Louise Crewe

Geographies of retailing and consumption

In this, the first of three reports on geographies of retailing and consumption, I will attempt to map out and delimit the boundaries of this large and growing research area. From being one of the most undertheorized and ‘boring of fields’ (Blomley, 1996), retail geography has come to occupy a central position within social-scientific research. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the spaces, places and practices of consumption, circulation and exchange lie at the very heart of a reconstructed economic geography (Crang, 1997), and that retailing is in many ways redefining the economic and cultural horizons of contemporary Britain (Mort, 1995). Quite how such a transformation has occurred forms the basis of the following account. Part of the problem with early work in retail geography was its inability to take either its economic or its cultural geographies seriously, the result being a largely descriptive and all too often simplistic mapping of store location, location, location. While many cultural theorists, historians and anthropologists at the time were exploring the ways in which retailing and consumption spaces act as key sites for the (re)production of meanings and the constitution of identities (Leach, 1984; Wolff, 1985; Benson, 1986; Abelson, 1989; Buck-Morss, 1989; Dowling, 1991; Williamson, 1992), retail geographers were slow to interrogate the ways in which consumer spaces can be at once material sites for commodity exchange and symbolic and metaphoric territories. The result was that retail geographies throughout much of the 1980s remained woefully undertheorized (Blomley, 1996). This early emphasis on retailers and store location activities served to ‘misrepresent both the wider structure of the commodity channel and the status of consumption in shaping retail change’ (Clarke, 1996: 295). However, the decade of the 1990s was a period when a reconstructed retail geography began to take shape, stimulated in part by Ducatel and Blomley’s (1990: 225) Progress in Human Geography 24,2 (2000) pp. 275–290

Identity, Mobility, and the Throwaway Society

This paper provides a critique of the concept of the throwaway society. Drawing on two years of intensive qualitative research, we argue that the concept of the throwaway society does not bear scrutiny. Rather than throwing things away households are shown consistently to engage in simultaneous practices of saving and wasting when getting rid of consumer objects. Saving and wasting are shown to be critical to materialising identities and the key social relations of family and home. Focusing on self, the couple relation, and the mother–child relation, we show how wasting things is intimately connected to the narration of self and to the enactment of specific love relations. The paper also shows how wasting things is central to moving home, constituting a surplus and then an excess of household possessions. The paper concludes by arguing that to understand the increasing amount of matter being turned to waste in the UK requires a focus on love relations and mobility, and not on the trajectories of things themselves.

Fashioning the City: Cultures of Consumption in Contemporary Urban Spaces

Abstract In this paper, we begin to unpack the cultural economies of urban regeneration in a former industrial quarter of a large English city, Nottinghams Lace Market. In this tightly defined urban space, the integration of culture and economic activity has been at the forefront of regeneration, and the area reveals a particular agglomeration of activities based around the production and consumption of fashion and design, media, architecture, and food and entertainment. Underpinning the revival of the area has been the development of defined networks of interlinked and embedded firms which cut across conventional production-consumption divides. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explore the role of cultural production and consumption in contemporary urban regeneration. The piece begins with a theoretical discussion of the cultural economy of cities in the 1990s. We then introduce Nottinghams Lace Market as a cultural quarter of the city and report the findings of detailed interview work with a wide range of cultural intermediaries and consumers, discussing the roles played by both producers and consumers in the cultural renaissance of the Lace Market. We conclude by evaluating the viability of a simultaneous economic and cultural strategy for urban regeneration.

On the reproduction of the musical economy after the Internet

The focus of this article is a crisis of reproduction that beset the contemporary popular music industry from the late 1990s onwards. In the early 21st century the music industry began to suffer from declining sales, negative growth and financial losses. Explanations internal to the music industry identified the cause of the crisis as the rise of Internet piracy, although the emergence of software formats, such as MP3, and Internet distribution systems is more accurately described as a ‘tipping point’ that brought into focus a set of deeper structural problems for the industry related to changing forms of popular music consumption. Drawing on research undertaken by the authors within US music companies, the article examines responses to the crisis in the form of three distinctive business models that represent different strategies in the face of the contemporary crisis of the musical economy, an arena within which a range of experiments are being undertaken in an effort to develop new ways of generating income. Nevertheless, there is reluctance within the industry to embrace the more radical organizational changes that might allow it to fully accommodate the impact of software formats and Internet distribution systems. A key reason for this, we argue, is the stakes that the leaders of the major record companies have in the preservation of the current social order of the musical economy.

The Bargain, the Knowledge, and the Spectacle: Making Sense of Consumption in the Space of the Car-Boot Sale

We are concerned with making sense of the car-boot sale as an empirical and theoretical phenomenon. The paper is based on participant-observation field research, in-depth interviews, and site surveys and we start by challenging two of the most commonly held myths about car-boot sales; that these events arc all about ‘shady rogues’ disposing of volumes of dodgy gear onto an unsuspecting public, and that a preponderance of cheap goods means that car-boot sales are dominated by ‘tatt’ and disadvantaged sectors of society. Having examined patterns of purchasing within the car-boot sale, we consider how car-boot-sale goers themselves construct and participate within the space of the boot sale. At one level, this construction is shown to involve the use both of accumulated and of local knowledge and to be open to interpretation as illustrative of competitive individualism, Another reading of the car-boot sale, however, and one central to understanding the enduring popularity of this phenomenon, is its transgressive nature. The space of the car-boot sale is argued to be one where people come to play, where the conventions of retailing are suspended, and where participants come to engage in and produce theatre, performance, spectacle, and laughter. We go on to examine the connections between the car-boot sale and the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, arguing that the car-boot sale needs to be read in multifarious ways: as a liminal space which encapsulates the carnivalesque, the festive, and the popular, which subverts convention and yet which, through its celebration of the free market and the unshackled individual, embraces facets of the dominant order. We then move on to comment on the broader significance of the car-boot-sale phenomenon for studies of consumption.

Shopping, space, and practice

In this paper we address questions of ‘shopping as practised’ and its relation to shopping space. We argue that modes of shopping, which comprise distinctive sets of shopping practices involving relations to goods (purchases), relations of looking (and seeing), the place of shopping in the rhythms of everyday life, and the socialities of shopping, are used to invest meaning in particular types of shopping space and to produce individual, accumulated, personalised shopping geographies that weave together particular locations and generic spaces. Furthermore, modes of shopping are shown to require specific sets of knowledge to practise and to relate to specific subject positions, namely necessity and choice. These arguments are developed in relation to charity shops and charity shopping. However, they are shown to have broader implications: specifically they show the relationality of modes of shopping and shopping spaces, and the distinctions between shopping geographies and retail geographies. Theoretically, they suggest that accounts of shopping need to locate meaning in practice; that the meanings of shopping (and the meanings invested in particular shopping spaces) are therefore potentially unstable; and that accounts of the constituting subjects of shopping need to take seriously the spatialities of subjectivities.

Gap on the Map? Towards a Geography of Consumption and Identity

The current blurring of the boundaries between economic, cultural, and social geography has placed issues of consumption and identity firmly on the research agenda. In this paper, we address the question of the spatiality of retailing and consumption and argue that emergent microgeographies of consumption are challenging the simplicity of the globalisation thesis. We argue that retailers are in the business of creating particular urban landscapes and that qualitative differences are emerging between areas as consumption centres. By focusing on the spatial outcomes of the complex mediation between retailers, advertisers, and consumers, we examine the complex political-economic relations which enable the production of consumption. The project is thus an attempt to mesh production-oriented and culturally derived understandings of consumption and identity.

Practices of Object Maintenance and Repair How consumers attend to consumer objects within the home

This article examines the practices of object maintenance in the home. Drawing on depth ethnographic research with households in north-east England, the article uses three object stories to show that ordinary consumer objects are continually becoming in the course of their lives in the home and that practices of object maintenance are central to this becoming. Located in a field of action and practice, consumer objects are shown to display traces of their consumption.The practices of object maintenance are shown to attempt to arrest these traces, not always successfully. A spectrum of practices of object maintenance is identified, ranging from routine cleaning, wiping and polishing, through quick-fix repair, to the more thorough-going restoration.The object stories show how restorative acts generally rekindle consumer objects; how other forms of repair (the quick-fix mask) are socially problematic, signalling the devaluation of objects; and how the failure of object maintenance can connect to the sabotage of objects.The success or failure of object maintenance is shown to have profound consequences for the social lives of consumer objects. More broadly, the article highlights the importance of consumer competences (and incompetence) with respect to object maintenance, and argues that object maintenance works to integrate consumption, connecting home interiors with acts of acquisition, purchase and ridding.

Markets, Design, and Local Agglomeration: The Role of the Small Independent Retailer in the Workings of the Fashion System

The fashion system, as a powerful cultural signifier, offers some important clues into the links between production and consumption change. In this paper, the workings of the fashion system are explored, with a focus on changing consumption patterns and new market trends, which may have the potential to even out the profoundly unequal relationship which exists between high-street multiples and small independent retailers. The suggestion is made that the fashion system is polarising at present, that design-led boutiques are enjoying renewed popularity. Not only is this benefiting local design talent, it is also a means of affording greater autonomy to local manufacturers. The emergence of one particular fashion agglomeration, the Nottingham Lace Market, is traced, with local linkage structures looked at through the interplay of manufacturers, designers, retailers, and local policymakers. In this way, an attempt is made to offer a more expansive investigation of flexible production systems, one which is not grounded exclusively in economic-centred narratives but which recognises that the factors which shape the development of local agglomerations are rooted in production and consumption shifts, and are dependent on multiple political, cultural, and economic discourses.

Performance and Possession Rethinking the Act of Purchase in the Light of the Car Boot Sale

This paper provides both an empirical account of the act of purchase within the car boot sale and an evaluation of the implications of these findings for theoretical debates on consumption. The paper begins by urging the need to rethink the act of purchase within consumption studies: whilst theoreti cal accounts have presumed much about the act of purchase, these same accounts are argued to exhibit serious deficiencies, some of which can be located in their assumption that the act of purchase (and consumption more generally) is confined to conventional retail environments. In contrast, car boot sale purchasing is shown to involve both separately and simultaneously theatricality and performance, unpredictability and the unexpected, skill, thrift and pleasure and desire. Furthermore, such characteristics are argued to exert considerable influence on the rituals of possession, personalization and re-enchantment that are shown to accompany much car boot sale pur chasing. We conclude the paper by emphasizing the continued need for research on consumption to connect the act of purchase to what is done with/to particular items; by examining the implications of our findings for theoretical narratives of risk; and by posing a number of questions for research on the act of purchase in conventional retail environments.