Knowing Consumers- Histories, Identities, Practices (Trentmann 2005)
The consumer as an engine of wealth and representative of the public interest keeps the economy moving onwards and upwards
Changing shape and values an d the different positions it has occupied in politics and society
Asking about the subjectivities of the consumer, moving beyond interest and use to thinking, the making of consumer as subject and object
Dramatic turn to the active or citizen consumer, a creative, confident and rational being articulating personal identity and serving the public interest. Consumer rights have become an expanding point of reference
General, discursive shift from 'passive' to active consumer highlighting agency, resistance and transgression that consuemrs bring to the process of consumption
Markets, choice and the point of purchase provide the dominant framework for most accounts of agency, involving a temporal distancing from earlier historical formations of consumers and consumption
Post mass consumer society- markets, shopping and choice appear as dominant drivers
Consumers as the natural consequence of the growing commodification and creation of desire in market-based capitlaism
Diverse range of signs and symbols that are tied to people's plural identities
Move from modern consumer versus post-modern active and creative consumer
Greater emphasis needs to be placed on the processes of identity and knowledge formation that criss cross the market and processes that occur outside that domain
Analysing and re-evaluating the formation of the consumer
Histories
The consumer was largely voiceless, marginal figure in the so called consumer revolutions of the transatlantic world
Different constructs such as those between 1930's citizen consumer to the purchaser citizen of the 1950s onward,
Consumer acquired a positive mantle through productive spending in the economy, 1800s negative connotation, 1900s positive ones- consumers wanted to be heard and represented, to use their material position to advance moral and public causes
Then the neoclassical critique of the individualist consumer, moved from 'the daily uses of life' to the consumption of things tending to 'raise the character of human beings'
Diverse social and ideological roots of the emerging consumer, there are multiple and changing boundaries of the consumer, bounded in terms of ideas, social composition, representation and consuming practices
However, the bounded nature of consumers was not fixed or static. Languages of the consumer are situated in beliefs and practices, which can be mobilised in different ways to influence perceptions of the consumer.
Many informal spheres of social life are frequently bracketed in market-orientated approaches to consumpiton
the expanding language of the consumer has managed to absorb diverse practices of consumption as com mensurate activities (while excluding others). This has involved the unifi cation of consumers initially differentiated and bounded by particular practices – water consumer, the consumer as shopper, the consumer of art
Role of state and law in establishing the consumer in a universalising tone: it was the need to rationalize scarce resources in war-time or to boost demand to overcome economic depression that made states identify consumers as a core target of public policy and organisation.
Recognition of the consumer within law
The accelerating privatisation of the consumer as a ‘market-citizen-consumer’ has been part of a supra-national institution’s attempt to transcend the nation-state with its territoriality rooted law of citizenship.
If liberalization and privatization have extended the scope of the commercial domain in social life, they have been met by a revitalized discourse about consumers’ human rights and cosmopolitan citizenship and the emergence of new opportunities for social protest and civic identities at the
level of local and global civil society
Dynamic relations
Consumers emerge out of dynamic relations with other social actors and agencies, in order to understand the changing status and associations of the consumer
The growing recognition that ‘the consumer is king’ from the late nineteenth century onwards was in part a step by smaller retailers to reassert their cultural and economic authority vis-à-vis more concentrated department stores and
alternative retail networks, like the cooperatives.
the culture of personalized relationships was buttressed
by corporate politics and state intervention
the point of purchase is here situated in a broad context
of management culture, local knowledge regimes and cultural values. The high expectation placed on customer service results from the interaction of two spheres: the global export of consumer-oriented marketing and training models and local cultures : of trust and reciprocal obligations.
In contrast, the case of department stores in China highlights the relational dynamics involved in shaping the consumer. It also points to the contribution of established cultural regimes and values (trust, obligation, family) in
shaping the consumer in contemporary societies.
Several themes and questions concerning the construction, fl ow and reception of knowledge emerge. In European and international law, for example, liberal knowledge of a market-based consumer became attractive not simply because of its status within economics but because it served an institutional project of reforming domestic regulation
Flow between systems
Suspicion and distrust over the new persona and fear of mass consumption amongst the elites to handle desire and material pleasures
The more consumer, the less citizen
The consumer may be a relatively thin, fl exible or diffuse identity, but it is useful to recall that thicker identities have included not only the republican citizen but also more totalizing and brutal projects of nationalism, fascism and communism. An expanding if diffuse and bounded conception of consumers may be a favourable condition for a pluralistic politics recognizing diversity and toleration