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Time and preferences in cultural consumption
In: Hutter M. and Throsby D. (Eds.) 2008 Beyond Price. Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, pp.236-260.
Marina Bianchi
Professor of Economics
Department of Economic Sciences
University of Cassino
Cassino, Italy
Introduction
Only recently has economic theory started to address the problem of cultural value and valuation when consumers’ choices are involved. One reason for this lack of analysis is the ambiguity that surrounds, in economics, the relationship between the use value and exchange value, or price, of goods.
This may sound a bit paradoxical, since in the neoclassical tradition in economics use value, in the form of utility and preferences, has occupied a central role in explaining the determination of prices, inverting the previous classical paradigm of cost-based determination. Yet, since use values imply an inextricable interaction of objective and subjective attributes of goods, analysing them proved to be problematic and was left outside economics, in the realm of psychology, sociology, or medicine. For economists, choices, freely made, reveal the individual’s reservation price and subjective utility, with no need for further investigation since basic preferences are deemed to be coherent and stable over time.
Utility, then, remains the main goal individual choices are intended to maximize but, emptied of any real meaning, it bears no explanatory power in solving the complex interplay that runs between individual aims and constraints. By contrast, how use values are created and modified in consumption, and how they interact with exchange values, cannot be lost if actual choices are to be understood. This is especially true when cultural values are at stake.
Recent analyses both within and outside economics have started to fill this gap, recovering an earlier, forgotten tradition, lost in economics, in which use value and individual motivations were central to choice; this is the eighteenth century philosophical tradition of Hume and Smith. Some of these new insights I shall investigate in the paper. One, however, is important to recall here. This is the proposition, coming from the field of experimental psychology, that individual motivations can be separated into two broad categories: those involving activities that are intrinsically motivated and self rewarding and those for which activities are extrinsically motivated, simple intermediaries for achieving externally set goals.[1]
The economist Tibor Scitovsky (1992 [1976]) reasoned along similar lines when he distinguished between defensive and creative consumption, between consumption whose aim is simply to relieve pain and discomfort – as in the satisfaction of basic needs – and a more “self-rewarding” consumption, whose aim is to produce positive pleasure such as one experiences in reading, playing, listening to music, walking for pleasure, or conversing.[2]
This distinction is important for two reasons that I shall explore more fully below. The first is that cultural goods fall into the modality of self-motivated and pleasure-enhancing consumption. Obviously one can engage in the consumption of art and culture for any number of extrinsic reasons: spiritual or moral elevation, knowledge, status, work, monetary rewards, and so on. But artistic creations are there mainly to be enjoyed and, through the senses, to stimulate the mind.
The second reason is that conflicts and imbalances may arise between these two modalities of consumption, as when (or if) the more pleasure-yielding, creative activities lose ground in comparison with the more defensive ones as a result of changes in their relative cost structure. It should be noticed however that the costs and constraints consumers face when choosing are not only those represented by money and prices, but also by other, more hidden constraints, such as the availability of time and the knowledge and skills necessary to select and produce use values.
In the paper I shall concentrate precisely on these different, less visible, forms of constraints. My underlying assumption is that the incentive structure that governs the choice of cultural goods is more complex and open ended than is the case with defensive or goal-related goods. It relies more heavily on accumulated experience and skills, and on available time, and it does not necessarily involve satiation. Qualitative features in other words matter more than quantitative ones and the traditional monetary constraints, price and income, also have less impact than the constraints represented by the patterns established by previous consumption and the time that is required to consume them.
The argument is organized as follows. In the first part I shall analyse the time constraints that the specific technology of consumption imposes on choices involving cultural goods. I will analyse next the technological changes that might have helped to relieve some of these constraints by rendering consumption time more flexible. In the second part of the paper I will survey some of the explanations coming from the field of experimental psychology that help explain those features of cultural goods that make them enjoyable. Then, on the basis of these analyses, I shall discuss how the differing and changing structure of constraints and rewards may affect the final use value and configuration of cultural consumption. This will be complemented by an extended example: that of ludic reading.
My aim here is to show how, when the different modalities of motivations and constraints are spelled out, the interplay between use value and exchange value gives rise to contrasts and conflicts but also to innovative solutions and the creation of value.
1. Time constraints.
The fact that time constraints may pose a threat to the creation of cultural value is well known and analysed in economics. The, by now vast, literature related to the problem of the so-called “cost-disease phenomenon” in the live arts has indeed uncovered just this, that some cultural sectors, in particular live performances, may suffer systematic productivity lags, and increasing relative costs, due to the simple fact that they require fixed amounts of time to be produced. Whereas the time required to fly from Rome to London has been reduced, thanks to technological progress, to just two hours, the time required to play a symphony will always be the same. Salaries however will not lag behind in the performing arts sectors but will increase more or less in line with the salaries in higher productivity sectors. As a result cultural goods and activities that are more dependent on time rigidities will lose out in competition with those cultural and non-cultural activities that are not (Baumol and Bowen 1966, Towse 1997, Caves 2000, Throsby 2001).
Yet, if production takes time so too does consumption. There is also a consumption side to this problem which has received much less attention though it shows the same form of the “disease” that affects production. Here too the productivity of consumption may increase unevenly among goods due to the different time constraints that their specific technology of consumption requires.
If one thinks for example of a basically defensive activity such as food consumption, technological advances have enormously reduced both the time involved in the home preparation of food (consider, for example, the progression from the ready availability of hot water to the heating power of microwaves), and the time and flexibility of its consumption (refrigeration for example has allowed a great variety of food to be kept longer and to be transported; fast food is fast to obtain and easy to eat even on the run). This is not the case with many cultural goods whose consumption time cannot be divided, or compressed and speeded up. If a symphony takes an hour and a quarter to be played, it also takes an hour and a quarter to be listened to. A ballet performance cannot be danced at a faster pace, or be broken into discrete sequences which can be followed at a time of one’s own choosing – though action in movies has indeed become much faster than in the past. The result is that the time necessary for consuming these goods has increased relative to that for other goods. Correspondingly, and rather perversely, the opportunity costs of time have also increased, since, as a result of price-lowering productivity gains, real average incomes have increased over the years.[3] The effect of these processes is that goods less demanding of costly time will be substituted for those more demanding of it.
Tibor Scitovsky was among the first economists to draw attention to these processes and to analyse their impact on consumption. In a 1959 article, “What price economic progress?” he stressed that the consumption of leisure activities, in particular those devoted to intellectual pursuits, is highly time consuming, especially if one includes the prior investment in skills that such activities demand (Scitovsky and Scitovsky 1959). Yet, economic progress has not “freed” time, nor has cheapened its cost. Despite the unprecedented productivity gains in house work, and the progressive shortening of the working week, for Scitovsky, the total amount of work time has not decreased, but taken different forms, in the increased time spent in commuting, and in personal care and related services.[4] The inevitable result of these more binding time constraints is that leisure consumption reduced or shifted towards activities that economize on time.
This process, however, is not without consequences for the quality of leisure time, and consumers’ overall utility. According to Scitovsky, leisure activities, and cultural activities in particular, that are quicker to consume must also require less knowledge and intellectual effort. They should not be complex but demand little in terms of concentration, memory, and attention. They should also be “conservative” rather than innovative. The process thus becomes self-perpetuating since, as a result of these features, the consumer becomes ever less skilled and less discriminating (see Scitovsky and Scitovsky 1959: 100-101, and Scitovsky 1986).[5]
Chicago economist Gary Becker’s well-known analysis of the efficient allocation of consumption time stressed the substitution effects generated by different relative opportunity costs of time (Becker, 1965; also 1976). Yet no trace can be found of Scitovsky’s concerns with the quality dimension of time and in particular of the possible quality losses which the higher price of consumption time can cause. This was left to the economist Staffan Burenstam Linder (1970) who studied the impact that the increasing scarcity of time has on its rational use. Like Scitovsky, Linder argued that, since productivity increases have made goods cheaper relative to time, consumption time will be re-allocated towards activities that are more “goods intensive” (Linder, 1970: 78, 80). This could be done through continuous and/or simultaneous consumption (e.g. eating and, at the same time, playing on the computer, drinking, listening to music and talking on the phone). The activities that might lose out would be those devoted to culture and to the development of the mind and spirit that, for Linder, are much less dependent on goods (ibid.: 95, 100) and more on a free use of time that relies on pauses and associations, on anticipations and memories.
In recent years there has been a lively debate in the United States on the topic of the reduced availability of free time. Work time on the whole has undeniably risen in the U.S. (see Schor 1992, 2000) and it is on the rise in Europe too after a period of decrease. Additionally, analysts have stressed that even independently of the objective trend of time availability people perceive a decreasing control over their own time and an increasing sense that time is scarce (see Robinson and Godbey 1997: p. 48 and 305).[6] The argument here is that the increasing speeding up and goods-intensity of both work and leisure-time puts ever-higher demands on the users of time that no increased availability of hours per se seems able to match. More and more activities are performed with the same attitudes one devotes to work (time efficiency, the elimination of slack, etc.).
Do we have to conclude that, as with the cost-disease phenomenon affecting the performing arts, the more contemplative, time consuming, and technologically rigid cultural goods will in the course of time disappear? The conflict here is even more distressing than in the case of cultural production: if public support of the arts might artificially lower their production costs, in the case of cultural consumption not even negative prices might provide the time necessary for their consumption. Yet, as in the case of cultural production, both technological changes activated by economic progress and consumers’ own active responses have interacted with the rigidities of consumption time and caused new solutions to appear.
2.Time flexibility
Many of the strategies that firms have introduced and adopted in order to overcome or diminish the impact of the cost disease in the production of arts have also favoured the containment of the cost disease in their consumption. As has often been stressed, major advances in the technology of reproduction – from the print to photography, from telegraph, radio and video transmission to the internet – have helped reduce unit production costs and provided strong antidotes to the cost disease phenomenon. In addition to these factors many of the organizational solutions envisaged by firms have contributed effectively to lowering the monetary and information costs of access to cultural goods.[7]
These changes have also extended to the technology of consumption, and the time, skills, and modes of cultural consumption have changed radically as a result. Already many of the technological changes that had transformed the consumption of comfort, or “defensive” goods, had affected the consumption of “creative” goods, thanks to the existing complementarities between the two. The technology of lighting, for example, remained unchanged till the use of coal gas in the early nineteenth century. Just to keep a house illuminated required the labour of one person to trim wicks (see Crowley 2001: 111-115). Gas and electrical illumination, however, brought not only comfort but loosened the time constraints on all manner of activities including cultural ones.
To be specific, the changes activated by the technology of reproduction in the creative sector have introduced four new features into consumption technology that contribute to making time more flexible and productive. These are durability, reproducibility, modularity, and decomposability.
Durability is obtained through the improved technology of duplication, preservation and storage.[8] It has the effect of extending the time horizon for exercising choices as well as enlarging the menu of available cultural experiences. It increases flexibility in consumption (since choices can now be made reversible) and, as a consequence, it also increases the freedom and efficiency of the use of time (even if this freedom is not actually exploited). These processes have two effects: they alleviate time constraints (effectively, one’s time endowment is made greater) and they decrease the opportunity cost of time by reducing the risk, costly errors, and regret that are associated with time-constrained choices.
Reproducibility does the same but also allows for increased accessibility and diffusion of cultural consumption opportunities. Accessibility and diffusion, in turn, facilitate information and exposure, permit the acquisition of informational details, and ease the selection of desired characteristics. The total effect is a gain in recognizability and familiarity.[9] Accessibility also multiplies the use and functions of time allowing for simultaneous consumption (listening whilst driving, reading when travelling) and a reduction of slack time. Here the opportunity costs of time are lowered through its more efficient use.[10]
Modularity (in art but also in furniture, in clothing, in the interactive use of new-media cultural products etc.) is obtained by exploiting the transferability of characteristics from one cultural good to another. Certain key properties become the matching links that allow for new combinatory solutions to appear. The creation of styles, genres, series, or the emergence of fashions are examples of modularity at work.[11] Besides favouring familiarization and understanding, modularity opens up possibilities for consumers to recombine elements of cultural products and actually produce a desired consumption good. From creating one’s own private collection of art, books, and music to newly combining the elements of one’s own dress, these are all activities allowed by the modularity of production and reproduction.[12]
Decomposability reflects and is made possible by the complexity of cultural goods’ characteristics. By making cultural experiences decomposable into discrete units, step by step learning is facilitated, as is the matching of skills to the difficulty of the task. Stopping a recorded live performance to study, repeat, savour a particular segment; splicing bits of music to create a new musical composition; managing the timing of reading by segmenting the experience at one’s chosen pace, all exploit new opportunities offered by this dimension of technical reproduction. Decomposability is complementary to modularity and together they allow – as in an open-ended puzzle – for an active and flexible recombinability of cultural goods’ characteristics and an innovative use of time.