There is one other concept that bears a close resemblance to the terminology of contemporary psychology and that is Bourdieu’s idea of habitus . Navarro (2006, p. 16) cites Wacquant’s (2005) definition and I have given the following gloss:
Habitus is a concept that tries to bridge the difference between the individual and the social which common sense tells us are separate ideas. But society is laid down in people as they are disposed to behave in certain ways, and they have learnt in society to act, think, and experience emotion in a particular way. We can then say that society has guided them in their creative response to the push and pull of their existing social milieu.
Careful readers of this book should be able to recognise in habitus the triad of mental functions that constitute thinking, feeling and action as one way of analysing the structure of an attitude . The rest provides a nod in the direction of recognising and being sensitive to the transactional relationship between levels of society and the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of an individual that are both separate but cooperative entities. The focus is on the behaviour of people in their adaptive response to their preferred niches and here I can recognise the concept of schema embedded in social privilege as well as disadvantage.
How do these theoretical ideas relate to ownership and possessions ? Status, prestige, and one’s social standing in the community can be transmitted by owning things, consuming ostentatiously, and displaying value on your body, especially in social situations at work, home , traveling or in leisure pursuits. We notice and recognise the value, the discreet brand label on the shoulder bag, the expensive engagement ring that demonstrates both status and wealth, and maybe the shoes with their signature splash of red. But do we translate this reading of our unknown traveller in the seat across from us into approval? There are several reasons why the intended display could fail. Perhaps we see good taste in wealth but although the wearer has wealth, she might not be concerned at all at creating an impression and would want to demonstrate status with her presentation at the business conference she will attend. Or that the taste of the traveller is for a more flamboyant display where gold is shown at every possible opportunity from medallions round the neck to bath taps at home . The point I am making is that mere display of cultural capital is not enough, whether that is embodied in hairstyle, use of language, visible tattoos, or deportment; objectified in dress, handbags and shoes; or institutionalised with a doctoral degree. It requires social recognition as well and despite Bourdieu ’s comments on the ‘prestige’ and ‘merits’ of cultural capital, it comes to naught unless shared by participants in that game. To complicate matters further, although there may be indicators that are almost universally recognisable as being indicative of high moral capital, it is quite possible for the observer to step outside the game and comment on the game itself by derogating the player as a ‘show-off’. However it is difficult to do this when the scope of cultural capital is so broad and inclusive where understatement and lack of ostentation is seen as one aspect of cultural capital for a certain elite.
As we shall see (see section on “Dematerialisation” in Chapter 11) physical objects are not necessarily the only objects we can own and possess and, as well as the soft touch of cultural capital being accrued, virtual objects and things need to be considered. So the idea of things as objects of use and pleasure forms the tip of a very large iceberg of ownership and possession . But we shall start with the child who has just been born.
Children, Ownership and Possession
Birth is often celebrated in cultures across the world and this provides an opportunity to parents and others to welcome this new member of the family with gifts that often acquire the status of keepsakes or mementoes . The added value is recognised by the recipient, often many years later. I have in my possession a silver napkin ring and silver spoon that was given to me by close relations when I was born. Both are inscribed with my first name. So as well as receiving gifts there is your first, familiar, given name that you own, usually throughout your life. Your second or surname as well as your first name can be interpreted by others to support and reinforce prejudice about you. For example, even the sound of the first phoneme of your name will affect first impressions. Slepian and Galinsky (2016) found that those first names such as Gordon or Rachel which were spoken with voiced consonants 2 as the first phoneme were seen as harder and masculine and were given more often to male children. Softer, unvoiced consonants however were more likely to be the initial phoneme in girls’ names than boys. And yes, those participants who scored high on gender stereotyping showed an enhanced hard = masculine, soft = feminine effect. Socio-economic class in the UK is also signalled with first names given by parents. The well-known UK journalist and provocatrice Katie Hopkins is not slow at expressing dislike of certain names such as Tyler, Charmaine, or Chardonnay as indicative of low social class and therefore not suitable friends for her children (see for example Falshaw, 2013). Double-barrelled surnames such as the apocryphal Fotherington-Smythe 3 typify posh English and Aubyn and Alfreda are the ones beginning with ‘A’ listed by Tatler for 2017 as the best posh baby names for that year (Horton, 2017). Times are changing though and double-barrelled names are common now especially with those couples who dislike the practice of the female spouse always adopting the male surname after marriage.
Putting your child down on the waiting list for a top UK private school as soon as birth is announced or even when pregnancy is diagnosed may be an apocryphal tale but getting your daughter or son into a top school is an aspiration for many well-off parents and a way of accruing cultural capital . Why? Well Eton College plus Oxford University defines a well-trodden route to success. Assuming that leading one’s country is also a mark of success and that one accepts Wikipedia as a reliable source (List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom by education , 2017) then from the 54 different people who were Prime Ministers of Britain, 8 were educated at Eton then Christ Church college at the University of Oxford, 13 were educated at both Eton and Oxford, 19 attended Eton, and 27 attended one of the Oxford colleges. 4 Cultural capital in the sense of a route to success is certainly available. However in order to access these pathways of prestige, one has to have what Bourdieu called ‘embodied capital’ (see section “Cultural Capital and a French Intellectual” in this chapter). This aspect of capital includes one’s socialisation into ways of behaviour, including both verbal and non-verbal communication as well as the tastes, prejudices and biases, clothes, and styles and indeed most of the cultural values and social networks shared by one’s group.
Language and class in the UK are intimately related and Bernstein (1971) used to be the core writer in this area. He argued that two codes could be identified in (English) language use. One was called the restricted code and was available to working class children. It involved a limited range of rather ritualistic responses and although he does not deny the potential of any code within a human language to encapsulate subtle and sophisticated thoughts, he claims that the other code called elaborated code enabled one to articulate and express the objective content of what one is trying to say. Therefore working class children are disadvantaged when they enter the middle-class environment of the classroom where the elaborated code is assumed, as they have to learn a new language as well as a new culture. 5 Although Bernstein ’s insights were profound and influenced a lot of sociologists interested in education and language, they do not do justice in my opinion to the immense variety of group-based language styles that are influenced by communication using text, and blog in popular culture as well as the creative mix of different language styles used, ironically and fragmented, by young people today. So why even mention Bernstein? The reason is that language and class were related in Britain for much of the twentieth-century and Bernstein was one of the few people who talked about it in the context of schooling. It is beyond the purpose of this book on consumption to develop the argument further but we certainly need to explore the idea of ownership extending
to intangible aspects of cultural capital as that is a core theme of the argument here.
It would be naïve at best and woefully ignorant at worst if we assume that progress in terms of furthering one’s career, income or opportunities is solely dependent on one’s ability and effort. Social advantage and heightened cultural capital go together and this is demonstrable to the most casual observer of a culture she or he knows and understands. My own horizons are limited in this respect as I have worked at English universities and know English culture, with a briefer period of time in my youth at my birthplace in Scotland and a sojourn as a rather privileged expatriate in the Far East. From this experience I can however identify a certain kind of cultural capital and a composite picture would be as follows. The ideal mix requires money which is never discussed but is more than adequate to pay university fees and maintain oneself through one’s 20s attending university and maybe having to take unpaid internships in firms. It should support a social life that is not necessarily extravagant but that functions to maintain and expand a social network so that one is ‘connected’. Money and connections are not enough though. The critical ingredient is a manner of behaving, an embodied capital , which in my opinion demonstrates a supreme confidence in oneself and one’s standing in society. It’s reflected in dress, deportment, laughing and talking properly, showing appropriate emotions at the right time, having tastes and interests that reflect the elite you now are member of. You will find that doors mysteriously open for you, your opinion is listened to respectfully and success is on your doorstep.
So at the outset I have argued that ownership can be intangible as it can reflect a culturally defined set of manners, the mores of elite groups, which are installed from birth onwards. I am aware that these are intangible and it would be difficult to point the finger at someone’s success story and say it was due to your cultural capital, especially when in the example I described cultural capital is confounded with possession and ownership of money that pays for the immersive learning of this route to success. Many of course are born into a disadvantaged home , neighbourhood or community and this is a heavy weight indeed to carry and the road from rags to riches often appears more mythical than real. Also there is immense variety in defining ‘success’ and ‘social standing’ across different groups especially across different cultures.
Gift Giving
The literature on gift giving should be an essential part of consumer psychology and research into how and the reasons why gifts are given or exchanged have been explored by psychologists and social anthropologists as well as consumer researchers. There are various ways of entry into this field but one door is through a curious and fascinating paper that looks at the phenomenon of ‘pay what you want’ (PWYW) which on the face of it seems to run contrary to principles of economic exchange such as equity . Jung, Nelson , Gneezy, and Gneezy (2014) looked at both PWYW and a parallel strategy called ‘pay it forward’ (PIF). This is more convoluted and involves telling customers that their product has been paid for by a previous customer but that their payment will be on behalf of someone else who comes later. 6 From the seller’s point of view both PIF and PWYW are similar but in the PIF case there is an added ingredient where there is a big change. The relationship between buyer and seller under PWYW pricing is changed as it now became constituted as the receiver and giver of a gift. This is a symbolic and social relationship with other customers. The direct exchange with the seller also becomes a symbolic social exchange. The relationship between past and future consumers becomes tinged as gift exchange and should then come with the cultural norms associated with that ritual. And so it proved where just framing the offer as gift giving meant more was paid.
That provides us with a suitable segue into gift giving. But where shall we start? For me and I assume many others 7 the main ritual is Christmas —the commercial version rather than the religious one although the latter informs the iconography of the former, much to the distaste and disapproval of some of us. 8 There is however a massive retail operation surrounding the celebration and it’s an occasion for gift giving. Starting from the outside or periphery we have the exchange of cards, both physical ones mailed from business to business or customer (B2B or B2C) and electronic greetings via email. Their function here is to maintain visibility and maybe gain some value that rubs off the general spirit of good will and peace on earth that might just permeate commercial Christmas. However traffic is one-way and I would not think of returning the favour next year if the Acme Corporation sent me a Christmas card because I had been a customer. Coming into the centre which must be family and friends, then reciprocity and exchange begin to be recognised. And these two functions are at the heart of gift giving . Reciprocity is a norm where under certain circumstances you assume your behaviour toward someone else will be reciprocated and the exchange of gifts often adheres to this. The circumstances surrounding the norm need to be explored however. For example Kunz and Woolcott (1976) in a frequently cited paper on the power of the reciprocity norm demonstrated that in an experimental study 20% of people sent a Christmas card to a complete stranger who had sent them one. However recently Meier (2016) attempting to replicate this effect found that only 2% of his sample reciprocated suggesting that people’s distrust of others and their frequent use of e-mail may have made them less likely to attend to and return the favour of the unexpected card.
Before we leave cards there is a transition concept which lies between the minimal value but recognition of a relationship that is conveyed by ‘sending a card’ to express sympathy, celebration, acknowledgement 9 and so on and the full-blown exchange of gifts within family and friends. This is the gift card . Tuten and Kiecker (2009) explored this concept and provided an insightful description of four kinds of value that can be transmitted in gift giving and exchange. Economic value is often seen as monetary in nature and given the nature of the gift card we might anticipate that economic value is strongly associated with such cards. The social value in gift giving on the other hand centres on the relationship between the giver and receiver and this can range from articulating and reproducing an already existing relationship such as gift exchange between a couple at different stages in a married relationship to establishing, changing or signalling the end of a new or different relationship. This can of course include not giving. For example, when an old friendship has been reduced to a single card once each Christmas or New Year and then is extinguished (perhaps an ‘old flame’ has had to go out?) The expressive value according to Belk (1979) is equivalent to giving over part of your identity to the other so that the receiver is reminded of you or us. Photographs taken on the wedding day, mementos, or even physical objects such as a lock of hair have an expressive function. Finally there is a simple utilitarian or functional value and according to the authors it is not really seen as the dominant value of a gift although they do mention parents-to-be getting a new stroller from their parents as an example. Returning now to the findings of Tuten and Kiecker (2009) they concluded that gift cards can function in gift giving like other gifts with the exception of the expressive function but that it would not be difficult to personalise the card so as to cover the complete range of economic, social, expressive and utilitarian functions. In addition for the group of over a thousand teenagers surveyed a new value which the authors called choice emerged as the most important (op. cit., Table 3), where the value of choice occurs when the control over gift selection is transferred from giver to receiver.
So far we have circled round gift giving with a couple of examples that demonstrate borderline but interesting examples of possible gift giving. When we enter the circle of family and friends then the full-blown version is met and although most of the studies have looked at dyadic situations where there is a giver and a receiver, at festivities like Christmas in a large family there are many interlinked patterns with informal rules about who should ‘buy for’ whom. Usually children are ‘bought for’ and intimate relationships are negotiated with a delicate
series of hints to preserve the secrecy of the ritual of ‘opening presents’. 10 As children grow up and transition into their own lives more the shifts from a big present to a gift card and finally to a greeting card need to be negotiated. Part of the problem as I see it is recognising that the status of the gift changes via changes in the norms of giving. When one’s sister or brother was growing up and starting a family then the ritual of giving from adult to child was recognised as the child was still dependent on the generosity of grown-ups and gifts from aunts and uncles. When children become ‘grown up’ and aunts and uncles had grown older then the reciprocity norm could be reintroduced but was that to be eventually withdrawn and reversed as uncle and aunt became much older and living on lesser means while nephews and nieces were drawing a fat salary each month? Or did the exchange become symbolic and reduced to cards for example? No doubt you will be thinking by now that I should get out more.
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