Abstract
When The Unmanageable Consumer was first published in 1995, its very title challenged dominant conceptions of consumerism and its subjects. Against the backdrop of Communism’s collapse, the mid-1990s saw a triumphalism espoused by ‘developed’ Western economies which was contained most explicitly in the rife consumption of its citizens. To claim, in 1995, that the ‘consumer’ was indeed ‘unmanageable’ represented a critical charge to mainstream views of marketing, advertising, public relations (PR) and management. However, the challenge was more of a conceptual signalling than it was an exercise in mere critique or pessimistic diagnosis. The book suggested, and continues to do so on the 20th anniversary of its publication, that it is ‘we’ – that is, the individuals who make up ‘society’ itself – who are unmanageable, and it is on account of the complexity of what consumerism represents, and who consumers are, that it remains a central aspect of contemporary living whose conceptualisation remains both essentially ‘contested’ (Gallie, 1964) and ‘unmanageable’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2015).
The book’s original configuration as a direct challenge to the notion that consumers can indeed be managed goes some way to suggest that consumerism itself is a sinister managerial concept that was constructed in order to govern the complexity of mass society (Bernays, 1928, 2015) through the manipulation of their innermost desires (Ewen, 1992; Leach, 2011; Lears, 1995, 2000; Peters and Simonson, 2004). However, for Gabriel and Lang, the story of this alignment finds its roots in an expression that they coined in 1995 – ‘the Fordist Deal’ – which takes us to the historical source of the phenomenon they describe.
The Fordist Deal describes the central promise of Henry Ford’s labour relations philosophy of ‘ever increasing standards of living in exchange for a quiescent labour force accepting alienating work’ (Gabriel and Lang, 1995: 9). In bringing attention to the origins of consumerism’s relation to work and production, Gabriel and Lang lay the foundations on which their analytical chapters continue to be based. Through the Fordist Deal, the ubiquitous and fragmented consumer of contemporary living is understood as having emerged via the triangulation of three dimensions (Gabriel and Lang, 1995: 9–10, 2006: 10, 2015: 10–11): its historical character, its global nature and orientation and its link with production. It is against these contextual and conceptual factors that the book comprises of a chapter-by-chapter account of focused analyses of the various ‘faces’ or ‘masks’ through which consumerism is centrally contained and performed. In the most recent edition, the authors have updated the nine thematic analyses of the consumer as ‘chooser’, ‘communicator’, ‘explorer’, ‘identity-seeker’, ‘hedonist’ … (‘or artist’) (Gabriel and Lang, 1995: 100–116, 2006: 96–11), ‘victim’, ‘rebel’, ‘activist’ and ‘citizen’ to include a seemingly new fragmentation, ‘The Consumer as Worker’. However, with the context of the Fordist Deal on which their notion of contemporary consumerism continues to be based, this additional focus serves to both provide an addition face/mask to the unmanageable interpretation of contemporary consumerism and, in doing so, returns their analysis to an ‘essential premise of [the] book since it was first conceived’, in the form of a new chapter.
It is in this capacity that the third dimension of contemporary consumerism (its relation to production) contains the ground from which the domain of traditional ‘production’ (i.e. ‘work’) can be understood as becoming increasingly connected with and understood through that of consumption (Gabriel et al., 2015) – both in terms of employees as consumers and as commodities to be consumed (see Dale, 2012). To this extent, the latest addition to this book does much more than merely update the central premises and analyses of the previous editions, but rather makes a contribution to current debates and developments in Management and Organisation studies related to the increasing consumptive nature and understanding of work itself.
The productive and increasingly performative form that consumption takes (and vice versa) can be read as an elaboration on Alvin Toffler’s (1980) notion of the ‘prosumer’: she or he who operates as both ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’: Producer and consumer, divorced by the industrial revolution, are reunited in the cycle of wealth creation, with the customer contributing not just the money but the market and design information vital for the production process. Buyer and supplier share data, information and knowledge. Someday, customers may also push buttons that activate remote production processes. Consumer and producer fuse into a ‘prosumer’. (p. 239; referenced in Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 215)
It is with this notion in mind that the additional chapter to the latest edition is conceptualised. Therefore, although it is on the 20th anniversary of The Unmanageable Consumer’s publication that the question has been formalised and developed into the penultimate chapter, the astute historical articulation of ‘the consumer’s’ rise from the first edition onwards has sustained as the foundation on which the book’s articulateness remains and is the central theme to which the authors return in this latest addition.
As it has been brought to attention in the editorial introduction to a recent special issue in the journal Organization, in recent years, there has been a substantial movement from the manager/worker dyad into a ‘three-actor show’ where the figure of the consumer is no longer seen as ‘impacting on’ organisational life from the outside, but increasingly as defining them (Gabriel et al., 2015). It is upon this new configuration of the authors’ original thesis that the consumer-worker is something much more significant to management learning than a need to chart a more recent ‘face’ of the consumer since the first and second editions (see Gabriel and Lang, 2008). In keeping with the conception of post-Fordism, the additional chapter can be read as a timely reconsideration of the ‘Fordist Deal’ of 1995 and 2006, to what we might interpret as something of a ‘post–Fordist Deal’ (although the authors use no such expression) where consumerism has become central to production, and work has become a site where those that produce are in turn consumed (see Chertkovskaya, 2013; Dale, 2012). Indeed, a key segment of the conclusive chapter (which shares its title with that of the book) has changed from a focus on ‘the Fordist deal and its aftermath’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2006: 189–190) to an understanding of its ‘demise’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 229–231). Through this, the emergent intersection between consumption and work found in the notion of ‘the consumer as worker’ takes this book’s original thesis very much into the 21st century.
Crucially, evidence of the bridge between the domains of ‘work’ and ‘consumption’, and the roles of individuals as ‘workers’ and ‘consumers’, is contained in the fact that the various masks that provide the book’s chapter-by-chapter focuses have also been used in the attempt to articulate questions of identity at work. With contemporary work itself being largely enframed as yet another site of ‘choice’, ‘freedom’, ‘communication’, ‘exploration’, identity-seeking, hedonism, victimhood, rebellion, resistance, activism and citizenship, what this final and sole additional chapter does for the book is cement the argument that the authors have reiterated elsewhere. This is worth repeating again, as they have located the kernel through which contemporary consumption and consumerism are intertwined with, and therefore cannot be studied in isolation from, the domain of ‘work’.
Through the book’s wider interrogation into the character and pervasiveness of consumerism, it appears that the reason why the most recent intersections between work and consumption have come about is due to a shared promise of freedom and autonomy. It is against a background of freedom that consumers at first appear to embody the cultural–economic logic behind the right to choose (as explored in chapter 2, ‘The Consumer as Chooser’), which is a similar vocabulary mobilised from organisations as an extension of the rhetoric of human resource management (HRM). ‘Choice’, in this sense, is commonly understood as the consumer’s ‘friend’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2008: 322), and it with ‘the consumer as chooser’ that Gabriel and Lang (2015) begin their first analytical chapter (pp. 25–45). However, such a conception is quickly revealed to be a double-edged sword in which the consumer is at the same time unsettled, fragile and ‘precarious’ on account of their economically sovereign subject position: the protean consumer is at any time supremely self-determining – seeking, fashioning and self-knowing while at the same time succumbing to an anxious form of victimhood (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 129–144) that is commonly understood as being preyed upon by those who produce, facilitate and coerce the consumption of the increasing numbers of consumables that bombard them in their everyday lives. Therefore, while the consumer can be interpreted ‘as’ ‘activist’, ‘identity-seeker’, ‘rebel’ and ‘hedonist’, she or he can and is, at the same time, a ‘victim’ considered ‘a weak and malleable creature, easily manipulated, dependent, passive and foolish’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2008: 322) in the eyes of ‘marginal businesses … fly-by-night hucksters … [and] US blue-chip business firms’ (Nader, 1968; referenced in Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 129).
With what began via the Fordist Deal’s merging of the interrelated but distinct understanding of ‘work’ and ‘consumption’ as two central spheres of activity, what remains unmanageable about and for the consumer also frames what is unmanageable for the worker and about their work: themselves. It is in this capacity that the newest enframing of the consumer raises questions that are central to any inquiry regarding consumption and work: the question of ‘identity’. ‘Identity is Rome to which all discussions of Western consumption lead’, and ‘the Western consumer readily transfigures into an identity-seeker’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 86–87). In chapter 5, ‘The Consumer as Identity-Seeker’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 86–107), the subheadings ‘Consumption and Identity’ (Gabriel and Lang, 1995: 86) and ‘Consumption and Choice’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2006: 84) have become ‘Consumption, Choice and Identity’, and with the sentiments present in ‘Chapter 11’ being indicative of how pertinent their originating thesis was, there was certainly the potential for new life to be breathed into a section that regrettably remains unchanged since 1995. In this section, the authors draw on the views most vehemently espoused by Zygmunt Bauman (1988, 1992, 2001) that ‘“the work ethic” has been dislodged by a “consumer ethic”’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 93), and with what chapter 11 brings attention to, a gesture towards these implications would have gone some way to bring the most recent face/mask of the consumer’s unmanageability into relation with the question of identity in a more explicit way. Of course, as a new edition to an already established text, it would have been wrong to channel everything towards a most recent trend; however, the way in which ‘The Consumer as Worker’ reinforces the first principles of the book, no gesture at all towards these implications on identity leaves a critical silence over a theme whose centrality is brought evermore into the fray with this latest addition.
The fact that Gabriel and Lang seek to understand the fragmented identity of the homogeneous ‘consumer’ as a particular configuration to a performed identity or role (‘chooser’, ‘communicator’, ‘explorer’, ‘identity-seeker’, ‘hedonist’, ‘victim’, ‘rebel’, ‘activist’, ‘citizen’ and most recently ‘worker’), rather than ‘configuration X’ ‘as’ ‘consumer’, may seem like a nuanced point, but it contains a clue to the book’s strength and continued relevance. Since the previous editions of The Unmanageable Consumer, consumerism has intensified in domains where it was originally associated while expanding into new areas of everyday life. Between the first and second editions, major technological innovations made our homes into ‘retail outposts’ and changed our consumption practices, particularly with regard to images and music. In the years since the first developments were identified in the second edition, social, cultural and economic interactions have continued to proliferate and intensify. In doing so, ‘consumerism’ has now infiltrated most aspects of the economy and the vocabularies surrounding education and health were beginning to hint towards ‘students’ (Williams, 2013) and ‘patients’ (Fotaki, 2011) as increasingly seen to engage with such provisions as consumers. Despite such trends being necessary additions to this new edition (whether addressed directly or not), others that have charted the developments in consumerism seek to use it as a concept that can be employed to understand the plight of contemporary phenomena as much as a domain within itself. It is in this capacity that one of the repeatedly articulated tensions in the book is between whether the term itself is all-embracing or too narrow: does it refer to one aspect of what we do or is it the very concept through which our various social roles are driven and understood? To understand ‘role X’ as ‘a consumer’ is to suggest the latter, whereas the author’s understanding of ‘the consumer’ as ‘role X’ suggests that consumption is a single and additional role that makes up the identity-seeking self. Therefore, the authors’ articulation is a gesture against the reduction of individuals to their inevitable engagement with consumerism, and it is through this that there is a glimmer of hope with regard to resisting or, at the very least, ‘responding to’ this homogenising discourse (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 168).
It is in this capacity that with the exception of the newest chapter, the authors have used this third edition as an opportunity to survey the landscapes of consumption and consumer studies since the book was originally published in 1995 (Gabriel, 2015). In turn, this 20th anniversary edition is as much a comment on what is currently central to consumer and organisation studies as it is a developed thesis of the first edition. Therefore, rather than breaking new ground, the authors offer additional instances that serve to reinforce the emergent postulations formed from the specific mid-1990s context in which this book was first published. In doing so, the scale and intensity of what they name has been confirmed through their integration of recent and iterative instances of consumerism, rather than any new or larger critique as such. However, it is upon this premise that this new edition is particularly strong and worth (re)reading as much as the additional chapter serves to reiterate their overall argument and context. The nine original, yet rewritten, chapters that fall between the introduction, first and final two final chapters are largely revised with particular developments, and they continue to tell an interesting and compelling narrative as both a collective account of contemporary consumerism and as individual snippets. However, upon reviewing these developments, the book’s success remains premised on the two analyses and final conclusion their focus is couched between.
As the faces and masks of consumerism become increasingly pronounced and fragmented, its centrality to all aspects of contemporary Western living make The Unmanageable Consumer a book that almost everyone would benefit from reading. As the authors suggest, ‘[f]or better or worse, many of us think of ourselves, at least part of the time, as consumers’ (Gabriel and Lang, 2015: 228). For students of consumption, the reason why the consumer-worker phenomenon appears so recent and has been argued as being a ‘blind spot of earlier consumer studies’ (Ritzer, 2015) is suggested by Gabriel and Lang (2015) to reside with theorists of consumption, rather than those preoccupied with the sociology of work, who have been systematic in their disinterest of ‘anything that smacks of work’ (p. 212). This in turn suggests something pertinent to students of business and management subjects in particular.
For those who find their studies, research and teaching concerned with ‘organisational’ rather than ‘consumer’ behaviour as such, this book poses a challenge to the syntagmatic containment of these increasingly modularised areas of inquiry and reinforces the need for a perpetual reconceptualisation of the various domains that business and management schools engage with in light of these changes. Therefore, the book is commendable as an introduction to consumerism at undergraduate level as much as one to those concerned with elaborating on a chosen focus as they progress through their studies. However, in a world where undergraduate and postgraduate students find themselves increasingly constructed as consumers (Williams, 2013), and facing a world defined by various modes of consumption (most recently in their prospective graduate work), engagement with this book should certainly be encouraged across the disciplines. This is because despite the books’ social-scientific tone and academic relevance, the authors continue to balance their account of the tightly coiled interrelations of the above-mentioned themes and phenomena with a pertinent yet accessible unpacking of how their complex formation is central to consumerism’s ongoing and intensified centrality to the narratives in and of our everyday lives.