Unpacking IKEA

Swedish Design for the Purchasing Masses

Pauline Garvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317642961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This book represents the first anthropological ethnography of Ikea consumption and goes to the heart of understanding the unique and at times frantic popularity of this one iconic transnational store. Based on a year of participant observation in Stockholm's Kungens Kurva store – the largest in the world - this book places the retailer squarely within the realm of the home-building efforts of individuals in Stockholm and to a lesser degree in Dublin. Ikea, the world's largest retailer and one of its most interesting, is the focus of intense popular fascination internationally, yet is rarely subject to in-depth anthropological inquiry. In Unpacking Ikea, Garvey explores why Ikea is never 'just a store' for its customers, and questions why it is described in terms of a cultural package, as everyday and classless. Using in-depth interviews with householders over several years, this ethnographic study follows the furniture from the Ikea store outwards to probe what people actually take home with them.

1
Unpacking Ikea

Introduction

There is a museum in the town of Älmhult in southern Sweden that is somewhat unusual.¹ Located in the same building as the first ever Ikea store (established in 1958), it is called the IKEA Museum, and it opened to the public on June 30, 2016. Under the themes of ‘Our Roots’, ‘Our Story’ and ‘Your Stories’, the exhibit presents a potted history of the Swedish furnishing company in the context of post-war domestic interiors, complete with typically furnished rooms.² The museum replaces an earlier, smaller exhibition of twenty room sets (800 m2) that was located in the Tillsammans building (trans: Together) and was noteworthy only because it was available for the training of staff, a showcase of corporate ‘culture’ for select visitors.³ The IKEA Museum by contrast is altogether more ambitious. It caters, for a start, to a general public and has been significantly revamped: the facade of the building was restored to recreate its original Ikea store appearance, and the exhibition space has been enlarged to cover an impressive 3,500 m2. With interactive areas, products on plinths and glassed-off exhibits, it carries off a museological format in which the visitor is educated while moving through the exhibition space. Through progressive stages and temporal milestones, the corporation is accreted into a broader social and historical weave. What is remarkable, however, is that nearby Ikea showrooms play on a similar series of museological themes but do so in a way that deliberately brings together standard exhibition and commercial practices. Specifically, Ikea showrooms typify a form of display that transmogrifies the housing exhibit into a high-performing commercial enterprise. Whereas the Ikea Museum adopts a somewhat conventional museological format, standard Ikea showrooms are singular in overturning it.

In this book, I trace how designed objects and environments conflate Ikea products with normative domesticity to the extent that such goods become a material shorthand for aggregate behaviour.⁴ In other words, I look at the ways in which Ikea is dispersed (cf. Garvey and Drazin 2016).⁵ During fieldwork, it was striking how often Ikea warehouses, designers, personnel and goods were indiscriminately subsumed under the term ‘Ikea’. Lacking a clear centre respondents tended to focus on the corporation as an abstract global brand that hovers over routinised daily life, or alternatively, they would hone in on the very ordinary objects that provide the scaffold for this same household activity. Beyond this introduction, then, this is not a book dedicated to brand narrative, organisational management or the machinations of corporate strategy. To be sure, during fieldwork in Sweden in 2008 and again in 2010, I duly visited the stores, I spoke to store managers and I interviewed marketing managers, range strategists and designers in ‘service offices’ in Helsingborg and Älmhult. I read volumes dedicated to Swedish design and perused the catalogues, web pages and business literature that expounded on the Ikea corporation’s many successes, challenges and failures. But in addition to the remarkably homogenous and successful brand narrative that emerged, it was clear to me that myriad contradictions – or at least polarisations – characterise Ikea consumption.

As a global corporation that is both dispersed and disembedded (Foster 2010; Giddens 1990), it is not surprising perhaps that the Ikea ‘vision’ advanced by the marketing arm of the corporation is experienced in contradictory ways for the consumer. Research respondents witness a disconnect between a brand proffering Scandinavian lifestyles, a modern Swedish aesthetic and mass accessibility on the one hand and unsustainable mass production and market rationalisation on the other. There are the inconsistencies of flat-pack rationalization, lengthy queues, maze-like stores and frustrating reassembly all subsumed under the naturalising imperative that ‘Home is the most important place in the world’.⁶ Then again, the renowned thriftiness of Ikea’s founder (Ingvar Kamprad) can be contrasted with the reputed spendthrift reputation of the store’s many shoppers. The design is self-consciously Swedish, yet the corporation stands as a potential meta-symbol of cultural homogenisation on a global scale (see Miller 1998). Moreover, the idiom of democratic design or design for the many, as Ikea’s design philosophy, is pitched as an egalitarian solution for the purchasing masses, irrespective of income, but simultaneously alternates as a byword for common, everyday, pedestrian purchases lacking individual expression. Affordable versions of high-end goods found in Ikea stores seem to undercut the last bastion of elitist expression – art and design, and yet it is equally clear that individuals struggle to capture something that is at once so abstract and so concrete, where far-reaching claims pivot on ordinary things.

During anthropological fieldwork, it was striking how often respondents adopted a dual register to discursively move from the store as an abstract entity, as a Scandinavian aesthetic and as an international brand to the brute materiality of more immediate and proximate concerns: ‘I put Ikea blinds in the boys’ bedroom because they are going to get thrashed anyhow’, said Johanna, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of two. At first, I judged the consequent ambiguity as an outcome of an ineffective interview technique, but later I realised that the seemingly incommensurate regimes of Ikea as a global retailer, and ‘the blinds in the boys’ bedroom’ are captured through a register that moves from the abstract level of global corporate retail to specific home-based goods. This dualism is significant in understanding how individual householders negotiate a tension between Ikea as both distant and proximate, predicated on rationalised productivity but also integral to domestic, family-oriented cares. Appreciating the complexity of this double helix is central to this book.

Recently, anthropologists have focused on ‘corporate oxymorons’, meaning that marketing strategies dominate the popular vocabulary and ways of thinking about products in order to minimise their harmful effects (Benson and Kirsch 2010; Foster 2010). But here, instead of the percolations distilled from a corporate source, I focus on the multidimensional translations that operate amongst a nexus of households, public spaces and commercial outlets. One of the aims for this work, therefore, is to understand how design, understood by my respondents as a kind of benign intervention, represents the bridging point between a diverse range of specialisms on the one hand and something that makes sense on a domestic level on the other. In looking at Ikea showrooms and Ikea design, I am drawn into considering how perceptions of design entail ideas of intercession for the good, how aggregate practices inform values of equality or its inverse and how extra-domestic activities contribute to the traversal of public and private distinctions, rendering the home a public object as well as a private one. So although Ikea as the world’s largest furniture retailer may be an apposite example of the uneven production, distribution and circulation of corporate goods, neoliberal policies and uneven life chances in a global perspective, my interest in this work is very specifically focussed on the role of one particular corporation as a structural component of domesticity in Stockholm.

In the chapters that follow, I explore some of the dualities underpinning Ikea consumption, which are pretty unexceptional for my research respondents. Inconsistencies amongst the workings, the stakeholders and the publics of transnational corporations are common, not least in the world’s largest furniture retailer. I scrutinise the Ikea brand in this chapter, but thereafter, I shift focus from Ikea as a legal or financial enterprise – which is well represented in business literature (eg. Jonsson and Foss 2011; Tarnovskaya and de Chernatony 2011) – to explore one Ikea store and its role within quotidian life in Stockholm. In so doing, I suggest the boundaries of ‘Ikea’ as a commercial entity are perceived as blurred. This anthropological perspective opposes, then, discursive clusters found in the media and business-oriented publications that present the Ikea brand as distinct from everyday life, in stark contrast to actual manifestations of it in very ordinary things.⁷ During fieldwork, I suspended assumptions about where the corporation begins or ends and adopted a perspective that explored how Ikea products circulate in various corporate (Ikea designers, retail centres, service offices); institutional and cultural (community creches, museum exhibits, broadsheet and satellite-based media); and popular and everyday settings (second-hand websites, local buy-and-sell markets, office and hotel lobbies, the Ikea catalogue, individual households). Far from being an immutable juggernaut, Ikea represents a material reality, a financial entity and a social relation that captures a social kaleidoscope of people, practices and places that actively constitute (rather than merely feature in) these diverse corporate, state, cultural and popular fora.

While sitting in Stockholm living rooms during fieldwork, householders did not concern themselves unduly with brand but quickly focussed on the scented tea lights, cups and bookcases around them. And although individuals were familiar with the brand narrative – the establishment of the company and tales surrounding its founder – beyond that, it was simply inconsequential to their concerns. Aligned more with their priorities were the fiscal resources required to buy or rent a home and the myriad activities dedicated to home maintenance, which, despite the diverse forms this practice took, was lauded by all my respondents as a ‘good thing’. Research participants describe their homes in highly emotive terms, the backdrop for the essentials of everyday life; the source for ambivalence regarding reconfigurations in domestic planning and the housing market; the bulwark against extra-domestic stresses; and the platform for the traditional state-citizen contract. In this spirit, most of this book adopts the more expansive meaning of the term corporate and focuses anthropologically on the cross-cutting influences that draw household groups into broader collectivities. For my respondents, I suggest, the sheer volume of circulating narratives about Ikea and the frequency with which they are encountered on an everyday level work to perpetuate an experience of Ikea as ubiquitous and largely associated with mainstream, aggregate householding practices. In other words, the most ordinary of goods becomes the channel for the most extraordinary of claims.

Extraordinary claims for ordinary things

Deriving its name from an acronym consisting of the initials of founder Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd (the farm where he grew up) and Agunnaryd (his hometown in Småland, southern Sweden), Ikea was founded in 1943 by the seventeen-year-old Ingvar Kamprad. From humble beginnings, it is now a global concern and represents the world’s largest furniture retailer. Ikea has been described as a new creeping avatar of the twentieth-century modernist international style, responsible for homogenous domestic environments on a global scale – a ‘monolithic tyranny of aesthetics’ (Hartman 2007: 492). Research respondents readily subscribe to this view, comparing Ikea Malaysia to its equivalent in Moscow without pausing for breath. Yet, on the whole, as popular perceptions of global corporations go, Ikea is largely atypical. Although subject to occasional and prominent critique (Stenebo 2012), the store avoids the stigma of extreme corporate greed levelled at corporations such as Nike, for example (Cronin 2004; Klein 2000; Lury 2004; Stolle and Micheletti 2013). In academic literature, one does not read of Ikeaization to the same degree as Coca Globalization (Foster 2008b) or McDonalisation (Smart 1999; Ritzer 2011), and outside the academy, Ikea has largely avoided the concerted and intensive negative attention formed through sustained media critique, consumer boycotts or buycotts to which other companies have been subject. Such critiques do exist (Hartman 2007; Lindqvist 2009; Roberts 2012), but they are more muted, less profiled and accrue less momentum than the popular activism that surrounds other, typically American-sourced products. Instead, Ikea exports a cultural package made up of tantalising images of Swedish domesticity that are pitched as essentially benign, self-styled as quirky, the darling of lifestyle pages of global popular press. Clearly, this breed of Scandinavian style is not popularly identified as cultural or economic imperialism (cf. Bengtsson 2010, Cieraad 2014).⁸

The store has a staggering international following. In 2016, the Inter IKEA Systems BV web page stated there are now 389 stores worldwide visited by 915 million people, while 2.1 billion visited its web page.⁹ By now, the stampede on Ikea in Edmonton, London, in 2005, in which ‘people grew agitated and charged the doors’ is infamous and a common idiom for the extremes of Ikea fascination. On that occasion, the south London store remained open for a mere thirty minutes as overwhelmed staff battled to hold back the surge of four thousand who stormed in, anxious to acquire the touted bargains on offer.¹⁰ It is events such as this that leave people scratching their heads at the phenomenal, and at times frantic, attraction of Ikea stores. As a singularly disadvantaged constituency whose population was offered one-off bargains, Edmonton reminds us of the desperation that variously accompanies deprivation and the role of global commerce in contributing to a social cartography of feast or famine. On this occasion, fascination erupted into frenzy, a situation that could, in theory, happen anywhere but particularly so where opportunities to furnish one’s home inexpensively are somewhat rare. In global Ikea showrooms, posters attempt to promote a feeling of wild excitement with frequent references to ‘being crazy about’ design or cheap prices, underlining the perceived alignment of the Ikea brand with youth, vitality, thrift and, above all, Sweden.

Ikea at large: exhibition spaces, media discourse, popular perceptions

Rippling from a source that is symbolically located in Sweden but actually based in several countries, Ikea is iconic of transnational corporate structures that reach into myriad sites of popular culture and cultural production. Ikea’s corporate and cultural influence emerges in popular forms and institutional circles, such as an exhibition in the contemporary art museum Liljevalch Konsthall in Stockholm dedicated to Ikea (2009), to displays of Ikea design in Stockholm’s National Museum and Moderna Museet, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (2016),¹¹ the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2009)¹² and Vienna’s Imperial Furniture Collection (2010).¹³ Not forgetting too the countless international media publications dedicated to Ikea stories that make rep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Unpacking Ikea
• 2 Benign intervention: Ikea showrooms as tableaux vivant
• 3 Home staging, housing theatre: design, domesticity and the People’s Home
• 4 Standardisation, democracy and equality: design for the many people
• 5 Storage solutions: Clutter and Containment
• 6 Still life?: circulation, emotion and mobility
• Epilogue
• Index