Mark A. Rademacher

Downshifting Consumer = Upshifting Citizen?

Michelle R. Nelson et al. — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:20:48 PDT

Critics suggest that contemporary consumer culture creates over-worked and over-shopped consumers who no longer engage in civic life. We challenge this conventional criticism against consumption within an individualistic lifestyle and argue instead that consumers who are "downshifting" do engage in civic life. In particular, this research examines downshifting attitudes among members of freecycle.org, a grassroots "gift economy" community. Results of an online survey show that downshifting consumers are indeed less materialistic and brand-conscious. They also tend to practice political consumption (e.g., boycotts, buycotts). Most importantly, they tend to engage in a digital form, but not a traditional form, of civic and political participation. We contend that alternative forms of consumption might be a new form of civic engagement.

Capital, Consumption, Communication, and Citizenship: The Social Positioning of Taste and Civic Culture in the United States

Lewis Friedland et al. — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:16:52 PDT

In this paper, we analyze the field of cultural consumption in the United States, drawing on the methods of correspondence analysis employed by Bourdieu (1979/1984). Using the 2000 DDB Lifestyle Study, we analyze a cross section of Americans (N=3,122) in terms of their occupational categories, media usage, consumption practices, social behaviors, and indicators of civic and political engagement. In doing so, we find many parallels to the determinants of taste, cultural discrimination, and choice within the field structure observed by Bourdieu in 1960s French society, though there are also some notable differences, consistent with Peterson and Kern's (1996) concept of omnivorousness. Specifically, we find that in terms of the form of cultural capital, the distribution of positions is largely defined by patterns of taste that discriminate between refinement, moderation, nurturance, and a communal orientation, on the one side, and coarseness, excess, aggressiveness, and an individual orientation, on the other. Historical and national differences partly account for this variation, but we suspect that a major role is played by the increasing formation of identities around media and consumption, leading to a more gendered and ideological positioning of taste cultures in the U.S context.

Fashion and the College Transition: Liminality, Play, and the Structuring Power of the Habitus

Mark A. Rademacher — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:07:56 PDT

Fashion has long been a signifier of social divisions within the education system as well as society at large. This paper seeks to examine how young people’s use of fashion varies in two distinct social milieus – the high school and college peer cultures. Interviews with 19 college freshmen were conducted to ascertain how fashion contributed to, or hindered, social divisions within each milieu. While informants recognized numerous social divisions marked by fashion choices within the high school milieu, during their initial weeks on campus no social divisions were identifiable. In this new milieu it appears fashion contributed to a sense of communitas among college freshmen. However, over time, this sense of communitas diminished as freshmen acquired the requisite levels of cultural capital to identify the signifiers of social divisions. Implications of this research are discussed in terms of freshmen’s limited ability to play with their identity, as expressed through fashion, as a result of the structuring power of the habitus.