Well upon your suggestion I did a google on "box of chocolates consumption"
And this gem of information proves how clearly advanced we are.
uk.geocities.com
Conclusion
The issue still remains on how to investigate the social meanings of things and uses without reducing them either to semiotic codes (or social order), or change and flux.
Sociology of Consumption: Social practices - the uses of things
In contrast to meanings of things, understanding consumer culture is a matter of social rather than textual analysis. It is a matter of understanding the ways in which meanings of things are part of the making of social relations and social order. Consumption is part of the cultural reproduction of social relations, a concrete process carried out through social practices in mundane life.
The social order of consumption practices
Mary Douglas provides a Durkheimian concern with moral order and social classification. Douglas argues that the flow of goods through consumption rituals maps out and solidifies complex networks of social relationship. As communicators, goods are primarily ‘markers’ that indicate social relationships and classifications. Through the public meanings attached to goods and their public uses, consumption organises social order by making visible social divisions, categories, ranks and so on. In general, social meaning is shifting and unstable. To take an example, the box of chocolates and flowers on Women’s Day.
The meanings and rituals of consumption mark out the categories and classifications that constitute the social order. Crucially, this approach, unlike semiotics, connects goods intrinsically to social contexts and relations, to practices.
* The meanings of goods are neither socially arbitrary nor derived from an autonomous sign system. Rather, the classification systems that govern the meanings of things reflect the social order itself and are central to its reproduction as a moral order.
* These meanings are used within everyday practices to make and maintain social relationships. They organise and transform practice (consumption rituals). For example, in accepting or refusing a gift, it can reinforce or undermine social relationships.
For Douglas, following Durkheim, consumption as a flow of information integrates people into an intelligible social world. Yet goods can be used for exclusion as well as inclusion; knowledge of categories (as in ‘good taste’) is necessary for inclusion.
There are two problems with this approach.
* There is a tendency to regard meanings as merely reflecting a pre-existing social reality – such a view can be overly deterministic.
* Public consumption meanings are not influenced by social networks, but are increasingly managed by vested commercial interests.
With the decline of traditional social information systems such as religion, politics and the family, advertising fills gaps with its privileged ‘discourse through and about objects’. Unfortunately, this development is not discussed in terms of commercial motives and opportunities for exploiting post-traditional anomie. Rather in terms of usefulness of advertising as a modern system of cultural information.
Status and social difference
Contrary to Douglas’s perspective, consumption goods are usually connected with competitive signs, as status symbols. The meaning of goods arises from their ability to act as markers of social status, symbols or badges indicating membership of, or aspiration to, high status groups. See the works of Veblen and Simmel.
One weakness of this approach is that the function of goods is reduced to a single one: to signify and differentiate status. The only utility of a thing is in furthering status competition; any other practical functions are treated as mere rationalisations or ‘alibis’.
Class and habitus
The significance of Bourdieu’s work stems from his attempts to understand the cultural nature of consumption without either collapsing consumer culture into abstract sign systems (à la Barthes and Baudrillard) or reducing it to a reflection of pre-existent social order (à la Douglas). For Bourdieu, taste (cultural patterns of choice and preference) is seen as a resource which is deployed by groups within the stratification system in order to establish or enhance their location within social order. The key term is distinction, which captures both the sense of meaning of classificatory schemes and the uses of things within hierarchical social relations.
Taste is seen as a cultural arbitrary, a matter of classification grounded in social processes. But, unlike Barthes, it is not social arbitrary: tastes correlate closely with social divisions. Culture becomes the battleground of class struggle and competition.
Bourdieu’s account differs from semiotic accounts. He is less concerned with the internal structure of taste systems and more with the complex economic, social and cultural battles through which the classificatory systems gain or lose social legitimacy, and how this relates to and reproduce class and status structures.
He also differs from Marxist accounts. He is less concerned to correlate taste structures with a pre-given thing called ‘class. Rather he is interested in how culture actively enters into the formation of class itself.
In addition, Bourdieu is concerned to offer an account of the relation between social and cultural structures and social agency. His central concept is habitus. Habitus is a structure of dispositions (schemas of classification, rules, expectations) that predisposes the individual to certain choices and actions. This habitus is learned through family and community experiences of class structure, and through the individuals’ experiences’ of everyday insults and injuries of class.
Bourdieu argues that every object chosen and every ritual can be related to an inner sense of appropriate aspiration and how to act on it. In particular, the working class culture and consumption are determined by the ‘choice of the necessary’. His point is not that they cannot afford the aesthetic because of immediate economic poverty, but rather that the ‘necessary’ is chosen out of a habitus, a structure of cognitions, formed by long and collective and transmitted experiences of the economic limitations of their class position.
This is a disappointing conclusion, one that argues that somehow the working class (or women or other disadvantaged groups) are untainted by ideology because they are compelled by real necessity, by a functional relation to things, or because they know things through direct labour. It is suggested that lower orders and women are morally and cognitively purer than the ‘cultured’ classes.
Conclusion
The issue still remains on how to investigate the social meanings of things and uses without reducing them either to semiotic codes (or social order), or change and flux. |
