Consumer Cultures and Tourism

Selection

Consumer Cultures and Tourism

Tourism is often linked with consumer culture as an example of the importance of consumption in modern society and of consumption’s global significance. But saying that there is such a thing as consumer culture is, it has been suggested, a bit of an oversimplification. There are, some scholars argue, four different cultures found in all democratic societies and these cultures are based around certain beliefs and values their members hold in common.

My analysis draws upon the work of the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky and the distinguished social anthropologist, Mary Douglas. Wildavsky said that cultural theory tries to help people answer two basic questions—one involves identity: Who am I? and the other involves action: What should I do? Wildavsky writes (in his article “A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation” in Berger, 1989: 25):

The question of identity may be answered by saying that individuals belong to a strong group, a collective that makes decisions binding on all members or that their ties to others are weak in that their choices bind only themselves. The question of action is answered by responding that the individual is subject to many or few prescriptions, a free spirit or tightly constrained. The strength or weakness of group boundaries and the numerous or few, varied or similar prescriptions binding or freeing individuals are the components of their culture.

There are, then, four political cultures—and, by extension, as Douglas argues, four consumer cultures—that arise from the answers to these two questions--what Wildavsky calls hierachical, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist/apathetic cultures. We can see how these cultures are formed out of the strength and weakness of group boundaries and the numbers and kinds of rules and prescription. As Wildavsky explains:

Strong groups with numerous prescriptions that vary with social roles combine to form hierarchical collectivism. Strong groups whose members follow few prescriptions form an egalitarian culture, a shared life of voluntary consent without coercion or inequality. Competitive individualism joins few prescriptions with weak group boundaries, thereby encouraging ever new combinations. When groups are weak and prescriptions strong—so that decisions are made for them by people on the outside—the controlled culture is fatalistic.

Over the years Wildavsky has changed the names of some of his cultures, but the four I have listed give a good idea of his ideas. He sometimes used Hierarchical Elitists or just plain Elitists instead of hierarchical collectivism, because he thought that description was a bit confusing.

One important point he makes is that there are only four political cultures possible in any democratic society. Wildavsky suggested that individuals make political decisions on the basis of their allegiance to whichever group they find themselves in and not on the basis of self-interest, since they generally don’t often know what is in their self-interest. The chart below lists the four consumer cultures and their relation to groups boundaries and prescriptions.

I should point out, here, that members of these four political cultures or consumer cultures don’t identify themselves as members of one of these groups and aren’t aware of their existence. People have certain values and belief systems that Wildavsky and Douglas have identified as placing them in one of the four cultures.

Culture / Group Boundaries / Number of Prescriptions
Hierarchists / strong / numerous and varied
Egalitarians / strong / few and weak
Individualists / weak / few and weak
Fatalists / weak / numerous and varied

Mary Douglas, a social anthropologist, who collaborated with Wildavsky on a number of projects, takes these four cultures, which for her purposes she also describes as lifestyles, and substitutes the term “isolates” for “fatalists” and “enclavists” for egalitarians. She suggests that it is their membership in one of the four consumer cultures or lifestyles—each of which is antagonistic or in conflict with the three others—that explains people’s consumer choices. People may not be able to articulate their beliefs and values that put them in one or the four consumer cultures, but they recognize that their values and beliefs aren’t those of members of the other consumer cultures. Consumption, then, is culturally determined and not based on individual wants or desires.

As she writes in her essay “In Defense of Shopping” (in Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, editors, The Shopping Experience, 1997: 19)

None of these four lifestyles (individualist, hierarchical, enclavist, isolated) is new to students of consumer behavior. What may be new and unacceptable is the point that that these are the only four distinctive lifestyles to be taken into account, and the other point, that each is set up in competition with the others. Mutual hostility is the force that accounts for their stability. These four distinct lifestyles persist because they rest of incompatible organizational principles. Each culture is a way of organizing; each is predatory on the others for time and space and resources. It is hard for them to co-exist peacefully, and yet they must, for the survival of each is the guarantee of the survival of the others. Hostility keeps them going.

She offers this theory to counter the theories of consumption that come from a framework based on individualist psychology and argues that “cultural alignment is the strongest predictor of preferences in a wide variety of fields.” (1997:23).

This suggests that there is an inherent logic behind the shopping that people do and, furthermore, as Douglas argues, it is shoppers, consumers, whatever you wish to call them, who ultimately dictate what will be sold. We can see this is we examine the households of people from different consumer cultures. People in the different consumer cultures may have similar incomes (except for the fatalists/isolates, who are at the bottom of the income ladder, generally speaking) but the way they organize their households and their patterns of consumption are shaped by their membership in one of the four consumer cultures.

Douglas concludes that the notion that shopping is the expression of individual wants is incorrect, for this notion doesn’t take into account cultural bias. As she points out in the conclusion to her essay (1997:30):

The idea of consumer sovereignty in economic theory will be honoured in market research because it will be abundantly clear that the shopper sets the trends, and that new technology and new prices are adjuncts to achieving the shopper’s goal. The shopper is not expecting to develop a personal identity by choice of commodities; that would be too difficult. Shopping is agonistic, a struggle to definenot what one is but what one is not. [my italics] When we include not one cultural bias, but four, and when we allow that each is bringing critiques against the others, and when we see that the shopper is adopting postures of cultural defiance, then it all makes sense.

If Douglas is correct, and there are four distinct and mutually antagonistic lifestyles—what I’ve called consumer cultures—then the various kinds and modes of travel would have to appeal to members of one consumer culture and not the others. It wouldn’t be socio-economic class and discretionary income that shapes travel decisions, but lifestyles or membership in one of the four consumer cultures, and, more precisely, the desire to avoid members of the other consumer cultures.

This means that members of each of the four antagonistic but mutually dependent cultures look for different things when they travel and become different kinds of tourists. Let me hypothesize how people in each of the different consumer cultures travel, assuming Douglas is correct about lifestyles.

Elitists search for hierarchy and obtain it when they travel by choosing luxury cruises or other luxury forms of travel, where they will find, they can assume—due to the cost of the travel—people like them. Luxury tours and everything associated with this kind of travel helps them maintain social distance from members of the other consumer cultures. Individualists, not wanting anyone to tell them what to do, will travel independently, booking their hotels and other aspects of their trips through their travel agents or on their own, using the Internet. They will avoid packaged tours. Egalitarians will take tours that focus on cultural matters, nature preservation and eco-tourism, wanting to do all they can to preserve nature and to show their links with people everywhere; they will avoid the kinds of tourism liked by Elitists and Individualists. Isolates, who are generally at the bottom of the financial totem-pole and have little resources, will take trips by automobiles or buses or short excursions. One reason why certain travel experiences may not be pleasurable for some people is that, by chance, they booked the wrong kind of tour and ended up with people from an antagonistic consumer culture.

Wildavsky and Douglas force us to consider that the various analyses of travel and tourism as a kind of consumption made by scholars who are unaware of the importance of the different consumer cultures may be overly simplistic and inadequate.

If we want to know why people choose to travel they way they do, according to Wildavsky and Douglas, we shouldn’t probe their minds and psyches but find out to which consumer culture they belong.