Sociology

How Collective Ideas Shape Consumption

Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism reminds social scientists that economic ideas influence consumption and savings practices. To commit oneself to working hard affirmed one's sense of “calling” to one's vocation and of doing one's work as if unto God. At the same time, the religious notion of asceticism required that excess earnings be saved rather than spent for superfluous objects or for ostentatious display. These collective ideas were shared across society and profoundly shaped the consumption and savings practices enabling the ethos of the capitalist economy to thrive.

Indeed, the “spirit of calculation” (Bourdieu 2000, 25) is not universal but a historically contingent understanding collectively shared in a society. Economic behaviors that most people take for granted (money, credit, saving, spending, wage work, etc.) are embodied beliefs and economic dispositions that influence what and how people understand goods to be goods and what people do with their money and their goods. In Pierre Bourdieu's investigation of Algerian workers after their country had been liberated from French colonization, he excavated the “folk economics” of a cook to demonstrate that the economic ethos of modern capitalism differs from the ethos of the earlier period and that such dispositions as economic rationality and allocation efficiency (that minimizes costs and maximizes profits) were historically constituted.

These collective ideas also restricted what should be sold by whom and to whom. At the end of the colonial period, for example, an honorable person could not sell milk, exchanges among neighbors and kin followed a gift/counter-gift logic, and the type of relationship people were in dictated what would be regarded as the appropriate medium (or media) of exchange:

The economic ideas of blind competition that disregard the national, ethnic, racial, or status identities of buyer and seller are hostile and war-like in Kabyle society. As such, the style of interaction, the media used in the exchange, and the goods bought and sold differ accordingly.

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