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© The Author(s) 2018
Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_11
11. Ownership and Possessions: The Adult Perspective and into the Future
Brian M. Young1
(1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Brian M. Young
Email: [email protected]
Ownership—The Adult Perspective
Although we have met Belk (Belk, Bahn, & Mayer, 1982; Belk, Mayer, & Driscoll, 1984) in our discussion of children’s understanding of consumption symbolism , this most prolific of researchers and writers has done much of his work with adults . One of his best known papers was Belk (1988) where he put forward an exposition of extended selfhood and the role of possessions . On re-reading it for this book I was struck by how familiar it all seemed, an indication of the extent to which the ideas and argument has permeated consumer research. In addition it is structured from a lifespan perspective which makes it doubly relevant for this book. So let’s see what he said. The integration of the self into possession and ownership has a history going back to William James so there is an established provenance. If an ‘extended self’ is assumed to be a valid metaphor, then we can integrate consumer behaviour into the heart of research and theories of the self. The value added by this integration, in my opinion should not be underestimated. 1 The compilation of evidence made by Belk is extensive, ranging both over the lifespan and a range of other cultures. The extended self can be viewed as attachment to, for example persons, places and things and the loss of these is felt as a blow to one’s self. Although Belk cannot discuss smartphones as they had not been invented when his paper was published, he does mention the smartphone in Belk (2014) but suggests the loss of that device is felt as a loss of the opportunities provided by smartphones rather than the loss of the phone per se being seen as losing part of the self . However in Belk (1988) car loss, by for example stealing or trashing was viewed as a reduction in the extended self and cars were seen by young people in the USA especially as extensions of the self. Homes and their contents are good examples of the extended self working, as loss of contents due to natural disasters like fire, flood, earthquake and hurricane cause anxiety and misery to millions and no amount of financial compensation can cancel out the feelings of loss. These events have been deemed as newsworthy and iconic images and interviews with survivors are a staple diet for TV stations. For some people, losing a home p
rovides an opportunity to claim insurance, move and start afresh and putting on a brave face is how we’ve been taught to cope if we’re Australian or American and learn to live with the vagaries of nature such as floods and bushfires. For most of us however the home is a place which is not just a repository for items to help us to live and satisfy our needs for food and shelter but it’s also an integrated set of memories and hopes. We have set out those memories of the past, the photographs of our family when younger. We remember buying the furniture or acquiring some from grandparents when they move and that’s where the dog scratched the table leg and here are the children’s first attempts at drawing on the worn surface of the kitchen table. It is a site full of memories and not only a background for living but a domestic ecology where people have their favourite chairs and TV used to have its own position in the hierarchy of objects. This may sound maudlin and indeed for many readers the home is a mythical place but for some, a dangerous and violent place of horrendous memories. Psychological research on ‘the home ’ is relatively scarce (Graham, Gosling, & Travis, 2015, p. 346) and given that many our consumption patterns are ‘home’ related 2 it is a research gap that should be more than just minded.
So loss of things is losing part of one’s self. The parallel is that acquisition can be felt as more than just having objects for their utilitarian value and that the self permeates acquisition of goods to a similar extent as the loss of material goods affects the self, but in a positive rather than negative way. We have seen that during adolescence as the child transitions to the adult role the need for material goods to display the self in a positive light increases. In addition the multiple social identities of student, rebel, band follower, cult group aficionado, and so on require careful positioning by the child–adult as all the cultural capital that has accumulated and is being acquired at that time is marshalled. What then about adulthood and the progression through it? We get older and at some tipping point there will be more memory years, years we have lived and experienced and can (theoretically) recall and learn from, than expected years which are actuarially anticipated at that tipping point. This will occur early in your 40s, say 41 or 42 years of age (Office for National Statistics (GB), 2017). Assuming the first couple of years of life are not memorable in the sense events at that time are not remembered (Bauer, 2006) then by 45 years of age you should have passed half way. Now the reason you don’t think about that is because part of the human condition is to be optimistic so don’t think about the end. We avoid making a will, plan for the future, and talk of 60 being the new 40 (Hartstein, 2016). However we give ourselves away later in life by the nature of our possessions . As we get older according to Belk (1988) we keep those possessions that are treasured most and while not exactly wallowing in sentiment for the past, older people will tend to use nostalgia a lot. Nostalgia in the context of life-span development has been recently discussed by Sedikides , Wildschut, Arndt , and Routledge (2008) and, although this source was written after Belk (1988), it does provide a useful summary of what is known about this emotion. Nostalgia is an emotion involving a yearning for the past and is widespread occurring in over 80% of British students at least once a week. 3 It is ubiquitous and can be found across the life-span from childhood to old age. Emotions evoked are positively tinged with bittersweet affect and images evoked by ‘nostalgia’ included close others, momentous events like birthday or holiday, and settings such as sunsets and lakes. The authors take a positive view overall of the role of nostalgia in our lives and see it as an emotion that can restore a balanced view of life where people came together in the past and bonded. In a later paper, Routledge et al. (2011) elevate the concept of nostalgia to the role of existential assistant as contributing meaning to life and helping our physical and psychological wellbeing. Under these circumstances a dose (or two) of nostalgia is beneficial, especially when we are older. Marketers and film makers will know this anyway and many products are sold and movies are made using the romantic rhetoric of the past when life was always better.
Belk revisited the idea of the extended self in two papers (Belk, 2013, 2014) and the main change from his original formulation of the extended self (Belk, 1988) was to incorporate the idea of the digital self into his theories. The widespread use of digital versions of objects that used to be handled, fondled, stored and exchanged, to name just a few of the transactions ‘things ‘n’ stuff’ undergo when they literally ‘pass through our hands’, raise important questions about their status. How do we collect them, own them, add value to them and trade them for example? Belk (2013) uses a neat system of categorisation that is given below and I’ll summarise and develop my own ideas 4 within that.
Dematerialisation
At some point (in my lifetime) in the twentieth century the boundary between the world of work and the world of leisure became blurred. It seemed to be simpler before. Here’s a caricature of that time with an adult male gaze. You went to work if you were a man and there were large machines that did things for you and often you would look after them and they needed ‘skilled operators’. Most days you ‘went to work’ and came home in the evening. You and your family would ‘go on holiday’ and maybe drink too much and laugh a lot in theatres and pubs. Homes were family nests that were kept clean by your wife and they were full of knick-knacks and family treasures and big things that washed clothes and another large object that you could listen to. But then things seemed to get different. Radios (or the wireless as it was known in the UK) became small and could produce rock and roll from new radio stations and you could listen to it anywhere. Coloured plastic appeared at work and calculators in offices were replaced by small things about the size of today’s smartphones that did that job for you. The office or workplace became attractive with potted plants and meetings about not very much and computers with their digital structure of ones and zeros shrank in size too. Fast forward to 2018 and we have the dissolution of the work/travel/home separate ecologies into one unit—person with smartphone. There is a body, a ‘physical you’ connected to the proximal environment of immediate people and the intimacy of others on the move or sitting (or standing or walking if you trying hard to be modern with meetings) next to you at work or drinking coffee or beside you watching TV at home . There is also the distal digital intimacy of you online. You need not move or touch or smell the objects and their relationships in digital space and you are like an immobile and tethered Gulliver 5 accessing anything and everything.
What’s in this virtual world or if you are not yet a convert, what can be? All your old CDs and vinyl records. Films and photographs. Your own genetic code i.e. my genome, if you can afford it (Tirrell, 2015). Anything written in any language and the sound recording of any language. Most things can be reduced to a series of ones and zero which is the ultimate currency of the digital computer. Critics might then say—what’s not in the virtual world? Pain, love and other emotions and thoughts about thinking. Reflexive thinking and feelings are human attributions which can’t be represented although we can experience them and talk about them and paint them and laugh and cry as a consequence of consuming digital media just as we can by ‘being there’. Many things can be transformed into a digital format. We can potentially access everything that is digitised using the internet although much of our effort these days is in finding ways so everyone can’t 6 do that.
However one of the problems of futurology, projecting what might happen in the future from what has happened already, is adopting a model or extended metaphor for change. The one that is used frequently is based on evolution which implies that innovations will succeed and survive if they enable us, the consumers to better adapt to our circumstances. At the moment the internet and digitalisation is seen in a positive light. As a technology it is becoming cheaper, miniaturised, ubiquitous and powerful and as we continue to tick these boxes 7 we assume things will get better. Why? Not only because of scientific advances but also as a consequence of an inbuilt predisposition to look on the bright si
de. Known as the optimistic bias it helps us to thrive as individuals as we assume that others will run a greater risk of, in this case failing to advance the technology. Harness this human proclivity to cultural values that stress the virtues of progress and we can see a brave new world of evolution that means advancement and progress.
When we look at the term evolution in the Darwinian sense of change in living systems over generations then the popular image (see for example Gifford, 2013) is of a series of step like changes from the primitive to the civilised, the civilised being a twentieth century human and the primitive being an ape-like creature that is now extinct. This image dominates the popular imagination and reinforces the vision of evolution as simple steps of progress. It’s an iconic image and appears in various forms. For example we can find it in the ‘couch gag’ that is part of The Simpsons where the evolutionary theme makes an ironic appearance transformed into Homer’s journey from primeval slime to his rightful place on the couch (Zapata, 2017). A step or stage metaphor, if I can use that term, is not unusual and is implicit in many theories in consumer psychology. I have mentioned two; one in the hierarchy of effects (see Chapter 5 and section on “The Hierarchy of Effects”) as well as in Maslow’s theory of motivation (see Chapter 5 in section on “Back to Consumer Psychology”).
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