kingfisher manuscript review history manuscript … · kingfisher manuscript review history...

This document is part of a JCR Manuscript Review History. It should be used for educational purposes only.

1

KINGFISHER MANUSCRIPT REVIEW HISTORY

MANUSCRIPT (ROUND 1)

Abstract

We define a taste regime as a discursively constructed system of explicit and implicit aesthetic

norms, preferences, consumption rituals and practices. We argue that taste regimes are

perpetuated by marketplace institutions such as magazines, web sites and transmedia narratives

and filter into daily practices through continuous exposure. Consumers' engagement with taste

regimes can institute an idealized aesthetic order that mediates their relationships with products

and spaces, ultimately structuring their habits and practices of consumption. We situate our

inquiry in a popular design blog and the community that it has attracted. Through a narrative

analysis of the blog, supplemented with interviews with readers, we uncover three interrelated

meta-processes through which a regime becomes part of the everyday consumption: processes of

normalization, processes of materialization and processes of progression. Our findings

demonstrate how aesthetics are linked to daily practice and habitual knowledge and become

materialized into routine consumption patterns and preferences.


2

Taste has been a fertile research domain for consumer researchers and sociologists

because it is established as a fundamental mechanism for perpetuating social hierarchies

(Bourdieu 1984; Holt 1998; Üstüner and Holt 2010). We argue that this long-standing focus on

the structuring property of taste has resulted in a paucity of theories explaining the embodied and

experiential aspects of how consumers practice taste. By focusing on how differences in taste

enforce hierarchies, we have not adequately analyzed how specific taste patterns within the strata

of hierarchies are enacted and materialized in everyday life. This is despite the assertion that

these taste patterns are matters of routine, practical, and habitual knowledge with material effects

on consumption (Allen 2002; Bourdieu 1990; Shove 2003). Our aim here is not to discuss how

taste hierarchies are made or to criticize existing theories, as this has been explored extensively

in consumer research and elsewhere (Holbrook 1999; Holbrook and Addis 2007; Holbrook and

Schindler 1989; Holt 1998; Levine 1988; Peterson and Simkus 1992; Üstüner and Holt 2010).

Rather, we investigate the ways taste, within one stratum of a hierarchy, is embodied, practiced,

and naturalized, and we theorize the discursive processes through which taste norms are

reproduced, enforced and contested.

We have situated our inquiry in the domain of domestic space, an understudied domain

that Sherry (2000) has called on consumer researchers to investigate. Likewise, within the

domain of design studies, historians have argued that a theory of interiors should be better

aligned with the works of other disciplines and “supplemented by other conceptualizations” to

emphasize the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of interior space (Sparke 2010, 14).

While past studies of taste in Consumer Culture Theory have dealt with domestic space (Holt

1998; Üstüner and Holt 2010), the focus of most existing research has been how symbolic

boundaries are established across different social class groupings. Our work extends upon this

research stream to provide a model of how regimes of taste are constituted and practiced by

consumers within a particular set of symbolic boundaries.

We define a taste regime as a discursively constructed system of explicit and implicit

aesthetic norms, preferences, consumption rituals and practices. Regimes of taste propagate an

idealized aesthetic order that mediates consumers’ use and relationships with objects and spaces.

A taste regime can be centralized in a singular authority figure such as a widely read magazine or

blog, be dispersed among the elements of a transmedia brand (Jenkins 2006), such as Martha

Stewart, or emerge from a loosely linked network of media products related by a similar

aesthetic sensibility (Gans 1975). A taste regime has both symbolic and material consequences

because it can influence the way people habitually interact with materiality and assign symbolic

meaning to objects. In our particular case, the taste regime is centered on the relationship

between people and the things with which they surround themselves at home.

Foucault’s (1991) concept of regime of practice, which refers to discursive systems that

generate their own regularities, prescriptions, reason and self-evidence, has been casually used in

literature to depict systems of taste (Gregson, Metcalfe, and Crewe 2009; Wilk 1999). However,

we are not aware of a formal definition or a theoretical elaboration of a taste regime as a concept

unto itself in the literature. Perhaps the closest to our work is Hand and Shove’s (2004) analysis

of changes in kitchen regimes through an historical study of the British magazines Good

Housekeeping and Ideal Home. By analyzing structural changes in the concept of the kitchen,

understood as an assemblage of material objects, symbolic meanings, and embodied skills, they

identify three regimes of British kitchens structured around one, efficiency and functionality,

two, autonomy, aesthetics, and unity, and three, leisure and self-expression. Similarly Bennett,

Emmison and Frow (1999, 103) propose that tastes are constituted through a value regime, which


3

is a “institutionally grounded set of discursive and intertextual determinations that inspire and

regulate practices of valuation, connecting people into objects or process of aesthetic practice by

means of normative patterns of value.”

We have chosen the construct regime instead of the more frequently invoked term taste

culture (Gans 1975) because it allows flexibility in the scale of analysis. Whereas Gans’s concept

of taste culture is operationalized at the aggregate level of lifestyles, a taste regime can function

at any level, from a very specific taste domain, such as subcultures of vintage car enthusiasts or

Harley Riders (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), communities centered on particular brands

(Muniz and O'Guinn 2001), to a lifestyle level clustering such as urbanite Muslim women in

Turkey (Sandikci and Ger 2010) Secondly, we would like to draw attention to the discursive

processes within the regime that work to stabilize rather than the mechanisms that serve to group

and stratify. Furthermore, we prefer the term regime to discourse because regime better captures

the continuous, practical and embodied way of relating to materiality and more strongly relates

to the idiocultural (Fine 1979) processes that we elaborate in our work.

In the following sections, we first summarize the theories of taste and practice

highlighting the often-overlooked practice dimension of doing taste. We follow by unpacking the

socio-cultural conditions that surround our specific research context, the design blog Apartment

Therapy, and the taste regime it establishes. After a brief overview of our method, we discuss

three interrelated meta-processes through which the regime becomes part of the everyday

consumption: processes of normalization, processes of materialization and processes of

progression. Finally, we discuss the contributions and limitations of this research.

THEORIES OF TASTE AND PRACTICE

Taste has been theorized as a mechanism through which individuals judge, classify and

relate to objects and practices (Bourdieu 1984). Accordingly, it is often defined as a set of

embodied preferences that hinge on cultural capital—that is, sociocultural resources such as

education, connections and enduring familiarity with artistic and aesthetic objects (see Holt 1998

for an overview). In this view, taste serves as a system of classification that perpetuates

hierarchies of status and systems of symbolic values through embodied action (DiMaggio 1987).

Within the field of material culture, taste is construed as a set of skills that emerge from the

relationship between people and things (Miller 2001, 2009). These skills are learned, rehearsed,

and continually reproduced through everyday action (Bourdieu 1984, 1990; Miller 2010). This

Bourdieuian formulation of class-conditioned habitus has been central to literature in Consumer

Culture Theory and to sociological accounts of taste and choice, where habitus is seen to regulate

the embodied attitudes, preferences, and habits that naturalize systems of distinction through

everyday practice (Allen 2002; Turner and Edmunds 2002; Üstüner and Holt 2010; Warde

1997). In Bourdieu’s classical theory, habitus corresponds with strict social class hierarchies

because it inscribes “schemes of perception, thought and action, [which] tend to guarantee the

‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and

explicit norms” (Bourdieu 1990, 54).

Critiques of Bourdieuian explanations of taste argue that a rigid conceptualization of

social hierarchy overplays the hegemony of a singular dominant culture and neglects more

nuanced and horizontal systems of social distinctions (Erickson 1996; Hall 1992; Lamont and

Lareau 1988; Latour 2005). Indeed, recent research has found that consumers with socio-

economic privileges no longer consume exclusively from highbrow categories such as opera,


4

fine arts and classical music. Rather, these consumers are theorized as cultural omnivores who

consume a mix of objects and services across categories of high, middle, and low (Johnston and

Baumann 2007, 2009; Peterson and Kern 1996; Warde, Wright, and Gayo-Cal 2007). This is

postulated as an inherent quality of the postmodern condition, wherein the consumer is imagined

as a much liberated subject (Firat and Venkatesh 1995) who assembles choices from marketplace

resources through a process of bricolage (Featherstone 1991) rather than sticking to the

established aesthetic conventions of a particular social class. Featherstone further suggests the

use of the term style instead of taste because style indicates a greater attention to individual

choice rather than structurally determined attributes such as class. However, other scholars warn

that an overt focus on style in domestic space can lead to an exclusionary focus on the symbolic

attributes of home-related consumption as a means of self-expression (Madigan and Munro

1996).

As a result of the split between the structuralist assumption that taste functions as a

mechanism for perpetuating strict class boundaries and the postmodern mode that, in our view,

overemphasizes the idiosyncrasies arising from unique consumer identity projects, little attention

has been paid to how taste is subjectively experienced and practiced by individuals. It has proven

difficult to conceptualize a subjective understanding of taste within a Bourdieuian framework

because the never-ending process of everyday consumption creates a level of experience and

knowledge shaped by broader sociohistoric processes rather than the conscious and rational

actions of an individual (Allen 2002). Individuals might not know why and how they are

engaging in certain consumption practices, as it is “difficult to put into words what one takes for

granted every single day of one's life” (Inglis 2005, 3).

We argue that the practice of taste as an experiential, practical and emic action is not only

determined by social class, but also is coded within class hierarchies by particular taste regimes

that consumers take for granted as natural. Our position is akin to Üstüner and Holt’s (2010)

depiction of upper middle class Turkish women invoking the Western lifestyle myth to construct

status consumption strategies. These regimes serve as laterally distinguishing mechanisms within

economic strata by setting apart the styles, preferences and dispositions of one middle class from

another. However, as indicated in our introduction, our goal is not to highlight the differentiating

strategies—the mechanics of which, as mentioned above, have been revealed repeatedly by prior

literature—but rather to better understand how patterns of taste become embodied by consumers

within a particular taste regime through discursive processes.

A significant body of consumer culture research has already investigated how discursive

systems shape consumption practices (Arnould and Thompson 2005). Marketplace discourses

are historically constituted meaning systems that have normative, ideological, and symbolic

influence over consumption practices (Kozinets 2008; Thompson 2004; Thompson and Haytko

1997). Research on marketplace discourses has predominantly focused on consumer identity

construction (Ahuvia 2005; Dong and Tian 2009; Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler 2010), but

this is not the exclusive application. For example, discourses are also seen to shape the cultural

understanding of health risks and illness (Arnould and Thompson 2005; Wong and King 2008)

and ways of coping with attenuated access to consumer goods (Crockett and Wallendorf 2004).

Other researchers have shown how changes in discourses have caused institutional and

marketplace level shifts in the perception of practices such as file sharing (Giesler 2008). Our

conceptualization of taste as a regime is parallel to extant consumer research that has

investigated similar practices of normalization of values and aesthetic practice: For example,

prior research has looked at how taste practices such as fashion discourses (Thompson and


5

Haytko 1997), relationship to technology (Kozinets 2008) and food (Johnston and Baumann

2009) have been established discursively. Along the same lines, we argue that practices of taste

are established and perpetuated through socio-historically contextualized regimes.

Our research follows this body of the literature and demonstrates how aesthetic regimes

created through marketplace narratives establish a visual and material order (Rip and Kemp

1998). These regimes regulate the aesthetic norms in taste domains such as cooking and eating,

fashion, travel, and home decoration. Using these shared meaning and values, consumers can

create material representations of the regime with a high degree of fidelity. This reproduction is

established through the repeated exposure to the regime components that furnish consumers with

tacit, embodied skills relating to objects and practices: the ability to evaluate, choose, arrange,

and use objects in space, and the particular ways of relating to daily practices. This process

creates a sense of extended familiarity—Bourdieu’s habitus. Thus a central function of the taste

regime is the way it permeates habitus, in the form of repeated practice replicating its principles

across consumers. In the next section, we analyze the taste regime associated with the home

design blog Apartment Therapy and its fundamental aesthetic principles.

RESEARCH CONTEXT

Our research centers on the taste regime associated with Apartment Therapy, an

exceptionally popular home design blog. AT, as its readers refer to it, started in 2004 as an online

extension of an interior design service based in New York City. It quickly gained a cult

following attributable in part to coverage in popular media including the New York Times,

Home and Garden TV and Oprah. By 2011, AT registered more than five million unique

viewers/contributors per month, a figure that eclipsed the annual audited print circulation of

magazines such as Martha Stewart Living (1,894,134), Sunset (1,448,044) and Good

Housekeeping (4,668,818) (Ulrichsweb 2010).

Whereas AT as a web site is a relatively new phenomenon, the taste regime that it is

allied with can be traced back to three factors: the recent and widespread popularity of mid-

century modernist furniture and decor, the emergence of craft consumption (Campbell 2005),

and the role online media have had in the diffusion of these ideas and restructuring the domestic

advice marketplace. Additional demographic and economic factors correlating with AT’s rise to

prominence include the return of population growth to American center cities and the real estate

and condo boom (Hymowitz 2008). In many ways, the core AT audience exhibits the

sensibilities of those groups labeled as the bohemian bourgeois (Brooks 2000), the cultural

creatives (Ray and Anderson 2000) or the creative class (Florida 2002): medium to high cultural

capital individuals with economic privileges, interest in self expression, social change and

experiential activities. In the following sections, we will briefly trace the socio-cultural

conditions that led the rise of AT and the taste regime it promulgates.

Apartment Therapy and the Reemergence of Modernist Style

Our informants described AT style with words such as warm, modern, minimalist, or

clean. This corresponds with the dominant aesthetic seen in the AT web site. Communicated

through visual information and text, the content of AT frequently references icons of modernist

design such as the Eames recliner (Carpenter 2009). The history and commodification of modern

design is too broad to address comprehensively in this article, but modern design in general and


6

mid-century modernism in particular is trendy among younger middle class consumers. Perhaps

best exhibited by the American television show Mad Men, mid-century modernist furniture has

become highly sought-after and accordingly valued (Wolf 2004). The trend seems to have

emerged in the late 1990’s, arriving in full force in the first decade of the 2000’s. By 2003,

Leslie and Reimer (2003) had discerned a generalized trend toward modernism among the

middle and upper-middle classes in the UK and Canada. Like Sparke (1995), they link

modernism to gender binaries, and in particular to a masculine “opposition to bourgeois taste,

craft, fashion, and colour” (298). Other scholars link the reemergence of modernism as a style

with the embrace of a modern subjectivity that results in a labor-intensive relationship between

spare domestic space and the ideal self. Cullens (1999, 221) describes a trend she labels “Zen

luxury.” Whereas objects, superfluous in number and meaning, once were a source of comfort,

abundance now threatens to contaminate an ideal of order that considers the home a sanctuary.

This sacralization of the home “overlaps with the New Age cult of daily life mindfulness, which

also encourages making home, garden, table, and body alike a temple consecrated to the simple

pleasures of moment-by-moment experience” (219). In this scheme, mid-century modern

furniture is valued because the minimalist aesthetic complements the austerity of the surrounding

domestic environment. In this context, austerity is consciously intended to enforce New Age

spirituality of mindfulness, purification and selectivity, a meaning far removed from its original

allegiance with rational and efficient production. Thus, the new popularity of modernist styles of

interior design allow for most of the elements McCracken associates with homeyness

(McCracken 1989), while representing a distinctly different mapping of aesthetic and material

elements to these same concepts (Bean 2011).

By early 2000s a range of shelter magazines such as Real Simple, Dwell, Sunset and

Domino had tapped into this trend. For example, Domino reflected middle class aspirations of

individuality, aesthetic agency, balance and pursuit of happiness through domesticity (Gothie

2009). Dwell defined “a residential style for Generation Xers who embrace modernism and green

living” (Sullivan 2007, 74). Real Simple also commodified modernism through fashioning a

“sparse aesthetic of muted colors… to create appropriate moods and labor-saving ease” and by

inscribing comfort as achieved “through cleansing and nurturing the body as well as the spirit”

(Wajda 2001). On a somewhat orthogonal taste regime, the Martha Stewart media empire has

been slowly expanding, featuring complicated craft, unattainable domestic ideals (Leavitt 2002)

and a georgic lifestyle of improbable labor (Bell and Hollows 2005). Whereas Martha Stewart

Living was like a fairy tale of domestic impossibility (Gachot 1999), its more austere spinoff

Blueprint, along with Dwell, Domino, and Real Simple, functioned as an instruction manual for a

more efficient and tidy everyday life. AT and other online media, however, have displaced these

magazines from a central role in the communication of meaning and the establishment of taste

regimes. In fact, the popularity of the AT and its appeal to advertisers may have contributed to

the demise of Blueprint and Domino (Green 2004). In this article, we have constrained our study

to AT because it plays a central role in this taste regime; however, we suggest that the regime

includes a larger network of media with a similar aesthetic predilection.

The Rise of Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy emerged in 2004 in this context, extending the spiritual aspects of

mindfulness with a brand that explicitly linked psychological wellness (including capsule-shaped

business cards) to well-ordered domestic space. The 2006 book Apartment Therapy: The Eight


7

Step Home Cure (Gillingham-Ryan 2006) extended this metaphor by offering “a therapeutic

questionnaire,” “a prescription,” and “a treatment plan” achieved through a step-by-step “home

cure” directly inspired by Dr. Andrew Weil’s #1 New York Times bestselling book Eight Weeks

to Optimum Health (Gillingham-Ryan 2006, 163). The book outlined a process to “cure” one’s

home through a ritualized process of envisioning, cleaning, reordering, buying, repairing,

lighting, creating a sacred space, and celebrating, complete with worksheets and lists of shopping

resources. Posts on the AT website encourage readers to purchase or borrow the book as a first

step towards participating in an eight-week collective “Group Cure” by contributing photographs

and comments to the blog. To convince the skeptical reader to participate in the home cure, the

AT book tells the story of a woman, Beth, who transformed her life through changing her

apartment. Beth lived in a “white box with beige furniture, light brown wood floors, and not

much on the walls.” But her apartment “had no heart.” Newly in love, Beth undertook a project

to inject color throughout her apartment. The result: “the apartment came to life… And that man

she was dating? He would eventually become her husband” (Gillingham-Ryan 2006, 33).

Thinking of the home as possessing bodily characteristics—bones, breath, heart, and mind—and

as an object that can be “cured” through conscious action is a key metaphor in the book, and one

that draws on its author’s experience as a Waldorf teacher and consequent exposure to Rudolf

Steiner’s theories of architecture and anthroposophy (Gray 2010).

From its origins as a single-authored blog intended to promote design services AT

quickly became an online media empire associated with a strong following built around a brand

community (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001). Within a few years, AT had established sub-sites for the

Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston markets, as well as sister sites on cooking,

parenting, domestic technology, and green living. Two other books extended the Apartment

Therapy brand: Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Design

Solutions (Gillingham-Ryan, Slater, and Laban 2008), and Apartment Therapy's Big Book of

Small, Cool Spaces (Gillingham-Ryan 2010). Both books, lavishly illustrated, reproduce

photographs from the site and depict homes that exemplify the AT taste regime. A core group of

four content editors, supplemented by a business and management team of nine, gradually

recruited approximately 40 bloggers who continue to contribute a staggering amount of content

to AT’s main site (Apartment Therapy 2010). As of February 2011, more than 60,000 individual

posts consisting of over 145 million words had appeared on AT’s main site alone. These posts

appeared in a loose system of categorization summarized in table 1.

––––––––––––––––––––

Insert table 1 about here

––––––––––––––––––––

METHODOLOGY

To understand how the Apartment Therapy narrative institutes a taste regime, we used a

longitudinal multi-method approach incorporating narrative analysis, long interviews and

extended participant observation. The data for our narrative analysis includes the text and image

based Apartment Therapy blog and the spinoff books. Because the blog data, consisting of over

145,000,000 words, was too voluminous for holistic in-depth qualitative analysis, we took three

subsamples. First, we reviewed posts published in each first full week of May from AT’s


8

beginning in 2004 through 2010. Analysis of this subset of 1,366 posts enabled us to establish

how the content and tone of the AT taste regime changed over time.

We paid particular attention to selected posts between February to June, 2010 while we

conducted research and analysis. This data amounted to 114 posts. We also subscribed to the

blog’s RSS feed, which we read daily throughout the process of writing and editing this article.

Lastly, we took 32 posts categorized by AT bloggers as related to the spring 2008 group “cure”

to help us identify any differences between the general content of the blog and content specific to

the cure. We chose the year 2008 because that was the year that post quantity peaked. The total

number of 2008 posts was 15,427. Both researchers coded the data until theoretical saturation

was reached, with daily exposure to the blog and iterative searches of the entire 58,274 post

database to confirm and test the coding schema. Our interpretation was also framed by the

Apartment Therapy Eight Step Home cure book and the two spinoff photo books that display the

“best of” from the site archives.

Second, we conducted 12 long interviews (one of which was with a couple) with reader-

participants of the blog. The interviewees ranged in age from 25 to 37. The total hours of

recorded interviews were 15. We sought variation across the informants in terms of their

involvement with the web site. Accordingly, five of the interviewees were casual readers who

habitually read the web site, four were selected by the site editors as representative homes in the

popular House Tour series, and the two were entrants to the annual Smallest Coolest Home

contest. Lastly, we interviewed one paid contributor to the site.

Third, we used participant observation to situate ourselves with respect to the research.

Both authors have been regular readers of the blog since 2005 and even attempted the home cure

with varying degrees of success. This enabled us to subjectively experience the practices

represented in the book and on the blog, such as buying flowers every week and making the bed

every morning, and better understand how the value systems of this taste regime becomes

internalized and naturalized through systematic and repetitive rituals. Insight into the world of

AT also came from the second author’s involvement with one of AT’s sister sites during 2007

and 2008 as a paid regular contributor.

FINDINGS

Taste Regimes Regulate Practice

Our own “personal styles” are created and developed through exposure to, and absorption

of, what we see around us every day. I have seen beautiful homes that incorporate the

Keep Calm sign, typography posters, IKEA cube shelves, Eames chairs, and any other

number of items that have been repeated over and over within spaces featured on this site.

Hopefully people will take what they glean from a wonderful repository like AT and find

a way to make it theirs. (blog comment by community member “inkybrushes” May 5,

2010)

The comment above summarizes the way our participants utilize textual and visual

representations of a taste regime made explicit by photographs and text on AT into practical

knowledge and material environments which eventually become embodied in the habitus.

Through repeated exposure to AT, they develop naturalized affinities that “feel right” (Allen

2002). Steered by the AT taste regime, individuals gravitate towards home furnishings, paint


9

colors, posters and decoration that deliver shared aesthetic qualities, pick them with a cultivated

ease, and evaluate and experience their preferences and those of others with an embodied set of

aesthetic standards and values. AT’s “wonderful repository” of ideas becomes a symbolic and

material resource for the consumers of the taste regime, one that functions to circumscribe

boundaries by defining what is orthodox and what is unconventional. But how does the regime

get reproduced through daily life in thousands of people’s homes? We argue that a mass-

mediated taste regime operates through three interrelated processes that link abstract taste norms

to daily practices and enable consumers to replicate its material representation: normalization,

materialization, and progression.

––––––––––––––––––––

Insert figure I about here

––––––––––––––––––––

Processes of Normalization

A fundamental quality of regimes is their ability to appear natural, justifiable and

legitimate, or in other words normal (Foucault 1980). Through their discursive power, regimes

can establish idealized states such as acceptable standards of body (Thompson and Hirschman

1995) or demarcate proper means of conduct such as how to practice leisure and pleasure

(Karababa and Ger 2011). In taste regimes, such discursive power is coded through two

interrelated processes: inscription of authority, and generating normative solutions.

Inscription of authority. A taste regime speaks with a legitimate voice. This can be established

by either centralizing the authority in a person and their charisma or power—such as Oprah

Winfrey—or by transferring power to an institution or collective. For example, while shelter

magazines have long used write-in features or visits to “actual homes” to relate ideas to readers

(Keeble 2007), their core content is under direct editorial control and relies on the magazine’s

position of authority. In our particular case, the authority is further distributed to the institution

of AT and its collective identity of readers/contributors. While relatively few of its 5 million

monthly readers participate in the creation of content, repeat readers are drawn nonetheless into a

collective identity that is perhaps best summarized by the constant use of the word “we” on the

site. The use of “we” is not only internalized by the participant/creators, but is also enforced by

the AT editorial policy, which is otherwise remarkably informal: “we” is required in all posts

except those in the overtly editorial “AT On…” category.

Traditional media outlets have utilized the institutionalized “we” to assert authority and

position it high in the discursive hierarchy (Baym 2000). Within a taste regime, “we” is used not

only for assigning authority to an institutionalized agent such as the TV news reporter, but also,

in varying degrees, to encourage consumers to imagine themselves as engaged creators and

holders of this authority. A closer look at the content of AT reveals four levels of use of “we” in

the narrative. The official “we” used in the narrative is the voice of authority assumed to occupy

a higher position in the taste hierarchy. It is used for declarative purposes and to create

irrefutable statements of fact through positioning its speaker above the public. We1 is used by

individual blog post writers and surprisingly often by commenters to indicate membership in the

imagined AT community. It is used to extend power to the general AT community (Baym 2000;

Fiske 1993). We2 is used by individual blog writers to refer to physical collectivities of 2 or more


10

people, generally who have, or might, engage in concrete action. I is used very infrequently on

the site, most often in the comments rather than actual posts. I serves to differentiate the

individual position from other AT readers. This rhetorical layering of authority is key to the

legitimization of a taste regime. Once invested with authority, the taste regime functions to code

norms to everyday action through the remaining elements of the narrative.

––––––––––––––––––––

Insert table 2 about here

––––––––––––––––––––

Problematization and resolution. A taste regime also establishes legitimacy by generating

solutions for problems that it creates for the purpose of solving. In other words, the regime first

generates ideals, then problematizes deviations from these ideals and then prescribes practices

that resolve these problems (Thompson and Hirschman 1995). AT offers both specific and

abstract sets of problems and instructions to solve them. Step-by-step how-to makes up a

significant portion of the site. Approximately one in five of the posts (10,202 out of 58,274) in

the archive we collected include the words “how to” somewhere in the post or comments, such

as “How to Avoid the Catalog Look At Home,” or “Good Question: How to Modernize this

Dining Room Set.” On this type of post, readers regularly comment about their own opinions and

experiences, meaning that it is not just AT’s paid bloggers who offer advice; rather, problems are

collectively constituted and resolved. Our interview data further suggests that readers view the

post and comment as an integrated resource. As Clare explains, “because AT posts are usually

really short anyways—like maybe one paragraph or two paragraphs—the comments give more

perspectives on that topic… I guess I am looking for other people’s opinions so I can make my

opinion: whose opinion do I agree with?” (emphasis in original).

In addition to specific and literal solutions for domestic problems, the taste regime also

offers instruction in abstract and intangible ways of being. For example, the emotional quality of

calmness is discussed with increasing frequency on AT. While some disorder, enclosure, and a

certain degree of clutter may be the epitome of homeyness (McCracken 1989), posts on AT

usually frame clutter as a problem that needs to be solved or “healed.” Within this specific taste

regime, a carefully edited or curated home with little clutter is the most desirable for reasons that

are justified in terms of emotion. As Mia explains in an interview:

I’ve moved around so much in my life; I’ve been quite nomadic. And clutter or things

make me nervous. If I need to move, I want to be able to do it with as much like ease as

possible, without much fuss. My mind, as it is, is cluttered enough and crazy enough that

I want my surroundings to be as empty as possible without looking, you know, ugly. I

still want it to look nice. I don’t like a lot of negative space and I like symmetry, I have to

have symmetry. I have to or it will drive me crazy if something’s not in balance.

Mia’s use of AT is not just for normative advice on how to best decorate her home. She

perceives her home as a balance to the emotional landscape she experiences: her nomadic status,

the clutter and her “crazy” mind require an empty, yet balanced arrangement of stuff. AT sets up

and resolves these contradictions, offering readers a feeling of empowerment while entrenching

its own authority by creating new associations with problems, such as the mess or disorder of


11

packed bookshelves; and offering solutions to these problems by suggesting to color-code books,

give them away, or wrap one’s entire book collection in white dust jackets.

Processes of materialization

While the processes of normalization serve to instill legitimacy to the regime and its

encompassing practices, the processes of materialization serve a different purpose. These

processes link immaterial and abstract ideals of the taste regime to the material qualities and

utilitarian functions of objects and space and then again to symbolic elements. For example, a

2007 AT blog post, which characterized dirty keys as “unconscious beings within our daily

lives” provides step-by-step instructions on how to wash one’s keys. Through the act of washing,

keys become an allegory for the merging of the ideal, ordered self with ideal, ordered space.

Further embedded are meanings related to a belief in incremental progress, a linking of the self

to the material, and a mapping of emotional experience onto everyday materials and practices.

Thus, processes of materialization help meanings to slide between the material world and the

immaterial world of social relations (Cranz 2004). These processes function in two ways: first,

they help consumers envision material possibilities of the taste depicted by the regime, and

second, they instrumentalize the material through linking immaterial values and ideals to

physical objects and spaces (Molotch 2003).

Envisioning Transformation.

The kitchen was kind of an avocado green… right when I started living here… I took on

changing all the appliances, of course, and changing all the counter tops and the back

splash and the Formica; and I just wanted it to look very, very neutral, so that way

whatever color of accessories I want to throw in here can change it to orange—or change

it to red or make it aqua. That’s what it is now. (Barb, interview)

As a sub-process, envisioning transformation is strongly related to a realization that one’s

home and one’s identity are ever subject to change, and that the self has a dialectical relationship

with domestic objects and space (Miller 2010). Consumers of the taste regime, such as Barb,

fantasize and actualize (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010) spaces with aesthetics that are

strongly shaped by the taste regime. This process is achieved through the visual depiction of the

potential of domestic transformation throughout the AT narrative. The best example of these

spaces of actualized fantasy are before and after features as well as AT’s recurring contests, such

as the Small Cool and Room for Color competitions. These serial features document idealized

and perfected homes created by other readers of AT.

The taste regime provides an order to otherwise potentially overwhelming fantasies of

material possibility by inscribing the material and symbolic bounds to opportunities. With posts

classified as “Look!” and “Inspiration,” the site functions like a collectively kept resource library

or idea book. Particularly useful for readers are “roundup” posts, which show multiple examples

of a popular trope as seen in the past on AT, on other lifestyle and fashion blogs, and in design

magazines. These images, brands, products, and styles furnish the readers of the blog with a

bounded vocabulary and skill set. In other words, the regime provides a restricted roadmap for

transformation, perpetuating its regularities and aesthetic principles:


12

I think that I’ve gotten better at putting my finger on what I like and what I don’t like and

learning the vocabulary a bit more. You sort of learn things that you lean towards and it’s

easier to search for things. Because when I was looking for the chair for my desk, I knew

it was called a Parsons chair. That’s something a year ago I would have never known. I

would have been like “chair with sort of curvy back.” I don’t know how I would have

looked for it, right?

…. On the back of their [referring to another design blog that is frequently compared to

AT in terms of style] Parsons chair, they have a scarf draped over the back of it. That’s

there just for decoration purposes. It’s funny because my mom had given me a pashmina

wrap in a very light, almost celery green color. When I wore it, I just felt “You know, this

really isn’t my color”. But yet the celery green went really well in my room, so now it’s

draped over the back of the chair. (Eva, interview)

For Eva, AT has served not only to narrow down the range of choices offered by the

marketplace but also increase the range of possibilities beyond her existing preferences of taste

such as the green color she would have otherwise not used. The regime and the corresponding

archive of resources—as in knowledge and means of judging and appreciating aesthetic

objects—fostered the cultural capital required to cultivate her own distinctive sense of taste,

gradually moving her from conscious emulation to choices based on tacit knowledge.

Readers of AT are not looking to escape to an unattainable world of perfect order like

that pictured in glossy magazines, but rather seek to cultivate ideas that can be used for

incremental transformation of their own domestic space. Possibility and practicality are central

concerns. As Robert says in an interview, “although I like Architectural Digest, there’s some

nice stuff in there, but there’s something much more appealing about the design blogs online or

design sites that are kind of like home cooked stuff that you can do yourself, if you have an open

mind and a sense of adventure.” Thus, within a typical taste regime, the possibilities represented

are meant to be accessible—perhaps with cost or effort—to an average consumer. This realness,

or almost-ordinariness, establishes attainability. This means that AT must walk a fine line

between representing designed interiors and objects that are fashion-forward, but never

outlandish or impractical. More importantly, it needs to provide moral imperatives for seeking

such transformations, a process we label as Instrumentalization of the Material.

Instrumentalization of the Material. In AT, the transformation of the space is aligned with the

individual and serves as a technology of self (Foucault et al. 1988). The idea that objects can

exercise agency over individuals (Miller 2001) is an implicit assumption core to participation in

the AT regime. The conscious consideration of objects and spaces is consistently presented as a

way to achieve a better self through the performance of everyday life. This transformation is

aimed at better aligning one’s material surroundings with the norms of the regime. In the context

of AT, in general, this means carefully choosing a color palette, avoiding clashes of pattern, and

choosing sparse, unembellished objects for furnishing. Yet the aim is not only to achieve an

aesthetic, but also to institute a relationship with things in domestic space, a relationship that is

intended to transform the self. In so doing, everyday domestic objects are turned into objects of

affection, and the home itself begins to function as an agent, a friend, a collaborator, and a

partner in an idealized relationship (Fournier 1998). Chantal explains that her home had long

been an object of desire, at least since she was a teenager: “my dad is an architect so we had all

those design magazines and Architectural Digests and I would cut up his old magazines and


13

scrapbook what would my home be like. Some girls dream about getting married. I dreamt about

a table.”

The taste regime helps normalize these kinds of person-object relationships by repeatedly

depicting objects as actors that can resolve any number of fundamental life problems; of course

this has to be attained through the conscious alignment of domestic space with specific aesthetics

and values. As mentioned earlier, at the core of the AT narrative is the anthropomorphism of

objects. Our interview data suggests that bodily metaphors become powerful ways to think about

the home; one participant compared her regular participation in the cure twice a year to the

feelings of renewal she experienced when washing her hair every day. Or for example, in the AT

book, the reader is instructed that buying fresh flowers is an essential component of week one of

the cure. This instruction falls under the subheading “heart,” indicating that flowers are far more

than decoration or indulgence in this scheme. Flowers, the reader learns, set “a standard for

attention to detail that will inspire” upon the return to home. An arrangement of cut flowers, the

reader is told, “enlivens the senses and invigorates our vision”. Here, vision refers to both the

cognitive act of seeing and also to a particular way of thinking about human consciousness. This

consciousness is achieved by daily practices that are repeated until they become one’s second

nature.

Processes of Progression

Processes of progression establish continuity and repetition for faithfully replicating the

material representations of taste narrative across time, and gradually enabling them to become

embodied dispositions. Progression works through two processes. First, the regime establishes

rituals and habits through previously discussed processes of problematization and

instrumentalization. Second, it contextualizes each act into a master narrative of home that is

shaped by the taste regime.

Habitualization. Habitualization is the integration of specific rituals, patterns, and preferences

into the automatized behaviors as a result of repetitive and enduring exposure (Wood, Quinn, and

Kashy 2002). This process functions to make particular aesthetic preferences durable over time

and filter them into the habitus. In the context of AT, the habitualization process is clearly visible

in the Cure, which is, as described earlier, a ritualistic process with the explicit goal of realizing

domestic transformation with an emphasis on acquiring new habits to perpetuate these changes.

For example, participants are implored to buy fresh flowers weekly, purchase high end candles

for the bathroom and bedside table, buy higher quality sheets and make the bed every day, and

keep the space free of clutter using a number of strategic AT-endorsed behaviors . The eight-

week collective ritual is structured by weekly assignments and deadlines corresponding to

distinct stages of transformation. The Cure is perhaps the most visible communal aspect of AT. It

spans posts and discussion forums on the AT site, weekly emails for those officially registered,

reading chapters of the AT book at the same time as others participating in the cure and

additional mediated online interactions, such as photo sharing. The medical analogy implicit in

the name of the site invites comparisons here to group therapy, but the Cure seems to privilege

the exceptional quality of a religious or meditation retreat to foster a community (Muniz and

O'Guinn 2001) and reinforce its most fundamental norms.

Outside the Cure, habitualization occurs at a micro scale in AT every day. For our

participants, reading the site itself is a matter of routine. As Agnes said in an interview, “I have


14

this blogroll that I follow every day, and Apartment Therapy has always been one of them.” But

habitualization is also seen in posts that explicitly link domestic order to routine. Posts with titles

like “8 Tricks to Make Making the Bed a Habit” or that invite people to share their own rituals

such as “Kitchen Rituals” appear regularly on the site. Cleaning in the Cure is similarly

ritualized, with a set of instructions, such as to never leave dishes overnight in the sink, or to hide

the dish detergent when not in use, or to schedule different tasks, such as vacuuming or laundry,

on a specific day of the week. Our interview data suggests that AT does indeed effect changes in

everyday routine and purchasing habits by repeated exposure. For example, Claire explains how

following AT for two years has changed her habits:

Interviewer: Is there anything that you do now, but you wouldn’t have done two years

ago?

Probably taking everything off of surfaces… also sheets. I buy better quality sheets. I

think that’s a result of being more interested in decorating—and not because of money. It

is the texture, the sensation of nicer sheets… I bought white sheets for my bed, which I

never would have done before, but there was a post on Apartment Therapy and someone

was like “I love white sheets.”

Claire made several changes through her involvement with the AT: she made an overt

and apparently effective effort to reduce clutter in her home, and she has shifted from buying

patterned sheets to the plain white ones which are frequently endorsed on the site. Another

participant, Chantal, started color coding her books after seeing this on the site, gradually

moving to a state where almost all corners of her house were organized through color schemes,

including her toiletries and kitchenware. Habitualization is frequently linked to the process we

call Instrumentalization of the Material: in the blog post Claire mentions, white sheets are

aligned with the emotion of love and serenity, an association made especially powerful in the

domestic context because of the special status of the bed. While Instrumentalization of the

Material provides the motives for engaging in new habits by making connections between

actions and consequences, it is the emphasis on the repetition and continuation that strengthens

these connections; such as the ongoing use of white sheets or the practice of keeping surfaces

clean of clutter.

Storylining. The last process refers to the ongoing act of creating and relating stories utilizing the

elements and tropes of the main taste regime. Storylining establishes the narrative representation

of the values and norms of the taste regime and links it to the individualized identity narratives of

the participants. We have chosen this word deliberately instead of storytelling to contrast our

holistic approach with Epp and Price’s analysis of singularized objects (2010), which points out

how particular pieces of furniture, such as a table, gain meaning through participation in the

narrative of a family life. Epp and Price’s work extends this particularizing approach to include

the web of relationships within a family, but we contend that singularized, individual stories are

interwoven and given further meaning through their role in a broader cultural narrative. For

example, Øllgaard (1999) explicates the cultural meanings of egalitarianism and national identity

encoded in the “superelliptical” table that is commonly found in Danish homes and government

offices. These metacultural narratives and associated meanings frame core aesthetic values that

our participants express through their spaces. For Jacques, who strongly identifies with mod


15

culture and the style of the fifties, the presence of an existing story makes a converted industrial

loft a natural choice for his home:

What I like about the lofts, aside from the obvious space and architectural elements, is

that it usually has a story behind it. This is what I really like about this place— it’s an old

cookie factory. I mean I can’t think of anything cooler than being in an old cookie

factory, and especially Délicieux, which has such a rich history especially for French-

Canadians. It was one of the two first French-Canadian owned companies to be on the

stock market and that holds a lot of meaning for a French-Canadian because we were

basically under English rule forever. And Délicieux is sort of a first for that French-

Canadian entrepreneurial spirit. So aside from being in a very old, cool building it has a

really rich history attached to it and that’s important. And you can see it everywhere. I

have Délicieux artifacts; well maybe not in the living room but everywhere else there’s

Délicieux antiques attached to this exact building. I’m probably one of the only ones in

the building has collected so much Délicieux stuff. So it’s important to have a big space,

something different, but to have a history attached to it, I mean, it doesn’t compare to

anything I can think of. I just couldn’t live across the street in those new condos.

Jacques’s old cookie factory home, filled with repurposed vintage dentist’s chairs,

mailboxes, and 50’s industrial memorabilia is an extension of AT’s aesthetic. The carefully

repurposed space, and the objects that make it home, are elevated from commodity status not

only because of their affiliation to the “French-Canadian entrepreneurial spirit” that Jacques

values, but also because they are repurposed with creativity and a sense of aesthetic that aligns

with the AT taste regime. Jacques’s house is a long novel of mid-century industrial glory with

singularized storylines assigned to each object, wall and corner. But these singularized storylines

also relate to bigger cultural narratives, such as the decline of urban manufacturing and French-

Canadian identity. While objects can be singularized within network biographies, as mentioned

above prior research has shown that objects also become intertwined with stories about identity

practice and spatial biographies (Epp and Price 2010). In addition, we argue that these stories not

only help to incorporate objects into a network, but also enable inhabitants to weave a coherent

aesthetic narrative of the network itself. Thus, multiple object histories within the home are

aligned and framed by a larger story for home, which is further orchestrated by the taste regime

and other broader cultural narratives.

Let us take a series of posts about a dressing table as an example: In a post titled

“Scavenger Success Story: Dressing Table Finds a Home,” AT informs its readers that a dressing

table, which once appeared in a “Scavenger” post written by an AT editor, had since found a

home in the bedroom of “longtime Apartment Therapy reader” Mindy. Not long thereafter,

Mindy eagerly joins the discussion, providing photographs and prose written in AT style to

illustrate her “find” and its new place in her home:

The dressing table was a great find! Jennifer, the lady who listed the table, is trying to

start her own refinishing/furniture business. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek into

her woodshop where she was in the middle of refinishing some other fantastic finds. I am

planning to recover the blue vinyl stool in a hot pink vinyl: DesignTex, Annex in Cerise.

I did some research online to find out more about the California furniture manufacturer,

Brown Saltman. I believe the dressing table is from the mid 50’s but I was unable to


16

locate any pieces like this one. Brown Saltman worked with several designers including

Paul Frankl, John Keal, and Greta Grossman. I’d be eager to find out more.

Two stories overlap with Mindy’s dressing table as represented on AT. First is the

narrative of the discovery. Mindy positions herself as a pioneer and a curator of mid-century

designs, a trait that is highly valued in the AT regime and recognized and reinforced by AT

management, who set a schedule for “Scavenger” or “find” posts to ensure that they regularly

appear on the site. As a result, much taste regime content centers around the linked elements of

discovery, surprise, overlooked value, and insider knowledge of mid-century design.

Accordingly, the objects, spaces and identity practices core to the AT taste regime are

continuously informed by this aesthetic and the values that shape it. In the AT taste regime, the

narrative of curator/collector/epicure serves as a mechanism to distinguish the insiders from

outsiders who do not possess the contextualized cultural capital (Arsel and Thompson 2011;

Thornton 1996) to identify, pick and appreciate these objects.

Second, there is the story of the newly singularized object and how it will be incorporated

into everyday domestic life. Mindy reports to AT that she plans to recover its matching stool in

hot pink vinyl, but not just any hot pink vinyl. Here, her knowledge of the fabric brand and

official color name point to insider status, enabling her to mobilize valuable contextualized

cultural capital. Standing in contrast to this story is the history of the object as a commodity

given meaning through its attribution to an obscure manufacturer and a correspondingly obscure

set of designers. What matters is not so much the particular designer, but that Mindy has gained

access to a set of narratives that enable her to relate to the table simultaneously as a commodity,

as an extension of self, as a carrier of status-laden symbolic meanings and as a part of the

narrative she is constructing through the objects in her home.

Through storylining, AT participants not only create meaning through their space or

exercise strategies of distinction but also represent the core values of AT taste regime through a

carefully woven space/identity narrative. This shared narrative incorporates not just aesthetic

standards, but also a knowledge of brand names—from the manufacturers of upholstery fabric to

the designers of vintage furniture. Along with the names of designers, materials, and historical

periods, AT serves as a repository of context-specific cultural capital. The narrative operates to

convey and circumscribe the cultural capital of the AT taste regime, and to enable participants to

mobilize this specific capital to make material choices, to present these choices as reasoned and

rational, and to tell stories about them. Through their engagement in narrative, these objects in

return serve as agentic instruments that facilitate further changes in the participants’ homes and

reflect back to change the participants themselves.

CONCLUSION

Contributions

[Apartment Therapy] helped me to make my apartment the way that I have it. I

am a minimalist so I would see posts on Apartment Therapy of apartments…

There is no clutter. There is nothing that’s, personal, a pen or anything like that.

So I really like that. So that is how I kind of made my apartment. (Claire,

interview)


17

In this article, we extend the notion of taste from a boundary-making process to a practice

that is discursively constituted and perpetuated within a given set of boundaries. We argue that

while taste is still class conditioned to a certain extent, the marketplace provides consumers

endless sources for narrative influence. The way consumers engage with these resources

channels them into specific variations within a taste cluster. For example, suburban middle class

consumers could choose between Martha Stewart’s vision of impossible domesticity (Leavitt

2002) and Real Simple’s minimalist materialism (Wajda 2001). These two trajectories, rooted in

similar class positions, are channeled through two distinctive regimes that have their own

systems of taste. Reading Real Simple Magazine every month, immersing oneself into the

Martha Stewart brand empire, reading fashion, food and wine magazines, or watching DIY

television and makeover shows are not just aspirational leisure activities, but can result in lasting

effects in habits and dispositions through continuous exposure. These consumers might also

reject the choices offered to them in the mainstream marketplace and seek out a niche resource

(as AT was at its inception) that reflects a narrative more resonant with their own experience and

disposition.

A regime model of taste can help us understand how aesthetics get linked to practice. For

example, the AT taste regime renders it possible not only to have a home that looks like it

belongs on AT, but also to acquire everyday practices for the right way of ordering objects in

space and justifying preferences for particular arrangements and types a legitimate matter of

habit. Therefore, we extend the theories of taste that account for why particular groups of people

gravitate to particular aesthetic categories to explain how these categories become taken for

granted dispositions. We stress that taste is an ongoing process, one that has very real effects in

the social and material world, and that the process of communicating taste through

representation, through space, and through practice is a key mode of generating consumer

meaning.

Understanding taste as a regime also helps explain how individuals gain skills and

cultural capital through their participation in the marketplace. Through gradual accumulation of

knowledge and skills, individuals accumulate context dependent cultural capital that further

binds them to the regime and internalize its practices. Arsel and Thompson (2011) argue that

consumers’ continuous participation into marketplace cultures creates unbreakable identity

investments and bonds to these cultures. Yet the underlying processes that buttress capital

accumulation are not addressed in the literature. The three processes described in this article

close the theoretical loop by further inquiring on the processes that foster the adoption and

embodiment of new tastes. While our analysis is conducted in a very specific taste regime of

home decoration, our theoretical findings can be extended to other domains of taste, such as

music, arts, and food.

Limitations and Future Directions

Our research context is a brand community established through a participatory medium;

we have, however, deliberately isolated these two issues from our analysis to better circumscribe

our contributions. More inquiries should be made regarding the democratization of tastemaking

through collaborative media and brand communities. For example, one can argue that

comparatively egalitarian narratives established through collaborative blogging could serve as a

distributed form of cultural authority that is in stark contrast with traditional models of

tastemaking. In other words, you can have a home that looks “right” and also be part of an


18

ongoing discussion about what is right. Similarly, through co-construction of brand meaning, the

regime related to a brand community might become less hegemonic and more inclusive of

diversity and divergence.

The AT phenomenon also uncovers interesting questions regarding the shifts in

traditionally gendered norms of domesticity. AT’s own research shows its readership is 41%

male. Its 2010 media kit also lists mentions and awards in Time, Vanity Fair and The New York

Times, but alongside this list is reproduced a page from Cookie Magazine naming Maxwell

Gillingham-Ryan its 2008 “Father of Invention.” On AT and on other sites, Gillingham-Ryan is

frequently pictured with his daughter and his wife and business partner, Sara Kate Gillingham-

Ryan, who manages AT’s food and cooking site. This is significant because in many media

representations the fields of interior design and decoration are coded as female, whereas

architecture and product design are coded as male (Sparke 1995). AT engages with and

frequently confronts dominant ideas about gender by providing accounts of changing domestic

gender norms (Courtney 2009) by showing portrayals of heterosexual men engaging in

traditionally feminized acts of decorating and women in masculinized practices such as furniture

refinishing. Consumer researchers could further inquire about the role of taste regimes in shifting

the gendered use of space and gender norms.

Another binary AT plays with is the distinction between inside and outside. The site

focuses almost exclusively on interior space. When outdoor spaces are featured, they tend to be

enclosed spaces such as patios or balconies. Of course, part of this focus comes from AT’s

emphasis on apartments, which indicates occupants will have little control over the exterior of

the building they inhabit. Nonetheless, even when suburban single-family houses are featured on

the site, the focus is on the spaces and practices contained within. AT makes strong implicit and

explicit statements about the importance of interiority and its connection to self (Sparke 2010).

This concept of interiority and how it constructs a sense of place suggests further research is

needed to understand how consumers construct interiority materially, to what concepts interiority

is opposed, and in what ways interiority matters.

As we indicated earlier, our research does not seek to address the question of how taste

hierarchies are made. Rather, we are interested in the symbolic, material and ritualistic processes

that occur within these hierarchies. Yet, we should stress that the core group of AT audience

belongs to a very specific social class segment. The people predominantly portrayed on the web

site are privileged individuals and couples living in urban America. Likewise, whiteness is a

central actor in the AT narrative. In the period of material and social change that followed World

War II in the US, middle class values were communicated through the representation of clean,

orderly spaces (Harris 2007). AT’s interiors communicate this sort of social and economic

privilege and so resemble an attainable version of the representations in the magazine

Wallpaper*, which celebrates a distinctly global, transitory, and portable mode of affluence

(Cullens 1999). In this regard, we acknowledge that taste regimes perpetuate existing cultural

hierarchies and enforce symbolic boundaries. On the other hand, prior research on cultural

narratives have extensively inquired on the variation on consumers’ interpretive strategies as

well resistance to marketplace influences (Arnould and Thompson 2005). Since the scope of this

article is more on the regime narrative itself than the differential use of this resource by the

consumers, we strongly suggest future research inquire about consumer resistance strategies to

market mediated taste hegemonies and the social distinctions perpetuated by these taste regimes.


19

REFERENCES

Ahuvia, Aaron C (2005), "Beyond the Extended Self: Loved Objects and Consumers’ Identity

Narratives," Journal of Consumer Research, 32 (1), 171-84.

Allen, Douglas E. (2002), "Toward a Theory of Consumer Choice as Sociohistorically Shaped Practical Experience: The Fits‐ Like‐ a‐ Glove (FLAG) Framework," Journal of

Consumer Research, 28 (4), 515-32.

Arnould, Eric J. and Craig J. Thompson (2005), "Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty

Years of Research," Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (4), 868-82.

Arsel, Zeynep and Craig J. Thompson (2011), "Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How

Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing

Marketplace Myths," The Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (5), 791-806.

Baym, Geoffrey (2000), "Constructing moral authority: <i>We</i> in the discourse of television

news," Western Journal of Communication, 64 (1), 92-111.

Bean, Jonathan (2011), "Consuming Hygge at Home: Perception, Representation, Practice,"

Working Paper, Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, CA

97420.

Bell, David and Joanne Hollows (2005), Ordinary lifestyles: popular media, consumption and

taste: McGraw-Hill International.

Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison, and John Frow (1999), Accounting for tastes : Australian

everyday cultures, Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge

Mass.: Harvard University Press.

_______ (1990), The logic of practice: Stanford University Press.

Brooks, David (2000), Bobos in paradise : the new upper class and how they got there, New

York: Simon & Schuster.

Campbell, Colin (2005), "The Craft Consumer," Journal of Consumer Culture, 5 (1), 23-42.

Carpenter, Wava (2009), "The Eames Lounge: The Difference between a Design Icon and Mere

Furniture," ed. Hazel Clark and David Brody, Oxford ;;New York: Berg, 479-84.

Courtney, Jennife (2009), "Real Men Do Housework: Ethos and Masculinity in Contemporary

Domestic Advice," Rhetoric Review, Volume 28 (Number 1, January ), 66-81.

Cranz, Galen (2004), "A New Way of Thinking About Taste," ed. Jean McLaughlin, Design

Mint Museum of Craft and Crafts Penland School of, New York: Lark Books.

Crockett, David and Melanie Wallendorf (2004), "The Role of Normative Political Ideology in

Consumer Behavior," Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (3), 511-28.

Cullens, Chris (1999), "Gimme Shelter: At Home with the Millennium," differences, 11 (2), 204-

27.

Denegri-Knott, Janice and Mike Molesworth (2010), "‘Love it. Buy it. Sell it’," Journal of

Consumer Culture, 10 (1), 56-79.

DiMaggio, Paul (1987), "Classification in Art," American Sociological Review, 52 (4), 440-55.

Dong, Lily and Kelly Tian (2009), "The Use of Western Brands in Asserting Chinese National

Identity," Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (3), 504-23.

Epp, Amber M. and Linda L. Price (2010), "The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of

Agency and Network Transformation," Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (5), 820-37.

Erickson, Bonnie H. (1996), "Culture, Class, and Connections," The American Journal of

Sociology, 102 (1), 217-51.


20

Featherstone, Mike (1991), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism: Sage Publications Ltd.

Fine, Gary Alan (1979), "Small Groups and Culture Creation: The Idioculture of Little League

Baseball Teams," American Sociological Review, 44 (5), 733-45.

Firat, A. Fuat and Alladi Venkatesh (1995), "Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment

of Consumption," The Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (3), 239-67.

Fiske, John (1993), Power plays, power works, London ;;New York: Verso.

Florida, Richard L. (2002), The rise of the creative class : and how it's transforming work,

leisure, community and everyday life, New York, NY: Basic Books.

Foucault, Michel (1980), Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977,

New York: Pantheon Books.

_______ (1991), "Questions of Method," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.

Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester

Wheatsheaf, 73-86.

Foucault, Michel, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (1988), Technologies

of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault: Univ of Massachusetts Press.

Fournier, Susan (1998), "Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in

Consumer Research," Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (4), 343-53.

Gachot, Ted (1999), "Through the cooking glass," AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, 17 (3), 48-

52.

Gans, Herbert (1975), Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste,

New York: Basic Books.

Giesler, Markus (2008), "Conflict and Compromise: Drama in Marketplace Evolution," Journal

of Consumer Research, 34 (6), 739-53.

Gillingham-Ryan, Maxwell (2006), Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure: Bantam.

_______ (2010), Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces: Clarkson Potter.

Gillingham-Ryan, Maxwell, Jill Slater, and Janel Laban (2008), Apartment Therapy Presents:

Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Design Solutions: Chronicle Books.

Gothie, Sarah Conrad (2009), "Unexpected Antlers: Stag Décor and Domino Magazine’s

Postfeminist Aesthetic of Balance," in Thinking About ‘Things’: Interdisciplinary

Futures in Material Culture, University College Dublin.

Gray, F. (2010), "Rudolf Steiner: Occult Crank or Architectural Mastermind?," Architectural

Theory Review, 15 (1), 43-60.

Green, Penelope (2004), "It's Apartment Therapy, But Not on the Couch," The New York Times.

Gregson, Nicky, Alan Metcalfe, and Louise Crewe (2009), "Practices of Object Maintenance and

Repair," Journal of Consumer Culture, 9 (2), 248-72.

Hall, John (1992), "The Capital(S) of Culture," University of Chicago Press, 257-83.

Hand, Martin and Elizabeth Shove (2004), "Orchestrating Concepts: Kitchen Dynamics and

Regime Change in Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home, 19222002," Home Cultures, 1,

235-56.

Harris, Dianne (2007), "Clean and Bright and Everyone White: Seeing the Postwar Domestic

Environment in the United States," ed. Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles,

Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Holbrook, Morris B and Michela Addis (2007), "Taste versus the Market: An Extension of

Research on the Consumption of Popular Culture," Journal of Consumer Research, 34

(3), 415-24.


21

Holbrook, Morris B. (1999), "Popular Appeal versus Expert Judgments of Motion Pictures,"

Journal of Consumer Research: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 26 (2), 144-55.

Holbrook, Morris B. and Robert M. Schindler (1989), "Some Exploratory Findings on the

Development of Musical Tastes," Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (1), 119-19.

Holt, Douglas B. (1998), "Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?," Journal of


Hymowitz, Kay S. (2008), "Opinion: The Comforts of Home," wsj.com.

Inglis, David (2005), Culture and everyday life, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire ; New

York, NY: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence culture: NYU Press.

Johnston, Josée and Shyon Baumann (2007), "Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of

Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing," American Journal of Sociology, 113 (1),

165-204.

_______ (2009), Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape: Routledge.

Karababa, Eminegül and Güliz Ger (2011), "Early Modern Ottoman Coffeehouse Culture and

the Formation of the Consumer Subject," The Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (5),

737-60.

Keeble, Trevor (2007), "Domesticating Modernity: Woman Magazine and the Modern Home,"

ed. Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Kozinets, Robert V (2008), "Technology/Ideology: How Ideological Fields Influence

Consumers’ Technology Narratives," Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (6), 865-81.

Lamont, Michele and Annette Lareau (1988), "Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos

in Recent Theoretical Developments," Sociological Theory, 6 (2), 153-68.

Latour, Bruno (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory,

Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Leavitt, Sarah Abigail (2002), From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: a cultural history of

domestic advice: UNC Press Books.

Leslie, Deborah and Suzanne Reimer (2003), "Gender, modern design, and home consumption,"

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21 (3), 293-316.

Levine, Lawrence (1988), Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in

America, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Luedicke, Marius K, Craig J Thompson, and Markus Giesler (2010), "Consumer Identity Work as Moral Protagonism: How Myth and Ideology Animate a Brand‐ Mediated Moral

Conflict," Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (6), 1016-32.

Madigan, Ruth and Moira Munro (1996), "`House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the

Home," Sociology, 30 (1), 41-57.

McCracken, Grant (1989), "Homeyness: a cultural account of one constellation of consumer

goods and meanings," ed. Elizabeth C. Hirschman, Provo, Utah: Association for

Consumer Research, 168-83.

Miller, Daniel (2001), Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, Oxford, UK ;

New York, NY, USA: Berg.

_______ (2009), The Comfort of Things: Polity.

_______ (2010), Stuff, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Molotch, Harvey (2003), Where Stuff Comes from: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and

Many Others Things Come to Be as They Are, New York: Routledge.


22

Muniz, Albert M. and Thomas C. O'Guinn (2001), "Brand Community," Journal of Consumer

Research, 27.

Øllgaard, Gertrud (1999), "A Super-Elliptical Moment," Journal of Design History, 12 (2), 143-

43.

Peterson, Richard A. and Roger M. Kern (1996), "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to

Omnivore," American Sociological Review, 61 (5), 900-07.

Peterson, Richard A. and Albert Simkus (1992), "How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status

Groups," ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier: University of Chicago Press.

Ray, Paul H. and Sherry Ruth Anderson (2000), The cultural creatives : how 50 million people

are changing the world, New York: Harmony Books.

Rip, A. and R. Kemp (1998), "Technological Change," Vol. 2, Columbus, OH: Battelle Press.

Sandikci, Özlem and Güliz Ger (2010), "Veiling in Style: How Does a Stigmatized Practice

Become Fashionable?," Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (1), 15-36.

Schouten, John W. and James H. McAlexander (1995), "Subcultures of Consumption: An

Ethnography of the New Bikers," The Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (1), 43-61.

Sherry (2000), "Place, Technology, and Representation," Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (2),

273-78.

Shove, Elizabeth (2003), Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of

Normality, Oxford ;;New York: BERG.

Sparke, Penny (1995), As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, London: Pandora.

_______ (2010), "The Modern Interior: A Space, a Place or a Matter of Taste?," Interiors:

Design, Architecture and Culture, 1, 7-17.

Sullivan, Lisa (2007), "Dwell on Design [Dispatches]."

Thompson, Craig J. and Diana L. Haytko (1997), "Speaking of Fashion: Consumers' Uses of

Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings," Journal

of Consumer Research, 24 (1), 15-42.

Thompson, Craig J. (2004), "Marketplace Mythology and Discourses of Power," The Journal of


Thompson, Craig J. and Elizabeth C. Hirschman (1995), "Understanding the Socialized Body: A

Poststructuralist Analysis of Consumers' Self-Conceptions, Body Images, and Self-Care

Practices," The Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (2), 139-53.

Thornton, Sarah (1996), Club cultures:music, media, and subcultural capital: Wesleyan

University Press.

Turner, Bryan S. and June Edmunds (2002), "The Distaste of Taste," Journal of Consumer

Culture, 2 (2), 219-39.

Ulrichsweb (2010), "Ulrich's periodicals directory," Ulrichsweb.com

Üstüner, Tuba and Douglas B. Holt (2010), "Toward a Theory of Status Consumption in Less

Industrialized Countries," Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (1), 37-56.

Wajda, Shirley Teresa (2001), "KMartha," American Studies, 42 (2 (Summer 2001)), 71-88.

Warde, Alan (1997), Consumption, Food and Taste: Sage Publications Ltd.

Warde, Alan, David Wright, and Modesto Gayo-Cal (2007), "Understanding Cultural

Omnivorousness: Or, the Myth of the Cultural Omnivore," Cultural Sociology, 143-64.

Wilk, Richard R. (1999), ""Real Belizean Food": Building Local Identity in the Transnational

Caribbean," American Anthropologist, 101 (2), 244-55.

Wolf, Peter (2004), "Past, Present, and Future: What Mid-Century Modern Furniture Means

Today," Arizona State University.


23

Wong, Nancy and Tracey King (2008), "The Cultural Construction of Risk Understandings

through Illness Narratives," Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (5), 579-94.

Wood, Wendy, Jeffrey M. Quinn, and Deborah A. Kashy (2002), "Habits in everyday life:

Thought, emotion, and action," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83 (6),

1281-97.


24

TABLE 1

FREQUENTLY USED POST CATEGORIES ON AT AND COUNT BY YEAR

Post Type 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

Good Questions 85 299 820 1150 1617 1309 780

AT On… 32 10 22 46 59 28 6

House Tour 14 11 47 85 377 302 384

Hot or Not 15 96 250 300 278 163 20

Inspiration 35 38 86 560 1578 2540 1134

Look! 2 40 279 634 1257 692 217

News 239 392 482 746 404 216 170

Slinks 21 331 733 1017 391 108 5

Smallest Coolest 0 41 111 228 211 302 334

Fall Colors and

Room for Color

Contests

0 53 286 273 275 206 173

The Home Cure 0 0 82 90 59 62 42

Blogging… 2 1 4 264 344 42 18

Open Thread 0 118 348 361 220 53 0

Total Posts

(includes above

posts, those in other

categories, and

unclassified posts)

1025 2569 6173 10765 15427 13064 9251


25

TABLE 2

INSCRIPTION OF AUTHORITY

Function in asserting authority Example

We The official voice of AT used by all bloggers.

The taste authority.

The invoked group of AT readers “in the know.”

“Earlier this year, we took a break

from the hospital-corner-aesthetic

and dove into some elegantly

unkempt bedrooms to mixed

reviews.”

we1 The blog post writer or commenter referring to

an imagined plurality: “myself as a member of

the community of AT readers.”

“As we've mentioned a time or

two before, though we're not

opposed to color in the bedroom,

we prefer to leave the zestier ones

for other rooms.“

we2 The blog post writer or commenter referring to

an actual plurality, such as “my boyfriend and I.”

“We just recently DIY'd our own

headboard after a major IKEA

bed fail…Now we have a modern

and sleek white headboard for

$30.”

I The blog post writer or commenter referring to

their own self as a specific individual: “myself as

an individual who stands apart from other AT

readers.”

”I love melamine tableware

because it is free of BPA

(Bisphenol A), is dishwasher-

safe, and is virtually unbreakable.

And it is so bright and cheery!”

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/bedroom/elegantly-unkempt-bedrooms-136242

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/bedroom/elegantly-unkempt-bedrooms-136242


26

FIGURE 1

HOW TASTE REGIMES REGULATE PRACTICE

kingfisher manuscript review history manuscript … · kingfisher manuscript review history...

Documents