Comparing Consumer Cultures

Comparative accounts of consumer cultures represent attempts to contrast or compare consumer practices and behaviors across different national contexts. They can demonstrate global cultural patterns, such as Americanization, convergence, and differentiation, and reveal qualitative breadth in consumer cultures, past and present. The Americanization thesis holds that consumer culture is a phenomenon definitive to the United States, spreading through globalization processes, including mainstream and niche cultural channels as well as trade and international retailing. Similarly, convergence is the idea that these forces homogenize, so that societies increasingly resemble one another in a common consumer culture, usually implicitly based on Western Europe or the United States. Differentiation or diversification argues rather that cultural differences are more striking or persistent than similarities, due to national institutional arrangements and preexisting cultural values. While in some discussions consumer culture is taken to mean the varying extent to which societies demonstrate “consumerist” values, other discussions highlight qualitative differences in the kind of consumer culture that is found in different contexts.

In addition to contributions to mainstream debates about globalization, studies comparing consumer cultures can complement analysis of economic and social conditions across countries and abstract indicators of well-being, such as growth and gross domestic product (GDP). Comparing consumer cultures may provide comparative information on the use of time, money, and leisure, illustrating differences in the performance of social practices and experience of daily life. A consumption-oriented perspective also connects geopolitical and socioeconomic trends relating to welfare and international trade with smaller-scale economic and sociological processes.

Comparing consumer cultures, like the study of consumer culture, is relatively new, but relevant cross-national analysis of consumer behavior and retailing strategy date from the 1950s. Studies such as James B. Jefferys and Derek Knee's (1962) Retailing in Europe: Present Structure and Future Trends and Robert Bartels's (1963) Comparative Marketing: Wholesaling in Fifteen Countries reflect on the changing landscape of shopping in different societies, despite overtly focusing on production and distribution data. Early trends noted were the [Page 228]increasing size of shops and accompanying increases in retail sector work and consumption, the authors predicting that as sales made per person increase, so would consumption per head. In other words, consumerism booms with efficiency savings made in goods provisioning; especially when employment in retail becomes widespread.

Comparative historical and sociocultural accounts of consumer culture date mainly from the 1990s onward and can be split roughly into three main types. Edited books containing geographically specific case studies of consumer culture are common, and many provide historical accounts of certain time periods as well as focusing on particular countries. These give a diverse and kaleidoscopic vision of consumer cultures and offer qualitative explorations of niche consumption practices or discuss formative stages in the development of consumerism. Examples include the focus on U.S. and Western European consumption in Getting and Spending (Strasser, McGovern, and Judt 1998) and, in the edited collection The Making of the Consumer (Trentmann 2006), the understanding of key moments and features of consumer cultures development across various countries is highlighted. Other collections, such as Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan's (2006) The Ambivalent Consumer, offer comparisons within chapters.

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