Major Themes in Industrialised Societies: Consumer Culture
We shall analyse the symbolic aspects of goods: how they acquire meanings, how such meanings are shaped, and the role these meanings play in the lives of consumers. We will also discuss the nature of ‘consumerism’, and its emergence. We will also discuss what is meant by consumer sovereignty.
- Don Slater and Peter Corrigan
There is a considerable distance between the physical properties of a product (such as alcohol or cigarettes) and its symbolic properties. In many cases, the symbolic meaning of the product seems more important than its physical features. The entire world of consumer goods consists of cultural meanings and symbolism. These meanings concern social status, lifestyle and self-image. They change over time and space; e.g., the image of Coca-Cola in Russia is different than in the UK or Pakistan.
In discussing commodity fetishism, Karl Marx suggested that under capitalism social relationships between human beings are distorted to appear as if they are relationships between things. However, in reality, commodities are not just useful things, they also possess the social characteristics of workers’ own labour, and reflect the social relationships of production. Yet, rather than viewing commodities as distorted social relations, the ‘embeddedness approach’ conceptualises the commodity as being both dependent on social relations and their meanings, and constitutive of social relations and new meanings.
Meanings of commodities are powerful, and they motivate the consumer to purchase a particular commodity; e.g., to drink a high-energy drink is to enjoy the association with a superstar athlete. Indeed, the association of distinctive meanings with particular commodities gives consumers the opportunity to embrace or acquire those meanings through their purchase. To buy a particular style of jeans (say, Levi’s) or newspaper (say, The Guardian) suggests the kind of image and status you want to portray to others. In this sense, all commodities have their own symbolic-value, as well as their particular use-value (utility) and exchange-value (price).
The meanings are socially constructed, that is, subject to deliberation and manipulation. Contrary to the neoclassical/liberal conception, consumers are not sovereign, and their preferences are not private, free and rational. Equally, it is too simplistic to suggest that manufacturers, distributors and advertisers manipulate consumers, since they work within an existing social norms and conventions of needs and meanings.
Significantly, meanings of things play a central role in modern capitalist economies. Such meanings influence who buys what commodities and why (e.g., gift giving). They affect how commodities are advertised and marketed (e.g., perfume for women only). They even determine the physical and colour of commodities (e.g., men’s and women’s clothes).
The meaning of things matters not only as a way for people to express aspects of their own selves and identities but also as an expression of relationships between selves (friendship, familial bonds, and communal ties). Commodities can play an important role in designating and maintaining social relationships. Such expressions have a substantial impact on the economy. Witness the immense retail sales during the Christmas and New Year season, as people purchase presents and gifts – sometimes the Christmas retail sales constitute 40-50% of total sales in any one year.
The social significance of gift giving in contemporary market society can be assessed by the extent of such activity during Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Women’s Day and other major holidays.
In addition, gifts can also facilitate business and political relationships, though often such activity is regarded as corrupting and interpreted as bribes.
Of course, gift relations need not take the form of commodities, and gifts can be reciprocated in other forms such as personal services, cash and invitation to social events.
Consumerism
- Don Slater and Peter Corrigan
It is suggested that consumerism facilitates individuals to express their values and make public statements about self-image, social status and personal identity. Consumerism, it is suggested, enables people to express their feelings about relationships with others (e.g., gift giving), and to align themselves with social groups and publicly declare their allegiance (e.g., anti-fur campaign, organic foods and ethical buying). Yet, change is an important part of consumerism – witness the changing fashions of food and music. For this reason, commodities may be inappropriate to reflect deep commitments or to construct long-term life-plans and social projects.
The growth of a consumer society
Some of the key elements contributing to the emergence of consumerism included a general rise in productivity, rising personal incomes, and an increase leisure time.
The meaningfulness of commodities serves a very useful purpose, and sustains the capitalist mode of production. If consumers acquire commodities only for their physical utility, consumers will become satisfied before too long. But if commodities consist of meanings and symbolism, then consumers will constantly search for new and different meanings and experience – witness the different forms of ‘extreme’ sports and ‘eco-tourism’.
There were four key factors behind the spread of consumerism. First, the commercialisation of major holidays (e.g., New Year’s Day and Women’s Day) encouraged the widespread gift giving, and connected with it the purchase of commodities. While, the commercialisation of holidays provides an opportunity to celebrate with one’s family and friends, the commercialisation of public sentiments can threaten to undermine the authenticity of the occasion. For example, Women’s Day becomes an occasion to give roses and chocolates rather than to demonstrate for political change and greater equality, or Christmas Day becomes an occasion to feast and to shop in department stores and supermarkets rather than to pray in churches and cathedrals.
Second, the spread of consumerism was helped by the different ways to finance consumption other than through direct income and savings. Credit enabled many Western Europeans to embrace a ‘buy now, pay later’ strategy. Early forms of consumer credit were tied to the purchase of specific items; a seller would lend money to consumers only if they bought the seller’s product. Later, generalised consumer credit could be used to purchase any item.
Third, advertising was significant as it created products’ meanings and symbols to match consumers’ desires and wants. Also, advertising shaped the psychological and social benefits of consumption. Advertisers aimed to create product differentiation, whereby the products were distinguished from the substitutes. Advertising also invented problems (e.g., bad breath and body odour) that their products were suppose to solve. One indication of the importance of advertising and image-making was the amount of money spent on marketing and promotion. In 1880, advertising in industrial societies was US$200m, and this rose to US$3.4b in 1929. In 1997, General Motors spent US$2.23b on advertising, and McDonald’s spent US$580m.
Fourth, consumers represent a diverse and plural set of groups (such as gays and lesbians, youth, minority ethnicities, elderly, and so on), each possessing a distinct lifestyle and a consumption pattern. In advanced societies, manufacturers had begun to recognise the demographics of the population, so that commodities and advertising were targeted especially for women and minority ethnicity. Many commodities (such as after-shaves and perfumes and alcoholic drinks) began to have a gendered quality. Minority ethnic groups became a powerful part of the consumer market (‘black pound/dollar’). Similarly, advertisers were attracted by the increasing spending power of gays and lesbians (‘pink pound/dollar’), so that they were featured in promotional campaigns for commodities such as holidays and night-clubs. Given the trend towards societal fragmentation and social re-groupings, new groups are emerging that are likely to boost sales if they are successfully targeted.
- Don Slater and Peter Corrigan
Within liberalism, ‘consumer sovereignty’ means two things:
· consumers have sovereignty over their own needs, desires, wants, identities; desires and needs are private, free from external, social authorities, who might wish to impose overarching social aims and projects
· in a market society, competition ensures that producers must respond to the expressed preferences of consumers; the price mechanism means that firms only survive by accurately and efficiently satisfying their desires
By making social institutions (e.g. firms) accountable to individuals’ desires, the liberal society fosters initiative, enterprise, efficient use of resources, imagination and opportunism. Consumer sovereignty brings together freedom, reason and progress. The most trivial, mundane purchase is an act of individual self-determination, of rational calculation of ends and means, and of energetic social advancement of economic forces.
Markets are crucial for realising consumer sovereignty. The liberal market is a mechanism for translating individual preferences into a socially coordinated allocation of resources among different spheres of production and between individuals with different kinds and degrees f desire. The market is seen as an impersonal mechanism or means of coordination that allows social order to emerge from the ‘anarchy of diverse individual desires’. Moreover, the attempt to will particular outcomes is self-defeating: no authority can know and control the infinite individual self-interests.
Price is not a reflection of the value of the good, but a social compromise between the agendas of wants followed by each private individual. Price is an efficient mechanism for allocating social resources.
Consumer sovereignty was the most popular Cold War difference between the east (industrial communist economies) and the west (advanced capitalist societies).
In the Soviet system: in aspiring to plan production and distribution, the social system subordinated the needs of the population to bureaucratic planning, instituting a ‘dictatorship over needs’. Unable to be disciplined by a market system, the Soviet system became increasingly undemocratic. It produced unfreedom, irrationality and lack of progress and dynamism. Yet, elements of consumer culture survived in the informal, unofficial black economy, making up for the deficiencies of central planning.
In the west: the neo-liberalism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics radically promoted consumer sovereignty: the ‘model of consumer choice’ came as the most adequate model for all forms of modern citizenship and social action. This meant that the state had to reduce its scope of economic activities (e.g. privatisation). Freedom meant the individualistic freedoms of the market and being ‘free to choose’. A cultural revolution occurred that replaced the traits of dependency, indiscipline of western welfare socialism with the enterprise culture, associated with market behaviour and economic competition. Within neoliberalism, consumers must be enterprising, demonstrate initiative, risk-taking, self-reliance, independence and self-responsibility.