Journal of Consumer Culture recent issues

Hypermodern Consumption and Megalomania: Superlatives in commercials

Gottschalk, S. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

Recent French sociological scholarship suggests the notion of hypermodernity to characterize the contemporary moment. While the meanings of this concept vary, the idea of excess seems central. Informed by this new scholarship, this article analyzes the superlative rhetoric in contemporary televised and internet commercials, and suggests elective affinities between this rhetoric and the various trends characterizing the hypermodern present.

Making a Habit of It: Positional Consumption, Conventional Action and the Standard of Living

Dwyer, R. E. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

Rising inequalities and high levels of consumption in many capitalist economies make understanding the relationship between stratification and consumption especially important at the turn of the 21st century. I propose that one way to advance this research is to build on work in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. This scholarship is often disparaged as positing an overly rational and manipulative consumer actor. I argue instead that the positional consumption literature in the Veblenian tradition offers a more complex view of the consumer actor than typically recognized and in particular allows an important role for habit, routine, and convention in consumer behavior. I identify three major arguments about the influence of habit on positional consumption from work in the Veblenian lineage. I conclude that incorporating this more complex view of emulative consumption produces more satisfying theoretical propositions about the dynamic relationship between consumption levels, the standard of living, and structures of inequality than typically addressed in research on stratification and consumption.

Good Young Nostalgia: Camera phones and technologies of self among Israeli youths

Schwarz, O. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

The nostalgic consumption of images, which only a few years ago was practised mainly by adults, has lately become prevalent among Israeli teenage girls. Girls often describe themselves as ‘nostalgic’ and nostalgia has become a desired emotion. Unlike the nostalgia of former generations, this nostalgia is cumulative and not necessarily based on a strong dichotomous contrast between past and present. The transformation of nostalgia is closely related to developments in technology (the camera-phone and the internet) and in the possession-patterns of devices. Personal mobile phones are used by teenagers for production, archiving and consumption of documentary images on a daily basis. These images, not unrelated to those of mass media, are consumed by teenagers in order to evoke nostalgia and other emotions, as a technology of self. This trend also contributes to blur the ontic distinction between events and their representations.

Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A new research agenda

Illouz, E. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

This article has three objectives. The first calls on vigorously injecting the notion of emotion in the sociology of consumption. In particular, I show that the former has much to contribute to the latter, especially when consumption is conceived as inherent in the process of identity building and maintaining. In this respect, and this is the second goal of this article, I argue not only that the category of ‘emotion’ can be heuristic for a sociology of consumption, but also that the sociology of consumption has long been, albeit unknowingly, dealing with emotions. Making explicit this analytical category helps strengthen, conceptually, much of the sociology of consumption. The third purpose of this article is to offer preliminary thoughts on the ways in which consumers’ volatile desires and emotions are mediated by culture. For the category of ‘emotion’ not to be psychological or individualistic, we need to understand just how it is infused by cultural meaning through and through. The conceptual link explaining the articulation between emotion and consumption is to be found in the notion of ‘imagination’, understood as the socially situated deployment of cultural fantasies.

Book Review: Robert, J. Foster, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 304 pp. ISBN-13 978--0--230--60386--8 (hbk), ISBN-10 0--230--60386--6 (pbk)

Sassatelli, R. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

Book review: Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum, Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2008. 248 pp. ISBN 978--1--84392--255--1 (pbk)

Jipson, A. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

Book review: Jason Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 322 pp. ISBN 978--0812240474 (hbk)

McGovern, C. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

Book Review: Jo Littler, Radical Consumption: Shopping for Change in Contemporary Culture. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008. 160 pp. ISBN-13 978--0--3352--2152--3/ISBN-10 0--3352--2152--1 (pbk)

Carducci, V. — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:19:35 PDT

Bourdieu, Cultural Intermediaries and Good Housekeeping 's George Marek: A case study of middlebrow musical taste

Doane, R. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

This article explores the nexus of class, gender, and musical taste for the white middle-class family in the USA from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. Cultural intermediaries in the western concert music field embraced an upper-middlebrow aesthetic and, in the anomic age of the reconversion era, buttressed the symbolic boundaries of whiteness for their middle-class readership. Using Bourdieu's work on fields and taste, I examine the representation of the classificatory schemes of western concert music in George Marek's music column in Good Housekeeping , one of the era's most popular magazines. I also examine how musical practices were gendered in the familial embodiment of cultural capital.This study concludes with an elaboration of Bourdieu's work on fields and Negus's work on cultural intermediaries, in order to highlight the connections between the privileges of musical taste and racialization in the USA, at mid-century and today.

Crossing Divides: Consumption and globalization in history

Trentmann, F. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

This article has two aims. First, it seeks to raise awareness about three competing frameworks that are currently dominating the debate about consumption and globalization: 18th-century global exchanges; Americanization; and consumerism. These have tended to operate in virtual isolation and ignorance from each other. Second, through a critical discussion of recent research, the article sets out to complicate conventional chronologies of tradition/modernity/late modernity that continue to underpin much research on consumer cultures. Instead of a linear progression from diversity to standardization, from gift-exchange to commodity-exchange, and from public engagement to privatized materialism, the article points to the dynamic interaction between these forms across time. An appreciation of these longer, deeper, and more variegated histories means that it is problematic to equate consumer culture with the `age of affluence' after the Second World War. In turn, it calls on critics of consumerism to adopt a more realistic and historically sensitive approach that engages with the longer evolution of consumer culture and avoids idealized images of a recent pre-consumerist past.

Manufacturing Customers: The database as new means of production

Zwick, D., Denegri Knott, J. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life.We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production—consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site of flexible accumulation processes in information capitalism.The result of our undertaking is a model of customer databases that foregrounds the far-reaching effect of potent simulational capabilities intersecting with constantly increasing computational power to transform the database into the factory of the 21st century.

Practices of Object Maintenance and Repair: How consumers attend to consumer objects within the home

Gregson, N., Metcalfe, A., Crewe, L. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

This article examines the practices of object maintenance in the home. Drawing on depth ethnographic research with households in north-east England, the article uses three object stories to show that ordinary consumer objects are continually becoming in the course of their lives in the home and that practices of object maintenance are central to this becoming. Located in a field of action and practice, consumer objects are shown to display traces of their consumption.The practices of object maintenance are shown to attempt to arrest these traces, not always successfully. A spectrum of practices of object maintenance is identified, ranging from routine cleaning, wiping and polishing, through quick-fix repair, to the more thorough-going restoration.The object stories show how restorative acts generally rekindle consumer objects; how other forms of repair (the quick-fix mask) are socially problematic, signalling the devaluation of objects; and how the failure of object maintenance can connect to the sabotage of objects.The success or failure of object maintenance is shown to have profound consequences for the social lives of consumer objects. More broadly, the article highlights the importance of consumer competences (and incompetence) with respect to object maintenance, and argues that object maintenance works to integrate consumption, connecting home interiors with acts of acquisition, purchase and ridding.

Modeling Consumption: Fashion modeling work in contemporary society

Wissinger, E. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

Fashion and branding have become powerful forces in the contemporary world. Fashion models, central players in these developments, are both lightning rods for controversy and objects of desire.To avoid the kinds of polarizing or sensationalist views of modeling that are common in academic and popular circles, this article focuses on modeling as work, to explore what models do when they fascinate or repel us via their engagement in commodification and branding processes that promote consumption. Using data from interviews with fashion models and those who work with them, the article argues that models promote consumption in far more complex ways than merely smiling for the camera.The article considers models as cultural intermediaries, discussing how they frame consumer experiences and encounters with commodities in the selection, styling and dissemination of images populated by models.Viewing models' self-commodification as forms of aesthetic, entrepreneurial, and immaterial labor, the article illustrates how these practices of compulsory image management and socializing glamorize the model `life' and so play into processes used to brand and sell urban space. Placing these activities in the context of new branding practices, the article concludes with a discussion of how the model life and the experience of being `in fashion' are being packaged and sold as a commodity in and of itself. By working hard to produce the image of living the `model life', workers in this industry model a lifestyle that is then packaged and sold to consumers as an experience that can be had for the price of their attention.

Book Review: Daniel Miller, The Comfort of the Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. 302 pp. ISBN 978--0--7456--4403--5 (hbk)

Belk, R. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

Book Review: Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny, Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007. 368 pp. ISBN 978--1--59874--01--2 (pbk)

Wilk, R. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

Book Review: Anne M. Cronin and Kevin Hetherington (eds), Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory, Spectacle. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. xiii + 305 pp. ISBN 978--0--415--95518--8 (hbk), 978--0--415--95519--5 (pbk)

Hannigan, J. — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:14:17 PDT

Editorial

Holt, D. B. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

Click a Donor: Viking masculinity on the line

Krolokke, C. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

In postmodern culture, sperm banking is turned into a legitimate business. This article expands on consumer theory and feminist scholarship and analyses the ways in which masculinity is positioned and performed on the website of one of the world's largest sperm banks, Cryos International. Cryos International brands its product as uniquely Scandinavian while simultaneously engaging in the discourses of a multicultural society. Viking donors are not only white, athletic, fit and young, but also sensitive, witty and moral; intimately connecting images of the donors to images of a nurturing and progressive Scandinavia. The website encourages prospective parents to not only consume sperm, but to also vividly consume images of cute, active, intelligent Nordic children and successful (heterosexual) families.

Between Incas and Indians: Inca Kola and the construction of a Peruvian-global modernity

Alcalde, M. C. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

Inca Kola is the only national cola to outsell Coca-Cola in its own territory. This article situates the marketing and success of Inca Kola within broader theoretical debates on the relationship between the local and the global and underscores the usefulness of more nuanced understandings of the local by bringing to the forefront internal heterogeneity and local hegemonic discourses. I suggest that Inca Kola is successful in large part because it bridges the gap between the local and the global and the traditional and the modern by presenting an alternative to Coca-Cola's American-global modernity through the construction of a Peruvian-global modernity. I then complicate notions of the local by analyzing how the Peruvian-global modernity represented in Inca Kola's ads is internally hegemonic and suggest that Inca Kola's marketing is better understood in terms of its embeddedness in urban white-mestizo racial hierarchies.

Growing Customers: Sales-service work in the children`s culture industries

Tyler, M. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

This article seeks to draw together insights from the sociologies of childhood and consumer culture as well as recent research on sales-service work to argue the case for a `paediocular' approach to the study of consumer culture and service work. Such an approach, it is argued here, would draw attention to the ways in which both the presence of children as consumers and dominant social constructions of childhood shape the configuration, management and experience of sales-service work. With reference to the findings of a series of interviews conducted with people in a range of sales-service environments, the analysis presented explores some of the ways in which sales-service providers working on the front line of the children's culture industries are required to socialize customers through the performance of aspirational and proprietary forms of aesthetic and emotional labour. The article also highlights some of the ways in which children's consumer culture involves the landscaping of sales-service environments and worker's bodies, as well as forms of interaction such as sales-service encounters, according to an aspirational and proprietary aesthetic that is designed to be simultaneously enchanting and instrumental.

Deviance, Dissonance, and Detournement: Culture jammers` use of emotion in consumer resistance

Sandlin, J. A., Callahan, J. L. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

Because emotion plays such a large part in the creation of the hegemony of consumerist ideology, we contend that any complete understanding of consumer resistance movements must also take into account the role of emotion in fighting against consumerist ideologies and global corporate control. In this article, we theorize about the role emotion plays in consumer resistance social movements — especially those using the resistance tactic of culture jamming. Drawing upon the frameworks of emotional hegemony and emotion management, we present an emotion cycle of resistance associated with consumer resistance activism. We illustrate the cycle by using examples from culture jamming enacted by groups such as Adbusters and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping.

Developing Consumer Subjectivity in Ireland: 1900--80

Dolan, P. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

The development of consumer subjectivity cannot be solely understood in terms of the intentions, strategies and discursive practices emanating from diverse power centres. Following Elias, and using Ireland as an empirical case, the consumer is presented as undergoing a shift along a continuum of We—I balances towards the latter pole. This occurs within the context of increasing social interdependencies, functional specialization and social integration. Through complex, unplanned social processes over time, the consumer is seen more individualistically. I conclude by suggesting that there are opportunities to synthesize figurational and Foucauldian approaches to consumer subjectivity once long-term social change is prioritized.

Book Review: Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 264 pp. ISBN 1--4039--8534--0 (hbk)

Butsch, R. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

Book Review: Regina Lee Blaszczyk (ed.), Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 363 pp. ISBN-13 978--0--8122--4037--5/ISBN-10 0--8122-- 4037--5 (hbk)

Briggs, A. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

Book Review: Frederick F. Wherry, Global Markets and Local Crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica Compared. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 184 pp. ISBN 978--0--8018--8794--1 (hbk)

Stillerman, J. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:17:20 PST

Introduction

Korczynski, M., Tyler, M. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

New Faces and New Masks of Today's Consumer

Gabriel, Y., Lang, T. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

In 1995, we proposed that consumption and contemporary consumerism could not be studied or understood separately from the world of work and production. We proposed that contemporary consumerism was built on the back of what we referred to as `the Fordist Deal'. This deal, pioneered by Henry Ford for his employees, was the promise of ever increasing standards of living in exchange for a quiescent labour force accepting alienating work. Since that deal was struck, consumerism came to signify a general pre-occupation with consumption standards and choice as well as a willingness to read meanings in material commodities and to equate happiness and success with material possessions. In this sense, Ford may be seen as the father both of mass production and mass consumption. Since the Fordist high noon of consumerism in the West, mass consumption is widely seen as having fragmented into a proliferation of highly individualized niche products. For its part, a considerable part of mass production has migrated to countries with lower wages and looser environmental and social controls, fueling their own variants of consumerism. In this article, we examine the gradual erosion of the Fordist Deal in the light of developments in the last 10 years or so, seeking to assess the future of consumerism at a global level. We also seek to identify and discuss some emerging conceptualizations of the consumer, some of the new faces and masks assumed by the archetypal character of our types. We analyse some of the tensions and contradictions lurking behind these conceptualizations and try to envisage some of the real choices facing consumers today and some of the processes of social change that hinge on the outcomes of these choices. The article identifies a fundamental paradox between the ubiquity of the consumer in contemporary discourses and the virtual impossibility of generalizing about consumers. We suggest, then, that the consumer may be viewed as one of those `essentially contested concepts' proposed by Gallie that defy domestication. The consumer, we argue, is unmanageable, both as a concept, since no-one can pin it down to one specific conceptualization at the expense of all others, and as an entity, since attempts to control and manage the consumer lead to the consumer mutating from one impersonation to another. It is precisely this paradox that we seek to capture in our article's title. The article concludes with a consideration of three basic challenges that are liable to lead to fundamental reorientation of consumption and production, as well as of our conceptualizations and theorizing about them. These challenges are the outcomes of environmental, demographic and social factors that, we argue, make the current situation unsustainable and will bring about its dissolution.

The Customer is Always Right?: Exploring the concept of customer bullying in the British Employment Service

Bishop, V., Hoel, H. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

Drawing on in-depth qualitative data from the British Public Employment Service (ES), this article sets out to examine the concept of customer bullying, an aspect largely overlooked within the literature. Highlighting the subjective, socially constructed nature of bullying, this article found that certain customer behaviours that were consistent with definitions of workplace bullying were not labelled as such by the ES frontline staff, but instead were seen as `part of the job'.

Creating Something: Using nostalgia to build a branch network

Cutcher, L. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

This article explores the way in which an Australian regional bank has been able to draw on nostalgia for a `golden era' of banking to expand its branch network. The bank's strategy centres on providing local friendly service delivered by civic-minded small-business people through a franchised community bank model. The article aims to contribute to our understanding of emotions in organizations by highlighting the ways in which nostalgia can be used positively to create connections between customer service and human resource strategies. These connections are made possible through a discourse of community that appeals to a desire for genuine social relationships, personal authenticity, moral certainty and a sense of belonging. That is, for a return to `something'.

Controlling Service Work: An ambiguous accomplishment between employees, management and customers

Johnston, A., Sandberg, J. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

In order to understand the control of service work, most service literature has focused on its production while treating the customer as secondary. The consumption literature emphasizes the customer's role but lacks empirical evidence for its claims. Using an ethnographic study of an `exclusive' department store, this article aims to reduce the gap between these two bodies of literature by investigating how employees, management and customers control service work. The findings suggest that the maintenance of class difference combined with competing expectations of managers, employees and customers makes the management of service work highly ambiguous and reveals a continuing instability between managerial practices of control and consumer culture.

Book Review: Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. London: SAGE Publications, 2007. pp. Viii + 237. ISBN 978--1--4129--1180--1 (hbk); ISBN 978--1--4129--1181--8 (pbk)

Miller, L. J. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

Book Review: David Nylund, Beer, Babes, and Balls: Masculinity and Sports Talk Radio. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. ISBN 978--0--7914--7238--5

Wachs, F. L. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

Book Review: Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity, 2007, 204 pp. ISBN 13: 978--07456--2483--9 (pbk)

Langer, B. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

Book Review: Mark Paterson, Consumption and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006. 252 pp. ISBN 0--415--35507--9 (pbk)

Southerton, D. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT

Book Review: Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge, 2006. 168 pp. ISBN10: 0--41534716--5 (pbk)

Ram, U. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:04:00 PDT