27 Symbolic Economy/Shopping

Dr. Debashree Dattaray

epgp books

 

 

I. Symbolic Economy: Definitions

According to The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, the use of the term “symbolic economy” refers us to the way in which the symbolic practices of culture are also productive activities of a monetary economy. This has been particularly marked in urban redevelopment practices such as the transformation of old wharfs and canals into shopping centres or areas of leisure activity during and since the 1980s. Here the symbolic economy is manifested as material economic power. Indeed, the redevelopment of urban spaces and places is commonly forged through the synergy of capital investment and cultural meanings. Symbolic culture plays an economic role in branding a city by associating it with desirable ‘goods’; for example, movie representations of the New York skyline and the Sydney Opera House. Further, culture industries such as film, television and advertising lend glamour to cities, bringing direct employment and other economic benefits. Finally, symbolic houses of culture such as museums and theatres provide convivial spaces of consumption for business meetings and tourism. Thus, Paris is famous for its architectural history and gastronomic reputation rather more than its manufacturing base.”

Published for the first time in 1995, Sharon Zukin’s2 seminal book entitled The Culture of Cities foregrounds the use of the term “symbolic economy”. Zukin traces the trajectory of symbolic economy in connection to the changes in processes of production and distribution through the usage of symbols or knowledge based inputs and outputs. Traditional and eternal needs of human civilization have been food, water, electricity, shelter and other civic amenities. According to Zukin, symbolic economy entails the inclusion of symbolic commodities such as data, technological inputs, fashion epistemologies and organizational knowledge and commodities and the ever-expanding flow of information as basic needs which in turn create a new culture.

Symbolic economy involves a gradual evolution from agrarian economy, industrial economy and monetary economy. Since the beginning of time, society was based on a system of agricultural economy where the source of livelihood emerged from the land – tilling the land, growing crops and selling them. The socio-economic status of people was determined by the ownership of land. In a primarily agrarian country such as India, the significance of land ownership would be connected to marital relations, political and economic authority and as an indicator of social reform and historical upheavals. Across the world, the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth century Europe led to a paradigmatic shift in the socio-economic structure of society through a change in the processes by which goods were produced and distributed. Consequently, people with an understanding and ownership of industry were brought into focus, rather than agrarian workers. Almost two centuries later, the concept of post- Industrialist society emerged in the 1970s. The concept “suggests that contemporary Western societies are shifting their central processes from industrial manufacturing to service industries and information exchange. The pre-eminence of information technology to the social formation, along with a relative shift of emphasis from production to consumption, is said to mark the post-industrial society. Pivotal to conceptions of the post-industrial society are (a) the critical place of knowledge in the economy and culture, (b) the shifts taking place in the kinds of work people do and (c) the related changes in the occupational structure. Theorists of the post-industrial society give a key role in their schema to knowledge production and planning. In particular, information exchange and cultural production are seen to displace heavy industry at the heart of the economy. This, together with the emergence of new production processes, makes information technology and communications the industries of the future. Central to these developments are the role and capabilities of computers in managing the increase in volume, speed and distance with which increasingly complex information is generated and transferred. In this view, technological change is the driving force of social change.”

Symbolic Economy constitutes three salient features as below:

  1. It is urban;
  2. It is based on the production of symbols as basic commodities;
  3. It is based on the production, in a very self-conscious way, of spaces as both sites and symbols of the city and of culture.

Symbolic Economy therefore emerges as a concept during the post – Industrialist phase. The overwhelming growth in the field of information technology and media industry have led to the development of “knowledge societies” in which symbols and knowledge based inputs contribute to the formation of economic structures and significant social patterns. In his book, Knowledge Societies, social scientist Nico Stehr argues that contemporary social theories must take cognizance of the changing nature of social relations around knowledge as well as the parameters within which this analysis should take place. It is imperative to understand the transformation of access to knowledge through higher education, the emergence of experts (managers, accountants, advisors and counselors) and of corresponding institutions based on the category of specialized knowledge formation. Consequently, there has been a shift in the nature of societal conflict in terms of generalized human needs.

II. Understanding Network Society

In this context, the term “Network Society” becomes important as propounded by Manuel Castells, Professor of Sociology and Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. A network society places a premium on the notion of ‘network’ in relation to its predominant functions and processes. There are three major historical processes which converge into the formation of a network society as below:

  1. The Informational Technology Revolution
  2. Restructuring of capitalism and statism in the 1980s
  3. Cultural revolutions of the 1960s and their aftermath in the 1970s.

It is important to note that the Information Technology Revolution did not create the Network Society but it is crucial towards the existence of the Network Society. Juxtaposing economic, social, political and cultural factors, Castells focuses on the idea of ‘space’ and the changing role of the nation state. According to him, the transition from the industrial age into the information age is an integral part of our lived experiences today. In the context of communication and biological technologies, society has witnessed rapid changes with the advent of new information technologies. Society continues to functional as a capitalist state.

However, the functionality of the society is dependent upon technological innovations or in other words, information rather than energy. In the 2010 Preface to his book, The Rise of the Network Society, Castells writes:

We live in confusing times, as is often the case in periods of historical transition between different forms of society. This is because the intellectual categories that we use to understand what happens around us have been coined in different circumstances, and can hardly grasp what is new by referring to the past. I contend that around the end of the second millennium of the common era a number of major social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations came together to give rise to a new form of society, the network society.

The processes of economic productivity are determined through the central role of information. Communication technologies lead to the disappearance of space and in the context of globalization, the notion of time changes with the presence of rapid and asynchronous communication. The networks are not merely indicative of social structures but are also of central significance for social morphology. This is because the decentralization of operations and systems of control is facilitated through communication technologies such as the internet. Castells explains that “while networks are an old form of organization in the human experience, digital networking technologies, characteristic of the Information Age, powered social and organizational networks in ways that allowed their endless expansion and reconfiguration, overcoming the traditional limitations of networking forms of organization to manage complexities beyond a certain size of the network. Because networks do not stop at the border of the nation-state, the network society constituted itself as a global system, ushering in the new form of globalization characteristic of our time.”  Therefore, today, networks are the centre of power. Networks pertaining to financial capital are global in scale. Networks also exists within and between businesses, wherein the organizational unit has shifted from being capability-oriented (e.g. accounting, human resources, etc.) to being project-oriented. Resources – including employees, consultants, and other businesses – are brought together to work on a particular project, then dispersed and reallocated when the task reaches completion. Castells asserts that the ability of an actor in the network – be it a company, individual, government, or other organization – to participate in the network is determined by the degree to which the node can contribute to the goals of the network. Such a structural framework demands skilled flexible workers and the organization man gives way to the flexible woman. Moreover, this results in the binary process of inclusion and exclusion from the network whereby people at the lowest run are forced to be outside the network as they seem to have nothing to offer.

As an urban geographer, Castells is deeply interested in the category of ‘space’ and the ‘space of flows’ which constitutes a domain of networks – of capital, of information, of business alliances. He argues that “While organizations are located in places, . . . the organizational logic is placeless, being fundamentally dependent on the space of flows that characterizes information networks”7. This space of flows subverts the space of places, including regional communities and nation states. Networks lead to the “destruction of human experience”8: power is considered apart from political representation, production from consumption, information from communication. The inclusion/exclusion logic of the network “switches off

. . . people and territories dubbed as irrelevant from the perspective of dominant interests”. This ensures and asserts domination: “[d]omination depends . . . on the simultaneous capacity of . . . elites to articulate themselves and disarticulate the masses” 10. While apparently, groups are free to form and develop their own networks and goals, their ability to interact with dominant networks is determined by their capacity to adapt to the goals of those networks. However, one needs to understand that the network society is not an entirely new phenomena but more of a continuation of industrial society.

III. Global Cities and Shopping: The Urban Space

As a result, symbolic commodities have become the corner stone of unpacking economic practices across the world. Symbolic Economy is nurtured and promoted by the tripartite combination of tourism, media and entertainment (the TME factor). Due to a plethora of information networks and technological developments, the world has transformed in to a “global village” (Marshal McLuhan) and the “global man” travels much more frequently and across wider geographical areas. Tourism has led to the inflow of cash into different corners of the world due to the growing urge to explore and travel. Media also plays a very important role for the propagation of symbolic economies. Television, radio, newspapers, films, advertisements, and the internet ensure that secondary needs of man are projected and reinforced as primary and basic needs. Consumer products related to beauty, grocery, health are mediated as indispensable products or must-haves for the global citizen. More importantly, entertainment has changed its face as another critical part of day – to – day existence. Theme parks, multiplexes, shopping malls, sports clubs, discotheques are mushrooming across the urban and even the sub-urban space as integral and mandatory for every day existence. Consequently, the historical understanding and implication of ‘culture’ is dramatically reversed in the great cities of the world where it becomes a product of symbolic economy. For governments, businesses and other organizations, culture is then perceived as a generator of wealth and with the potential to reap far richer dividends than before. According to Zukin,

“By the same token, the very term ‘World Cities’…. as a 20th century term, binds together business and culture. Patrick Geddes, the British urbanist, wrote at the beginning of the 20th century that world cities are cities where a disproportionate amount of the world’s business is conducted. Closer to our time, in the 1960s, another British urbanist, Peter Hall, wrote about world cities as places where we find the greatest concentration of political power, trade, rich people and entertainment facilities. In a more recent book, in the 1990s, Peter Hall added cultural creativity to the definition of world cities. John Friedeman and Gertz Wolfe in the 1980s, wrote about world cities as places where there is a disproportionate amount of capital accumulation – again, emphasizing the role of financial institutions – in the development of culture. And Saskia Sassen, in a book on ‘The Global City’ at the beginning of the 1990s, also concentrated on world cities as centres for the co- ordination of finance.

The resultant marriage of culture and business has diverse ramifications within the complex space of world cities in the twenty first century. The space is defined and determined by the increasing mobility of people within these cities and the media ensures ease of communication and interaction. Further, the boundaries between institutional and organization spheres are fluid and permit more interaction and movement across disciplines and spaces. The degree of mobility, Zukin writes, creates the notion of “urban imaginary” which is “made up of ordinary people walking every day in the streets, ordinary people talking, wearing clothes, cooking food, and developing the sense of excitement that we find in world cities. The urban imaginary also includes the struggle between forces of social control and forces that try to break loose from social control.”

The apparently democratic set – up of culture is transformed into a coterminous process of inclusion and exclusion in terms of personal significance and commercial profit. Zukin explains that such a social structure leads to the development of a permanent paradox between centralized monopolies with their attempts to control cultural production and the new ideas which necessitate democratic access to means of cultural expression in order to facilitate new modes of culture. This paradox is acted out in different parts of the urban space but most importantly in the public space of consumer shopping. Shopping constitutes spaces which involve both economic and symbolic power. The concept of shopping has revamped itself within the urban economy through new patterns of social fragmentation, segregation and polarization. Patrolled shopping centres are indication of a shrinking middle class and an ever expanding community of the homeless, welfare dependents and cheap labour. The urban world economy is dominated by limited number of centres which function as command and control points for a varied set of economic activities. The concept of a global city with shopping arcades, malls and accessibility to online shopping portals are emblematic of the structuring and restructuring of space as a created environment through the dissemination of industrial capitalism. Issues of location and their relative advantages are important factors for capitalist corporations and brand factories. Low labour costs, weaker unionizations and tax concessions determine the locations for plants, markets and development. Global cities such as London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Paris, Singapore are important not only in terms of their size or volume of business but also in terms of the key personnel and activities located within them. As global cities, they are the sites for accumulation, distribution and circulation of global capital and cater to hundreds of transnational corporations. The concept of shopping within these cities and also in the context of the urban space changes ideas of real estate, schooling and desire and needs. In his book entitled Captains of Consciousness13, Stuart Ewen showed how corporate advertisers changed the American consciousness “from virtues of frugality and deferred gratification to a new ethic of mass consumption. Within a capitalist system of supply and demand, the advertisers would supply the demand for products. Advertisers know that, while people go to supermarkets and shopping malls to purchase products, real shopping is more about people than about merchandise, and it takes place mostly in the mind.” Through processes of gentrification and representation, the neighbourhood economy finds itself transformed in terms of shopping streets and centres. In a country like India, the gamut of malls being developed in the Urban space delineate the changes within public culture. For the urban youth and for young families, the shopping mall seems to offer an integrated space of social, symbolic and dynamic interaction. “In this sense one might argue that shopping districts and in particular ‘the street’ has a great influence on the way how people become integrated into a community as a result of retail’s expressions. The act of shopping is simultaneously social and economic. Consumers purchase goods which have not only practical utility but also complex cultural meanings. Retailers ‘mediate’ between producers and consumers and exchange these meanings about place. On the one hand, consumers’ purchases send information to producers about the goods that consumers ‘want’, on the other hand consumers select from the goods presented to them by retailers. Retailers therefore not only respond but also structure consumers’ desires and choice”

Shops and shopping centres represent the quality of a neighbourhood and are a reflection of the economic progress of real estate, health services and schooling in the area. In this process, one must understand how the symbolic process of consumption changes and also take into cognizance the social consequences of such transformations. According to Zukin, cultural strategies of economic growth and community revitalization are related to the growing presence of material inequalities. “In the shopping street, vision is power”16 She argues that retail is powerful visual structuring medium for the social production of place. The identity of the “thing” itself—the retail good, the store, or even the shopping experience—changes meaning according to who does the shopping when and where.17 The politics of cultural representation is based on material realities. Further, processes of gentrification and urban development are connected to the politics of representation and economic conflicts. The crucial questions are who owns, who occupies and who controls the city’s public spheres. Cultural is a powerful means of control and symbolizes the idea of belonging to particular spaces via a repository of images and memories. Neighborhood shopping streets, especially when they are connected with ethnicity, social class, and gender, are sites where identities are formed. The street as a consumption space has the potential to act as a significant site of resistance to dominant cultural norm, because of the sheer accessibility of the street enabling activities of various groups in this public space. Moreover, in a postmodern global economy, culture is business and touted through tourist attractions, shopping centres and souvenirs. Nonetheless, new cultures through immigrants have become integral to city life and both policy makers and shopping malls have tried to adapt to these new cultures.

Ethnicity is both promoted and reviled in neighborhood shopping streets, which can equally become symbolic centers of solidarity or resistance. Yet neighborhood shopping streets are the site of vernacular landscapes. Sometimes local merchants represent the vernacular of the powerless against the corporate interests of chainstores and national franchises…The transformation of shopping streets from vernacular diversity to corporate mono is also a reflection of the global and the national economies.

To create a homogenous, controlled image of a consolidated culture is an illusion for any city but the cultural power to be able to create an image or vision of the urban space must be noted. As traditional institutions are less important as modes of expressing identity, the creation of a public culture involves shaping public space for social interaction and visual representation of the city.

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Reference

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  • Castells, M. (2000a). Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society.British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 1 (January/March 2000) pp. 5-24.
  • Castells, M. (2010). The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed.). U.S.: Blackwell Publishing.
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