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The Unmanageable Consumer
Third Edition
Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang
SAGE Publications
London Thousand Oaks New Delhi
© Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang 2015
First published 1995
Reprinted 2002, 2003
Second edition first published 2006
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms
should be sent to the publishers.
SAGE Publications Ltd
1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP
SAGE Publications Inc.
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
B-42, Panchsheel Enclave
Post Box 4109
New Delhi 110 017
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-10 1-4129-1892-8
ISBN-13 978-1-4129-1892-3
ISBN-10 1-4129-1893-6
ISBN-13 978-1-4129-1893-0 (pbk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005932913
Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead
Printed on paper from sustainable resources
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Preface to the Third Edition 8
Introduction: The Faces of the Consumer 11
1 The Emergence of Contemporary Consumerism 18
2 The Consumer as Chooser 41
3 The Consumer as Communicator 65
4 The Consumer as Explorer 88
5 The Consumer as Identity-seeker 106
6 The Consumer: Hedonist or Artist? 126
7 The Consumer as Victim 150
8 The Consumer as Rebel 169
9 The Consumer as Activist 194
10 The Consumer as Citizen 218
11 The Consumer as Worker 235
12 The Unmanageable Consumer 252
References 263
Index ?
Acknowledgements
In writing this book, from its inception to this third edition, we have been helped by many people
who have encouraged us to develop our thoughts; or discussed all or parts of our thesis; or fed us
ideas, papers and facts; or suggested avenues of reading and research; or all of those! Our thanks to
them all, and in particular to our academic colleagues in our own Universities as well as our many
friends around the world. We also thank everyone in the world consumer movements with whom
we have talked and debated with over the years, also too numerous to mention! Our thanks, too, to
our editors and all the people at Sage.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
The Unmanageable Consumer was originally published in the mid-1990s, a period dominated by
claims of the triumph of the consumerist West. In the midst of excitement about what was seen as
an uncontestable hegemony of consumer capitalism, the book warned that ‘any triumphalism about
Western style consumption is misplaced. The future of global consumption must remain the object
of questioning on economic, cultural, environmental and moral grounds’ (p. 5). Unlike some, we felt
that the 1990s was a ‘troubled time in the world’. Two decades later, few would dispute that times
are indeed troubled or that Western-style consumerism is both facing and creating serious threats.
These range from ecological crises such as climate change, resource shortages (from water to oil)
and waste, to financial and geo-political uncertainties, including escalating religious and ideological
divides.
Recent years have seen extraordinary military and political upheavals, and a major financial crisis in
2007-8 whose impact continues. Yet consumption continues to thrive as a social, economic and
ideological force worldwide. The emergence of China, India and other developing countries as huge
consumer markets and producer hotspots has extended the reach of contemporary consumerism.
Political realignments worldwide have spawned new outposts of consumption and new black holes
of deprivation, while debt and concerns over the costs and consequences of consumption have
tempered some consumers’ appetites. The seismic shift in consumption brought about by the
Internet has turned homes into retail outposts. It has also turned consumers into workers, often
doing unpaid work for corporations. Consumers now have to work hard to service their needs, to
develop new products or new uses for existing ones, to advise other consumers, and generally to
self-service and replace other employees. At the same time, many objects that used to feature in
consumption have de-materialised. Books, music, films and images are now consumed in electronic
forms. Education and health services have become ever more commodified, with students and
patients being recast as consumers. Anti-globalization movements, sometimes with overtly anti-
consumption messages, have intermittently assumed centre-stage in politics, offering at least a
glimpse of opposition to mainstream consumer capitalism. Alongside this opposition have emerged
new forms of ‘soft’ opposition, framed around alternative exchange practices and a distaste for the
global domination of markets, brands and corporations. These don’t escape the grips of
consumerism but generate counter-currents within it. Despite of such eddies and currents, overall it
has to be acknowledged that the last 20 years have seen a substantial expansion of consumerism
worldwide.
Academics have watched this emerging picture with fascination. There has been an outpouring of
writing on consumption and the accompanying fetishization of the consumer in new journals, books
and debates. Cultural studies as an academic subject has thrived on consumption as a distinct and
new terrain which, when cross-fertilized with marketing research, has spawned a large consumer
culture theory (CCT) as a major field of academic inquiry. While CCT has been dissecting shopping
malls as cathedrals of consumption, students of organization have focused on the limits of the ethos
of customer service. As academic engagement with consumerism and consumption has intensified,
other academic discourses have colonized by the language of consumption. Identity construction has
come to be viewed increasingly through the prism of lifestyles. Choice, modelled on the affluent
consumer experience, has become the central tenet of many political and ethical discourses. At the
same time, there is an increasing awareness among academics of the ecological limits to the
consumerist orgy, which are already alarming observers of climate change, eco-systems, resource
use, and the fragility of natural resources such as soil, water and air. Alongside the orgy, billions of
people in low income countries subsist at a level of bare survival, and hundreds of millions of people
in affluent societies quietly sink into new forms of poverty, dejection, debt and exclusion. Marketers,
aware of this social phenomenon, have invented a new consumer category referred to as ‘the
bottom of the pyramid’, which is to be pursued with messages and social packaging appropriate to
straightened circumstances: thrift, ultra-cheap, aspirational to climb up.
When we originally wrote The Unmanageable Consumer, we put forward an unfashionable thesis.
We argued that the notion of the consumer was an intellectually unstable entity, which summed up
a central dilemma for late 20th-century capitalism – whether to treat people as controllable or free.
We proposed, not least in the title of the book, that, in spite of the best attempts to seduce them,
coax them or chide them, consumers consistently proved themselves unpredictable, contradictory
and unmanageable – that they displayed many different faces and images. We also argued that far
from disappearing from sight, work remained a fundamental part of people’s everyday experience
and that production and consumption were intrinsically interlinked through the socio-economic deal
pioneered by American automobile magnate Henry Ford. What we termed the Fordist Deal offered
alienating work in exchange for ever-escalating material standards and consumption. We observed
that this Deal which had dominated the 20th century had, by the end of the 20th century, become
fragile and that could easily be disturbed by sudden events and cultural shifts. One such shift is the
emergence of the working consumer now often referred to as the ‘prosumer’, a word combining
‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ coined by futurologist Alvin Toffler to denote that the work process is
being incorporated into the consumption process and vie versa.. We also argued that citizenship is
far from dead as a force in political arenas and that international relations could not be reduced to
political deals aimed at improving consumer choice and by removing trade barriers. We anticipated
the continuation of a viable critique of rampant consumerism, building on the legacy of decades of
struggles against the impact of industrialization and widening social divisions and inequalities.
Events in the last 20 years have strengthened our commitment to these arguments. An increasing
number of academic voices now challenge the political and ideological primacy of ‘the consumer’.
The unmanaged and unmanageable dimensions of consumption signalled by our book have gained
wider recognition, not least due to the urgency of environmental constraints, the growth of
inequalities within and between societies and the impact of the 2007-8 financial crisis. That said, in
certain ways our analysis of future trends could be accused of having been premature. In particular,
in our concluding chapter, we were perhaps too eager to discern signs of a twilight of consumerism.
As we have noted above, it has continued to grow and to flourish as a core feature of global
capitalism for the 21st century.
Questions and doubts continue, however. Is consumer capitalism in the process of reinventing itself,
in ways that transcend the crudity of mass production and mass waste? Could environmental and
ethical costs be internalized into the prices of goods and services paid by consumers? Is the moral
outrage against sweatshops sufficient to curb the worst excesses of consumer capitalism? Is
consumerism now inextricably wrapped up in consumer debt? Is quality of life assuming a greater
prominence over the sheer quantity of consumption? Or alternatively, is consumerism enlargening
its grip and turning consumers into workers in pursuit of their dreams with the arrival of the
prosumer? These are some of the questions which have prompted us to produce this new edition,
while leaving the essential thesis, scope and arguments unchanged. We believe the unmanageable
consumer continues to pose many threats for the survival of the planet, social justice and human
happiness. We hope that the account that we give here deepens engagement with the urgent policy
debates on the containment of the negative aspects of consumerism, while enlarging and
democratizing its positive aspects.
INTRODUCTION: THE FACES OF THE CONSUMER
The consumer is now a god-like figure, before whom markets and politicians alike bow. Everywhere
it seems, the consumer is triumphant. Consumers are said to dictate production; to fuel innovation;
to be creating new service sectors in advanced economies; to be driving modern politics; to have it
in their power to save the environment and protect the future of the planet. Consumers embody a
simple modern logic – the right to choose. Choice, the consumer’s friend, the inefficient producer’s
foe, can be applied to things as diverse as soap-powder, holidays, healthcare or politicians. And yet
the consumer is also seen as a weak and malleable creature, easily manipulated, dependent, passive
and foolish. Immersed in illusions, addicted to joyless pursuits of ever-increasing living standards,
the consumer, far from being a god, is a pawn, in games played in invisible boardrooms.
The concept of the consumer sits at the centre of numerous current debates. Policy-makers,
marketers, politicians, environmentalists, lobbyists and journalists rarely lose the consumer from
their sights. The supermarket has become a metaphor for our age, choice its mantra. In the 20th
century a new way of thinking and talking about people has emerged, which engulfs all of us. By the
beginning of the 21st-century, we had learnt to talk and think of each other and of ourselves less as
workers, citizens, parents or teachers, and more as consumers. Our rights and our powers derive
from our standing as consumers; our political choices are votes for those promising us the best deal
as consumers; our enjoyment of life is almost synonymous with the quantities (and to a lesser extent
qualities) of what we consume. Our success is measured in terms of how well we are doing as
consumers. Consumption is not just a means of fulfilling needs but permeates our social relations,
identities, perceptions and images.
The consumer has also assumed centre-stage in academic debates. If the 19th century tradition of
social theory and political economy approached people primarily as workers and creators of wealth,
consumption is the focus of much 21st-century theorizing. Psychologists have redirected their sights
towards an understanding of what drives modern consumers. Cultural theorists have increasingly
recognized the spirit of our age (whether described as late modernity, post-modernity, or advanced
capitalism) not in modes of production, government, class structure or art but in modes of
consumption, lifestyles and identities. Following the collapse of communism in the 1990s,
consumerism was commonly described as the unchallenged ideology of our times. Its scope
constantly stretched to incorporate new geographical areas, such as Far Eastern countries, new
spheres of social relations, like health and education, and new social spaces, like homes and the
countryside.
Discussions about consumption and consumerism are rarely value-neutral. Some commentators
celebrate the rise of the consumer; having lost faith in religious or political recipes of salvation, the
consumer is seen as the mature individual who seeks to enjoy life by making choices and exercising
freedom. Others lament consumerism as the final stage of commodification, where all relations
between people are finally reduced to usage and exploitation, in which the consumer is easily co-
opted. The consumer is not merely an object of theorizing, but almost invariably a central character
from a story; now a hero or a heroine, now a victim, now a villain, now a fool, but always central. In
some stories, consumers feature as sovereign, deciding the fate of products and corporations at a
whim, in others they feature as duped victims, manipulated by producers, advertisers and image-
makers. In some, they feature as callous villains, indifferent to the plight of the planet or those less
fortunate than themselves, in others as addicts, pursuing a chimera that only reinforces their
despair.
This book was written because we believe that the word ‘consumer’ is now so extensively used that
it is in danger of collapsing into meaningless cliché. At one level, to state that someone is a
consumer is almost as meaningless as acknowledging that she or he is a living being. We all consume
the same way that we all breathe, since life without consumption is as impossible as life without
respiration. Plants and other animals consume too. Why then has ‘the consumer’ in our culture
become so loaded with meanings, assumptions and values? From where does this idea draw its
power?
In this book, we argue that different traditions or discourses have invented different representations
of the consumer, each with its own specificity and coherence, but wilfully oblivious to those of
others. Neo-liberal economists, for example, have celebrated the consumer as a rational decision-
maker and an arbiter of products while some consumer activists look at the consumer as a
vulnerable and confused being, in need of help. Many cultural theorists look at the consumer as a
communicator of meanings sustaining the social fabric, while most ecologists reproach consumers
for their reckless and selfish behaviour. In this way, the concept of the consumer appears to have
lost its specificity. It can enter different social and cultural agendas, including those of cultural
theorists, Marxists, neo-liberals, journalists, publishers, marketers, advertisers and politicians across
the spectrum with apparent equanimity, in seemingly perfect accord. The consumer can mean all
things to all people.
The theoretical softness of the concept of the consumer (its readiness to act as an obedient and
polite guest in almost any discourse) is accompanied by a moral hardness which it can readily
assume. In reviewing what other thinkers have written and after considering the common usage of
the term, we became and still are impatient with one-dimensional views of the consumer, whether
they demonize or romanticize the consumer as if in consuming, people transcend every other level
of social existence, as if consumption alone defines them. Perhaps surprisingly, love and fear of
consumption cross conventional political, ideological and economic boundaries. Religious authorities
can side with environmentalists in denouncing excessive consumption, while co-operative socialists
and free market conservatives can join hands to celebrate consumer power.
We believe that it is time different traditions of defining the consumer started to take notice of each
other. Our first object therefore is to identify, disentangle and juxtapose approaches to
contemporary consumption that are rarely found within a single book or debate. Our discussion will
address diverse features of consumption ranging from gifts and bargain-hunting to cashless systems
of exchange, from fashion and fads in the developed world to the effects of Western consumerism
on the developing world, from the class dimensions of consumption to children as consumers, from
the semiotics of modern advertising to the scope and limitations of the law as an instrument of
consumer protection, from the concept of choice to debates about free trade and protectionism.
The book’s structure is an attempt to organize a truly prodigious, though sometimes chaotic, array of
arguments according to the underlying image of the consumer which inspires and drives them. Thus,
after Chapter 1, which investigates the emergence and spread of contemporary Western
consumption, each subsequent chapter until the final one presents a distinct portrait of today’s
consumer, as it emerges from the writings of academics, journalists, advertisers, consumer
advocates, policy-makers and others. We portray in succession the consumer as chooser, as
communicator, as identity-seeker, as victim, and so forth. It will quickly become evident that each of
these portraits highlights a different feature of the consumer’s physiognomy, while at the same time
obscuring others. We discuss the tensions and contradictions inherent in each portrait and examine
the tendencies of each to mutate into or confront different ones. We observe how critical
discontinuities and anomalies in a particular tradition of consumer studies are overcome by simply
switching from one consumer representation to another. We look, for example, at how the
consumer as explorer turns identity-seeker or how the consumer-chooser turns into victim or the
consumer as activist is seduced into being a consumer as worker. We argue that each one of these
portraits has strengths as well as weaknesses and we try to evaluate each.
Our own purpose, however, is not merely to recreate these images, compelling though they be, nor
to criticize each one of them from the vantage point of another. In spite of their considerable
complexity, we shall argue that all of these portraits are too tame, predictable and one-sided, failing
to come to terms with the fragmentation, volatility and confusion of contemporary consumption. By
stirring various traditions together, we are seeking to reclaim some theoretical recalcitrance for the
concepts of consumption and the consumer. We would thus like to re-inject some critical edge and
prickliness into the notion of the consumer that it has lost by being all things to all people. We
introduce the concept of the ‘unmanageable consumer’ to express this recalcitrance, a refusal on
our part to allow the idea of the consumer to become domesticated and comfortable within
parcelled discourses.
But there is another quality that we seek to capture through the concept of unmanageability, one
that pertains not to the concept of the consumer as it features in academic, political and cultural
discourses, but rather to the vital unpredictability that characterizes some of our actions and
experiences as consumers, both singly and collectively. As consumers, we can be irrational,
incoherent and inconsistent just as we can be rational, planned and organized. We can be
individualist or may be driven by social norms and expectations. We can seek risk and excitement or
may aim for comfort and security. We can be deeply moral about the way we spend our money or
quite unfettered by moral considerations. Our feelings towards consumption can range from
loathing shopping to loving it, from taking pride in what we wear to being quite unconcerned about
it, from enjoying window-shopping to finding it utterly boring, from being highly self-conscious
about the car we drive to being quite indifferent to it. Such fragmentations and contradictions
should be recognized as core features of contemporary consumption itself, hence the pertinence of
the idea of the unmanageable consumer.
To portray consumers as unmanageable does not seek to overlook the difficulties many people have
in making ends meet, the lack of choice that we experience due to the oppressive burden of social
expectations or the indignity of rank poverty. Nor does it skim over the immense resources and
effort deployed to observe, monitor, survey, forecast and control our behaviour as consumers, in
short, to manage us. Like today’s worker, today’s consumer is over-managed, prodded, seduced and
controlled. Never before has one’s every purchase been so closely observed, each credit card
transaction so closely dissected, each movement monitored on close-circuit TV. In the pages of this
book, we will encounter countless modes of consumer management coming from diverse quarters.
Consumers, however, do not always act as predictably as would-be managers desire. The very
fragmentations and contradictions that characterize our actions as consumers enable us from time
to time, in devious, creative and unpredictable ways to dodge management devices and evade
apparatuses of monitoring and control.
Ultimately, our actions and experiences as consumers cannot be detached from our actions and
experiences as social, political and moral agents. The fragmentation and contradictions of
contemporary consumption are part and parcel of the fragmentation and contradictions of
contemporary living. Being a consumer dissolves neither class membership nor citizenship; it is not
the case that at one moment we act as consumers and the next as workers or as citizens, as women
or men or as members of ethnic groups. We are creative composites of several social categories at
the same time, with histories, presents and futures.
But the most important reason for writing this book has been our desire to explore the qualities of
fragmentation and unmanageability of contemporary consumption as part of a long-term historical
process. Today’s Western consumer is often treated as the terminus of a historical process, which
will be duplicated in other parts of the world. Alternatively, Western consumption is viewed as
culpable for the escalating plunder of vast sections of the developing world and the continuing
deprivation of its inhabitants. We want to emphasize that today’s Western consumerism is itself but
a stage towards something different. The fact that no-one can be sure about what lies ahead does
not imply that we should treat today’s Western consumer as the summation of a historical
development. This is a mistake made by some political ideologues in their romanticization of
consumer choice and inability to imagine a future different from the present. We wish therefore to
re-assert the importance of the debate about the global and historical implications of Western
modes of consumption and the legacy that it is likely to leave for future generations.
The meaning of consumerism is framed by its wider political and social context. The demise of the
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s signalled to many observers the
triumph of Western consumer capitalism. Equally, the spectacular rise of the economies of the Asia
Pacific region was seen as confirmation that the only meaningful choice left to nations (now that the
choice of capitalism versus socialism was foreclosed) was that between consumer capitalism and
poverty-ridden, corruption-rife under-development. Instead, we argue that any triumphalism about
Western-style consumption continues to be misplaced. The future of global consumption must
remain the object of questioning on economic, cultural, environmental and moral grounds. The rapid
globalization of production and markets heralds a decline in some of the conditions that fuelled the
rise of modern consumerism: steady jobs, full employment, high wages, rising standards of living,
and so on. Following the economic and banking crisis of 2007-8, the efforts of politicians, marketers,
advertisers, publishers and trend-setters to entice people to resume the riotous pace of debt-based
spending have not been consistently successful. Major economies like those of Japan and the
Eurozone have faltered, while the USA itself stuttered and has lumbered itself with still more debt.
In the wake of insecurity about jobs and pay, fed by countless cautionary tales of debt,
homelessness and bankruptcy, many commentators talk about consumers suffering from spending
reluctance and a return to thrift. Some politicians are quick to despair about consumers doing their
bit for the economy. Many consumers have become nervous of unaffordable consumption. As
earlier generations of workers had been accused of being work-shy by their bosses, so consumers
today can be castigated for being spend-shy and failing in their duty to keep the economy going.
The core assumptions of consumerism have also come under scrutiny. The foolishness of pretending
that the natural environment contains inexhaustible resources and has unlimited tolerance to abuse
has become patently clear to an increasing number of analysts. The notion that everyone in the
world could ‘enjoy’ Western standards of living without leading to an environmental and ecological
catastrophe seems increasingly blinkered. Indeed, many giant corporations reliant on consumption
now acknowledge that they need to reduce their resource use and environmental ‘footprints’. Even
the axiomatic equation of quality of life with wealth has started to be questioned, as some vanguard
consumer groups advocate ‘consume less’. A sizeable number of people are also heeding the call
and voluntarily simplifying their lifestyles. While we cannot see the end of consumerism yet, its
future and pattern can no longer be taken for granted. For the time being, consumerism, far from
resting on its laurels, seems to be going through a period of well-earned malaise.
This book argues that the fragmentation and unmanageability of the consumer are features of this
malaise. As long as the consumer could confidently look forward to a future of greater prosperity
and affluence, the issue of defining the consumer seemed pedantic. Today, however, defining the
consumer has become like a Rorschach Test, the psychologist’s tool, where individuals are invited to
say what they ‘see’ in the shape of an inkblot; the idea is that what they each ‘see’ betrays their
state of mind. Similarly, to ask what the consumer is invites us to explore ourselves, our notions of
society and our outlook on life. One’s tendency is always to search for meaning, cohesion and
transparency where there may be doubt, ambiguity and uncertainty. By accepting fragmentation
and unmanageability, this book invites the reader to unravel some of the paradoxes that make up
contemporary consumption and to assess their implications for the future. Are we going to witness
the consumer’s resurgence, metamorphosis or demise?