism, 3:1478
Poster, Mark, 1:423, 425
Postfeminism, 2:604, 637
Post-Fordism, 3:1117–1121. See also
Postindustrial society
capitalist development, 1:132–133,
3:1197
characteristics, 2:912–913,
3:1118–1119
contexts/environments, 3:1120–1121
cultural fragmentation, 1:387, 2:912
databases, 1:424
emotional labor, 3:1119–1120
Fordism vs., 3:1117–1118
immigrants, 2:975
individualization, 2:767
industrial society, 2:770
informal economy, 2:777
information society, 2:784, 786
resistance, 3:1216
service industry, 3:1271–1275
Postindustrial society, 2:770, 784, 788,
3:1121–1123, 1271–1275. See also
Post-Fordism
Postman, Neil, 1:156
Postmaterialism. See Materialism and
postmaterialism
Postmodern research, 2:954
Postmodernism, 3:1123–1130
advertising, 1:12
air travel, 1:31
autoethnography, 1:77
clubbing, 1:179–181

1585

collective identity, 1:201–202
commodification of culture, 1:17–18
consumer culture, 2:984
consumption, 3:1128–1130
consumption patterns, 2:731–732
cultural fragmentation, 1:386–388
cultural intermediaries, 1:389
cultural studies, 1:404
defining, 3:1123–1128
global cities, 2:663–665
Hinduism, 2:718
information society, 2:785–786
Lyotard, 2:880
modernism vs., 3:1123–1128
neo-tribes, 2:1034
nostalgia, 2:1046
nostalgic/revisionist, 3:1126
origins, 1:222, 2:880
radical, 3:1127
research approaches, 2:954
sacred and profane, 3:1243–1244
shopping, 3:1285
strategic, 3:1126–1127
Postnational citizenship, 2:856. See also
World citizenship
Postpositivist research, 2:954
Postrel, Virginia I., 1:349
Postsocialist consumption
China, 1:337–340
Eastern Europe, 1:341–345
Post-structuralism, 3:1131–1135
anorexia theories, 1:48–49
Barthes, 3:1134
characteristics, 3:1131–1132
cultural studies, 1:396
Derrida and deconstruction, 3:1135
existentialism, 3:1133
Foucault, 3:1134–1135
linguistics, 3:1132
phenomenology, 3:1132–1133
psychoanalysis, 3:1133–1134
Potlatch, 2:659–660, 922, 3:1136–1138
Potter, David, 2:667
Poulain, Jean-Pierre, 2:613
Pountain, Dick, 1:365
Poverty, 3:1138–1142. See also
Inequalities
ghettos, 2:656
measurement of, 3:1376–1377
social exclusion, 3:1319–1320
state provisioning, 3:1375–1379
subaltern, 3:1391
Povrzanovic, Maja, 1:556
Power
consumer regulation, 1:306, 308
informational capital, 2:793
places, 3:1352–1353
political economy, 3:1102–1103
production-consumption chains,
2:856–857
symbolic violence, 3:1422–1423
Power dressing, 2:633–634
Power/knowledge, 3:1127
Powers, Madelon, 3:1182
PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), 2:875

1586

Index

Practice theory. See Theories of practice
Pragmatics, 1:461–462
Prandy, Kenneth, 3:1381–1382
Pratt, Geraldine, 2:833
Predatory pricing, 3:1152
Preference formation, 3:1142–1145. See also
Consumer (freedom of) choice;
Decision making; Motivation
research; Taste
behavioral economics, 1:508–509
consumer demand, 1:257
consumer research, 3:1142–1143
context as factor, 3:1143
economic theory, 1:503
neuromarketing, 2:1040–1041
policy implications, 3:1144–1145
revealed preferences, 1:504
theory of planned behavior,
3:1452–1453
types of preferences, 3:1144
utility, 1:503–504
Prendergast, Gerard, 3:1076
Presidential Commission on the Year 2000
(1966–1968), 3:1121
Press. See Print media
Press, Andrea, 3:1203, 1300
Price, Linda L., 2:575, 759
Price and price mechanisms, 3:1145–1146.
See also Product loss leaders
Princen, Thomas, 1:540
Princeton Radio Research Project, 2:837
Principal component analysis, 2:1019
Print capitalism, 2:1027
Print media, 1:220, 3:1147–1151
capitalism, 2:1027, 3:1148
Enlightenment, 1:530
magazines, 3:1150–1151
men’s magazines, 2:951–952
newspapers, 3:1149–1150
origins, 3:1147
public sphere, 3:1178
teenage magazines, 3:1438–1439
Western history, 3:1147–1149
women’s magazines, 2:599–601,
3:1531–1532
Private sphere. See Gendering of public and
private space
Privatization, 2:795–796
PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip
Marketers), 2:864
Probability sampling, 2:1058–1059, 3:1416
Probyn, Elspeth, 1:411
Producer market model, 1:501
Product life cycles, 1:262–263, 347–349,
2:1048, 3:1095–1096
Product loss leaders, 3:1151–1152
Product placements, 3:1153–1154
Product policies, 2:937–938
Production cycles. See Cycles of production
and consumption
Production of consumption, 1:166
Production of culture, 3:1154–1157.
See also Culture industries
Adorno, 1:9–10
omnivores, 1:391–392

Production studies, 3:1157
Product-service systems, 1:263
Prognathism, 1:206
Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el
Desarrollo, 1:251
Progress, 3:1305–1306
Progressive Movement, 2:633
Prohibition (U.S.), 3:1295
Promotional culture, 3:1157–1159,
1513–1514. See also Celebrity
Pronger, Brian, 3:1526
Property rights, 2:718
Proprioception, 3:1270
Prosperity theology, 1:160
Prostitution, 3:1277–1278. See also
Sex tourism
Prosumption, 1:38, 38–39, 149, 2:784, 807,
890, 941, 3:1160–1161
Protestant ethic, 1:67–68, 132, 523, 2:709,
721, 3:1125, 1161–1162, 1283–1284,
1338, 1523
Proust, Marcel, 1:93, 2:950
Prout, Alan, 1:155
Provision of goods. See State provisioning;
Systems of provision
Przeclawski, Krzysztof, 3:1465
Pseudo individualization, 2:897, 905, 3:1108
Psychoanalysis, 3:1163–1166
consumer culture, 3:1165–1166
Freud, 2:619–620, 3:1163–1165
identity, 2:754–755
interpellation, 2:810
motivation, 2:1003
nostalgia, 2:1044
obsession, 2:1055–1056
Psychobiology, 2:956–957, 965
Psychographics, 3:1165
Psychology, 3:1166–1174. See also
Economic psychology; Psychoanalysis
attitude surveys, 1:69–70
attitude theories, 1:70–72
behaviorist approach, 3:1167
cognitive structures, 1:187–191
collective identity, 1:201
consumer anxiety, 1:233–235
consumer apathy, 1:235–237
consumer behavior, 1:237–238
consumer dissatisfaction, 1:259–260
consumer moods, 1:274–278
discursive, 1:460
dynamicist approach, 3:1167
hierarchy of needs, 2:712–714
Maslow, 2:902–903
mentalist approach, 3:1167
narcissism, 2:1023–1025
obsession, 2:1055–1056
post-structuralism, 3:1133–1134
psychobiology, 2:956–957
self-interest, 3:1255
sustainability, 3:1172–1173
theory of planned behavior,
3:1452–1453
unconscious in consumer culture,
3:1169–1172
Public broadcasting, 1:125

Public choice theory, 1:240
Public goods, 3:1175–1177
characteristics, 3:1175
collective consumption, 1:198–200
consumer awareness, 3:1176–1177
consumer choice, 1:240–241
global, 3:1175–1176
provision of, 3:1176
social/political factors, 3:1175–1176
Public houses, 1:62–63. See also Pubs and
wine bars
Public opinion research. See Opinion polls
Public policy
families, 2:572–573
inequalities, 2:774–775
informal economy, 2:779
Public sphere, 3:1177–1181, 1182.
See Gendering of public and private space
Pubs and wine bars, 1:62–63,
3:1181–1183. See also Coffee shops;
Dining out
Pugh, Allison, 3:1205
Pulp biographies, 2:906
Puma, 3:1297–1298
Punk subculture, 1:68, 119, 2:581, 698,
3:1109, 1214–1215, 1222, 1390,
1394, 1552
Purchasing, company. See Companies as
consumers
Purchasing power parities (PPP), 2:762
Putnam, Robert, 1:561, 2:1039–1040,
3:1129, 1325, 1481, 1510
Putney, Norella M., 2:852
Pybus, Jennifer, 3:1160
Pyrex, 2:803–804
Pythagoras, 1:149
Qualitative research, 1:273, 2:954,
958–960
Quality of life, 3:1185–1187. See also
Happiness; Measuring standards of
living; Standards of living; Well-being
Quant, Mary, 2:587
Quantitative research, 2:954–958
Quasi-rationing, 3:1199
Queer theory, 2:603, 3:1187–1191
Questionnaires. See Surveys
Quetelet, Adolfe, 1:528
Quintilian, 1:219
Quisumbing, Agnes, 2:744
Quota sampling, 2:963, 1059, 3:1416
Rabelais, Francois, 1:84, 3:1216
Rabin, Matthew, 1:495
Rabobank, 1:243
Race. See Ethnicity/race
Radio, 1:124–125, 3:1193–1195
content, 3:1194
current issues, 3:1194–1195
debates over, 3:1194
innovation, 2:802
message, 3:1194
portability, 2:979
technology, 3:1193–1194
Radio Free Europe, 1:193

Index
Radio frequency identification (RFID),
3:1151
Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures,
1:163
Radway, Janice, 2:632, 3:1203, 1215
Rae, John, 2:878
Raghunathan, Rajagopal, 1:277
Rail travel. See Air and rail travel
Rainforest Alliance, 2:567
Raleigh, Walter, 1:122, 3:1458
Ramsay, Nissa, 3:1348
Ramsey, E. Michele, 2:639
Ramsey, Frank P., 2:878
Rand, Ayn, 3:1255
Random sampling, 3:1416
Ranger, Terence, 2:811
Rao, Shakuntala, 1:105
Rapaille, Clotaire, 1:182, 3:1266
Raphael, 2:683
Rappaport, Erika, 3:1437
Rasch two-parameter logistic model, 1:69
Rational capitalism, 1:500
Rational choice theories. See also Decision
making
addiction, 1:6
bounded rationality, 1:106–108
consumer choice, 1:239–240
consumer demand, 1:257
disembodiment, 1:518
purchasing analysis, 1:225
theory of planned behavior,
3:1452–1453
voting behaviors, 3:1512
Rational recreation, 3:1207
Rationalization, 2:570, 674, 924, 3:1178,
1195–1197, 1523
Rationing, 3:1197–1200
Rawls, John, 1:239, 294, 2:828
Raymond, Alex, 1:209
Raymond, Henri, 2:665
Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 1:529
Read, Piers Paul, 3:1242
Reading, 2:632
Reagan, Ronald, 1:111, 327, 2:1042, 1043
Real estate, race and, 2:656–657
Realism, 1:75
Reality. See Hyperreality
Reality TV, 1:151, 3:1200–1202, 1367
Reappropriation, 1:429–430
Reason. See also Rationalization
Enlightenment, 1:529–532
Kant, 2:827–828
Reason analysis, 2:836
Reay, Diane, 2:696, 697, 3:1313
Reception theory, 3:1202–1205. See also
Audience research
Reciprocal Tariff Act (U.S., 1934),
3:1471
Reciprocity. See Gifts and reciprocity
Reclaim the Streets, 3:1217
Recognition, ethical, 2:1005
Recreation, 3:1206–1208. See also
Hobbyists and amateurs; Leisure;
Sports
Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), 1:241

Recycling. See Reuse/recycling
Redlining, 2:657
Reebok, 3:1297–1299
Rees, Phil, 3:1364
Reference point (economics), 1:508–509
Reflexive individualism, 2:764–766
Reflexive modernity, 1:38, 2:854–855, 986,
3:1226, 1258
Reflexivity, environmental, 1:329–331
Regan, Tom, 1:298
Regression analysis, 1:488, 2:1015–1016
Regulation. See Consumer regulation
Regulation theory, 1:359
Reich, Wilhelm, 3:1118
Reid, Margaret, 2:832
Reification, 2:570, 897, 3:1209–1211
Reimer, Suzanne, 2:647
Reith, Gerda, 1:271–272
Relationship marketing, 2:887
Relativization, 1:44
Reliability, of surveys, 2:866–867
Religion
asceticism, 1:67–68
capitalism, 1:132
Christianity, 1:158–160
consumption control, 1:54
gift exchange, 2:658–659
Hinduism, 2:717–718
Islam, 2:814–815
pilgrimages, 2:943–944
political economy vs., 3:1101–1102
sacred and profane, 3:1241–1244
science vs., 3:1241
totemism, 3:1460–1461
Remittances, 2:674–675, 972
Renan, Ernest, 2:1027
Renewable resources, 3:1211–1213. See also
Sustainability
Renner, Karl, 3:1311
Rental goods. See Hire-purchase and
rental goods
Repeated cross-sectional surveys, 2:872
Representative sampling, 2:1058–1059
Repressive de-sublimation, 2:885,
3:1281–1282
Research Committee on Leisure (RC13),
International Sociological Association,
2:847–848
Resistance, 3:1213–1217. See also
Consumer protest entries; Subversion
bricolage, 1:119–120
consumer culture as site of,
3:1215–1216
consumer culture as target of,
3:1213–1215
consumer education, 1:265
coolness, 1:365
cultural studies, 3:1216–1217
de Certeau, 1:426
eighteenth-century Britain, 1:310–313
ethnicity/race, 1:547
Frankfurt School on impossibility of,
2:885, 905–907
globalization, 2:676
glocalization, 2:678–682

1587

spaces and places, 3:1350
subcultures, 2:810
T-shirts, 3:1484
Re-skilling. See De-skilling, re-skilling, and
up-skilling
Responsible consumption, 3:1217–1219.
See also Alternative consumption;
Political and ethical consumption
Restaurants, 1:456–457
Retail architecture, 1:62–64
Retirement, 3:1219–1221. See also Age and
aging
Retro, 3:1222–1223. See also Nostalgia
Retrospective cross-sectional surveys, 2:872
Reuse/recycling, 1:139, 3:1223–1225.
See also Secondhand goods; Waste
Revealed preference approach, 1:489
Reverse product placement, 3:1154
Review, The (magazine), 3:1150
Revue Économique (journal), 1:359
Re-Westernization, 1:341
Rexford, Nancy, 3:1297
Reynolds, Joshua, 2:689
Reynolds, Kristy, 3:1489
Rheingold, Howard, 2:981, 3:1504–1505
Rhetoric, 1:219
Ricardo, David, 1:22
Ricciardelli, Lina, 1:452
Rich, Adrienne, 2:603
Richemont, 2:875
Ridgway, Nancy, 1:270
Ridolfi, Carlo, 2:691
Riesman, David, 1:318, 3:1129
Rifkin, Jeremy, 2:1048, 3:1526
Rifon, Nora J., 1:150
Rights, 1:167–168. See also Consumer
rights and the law
Riis, Jacob, 1:41
Ringen, Stein, 3:1377
Risk
economic theory, 1:506–507
realist vs. sociocultural perspectives,
3:1226
Risk society, 3:1225–1229
consumption, 3:1229
criticisms, 3:1228–1229
environmental studies, 1:541–542
theoretical context, 3:1226–1228
trust, 3:1481
Rites of passage, 1:154–155, 3:1232–1233,
1524
Rituals, 3:1230–1233
animal welfare, 1:298
consumption-oriented, 3:1230–1231,
1340–1341
elements of, 3:1230–1231
gift giving, 3:1231–1232
holidays and special occasions, 3:1232
immigrants, 2:972–973
liminality, 2:868–869
potlatch, 3:1136–1138
research trends, 3:1233
rites of passage, 3:1232–1233
shopping-related, 3:1357
weddings, 3:1524–1525

1588

Index

Ritzer, George, 1:50, 104, 149, 187,
202, 339, 445, 2:674, 680, 926,
1037, 3:1160–1161, 1197, 1342,
1366, 1523
Rival goods, 3:1175
Rivera, Lauren, 3:1317
Road system, 1:134–135
Robbins, Lionel, 3:1246
Robbins, Peter, 3:1478
Robert of Normandy, 2:944
Robertson, Roland, 1:385, 2:671,
678–679, 3:1371
Robins, David, 1:365
Robinson, Mike, 3:1465
Robinson, William, 3:1480
Rochberg-Halton, Eugene, 2:1051, 1054
Rochdale Pioneers, 1:242
Rock, Paul, 1:428
Rock music, 3:1214
Roddick, Anita, 1:103
Rodman, Dennis, 3:1373
Roebuck, Alvah Curtis, 3:1249
Rogers, Everett M., 1:454, 455, 2:1058,
3:1330
Rogers, Richard, 3:1399
Rogers, Roy, 2:825
Rohm and Haas Company, 2:802
Rojek, Chris, 3:1464
Rokkan, Stein E., 3:1512
Rolling Stone (magazine), 3:1109
Romance novels, 2:632, 3:1215
Romance of the Rose, 2:944–945
Romanticism, 1:19, 2:709, 757–758, 1069,
3:1523
Romantic love, 3:1234–1235
origins, 3:1276
personal ads, 3:1081–1083
women, 2:630
Romany, 2:1029
Rome, 1:1
Ronaldo, 2:668
Rook, Dennis, 3:1230–1231
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 2:692
Roper, Elmo, 2:962–963, 1058
Rose, Axl, 3:1408
Rose, Nikolas, 1:308, 2:754, 755
Roseborough, Howard, 1:318
Rosemeijer, Frank, 1:225
Rosie the Riveter, 1:368–369
Rosman, Abraham, 3:1136–1137
Ross, Andrew, 1:330
Ross, Don, 1:271
Rostow, Walt Whitman, 2:983, 988,
3:1129, 1236–1237
Roubini, Nouriel, 1:509
Rouse, Elizabeth, 2:584
Rouse, Joseph, 3:1450
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1:370, 440, 529,
532, 2:723, 772, 774, 883, 1031
Routines and habits, 2:1062,
3:1237–1239
Rowling, J. K., 2:807
Rowntree, Seebohm, 1:266, 3:1377
Rowntree’s, 1:230
Roy, Robin, 3:1212

Royal African Company, 1:122
Rubel, Paula G., 3:1136–1137
Rubin, Gayle, 2:603, 629
Rummage sales, 1:138
Rundh, Bo, 3:1077
Rush, Benjamin, 1:6
Rush, Hans-Peter, 2:1067
Rushdie, Salman, 2:670, 1006, 1008
Ruskin, John, 1:376
Ruspini, Elisabetta, 2:872
Russell, David, 3:1371
Russia, 2:646, 3:1221, 1437
Ruth, Julie A., 3:1231, 1233, 1358
Ruthven, Phil, 2:1074, 3:1264
Rutter, Jason, 1:511–512
Ryan, Bryce, 1:453–454, 2:1058
Ryan, Chris, 3:1464
Ryan, Michael, 2:739
Rybczynski, Witold, 2:1052
Ryle, Gilbert, 3:1448
Sachs, Wolfgang, 1:330
Sack, Robert, 2:647
Sacks, Harvey, 1:362–363
Sacred and profane, 3:1241–1244
Safeway, 3:1406
Safran, William, 1:447
Sahlins, Marshall, 1:400, 2:887, 3:1247
Said, Edward, 1:58, 208, 399,
2:1068–1071, 3:1116–1117, 1131,
1478–1479
Saint Laurent, Yves, 3:1391
Salais, Robert, 1:358, 359, 361
Sale, Laura, 3:1172–1173
Sallaz, Jeffrey J., 1:520
Sallust, 2:874
Salons, 1:531, 3:1178, 1303, 1432
Salvage paradigm, 2:1069
Salvori, Francesco, 2:816
Salzman, Amy, 1:479
Samers, Michael, 2:779
Sampling, 1:354, 2:957–958, 962–963,
1058–1059, 3:1416–1417
Sampling error, 2:1059
Samuelson, Paul A., 1:257
San Blas Cuna molas, 1:375
Sandel, Michael, 1:137, 2:1028
Sandikci, Ozlem, 3:1357
Sandlin, Jennifer A., 1:265
Sandvoss, Cornel, 2:582
Sanne, Christer, 1:480
Sans-culottes, 1:531
Santa Claus, 1:161–162
Santiago de Compostella, Spain, 2:944
Sara, Rod, 3:1076
Saris, William, 2:1060
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 1:169, 2:1029
Sarpavaara, Harri, 1:68
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1:88, 108, 441, 443,
3:1086, 1132, 1133, 1448
Sassatelli, Roberta, 1:35, 36, 37, 153, 203,
429, 430, 534, 2:634, 755,
1030–1031, 1033, 3:1428
Sassen, Saskia, 3:1494
Satellite television, 1:126

Satiation, 3:1245–1246
Satisfaction. See Consumer dissatisfaction;
Measuring satisfaction
Satisfizers, 3:1166
Saunders, Peter, 1:199
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1:86, 89, 220, 396,
401, 3:1132, 1265, 1267, 1268,
1386–1387
Savage, Mike, 1:199, 3:1310, 1313
Saving
psychology of, 1:496–497
thrift and, 3:1454–1456
Sawyer, Alan G., 2:955
Say’s law, 2:828
Scanlon, Jennifer, 1:476
Scapes, 3:1351–1352
Scarcity, 3:1246–1248
Scavenging, 3:1224
Schäfer, Martina, 3:1238
Schama, Simon, 1:141, 2:721
Schatzki, Theodore, 1:543, 3:1449
Schatzman, Leonard, 1:552
Schegloff, Emmanuel, 1:362
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 1:19
Schelling, Thomas, 3:1144
Schemata, 1:190–191
Schenkenberg, Marcus, 3:1409
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 2:1065
Schewe, Charles, 2:645
Schiffer, Claudia, 3:1408–1409
Schifferstein, Hendrik N. J., 1:188
Schiffman, Leon, 3:1076
Schiller, Friedrich, 3:1431
Schindler, Robert, 2:646
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 1:31, 141
Schlegel, Friedrich, 1:19
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 3:1303
Schlink, F. J., 1:325
Schmalenbach, Herman, 2:1035
Schmalz, Bill, 1:406
Schöffer, Peter, 3:1148
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1:20, 368
Schor, Juliet, 1:26, 320, 333, 335, 344,
349, 356, 408, 479, 538, 2:921,
3:1341, 1533
Schroeder, Jonathan, 1:464, 2:789,
3:1508, 1509
Schudson, Michael, 1:37, 153
Schultz, Henry, 1:487
Schultz, Howard, 1:186
Schulz, Charles, 1:209
Schulz, Jeremy, 1:516
Schumacher, E. F., 1:23, 434
Schumann, David, 3:1166
Schumpeter, Joseph, 1:2, 129, 417, 499,
533, 2:801, 1047, 3:1306
Schutz, Alfred, 1:362
Schwabe, Heinrich, 1:528
Schwabe’s law, 1:528
Schwartz, Barry, 2:948, 3:1166
Schwartz, Hillel, 2:635
Schwartz, Jordan L. K., 3:1170–1171
Schwartz, Norbert, 1:276
Schwartz, Shalom, 2:1026
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 1:409

Index
Science
grand narratives, 2:880
religion vs., 3:1241
Science and technology studies, 2:788,
796, 3:1343
Scientific management, 2:769, 923.
See also Sociotechnical systems
Scitovsky, Tibor, 2:878, 3:1114, 1115,
1245–1246
Scotland, 1:206
Scott, Allen, 3:1351
Scott, Allen J., 3:1495
Scott, James C., 3:1216, 1393
Scott, Ridley, 2:1045
Scott, Terry, 1:190
Scott, Walter Dill, 3:1167
Scribal drift, 3:1149
Scripts, behavioral, 1:190–191
Searle, John, 1:306
Sears, Richard W., 3:1249
Sears, Roebuck and Company,
3:1249–1250
Seaside resorts, 3:1250–1252. See also Spas
Sebeok, Thomas, 3:1266
Sechehaye, Albert, 3:1265
Second economy. See Informal economy
Second Life, 3:1160, 1252–1253
Second wave feminism, 1:91, 2:600,
602–603
Secondary consumers, 3:1139
Secondhand goods, 1:138–139, 195–197,
3:1222–1224. See also Car-boot sales
and flea markets; Thrift
Seduced and repressed, 1:199,
3:1254–1255
SEEA (System of integrated Environmental
and Economic Accounting)
accounts, 2:938
Segmentation, and food consumption,
2:611
Segregation, 1:42, 546, 2:656–657, 3:1397
Sejong, king of Korea, 3:1147
Sekora, John, 1:311
Sekure D, 3:1298
Self. See also Identity; Subjects and
subjectivity
civilizing processes, 1:174–175
consumer anxiety, 1:233–235
Diderot effect, 1:450
extended, 3:1421
fashion, 2:584–585
habitus, 2:695–697
happiness, 2:699–703
hedonism, 2:708–709, 3:1429
Mead, 2:929
reification, 3:1210
Self-actualization, 2:713
Self-administered questionnaires,
3:1414–1415
Self-branding, 1:115–116
Self-governance, 1:307–308
Self-interest, 3:1255–1256
consumer choice, 1:240
individualism, 3:1255–1256
Mandeville, 2:883–884

moral economy, 2:999–1000
philanthropy, 3:1084
Self-presentation, 3:1257–1258
adornment, 1:7–9
personal ads, 3:1082
Self-provisioning, 1:474, 474–475, 2:776
Self-reflexivity, 3:1258–1262
consumer culture, 3:1259–1260
criticisms, 3:1260–1261
individualization, 2:764–766
key issues, 3:1261–1262
reflexive modernity, 1:38, 2:854–855,
986, 3:1226, 1258
self-presentation, 3:1257
Selfridge, Gordon, 1:435
Self-service economy, 3:1262–1264. See also
Do-it-yourself (DIY); Informal
economy; Insourcing
postindustrial society, 3:1122
prosumption, 3:1160
supermarkets, 3:1406–1408
Self-service stores, 2:911–912
Self-sufficiency, 1:60–61
Seligman, Adam B., 3:1482
Sell-side e-commerce, 1:485
Semiotics, 3:1265–1268
Barthes, 1:86, 3:1134
Baudrillard, 1:89
consumer culture, 3:1266–1268
post-structuralism, 3:1132, 1134
structuralism, 3:1386–1387
Semi-structured interviews, 1:274, 2:959
Sen, Amartya, 1:507, 2:580, 932, 3:1144,
1247, 1309
Seneca Falls Convention. See Women’s
Rights Convention, Seneca Falls,
New York
Senghor, Leopold, 3:1116
Senior, Nassau, 1:312
Sennett, Richard, 1:203, 376, 377, 436,
3:1312
Senses, 3:1269–1270
Sensus communis, 3:1432
September 11, 2001 attacks, 2:1071
Service industry, 3:1271–1275
categories, 3:1272
emotional labor, 1:519–521
features of services, 3:1272–1274
postindustrial society, 3:1121
trends, 3:1274–1275
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944
(GI Bill of Rights), 1:41
Servicescape model, 1:237
Services-oriented relationship-building
websites, 1:485
Severus Alexander, 2:734
Sex, 3:1276–1278
Sex tourism, 3:1279–1281
Sexism, 3:1282–1283
Sex-role theory, 2:597
Sexual difference, 2:603
Sexuality, 3:1281–1283
advertising, 1:11–12, 2:636–638
comics, 1:210
culture, 3:1282–1283

1589

Foucault, 3:1282
Frankfurt School, 3:1281–1282
male, 2:900–901
men’s magazines, 2:952
metrosexuality, 2:968–970
psychoanalysis, 3:1163–1165
queer theory, 3:1187–1191
slash, 3:1446
teenage magazines, 3:1438
Seymour, Stephanie, 3:1408
Shaffer, Peter, 3:1244
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 2:690
Shakespeare, William, 2:978
Shalom, Celia, 3:1082
Shammas, Carole, 3:1402
Shannon, Claude, 1:220–221
Sharia, 2:814, 815
Shea, Dennis, 1:496
Sheffield, England, 2:771
Sheldon, Roy, 3:1095
Shen Nung, Emperor of China, 3:1435
Shepperson, George, 1:447
Sheridan, Dorothy, 2:909
Sherry, John F., Jr., 3:1232, 1356
Shestov, Lev, 3:1133
Shida, K., 2:812–813, 814
Shields, Rob, 2:1035
Shiller, Robert, 1:509
Shilling, Chris, 1:523, 3:1277
Shintoist weddings, 2:812–813
Shipton, Eric, 3:1198
Shiva, Vandana, 1:300
Shively, JoEllen, 3:1203
Shoes. See Sneakers/trainers
Shohat, Ella, 2:1069
Shoplifting, 1:436
Shopping, 3:1283–1285. See also Spaces
of shopping; Typologies of
shoppers
British consumer revolution, 1:310–313
department stores, 1:435–437
discount stores, 1:458–459
domestic labor, 1:472
Douglas, 1:478
ethnography, 1:556–557
gender, 2:632–633
importance, 3:1283–1285
routine of, 2:1063
thrift, 3:1455
Shopping centers, 1:63
Shopping malls, 1:63, 408, 2:607, 889,
925–926, 3:1284, 1349–1350, 1357
Shops, 1:61, 62, 63–64, 2:888
Short message services (SMS), 2:981
Shorter, Edward, 3:1277
Shove, Elizabeth, 1:5, 354–355, 356, 470,
526, 543, 2:795, 797, 919, 1063,
3:1333, 1451
Sidney, Philip, 2:690
Sidwell, Mark, 2:568
Siege of Paris (1870), 3:1198
Sieverts, Thomas, 3:1396
Sight, 3:1269–1270. See also Visual culture
Signage (retail transactions), 1:510
Signs. See Semiotics

1590

Index

Silverstone, Roger, 1:59, 222, 356, 2:789,
3:1285–1286, 1398
Simmel, Georg, 3:1286–1287
aesthetic sociology, 3:1432
capitalism, 1:132
citizenship, 1:167
consumption, 1:500, 2:630
culture, 1:402
fashion, 1:152, 2:584–585, 589,
592–593, 597–598
Hegelian influence, 3:1086
individualization, 2:763, 765
influence of, 2:684, 3:1286, 1306
lifestyle, 2:860–861
luxury, 2:875
modernity, 1:422, 2:607, 704, 763, 765,
988, 3:1088–1089, 1498, 1501
money, 1:523, 2:758, 994, 3:1088–1089
motivation, 2:1002–1003
objectification, 3:1088–1089
social class, 1:515
social networks, 3:1330
sociability, 3:1302–1304
sociological method, 1:444, 498, 2:958,
3:1286
spaces and places, 3:1350
style, 3:1390
trickle-down, 1:516
urban culture, 3:1493–1494, 1497, 1516
value, 1:203
Simon, Herbert, 1:107, 191, 495, 3:1238
Simplicity. See Downshifting; Voluntary
simplicity
Simulacrum, 1:222, 372, 2:751,
3:1288–1290
Sinclair, Upton, 1:41
Single-person households, 3:1290–1291
Sinha, Piyush K., 3:1489
Sirk, Douglas, 3:1398
Sit, Jason, 3:1488–1489
Situationists, 1:406, 2:838, 3:1365
Skeggs, Beverley, 3:1312, 1313, 1418, 1502
Skills. See De-skilling, re-skilling, and
up-skilling
Skinheads, 1:119, 2:698, 3:1214, 1394
Skinner, Quentin, 1:167
Sklair, Leslie, 1:407, 3:1477–1480
Sklar, Robert, 1:163
Skocpol, Theda, 3:1510
Skrbis, Zlatko, 2:576
Slash, 3:1446–1447
Slater, Don, 2:790, 1030–1031,
3:1091, 1551
Slavery, 3:1540–1542. See also Caribbean
and the slave trade
Sloan, Alfred, 1:134
Sloman, John, 1:491
Slovic, Paul, 1:107
Slow cities movement, 2:676
Slow Food movement, 1:300, 2:676, 926,
3:1291–1293
Sly & The Family Stone, 2:662
Smart grids, 3:1212
Smell, 3:1269, 1270
Smidts, Ale, 2:1040

Smith, Adam, 1:22, 129, 171, 239, 258,
312, 323, 442, 467, 495, 532, 2:875,
878, 883, 886, 996, 999, 1046,
3:1103, 1162, 1245, 1256,
1293–1294, 1410, 1429
Smith, Adrian, 3:1497
Smith, Charles, 2:995
Smith, Eliot, 1:71
Smith, Graham, 2:578
Smith, Philip, 3:1157
Smith, Thomas Spence, 1:421
Smith, Tommie, 2:1029
Smith, Vernon, 1:563
Smith, W. Robertson, 3:1460
Smith, Woodruff, 1:143
Smoking, 3:1458–1460
Smoot-Hawley tariffs (U.S., 1930), 3:1471
Smuggling and black markets, 1:371–373,
3:1294–1296. See also Informal
economy
Sneakers/trainers, 3:1296–1299
Sniderman, Paul, 2:1060
Snow, John, 2:615
Snowball sampling, 3:1416–1417
Soane, John, 2:691
Soap, 1:207–208
Soap operas and telenovelas,
3:1299–1301
Soccer, 3:1371, 1373–1374
Sociability, 2:576–578, 3:1301–1304
Social accounting, 3:1338
Social and economic development,
3:1305–1309
Engel’s law, 1:528–529
influence of past, 3:1307–1308
multiple factors, 3:1308–1309
progress, 3:1305–1306
Rostow, 3:1236–1237
significance of the social, 3:1306–1307
world-systems analysis, 3:1539
Social capital, 2:974, 3:1315,
1481, 1510
Social class, 3:1310–1314. See also Middle
class; Social distinction; Status
affluent society, 1:21–23
Bourdieu, 1:108–109
British consumer revolution, 1:310–311
classic paradigm, 3:1310–1312
collective identity, 1:200, 202
conspicuous consumption, 1:231–233
consumption patterns, 2:724–726
cultural class analysis, 3:1312–1314
cultural intermediaries, 1:389
department stores, 1:436–437
division of labor, 1:468
elites, 1:514–517
ethnicity/race, 1:545–546
fans, 2:581–582
fashion, 2:584–585, 589
hegemony, 2:710
leisure class, 1:231–232
public sphere, 3:1178–1179
reception theory, 3:1204–1205
spaces of shopping, 3:1358
status vs., 3:1382

sumptuary laws, 3:1404
taste, 3:1433–1434
voting behaviors, 3:1512–1513
women’s magazines, 3:1531–1532
youth culture, 3:1552–1553
Social cognition theories of attitude, 1:71
Social construction of technology,
3:1331–1332
Social desiderability, 3:1417
Social distinction, 3:1314–1317.
See also Social class; Status
dandyism, 1:421–422
debates over, 3:1316–1317
Diderot effect, 1:449–451
elites, 1:514–517
key authors, 3:1315–1316
potlatch, 3:1136–1137
research trends, 3:1317
Social exclusion, 3:1318–1321.
See also Ghettos; Segregation
Social justice, 2:774
Social learning theory, 1:265–266
Social memory, 2:947–949
Social movements, 3:1321–1325
analyzing, 3:1323
characteristics, 3:1321–1323
consumer movements, 3:1323–1325
new social movements, 3:1177, 1180
Social network analysis, 3:1326–1329
Social networking, 2:807, 1045, 3:1081,
1160
Social networks, 3:1329–1330
convention theory, 1:359
cultural fragmentation, 1:387
culture industries, 1:404–405
influences of, 3:1339
virtual communities, 3:1504–1505
Social psychology, 3:1512
Social shaping of technology, 1:58, 59,
3:1331–1333. See also Sociotechnical
systems
Social status. See Status
Socialism and consumption, 3:1333–1337.
See also Postsocialist consumption
asceticism, 1:68
cultured consumption, 3:1335–1336
ideology, 3:1336–1337
inequality, 3:1333–1334
rational consumption, 3:1334–1335
responsibility, 3:1336
Society of Judgment and Decision Making,
1:495
Socioeconomic index, 3:1380
Socioeconomic rights, 1:168
Socioeconomics, 3:1144
Sociology, 3:1337–1342
collective ideas and consumption,
3:1338
convention theory, 1:358
corrupting influence of consumer culture,
3:1342
embodiment, 1:518
emotions, 1:522
entrepreneurship, 1:534
happiness, 2:701–702

Index
marketing and consumption,
3:1341–1342
Mauss, 2:922–923
Mead, 2:928–929
methodology, 2:958
rituals and consumption, 3:1340–1341
Simmel, 3:1286–1287
social ties and consumption,
3:1338–1340
Weber, 2:958, 3:1522–1523
Sociology of translation, 1:4
Sociotechnical systems, 3:1343–1345.
See also Infrastructures and utilities;
Scientific management; Social shaping
of technology; Systems of provision
Socrates, 1:369–370, 2:683, 708
Sofoulis, Zöe, 2:797
Soja, Ed, 3:1351
Solomon, Jack, 1:12
Sombart, Werner, 1:499, 502, 514, 559,
2:630, 720, 875, 3:1345–1346
Sontag, Susan, 3:1091
Sony, 1:417, 3:1515
Sony Music, 3:1109
Sony Walkman. See Walkmans and iPods
Soper, Kate, 1:37
Sørensen, Nyberg, 2:682–683
South Africa, 1:244, 2:579, 656, 774
South Korea, 1:247–249
Southern v. How (Britain, 1618), 3:1474
Southerton, Dale, 1:228, 356, 357, 561
Souvenirs, 3:1347–1348. See also Collecting
and collectibles
Sovereign consumer. See Consumer
sovereignty
Soviet Union (USSR)
cold war, 1:192–193
consumer culture, 1:251–256
interwar consumption patterns,
2:728–729
othering of, 2:1071
socialism, 3:1333–1337
Spaargaren, Gert, 2:797
Spaces and places, 3:1348–1354.
See also Geography; Spaces of
shopping; Spatial analysis
ethnicity/race, 3:1358
gender, 2:640–642, 3:1353
geographies of consumption, 2:652–653
glocalization, 2:679
nonplaces, 2:674, 3:1342
place, 3:1352–1354
scapes, 3:1351–1352
social class, 3:1358
social thought, 3:1349–1351
souvenirs, 3:1347–1348
tourism, 3:1465
wine, 3:1530
Spaces of shopping, 3:1355–1358.
See also Shopping malls
architecture, 1:61–64
British consumer revolution, 1:310–311
car-boot sales and flea markets,
1:138–139
department stores, 1:435–437

e-commerce, 1:484–486
fashion, 2:586
functions, 3:1357–1358
gender, 3:1357–1358
overview, 3:1355–1356
scholarship, 3:1358
sociology, 3:1341–1342
supermarkets, 3:1406–1408
trends, 3:1356–1357
Spain, 1:249–250
Spang, Rebecca L., 1:456
Sparks, Leigh, 1:459
Spas, 3:1359–1360. See also Seaside resorts
Spatial analysis, 3:1361–1364.
See also Spaces and places
Spatial autocorrelation, 3:1361
Spatial fix, 3:1351
Specialization in production, 1:60,
467–468
Spectacles, 1:147–148, 3:1365–1369
Spectator, The (magazine), 3:1150
Spencer, Herbert, 1:516, 3:1286
Spencer, Liz, 2:621
Spice Girls, 3:1374
Spices, 1:141, 3:1369–1370
Spillovers. See Externalities
Spindler, Amy, 2:594
Spinoza, Baruch, 1:440–441, 3:1255
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2:711,
3:1117, 1393
Sports, 3:1370–1374. See also Fans
celebrity, 3:1373–1374
commercialization of stadia, 3:1373
endorsements/sponsorship, 3:1372–1373
European Union, 1:560
future research, 3:1374
global events, 3:1371–1372
history of, 3:1371
Italian Fascism, 2:817
leisure, 1:513, 2:846–847
recreation, 3:1207
television, 3:1372
Springsteen, Bruce, 1:42
Sputnik (satellite), 1:192, 193
Srinivas, Lakshmi, 1:106
Srinivasan, T. N., 3:1471
Srull, Thomas, 1:190
Stadia, commercialization of, 3:1373
Stafford, Barbara, 3:1507, 1508
Stagflation, 2:830
Stalin, Joseph, 1:193, 2:579, 896,
3:1198, 1333
Stam, Robert, 2:1069
Standard International Occupational
Prestige Scale, 3:1379–1380
Standard Research Institute, 2:863
Standardization, 2:671–673, 905,
910, 3:1108
Standards of comfort, 2:894
Standards of living, 1:192–193, 338,
3:1377. See also Measuring standards
of living
Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
International, 3:1165–1166, 1284
Stanley, Henry Morton, 1:205

1591

Star, Susan Leigh, 2:788
Starbucks, 1:185, 186–187, 3:1120
Starck, Philippe, 3:1298, 1420
Starke, David, 1:359
Starley, James, 1:95
Stasi, Mafalda, 3:1447
State provisioning, 3:1375–1378. See also
Systems of provision; Welfare state
collective consumption, 1:198–200
public goods, 3:1176
rationing, 3:1197–1200
socialism and consumption,
3:1333–1337
Status, 3:1379–1382. See also Social class;
Social distinction
automobiles, 1:134
class vs., 3:1382
conspicuous consumption, 1:231–233
intimate associations, 3:1380–1381
occupations, 3:1379–1381
socioeconomic index, 3:1380
sumptuary laws, 3:1404
Weber, 3:1315
Stearns, Peter, 1:228, 229
Steele, Richard, 3:1150
Steinbeck, John, 2:969
Steinberg, Ronnie J., 1:520
Steiner, Chris, 3:1347
Steiner, Franz, 3:1427
Steiner, Rudolf, 2:1067
Steiner movement, 1:483
Steketee, Gail, 1:271
Sterlicchi, John, 1:260
Stern Review on global warming, 1:508
Stevens, Brooks, 3:1095
Stevens, Mitchell, 3:1317
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 2:709
Stewardship labels, 1:483
Stewart, Alexis, 3:1552
Stewart, Jon, 3:1368
Stewart, Susan, 3:1347
Stibbe, Arran, 2:900
Stigler, George, 1:257
Stillerman, Joel, 1:251
Sting (singer), 2:947
Stirner, Max, 3:1255
Stockholm Environment Institute, 1:536
Stockmann, G. F., 2:1046
Stockmann’s Department Stores, 2:1046
Stoicism, 1:369
Stolle, Dietlind, 1:36
Stollwerck, 1:230
Stone, Gregory, 3:1257, 1487
Stone, Lawrence, 3:1276
Stones, Rob, 2:858
Stopford, John M., 1:416
Stoppard, Tom, 3:1446
Store loyalty cards, 2:887, 3:1261,
1383–1385
Storper, Michael, 1:359, 361
Storti, Luca, 1:535
Straight edge, 1:68, 3:1552
Strange, Susan, 3:1477
Strasser, Gregor, 2:1043
Strasser, Otto, 2:1043

1592

Index

Strasser, Susan, 1:228
Strategic innovation, 1:416–417
Strati, Antonio, 1:376
Stratified sampling, 3:1416
Stratton, Jon, 2:634
Strauss, Anselm, 1:552
Strauss, Levi, 2:824
Straw, Will, 3:1110
Streamlining, 1:438–439
Structural anthropology, 3:1387–1388
Structural equation modeling, 2:1021
Structural linguistics, 3:1132, 1386–1387
Structuralism, 2:849, 3:1385–1388
Structured interviews, 1:273, 2:1059
Sturge, Joseph, 1:144
Style, 3:1389–1391. See also Design;
Fashion
dandyism, 1:421–422
popular culture, 3:1390–1391
retro, 3:1222–1223
semiotics, 3:1267–1268
theories, 3:1389–1390
Subaltern, 3:1391–1393
Subaltern classes, 2:688, 710
Subaltern studies, 1:399, 2:711
Subculture, 3:1393–1395. See also
Counterculture; Neo-tribes; Youth
culture
bricolage, 1:119–120
criticisms of, 3:1110
cultural studies, 1:396–397
fans, 2:581–583
hair, 2:698
jeans, 2:825
popular music, 3:1109–1110
resistance, 2:810, 3:1214–1215
urban, 3:1495–1496
Subjective age, 2:644
Subjective norms, 3:1452–1453
Subjectivist theories, 3:1186
Subjects and subjectivity, 2:754, 809–810,
3:1392–1393. See also Identity; Self
Sublation, 3:1086–1087
Subliminal advertising, 3:1170
Subpolitics, 3:1227
Substitution (economics), 1:505, 3:1146
Suburbia, 3:1395–1399
Subversion, 3:1399–1401. See also
Consumer protest entries; Resistance
Subvertising, 1:406
Suchard, 1:230
Suez Canal, Egypt, 1:205
Sugar, 1:142–144, 229–230,
3:1401–1403
Sullivan, Oriel, 1:391, 472
Sumptuary laws, 1:311, 514, 2:588, 722,
874, 945–946, 3:1403–1405, 1444
Superego, 2:700–701, 3:1164
Supermarkets, 1:62, 459, 3:1075–1076,
1406–1408
Supermodels, 3:1408–1410
Suppliers, 1:224–225
Surplus repression, 2:885
Surplus value, 3:1410–1412
Surrealism, 3:1412–1413

Survey of Consumers, 3:1414
Surveys, 2:957–958, 3:1414–1417
attitude surveys, 1:69–70
consumer expenditure surveys,
1:266–268
data collection, 3:1414–1416
defined, 3:1414
Likert scales, 2:865–867
longitudinal studies, 2:871–873
market research, 2:962–963
opinion polls, 2:1059
polls vs., 3:1414
questionnaires defined, 3:1416–1417
reliability, 2:866–867
sample design, 3:1416–1417
satisfaction measures, 2:929–931
time use, 1:334
types, 2:963
unidimensionality, 2:867
validity, 2:867
Susman, Warren, 1:523
Sustainability. See also Environmental
social sciences and sustainable
consumption
consumer durables, 1:262–263
environmental footprinting, 1:535–537
life(style) politics, 2:854–860
psychology, 3:1172–1173
renewable resources, 3:1211–1213
responsible consumption, 3:1217–1219
reuse/recycling, 3:1223–1225
Sustainable national income (SNI), 1:494
Sutcliffe, Bob, 2:772, 774
Sutton, David, 1:456
Sutton, Robert I., 1:520
Swartz, David, 3:1418
Swedberg, Richard, 1:498, 501
Sweezy, Paul, 1:322
Swyngedouw, Erik, 2:679
Symbolic capital, 1:109, 3:1417–1419
Symbolic interactionism, 1:397, 2:928
Symbolic value, 3:1420–1421
Symbolic violence, 3:1422–1423
Symmetry, generalized, 1:4–5
Syncretism, 2:673
Systematic sampling, 3:1416
Systems of provision, 3:1424–1425. See also
Infrastructures and utilities;
Sociotechnical systems; State
provisioning
geography, 2:651–652
ordinary consumption, 2:1064
public goods, 3:1176
rationing, 3:1197–1200
self-service economy, 3:1262–1264
Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 1:330
Sznaider, Natan, 2:950
Sztompka, Piotr, 1:343
Taboo, 3:1427–1428
Tacitus, 2:988
T’aejo, king of Korea, 3:1147
Taeuber, Alma, 2:656
Taeuber, Karl, 2:656
T’agong, king of Korea, 3:1147

Taiwan, 1:247
Takahashi, Noboru, 2:982
Talbot, Henry Fox, 3:1090
Tamed hedonism, 3:1428–1430
Tarde, Gabriel, 1:454, 495, 515, 516
Tariffs, 3:1471–1473
Taste, aesthetic, 3:1430–1435.
See also Aesthetics; Fashion
Africa, 1:245
Bourdieu, 1:108–109, 2:686
collecting and collectibles, 1:196
consumer expenditure surveys,
1:267–268
embodiment, 1:518–519
Foucault, 2:686
preference formation, 3:1145
recent research, 3:1431–1434
social class, 3:1433–1434
theories, 3:1431–1434
Taste, sense of, 3:1269, 1270
Tastemakers, 2:804
Tatler (magazine), 3:1150
Tattooing, 1:8
Taussig, Michael, 1:553
Taxes
Engel’s law, 1:528
global institutions, 2:668
luxury taxes, 2:877–879
Taylor (Lord Justice), 3:1373
Taylor, Charles, 1:203, 2:1005–1006,
3:1448, 1449
Taylor, Diana, 1:150
Taylor, Frederick, 2:769, 923
Taylor, Harriet, 2:602
Taylor, Nicole, 1:453
Taylor, Vanessa, 1:304
Taylor Nelson Sofres, 2:963
Tea, 1:121–122, 2:813, 3:1435–1437
Tea Party (U.S. politics), 3:1368
Teague, Walter Dorwin, 1:438
Technological determinism, 2:783–784, 790
Technology, and youth culture,
3:1551–1552. See also Information
technology; Social shaping of
technology; Sociotechnical systems
Teds, 1:120, 2:581, 698, 3:1214,
1222, 1394
Teenage magazines, 3:1438–1439
Telenovelas. See Soap operas and
telenovelas
Telephone interviews, 3:1414–1415
Telephones, 2:981–982, 3:1439–1441
Television, 3:1441–1443
advertising, 1:11, 12, 125–126,
3:1442
cable and satellite, 1:126
consumer socialization, 1:319, 320
impact of, 1:123
reality TV, 1:151, 3:1200–1202
rise of, 1:125
shopping, 3:1355
significance of, 3:1441–1443
soap operas and telenovelas,
3:1299–1301
socialism, 3:1336

Index
sports, 3:1372
violence, 1:209
Temperance movements, 1:6
Territoriality, 2:812
Tertullian, 1:368
Tesco, 3:1384
Textiles, 3:1443–1445. See also Clothing
Textual poachers, 3:1445–1447
Thailand, 3:1279–1280
Thaler, Richard, 1:258, 509
Thalidomide, 1:316
Thatcher, Margaret, 2:898–899, 1042, 1043
Theater, 3:1079–1080
Themed retail environments, 3:1356
Theme parks, 2:727
Theories of practice, 3:1447–1451
Theory of planned behavior, 3:1452–1453
Theory of the development state, 3:1477
Therborn, Göran, 1:228, 229, 2:774
Thermoception, 3:1270
Thévenot, Laurent, 1:358–360
Thick description, 2:958
Third places, 1:185, 186
Third wave feminism, 1:91, 2:603–604
Thomas, Dana, 1:372
Thomas, David, 3:1151
Thomas, Nicholas, 1:218
Thomas, William, 2:690
Thompson, Craig, 1:357, 2:575, 990, 994,
3:1218, 1428
Thompson, E. P., 1:394, 400
Thoreau, Henry David, 1:469, 479,
2:920, 1031
Thoresen, Victoria W., 1:265
Thorns, David, 3:1396
Thornton, Sarah, 1:397, 3:1110, 1550
Thrasher, Frederic, 3:1496
Thrift, 3:1454–1456. See also Car-boot
sales and flea markets; Secondhand
goods
Thrift, Nigel, 1:376, 3:1197
Thurow, Lester C., 1:2
Thurstone scales, 1:69
Tian, Kelly, 3:1233
Tiber, Elliot, 2:661, 662
Tiberius, Emperor of Rome, 2:990–991
Tie-ins, 3:1153
Tietje, Brian C., 3:1169, 1171
Tiffin, Helen, 1:208
Tiggemann, Marika, 2:901
Tillyard, Stella, 1:150
Time
consumer preferences, 1:506
consumption, 1:332–336
convenience, 1:356–358
domestic labor, 1:476
domestic technologies, 1:476
harried leisure class, 2:703–705
industrial society, 2:769
longitudinal studies, 2:871–873
luxury, 2:876–877
Time (magazine), 2:1057
Time-series analysis, 1:488
Time-use diaries, 1:333–336, 2:840,
3:1456–1458

Tin Pan Alley, 3:1108
Tinbergen, Jan, 1:487
Tinsman, Heidi, 1:251
Tintoretto, Domenico, 2:690–691
Tintoretto, Jacopo, 2:691
Tironi, Eugenio, 1:251
Tisias, 1:219
Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, 3:1241
Titmuss, Richard, 2:1028, 1065, 3:1375
Titus, Philip, 2:955
Tobacco, 3:1458–1460
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1:171, 443, 2:1031,
3:1510
Toënnies, Ferdinand, 1:167, 3:1493–1494
Toffler, Alvin, 1:38, 2:1047, 3:1160
Togliatti, Palmiro, 2:687
Toki, Hiroyuki, 2:982
Tölölyan, Kachig, 1:447
Tolstoy, Leo, 2:604
Toma, Catalina, 3:1082
Tompion, Thomas, 1:530
Total Research Corporation, 2:862
Totemism, 3:1460–1461
Touch, 3:1269, 1270
Touraine, Alain, 3:1121
Tourism. See also Air and rail travel
authenticity, 1:76, 3:1347
crafts, 1:374–377
cultural flows, 1:385
defining, 2:914
foreign, 2:914–915
globalization, 3:1467
grand tour, 2:688–691
inventing tradition, 2:812
leisure, 2:842–843
mass, 2:913–916
numbers in, 2:914
Orientalism, 2:1069
photography, 3:1091–1092
sex tourism, 3:1279–1281
souvenirs, 3:1347–1348
spas, 3:1360
study of, 3:1462–1465
system of, 3:1464–1465
tourist gaze, 3:1466–1468
types, 2:915
Tourism studies, 3:1462–1465, 1468
Tourist gaze, 3:1466–1468
Townley, Charles, 2:691
Townsend, Nicholas, 2:899
Townsend, Peter, 3:1377
Toy, Crawford H., 3:1427
Toynbee, Arnold, 1:434
Toynbee, Polly, 2:772
Toys, 3:1468–1470
Barbie dolls, 1:84–85
child development, 3:1469
commodities, 3:1469–1470
consumer society, 3:1470
exports and imports, 2:773
future research, 3:1470
socialization, 1:320, 3:1469
Tracking surveys, 2:963
Trade. See Barter and trade; Trade standards
Trade diasporas, 2:974

1593

Trade standards, 3:1471–1473
Trademarks, 3:1473–1476. See also
Intellectual property
Tradition. See Inventing tradition
Tragedy of the commons, 1:483,
2:666
Traidcraft, 1:145
Trainers. See Sneakers/trainers
Transaction cost analysis, 1:225
Transactional e-commerce sites, 1:485
Transformationalism, 1:384
Transgender, 3:1092–1094
Transition cultures, 1:341
Transnational capitalism, 3:1477–1480
Transnational social spaces, 3:1479
Transnationalism, 2:673
Trauma, 2:947
Travel. See Air and rail travel; Automobiles;
Tourism
Traveling cultures, 1:385
Treaty on the Functioning of the European
Union, 1:293
Tree, Penelope, 3:1409
Treiman, Donald J., 3:1379
Trentmann, Frank, 1:242, 243, 304, 307,
2:734, 984, 988
Trevisani, Francesco, 2:691
Triandis, Harry, 2:1026
Tribal people, 1:8
Tribe, John, 3:1464
Trickle-down effect. See Diffusion studies
and trickle down
Troester, Maura, 3:1428
Trotsky, Leon, 2:896
Trotter, Thomas, 1:6
Troubetzkoy, Nikolai, 2:849
True preferences, 3:1144
Trujillo, Jennifer, 1:278
Truninger, Monica, 2:1067
Trust, 3:1481–1483
T-shirts, 3:1483–1484
Tucker, William T., 1:351
Tugwell, Rexford, 3:1078
Tulving, Endel, 1:190
Tupper, Earl Silas, 3:1484, 1486
Tupperware, 3:1484–1486
Turkle, Sherry, 2:1053
Turlington, Christy, 3:1408–1409
Turner, Bryan, 1:30, 518
Turner, Bryan S., 2:643, 645, 646
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1:147
Turner, Graeme, 3:1200, 1201
Turner, J. M. W., 2:689, 1045
Turner, Victor, 1:148, 2:868, 1035,
3:1231, 1524
Tusche, Anita, 2:956
Tushman, Mike, 2:1048
Tversky, Amos, 1:107, 191, 258, 509
Tweens, 3:1438
Twelve Tables, 1:427
21 Grams (film), 2:982
Twiggy, 1:90
Twin Trading, 1:145
Twitchell, James B., 2:876
Twitter, 3:1367

1594

Index

Typologies of shoppers, 3:1384,
1486–1491. See also Consumer types
Tyson, Mike, 3:1408
Udry, Christopher, 1:245
Ukraine, 2:579
Ulman, Bonnie, 2:639
Unamuno, Miguel de, 3:1133
Unconscious, the, 3:1163–1165,
1169–1172
Underwood, Michael, 1:25
Unidimensionality, of surveys, 2:867
Unilever, 1:246
Union Fédéral des Consommateurs (UFC),
1:326
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
See Soviet Union (USSR)
Unità, L’ (newspaper), 2:687, 710
United Africa Company, 1:205
United Kingdom. See also Britain
leisure studies, 2:846–847
New Right, 2:1042
retirement, 3:1219–1221
waste, 3:1519
United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 2:668
consumer education, 1:264
Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities, 2:667
Development Programme, 1:409,
2:932–934
environmental studies, 1:539
Environment Programme, 2:666,
668, 937
Food and Agricultural Organization,
1:294
Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), 1:136
growth of, 2:670
Guidelines on Consumer Protection,
1:327
human development index, 1:494
Human Settlements Programme
(UN-HABITAT), 3:1498
inequalities, 2:774
International Women’s Year, 2:603
Internet Governance Forum, 2:666, 667
national cultures, 2:1027
Office for Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs, 2:666
Office on Drugs and Crime, 2:666
Oil for Food program, 2:668
World Human Development Reports,
3:1309
World Women’s Conference (Mexico City,
1975), 2:603
United States. See also American Dream;
Americanization
cold war, 1:192–193
consumer policy, 1:290–292
consumption, 1:345–350
happiness, 2:702
leisure studies, 2:846
New Right, 2:1043
organ and blood donation, 2:1064–1065

philanthropy, 3:1083–1084
retirement, 3:1219–1221
seaside resorts, 3:1251
supermarkets, 3:1406–1407
tea, 3:1436
Universal Music Group, 3:1109
Universal Product Code (UPC, or barcode),
2:889
University of Chicago, 1:220
Uniyal, Dwarika P., 3:1489
Unpaid community work, 1:474, 2:776
Unrestrained preferences, 3:1144
Unstructured interviews, 1:273–274.
See also Open-ended interviews
Upham, Paul, 1:536
Up-skilling. See De-skilling, re-skilling, and
up-skilling
Upton, Florence K., 1:206
Urban, Glen L., 3:1420
Urban cultures, 3:1493–1496. See also
Suburbia
cities as site for culture, 3:1493–1495
collective consumption, 1:198–199
fashion, 2:586–587
flaneur/euse, 2:606–608
global cities, 2:663–665
slow cities, 2:676
subcultures, 3:1495–1496
Walkmans and iPods, 3:1516–1517
Urban Renaissance, 3:1399
Urban VIII, Pope, 2:689
Urbanization, 3:1496–1498
architecture, 1:64
Soviet Union, 1:254–255
Urry, John, 1:32, 134, 135, 329, 331, 370,
385, 466–467, 538, 2:647, 739, 861,
1047, 3:1091, 1347, 1361, 1463, 1464
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 1:490
U.S. Department of Commerce, 1:490
U.S. Department of Defense, 2:805
U.S. Department of Energy, 1:525
U.S. Post Office, 3:1249
Use value. See Value: exchange and
use value
USSR. See Soviet Union (USSR)
Utilitarianism, 1:507–508
Utilities. See Infrastructures and utilities
Utility, 1:503–504
Valence politics perspective, 3:1513
Valentine, Gill, 1:411
Validity, of surveys, 2:867
VALS (values, attitudes, lifestyles)
approach, 2:713
Value
informational capital, 2:793–794
surplus, 3:1410–1412
symbolic, 3:1420–1421
Value: exchange and use value,
3:1501–1503
Baudrillard, 2:1032
commercialization, 1:211–212
commodification, 1:215
Values and Lifestyles (VALS) typology,
2:862, 3:1165–1166

Van der Horst, Hilje, 1:556
Van Dijk, Jan, 2:1037
Van Gennep, Arnold, 2:868
Van Leeuwen, Theo, 3:1507
Van Otterloo, Anneke H., 1:456
Van Raaij, Fred, 1:495
Van Vliet, Bas, 2:795
Van Weele, Arjan, 1:225
Vanderloo, Mark, 3:1409
Vannini, Phillip, 1:75
Varman, Rohit, 3:1392
Veblen, Thorstein Bunde, 3:1503–1504
affluent society, 1:23
capitalism, 1:446
conspicuous consumption, 1:2, 41,
231–233, 319, 348, 480, 499–500,
515, 516, 526, 2:875, 878,
920–921, 3:1129, 1502
drunkenness, 3:1181
fashion, 2:585–586, 589, 597
gender, 2:630
influence of, 2:623, 3:1306
leisure, 1:333, 2:703
lifestyle, 2:860
modernity, 2:988
philanthropy, 3:1084
positional goods, 3:1114
social distinction, 3:1315
status, 1:383, 545–546, 2:712
style, 3:1390
suburbia, 3:1397
symbolic value, 3:1420
taste, 3:1433
Velthuis, Olav, 2:995
Venedig in Wien, Vienna, 2:727
Venezuela, 3:1299, 1301
Venturi, Robert, 2:880
Verba, Sydney, 1:168
Veronese, 2:690
Verplanken, Bas, 3:1238
Versace, Gianni, 3:1242, 1409
Verstehen (understanding), 2:958
Vertical integration, 2:940, 941
Vicary, James M., 3:1170
Vickers, Dan, 3:1364
Victoria, queen of England, 3:1524–1525
Video. See Photography and video
Video diaries, 3:1092
Video games. See Electronic video gaming
Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, 2:948
Vihalemm, Triin, 1:342
Vikas, Ram Manohar, 3:1392
Vila, Natalia, 3:1077
Villani, Giovanni, 3:1405
Vinola, 1:207–208
Violence
comics, 1:209–210
gift exchange, 2:660
masculinity, 2:900–901
symbolic, 3:1422–1423
television and video games, 1:209
Viral marketing, 2:942
Virginia Slims, 2:640
Virilio, Paul, 1:31
Virno, Paolo, 1:398

Index
Virtual communities , 3:1504–1505.
See also Network society
identity, 2:806
Second Life, 3:1252–1253
Virtual memorials, 2:948
Visa, 1:379
Visual culture, 2:789, 3:1506–1509.
See also Sight
Visual research methods, 2:960
Vitaphone Corporation, 1:163
Vogel, David, 1:307
Voice of America, 1:193
Volosinov, V. N., 1:401
Voltaire, 1:532, 2:723, 875, 883
Voluntary associations, 1:171–172,
3:1510–1511
Voluntary simplicity, 1:479, 2:921.
See also Downshifting
Von Houten, Coenraad Johannes, 1:230
Von Mises, Ludwig, 1:2
Von Thünen, Johann Heinrich, 3:1363
Voting behaviors, 3:1511–1514
Voting rights, 2:602
Votolato, Gregory, 3:1297
Vygotsky, Lev, 3:1469
W. T. Grant, 3:1249
Wachowski brothers, 3:1288
Wacquant, Loïc, 2:696, 3:1418
Wadleigh, Michael, 2:661
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, 2:948
Wagnleitner, Reinhold, 1:183
Wajcman, Judy, 1:477
Walby, Sylvia, 1:168
Wales, 1:206
Walker, A., 3:1220, 1221
Walker, David, 2:772
Walkerdine, Valerie, 3:1438
Walkmans and iPods, 2:980, 3:1515–1517.
See also Mobile media gadgets of the
analog age
Wallendorf, Melanie, 3:1232
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1:142, 215–216,
3:1124, 1477–1478, 1536–1537,
1540, 1542
Walmart, 1:458–459, 2:926, 3:1250,
1517–1518
Walton, Sam, 3:1517
Wang Hai, 1:340
War, and rationing, 3:1198
War memorials, 2:948
Ward, Aaron Montgomery, 3:1355
Ward, Colin, 1:304
Ward, Kathryn, 3:1539
Ward, Scott, 1:318
Warde, Alan, 1:199, 233–234, 356, 457,
535, 543, 2:612, 646, 3:1448, 1451
Warhol, Andy, 3:1288
Warner Brothers, 1:163, 3:1446
Warner Music Group, 3:1109
Wärneryd, Karl-Erik, 1:496–497
Warren, John Robert, 3:1379
Wasner, Barbara, 1:559
Waste, 1:262, 3:1518–1522. See also
Reuse/recycling

Water, 1:303–305
Water footprinting, 2:939
Watson, James, 1:283
Watts, Naomi, 2:982
Waugh, Evelyn, 3:1242
Wayfinding, 2:955–956
Wayland, Francis, 2:1031
Wayne, John, 2:825
Wealth effects, 1:505
Wealth gap, 3:1138, 1480
Weaver, Warren, 1:220–221
Web 1.0, 2:806
Web 2.0, 2:807, 3:1160
Webb, Veronica, 3:1409
Weber, Max, 3:1522–1523
acculturation, 1:3
bureaucracy, 2:923–924
capitalism, 1:129–132, 160, 481, 500,
3:1128
cities, 3:1497
citizenship, 1:167
cultural turn, 1:402
desire, 1:444
disenchantment, 3:1178, 1196
economic sociology, 1:498, 500
elites, 1:515
entrepreneurship, 1:533
erotic sphere, 3:1278
influence of, 3:1286, 1306
law, 1:315
lifestyle, 2:860, 3:1393
modernity, 1:138, 2:988
motivation, 2:1003
Protestant ethic and capitalism, 1:67–68,
132, 523, 2:709, 721, 3:1125,
1161–1162, 1283–1284, 1338, 1523
qualitative research, 1:273
rationalization, 2:570, 674, 924, 3:1178,
1195–1197, 1523
social class, 3:1310–1311
sociological method, 2:958, 998–999,
3:1522–1523
status, 1:383, 3:1315, 1379
Webster, Daniel, 2:1031
Weddings, 3:1233, 1524–1525
Wedgwood, 2:691, 3:1157–1158
Wedgwood, Josiah, 1:312
Weeks, Jeffrey, 3:1282
Weems, Robert, 1:546
Weigh houses, 1:61
Weiner, Annette B., 2:759, 760
Weismantel, Mary, 1:51
Weiss, Edward, 1:452
Weitz, Barton, 1:510–511
Welch, Evelyn, 2:987–988
Welfare economics, 2:932
Welfare state, 1:168–169, 2:1042–1043,
3:1375–1376, 1454–1455. See also
State provisioning
Well-being, 1:494, 3:1185, 1525–1528.
See also Happiness; Hedonism; Quality
of life
Welles, Orson, 2:1053
Wellman, Barry, 2:790, 3:1505
Wellner, Alison Stein, 2:965

1595

Wells, C. H., 2:961
Welsch, Wolfgang, 1:196
Wen Jiabao, 1:339
Wernick, Andrew, 3:1157–1159,
1221, 1502
Wernick, Iddo K., 1:433
Wertham, Frederic, 1:209
Westbrook, Robert, 1:259, 3:1489
Westermarck, Edward, 3:1294
Western Electric, 1:163
Westinghouse, 1:124
Westphalia. See Peace of Westphalia (1648)
Westwood, Vivienne, 2:587
Whalley, Peter, 1:480
Whannel, Garry, 3:1372
Wharton, Edith, 1:348
Wheeler, Ladd, 3:1082
Which? (magazine), 1:196, 326
White, Cynthia, 3:1156
White, Harrison, 1:501, 3:1156
White, Hayden, 1:400
Whyte, W. F., 3:1311, 1397
Wicklund, Robert, 3:1210
Wier, Mette, 2:938
Wieser, Friedrich, 1:323
Wikipedia, 3:1160
Wilcox, H. H., 2:738
Wildavsky, Aaron, 1:477
Wilde, Oscar, 2:1023
Wildlife parks. See Zoos and wildlife parks
Wiley, Norbert, 1:12
Wilhite, Harold, 2:676
Wilk, Richard, 1:51, 55, 250, 3:1451
Wilkinson, Richard, 2:774
William (British prince), 3:1296
Williams, Christine, 3:1341
Williams, Colin C., 1:36, 470–471, 2:1073,
3:1263–1264
Williams, J. Patrick, 3:1552
Williams, Patrick, 1:75
Williams, Peter, 3:1284, 1357
Williams, Pharrell, 3:1297
Williams, Raymond, 1:319, 394, 400, 401,
3:1155
Williams, Robert H., 3:1487
Williams, Simon J., 2:758
Williamson, Judith, 2:637, 810
Williamson, Oliver E., 3:1339
Willim, Robert, 1:557
Willis, Paul, 1:119, 155, 397, 429, 430,
2:810, 3:1107, 1109, 1548, 1551
Wilska, Terhi-Anna, 2:645, 3:1375, 1377
Wilson, Alexander, 1:328
Wilson, Charles, 3:1118
Wilson, Elisabeth, 2:633
Wilson, Timothy, 2:682
Windebank, Jan, 3:1263
Wine, 3:1529–1531
Winkielman, Piotr, 1:278
Winslow, Simon, 1:84, 157
Wireless telegraph, 1:124
Wirth, Louis, 3:1493–1494, 1498
Wise, Brownie, 3:1485, 1486
Wissler, Clark, 1:454
Witkowski, Terrence, 2:568

1596

Index

Witt, D., 2:957
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1:401, 3:1448
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 2:1072
Wolf, Naomi, 1:90–91
Wolfe, Donald, 2:748
Wolff, Janet, 2:608
Wolff, Michael, 2:808
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2:602
Woman’s Journal, 2:600
Women. See also Femininity; Gender
advertising, 2:636–637
aging in consumer culture, 1:29
body, 1:452
comics, 1:209–210
dieting, 1:452–453
ethical consumption, 1:143–145
fashion, 2:586, 630
hair care/hairdressing, 2:697–699
Italian Fascism, 2:816–818
Japanese, 2:823
love, 2:630
media, 2:638–640
money, 2:992
public and private space, 2:640–642
sex tourists, 3:1280–1281
Soviet Union, 1:255
teenage magazines, 3:1438–1439
Tupperware, 3:1485–1486
Walkmans and iPods, 3:1516–1517
world-systems analysis, 3:1539–1540
Women’s Conference of the International
Socialist Women (Copenhagen,
1910), 2:602
Women’s Liberation Movement, 2:603
Women’s magazines, 3:1531–1532
early, 2:638
feminist analysis of, 2:599–601
Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls,
New York, 2:602
Women’s Trade Union League,
2:602, 831
Woo, Hyungi, 1:245
Wood, Andrew F., 2:607–608
Wood, L. J., 2:681
Wood, Robert E., 3:1250
Wood, Simon “Woody,” 3:1298
Woodstock. See Glastonbury/Woodstock
Woodward, Ian, 1:233, 234
Woodward, Kath, 2:754
Woolworth, F. W., 1:458
Word of mouth, 2:620–621
Wordsworth, William, 2:920
Work-and-spend cycle, 3:1532–1534
consumption and time use, 1:333
downshifting, 1:479–480
harried leisure class, 2:703–705
Working class, consumption patterns of,
2:725–726

Works Progress Administration, 2:693
World Bank, 2:774, 1027, 3:1129, 1480
World Blind Union, 2:667
World citizenship, 2:669, 856
World Council of Churches, 1:160
World Cup soccer, 3:1371–1372
World exhibitions, 2:727, 1046–1047,
3:1534–1536
World Health Organization, 1:294, 2:1027,
1049
World Intellectual Property Organization,
3:1475
World Leisure and Recreation Association
(WLRA), 2:847–848
World Leisure Journal, 2:847
World Leisure Organization, 2:847
World Meteorological Organization, 2:666
World of Warcraft, 3:1160, 1252
World Trade Organization (WTO),
1:293–296, 299, 327, 337, 559,
2:666, 774, 3:1471–1474, 1480
World Values Survey, 3:1528
World Wide Web, 2:805–808. See also
Internet
World Wildlife Federation, 2:667
World-systems analysis, 3:1536–1544
ancient world-systems, 3:1542–1544
basic principles, 3:1536–1537
capitalism, 1:465–466, 3:1537
commodification, 1:215–216
incorporation into world-system,
3:1540–1542
insights from, 3:1539–1540
postcolonialism, 3:1116
processes and dynamics, 3:1538–1539
terminology, 3:1537–1538
Worth, Charles F., 2:584
Wouters, Cas, 1:175, 513, 523, 2:780–781,
3:1276–1277
Wright, Carroll, 1:266
Wright, Erik Olin, 3:1311
Wright, Judith, 3:1424
Wrigley, Neil, 2:647
Wundt, Wilhelm, 3:1167
Wynder, Ernst L., 3:1459
Wynne, Brian, 1:541
Wynstra, Finn, 1:225
X, Malcolm, 3:1216
Xenophon, 2:683
Xenos, Nicholas, 3:1246
Xylography, 3:1147
Yale French Studies (journal), 3:1131
Yamada, Masahiro, 2:823
Yang, Mei-ling, 2:639
Yasgur, Max, 2:661
Yasuo, Tanaka, 2:822–823

Yearley, Steven, 1:541
Yelp.com, 3:1160
Yesenin, Sergey, 1:422
Yoshimi, Shunya, 2:822
Yoshioka, Akia, 2:982
Young, Iris Marion, 3:1099, 1106
Young, Robert, 3:1116
Young and the Restless, The (television
show), 2:680
Youth culture, 1:26–27, 3:1547–1554.
See also Childhood; Popular culture
agency and lifestyles, 3:1548–1550
bricolage, 1:119–120
clothing consumption, 1:178
clubbing, 1:179–181
consumption, 3:1553–1554
emergence, 3:1547
fashion, 2:585
generations, 2:644–646
Glastonbury/Woodstock, 2:661–663
jeans, 2:825
magazines, 3:1438–1439
mobile media gadgets, 2:978–980
music, 3:1550–1551
othering, 2:1072
popular music, 3:1107–1110
resistance, 3:1214
social class, 3:1552–1553
technology, 3:1551–1552
Youthquake, 1:178
YouTube, 2:807, 3:1160
Yugoslavia, 2:670
Yuling, Ding, 2:813
Yurchak, Alexei, 3:1336
Yuriko, Furuhata, 3:1368
Zaller, John, 2:1059
Zaltman, Gerry, 2:1040
Zambia, 1:244
Zanzibar, 2:771
Zara, 2:591, 595
Zeitlin, Jonathan, 2:1047
Zelizer, Viviana, 1:501, 545, 2:631,
992–993, 995, 3:1338–1340,
1342
Zetkin, Clara, 2:602
Zhang, Xing Quan, 1:282
Zimbardo, Philip, 1:151
Žižek, Slavoj, 1:156, 2:700–701,
756, 1024
Zoffany, Johan, 2:691
Zola, Émile, 1:436, 2:597, 875, 1046
Zonal models, 3:1363
Zoos and wildlife parks, 3:1555–1556
Zukin, Sharon, 1:349, 3:1342, 1353–1355,
1494–1495
Zurich Consumverein, 1:242
Zwick, Detlev, 1:18, 352, 2:981