Being Sociological
Chapter 17
Consuming
Sociology is the science that examines the
relationship between production, exchange and
consumption.
Classical Sociology and
Consumption
• Sociology was born out of revolution and a strong
theme in its development has been the production of
social order in dialogue with principles of
empowerment, distributive justice and social
inclusion.
• The issue of consumption touches all three of these
principles at many points.
Class Rule
• Karl Marx maintains that social order is imposed
by class rule.
• For him the consumption of the working class is
confined to productive consumption.
• Marx appreciates that capitalism produces a
cornucopia of plenty, in the form of luxury goods.
• But he presumes that the consumption of these
goods is deeply stratified and that ordinarily, the
working class are allocated no more than is
sufficient to reproduce their labour power.
Broadly speaking, classical sociology produced
four approaches to the question of consumption
and social order:
•
Class rule;
•
Division of labour;
•
Power and rationalization;
•
Distinction and emulation.
• Marx privileged relations of production over
consumption in his study of capitalism.
• As a result he fails to develop a satisfactory
appreciation of capitalism’s capacity to generate
limited economic redistribution and extended
consumption as a front of social control.
Two generations later, consumers are well aware
that they are exploited. However, through
marketing, design, branding, advertising and
other public relations devices invented by
capitalism, they are persuaded that there is no
alternative to the system.
The Division of Labour
• Emile Durkheim’s approach to the problem of
social order and, tacitly, to questions of
consumption, focuses on the topic of social
solidarity.
• In his view, urban-industrial society produces a
specific form of social solidarity that he refers to
as ‘organic’.
In his study Suicide (1897), Durkheim set out the
perils of excess egoism. Where individuals
experience weak connections with society, the
result is friction and isolation. In terms of
consumption, if too many people demonstrate
excess in their propensity to consume the end is
unrest, since the balance between the needs of
society and the freedom of the individual is abated.
• Conversely, where the relationship between
individuals and society is too strong, individuals
may feel crushed and suffocated. The result is
that they decide that their personal interests are
of no consequence.
• Individuals cease to have the experience of
freedom, or at least, conditioned freedom, which
is necessary to their well being.
• Hence, innovation, which is the spur of
economic growth and social health, may be
swamped by blind deference to the external
order.
• Durkheim’s approach points to the importance of
consumption as a marker of association. What we
consume expresses something about ourselves:
that is, either the values, interests and aspirations
that define us or that we would wish to have.
• It suggests links between consumption and
ritualized behaviour. It points to the importance of
display and performance in reproducing solidarity.
Power and Rationalisation
• Max Weber is sociology’s greatest theorist of the
struggle for power.
• At the core of his theory is an interest in the
relationship between structures of authority and
forms of conduct.
• He distinguishes three basic types of authority:
charisma, traditional and legal-rational.
Charismatic forms of leadership are based in
people’s sincere belief that the leader possesses
the gift of grace. It produces a condition in which
followers cultivate close identification with the
leader. With respect to consumption, followers will
place everything that they have, including their
own lives, at the disposal of their leader.
Charisma is an ultimate form of authority in which
no limits are recognized in regard to the cause in
question.
• Traditional authority means rule based upon
precedent. Cases in point include obedience to
the rule of hereditary monarchy, an elected
religious leader, a caliph or a sultan.
• Consumption patterns are governed by historical
precedent. Innovation and deviation are given
short shrift.
• Instead, consumption and social behaviour in
general are based on conformity.
• Legal-rational authority means government on the
basis of rational, bureaucratically administered
directives. Authority derives from tabulated rules rather
than the inspiration of a leader or the conventions of
tradition.
• Weber regarded this form of rule to be part of a wider
process of rationalization. That is, the colonization of
everyday life with systematized, impartially
constructed, written rules of behaviour.
• Legal-rational authority appears to grant maximum
freedom to the individual and supremely secure social
order, for rationalization is not the expression of
individual or group interests, but the crystallization of
the objective principles and protocols that are
nominally in the best interest of all.
• Basic to Weber’s discussion is the proposition that
rational rule-bound existence encases individual
freedoms in ‘an iron cage’. Where rules govern every
scintilla of practice, individuals can never feel free.
• With respect to consumption, this results in a
regimented consumer who indulges in the act of
consumption without passion or real fulfilment.
• This view of consumption regards the consumer as
keeping up with protocol rather than achieving genuine
satisfaction. Weber points the way to understanding
consumption as soulless, pedestrian and unfulfilling.
Distinction and Emulation
• The work of Thorstein Veblen (1899) opens up
consumption as a means of exhibiting distinction.
• It also sketches a model of how industrial
consumption breeds conformity through emulation
and stimulates the production of waste.
• Veblen’s work treats consumption as the axis of
society.
• For Veblen, the enormous wealth created under
capitalism produces a leisure class. While their
riches insulate them from the need to engage in
paid labour they do not exactly deliver freedom.
• The leisure class demonstrates its liberty from
the paid labour by cultivating characteristics of
distinction that automatically signify their social
separation and distance from the labouring class.
The ‘Conspicuous Consumer’
Veblen (1899) introduced this term to refer to the
spendthrift practices of the leisure class. Examples
include expenditure on extravagant parties,
building opulent mansions and gardens and the
cultivating of expertise in activities that have no
pecuniary value in industrial society, such as
becoming adept in dead languages or acquiring
the skills of the huntsman.
• Veblen shows how wasteful consumption is a
mark of status.
• As wealth in society accumulates, conspicuous
consumption will trickle down the social order.
• As a result, the lower ranks emulate the
spendthrift ways of the upper echelon.
• Thus, waste is transformed into a characteristic of
social distinction.
Veblen’s approach demonstrates how waste
is intimately related to advancing status.
The Contemporary Sociology of
Consumption
• There is an enormous amount of work being done
on patterns of consumption, inequality and
distinction, over-consumption, risk, regulation and
consumption and various subsidiary issues
(Paterson 2006; Smart 2010).
• All of this reflects the growing importance of the
subject in everyday life, but there is no agreed
thrust of direction.
• Moreover, the ‘rediscovery’ of consumption
privileges consumption over production and
exchange.
• An adequate sociological view of consumption
must systematically link it to relations of
production and exchange at all points.
• In pursuit of this goal it is helpful to distinguish
between two general approaches in the
contemporary sociology of consumption:
levelling perspectives and liquid
perspectives.
Levelling Perspectives
• The characteristic propositions of this approach
to the sociology of consumption are that
consumer culture produces standardization,
regimentation and pseudo-individualism.
• Consumption is examined as a front of social
control rather than an arena of choice.
• This implies that capitalist consumer culture is
self-correcting with powerful limits to resistance
and opposition.
• ‘Cool’ or ‘Smart’ capitalist corporations have
cultivated informality between management and
customers, developed ethical responsibility
programmes which ‘invest in people’ both within
and outside the corporation, and subscribe to
anti-sexist, anti-racist and environmentally
responsible business doctrines (Frank 1998;
McGuigan 2009).
• Questions of control ultimately lead to the issue of
the production of ‘socially constructed’,
‘disciplined’ forms of subjectivity (Fiske 1989: 83).
• This is the inverse of the neo-liberal view which
is predicated in the notion of ‘the sovereign
consumer’.
• By highlighting the socially constructed,
disciplined nature of consumer subjectivity, the
concept of the sovereign consumer is exposed
as a myth.
• The levelling of consumer behaviour is
necessary because the economic and social
interests behind production, exchange and
consumption demand that consumers have
standardized responses to products.
• Commodification is connected with dehumanization.
Thus, Zygmunt Bauman (2007) completely rejects the
proposition that consumption is about satisfying need.
• As evidence he cites the ‘capricious’, ‘volatile’,
‘ephemeral’, ‘insatiable’ and ‘narcissistic’ character of
modern consumer needs. What then is the purpose of
consumption? For Bauman, it is nothing but an end in
itself.
• He argues that the interests behind production and
exchange require life to be dominated by distraction
and the absence of any sense of a realistic
alternative, since this strengthens the security of the
system by stifling movements of resistance and
opposition.
Branding
• The concept of branding refers to the
construction of a market culture that expresses
standard responses to a brand.
• The main instruments used to achieve this end
are design, marketing and advertising (Ewen
1992, 1998).
• Through these means consumers are continually
persuaded to want new things.
Pierre Bourdieu and cultural
sociology
• Bourdieu holds that taste is a marker of social
distinction. What constitutes ‘good taste’ is partly
related to the values of the dominant class.
• There is a hierarchy in consumer culture in which
the lower orders emulate the standards of the higher
classes.
• This is connected to class habitus. This refers to
the system of classification, mental maps of the
physical and social world and characteristics of
belonging that are engrained in individuals and
groups as a corollary of the socialization process.
Distinction
This refers to the conscious and unconscious
ways in which individuals signify difference and
particularity from other strata. Through fashion,
political values, cultural concerns, psychological
sensitivities, health awareness and other social
markers, individuals position their identity in
relation to others.
Cultural Capital
• This refers to the set of tastes, skills, knowledge
and practices that relay social distinction.
• Cultural capital is closely but not invariably
related to economic capital.
• Bourdieu is concerned to relate questions of
taste and distinction in commodified culture
more directly to social institutions.
• Branding is a corporate means of objectifying
distinction in a commodity.
• Corporations quite deliberately seek to construct
taste cultures around products.
• In so doing they aim to inspire consumer desire
and loyalty.
George Ritzer’s theory of
‘McDonaldization’ (1993)
Ritzer contends that modern society is beset by
deep processes of regulation and compliance
that limit human freedom and reproduce social
control. In describing these processes as the
‘McDonaldization of society’, he identifies
consumption as the fulcrum of control.
• The McDonaldization thesis submits that the
conditions of consumer management developed
by the McDonald’s food chain both reflect and
reinforce much wider conditions of regulation.
• Four principles are highlighted:
• Efficiency;
• Predictability;
• Calculability;
• Control.
• Individuals and groups are portrayed as
powerless in the face of compelling social forces
that engulf them and close down their capacities
for response.
• As is typical with the levelling perspective, the
thesis presents societies converging towards
higher levels of uniformity, regulation and
compliance.
• Levelling approaches are extremely compelling.
• The flaw in these approaches is that questions
of social control and discipline of subjectivity are
overstated.
Liquid Perspectives
• These are approaches that place greater
emphasis on the following:
• The interpretive capacities of consumers;
• The diversity of experience in consumer
culture;
• The superficiality of meaning;
• The controls of built-in obsolescence and the
effects of economic growth upon consumer
identity.
• This perspective views the fundamental problem in
consumer culture to be one of surplus rather than
scarcity (Bataille 1985; 1991; Baudrillard 1986,
1998).
• Commodity culture is regarded as producing an
over-abundance of meaning, although meaning is
not necessarily very deep. Indeed, one of the central
propositions of the Liquid approach is that modern
consumers do not value durable meaning.
• Rather, consumer culture has become an arena in
which wants and longings are serial.
‘Solid’ and ‘Liquid’ Consumption
• Solid consumption is ascendant in a context in
which relations of production are dominant and
work is the central life interest.
• Producers exchange and consume products for
the ‘comfort’, ‘esteem’ and long term use value
such products deliver.
• Product utility and durability are at the forefront
of consumer choice.
• Liquid consumption refers to a later (current)
stage in consumer culture.
• It flourishes in a context in which relations of
production are dominant and non-work
experience is valued as the central life interest.
• In this phase in-built obsolescence is
normalized.
• Utility and durability are labelled as liabilities.
Bauman’s ‘Modernity 1’ and ‘Modernity
2’
Modernity 1 refers to the tendency of modern social
life to strive to establish territories, boundaries and
clear rules of practice. The notion that work is
compartmentalized from leisure and that each
sphere has its own rules of conduct is an example.
The central thrust of Modernity 1 is to establish
unimpeachable, universal, rational criteria of action
and judgement.
Modernity 2 regards the development of modern
life as inherently contradictory. Accordingly,
territories, boundaries and rules are dismissed
as a) arbitrary and b) subject to resistance and
opposition that derive from ambiguities intrinsic
to the idea of modern order. From this
standpoint, in the long run, territories,
boundaries and rules always precipitate
reactions and counter-movements.
Bauman’s discussion of solid and liquid
consumption can be seen as too polarized. Solid
and liquid forms co-exist. Boundaries, territories
and rules in consumption are inherently
contested and negotiated. That is, solid
consumption always leads to liquid reactions
and vice versa.
• Liquidity also suggests impermanence, mobility
and variety. Commodities and brands can be
read in an infinite number of ways, creating the
basis for consumer subcultures and individual
reactions that perpetually out-run levelling and
standardization.
• Thus brand loyalty is commitment to a sign or
system of signs.
• Each branded commodity obeys the law of inbuilt obsolescence.
Symbolic Commodity Capital
• This derives from access to a desired commodity.
Owning an Omega watch or a Rolls Royce
provides access to the independent status
attached to the commodity.
• An Apple lets you download songs from iTunes
and a Lamborghini gets you from A to B, but each
is also a source of symbolic commodity capital,
automatically linking the individual to a
recognizable position in the social pecking order.
Implications
• If one holds fast to the Levelling perspective,
positioning scarcity at the heart of the matter, one
leads to questions of empowerment and
distributive justice.
• This kind of examination of consumer society is
directed towards building a just, socially inclusive
society, implying an alternative to the existing state
of affairs.
• The Liquid approach is cognizant of issues of
waste, emulation and ecology.
• However, coextensive with this is the recognition
that consumption perpetually conceives new
meanings and creates the basis for new types of
association.
• It is analysed as the basis for harnessing random
imagination and unfocused energy that adds
value to society.
Jean Baudrillard (1986, 1998)
• Baudrillard contends that the abundance of meaning
produced in consumer culture compromises truth claims
and programmes of reform and resistance.
• He argues that it is no longer sufficient to try to understand
commodities and brands as purely material objects. To
truly grasp their significance in consumer culture we must
see them primarily as signs.
• The will to finally decode a sign is natural and compelling.
According to Baudrillard, it is also futile, since all readings
or decodings that purport to be ‘final’ simply reveal
themselves to be signs themselves.
• So consumer culture is caught in a fatal circle in which
meaning abounds, but truth is perpetually absent.
• The emphasis upon consumption as a process
that fundamentally involves signs and
representations connects with a specific view of
consumer identity.
• Modern conditions have generated a particular
type of consumer, for whom participation in
consumer culture rests on the power of the eye.
Framing and coding consumption is examined
through the metaphor of ‘the gaze’.
• John Urry’s (1991) famous work on the tourist gaze is
one of the most influential expressions of this
approach.
• Urry maintains that the anticipation that tourists have
in visiting sites is framed by a network of power
relations e.g. selective cultural traditions in literature,
photography and music, tourist brochures, criminal
bulletins, medical reports on the hazards of travel,
and crime reports on ‘dangerous’ places. This
network establishes a setting as ‘extraordinary’ and
‘exceptional’.
• However, since media hubs establish the parameters
of the tourist experience the authenticity of tourism is
questioned.
Conclusion
• Consumption raises questions of power,
inequality, identity and the ecological limits of
exploitation. It is now central to sociological
investigation and is likely to remain so.
• The challenge is to consider it accurately in
dialogue with relations of production and
exchange. For there is no consumption without
surplus, and no competition without scarcity.
Discussion Point 1: Consuming
Coffee
• Do commodities like coffee and the pleasures
they give us hide the ugly truth of capitalist
society?
• What elements of the Levelling and Liquid
perspectives are found in the discussion of
coffee?
• If coffee disappeared tomorrow what would take
its place?
Discussion Point 2: Conspicuous
Consumption and the Aspirational
Ethos
• What role does conspicuous consumption play
in contemporary society?
• Can conspicuous consumption and the
aspirational ethos survive in times of austerity?
• Can religion be a commodity?