Consumption

Consumption as the Object of Governance

In this market-mediated form, consumption has been the object of various forms of governance. Minimally, it is thought to require the legal apparatus of private property so that things and money can be freely exchanged and to prevent theft and deception. More elaborately, such consumption may require forms of regulation by government or its agents: weights and measures standards, safety standards, forms of licensing of providers and venues, and varieties of taxation. These regulatory processes reflect the problems of market failure and the accommodation of popular protest, as well as providing a funding stream for the development of modern forms of state. In matters of quality, reliability, and safety, market dynamics have proved less-than-satisfactory means of guaranteeing the consumer's needs. Adulterated foods, variable measures, and unsafe products (ranging from toys to financial advice) have created substantial demands for public intervention to regulate the free market. Advocates of the free market have, in turn, called for deregulation and the liberation of entrepreneurial dynamism from the shackles of state regulation.

Collective Consumption

Despite the rise of market-mediated consumption, other forms of consuming have coexisted with it. Both economists and urban sociologists have been interested in collective consumption. For economists, some consumption practices deviate from the model of individualized market-mediated consumption. So, households may act as a collective unit of consumption, or there are “public goods” of various kinds (from national defense to public parks) that are not designed for individualized purchase and consumption. Urban sociology examined forms of public provision (from infrastructure to welfare services) as distinctive patterns of collective consumption and as the focus of political conflict and bargaining.

The concept of collective consumption draws attention to the importance of public provision of goods, benefits, and services during the second half of the twentieth century in particular. These provisions were more or less decommodified—that is, removed from the inequalities of market exchange by being provided as social rights. Public provision represented an alternative and supplement to, and infrastructural support for, market consumption. As alternatives and supplements, public provision served to remedy market failure and redress market-generated inequalities. But public provision also underpinned market-mediated consumption: benefits to create spending power, or infrastructural provision and taxation support for private housing.

Consuming Public Services

Public provision came under increasing attack from advocates of markets in the late twentieth century. Ideological claims about the innate superiority of the market form coincided with sociohistorical accounts of the rise of a “consumer society.” From different starting points, a number of political and cultural strands came together to change the relationships between publics and public services toward a more “consumerist” orientation. Creating a more consumerlike relationship in public services was expected to: promote efficiency, create a more personalized or responsive mode of service provision, encourage more [Page 147]responsible behavior on the part of users of public services, improve the experience of service use, and increase consumer satisfaction. For some critics, the drive toward consumerism threatened to undermine the public or decommodified character of services and benefits by reinstating the dynamics of markets. Such political choices would value profits over service, risk market failure, and reproduce market inequalities.

...