Ironically, shopping itself has only rarely been the focus of work in consumption in any of these three stages; commentators on consumption have rarely paid much attention to shopping. ?ven studies of department stores and shopping malls devote remarkably little attention to the cultural practices of shopping. Instead these practices are subsumed into a more general interest in an overarching activity called consumption. The shopper therefore nearly always figures as a sign for something else. The book"Being the Shopper" by John Wiley takes the opposite tack. Wiley proclaims in the book what shoppers do and what they understand as 'shopping'.
Consumption is an unknown topic but that it is, in some senses, known too well: the unorthodox has become a new orthodoxy with all the problems that entails. Of course, this trajectory is hardly unique. A number of other recent academic subcultures have followed much the same path, for example media studies and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Academic subcultures can even be characterized in some of the same ways as the study of consumption. They are fundamentally interdisciplinary. They are unsure of their exact focus; therefore they debate endlessly their central terms. And they have come to be seen as particularly concerned with different kinds of knowledge and with the nature of the object.
How, then, can we understand modern consumption studies, and, most especially, the place of shopping as a crucial element of such studies?"Being the Shopper" is a critical review of work in this field. To this end, it is in four sections. The first is a brief history of the study of consumption in three stages, highlighting the issues raised by each stage of work. The second then considers shopping itself. Here, the concern is both with the sheer diversity of approaches to shopping that are possible and with beginning to develop the framework which informs the work in the book. (Lempert, 2002) The third section then considers the issues of place and identity as vital determinants of modern consumption. In the final section, the four different threads of consumption, shopping, place and identity are brought together again through a consideration of the literature on shopping malls.
During the analysis of psychology of shopper behavior John Wiley noted that as someone who grew up in city with many big stores, who remembers its original opening and for whom it has always been a major shopping location, the recent changes to that centre have come as something of a shock. In coming to the shoppers we no longer expect some consistent or clear image of either shopping or nature; instead people are faced with a series of overlapping terrains within each of which these terms gain particular meanings and evocations that are brought to bear on the architectural transformation of the centers. (Lempert, 2002) It is only through the kind of intensive work which is represented by this study that we may be able to discern how precisely the experience of shopping in shopping centers has plural connotations for the shopper that produce the actual conceptualizations of nature and modernity that they employ.
Once we have a better grasp of the shopper's perception of these terms we may come to one of several conclusions. It may be that these changes were 'inevitable' if the company wanted to retain a commercial sensitivity to these vague moods and feelings of an aggregate shopping mass that nevertheless become the quite concrete statistics of commercial success and failure. Alternatively, as can be demonstrated with much commercial logic (Lempert, 2002), despite claims to research and a clear drive for profitability, it may turn out that companies spend vast sums merely following international trends without much idea as to the actual commercial impact of their ventures. As in the case of advertising, capitalist firms spend vastly more money 'just in case it has a positive effect' or because their rivals are spending similar sums, rather than because they are confident of the results of their expenditures.
Turning from the architecture and from management to the shoppers themselves need to determine what constitutes an experience of shopping that is relatively speaking natural or artificial for the contemporary shoppers. Such a discourse is to be found when listening in to shoppers during their actual shopping trips. These attitudes become most evident when shoppers expressed their representation and relationship to the shop assistant, a figure who turned out to be a much more common topic of conversation than the shop architecture.
If, however, a shopper requires assistance from a shop assistant it is vital that the latter are available and are as helpful as possible in responding to the various questions and requests of the shopper. Shops were constantly being appraised in terms of the degree to which shop assistants conformed to this model. One of the factors that separated out the two key middle-class sites of"Being the Shopper"was precisely this experience of shop assistants. Wiley on the whole was praised as having assistants who most closely conformed to this idea of a discrete presence which is nevertheless informed and helpful when requested."Being the Shopper" was not seen as having intrusive assistants but it was often seen as few and far between and not nearly as knowledgeable about the merchandise when they could be tracked down. (Lempert, 2002)
The apparent 'naturalness' of this attitude to shop assistants is best critiqued by reference to a contrast with quite different styles in the relationship between shop assistant and shopper. In the first case Wiley compare this view with the presence of some 'American' style shops and shop assistants. In the second place Wiley show different contrast with what might be viewed as a remnant working-class vision of solidarity. Wiley has an academic, social science, background and although he has become increasingly involved in more commercial ventures he retains many of the concerns and intellectual interests generated by his studies. Wiley is also aware that, if not what she would call wealthy, he is quite 'comfortable' and has considerable cosmopolitan experience both from holidays abroad and periods spent living or working abroad.
Throughout"Being the Shopper" book Wiley have attempted to ground our understanding of the relationship between shopping, place and identity through detailed empirical research in shopping centers. As a result, Wiley findings contrast with some of the more ungrounded speculations about contemporary consumption which have tended to see 'identity' as inherently plural and free-floating and 'consumption' as a hedonistic pursuit of a virtually limitless range of lifestyle choices. (Lempert, 2002)
John Wiley's approach has been rooted in the material culture of specific places: the shopping centers themselves and the neighborhoods and communities around the location where you live. Through shopping in shopping places, consumers are involved in a creative reworking of gender, ethnicity, class and place. Whether shopping on their own or with others, they are making significant social investments in a relatively narrow set of family and domestic relationships as well as making economic choices about the utility of particular goods. In his book John Wiley draw out some of the more general conclusions of our research in terms of the mutual constitution of place and identity, the advantages of using multiple methods, and the significance of our findings with respect to future policy and future research.
The tenor of John Wiley's book has been to refuse the autonomy of either place or subject, and rather to use this project to examine the articulation between identity and place and thereby transcend any simple duality of subject and object. Although topics such as ethnicity and gender are central to his analysis, we do not take these as pre-given social parameters of identity that are then subject to some process of symbolic representation by place. (Lempert, 2002) That is to say that place is itself partly responsible for the form that they take. Although it is evident that such a relationship may be refused as well as accepted by an individual, the very materiality and scale of place constrains the possibilities for individuals and creates normatively-what we think of as typical responses-as an outcome of its presence.
The rational order of shopping for John Wiley is held against an opposed image of order in the cheapjack based upon taking advantage of fortuitous supply. It was not simply that the sites themselves represented class. On the contrary, we demonstrated that in most respects the shopping areas were very similar. It was rather that the consuming population utilized certain key features of the two centers to break them apart, as it were, and manifest an opposition sufficiently systematic as to appear within analysis as a structural opposition. In understanding the articulation between the shopper and the place of shopping, therefore, the relationship between the producer and consumer of space has to be observed and analyzed in it. This is not at all to suggest that the place is merely the manipulated expression of the intentions of management.
Bibliography
1. Phil Lempert. (2002)"Being the Shopper: Understanding the Buyer's Choice" Sons Publishing, Inc., New York ISBN: 0-471-15135-1
