Consuming Behaviour

© John Desmond

First published, January, 2026

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design © John Desmond (with thanks to Alan Gillies)

Chapter Two: Consuming Space and Time

Introduction

This chapter revisits themes from chapter one to consider relations between space, time and consumption. The place of traditional community is described, where time is circular and reversible. This is contrasted with the rational ordering of modern spaces where time has the quality of an arrow that is projected from the past, through the present and towards the future. Modernization theory is discussed in this context in relation to the belief in progress, through the spread of forms of rationality in science, politics and economics. Proponents point to improvements in human health and longevity, arguing that the modernization process creates longer chains of interdependency, leading to more pacific relations between states where the fruits of development include security of employment, resulting in smaller families and greater prosperity and ultimately, greater happiness. Time is envisaged as an arrow projected into the future, towards an endpoint where all societies are equal.

The discussion of modernization theory forms the background to two very different critiques of capitalism, each of which likens it to a machine. The first critique on the rationalization of space is based on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber (1905). This explains how the modern market system employs bureaucratic organization to rationalize the uniqueness of traditional places into a series of modern spatial grids. Weber’s argument relating to bureaucracy is outlined and elaborated by referring to the contribution made by George Ritzer. Against the modernist idea that technology acts as a tool to serve humankind, the argument based on the rationalization of consumption is that technology is at best, problematic and at worst, dangerous, running ahead of human ability to contain it. The rationalization of space is illustrated in relation to several spaces, including the spaces of government, the city and the body. The perspective is summed up in the view that the world is being increasingly ‘McDonaldized’ or ‘Coca-Colonized’; summed up in the slogan, “Coke is it!’ Discussion then turns to Michel Foucault, whose perspective on rationality is quite different from Weber, despite their focus on similar issues.

The second critique of modernization theory is based on Karl Marx, for whom capitalism is a monstrous machine that pulverizes place, and compresses space through time, in its quest to devour the world. The critique from fetishism, which is our first topic for discussion focuses more on how the market operates to highlight the lure of commodities to consumers while hiding the exploitation of workers and natural resources that occurs in their production. The second argument focuses on David Harvey’s discussion of the transformative and massively disruptive power of capitalism, through the ‘annihilation of space through time’, which conceives capitalism as a dynamic process that must constantly grow by destroying spatial distance and by opening new spaces.

This chapter concludes by suggesting that modernization theory and its critiques have perhaps been anthropocentric, by focusing on a notion of human wellbeing that is too narrow and excludes consideration of the natural environment that makes human life possible. This is slowly being corrected through recently developed concepts such as the Anthropocene, which emphasizes the lasting and massive effect of humans on our planet. However, we first turn to discuss the differences between the places of traditional communities and the modern conception of space.

The Place of Community versus the Space of Society

Several authors discuss questions related to space and time in relation to the erosion of the place of community and the emergence of more abstract notions of time and space. It should be mentioned first that the theorists discussed in this section, such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Pasi Falk were influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Karl Marx and Max Weber, whose ideas are discussed later in this chapter. It is thus worthwhile re-reading this earlier section once you have finished the entire chapter, to see if you can spot the respective influences.

Place and Time in Traditional Community

Traditional communities are by necessity close to nature as their senses of place and of time were intimately influenced by the rhythms of the seasons. The perception of time is cyclical, being governed by the repetitive, rhythmic demands of the seasons. The ancient Celts of Ireland ordered time according to four great festivals; Imbolc heralded the end of winter; Beltane marked the movement of cattle from winter to summer pastures; Lunasa was held in hope of a good harvest and Samhain celebrated the dead and marked the onset of winter. The important stories retold within traditional cultures do not refer to historical time, but rather to a mythical past concerning the discovery of the place and the naming of its features and landmarks by the community. By retelling these stories, the past is continuously joined to the present, such that the community and the place became one and the same thing. Tradition is extremely important in these places, emphasizing the continuity of the same place through time. On the other hand progress, or the idea of changing places through time, is thought foreign and threatening.

Anthony Giddens (1991) describes as “reversible time”, the cyclical and repetitive nature of time as characteristic of traditional community. Before the invention of clocks time was measured in a rough and ready way according to the duration of a task. For instance one might agree to meet another person “in the milking of a cow” or “the mowing of a field”. Giddens describes the close relation of traditional communities to the place they inhabit as “embeddedness”. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 163) also believed that social orderings of space and time are important because they provide a framework for experience, organizing not only how a group perceives the world but the group itself, which orders itself according to these representations (1977: 163). This is a means to grasp his concept of the habitus, which was introduced in chapter one and is discussed further below. Bourdieu based his observations on his study of the Algerian Kabyle. One map he drew of the Kabyle calendar is shown in Figure 2.1. The overall effect is symmetrical. For the Kabyle daily life was ordered according to the rhythms imposed by the seasons. Life was separated into male and female zones within which activities were ordered.

￼

Figure 2.1: The Annual Calendar of the Kabyle¹.

In the Kabyle system, given that the house, where the females work is cool in summer and that men work outside in the heat, so maleness is associated with ‘heat’ and the female with ‘cold’. The activities for cooler months comprising autumn, winter and spring, are thus classed as female, divided into times for ploughing, sowing, germination and growth. Spring, summer and autumn were in turn associated with the characteristics of growth, ripening, harvest and stubble which the Kabyle associate with the male part of the cycle.

Bourdieu’s study of the Kabyle illustrates how their place is intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life, by organizing a division of labour between the sexes, ages and occupations. Pasi Falk (2006) argues that such traditional communities act to form a protective second skin around the individual self, which spills beyond the contours of the body and into the community that contains it. The bodies of its members are open, as the community itself forms a buffer between what is regarded as ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’. The inside of community is bound together through communion, the sacred exchange of food; the exchange of gifts and the reciprocal obligation to respond to the gift. One should not be overly romantic about the place of community, where there is little or no concept of privacy, which can impart feelings of claustrophobia and loss of identity in the modern mind.

From Traditional Place to Modern Space

Although there are some continuities, modern experiences and perceptions of space and time are considerably different to those described above. Our daily routines bear some resemblance to the reversible time described by Giddens (1991). The clock also measures circular time at intervals of twenty-four hours. However, such resemblances are superficial. Galileo Galilei’s observation, that the operations of a pendulum form the basis for the measurement of equal intervals of time, paved the way for the invention of the mechanical clock. The clock is conducive to the calculation involved in market pricing. Giddens observes that before the invention of the clock time was fitted to the task (“I will meet you in the milking of a cow”), whilst afterwards the task was fitted to the time (“How many cows can be milked in an hour?”).

The invention of writing was equally if not more important to the perception of time than that of the clock. If clocks enable the precise measurement of time, then writing enables the recording of events through time. The development of writing opened the possibility to record historical time, enabling the idea that time moves like an arrow, from somewhere to someplace else. The ability to note down, retain and communicate records of available resources greatly facilitated the centralization of power. The development of writing provided the power to stretch across time and space, by keeping records of the past. This greatly increased the capacities to exercise violence and for trade, because the more that limitations of time and space are transcended, the more military power can be created. Written documents enabled the assemblage and coordination of large armies that could fight for months on end. These professional armies had to be fed and their soldiers paid.

Where place is specific, space is abstract, referring to an area, a distance between two points or to a temporal expanse (‘in the space of a week’). The rational perception of space requires perspective, or the ability to adopt different points of view. Perspective in art was developed during the Renaissance, among others, by Giotto and Michelangelo. These artists influenced Mercator, the sixteenth century genius renowned for developing the Mercator Projection which converted the curvature of the globe into two-dimensional maps, enabling mariners to accurately plot a course to distant countries. This development was highly Eurocentric, not only because it facilitated the European conquest of the Americas and Asia through war and trade, but also by placing European countries such as Britain and France at the centre of the world map; a practice largely continued to this day.

Giddens (1991) contrasts the embeddedness of space and time in traditional communities with the disembeddedness characteristic of the modern era. He explains that during the shift from feudalism to capitalism and continuing into the present, the embedded places of traditional community were progressively ‘emptied out’, or disembedded by the rational ordering of space. According to some authors this process began as early as the sixteenth century. For example, McCracken (1990) notes that during the Elizabethan period (of the first ‘consumer boom’) English households were substantially rebuilt to provide private spaces, such as bedrooms, a new idea that expanded dramatically during the eighteenth century. Additionally, the new focus on purchase-for-self rather than purchase-for-family during the Elizabethan era opened a gap between the noble and the community which had previously formed his ‘second skin’. The consumer boom of the eighteenth century and those since then opened the space of individuality, or “I” identity for progressively more people. This enabled a growing focus on the organization of the internal space, the mind of the consumer, which was presumed to be organized according to rational principles.

According to Giddens the 24th of May 1844 is a momentous date in history, as the date when Samuel Morse sent a coded message from the Supreme Court chamber in the US Capital building in Washington DC to his partner in Baltimore. This first electronic communication between two cities separated by space and time was the first occasion in human history when one could send a message between two places without physically travelling from one place to the other. The invention of the telephone followed soon after. The ability to coordinate massive resources across space and time allowed for mass industrialization and for the conduct of warfare on a scale unprecedented in human history. Subsequent developments in communications represent an intensification of these earlier innovations, facilitated by the colonisation of near-space during the Cold War, the development of microchip technologies, and Arpanet, by the US Department for Defense.

Where traditional communities provide a stable place for the individual to dwell in, modern abstract spaces such as city-centres, transport systems, airspace, advertising space and to an extent, cyberspace are not places for living in, but are rather composed as spaces for travelling through (Augé, 1995).

Modern Consumption: Apocalittici e integrati

This section owes its title to Umberto Eco (1994), who distinguishes between integrati who celebrate the market as the space where consumers have freedom and choice to fashion their individual identity, and apocalittici, who argue to the contrary, that the market is based on exploitation and inequality which it masks, and which rationalizes and homogenizes human being. Modernization theorists represent the former tendency by arguing that economic development has fostered conditions for the realization of individual autonomy and self-expression (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005: 46). This is reflected too in Campbell’s (1987) discussion of the romance of consumption, which portrays the consumer as a modern day Kubla Khan sampling the delights of the pleasure dome, although he observes that the reality never quite lives up to the fantasy. Consumer researchers Elizabeth Hirschman and Morris Holbrook (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982; Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982) focus on the positive aspect of the fun and pleasure derived from the consumer experience. Much research framed by the perspective of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) (Arnould & Thompson, 2005), is celebratory of market culture, envisaging the brandscape as a palette from which the consumer selectively selects to fashion a distinctive identity.

Social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens and Richard Sennet made downbeat assessments of the effects of the neoliberal market. Sennett (1997) worried that the social divisiveness of market- based policies risk the destruction of civil society. Despite its liberatory connotations Giddens’ modern reflexive project of the self is obligatory, demanding that today’s consumer must live out her life as if this is in furtherance of a project of self-realization (Walkerdine & Basel, 2010: 495). Foucault (2008) called attention to the gap between the neoliberal assumption that the consumer is rational and so can be judged to be fully responsible for governing themselves and the reality which is that they often lack the freedom and capacity to make informed choices. Authors also summon our attention to the growing number of individuals who are excluded within modernity. Pierre Bourdieu reputedly commented that anyone with an allegiance to neoliberalism should be set down in one of the ghettoes occupied by the outcasts of North and South American cities (Beck & Beck, 1999: 495).

The Integrati: Modernization and Development

This section continues the introductory discussion of modernization theory in chapter one. It is appropriate to mention here that the charts used as illustrations in this section are inevitably, but that their topicality is not the point. An important aim of this text is to provoke the reader to engage critically with source material, so if you think that a particular chart is out of date, then why not check out the references yourself for more recent information and while you are at it, evaluate how accurate and reliable different sources are.

Development is the modern idea sustained by belief in the potential perfectability of society and for the extension of principles of individual freedom and rational choice in politics and trade to all countries. Early modernization theorists ranked countries according to their stage of development, locating the USA at the top (Rostow, 1960). Within countries they encouraged urbanization as a means to transform the rural economy, described as backward, conservative, static, protectionist and nepotistic, against a modern, progressive, urban economy geared to individual enterprise and achievement. Early modernization theory was highly influential in the USA at the time of the 1960s Kennedy administration when the President proclaimed that world poverty could be ended in a generation and when thousands of young idealists were recruited to the Peace Corps to transmit US values overseas; in retrospect, a time of great, but ultimately deeply misplaced, optimism.

This early version of modernization theory has since been criticized as naïve and ethnocentric, dominated by an American model of development. Modernization theorists today distance themselves from this, stating that the modernization process now being driven forward in Asia, is definitively not a form of Americanization,

The United States is not leading the world in cultural change, it is a deviant case, exhibiting much more traditional religious values than other rich societies. The United States is not the model for the cultural changes that are taking place, and industrializing societies in general are not becoming something like the United States, as a popular version of modernization theory assumed” (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005: 47)

The idea that the United States was once regarded as the epitome of modernization perhaps makes more sense if one regards it as an empire, the hegemon that acted, “to underwrite a liberal international and commercial system” (Ferguson, 2004: 9). As Ferguson points out, the power of the United States after 1945 was greater than that of the British Empire after the banishment of Napoleon in 1815. A pertinent question today, given the rise of China, is how long will it continue in this role?

Aware of the growing challenges, proponents of modernization today are more tentative than their forbears in recognizing that development is a complex process as there is no deterministic straight line between socioeconomic development and post-materialist values. Their arguments are similar to Norbert Elias, suggesting a process of development from small independent communities to large interdependent communities which is neither linear, nor irrevocable. However, modernist ideas of rational progress and perfectability continue to inform the logic of the World Values Survey, developed by Inglehart and Welzel, which features “progressive” Scandinavian countries at the top and “conservative” sub-Saharan Africa at the bottom.² The United Nations approach to human development, is nuanced, recognizing the shortcomings of the market system and emphasizing global inequalities in education, healthcare and access to technology. However, the broad principles are similar; “(h)uman development is about empowering people to identify and pursue their own paths for a meaningful life, one anchored in expanding freedoms”.³

The Human Development Index (HDI) envisioned by Mahbub al Haq, was developed by Amartya Sen, as a more relevant measure of the development of human capability than Gross Domestic Product. Sen argues that economic prosperity and human development are best served by adhering to principles of rationality, democracy and political liberty. Sen’s argument is nuanced, for instance when arguing that true democracy is a demanding system and that democratic self-determination entails much more than majority rule.⁴ Sen also rejects narrow readings of Adam Smith that focus on the rational self-love that is presumed to motivates homo economicus.⁵ As a composite measure of the quality of human life, the HDI sums across a wide range of indicators such as life expectancy at birth, average years of primary, secondary and tertiary education, gender equality, security and access to healthcare and technology. Each year since 1991 the United Nations has produced a report based on the HDI index, and for most of these it has reported modest increases in overall development, with relatively modest falls in some years, even after the financial crisis of 2008/9. Against this pattern of modest but sustained progress, the projected drop in the index for 2020 resulting from COVID-19 was unprecedented, even jaw-dropping.⁶ Given this, if life during and after COVID provides a foretaste of what is to be expected, if nothing is done now to ameliorate the effects of climate change, then “catastrophic” would not be too strong a word to use to describe its likely effects. Some aspects of the enormity of the challenge are highlighted below.

Feeding a Growing Population

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776) famously stated that the best indicator of the prosperity of a country is the increase in the number of its inhabitants. Thomas Malthus (1798) made the opposite argument, contending that in the situation where technology is unchanged and the stock of land is fixed, increases in population will inevitably outstrip the provision of food, resulting in population loss through decreasing fertility, starvation and disease. Happily, Malthus’s predictions have not yet come to pass, largely because of the increased productivity created by scientific and technological developments. The global population at the time Malthus wrote was just short of one billion and at time of writing is eight billion, projected to rise to nine billion by 2050 AD and over eleven billion by 2100 AD (Figure 2.2).⁷

Modern science responded by developing technologies to shape and control the environment through what has come to be known as the ‘green revolution’. In the decades following the Second World War agricultural scientists developed technological￼

Figure 2.2 Trends in World Population Growth

Figure 2.2 Trends in World Population Growth

solutions to the looming crisis, based on the development of high-yielding strains of rice and wheat, irrigation, and the extensive use of pesticides such as DDT. The relentless focus on producing more food, faster and cheaper, led to an overall doubling in world agricultural production in thirty years.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) called in 1996 for a new Green Revolution to meet the challenge presented by continuing increase in the human population.⁸ This posed a considerable challenge, given that the agricultural industry was already highly efficient.

The challenge is truly enormous given arguments that the present industrial system of agriculture cannot form the basis for a solution as it is now part of the problem. For instance, meat consumption has trebled in the past thirty years and now consumes one-third of world cereal production. Compared to the 1960s, humans and their pets consume more than four and a half times as much chicken, two and a half times as much pork and almost twice as much beef, mutton and lamb.⁹ This places immense strain on water resources. Some are surprised that it takes five hundred litres of water to grow one kilogram of potatoes. This is frugal compared to the 3,500 litres of water it takes to prepare one kilogram of poultry, or the equivalent of beef, which requires 15,000 litres.¹⁰. Additionally, cattle, buffalo, sheep, horses, pigs and poultry are estimated to contribute somewhere between eighteen and fifty percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases.¹¹ To make matters worse, much of the land used for new livestock production is on degraded land such as in the Amazon where primary forest has been burned, leading to the release of more greenhouse gases and decreasing capacity to absorb these. In the USA, which makes heavy use of intensive indoor production, cooling systems emit large amounts of fluorocarbons.

Collapsing Fertility

Although as illustrated in Figure 2.2, the population of the world is projected to increase until the end of the century this is projected to be followed by a very steep decline. This is because fertility rates have been declining for over seventy years. For a population to maintain itself requires a Total Fertility Rate (TRF) of 2.2 children per woman, so that on average, each woman should bear this number of children over her lifetime if the population is to reproduce. If the TFR falls below this figure the population will begin to decline. Average fertility across populations which was 5.1 in 1965 fell to 2.2 in 2023. It is probably worth reading that last sentence again to let the consequences sink in.

Figure 2.3 Projected Distribution of World Population

Figure 2.3 Projected Distribution of World Population

Fertility has been falling in ‘developed’ countries for decades, motivated at least partly by the decisions of wealthier individuals to sacrifice quantity for quality through birth control and abortion in a pattern first recognised by Gary Becker (1960). With a fertility rate of 1.5 in the absence of immigration, the population in the UK and USA will half in roughly 72 years, whilst with a rate of 1.0 as is the case in China and Thailand, this will happen in 40 years; and with a rate of 0.8 in South Korea, this will take just 34 years. From this one can surmise that in coming years current demands to hinder immigration will come to an abrupt halt as governments and citizens come to realise that the wellbeing of their ageing populations relies crucially on the taxes paid by imported labour. Indeed, unless the revolution in machine learning leads to the robotisation of the entire economy, one might go further to suggest that governments will compete to attract labour to their shores. In light of this it is perhaps ironic that those countries with the highest TFRs are in sub-Saharan Africa, which is one of the regions most likely to be affected by global heating and thus prone to experience massive waves of emigration in coming years.¹²

The related trend towards ageing in industrial and post-industrial countries is largely a consequence of decreasing fertility and increases in healthcare, which present major threats and opportunities presenting major implications for the discussion of explosive questions such as immigration (Figure 2.4).. The first of seventy-eight million American baby-boomers began to collect Medicare benefits in 2007. By the time all of the baby boomers have retired, the proportion of elderly will have doubled, whilst the population of￼

Figure 2.4 Proportion of Population aged 60+

Figure 2.4 Proportion of Population aged 60+

taxpayers to pay their benefits will have increased by just 15%.¹³ Gokhale (2014) argued prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that the United States government had the stark choice to either double taxes, or reduce expenditure to zero; it did neither. At the time it was also estimated that taxes in the EU where they were already high would have to rise on average by 13.5% to cope with the same problem; and once gain, nothing was done. Overall,

The underlying problem is that successive governments have made promises which can simply not be honoured’ from the existing tax base. The electorate is grazing a fiscal commons at the expense of future generations (Gokhale, 2014: xi).

Gokhale makes no mention of whether it would make any difference if multinational corporations were to pay their fair share of tax rather than channelling their profits through fictitious front companies in tax havens. Data are not available for China, where until relatively recently the State actively sought to control population by means of the ‘one-child’ policy. In other countries infants, usually females have either been aborted or killed in infancy. Despite this the world’s population is expected to continue to rise sharply, largely because of continuing increases in Africa.

Urbanization

The trend towards urbanization is illustrated in Figure 2.5. Today more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Tokyo, with a population of thirty-seven million is the largest mega-city, but what is perhaps most arresting is the dramatic increase in the size of other mega-cities. For instance, Lagos and Dhaka, which had populations of just one point four million in 1970, are predicted to rise to nineteen million and twenty-three million respectively, by 2025.

Figure 2.5 Proportion of urban to total population

Figure 2.5 Proportion of urban to total population

From Globalization to Protectionism

The basis for governance on a global scale was established largely under US patronage as the Second World War drew to a close, with the formation of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Some of the key developments since then are summarized in Table 2.1, which shows a general movement towards the formation of greater interdependencies among countries with the formation of new trade blocs and the liberalization of trade. However this began to falter in the wake of the financial crash of 2008, the Brexit vote to leave the European Union, the collapse of the TTIP talks in 2016, the parlous state of the Euro and the protectionist policies followed by populist leaders in Europe and America. One wonders if these are temporary blips on the upward path of progress, or rather, if they instead signal a turning point in what was recently perceived to be an inexorable process

of globalization?

Table 2.1: Globalization of Trade
July 1944 | Bretton-Woods agreement. Dollar is pinned to gold at $35 per ounce.
November, 1945 | United Nations (UN) formed.
November 1945 | International Monetary Fund (IMF) formed.
December, 1945 | World Bank formed.
1948-1984 | Tenure of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
March 1957 | European Economic Community (EEC) formed.
August 1971 | US President Nixon ends Gold Standard. US dollar becomes a fiat currency.
January 1973 | EEC enlarged- the UK, Denmark and Ireland join.
1974-Jan 2005 | Tenure of Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) to allow developed countries to adjust to imports from developing countries.
December 1991 | European Union (EU) formed.
January 1995 | Formation of World Trade Organisation (WTO)
January 1995 | EU enlargement – Austria, Finland and Sweden join.
December 2001 | China apples to join the WTO in November 1995 and is admitted in December 2001: GDP grows from $1 trillion to $4.3 trillion and trade from $5 trillion to $16 trillion, from 2000-2010.
February 2002 | Eurozone formed.
2005 | Central American Dominican Republic Trade Agreement (CAFTA)
May, 2004 | EU enlargement- Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia.
January 1994 | North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA)
1995 | Formation of World Trade Organization
January 2007 | EU Enlargement- Bulgaria and Romania join
March 2008 | Financial crash
2009-2016 | Greek government debt crisis
2011-2021 | USA objections to Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization greatly weakens WTO enforcement of rules.
July 2013 | EU enlargement – Croatia joins
February 2014 | Negotiations begin for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
June 2016-January 2020 | Brexit: UK votes to leave the EU- UK leaves EU
August 2016 | Collapse of TTIP talks
April 2019 | Mandates for TTIP judged irrelevant
2023/2024 | USA fails to pay WTO membership fee and blocks appointments of judges
February 2025 | Trump announces wide-ranging tariffs on allies
January 2026 | Trump regime states its intention to colonise Greenland

A neoliberal agenda came to dominate thinking on development from the 1980s onwards. Neoliberals enthusiastically promoted the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, which provided a more robust institutional framework than GATT which in their view; between them, “have probably done more to better people’s lives than any other government institutions” (LeGrain, 2002). From this perspective business growth and free markets are the engines that provide wealth and prosperity.

Such arguments circulated widely in Eastern Europe in the run up to the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. Ladislav Holy (1992) described how in Czechoslovakia at that time, the market was presented as a symbol of civilization and modernity based on the return of rationality. A neo-Darwinian argument was deployed where market rationality was portrayed as natural, operating on the basis of natural selection, in contrast to the centralized economy which was portrayed as artificial and ideological. Holy (ibid.) notes that the populace of the cities were frustrated by the arrogant and self-serving behaviour of petty officials, waiters and shop-assistants (Holy, 1992: 236). In this context it came to be widely believed that the imposition of market discipline,‘would automatically deliver smiling shop-assistants, waiters ready to serve us, correct measures of beer and anything else we may only wish for’.¹⁴ Out of curiosity I conducted a cursory search of the Internet on this topic and found that twenty-five or so years later, perceptions of the rudeness of waiters and officials in what is now the Czech Republic had not improved!¹⁵

Arguments supporting the neoliberal agenda were also made by Western politicians and officials of the World Bank, which in a 1989 publication stated its aim to,

release the energies of ordinary people by enabling them to take charge of their lives. Profits would be seen as the mark of an efficient business…the state would no longer be an entrepreneur but a promoter of private producers. The informal sector would be valued as a seedbed of entrepreneurs not a hotbed of racketeers (Stirrat, 1992: 205).

It has been argued that in ‘primitive’ societies individual creativity is constrained by tradition, custom and hierarchical control, from which it can be released by the forces of modernity. The Bank argued that this could be achieved by reducing the size of government and by shifting its role to create an, ‘enabling environment’. It also argued that public goods such as education, water supply and primary health care should be privatised, “for this makes people act responsibly and empowers them as consumers” (ibid.: 206).

Figure 2.6 Snapshots of Global Trade 2005: 2014: 2022

Figure 2.6 Snapshots of Global Trade 2005: 2014: 2022

As is illustrated in Figure 2.6, until the epidemic of Covid-19, the implementation of neoliberal policies had contributed to a huge increase in world trade in goods and services.¹⁶ Air travel increased more than tenfold¹⁷ and shipping, which accounts for more than ninety percent of global trade, also increased steadily, with noticeable dips in the years following the financial crash of 2008 and during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, when it fell by over 4%.¹⁸Ownership of motor vehicles continued to increase rapidly. Already well established in the USA by 1960, automobile ownership surged in Europe in the 1970s and has since been outstripped by that in Brazil and China where it increased from twenty million in 1980 to 280 million.¹⁹

Despite the above even before the election of Trump-45, the general prospects for continued growth in world trade had beendiminished as a consequence of the migration of manufacturing jobs in textiles and steel from the US and Europe to Asia, and the concomitant rise of calls by right wing populists for protectionism; of escalating conflict in Africa, the Middle-East and Ukraine; and of growing tensions between China and the USA. Since the election of Trump-47, it has become clear that so-called international ‘rules-based’ order that had been underpinned by the hegemony of the USA was at an end, pointing to a future dominated by competing trade blocs.

Human Development

The most important question from the perspective of modernization theory is whether the increase in has trade brought about a related increase in wellbeing? The United Nations Human Development Index provides insight into the general level of human wellbeing. The legacy of early modernization theory is evident in Figure 2.7, where world regions are ranked progressively according to their aggregated score on key indicators. In global terms the overall trend is upwards, although this has distinctly flattened since the Great Financial Crash of 2008 and there remain huge differences between regions.

Figure 2.7 The Path to Human Development

Figure 2.7 The Path to Human Development

The eight Millennium Development Goals devised by the United Nations sought amongst other aims to eradicate world poverty by 2015.²⁰ Whilst poverty was not eliminated by that time, between 1990 and 2015 it was estimated that two billion people had been

removed from the category of low human development and one billion from crushing poverty. This impressive figure was tempered by the news that around 830 million workers in developing regions continued to live on less than $2 a day and that half of workers and their families in developing countries continued to survive on less than $4 a day.

A striking feature has been the creation of a large middle-class in China, at a time of relative impoverishment for the middle-classes in the USA and Europe (defined as those who are fifty percent above and below median income). Middle-class wealth fell with the drop in values of their houses, whilst the value of stocks that they did not own rose. Additionally, although productivity in developed countries rose consistently from the 1980s, this was not met by corresponding increases in real wages, which stagnated. Poverty rates remained high in the USA, averaging 14% but rising to 18% for children and 30% for blacks.²¹

Figure 2.8 Distribution of Wealth

Figure 2.8 Distribution of Wealth

As it can be easy to drown the stark facts in a welter of eye-watering statistics, Figure 2.8 offers a snapshot of disparities in wealth. The latest in a series of reports from OXFAM states that this is the decade of billionaires and even of trillionaires - with one trillion equalling one million, million, or $1,000,000,000,000.²² By comparison with the vast majority of citizens and consumer billionaires did well out of the Great Financial Crash of 2008 (Wolf, 2012). An OXFAM report found that in 2016, just 62 individuals (down from 388 in 2010) owned the same amount of wealth as the bottom fifty percent of the world population and that by 2020, just eight billionaires accounted for the same proportion. Given that the world population is currently 7,900,000, this means that they each own assets equivalent to roughly one billion of their fellow humans.

It is because big corporations, Wall Street and some enormously wealthy individuals have gained political power to organize the market in ways that have enhanced their wealth while leaving most Americans behind. That includes trade agreements protecting the intellectual property of large corporations and Wall Street’s financial assets but not American jobs and wages. Bailouts of big Wall Street banks and their executives and shareholders when they cannot pay what they owe, but not of homeowners who cannot meet their mortgage payments. Bankruptcy protection for big corporations, allowing them to shed their debts, including labour contracts. But no bankruptcy protection for college graduates overburdened with student debts.²³

The above quote is not from some Marxist renegade but from Robert Reich, former United States Secretary of Labour, who also said; “We seem to be heading at full speed to the late nineteenth century (United Nations, 2015: 67).

The Case of South Africa

One can sometimes get a better picture of the global situation by focusing on a specific case. Two books were published in 2004, each author taking a diametrically opposed view of developments in the South Africa following apartheid. Paul Kingsnorth (2004) took the position of an apocalittico, to argue that the country embrace of neoliberal policies signaled the road to ruination; Philippe LeGrain (2004) argued from the perspective of the integrato, that the implementation of neoliberal policies would usher in a new era of prosperity. The case below provides a brief summary of the situation in South Africa today.

When the ANC rose to power in South Africa in 1994, some welcomed the government’s embrace of neoliberal policies, whilst others were worried that this would simply help the rich. How has South Africa developed since then? At that time the country was yet to experience the worst rigours of the AIDS crisis, which today maintains its grip on nineteen percent of the population. As a country rich in resources, South Africa suffers from the “resource curse”, resulting in malnutrition of women and children, increased domestic violence, decreased literacy and life expectancy that is on average is four and a half years shorter than in comparable countries (Beegle et al., 2016: 14; 91). According to the United Nations, life expectancy that in 1992 was 62 years of age, had fallen to 57, by 2014.

While the percentage of the population living below the poverty line fell from 68% to 50% between 2005 and 2010, The 2008/9 financial crisis had a dramatic effect on the very poorest in South Africa, where the number of people living below the food line with insufficient resources to eat, rose to 15.8 million in 2009 from 12.6 million in 2006, dropping to 10.2 million in 2011.²⁴ Almost a quarter of South Africans continued to live in extreme poverty, unable to satisfy their basic nutritional needs and nearly 40% had to sacrifice food to pay for things like transport and airtime. Over half of the population (53.8%) who could afford enough food and non-food items fell under the widest definition of poverty in South Africa, surviving on under R779 per month. However a World Bank study (Beegle et al., 2016) found that over three and a half million people had been lifted out of poverty, effectively halving the number living on less than $1.25 a day.

The period following the Great Financial Crash (GFC) of 2008 witnessed a massive expansion in credit, so that by 2015, average monthly debt repayments amounted to 49% of personal income.²⁵ According to the National Credit Register, twenty-four million South Africans lived in debt, of which just over ten million found it difficult to meet repayments for debts on housing, cars, furniture and food. This lifestyle of ‘live now pay later’ meant that only six percent of South Africans could maintain their lifestyle after retirement. Since 2015 the economy has stagnated, with growth of 0.2% in 2019, contracting sharply by around 7% in 2020 due to the response to Covid-19.²⁶ The World Bank estimated that this added two million to those living in extreme poverty, with 63% of youth unemployed.

From the above, one might conclude that South Africa has performed poorly in overall terms of human development. However the United Nations placed South Africa in the high human development category in 2019, with its overall HDI value rising from 0.627 to 0.709. To find out the reasons why, you may wish to consult the report online.

The Apocalittici: Critiquing Modernization

This section briefly introduces arguments stemming from the work of Max Weber and Karl Marx respectively.

Max Weber

In contrast to the last section focused on the here and now, the aim in here is to trace the antecedents of the modern rationalization of space and time, by returning to the time of the birth of capitalism in Europe. Rationality features strongly in consumer behaviour texts where the consumer is presented as formulating goals, evaluating relevant information relating to competing offerings, then forming preferences prior to selecting an optimal assortment of goods. However, this is just one form of rationality. Max Weber and Michel Foucault, who are respectively discussed here, understand rationality in quite different ways. Weber formalizes rationality by presenting four abstract ideals, of which that presented in consumer textbooks approximates to one. His argument that formal, or instrumental rationality is best suited to capitalist market pricing, was introduced in chapter one and is further developed below. In contrast, Foucault does not attempt a formal definition of rationality, arguing instead that forms of rationality are used contexts where they are closely related to knowledge and to power. The argument associated with Weber is discussed first.

Formal Rationality

Max Weber is introduced in chapter one through discussion of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1905). This held that the Puritans provided the social character necessary for the growth of capitalism, being driven by a rational process conducive to market pricing. Because the Puritans believed that time is money and furthermore that money is a sign of Divine blessing, wasting time was perceived as literally sinful. The Puritans were constantly driven to focus on the means used to achieve desired ends, by the rational quest to achieve their ends faster, more cheaply and overall, more efficiently than before. Puritanism was indispensable to the growth of capitalism by providing its guiding ethos. To Weber, this explains difference in culture explains why capitalism grew so rapidly in Protestant Europe and in North America, but was held back in Catholic Europe and in India and China.

Weber’s argument is supplemented in chapter one with Colin Campbell’s (1987) critique, which argues that Weber’s analysis of Puritan life is partial and incomplete, by overplaying the role played by duty, while paying insufficient attention to the role of fantasy in consumption. This section supplements the account of Weber provided in chapter one and serves as a vehicle to introduce the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman and George Ritzer.

Weber distinguishes four kinds of rationality, of which the formal rationality of the marketplace is one. Practical rationality, refers to the judgments we make daily to deal with immediate practical issues; theoretical rationality, involves the mastery of reality through the abstract concepts devised by philosophers and scientists rather than through direct action; substantive rationality, refers to the ordering of action by shared values such as those held by religious communities such as the Puritans; finally, formal rationality, is similar to practical rationality, but is deliberative and proactive, relying on an impersonal organization of rules and regulations that seeks the optimum means to achieve preordained ends. Formal rationality is instrumental, in that it involves the calculation of the most precise and efficient means to attain a goal, using a set of universal, abstract rules. Science involves two forms of rationality. Hypotheses are instances of theoretical rationality, whilst experimental design is informed by formal rationality, consisting of the application of a clear and consistent set of rules.

Puritans were religiously inspired by a substantive rationality to believe that industriousness, self-discipline and the accumulation of wealth (so long as one did not enjoy it), are outward signs of Divine favour. Weber argues that at the time of the rise of capitalism only Puritans possessed the formal rule-based rationality necessary to become a successful merchant in the market society. It should be emphasized that he is not referring to the high bourgeois class of court administrators discussed by Elias, but to the petit-bourgeoisie, or small merchant class. The sober industrious Puritans were more successful than were the merchant adventurer capitalists who existed at the same time (Kalberg, 1980: 1163). Success in business is not simply about risk but requires, not only the ability to take the perspective of others, but also the possession of a formal organized and rule-based rationality. This involves the ability to distinguish means from ends and to formally specify these; to be able to calculate and specify likely benefits and costs of following one means as opposed to another, in advance; finally, the ability to implement a preferred strategy to attainment one’s ends because of that evaluation.

Weber points out that, from the perspective of one form of rationality, another is irrational. The Puritans understood the world based on a religiously inspired substantive rationality. From the perspective of hedonism, another substantive rationality which holds that the pursuit of pleasure is the most important thing in life, the Calvinist Puritan ideal, that one should accumulate wealth but not enjoy it, appears nonsensical. The central idea of Puritanism was active self-control involved in the reining-in of the emotions: “The most urgent task was the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment, the most important means was to bring order into the conduct of its adherents.’(Weber, 1930: 119]). Pursuits that did not lead directly to these ends, such as music or dancing were to be avoided as distractions, whilst alcohol was to be avoided at all costs.

The life of the Puritan believer was subjected to constant calculation. If believers were to prove that they were in fact ‘elected’ to eternal glory, they faced a maze of (self- imposed) sanctions and prohibitions. Anything that did not add to the greater glory of God was to be avoided, including ‘idle’ talk, over-sleeping, sexual activity not directly associated with procreation, inactive contemplation and the pursuit of sports other than those which provided the recreation necessary for physical efficiency. The glory was magnified only by a life of hard, continuous bodily or mental labour. The acquisition of wealth was regarded as a potential danger only insofar as it might encourage relaxation and idleness. Employed industriously and wisely, wealth could be counted as an instance of God’s blessing. Weber concludes his story of the Protestant ethic by reflecting ironically, that the widespread dissemination of Puritan values and their articulation with capitalist enterprise led to the demise of the religious component. He illustrates this through his discussion of a Puritan thinker,

In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint” like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that cloak should be like an iron cage, or the shell on a snail’s back.²⁷

For the original Puritans, material goods held no intrinsic merit. They were of interest only insofar as they served to signify that their owner had gained God’s blessing as one of the Elect predestined to heavenly bliss. For the Puritan, the idea that one should live one’s life as a project consisting of a successful career marked by the accumulation of wealth was not an end in itself, but rather constituted the means to a greater end. The travails of this life could thus be worn ‘like a light cloak’ as means to the noble and just end of magnifying the glory of God. Puritans warned that over- attachment to the material things of this world was dangerous to one’s prospects for salvation, because wealth and goods, which should be properly taken as means to an end (of the glory of God), should not become ends in themselves. To enjoy material goods for their own sake, which today is called terminal materialism (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981), was regarded by the Puritans as blasphemous, constituting a form of idolatry, by falsely placing means in the position of ends. Yet, Weber argues, this is eventually what happens; goods become valued as ends in themselves. In modern consumer society, where the religious ethos has largely disappeared, the concern with acquiring wealth and goods is central to human aspirations. Some interpret the phrase “shell on a snail’s back” as “iron cage”. It makes a lot of difference to how one interprets instrumental rationality: as something which comes from outside and is imposed upon us (as an iron cage), or as something which forms an inseparable part of our being and identity, which we carry around with us, like the shell on a snail’s back (Sayer, 1991 in Smart, 1999).

Bureaucracy

To clarify the above, Weber is not suggesting that formal rationality is the only form used by capitalists - some may pride themselves in their tacit practical “street smart” rationality; others may believe that success in business can be achieved by adhering to a substantive value orientation of industriousness and dependability – but he does argue that this is overall the most methodical and efficient form. Bureaucracy, which first developed in a religious context, is the organizational form most compatible with formal rationality. Bureaucratic control is fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge and is technically the most rational type of organization as it fits the capitalist’s need for stable, strict, intensive and calculable administration,

From a purely technical point of view, it is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control, in precision, stability, discipline and reliability. It makes possible a high degree of calculability of results for organization’s heads; superior in intensive efficiency and scope of organization, of application to all administrative tasks (Weber, 1947: 337).

The large corporations of his time represented for Weber a type of bureaucracy rivaled only by the state, promoting rational efficiency, continuity of operation, speed, precision and calculation of results. For him the bureaucratic rationality of these enterprises resembled the smooth, impartial, inexorable workings of a great impersonal machine, with all the benefits and disadvantages of the machine process. While standardization, constancy of quality, predictability and control are advantages which lubricate the cogs of the capitalist enterprise by generating ‘satisfied’ consumers, this occurs at the expense of the disenchantment of the world, as all that is particularly human is expunged from its operation.

Kalberg points out that the Puritan legacy turned out to be a mixed blessing for humankind, on the one hand, by contributing to the formation of welfare state bureaucracies to achieve a ‘peak of civilisation’, and on the other hand enslaving individuals within impersonal "iron cages" saturated by formal, theoretical and practical rationalization processes (Kalberg, 1980: 1173).

Fordism: The Rationalization of Factory Production

Antonio Gramsci coined ‘Fordism’ to describe the application of formal rationality to business production. In 1914 Henry Ford introduced his five-dollar, eight-hour day as payment for workers manning the new automated car-assembly plant at Dearborn. Ford’s vision of mass production was shaped by his experience of the vast scale of organization in Chicago’s slaughterhouses (Burrell, 1999). Ford was acutely aware that it was not enough to manufacture the goods, the demand had to be there too. Ford came to stand out as the icon of or ‘ideal-type’ of the bureaucratic process, through the specialization associated with its assembly line operation, leading to repetitive and standardized work and the intensification, homogenization and deskilling of labour, under a strong hierarchical organization.

Work on the first production lines must have initially been shocking for migrants who left their rural home to seek work in the Ford plant in Highland Park Michigan in 1910. Rural life was hard, but there was variety and one enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy. In contrast, the Ford plant at Highland Park ran on strict factory time where everything was calculated to the standard minute. When it was first introduced in 1910, it took twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes to assemble a chassis. Four years later, this had dropped to one hour and thirty-three minutes. The traditional human cycle was also interrupted by the shift system; because the cost of plant and machinery was so much greater than that of human labour, it had to be kept running at all times.²⁸

The Rationalization of Death

Zygmunt Bauman (2000) discusses rationalization in relation to the bleakest events of the 20th century. The Holocaust, in which millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and dissidents were murdered by the Nazis came as a great shock to those who believed in the power of modernization. Baumann argues that the truth of the Holocaust was its banal normality. It was normal because its organization was fully in keeping with the spirit of modernity, and its guiding principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. The Holocaust was organized along lines typical of the modern factory. Indeed several of the death-camps were also factories, and most of those who committed abominable atrocities were normal people, not sadists. Bauman explains how ironically, the bureaucratic principle, which was devised to be fair and disinterested to transcend the problems presented by nepotism, was in the Holocaust turned to serve an evil end. This facilitated the killing machine by enabling individuals to regard themselves as small cogs in a big wheel, who could displace responsibility elsewhere along the chain of command. The Holocaust required an efficient railroad grid to transport millions of people from around Europe to the death camps. It required daily production quotas and the construction of efficient means for killing and disposing of the bodies of the dead. Over and above these, it required the existence of a system of bureaucratic organization and control, based on the separation of means from ends. Most important of all was the impersonality of the system, whereby “ordinary” people suppressed their ‘animal pity’, enabling them to continue killing other human beings.

Whilst the sphere of factory farming is patently different in several important ways from the incarceration and mass murder of human beings described above, it is noteworthy that the core bureaucratic processes are the same. If, as some suggest, Ford’s mass production process was a model for the mass destruction that constituted the Holocaust, then it should be mentioned that Ford was himself inspired by the efficiency of organization of the division of labour in the Chicago slaughterhouse (Burrell, 1999). There are similarities too in relation to strategies of moral distancing discussed by Bauman (op. cit.). Serpell (1999) lists the strategies used by farmers to distance themselves from the suffering of the animals in their care, which share uncanny similarities with the process of moral distancing described by Bauman. These include: the denial or dilution of responsibility, due to the division of labour in the supply-chain (the argument that one is a small cog in a big wheel); screening out or misrepresenting evidence of animal suffering: expiating guilt through acts of benevolence to individual animals; maintaining a distance from the animal - refusing to anthropomorphize the animal by giving it a name; disguising their fate by using euphemisms such as “harvesting”: aligning oneself with a higher moral purpose (saving lives, serving human interests such as the needs of the consumer, or preserving the countryside).

Ritzer’s McDonaldization Thesis

The story of Laura Brown told in chapter one is offered as an example of the life of the rationalized consumer. While consumption is sold as a free and pleasurable experience, Stuart Ewen argues (section 1.4.2) that the advertising industry offers itself as a means of efficiently creating consumers and homogeneously controlling their consumption (Ewen, 1976). Jean Baudrillard argues further that consumption, which many equate with freedom and pleasure, is sold as a Puritan duty,

The Puritans considered themselves, considered their actual being, to be an enterprise to make profit for the greater glory of God. Their “personal” qualities, and their “character”, which they spent their lives producing, were capital to be invested wisely, and managed without speculation or waste. Conversely, yet in the same way, man-as-consumer considers the experience of pleasure an obligation, like an enterprise of pleasure and satisfaction; one is obliged to be happy, to be in love, to be adulating/adulated, seducing/seduced, participating, euphoric and dynamic (Baudrillard, 1988: 480).

Thus commanded to enjoy, what appears to be the ‘fun’ morality that is so prevalent today, “involves the complete exploitation of all the possibilities of being thrilled” (Barber, 2007: 41). The duty to consume is preached to as the engine of economic growth, by which the wellbeing of society is measured. When growth dips, as it did in the USA following the “9-11” terrorist attack and following the 2008 Credit Crunch, consumers are implored not to volunteer for the army or civil-defence forces, but rather to continue shopping (Barber, 2007: 41).

In The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer provides a spatial context for Weber’s formal rationality by rebranding it as; “the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world” (Ritzer, 1993: 1). Just as Gramsci takes Ford as an icon to exemplify the rationalization of production, so Ritzer holds up McDonald’s as the model for formally rational principles of efficiency, calculation, predictability and control. McDonald’s is the epitome of efficiency devising the optimal methods to process customers, using drive-throughs and uncomfortable seats; food and service provision are precisely quantified and calculated; the predictability of McDonald’s offering repeated in thousands of outlets, contributes to the homogenization of the environment; finally, McDonald’s exemplifies control as the process is largely governed by machines, which reduce human labour to the performance of routine, repetitive tasks. The consumer is automated, as they are processed through various points of the system.

Ritzer argues that McDonaldization leads to irrationality which occurs when rationalization reaches a point where it rebounds on itself leading to, “inefficiency, unpredictability, incalculability and the loss of control”.²⁹ While fast food offers customers the illusion of efficiency and value for money, the reality is that it is expensive when compared to what can be produced at home with the same ingredients and can be slow, with long queues. In relation to other McDonaldized contexts Ritzer asks whose needs does efficiency serve when consumers have to do all the work; “Is it efficient for us to push our own food over the supermarket scanner and then bag it ourselves? Is it efficient for us to pump our own gasoline” Is it efficient for us to push numerous combinations of telephone numbers before we speak, if even then, to a human voice.”³⁰ Acknowledging that McDonald’s were forced to adapt their menu in light of health concerns, he blames them for contributing to the growth of obesity.³¹ He also criticizes the environmental damage caused by fast food packaging that ‘devours” whole forests and produces ‘mountains’ of waste.³² He suggests that McDonald’s is really part of the unreality industry, by providing faux entertainments such as clowns and balloons to add glitz and the “illusion of fun” to food that is poor quality and bland. His main point is that McDonaldization is unreasonable because it is dehumanizing, minimizing contact between human beings to the absolute minimum necessary to effect a transaction.

In Ritzer’s view, McDonaldization has infiltrated all areas of late modern life, even those traditionally associated with public service, with McDoctors, McHospitals and McUniversities driven by the same formal logic. The life of Laura Brown, whose story is told in chapter one, is rationalized from top to bottom. However, while Ritzer’s argument can be persuasive, he must account for the changes in modernity leading to post-Fordism. This is based on the argument that modernism has progressed beyond Fordism which is no longer adequate to describe the prevalent system of production today, because it is not centred around the mass production of homogeneous products, but is specialized, capable of producing small batches targeted at market segments within fluid, heterogeneous and highly differentiated markets and also at the individual level. Taking these changes into account then perhaps Wai Ching, whose story of reflexive self-formation is told towards the end of chapter one, is a better example to describe today’s consumer. Ritzer replies to the argument for Post-Fordism by on the one hand, accepting in some aspects life today is radically different from that in early modernity, but on the other, insisting that there are also strong continuities, one of which is the persistence of McDonaldization (ibid.: 156-157).

Coca-Colonization

The term ‘Coca-colonization’ is sometimes used in a similar manner to McDonaldization as an extension of the rationalization argument, which likens globalization to ‘Americanization’. This argues that the USA is an ‘advanced’ consumer culture which, through the massive propagation of its bland, individualist, consumerist values, overwhelms the cultural and communitarian bonds of traditional societies, converting them into mini-versions of itself. The paper by Joy and Wallendorf (1996) provides an excellent basis for class discussion. Coca Colonization can work both ways. Jaded western tourists, who travel to exotic lands in the hope of finding a sense of authenticity lacking in their McDonaldized lives, are confronted by McDonaldized re-enactments provided by locals that perforce conform to the rigid timetable imposed by the arrival and departure times of the next luxury cruise-ship.

Resisting McDonaldization

Ritzer suggests how consumers can better cope with McDonaldization. He acknowledges that pressure from consumers has already prompted fast food outlets to change their ways and urges them to continue to exert pressure.33 He advocates a variety of responses to McDonaldization such as; focusing on quality not quantity; avoiding franchises; attending smaller universities and avoiding classes that are graded by multiple question tests scored by computer; choosing bed and breakfasts rather than McHotels; opting for the “caring capitalism” of companies such as Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. These examples are obviously dated – Ben & Jerry’s have since been taken over by Unilever and many consumers now feel jaded by the McDonaldization of appeals to “caring capitalism”. However he would not be unduly surprised to such developments, being aware that McDonaldization is an ongoing process of colonization.

Discussion

O’Neill (2010) seeks to hoist Ritzer by his own petard, accusing him of facilitating the McDonaldization of education by providing a ‘McText’, an easily digestible ‘McCritique’ that can be regurgitated on demand by students of the ‘McUniversity’. But is it a sociological sin to render Weber’s dense and often opaque corpus into a readable form (Jary, 2010: 119)? Parker (1997) also acidly critiques Ritzer’s conception of ‘resistance’, likening it to asking a person to use a knife and fork rather than to eat with their fingers! Ritzer’s catchy title can have the unfortunate effect of focusing attention overmuch on the global uniformity of retail and fast-food settings, distracting from discussion of more important matters. In class discussion one sometimes hears the banal opinion expressed, which totally misses the point, that there is no McDonaldization, because McDonald’s in Asia offers a different menu to that available in the West! However how far should resistance go? Some vegetarians are motivated by moral concern because they find the killing and eating of animals repugnant. For some it is sufficient to maintain a meat-free lifestyle. Others engage in activism, perhaps joining the Vegetarian Society, or a specific group concerned with animal welfare, anti-vivisection, or anti-fur lobby. At its most extreme, disaffection may stray over the line to joining the UK Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which in the UK is classified as a terrorist organization that is proscribed by government on the same basis as is Islamic State.

Global markets are certainly dominated by Western brands and global communications by Western media. But does this inevitably lead to the homogenization of values implied by terms such as McDonaldization and Coca-Colonization? Ritzer does little to explain the emergence of alternative youth movements such as punk rock, rave culture and animal activism from the ‘McDonaldized’ suburban sprawl. His simple answer is that these outpourings of creative energy were predictable reactions against the bland conformity imposed by their setting. Consider Coca-Cola. According to Levitt, a key aspect of the identity of Coke is that it looks and tastes the same everywhere. Coke might then be argued as proof of the existence of the global consumer. In discussing this question Joy and Wallendorf (1996: 132) argue that although it is true that Coke is consumed in several ‘developing’ nations, we do not know the myriad of meanings it assumes in these varied cultural contexts.

In his study of Trinidadian identity, Daniel Miller found that Trinidadians identify Coke with ‘blackness’ and its chief competitor, Red Cola (which is produced by Indians), with ‘redness’. Within Trinidadian culture cola was used as a vehicle to signify one’s identity to others. This is not to suggest that black people only drank Coke and Indians, Red Cola. Many Indians drank Coke to identify with the values associated with it, while many blacks drink Red Cola. The globalization argument suggests that global brands carry with them the values of their country of origin. Following that argument, when drinking Coke, Trinidadians would be literally swallowing US culture. However Miller found that this is not the case and that the ‘global’ brand Coke was incorporated into the construction of Trinidadian identity in a unique way to reflect local customs and signifying practices. The implication is that the global brand or signifier, ‘Coke’, is decoded differently and can signify different things, depending on the local code used to decode its meaning, and the point of view of the receiver.

By extension, it would be disingenuous to imply that globalization is all one way. Salsa music, Thai cuisine and many other traditions once characteristic of a particular time and place have spread globally, and more nations are becoming multi-ethnic. But then Coca-Cola is not a living tradition but a corporate brand with a reputation for ruthlessness.³⁴ In light of the above, it should be mentioned that the term ‘Coca-Colonization’ was not originally coined to describe a process of progressive homogenization of culture, but rather one of alienation. Jean Ki- Zerbo, an anthropologist from Upper Volta, first mentioned it in his address on behalf of African developing countries to a conference held at the Sorbonne (Cinquin, 1987). In his address Ki-Zerbo was most critical of how villagers find themselves swamped by ‘implements made of plastic and provided by the dominant economy’. The point made by Ki-Zerbo is that when swamped with commodities from outside, the people no longer recognize themselves (their work or value) in things which they had not produced themselves. This point is also made by Daniel Miller who argues that the idea that consumer culture is inherently ‘Western’,

is probably as insidious as the relative inequalities in wealth in sundering people from the goods in which they increasingly live (Miller, 1996: 157).

Miller argues that this representation creates severe difficulties for those peoples who are characterized as peripheral. Furthermore, his research in Trinidad revealed that the main difficulty experienced by people with respect to consumer goods was not their inability to purchase them, but their inability to respect either their own local production or local consumption. He offers the following explanation for one Trinidadian’s obsession with blue jeans – he had 25 pairs in all,

It became clear that underlying this obsessive purchasing was the sense that although he could buy them, he could never feel a sense of possession. As long as commodities are seen as authentically American, his wearing of them seemed inauthentic (Miller, 1996: 157).

Ritzer also plays down the extent to which McDonaldization, or the extension of formal rationality, can result in unexpectedly good outcomes. The “green” revolution that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century involved theoretical rationality in the form of the abstract concepts formulated by scientists and formal rationality to enable their realization into workable technologies. This instrumental view portrayed nature purely as a resource and so was compatible with the impersonality of formal rationality and with the Enlightenment view that separates nature from culture. From this, one might have envisaged a continuing ‘McDonaldization’ of the environment. However Frank et al. (1999) argue that instead a profound change occurred as rationalization advanced, when scientists discovered that human life is part of complex system relating the biosphere to the geosphere and the hydrosphere (ibid.: 82). They argue that the astonishing rise of International NGOs relating to the environment between 1875 and 1990 was facilitated by the discovery of the ecosystem, which located humanity within a complex web of interdependency where the absence of the smallest predator could have a major effect. This change provided the basis for the Earth Summit, held in Rio in 1992, which established the United Nations environmental programme.

Douglas Kellner points out that although Ritzer provides a ‘striking’ sociological analysis, he neglects to discuss the cultural dimensions of McDonald’s, “in particular the ways in which the Corporation mobilizes advertising campaigns and promotional stunts to create an experience of fun, of family togetherness and of Americanization itself’ (Kellner, 2010: 188). Ritzer responds to this criticism, in Enchanting a Disenchanted World (2010). This is a more thoughtful text which rows back on some of the claims made in his earlier book. Here Ritzer addresses Colin Campbell’s (1987) argument, that an unexpected consequence of Puritanism was that over the course of a few generations, the ascetic Puritan spirit was transformed into a hedonism that was, ‘individualistic and involved illusions, daydreams, and fantasies; in other words it was a world of enchantment” (Ritzer, 2010: 60). Ritzer continues, “I draw on both Weber and Campbell in my conceptualization of the cathedrals of consumption as not only rationalized and disenchanted but also enchanted” (ibid.: 61). Elizabeth Hirschman and Maurice Holbrook (1982) may be gratified by Ritzer’s late conversion to the role played by hedonism in consumption, although like this author, they might also be a little mystified by this latter paradoxical quote. In the course of his exploration of the ‘cathedrals of consumption’ Ritzer acknowledges that consumers are not driven to the shops at gunpoint, but are rather lured and seduced by the pleasures it offers. Finally, Ritzer’s analysis generally floats free of discussion of the economy in that he does not analyse the relations between the spread of formal rationality and that of capitalist circulation and accumulation.

Michel Foucault

Max Weber’s concept of bureaucracy described above is wide-ranging, enabling the realisation that modern organizational forms as diverse as concentration camps, factory farms, hospitals and fast food restaurants share in common a formal rationality that values efficiency, predictability, consistency and control. Commenting on the process of bureaucratic rationalization Michel Foucault (1982) comments that,

The relationship between rationalization and excesses of political power is evident. And we should not have to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the existence of such relations. But the problem is, what to do with such an evident fact?... I think that the word “rationalization” is dangerous. What we have to do is analyse specific rationalities rather than always invoke the programme of rationalization in general.” (Foucault, 1982: 779/780).

Foucault lived through the 1960s and 1970s, a time of ferment in the industrialized west, when women and people of colour openly challenged the established power of privileged white men, when those judged insane attacked the legitimacy of the mental profession, others protested at the grip maintained by pharmaceutical companies on the health system and youth questioned the legitimacy of the state war machine. Foucault argues that at the heart of these various forms of resistance lay a fundamental struggle against a form of power which he calls the “government of individualization” (ibid. 781).

As an historian, Foucault was interested to study the transition from absolute monarchies such as the Court Societies discussed in chapter one, to the modern democratic nation-state. In the Court Society as in any autocratic state today, the individual was utterly subservient to the monarch. The peasantry, constituting the bulk of the population, were socially invisible and treated by the nobility as mere chattels. In contrast, in modern liberal democracies, the individual citizen and consumer is proclaimed sovereign, no matter how lowly their birth. A pertinent question is to enquire how an unruly mob of premodern peasants was transformed in the matter of a few generations into a disciplined class of workers and consumers? This question has already been answered in the context of Norbert Elias’s explanation of the civilization process discussed above in chapter one. Elias applies a version of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to argue that beginning in the early Court Societies, and extending into the modern period, inappropriate expressions of violence, rage, or sexual conduct judged rude, were disciplined by the repression of emotion, with the perpetrators feeling shame and expressing remorse at their conduct, whilst onlookers felt embarrassment on witnessing such conduct in others. While discipline plays a role in Foucault’s explanation, this is situated differently to that of Elias. Foucault sees no need to resort to Freud for his explanation. Foucault is not interested in abstraction but rather seeks to explore the historical development of specific forms of rationality in different contexts.

Governmentality

The period of the industrial and consumer revolutions in Europe from the late seventeenth century was one of social upheaval. As in China in the past decade, so European cities experienced huge increases in population. The population of Paris rose five-fold between 1800 and 1900, from 550,000, to 2,714,000 citizens, whilst that of London rose in the same period almost sevenfold from 1 million to 6,700,000. This was one factor that required a change in the management and control of the population and thus of space. Another major factor was the modern imperative to treat the citizen and consumer as a rational agent. The ensuing changes were not centrally organized by the state, but rather by the bourgeoisie, involving experts in law, psychiatry, criminology and education who applied forms of rationality that evolved in particular contexts to those particular individuals who came within their respective sphere of control. Governmentality, is the portmanteau term coined by Foucault to describe the modern development of a complex array of institutions, statistics, and reports compiled by experts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Foucault, 1979). Governmentality shaped individuals into subjects in two senses; firstly, in the sense that they became subject to the control of others and secondly, became subject to a particular identity imposed from outside to which they were bound. Processes of governmentality relate equally well to the 1960s protestors described above, who were individualized and identified according to different rationalities, as they were to their seventeenth century counterparts.

The Disciplinary Blockade

Foucault explains that a form of identification came into operation in the seventeenth century through the disciplinary blockade, which describes the division of the abnormal from the normal, using rationality as the criterion to judge normality. A wide range of individuals judged abnormal by experts, such as beggars, petty criminals, tramps, prostitutes, the old, lame and lunatics.were sequestered from society and enclosed in newly constructed institutions (Foucault, 1988). Psychiatry then developed its power-base from the mid-nineteenth century, justifying its existence as an extra-legal defence to protect society from dangerous individuals. Its primary aim was to use rationality as a criterion with which to differentiate normal from abnormal behaviour. From then onwards behaviour judged irrational or degenerate, such as masturbation, claustrophobia, kleptomania, exhibitionism, homosexuality, or addiction, was labelled abnormal. These behaviours were not classified as illnesses but rather as syndromes, or disorders, because they deviated from the rational norm.³⁵ This was an important development. In premodern times persistent acts of thievery, exhibitionism or homosexuality were judged by the religious authorities as sinful acts and were punished as such. When judged instead as syndromes or disorders, these were understood as continuously existing aberrant identities, requiring incarceration, treatment or both. These were the antecedents for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSMV) that provides the guidelines for the 157 disorders that exist today.³⁶ In line with this a therapeutic ethos emerged towards the end of the eighteenth-century, which provided the rationale that madness is not unreason, nor is it a lack of reason, but rather signifies incorrect reasoning, thus rendering it capable of treatment and reform.

Disciplinary Power and Biopower

Governmentality in relation to the “normal” population consisted of two forms of power that came into prominence in the early modern period. The first of these, disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977), developed as a re-working of spatial contexts in the late seventeenth century. Disciplinary power was based on the surveillance, monitoring and examination of individuals to determine if they measured up to the norm (judged as sane or mad, competent or incompetent, normal or abnormal). The otherwise unruly bodies of children, soldiers, patients and workers were monitored, disciplined and controlled in spaces that were re-organized according to a rational Cartesian grid. School classrooms, military parades, hospital wards, prisons and city-spaces were created or reordered based on a design of neat rows and columns. In cities, unruly warrens were demolished and replaced by the rational system of wide boulevards, parks and squares still to be observed in central Paris, London and Edinburgh’s New Town and in the grid system that forms Manhattan. These developments took a long time to come to fruition. For instance, although a system of regular street numbers was introduced in Manhattan in 1793, even by 1820 this was judged so irregular as to be of little use (Rose-Redwood, 2006:177).

Foucault (2004) explains that biopower, which operates at a different level to disciplinary power but is complementary to it developed during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Where disciplinary power acts directly on the bodies of individuals, biopower is based on the systematic collection and monitoring of statistics by demographers with the overall aim of improving the overall productivity of the stock of the population. Originally demographers measured the birth rate, fertility, longevity and hygiene. These statistics fed into an early form of biopolitics, where statistical estimates and forecasts informed policy on questions such as, how to reduce mortality rates and poverty and how to increase the overall productivity of the population (Foucault, 2004: 245). Much of this information was gathered by welfare and commercial agencies operating outside of the state. The rapidly expanding cities of the industrial revolution quickly segregated along demographic lines. In the West-End of London and in the new suburb of Whalley Range, Manchester, the wealthy lived in houses barred to the public, guarded by toll-gates and by private police (Atkins, 1993). Recognising that in the rapidly growing cities ‘birds of a feather stick together’, Charles Booth produced the ‘Booth Map” based on a survey of life and labour in London conducted between 1886 and 1903. Districts were colour-coded by social-class, ranging from black (signifying semi criminal), to light blue (the poor); red (middle-class) and yellow (upper-class).³⁷ In the 1970s, Booth’s scheme was replicated by Richard Webber to enable policymakers to target areas of social deprivation in Liverpool. Developing A Classification of Regional Neighbourhoods (ACORN), Webber’s innovation laid the foundation for the geo-demographic segmentation, profiling and targeting used by commercial and social marketers today.³⁸ Using this device the marketer can conduct an analysis by any postcode (16 addresses) in the UK by profiling it against other similar postcodes.³⁹

Surveillance and Control

The surveillance society that consumers live in today can be understood as an extension of the rather crude systems of biopolitical monitoring first developed in the nineteenth- century. Today the state comprises one amongst many agencies that routinely observe, record and store personal information. Corporations argue that they need to record personal data to build relationships with their customers to offer the right products and services. Zamyatin, and George Orwell, the authors of the great dystopian novels of the twentieth century, wrote We, and 1984, precisely to warn of real potential dangers. They would find it incomprehensible that consumers today have no qualms about disclosing their innermost secrets through social media. The amount and variety of data amassed on each individual is now more detailed than any dictator of a totalitarian state could possibly have dreamt of. Biometric data are stored based on Automatic Face Recognition and DNA fingerprinting; car journeys are tracked by ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition); every click one makes on the Internet is recorded, as is all the data posted onto social media, alongside every text and phone call. A study reported by the BBC found that a visitor to a single website can be monitored by 140 cookies and other trackers.⁴⁰ Add this to the individual data held by retail loyalty schemes such as Nectar and consider that much of this data is for sale. Consider too that one’s work ID-card leaves a trace of the zones one has been admitted to, that one’s mobile-phone acts as a tracking device and that smart-tags on clothing perform similar operations. If all that fails and CCTV is unavailable, then one’s movements can be tracked by satellite.

Commercial researchers extended their research to explore the inner workings of the human mind. Schwarzkopf (2015) describes the various biometric methods that were used by market researchers between the 1890s and 1990s. In the late nineteenth century, Harlow Gale of the University of Minnesota and Dill Scott of Northwestern University used scientific management as the model to understand consumer responses to advertising, contriving experiments that split advertisements into visual and verbal elements to see which execution attracted most attention. Psychologists developed an assortment of weird and wonderful devices, such as the eye camera, to ascertain how consumers retain information in advertisements and the psychogalvanometer, or lie detector, which measures the subconscious emotional state of the mind. The tachistoscope enabled researchers to project images at a great speed and controlled duration. This provided the antecedent conditions necessary to develop subliminal advertising, controversially argued by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1960) to be extremely effective and dangerous, on the grounds that the message passes below (sub) the threshold of the conscious censor (limen) straight into the consumer unconscious. Today the territory once occupied by psychology is now possessed by neuroscientists who are in the pay of organizations which seek to locate the neural correlates of brand loyalty and consumer behaviour (McClure et al., 2004).

The complementarity of disciplinary power and biopower are illustrated through the example of a French council estate (Foucault, 2004; 251). The estate is spatially organized according to a grid pattern into symmetrical rows and columns, with each address being easy to locate because of clear street names and door numbering. This symmetry is applied to each individual house, which houses one family and one person in each room. This is complemented by policies that help owners gain access to mortgages with which to buy their homes, health insurance schemes, pension provision and hygiene rules that help to increase the longevity of the population.

Issues of credit and debt combine regulatory biopower with market discipline. For instance, Stuart Ewen argues that US marketers faced the difficulty that early consumers lacked the income to buy the goods on offer. Rather than raising wages, this problem was solved by developing credit-installment and hire purchase plans subject to state regulation, that were based on the principle of ‘buy now, pay later’. One can argue that while credit was (and is) sold to consumers through the guise of gratification, or freedom from thrift, it acts as a disciplinary mechanism to extort savings, just as wage-labour can understood as a rational process in the extortion of labour power. In the USA, the transformation towards a consumer society happened in waves. Many Americans were reduced to penury through debt in the Great Depression of the 1930s. This memory persisted in public consciousness to such an extent that in 1956, marketing guru Ernest Dichter urged advertisers, “to train the average citizen to accept the growth of his country and its economy as his growth rather than a strange and frightening event” (Dichter, 1960: 210). In the twenty-first century, there is no longer any need to justify why one should enjoy now and pay later. Although consumers say that they prefer free time to spend with friends and family, rather than working or accumulating possessions, the reality is different. It is thus argued that today’s self-centred consuming narcissist is a ‘compulsory shopper’ (Barber, 2007). The credit schemes that target today’s compulsory shoppers affect the poor most of all; a UK study found that the poorest 10% of the population owed four times as much as they held in assets and 40% of them said that debt was a major burden, compared to18% of the population as a whole.⁴¹

Consumer Rationality

Miller and Rose (2008) researched the archives from London’s Tavistock Institute to discuss specific UK marketing campaigns devised in the 1950s, to illustrate how consumers are constructed according to different rationalities. The outlook of the ‘Tavi’ as it is known was for a time deeply influenced by the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein, but not exclusively so. In one case, marketers of ice-cream approached the Tavi for advice on how to persuade consumers to continue buying ice-cream in the winter months. The researchers at the Tavi used psychoanalytic theory as a frame to describe the consumption of ice-cream as a pure pleasure food which compensates for the oral anxieties and depression re-experienced as the consequence of the loss of the mother’s breast during infancy. On this basis the researchers argued that in the consumer unconscious, ice-cream signifies love, comfort and security. They also warned their clients that the benefits could be reversed if the ice-cream was too cold, or if it was not immediately available, as this could result in outbursts of regressive infantile rage.⁴² In this context psychoanalysis comprised the particular form of rationality by means of which the consumer came to be constructed by advertisers in a specific way, as the subject of a particular identity.

Psychoanalysis constructs a particular model of the consumer that foregrounds unconscious powerful emotions such as anxiety and rage that are linked to infantile experience. The popularity of psychoanalysis had waned by 1960, such that when the Tavi was approached by Guinness in that year, the now dominant view was that the consumer is formally rational. Based on this assumption research was conducted using the Semantic Differential, to measure the objective images of Guinness and rival brands such as Mackeson. These images enabled the researchers to make propositions, such that it was likely that Bitter drinkers could be persuaded to drink Guinness, but unlikely that Mackeson drinkers would.⁴³ Thus in this case the advertising appeal was based on a completely different form of rationality to that used earlier in relation to ice-cream.

The above examples illustrate Foucault’s point that it is important to attend to the specific form of rationality operating in any given context. In each situation described above, the consumer is constructed as a subject by a specific rationality which subjects them to extensive market research and targets them through advertising appeals and then subsequently exposes them to monitoring and control through attitude research and the analysis of usage data. Marketers argue that this process is conducted in the long run interests of consumers to provide them with better products. It is nonetheless also a form of rationalization and control. Douglas Kellner muses on the extent to which marketing has contributed to the construction of a postmodern subject. He argues that the constantly changing positioning strategies employed by brands today has had the effect of undermining the identities attached to older campaigns. The end result of this is to produce,

more unstable, fluid, shifting identities in the contemporary scene. And yet one also sees the inexorable process of commodification at work in this process. The market segmentation of multiple ad campaigns and appeals reproduces and intensifies fragmentation and destabilizes identity which new products and identifications are attempting to restabilize (Kellner, 1992: 172).

Kellner’s description of the consumer is a long way from the strictly disciplined individual described by Foucault as being characteristic of the early modern period. Neoliberals would argue that today’s consumer is no longer constrained by rigid disciplinary controls typical of the early modern period, but in contrast to the fragmented consumer described by Kellner, they would emphasize the unrivalled freedom of choice enjoyed by the late-modern consumer. This argument is further discussed in chapter four in relation to market pricing.

Karl Marx: Capitalism as a Devouring Machine

The second major theoretical perspective addressed in this chapter, which views capitalism as a devouring machine is inspired by Karl Marx and Rosa Luxembourg. Marx argued that the spirit of capitalist modernization involves struggle, contradiction and change, where ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Berman sums it up thus,

First of all, there is the emergence of a world market. As it spreads, it absorbs and destroys whatever local and regional markets it touches. Production and consumption – and human needs– become increasingly international and cosmopolitan. The scope of human desires and demands is enlarged far beyond the capacities of local industries, which subsequently collapse. The scale of communications becomes worldwide, and technologically sophisticated mass media emerge. Capital is concentrated increasingly in a few hands. Independent peasants and artisans cannot compete with capitalist mass production, and they are forced to leave the land and to close their workshops. Production is increasingly centralized and rationalized in highly automated factories. (It is no different in the country where farms become ‘factories in the field’, and the peasants who do not leave the countryside are transformed into agricultural proletarians.) Vast numbers of the uprooted poor pour into cities, which grow almost magically – and cataclysmically – overnight. For these changes to go on with relative smoothness, some legal, fiscal and administrative centralization must take place; and it does take place wherever capitalism goes. National states arise and accumulate great power, although that power is greatly undermined by capital’s international scope. Meanwhile industrial workers gradually awaken to some sort of class consciousness and activate themselves against the acute misery and chronic oppression in which they live (Berman, 1982: 91).

These processes are still at work in the world well over a century after Marx wrote about them. Spatial distance is destroyed with the intensification of capital, resulting in the annihilation of space through time. The fetishism of commodities, refers to the idea that suffering and inequity produced by the market appear to be inevitable, as the market is fetishized, being thought to be a stand above humanity as a great god, when it is in fact a human product.

Entropy

Why is it that we think of time as an arrow moving in a linear direction from past to future? Earlier this was explained a development linked to modernity. One explanation is linked to thermodynamics, the energy movements which occur in physical and chemical processes. The universe becomes more disorderly, order precedes disorder. Jugs smashed into smithereens do not automatically reconstitute themselves; likewise, human energy dissipates over time. The amount of disorder in a system is called entropy. The early universe was low in entropy and as it has expanded, entropy has increased. This process will at some stage reach a tipping point. By living we increase the disorder of the universe and hasten the arrival of the day when time will eventually end. In order for the human adventure to run its course, time must die.⁴⁴

Human survival depends on increasing entropy, with the arrow of time moving in one direction from birth to death and dissolution. Our bodies are islands of order, which is achieved by the extraction of high-grade energy as food, which we use to temporarily decrease entropy in our bodies. We release this back to the environment in a degraded form, as waste, thus increasing the disorder of the universe to a far greater extent than we decreased it by our own local increase in order. The second law of thermodynamics explains production as a disruptive process which resulting in a transfer of entropy. The sum of industrial products represents greater entropy than the sum of fuels and raw materials that constitutes them. It is ironic that the names we give this process of

dissolution are growth and development.

The Fetishism of Commodities

The section on rationalization described how global culture is increasingly taken up with commodities. Neoliberal discourse argues for the extension of the ‘freedom’ of the marketplace and choice to all. Market principles argue that it extends freedom and choice to all. In contrast, Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities argues that the seemingly egalitarian system which claims to work in pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number, masks gross inequalities and inequities, which it veils. Furthermore, by arguing that the market is inevitable, constituting a natural aspect of humankind, scarcity and inequality created by the operation of the market are considered inevitable.

A central aspect of fetishism is that when presented in the marketplace, commodities hide the real social relations objectified in them through human labour. This aspect of the commodity was puzzling to Marcel Mauss (1990) who thought that just as gifts convey some residue of the person who gives them, so commodities too should carry the hau, or spirit, of those who made them. But this is clearly not so. Others, following Marx, argue that commodities both reveal and conceal. The most visible part of the commodity is its ability to satisfy consumer desire which is communicated through advertising, promotions and point of purchase displays.⁴⁵ Whilst drawing attention to their allure, they simultaneously draw a veil over their origins. Sut Jhally (1990) provides a list of how commodities conceal their origins. Jhally argues that all the following constituents of the meaning of products are systematically hidden:

the process of planning and designing products;

the actual relations of production that operate in particular factories around the world;

Conditions of work in factories

Wages and benefits of workers

Degree of unionization of workforce

Quality checks and level of automation

Treatment of animals used as inputs to the production process

Consumer market research

Environmental effects of industrial processes and of logistics in distribution

Renewability of materials

Processes used in extraction of raw materials through mining, forestry and so on.

One could easily devote a book to the exploration of the above, each of which forms a topic for research. The United Nations argues that tighter control of innovation in the hands of multinational corporations ignores the needs of millions. Driven by market pressures, biotechnology companies have focused on developing cosmetic drugs and patenting genetically engineered seeds as opposed to developing a vaccine against malaria or drought-resistant crops for marginal lands (UN Human Development Report, 1999: 68).

As consumers, we are seduced by the pristine look of the product we are buying. The silvery slim computer looks so perfect that one can scarcely believe people were ever involved in its production. Trying such a machine out in the store, the last thing on our mind is likely to be the working conditions of the person or people who made it. When I recently visited an Apple store, I asked the salesperson if, as an employee of Apple they ever thought of their kinship with those working at Foxconn and Pegatron. They furrowed their brow before replying to say that they didn’t know much about software! There are a few exceptions, where we are told this information. In Britain Lush is an example, but these are few and far between. Given the lack of information that is displayed on products, it is unsurprising that consumers rarely learn, nor enquire, about their origins, what they contain and what will happen to them when they are discarded. Such thoughts are conveniently pushed aside in the advertising or the shopping context.

The only means to learn more about the otherwise hidden spaces of production and disposal is by means of the television or newspaper exposé, which features the exploitation of some distant workforce or the illegal or dangerous dumping of toxic wastes. Over the last few years a number of programme makers explored these previously hidden areas, exploring exploitation in the clothing industry and the use of child slaves in the production of chocolate (Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts); factory farming and animal slaughter (Kill It, Cook It, Eat It; Hugh’s Chicken Run; Our Daily Bread). Whilst these are well-made and informative, this format is now rather predictable and one wonders about the extent to which this is just a phase, or whether the ethics of consumption is here to stay?

Media exposés have been a force for the good in that some of the firms that were once targets for early programmes such as Levi-Strauss⁴⁶ and The Gap sought to rehabilitate themselves by developing ethical codes linked to extensive publicity campaigns. However this might be regarded as the tip of a very large iceberg. Few consumers of chocolate know that slave labour is still routinely employed in the harvesting of cocoa beans that are an ingredient in chocolate.⁴⁷ Indeed one of my Swiss students was so incredulous and angry to hear this that he left the class, thinking it untrue!

Despite current concerns over food-safety and animal welfare, it is difficult if not impossible to gain access to intensive facilities which rear animals for mass slaughter. Since the Second World War the United Kingdom has adopted a policy of providing cheap food to the population, which has generally been successful in its aim. The downside is that consumers often have no idea of the complex supply-chain and methods for meat production such as Mechanically Recovered Meat (MRM) or Mechanically Separated Meat (MDM), or of the differences between them. While the link between toxic meat and toxic financial products may seem strange, these share the fact that apart from a few insiders, no-one knew how they were made. Just as sub-prime meat often finds its way onto the dinner-plate, so sub-prime- properties that should have been junk, were re-classified by physics graduates to ‘triple A’ status, by dicing and mixing them with supposedly sound stock. These products were then offloaded onto people who were bamboozled by the complex and bogus maths, who bought them on trust.

Waste disposal is now a major issue for all consumer societies. For example a difficulty associated with the disposal of non-ferrous metals is that the recycling process, which, although highly profitable, constitutes a major hazard to the local environment and to health. The recycling of copper from cable requires that the insulation, which contains deadly dioxins, is burnt off. In the past, Western computer companies exported everything from PCBs to asbestos overseas for reprocessing. When overseas governments tried to counter this trade, Western governments insisted that this went ahead as part of ‘free trade’. It is not surprising that Western governments are loath to deal with this waste at home. According to Greenpeace, the incineration process itself generates all sorts of new poisons, some of which end up in landfill sites. The largest dump in the USA, which is operated by Waste Management, opened in 1978. At that time it was said that the dump would not leak for one hundred years. It did so in six (see note xii)

Neoliberals do not often draw attention to problems associated with economic development. However this is discussed by the United Nations, which draws attention to the underside of development, including trafficking and forced migration and the hardship caused by unfair economic structures on vulnerable groups such as the elderly, children, the disabled, migrants and other minorities. The authors of the 2014 report call attention to the vulnerability of the 25% to 40% of the population in developing countries who work in the informal sector and to unemployment in Southern Europe following the debt crisis of 2007.

In the Congo, three quarters of people live in “multi-dimensional’ poverty, where average life-expectancy is fifty and most receive only three years schooling. That the Congo is “green”, contributing just .05 tonnes of carbon per capita to the atmosphere, is not surprising when one learns that the average annual income is $444 per capita. By comparison Norway reports no data on poverty; the average citizen can expect to live until they are almost eight-two years of age, is educated for about thirteen years; earns almost $64,000 dollars and contributes 11.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide to the environment.

In the world where the consumer is king, one fifth of the population is excluded because they are poor. The poor live a life of involuntary simplicity in the hope of something better. Whilst the United Nations (2015) report that one billion people have been raised from poverty since 1990 is very good news, the widening gap between rich and poor is of great concern. In addition to their economic disadvantage, poor people are treated as outsiders or strangers within consumer societies, thus increasing their separation from the mainstream (Alwitt,1996). For the poor the marketing exchange is usually unbalanced in favour of the marketer. As a result of this imbalance, not only do poor people have restricted access to the world of goods, they must pay more for goods and services in many marketing exchanges.

Poverty is a relative concept. Poverty in the UK is very different to that in Nigeria. Taking the UK as an example, there has been a huge increase in life expectancy for men and women over the past century. Men born in England could expect to live to 52 years of age can now reasonably expect to live 27. Infant morality is now one twentieth of what it was then. However, in England, those living in the poorest areas die on average, seven years earlier than those living in wealthiest areas, whilst in Scotland the gap is eleven years.⁴⁸ The poorest have mortality rates well in excess of other social groups for deaths by stroke, ischaemic heart disease, lung cancer, accidental death and suicide. There are clear indications of social class effects with respect to consumption of fats and sugars, which increases with decreasing income, A report also found that 35.2%% of women in lower socioeconomic groups are obese, which is almost twice that for professional women, at 18.2%.⁴⁹ The poorest are also more prone to smoke cigarettes and suffer disproportionately from mental illness.⁵⁰ The main aspiration for those born poor in industrialized countries is that one can escape to a more affluent lifestyle. However, this is a remote possibility for the underclass who inhabit a shadow world comprising,

residence in a space isolated from other social classes, long-term joblessness; consequentially, female headed households; absence of training and skills; long spells of poverty and welfare dependency and a tendency to engage in street crime” ghetto (Lash & Urry, 1994: 148).

The underclass effectively comprises those who remained when working-class and middle-class families left urban inner-city areas in the USA in the 1980s and 1990s, which is now a feature of many countries. Overall, the poor have less resilience to cope with economic downturns, natural disasters and the effects of global warming such as storms and rising sea levels. Mullainathan and Shafir (2013) present an intriguing hypothesis as to why the poor are particularly poor at making decisions that others find routine. They use a computer metaphor to explain that this occurs because their band-width is severely constricted by anxiety as to make ends meet in the here and now. Those living with such heightened anxieties are at risk of self-harm. One arresting statistic is that of the 1.6 million people who died in 2000, half were suicides and one fifth were war related, while 98% of those killed in natural disasters lived in developing countries (United Nations, 2014: 21).

Annihilation of space through time

David Harvey draws upon Marx’s observation that the annihilation of space through time is one of the most salient features of capital. This refers to the progressive conquest by capital of space, achieved by tearing down spatial barriers. Capital organizes space to facilitate the growth of production, the reproduction of labour power and the maximization of profit.

A growing feature of the annihilation of space through time is the action of the electronic herd. This term was coined by Thomas Friedman (1999), who argues that the development of computerized media technology made the wave of globalization in the1990s different to preceding eras, when Marshall McLuhan’s prediction of the ‘Global Village’ finally came true. The key defining aspect of information technology is speed. The electronic herd are investors who using electronic media have acted to destabilize economies and communities around the world. Evidence of the growing power of the electronic herd is not hard to find. In the late 1990s, this precipitated the rapid rise and then crash of the South-East Asian ‘Tiger’ economies resulting in widespread bankruptcy and unemployment, with social consequences of reduced schooling and public services and increases in suicide, domestic violence and street crime (UN Human Development Report, 1999: 40). Since then, the herd have been involved in the creation of a technology bubble, which burst. Since the Credit Crunch, they have moved into commodities, leading to huge price increases for staple foods.

￼

Figure 2.9: Capitalism: The Constant Pressure to Reduce Turnover Time of Capital

Volatility is experienced at the level of the firm, which is driven constantly to outdo itself in bringing new products to market faster and cheaper than the competition. This leads to a constant drive for cheaper and faster means of production (Fig. 2.9). The focus on progress is tied to a future orientation, to the idea of becoming rather than on being. Within this perspective, time takes on the character of an arrow, and the individual and the organization alike are oriented primarily towards the future.

Increase in turnover time of capital

Material commodity exchange entails movement between locations. For example a firm based in Scotland which supplies shirts to a retailer in London pays more for transport costs but possibly less in wages than a supplier which is based in London itself, where labour costs more. Overcoming these spatial barriers costs time and money; the firm based in Scotland must pay for the cost of transport of goods to London and the transport takes time to get there. The efficiency of spatial organization and transport systems is therefore an important issue for all firms.

The turnover time of capital refers to the time of production together with the time of circulation in exchange. The faster that capital which is launched into circulation can be recovered, the greater the profit. Harvey argues that there is a universal incentive for individual firms to accelerate their turnover time with respect to the average for their industry, an activity which all firms engage in and which promotes a trend towards faster average turnover times. In pursuit of this objective, individual firms make continuous efforts to shorten turnover time.

Post-Fordism

Post-Fordism was briefly referred to in the preceding section in relation to George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis. Harvey associates the flexible accumulation associated with post-Fordism to the speed-up in the turnover time of capital. He explains that the entire history of manufacturing can be thought of as dedicated to the removal of barriers in pursuit of this goal. This encapsulates the history of technical and organizational innovation including the initial development of the assembly-line process (from cars to battery hens), the reduction of set-up times and the acceleration of physical processes (for example through genetic engineering). Harvey argues that increases in the turnover time of production would be of little consequence if the turnover time of consumption were not also reduced. Consequently marketers have increased the rate of product obsolescence, paid much more attention to stimulating the adoption of quick-changing fashions, the extension of credit and to marketing and promotional activities. The volatility in marketplace fashions has made it difficult for firms to engage in of long-term planning. This has placed more emphasis on being able to quickly anticipate or at least to react quickly to changing marketplace trends, as pioneered by brands such as Zara.

Distance and speed are of prime importance in the consumption environment. The popularizing of mass-market fashions accelerated the pace of consumption not only in clothing, but in a variety of lifestyles and recreational activities, including: leisure, sport, pop music and games. Firms keep a close eye on the emergence of street fashion. British sociologist Angela McRobbie argues that ‘leggings’ initially emerged as a fashion item during the Punk revival of the 1980s, which firms responded to after the event. Bernard Cova and his co-researchers have explored the patterns of interaction of the ‘neo-tribes’

discussed by Michel Maffesoli (1996). For Cova (1999) the golden rule of ‘tribal marketing’ is to consider the value of a product in terms of its linking value (to others in the tribe) rather than to its use value. He suggests that it is much more important for the firm to know how its product supports the tribe ‘in its very being’ than how to deliver the product to the customer. Companies are sometimes caught unawares when their brands suddenly become coveted tribal icons. In the UK, punk youth created their own style based on the detritus of consumer culture; towards the end of that decade the US trash group ‘The Beastie Boys’ popularized the wearing of Volkswagen grille badges as a form of jewellery. This craze became so widespread that these items were stripped out of most of the Volkswagens in the UK. Adidas could scarcely believe their good fortune when top rap band Run-DMC adopted their brand as an alternative to Nike.

The huge rise in the production of services, which constitutes the second consumer trend, includes not only personal, business, educational and health services but also entertainment and the provision of spectacles such as mass pop-concerts. The entire city of Las Vegas qualifies as a spectacle in its own right. Although it is hard to estimate, the lifetime of such services (for example a movie, rock concert, or a visit to a museum) is much shorter than that of a car or a washing machine. Harvey suggests that the main dynamic for this rise of services has been the limits to growth in the production and consumption of physical goods. While some people buy enormous quantities of physical products (Imelda Marcos reputedly had 6000 pairs of shoes), it is in practice difficult to persuade consumers to own more than one or two variations of a physical product. On the other hand it is much more difficult to place limits to the growth of services, because of their perishability and shorter lifespan. Services are used up faster.

One need not be quite so deterministic about the attempt to stimulate demand. While traditional industries such as cars and many sectors of clothing remain relatively low-growth, there has been a massive increase in growth of the ‘knowledge’ industries which offer a differentiated array of Internet-enabled hardware devices linked to a vast supporting web of software applications. Marketing activity has also been greatly enhanced through the compilation of precise geo-demographic customer databases and their use in direct marketing. This technological innovation is what lies behind most of what I call relationchip marketing. Added to this is the increased importance of commodities in consumer lifestyles and identity-formation. As we shall see shortly, it seems a little ‘chicken and egg’ to determine the extent to which this has been cynical exploitation by firms or merely the opportunistic response to the initiatives of consumers in appropriating commodities to their own ends.

World Systems Theory

Teresa Brennan (1994) shares Harvey’s main argument, which she develops to suggest that competitive pressures within capitalism are such that consumption constantly outstrips generational time, or the time it takes for resources to naturally reproduce. When one natural resource is used up, the effect of capitalism is to switch demand to substitutes. The availability of substitutes is such that it will be possible for producers to switch resources for many years to come. Ultimately this form of consumption is unsustainable, threatening the entire global ecology. Brennan argues that this logic is partially responsible for the technological drive involving risky experiments with genetic engineering, which seeks to produce plants and animals that reproduce more quickly and which grow faster and larger than ever before. Consequently, the quality of wood used in furniture has declined as trees are selected primarily for their speed of grown and turkeys, hens and pigs are routinely bred to develop so quickly that their legs cannot sustain their weight. In consuming living resources faster than they can be reproduced, Brennan argues that consumer society constitutes a danger to its own survival as well as that of others.

The first edition of this book drew attention to food miles, citing the example of the cost of strawberry yoghurt (Paxton, 1994). To produce the yoghurt and transport this to a central distribution outlet in South Germany, strawberries were transported from Poland, yoghurt from North Germany, corn and wheatflour from the Netherlands, jam from West Germany and sugarbeet from the east of the country. The aluminium cover for the strawberry jar was manufactured 300 km away from the yoghurt producer. Only the milk and glass were produced locally. This was recognised as a general trend in the 1990s, when it was found that the distance food was transported had increased by 50 per cent between 1978 and 1993 (Paxton, 1994: 18/19). Since the 1990s a host of small-scale initiatives have developed to produce and source goods locally. However, it should be noted that the issue of food miles is compatible with a capitalist market orientation. Walmart for instance, have paid close attention to minimizing food miles as a means of increasing efficiency!

Developments which have led to food miles becoming an issue have occurred because of a decrease in the ‘real’ (economic) cost of transportation, which does not consider the real environmental costs of replacing resources that are used up in transporting the materials nor the environmental effects of pollution occasioned by this. World Systems Theorists argue that economics and ecology are two sides of the same coin, when one thinks of relations between core and peripheral economies. Prices are determined for the extraction of commodities based the low wage rates determined in the peripheral economy, whilst those for the finished goods are based on the higher rates charged by core economies. Raw materials such as precious metals, which are cannot be replaced in a thousand human lifetimes, are transferred at rock-bottom prices to wealthier counties. In this view, technology is a machine for redistributing time and space, or to put it another way, the technomass is a means to drain the biomass (Homburg, 2001).

Creation of Non-places

A peculiar secondary effect of this process is that in the process of tearing down spatial barriers, new spaces are created, which Augé (1995) calls non-places, or spaces for travelling through. Take for example the space of the railway. When railways were first constructed in the USA and in Europe they opened up vast tracts of land that were hitherto inhospitable and inaccessible. To provide access to these spaces and reduce the time taken to reach them, the new space of the railway itself had to be built, including the panoply of stations, tracks, rolling stock and manufacturing facilities for these. Raw materials had to be procured and often transported great distances to construct this infrastructure, and indeed to construct the transport that conveyed them. Similarly motorcars require spaces (roads, roundabouts, junctions, bypasses, petrol stations, garages, manufacturing facilities) which themselves take up a large amount of space. The hyperspace created by the Internet is an especially interesting phenomenon as it not only creates a virtual ‘space’ for global villagers to interact with one another simultaneously, but its nodes are progressively invading real spaces in homes, offices and in other media.

A new category of non-place was created because of the financial crash in 2008 when the property values in the USA, Ireland and Dubai plummeted, resulting in a landscape peppered with ghostlike zombie developments consisting of half-built housing estates, tower-blocks and retail developments.

Time-Space Compression

Speed-up of production cycles and transportation leads to time–space compression. The turnover time of production reduces steadily as distributive and communications technologies speed up, to the extent that spatial barriers such as the effect of distance, have almost entirely collapsed. There have been parallel developments in the areas of exchange and consumption with the advent of electronic banking. Nowadays the idea of a ‘global village’ appears to be closer than ever to describing the reality. As a result of these changes, Harvey argues that the world has seemed to fold in upon itself, to collapse inwards and shrink. The effects of time-space compression on different groups are discussed below.

Consumers

Just like the early Puritans, individuals today are constantly pressed with the value of time, believing that time is money. Consumers say that they value time, but will often trade this for money, by working overtime or taking a second job. Schor argues that we have forgotten the real worth of time. She reminds us that during the Industrial Revolution workers struggled against the very idea of the attempt to introduce time discipline. Nowadays, most people treat time as a commodity like any other, which can be bought and sold. Rather than valuing their free time and being resistant to time-discipline, workers fight for overtime, or the right to sell as much of their free time as they can. This is why more Americans are working longer hours than their predecessors. She argues that in previous times and even in the medieval period, which was exceptional in history, there was much more room for leisure and enjoyment.

Schor’s main argument is that the key incentive structures of capitalist economies contain biases towards long working hours. Consumerism is central to her explanation, which is that a large proportion of the population of the USA has become entrapped in an insidious cycle of work-spend (1991: 113). She suggests that as consumers have become accustomed to the material rewards of prosperity, their desire for leisure time has been eroded and they increasingly look to consumption to provide satisfaction and meaning in their lives. As a result, in both the workplace and the home, progress has translated into the consumption of more goods and services rather than more free time.

The Squirrel-Wheel of Work-Spend

Are we trapped on a squirrel-wheel of work-spend? There is insufficient space to deal fully with this question here and so only a few pointers can be made. There was considerable consensus amongst the authors of a report published by UK interest group Demos, that fundamental changes in perceptions of time and space are underway in the age of the Internet. Pahl (1995: 15) mentions new illnesses which have accompanied this transformation, which he calls generically, ‘hurry sickness’, which he says is triggered by an exaggerated sense of urgency. He quotes an American study which found that computer-related distress manifests itself in a form of ‘temporal schizophrenia’, whereby people who move in and out of computer time become less tolerant of interruptions, more impatient and less capable of slow reflection. Although published in the UK, the authors suggest this to be a global trend. They note that the number of hours worked in developed countries decreased steadily during the course of the twentieth century until 1980 – a significant date, because that is at the time when neoliberal governments were first elected. The trend then into reverse, with hour rising in the USA, Canada, Sweden and the UK (thus confirming Schor’s findings). In complete contrast, Ferguson argues that, ‘Europeans today are the idlers of the world’ (Ferguson, 2011: 265), with fewer members in the labour force, shorter workdays and longer holidays than in the USA or China. His message contradicts that of the Demos group, by asserting that since 1979, European working hours have decreased by almost one fifth. He argues that today the average German works 16% fewer hours than the average American, who works roughly the same number of hours as the average Japanese worker, while those South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore work longer hours.

Happiness?

Schor claims that despite being materially better off, consumers are no happier today than in previous generations (Indeed she quotes two polls which suggest this peaked in 1957!) Key to her argument is that longer hours of work are not driven by the free choices of individuals but by the demands of capital. Although the Demos collection of articles is somewhat dated these authors argue that the greatest potential is for change in how consumers spend their free time. One contributor argues that ‘the economists’ belief that money buys happiness is largely wrong’ (Mulgan & Wilkinson, 1995: 12). This is not to say that changes in income do not give joy and sorrow, but that people adapt rather quickly to any level of income and the new level becomes the standard for assessing their wellbeing. This is like the analogy of the ‘squirrel- wheel’, the cycle of work–spend, discussed by Schor (1991).

If as neoliberals suggest, happiness is linked to one’s relative standing measured by income and wealth, then the European and American middle classes must presently be feeling rather unhappy relative to the position of the 1% (Wolff et al., 2012). Zygmunt Bauman (1995) might argue that the super-rich are even more anxious given that anxiety, which he links to over-choice, is central to the psychology of the consumer. This is not simply a matter of choice of what to buy. Rather this refers to the decline of traditional community and family life, leading to the constant negotiation of roles within households (although much of this burden, including childcare, shopping and house maintenance, seems still to fall on women). Samms (1995) agrees, arguing that consumers, and primarily women, report that they are ‘over-choiced’, experiencing severe time pressure, gaining little enjoyment from shopping or from basic household management. This is supported by research from the Henley Centre, which suggested that UK women on average ‘work’ for 86 hours each week, compared to 71 hours for males.

Anxiety is further compounded by institutional reflexivity (Giddens, 2001). While modern institutions such as science aim to produce a secure foundation for knowledge, they are governed by the principle of doubt, which means that no matter how cherished and apparently well-established a given scientific fact may be, it is always capable of being revised or even discarded at some time in the future, considering new findings. The reflexivity of science is existentially troubling to ordinary individuals who must live in a world where whatever passes for ‘truth’ must always be placed in doubt. This is exacerbated by the fact that today the consumer is disembedded from community, which means that he or she must place increasing faith on distant experts (for example the engineering expertise that produces the food which we eat, which offers us advice about which food is currently dangerous). Unfortunately, expert opinion is often divided. Additionally, the credibility of experts has been seriously eroded following a number of major food-scares involving E. Coli in eggs, listeria, BSE and foot and mouth disease. Late modern consumers are thus faced with the position of having to assume an almost unbearable responsibility for their own consumption.

Finally, there are arguments that since its development smartphone technologies have effectively “rewired” the brains of children, with the result that they have lost the motivation to play and to explore with their friends. For instance, Haidt (2024) argues that a consequence is a steep rise in mental disorders diagnosed in young adults.

Voluntary Simplifiers

The voluntary simplicity lifestyle Elgin (1993) emphasizes values of ecological responsibility and self-sufficiency. Voluntary simplifiers often start out as well-positioned rationalized consumers whose frenetic lifestyle leads them to re-evaluate their position and ultimately to make the decision to live a frugal life to free themselves of the clutter of too many possessions and instead to live a ‘frugal’ life that is close to nature. By comparison with the voluntary simplifier, the life of the consumer is either involuntarily or voluntarily complex, in that he or she actively enjoys or stoically endures the complexities of managing life in contemporary consumer society. Rudmin and Kilbourne (1996) have written an insightful piece on the paradoxical position of voluntary simplifiers. The risk, and indeed the likelihood for the rationalized consumer who seeks to become a voluntary simplifier is that they end up being ‘involuntary simplifiers’ and join the ranks of the poor who have no choice but to be poor. The position of voluntary simplicity is thus perched on the edge between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Consequently the voluntary simplicity lifestyle may appear to have a false or ersatz quality to it; to the poor, they may seem to be rich people who are merely playing at poverty; to their ex-colleagues in business or journalism, they may seem to be foolish, or even crazy.

Anti-consumers: Revolutionaries and Fundamentalists

Anti-consumerist groups occupy a variety of stances against what they perceive to be the dangers of consumerism. Bauman argues that the fundamentalist identity arises as a reaction against the forces of modernism, and especially the consumer culture. To fundamentalists, consumer society represents a major threat to the idea of the good society. In this view consumerism evokes the stereotype of a decadent, idolatrous, Western lifestyle based on values of hedonism, materialism, secularity and rampant individualism that poses deep threats to the ordering of life according to principles of religion and tradition. John Parachini,(1993) quotes investigative reporter Steven Emerson’s description of the “9/11” hijackers; “They feel they are surrounded by a common Enemy, Westerners and their values (ibid.: 40). When Islamic State claimed responsibility for murdering of 23 tourists in Tunisia on 18th March 2015, that evening’s BBC News quoted sections of their statement describing the tourists as ‘evil’ and ‘idolatrous’. However, there is not only a very modern aspect to the staging of these acts of terror. As Bauman notes, the appellation of fundamentalism is a misnomer, in that the staging of such horrific events is a very modern business, involving an idolatry of image management that in other contexts, the same perpetrators so violently denounce. There is a certain cruel irony at work in that that several of those who supposedly acted in the name of religion to attack what they described as a decadent “Western” lifestyle, had themselves previously indulged in the very culture of louche-living, booze, commodities and easy sex they later savagely repudiated.

While fundamentalists reach for the immutable values of religion, revolutionaries are future-oriented in seeking to transcend the capitalist order. The revolutionary identity is thus modern to the extent that its aims are in ‘sympathy’ with the modernizing process concerned with undoing and transcending the existing order. Che Guevara is an exemplar of the classic revolutionary figure who sought to raise the consciousness of South American peasants to further the cause of communism and the overthrow of capitalism. As Manuel Castells (1997) notes, the composition of revolutionary groups is not at all clear cut. The Zapatista revolutionary movement which has had a large amount of success in the Chiapas region of Mexico was composed of at least two groups of people, of radical left-wing intellectuals who saw the revolution as the path to a better society, and of peasants who on the contrary wanted to gain entry to the consumer society.

The time-rich poor

It scarcely makes sense to ask if the poor are contented. For some, perhaps a budding voluntary simplifier, the idea of belonging to a primitive peasant community may provide a warm glow of nostalgia. However for the vast majority, the idea that people are ‘poor but happy’ is a dangerous myth. Schor postulates that while it could be argued that everyone has 24 hours in each day, money skews the distribution of time to some extent, in that wealthier people live longer. The sale of time undermines its egalitarianism. Those with money can economize on it by hiring people to wait on them and watch their children. Those whose time is being sold are less economically well situated, as happened earlier in the nineteenth century when growth of the middle classes increased the demand for servants. Establishing a right to free time may sound utopian, but it is not legal to sell oneself into slavery. For the underclass, including those on welfare and illegal immigrants seeking to improve their lot, time may thus be an even more scarce resource than it is for the wealthy. However if a person lives according to the welfare rules and does no additional work, it may be the abundance of time which weighs heavily upon them. While the challenge for the consumer is to have enough time in the day to complete all the task which they need to do, those on welfare have an abundance of time but nothing to fill it with.

Degree Zero of Time-Space Compression: Living in an eternal present?

The vertiginous acceleration associated with continuous speed-up has led to changing perceptions of space and time. Nowadays one can be in several places at the same time. One might be in a lecture and one might also be texting photos to one’s friend who is five thousand miles away. The proliferation of spaces of consumption and the reduced friction of distance leads to the impression that time has slowed down and we are living in an eternal present. For example, while once we ate what was readily available in each season, such as strawberries in the summer and apples and pears in the autumn, technology now enables us to consume whatever we want all year round, One can talk of the re-creation of the present with respect to changes in patterns of work and reproduction. For example there has been a blurring between home and workplace as more people work from home and at the weekend and are also engaged in some form of ongoing education or training programme. Instead of having a fixed period for having and raising children, child-bearing is spread into the late 40s, 50s and even 60s.

The ‘24-hour city’, is argued by some as logical response to contemporary lifestyles. Franco Bianchini argues that these trends include the ‘new consumerism’ of those in relatively high-paid jobs who are working longer hours and who find it difficult to access the services they need during the day. Robert E. Lane suggests that a more powerful logic for this development lies in its ability to offer a clearly visible goal which seems to address a number of problems. This view of the future promises great efficiencies in fields such as tourism or transport by reducing the need for investment at peak loading of summer time or the morning rush hour. It promises genuine full-time operation for manufacturing, distribution and retailing with obvious benefits for productivity. Pressures in this direction are giving rise to the creation of a more ‘flexible’ workforce.

Temporal order is also disrupted through retro-marketing through the constant recycling of images and styles. In one year perhaps the 1980s genre will predominate; the next it is the 1950s and the year after that style may be modelled on some futuristic sci-fi image. Some authors argue that the net effect of such constant recycling not only exacerbates feelings of impermanence and the ephemeral nature of images, it also evokes the feeling that we live in an era which constantly recycles the styles of all the eras that have ever been and some that have yet to be (as in the recycling of styles based on fantasies). In a peculiar way, it seems not only that time is standing still, but that it is being consumed by space, by the spaces of consumption.

Discussion

The previous section has considered a predominantly ‘Marxist’ explanation for changing relations between space and time. The idea of the fetishism of commodities focuses our attention upon the inequality and exploitation present in hidden spaces of production far away from the glitz and ‘equality’ of the marketplace. In this sense the activities of global brands such as McDonald’s come into focus not as steamrollers which act to ‘level down’ culture, but in relation to the exploitation carried out as part of the process of production.

This argument appreciates that consumers may want quality products at cheap prices but goes further to insist that this very availability blinds them to the exploitation of people and other inputs into the production process. When you are hungry, want something to eat and have a couple of pounds or dollars in your pocket, the last questions on your mind will be whether the cow had a good life and whether it was reared at the expense of the destruction of virgin rainforest. It is in this sense that one can argue that the overwhelming presence of the marketplace draws a veil over the conditions in which commodities are produced.

On the other hand the idea of the annihilation of space through time, coupled with notions of speed-up and time–space compression create a vertiginous feeling. This comes close to Anthony Giddens’ description of late modern society as a ‘runaway world’. The need to constantly outdo the competition in the drive for profit leads to the constant relocation of capital as it chases lower costs, resulting in feelings of insecurity among workers. This also provides the motor for constant changes in fashion, in the recycling of images to promote these and in the creation of new services. Such processes increase the separation of space from time through the constant recycling of fashions and images.

Conclusion

One might argue that each of the approaches discussed above are useful in illustrating different aspects of contemporary life in consumer society. The ‘Weberian’ focus on rationalization draws our attention to certain aspects of contemporary society – the drive to understand and control the world and make it predictable through being able better to understand it. It allows us to realize the thoroughgoing rationalization of time and space which has occurred during modernity, from the creation of time-zones to overtime, quality time, post-codes and those digitized spaces where much of our ‘personal’ details are kept on file. While this approach can also make a valuable contribution towards understanding the impact which the rationalization of science has made on daily life, it tends to ignore reflexivity, the principle of doubt which drives science forward. Perhaps most of all Weber was prescient in noting that, once Puritanism was stripped of its religious ethic, what was worn like a ‘light cloak’ by the pilgrim would become like the ‘shell on a snail’s back’ for the consumer.

On the other hand the ‘Marxist’ analysis draws our attention to dynamism and flux; a world unmade and in perpetual motion. It calls our attention to the ways in which the marketplace, while purporting to offer freedom and a kind of equality, fosters oppression and exploitation in the circuit of production. It also provides a means for understanding the truly dramatic implications of speed-up for all aspects of our lives.

References

Alwitt, Linda (1996). Marketing and the Poor. In Ronald Paul Hill (ed.), Marketing and Consumer Research in the Public Interest, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage: 69-87.

Arnould, Eric & Craig Thompson (2005). Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty years of research, Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 31(4): 868-882.

Atkins, PJ (1993). How the West End was won: The struggle to remove street barriers in Victorian London, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 19(3):265-277.

Augé, Marc (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, London: Verso.

Barber, Benjamin R. (2007). Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantalize adults and swallow citizens whole. New York & London: W.W, Norton.

Baudrillard, Jean (1988). orig. 1970 Consumer Society, pp. 29–55. In Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Burrell, Gibson (1997) Pandemonium: Towards a retro-organization theory, London: Sage.

Bauman, Zygmunt (1995). Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Belk, Russell R. (1997). Been There, Done That, Bought the Souvenirs: Of Journeys and Boundaries, pp. 22–46. In Stephen Brown and Darach Turley (eds), the Consumer Research: Postcards from Edge, London: Routledge.

Benjamin, Walter (1999) The arcades project, Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge MA; London: Belknap Press.

Benzeval, Michaela, Ken Judge and Margaret Whitehead (1995). Tackling Inequalities in Health, London: King’s Fund Publishing.

Berman, Marshall (1982). All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experiences of Modernity, London: Verso.

Bianchini, Franco (1995). The 24-hour City, p. 47. In The Time Squeeze, Demos, 5.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press.

Burrell, Gibson (1991). Pandemonium: Towards a Retro-Organization Theory, London: Sage.

Brennan, Teresa (1994). History After Lacan, London: Routledge.

Bywater, Michael (2006). Big babies or: Why can’t we just grow up, London: Granta

Campbell, Colin (1987) The romantic ethic and the modern spirit of consumerism. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Campbell, Colin (1997). ‘Shopping and the Sex War’. In Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, London: Sage.

Campbell, Colin (1987). The romantic ethic and the modern spirit of consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Castells, Manuel (1997). The Power of Identity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Cinquin, Chantal (1987). Homo Coca-Colens, in Jean Umiker-Sebeok (ed.), Marketing and Semiotics, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Conway G. (1997) The doubly green revolution: Food for all in the twenty-first century, London: Penguin Books.

Cova, Bernard (1997). Community and Consumption: Towards a Definition of the Linking Value of Products and Services, European Journal of Marketing, vol. 31, no. 3/4: 297–316.

Cova, Bernard (1999). Tribal Marketing: A Latin Deconstruction of a Northern Construction.

Presented to the First International Conference on Critical Management Studies, UMIST, Manchester, 14–16 July.

Cross, Gary (1995). The All-Consuming Work Ethic, pp. 21–2. In, The Time Squeeze, Demos, 5.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1977). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, 2nd edn, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

D’Silva, Joyce (1998). BST – A Distressing Product: An analysis of the health and welfare problems of dairy cows injected with BST, Petersfield: Compassion in World Farming.

D’Silva, Joyce & Peter Stevenson (1995). Modern Breeding Technologies and the Welfare of Farm Animals, Petersfield: Compassion in World Farming.

Danesi, Marcel (1994). Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, University of Toronto Press.

Dichter, Ernest (1960). The Strategy of Desire, New York: Doubleday.

Eco, Umberto (1995). Apocalypse Postponed: Essays by Umberto Eco, Robert Lumley (Ed.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Elgin, Duane (1993). orig. 1981 Voluntary Simplicity: Towards a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, New York: William Morrow & Co/Quill.

Evans, Alex (2009) The feeding of the nine billion.: global food security in the 21st century. London: Chatham House

Ewen, Stuart (1976). Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Falk, Pasi (1994). The Consuming Body, London: Sage.

FAO (1996) Towards a new green revolution, Natural Resources Management and Environmental Department. Food For All: World Food Summit- Agricultural Machinery Worldwide. Rome: 13th-17th November. http://www.fao.org/docrep/x0262e/x0262e06.htm

Ferguson, Niall (2004) Colossus: The rise and fall of the American empire, London: Penguin.

Fine, Reuben (1986). Narcissism, The Self and Society, New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Arnold I. Davidson. (Ed.) Graham Burchell (Trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, Michel (2004) Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, David Macey (Trans.), London: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel (1988). Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Random House.

Foucault, Michel (1982) The subject and power. Critical Enquiry, vol. 8(4): 777-795

Foucault, Michel (1979) On governmentality. I&C, vol. 6:5-22.

Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Peregrine, Penguin Books.

Foxall, Gordon and Paul Hackett (1994). Consumers’ Perceptions of Micro-Retail Location. In

Mark Jenkins and Simon Knox (eds), Advances in Consumer Marketing, London: Kogan Page

Fredriksson, Cecilia (1997). The Making of a Swedish Department Store Culture. In Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, London: Sage.

Friedman, Thomas (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree, London: HarperCollins.

Fukuyama, Francis (1992). The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin.

Ganetz, Halevi (1995). The Shop, the Home and Femininity as Masquerade. In John Formas and Goran Bolin (eds), Youth Culture in Late Modernity, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Giddens, Anthony (1999). Runaway World: How globalisation is shaping our Lives, London: Profile Books.

Godfray, H. Charles, John R. Beddington, Ian Crute, Lawrence Haddad, David Lawrence, James Muir, Jules Pretty, Sherman Robinson, Sandy Thomas & Camilla Toulmin (2010) ‘Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion’. Science, 327, no. 5967: 812-818.

Gokhale, Jagadeesh (2014). The government debt iceberg, London: Institute of International Affairs.

Goodland, Robert and Jeff Anhang (2009) Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are…cows, pigs and chickens? World Watch, November-December.

Goss, Jon (1992). Modernity and Post-Modernity in the Retail Landscape. In Kay Anderson and Fay Gayle (eds), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, Cheshire: Longman.

Harvey, David (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hawking, Stephen (1988). A Brief History of Time, New York: Bantam Dell Publishing.

Holbrook, Maurice B. (1997) Walking on the Edge’, pp. 46–78. In Stephen Brown and Darach Turley (eds), Consumer Research: Postcards from the Edge, London: Routledge.

Hornburg, Alf (2001). The power of the machine: Global inequalities of Economy, Technology and Development, Rowman, Altamira.

Jary, David (2010) The McDonaldizing of sport and leisure, pp. 116-135, in, Barry Smart (ed.) Resisting McDonaldization, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.

Joy, Annamma, & Melanie Wallendorf (1996), "The Development of Consumer Culture in the Third World: Theories of Globalism and Localism," in eds. Russell W. Belk, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Alladi Venkatesh, Consumption and Marketing: Macro Dimensions, Cincinnati: South-Western College Publishing, 104-142.

Ikerd, John (1999a). Organic Agriculture Faces the Specialization of Production Systems; Specialized Systems and the Economic Stakes. Presented at, Organic Agriculture Faces the Specialization of Production Systems, sponsored by Jack Cartier Center, Lyon, 6–9 December.

Ikerd, John (1999b). The Real Economics of Factory Livestock. Presented at the 1999 Big River/Clean Water Week, sponsored by the Sierra Club, Washington DC, 10–15 June.

Jhally, Sut (1990). orig. 1987 The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, New York and London: Routledge.

Joy, Annamma and Melanie Wallendorf (1996). The Development of Consumer Culture in the Third World. In R. Belk, N. Dholakia and A. Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro-Marketing Dimensions, Ohio: South-Western College Publishing and International Thomson.

Kalberg, Stephen (1980) Max Weber’s :Cornerstones for the analysis of rationalization in history. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 85(5): 1145-1179.

Kamenka, Eugene (1969). Marxism and Ethics, London: Macmillan (now Palgrave).

Kellner, Douglas (1999) Theorising/resisting McDonaldization: a multiperspectivist approach, pp. 186-206, in, Barry Smart (ed.) Resisting McDonaldization, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.

Kellner, Douglas (1992) Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities, ch 6, pp. 141177, in Scott Lash & Jonathan Friedman (eds.) Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell.

Lane, Robert E. (1995).‘Time Preferences, the Economics of Work and Leisure, pp. 12–14, in, The Time Squeeze, Demos, 5.

Lash, Scott and John Urry (1994). Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage.

Levitt, Theodore (1986). The Marketing Imagination, London and New York: Free Press and Macmillan (now Palgrave).

Lipsitz, George (1986). The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 1(4):355-387.

McCarthy, James & Scott Prudham (2004). Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism. Geoform, vol. 35: 275-283.

McClure, SM; J Li, D Tomlin, KS Cypert, LM Montague and (2004 Neural correlates of behavioural predicates for culturally familiar drinks. Neuron, vol. 44(2)379-387. Doi 10.1016/j.neuron2004.09.019

McCracken, Grant (1990). Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

McKay, George (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, London: Verso.

Maffesoli, Michel (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, London: Sage.

Miller, Peter & Nikolas Rose (2008) Governing the present, Cambridge: Polity Press.

United Nations (2014). Human Development Report: Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience. New York: UNDP, July. ISBN 978-92-1-126368-

Maritime Knowledge Centre, (2012). International shipping facts and figures – information resources on trade, safety, security, environment, 6th March. http://www.imo.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/ShipsAndShippingFactsAndFigures/TheRoleandImportanceofInternationalShipping/Documents/International%20Shipping%20-%20Facts%20and%20Figures.pdf

Malyon, Tim (1998). Tossed in the Fire and They Never Got Burned, The Exodus Collective, pp. 187–207. In George McKay (ed.), DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, London: Verso.

Marcus, Hazel Rose and Barry Schwartz (2010). Does choice mean freedom and wellbeing? Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 37(2):344-355.

Marsh, Alan and Stephen McKay (1994). Poor Smokers, London: Policy Studies Institute.

Miller, Daniel (1996). The Myth of Cultural Erosion. In R. Belk, N. Dholakia and A. Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro-Marketing Dimensions, Ohio: South-Western College Publishing and International Thompson.

Miller, Daniel (1998). Coca Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad, pp. 169–89. In Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, London: UCC Press.

Mukerji, Chandra (1983). From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism, New York: Columbia University Press.

Mulgan, Geoff and Helen Wilkinson (1995). Well Being and Time, pp. 2–11. In, The Time Squeeze, Demos, 5.

Mullainathan, Sendhil & Eldar Shafir (2013). Scarcity: The true cost of not having enough, London: Penguin.

O’Brien (2014) The middle class is poorer today than it was in 1989. The Washington Post, October 1st: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/01/the-middle-class-is-poorer-today-than-it-was-in-1989/

O’Neill, John (2010) Have you had your theory today?, pp. 41-57, in, Barry Smart (ed.) Resisting McDonaldization, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.

OXFAM (2016) An economy for the 1% : How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme poverty and inequality and how this can be stopped. Briefing paper 210, 18th January.https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-en_0.pdf

Packard, Vance Oakley (1960) The Hidden Persuaders, London: Free Penguin.

Pahl, Ray (1995). Finding Time to Live, pp. 15–16, in The Time Squeeze, Demos, 5.

Parachini, John V. (2000). The World Trade Centre Bombers, Cambridge OH: MIT Press.

Parker, Martin (1997). Nostalgia and Mass Culture: McDonaldization and Cultural Elitism. In, M. Alfino, J. Caputo and R. Wynard (eds), McDonaldization Revisited: Essays on the Commodification of Culture, Connecticut: Greenwood.

Passos, Nikos (2000). Global Anomie, Dysnomie, and Economic Crime: Hidden Consequences of Neoliberalism and Globalization in Russia and Around the World, Social Justice, vol. 27(2): 16-44.

Paxton, A. (1994). The Food Miles Report: The Dangers of Long-Distance Transport, Sustainable Agriculture, Food and the Environment (SAFE) London, September, 59 pp.

Piketty, Thomas (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Arthur Goldhammer (trans., ) Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Pilkington, Ed. (2010). How the Disney dream died in Celebration. Guardian Online, Dec. 13th:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/13/celebration-death-of-a-dream, accessed Feb. 2013.

Raban, Jonathan (1988). orig. 1974 Soft City, London: Collins Harvill.

Rarick, Charles (2007). Confucius on Management: Understanding Chinese Cultural Values and Managerial Practices. Journal of International Management Studies, August. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1082092

Reville, William (2010). There’s no time like the present. Irish Times, November 4th: 18.

Smart, Barry (1999) Resisting McDonaldization: Theory, Process, Critique, ch 1, pp.1-22, in Resisting McDonaldization, London, Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Rheingold, Howard (1994). The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized

World, London: Secker and Warburg.

Ritzer, George (2010) Enchanting a disenchanted world: Continuity and change in the cathedrals of consumption, Los Angeles, London: Sage

⁵¹Ritzer, George (1993). The McDonaldization of Society, Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press

Rose Nikolas, (1999) The powers of freedom: reframing the political, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rudmin, FW and W. Kilbourne (1996). The meaning and morality of Voluntary Simplicity: History and hypotheses on deliberately denied materialism. In R. Belk, N. Dholakia and A. Venkatesh (eds), Consumption and Marketing: Macro-Marketing Dimensions, Ohio: South-Western College Publishing, International Thomson.

Safran-Foer, Jonathan (2009). Eating animals, London: Hamish Hamilton.

Samms, Carol (1995). Time in the Global Village, pp. 35–6, In The Time Squeeze, Demos,5.

Schwarzkopf, Stefan (2015) Measurement devices and the psychophysiology of consumer behaviour: a posthuman genealogy of neuromarketing. Biosocieties, vol. 10(4): 465-482.

Schama, Simon (1987). The embarrassment of riches, London: William Collins.

Shepard, J., Chung, C. & M Dollinger, (1989). Max Weber Revisited: Some Lessons from East Asia Capitalistic Development, Asian-Pacific Journal of Management, vol. 2,(6), 307-322.

Schor, Elizabeth (1991). The overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure, New York: Basic Books.

Sennett, Richard (1998). The corrosion of character, New York & London: W.W. Norton, in

Serpell, J.A., (1999c). Sheep in wolves' clothing? attitudes to animals among farmers and scientists, pp. 26-33, in: Dolins, F. (ed.) Animal Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Silverstone, Roger (ed.) (1997) Visions of Suburbia, London: Routledge.

Simmel (1978) The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Smart, Barry (1999). Resisting McDonaldization: Theory, Process and Critique, pp. 1–22. In Barry Smart (ed.), Resisting McDonaldization, London: Sage.

Steinfield, Hanning, Harold A. Mooney, Fritz Schneider & Laurie E. Neville (2010) ‘Livestock in a changing landscape: Drivers, consequences and responses’. Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) (Two vols.). Washington DC: Island Press.

Ufkes, Frances M. (1995). Lean and Mean: US Meat-Packing in an Era of Agro-Industrial Restructuring. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 13: 683–705.

United Nations (2012) World urbanization prospects: the 2011 revision. Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, March, New York: United Nations. Http WUP2011_Highlights.pdf

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision. Department of Economic and Social Affairs.https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

United Nations (2014) Human Development Report: Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, UNDP.http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-report-2014

UNDP (2015) Human Development Report: Work for human development, UNDP http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2015_human_development_report.pdf

UNDP (2019) Human Development Report: Beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today.: Inequalities in human development in the 21st century.

UNDP (2020). The next frontier: Human development and the Anthropocene. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2020.pdf

Venkatesh, Alladi (1994) Gender Identity in the Indian Context: A Sociohistorical Construction of the Female Consumer, pp. 11–42, in Costa, Janeen (ed.), Gender Issues and Consumer Behaviour, London and New York: Sage.

Walkerdine, Valerie & Peter Basel (2010). Neoliberalism, work and subjectivity: Towards a more complex account, in Margaret Wetherell & Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Identities, ch. 25: 492-507

Weber, Max (1930). orig. 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, London: George Allen & Unwin.

Weber, Max (1947). The Theory of Economic and Social Organization Being Part I of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft, trans. A.R. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, London and Edinburgh: Hodge.

Wolff, Edward N.; Ajit Zacharias & Thomas Masterson (2012a). Trends in American Living Standards and Inequality, 1959-2007. The Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 58(2):197-232.

Wolff, Edward N. (2012). The asset price meltdown and the wealth of the middle class. NBER Working Paper No. 12559, November: National Bureau of Economic Research,

Worden, Skip (2010). Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian thought on profit and wealth, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield

¹ Adapted from Bourdieu (1977) Fig. 3: 134

² World Values Survey: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

³ UNDP (2020: 6).

⁴ See Sen, A. (1970). Collective choice and social welfare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Sen, A. (1992). Inequality re-examined. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York, NY: Knopf;, A. (2003). Democracy and its global roots: Why democratization is not the same as westernization. The New Republic, 229(14), 28–35.

⁵ Sen, A. (1995) Rationality and human choice. The American Economic Review, vol. 85(1):1-24: 15.

⁶ See UNDP (2020), Figure 4, The Covid-19 Pandemic’s Unprecedented Shock to Human Development: 7.

⁷ See United Nations (2015: 67) for data relating to 2015-2100.

⁸ Source: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (1996) Towards a new green revolution. National Resources Management and Environmental Department, World Summit, 13th-17th November.http://www.fao.org/docrep/x0262e/x0262e06.htm

⁹ See Mooney, (2010); Godfray et al., (2010).

¹⁰ Source: Conway, (1997)

¹¹ See Steinfield, (2006); Goodland & Anang, (2009).

¹² By comparison to ‘developed’ nations the following have TFRs well above replacement level; Democratic Republic of Congo ( 6.0),Central African Republic, (6.1) Cote D’Avoire (4.3), Equatorial Guinea  (4.1), Ethiopia (4.0), Eritrea, (3.7), Gabon, (3.6). Source: World Bank, 2026.

¹³ Ferguson, 2004: 270.

14 Source: Holy, 1992: (236).

15 See for example John Lichfield (2004) “Unleashing hell on the neighbours.” www.independent.co.uk 18th May. I found similar threads on Facebook for 2009/10 – then more recently in posts in 2019. The furore seems to have died down since then, with posts beginning to suggest that rudeness should be expected!

16 United Nations Human Development Report (2015: 87).

17 Source: World Bank, 2016. Air Passengers Carried http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR

¹⁸ UNCTAD (2021) COVID-19 cuts global trade: Transforms industry, Fig. 1: Development of International maritime trade and global output, 2006-2020. https://unctad.org/news/covid-19-cuts-global-maritime-trade-transforms-industry Accessed July 2021.

¹⁹ These figures are for 2015. China Daily (2016) China’s car ownership reaches 172 million. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/motoring/2016-01/26/content_23253925.htm

20 United Nations (2015). The Millennium Development Goals Report. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20rev%20(July%201).pdf

21 Irvin, (2008: 16)

²² OXFAM, (2026). Billionaire wealth jumps three times faster in 2025 to highest peak ever sparking dangerous political inequality says OXFAM, 19th Jan.

²³ Reich, Robert, (2015) Inequality and Labor Markets. In UNDP, (2015) Human Development Report: Work for human development, 66. https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/2015humandevelopmentreport1.pdf

²⁴ ibid.: 12.

²⁵ Source: Pireu, Michel (2016) What 10 million South Africans Struggling with Debt should know. Rand Daily Mail, 8th March: http://www.rdm.co.za/business/2016/03/08/what-10-million-south-africans-struggling-with-debt-should-know

²⁶ World Bank. Overview: The World Bank in South Africa. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/southafrica/overview. Accessed July 2021

²⁷ The phrase above is underlined because there is some dispute as to its precise meaning. Ritzer interprets this (following Talcott Parsons who translated the original text from the German) as meaning ‘iron-cage’. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argues that the meaning comes closer to ‘steel-cloak’; whereas Barry Smart (1999) suggests that the idea of the shell on a snail’s back is more acceptable.

²⁸ Source: Ewen, (1976).

²⁹ ibid.: 121.

³⁰ Ibid.: 124.

³¹ Ibid.: 130.

³² Ibid.: 131.

³³ Ibid.: 163.

³⁴ Blanding, Michael (2010) The Coke Machine: the dirty truth behind the world’s favourite drink. New York: Penguin.

³⁵ Ibid.: 313.

³⁶ McCarron, (2013).

37 http://booth.lse.ac.ik/

38 http://acorn.caci.co.uk. Webber is now associated with MOSAIC, which is a competitor to ACORN, http://www.experian.co.uk/marketing-services/products/mosaic-uk.html

39 Marsden (2001) seeks to apply Foucault to three areas of marketing: market research, information technology as a tool of surveillance; segmentation to categorize and target individuals; and advertising to direct messages.

⁴⁰ ‘Action Needed to Meet UKs Cookie Tracking Guideline. BBC News, 18th April 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17745938. Accessed May 2012.

⁴¹ Office for National Statistics (2013) Wealth in Great Britain Wave 2, The burden of household debt in at Britain. http://wealth.and.assets.survey@ons.gov.uk

⁴² Miller & Rose, 2008: 121-123.

⁴³ Ibid.: 130-131.

44 See Hawking, (1988), chapter 9.

⁴⁵ See Kline & Leiss (1978) Commodity Fetishism.

⁴⁶ I discuss the case of of Levi-Strauss further in chapter four of Desmond (2025).

⁴⁷ Samlanchith Chanthavong, (2002) Chocolate and Slavery: Slavery in the Cote D’Ivoire, TED Case Studies Number 664, 2002.

⁴⁸ Royal College of Nursing, (2012). Health inequalities and the social determinants of health. Policy Briefing 1/12: Cavendish Square: London

⁴⁹ National Obesity Observatory (2012) Adult obesity and socioeconomic status, September: 4. www.noo.uk

⁵⁰ Source: Health Inequalities, 1997, Table 15.9, page 205.

⁵¹