Cultural Geography

production, exemplified by the Fordist flow-past

assembly line with its intensive technical divi-

sion of labour, high productivity, aesthetic stan-

dardization of goods and decreasing unit costs.

The double need to ensure workplace discipline

in increasingly alienated production processes,

and to ensure sufficient effective demand to sell

the huge volume of output, were both to be

solved by promising workers (who are also con-

sumers) a steadily rising standard of living

defined through consumption norms. These were

institutionalized through such mechanisms as

national industrial relations agreements, under-

written by the state, and Keynesian demand

management. Therefore Fordism is a means of

institutionalizing and stabilizing the split between

production and consumption, identifying private

consumption as the sphere in which modern

citizens might experience progress, freedom and

self-determination, and establish culturally

meaningful ways of life within their private

sphere of consumption.

Post-Fordism – usually dated from the early

1970s – represents a new mode of articulating

and stabilizing the relation between economy

and culture, production and consumption. It is a

response to both the perceived limits of Fordism

(e.g. insupportable risks of investment in inflexi-

ble mass production facilities in a context of

saturated consumer markets; increased workplace

alienation; the ability of the state to avert crisis

tendencies) and the emergence of new technical

and organizational opportunities. The latter tend

to promote structures of consumption that are not

‘mass’ but segmented and specialized, flexible,

‘small batch’. For example, the increased role

of knowledge and information in production

(computer-aided design and robotization) allows

for production lines to be changed by cheaply

reprogramming rather than by scrapping expen-

sive plant; increasingly fragmented media (non-

broadcast television, internet) allow targeting of

smaller, more specialized market niches; market-

ing and advertising – the conceptual and symbolic

definition of goods and services – take on com-

manding and coordinating positions within

firms. Moreover, the idea of post-Fordism

converges with broader characterizations of socio-

economic change in the direction of increasing

‘dematerialization’ or ‘informatization’ (dis-

cussed below) in which commodities are defined,

produced and distributed in relation more to their

signification than to their materiality. The upshot

is the increasing centrality of cultural processes

and logics within both production and consump-

tion and their articulation.

The various brands of post-Fordist theory, and

formulations of ‘new economy’, are certainly

open to considerable debate. However, their

influence has been enormous, particularly in

forming and more latterly in convergences

between consumption studies and economic

sociology (Callon, 1998; Slater and Tonkiss,

2001). The Fordist/post-Fordist framework para-

doxically derives its pictures of consumption

entirely from transformations in production and

economy (narrowly conceived) while at the same

time points us towards the absolute and increas-

ing centrality of consumption, and indeed

culture, in the reproduction of the economic

order. Hence it has moved analysis, almost in

spite of itself, towards a concern with the inter-

connections between economy and culture to the

extent that it has provided the core set of

presumptions behind the most culturalist accounts

of consumption to date: theories of postmodern-

ity (Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1984; Lee, 1993),

discussed below.

CONSUMPTION AND CULTURE

It could be said that neither liberal nor critical

traditions seriously examined consumption as

culture. For liberals, consumption lay within the

private domain of the individual and only

reached visibility in the form of demand, the

result of rational abstraction from a culture of

needs and wants that was itself unexamined. For

critics, contemporary consumer culture was the

inauthentic and manipulated result of productive

forces which were the only important focus of

investigation: actual contemporary consumption

was simply an index of debasement; the only

alternative form of consumption was the utopian

or nostalgic relationship to needs that came

before or after capitalism.

We could therefore argue that the emergence

of a research agenda that is explicitly concerned

with cultures of consumption is relatively recent

(perhaps two decades old), and has drawn on

two kinds of resources: firstly, traditions and

methodologies for thinking about the way in which

meaningful goods play a part in the reproduction

of everyday life; and secondly, accounts of those

specifically modern conditions which have given

consumption a strategic place in negotiating

status and identity.

Different lineages could be claimed but we

might point to three major traditions that place

the ‘meanings of things’ on the centre stage of

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