The fool, the hero, and the sage: narratives of non-consumption as role distance from an urban consumer-self

ABSTRACT

One fruitful perspective with which to think differently about the consuming subject in affluent capitalist societies can be found in the field of non-consumption. Whilst “choices” not to buy, own and use are often tacit in analyses of social class dynamics, identity expression, and consumer resistance, here we adopt the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman to argue that forms of non-consumption may occur within expressions of role distance. Our interpretive analysis of interview narratives identifies three imagoes – the fool, the hero, and the sage – that our informants reproduced to disaffiliate from a virtual self-generated by participation in the shopping situations dominating many urban centres. We conclude that buying and consuming less in “everyday” contexts may require the performance of alternative, culturally available personas, and that role distance can signify alienation from a consumer role or, conversely, constitute a defence against actual attachment to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Goffman
• imago
• narrative
• non-consumption
• role distance
• shopping

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Søren Askegaard and Yiannis Gabriel for their feedback on the definitions of consumption and Avi Shankar, Marek Korczynski and Nick Stevenson for their support with earlier versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elizabeth Nixon is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Nottingham and holds a PhD from the University of Bath. Her research focuses on cultural and social theories of contemporary consumption and critical perspectives in marketing. Lizzie is also a co-editor of The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer (2011, Routledge) and continues to investigate pedagogy and student behaviour in higher education. Her work can also be found in Marketing Theory, Studies in Higher Education, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization.

Notes

1 Few scholars appear comfortable proposing any definition of consumption within their own work. Whilst we acknowledge that such categorizations are not neat and inevitably involve overlap, we discern three broad variants: (1) Consumption as unavoidable – the ‘using up’ of resources as part of life (biological meaning) (2) Consumption as constituting culture – objects as carriers and communicators of meaning in all societies (anthropological meaning), and (3) Consumption as a set of cultural practices with particular meanings under modern consumerism – encompassing the broad range of cultural practices and social issues related to mass buying patterns and usually associated with monetary exchange (sociological meaning). This last discourse can be seen as the dominant sociological meaning of the term and the one to which we attach the negative prefix here.