Consumption

Consumption is the acquisition and use of an object or service. Consumption and production have generally been treated as dichotomous in academic thinking and research; however, contemporary scholars are emphasizing the connections between the two by building on the work of some early thinkers who recognized the considerable overlap and interrelatedness of consumption and work. In particular, the growth of Internet technologies has opened up new ways of working and new ways of consuming material and immaterial goods, further complicating the relationship between consumption and production. Writers are now charting the blurry lines between consumption and work, both in the substantial influence that consumption has upon the conditions of work, particularly service work, and in more recent formulations of consumption as a form of work.

With the rise of the service economy, scholars have focused on how consumers shape the conditions of work. For example, as Robin Leidner and others have explored, service work features “triangles of power,” an “interest-alliances framework” in which consumers enter into the labor process through relations with workers and managers, resulting in shifting coalitions among and between the three parties that change the conduct and experience of work. More recent scholarship has documented the ways in which these relations influence (and are influenced by) external hierarchies such as race, class, and gender, as in Christine Williams's work on the entitlement of white, middle-class women customers in chain toy stores and in Amy Hanser's study of the “distinction work” conducted by service workers in China's new high-end department stores.

The presence of consumers in work interactions also broadens the notion of just what is for sale in service work. Arlie Hochschild introduced the idea of emotional labor—the control of how one feels and how one expresses feeling for a wage—arguing that such work is part of what employers sell to customers, contending that requiring such labor serves to alienate workers from themselves. Scholars have continued to build upon and critique this concept, as when Steven Lopez suggested that some employers do not just exploit or control workers' feelings for gain, but also provide “organized emotional care,” or when others argue for revising the idea of emotional labor to allow for greater discussion of workers' autonomy and control over their feelings, depending on the context. Some maintain that the concept is elastic enough to contain these contradictions; other scholars have introduced the notion of “aesthetic labor” to capture employers' dictates that workers display certain kind of predispositions—gendered, cultural, stylistic, and emotional—always with an eye toward giving the customer a certain experience.

Consumption can also exert direct influence on work when consumers base their purchasing decisions on labor conditions. Consumers have historically organized on behalf of some workers, dating back to early stands against sweatshop labor in garment work and through the grape boycotts of the 1960s. Labor activists, faced with the challenges of organizing contract labor, increasingly aim their tactics at a presumed audience of consumers or potential consumers, such as in the Justice for Janitors campaign. Consumers figure prominently in the fair trade and other ethical consumption movements, in which part of the product sold is the story of the working conditions of those who harvested the beans or made the soccer balls. In order for consumption to influence work conditions, however, those conditions must become more visible, as opposed to the “commodity fetishism” that Karl Marx diagnosed as capitalism's conventional practice; some forms of work have become more visible to consumers through the efforts of such disparate actors as corporate marketers, investigative journalists, and activist street theater.

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