Consumption

Ian Hudson, Mark Hudson

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509535392
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Economía
• Categoría: Política económica

Consumption used to be a disease. Now it is the dominant manner in which most people meet their most basic needs and – if they can afford the price – their wildest desires.

In this new book, Ian and Mark Hudson critically examine how consumption has been understood in economic theory before analyzing its centrality to our social lives and function in contemporary capitalism. They also outline the consequences it has for people and nature, consequences routinely made invisible in the shopping mall or online catalogue. Hudson and Hudson show, in an approachable manner, how patterns of consumption are influenced by cultures, individual preferences and identity formation before arguing that underlying these determinants is the unavoidable need within capitalism to realize profit.

This accessible and comprehensive book will be essential reading for students and scholars of political economy, economics and economic sociology, as well as any reader who wants to confront their own practices of consumption in a meaningful way.

1
The Meanings of Consumption

Coachella is a music and arts festival that happens every April in the city of Indio, California. Coachella is so cool, so self-explanatory that the answer to the number one question on the website’s FAQ “But Why?” is “Because.” Its 2019 music headliners featured heavy hitters such as Ariana Grande. It puts the festive in festival with the Pantene Styling Lounge, which encourages people to “be at the top of your content game & get your hair styled with glittery gold accessories,” and the “Sound + Sun = Fun” experience, where “Wearing Bose Frames & pairing them with your phone doesn’t just give you music for hours & style for miles – it also unlocks exclusive audio content in the official Coachella app.” Its 2019 sponsor list runs from Absolut and Amazon to Uber and YouTube. The UK’s Sun deemed Coachella “one of the most ‘FOMO’-inducing events of the year” (Wakefield, 2019). For those, like ourselves, who need the urban dictionary to understand even outdated terms, FOMO is fear of missing out – the anxiety you experience from missing a crucial event, often brought on by viewing posts on social media.

Part of the story of Coachella revolves around the importance of the festival as a vehicle for marketing. The sponsors not only appear prominently on the webpage but they are integrated into the very event itself, putting their names on parties and activities. This may represent a change from some concerts of the distant past, such as Woodstock, but this marketing path has been well travelled by big events such as Lolapalooza, which debuted way back in 1991.

What is also notable about Coachella and many similar culturally important events is that they are no longer merely events that people enjoy as consumers. They are also inputs into the production of something that had barely been conceived when Lolapalooza first grunged its way on stage. The 2019 Coachella festival was attended by the likes of Kendall Jenner, Olivia Culpo, Hailey Bieber, Gigi Hadid and Emma Chamberlain, some of the biggest influencers in the world. To take one from the list, Emma Chamberlain is an eighteen-year-old who, in 2019, had 8 million YouTube subscribers and another 7.7 million followers on Instagram. By some estimates she was earning around $2 million from the ads on her YouTube channel alone (Lorenz, 2019). Her product, distributed on social networks such as Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, is herself, or at least an infotainment version of her life. Influencers like Chamberlain make money by signing contracts with brands eager to have their products associated with people’s real life stories. Of course, the more followers an influencer has, and the better able they are to create sales for their sponsors, the bigger the contract. Chamberlain, for example, has a partnership with Hollister, which involves her posing for Instagram posts in its clothes. Our interest in their daily lives really functions – from their point of view and that of their sponsoring companies – only to make us into more enthusiastic consumers.

Influencers are not only selling their public lives to promote consumption, but their ability to do so is determined by the creation of an aspirational, interesting and enviable lifestyle through the products that they consume. So their status is largely based on the careful curation of their own consumption. For an influencer, whose stock-in-trade is living a life that others want, a media feed without Coachella is an incomplete and below average product, like a car without air conditioning. The idea that people are worth following because of the interesting ways they create an identity through consumption demonstrates the increasingly strong connection between who a person is and what they consume.

Influencers also demonstrate how new technologies and platforms are designed for commercial purposes. Instagram was originally touted as a venue for people to share pictures with friends, but it quickly transformed into a marketing tool – both for the collection and sale of data about our consumer preferences to advertisers and as a more traditional advertising venue – in order to maximize its revenue stream.

Do influencers represent a worrying new trend in which people famous for doing nothing other than showing off their lives peddle a shallow, materialistic and yet unattainable version of the “good life” to their impressionable followers? Should the idea that someone’s life can become a marketable, commercial product give us cause for concern?

What Are We Talking About? Consumption and Political Economy

As its title suggests, this book is about consumption. What the title does not make clear is what we actually mean by that word. Consumption did not always mean what it does now. Back in the day, it meant the “using up” of things, like physical strength, which meant that it was used to describe the exhaustion of the body caused by tuberculosis (Trentmann, 2016). From this definition, it is clear that consumption had something of a negative connotation, associated with wastefulness and tragic wasting away.

The word “consumption” has benefited from a remarkable transformation to become associated with the pleasures of enjoying goods and services such as those offered by Coachella. Different scholars have put forward very different definitions, from the relatively narrow to the very broad. On the very broad end of the spectrum, in the discipline of economics, consumption generally means the use of goods and services by households (McCabe, 2015: 4–5). Historian Frank Trentmann defines consumption as “a shorthand that refers to a whole bundle of goods that are obtained via different systems of provision and used for different purposes” (Trentmann, 2012: 3). This broad definition allows him to place very different goods and services, acquired and used in a wide variety of ways, under the category of consumption. To use his examples, buying a Ferrari and turning on a shower are both consumption activities. For Trentmann, the key difference between the two is that one is a luxury, purchased to display your status in society, and the other is more of a necessity and done without any showy considerations. We might also add that the Ferrari is produced by a for-profit company, while the water that streams out of the shower is, for most people, provided by a utility, owned, controlled or heavily regulated by the government. Clearly, Trentmann’s definition can be applied across almost all societies, political economic systems and historical periods. This definition could be used to describe someone in the United States in 2019, buying (or stealing) a digital download, and someone two thousand years ago, eating a root vegetable pulled out of the ground for the communal pot in a hunter-gatherer society.

Those opting for a narrower definition often attempt to distinguish between consumption done in different manners with different motives. Historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb define consumption in a consumer society as taking place in the context of the market, and in which people have sufficient discretionary income to buy for fashion and novelty rather than necessity and durability (McKendrick et al., 1982: 3). An extension of a consumer society’s attraction to fashion and novelty added by some scholars is that “wants and needs [are] infinitely stretchable” (Stearns, 2001: 16), so that people are willing to “take up everything that is endlessly produced” (Clarke et al., 2003: 27). This creates a distinction between the motives of people in a pre-consumer society – those who are satisfied with some (admittedly unspecified) level of comforts from consumption – and those in a consumer society – who behave in a manner which reflects what economists define as non-satiation of wants.

Writers taking the role of consumption in defining people’s goals and identities one step further often talk about consumerism, or a consumer society, as one in which “many people formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence or for traditional display” (Stearns, 2001: ix). The addition in this definition is the “formulation of goals in life,” so consumption in the context of consumerism is not only about acquiring but also about identifying yourself through what has been acquired. Sociologist Mark Paterson, for example, has a definition of consumerism that appears to be targeted toward the importance of lifestyle considerations: “a particular moment in which the consumer is participating in a series of processes, having taken account of branding, images, notions of self-worth … and exercised the temporary satisfaction of a desire or felt need” (Paterson, 2017: 3). For Paterson, any examination of current consumption must include “what kinds of things are motivating our decisions to buy, such as the concept of lifestyle, advertising, and notions of consumer choice” (ibid.: 12). This suggests that people define themselves by their consumption – as consumers – rather than through the other roles in their lives. Instead of identifying with their occupation, for example, people view work only as a means “to acquire coveted, meaning-laden consumer items, while the inherent meanings or value attributed to one’s work, career, or job largely [loses] importance … the primary purpose of work [is] its potential or ability to generate disposable income for consumption” (Dholakia and Fuat Firat, 1998: 5). This creates a difference between Trentmann-style consumption, which can be applied fairly universally, a consumer society and consumerism. We use the word “consumerism” to refer to a cultural orientation in which needs are fulfilled and meaning is produced primarily through the acquisition of commodities.

This book gives an analysis of consumption using a political economy framework. This means that it will examine theories through which we can analyze the context for, and consequences of, most consumption as it is currently practiced within a specific system of political economy. Consumption is part of an economic system. Rather than approaching it from the exclusive point of view of the individual consumer, a political economy of consumption centers the systemic: the needs of a capitalist system for growth, the embeddedness of individual consumption in commodity-specific “systems of provisioning” (Fine, 2002: 79), and the problems that arise from those systems for people and the planet. Political economy also foregrounds that consumerism as a mass phenomenon is historically specific. The implication of this is that a political economy of consumption does not set out to generate a critique of “consumption” as a transhistorical or ahistorical category. We must, in some way, shape or form, consume. Rather, we set out to add to our understanding of how capitalism conditions our patterns of consumption in specific ways.

We will take McKendrick et al.’s definition of consumption, which includes the market, one step further by arguing that capitalism – our currently dominant political economic system – contains two other crucial components: for-profit, private ownership and wage labour. Many other political economies, such as slavery, used markets extensively. The key difference between capitalism and slavery is not markets but the different rules about how labour is organized, which have crucial implications for the manner in which consumption should be analyzed. Slaves engaged in consumption – they ate food, wore clothes and slept in shelter of better or often worse quality. They even had some input into the goods and services purchased for their use (McDonald, 2012: 118). However, consumption by the slave, as an owned input into production, would have been determined largely by the slave owner, with the purpose of yielding the highest return in terms of minimizing the cost while maintaining the value of the slave as a salable asset and input in production. In capitalism, for-profit firms hire workers in the labour market based on whether the costs of the worker are less than the benefits that the worker produces for the firm. This calculation largely determines the income that workers have for consumption. The manner in which consumption decisions are made by a wage earner is vastly different in terms of the income earned and the worker’s amount of discretion about where that income goes. It is consumption by the worker, rather than the slave, on which this book will focus. It is the “sphere of exchange,” or the market, for both labour and consumer goods that translates work into consumption in a capitalist, market economy (Sassatelli, 2007).

The second element that distinguishes the capitalist political economy is for-profit, private ownership. This is relevant in terms of consumption because it means that the goods and services that people consume are produced in order to make a profit for firms and the individuals that own them. Goods and services produced in this manner are often referred to as commodities. This makes for a different context of provision than occurs in the home or by the government, neither of which are quite as concerned with profits. Most people acquire most of their goods and services through the market, although this is not exclusively so. Many goods and services, although a declining percentage of total consumption, are acquired through production in the household. This is where many child-rearing services are performed, from changing diapers to cooking meals, often according to socially constructed, traditionally defined gender roles. People also consume goods and services produced by the government. This is how most people get their education, their drinking water, fire protection and roads. Compared to market provision, these are produced under a different logic and with very different consequences for who gets to consume and the types of goods and services with which those people will be provided. In this book, we are concerned primarily with commodity consumption, although we will frequently contrast its crucial differences with the home or government. To sum up all of our definitional discussion, this book is on consumption, with a particular focus on capitalist, commodity consumption, or, as sociologist Max Weber put it, the satisfaction of daily wants and needs achieved through the “capitalist mode” (Weber, 1961).

Competing Themes in the History of Consumption

As we shall see in the remainder of the book, two fractures show up time and again in analyzing the political economy of consumption. The first tension is whether the evolution of consumption is one of continuity or transformation. Those, like Trentmann, who advocate for continuity argue that consumption is a dynamic evolution, not a phenomenon that should be associated with more recent times or any particular place. Rather, they argue that consumption and consumer culture extend back into time and across geographical locations, with no sharp break between a consumer society and a pre-consumerist past (Trentmann, 2009). As Trentmann stated, “things are an inextirpable part of what makes us human” (2016: 678).

Continuity advocates point to the importance of consumption beyond the usual Western European and American locations and back into the distant past. In tribal societies people not only ate, clothed and sheltered themselves but also consumed beyond bare necessities, often using consumption as a mark of status (Sassatelli, 2007). The Roman Empire was famous for its system of transportation that facilitated trade (Trentmann, 2009: 191). Marco Polo’s voyage in the thirteenth century marked the beginning of long-distance trade in high-value items between Asia and Europe. His accounts of the riches of the Great Han, including exotic horses, elephants and leather shoes, inspired further voyages and an expansion of Asian possessions in Europe by the aristocracy and (perhaps ironically) the religious hierarchy – an inventory in 1295 at the Vatican listed quite a collection of Mongolian silk (McCabe, 2015: 18–19). Moving in the other direction, Western imported goods were integrated into Middle Eastern markets by the sixteenth century (Stearns, 2001). An important part of this scholarship highlights the number of things that were in people’s houses as evidence of their propensity to consume (Margairaz, 2012: 193). In China, during the late Ming dynasty (up to the first half of the 1600s), books were an important household item, as were Japanese-made fans, lacquered tables, gold-painted screens and cosmetic boxes (Trentmann, 2016: 47).

Even McKendrick et al.’s definition of consumption for novelty and fashion can be found in more locations and further back in time than is often assumed. In Ming China, people exhibited a taste for changing sleeve lengths, demonstrating the importance of fashion, and one scholar at the time lamented that for “young dandies in the villages … even silk gauze isn’t good enough and [they] lust for Suzhou embroideries.” Merchants would create gigantic ban...

Índice

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Meanings of Consumption
• 2 An Aspiration for All the World: Championing Individual Freedom of Choice
• 3 The System: Capitalist Consumerism
• 4 Private Choices, Social Problems
• 5 The Shopocalypse?
• 6 Consumption, Power and Liberation
• 7 Shopping Police
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement