The Sociology of Consumption

A Global Approach

Joel Stillerman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745696911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach offers college students, scholars, and interested readers a state-of-the-art overview of consumption the desire for, purchase, use, display, exchange, and disposal of goods and services. The book's global focus, emphasis on social inequality, and analysis of consumer citizenship offer a timely, exciting, and original approach to the topic. Looking beyond the U.S. and Europe, Stillerman engages examples from his and others' research in Chile and other Latin American countries, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East and South Asia to explore the interaction between global and local forces in consumption. The text explores the lived experience of being a consumer, demonstrating how social inequalities based on class, gender, sexuality, race, and age shape consumer practices and identities. Finally, the book uncovers the important role consumption has played in fueling local and international activism. This welcome new book will be ideal for classes on consumer culture across the social sciences, humanities, and marketing.

1
Introduction

Pop singer Beyoncé Knowles was the headline act during the Super Bowl 2013 half-time show. This event illustrates several dimensions of contemporary consumption explored in this book. The Super Bowl has the largest audience of any televised program in the United States, fans engage in many rituals while viewing the game, and Super Bowl advertisements set industry trends for the upcoming year. The game tells us something about contemporary American culture, our habits of consuming food and media, and what many of us think is important, since millions of us tune in. It also illustrates group identities and their expression, as fans wear their favorite team’s jerseys and build replicas of the football stadium with sandwiches and potato chips. Additionally, men and women have different viewing habits and watch with different levels of attention. Finally, the Super Bowl is one of the few rituals (shared, meaningful activities) in which a large cross-section of Americans participate.

In 2013, advertisers paid approximately $4 million dollars per 30-second spot with the hopes that their humorous or eye-catching ads would secure brand loyalty among the diverse age, gender, income, and ethnic/racial groups that view this event (Konrad 2013). The ads reflect and influence our ideas and behaviors in relation to work, leisure, money, gender, sex, race, and everyday life.

The half-time show often features established performers that commercial sponsors (Pepsi this year) hope will appeal to a broad range of viewers and persuade them to increase their purchases of the sponsor’s product. This year, Beyoncé had a small problem, as she had been caught “lip-syncing” “The Star-Spangled Banner” during President Barack Obama’s inauguration into his second term just weeks before (Moody 2013). Hence, many journalists, bloggers, and observers believed Beyoncé had to give a superb performance in order to “rescue” her career. Like other half-time shows, Beyoncé’s performance included a massive light show and highly stylized dancing with female performers sporting sexually provocative clothing.

Apart from the usual ingredients, the Beyoncé show made some interesting implicit comments about gender and race. The fact that the band is all female visibly contrasts with women’s traditional roles in pop music as singers rather than instrumentalists in a male-dominated profession (Milestone and Meyer 2012). Further, Beyoncé is part of a long tradition of music and dance cultivated within the black community. At the same time, being an entertainer is one of the few occupations relegated to African Americans by a dominant white majority (Jones 1963; Dyer 2009).

This event contains many of the ingredients of our complex and dynamic consumer society. Nonetheless, it is only a small piece of the puzzle. This once-a-year, turbo-charged spectacle has little to do with our daily consumption. To study consumption is to address its spectacular forms, like the Super Bowl or purchases of luxury goods, as well as its mundane, everyday forms – eating, grocery shopping, buying clothing, and visiting the gas station. Further, the Super Bowl is meaningful primarily for Americans, though it may be viewed in other countries. To what extent does the “larger than life,” “bigger is always better” model of consumption symbolized by the Super Bowl reflect the consumer behavior of most Americans, and how is it similar to or different from consumption in other countries?

This book seeks to understand the fast-changing world of consumption – the desire for, purchase, use, display, sharing, exchange, and disposal of products and services. Other general works offer valuable insights on this phenomenon, and I will build on their ideas throughout this book (see Slater 1997; Lury 2011; Lee 2000; Schor and Holt 2000; Sassatelli 2007; Smart 2010). However, this book is different from these works in three important ways. This book focuses on global consumption, consumption and inequality, and consumer citizenship.

General discussions focus on consumers in the United States and Europe; but today, some of the most important areas of expansion of consumption are outside the Global North (the U.S. and Europe) in the regions we now call the Global South (Parker 2009). These are non-European societies, many of which were colonized by European powers or financially dependent on the U.S., but whose wealth has expanded in recent decades. The economically most important of these countries are the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), though these changes are present in many countries throughout the world. Having studied consumption in the South American country of Chile since the late 1990s, I am acutely aware of how models of consumption exported from the Global North affect countries of the Global South, but also how countries in the Global South have distinct patterns of consumption that reflect their different histories, cultures, and societies. Since Europe and the U.S. only represent a small percentage of the world’s population, an analysis of consumption must take into account patterns in the Global South.

However, this book will also explore cross-national and cross-regional variations in consumption and its meanings that call for finer distinctions than the broad division between “North” and “South,” take into account the difficulty of classifying some countries as belonging to the North or South (like South Korea, a former colony that developed rapidly in recent decades and is now considered a wealthy country), and examine the mutual influences and exchanges of consumer styles across countries and regions. Some examples of these exchanges include the popularity of Japanese cartoons among teens in many countries or the emergence of “crossover” celebrities like Shakira. This Colombian singer has become a global superstar, having appeared on the U.S. reality television show The Voice and performed the theme songs for World Cup soccer championships in South Africa and Brazil.

Additionally, many scholars argue that since the 1970s, we have been experiencing the phenomenon known as globalization – intensified economic, social, cultural, and political contact across national and regional borders. In reality, globalization is a very old phenomenon, dating back at least to the Asian empires of the Middle Ages (Abu-Lughod 1991). However, the process of contact and influence across borders has accelerated and intensified over recent decades due to changes in technology, market competition, the organization of capitalist firms, public policies, and international migration (Harvey 1990).

Therefore, we need to understand not only how consumption varies across countries, but also how the diffusion of consumer goods and lifestyles across borders affects receiving societies. One obvious example of this pattern is the spread of U.S. pop music and media companies. In Latin America, U.S. media channels and Hollywood films have made major inroads in domestic music and film markets in recent years (García Canclini 2001). However, the main source of visual entertainment around the world is national broadcast television. Indeed, soap operas (telenovelas), news, and variety programs produced in the region are more popular than foreign programs (Straubhaar 2007: 7). We need to look at variations in consumption across the world, as well as the mutual influences of consumption patterns between countries.

Another distinctive feature of this book is its focus on inequality. Many discussions of consumption implicitly assume that all consumers are white, middle class, and residents of the Global North. However, this assumption ignores how social inequalities based on class, race, gender, sexuality, and age differentiate consumers (Zukin 2004; Bourdieu 1984; Gill 2009); how individuals use consumption as a way to signal their difference from consumers with different backgrounds (Schor 1998); and how ideas about inequality inform consumer choices and consumption-based identities (Milestone and Meyer 2012; Crockett 2008; Goldman and Papson 2000). Hence, consumption reflects an individual’s social position (e.g., their gender or race), but individuals also use consumption as a way to achieve social status in relation to other groups.

Scholars have examined how consumption interacts with class differences (Bourdieu 1984), and many researchers acknowledge that consumption has often been conceived as a feminine activity (Milestone and Meyer 2012). However, scholars have paid less attention to race, sexuality, and age as bases of differentiation between consumers. Yet we need to look carefully at these differences to avoid the mistake of assuming that most individuals buy and use products and services in roughly the same way, or that all individuals have the same capacity to access valued goods and experiences.

Finally, this book differs from general accounts of consumption through its focus on consumer citizenship. We often think of consumption as promoting political apathy or as a politically neutral activity (Adorno and Horkheimer 2000). This perspective overlooks the fact that governments promote and manage consumption by subsidizing (artificially reducing the price of) “essential” goods (gasoline and corn are two obvious examples in the U.S.), providing tax incentives to citizens for the purchase of certain goods (allowing homeowners to deduct mortgage interest from their taxes, hence promoting homeownership), and setting the rules for managing the money and credit supply that may promote purchases and/or specific industries (Zukin 2004; Cohen 2003; Manning 2000). These government policies are part of an implicit bargain between elected officials and citizens – the government will make specific goods available in exchange for political support (or at least compliance).

When governments cannot fulfill their part of the bargain (e.g., when gas prices spike or when there are shortages of essential goods), citizens blame individual officials or the government as a whole. For example, it is widely believed that U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1976–80) did not win re-election in part because of price inflation linked to the 1979 increase in the cost of gasoline. (In fact, oil producers based mainly in the Middle East had generated the gas price increase by reducing fuel supplies; President Carter had little to no influence on oil prices.) Similarly, many scholars argue that the Soviet Union and its satellite states collapsed in 1989–91 in part because of consumer goods shortages (and the visible example of consumer plenty in Western Europe) (Chirot 1990). Citizens thus expect their rulers to promote and safeguard a socially acceptable level of consumption.

Consumption is also a medium through which citizens demand respect for their rights and those of other groups. In the early 1900s, trade unions promoted boycotts of companies with anti-union policies to pressure them to negotiate. In a better-known example, during the 1950s and 1960s, African American college students staged “sit-ins” at Woolworths lunch counters to demand their rights to consume alongside their white counterparts. This tactic was one of many that helped crush Jim Crow, the legal segregation system of the U.S. South. Similarly, during the 1970s under the leadership of Mexican-American activist Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers Union promoted grape boycotts to pressure California landowners to recognize the union (Gabriel and Lang 2006; Cohen 2003; McAdam 1982; Morris 1981).

In the contemporary era of globalization, the arena of citizenship has expanded so that individuals around the world may mobilize and/or consume in ways they hope satisfy their ethical and political goals. One type of activism is an extension of the traditional boycott extended to the international arena. For example, during the 1980s, college students pushed their universities to divest (to withdraw their investments) from South Africa, which at the time was considered the most racist government in the world. The divestment campaign was a major factor leading to the fall of the apartheid regime (Gabriel and Lang 2006).

More recently, members of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) have attempted to gain greater control over the conditions under which athletic apparel for their universities’ sports teams is produced. Growing awareness that global brands like Nike and Reebok subcontract production of their clothes to “sweatshops” (employing women and children under hazardous conditions), in Asia and Latin America, led students to pressure their universities to review their licensing contracts (whereby universities receive funds from companies in exchange for exclusive use of their goods for sports teams). Students created organizations to review the working conditions in factories contracted to fill their universities’ orders (Klein 2010).

A third arena of consumer citizenship is what many scholars call “ethical consumption.” Here, individuals seek to purchase goods that have been produced under ethical conditions or in ways that are not damaging to the environment. Increasing awareness of the prevalence of sweatshops, poor wages for food producers (like coffee-bean pickers), and the environmental damage caused by industrial food production have led an important segment of consumers to purchase ethically certified and environmentally friendly products. Their choices have led large producers and retailers to stock environmentally friendly lines of goods in addition to their traditional brands and products (Micheletti 2003; Barnett et al. 2011).

Ethical consumption may also involve purchasing specific goods whose producers donate a portion of their proceeds to a charity. This can range from companies that develop agreements with charities (like the Susan Komen campaign for breast cancer research), as well as full-scale events devoted to charitable causes, like the “Brand Aid” concerts. Scholars question the effectiveness of ethical consumption in that it may be a poor substitute for volunteer work or political activism directed toward achieving the charitable goals promoted by the companies involved, it has not led to major governmental or inter-governmental legal regulation, and it may also bolster the image of companies engaged in unethical activities toward employees or the environment (Jaffee 2012; Smart 2010).

Understanding Consumption: An Initial Overview

Before outlining how I explore each of these issues in the text, I will first briefly note some of the key ways scholars have understood consumption. While the use of objects to satisfy biological needs and to construct meaningful lives is a cultural universal (Sassatelli 2007; Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Lury 2011), this book focuses on modern consumption, which is largely (though not exclusively) based on the purchase of goods and services on the market.

In addition to the acquisition of goods through market exchange, modern consumption occurs in societies where individuals and groups shape their identities in relation to goods. As we explore in chapter 2, scholars disagree about when such a society emerged. Traditionally, economic historians focused on the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England as ushering in the modern era. However, recent scholarship challenges this view, arguing that a consumer or commercial revolution coincided with and may have precipitated the Industrial Revolution (McKendrick et al. 1982). Others suggest that there were precedents for the eighteenth-century consumer boom in the Middle Ages (Sombart 1967), the European Renaissance (Mukerji 1983), sixteenth-century England (McCracken 1988), and seventeenth-century Holland (De Vries 1975, 1993).

Many of our ideas regarding modern consumption began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with economists’ efforts to define the new identity of the “consumer.” Classical economics argued that consumers are rational actors seeking the best price for a given product. According to this view, the combined actions of consumers ultimately determine the prices of goods, and hence shape and discipline markets. However, this view ignores the fact that desire rather than calculation motivates much of consumption, gift-giving does not necessarily satisfy personal needs or desires, and advertisers often influence consumers’ choices. The view of the consumer as an isolated, rational individual ignores the fact that non-rational motives and social influences shape consumption (Slater 1997; Smart 2010; Campbell 2005; Sassatelli 2007). Further, Trentmann (2006a) suggests that the British began to view themselves as consumers in the nineteenth century primarily due to political struggles, the law, and warfare. Consumer identities emerged differently elsewhere: in Germany, individuals were politically mobilized as members of interest or class groups like “workers” or “women” rather than as individual consumers. In sum, modern consumption did not necessarily coincide with people’s identification of themselves as consumers, a process that varied across time and space.

Karl Marx (1967) disagreed with classical economists who argued that supply and demand shaped modern economies. He argued that employers’ exploitation of workers in production generated profits, in contrast to economists’ view that profits...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Marketing and Retail from the Modern Period until the Postwar Era of Mass Consumption
• 3 Market Fragmentation and Globalization
• 4 Consumption, Status, and Class
• 5 Gender and Race at the Margins and Center of Consumption
• 6 The Life Course
• 7 Consumer Citizenship and the Nation-State
• 8 Consumer Citizenship in the Era of Globalization
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement