the history of consumption: a literature review and consumer guide

Grant McCracken The History of Consumption: A Literature Review and Consumer Guide

ABSTRACT. The history of consumption is fast becoming a vital area of academic research. For the social sciences, in general, this new field promises new insight into the "great transformation" of Western society. For consumer research, in particular, it promises the opportunity to create new perspectives, sources of data, and theoretical concepts. The purpose of this paper is to review recent literature on the history of consumption, and to offer a consumer guide for those who wish to use it in the study of modern consumer behavior and policy.

Both formal and operat ional definitions of consumer research fre-

quently neglect the possibility and the value of a historical approach.

As a result of this neglect, a wide range of research projects, many of

them vital to the study of present consumpt ion behavior and

consumer policy, are not considered. This paper is meant to help remedy this neglect by offering a review and criticism of recent work

in the history of consumpt ion . It is hoped that this t reatment will

establish a consumer guide for those who wish to evaluate and use

the historical work now at their disposal.

THE HISTORY OF THE HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION

It is a curiosity for the sociology of knowledge that the history of

consumpt ion should have been so systematically ignored, both within

consumer research and the historical communi ty , for so long. If the

causes of this long neglect are not apparent , its consequences are plain enough. The history of consumpt ion has no history, no

communi ty of scholars, no tradit ion of scholarship. In a popular

academic phrase, this field is "preparadigmatic ." Or, perhaps more

accurately, it is "neo-natal." The last five years have seen the

appearance of several substantial t reatments of this topic and a host

of smaller ones. There is, however , still no programmat ic scheme to

inform or evaluate investigation in this vital area of research. It is the object of this paper to suggest such a scheme.

Journal of Consumer Policy 10 (1987) 139-- 166. © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.

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Changes in consumption have contributed mightily to the "great transformation" (Polanyi, 195.7) that turned Western societies once relatively traditional, slow changing, status-bound, sacred into the relatively innovative, quick paced, contract-bound, profane entities they have become. This central role in the creation of the modern Western world makes the history of consumption an enormously complicated study. Consumption is implicated as cause or consequence in virtually all of the historical activity that has taken place around it. It is therefore impossible to create a historical record of consumption without taking into account a wide range of disparate considerations. In order to capture some of this diversity the present paper is divided into seven sections. Each of these sections represents another context of the history of consumption. These contexts are the following: cultural, sociological, psychological, political, intellectual, marketing, and consumer.

Not every study will attend to all of these contexts, but even when one or two are isolated for special attention, it will be borne in mind that the larger topic has been simplified for short-term heuristic purposes. In the long term, the study of consumption will want to attend to all of these contexts. The complexity and centrality of the role of consumption in the transformation of Western society makes this holistic orientation not just desirable but apparently unavoidable. Only thus can we hope to determine how consumption has served so profoundly as a cause and consequence of the great transformation. From a more particular point of view, it is also only thus that we can take full advantage of the history of consumption as a workshop for the application and refinement of ideas useful to the study of consumption in the present day.

Historical Precedents: Caveat Emptor

Some of the historical work to be done in this field of study must be done on a large and demanding diachronic scale. Because consumption serves as a decisive social and historical force in the West over so many centuries, and because it operates with such complexity, some of the work done in this area will have to assume appropriately large and ambitious proportions.

Four recent studies have met this challenge. The most influential of these four is Fernand Braudel's Capitalism and Material Life

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1400--1800 (1973) which has helped to rescue the study of the history of consumption from its neglect and establish it as a legitimate field of study. Braudel was the first to suggest the essential contribution of consumption behavior to the extraordinary development of the West (1973, p. 323), and the first to demonstrate the importance of a broad historical focus. The remaining three authors all pay this founding father appropriate homage and follow his impressive lead. McKendrick is the chief contributor to The Birth of A Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (McKendrick, Brewer, & Plumb, 1982) and it is to McKendrick that we owe as stirring and persuasive an argument as any emerging field could hope to have (pp. 1--6). McKendrick convincingly argues that the history of the great transformation has been written as a study of the industrial revolution to the neglect of the consumer revolution that was its necessary historical companion. As a result of the influence of Braudel and McKendrick, the long neglected study of demand is now drawing increasing attention in the historical 'community (e.g., Fraser, 1981; Stuard, 1985). Others to have looked at the history of consumption from a broad perspective include Williams whose Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (1982) considers the role of consumption in the social life of France from the court of Louis XIV to the Department Store in 19th century Paris. Mukerji's From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (1983) traces the rise of a "consumerist culture" in 15th and 16th century Europe, and pursues the implications of this development into the 18th century. Mukerji insists that the consumer revolution is no mere companion of the industrial revolution but indeed its necessary predecessor. All of these studies address themselves to the topic with an appreciation for necessary scope of the undertaking (McCracken, 1984, 1985c, in press a).

These studies have been extremely important in opening up the field and, as we shall see, in contributing ground breaking scholarship. They have allowed us to see some of the major issues that confront the study of consumption in a historical context. It is worth pointing out that while the sheer scale of this study demands a sweeping command of modern Western history, the full complexity of the topic demands the skills of the miniaturist. Indeed, until the history of consumption is a place in which these small scale studies are undertaken we cannot expect to see in a fully sophisticated way

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just how consumption has played its vital role. Large-scale works are necessary to establish a frame for smaller ones. And large scale studies will come again to integrate these smaller ones into a comprehensive global view. But the real work of this field will be accomplished, as it is in every field, in the finely detailed terms of very particular studies. For the moment, then, we must distrust even as we embrace the initial large-scale studies. Until we have entered the miniaturist stage of research, all claims to knowledge are suspect.

A series of smaller caveats for the creator and especially the consumer of historical knowledge is also appropriate. There are three species of error that will enter into this historical research and also into its use by the consumer. The first of these is "presentism." This is the error of looking at the past as an anticipation of and preparation for the present day (Butterfield, 1963, p. 10). To guard against this error we must insist in seeing the past as a bundle of possibilities, any one of which might have prevailed. The past is not the present in training. It is a protean mix of forces and events out of which any one of a number of "presents" can emerge. We must be prepared to entertain the possibility of presents other than our own. It is worth noting however that because we inevitably use our present as a basis of comparison, the sins of presentism are normally more easy to forswear than forego.

A related error might be called "tempocentrism." This is the temporal equivalent of ethnocentrism: the projection of one's own assumptions and beliefs onto another time, rather than another place. Tempocentrism occurs when scholars suppose that they can investigate the past with ideas from the present (Bailyn, 1970, pp. 10--1 l). A good example of this is Williams' suggestion that it was a "reverence for leisure" that directed in part the consumption of the early modern European aristocracy (1982, p. 34). The concept of leisure, familiar and necessary though it is to the present day, is alien to the 16th century. This historical period did not conceive of time and activity in these terms. When Williams transports this idea back into the 16th century she succeeds in imposing a cultural notion that does not belong there, and, what is worse, she fails to see that what she has identified as leisure activity has its own contemporary definition. Nobleman did not seek leisure for its own sake. They sought to avoid the impression of gainful labor because this was thought to compromise their claim to gentle status (Kelso, 1929, p. 66; Peacham, 1962, p. 23). It is, however, much easier to decry this


error than to avoid it, and the discerning reader will find it committed once or twice in the remainder of this paper. Inevitably, our historical inquiry becomes what some have called a "history for us," and concentrates on the aspects of the past that seem most continuous with the present (Sahlins, 1976, p. 56).

A third error is better called a temptation. When the study of history is often undertaken for political and moral reasons, it is easy to let this motivation carry into the historical work itself, determining its outcome. Williams supplies the illustration here as well. Williams is unabashed in her condemnation of the commercialization of modern society and what she sees as the excesses and deceptions of the "dream world" of consumption. This is an acceptable position when offered as a general commentary in the introduction or conclusion of a historical work, and indeed many will admire the skill and intelligence with which Williams presents this now familiar case. However when it is allowed to become the stuff of analysis as it does, for instance, when Williams (1982) suggests that the "deception of mass consumption must be resisted from the outset" (p. 105), polemics and scholarship collide, and the past once again becomes a version of the present (cf. McKendrick et al., 1982, pp. 30--31).

These errors aside, there are perhaps two major challenges that face this growing field. The first of these is to show how the species of social action called "consumption" established an ethnographically unprecedented relationship to culture in Western societies. The objective here is to understand how culture and consumption became thoroughly interpenetrated and mutually determining. This project cannot be fulfilled unless historical scholars are prepared to see first that consumption is what Mauss (1970, p. 1) would call a "total social phenomenon." It must be viewed broadly, not merely as the satisfaction of needs but as an activity with implications for every aspect of the consumer's existence and ideology. Second, historical scholars must acknowledge that consumption has been no mere reflection of the social changes taking place around it but a constitu- tive causal agency in its own right.

The second challenge is to establish an account of consumption that shows how the "consumer revolutions" that take place as fierce episodes from the 16th century onwards become finally a "sustained reaction" sometime in the 19th century. In this century the "boule- versement" of changing consumption patterns ceased to be a periodic

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event and became instead a continuous structural reality for the modern West.

SALIENT CONTEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION

Cultural Context

The cultural context of consumption concerns the fundamental organization of meaning for a community. Through its meaningful distinctions, culture creates categories of person, time, space, activity, and object. It supplies the distinctions of class, sex, age, occupation into which the social world is organized. It defines the concept of individual and corporation which inform social organization and social action. It organizes the continua of time and space into a set of distinctions that inform what a culture means by "when" and what it means by "where." It decides in short how the phenomenal world is turned from a homogeneous mass of sensation into a coherent, demonstrable, and shared body of distinct impressions (Douglas & Isherwood, 1978; Levy, 1978; McCracken, in press b; Sahlins, 1976).

The history of consumption worked and continues to work extraordinary changes in the culture of the West. It helped to change our cultural categories of time and space. What impressed Braudel most (1973, p. 232) was the effect of fashion. This systematic turn- over of styles in clothing, pottery, food, furniture, architecture, and other product categories intensified the "periodicity" of Western time. The constant innovation of style created an increasingly "narrow" present. It made the past recede more quickly and the future approach with new rapidity. If the goods transformed by fashion encouraged the West to discriminate units of time more finely, they also served as an opportunity to mark these distinctions in the material world. Goods became a way of telling time. We have begun to see how the industrial revolution changed the manner in which time was reckoned in the West (e.g., Thompson, 1967), it is time now to see the influence of the consumer revolution in this regard.

New kinds and amounts of consumption also shaped and were shaped by new Western notions of space. Especially in the area of housing, innovation was essential to the realization of new notions of


privacy. New forms of housing and interior design created private space in what Hoskins (1953) has called the "great rebuilding" of the rural England that took place in the 16th century. Braudel (1973) is persuaded that privacy is an 18th century innovation and he too notes the way in which this idea is played out in new kind of building and new discreteness in several product categories (cf. Tuan, 1982, pp. 52--85). It is hard not to wonder whether in fact new ideas of privacy do not reflect new ideas of possession that are themselves the work of the consumer revolution. If this is so, it is one of the many places in which the consumer revolution created effects that became effects that, finally, became causes.

Cultures do more than define the co-ordinates of time and space. They specify what is meant by the "individual" (Carrithers, Collins, & Lukes, 1985). They declare just what a "person" consists in. Necessarily, this will be an exceedingly complicated chapter in the history of consumption. As we shall note below, we will want to comprehend how the individual emerges successively from corporations such as family and class in which he/she was once subsumed. It will also have to be noted, as Belk (1984) has done, that this growth of the autonomous individual is aided by the use of consumer goods as a means with which the individual can define and distinguish aspects of the self. In this respect the consumer revolution helps to "spring" the individual from certain social corporations and then to supply this individual with the kinds of meaning and definition that become necessary.

But the history of consumption makes its contribution to the growth of Western individualism in other ways as well. It has been profoundly implicated, again as cause and consequence, in the development of the notion that the individual can and should undergo a process of continual transformation. This is a common place notion in the present day, but it is obviously one of the great peculiarities of the Western world. Consumption has helped to encourage this idea and it has supplied a source of meaning with which the process of transformation could be undertaken. Campbell (1983) has made a vital contribution to this topic by observing the role of the Romantic movement in encouraging new ideas of the self that served then and now as a constant prod to consumption. The Romantic self was something to be fulfilled through a discovery of a unique inner personality. Its expression demanded novel experiences which transcend the dulling effects of custom, form, and convention.

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Plainly, this idea has been a powerful force for creation of new levels of consumption. Just as plainly these levels of consumption have helped give it the authority it now possesses in Western culture. The world of goods has honored it by making it the most hackneyed theme of modern advertising.

It is even suggested that we have seen a cultural redefinition of the body as a result of the consumer revolution. O'Neill (1978), for instance, has suggested that we have witnessed a domestication of the body for commercial purposes in which the conditions and properties of this body have been turned into market opportunities, social anxieties, and symbolic declarations (p. 225). The "commodi- tization" of the body is part of a larger movement in which things traditionally regarded as independent of the marketplace (e.g., certain emotions, intimacies, and other "personal" matters) have been turned into commodities (Ewen, 1976; Fox & Lears, 1983; Lears, 1981; Leiss, 1978, 1983; Thompson, 1967, p. 61).

Another would-be measure of the interpenetration of culture and consumption is the possibility that economic themes and meanings have entered into literature and helped profoundly to shape the view Western writers have (and present) of the world (Friedman, 1985; Harris, 1981). Shell (1978, 1982) has gone even further to suggest that indeed literary and economic activity are essentially similar enterprises. According to this argument, money and language are both systems of value that represent one reality with another, and those who work these media of exchange essentially similar agents. Still another measure of the interpenetration of culture and consumption is noted by Allen's (1983) brilliant treatment of the way in which culture was used for marketing purposes and marketing for cultural purposes in 20th century America.

One of the most fundamental changes to take place here was the change in the kind of meaning that goods could carry. In the medieval period and the Renaissance, objects of human manufacture were adorned with symbols and emblems and to this extent were charged with moral significance. Every possible surface of the Elizabethan home, for instance, was covered with the representations of biblical and classical events, and the purpose of inscribing them there was to surround the owner with reminders of the moral imperatives of the world and prompts to fight action (Thrupp, 1948, p. 140; Tillotson, 1942; Wingfield Digby, 1963). Sometime after the Renaissance this "moral graffiti" ceased to appear on Western goods.


But it would be wrong to suggest that the emblematic tradition disappeared entirely. For in the place of these emblems and their constant recitation of the verities of the early modem world, were inscribed a new set of meanings, more secular, more profane, but no less social. These meanings included the notions of role (Solomon, 1983) and identity (Belk, 1984; Csikszentimihalyi & Rochberg- Halton, 1981), new ideas of lifestyle (Williams, 1982), new ideas of femaleness and maleness (Leach, 1984, p. 342), new ideas of sociality (Ames, 1982), and new ideas of nationality (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1984), to name a few. At a time when the force of change and the decline of tradition brought an established order of meaning and its dissemination in question, the Western world appears to have developed a new medium for the representation of certain kinds of meaning. This new means of communication served not only to secure unmoored meaning (Arendt, 1958) but also to give an increasingly anonymous and mobile society a way to avoid a descent into complete anomie (Belk, 1984, p. 757). Goods allowed the West, as Sahlins puts it, to turn "the basic contradiction of its construction into a miracle of existence, a cohesive society of perfect strangers" (1976, p. 203). Making goods the site of new kinds of meaning also was the beginning of the creation of a complicated system of meaning movement that routinely operates in the present day to move meaning out of the culturally and historically constituted world into consumer goods and from these goods into the lives of individual consumers (McCracken, 1985a). Simple material goods were increasingly charged with new and profoundly important cultural meanings (e.g., Forty, 1986; Hine, 1986). Increasingly, the material culture and the culture of the West were one.

Sociological Context

The sociological perspective calls for an account of how consumption by individuals is influenced by group membership and how the consumption of groups is influenced by their internal dynamics and definition (Mayer, 1982, p. 92; Nicosia & Mayer, 1976). More particularly, the consumption of individuals is seen to be influenced by membership in families, social classes, sub-cultures, ethnic groups, life styles, friendship circles, occupations, and the "reference" groups in which membership is desired. These groups, in turn, exhibit characteristic aggregate patterns of consumption according to the

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nature of their demographic composition, social location, resource base, status entitlements and ambitions, and concepts of self, society, and world. The serial influence of the consumption of one group on the consumption of another has been considered in the form of diffusion theories and opinion leadership models, and these have been useful in tracking the movement of stylistic and technological innovations through society. The competition between individuals as group members has been considered through theories of conspicuous consumption (Mason, 1981; Veblen, 1912), and vertical and horizontal status competition (Simmel, 1904). This in hasty and imperfect summary represents some of the considerations that arise when one attends to the sociological context of consumption.

For historical purposes the key area of research here is how consumption contributed to and was changed by the continual transformation of two groups: class and family. Let us look first at class. At the beginning of the great transformation in the 16th century, Western Europe was a relatively well defined hierarchy with a fine gradation of status organized into a relatively clear set of classes within which constant mobility took place (Stone, 1965). The consumption behavior of an individual was determined largely by location in this hierarchy, in a word, by class membership (McCracken, 1982b). Furthermore, this hierarchy encouraged the individual to admire and imitate those of a higher class, and to look to higher classes for diffusion of innovations. By the beginning of the present century this system of social organization was very substan- tially transformed. Class membership had become difficult to define and even more difficult to assess as an influence on the individual. The concept of "class" was itself an endangered species of academic thought as evidenced by the mildly admonishing title Coleman (1983) felt called upon to give his recent paper: "The Continuing Significance of Social Class to Marketing."

Part of the history of consumption, then, must consist in docu- menting the transformation of "class" as an influence and then show- ing how new groups and influences began to effect the consumer. When and how, for instance, did subcultures, ethnicity, lifestyles, opinion leaders, come to influence the consumer's tastes and preferences? McKendrick et al. (1982) suggest that during the industrial revolution, class was still the chief determinant of these things. But in the late 19th century, Williams' (1982) work suggests, class was fast losing its position of preeminence and was being displaced by lifestyle and other influences (cf. E. C. Hirschman, 1985).


There are a range of other research questions that surround the issue of class. One of these is the role of consumption in helping to regulate and define social mobility that has been so important a part of Western societies (Macfarlane, 1978). First, goods played an important gatekeeping role in this mobility. Individuals simply could not make certain status claims without the possession of a certain bundle of goods. The failure to obtain all of these goods, or small, tell-tale errors in their selection helped to give the pretender away. Second, goods even has a "performative" role to play in the mobility game (McCracken, 1985a, p. 25). It was the possession of the right goods over several generations that permitted a family to legitimize (indeed quite literally to "substantiate") their claim to noble standing (McCracken, in press b). Third, it is possible that certain patterns of consumption served as a substitute for mobility for the members of certain classes (cf. Fallers, 1961). Fourth, Miller (1981, p. 183) suggests that consumer goods served as "cultural primer" for those of one social location who aspired to the lifestyle of another. In this capacity, goods carried certain meanings and values that enabled one class to socialize and control another. These are all aspects of the relationship between consumption and class that are germane to the history of consumption.

The effort to document the transformation of class as a consumer influence will also have to reckon with the fact that after the relative democratization of the West, even after the aristocracy had been vastly diminished in its political influence, this class continued to have tremendous influence over the consumption patterns of other groups. Williams, for instance, notes how sturdy and long-lived was the "courtly model of consumption" and how successfully it survived the decline of patronage and even the French revolution of 1789 (1982, p. 48). It is worth noting however that the democratization of consumption, when it finally began to take place in the 19th and 20th centuries, made a vital contribution to the process of democratization of society (Boorstin, 1973, p. 92; Kidwell & Christman, 1974). In this historical instance, consumption helped to influence the concept and practice of class instead of the reverse.

The nature of the family as a group exercising influence over the individual has also changed profoundly. At the beginning of this period class membership was mediated by family membership (James, 1974; 1978, p. 15). The individual belonged to his or her class through the family into which he or she was born or married. It was this family, not the individual, which gathered, lost, or main-

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tained the social status that each member enjoyed. For many product choices, particularly those effecting status, the family was the effec- tive consuming unit. The early modern period saw the gradual diminution of the family as the chief corporation to which the individual belonged. Stone (1977) notes how the family was pared from an extended genealogical net to a nuclear family. As a result of this diminution the individual was progressively less subsumed within a corporation and began to take on a new degree of autonomy. Gradually, the individual emerged as an increasingly autonomous consumer, whose purchases were less directed by and less determining of the family and its status concerns. One of the objectives of the history of consumption must be to show how patterns of consumption change as they begin to center less on the family and more on the individual. McKendrick et al. (1982, p. 1) points out that by the 18th century purchases had begun to shift from one to the other.

The family is important to the history of consumption from quite a different point of view. As the site of consumption, as the place where this bewildering new variety and number of things came to rest, it is one of the most vital causes and consequences of consumption changes. Plainly the family and its meaningfully charged complement of consumer goods and activities were in a process of constant interaction from the 16th century onwards. The study of the relationship between this institution and the consumer revolution is only now truly underway (Cohen, 1982; Gordon & McArthur, 1985; Leach, 1984). It is a cultural commonplace in the West to equate the "family" with that bundle of material objects we call the "home." This peculiar and culturally specific phenomenon is a new but fast growing area of scholarly study (Clarke, 1986; Cohn, 1979; Hayden, 1981; Rybczynski, 1986; Wright, 1980).

Conspicuous and competitive consumption are especially important to the study of the history of consumption because they play such an important role in the growth of a consumer society. Outbursts of this kind of competition between and within social groups has driven Western consumption to new degrees and patterns of consumption. These outbursts have been the engines of change that have helped drive Western societies forward into their present preoccupation with material possessions. One of such outbursts in the Elizabethan period was responsible for fundamental changes in this society (McCracken, in press a). Another is recorded by


McKendrick et al. (1982) for the eighteenth century. A detailed record and comparison of these outbursts from the 16th century to the present day would make an important contribution to the role of consumption in the great transformation. This record and comparison must include special attention to the dynamics of the diffusion process. Simmel's charter theory has discouraged careful attention to some of the subtleties that take place between competing status groups, and to this extent it has concealed crucial factors that can help explain consumer explosions from the 16th century onwards (McCracken, 1985b, p. 41).

Important as status has been as an engine of the history of consumption, care must be taken to avoid overemphasizing its importance. McKendrick et al. (1982) have made the ideas of conspicuous consumption and status competition the exclusive prin- ciples of explanation. It must be kept in mind that consumer goods carry a great deal of cultural meaning beyond status and that they can be used for cultural purposes beyond social competition (McCracken, 1985a, p. 7).

As a final note, it is worth noting that one product category looms especially large in the historical consideration of the sociological context of consumption. This is the category of food. Patterns of relationship and interaction, in classes, in families, in acts of social solidarity and status competition, are inevitably played out in the medium of this vital consumable. Indeed food plays so central a role to the formation and maintenance of these patterns that its history is a record of sociological changes. The study of food from this point of view has yet fully to be exploited but there is evidence of new interest (e.g., Burnett, 1979; Forster & Forster, 1975; Forster & Ranum, 1979; Goody, 1982; Mennell, 1985).

Psychological Context

The history of consumption is nothing if not a study in new attitudes, new sources of information, new kinds of information processing, and new decision-making activities. A "presentist" treatment of the history of consumption would have us suppose that Western Euro- peans and North Americans took immediately, enthusiastically, and effortlessly to new patterns of consumption. But this is plainly wrong. Fundamental shifts had to take place in the psychological context of consumption before we could become fully fledged consumers.

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There are many aspects to the development of this new context. As O'Neill (1978, p. 224) and Leach (1984) point out, it was necessary first to persuade people to want to want. This represents not merely a change in existing attitudes but the inculcation of an entirely new attitude. An entirely new "readiness to respond" (Day, 1972) had first to be created to bring individuals into the consumer society. They had to be sensitized to new objects, influences, patterns of behaviors, and objectives. But this is just the first attitude that had to be constructed. Once the individual had been recruited, a further set of attitudes about particular goods, information sources, purchase behaviors and goals were then necessary.

There was an explosion in information sources from the 16th century onwards. Advertising began to fill public spaces with increasing amounts of information. The pamphlets of the 17th century were joined by new levels of advertising in signboards (Hendon & Muhs, 1985), newspapers (Presbry, 1968), catalogues (Boorstin, 1973, p. 128), trade cards (Welch, 1986), and magazines (Pollay, 1985). The advent of film created one of the most powerful of the new media available to advertisers (Williams, 1982). (But even without explicit commercial messages, this new medium was becoming a powerfully influential source of consumer information, O'Guinn, Faber, & Rice, 1985.) Fiction was another source of commercial influence (Friedman, 1985). As Marchand (1985) and Belk and Pollay (1985) demonstrate so convincingly for America in the 20th century, advertising shaped as it informed, transforming the beliefs of those who came to rely on it for their knowledge of the world.

New sources of information were matched by a dramatic increase in the kinds of information that had to be processed. Brands and product types proliferated creating vast amounts of new information (Schudson, 1984; Thirsk, 1978, p. 106). But these goods themselves became the medium of unprecedented amounts and kinds of meaning. Increasingly it carried information about concepts of self (Belk, 1982, 1984), role (Solomon, 1983), and a range of other cultural information (Holman, 1980; McCracken, 1985a).

These new sources and kinds of information dramatically increased the amount of information available to the individual. Indeed it is no exaggeration to suppose that it must have demanded of the individual a new attention to the environment and a constant schedule of scanning and interruption (Bettman, 1979) while new information was identified and assimilated. It is also likely that the possibility of


information overload, much discussed in recent literature, became increasingly real.

In order to contend with all of this, fundamental changes took place in the manner in which information was encoded. Certainly, individuals will have to have cultivated new "repertoires of cogni- tions" (Kassarjian, 1982, p. 622). In order to process this information elaborate new memory schemata will have been developed, and new skills in information encoding cultivated (Olson, 1978). The processing of all of this information in decision-making also became necessary. Unfortunately, there is no historical work that documents these all important questions. It must be emphasized that this dearth of work is not unavoidable. It is in fact possible to reconstruct cognitive processes from historical evidence for periods as distant as the 15th century as the brilliant work of Baxandall (1972) makes apparent.

On a quite different but no less psychological tack, this perspective on the history of consumption will want to include the growing use of sexuality as a theme in advertising (Williams, 1982) as well as the role of consumer goods in what Elias (1978) calls the "civilizing process" that increasingly constrained the individual from the Renaissance onwards.

Political Context

The political context of consumption is a particularly valuable one to a historical perspective. It calls for a rendering of who gets what goods, and when, where, and from whom they do so (Firat, in press). The chief issue here for the history of consumption is the consumer participation rate. In the 16th century, the only real participants were the nobility. By the eighteenth century, McKendrick et al. (1982) tell us, even the lower middle classes had begun to take part (but cf. Ewen, 1976; Sombart, 1967, p. 83). What is needed is a thorough record of when various social groups were "enfranchised" as consumers and just what consumer choices were then accessible to them.

Another compelling issue here is the use of consumption as an instrument of politics. It is clear that Elizabeth I deliberately turned her courtiers into grand consumers and that she did so, first, in order to get them to foot part of the bill for the ceremony with which she ruled the Kingdom and, second, in order to commit them

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to a standard of consumption that would diminish their financial resources. This was a vitaFbut neglected part of her contribution to the Tudor effort to subdue the overmighty subject (McCracken, in press a; Strong, 1973, 1977). Williams (1982) has observed a similar undertaking on the part of Louis XIV whom she calls the "consumer king." She suggests that Louis had in fact "transformed consumption into a method of rule" (p. 28) and turned his nobility into "insatiable consumers" (p. 30). It is worth noting that Elizabeth and Louis were following the lead of 15th century Italians leaders who sought to make "luxury. . . a means of government" (Braudel, 1973, pp. 306-- 307). The notion of hegemony now increasingly current in the efforts of historians to take account of the political success of ruling groups (cf. McCracken, 1982a; Thompson, 1974), awaits a sophisticated account of how the consumption strategies of ruling courts and classes helped to legitimize and substantiate their claims to power.

Intellectual Context

The intellectual context of consumption attends to the explicit intellectual efforts with which a society attempts to come to terms with the social, cultural, and other consequences of the changes taking place in its consumption behavior. A. O. Hirschman (1977) has documented the novel 17th and 18th century conviction that the passions could be harnessed, counter-balanced, and made to serve a collective good by new forms of commerce. He has also observed (1982) the contrary 19th century conviction that these new forms were antithetical to a collective good, an idea thatwas shared and developed by 20th century American social observers (Horowitz, 1985) as well as English ones (Wiener, 1981). Williams (1982) shows how the opposition between Rousseau and Voltaire may be interpreted as a conflict between different views of the social significance of consumption. Voltaire defended aristocratic consumption on the grounds that it served the cause of civilization while Rousseau argued for the moral virtue of material simplicity (p. 45). She also observes the efforts of a later generation of French intellectuals, which in the late 19th century sought to comprehend and give coherence to the vast social changes that were being wrought by their commercial brethren. Appleby (1976, 1978) has noted the efforts required of English intellectuals in the 17th century to comprehend the idea that growth in domestic consumption could


actually serve instead of harm the national economy. That an idea of such currency in the present day should have once been a novel, even peculiar notion, reminds us of how important it is to avoid the error of "tempocentricism" and how easily and invisibly this error

can claim us. Religious doctrine has worked constantly in the West to grapple

with the changes created by the consumer revolution. Sometimes it has been identified as a kind of handmaiden of this development (e.g., Camic, 1983; Marshall, 1980, 1982; Mukerji, 1983; Poggi, 1983), but more often it is seen as an agency devoted to fighting the conflation of commerce and culture (Shi, 1985).

There is no question that the effort to appreciate the social consequences of the industrial and consumer revolutions has been one of the major projects of both the sacred and the profane aspects of the Western intellectual tradition. Clearly, for instance, the social sciences are intellectual enterprises that were set in train largely in an effort to come to terms with the social changes accomplished by these revolutions. The history of consumption is an opportunity to redouble this undertaking and apply the advances of the social sciences to the study of its charter questions.

Marketing Context

The conscious understanding and manipulation of the market place to encourage consumption must be a central piece of the historical efforts to understand its development. Dixon notes the presence of "macromarketing" thought in the medieval period (1980) and the wedding of marketing theory with concepts of national development in the 16th century (t981). Fullerton (1984) suggests that a revolution in marketing took place after 1500 that was driven to more and more sophisticated developments by the growth of capitalism. By the 18th century, marketing had begun to take on modern shape and substance. McKendrick et al. (1982) give us a detailed glimpse of the efforts of the English entrepreneurs, Wedgwood and Boulton. Both of these men manipulated demand in new ways. Wedgwood, for instance, exploited the trickle-down effect by placing his pottery in the hands of high-standing consumers so that it would be emulated by low-standing ones (McKendrick et al., 1982, p. 71). Much has been made of how important the mastery of certain forces of nature was to the industrial revolution. We are only beginning to appreciate

156 Grant McCracken

how mastery of forces of society were the necessary conditions of the consumer revolution. The entrepreneurs of the 18th century also created innovations in window display, store design, distribution, and advertising in the form of trade cards, shop signs, and newspaper advertisements (McKendrick et al., 1982, p. 85). Perhaps the major device by which the 18th century sought to tap existing, latent, and new demand was its cultivation of a new pace of fashion change. While it may be doubted that this period saw the beginning of the fashion system, as McKendrick et al. claim, there is no question that the influence of fashion increased enormously (McCracken, in press a) in this period and that this increase was vital to the consumer revolution.

The chief marketing innovation of the 19th century is the department store which fundamentally changed particularly the context of purchase and the nature of persuasion. Williams notes how much the department store owed to the world expositions that had taken place at the turn of the century (1982, p. 12). Williams also notes that the department store encouraged a new pattern of anticipation in consumption. Individuals were free to spend time in these stores and could do so without committing themselves to purchase. This new freedom was obtained at a cost. Consumers had the liberty of the store but they were no longer permitted to bargain for the goods sold there. Prices were now fixed and beyond negotiation (Williams, 1982, pp. 66--67 but cf. McKendrick et al., 1982, p. 83, and Boorstin, 1973, p. 114). The really important innovation here, Williams suggests, was that individuals were now the subjects of sophisticated persuasive marketing efforts beyond the point of purchase. Marketing was now a full scale, continual, and ubiquitous influence, the individual a full time target. He or she now lived in an embracing environment of commercial messages. This shift in marketing represents a crucial phase in the development of modern consumption. It represents yet another measure of the extent to which consumption had ceased to be a minor activity resident in an insignificant corner of domestic life and become instead a full scale collective and individual preoccupation.

Williams (1982) also skillfully examines a change in the aesthetics of marketing. She suggests that a new "chaotic-exotic" style had emerged, aided in part by the aesthetics of film (p. 71). The style sought apparently to pry consumer goods away from conventional association and ordinary life using a fantastic mixture of ethnic,


geographical, and mythical allusions. Film, as a new and experi- mental medium of communication, was itself almost immediately pressed into commercial service. No medium could create a dream- world quite so vividly. One of the important themes of the new marketing messages was sexuality with unhappy consequences for the Western concept of women (Williams, 1982, but cf. Leach, 1984). The ability to take possession of consumer goods before actually paying for them was one of the things that gave modern consumption its "dream-like" quality (Williams, 1982, p. 93). What this area of research most plainly needs in order to systematize its study of the nature and development of marketing from the 16th century onwards is a systematic record of how marketers defined their worlds. Who did they think the consumer was? In what terms did they construe the decision-making processes of the consumer? How did they conceive of the instruments of persuasion at their disposal?. These are vital questions if we are to understand how marketing took shape within, and contributed to, the consumer revolution.

Marketing is sometime defined as part of a larger process of exchange (Bagozzi, 1975) and there are important developments in the history of consumption from this point of view as well. Mauss (1970, p. 74) suggested that Western societies were the first to create "homo oeconomicus," a new social being who entered into exchange with fellow members of society in order to maximize utility instead of accomplishing certain social goals (cf. Arnould & Wilk, 1984, p. 749). This exaggerates the case somewhat and Belk (1984) and Sherry (1983) have demonstrated how much non-marketplace exchange continues to occur in the present day. Nevertheless it is clear that the proportion of what we might call "social exchange" versus "instrumental market exchange" changes dramatically from the medieval period onwards with the latter increasing dramatically (Gurevich, 1977; MacPherson, 1962). More of the things that an individual possesses come from the market place and fewer of them from social exchange. This transition is an interesting and note- worthy one.

Consumer Context

Buying behavior expanded dramatically in time and space as a result of the consumer revolution. This was once an activity restricted to a

158 Grant McCracken

single day of the week in some delimited part of one's world. By the 18th century, these restrictions were giving way. Shopping expanded in time until it became an activity that could be pursued throughout the working week (Leach, 1984, pp. 333--335). The present (and now controversial) laws against Sunday shopping in some regions of North America are perhaps the last substantial temporal restriction on our buying behavior. Shopping also expanded in space, breaking out of the market place or high street, and moving throughout the cities (Mumford, 1961). The opportunity to consume was growing in time and space.

A transformation was taking place in the legal constraints of the market place. Laws that protected the consumer from misrepre- sentation in weights and measures can be found in Western law from ancient Rome onwards. But coincident with these laws was sumptuary legislation which was designed not to protect the consumer but to control the nature of his or her consumption. Sumptuary legislation narrowed the goods an individual could consume in the areas of clothing, food, and house form (Hollander, 1984). In England this legislation was not created after the sixteenth century (Hooper, 1915) and it has gradually passed from the modern West. Increas- ingly it is to protect, rather than constrain, the consumer that legislation has been passed. By the nineteenth century new institutions had appeared in the form of consumer organizations and these have flourished in the present century (Herrmann, 1980, 1982). This represents the development of a new relationship between the consumer and the market place, and a market change in the purchase environment.

Not only did the "when" and the "where" of consumption change, but also the "what." McKendrick et al. (1982) note that the dictates of fashion put an end to patterns of inheritance and long-term ownership that had once prevailed. An individual in the 18th century was increasingly likely to buy what he or she had once inherited. It was now also necessary to buy repeatedly what had previously required only a single purchase. The move away from the manufacture of one's own goods also necessitated new purchases. All in all, individuals were beginning to give more time to a heightened schedule of purchase activity (Gordon & McArthur, 1985).

As we have seen, the determinants of consumption were also changing as the individual's taste and preferences were less and less


determined by class and family. The information necessary to engage successfully in this activity was multiplying dramatically. Also changing were the cognitive repertoire needed to organize and process this information, and make the fight consumer decisions. Increasingly, purchase activity took place in the controlled environment of the department store where the individual was surrounded by newly sophisticated methods of influence. The motives for purchase had also changed. The individual was now buying products that helped mark new categories of time and space, and fulfill new cultural concepts of the "person," the "body," and the "self."

In short, purchase behavior was undertaken for different reasons, in different circumstances, according to new influences, and in pursuit of new objectives.

CONCLUSION

The study of the history of consumption has much to offer the fields of consumer research and consumer policy. At the most general level, it offers these fields an opportunity to make a key contribution to one of the charter concerns of the social sciences: Why and to what effect the West underwent the great transformation. It is now acknowledged that changes in consumption are just as important as changes in production and that this transformation represents a consumer revolution as well as an industrial revolution. The field of consumer research is long skilled in the study of consumption in the present day and is therefore peculiarly advantaged when it comes to the study of the consumer revolution. The field of consumer research can give depth and acuity to this historical project that no other social science can provide. It is in short especially well situated to make a fundamental contribution to a fundamental issue.

There are more self-interested reasons for this study, however. One of them is the perspective that this study will provide the study of present-day consumer behavior and modern consumer policy. The factors that impinge on this behavior may appear to have a static character but each of them is in fact highly dynamic. Each of them issues from a set of identifiable origins and possesses a particular trajectory that will shape and transform them. To understand this dynamism is to be able to study, explain, and predict them more

16 0 Grant McCracken

readily. It is to know whether a factor is on the ascendancy or near eclipse. It is to know how to evaluate the relative weight of the factor within a larger constellation of factors.

Furthermore, the history of consumption gives us an opportunity for the formulation and refinement of theoretical ideals useful to the study of modern consumption. Every one of the concepts now disputed within the field can be examined in its historical context, and developed and tested there. The history of consumption can be a workshop in which the field does some of its product development and product testing.

The history of consumption promises both these general and particular benefits. It is hoped that this paper will encourage the field of consumer research to incorporate this topic of research into its formal and operational definitions.

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ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

Die Geschichte des Konsums: Ein Literaturiiberblick und Lesefiihrer. Die Geschichte des Konsums wird immer starker zu einem wichtigen Gegenstand der akademischen Forschung. Fiir die Sozialwissenschaften im allgemeinen gilt, dab das neue Feld v611ig neue Einsichten in die "grofSe Tranformation" der westlichen Gesellschaften bietet. Fiir die Verbrauchefforschung insbesondere gilt, dab es neue Perspektiven er6ffnet, neues Datenmaterial erschliel3t und die Bildung neuer theoretischer


Konzepte erm6glicht. Der vorliegende Beitrag will fiber die neuere Literatur fiber die Geschichte des Verbrauchs orientieren und Einstiegshilfen fiir denjenigen geben, der diese Literatur bei der Analyse des heutigen Verbraucherverhaltens und der Verbraucherpolitik benutzen m6chte. Dabei warnt der Beitrag gleich zu Beginn vor einigen naheliegenden Betrachtungsfehlern, vor allem vor einer allzu gegenwartsbe- zogenen Betrachtung, die vergangene Perioden vorranging als die Vorwegnahme oder zumindest die Vorbereitung unserer Gegenwart auffal3t, sowie vor der Gefahr einer Projektion der eigenen Sichtweisen und Einstellungen auf eine andere Zeit, also die Erforschung einer vergangenen Zeit ausschlieBlich mit Denkweisen von heute.

Die weiteren Abschnitte behandeln die verschiedenen Zusammenh/inge, in denen Konsum gesehen werden kann: den kulturellen, den soziologisehen, psycho- logisehen, politischen und intellektuellen Kontext, sowie den Marketing- und den Verbraucherkontext. Diese Uberlegungen k6nnen -- so die Schiul3folgerung des Beitrages -- einen entscheidenden Beitrag zu der Frage beitragen, weshalb sich in den westlichen Gesellschaften so grol3e Ver/inderungen ergeben haben, die sich nicht nur in einer industriellen Revolution, sondern auch in einer Konsumrevolution niedergeschiagen haben.

THE AUTHOR

Grant McCracken is Assistant Professor, Department of Consumer Studies, Univer- sity of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada. He wishes to thank Russell Belk, Victor Roth, Montrose Sommers, Richard Vosburgh, and anonymous referees for their comments on this paper.

the history of consumption: a literature review and consumer guide

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