The Dictionary of Human Geography (31 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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consumption
Conventionally, the act of purchasing and using commodities, although some commentators insist that the term should also refer to their transformation, resale and exchange (Gregson and Crewe, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Although economic geography has traditionally focused on spaces of produc tion, there has been a significant rise ofinterest in consumption since the 1980s, accompanied by increased dialogue between economic and sociaL geography. One reason for this is the putative shift to a post industriaL society, where retaiLing, Leisure and tourism are widely identified as major engines of growth (in the west, at least). Another is the theorized importance of consumerism as a locus for identity: in the consumer society, what we buy has seemingly become more important in defining our sense of self than what we pro duce. Finally, the rise of interest in consump tion appears to be related to important trends in globalization, with place related con sumer cultures (such as national cuisines or musics) having been largely replaced by a landscape of hybrid commodity flows (see food, hybridity, music, transculturation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Some of the features taken to be character istic of contemporary consumption are likely facets of modernity (Glennie and Thrift, 1992). Indeed, some argue that the consumer revolution actually preceded the industrial revolution, with innovation in production being fuelled by changes in consumer tastes and mores. Historical geographies of retailing thus reveal a remarkable series of innovations in the design, advertising and selling of goods through the eighteenth and nineteenth centur ies, with a succession of carefully orchestrated spaces including market halls, arcades and department stores playing a major role in imbuing products with an aura of desirability (Wrigley and Lowe, 2002). In the era of high modernism, cultures of consumption were also very much associated with the attainment of security and comfort, with the idealization of the suburbs reflected in a plethora of products that no home could possibly be without. The domestication and suburbaniza tion of consumption was mirrored in the de centring of consumption, with retailing and leisure following the middle classes into the suburbs; simultaneously, however, mass trans portation allowed the city centre to enhance its role as a space of consumption, with cin ema going, nightclubbing and eating out becoming key urban rituals, maintaining the myth that city centres provided a vibrant public sphere. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The mid twentieth century has thus often been characterized as an era of ?high mass consumption?. Nonetheless, Bauman (2001a) suggests that consumption remained subor dinate to work throughout this period. As he describes, work served as the link holding together individual motivation, social integra tion and systemic reproduction, with con sumer goods primarily regarded as rewards for work. Furthermore, in industrial producer societies, the state provided some of these rewards to workers through collective provi sion, so even the unemployed could partici pate in rituals of consumption. However, in postmodern, deindustrialized societies, the state has little interest in tending to this ?reserve army of labour?. Hence, the welfare state ?safety net? has gradually eroded, with individuals forced to search for security in the marketplace. (see neo liberalism. Luckily (at least for some), contemporary consumerism implies that for every human problem there is a solution that can be purchased: even prob lems of over consumption (e.g. obesity) fuel the marketing of new commodities (e.g. diet products, health club subscriptions, plastic surgery). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second consumer revolution has thus heralded an era in which consumption, not work, is the hub around which identity revolves. Yet, as Appadurai (1996, p. 38) insists, ?consumption has now become serious work', and it is wrong to imply that consumer led societies are any less disciplined than industrial ones. Indeed, consumerism has arguably bequeathed a new mode of social control, where the fundamental social divide is not between bourgeois and proletariat, but between the creditworthy seduced those whose appetite for consumption fuels a huge leisure, recreation and service sector and the repressed those ?flawed consumers' who are unable to enjoy a life ofconspicuous consump tion (Clarke, 2003). While the former are drawn into purchases through a panoply of subtle (and not so subtle) marketing, it also requires surveillance to exclude the repressed from spaces of leisured consumption. CCTV, security guards, credit rating mechanisms and consumer profiling are all significant in this process, maintaining the order of consumer spaces designed for the affluent. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The way in which shopping malls combine such mechanisms of social control with a care fully orchestrated ambience has led many geographers to proclaim them as paradigmatic consumer settings: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Developers have sought to dissociate malls from the act of shopping. That is, in recog nition of the emptiness of the activity for which they provide the main social space, designers manufacture the illusion that something else other than mere shopping is going on. The product is effectively a pseudo space that works through spatial strategies of dissemblance and duplicity. (Shields, 1989) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Given that the acquisition of commodities has become so central to developing a sense of self, exclusion from such spaces must be regarded as a significant dimension of social exclusion (Williams and Hubbard, 2001). However, accounts focusing on seductive spaces of consumption perhaps ignore the more routine spaces where the majority of consumption occurs (e.g. supermarkets, corner shops, take aways). Likewise, the emergence of new spaces of?second hand? consumption (e.g. eBay) also raises important questions about the relation ship between repressed and seduced. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Alongside the attention devoted to the soci alities of consumption, there is significant work by geographers on the subjectivities created through acts of consumption. For instance, the centrality of consumption in con structions of the body is of growing interest (Valentine, 1999), as is the emotional connec tion forged between people and the things that they consume. Some are even beginning to explore the emotional labour required to dispose of old goods, noting they may be incorporated into our personal biographies in profound ways (Gregson and Crewe, 2003). The fact that consumer goods may have long and complex lives is also something that geog raphers have explored through attempts to chart global commodity chains and the ?traf fic in things? (Jackson, 1999). Transcending simple distinctions between production and consumption, tracing webs or networks of commodity circulation not only offers an important perspective on transnationaLism; it also draws attention to the range of tech nologies, spaces and bodies involved in prac tices of consumption. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although consumption was once regarded as marginal to geographical enquiry, the sheer variety of recent studies suggests that it is now impossible to ignore the spatiaLity of con sumption. Indeed, perhaps the main impedi ment to the development of geographical theories of consumption is the current ubi quity of consumer studies. Having quickly reached a point at which a bewildering range of activities are understood to involve con sumption, a key challenge facing human geog raphers is to decide whether consumption remains a useful concept around which to orient a vast and complex literature. ph (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Clarke, Doel and Housiaux (2003); Mansvelt (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
contextual effect
The impact of local environments on individuals? attitudes and behaviour. Much social science is based on compositional effects, whereby attitudes and behaviour are influenced by individuals? non geographical position within society, such as their social cLass: within any society, people from similar backgrounds are assumed to behave in similar ways, wherever they live. According to arguments regarding contextual effects, however, because attitudes and behav iour patterns are to a considerable extent learned through social interaction in pLaces (such as households and neighbourhoods), similar people living in different sorts of places may think and act differently as a result of interactions with their neighbours. Furthermore, many patterns associated with compositional effects may themselves be the results of aggregating contextual effects. If behavioural norms are learned from local models, national patterns are simply summa tions of those local practices over all places: the national is an aggregation of the local. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The terminology regarding contextual effects varies across disciplines. In economics, for example, Brock and Durlauf (2000) distin guished among: endogenous effects, whereby one individual?s behaviour is causally influ enced by that of other group members (cf. eNDOgeneity); exogenous effects, according to which individual behaviour varies with the observed attributes that define group member ship; and correlated effects, on the argument that individuals in an area tend to behave in similar ways because they either have similar characteristics or face similar opportunities and constraints. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The contrast between compositional and con textual effects strongly influenced thinking within human geography in the 1980s, as char acterized by Thrift?s (1983) seminal paper in which he deployed the structuration approach to appreciate various forms of beha viour (such as the ?life path?) as compositional orderings within contextual fields. Citing Therborn, he argues that ?being in the world? involves both inclusive (being a member of a meaningful world) and positional (having a particular place in the world as defined by characteristics such as gender, ethnicity etc.) characteristics and that the processes of becom ing learning about one?s positional situations are structured contextually in LocaLes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contextual effects underpinned much of the early work on diffusion, notably through Torsten Hagerstrand?s operationalization of social contact and influence through the con cept of the mean information fieLd, and their production was central to his conception of time geography. More recently they have been widely explored within eLectoraL geog raphy, with studies showing that people are very likely to share political attitudes with and to vote in the same way as (the majority of) their neighbours, irrespective of their social positions (cf. neighbourhood effect). They have also been identified in other fields, as in studies of morbidity and mortality in medicaL geography and of school effects on student development (cf. education). Although empirical studies have identified behaviours consistent with contextual effects, however, the processes assumed to produce them for example, the role of social inter action in the spread of attitudes and behav ioural norms is less well understood. Indeed, in some situations it may be impossible to identify the causal impact of a local context because of an endogeneity effect whereby (some at least) individuals select their inter action contexts (as with working class people who aspire to middle class status and so choose to live in middle class areas and send their children to local schools). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Jencks and Mayer (1990) suggested five mechanisms which can generate outcomes consistent with contextual effects: (NEW PARAGRAPH) epidemic effects, whereby peer influences within an area spread to neighbours; (NEW PARAGRAPH) collective socialization, whereby local role models are important ingredients in atti tude development; (NEW PARAGRAPH) institutional models, in which local insti tutions rather than people provide the influences; (NEW PARAGRAPH) competition models, whereby neighbours compete for scarce resources; and (NEW PARAGRAPH) relative deprivation models, which involve individuals comparing their situations relative to their neighbours' and act accordingly. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Two or more of these may be relevant in any particular situation. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agnew (1987); Johnston and Pattie (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
contextuality
The situated character of social life, involving coexistence, connections and ?togetherness' as a series of associations and entanglements in time space. The con cept of context has deep historical roots. It is initiated in relations of language, and it has always contained some double sense of ?circumstances? and ?connections?. Like text, context is a metaphor derived from the Latin texere, ?to weave', and in traditions of inter pretation, context came to refer to the coher ence of the text, the connections between the parts and the whole. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term was translated into geography by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hagerstrand as part of the ontological and epistemological basis of time geography. Hagerstrand (1974) distin guished between compositional approaches, which proceed by splitting up their objects into structural categories derived via formal logical method, and contextual ones, in which objects and events are treated in their immediate spatial and temporal setting and attributed a property of ?togetherness' that must not be split asunder. In time geography, trajectories of indi vidual entities are represented in time space, not as movements in an empty Cartesian time space, but as bundles of activities together con stituting a web of trajectories. Hagerstrand saw the idea of such a web as a basic postulate of the contextual approach. It should ensure an understanding of time and space as resources ?drawn upon? in the conduct of life. It does, however, remain debateable whether his reduc tion of human action to moving entities and his graphical illustrations still retained a sense of time and space as external frameworks. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Stripped of their connotations of ?physical ism?, Hagerstrand?s ideas eventually inter sected with threads in modern sociaL theory and social phiLosophy pursuing ontologies of practice and understandings of the ?situation? for social action. In structuration theory, introduced by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984), for example, contextuality does not denote boundaries of social life but, rather, features that are inherently involved in its construction. ?All social activity', it says, ?is formed in three conjoined moments of differ ence: temporally, structurally and spatially; the conjunction of these express the situated character of social practices' (Giddens, 1981, p. 30). Giddens provides a set of concepts that describe contextuality as inherently involved in the connection of social integration and system integration; of face to face interaction and more extensive relations of mediated interactions. One of them is the concept of LocaLe, describing ?settings' of interaction connected to different social activities. Many geographers have worked in critical dialogue with these formulations. Pred (1984), for instance, pursues a ?theory of pLace as histor ically contingent process that emphasizes institutional and individual practices as well as the structural features with which those practices are interwoven'. Simonsen (1991) adds a more phenomenological aspect by emphasizing the ?situated life story' in an approach to the constitution of social life involving the interaction between different modes of temporality and spatiality. In these, and other, contributions, a central point is that contexts are not passive backdrops. They are ?performative social situations, plural events which are more or less spatially extensive and more or less temporally specific?, and they are ?productive time spaces which have to be produced? (Thrift, 1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Another thematic corresponds to episte moLogy. Several philosophical sources inform these discussions. Central are Martin Heidegger?s phenomenoLogy and Ludwig Wittgenstein?s ideas of language games, some how intertwining with Michel Foucault?s ideas of historically constituted and spatially formed ?power knowledge?. But also important is Karl Mannheim, a pioneer of the sociology of knowledge, who was one of the first to treat ideas as socially situated (Situationsgebunden). Part of these ideas, often mediated through Donna Haraway?s notion of situated know Ledge, has induced a new understanding of the production of geographical knowledge. Knowledge production is seen as a practical activity that literally takes place and intervenes within specific contexts. Different versions of contextual knowledge circulate, but what gen erally connects them is a rather modest atti tude towards the powers of theory (cf. Thrift, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Theories are of course vital and indis pensable accounts, but at the same time they are always limited and partial: they are marked by the contexts from which they emerge and the circumstances that they are intended to meet. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Common to contextual approaches is their reference to dynamic, connected time spaces. More recent contributions both accentuate and develop this point. Schatzski (2002), for example, in what he calls a ?site ontoLogy?, connects to practice and human coexistence. Social sites, in this account, are contexts where ?practices and orders form an immense, shift ing, and transmogrifying mesh in which they overlap, interweave, cohere, conflict, diverge, scatter and enable as well as constrain each other?. In another way, Massey (2005), with out using the term, opens to a radically dynamic vision of contextuality. She discusses space in terms of interrelations, heterogeneity and process, and connects it to time through a double determination as ?discrete multiplicity? and ?dynamic simultaneity?. This allows for a conception of different time spaces (or con texts) as relational; as ever shifting constella tions of trajectories, constructed out of their interrelations and ?throwntogetherness?. ks (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Massey (2005); Simonsen (1991); Thrift (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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