Describe and analyse an aspect of your life which has been affected by COVID-19, using what you have learned in this unit.

Sociology of Everyday Life Week 6 Lecture

STUFF! PART 1

Dr Phillipa Bellemore, Sociology August 2020

Stuff

• Consumer culture: where necessities are acquired as commodities in the marketplace. Where buying goods is central to what is considered a good life

• A necessity or commodification? • Durkheim shopping as anomie or social connection • Bourdieu – class and taste • Giddens – constructing our identity through consumption • What does shopping tell us about class, taste, inclusion and exclusion?

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Consumer culture

In Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Mike Featherstone (1991) highlights ‘lifestyle’ connection to consumption.

• Clothes, leisure patterns, cars, home decoration, electronic goods etc are indicator of individual style, taste and even politics. (We don’t have fashion, we have fashions). Consumers choose identities by buying particular products. Lifestyle consumption tied to just-in-time production and niche- marketing (as opposed to Fordism – where goods are efficiently mass- manufactured)

Consumption important to our economy • ‘Just in time’ production methods allows competition creating ‘niche

markets’, trend spotters, disposable, planned obsolescence. Think fast fashion, a major cause of landfill.

• Consumption has replaced production as the ‘vanguard’ of the modern western capitalist economy.

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Silly products

Production of bottled water not needed in developed countries

A percentage of thankyou sales went to provide water for poor communities – ‘branding as a form of cultural parasitism…find non-commercial moral meaning ( Wilk, 2006, p. 320)

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https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2020/aug/18/silly-product- thankyou-stops-producing-bottled-water- citing-environmental-damage

Bottled water

Why do we drink bottled water when we have safe drinking water?

What do you say when waitstaff asks if you want tap water (free) or mineral water (expensive)?

Global billion-dollar busines. Nothing to do with ‘need’, much to do with branding, commercialisation and cultural meaning e.g. ‘pure’, mountain fresh (Wilk, 20o6)

Wilk, Richard. 2006. ‘Bottled Water: The Pure Commodity in the Age of Branding’, Journal of Consumer Culture 6(3): 303-325.

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Your stuff

• Consider mass-produced objects in your home. Where do they come from? What do you know of the conditions under which they are made (or if you don’t, what do you suspect of conditions under which they are made? Does this change how you feel about them?

• What are your most prized possessions? Why do you value them? If your house was on fire, what objects would you try to save? Why?

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Is there a hoarder in all of us?

• Why do we buy and keep things we don’t use, value or need? Clothes, mugs, cards, pens, paper, unused gifts, second drawer in kitchen that clutter our spaces

• When buying and storing becomes a problem: 1.2 million Australians have hoarding disorder. Related to loneliness (Norberg & Grisham, 2018)

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‘Reflexive project of the self’ BRANDING OURSELVES

• English sociologist Giddens (1991) argues we continuously reflect on the image we project, and our consumption choices tell a constructed version about ourselves or a reflexive project of the self. This is done to cope with the challenges of modernity where the certainty of traditional life is absent, and our self is more open-ended and ambiguous

• What we purchase communicates something to ourselves and others (think Cooley’s 1902) concept of looking glass self

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Shopping as social inclusion

• Classical sociologist Durkheim • Anomie and social solidarity • Can shopping be an isolating

experience or potential for connectedness and ‘we-ness’?

• Shopping the new religious with brands the new sacred icons?

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Emile Durkheim, French Sociologist 1858-1917

Shopping as social exclusion WHO BELONGS AT SHOPPING MALL?

• Who belongs? • Who doesn’t? • How are malls organized to encourage certain types of shoppers • Who does and doesn’t feature in advertising? E.g. people of colour, people

with disabilities

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Good taste

• Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) argues display of objects in homes relate to cultural taste in a competitive world of ‘cultural capital’.

Bourdieu contends taste is not individual but deeply social; the product of socialisation.

• Dominant classes maintain their position and power through ‘symbolic violence’, through judgments of taste, including things like the books you read, the films you watch and how you decorate your home.

• Taste not just about money. Artists and writers may not have money but time and commitment to develop taste

• Ideas about aesthetic judgments socialized by culture. One ability to discern good and bad wine….

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Gift-giving

• We live in a gift society. Calendar revolves around events such as Easter, Christmas that involve exchange of gifts - industries developed around gifts for new babies, birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day

• Marcel Mauss (The Gift, 1925) explored gift economies of tribal societies, in contrast to modern economies based on commodities. In tribal societies gifts predicated on system of reciprocity and obligation and to establish alliances and preserve order between groups

• Same logic can apply to gift-giving in modern societies • Gift giving entail specific obligation – to give, to receive and to reciprocate. • Gift giving is an expression of love, intimacy, generosity and altruism • In gift exchange, a process of decommodification occurs - commodities

are stripped of their status as a mass-produced object or economic value

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Decommodification

• Decommodification: a way we personalize and singularize an object, making it unique and marked by our humanity.

• Removing price tags, wrapping and attaching cards to things transforming the thing

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Resistance

• ‘Gentrification, advertising and blandness make us sad. We believe there is magic in the mancunian rain. Our city is wonderful and made for more than shopping. The street belongs to everyone and we want to reclaim them…’ Morag Rose, 2015, Loiterers Resistance Movement

• Buy local, maker market and repair cafes • Good Karma Networks: suburb-specific online communities to connect,

collaboratively solve problems and build relationships, therefore breaking down barriers and developing community resilience and resourcefulness.

• Borrow don’t buy libraries

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Thinking frames in relation to stuff

• Material/cultural: Our material objects link to our sense of self and communicate to others what we value. What matters differs across cultures.

• Structure/agency: While we have agency in what we buy, corporation and brands actively advertise and influence us. Many workers are damaged and exploited by brand names.

• Micro-macro: Symbolic interactionism theory interrogates impression management and presentation of self at a micro-level. Transnational corporations and brands actively manipulate how we present ourselves without most of us realizing what is happening.

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