I. Shifts in the Organization of Late Capitalism Change the Vanguard of History (continued)

A. Recent focus on consumption as creating identity

1. Capitalism allows greater access to goods
2. People enjoy consumption
3. People make consumption choices

B. Consumption enables heterogenization of culture
C. Miller: consumers have preponderance of power in late capitalism

1. Shift in how products are marketed

a. Producers used to make product, then create desire for it through advertising
b. Now, marketing studies allow producers to respond to consumer demands

2. Vertical integration

a. Producers are distributors
b. Gap, Ann Taylor, supermarket brands: flexible, efficient, fast in responding to consumer demands

D. Shifts in consumption in developing countries

1. Old paradigm: Third World produces, First World consumes
2. Today: Size of Third World market attracts companies
3. Pepsi in Vietnam

a. Embargo lifted in 1994
b. Pepsi's advertising campaign
c. Vietnamese consume 15 bottles of soda per person per year

4. Fordism in Third World

E. Spread of mass consumption makes it more anthropological

1. Examine why people make certain consumption choices, impact of history, global conditions
2. Explore effects of consumption choices on individuals, society, and economy

 

II. The Consuming Housewife

A. Miller: housewife as "global dictator"
B. Gender component led analysts to denigrate consumption

1. Worker struggles for higher wages = important, powerful
2. Housewife clips coupons to save money = trivial, superficial

 

III. Third World Women as Producers and Consumers

A. Female factory workers challenge idea that production is male domain
B. Maria Mies (1986)

1. First World: women as housewife-consumers
2. Third World: women as working class producers
3. Double oppression by collusion between international divisions of labor and patriarchy

C. Boserup revisited

 

IV. Pink Collar Workers in Barbados

A. Mies ignores Third World consumption
B. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels (2000)

1. Working class women use consumption (fashion) to construct selves as new type of professional class
2. Consumption is pleasurable

C. Informatics in Barbados

1. Information processing done off-shore for American companies
2. Shifts in the global assembly line
3. Barbadians as attractive labor: cheap, literate (98%)
4. Pink collar work = feminine

a. Women perform these jobs
b. Tasks seen as inherently feminine (as in Ong's book)
c. Dress signifies it as different from white or blue collar work

D. Informatics work as pseudo-professional

1. Efforts to dress the part: shopping, extra employment, travel abroad
2. Not professional: bus stop encounter

E. Freeman's reconfiguration of class

1. Marx: class results from relationship to means of production, objective category
2. Bourdieu, Distinction (1984): class is associated with taste, consumption, subjective experience
3. Looking at consumption and production together shows that informatics workers are lower status economically, higher status culturally

a. Dress, travel abroad
b. "Femininity practice" blurs class distinctions and imagery

4. Identity performances "reconfigure their class consciousness at the same time that it situates these women workers in a complex of transnational and local relations from which they derive pleasure and pride" (65).

F. Transnationalization of Barbadian informatics workers

1. Global history of Barbados (as in Mintz), inauthentic in cultural terms
2. Today: important site for understanding local and global
3. Transnational production motivates and enables transnational consumption

a. Work is for foreign company
b. Workers see selves as part of global community, want to consume global products

4. Transnationalism as an intellectual stance expressed through concrete consumption choices

G. Production and consumption links reveal both oppression and pleasure, pride in new identities, blurring of traditional class distinctions

 

For more information, contact:  aleshkow@holycross.edu