Consumption

Question 1

Consumption Primary Literature

Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (2008), portraits 1 & 5 [18pp]

Answer 1

• Ethnographical survey conducted by Daniel Miller and Fiona Parrott
• Conducted interviews with 30 households of ‘Stuart Street’ in South London
• Exploration of the relationship between possessions and a sense of self and place
• Challenge to the narrative of the superficial and materialistic consumer culture of the post war era
• Findings are presented as ‘portraits’ and structured as juxtaposing narratives
• The connection between object and identity was (and remains) a technique for encouraging consumer behaviour.
• Despite this, Miller’s The Comfort of Things reveals the differences between consumer sensibility and material attachment, which can be used as both a conscious and inadvertent expression of identity.
• Despite criticisms of deliberate romanticism, Miller’s narrative of relationships reveals a complex and varied understanding of materialism, beyond the traditional discourse of superficiality.
• Portrait One
• Subject of the portrait is George, 75, who lives alone after being provided with a flat by the council, 1 year prior to the study.
• Served in the army during the war (although was never called for active duty), since then had worked as a clerical assistant until his forcible retirement at 55.
• Previous accommodation had been the YMCA and hostels, until his last residence closed.
• “I did not want to live alone by myself. But these people, all these experts, said this was the best place for me. So here I am.”
• “When we ask where he would most like to live, he can only think of the YMCA”
• Of all the portraits, George’s is the most isolated, with a sense of displacement; he does not comfortable fit into tropes of the older, co-dependent community member, or the privatised consumer.
• ‘I don’t like shopping. I had to pull myself together and do it for myself otherwise I’d have no food to start with.’
• “The flat was empty, completely empty, because its occupant had no independent capacity to place something decorative or ornamental within it.”
• “From the time he started speaking, it was evident that there was no counterbalance between person and place, rather that the flat was the man.”
• Lack of aesthetic expression is presented as evident of someone who does not actively seek out self-definition.
• Despite the apparent ‘emptiness’ of George’s life, he does have some material concerns; writing a will is still important to him.
• • Portrait 5
• Marjorie is a similar age to George and also lives alone, however her life and her aesthetic considerations are vastly different.
• She has previously married and had children, and throughout her life had taken in over 40 foster children
• Material Expression and Performance:
• “The room was a testimony to the care and attention to detail in her strategies…the sheer quantity and diversity of these images seemed deliberately designed so that others wouldn’t be able to pick out the special relationship of her relationship to her own children as the only type of love available in this room.”
• “The way so many of these pictures poked fun at the person they portrayed, in a manner that’s showed the solidarity of respect they could still take for granted”
• The Object and Nostalgia:
• “it’s too rusty and the later models are much better, but it remains as likely to invoke some childhood escapade as any rocking horse.”
• “Then there are all her own clothes; the one’s she keeps in case they come back into fashion again, but also the skinny size-eight dress: there is no chance of her wearing it again even if it does come back into fashion, but it is important to retain it as an object and not just as an image within those sixties photograph. In any case, almost everyone who ever could keeps at least one size-eight dress”

Question 2

Consumption Primary Literature

TV; Ultra Group Stereo; Texas Instruments Adverts

Answer 2

• Promotes products along performative persuasion and self improvement
• ‘We’ll help you do better.’
• ‘It’s designed for people who have eyes, as well as ears’
• ‘There’s a lot to be said for seeing what you want, where you want it’
• Targeted at an affluent audience of homeowners
• ‘And you’ll find its price of £340 will fit easily into your household budget.’
• Visual presence is mainly female, however representations of gender dynamics vary
• Texas Instruments: focus on domestic life with a mostly female presence, the male figure is presented more as temporal observer
• Ultra Stereo: female presence but ambiguous gaze, she represents the ‘paragon of elegance and good taste’
• National Panasonic: clearest representation of the male gaze, female presence portrayed the image, although has the strongest visual presence.

Question 3

Consumption Primary Literature

Brian Jackson, Working-class Community (1968) ch. 4 ‘At the club’ [31pp]

Answer 3

• Born into working-class Huddersfield family and Cambridge-educated(Young and Hoggart-esque)
• Studies of Huddersfield, an industrial town with population of 130,000
• Attempt to make those with power over the working-class understand the realities of working-class culture
• Chapter 4, “At the Club” – Huddersfield had 70 working men’s clubs, Jackson visited 16 of them and recorded 100 interviews
• Emphasises the persistence traditional modes of working-class sociability
• Begins the chapter with a history of the clubs – most established 1875 –1914
• Exceptional case: a club had been founded on a new housing estate on 1964
• Links to other aspects of working-class culture: the largest club, the Friendly and Trades Club, had 72 unions and 300 Friendly Societies affiliated with it; members of these trade unions automatically became members of it
• Nearly all 50 members of the Forest Hill Working Men’s Club came from the same street it was located on
• “Members who we picked at random in the clubs usually had relatives in the same club … Everybody we asked had neighbours in the club”
• Barred “them strangers and West Indians causing bother”
• But now open to women (one exception, which only allowed women into an “adjoining concert room”) and offered a wide range of activities: concerts, coach trips to Blackpool or to the horse races, drinking, betting, reading
• “Did any working-class boys, having gone through the grammar schools, then return and join this club community?”- cites the example of a former working-class boy at the Friendly and Trades Club who was a lecturer at Manchester University, “You get this strange feeling of being caught between two worlds”
• Clubs had two million members nationwide – yet “they are little touched by the mass media, little noticed by the upper sections of society”
• Sought to demonstrate that working-class had been able to maintain a culture in its own right with idiosyncratic norms and values, to refute the prevalent belief middle class culture was the norm and working class culture ‘deviant’
• But the book is not a sociological analysis; it is informal and descriptive and employs a vague, romantic, and nostalgic concept of working-class cultures.

Question 4

Consumption Primary Literature

Elaine Grand and John Bulmer, ‘Can We Live with Leisure?’ Sunday Times

Answer 4

• 1962, Sunday Times
• Photojournalism, first colour supplement published in a UK newspaper - successor to the likes of Picture Post.
• Hemming: ‘I think people are becoming much less conformist’
• Increase in book-reading – publishers’ sales increased from 10 million in 1939 to 75 million in 1960
• Increase in ten-pin bowling – started in 1960
• Increase in television – number of licenses increased from 33,000 in 1947 to over 11.5 million in 1960
• Decline in cinema attendance – from 1946 to 1961
• Decline in pub attendance – in 1961, nearly 250 pubs closed in England and Wales, while over 250 new off-licenses opened
• Decline in football attendance – from 1948 to 1960
• Increase in more private forms of leisure that can be enjoyed in the home or as a private family unit
• Hemming: “There seems to be a revolt against having our leisure done for us … The new interest in the home proves this” and points to “the decline of passive group experiences: cinema, dog racing, soccer”

Question 5

Consumption Primary Literature

Is Your Seaside Holiday Really Necessary?

Answer 5

• 1955
• Seaside resorts impacted by strikes, holidaymakers going abroad, staying at home.
• Follows Pimm family - classic nuclear.
• Declensionist - detailing how seaside corporations were strained by lack of interest in resorts. ‘Fight for survival.’
• Presentation of virtues of frugality.
• Focus on the ‘little men’ - donkey rides, Punch and Judy, stallholders etc. - Touching on socialist roots.
• Look at attire of people on beach. Very conservative.
• 11,000,000 did not take a holiday at all.
• 1955 - beginning of postwar affluence - British Travel Association - other forms of leisure available - cycling, camping, boating.
• The Pimm family, from London, paid £30 for their four-day holiday to Margate; Joe Pimm, a postman, earned a little over £8 a week.

Question 6

Consumption Secondary Literature

Summarise the key findings of the Presentation

Answer 6

• British culture began to change from the mid-1950s: transition from industrial to service work, and increase in availability and variety of leisure activities.
• The new affluent society created anxieties, especially among left-wing intellectuals and the middle-class, about how leisure time was being used.
• Leisure was not a classless phenomenon – both for negative reasons (not everyone was touched by affluence and had equal opportunity to participate) and positive (older forms persisted).

Question 7

Consumption Secondary Literature

Summarise the key findings of Ian Procter - The Privatisation of Working Class Life - A Dissenting View

Answer 7

• Goldthorpe suggested privatisation damaged class consciousness - suggesting it encouraged an instrumental rather than solidaristic collectivism.
• Pahl - collectivism as purely instrumental.
• Wilmott - saw Dagenham as the”the east end reborn”
• Pahl is right in suggesting that privatisation occurred in terms of the diminishing reliance on neighbourly and community support by individual households, but this does not naturally infer validity to the notion that sociability declined, on three pillars:
• Questionnaire - flawed; did not ask about non-work contact with colleagues
• Focus on work tasks in questionnaire steers focus away from supportive tasks that do not fall under the traditional DIY remit
• Focus on labour in the household does not question the point of origin.

Question 8

Consumption Secondary Literature

Summarise the key findings of Stefan Ramsden, Remaking Working Class Community

Answer 8

• Goldthorpe study suggested age of affluence led to rise of conjugal family socialisation over community, within the confines of the home. Reinforced later by likes of Hobsbawm.
• Selina Todd - affluence impact was uneven. Bourke - Working Class communities were not homogenous postwar. Lawrence & Savage - long term changes were in effect.
• Sociology adopted nostalgia in accounts. Langhammer shows privatisation pre-war.
• Street interaction important in forming the image of community.
• Affluence permitted WC enjoyment of previously ‘elite’ MC leisure pursuits - tennis for instance.
• Closure of factories in late 70s and 80s decimated the industrial base, which thus forced young people out of the town, as affluent occupations were now without the community. Ramsden warns against this being the main explanatory framework though, pointing to a 2009 case study in which one interviewee stated: ‘[the estate is] close-knit . . . everybody knows everybody and everybody is related to everybody”

Question 9

Consumption Secondary Literature

Summarise the key findings of Aver Offer, ‘British Manual Workers; From Producers to Consumers’

Answer 9

• By 1961, most employment was already service-based (55%). Industrial production became concentrated but never fully applied Fordist principles. Britain was less productive for inadequate teaching framework. Argues that, up until the 1960s, daily life was constrained by scarcity. European motor companies ‘invaded’ in the 1970s.
• Argues that ‘arousal goods’ became more commonplace compared to ‘prudential goods’ - sacrifices now for payoffs later.
• Neoclassical economics - value arose out for the subjective preferences of consumers, rather than from the endowments and efforts of producers. This is known as consumer sovereignty.
• Emerged strongly in 1970s.
• The UK Gini coefficient rose from around .25 to around .35 during the 1980s
• Council Housing - Thatcherite ‘right to buy’ described as ‘masterly manoeuvre’ - overcame the lack of coherent vision put forward by Labour. The sale of council houses strove to convert housing from an entitlement to a market commodity.
• This was one of the sources of the great surge of the financial industry. Although incomes rose somewhat, house prices rose a great deal more – and with house prices, the share of income transferred from workers to finance. The seed capital for this transition was taken from the public estate, and handed to the tenants at well below market value.
• The 1980s saw a new political alignment, between business and finance on the one side, and impatient consumers on the other. ‘Tell Sid!’, shouted hoardings and the press, advertising the privatized shares of British Gas. The implication was that this was a windfall, in which public assets were sold cheaply to Sid to gain his assent for the transfer of the bulk of them to the financial sector.