Consumer Society

Critical Issues & Environmental Consequences

Barry Smart

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446241868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What factors are contributing to the continuing growth in consumption of goods and services? At what point do the costs associated with consumerism begin to call our way of life into question? How are the problems of resource depletion, waste and pollution, and environmental impact being addressed? What is to be done about the consequences of our all-consuming way of life?

Ever-increasing consumption and a relentless pursuit of growth in output are the twin pillars on which the modern economy and contemporary social life rest. But the consumer way of life is globally unsustainable. We can?t all live the consumer dream.

This comprehensive, lively and informative book will quickly be recognized as a benchmark in the field. It brings together a huge set of resources for thinking about the development of consumer culture, its defining features, and global consequences.

Adept in handling a complex range of classical and contemporary theoretical sources, the book draws on an impressive range of comparative material and provides a variety of contemporary examples to inform and enhance understanding of our consuming way of life. Smart writes with verve and feeling and has produced a stimulating book that enlarges our understanding of consumer culture and provides a timely critical analysis of its consequences.

Clear, engaging, and original this book will be essential reading for all those interested in and concerned about our global culture of consumption including researchers and students in sociology, politics, cultural studies, economics, and social geography.

1

CONSUMING: HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

The twentieth century has been termed ‘The American Century’ (Luce, 1941; Evans, 1998). This designation seems especially appropriate in respect of contemporary consumer culture and associated consumer lifestyles, for as the twentieth century developed the global reach and influence of American consumerism increased markedly. With the growth of American economic and cultural influence, particularly in the latter half of the century, American consumer brands, culture, and lifestyles increasingly were being exported to and adopted by the rest of the world, albeit inflected in various ways by local customs and practices (Ritzer, 2005; Brewer and Trentmann, 2006). American corporations, consumer goods, cultural forms, and styles exerted an increasing influence over people’s lives and corporate brands, commodities, and services associated with the likes of Ford, Coca-Cola, Disney, McDonalds, Nike, MTV, Microsoft, Starbucks, and numerous other commercial enterprises became cultural universals, immediately recognizable features of the consumer landscapes of a growing number of people around the world. If consumerism had its initial roots in Europe in the seventeenth century, as the fruits of conquest and colonization gave rise to increasing material wealth and a growth in the range of products available for consumption (McKendrick et al., 1983; Brewer and Porter, 1993), the ‘imitation’ that quickly took hold in the American colonies, and then in an independent USA, became from the late nineteenth century the ‘real thing’, a way of life to which, in due course, more and more people around the world have aspired, albeit while also at times attaching local meanings and values to the commodities and services purchased and consumed (Glickman, 1999; Beck et al., 2003; Breen, 2004; Brewer and Trentmann, 2006).

In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were accumulating signs that America was no longer the manufacturing powerhouse that it once had been and the growing economic prowess of Japan and the ‘Asian Tigers’ led observers at the time to speculate on America’s relative decline, as in the early twenty-first century did the emergence of China and India as economic powers. However, if American manufacturing is no longer the driving force that it was early in the twentieth century, and especially in the immediate aftermath of World War II, America has sustained its place at the epicenter of global consumer culture. In 2006, consumer purchases accounted for 70% of US gross domestic product (GDP) the closest competitors in the GDP consumer stakes being the UK (61%), Italy (59%) followed by other EU member states France and Germany and then Japan (approximately 55%) (Meyerson, 2008). From being a leading exporter of manufactured goods in the first half of the twentieth century America increasingly has become an importer, a ‘nation of shoppers’, buying goods produced predominantly overseas, a significant number of which are ‘outsourced’ by American corporations that have abandoned a commitment to manufacture and ‘heavy capitalism’ in favor of brand enhancement, product promotion, and the mobility, flexibility, and financial benefits of ‘light, consumer-friendly capitalism’ (Bauman, 2000: 63; Klein, 2001; Arvidsson, 2006).

As the twentieth century drew to a close ‘the emergence of China, as the new workshop of the world’ (Anderson, 2007: 6), began to be a focus of growing interest, increasing expectation, and rising concern. As China’s production and consumption of commodities, goods, and services rapidly rose, so speculation grew that it would soon overtake America as the primary catalyst for global economic growth, its anticipated annual growth rate, combined with its projected level of consumer expenditure, being expected within decades to contribute more to global economic expansion than that of America (Bin Zhao, 1997; Shenkar, 2005). India, Asia’s fourth largest economy in the early years of the twenty-first century, was also developing rapidly, its economic growth rate, second only to China, averaged 8% for the period 2003–2006 and the signs of a burgeoning consumer culture, catering for a rapidly expanding middle class with increasing disposable incomes, were becoming ever more apparent. A report in The New York Times in 2003 described consumers inside an Indian shopping mall, young people at Barista Coffee, the Starbucks of India, families wandering through department stores, shopping at Marks & Spencer, Lacoste, and Reebok, dining with their children at McDonald’s, or buying food at the Subway sandwich shop. While poverty continues to be a big and serious problem in India with around 80% of the 1.1 billion population living on 25 rupees (30p) a day or less (Warner, 2007), following the opening up of the economy another increasingly prosperous India has emerged, one that is ‘based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class [between 250 and 300 million in number], including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country’s population’ (Waldman, 2003; see also Farrell, 2007).

What appears to be occurring in Asia has been described not as the emergence of China but its re-emergence. Before 1800, Europe and America were not the driving forces of a developing world economy, rather the dominant regions were in Asia and it has been suggested that if ‘any economy had a “central” position and role … it was China’ (Frank, A.G. 1998: 5). In addition, in this period the Indian subcontinent was itself ‘highly developed and already dominant in the world textile industry’ and this contributed to its very significant ‘balance of trade surplus with Europe’ (Frank, A.G., 1998: 85). In consequence, the recent rapid economic growth of China and India, and their increasingly influential participation in global consumer culture, may signify the beginning of an historic process of reorientation of the global economy away from the West and towards Asia, perhaps a restoration of Asia as the epicenter of the global economy, or the development of a bipolar or tripolar global economy (Chen and Wolf, 2001; Virmani, 2005).

One illustration of the growth of American or Western-style consumer activity in China and India is the increase in private car ownership. In 2004, in China the requirement to register bicycles ended and cycling became increasingly equated with the poor, with those unable to afford car ownership, those largely excluded from a growing consumer culture. In Beijing, the annual cycle tax was cancelled, bicycle lanes converted into car lanes, and 2 million cars given priority over around 4 million bikes. Between 1978 and 2006 the number of cars and vans on China’s roads increased more than 20-fold to 27 million and in Beijing alone in 2006 car ownership was increasing at a rate of 1000 every day (Watts, 2009; BBC Asia-Pacific News, 2008). In India, a comparable pattern is emerging as a growing middle class aspire to car ownership and car manufacturers move in to nurture and satisfy the demand for auto-mobility, the best example of which is the production by Tata of a ‘people’s car’, the four-seater 625 cc Nano, the world’s cheapest car (Madslien, 2008). Given that ‘a large Indian middle class … has internalized Western consumer and celebrity culture even more avidly than its Chinese counterpart’ (Anderson, 2007: 8) it is no surprise to find observers projecting that the consumer market in India may in due course exceed that of China (Engardio, 2005).

A consumer lifestyle – consumerism – that initially emerged in Europe, in England, in the seventeenth century, developed and achieved maturity in America, has subsequently become in the course of the twentieth century the most persuasive and pervasive globally extensive form of cultural life, one to which more and more people around the world continue to aspire. Before giving consideration to broad aspects of the historical trajectory leading from seventeenth century England through twentieth century America and, with the globalization of economic life, on to the growing number of other locations around the world that have embraced Western consumer lifestyles, including centres of development in China and India (Kalish, 2005, 2007; Shenkar, 2005; Farrell, 2007), brief clarification of key terms and consideration of the pivotal relationship between production and consumption is warranted.

Consumption and Consumerism

Consumption is a cultural universal, a necessary aspect of human existence, a practice that has constituted a prominent part of social life in all societies throughout human history (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979). Mundane consumption is a necessary and routine part of people’s lives, as is the exercise of choice in respect of a variety of relatively inconspicuous or ordinary products and services intrinsic to the maintenance of everyday life (Bevir and Trentmann, 2008). Consumption is closely articulated with another culturally universal and no-less essential practice, production, and to achieve an effective understanding of consumption analysis has to take production into account. As two radical critics of nineteenth-century political economy observed, consumption is a necessary corollary of ‘the existence of living human individuals’ and production for consumption is synonymous with material life itself:

the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history … [is] that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. (Marx and Engels, 1976 [1845]: 41–2)

The relationship between consumption and production, alluded to in this statement, is complex and varied, has changed over time and undoubtedly will continue to do so. Production and consumption continue to be articulated in a number of ways. The very process of production itself involves consumption, ‘is immediately consumption’ (Marx, 1973: 90), in the sense that, of necessity, materials and resources are used and energy and other capacities are expended in the course of making things and/or providing services. But where things are made and services are located is also subject to change. With the globalization of forms of economic production, manufacturing of consumer goods, and provision of consumer services have been increasingly outsourced or off-shored from wealthier, more developed, ‘consumer’ societies to less wealthy, less developed, ‘producer’ societies, creating distance between producers and consumers (Klein, 2001).

In a parallel manner the process of consumption can also be seen to be productive in so far as the act of consuming produces a range of effects and consequences, as in the mundane senses referred to above where the consumption of foodstuffs produces life, maintains and develops the body, reproduces energy and other bodily capacities, or where the consumption of a service may produce an ability, or an extension or development of the same, as in sports training and coaching, or in educational courses. While on the ‘supply side’ production creates the things, the objects, the services that are integral to the act of consuming, on the ‘demand side’ the process of consumption ‘creates for the products the subject for whom they are products’ (Marx, 1973: 90). The implication being that it is only in the act or process of consumption that a product truly achieves realization – ‘a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn … the product … becomes a product only through consumption’ (Marx, 1973: 91). A further respect in which Marx considers consumption to promote production is that through use, through the act of consuming, ‘consumption creates the need for new production’ (1973: 91), creates the motive by reproducing the need, not only for products, which have been used up or consumed and need to be replaced, but also for other related new products offering additional and/or complimentary functions as, for example, is the case with accessories for mobile phones, computers, and many other commodities.

In addition to producing objects and/or services for consumption, production, in the broadest of senses, also stimulates consumption by generating needs, wishes, desires, and fantasies in respect of goods and services, effectively creating the consumer, and powerfully influencing, if not determining, how a particular good and/or service is to be consumed (Marx, 1973: 92–3). It is here at the nodal point of the articulation of production and consumption that a particularly distinctive modern way of life – consumerism – a way of life that is perpetually preoccupied with the pursuit, possession, rapid displacement, and replacement of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of things, first emerged, rapidly developed, and subsequently has grown to become global in scope and influence. It is a way of living that revolves around the wanting of things, the longing for things, the purchasing of things, a way of life in which having, desiring, and wishing for more and more things have become significant preoccupations for late modern subjects whose identities are increasingly bound up with what and how they consume. As critics have commented, consumerism represents ‘the crass elevation of material acquisition to the status of a dominant social paradigm’ (Princen et al., 2002: 3).

Analysts of modern consumer activity and the development of consumerism as a way of life have drawn a number of distinctions between ‘consumption’ on the one hand and ‘consumerism’ or ‘consumer culture’ on the other (Slater, 1997; Miles, 1998; Gabriel and Lang, 2006; Bauman, 2007b). While consumption has been present throughout all human history, and necessarily so, ‘consumerism’ or ‘consumer culture’ is argued to be a more modern phenomenon and is considered to have developed initially in the West in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Braudel, 1974; McKendrick et al., 1983; Slater, 1997). For example, in France through the course of the seventeenth century, markets, especially at fairs and carnivals, were becoming an increasingly prominent source of consumer activity and historians have noted that in England early in the eighteenth century there were increasing signs of a growing propensity to consume and traces of a developing commercial interest in the value of advertising, marketing, and sales techniques (McKendrick, 1983).

There is a considerable body of historical evidence that reveals a steady growth in the range of goods being consumed in the West before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, in particular, commodities obtained through overseas voyages of discovery and ‘colonial exploitation’, such as ‘coffee, tea, tobacco, imported cloths and dyes, new foods (potatoes, tomatoes), fruits’, commodities that demonstrate that the ‘west was a master consumer of imperially expropriated commodities before it was a consumer of goods it produced itself’ (Slater, 1997: 18–19). The appearance in this period of a growing variety of consumer goods, including different forms of clothing and materials, crockery, decorative or non-essential manufactured items such as broaches, buckles, and pins, as well as cards, toys, and puppets, constitutes evidence of changing preferences and tastes on the part of consumers and households to obtain goods through the market by becoming more productive and dependable workers and signifies the early development of consumer culture, the emergence of consumerism as a way of life (Vries, 1993: 117; see also Campbell, 1987). The increasing proliferation and purchase of such commodities from the eighteenth century onwards has led analysts to refer to a ‘consumer revolution’, which along with the Industrial Revolution is considered to have inaugurated a process of transformation in and through which consumer activity has been accorded a critical economic significance and a prominent, if not central, position in contemporary social life, leading in due course to contemporary society being designated a ‘consumer society’ (McKendrick et al., 1983: 9; Miles, 1998: 6).

Although consumer culture has a history that extends back into the eighteenth century, if not earlier, it is only with developments from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that those early traces began to be given a more substantial and coherent form and through the subsequent growth of mass production and mass consumption came to be recognized as constitutive of a distinctive way of life – ‘consumerism’ – that has continued to grow in influence to become, from the late twentieth century, truly global in scope and extent.

On Consumerism

It is developments from the period 1880–1930 that have been identified as particularly influential in promoting the growth of consumer culture, as inaugurating a series of qualitative changes that might be said to have ushered in a new age of consumption, to have given birth to consumerism as a distinctive way of living to which more and more people have aspired, initially in Europe and North America but subsequently across the rest of the world (Slater, 1997; Miles, 1998; Gabriel and Lang, 2006).

In drawing a series of distinctions between different possible meanings of consumerism Gabriel and Lang comment that it was from the 1920s in America ‘that the meaning of consumption … broadened … to resonate pleasure, enjoyment and freedom … [moving] from a means towards an end – living – to being an end in its own right’ (2006: 8), to being not just a way of life, but in effect increasingly synonymous with the primary purpose of modern life, providing meaning to social existence. Consumerism is represented by Gabriel and Lang (2006: 8–9) as:

(1)	A moral doctrine in developed countries.
(2)	The ideology of conspicuous consumption.
(3)	An economic ideology for global development.
(4)	A political ideology.
(5)	A social movement promoting and protecting consumer rights.

With the exception of the last category all of the ‘distinct uses’ listed are closely interrelated aspects of an ethos of consumerism that gathered momentum throughout the twentieth century with the accelerating global diffusion of the economic logic of modern capitalism. The identification of consumer activity, the pursuit and purchase of commodities and services as constituting a virtual duty, as embodying a ‘moral doctrine’, as articulated with ‘freedom, power, and happiness’, and as signifying ‘the good life’, is integral to the political economy of a form of life that requires a continual cultivation of new markets and a parallel perpetual (re)generation of consumer demand. The several ‘meanings’ distinguished are the inextricably inter-connected moral, social, economic, and political dimensions of consumer culture, of consumerism as a way of life that has become global, ‘natural’, quite simply the way the world is thought to be and cannot be imagined otherwise.

The final meaning of consumerism distinguished represents a response to a number of different consequences of a way of life that revolves around increasing consumption of goods and services, and represents far more than merely a social movement operating to promote and protect consumer rights, as Gabriel and Lang indicate by drawing attention to the growing concern about ‘unbridled consumption in a world of finite resources and a fragile natural environment’ (2006: 9). Concerns about the consequences of consumer culture, the impact of a way of life that is predicated upon the increasing use of what are in many instances finite resources and materials, and that leads to the production of growing volumes of waste, as well as potentially irreversible climate changes, are matters to be considered at length below.

The rapid growth and expansion of consumerism through the course of the twentieth century was the product of a number of factors. Technological and organizational innovations in production raised output significa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Consuming: historical and conceptual issues
• 2 Consumer choice: rhetoric and reality
• 3 Cultivating consumers: advertising, marketing, and branding
• 4 Designing obsolescence, promoting consumer demand
• 5 Globalization and modern consumer culture
• 6 Consequences of consumerism
• 7 An unsustainable all-consuming world
• 8 Consuming futures I: business as usual
• 9 Consuming futures II: ‘green’ and sustainable alternatives
• References
• Index