Ordinary Consumption

Ordinary consumption refers to mundane, quotidian, and routinized forms of consumption and to the theoretical and academic approaches, which pay these forms of consumption serious attention. As such, this term is in fact a millennial manifesto, calling for a radical reorientation of cultural studies of consumption.

The constitution of consumption as a proper focus for academic inquiry was inseparable from the broader cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences through the 1980s and 1990s. Through insights generated in cultural studies, the positive potential of the processes of consumption, the opportunities offered by the market to consumers were increasingly recognized. Rather than a dupe of capitalism and the market, the consumer became understood as a self-reflexive, creative, active agent. While the study of consumption through the 1990s was diverse and fragmented, it was nevertheless characterized by a focus on the symbolic properties of products and of processes and spaces of consumption.

It is against this backdrop that calls to pay attention to mundane commodities and services and forms of consumption embedded in quotidian routines emerged. These concerns crystallized most clearly in the edited collection Ordinary Consumption (Gronow and Warde 2001). The introduction to the volume suggests that focusing on themes like choice, freedom, taste, lifestyle, and identity neglected much of substance in consumption. What came of all those forms of consumption with limited scope for self-reflexivity, with little if any potential for communicating taste, [Page 1063]distinction, or identity, or that fail to excite emotion and passion? The authors' contention is that new insights must emerge if we refocus our attention toward forms of consumption that escape dominant modes of analysis and explanation: that by considering inconspicuous rather than conspicuous forms of consumption; by exploring collective, routinized, and conventional conduct rather than moments of conscious individual decision making; and by considering situations and processes of use rather than moments of acquisition, scholars of consumption will uncover different logics and relationships.

Ordinary consumption does not provide a neat classification for empirical phenomena. That is, there is no definitive statement of what sorts of consumption, what particular commodities or services, are “ordinary” and which are not. Many studies that can be situated in the emergent field of ordinary consumption have certainly focused on profoundly mundane, inconspicuous products, such as in routine food consumption or the use of utilities, such as energy and water. Ordinary consumption, however, is better understood as an approach, a broadly defined but nevertheless distinctive analytical sensitivity, than as an empirical class of things or activities. This is illustrated by studies that explore commodities that have been staples of analysis in terms of identity, status, and meaning as objects of ordinary consumption. For example, Tim Dant and Pater Martin (2001) examine cars, a clear means of individual symbolic expression in terms of mundane use to better understand the car's deep entrenchment in society.

The application of this analytical sensitivity toward the mundane has indeed led to the uncovering of previously hidden relationships and processes that run throughout the intermingling of consumption with the rest of the social. A broad thrust of the arguments that emerge is a contestation of established models of human agency and the potency of consumer choice in the market. While the relevance of insights from ordinary consumption should not be reduced to their implications for ideas of choice, it is both a significant theme and one around which several of the key insights from the field can be introduced.

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