Completing and Complementing: The Work of Consumers in the Division of Labour

Abstract

Few goods are delivered ‘complete’ to consumers as ready for use without further processing. The operation of markets and capitalist production presuppose the work of consumers in searching for, completing and coordinating between goods and services. Yet the critical contribution of consumers in finalising and complementing a division of labour is rarely acknowledged in theories of either work/production or consumption. The article argues for a radical extension of the division of labour, a central and classical concept of sociology, in order to overcome this limitation. Consumption work is defined as ‘all work undertaken by consumers necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods’ and its distinguishing characteristics are delineated. Building on a relational socio-economic perspective, which emphasises the connections between different forms of work (paid/unpaid, formal/informal, production/consumption), an analytical framework for consumption work is developed and then elaborated by reference to comparative empirical research.

Keywords

broadband installation consumption work division of labour domestic labour prosumption recycling socio-economic formations of labour total social organisation of labour unpaid labour work

Introduction

Sociology has long offered a distinctive approach to the study of work, keeping pace with the insights and new perspectives of the discipline in recent decades. Its comprehensive approach has enabled scholars to ask how work differs from other social and economic activities, and what is distinctive about it. Sociologists of work have not confined their focus to the economy or economic institutions but rather looked at all forms of labour and the broad range of social relations and organisations within which it is undertaken. Major historical shifts, such as the withdrawal of millions of women from domestic service work in the early 20th century and their entry into factories, shops and offices, and the associated recasting of the household as a site of work, call for a broad societal understanding that sociology has been particularly well equipped to grasp. This article draws directly on such an approach to suggest that many of the activities undertaken by consumers, whether in the domestic or wider social domains, are to be understood as work.

There has been little recognition within either the sociology of consumption or of economic life that work is frequently undertaken by consumers to complete and complement an economic process. Yet investigation of such work can contribute directly to interrogation and renewal of the foundational concept of division of labour, especially when a relational approach is adopted to challenge and overcome the binary oppositions (production/consumption, public/private, formal/informal, paid/unpaid) that characterised much of mid-20th century sociology. The process of food preparation, for example, combines the work of (amongst others) farmers, manufacturers and retailers undertaken at different stages of the division of labour up to the point of sale. Yet what customers buy from supermarkets normally requires further work before it is ready to eat, except in its most extreme ready-made forms. Such work by consumers completes that accomplished at earlier stages, even though it is conducted outside of the market and on a different socio-economic basis. Rather than treating the realms of work and consumption as insulated silos or considering work undertaken within the household or the market or public sector as self-standing, a relational paradigm looks across and between such fields. It takes the distribution of work activities across socio-economic domains and between differently located actors as its focus, analysing their connection, articulation and boundaries, so as to understand how and why these change and shift over time. To take another example, if politically-driven cuts to welfare services result in the transfer of care from paid employment in the public or market sector to the unpaid labour of relatives and friends, then the study of care work, including its changing distribution and cost, needs to encompass both paid and unpaid care work whether it is undertaken by municipalities, firms or households. Or, when airlines require passengers to check-in online and increasingly to tag their own luggage at the airport, this involves a shift of work across domains from a market service provider to the consumer, linked developments to be understood in relation to each other. In all these examples, the hidden work of coordination by consumers is presupposed, yet ignored and unproblematised. It calls for a major sociological rethink.

Acknowledging that consumers work has the potential both to undermine the longstanding disconnect between the sociological studies of work and of consumption, and to extend analysis of the division of labour by combining within it the connections between paid and unpaid forms of work. The article proceeds as follows: the first section summarises the theoretical framework as the basis for then defining and characterising consumption work; the second situates consumption work in relation to two contemporary social science literatures, which highlight respectively the active role of consumers in the economy and the prevalence of unpaid forms of work, and attempts to strengthen recent challenges to binary sociological thinking; empirical examples from a recent comparative research programme are introduced in the following section to demonstrate the purchase of the theoretical framework, before turning to a brief conclusion. The overall analysis enables us to appreciate the constantly shifting boundaries between the work undertaken by consumers and paid employees, and the constantly emerging new interdependencies between them.

The Work of Consumers: A Relational Socio-Economic Perspective

The initial task of this section is to introduce in summary form two basic building blocks for conceptualising consumption work, before proceeding to define and characterise it. The first is a multi-dimensional conception of the division of labour (Glucksmann, 2009) formulated to initiate renewal of this foundational concept. This framework distinguishes between three dimensions of integration and differentiation of labour which combine together as a higher level ‘socio-economic formation of labour’.

The first dimension (division of labour or DL) remains the technical division of skills and jobs within particular work processes, organisations or sectors, and their allocation to different kinds of people usually in a hierarchy. (To avoid confusion the term division of labour is now confined to this traditional definition.)

The second dimension is of labour across socio-economic modes (TSOL or total social organisation of labour). These domains include the state, market, not-for-profit sector, household and community where the same tasks (e.g. care work) may be undertaken on very different bases (paid or unpaid, formal or informal). Work may shift across socio-economic boundaries from one domain to another for a variety of reasons (including privatisation, outsourcing or cuts in public services), and the boundaries themselves may change (Glucksmann, 2005). The work undertaken in one socio-economic domain presupposes and interacts with that undertaken in another. In different countries and at different times work activities are distributed in particular ways between socio-economic domains, resulting in distinctive ‘multi-modal’ organisations of labour.

A third differentiation and connection of labour comes into focus when work conducted at the various different stages of an overall instituted economic process is considered (Harvey, 2007; Polanyi, 1957). Labour is organised and distributed across the processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption in such a way that what is done at any one phase presupposes and is shaped by work undertaken at others. For example, the self-assembly of furniture required by a company like IKEA is an integral component of its whole manufacturing and design process. All the different stages from raw material preparation, design, through manufacture, carpentry and upholstery, to packing and distribution not only connect with each other but presuppose that final assembly work will be undertaken at its eventual destination by the consumer. Crucially, this third component (instituted economic process of labour, or IEPL) offers the opportunity to explore work conducted at the phase of consumption and recognises that the work of consumers cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to work undertaken in production/provision, distribution and exchange.

Taken together, these three dimensions integrate a relational conception of the work of consumers within the analysis of the overall socio-economic formation of labour. Conversely, consumption work provides an analytically key entry route for exploring articulation of the three dimensions of socio-economic formations of labour. The work consumers undertake (what skills are acquired, the amount and range of work to make consumption possible) depends on how goods and services are sold, how ‘complete’ they are and on their potential uses.

The second building block is the relational approach to work. The same activity may comprise work in some circumstances, but not in others, and it may be variously experienced by actors as leisure, pleasure and/or work. The key issue in determining whether or not it comprises work are the social relations in which it is undertaken and whether it links with other activities in a wider economic nexus. Pahl’s ‘thought’ survey of a woman ironing was illuminating in this respect: in some instances her activity was clearly embedded in social relations that constructed it as work, while in others it was not (Pahl, 1988: 744–747). From a relational perspective, work activities are to be understood as such ‘because they hang together and interdepend in a way that makes it worth thinking of them as forming distinctively economic relations’ (Glucksmann, 1995: 69–70). Consumers undertake many activities, some of which may be considered work when they contribute to the completion or cycle of an economic process that links their activity with those of others. From a relational perspective, what constitutes such activities as work is their relationship to wider economic processes of production/provision, distribution and exchange existing beyond the field of consumption.

Having laid the grounding, ‘consumption work’ may be defined as all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services. It is distinct from consumption itself in the sense of using or using up goods or services. As already suggested, very few products or services are complete, or immediately ready to use, at the point of final transaction without prior intervening activity on the part of the consumer. Moreover, this final preparation for use determines what exactly is eventually consumed. Even in the case of drinking water, what is finally consumed, a glass from the tap, as tea, soup or squash, requires work that completes the process of production ‘from source to sip’ (Harvey, 2015).

The work of consumers includes a whole range of activities undertaken prior to, during or post acquisition of goods or services that are a precondition of using or appreciating them. Each good or service comes with its own specific range of consumption work tasks. The prosaic example of a washing machine reveals a fairly self-evident range of work activities expected of consumers to support its consumption. When buying a new machine the consumer needs to research the range of machines, and compare specifications in order to choose a particular model. S/he also has to find out about retail options and which outlet sells what models, and then order online, by phone or in store and arrange for delivery. Plumbing alterations may be required prior to installation, and arrangements made for these, normally by acquiring the paid services of a plumber. On delivery, the machine has to be unpacked, then installed, either by the consumer her/himself or by paying for this to be done. S/he also will need to dispose of the packaging, study the instructions, become familiar with the machine’s functions and learn how to use it; undertake periodic maintenance, and, at the end of its life, arrange for its disposal and recycling. All these tasks are distinct from the actual act of consuming or using the machine to wash, and describing them simply as domestic labour does not do justice to their wider significance (see the following section).

A similar range of demands applies to the many kinds of domestic, leisure and personal equipment that our lives increasingly rely on, involving a similarly ‘invisible’ or unrecognised range of tasks to get and keep them up and running, and render them consumable. Not only is work necessary in order for the consumption of goods and services to take place, but in addition many forms of consumption actually create work as a consequence of use (e.g. maintenance, disposal and recycling). Following the final transaction, consumption work converts the product into an object for consumption according to how the consumer wants to use it. A chicken may be roasted whole or cut into pieces and curried, or barbecued, the same purchased raw material being transformed by different kinds of consumption work into different end-consumables. Work undertaken post-exchange but prior to use has a non-market character: it is not organised or specified by the seller or other market agents but falls to the consumer to accomplish outside of exchange relations.

Four generic characteristics of consumption work may be distinguished.

Consumption work is an economic activity. In most cases, consumers will take for granted the demands made of them as simply the normal way of doing things, without thinking of them as work. Yet, from the perspective of economic activity, accomplishment of the tasks is integral to and presupposed for completion and repetition of the process. The fact that they are individualised and the responsibility of individual consumers or households, that they are undertaken outside of formal economy relations, and that they are unpaid, should not detract from their role. They may not amount to much when considered separately in relation to a particular consumption good. However, when considered collectively as the totality of all tasks associated with all the stages of a process, in relation to all consumption goods and services, the picture looks rather different. From this viewpoint, consumption work may be seen as an extensive realm of activity, and one that is not normally acknowledged, certainly in theory but often also in practice. Just because the work required of consumers is not usually named, and may not be experienced as such, does not mean that it is insignificant as a form of work, nor unamenable to analysis. The aim in grouping together under one heading and naming the disparate range of tasks is to open up a large black box, and to highlight a form of labour, which although necessary, has largely been invisible or ignored.

Acquisition of appropriate knowledge and skills. Consumption work frequently involves acquiring a set of competencies, rather than simply using a product instruction manual or a single skill. Cooking, for example, relies on the prior accumulation of a range of knowledges, which, if not transmitted informally or intergenerationally, have to be formally learned (Leadbeater, 1999). That such knowledge may often be tacit does not diminish its significance. Driving a car also relies on possessing particular competences: learning to drive, to navigate, becoming conversant with the highway code and rules of the road. Indeed this is legally enforced through the requirement to pass a driving test in order to acquire a license to drive. Thus, one important element of consumption work, in addition to undertaking the tasks themselves preparatory to consumption, is acquisition of the skills and knowledge required in order to perform them.

Coordination. The contours of consumption work look different depending on the lens through which it is approached. Viewed from the perspective of the consuming person or household, the issue is one of undertaking tasks in relation to individual goods or services. But departing from a product-centred view, consumers confront the challenge of coordinating, and creating coherence amongst the performance of all the tasks associated with the full range of consumption goods and services. At any one time the consumer is likely to be orchestrating multiple tasks in relation to many objects of consumption, requiring coordination. S/he coordinates what needs to be accomplished with respect to clothing, food, travel, housing and so on, so as produce coherence and complementarity across the many fields that together are constitutive of social life. Producers and retailers do not script that coherence. Most deal only with a particular range of products, but even hypermarkets do not coordinate either the preparation for or use of products; nor do they create coherence between the many disparate acts of coordination. Coordination of all consumption work activities therefore adds another dimension above and beyond what is required by each product or service considered individually. It comprises the sum of consumption work activities in relation to all products or services and is an important consumer or household activity in its own right. Rather than being limited to tasks relating to specific goods, the work of consumers combines all these activities together, which involves planning as well as coordinating. Consumption work is thus much larger when viewed as a form of consumer or household activity than when considered in relation to specific products or services. The commonly-held assumption of the market as the primary coordinating institution for bringing together buyers and sellers neglects the range of coordination tasks required of buyers, as a pre-condition for the market coordination between buyers and sellers.

Outsourcing of consumption work. Thus far consumption work has been described as undertaken personally by consumers without pay. However, there also exist opportunities to outsource certain tasks for payment. Many small businesses offer services to assemble furniture or install computer equipment. Large UK supermarkets offer a home delivery service for internet shopping. So consumers may either do it themselves or pay for it to be done by others. When tasks are outsourced, they shift across the socio-economic boundary, from the unpaid labour of the consumer or household to paid employment in the market. When undertaken for a monetary payment by intermediate businesses the labour counts as paid work rather than as consumption work. If consumers employ intermediaries to do the shopping, or install equipment, then the activity is effectively ‘sent back’ into paid marketised work. However, if consumers do the same tasks themselves it is consumption work. Supermarket home delivery involves a different range of consumption work tasks from shopping in store. While it presupposes the consumption work of ordering groceries online, the work of selecting, packing and transporting the goods is undertaken on behalf of consumers and reverts to conventional paid work.

Consumption work can thus be characterised as comprising a large and disparate range of activities, required for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services, their precise nature dependent on the particular good or service, and its system of provision. The need to acquire appropriate competences and knowledge, and to coordinate activities, is central to the performance and organisation of consumption work, and is to be included in its characterisation. However, the possibility for consumption work to be outsourced serves as a reminder that the socio-economic relations within which tasks are accomplished are crucial in determining whether or not work activities count as consumption work.

Widening Horizons: Consumers and Unpaid Work

While consumption work may overlap with, or be undifferentiated from other practices, this article suggests that it nevertheless comprises a distinctive realm of activity, which is not coterminous with any of them. The attempt to conceptualise it resonates with a number of literatures relating to some aspects of what is here being brought together under one heading, notably those highlighting the active role of the consumer and the range and significance of unpaid labour. A further aim in theorising consumption work is to bridge the study of work and consumption and so extend sociological attempts to supersede binary thinking.

Over the last 20 years sociology has taken serious steps to overcome the dualistic paradigms of some mid-20th century approaches, which had inevitably stultified analysis of connections across fields of social activity. Until the 1990s, production and consumption, for example, were normally treated as self-standing or separate realms. While not overcome, this opposition has been progressively undermined with increasing acknowledgement that both are integral components or phases of a wider process. The concept of consumption work makes the link between production and consumption both more immediate and direct. So, while consumption work revolves around finalising tasks and activities enabling the consumption of goods and services to take place and facilitating their appreciation, consumption itself involves the using or using up of goods and services, appreciating or in other ways consuming them. Of course there are blurry boundaries between the two, with some activities, such as window shopping or the personalisation of goods, comprising both consumption and consumption work (Miller et al., 1998; Radner, 1994), often also involving emotional engagement (Hochschild, 2012), especially when destined for others.¹

Similarly, the binary opposition between work and home, overlapping with those of public versus private, and employment versus family, was pretty well taken for granted until it succumbed to concerted feminist critique from the 1980s. These dualisms embodied not only a strongly gendered conception of separate spheres but also implied that work and pay define each other, so that if an activity is paid, then it is work and vice versa.

Co-production, Prosumption etc.

Many of the new approaches to consumers pay attention to their contribution to work and to economic relations, although there is fundamental disagreement between those who emphasise the positive, active and empowering role of the consumer in the production of goods, value, brands or services and those who interpret the same developments as a process of offloading of tasks from producer to consumer where the producer realises the value created out of consumers’ unpaid labour. Scholars have commented on developments requiring greater input on the part of end consumers, for example the growth of self-service in retail (Humphery, 1998) and fast food outlets (Ritzer, 2001), the role of customers in contemporary service work (Korczynski, 2013), the ‘work transfer’ in health care (Glazer, 1993) and the proliferation of ‘self-provisioning’ activities including DIY (Pahl, 1984).

Most theorists of co-production, co-creation or prosumption interpret it positively, rejecting a traditional sociological conception of the passive consumer ‘dupe’, and emphasising instead the active consumer involved in the process of design or customisation of the end product. Consumers become co-producers, and the distinction between producer and consumer becomes increasingly blurred, especially in new media with the spread of user-generated online content. Ritzer goes so far as to hail the emergence of ‘prosumer capitalism’ (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010) where ‘most prosumers enjoy all, or at least most, of what they do’ (Ritzer, 2014: 20). Co-production has also become a buzzword in public service provision and the voluntary sector where it is heralded as a key innovation to involve citizens and service users in the design of services (e.g. Horne and Shirley, 2009). It is frequently presented positively in contrast with older modes of governance such as managerialism, paternalism or voluntarism (Boyle et al., 2006).

The other perspective takes a more negative view of putting the consumer to work. This complements the ‘workshift’ (noted above) where work previously undertaken as public services (especially in the health and social care sectors) in advanced western economies is shifted onto communities, households and family members. Examples from the commercial world include customer satisfaction and feedback surveys or online reviews of goods, understood as providing free market research for companies (e.g. Fuller and Smith, 1991; Sherman, 2011). Surveying new business strategies in France, Dujarier (2008) emphasises the co-optation of the consumer to undertake tasks that were previously the responsibility of the producer or seller, and argues that by benefiting market organisations new forms of consumer work effectively turn the notion of the ‘sovereign consumer’ on its head. Even more critically, Koeber, writing about the US, designates as ‘consumptive labour’ the arrangement whereby businesses deploy consumers as quasi-workers. In his interpretation not only are consumers directly engaged in the labour process to contribute to the production of goods and services, but organisations also ‘manufacture consent’ of consumers to such labour (Koeber et al., 2012: 8, 13). The extension of self-service from its original location in supermarkets to many other spheres is also seen in this light, as is the spread of ‘ikeaisation’ where consumers complete the final stages of a process that used to be undertaken as part of ‘production’.²

Although both proponents and critics of co-production and allied approaches highlight the significance of consumers’ work, they tend not to explore its broader implications for analysis of the division of labour or transformation of work. Many derive from management approaches to advertising, marketing and branding and aim to chart emergent practices and their effects for businesses and consumers. Most continue to operate within a dualistic producer versus consumer paradigm where production is undifferentiated and includes retail and exchange and all other market-based operations in addition to actual production itself, while the consumer is on the other side of a boundary, in the equally unpacked realm of consumption. The focus then is on the shift of work across these boundaries. In the positive interpretation, consumers enter the producer camp, doing unpaid labour and dissolving the boundaries between paid and unpaid, and between production and consumption which become conflated. Yet, while the emphasis is on creativity and the positive nature of consumer input, there is little consideration of how power relations are affected. Internet companies continue to determine the contours of consumer-generated data and to make enormous profit from it. In the negative version, work is transferred out of the realm of production and dumped on consumers, but with little attention to the wider reconfiguration of the distribution and organisation of labour throughout the particular economic process. Most of these analyses also lack a historical dimension in their concentration on the present day shift from market to consumer; they tend to ignore work undertaken by consumers in the past (including going from shop to shop) before commoditisation of many household activities. They focus on a one-way shift rather than on the moving boundary, and also avert attention from domains (such as food production) where the current shift is in the opposite direction. In other words, despite their insights into new management and business practices, their appreciation of the work of consumers goes only so far.

Unpaid Work

Historically, another emergent strand of thinking concerns unpaid labour. Like the work of consumers, this is now far more fully recognised than in 1960s and 1970s sociology, primarily in the form of domestic labour, but recently also with respect to work in the variously named third, not-for-profit or voluntary sector, civil society or ‘social economy’. Discussions of domestic labour highlighted not only the significance of work within the home but also its glaring neglect in social and economic theory. The ‘discovery’ of its importance was predicated on recognition of the historical emergence of ‘separate spheres’, the domains of ‘private’ and ‘public’, home and work with their respective specialisation in reproduction and production, in unpaid work and paid employment.

Two basic approaches characterised the study of domestic labour: a socialist feminist discussion that emerged during the second wave women’s movement of the 1970s, and a later but more enduring sociological version that drew on the original but prioritised different concerns. The former concentrated on analysing the household as the sphere for reproduction hitherto neglected by traditional Marxism’s overwhelming focus on production and the commodity sphere. A variety of formulations (for lucid overviews see Kaluzynska, 1980; Molyneux, 1979) countered this omission by emphasising the contribution of unpaid domestic labour to both generational and daily reproduction of the species (through childbirth and childrearing, and through reproducing the conditions of daily life so that workers could return for the next day’s work fed, clothed and clean). The appropriation of women’s domestic labour was a major analytical preoccupation, revolving around the question of whether men (husbands, fathers, sons) or capital (employers) were the main beneficiaries. For present purposes, the most problematic aspect of the feminist socialist approach towards domestic labour was its productionist treatment of all work outside of employed labour as being ultimately dedicated to the re/production of capital, through re/producing labour for the labour market.

Sociological approaches to domestic labour concentrated more centrally on the nature and extent of work undertaken in the home, the domestic division of labour and especially the disproportionate contribution of women to household and caring tasks. The precise link between performance of these tasks and the market economy was of less concern, except in so far as domestic responsibilities excluded women from the wage economy and made them financially dependent on men (e.g. Malos, 1980; Oakley, 1974). Over the decades the politics has become muted, and the focus shifted to investigation of the relative contribution of men, women and children to household work in terms both of time and labour, their respective areas of specialisation and the questions of convergence between the genders and across socio-economic groups (Kan et al., 2011; Scott et al., 2012). Again, prevailing household tasks are the prime object of scrutiny, rather than work required for and by the consumption of commodities, or the connection between such labour and work conducted in other phases of a process of provision or production.

Both these approaches define domestic labour in relation to the site in which it is undertaken, while the consumption work lens is focused on the division of labour and the shifting boundary between work undertaken in different socio-economic modes in relation to consumption goods and services. It has different theoretical objectives than the analysis of domestic labour and a different range of empirical subject matter, even if some of these overlap with and may also be interpreted as domestic labour.

In contrast to both approaches towards domestic labour, the prescient work of Pahl on ‘self provisioning’ and informal forms of household labour, including DIY (1984) did draw attention to work that could be conducted on different economic bases. Similarly, Gershuny’s ‘chains of provision’ (2000: 18) incorporates both paid and unpaid forms of work. Both prefigure the consumption work optic being developed here.

Somewhat belatedly, unpaid work in the public domain is now also receiving attention as a vast area of previously unacknowledged and crucially important form of work in the service of community, associational and civic life (Parry, 2005; Taylor, 2004). Such work has a long history, dating back to the philanthropic institutions and voluntary associations of the 19th century, run by members of the new educated professional and manufacturing classes, and the self-help organisations, cooperatives, friendly and burial societies established by the emergent industrial working class (Finlayson, 1994). Despite definitional difficulties, about one-half of adults in the UK and US volunteer today (Hardill and Baines, 2011; NCVO, 2014; Salamon and Sokolowski, 2001), and in a range of organisations and capacities. According to the 2011 Census, approximately 5.8 million people provided unpaid care in England and Wales, representing just over one-tenth of the population (White, 2013). At the same time, new forms and locations of unpaid work in the public domain have emerged, including internships and other forms of ‘working for free’ as a means of boosting graduates’ CVs to gain a foothold in professional employment. There has also been a considerable growth of unpaid work in support of community services to prevent the closure of libraries, sports facilities and other formerly publicly provided local services now under threat (Taylor, 2015). The expansion of these and other forms of unpaid work are clearly connected to broader changes affecting paid employment, including politically driven contraction of state provision, but also transformation of entry routes to the professions. ‘Voluntary’ work is essentially an umbrella term for the many forms of labour undertaken by millions of people in the community and public domain. Despite creeping recognition, it remains in need of detailed unpacking and analysis.

These two new ways of thinking, about consumers and about unpaid labour, mark a significant development on more rigid conceptual frameworks of mid-20th century sociology. From the socio-economic formations of labour perspective, however, they do not go far enough. Both ignore the work routinely undertaken between purchase and consumption that is effectively a precondition for use/consumption, work which comprises both unpaid labour and which is undertaken by (or on behalf of) consumers. Extending the conception of unpaid labour to include consumption work alongside domestic and ‘voluntary’ work would enlarge and further establish this field of enquiry. Similarly, exploring how the work of consumers articulates with the broader division of labour between socio-economic agents can only strengthen understanding of consumers’ contribution to producing what they consume.

Researching Consumption Work

Elaborating the concept of consumption work rests on empirical research and analytical reflection. Development of the argument here has relied on illustrative examples, some of which are drawn from a recent comparative research programme on societal divisions of labour and consumption work. This centred on three distinct domains (the installation of broadband in the home, food preparation work and domestic recycling of waste),³ selected for the issues they raise about consumption work in the division of labour. The nature and amount of consumption work differs not only by domain, but also nationally insofar as nationally prevailing systems of provision place different demands on consumers. For reasons of space the following summary findings concentrate on two of the three domains. Illustrative examples above have drawn on the case of food preparation, which will be briefly revisited at the end.

Installation of Domestic Broadband

Having online access to the internet at home requires accomplishment of a range of tasks, not only to establish connection in the first place, but also to maintain and update it. The first step involves research, comparison and filtering of the plethora of ISP packages offering different services, ‘bundles’, contracts and speeds, in order to choose a contract. The second task is installation itself: getting broadband up and running (or at a later stage switching between providers). This requires coordination of infrastructure (cabling, including high speed), with routers connecting infrastructure with provider, and software for internet service provision.⁴ Depending on the access technology purchased, consumers need to physically connect the router to the available telephone/cable infrastructure and to their home computers. Over the past decade technological advance has made this a more user-friendly process. In the UK it is normal for routers and instructions to be sent in the post for ‘self-installation’, ISPs devolving this task entirely to consumers. In Korea, by contrast, self-installation is unknown, but is included in the ISP package, so a technician comes to set it up and ensure everything is working properly. Here companies compete on the quality and efficiency of their after sales service, rather than on (low) price as in UK. This contrast is also evident if consumers switch between providers: in the UK they have to undertake the technical tasks associated with de- and re-installation, which in Korea are undertaken by the new provider. Sweden and France lie somewhere between these two extremes.

A third consumer task relates to interoperability: establishing compatibility between various devices using the internet. Synchronising fixed and mobile broadband, and ensuring access across all devices in the home can present difficulties. While some consumers may be able to work out their own solutions, others rely on personal networks or advice online, or resort to paying small installation companies or ISPs to do it for them for a fee. Finally, keeping broadband up and running (if it breaks down, goes slow) and routine upgrading and maintenance (such as changing a router) comprise the fourth element of consumption work, and often the most trying for UK consumers who often do not (or cannot) know whether their system failure is down to the ISP or to the domestic infrastructure. Given the forced separation between infrastructure and ISP in broadband provision, they can be caught between two companies, each of whom blames the other. Commercial providers offer similar customer support in the UK, Sweden and France (call centres initially, but increasingly virtual help, through avatars and consumer online fora). If recourse to the ISP does not solve the problem, then there is the option of asking friends, following message boards or blogs, paying a dedicated computer company to sort it out or taking out an insurance policy to devolve the solution of problems before they occur. Again, Korea contrasts markedly with the UK since ISPs take full responsibility for solving maintenance issues.

Although ever-simplified over the years, broadband cannot be bought and is not provided ‘ready to use’ without consumption work. While the four tasks are specific to broadband, they reveal the general characteristics of consumption work outlined above. The work is clearly economic in character; it presupposes deployment of appropriate knowledge and technical skill; coordination, between ISP and infrastructure and between bits of equipment, both technical and financial, is a central aspect of the operation; and the work is amenable to outsourcing.

However, how much work falls to consumers differs according to the prevailing system of provision. National variations in vertical integration between infrastructural and service provision, and in the relative weight of public, private and not-for-profit sector involvement, have a significant impact on the choices and coordination tasks confronting consumers. In Britain there is strict division between infrastructure (British Telecom remains responsible) and service provision, ISPs include varying amounts of ‘technical support’ as part of their sale and intermediary companies offer services to consumers who do not possess the necessary expertise to undertake coordination themselves. In Sweden, by contrast, with its heavy reliance on web-enabled financial and health services, infrastructure provision is largely undertaken by municipalities (local state), and is often provided as part of basic housing equipment, while the Korean government initiated both major infrastructure investment and IT literacy programmes targeting hard-to-reach groups.

The nature and extent of broadband consumption work, and whether end-users are construed as citizens or consumers, varies according to the system of provision, in particular the more or less active involvement of the public sector. In terms of the broader multi-dimensional approach to divisions of labour outlined above, the ‘socio-economic formation of labour’ associated with domestic broadband consumption can be seen as articulating a technical division of labour with interdependencies across both socio-economic domain (TSOL) and work undertaken across the whole span of provision of broadband (IEPL).

Recycling of Household Waste

Historically unprecedented levels of domestic waste, combined with the need to reduce carbon footprints, have led to concerted strategies for its disposal. The consumer plays a central part in this, as in the market economy of materials reuse, and the wider division of labour of waste management. Although rooted in state policy, recycling strategies are usually implemented by municipal authorities. The market plays a key role in the production of value from waste, buying and selling on recycled materials, while the third sector is significant as pressure group, promoter of good practice, provider of public education and inculcator of norms. The research focused on the interface and division of responsibilities between consumers, state, market and third sector, and the consequent shaping of household recycling as a form of post-consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013, 2015a).

Much of the variation between Sweden and England can be explained by differences in their respective systems of waste management. In Sweden, a legal distinction between packaging and all other recycling results in division of responsibility between producers who provide for the infrastructure and collection of recyclable packaging, and municipalities who provide recycling centres for all other household materials. The Swedish consumer must sort and transport their waste to either the producer or municipal centres. Waste must also be sorted into more fractions than in many other countries (light bulbs, batteries, electronic equipment etc.), and there are sanctions for putting it in the wrong containers. The producer and municipal systems operate on a not-for-profit basis, impacting on how consumers are encouraged to recycle. In England, by contrast, the municipality is responsible for all waste services, which many outsource to private companies. Consumers’ recyclable waste must be sorted as their municipality or its contractor demands, and is collected from their home. There is huge variation regarding how to recycle (which materials, how many fractions), so that even neighbouring boroughs may demand very different amounts of sorting (commingling or separation). Recyclable materials represent a financial resource for municipalities for selling to recycling companies.

As with broadband installation, the tasks confronting the consumer are specific, revolving around three central activities: supplying feedstock, warehousing and distributing it (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015b). First, waste must be sorted into different categories (e.g. plastic, paper, glass, food, metal), and cleaned or readied for its onward journey. Knowing what counts as a particular material can be tricky and has to be learned, especially in the case of plastic, since not all forms are accepted by local collections. Washing out jars and cans or separating packaging into different recycling fractions is largely left to consumers’ goodwill. Second, the different kinds of waste have to be collected together and stored in appropriate containers. In the UK these are usually provided by the local authority, while in Sweden they are not. Storing the recycling can involve cluttering up domestic space. Swedish interviewees complained of up to seven containers filling up their kitchen cupboards or basement, until there was so much they had to get rid of it. Third, consumers must leave their packaging recycling outside the house (UK) or transport it to the collection points (Sweden).

Consumers’ work is clearly crucial to the market economy of materials re-use and constitutes economic activity. It also presupposes the knowledge to discriminate between materials, and the ability to sort them appropriately and to coordinate their transfer to the next stage in the cycle. But in both Sweden and the UK routine household recycling cannot be understood outside of the institutional system of which it is part, just as successful operation of the system presupposes active participation through routine and regular consumption work.

Recycling differs from many other forms of consumption work in relying heavily on internalised norms. Although sanctions may be in place, compulsion is hard to implement and commitment is often the key to successful performance. Consumers are not remunerated (indeed they pay for recycling services through their local taxes) but are rather motivated through a complex set of moral norms. In Sweden, environmental citizenship remains the key discourse for encouraging participation, while in the UK cuts to public spending have introduced a new message, encouraging people to recycle in order to save public money (Wheeler, 2014).

Like other examples, the work of recycling may be analysed as a three-dimensional socio-economic formation of labour (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015a, 2015b): the work is separated into different stages which are distributed in a complex and often global division of labour (DL); there is interaction between work accomplished on differing socio-economic bases (unpaid household; formal employment in the state, not-for-profit and market sectors) (TSOL); and the different phases of work undertaken by respective parties in accomplishing the overall process of recycling are clearly connected (IEPL).

The case of food preparation differs from many other domains of consumption work. Increasing commoditisation has involved a progressive historical shift of labour to the market from the household, away from unpaid work in the home and towards paid employment in processing plants, factories and shops. This transformation, linked with rising levels of women’s employment and the proliferation of ready-prepared meals, differs nationally, for reasons that are cultural and historical, as well as social and economic. While in three countries researched (France, Taiwan and the UK), the boundary between cooking and buying shifted towards greater market input since the 1970s, this varied both in degree and speed (Glucksmann, 2014). Taiwan experienced the greatest and fastest transformation, notably in contrast to France where the scale and pace of change are lower. In the former, eating-out and buying-in prepared food appear to have become the norm, especially with the growth of convenience stores. France, by contrast, has experienced far less reduction in time spent on domestic cooking, and institutional buttresses to traditional French cuisine have been reinforced by an emphasis on local provenance. The UK lies between the two extremes: the consumer is confronted by a plethora of fresh prepared food and ready-meals for eating at home.

The direction of shift in food preparation work away from the consumer and towards the market and commodity sector is noteworthy: it is moving in the opposite direction from many other kinds of consumption work. But this does not undermine the argument of this article for the significance of consumption work in the division of labour. A central focus of the theoretical framework is the forming and reforming of boundaries between socio-economic modes, and shifts in and across them, with no presupposition of unidirectional movement.

Completing and Complementing

This article has attempted to revise and move forward one of the central concerns of classical sociology, using a relational perspective to conceptualise across domains that are often erroneously treated as self-standing. The multi-dimensional ‘socio-economic formations of labour’ framework highlights that divisions and connections of labour are not only technical, but also straddle and link diverse socio-economic modes and the differing stages of instituted economic process. The aim of the article, in bridging that gap, has been to draw attention to consumption work as a distinctive form of labour whose conceptualisation calls for expansion of traditional understandings of the division of labour. Work does not cease when goods and services are transferred to consumers and leave the realms of production and retail. Yet the labour required to complete and complement the process of production, provision and marketing on which final consumption is predicated has had little place in the study of either work or of consumption.

While contributing primarily to economic sociology, the analytical approach to consumption work draws on a range of disciplinary perspectives. It develops an anthropological understanding of work: that it may be undifferentiated from other activities, and not acknowledged as such, while nevertheless contributing to the continuation of economic life, through relational connection with other economic activities. Exploring variations in consumption work by domain and country will necessarily rely on political science and political economy perspectives to elucidate the origins and stability of divisions between public, private and not-for-profit sectors.

Historically, consumption work appears to become important only with the development of commodity capitalism, in so far as it intervenes between production and use. In subsistence or non-commodity economies people produce primarily for direct use, but the introduction of commodity exchange creates a rupture between production and use. Paradoxically then, expansion of the commodity sphere also creates expansion of non-commodity labour like consumption work. The emergence of new products and services not only presuppose but are often shaped by the skills and coordinating work of consumers. While it is not new, consumption work is metamorphosing in the current period, for a variety of reasons. Business strategies that shift work out of the market, often associated with discourses of consumer sovereignty, represent an important factor. So does progressive digitisation by facilitating the reconfiguration and pruning of organisational chains, enabling a more ‘direct’ relation to be established with end-users by cutting out a number of previously intervening links in the chain.

If most products presuppose work on the part of consumers after they have been sold but before they are consumed, then it is no exaggeration to claim that continued development of market economies or commodity production is predicated on a commensurate evolution of consumption work. The relational ‘socio-economic formations of labour’ framework proposes an integrative approach to the processes spanning production through to final consumption, highlighting their relational and configurational evolution in which consumption work plays a critical role. Theoretically, the contribution of consumption work is to challenge and extend the central sociological concept of division of labour and give it a new significance.

Footnotes

Funding

The research programme on which this paper is based (‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour’) was funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant (DivLab 249430).

Notes

Miriam Glucksmann is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, Visiting Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has longstanding interests in work, employment and gender, especially restructuring, and connections between different forms of labour. Her books include Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (1974, 2014), Women on the Line (1982, 2009), Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain (1990), Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organisation of Labour in Time and Space (2000), the jointly edited A New Sociology of Work? (2005) and jointly with Katy Wheeler Household Recycling and Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies (2015). She completed a research programme on ‘Transformations of Work’ as an ESRC Professorial Fellow in 2007, and was funded by the European Research Council (2010–2014) to research ‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour’.

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