Market practices and over‐consumption

Abstract

Three things are drawn together to form the basis for this article: the contemporary debates about excessive consumption, a theoretical interest in markets and consumption, and a set of sensivities concerning the study of social practices derived from the sociology of science and techniques. The purpose of the article is to elaborate on how current theorising about markets and consumption within interpretative consumer research and market studies may be furthered by insights from a practice approach. The challenges for marketing provided by the contemporary debates on rampant materialism and excessive consumption were chosen as a suitable site for this discussion. Specifically, the article addresses three issues that emerge at the intersection of market exchange and consumption in the face of uneconomic growth: 1) calculation – how do calculative practices, broadly defined, partake in generating over‐consumption? 2) performativity – what is the role of marketing in fuelling overconsumption? 3) agency – how are “over‐consumers” constituted in practice?

Keywords:

• market practices
• consumption
• calculation
• performativity
• agency

Acknowledgements

This article was written as part of research project P2005‐0517:1, Market‐making – shaping markets and market actors in practice, funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund. I would like to thank Bernard Cova for convincing me to attend the 4th Workshop on Interpretative Consumer Research at Euromed, Marseille, for which the first version of this article was written. I would also like to thank the participants at said workshop as well as two anonymous reviewers for CMC for useful comments and stimulating questions that helped me improve the article. Remaining shortcomings are my own.”

Notes

1. A clarification is in place concerning the term consumption. Most standard definitions emphasise the literal meaning of the term, that is the using up of some entity. Given this, it is disappointing that the article by Arrow et al. (2004) contains no discussion of central concepts such as utility and the social costs of consumption. In addition, a growing body of empirical studies of consumption practices have emphasised the creative aspects of consumption, for example “The ‘making’ in question is a production, a poiesis […] it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order” (de Certeau 1984, xii–xiii). There is thus scope for a much wider set of considerations when discussing over‐consumption.

2. For an empirical illustration of how consumers acknowledge the need to take the environment into account in order for it to affect their actions, see the study of how Irish consumers view the issue of consumption and the environment by Conolly and Prothero (2003, specifically page 283).

3. Another source of critique has been the failure of environmental economists to present convincing arguments for their choices of discount rates for calculating “the present value” of future consequences of policy decisions (Castle 1999).

4. The conflict between environmental economics and deep ecology derives from an ontological divide. The economics approach relies on individual preferences expressed through consumer choice as the only “real” indication of value, resting squarely in a subjective, anthropocentric tradition. Radical environmental philosophy, on the other hand, rests on an ontological assumption that “there is a real world outside the human mind” (Gowdy 1997, 34). Moreover, this world is held to have intrinsic value so that “natural assets should be preserved for reasons independent of their values as expressed by people [in market or induced market contexts]” (Mazzotta and Kline 1995, 247).

5. This is also the primary reason why I find it impossible to draw extensively on the work of Kilbourne and colleagues on the Dominant Social Paradigm (Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero 1997; Kilbourne 1998; Kilbourne and Beckmann 1998; Kilbourne 2004). This approach doubtlessly has many merits to it. By constructing economic, political and technological structures and by linking those to system‐wide effects it can be used to shift the blame for the current situation from individuals to certain dominant groups. Due to the many components of the world under study it puts in place already at the outset of inquiry, I find it less useful for studying the practical shaping of consumption, however.

6. Writing in organisation studies, Mumby and Putnam focus on the overt and covert emotional management of organisational members, suggesting that recruitment, selection, socialisation and performance requirements in organisations transform feelings into a form of alienated, abstract labour; a commodity that may be exchanged for organisational ends. Operating less explicitly, they suggest that efforts to manage organisational culture, for example through rituals and ceremonies, may be a way of controlling our emotional experience and thus aligning a member's emotions with a particular organisational rationality (Mumby and Putnam 1992).

7. For a similar argument specifically related to research on sustainable consumption, see Dolan (2002, 177).