Margit Keller

What makes me cool? Estonian tweens' interpretative repertoires

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reveal how “cool” as a concept is constructed by urban tweens in the post‐socialist country Estonia.Design/methodology/approach – The data consist of 42 essays written by 12‐year‐old schoolchildren of a secondary school in Tallinn in 2007. Discourse analysis was used to discover interpretative repertoires, subject positions and ideological dilemmas in the essays.Findings – “Cool” is primarily constructed within three interpretative repertoires: cool as appearance, cool as leisure and cool as sports and hobbies. The main subject positions are young expert consumer, fun‐lover/pleasure‐seeker, achiever and creator. The main ideological dilemma is between individual distinction and fitting and merging into the group.Research limitations/implications – The essays are rather brief and normative statements of what qualifies as “cool”. However, a certain degree of social desirability constitutes the value of these texts, revealing what Estonian tweens consider to be norms...

Emerging Consumer Types in a Transition Culture: Consumption Patterns of Generational and Ethnic Groups in Estonia

This article offers an insight to Estonian transition culture from the perspective of attitudes and practices related to consumption and environment. Based on representative survey data from November 2005, the article focuses on differences between age groups and ethnicities, and presents the consumer typology. The results indicate that the youngest age groups are most consumerist and brand-prone, being less oriented towards sustainable consumption. Consumerist orientation is stronger among Estonian Russians compared with ethnic Estonians, while the latter are more brand-oriented. The findings of the typological analysis lend support to Sztompka’s thesis about the ambivalence of the transition culture. Key words: consumerism, sustainable consumption, youth, ethnicity, types of consumers

Needs, Desires and the Experience of Scarcity: Representations of recreational shopping in post-Soviet Estonia

This article contributes to the new field of post-Soviet consumer culture studies by exploring the meanings of recreational shopping carried by the Estonian notion of s oppamine, adapted from the English word ‘shopping’. It draws on empirical data derived from 71 original interviews with Estonian-speaking consumers. Underlying these respondents’ normative judgements of their own and others’ shopping behaviour is a system of moral concepts in which ‘need’ and ‘restraint’ are continually juxtaposed against ‘desire’,‘pleasure’ and ‘excess’. This opposition, while common to a range of consumer contexts, takes a specific form in the post-Soviet conditions of Estonia, marked by a shift from a collectively experienced absence of consumer goods in general to an individually perceived scarcity - either material, in the form of the money to buy available goods, or symbolic, based on an opinion that the new commodities are insufficiently sophisticated.

Positioning consumption: A practice theoretical approach to contested consumption and media discourse

This article analyses the ways in which media discourses become a part of contested consumption activities. We apply a positioning perspective with practice theory to focus on how practitioners relate to media discourse as a symbolic resource in their everyday practices. A typology of performance positionings emerges based on empirical examples of research in parent–children consumption. Positionings are flexible discursive fixations of the relationship between the performances of the practitioner, other practitioners, media discourse and consumption activities. The basic positioning types are the practice maintenance and the practice change position, with different sorts of adapting in between. Media discourse can become a resource for a resistant position against social control or for an appropriating position in favour of space for action. Regardless of the current relation to a particular media discourse, practitioners attempt to maintain their self-positioning of competence when performing. This leads us, as researchers, to caution against any a priori anticipation of the anchoring power of media discourses within everyday activities.

Freedom calling Telephony, mobility and consumption in post-socialist Estonia

This article focuses on the development of consumer culture and specifically the notion of consumer freedom in the transitional society of Estonia. Drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Don Slater as well as the notion of ‘transition culture’ proposed by Michael Kennedy, it investigates the importance of western goods and western notions of consumer choice in anchoring emerging conceptions of individual freedom in post-socialist countries. This theme is explored through an analysis of a consumer item with a particularly high sign value in Estonia: the mobile phone. The analysis details the transformation discourses around freedom in print advertisements for mobile telephony from 1991-2001, demonstrating how over this period the meaning of freedom as a value shifted from political and economic conceptions to an individualized discourse of consumer choice emphasizing hedonism, self-expression and leisure.

Between Consumerism and Protectionism Attitudes towards children, consumption and the media in Estonia

This study measures attitudes towards children’s vulnerability or empowerment within consumer culture, based on data from a representative population survey (N = 1475) conducted in Estonia in 2005. The study use indices comprised of assessments of consumption practices and assertions pertaining to the ‘endangered vs empowered child’ debate in consumer and media studies. The results of the analysis show that consumerism and brand valuation are more strongly predicted by age and income and opinions about children’s vulnerability to advertising are mostly influenced by education and gender. Attitudes on the socializing role of the media are poorly explained by sociodemographic variables, although income and education play a more important role.

Young Estonians and Danes as online shoppers A comparative study

In this study, interpretations of young Danes’ and Estonians’ online shopping are compared based on interviews with 23 Danes and 24 Estonians aged 12–18 years. The findings show that young Danes are more familiar with online shopping and buying, and view it more positively than do young Estonians. This is well reflected by the fact that Estonians focus mainly on the risks of online shopping, expressing various forms of distrust, while young Danes tend to emphasize benefits. Yet, both countries’ respondents show more confidence in regular shops with face-to-face contact than in online stores which are considered to be abstract and disembedded. Differences in representations of online shopping are related to a complex set of system and agential resources: different cultural contexts, institutional and economic factors, and social networks.