I have been writing about consumer culture theoretics for 8 years.  Over this period, I’ve thought a lot about the shifts in discursive conventions among those writing at the intersection of culture and consumption in business schools.  I’ve noted the shift from a heroic anti-managerial, romantic embrace of consumers questing for the authentic self to a more culturally sophisticated investigation of the social and cultural construction of consumption and consumer as ongoing achievements as a social category for instance. A more recent rhizomatic turn, a term applied in the domain of consumption studies by my colleague Craig Thompson, has been for ideas developed in consumer culture theoretic circles to be appropriated by consumer researchers in the psychological tradition, sadly often without attribution.  Identity, status consumption, and brand community are examples.  Recently I’ve noticed that a professor at the Stern School at NYU wants to tell us about brands and religiosity on the basis, of course, of some laboratory experiments with undergraduates.  I hope that this professor takes full advantage of the pioneering work in consumer culture by Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry who wrote about the sacred and profane aspects of consumer to consumer markets and related consumption practices way back in 1989.  And surely Schau and Muniz’s fascinating account of religiosity in the Apple brand community published more recently in the Journal of Consumer Research will not have escaped his attention.  At a more foundational level, I think it is a pity that more people have not built on Daniel Miller’s discussion of sacrifice in his masterful A Theory of Shopping, about which more below.  Then even more neglected by consumer culture theoreticians is Marshall Sahlins, amazing tour de force in Current Anthropology from 1999 in which he unpacks the Biblical and later religious roots of the prevailing master mythos that undergirds the microeconomic theory of needs, and the chartering marketing myth of need satisfaction.  This provides a fuller unpacking of the cultural basis of the western economy begun by Colin Campell in the The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.

On Miller,  in a recent paper co-authored with Risto Moisio, a former doctoral student, and James Gentry, a colleague, it occurred to me how Do It Yourself activities as undertaken by low cultural capital men in the American heartland paralleled, the mundane shopping described by Daniel Miller in the book mentioned above.  In an earlier version of the manuscript than the one slated for publication, I wrote,

The provider ideal as a constituent of family handyman masculinity among LCC (low cultural capital) men replaces the experiential emphasis salient among HCC (high cultural capital) men with an instrumental one. Congruent with prior research that suggests that dependent or subjugated men seek to redefine their work around the household in economic terms (Roy 2004), LCC informants tend to highlight the economic benefits of DIY home improvement over autotelic, experiential ones. In a way, our LCC informants stories echo Miller’s (1998) analysis of the frugality, sacrifice, and parental love organizing and motivating LCC women’s work of mundane shopping. For male LCC informants the sacrifice occurs through commitment of extra labor, in addition to that already committed to their day jobs,  to DIY home improvement. DIY as a form of provisioning is a meaningful endeavor. Through it LCC informants meet what they perceive as a societal expectation to provide for their families. Thus, while resentful on occasion, DIY home improvement caters to identity work. It allows LCC informants to realize that they indeed are productive and useful members of their families.  The sacrifice of their DIY labor is realized, not in the family meal, as in women’s mundane shopping, but in the deck, bathroom, closet or other tangible outcome that becomes an object of joint consumption.