explaining conspicuous consumption 25
of many social institutions to be unobservable to those who are part of the
society. For Bourdieu, for example, a social practice is to a large extent
defined by generating actions that occur “without presupposing a con-
scious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary
to attain them.... The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of clas-
sification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below
the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective
scrutiny or the control of the will.... It functions as a sort of social orien-
tation, a ‘sense of one’s place’, guiding the occupants of a given place in
social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and
towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position”
(Bourdieu 1990 , 53 , 466 – 67 ; Trigg 2001 ).^48 Steven Lukes ( 2005 ), similarly,
argues that power structures often operate subconsciously by affecting ac-
tors’ preferences. Furthermore, in the prestige case, strong norms restrain
an open discussion of conspicuous consumption — one does not wish to be
seen as smug or vain. Because prestige is a positional quality, an explicit ad-
mission of prestige- seeking behavior is likely to trigger emulative reac tions
by other actors. Thus, acknowledging conspicuous consumption openly
can be self- defeating.
Instead of acknowledging prestige- seeking motivations, actors often
justify the purchase of expensive goods by reference to higher quality, aes-
thetics, cultural sophistication, interesting design, famous brands, or similar
quasi- functional assertions. Veblen describes the process through which
acts of conspicuous consumption get wrapped in a tangle of mitigating val-
ues. While initially conspicuous consumption was admired exactly because
it was expensive, over time it gained other meanings, such as efficiency, re-
solve, or aesthetic value. Furthermore, “whereas at the start the wealth was
desired only secondarily, as one of the marks of prestige, later it was desired
because by itself it conferred prestige”(Andersen 1933 , 610 ). Actors will
therefore tend to motivate their behavior in terms of wealth rather than
prestige.^49 Hence, research on conspicuous consumption often has to rely
on indirect evidence — not on the articulated rationale of actors but rather
on their observable behavior.
This methodological problem is not exclusive to the study of Veblen
effects. All theoretical approaches that rely on actors’ preferences suffer
from a similar difficulty. Because their starting point lies in an assumption
about preferences, rational choice approaches are especially susceptible
to this shortcoming. Samuelson ( 1947 , 91 – 92 ) offers a classic formulation
of this problem: “Consumers’ market behavior is explained in terms of
