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Consumer Culture

The Use of and Commitment to Goods

Kaj Ilmonen
Journal of Consumer Culture 2004 4: 27
DOI: 10.1177/1469540504040903

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 Journal of Consumer Culture

ARTICLE

The Use of and Commitment to Goods

KAJ ILMONEN
University of Jyväskylä

Abstract. In social theory, goods have usually not been included in the social world.
However, in the sociology of consumption, they have been seen as mediating social
relations and offering opportunities to make social distinctions. It is precisely the
symbolic aspect of goods that makes this possible. In helping to make these
distinctions, goods are only given a passive role in our lives. They only get to function
as markers of social differences, tastes, and so on. However, the use value of goods
cannot be reduced to their symbolic aspect. Generally speaking, the use value also has
two other aspects which I will call the ‘functionality’ and ‘productivity’ of goods. I am
going to argue that because goods also comprise these aspects, they are not just ‘dead’
or ‘asocial’ elements or phenomena in our everyday lives, but also play an active role in
our relationship to other people. Moreover, I will pay attention to the process of
appropriating goods. On the one hand, I will focus on how we internalize purchased
commodities (i.e. how we make them our possessions in the social meaning of the
word); and, on the other hand, I shall also draw attention to the ways in which we
surround our goods with the aura of ‘me-ness’ (i.e. how we externalize them). I will
then conclude by looking at the active role that goods play as our partners when we
try to cope with everyday life. They are ‘something in order to’, as Heidegger puts it.
We are therefore prone to treat them well,‘to take care of them’, and they may have
an even more important role in our lives than is usually thought.

Key words
appropriation process ● externalization ● functionality of goods ● internalization ●
‘me-ness’ ● object-centred sociality

In his magnificent tale The Fellowship of the Ring (1954–55), J.R.R. Tolkien
puts an ancient theme, the fight of good and bad, in a wonderful frame.1

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(1): 27–50 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540504040903]
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Journal of Consumer Culture 4(1)

The focus of this fight is the possession of a specific fairy ring. Most of the
story is about envying and fighting for this ring because it provides its
owner with great power. For instance, with the help of the ring, it is possible
to make oneself invisible, but at a high price: the possessor of the ring
becomes its prisoner. This view describes well the old and widespread belief
that the possession of some significant object and even the plain desire to
have it will have disastrous effects not only on the soul of a single human
being, but also on the existing social order. This view is not only a matter
of fairytales, but can be seen in the way that the same kind of fear that
these tales incorporate has been repeatedly reproduced when some signifi-
cant new good (car, radio, telephone, TV, mobile phone) has been intro-
duced into the markets (see Pantzar, 1996).
Although it is generally believed that goods have a marked impact on
our lives, they have not obtained a reasonable place in social theory, especially
in the analysis of our sociality (see Knorr Cetina, 1997; Preda, 1999). Of
course, one of the forebears of sociology, Marx, considered commodities as
alienated end products of collective workers that connected them in the
markets to people that were unfamiliar to them. His emphasis, however,
was more on the exchange value and the related social relations than on
the use value of commodities (Marx, 1972; see also Haug, 1979). Simmel
(and Veblen), in turn, paid his attention to the uses of goods, for instance,
in his analysis of fashion, and pinpointed their distinctive nature. However,
since such classic analyses, in most social theory, whether talking about
different strands of structural theories inspired by Parsons or ethno-
methodological theories based on Schutz and Garfinkel, our relations to
products are missing. It is not so much that these social theories do not
accept the existence of goods, but that they do not admit that goods play
an important role in a social world. This is the case in spite of the
commonly shared fact that ‘homo faber’ works and rebuilds the physical
world by utilizing tools and ‘homo consumens’ transforms it according to
his or her tastes and preferences.
The situation did, however, change in the late 1970s when sociology
became interested anew in consumption matters. It considered goods not
only to be one of the most important means to make and maintain social
distinctions, but also to be an important element in our identities
(Campbell, 1996; Ilmonen, 2001a; Warde, 1994). Until now, the way in
which consumption has been dealt with in the sociology of consumption,
which is my main frame of reference, has been relatively narrow. It still
leaves open the general question of the use of consumption objects. In this
article, I will proceed further and try to show that goods play a more

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

important role than is usually thought, that goods are not only a passive
means that can be utilized for whatever aim, but, on the contrary, that they
actively influence our lives and have, therefore, an important role in our
social networks. In this role, they may even counteract the trend of
desocialization related to the individualization process.
Knorr Cetina, for example, maintains that understanding the issue of the
‘disembedding of modern selves’ in terms of human relations ignores ‘the
ways in which major classes of individuals have tied themselves to object
worlds’ (1997: 1). She is certainly right here, but she never mentions that
our object relations are necessarily different from human relations. Objects
do not speak back (at least, for the time being), unlike we humans. Still, they
may attract our attention and even become objects of passionate care and
great attraction. The main focus of this article is how this takes place.
In order to explore this question, I will first outline some general argu-
ments on the uses of consumption objects based on some features of ‘actor
network theory’. When goods are used, they will attain personal meanings;
this is my next theme. By utilizing the concept of appropriation, I shall
focus on the way that goods are internalized by consumers. This is, however,
only one side of the appropriation process. Therefore, I will round out my
main discussion by drawing attention to the externalization of personal
meanings and how they may become collective meanings and thus even a
basis for collective identities.

INDIVIDUALIZATION AND SOCIALITY WITH GOODS

According to Knorr Cetina, much of postmodern theorizing is about the
postsocial condition. It is a grand story about the individualization process.
The notion that we live in a world marked by individualization is by no
means very new. De Tocqueville already wrote about it over 150 years ago,
saying,‘Individualism is a word recently coined to express a new idea’ (1969:
506). It had to be separated from egoism. Individualism is more moderate
than egoism, but, in the end, the results are much the same. ‘Individualism
. . . disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and
withdraw into the circle of family and friends’ (1969: 506). Once this with-
drawal has taken place, citizens form ‘a habit of thinking of themselves in
isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands’. This
implies a ‘danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart’
(1969: 508).
Since de Tocqueville, the danger he mentions has arisen every now and
then. It has usually been mentioned in the context of theorizing individual-
ization, which is considered to be one of the main trends of modernization.

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Durkheim is a well-known example of this. He saw that changes in the

division of labour, increasing mobility, and so on release people from old
social bonds and, in this sense, set them free and he was afraid that this would
not necessarily lead to a happy ending, which he called ‘organic solidarity’
(1968). There was always the threat of anomie, and, according to Durkheim,
it was especially consumption and the never-satisfied desires evoked by it that
increased the risk of anomie (1951).
Durkheim’s nightmare of alienation has been repeated mostly in the
Anglo-Saxon sociological tradition, particularly in texts that theorize the
erosion of community and the end of traditions. Most of them deal with
the issue that has by now been coined social capital. From Riesman et al.’s
The Lonely Crowd (1950) to Berger et al.’s The Homeless Mind (1974), from
Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart (1996) to Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000),
the story has been much the same.
In these traditions of thought, it is common that individualization is
likened to the individualism that neoliberalism promotes. As Knorr Cetina
(echoing Fromm) says,‘the demise of community and traditions also leaves
the individual in the lurch – without the psychological means to deal with
great freedom of choice or contingency of contemporary life as which this
freedom rebounds’ (1997: 4). In this view, society is seen as an aggregate
consisting of lonely, asocial and ahistorical psychological particles. Society
is like what Nietzsche called ‘social sand’. According to Knorr Cetina, the
postsocial condition is, however, not about individualism; it does not deal
with asocial or non-social relations: ‘Rather they are relations specific to
late modern societies, which are marked by the interweave of the social as
it existed with “other” cultures.’ The alien culture relevant here is ‘that of
knowledge and expertise’ (1997: 5). The individual is helpless in their
choices without ‘expert systems’ (see Giddens, 1990, 1991). This expression
describes the existing situation well, since it does not relate the individual
to isolated knowledge items, but to ‘the presence of whole contexts of
expert work’ (Knorr Cetina, 1997: 5). It is because of this ‘presence’ that
the postsocial society is also called a ‘knowledge society’.
A knowledge society, however, is not only about more experts and
technological information, but rather about laymen’s interpretations (or, as
Knorr Cetina puts it, ‘participant interpretations’). Let us think about a
nutritionist’s teaching about a healthy life, dieting, and so on. It serves as a
good example of a modern situation in which we read expert texts, inter-
pret them in our own way and apply these interpretations more or less in
our daily lives. If this example can be generalized, it means that knowledge
and social processes are no longer separate; on the contrary,‘knowledge has

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

become constitutive of social relations’ (1997: 8). According to Knorr

Cetina, this replaces the status of goods in our daily lives. They become an
important element in social processes. We only have to think about mobile
telephones, micro machines, and so on, which speed up the individualiza-
tion process, but, in doing so, also help people to interconnect themselves
and construct what Wittel (2001) calls ‘network sociality’. Thus, they coun-
teract this process.

TOWARDS THE THEORY OF USE: ‘THE WORK OF HYBRIDIZATION’

If the above-outlined picture of our relationship to goods is correct,2 goods
cannot be placed in a world that is external to our social life. Although
they are, so to speak, ‘non-human actants’, they are still endowed with the
ability to ‘act’ as objects internal to our social sphere (see, for example,
Callon, 1995). In this position, they mediate one kind of daily activity to
another kind and to other people. As such, they are not indifferent to us
because, in effect, they make most of our activities possible, no matter what
kinds of goods they are (a chair for sitting, a pot for cooking, and so on;
Reckwitz, 2002: 253). In some cases, such as cycling or driving a car, the
tie between the consumer and the good is so strong that it is not easy to
say where the good ends and where we, as human beings, originate (Preda,
1999). According to Latour, this practical codependency could be called a
‘work of hybridization’ (Preda, 1999) because, during this work, objects and
humans become (for a while) one.
When the codependency of humans and goods is strong, it is hard to
say on whose terms an activity takes place – that of humans or the goods.
In this respect, we could once again look at, for instance, driving or cycling.
Both activities depend upon the condition and the properties of the
vehicle, for example, its acceleration and steering characteristics. We have
mentally learned to handle these vehicles and have trained our bodies
routinely to deal with cycling and driving in varying situations (Reckwitz,
2002: 251, 258). From the outsider’s view, cycling or driving looks like a
completely synchronized collaboration between the car/bike and the
driver. One can only draw conclusions about the time sequences: who or
what and in which situations do the consumer and the consumed object
steer a ‘work of hybridization’? The car driver, for instance, must wait on
a cold day for the car to ‘consent’ to start or be ‘willing’ to stop on a slippery
road. The car can control the driver, whether he or she likes it or not,
although the driver is mainly the captain of the car.3
The temporal structures that consist of time sequences are crucial in
our object relations (see Reckwitz, 2002: 255). They depend more on the

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properties or functionality of goods than on their symbolic features, which

have been so important in the sociology of consumption. Hendricks
(1997), for instance, underlines how quotidian goods like coffee makers and
chairs structure the time sequences in our interaction with such objects.
In effect, all of our ‘work of hybridization’ is based on time sequences.
Let us think about the process of eating hamburgers (or any kind of food,
for that matter). It has a beginning and a clearcut ending and sequences in
between. As an activity, the hamburger is mediating the eating process. Bite
after bite, we approach it in a slightly different way (see, for example, Law,
1992: 381). The sequences of our transaction with goods can be followed
even better when attention is paid to listening to CDs, watching TV, making
coffee or driving a car. They do not only structure our use of time passively,
but also actively. Actor network theory even claims (somewhat dimly) that
time order in this ‘work of hybridization’ is ‘an effect generated by hetero-
geneous means’ (or goods) (1992: 382).
Because goods and human activities are intertwined, the distinction
between human activity and the functionality of a good is only contingent,
as actor network theory states. Goods and human activities form a network
whereby humans act and goods react endlessly.‘And,just as human beings have
their preferences – they prefer to interact [with goods] in certain ways rather
than in others . . . so too do the other materials that make up the hetero-
geneous networks of the social [world]’ (Law, 1992: 382). Cars and forks
can be used as status symbols or for whatever end, but this does not change
the fact that, in actual use (driving, eating), they put certain demands on us.
These demands are, first, based on the fact that products include much
former experience and up-to-date knowledge. They imply that we have
appropriate skills to use them. The more advanced the goods are techni-
cally, the more competencies they also demand of us. In other words, it
takes longer for us to mentally learn how to use them, to embody this
knowledge and to transform it into routine practices. Second, and I will
return to this, learned practices bring about an emotional level that is
required for carrying out these practices. They strengthen our attitudes to
goods that we consider our ‘own’. These attitudes are loaded with emotions
that may vary from very strong passions to mild or indifferent concern.
Third, the consumer, as a carrier of certain practices, is a unique crossing
point of these practices, which are, in turn, mediated by goods to form a
system that, in time, will constantly shape the practices themselves
(Reckwitz, 2002: 257). As Bateson argues, instruments and goods in general
are one moment of the feedback system in human activity that emerges
when we work with them (1972: 318).4 Moreover, these networks of

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human actors and goods are stabilized over time and tend to expand, as
Simmel (1993) points out (cars to petrol, petrol to petrol stations, petrol
stations to motorways and related restaurants, and so on).
In other words, goods contribute to the patterning of our social world.
Therefore, it is not right to reduce the social merely to human agents and
their relationships, but also to take our material surroundings into consider-
ation in the formation of this, as, for example, Sartre’s concept of the socio-
material implies (1976). This is why it is also not right to separate goods
and humans into totally different spheres, although they are generally seen
to belong to different moral spheres (see Kopytoff, 1986: 84). To say that
humans and our products go together does not mean, in the context of the
‘work of hybridization’, that we have to treat people as goods or instru-
ments. Goods do not have the duties, rights and responsibilities that we
usually accord to people, but they can be used for fulfilling these moral
aspects in our lives (see Law, 1992: 383).
When it is accepted that goods belong to the same sphere as humans
social methodological asymmetry in our commodity relations cannot be
defended (Law, 1992: 282; Preda, 1999). This means that, to a certain
degree,‘methodological assumptions that apply to human actors would also
apply to things’ (Preda, 1999) and that subject–subject relations cannot
claim superiority over subject–object relations (Reckwitz, 2002: 253). This
symmetry between consumers and goods must not be mixed with onto-
logical symmetry because it would allow us to assume that goods have the
same properties as human actors (i.e. that goods are intentional, reflective,
and so on). This, in turn, maintains a belief that a relationship between
human actors and products is asymmetric. However, it is only historical
obliteration, and, in that sense, a contingent situation that can be treated as
the great divide of modern times (see Preda, 1999).
Although goods are not intentional, the methodological symmetry
assumption implies that the materiality or functionality of goods forms the
frame of reference of our activity by setting the preconditions for us in
‘keeping company’ with products. In this sense, the functionality of goods
is their most crucial element. However, the functionality never determines
our action completely, although it restricts what can be done with goods.
Therefore, one part of the knowledge that is inscribed in goods includes
restrictions that are central to the skill formation that is learned by using
goods. Formal teaching helps to form these skills, but only partly; we learn
most of them by doing them. The end result of this kind of learning is
called ‘indeterminate’ or ‘tacit’ knowledge (Polanyi, 1962: 48).
Since human ties to goods might be very strong, they can hardly be

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described as alienated, according to Knorr Cetina, although they are

mediated by objects. Objectual relationships, particularly in expert work,
seem to be the opposite; they are about non-alienation and identification
(1997: 12). Knorr Cetina, however, wants to make a clear distinction
between objects of knowledge and instruments/other kinds of goods.
According to her, only the former can become objects of great passion in
our lives. This is because she has a very narrow view of kinds of goods
other than objects of knowledge. She argues that, according to the
dominant understanding, products are not valued for their intrinsic prop-
erties, but ‘rather for what they buy – status, relationships, other objects’,
and so on (1997: 11). This is, however, not as ‘dominant’ as Knorr Cetina
would have it. Much of what Knorr Cetina says about objects of know-
ledge may apply to any goods (disposable goods, of course, excluded).
In addition, the symbolic value of goods might be their most import-
ant ‘intrinsic’ aspect. This is particularly true for objects that have become
totemic in the Durkheimian sense of the word. For instance, totemic goods
such as commodified pop stars and soccer clubs attract people to join a sort
of tribe (fan clubs, collectors’ associations). This is an old phenomenon, but
it is especially significant in a knowledge society. It shows that individual-
ization does not take place in a void, but is related to existing institutions
and also to the growth of the world of goods that surrounds us (as Knorr
Cetina also argues). Even for that reason, it is wrong to say that goods are
extrinsic to our social interests (1997: 12); on the contrary, we may even
feel solidarity for these things, which is a firm basis for ‘object-centred
sociality’. By this expression, Knorr Cetina suggests: a) ‘a sense of bonded-
ness or unity (an identity feeling) with objects’; b) ‘the oughtness of
approaching them in certain ways’ (a moral sense); and c) ‘states of excite-
ment reaffirming the bondedness’ (1997: 20).

MAKING GOODS OUR OWN: THE INTERNALIZATION OF GOODS

It is not clear how we can proceed from the phase where goods are seen
as internal to our social world to the situation that Knorr Cetina calls
object-centred sociality. The sociality based on goods is only a precondi-
tion for sociality with objects. It remains to be explained how the jump
from admitting that goods have an internal place in our social lives to
object-centred sociality takes place. In the words of market research, we
should be able to explain how the feeling of ‘me-ness’ of an object emerges.
In order to come to grips with this qualitative change that takes place in
our object relationships, we have to look at the process of adaptation that
has interested psychologists and social psychologists for a long time. In what

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follows, I will focus mainly on the famous Russian psychologist Vygotsky

and a well-known social psychologist, Harré (who has been much influ-
enced by the former). In order to ground my train of reasoning, I will,
however, start with Durkheim’s idea of totemic thinking.
In The Division of Labor (1968), Durkheim argues that the structural
characteristic of differentiating and differentiated societies does not
endanger an individual’s integration, but rather makes it possible (see also
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001: xxi). This takes place as a result of a need
to coordinate social activities by establishing social links between individuals
and social obligations and a demand for increasing social exchange based
on the division of labour and a related specialization. Later, Durkheim
urgently needed to complete this description. He had to answer the ques-
tions of how the objective social relations and conditions that are based on
the division of labour take on an internalized form and ‘what this internal-
ized form looks like’ (Morrison, 2001: 108).
In order to answer the latter question, Durkheim had to tackle the a
priori categories of Kant. Whereas Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason
(1965: 111) that understanding objects in the real world involves a priori
categories, Durkheim turned this argument upside down. He insisted that
because human beings thought of themselves in the form of groups and
because they also grouped living beings, mainly animals, in their external
environment, these two modes of grouping were merged (Morrison, 2001:
110). As a consequence, premodern people started to think of themselves in
terms of these animals and the related symbolic representations called totems.
As is well known, Durkheim saw that totems played a very crucial role
not only in primitive societies, but also in advanced European societies.
Totems implied a thought form that placed social groups in clear relation-
ships to each other. They also appeared as materialized symbols, or collec-
tive representations, that helped to reproduce the existing social fabric. In
this reproduction process, the social organization of the society becomes a
model of its mental organization and, in turn, a reproduction of it
(Durkheim, 1964: 12). This is the background to the fact that, as material
symbols, totems are treated with honour and great care. Insulting them
means insulting the groups that honour them.
Durkheim’s train of thought has been very influential. However, he left
many questions open. He did not explain how individuals in some kin
groups reacted to totemic categories. How did they make them their own?
He also did not leave much room for individual variation in the adoption
of external and historically established totemic categories. The moderniza-
tion process has shuttered the position of these categories. Although they

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still exist (and new ones will emerge), for instance, as symbols for sporting
clubs or in the coats of arms of noble families, their enforcing power on
the individuals belonging to those clubs and the kin is not the same as in
premodern societies. The individual adoption of totemic symbols and
related objects can no longer be taken as a given. This is especially true for
commodities on markets, although marketing people have for a long time
used totemic symbols (for example, Esso’s famous tiger). It is therefore
necessary to analyse how people make such goods their own.
The process of making commodities our own occurs through an appro-
priation process. There are, however, varying uses of the concept of appro-
priation. In any case, most writers seem to agree that appropriation occurs
after a commodity is sold. When this takes place, it leaves the markets and
gives up its status as a commodity (the generalized system of equivalence
and change) and is taken possession of by an individual, a household or an
even larger group. In this phase, the good is singularized and given a ‘social
life’. Later, it can be removed to the markets and offered again the status of
a commodity (Kopytoff, 1986: 65; see also Appadurai, 1986). I will,
however, skip the latter phase and focus only on how this singularization
might take place.5
Vygotsky (who wanted to take further Hegelian and Marxian ideas
about our subject–object relations and to apply them to Russian psychol-
ogy) offers a good starting point for the analysis of the process of making
something your own. He was very keen to find out the general principles
that govern our individuation process and related mental processes. Accord-
ing to Vygotsky, ‘every function in child’s cultural development appears
twice, first on a social level, and later on an individual level’ (1978: 57). If
we generalize this principle, we will at first recognize our relations to
objects of the external world and only then will we internalize them. It is
therefore necessary to inspect the way in which we internalize objects that
are external to us. We must study how we make those objects our posses-
sions. By this, I do not refer to the formal juridical and economic owner-
ship of a ‘thing’, but rather to the subjective aspect in considering that a
‘thing’ is one’s own. The expression ‘my home’ illuminates this point well.
It implies that a physical phenomenon, a residence, has been transformed
to something personal (‘home sweet home’).
The internalization of goods is, however, only one step in an appro-
priation process. It is also necessary to examine how we project ourselves
on external goods or ‘objectivate’ ourselves in them; in other words, we
should look at how we externalize and transfer our desires, inner feelings
and social relations to objects. The result of this move from the inside to

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

the external world has, in market research, been seen as the creation of the
‘me-ness’ of things (see Schulz Kleine et al., 1995). I will start with the
internalization process.
As previously mentioned, the appropriation of goods starts after we
have bought a commodity. According to market research, consumers
become attached to an object almost instantly upon being endowed with
it (Beggan, 1992). It has been called the ‘instant endowment effect’.
However, Barone et al. challenge the instantness of this effect. In a series
of studies using several different objects, they failed to observe a consistent
increase in the perception of object attractiveness (1997: 282–4). However,
even if the effect of object valuation does not always begin immediately
following purchase, a deeper adaptation to ownership will occur with time.
This has also been shown experimentally. The length of ownership
increases the reluctance to give a thing up (Strahilevitz and Loewenstein,
1998: 276, 287–9). Thus, instead of an instant endowment effect, it is better
to call this mechanism simply an ‘endowment effect’.
There are many attempts by market research to explain the endowment
effect. First, it has been linked to the idea of ‘loss aversion’ developed by
Tversky and Kahneman (1991). According to them, people have a tendency
to place greater weight on losses than on gains of equal absolute magni-
tude. This can easily be observed in gambling and in risk taking in general
(Strahilevitz and Loewenstein, 1998: 278). It is, however, not easy to see
how this works with such possessions as, for example, old walking shoes,
although Strahilevitz and Loewenstein seem to think so.
The endowment effect has also been explained by referring to ‘famili-
arity’. The longer someone owns an object, the better he or she learns to
know it and interact with it. The more positive the experience, the more
eager he or she is to keep it. However, there is no reason to believe that
the positive experience of an object will remain stable over time; on the
contrary, it may become more and more negative in the long run, especially
if new kinds or a new generation of goods emerge on the market that may
be more effective and attractive than the old objects (see Harrison and
March, 1984). It may also be that, while the positive experiences remain
stable, there will be negative experiences as well (see Thaler, 1980). They
may not exceed the positive ones, but they may in any case diminish the
involvement in the old objects. Therefore, familiarity cannot explain (at
least, alone) people’s reluctance to give up their old possessions, even if the
possessions no longer work in the best possible way (see Ilmonen, 2001b).
What about a taste change? According to Strahilevitz and Loewenstein,
‘motivated taste-change suggests that the increases in valuation as a result

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of ownership and duration of ownership will be mediated by increases in

perceived attractiveness’ (1998: 283). They are, however, not able to prove
this hypothesis and they do not ponder at all why ‘increases in perceived
attractiveness’ take place. It is obvious that mere possession will not, in the
long run, have this effect. Only active use of goods can do that.6 There are
many reasons why only consumption, or the repeated use of goods, can
help to mould our view of goods to maintain and even increase the strength
of the endowment effect.
In order to undertand the endowment effect, one must look at
consumption from a different angle than we are used to. Consumption is
not only about style, fashion or wearing something; it is, as Latour says, also
a kind of work. This applies especially to appropriation, according to Miller
(1987: 191). The appropriation work is aimed at processing an alien object
in order to ‘de-alienate’ it and to absorb it into the social world of the
consumer. According to Vygotsky, this work includes two steps. The first
step deals with the cognitive appropriation of the good; the second
concerns the internalization of the good in the proper sense of the word.
In other words, the goods are loaded with emotional attachment. The steps
can also be expressed more generally as: a) the recognition of goods external
to our social lives; and b) their absorption emotionally into our personal
lives.
The first step is, in effect, not a step at all. It is rather a process that
entails several aspects. First, as mentioned earlier, most goods incorporate
the existing level of knowledge. Whatever goods they might be, knowledge
already exists there (see Preda, 1999). This implies that goods demand
special skills and related tacit knowledge from a consumer if the consumer
wants to be able to utilize them (see Polanyi, 1962) – even processed food
does that. When we consume goods, we must learn to master the skills that
relate us to them. Second, when a consumer is applying the demanded skills
(in other words, is consuming the good), he or she is also reproducing these
skills. The reproduction is not plain repetition. While renewing our skills,
we may also learn some new aspects of the good. As Callon et al. say,‘The
qualities of a product depend on the joint work of host actors and there is
no reason to believe that consumers do not participate . . . in the objecti-
fication of those qualities’ (2002: 203). As consumers, we learn to know
what the goods are good for and what they are not suitable for at all. In a
word, by utilizing goods, we first adopt them cognitively as goods for
ourselves.
The cognitive adoption of goods is, in many cases, a never-ending
process. However, while this process keeps going, our relationship to goods

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

is transformed in a way analogous to what Vygotsky says happens when we

move from written text to inner speech. When analysing this move, he
makes a distinction between the meaning and mind of a word (1978: 239).
Meaning refers to the abstract and shared meaning of the word that is speci-
fied in dictionaries. Mind, in turn, points to the changing aspect of the
word that is unconsciously defined in varying contexts and that is related
to our relationship to the issue that the word refers to. Thus, meanings are
objective and general while minds are loaded with our personal, subjective
and emotional experiences. According to Vygotsky, the move from written
text to thinking means that the subjective mind starts to dominate the
objective meaning of words. Every individual develops, in a way, his or her
own parole that has its emotional loadings.
I take the Vygotskian step from the meaning to the mind of a word to
be analogical to what happens in the use of goods. The internalization of
goods is, however, not necessarily only an individual process, but very often
occurs together with other people. For instance, when a four-person family
buys a flat, they start to fit it out in order to make it habitable. They must
do it quickly in order to make their everyday life at home satisfactory. They
have to figure out cognitively how the flat as a spatial place will work. They
must decide which room will belong to whom and specify the main func-
tions that will take place in each room. However, after six months, one of
them might realize that the furniture arrangement of the flat is not very
practical. He or she may succeed in persuading the others that they should
help him/her to change the existing order. In this way, they gradually trans-
form the flat into a ‘home’ that is no longer an indifferent place, but one
that is strongly emotionally loaded. In Kopytoff ’s terms, the flat is singu-
larized and becomes a ‘unique’ place. When this has occurred, the residence
will have two types of value: as a commodity that can be compared to other
dwellings on the market; and as a unique object, a home, which is incom-
parable (Graeber, 2001: 32).
I want to stress that the internalization process does not take place in
a cultural void. We learn a lot from the older generations about how to
utilize goods. At the same time, we learn how to relate ourselves to them
and utilize them for our own purposes. As Berger and Luckman point out,
we have not only been socialized in our cultural reality, but we also partici-
pate in the construction of it (1966: 11–58). Consequently, societal subcul-
tures and everyday beliefs related to age, gender, race and religion load the
internalization of goods. A good example of this could be how differently
men and women in our culture relate themselves to technical tools (see
Lupton and Noble, 2002: 11–12).

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Journal of Consumer Culture 4(1)

After making the abovementioned qualifiers to Vygotskian thinking,

his reasoning serves my aim of specifying what takes place in our relation-
ship to goods. If I understand it rightly, Vygotsky considers our thinking
(or inner speech) as a meeting place of cultural meanings and personal
experience. This is exactly what I think happens when we adopt goods
cognitively by utilizing them. In this process, we improve our skills to use
the good, but also experience the good more and more profoundly. This
experience shapes our relationship both cognitively and emotionally; it
becomes more and more personal. Generally speaking, ‘appropriation
develops a processual, mutually constitutive notion between artefacts and
subjectivity’ (Lupton and Noble, 2002: 7). Returning to the first question
in the context of Durkheimian representations, appropriation causes a lot
of variation in how not only individuals, but also social groups, relate them-
selves to general meanings incorporated in totemic categories. Singulariza-
tion as a process of giving something a unique status and at the same time
making it one’s own resembles a choir (or a jazz band) that sings (plays) in
many voices, rhythms and tunes.
In other words, interaction with goods does not leave us intact. If the
goods work well for our purposes, we will be content with them and invest
our emotions in them. The opposite is also true; if we are not ‘happy’ with
them, we are prone to discard them. As Preda (1999) notes, this echoes
Mead’s observation that ‘things answer to the attitudes we have formed to
them and that our attitudes adjust to things’. As a corollary to the first
alternative, it can be said that the more we utilize goods that satisfy our
needs in some respect, the more likely we also are to commit ourselves to
them. It can also be presumed that the stronger our commitment to the
object in question, the more reluctant we are to give it up. Moreover, it can
be assumed that the stronger our involvement in and commitment to some
good, the more significant the role that it plays in our daily social universe
and the better the endowment effect.

HOW INTERNALIZED GOODS CAN GET A COMMON MEANING: THE

EXTERNALIZATION OF GOODS
Involvement in and commitment to a good tells about the strength of our
feelings towards this good (Heller, 1977: 7). This involvement is, by its
nature, specific, as hopefully clarified by the above reasoning. ‘To be involved
in something’ includes, however, two possibilities. Involvement itself is
equal to a feeling, according to Heller. It can be at the centre of our atten-
tion, but so can the object of involvement. When feeling as an experience
is emphasized, its object shifts into the background (1977: 11–12). This is

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

usually the case when a strong emotion like fear, hatred or love overwhelms
us. The same happens when our action is prevented for one reason or
another. The target of involvement, in turn, rises into the foreground when
our attention is focused on solving a problem, on a specific situation or on
the way in which something happens. It is important to recognize, however,
that irrespective of whether it is the object of our involvement or our
involvement itself that rises into the foreground, both are always present in
our emotions. If one is missing, the feeling is extinguished.
The object-orientated nature of emotions means that an emotion can
be separated neither from the act of observing nor from the (pre)concep-
tions about the object of observation. Instead, emotions are connected to
the processing of information about the goods and to our ways of seeing
and experiencing them. Emotions also have a cognitive component. They
give us important information about our relationship to the object of
emotion, which is subjectivized (or internalized) in the experience and
allows us to act in subjectively meaningful ways in relation to it (Heller,
1977: 50; Hochschild, 1983: 30–1, 222).
Furthermore, we are prone to project our emotions onto consumption
objects. We relocate our feelings and desires in products (objects). Conse-
quently, they will entail a part of us, the aura of ‘me-ness’. This ‘me-ness’
is not only a virtual idea. In consumption, mass-produced commodities are
shaped and earmarked (individually or collectively) through embodied use.
We may either decorate or somehow configurate them in everyday use. Lupton
and Noble believe that these are the two major ways of appropriating
particularly personal computers in academic settings (2002: 11–21). Decor-
ation ‘includes adding external objects to the computer to achieve a person-
alizing or aesthetic effect’ while configuration means, for example, naming
the hard drive, remaking the background picture and arranging the set-up
of the computer (2002: 11, 15). It is very likely that these strategies apply
to most consumption objects and that they may vary according to gender,
age, and so on.
Appropriation strategies should not, however, be understood to mean
that involvement necessarily consists of a wicked relationship to goods.
Rather, the question deals with transcending the mere utilitarian or func-
tional aspect of goods. The decoration and configuration (or whatever
appropriation strategies there may be) of objects serve to extend the self
outwards in space and to form ‘a territory that surrounds the body’ (2002:
7), to enlargen ‘me-ness’.
Thus, involvement in and commitment to goods implies that goods are
not merely indifferent objects of our consumption. Because they have the

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Journal of Consumer Culture 4(1)

aura of ‘me-ness’, we are prone to take care of them almost as we do of

our domestic animals. (This is naturally said on the condition that we will
enjoy these goods in the future.) Heidegger has even confirmed that many
reflective everyday acts are about the care of goods (1977: 93). This sort of
activity is a steadily ongoing (but, in research, steadily neglected) part of
consumption.7 Clothes should be washed, tables must be cleaned, cars have
to be serviced, and so on. Only when we think that goods are nothing
more than rubbish will we leave them on their own or simply throw them
away.
Moreover, the appropriation of goods does not only change our
relations towards them; it also transforms our practices. When, for instance,
we have learned to master a complex technological product such as a video
camera relatively well, we do not need to pay much attention to the cogni-
tive aspect of its use. Instead, filming occurs more and more routinely. This
increases our degrees of freedom to act and use the camera, since we can
now concentrate on the object of our filming. When we have reached this
phase in the use of the camera, the practice of filming is incorporated
fluently into the set of related practices. Our mental activities of under-
standing and feeling the filming process and knowing how to do it are
mixed with a complex set of simultaneous tasks such as walking and
filming, checking the rate of illumination, and so on.
When we have reached the phase when the use of goods is routinized,
we might no longer realize our activity as consumption at all; instead, it
becomes a byproduct of our practices. When we jog, we do not think about
consuming our running shoes, but of trying to keep fit, or, when we cook,
we do not consider this practice as the consumption of pots and pans; on
the contrary, they have a side role in the complex set of practices called
‘cooking’. How well the product ‘submits’ itself to practices depends, of
course, on its nature. On the one hand, there are fluid products such as elec-
tricity or energy, which are generally used without thinking that we
consume them. It is hardly possible to commit to such products at all. Prac-
tices like cooking almost absorb the use of energy as consumption while,
on the other hand, there are goods like microcomputers that might even
dominate our practices. Most goods, however, are located in between these
two extremes. Although they may, in the long run, become a byproduct of
some practice, once in a while we must still pay attention to them and their
use if for no other reason than to take care of them in order to improve
their functionality, which is already a sign of commitment to these goods.
Although our commitment to goods is personal or group based, it is
not necessarily hidden from others. Our involvement not only informs us

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

about our relationship to goods, but, if we want, it also provides others with
information about us and especially about our relationship to these goods.
We can even make this relationship explicit by informing others of new
ways to deal with the goods (make recipes, develop new styles, give new
instructions). Harré calls this phase ‘making known’ (1983: 258), but it could
also be said that the productive aspect of the good is emphasized. It is the
phase in which we present our individual style of handling a good to a
larger public. This step is always risky because we open our notion of goods
and our skills to use the goods (i.e. the ability to cook) to the evaluation
of others. In the worst case, they may consider us lunatics; in the best case,
they may praise us for a fresh innovation. When this happens, it is possible
that the innovation is accepted in the community as part of its cultural
heritage. If this occurs, it will become part of common wisdom that serves
as a social resource for the whole community.
To describe the process of appropriation more formally, I will utilize
Vygotsky’s and Harré’s ideas of the above-outlined process of internalizing
and externalizing goods. Harré uses two dimensions in order to describe
it. One is ‘presentation’ and the other is ‘realization’. One end of the
‘presentation’ dimension consists of public presentation and the other of
private presentation (to keep things for ourselves). ‘Realization’, in turn,
can be either individual or collective, as shown in Figure 1.
In presenting this picture, Harré accepts the Vygotskian psychology of
a child’s development as his starting point in utilizing language.8 Language
is, however, not an unchanging system of codes, but an endlessly changing
practice (parole) that moulds the language system. For instance, the first text
messages that were sent by cell phones in Finland no longer look like the
messages that are being sent today. The first messages imitated short letters
written in proper language. Today’s messages utilize all sorts of abbrevia-
tions and symbols. In order to understand these messages, we must learn
what the expressions stand for. They must, in a way, be collectively accepted
in order for them to work as messages. In general, Harré (1983) treats
language in an analogous way. Language to him is a developing system that
must become established, at least for a while. He therefore talks about
conventionalization as a process.
From the point of view of an individual consumer, conventionaliza-
tion goes on all the time and the circular process may start from any of the
cells in the picture. Because my focus is on the appropriation process, I will
start where Harré does. The consumer buys a good from the markets.
Although industries try to develop it with particular ‘ideal’ users in mind
and to anticipate typical uses of their products, they seldom succeed in this.

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PUBLIC PRESENTATION

4 . making known 1. conventionalization

(producing innovations) (common commodities on C
I markets) O
N L
D L
I E
V C
I T
D I
U V
A E
L 3. transformation (learning 2. adaptation (use of goods
new ways to use and the after puchase)
routinization of use)

PRIVATE REALIZATION (see HarrŽ, 1983: 258)

Figure 1

The preconceived actual user is confronted with the ‘ideal’ user (see
Woolgar, 1991, 2000). The result is necessarily not as anticipated because,
after the purchase, the personal adaptation by every consumer of the good
starts, whether the good is conventional or new (see Lehtonen, 2001; Miller,
1998). This implies a personal or collective appropriation of the good,
which in turn changes the consumer’s relationship to it. It becomes more
or less personal.
Let’s take a new bike as an example – not a special mountain or racing
bike, but quite an ordinary bike with a few gears. The bike takes its time
to teach you to adapt to it and learn how to ride it: how to sit on the
saddle, what movements the pedals make, how the gear system works in an
optimal way, and so on. After we have overcome this phase, we no longer
need to pay attention to the technical side of cycling, but can start devoting
ourselves to the endowment of the enjoyment of riding and to our bike

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 Ilmonen / The use of and commitment to goods

(Ilmonen, 2001b: 21–2). Consequently, both our approach to this good and
its use get individual or group-based features. We may mark it somehow,
for instance by attaching a shopping basket of a special colour, or decorate
it in a particular way, as is often done with old bikes. These singularizing
decorations may include special tribal symbols: flags, colours and names, as
do the so-called ‘grandpa mopeds’ in Finland. In the best case, these features
may include some innovative aspects, for instance new electric fixtures. To
‘make known’, however, does not necessarily imply this. Innovation is
usually only a byproduct of ‘making known’. The main aim is to show
others that you are capable of mastering the good. However, sometimes
this is not enough. We might also need some papers such as a driver’s or
gun licence that show that we are proper consumers of a special group of
products.
In order to ‘make myself known’, I will give another example. Food
shopping is one of our everyday practices (Lehtonen, 2001; Miller, 1998).
It is a common headache for all of us (however, mostly for housewives) to
ponder, for instance, whether to buy some raw materials or stick to ready-
made foods. In both cases, the next step is to decide how to prepare the
food and what additional items need to be purchased. In deciding this, we
may lean on some familiar recipe. However, in many cases, we cannot use
the recipe as such because not all family members like it because they may
suffer from some kind of allergy or because all the required ingredients are
not available in the market. Therefore, we must somehow modify the recipe
in order to please the needs and desires of all family members. Because we
might not be master cooks à la Bocuse, we must rely on trial and error. It
takes a while to internalize how to modify the old recipe to best please all
the family members. After a couple of successes, we might feel personally
satisfied about producing something completely new and feel that it is
worth sharing with our friends and neighbours. If they enjoy the new
recipe, they might recommend it to their friends. In this way, the recipe
becomes slowly conventionalized and the circulation process continues
endlessly.
Some large companies even try to systematically use consumers’ ideas
for product development. It depends on the willingness of the consumers
to accept these innovations (see Klein, 2000). Callon et al. put it in a
nutshell, thus: ‘The products they buy are tested in their home; collective
evaluations are made; learning takes place, which gives rise to evaluations.
More broadly, our consumers are caught in social networks in which tastes
are formed, discussed and mitigated’ (2002: 203). Goods mediate these
networks. Products play an important part in our social lives, but not all

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goods reach that position. Therefore, it is probably right to state that, ‘in
the economy of qualities, competition turns around the attachments of
consumers to products whose qualities have progressively been defined with
their active participation’ (2002: 212). If this attempt to attach consumers
to products, for instance by marketing, does not succeed, consumption
objects will not be appropriated. Instead, they remain with the status of a
commodity (until they are thrown away as waste).

CONCLUSION
I have tried to briefly outline that (at least some) goods have a central place
in our social world. They are not external to it, but a necessary part of it.
Much of our activity labeled as consumption entails work (or a ‘work of
hybridization’) that is a profound condition of our existence. In addition,
the consumption process does not take place only according to our wishes,
but goods also put claims on us. We must consume them in a sequential
order and take into consideration how they react to our acts. The proper-
ties of the electric oven and the pot that we use to make soup, for instance,
put limits on what we can do with them in every phase of the cooking
process. Sometimes our interaction with goods is so tight that it is difficult
to say on whose terms this interaction takes place. This is as far as the so-
called actor network theory (theories) takes us.
That goods are tightly bound to our social lives is, however, only a
precondition for our commitment to them and for the ways in which they
may participate in the construction of our identities. In order to proceed
further from this point, it is necessary to open up the old general philo-
sophical question of subject–object relations and to attempt to overcome
it by trying to create an understanding of sociality mediated by goods. In
tackling this problem, I have utilized the Vygotskian ‘psychologized’
Hegelian theory of a child’s learning of cultural products (language). To
commit to some good presupposes that we make it our own; in a word,
internalize it. Internalization is a process during which we first learn to
utilize the good cognitively. When our experience with the good grows,
our skills in using it improve and our relationship to it changes – it will
become more and more personal and subjective. This change can be
described with the help of Vygotsky’s concepts of meaning and mind,
whereby meaning stands for a shared cultural meaning and mind for the
personal interpretation and application of it. We meet commodities on
markets, where marketing and consumers themselves construct more or less
shared meanings of these commodities.9 After the purchase, the appropri-
ation of these goods takes place. It is a process that will end when we treat

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these goods as our own. They get an aura of ‘me-ness’ (or catch our mind),
as market researchers like to put it.
Depending on the nature of our experience during the appropria-
tion process, we will approach the good in a special way. If our experi-
ence is positive, this approach strengthens our emotional bonds to the
good, but it might also be so innovative that we want to show it to others.
It is being suspended from their evaluation, whether or not it eventually
becomes common property that can be applied in the production of new
goods. This implies that it is consumption as such that provides the
impulse and knowledge to improve goods. Many large international
enterprises therefore intentionally utilize consumer groups in order to get
feedback about their products and to create goods for the next gener-
ation.

Notes
1. Kalevala, which Tolkien knew very well and probably used as a source for his own
ideas, could also be used here as an example. The mighty blacksmith Ilmarinen
created a sort of machine of wealth, a ‘sampo’, that evoked much envy, gave a
reason to start a war and, in the end, led to the destruction of this machine.
2. I will exclude all disposable goods from scrutiny here.
3. However, car makers are already producing cars that do not simply react to drivers’
efforts. They may, for instance, slow down at bends whether drivers want them to
or not.
4. Bateson has developed a systemic view of interaction between humans and non-
human materials. He considers, for example, how, in the process of cutting down a
tree, man and tree form a feedback system. The tree has an ‘active role’ in this
process in the sense that man must constantly take into consideration the changes
in the chopped tree if he is to do his job successfully. However, according to
Bateson, the western observer is not looking at tree-cutting in this fashion; rather,
he says that ‘I chop the tree’ and even believes that ‘I’ is separate from the tree that
is cut (1972: 318).
5. Some words of warning are necessary here. Not all commodities are singularized.
This applies to disposable products and some everyday utensils such as washing
powder and clothes pegs.
6. It is worth noting that in experiments conducted by Strahilevitz and Loewenstein,
subjects were not given an opportunity to actually use the objects (1998: 286).
7. It is illuminating that this kind of activity is labelled ‘housework’ rather than
‘consumption’, but naturally consumption usually implies a lot of work.
8. Archer challenges this starting point. She claims that privacy and practices come
before social and collective realization (2000: 114–17). It is hard to assess who is
right in this question. However, both are more interested in theories about the
morphology of a child’s development than in how we as beings who have already
been socialized into the role of a consumer face the existing world of goods.
Because I deal with the latter issue here and because my focus is on the

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appropriation of goods, I consider Vygotsky/Harré’s theory to be in this context

more adequate than that of Archer.
9. One must be careful here because much of the sociology of consumption deals
with an outsider (etic) perspective on goods. This has led to an illusion that there
are generally shared clearcut meanings related to goods. However, McCracken’s
studies on clothing show that a generally accepted code for interpreting the
‘messages’ that clothes may carry does not exist (1988: 57–70). In the same fashion,
Middleton pinpoints that meanings that have been connected to rock music have
been mainly etic in nature while the insider (emic) perspectives have been, by and
large, missing (2001: 216–19).

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Kaj Ilmonen has been a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy and Social
Sciences, University of Jyväskylä since 1994 and, before that, was at the University of Tampere.
His main fields of interest include social theory, social movements, industrial relations and the
sociology of consumption. Recent publications include: Trust in the Modern World (Sophi,
2002; with Kimmo Jokinen); ‘Sociology, Consumption and Routine’, in Ordinary Consumption
(Routledge, 2001; edited by J. Gronow and A. Warde); ‘A Social Movement of the Mature
Stage of Post-industrial Society?’, Work, Employment & Society (14[1]: 137–157; with P.
Jokivuori). Address: University of Jyväskylä, PO Box 35, 40014 Finland. [email:
Ilmonen@yfi.jyu.fi]

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