http://joc.sagepub.com/ Journal of Consumer Culture http://joc.sagepub.com/content/11/2/215 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/1469540511402447 2011 11: 215 Journal of Consumer Culture Sofia Ulver-Sneistrup, Søren Askegaard and Dorthe Brogård Kristensen resistance The new work ethics of consumption and the paradox of mundane brand Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at: Journal of Consumer Culture Additional services and information for http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://joc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: http://joc.sagepub.com/content/11/2/215.refs.html Citations: What is This? - Jul 13, 2011 Version of Record >> at National School of Political on April 27, 2012 joc.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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http://joc.sagepub.com/Journal of Consumer Culture
http://joc.sagepub.com/content/11/2/215The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/1469540511402447
2011 11: 215Journal of Consumer CultureSofia Ulver-Sneistrup, Søren Askegaard and Dorthe Brogård Kristensen
resistanceThe new work ethics of consumption and the paradox of mundane brand
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:Journal of Consumer CultureAdditional services and information for
Indeed we have reached this absurd stage when the only activity that is granted
authenticity for most of the world is that of resistance. (Miller, 2001: 240)
Perhaps it goes without saying that the topic of morality makes out a centripetalgist in contemporary philosophical conversation on consumer culture and the resis-tance within. The framing and target of this morality however varies substantiallyin content. Some moralize, in veiled terms, on the inherent traits of Modernityleading up to a never-ending desire to consume (Bauman, 2001). Some elaborate onthe history of ideas that have led up to various moralizing images of the Consumerin academic texts (Campbell, 2005). Others claim that, historically speaking, themorality of consumption has evolved stepwise towards a relative demoralizationand, whatever morality has been left, has been individualized in the sense that it isoriented towards the body. However, sketches of a re-emerging morality of con-sumption based on global inequalities (and climate issues, we might add, sevenyears later) are also hypothesized (Hilton, 2004). Finally, a few counter-voicesmoralize on academics’ propensity to moralize on consumption and consumersper se (e.g. Miller, 2001). As much as these contributions shed brighter lightupon the origins of morality dominating academic critical discourse(s), they donot elaborate on its proliferation into everyday consumer culture, which accordingto various scholars (e.g. Campbell, 2005; De Certeau, 1984; Holt, 2002), in the longrun, will influence the market system through micro-tactics in pervasive everydayconsumer practice. In this article we will therefore tap into the preceding philoso-phizing conversation by continuing the elaboration upon the complex constructionof morality in the marketplace, but foremost by empirically contributing with newinsights concerning consumers’ emic morality of consumption in general, andbrands in particular. First we will argue that, in mundane consumption, thebrand-inflated commercial market is assumed to be inescapable, which in itself isexperienced as ‘bad’. Second, in order to deal with this lack of agency, mytholog-ical and ideological resources are used to bridge the gap between legitimate andillegitimate consumer practice – resulting in a paradoxical brand-resisting con-sumption of brands – and finally, that this paradoxical brand resistance lacks rev-olutionary potential but quietly works to change the conditions of capitalistproduction. By doing this we wish to contribute to the theoretical debate on con-sumer morality, consumer desire, consumer movement and add practicality toprophecies regarding the future ethical consumer.
Conversations on morality of consumption
Moralizing about consumption is far from new, as is obvious from Foucault’s(1985) analysis of Greek dietetics during Antiquity. In a more modern context,ranging from Veblen’s (1899) indignant description of the conspicuous consump-tion of the leisure classes via Packard’s (1957) and Ewen’s (1976) alleged debunkingof the moral bankruptcy of the advertising industry, to more contemporary criti-cisms of the amoralities of consumer society (De Graaf et al., 2001) and its
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influences on our personalities (Schor, 1998), there is no lack of condemnation ofconsumption and consumer society. The general sociology and philosophy ofmorality of consumption has since been discussed vividly in more specific consumercultural literature. Bauman (2001) discusses the moralistic takes by Montaigne andcolleagues on the general incapability of human kind to seek rest, to always be ontheir way somewhere undefined the journey being more pleasurable than the actualgoal. Here, in this ongoing pursuit, consumption becomes an illusive attempt tomaterialize the undefined, and thereby give it meaning as Don Juan used women togive meaning to his undefined. Pursuits for desire are distractions from the thoughtof the inevitable fact that we shall eventually die, and consumer desires have in thisliquid modernity, as Bauman calls it, become a social construction that the wholeconsumer society thrives on: ‘setting consumption free from functional bonds andabsolving it from the need to justify itself by reference to anything but its pleasur-ability’ (ibid: 13). According to Bauman, the solidification of fluidity – that is, thecondition where irrationality and perpetual change becomes the ultimate rational-ity – came about when capitalism discovered that it could make the irrationaldesires into an endless cash cow, a profit-maker by reclassifying them, and thenwhen modernity discovered how uncertainty could become the toughest construc-tion of order. By consuming brands and nesting them into a life narrative, peoplethereby seek a ‘biographical solution of systemic contradictions’ (ibid: 23). Brandsbecome shelters from the insecurity of liquidity while simultaneously constitutingthe ubiquitous fundament of this very insecurity. We all remain consumers nomatter how different the things and individualized offers we seek. In relation tothis, Goldman and Papson (2007) elaborate on brand signs in this liquid modernityand state that one of the very purposes with branding is to – through its symbols,logos and messages – create a veneer of stability lacking in the volatile globalizedmarketplace. However, ‘the more ubiquitous a brand becomes, the more readily itcan become a media lightning rod for criticism’ (2007: 341).
In line with Bauman, Miller (2001) claims that the alienation created by capi-talist modernity is confronted by consumers exactly through consumption.However, unlike Bauman, Miller seems to believe it works (and is therefore notevasively critical), whereas Bauman believes it reproduces the alienation. Lookingat academia’s morality of consumption, Miller concluded that the current moral-ism is based on: (1) a condemnation of materialism, and thereby romanticizingpoverty; (2) a condemnation of capitalism in general and American brandscape inparticular; and (3) an assumption that consumption is incompatible with environ-mentalism. Miller is critical against these building blocks in the morality of con-sumption, and not the least against the dominant assumption that materialismshould be mutually exclusive of the desire and skill to form relations with otherhuman beings. Instead, he means this is what materialism and objects are most ofall about; to create meaningful relationships with others. Thus, Bauman’s veiledcriticism against materialism (as the illusive defining of the undefined) fits well intoMiller’s theme of the mistaken assumption of materialism as bad, and has, accord-ing to Miller, led to a ‘poverty of morality’ in western academia where it has
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condemned materialism without considering that the massive amount of peoplein poverty around the world would live a better life had they more materialresources.
Taking an historical perspective on morality of consumption, Hilton (2004)offers some thoughts on the relationship between morality and consumptionover the last 200 years and identifies three periods of thought. In the first period,during the 19th century, Victorians’ conspicuous consumption was vividly moral-ized, but where liberal economics later would use the main arguments from AdamSmith when contributing to the luxury debate – namely that consumption andgreed is good for the economy. In line with this, Stuart Mill condemned ‘unpro-ductive’ consumption as opposed to ‘productive’ consumption, applying an accord-ing to Hilton, ‘narrow utilitarian measure of worth – that of increased nationalwealth – which denied the diversity and pluralism of human ends, talents andcreativity’ (ibid. 2004, p. 105). In the second stage, 19th to 20th century moralityof consumption, there was a reaction to the rise of the mass market where themoralizing of bad taste among the 20th century cultural elite was accompanied by asocialist, ascetic tradition. In the third and present stage, morality of consumptiondeveloped into a cultural studies debate regarding specific product categories –centred around the healthy body and the climate – rather than regarding consump-tion per se. However, according to Hilton it should be more concerned about thepolitical systems limiting consumers’ agency instead of assuming that consumers’negotiation, personalization and authentic customization of products has mademorality of consumption obsolete.
Moving into the realm of consumers’ morality of consumption, Campbell (2005)complements Hilton’s historical overview by typologizing academia’s constructionsof ‘the consumer’. In terms of morality, the mass consumption critique produced aportrait of the consumer as a dupe, whereas the emerging craft consumers havegone beyond the less moralizing subversive customization, personalization andappropriation practices that Hilton (2004) also touched upon, and actively takenon the role as mass consumption critics by crafting their own products for theirown consumption. Botterill explains this desire for ‘authenticity’ as historicallyemerging from philosophical ideas; such as the idea of an authentic self as seenby the German philosopher Herder, and the idea of society as a distraction to aRousseauian ‘true voice of nature within’ (2007 p. 111). Botterill draws on Taylor(1991) for explaining the success of these ideas as part of a ‘massive subjectivistturn in philosophy’. Ironically, as accounted for by Hilton (2004), this subjectivity,in the shape of liberalism, was the ideology behind morality of consumption in the19th century. This morality then transformed into a critique against the loss ofsubjective liberty in the 20th century upon the emergence of mass production andmass consumption but is, according to Hilton, no longer concerned with consump-tion on an ontological level. In a similar vein, Miller (2001) banters academicdouble morals: ‘what worries me is that this bogey of a deluded, superficialperson who has become the mere mannequin to commodity culture is alwayssomeone other than ourselves. It is the common people, the vulgar herd, the
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mass consumer, a direct descendant of the older ‘‘mass culture critique’’ of the1960s’.
Morality of consumption in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT)
In the socio-culturally informed marketing and consumer research tradition ofConsumer Culture Theory (CCT) (Arnould and Thompson, 2005), morality ofconsumption has predominantly been approached in terms of consumer resistance.This has been conceptualized in a number of somewhat overlapping ways, typolo-gized and outlined according to the historical evolutions of resistance (Firat andVenkatesh, 1995; Fischer, 2001; Fournier, 1998; Holt, 2002; Izberk-Bilgin, 2010;Kozinets and Handelman, 2004; Penaloza and Price, 1993). For example, Penalozaand Price (1993: 123) stated that there are multiple forms of consumer resistanceand identified four forms along the axis of individual versus collective action andthe other axis of reformist to radical goals. Inspired by the post-structuralism ofMichel de Certeau, Penaloza and Price see the individual reformist as the consumerwho resists through everyday activities, such as cooking homemade food or co-creative activities, that ignore the market’s instructions of product use and so on.Such an individual reformist could also be seen in Campbell’s (2005) craft con-sumer as a necessary distinction from the postmodern consumer. In his view, thecraft consumer differs from the postmodern consumer as s/he does not possess anoverwhelming desire to gain identity, image and status (as the postmodern does),but already has a clear and stable sense of identity and rather engages in consump-tion out of ‘a desire to engage in creative acts of self-expression’ (2005: 24).
Holt’s (2002) postmodern and post-postmodern consumers correspond toCampbell’s postmodern and craft consumer, De Certeau’s tactical consumer, orPenaloza and Price’s individual reformist in that neither adhere to the culturalauthority model of the Frankfurt school, nor to the reflexive resistance modelmetaphorically described as an emancipated tiger (Murray and Ozanne, 1991;Murray et al., 1994) or Firat and Venkatesh’s (1995) liberatory postmodernism.Holt’s co-creative postmodern consumers and post-postmodern consumer artistshistorically, culturally and dialectically relate to the marketing paradigm and viceversa, more according to an Engel’s law than as an arbitrary urge of resistanceagainst something unusually worthy to resist. In Holt’s conceptualization, con-sumers’ brand resistance has been moulded in a dialectic relationship with thebranding paradigm, where initiatives by high culture capital consumers finallyhave trickled down to the mainstream consumer culture, whereupon the brandmanagement paradigm has been urged to change strategies and vice versa. Thedifference between the postmodern and post-postmodern consumer is that thelatter not only has seen through the brand veneer but also accepted it. Instead ofresisting an irresistible market (from which there is no escape) the post-postmodernconsumer uses it for creative self-expression, just as Campbell’s (2005) craft con-sumer does.
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A great deal of CCT work has also engaged in exploration of specific commu-nities built on consumer resistance (Cova and Pace, 2006; Kozinets, 2002; Moraeset al., 2010; Sandlin and Callahan, 2009; Thompson, 2004; Thompson andCoskuner-Balli, 2007) to specific brands such as Starbucks (Thompson andArsel, 2004) or the Hummer (Luedicke et al., 2010). For example, investigatinganti-discourses towards three specific ‘anti’-communities (Nike, General Electricand advertising), Kozinets and Handelman (2004) looked at activists through thelens of New Social Movement (NSM) theory, where a distinction is made between‘strategy-oriented’ and ‘identity-oriented’ movements (Bernstein, 2003), and cameup with oppositional themes regarding the activist identity work versus the ‘obvi-ous opponent’; the corporate elite consisting of large corporate puppeteers aswell as the weak general consumer public. This latter theme is especially interest-ing in our case as Kozinets and Handelman’s activists don’t identify with main-stream consumers but rather see them as enemies, pawns in the hands of thecorporate elite (cf. Touraine, 1981; one of the main contributors to NSMtheory). Furthermore, these activists even see mainstream consumers as ‘entrancedcouch potatoes’, ‘wicked and selfish’, ‘slavish adherents’, ‘idiots’ and ‘foolish’,whereby the activists must take the leading role and responsibility to change andrevolutionize this duped consumer culture rather than directly attacking the systemitself.
Without departing from Penaloza and Price’s (1993) consumer resistance con-ceptualization, Izberk-Bilgin (2010) recently offered an interdisciplinary review(including the most seminal work in anthropology, sociology and marketing[CCT]) of consumer resistance. In short, she distinguishes two distinct paradigms:one critical of consumer culture, the ‘Manipulation and Enslavement Discourse’and another more positive to consumer culture, the ‘Agency and EmpowermentDiscourse’. The former is emphasizing macro-strategies; how the dominant classesand culture industries execute power over workers and consumers. In contrast thelatter is emphasizing ‘everyday’ micro-tactics; how consumers in subtle but skilfulways use consumption to oppose the dominant order. Here, struggles betweenworkers and capitalists (Marx), between cultural capital and economic capital(Bourdieu), and consumers versus cultural industrialists (Adorno andHorkheimer), are in line with De Certeau’s view on the power of mundane tactics,seen as being resolved, not through revolution but through persistent everydaypractice. Izberk-Bilgin, whose review includes many of the studies accounted forin our article, suggests that future research should engage in the impact of global-ization on resistance (and vice versa) across cross-cultural contexts and developingcountries, religiously motivated resistance, nationalistic resistance, resistance inrelation to the marketer, and the potentiality of mundane consumption to mobilizepolitical and cultural resistance. This latter suggestion is noteworthy for our argu-ment, as it is exactly mundane consumption of food that is the centre of ourattention.
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A main argument in the presented stream of research is that consumer cultureresearch ought to go beyond the trope where distinction between market protag-onists and antagonists is decided by an imaginary being-inside-or-outside the mar-ketplace (Arnould, 2007; Holt, 2002; Kozinets, 2002; Thompson, 2004). Rather,the marketplace is viewed as ubiquitous and as a prerequisite even for marketantagonists where ‘new opportunities for localized resistance are produced in [a]matrix of overlapping discourses of power’ (Thompson, 2004: 173). Advocating‘Foucault’s undecidedly unromantic view of resistance’ (1985); that the contesta-tion of dominant power structures only leads to new ones, Thompson comes to theconclusion that consumers use marketplace mythology to contest other dominantideologies, and, hence, ‘there is no sharp line of demarcation where the influencesof the marketplace end and emancipated spaces begin’ (2004: p.172), In otherwords, there is no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the marketplace. An empirical example ofthis is provided by Thompson and Coskuner-Balli (2007). They empirically inves-tigate community sponsored agriculture (CSA) consumers and farmers, and elab-orate on the notion of ‘enchantment’ as a ‘conceptual frame-of-reference fromwhich to critique and perhaps resist the rationalization of everyday life that char-acterizes modernity’ (2007: 280). This frame-of-reference is in their view a socialconstruction, which guides ethical consumption as a subtle kind of activism. Theyfound that no matter how much enchantment makes itself present in consumers’ethical discourse, the farmers ‘still have to compete in a commercial marketplacedominated by advertising imagery and enticingly themed servicescape settings [. . .]designed to entertain, seduce, and fulfil desires for immediate gratification of thesenses’ (2007: 299).
Appadurai coined the notion of ideoscape referring to the globalization of a ‘setof central ideas coming out of the Enlightenment tradition (democracy, welfare,freedom, etc.)’ (Appadurai, 1990: 92). Based on the abovementioned arguments, wemight conclude, that the 20th century has added capitalism and the liberal marketeconomy to the list of the global ideoscape notions. The ubiquity of the market-place as a metaphor for understanding social relations has also paved way for anincreasingly global adoption of the trope of the brand as an expression of thecultural and social value of phenomena, whether they are things, places, people,events, or something else. In line with this, Askegaard (2006) illustrates how thegrowing tendency to think of the value of something in branding terms makes itpossible to talk about brands as a global ideoscape. One may then assume that in aglobal ideoscape of brands, capitalism and its many protagonists (as well as antag-onisms) make out the most dominant ideologies, where branding contributesto ‘overarching capitalist meta-narratives’ (Goldman and Papson, 2006: 327),in turn making it impossible for the consumer (and producer) to think ‘outside’the brand.
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However, although explicit wishes (e.g. Holt, 2002; Penaloza and Price, 1993;Thompson, 2004) for more empirical research to not fall into the trap of the‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the marketplace cliche, the majority of the collected work onconsumer resistance in CCT focuses on more or less overt, sometimes even specta-cular (such as The Burning Man Festival [see Kozinets, 2002]) resistance from theperspective of specific consumer movements and micro-cultures – in other wordscollectivities with a propensity to reproduce the inside/outside-the-marketplaceopposition (e.g. Belk and Costa, 1993; Cova and Pace, 2006; Kozinets, 2002;Luedicke et al., 2010; Moraes et al., 2010; Sandlin and Callahan, 2009;Thompson, 2004; Thompson and Coskuner-Balli, 2007). While often at timesspectacular and therefore more revealing, such research objects do not exhaustthe complexities foregrounding market scepticism and consumer morality in mun-dane, everyday-like consumer practice, a sort of subtle kind of activism, as empha-sized in various ways by Thompson and Coskuner-Balli (2007), Penaloza and Price(1993), De Certeau (1984), and Holt (2002). So how does it look among ordinaryconsumers whose identities typically aren’t constructed around the revolutionaryunder-dogism of iconic activism, called ‘Beginner Voluntary Simplifiers’ byMcDonald et al. (2006), and where consumers do not necessarily blame otherconsumers (the ‘jeremiad against consumerism’ as coined by Luedicke et al.,2010)? How do Penaloza and Price’s (1993) theorized individual reformists con-ceptualize the borderlines between, or blur the market and the non-market, and inwhat ways is the market used as a tool for establishing its own limits? Bylooking into more mundane consumption among mainstream consumers whoseself-identity not necessarily entails the trait of resistance as such, we explore amore subtle character of moralizing consumer resistance. Subsequently, as thissubtle brand resistance was quite overwhelming in our field data, and as ordinaryconsumers’ everyday moralizing regarding brands is understudied, here we wish tocontribute with an empirical interpretation of such mundane, mainstream brandantagonism and situate it in relation to previous thought and findings within con-sumer culture research (1) on the morality of consumption and consumer desire, (2)on consumer resistance and movements, and (3) on the practicality of future ethicalconsumers. Like Thompson and Coskuner-Balli (2007) we here set out to see ‘howethical consumerism actually works under a specific set of marketplace conditions’(2007: 277–8), however, where the ethical dimensions emerged rather than workedas the outset.
Method
Exploring the mundane
Exploring consumers’ brand meanings in food consumption, the authors of thisarticle belonged to two originally separate research projects applying ethnographic
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methods, with the aim to interpret the findings in an existential-phenomenologicalway (Thompson et al., 1989). For the Swedish exploration, six Swedish women(three from an urban area and three from a suburban/rural area) aged 30–45 yearswere selected. These women belonged to different quintiles of the middle-class anddiffered from each other in lifestyles, type of work engagements and family con-stellations, but they all had children living at home. The methods used were semi-participant observations of the women shopping for groceries. After the shoppingsession, long ethnographic interviews (McCracken, 1988) lasting for about twohours, were conducted at the women’s homes. Each woman was given a dispos-able camera and a photo diary to record responses for five days over the courseof one month. In each diary there were 40 questions and a request to take pic-tures corresponding to every question in the diary. Each question in the diary had acomplementary question, where the participant was instructed to describe what shehas taken a picture of and why. All food shopping receipts and shopping lists of thehousehold were also collected over the course of the research period. The womenwere instructed to send the diary, photos, lists and receipts after a month, receivinga reward of 1000 Swedish kronor (approx 100 Euros) as compensation fortheir work.
The Danish research project was equally based on the method of participantobservation including shopping trips with 26 consumers (17 women, 9 men) between20 and 60 years of age, completed with long ethnographic interviews. The informantswere recruited in different types of supermarkets, ranging from discount type mar-kets to markets specializing in organic produce. Half of the interviews were con-ducted in Odense, a major provincial city, and half in Copenhagen, the capital. Afterthe shopping session, interviews were carried out in the informants’ homes focusingon food culture, eating behaviour and life style. Later, a follow-up interview focusedon health and brand symbolism was conducted with the purpose of stimulating theinformants to reflect more specifically on brands and products.
As already mentioned, the ad hoc integration of these two research projectsfrom two different countries was motivated by overwhelmingly similar findingsin the Swedish and in a subset of the Danish sample. We consider the differencesin methodology, focus and sampling strength, since it contributes to the trustwor-thiness of the findings.
Analysis
The bridging between illegitimate and legitimate branded food consumption
The food I eat is not branded. I mean, you would never see a commercial for broccoli
would you?, so . . .well, then of course it is . . . I mean, Arstiderne is a label one could
say . . . it is a brand . . . apparently (Lene, 27, Denmark).
Illustrated by the quote from Lene, informants were trying, more or less success-fully, to create distinctions between ‘real’ brands and brands that were considered
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‘non-brands’ and therefore ‘better’. This paradox was what initially awoke ourinterest to explore the cultural contradictions and moral considerations involvedin making sense of the double-edged consumer relationship to brands and brandingin lay theory.
First, it is important to note that food brands presumably make out a rare caseamong product categories in terms of distinctions made between more or lesslegitimate brands, and in terms of morality of consumption. That is, the merefact that the product category is put inside one’s body, digested and transformedinto more or less healthy consequences for the body, should make the sensitivity forcertain brand signals stronger than they would for, say, make-up. For example, themeanings of health persistently emerged as coinciding with legitimate consumptionand branding in our material.
We were able to distinguish between four combinations of the consumer-branddialectic, based on various (non)craftsmanship-related mythologies. In turn, thesecombinations represent four distinct ways to evaluate brands as more or less legit-imate to consume (see Figure 1).
Bad brand consumption: Non-craft producer andnon-craft consumer
Luedicke et al. (2010) claim that moralism on consumption has now become closeto synonymous with the cultural viewpoint that certain, if not most, consumptionis built on greed, selfishness and leads to environmental and moral destruction.
Figure 1. Bridges between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ brand consumption.
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And in fact, also in line with Thompson and Coskuner-Balli’s (2007) ‘enchant-ment’, Botterill’s (2007) ‘authenticity’ and in particular Campbell’s (2005) ‘craftconsumer’, nothing caused so much verbal resistance among our respondents asbrands that were perceived as coming from producers that were perceived as lack-ing craftsmanship and consumed by consumers who do not understand this matterof contention.
In addition, we saw a perseverance of a Scandinavian consumer mythology thatregards the human bodily self as authentic and pure (Askegaard, Gertsen andLanger 2002); a body that is in a constant threat of being ‘polluted’ by the influ-ences from a capitalist marketplace that is willing to sacrifice the well-being ofhuman beings for the sake of economic profit. The market and, as we shall see,in particular the brand, is consequently inherently suspected for distorting human-ness, and in Scandinavia, food is particularly seen as nutritional and healthy whenit is liberated from the influences of the production sector and left in its natural andunaltered state (Askegaard, Jensen and Holt 1999):
[points to a packet of industrial rye bread from Kornkammeret] I really find it wrong
that they can add all that sugar. I find it grotesque that it is impossible to get a pure
product, they always add lots of things; they add additives, colourings, and apparently
also sugar. I find it really grotesque. It is because it is much cheaper than doing it the
healthy way (Birgit, 41, Denmark).
Our consumer accounts also echoed a common theme in the literature on con-sumption and morality, namely that the desire for goods is a symptom of a deepersickness in the soul (Wilk, 2001: 247) and that real needs do not come from themarket but from within:
There is so much seduction in commercials. They just want to tempt you to buy
something that will not make you any happier. Ideally people should not need com-
mercials to find out what they need to put in the shopping basket. The horse knows
from within that grass is what it needs. We should feel inside ourselves, what we really
need (Christine, 28, Denmark).
Consumers who do not know ‘from within’ what they need and what they oughtto eat and consume, are seen as mass consumers who simply are puppets of themarket, unlike a good craft consumer, like Per, 50, who says: ‘In that way I am notfor sale. No it will never get me. Due to the way it is made’, or Christine, whoallegedly can see through the brand veneer:
[looking at a package of Kellogs K Special ] This picture sells an idea of ‘then you are
healthy’ . . . . The logic is when you see this you think ‘I can become like them’. Like
when a beautiful model makes an advertisement for a perfume. Everyone knows they
won’t become like her by buying the perfume. But they still buy it. But it is all just
wrapping, and has nothing to do with the actual content. Here in my drawer
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[she opens the drawer and takes a glass of cereals] I have something, I believe it is from
Romer. This is a product without sugar. This is just cornflakes, just corn. You can see
all that is in it (Christine, 28, Denmark).
In the end, such ‘wrappings’, greed, industrial processes and additives are putagainst the slow, the traditional, the honest and the people who are willing to movein the pace of nature:
[asked whether she would consider buying Probio, a yogurt product from major dairy
company Arla] It is a thing I would never even consider buying. It is for those who
want to be efficient, I believe it is sold as a quick solution for a healthy life. Like this
‘take this and you will be healthy the rest of your life’. I simply do not believe in it. It is
so processed, and so marketed, it seems as though it has been through so many
processes. This is not made thinking about the health of the people, but because
this huge company Arla have found out that it gives profit (Christine 28, Denmark).
However, Thompson (2004) looked at mythic narratives circulating in the nat-ural health marketplace and illustrated how such marketplace mythologies, nomatter how anti-market they may seem, actually work in the hands of themarket by constituting ‘humanity’s collective unconscious’ (2004: 162).Thompson elaborated on the Edenic mythic construction, forming the culturalrelationship between nature and technology in this marketplace. In the Edenicmyth, humanity has fallen from grace (like Adam and Eve) where the manipulationof modern science and technology has destroyed the holistic harmony of natureand thereby caused otherwise never-would-have-existed illnesses and suffering;modern science has thrown us out of paradise. Thompson illustrates how theEdenic myth has been made mouldable in the natural health market through theRomantic tradition; the Romantic mythos. Celebrating the creative, the authenticself-expression, the holistic, the organic and mystical forces, the Romantic mythoscarries almost apocalyptic undertones where nature is expected to ‘strike back athumanity for violating its sacred order’ (Thompson 2004: 165). Given this proph-esied apocalypse, no wonder that consumers seemingly instinctively react againstbrand consumption which is in danger of violating this order of nature.
Hence, the worst possible dialectic interaction between consumption and marketcomes when a non-crafting consumer buys non-crafted brands. When the brand isso processed and neither demands crafting to produce it, nor demands a craftingconsumer to consume it, that’s when the brand consumption is both verbally andpractically resisted among our middle class consumers.
In contrast, products which carry minimal signs of branding, and then are properly‘crafted’ by the consumer make for the ideal food consumption. Below, Karin tags
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along the Scandinavian celebration of immersion into nature, where the hard-to-learn skill regarding where and what mushrooms to pick in the forest is a sign ofcultural capital in authentic locality.
[Written in her photo diary about products she would like to buy but can’t]
Mushrooms I would like to buy unpacked, by weight, fresh. Unfortunately I don’t
trust quality and origin in shops and therefore I rather pass. My mum picks the
mushrooms herself in the forests of Jamtland and shares the harvest with
us¼LUXURY! (Karin, 38, Sweden)
In fact, in Scandinavia, the celebration of nature is in general mystified and repro-duced by mythic folklores on trolls and other Nordic elemental beings, such as, thewater sprite and the elves that romantically lived in the forest in self-chosen soli-tude. But, for those who can’t immerse into the forest world of elves, the closest onecan get to nature’s origin may be the local market where there is supposedly no, orin the worst case one, middleman between consumer and nature. The time-consuming process and skills put into this choosing and later crafting makes outthe holistic experience of ideal food consumption in its pure and brand-free state asexemplified by Gudrun below:
We really like to drive to the farm shops to see what they have, as well as to the small
dairy companies. They are getting more and more popular. Then you find a product in
their shop, which makes us say ‘this they make well’. And then we gladly drive 20
kilometres frequently to get it because we have found out that it tastes so good
(Gudrun 59, Denmark).
The crafting consumer is apparently based on the romantic ethos permeatingmodern consumption first of all in its very emergence; that is, as the necessaryanswer to production, itself coming out of the ascetic protestant ethic of capital-ism encouraging accumulation through production, where the romantic ethicencouraged accumulation for the individual self rather than for the family unit(Campbell, 1987). This self was relative to the ‘nasty society outside’ (Corrigan,1997: 10); constructed as a better more authentic universe of inner life, close tonature and far from Marx’s dystopic alienation through wage relations and fac-tory labour. However, if consumption in the beginning was constructed as aromantic contrast to work, as a sort of freedom and contact with one’s innersoul, in late modernity it is rather contrasted against industrialization as a whole.We see in our own informants’ accounts that righteous consumption has beenreconstructed to fit with traditional life when consumption and production wasnot distinguishable, but rather the same thing. Of course most consumers will notbe able to raise their own cows or catch their own fish, but they can get as closeas possible to nature by putting in the time and effort to shop at ‘local markets’,and then engage in social communing around the food which is like a craft
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[Diary question: To whose home would you like to be invited to dinner, and where
would he/she go food shopping?] Gordon Ramsey, the British TV chef. At [the] local
markets, [for] the most premium high quality products. We would of course have the
best time and discuss the food in detail (Katrine, 38, Sweden).
Bridging to acceptable brand consumption:Non-craft consumer and craft producer
Most of the time local markets are not available, or the time and lust to craft theproducts one-self is not there. Then regular brands offered by regular retailers mustcome to the rescue. But to replace the ideal of not crafting the product oneself,especially if one is dealing with precious goods such as babies, buying (if one canafford it) brands from small suppliers that seemingly craft the products in a tradi-tional way without adding the poison of industrialism, bridges, in a compensatoryfashion, the bad consumption with good consumption by adding feelings ofresponsibility and of being a good mother:
[A photo of Bramhult’s Juice in the photo diary. Representing a product that one
would like but does not buy] No added sugar. Healthy and tasty. However, too
expensive to buy now that I’m not working [maternity-leave]. Know what the product
consists of? No weird additives, I guess, before I never thought about what I bought.
Now I think more. On one hand ‘cause it is more expensive nowadays, and then I
guess I think there are more fun things than food to spend my money on. On the other
hand it’s important what one eats, that’s something that one really has become con-
scious about, what the food contains (Linda, 29, Sweden).
If the product’s geographical origin is considered romantic and genuine in itself,this semiotically rubs off on the product and on the almost advertising-like way theconsumer describes its. The consumption is good, because the product is almost acraft in itself in its riping process, and the brand is invisible on the actual product asthe packaging has been removed and replaced by generic transparent plastic forstorage in the fridge:
[Diary question: A product you could not live without? Photo: a parmigiano cheese] I
appreciate the complexity in a really ripe, genuine parmigiano tremendously. So tasty
both to simple pasta dishes or with a glass of Italian wine. I keep it in the fridge, but
the turn-over in our home is very high! (Madeleine, 41, Sweden).
Likewise, consuming brands is okay if it has a spell of the magic of the originalcraftsman, romanticized by the myths of the honest and righteous farmer whobelieves in hard work and quality. Such a righteous man is so in tune with nature
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and the craft that he does not care about the vain whims of urban society:
I have the feeling that products from Thise signals really good quality. Without having
read much about it I believe I once met one from there at the farmers market. There
was this man standing there . . . I said ‘hello’ to him and I remember that his hand was
so rough that he looked as though he had just been out to fetch the cow himself. To
me that is what [Thise] signals. For this reason it is also more expensive than usual
(Steen, 41, Denmark).
Hence, the real craftsman wants his job, and actually loves it. Instead of themorality of consumption these people nurture a genuine morality of labour, thekind that existed before work became equalled to industry and consumption withromanticism (Campbell, 1987). This work ethics makes the brand ‘trustworthy’,even if one doesn’t even really ‘know’ the brand:
Grønnegarden and Hanegal [both companies specialized in organic products] then you
know that the people working there, they really want this job. It makes it more
trustworthy, that there are people working that really want a good product. But I
must admit, I don’t actually know Grønnegarden (Christine, 28, Denmark).
The work moral of the producer hence plays a part, but also his/her moral interms of human beings as force of labour. If the brand is non-transparent, it isprobably a mass produced product infused by industrial greed, but if they dare tobe transparent about their production process and supplier chain, and seem to treattheir people well, then the brand is regarded as a good brand which even deservesits premium price:
I just can’t help it, now that they have launched this campaign, that they who have
picked the bananas, and they who have picked the coffee beans, they get a decent
salary, and then, because I can afford to pay more for it I gladly buy a bag of coffee if
it helps the people who picked the beans (Gudrun, 59, Denmark).
Bridging to acceptable brand consumption:Craft consumer and non-craft producer
The crafting and actual working with product ingredients can also wash away thenastiness from industrial processing. In other words, even basic brands can, incombination with the love of seeking, and the love of cooking, be excused aslong as they are prepared lovingly enough and preferably in harmony with otherproducts that are seen as crafted to begin with:
[Photo diary: picture and text of what symbolizes someone she wants to invite her for
dinner at that person’s home] A jar of ginger cookies. This year the cookies are baked
after my son’s God mother Beata’s old relative’s recipe. I would love to be invited
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home to Beata and Joakim now before Christmas, especially as she cooks such great
ginger cookies and makes it so cosy. Beata shops at Netto, Domus, the market hall, in
Denmark, at Ahlgrens in Lund, an eclectic mix of places. Low price and luxury mixed.
She has this amazing skill to find great combinations in a balanced style (Madeleine,
41, Sweden).
Also, ingredients can be more or less industrially branded but as long as the fin-ishing process is one that requires crafting on part of the consumer, it is legitimate.The quote by Gudrun below illustrates how important the consumers’ own workput into the process is for basic brands to be okay:
I bake my own bread. I would never buy that kind of bread [industrial bread]. When I
make rye bread I buy my flour from Oma, where you just have to add yeast and water.
It might not be particularly healthy, but I make it myself. I do not know about the
rules for percentage of fat, but I still bake my own bread. I would never buy [indus-
trially produced bread ] (Gudrun, 59, Denmark).
Karin on the other hand, who does not have the time to bake, puts in work inthe choosing process at the store and sees the retailer as less commercially partialthan the non-crafted brand producers:
Bread is important to me. It should be healthy and have a low level of sugar. Myself, I
prefer really dark and rough bread but the rest of the family prefers lighter bread.
That’s why I have to stand here for a long time to pick the right kinds. Today I got
happy because one of the shelves had the label ‘without sugar’ but then again, it’s
sponsored by Pagen. I wish the shop itself made that categorization for all the bread to
make it easier and more trustworthy (Karin 38, Sweden).
In the end, it is the caring food-producer who can bring the ubiquitous brandconsumption back to where we were before industrialism. The myth of the warmand simple cook from a region signalling slow living, who genuinely loves primaryproducts, has accumulated his/her knowledge slowly over time, possesses a naturalinterest in cooking, radiates farm-life, knows the authentic localities of the bestquality products, and is simply ‘down-to-earth’, rings loudly in our consumer nar-ratives of the dream dinner. And even if certain basic products from large brandedretail chains must be added, the love for the rest compensates:
[written in diary about favorite celebrity Tina Nordstrom, (a popular TV-chef from
Skane, in Southern Sweden) who should cook for her] She seems to be a down-to-
earth person who cooks simple but well-organized food. Good food simply! She
would of course choose totally fresh primary products, for example in Feskekorka,
Gothenburg. Other more basic products she would buy at ICA or Hemkop. She will
probably make fish fresh today and base the menu upon that. Fine, fresh potatoes
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from Skane and some good cheese directly from the farm. She is easy to talk to, and
we will chit chat about everything. And of course I will praise her for the simplicity
and the tastes that this brings out! (Karin, 38, Sweden).
The work ethics of brand consumption
From what we have seen here we want to raise an aspect of the myth of crafts-manship in consumption that has not been emphasized enough, neither in con-ceptual (e.g. Bauman, 2001; Botterill, 2007; Campbell, 2005; Hilton, 2004; Miller,2001) nor in empirical (e.g. Holt, 2002; Kozinets, 2002; Kozinets andHandelman, 2004; Luedicke et al., 2010) consumer culture research on moralityor consumer resistance. We find that Campbell’s (1987) classic distinctionbetween work and consumption establishing itself in culture during industrialismin the 19th century, has taken on a reverse relationship among our ordinaryconsumers. Previous writings on consumer morality focus on the industrial pro-cess, associations made to consumption, and consumption versus this industrialwork where the former is seen as ‘good’ and the latter is seen as ‘bad’ and notthe other way around. We argue that work is at the core of this craftsmanshipmyth in a reverse relationship to consumption. In other words, the work ethichas permeated consumption and taken over consumption ethics. What matters ishow much one will work with one’s consumption, and no matter how simple thework, one must love it. This work is then characterized by romantic craftsman-ship myths such as ‘the true love’ invested, the handmade, the sacred of theorganically emerged, the joy of the natural being, and the absence of touch byevil (industrial) hands.
The consumer-held myth of craftsmanship is from this perspective primarilybound up by ethics of work rather than by the formally emphasized dichotomyof production versus consumption. The revered relationship between diligent workand an admirable outcome is presumably fairly universal. However, if we dare tomake a risky leap into the historical European context, we might hypothesize thatthe opposition between Protestant solemnity and Catholic sensuousness plays asignificant role. For Catholics, the body is not the pitiful imprisonment of the soulbut the sanctuary for the Holy Ghost. Hence, in terms of food, the point of depar-ture may be the inverse. It is the reverence for sensuous pleasure that inspires thegood work. In Northern European and Calvinist cultural history following theProtestant Ethic (Weber, 2002), frugality and hard work were signs of being obe-dient to God to whom one owes ones salvation. As a sign of grace, diligent workwas a modified version of the Catholic idea of good works which was rather theresult of one’s salvation and could only come from faith alone. In contrast, theProtestant idea of diligent work was, according to Weber, a way to get salvation, inother words, the only way to be a good man. As a result, this ethos could be used asa motor in industrial capitalism. Many critical philosophers, for example, Gorz(1989), have then claimed that the alienating result of heavy and saturated
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industrialization during the 20th century has made the concept of work ethicsobsolete. And, indeed, salvation must be hard to discern from the assembly line.Hence, as the idea of salvation from work got lost at the conveyor belt, and indus-try thereby lost its cultural legitimacy, its necessary counterpart, consumption,went through a similar journey. Representing the subordinate side of the dichot-omy between work and leisure, consumption has come to be seen, also in ourinvestigation, as a passive leisure act and production as an industrial evil producingpassive consumers. Instead, manual work, pure and simple craftsmanship, sodespised by Veblen’s (1899) 19th century conspicuous leisure class and the bour-geoisie of 20th century Europe (Bourdieu, 1984), is now the only cultural categoryof practice that can take romanticism, and not least salvation, back to the pacifiedand profane domain of consumption.
The previous insights may at first seem to be just another take on co-production,prosumerism, crowd-sourcing and open innovation, the buzz words of today’sconsumer and brand culture where consumers like consumer artists (Holt, 2002)or craft consumers (Campbell, 2005) create their own pop-cultural products andmeanings by help of resources provided by the brands. This is a fair interpretation,but if these conceptualizations have rested upon meaning structures of consump-tion mainly positioned against cold industrialism, what we have seen here is anintensified focus on meanings of proud work ethics positioned against pleasure-freeconsumption where the only way to experience pleasurable consumption is bymobilizing traditional work ethics.
Hence in relation to previous conversations on morality of consumption andconsumer desire, we argue, based on our findings, that in mundane consumptionthe brand-inflated commercial market, the brand as global ideoscape (Askegaard,2006) is indeed assumed to be inescapable. In relation to Bauman’s (2001) viewon brands as the ‘biographical solution of systemic contradictions’ where tryingto avoid alienation through consumption only worsens the consumer experienceof alienation, versus Miller (2001) who implied that consumption indeed canwork against alienation, our methodologically eclectic consumer study (althoughin this article only illustrated by textual accounts, written or told), witness of anuanced reality. Myths of craftsmanship are by consumers not implying merenegotiation, personalization or customization of products – concepts that Hilton(2004) is afraid will fool us to think that consumer morality is obsolete. Rather,as consumers experience the market as ubiquitous, the model of consumer ethicsis in itself contradictory, paradoxical, insufficient and yes, in that sense obsolete.Instead another model of morality is taking over. Consumption is work, andwhen done right it is work to be proud of. Then rules of traditional workethics (e.g. how much love, discipline and energy was invested in this craftingprocess [before and after purchase]?) set the stage, rather than rules of modernconsumer ethics (e.g. Descendants of 1960s mass culture critique, ‘How much doI really need this stuff? Not at all! It is capitalism that needs me.’). This way onedoes not have to, as Miller (2001) bantered, place ‘the mythic bogey mannequin
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to commodity outside oneself’, because there is no inside or outside the market.Rather, the experience is, right or wrong or both, that one works the marketmore or less properly. Active, genuine work pleasure legitimizes pleasurableconsumption.
Hence, to deal with the lack of agency mythological and ideological resourcesused to bridge the gap between ideal legitimate and actual illegitimate consumerpractice – resulting in a paradoxical brand-resisting consumption of brands. Thisadds practicality to Campbell’s (2005) ‘craft consumer’ and Holt’s (2002) ‘con-sumer artists’, where these no longer are experienced as consumers but as com-mitted craftsmen following another ethic than their predecessors. Thus, more thanclinging to consumer myths such as ‘economic rational hero’ (see Campbell, 2005)and Mill’s ‘productive consumer’ (see Hilton, 2004), or avoiding the less flatteringstereotypes such as Miller’s (2001) ‘bogey’ or the ‘passive dupe’ of Holt (2002),these consumers evaluate legitimate brand consumption with the help of mytho-logical resources concerning craftsmanship and working ethics in traditional cul-ture. The tactical practices surrounded by these myths then further grant the reachof an acceptable minimum level of victimization in the otherwise autonomy-lackingmarketplace; a marketplace which is not negotiable, it is there no matter what, onejust has to work it.
Alas, the mundane consumption we have elaborated on in this article revealshow various techniques, practices and orientations bridge the ‘bad’ brand con-sumption to the ‘good’ brand consumption and thereby legitimizes it. This is asubtle brand resistance which paradoxically does not exclude the very consump-tion of brands, as that would be an impossibility given the accepted inescap-ability of the Market. Rather, brands are categorized according to more or lessgood or bad brands according to the ethics of traditional work more than theethics of modern or postmodern consumption (e.g. Holt, 2002). These haveproliferated and become obsolete in their moral critique as feared by Hilton(2004). With this said, this is of course just another kind of morality of con-sumption, but with the important difference in that it uses ideological resourcesfrom another intellectual field; the one on work both on the ‘producer’ and‘consumer’ side.
Finally, this paradoxical brand resistance indeed lacks revolutionary potential,but in its quiet, proliferating form it may work to change capitalist production inthe long run. If middle-class consumer desire slowly turns towards traditional workethics both in terms of production and consumption (if there is a distinction in thefirst place), the dialectic between consumer culture and brand management (Holt,2002) will lead to a synthesis in the form of new systems of production. In otherwords, this will not happen through a middle-class barricade movement but ratherthrough the more phlegmatic influence that brand managers and consumers haveon each-other. Like an inversion of modern capitalist history; now the middle-classification of the crafting citizen artist makes necessary the proliferation of thecrafting industrialist.
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Sofia Ulver-Sneistrup, PhD, is Assistant Professor of consumption studies at theSchool of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden. Her researcharea is consumer culture with particular focus on status consumption and trans-formation culture within domains such as food, brands, fashion, home and retail.
Søren Askegaard is Professor of consumption studies at the University of SouthernDenmark, Odense. His research is oriented towards investigating consumer culture,and he is currently particularly interested in globalization processes, food culture,technologies of self and lipophobia.
Dorthe Brogard Kristensen, PhD, is Assistant Professor of consumption studies atthe University of Southern Denmark, Odense. Her research interests include con-sumer culture, consumption of food and health, medical pluralism, body andidentity.
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