Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture* Timo Johannes Hämäläinen and Johanna Katarina Moisander The contemporary or postmodern era is often discussed in terms of a “consumer society” or “consumer culture.” Consumer culture generally refers to a society where consumer goods obtained through market exchange play a key role in the construction of culture, identity, and social life. In a consumer culture, private market–based choice is not only the principal means of pursuing personal happiness and well-being, but is also an important way of performing the role of the citizen and participating in the polity. Historically, the emergence of consumer culture is often traced to the 17th and 18th centuries and the advent of consumer markets for fashion and household goods. Also, the later introduction of department stores and the rise of the mass media—television in particular—have been seen as important catalysts of consumer culture. Conceptual Overview Two main approaches to the study of consumer culture may be discerned. First, there are the critiques of consumer culture, which have largely drawn from Marxist discussions of capitalist society and the Frankfurt School–inspired critiques of mass culture. Among the important scholars who have generated and inspired this criticism are Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer. For many of the critics, the consumer culture is essentially synonymous with “capitalist culture” or “mass culture,” and it represents alienation and the destruction of a stable traditional social order by industrial and capitalist relations that debase “real culture” and destroy community. In these accounts, consumer culture is sometimes viewed as being produced and sustained particularly by mass media, which lulls people into the pleasures of consumption and consumer ideology. Consumer culture, in these critiques, is often associated with inauthenticity, materialism, planetary exploitation, and sometimes also with “Americanization” (or “Disneyification”). Consumers are seen as having a fairly passive role; they are sometimes even viewed as powerless, manipulated victims of the capitalist culture. As such, they are depicted as satisfying “false needs,” buying things they do not need and in the process destroying the planet. * This is Authors’ Original Copy. Please refer to the final, published version of the text: Hämäläinen, T., & Moisander, J. (2008). Consumer Culture. In S. R. Glegg & J. R. Bailey (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies (pp. 262265). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1 Second, from the late 1980s and early 1990s onward, there has been a growing interest in cultural studies of consumer culture. In this stream of research, the focus of interest has been on the cultural dynamics and complexity of consumption and marketplace behavior, and it has taken significantly less “moralistic” forms. From this perspective, consumption is viewed as productive and profoundly cultural in the sense that it invokes, mediates, and reproduces the meanings and systems of representation through which people make sense of their everyday life and achieve social order. While acknowledging and focusing on the effects of different mechanisms and relations of power in consumer society, cultural studies of consumption tend to accord consumers a more active and creative role. The focus of interest may be, for example, on the ways in which consumers resist, re-accent, and rearticulate the meanings that marketers have encoded to brands and products, as well as on the practices through which consumers transform, customize, and reconfigure the products that they buy. The work of Michel de Certeau on consumption and the practice of everyday life in 1984, for example, radically questions the basic arguments and assumptions of the Frankfurt School about the victimization of consumers by the culture industry or the capitalist order. Through the tactics of everyday life, consumers continuously disrupt the logic of late capitalism even while confirming it. In cultural studies of consumer culture, research is usually based on theories and methodologies borrowed from cultural anthropology and sociology of consumption. Much of this research adopts insights and methods from the established traditions of structuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and ethnomethodology. However, it is definitely also informed and inspired by the more recent post-Marxist and post- structuralist theories, the works of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Michel de Certeau, for example. On the whole, the two streams of British cultural studies identified by Stuart Hall, the culturalist and the structuralist paradigms, can also be detected in consumer culture research. In the culturalist accounts of consumer culture, a pivotal role is given to “lived experience.” Drawing from a phenomenological perspective, structures of social relations and cultural practice are read in terms of how they are lived and experienced by members of culture. The structuralist— and poststructuralist—analyses, for their part, usually draw from literature studies and structuralist theories of language and focus more specifically on the cultural structures and systems of meaning or discourse that guide and constrain people’s everyday life. In these accounts, culture is often studied as a text, on the model of textuality. Much of the research on consumer culture, in its different forms, has been critical. Culture has been conceptualized and studied as a site of hegemonic struggle, and research on marketplace phenomena has tended to be openly 2 political, aiming to make our societies more open, democratic, tolerant, and egalitarian. Critical Commentary and Future Directions Material consumption has become an increasingly important activity in advanced societies since the first industrial revolution. However, it was only during the long economic upswing of the late 20th century that it became a dominant feature of modern cultures. The emergence of a consumer culture was facilitated by the satisfaction of people’s basic survival needs and the continuous growth of their disposable incomes. The extra income could be used in the marketplace. However, as Ronald Inglehart has argued, the rising income levels and the strong social security nets of welfare states are producing a slow but clear cultural shift in advanced societies away from the traditional material growth– oriented and economic achievement–driven cultural values toward new postmaterialist and postmodern values that are focused on subjective well-being. For several reasons, material consumption is likely to play a less important role in the postmaterialist society of tomorrow. First, material goods become less important for the satisfaction of human needs as the basic physiological (hunger, thirst, warmth, etc.) and security needs have been met. The higher-level needs of love and belonging, esteem and selfactualization are not very effectively met by consumption. For example, social relationships and communities tend to be much more important for satisfying these needs. Second, as argued by Richard Layard and other researchers of the “economics of happiness,” the value of increased consumption for an individual is reduced in wealthy societies by the simultaneously growing consumption of others, since consumers compare their consumption to that of their peers. Moreover, people tend to adapt to their new income and consumption levels rather quickly, which reduces the contribution of additional consumption to well-being. As these researchers point out, the “happiness” or subjective well-being of people has not increased in advanced societies in recent decades despite continuous economic growth. Finally, Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists have shown that people make irrational and short- sighted choices about their long-term well-being. Particularly problematic are choices that have both short- and long-term wellbeing consequences. In such cases, the short-term pleasures of consumption tend to overwhelm the more distant negative consequences in decision making. The consumption of food, soft drinks, alcohol, and drugs are the most obvious examples. However, the consumption of many leisure- time services and goods (e.g., those related to sporting activities and other hobbies) may also produce such negative “consumption externalities” if they use the time needed for other 3 important human activities that would contribute to long-term well-being, such as maintaining social relationships with family, relatives, or friends. People also tend to neglect the negative impacts of their consumption on others. The traditional example is environmentally harmful consumption (gas-guzzling cars, littering, etc.). Moreover, as pointed out in the economics of happiness research, the increased spending of one consumer can reduce the subjective well- being of others due to the importance of interpersonal comparisons. The various types of negative consumption externalities have become more common in wealthy societies where people have more resources, freedom, and choice in shaping their identity and lifestyles than ever before. A better understanding of negative consumption externalities would provide a better basis for improving individual and social well-being. As Anthony Giddens has argued, there seems to be an increasing need for a new type of “life politics” in the postscarcity world that would support individual choices and well-being in the long term. For all of the above reasons, the consumer culture and society is likely to change considerably in the future, and may even be approaching its end. This would not, of course, mean an end to all consumption, only an end to its dominant role among the everyday activities of human beings. However, the shift toward a postmaterialist society will be slow because the consumer culture is so strongly institutionally embedded in advanced societies, and value changes tend to require generational changes. Vast changes have taken place in everyday life and the key determinants of well-being in recent decades: the resources and capabilities of individuals; their everyday lifestyles; dominant human needs; differentiation of individual preferences; and the natural, technological, cultural, institutional, political, economic, and organizational context of everyday life. As a result, the subjective well-being of individuals is increasingly difficult to understand. The most innovative firms are actively engaging consumers in their product and service development processes in order to better understand their needs and lifestyles. The changes in everyday life and determinants of well-being are fundamentally reshaping the cultural context of consumption. We need to understand these changes better if we want to understand the role that consumption plays in everyday life, well-being, and the society as a whole. Unfortunately, there is no well-established, comprehensive theory of well-being available for analyzing the above changes, their inter- dependencies, and their impacts on well-being. More research on the changing determinants of everyday well-being would serve well the decision makers in both firms and public agencies. The former could develop better products and services with increased value-added for their customers, while the latter could develop better policies with more direct positive impact on citizens’ well-being. 4 Further Readings Certeau, M. de (1986). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Denzin, N K. (2001, September). The seventh moment: Qualitative inquiry and the practices of a more radical consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 324–330. Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right: The future of radical politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture & Society, 2, 57–72. Holt, D., & Schor, J. B. (Eds.). (2000). The consumer society: A reader. New York: New Press. Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kahneman, D., & Thaler, R. H. (2006). Anomalies: Utility maximization and experienced utility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(1), 221–234. Mackay, H (Ed.). (1997). Consumption and everyday life. London: Sage. McKendrick, N., Brewer, J., & Plumb, J. H. (Eds.) (1982). The birth of consumer society: The commercialization of eighteenth-century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, D. (Ed.). (1995). Acknowledging consumption. A review of new studies. London/New York: Routledge. Miller, D. (2001). The poverty of morality. Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(2), 225–243. Moisander, J., & Valtonen, A. (2006). Qualitative marketing research: A cultural approach. London: Sage. Slater, D. (1997). Consumer culture and modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 5