In the Family Way: Bringing a Mother-Daughter (Matrilineal) Perspective to Retail Innovation and Consumer Culture

Here we apply the multilevel narrative approach of critical oral history to develop intergenerational narratives that show how social change in consumer culture is enacted through family interrelations. The research uses intergenerational storytelling to describe memories of women as mothers and daughters in families. Places and practices around provisioning, budgeting, cooking, childcare, and domestic labour provide the setting in which the dialectics of family and gender are transformed through evolving family signatures. Families develop enduring myths that function as a means of making sense of consumption. The oral histories show how family signatures proliferate, how they are shaped by retail innovation, and how they become structured into everyday practices and family norms. This further demonstrates that family is important to understand the relationship between individuals and consumer culture.