The Cultural and Political Economy of the Indian Two-Wheeler

Citation:

Bruce de Pyssler (1992) ,"The Cultural and Political Economy of the Indian Two-Wheeler", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 19, eds. John F. Sherry, Jr. and Brian Sternthal, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 437-442.

Advances in Consumer Research Volume 19, 1992      Pages 437-442

THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INDIAN TWO-WHEELER

Bruce de Pyssler, University of Texas-Austin

INTRODUCTION

This paper is part of a project that combines political economy, communication theory, and cultural anthropology to examine India's economic liberalization, its accompanying consumer boom, and the communicative resources unleashed by the recent flood of consumer goods in India. More specifically, the project addresses the conceptual relationship and interaction of what John Fiske, in his volumes, Reading the Popular and Understanding Popular Culture (1989), calls "two parallel, semi-autonomous economies." In these two studies, while demarcating between production and consumption, and while stressing that the conditions of production of a cultural system are not the same as, and do not predetermine, the conditions of use and consumption, Fiske makes a crucial distinction between what he terms the financial and cultural economies of television texts. In his work, the financial economy refers to the role television texts play generating wealth (advertising revenue, syndication fees, etc.), while the cultural economy refers to the ability of texts, combined with creatively active readers, to generate "meanings, pleasures and identities" (Understanding, pp. 26-27).

My project, based on a study of the product category of Indian two-wheelers, assumes that Fiske's distinction can be productively applied to consumer goods. I, however, will expand his conceptualization of the financial economy to reflect my wider concern with the flow, distribution, allocation, and accumulation of economic surplus and its accompanying socio-political arrangements (production relations, legal structures). I will rename it a political economy of texts/goods.

The cultural economy of goods, on the other hand, is concerned with the "manufacture and trajectory" (the terms are McCracken's) of cultural meaning. While a political economy impels us to track the movement, distribution, and institutional arrangements accompanying the flow of surplus, a cultural economy directs us to track the flow and movement of significance and cultural meanings and their cultural implications - Fiske's "meanings, pleasures, and identities". The argument here is that a full cultural analysis of the significance and meaning of a given consumer good must explore a textual meaning, how that meaning was arrived at (meaning movement, a cultural economy), and how the larger political economic context frames meaning-making.

Many questions arise when we consider the relationship between the productive and symbolic orders. One concern here will be how the productive order, certainly a major player shaping social conditions and social positions, resonates via a steady flow of consumer goods with the symbolic order. How that is the design, marketing, and advertising - literally, the production of meaning - that accompanies the world of goods must, in order to resonate with the social world, give due regard to reigning social conditions and subject positions. One purpose here is to make a contribution to a cultural economy of the meaning of consumer goods in light of these questions. Another is to provide some instances where the symbolic order - here consumer goods cum material culture - has been used to reflect on the institutional arrangements of the productive order.

After a short social history of the scooter, I will examine these questions by combining my work on the Indian two-wheeler - a product category including scooters, motorcycles, and mopeds - with two very illuminating papers, one by Grant McCracken (1986) and the other by Dick Hebdige (1988). Some examples of actors reflecting on the less directly meaningful domain of political economy via the medium of consumer goods will be provided.

RANDOM NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF THE SCOOTER

Italy. The scooter, as we know it today, emerged from post World War II Italy. Both Innocenti's Lambretta and Piaggio's Vespa (Vespa means Wasp in Italian) emerged simultaneously to capture the mood and market of the post-war generation. Scooters were cheap, stylish, and importantly, they could negotiate war torn roads. Scooters were sharply distinguished - nitched as they say in the trade - and marketed as friendly, sociable vehicles. Advertising campaigns targeted women and an emerging genre of consumer - teenagers. As Hebdige points out: scooters were gendered "feminine" both by design and mediation. Adverts emphasized ease of use, simplicity, social touring, tourism, picnics, and the like. Machismo motorcyclists condescendingly referred to the scooter as "the hairdresser on wheels."

D'Ascanio, Vespa's designer, drew on emerging production processes to incorporate motifs from airplane design (such as the scooter's stressed skin, or sheathing, and stub axle wheel mounting). The political economic frame of scooter production required a bricolage of surviving Italian talent, production processes (whatever remained standing after the war) and the import of financial and productive capital (Marshall Funds).

The scooter also can be seen as a commodity that typified, like the products coming out of Harley Earl's GM Styling Division, the emergence of a new post-war theory of selling (or profit realization) - the packaged, stylized post-war product had arrived. This "theory" must be understood as representing important shifts in production processes, in the scale and rate of capital accumulation, and in the relation between the commodity and the market. Likewise, the new theory of selling must be understood as linked to the Fordist production line and in corporate/monopoly efforts to protect massive capital investment by managing patterns of consumption.

Britain. While this productive frame evolved in Italy, in Britain the cultural significance of the object took on new and diverse cultural meanings. Hebdige identifies a major fault line in what he calls the national "official reception" of the scooter. On the one hand there was the reception, or reading, of the scooter by those social actors identified with declining heavy industry. These actors, having technical and financial capital tied up in the existing motorcycle product and market, tended to promote and identify with a negative reading of the scooter-text as an object clashing with prevailing definitions of masculinity. On the other side of the fault line, were those, positioned in the ready-to-boom design/fashion sector, who gave a much more positive reading of the scooter-text. Their alternate reading of the consumer good was guided, Hebdige suggests, by their interest in transforming the market and in aestheticizing its products. Perceived as "foreign competition" by one sector, to the other, the scooter-text was "the look of the future."

A complex reflection of this response to and reading of the scooter, was the Mods subcultural incorporation of the scooter as a "product complement" (in McCracken's terminology) to a consumption style that included consumer goods such as Hush Puppies and French Berets. The Mod's scooter served to mark them apart from the Rockers, who were oriented to motorcycles and a variety of more masculine consumer goods, such as boots and leather jackets. In Britain also, the scooter suffered through two different phases of customization: a baroque phase, marked by the use of streamers, extra mirrors, chrome, and the like, and a minimalist phase, where the scooter was returned to the "masculine" by the stripping of its sheathing. These activities - the ritualized reconstitution of the consumer good - fit nicely into McCracken category of possession rituals.

India. The Lambretta was introduced to Indian consumers in the early 1960's via a production agreement between Bombay-based Automobile Products of India and Innocenti. Indeed, in northern India "Lambretta" or "Lamby" rapidly became the Indianized generic name for scooters. Several years later Bajaj Auto formed a production agreement with Piaggio to produce a line of Bajaj "Vespa" scooters. Today, having divorced itself from Piaggio, Bajaj produces its own "Vespas," and Piaggio collaborates with LML, an Indian firm. During the 1960's and 1970's, because of restrictive government policy (licenses, production controls), a family could remain on a list for up to seven years waiting for the opportunity to purchase a scooter. Now, largely because of an emerging competitive environment, there is no longer a wait, and the scooter is the top selling two-wheeler in the country: 1) scooter sales per month = 65,000 units; 2) mopeds = 34,000 units; 3) motorcycles = 36,000 units.

Thinking in terms of a two-wheeler "code of commodities" and what scooter ownership signifies, as opposed to other two-wheelers, statistically the situation is as follows - 1) mopeds: these are associated either with lower income families, as their primary means of transport, or with pre-university students from the upper classes; 2) motorcycles: this is a mixed genre whose ownerships is split between the upper peasants who prefer heavy 1950's Polish and UK designed motorcycles, and the new Indo-Jap collaboration 100cc's which are the rage amongst upper class college students and young, yuppie-type professionals, and 3) scooters, which, excepting the Kinetic, are associated with salary earners and shopkeepers, who have started families.

Owning a scooter today in India appears to be similar to owning a station wagon in 1950's and 1960's America. Indeed, it is the scooter's use value - its durability, its repairability, and, especially its floor board, a feature providing the scooter owner with the ability to carry his family, which determines to a great extent the scooter's symbolic and commercial value. In a movement reversing both Marxian and classical utility theory, the scooter's monocoque/sheathing design - signifier in Italy of gender, and then of subculture in Britain - only took center stage as a use-value when transplanted into India.

Oddly, this functional use of the scooter's floorboard cannot be shown in scooter advertising - government regulations prohibit showing a third rider on the scooter. Consequently, this utility function is removed from mass mediation. Baja Auto markets its scooter's in a sentimental nationalistic tone, while LML stresses its vehicles' safety features. Both advertising campaigns pitch to the consumer's sense of identity either, in the one case with India, or in the other, with the family.

In the southern state where I conducted my research, Karnataka (pop. est. 45 million), there are, as of 1990, 887,000 two-wheelers, 120,000 cars, 44,000 auto rickshaws, and 15,000 buses. Fully 70% of all vehicles in the state are two-wheelers, and only 10% are private cars. Over 50% of the state's 400,000 two-wheelers are in Bangalore city, where I conducted my field work. Nation-wide penetration of the two-wheelers (per 1,000 households) is as follows: 1) mopeds: urban 6.14; rural 2.13; total 3.23; 2) motorcycles: urban 3.83; rural 1.17; total 1.90; 3) scooters: urban 11.21; rural 1.59; total 4.22.

The growth of two-wheeler ownership in Bangalore, with its 4 million inhabitants, has been: 18,000 in 1970; 97,000 in 1980; 399,000 in 1988. This growth reflects several things, but primarily, a growing population, a rapidly expanding middle class, a government incomes policy that directs purchasing power to the middle class, and the 1980's economic liberalization.

THE SCOOTER IN INDIA

I would now like to try to give some sense of the consumer meanings, pleasures and identities attached to the Bajaj scooter. These comments are culled from my research and are intended only to capture some of the object's cultural significance, and not the trajectories by which that significance has been arrived at, the latter being a question of what I have earlier called the cultural economy of the commodity.

1) Focus group with school children. On the look of the scooter:

"a normal useful vehicle," "a family friend," "for shopping," "looks friendlier than an Enfield," "its meant for shopping," "king of the road," "absolutely smashing," "it looks like it is smiling," "I can see images of small people standing in the front," "good for Indian roads and middle-aged people," "looks delicate but is sturdy and tough"

2) Lintas ad agency account rep. On the differences between a Bajaj Scooter vs. a Yamaha 100cc user:

unlike the motorcycle user, the scooter user has a slightly more conservative profile; he's much more of a family man; he's slightly older than the typical motorcycle rider; he's more into functional usage of the product and not really for the fun of riding it; unlike a motorcycle rider there may not be much of this man-machine relationship; a Yamaha guy is brash, on the move, quick to take decisions, the kind of guy who on a weekend likes a girl on the back, the wind in his hair; the scooter user has a sedate, mundane life style; he is through with the good things in life.

3) Review, "The Lion Whelps," Car & Bike, Nov. 1987:

The first scooter I saw on Indian Roads was the Innocenti- Lambretta. Time was when colloquially Lambretta meant Scooter - any scooter ... The scooter's visual appeal took the urban middle class by storm. As opposed to classic motorcycles wherein almost all parts are visible and exposed, in the scooter everything (not almost but exactly) that did not need touching by the rider was covered. ... the Lambretta did not get 'branded' as a ladies vehicle which proved to be a great boon to API, and its popularity among urban males shot up ... sales soared and API rode the crest of the profit wave three decades ago. Enter the dragon - in the form of a buxom looking scooter more than two and a half decades go. Its eye appeal was even great, But people did express reservations at that time. Some said, 'how can a scooter be stable when the engine is on one side?'; but the dragon steamrolled over all of them to become the greatest success story on two wheels in India.

4) Editorial to " Scooter Buyers Guide," Car & Bike, May 1989:

There is something about a scooter. As a genre scooters arrived half a century after motorcycles. Why did no one think about them before? As a race, we Indians are genetically fond of scooters. More so than motorcycles ... the sales figures are proof. The genetic theory holds true even more because of what one sees overseas. In Malaysia and Singapore ... 90% of scooter riders are ... genetically Indian. The scooters they ride are not imported from India but genuine Vespas ... So their preference for scooters cannot be because of any affinity to India. ... Why is the Indian gene so scooter oriented? That's one for psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists to answer. The reason therefore has to be social and/or need based [mentions carrying space, can carry kids or suitcase on floor, lockable dickey space]; Is that the reason why scooters are such a hit in India? Imagewise, a scooter projects the rider as a solid family man, rather opposite that of a man on an Indo-Jap out to sow wild oats. Even the cops are more considerate to a man on a scooter ...

5) Interview with sociologist (Bangalore):

there is perhaps a stagnant craze for the Bajaj scooter ... everyone seems to feel that the ultimate answer to your two-wheeler requirement - its the Bajaj; every person with whom I have discussed my vehicle - it's a Vijay Supra - in every context I've talked to some one - either you've had a toss or had a puncture or a breakdown or whatever - the moment you stop talking they say 'see you shouldn't have gone for this here, you should have gone for a Bajaj'; this is the one constant thing...why this fixation on the Bajaj?

Interviewer: But the young university student, he doesn't want a Bajaj, he wants a 100cc Yamaha, right?

Karanth: Right - but wait till he gets married and has a child ... the moment there's a child.

[And much later in interview]: I am still unable to resolve this fixation for Bajaj. Let me tell you a story of a good friend: He bought a vehicle - a Bajaj Chetak - he bought it out of the sheer fixation that he had that this is the only vehicle you should buy at all if you are buying a vehicle; and now he's telling me that he's looking for another vehicle which has a lower seat because he was so shocked he couldn't even reach the pedal; he never knew; he never thought of that; this is another extreme, you see that fixation is so much ... and then there is this fixation of all my colleagues who have bought a Bajaj; so many of them have bought it because of 'resale value'; you just go to any mechanic today - just go - you ask them one standard question: 'how many of your customers who come for repairs will ask you - every time they go back taking the vehicle - as to what the cost would be if he were to sell this vehicle? he wouldn't sell it, he wouldn't; but he'll ask nevertheless; he'll ask the mechanic: 'how much would I get for this?' and the mechanic says, 'well 6,000/7,000 rupees - like that'; he gets emotional satisfaction; he'll freak out on that; yet he'll never contemplate on selling it.

In short, what we see from the combined random notes on the social history of the scooter, and from the material culled from my research, is that the scooter in Italy, Britain, and India, while materially the same physical object, has taken on very different cultural meanings. Operating within different political economic structures, seen by different people, at different times, from differing perspectives, the scooter has generated diverse meanings, pleasures, and identities. For actors spread across social space and through time, it has been a different object. Appreciating this diversity, is one question, theorizing its movement, however, another.

MCCRACKEN & HEBDIGE

In order to begin to build a conceptual framework to account for the meanings, pleasures and identities identified above, we will now turn to two important papers. The first is Grant McCracken's, "A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods" (1986). McCracken's insightful, clear-headed accounting, amounting to a prescriptive outline for following the manufacture and trajectory of meaning in consumer goods, falls into what I have above called a cultural economy of meaning. As I've stated earlier, McCracken stresses the mobile quality of meaning, suggesting that we track the intentional agency-driven transfer of meaning from the already-existing cultural world into the product (design), onto the product (advertising), and out of the product (use). Importantly, he stresses how the manufactured meaningfulness of consumer goods ultimately loops back to assist social actors in the construction of the social world.

Following McCracken's model, and recapping the short history given above, we've seen how, first, as originally designed, the Italian scooter gives form to the gender category "feminine," and, as a kind of motivated sign, it actually displays the ideological principle guiding this gendering - the smoothness, the separation of mechanical parts from the consumer, etc. Secondly we've seen that, in mass mediation, first the quality of "sociability" (in 1950's Italy) and then the quality of "nationhood" (in 1980's India) were intentionally attached to the original Vespa cum Bajaj scooter. Thirdly, we've seen some examples of the ritualized extraction and reconstitution of commodity meaning. These are those instances where, as McCracken puts it, goods are used to "affirm, evoke, assign, or revise the conventional symbols and meanings of the cultural order" (1986, p. 78).

Here are some examples of these ritualized actions in Europe and India: the Mods use of the scooter in the subcultural revision of their social lives; the baroque and minimalist phases of scooter customizing; a proud 100cc owning Indians who, in addition to meticulously cleaning his cycle, goes to the extreme, on a weekly basis, of switching out stale for fresh air in his motorcycle tires; the ritualized marking of social passage or transition marking via parental gift-giving (eg., of mopeds to young upper class Indian girls to mark their passage of the pre-university exams, or of 100cc's to young Indian men upon entering university); and lastly, as an incorporation ritual, the Hindu puja performed at the purchase of a new vehicle.

Also, and lastly, along McCracken's model, we see a fashion system which, as he maintains, often outruns the mass mediated meaning-producing reach of the capitalist class's agents of surplus realization. A major element of the two-wheeler fashion system is something I would call street media, the everyday spectacle of persons of certain caste, class, ethnic, generation, and gender identities, wearing other identifying signs - such as clothing - driving specific models of two-wheelers. In this fashion system a Levi-jeans and Adidas- clad university student or a safari-suited, middle-aged, middle-class Bajaj-scooter driver might closely fit the set of meanings a company considers to fit best their sales strategy, but the street media of Indian women driving Kinetic Hondas - and thereby making it a "sissy scooter", as one informant said it, may be quite out of tune with the image a company has in mind for its product.

Other instances of the fashion system at work occur in magazines such as Car & Bike and Indian Auto. These magazines provide abundant materials reflecting both McCracken's concern with the manufacture of meaning, as well as Fiske's textual concern with meanings, pleasures and identities.

1) Self/consumer good, practices (letter to the editor, Car & Bike, Aug. 15-Sept., 1989):

I am the proud owner of a RX 100. With respect to your May '89 edition ... Mr Satish has praised his KB. I think he has never ridden a RX 100. It is the best bike in the 100cc class. You just can't feel the power in the KB. Whereas in RX, one can really feel the thrust under him urging him on. The more power you want, the more you get. I'm just 19 years and of course would like to show off to the girls. In this matter RX has never let me down. Doing a wheelie is so simple and the sound is just great when you rip across the street. - Shekar Reddy

2) Product reviews also can contain interesting examples of the self/consumer good relation (Car & Bike, December 1989):

After our road test supremo Dilip Bam had finished his test and the bike was handed over to me for the performance tests and photography, it became a problem for me to leave the bike alone. The RX had captivated me - it was like I had fallen in love for the first time like a 16 year old adolescent, who wanted to be with his girlfriend all the time. ... Just as Gene Wilder went crazy over Kelly McGillis in Woman in Red! The RX100 had some sort of similar effect on myself as I went completely bonkers over it ... and I can say that the RX 100 HAS NEVER LET ME DOWN.

3) Here a product review captures nicely both the sensibility of the typical 100cc owner, and the excited response of an entire generation of young upper- and middle-class Indians to the 1980's consumer boom (Car & Bike, January 1988):

My own conclusion is that the RX is the bike of youth. Of impatience. Youth just has to get ahead. Overtake everything in sight. The RX responds beautifully to young desires. The greatest feature of the RX is its ability to overtake everything on Indian roads - including the Maruti.

The strength of McCracken's model is, of course, its anthropological and communicative orientation to material culture. Examining the trajectory and manufacture of meaning certainly gets the researcher on the right track. But one wonders if the model is possibly a little too tidy. Is it only a question that, as McCracken so nicely puts the cultural issue, "goods have a significance that goes beyond their utilitarian character and their commercial value" and that "this significance rests largely on their ability to carry and communicate cultural meanings" (p.71)?

Do we want to organize our theoretical imagery of the cultural significance of consumer goods as a kind of layer cake of values where there's utility (or use value), then there's commerce (or exchange value), then there's cultural meaning (or sign value)? Or are we possibly looking more at a kind of irregular marble cake where, at varying moments and across social space, the values of utility, commerce, and cultural meaning swirl to alternatively dominate one another.

Only by addressing the question in this manner can we begin to understand how the cultural connotations of something such as the Bajaj scooter are bound up with the productive order. And please note that I don't believe that offering an account of this linkage goes beyond what social actors sometimes actually do when they engage themselves with the cultural meanings of consumer goods. As evidence I offer this commentary from a product review of two scooter brands, a reflection comparing two productive units - one private, the other public sector - which addresses the possibilities of innovation and labor productivity under private versus state ownership (Car & Bike, May 1989):

But then how can a public sector company innovate? It had to fail and it did. The only plus point in favour of this scooter was the time it appeared: Exactly when Bajaj Scooters were selling at a massive premium. Today the factory is closed, it's employees on strike. Rahul Bajaj wanted to take over this company, the government too wants that to happen, but the employees don't want that - they are afraid that if Bajaj takes over, they might have to actually work! (a review of the Vijay Super, a public sector scooter made by Scooters India).

By this accounting the quality of the Vijay is defiled, justly or unjustly, by its association with state production. But, and importantly, this need not always be the case. Indeed, one of the messages of the little Maruti auto is just the reverse - the Indian government, at least in collaboration with the Japanese, can produce quality.

But the cardinal point is this: We must also begin to understand how social relations of production and other questions relating to production, such as, with the Bajaj, production shortages, and consequently, interminable waiting, can play a role in molding what the informant above called the "stagnant craze" for the Bajaj. We must begin to understand how, in an impoverished country, the scooters' utility function - its ability to carry three and four family members - shapes not just the commercial value, but also the cultural meaning of the scooter.

Thus, in reconstructing commodity meaning, while we must take into account, as McCracken maintains, the passage of consumer goods from the frames of design to mediation to use, we also must draw back on occasion to examine the structures within which these frames operate. So that, to give one of many possible examples, understanding the designed meanings of consumer goods requires not just an analysis of how goods do duty incorporating cultural principles, such as, for example, how something like a push-button auto transmission can encode the cultural idea of progress. But also how, beyond mediated events such as design, advertising, exhibitions, reviews, advertising, user groups, and owner consumption rituals, commodity-meaning is also tied up with things like: 1) the intracorporate division of labor (say, between, at the design stage: engineering, styling, and management); 2) constraints of available technical resources, ability and willingness to modify plant; 3) labor relations and labor processes; and 4) distribution and retail.

Dick Hebdige's paper, "Object as Image: The Italian Scooter Cycle" (1988) provides a strategy. While Hebdige's approach is similar to McCracken's in that he stresses that we track meaning, in addition, he strains to account for the political economic issues discussed above so that the the cultural analysis of consumer goods can be placed into the structures of the political economic context. Earlier I provided Hebdige's accounting of how different sectors within Britain's social structure reacted to the arrival of the Italian scooter. Along these same lines we certainly would want to consider Mahatma Gandhi's mobilization of India's peasants to nationalism and socialism around the indigenous cotton, khadi.

By this accounting the meaning of a particular consumer good, say of the Vijay scooter, must be subject to a sociology of knowledge; that is, to an accounting of the subject and social position of the reader. How many, for example, within the social structure are able to factor into his or her decoding of the consumer good things such as labor and productive arrangements? This also reinforces the idea that the cultural significance of a consumer good must at many moments, according to the social position of the actor, be interpreted as occurring in a dynamic state of tension with the reigning political economic order.

Only if these issues are addressed will we be able to claim that we have provided an accounting of the cultural significance that provides for every possible point and moment where meaning is fixed. Only then can we claim to provide what Hebdige calls a "a unified account of all the multiple values and meanings which accumulate around a single object over time" (1988, p. 81).

CONCLUSION

In the Upanishads Maitreyi questions Yajnavalkya as to whether her wealth will bring her immortality. Receiving a negative answer she then asks: "What then should I do with that by which I do not become immortal?" By now I hope that the answer to Maitreyi's question is clear: We are to communicate with our wealth. I hope if nothing else that this paper has established that, while this is fully a matter for cultural analysis, it is a cultural analysis which must be carried out in the context of a larger, largely political economic context. I conclude with a final example of the merging of the political and cultural economies of meaning: Several days before finishing my field work and returning to the USA, a close friend and informant, Hari, made a special trip to visit me at the home where I lived. He had with him a photograph he had clipped from the Deccan Herald. Before showing me the photo however, he sang, with the utmost delight and with a glimmer in his eyes a line from the jingle of a popular TV advertisement for the TVS Champ moped. The line: "Oh What a Way to Get Carried Away! TVS Champ." The photo: A completely burned-out and destroyed shell of a bus. The bus in fact was TVS's executive bus. It had been attached and destroyed just outside Bangalore while fully loaded with its precious cargo. What was "getting carried away" in Hari's mind and rendition was, of course, not some proud TVS Champ owner, but an angry labor force. It struck me then and there that the little TVS Champ would forever have a slightly different connotation for Hari. The productive order had intruded successfully into the carefully managed meaning of the TVS Champ.

REFERENCES

Fiske, J. (1989). Reading the Popular & Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin & Hyman.

Hebdige, D. (1988). "Object as Image ." In Hiding in the Light - On Images and Things. London: Comedia.

McCracken, G. (1986). "Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods," Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (June), 71-84.

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