Counting the pennies: the cultural economy of charity shopping

ABSTRACT

The Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP) project is grounded in the belief that the current system for the support of culture promotes and privileges certain practices and activities, tastes, relationships and competences and that, crucially, this system has effects that extend outside of the cultural domain to the economic, political and social spheres. In order to challenge this dominance, UEP sets out to explore the meanings and values people attach to their “everyday participation”, with the aim of re-evaluating current understandings of cultural participation and cultural value [Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Understanding everyday participation-articulating cultural values. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157]. This article discusses UEP ethnographic research conducted within a charity shop in Manchester/ Salford. The charity shop is found to be a site fundamentally involved in the “cultural economy”, defined broadly to refer to the relations between the cultural and economic values of particular practices and institutions involved in cultural production and consumption. Existing research on consumption have understood the charity shop as a place of cultural consumption, for certain subcultures that make “clever” choices regarding their identities [Gregson, N., & Crewe, L. (2003). Second hand cultures. Oxford: Berg]. This article argues for an understanding of the charity shop as more than simply a place of consumption but as enmeshed within a set of relations between culture, economy and place which has effects in the social sphere. This research identifies a number of forms of participation, including consumption, but also extending to various production practices, and other forms of social interaction, which take place within and through the charity shop. We argue that these different types of participation are bound up in a positioning cultural system that categorises people, places and values within and beyond the sphere of the charity shop.

KEYWORDS:

• Charity shop
• cultural consumption
• cultural practice
• cultural value
• cultural economy
• everyday participation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the management and other participants at CH Charity for allowing Edwards to participate with them and for engaging with her over the three months she was a volunteer there. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this article whose insightful comments have helped us to improve the presentation of the research. Finally, thanks to Andrew Miles, whose feedback and editing helped us to refine the presentation of our research and arguments.

Notes

1. See http://www.cles.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Cheetham-Hill-Community-Resilience-UF-logo.pdf

2. The closest library is located across the local authority boundary in Salford or at the local high school, a tram ride away.

3. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/22/beckhams-castoffs-red-cross-typhoon-haiyan

4. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/nov/21/the-best-charity-shops-for-finding-celebrity-castoffs (Cochrane, 2013b).

5. Shops include: Oxfam, Oxfam Originals, the RSPCA and the British Heart Foundation.