owning, but also in looking and browsing,
watching other consumers and moving through
sign worlds, we imaginatively try on identities.
Both the reflexivity of the consumer – their
‘knowingness’ and semiotic skills – and their
supposed playfulness or ironic, flaneur-style
distance from commitment are also associated
with a new fluidity in social identities and
memberships, as we have noted in Bauman’s
and Mafessoli’s ideas of neotribes and elective
memberships: new spaces of consumption both
enable and arise from a condition in which people
can elect (imaginatively or really) their cultural
and subculturalallegiances.
What came to be known in the mid 1990s as
the ‘new retail geography’ – an important cor-
rective to the postmodern excesses current in
other disciplines – sought to evade the problems
of both these positions, both the productivist and
culturalist extremes as well as their overly facile
pessimism or optimism. Firstly, it correctly
recognized retail as a primary site on which one
could and indeed had to connect political eco-
nomy and cultural processes rather than reduc-
tively to assign a dominant position to either of
them. For example, Lowe (2000) demonstrates
that new retail megastructures, planned by
global capital, can be transformed into true
‘places’ by local authorities, consumers and
users. Secondly, it cleared the path for new
strategies of empirical engagement, eschewing
both macro-analysis and simple semiotic read-
ings of spaces and discourses. The primary need
was, and is, for ethnographic investigations that
bring to light the ways in which people actually
use and experience these retail spaces, and how
they are linked into longer chains of provision,
both ‘downwards’ to the consumers’ lifeworld
and ‘upwards’ into commercial and industrial
organization and social regulation. Moreover,
the ethnographic approach gives a more con-
crete sense of how more durable identities such
as gender, ethnicity and age mediate these retail
practices but are also partly constituted through
them. The study of London shopping centres
and high streets by Miller et al. (1998), for
example, provided a particularly rich account of
the relation of these social spaces to complex
social and local histories, rather than to a post-
modern play of styles. Thirdly, as particularly
emphasized by Miller (1998; also Slater,
1997a), postmodern readings of new consump-
tion spaces were perversely informed by a
highly individualistic orientation. These con-
sumers, unlike the sovereign ones of economic
theory, might be fragmented and motilesubjects, but they were nonetheless depicted as
individual ones. Miller’s work focused on the
consumer’s connectedness to significant others:
going shopping is not so much the act of iden-
tity-seeking subjects entering a supermarket of
style as the process by which people (and
largely women) provision the lives in which
they are embedded, and hence in which they
must construct the needs of their children and
partners as much as they may imaginatively play
with their own. Shopping is, as Miller writes, an
act of love.MASS CONSUMPTION AND
GLOBAL CULTURESimilar issues also arise in relation to increasing
scales of both production and consumption,
which is also a central concern for cultural geo-
graphy. Globalization is hardly a new concern in
that capitalism has always been associated with
an internationalization of trade and production
relations. Early liberal arguments for capitalism
emphasized both increased awareness of inter-
dependence and the stance of rational calculation
that attended the development of commerce
(Hirschman, 1977). By contrast, Marx provided
some of the most vivid images of capitalism as a
force that is driven to explore the world for new
‘use values’, hence bringing formerly isolated
populations into competitive market conditions
for both labour and consumer goods. In the
process, Marx argued, non-capitalist social rela-
tions and cultures are dissolved. Significantly,
consumption has long been equated with mass
consumption, a central means through which
concepts of mass culture and mass society were
understood. Again, the central image is the
ineluctable dissolution of previous material
cultures in the face of globalizing commodity
production. Early arguments about a global
consumer culture echoed the structure of mass
consumption and mass culture theories, often in
the form of ‘Americanization’ theses.
There are in fact several different claims
embedded in such formulations: firstly, a claim as
to the homogeneity of consumption under regimes
of massification or globalization; secondly,
a claim as to the inevitability and smoothness of
the successful spread of consumer culture; and
thirdly, a set of value claims usually centring on
either the quality or the authenticity of life under
consumer culture (Miller, 2001; Wilk, 2001).
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