Matti Hakamäki

Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy

University of Jyväskylä

'To consume' is a verb. As such it suggests to us that consumption is an action, a series of acts of buying and expending goods. These acts are believed to be performed by individual consumers, provided with free will and the ability to make choices. In case of action, there should certainly be an actor - a subject to the verb. Still we can raise the question whether the actor really is the primary cause behind the action or is he merely an agent connected to it. Questions of autonomy, freedom and authenticity are ones that make "consumption culture the story of struggle over the everyday" (Slater 1996). It could be argued that instead of a simple cause and effect model, another kind of model where the consumer is defined as an agent in the process would be more fruitful and adequate. Such an idea defines the position of the individual as something more powerless. In a model like this the total phenomenon is best illustrated by such metaphors as a web, where the people simply are points, knots in the network, keeping the threads together. This gives stronger emphasis to the system , the overall construction of the network. The benefit of this type of thinking is that closer attention is paid to environments, structures, foundations and limitations of the phenomenon.

As a system consumption resembles production, not only in the vulgar sense, that one is considered to be the flip side of the other, that consumption is the place where the goods that are produced go, that it is only a market created, formed and colonized according to the needs of the producing enterprises. The point of the comparison lies in the fact that like various modes of production, consumption too takes place in a particular historical situation which is limited, regulated and constructed by a totality of the magnitude of a society or world-economy . Acts of consumption are parts of a bigger system.

Between an individual person and society there is a level, where the everyday actually happens. I have found it most convenient to use a household as the basic unit of study (instead of an individual level). It would also have been possible to use the concept of a family, but that would have produced some severe weaknesses. Family is a term we can not do without, and one that carries much weight in the form of both useful and unnecessary connotations. The problem with this term is that it has become very difficult to define what a family is and who the members are. A household differs from family in the sense that people belonging to it at least have a certain amount of common consumption. By definition, dwelling is a field, where the consuming unit naturally is the household. In a traditional rural environment, where it was more common than today for several adult generations to live and work together, one important criteria in defining the relationship between them was to ask whether they ate in the same table or not. Now that eating together at home at the same time and place has become more rare, the problem of being classed with the same household or family has been solved in a more prosaic way by asking whether these people eat from the same fridge. This of course is not an absolute method in all cases (like students living in dormitories). I am not suggesting that consumption is the last social glue holding people together, but it is one of the best methods of judging people's relations with each other.

Even in the areas where the consumption is not shared, an individuals household plays an essential role. One person's decision to buy something expensive limits the ability of the other household members to acquire goods. The decisions to use a certain kind of product sometimes has a structuring effect in the everyday life and thus makes certain future options more probable than others. Good examples supporting this hypothesis can be found for instance in the fields of housing and transportation. Often we are talking about chain of necessities, where one choice leads to another. The original decision may have unforeseen consequencies. Sometimes these choices could be made anew but that does not necessarily happen, because of the human tendency to create conventions and routines to simplify living (Ilmonen). Thirdly goods are not only material objects, but also things that have a role in forming our identities. For instance, if there is a car in the household, also those trips that would be economically more rational to make by foot, bicycle or train, are often made by private car (Hakamäki and Ukkonen).

During the last two decades there has been a substantial shift in the age-structure of consumption. The core of this shift is the increase in the economical resources of middle-age and late middle-age households. Currently they have a lot more opportunities of fulfilling their needs and desires than the comparable age group twenty years ago. This fact is illustrated in the figure, the data comes from the Household Expenditure Surveys conducted by Statistics Finland. In the figure the age of the household simply denotes the age of the adult person with the biggest income in the household. In the youngest groups males and females are represented almost equally. In the oldest age groups the same is true because of the huge proportion of older women living alone. Otherwise the person in question usually is male. The total disposable income is divided by the number of OECD consumption units (1 for the first adult family member, 0.7 for other adults and 0.5 for each child under 18 years of age). The figure only shows what has happened to age groups compared to each other. The overall rise in the standard of living is not taken into account. Also the change of the population structure is not taken into account. That is of course important from the marketing point of view.

The purpose of this figure is to show the change in economical freedom, possibilities available for different age groups. As this picture is a combination of two cross sections, it does not suggest what will happen to a single generation, but it excellently illustrates the situation, where the greatest economical freedom and autonomy is enjoyed by the group of people who typically are spending their last decade in the labour market or are recently retired. This is a new and interesting phenomenon because it is the first time that health and consumable resources are so loosely connected to work, and people who have money also have the time to spend it. Those men of this age, that are still working, in average have a higher income than younger ones. The income of woman does not vary as much by age.

It should also be mentioned, that life is a path of gathering property. At the earlier stages of adult life this is done to some extent with the help of loans, which have a restricting effect to consumption. In later stages of life loans are typically smaller or nonexistent. People finance their consumption directly with their income or savings. They also have property, that may be sold to some extent, if necessary. Though in Finland most of the wealth possessed by households is in the form of an apartment or a house. Thus it is not easily liquidateable.

Even if the environment of consumption changes, people's adoption of new consumption habits available to them is not an automatic procedure. People born at about the same time can be grouped into the form a cohort. A cohort meets certain historical facts at approximately the same phase of their life cycle. Each change of the environment has an impact that increases the similarity within the group and differentiates it from preceding and later cohorts (Ryder). Modernisation means the change in the material culture surrounding us. Every cohort has its characteristic similarities in accepting and taking advantage of new products and innovations(Sackmann).

Role of the new goods is not usually predictable in advance, because as we adopt those products into our lives, their presence shapes our habits and our use of time in some way. Although some of the new technological products have an obvious simplifying or helping role in our everyday life, it is clearly perceivable machines connected to entertainment have been generally accepted most rapidly. Thus technological change can not be deduced to any technical rationality principle alone.

Some new consumption habits become prevalent very quickly and then disappear; others remain. The diffusion among the public and possible fading away often vary in different cohorts. Fading away sometimes happens naturally as the population that took the products as a part of their life gets older. Usually a pioneering group is needed before an innovation is more widely accepted. Sometimes the young ones are the pioneers, but this is actually quite rare and possible applicable only to very few categories of things. Their importance and weight is in fact limited to certain areas of clothing and relatively inexpensive entertainment products, such as music and film. This is mostly due to their limited income or absence of such life circumstances, where new things could turn up. The consumption habits that emerge, or are common, among the middle-aged or elderly persons are mentioned less frequently.

The long-continuing positive growth in the financial resources has changed the attitude of cohorts older than 50 years. Twenty years ago this age group would have been more likely to have a more moderate part in the age structure of consumption. The fact that these older households continue buying a lot of consumer durables like they used to do in the seventies, is actually an important change, because the consumption now takes place in a very different life-circumstance context.

References:

Hakamäki M ja Ukkonen T: Autoilu ikääntyvässä yhteiskunnassa (article submitted)1998.

Ilmonen K: Sosiologia, rutiinit ja kulutus. 92-103 Sosiologia 1998(2).

Ryder N B: The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of the Social Change. American Sociological Review 30:843-861, 1965.

Sackmann R: Generations, Inter-Cohort Differentiation and Technological Change. In book Elderly people in industrialised societies: social integration in old age by or despite technology? 288-308. Edited by Mollenkopf H. Edition Sigma, Berlin 1996.

Slater D: Consumer Culture and Modernity. Polity Press 1996.