the therapy of consumption motivation.pdf

THE THERAPY OFCONSUMPTION MOTIVATIONRESEARCH AND THE NEWITALIAN HOUSEWIFE,1958–62

◆ ADAM ARVIDSSON

University of East Anglia, UK

AbstractThis article describes the transformation of the image of the housewife-consumer in Italian advertising during the ‘economic miracle’ of the late1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on market research, professional debatesand advertising campaigns it argues that motivation research – an originallyAmerican market research technique with Freudian origins – was crucial inaltering the ways in which advertisers and marketers related to womenconsumers. Motivation research made advertisers and marketers conceiveof consumers as endowed with an intrinsic desire for self realization. Thequalitative methodology that it introduced also allowed the marketingprofession to observe and absorb the new ways of life that were proposedby the counterculture and the women’s liberation movements of the early1960s. Towards the early 1970s these elements blended into a distinctly‘emancipated’ advertising discourse, a ‘commodity feminism’ where womenconsumers were encouraged to use consumer goods to mark off an auton-omous, individualized subjectivity, rather than to ensure the compliancewith traditional gender roles.

Key Words ◆ Advertising ◆ constructivism ◆ consumer culture ◆counterculture ◆ gender ◆ Italy ◆ market research

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Journal of Material CultureCopyright © 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol. 5(3): 251–274 [1359-1835(200011)5:3; 251–274;014323]

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INTRODUCTION: MAKING UP CONSUMERS

The production of consumers is a crucial aspect of contemporary capi-talism. Since the Second World War the relative weight of ‘immaterial’or ‘symbolic’ aspects of the production process has increased steadily(cf. Mattlehart, 1991), and the labor of ‘mediation’ (Debray, 1996), offitting producers and consumers together has become all the morecrucial to market success (cf. Featherstone, 1991; Goldman, 1992;Goldman and Papson, 1998; Sassen, 1991; Vanderbildt, 1998). Today,reflections on the nature of consumers enter the contemporary produc-tion process at a very early stage. Throughout the various phases ofproduct development, like design, branding and advertising, the labor ofconceptualizing the product remains inseparable from considerations ofthe actual or desired nature of consumers (Hennion and Méadel, 1989;Lien, 1997; Morean, 1996). Through these practices, a new ‘user iden-tity’ (Woolgar, 1991) is developed along with the product and, eventu-ally, inscribed in its material and symbolic properties. This way,consumer goods come to cater to particular kinds of users, particularconsumer personalities, or ‘human kinds’, to use Ian Hacking’s (1986)term (cf. Latour, 1998). To the extent that these attempts are successful,such already inscribed user-identities become no less tangible or realthan other properties of consumer goods, like their size or weight. (Afterall, as Baudrillard [1988] has pointed out, true worldly success residesin the Rolex watch.)1 In contemporary capitalism then it is not, as inMarx’s version of commodity fetishism, relations between people thatare represented as relations between things, but rather the contrary:relations between things are represented as relations between people;the disenchanted world is enchanted and populated once more (Ritzer,1999).

While not all of these user identities are embraced by actual con-sumers (who ever identified themselves as part of the ‘Pepsi Gener-ation’?), some are. One of the most successful examples is the ‘modernhousewife’. Even if there were many other factors behind ‘her’ emer-gence, it is beyond doubt that advertising, marketing and design – themediating aspects of contemporary capitalism – have had a decisiveimpact on the ways in which generations of women have habituallyrelated to themselves and the objects that have made up their materialenvironment (Fox, 1990; Gordon and McArthur, 1988; Hardyment, 1988;McMillan, 1981; Peiss, 1998; Wilson, 1983).

In this article I will describe the making and molding of the ‘modernhousewife’ in Italy during the 1960s. This period was one of the mostturbulent in the development of Italian mass consumerism. In the wakeof the ‘economic miracle’ (1958–62) consumer goods had achieved apopular diffusion (in 1965 49% of all Italian households possessed a

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television set, 55% a refrigerator and 35% a car2), and new consumergoods linked either to an emerging cosmopolitan middle class culture,like air travel and spirits like whisky and cognac, or to the emergingcounter culture, like unisex fashion and pop music, began to becomeavailable to the Italian middle classes, as did the hitherto primarilyexported products of Italian design (Sparke, 1988). From having lived inone of the poorest countries in Europe the middle classes now began toenjoy average European levels of consumption. At the same time, theturbulent consequences of what appeared to have been a rapid transitionfrom a predominantly rural environment to an American-style consumersociety began to have an public impact, most pertinently through theexpressions of leftist intellectuals, artists and filmmakers. Womenseemed to be particularly vulnerable to these transformations. Accord-ing to a series of books, like Goffredo Forte’s I persuasori rosa (The PinkPersuaders, 1966) or Gabriella Parca’s Le italiane si confessano (Confessionsof Italian Women, 1958) that drew on the hearts columns of the women’smagazines, the realities of Italian women were very different from therosy tales of material progress told by the media, generally in the handsof the Christian Democrats. Indeed, according to Forte, the generalimpression was that ‘the family appears not to be the ideal context forthe realization of women’s personalities, but rather a kind of diabolictrap, from which it is impossible to escape’ (p. 29).3 In addition, moreupscale women’s magazines like Grazia and Annabella launched a seriesof investigations into the lived realities of Italian women, focusing on thestrains produced by the conflict between a lingering patriarchal traditionand a seemingly invasive modern consumer culture.4 The conclusionswere that far from unanimously beneficial, consumerist modernizationhad produced a series of strains in the lives of Italian women, not tomention alienation and anomie.

In what follows, I will describe how the Italian advertising industrymobilized these perceived problematic consequences of mass consump-tion and turned them into allies in the promotion of a new female con-sumer personality, thought not only to be more fit to withstand thestrains of modernization, but also to play a central role in their ownvision of the modern order, where a democratic, ‘post-conformist’ con-sumer culture formed the central element. I will stress how motivationresearch – a new brand of market research based on Freudian psycho-analytic thought – played a crucial part in this process, allowing theadvertising industry to conceive of a new paradigm for how people andgoods could be successfully related.

Before I begin, however, let me introduce one methodological caveat:my study deals with the discursive production of the ‘human kinds’ thatpeople are presented with as attractive or normatively right ones toassume in advertising and consumer culture. It says nothing, or at least

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very little, of whether they do so or not. Neither, however, does myanalysis exclude that people have agency in relation to such consumerpersonalities, that they appropriate them, contextualize them, recombinethem and use them in a generally creative way. Such agency very prob-ably exists; indeed it is very probably an inevitable feature of a socialorder characterized by a generalized contingency. To investigate that,however, would require a different study relying on different sourcesand using different methods.

I. THE PROBLEMATIC OF RESISTANCE

Motivation research, developed by Freudian psychoanalyst, ErnstDichter in the years immediately following the war, was to trigger some-thing of a Copernican turn within marketing. Inspired by Freudianthought, motivation research saw the individual unconscious as the mainsource of consumer demand. This perspective was diametricallyopposed to the notion of consumers as primarily guided by a desire toconform, or to face up to other people’s expectations that had been atthe core of previous, behaviorist theories of consumer behavior. In linewith the growing use of psychoanalysis as a new ‘science of integration’(Zaretsky, 1995), Dichter understood the task of marketing as the dis-covery, and subsequent rendering socially acceptable through advertis-ing, of hitherto hidden or even unconscious desires. Not, as had beenthe hitherto prevailing idea, to impose new tastes and desires through‘suggestion’ or fearful solicitations of consumer shame or guilt (cf.Buckley, 1981; Ewen, 1976; Kreshel, 1989, 1990; Marchand, 1985).5Motivation research, in Dichter’s words, promoted a progressive, eman-cipatory ‘morality of hedonism’.6

In Italy motivation research had a substantial impact in the wake ofthe ‘economic miracle’. A number of research institutes mushroomed.The most influential one, Misura, was led by famous-to-be sociologist,Francesco Alberoni. In 1962 Dichter himself put up a (short lived)branch of his ‘Institute for Motivation Research’ in Rome.7 The mainattraction of motivation research was, according to Alberoni, that itoffered a ‘thick description’ – to use Clifford Geertz’s term – of consumerattitudes – the fruit of in-depth interviews – that better satisfied thehunger for knowledge on the part of producers and advertisers than thehitherto prevalent rather dry fare of often methodologically complex sta-tistics.8 In particular, motivation research was successfully sold as a wayto address the seemingly growing problem of consumer resistance.

This was by no means a new problem, but an expanding amount ofmarket research data made it more pressing. Market research producednew statistics that indicated that Italian housewives in general (asopposed to their American ‘colleagues’) did not appreciate branded


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goods. Neither did they consider the models proposed by consumerculture to be appropriate guides for everyday behavior.9 Previously, suchresistance had mainly been attributed to faulty value-structures on thepart of consumers. They were still locked into ‘traditional’ conceptionsof needs and spending and dominated by a widespread ‘spirit of auster-ity’, that some considered a residue of the propaganda of the fascistregime. This prevented them from apprehending the crucial linkbetween consumption and civility. The solution was then to use massiveinvestments in advertising in order to ‘teach people to spend, to createnot only the individual as producer, but also the individual as con-sumer’.10

The proponents of motivation research on the other hand, wouldargue that such solutions were not only far too simplistic and crude, buteven risked being counterproductive. Indeed, as Adriana Battaglia-Ferrari, a woman advertising professional and a proponent of the use ofmotivation research in investigating the readership of women’s maga-zines, proposed at the conference of the Italian advertising associationin Venice in 1954, in a speech that anticipated many arguments to comeforth in the late 1950s, the cause of Italian women’s resistance to con-sumer goods rested not so much with a simple cultural lag that could beovercome by intensified propaganda efforts, but had deeper psycho-logical roots. According to her investigation, or perhaps better, impres-sions – based, in the manner of Betty Friedan, on ‘small talk that I pickedup in stores, trains and trams, wherever I had the occasion’ – womenwere generally dissatisfied and confused. They did not know how tohandle the contradictory claims of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ and wereunable to balance family budgets against the demands and temptationsof advertising. When talking about their situation as housewives,Battaglia-Ferrari, reported, they ‘often use the bitter expression, “I ambut a slave to my husband, house and children”’. The task of advertisingwas then, according to Battaglia-Ferrari, recognizing its ‘enormousimportance in modern society’, to help women to cope with this‘environment that has changed radically – in practical, ethical, social andeconomic terms – during the last few years’, to help them cope withmodernity in a way that would have less alienating results.11 Indeed, itwas now supposed that ‘resistance’ on the part of women consumersresulted less from their retrograde mentality than from the contradictoryclaims put on them, ‘they are the target of hundreds of different prod-ucts, and at the same time they have to remain good mothers and house-wives’ advertising professional Adriano Pasqualini wrote in 1957. Thesolution then no longer rested with action and propaganda. That wouldrather serve to increase women’s confusion and anomie. Instead, womenhad to be given clearer guidelines that were more in tune with theiractual needs. This required knowledge and research: ‘Nobody really


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knows what complex motivations move today’s woman consumer’,Pasqualini concluded. Finding out, however was crucial to developing aconsumer culture that could work not only to integrate women intomodern society, but also to accommodate the new products that couldbring about modernity without threatening the balance, harmony andstability of everyday life.12

II. MOTIVATION RESEARCH IN ACTION: THEPATHOLOGIES OF RESISTANCE

The first motivation studies performed were deeply marked by the con-flict between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ that, according to the entrepre-neurs of motivation research, stood at the root of Italian women’s proved‘resistance’ to consumer goods. It seemed that women saw modern con-sumer goods as a threat to their very ‘ontological security’, to use AnthonyGiddens’ (1991) term. The motivation studies performed by FrancescoAlberoni’s research company Misura in the early 1960s indicated thatmodern products were often perceived as tasteless, fake, artificial andeven poisonous. Both margarine and bouillon-cubes were understood tobe foul tasting, without nutritious value and made of just about any-thing.13 Such ‘resistance’ concerned not only food, where the public atten-tion to the frequent food frauds in the early 1960s gave it some form ofjustification (cf. Lanaro, 1992: 203 ff.), but a whole series of modern con-sumer goods. Washing machines, for example, were, according to Misura’sresearch, perceived to be sadistic and destructive. Together with moderndetergents they would rip clothes apart and damage textiles.14

Such fears of modern consumer goods came out clearly in a studyperformed under the direction of Alberoni and his colleague GabrieleCalvi for the research company Misura in 1962. Hired by the ItalianAssociation of Industrial and Agricultural Chambers of Commerce(Unione Italiana delle Camere di Commercio Industria e Agricultura),they attempted to map the public perception of, the then modern, plasticmaterials. (Plastic materials became a token of modernity in the early1960s, as plastics were one of the preferred materials of the boomingItalian industrial design sector, and soon translated into an importantingredient in a material culture of modernity, see Sparke, 1988.) Bothfrom the group interviews and from the survey that followed, it emergedthat the interviewees were afraid of plastic materials. In particular, theythought that plastics would be poisonous or unhygenic, and hence unfitas food containers.15

The same kind of mistrust of modern consumer goods also came forthin another Misura study from 1961, this time on mass-produced foods.The women interviewed understood mass-produced, pre-packaged foodsto be inadequate for family needs, mostly on account of their foul taste.


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Good, tasty food was understood as the equivalent of healthy nourishingfood, food that would keep the husband energetic and children healthy.Thus many of the women talking to Misura’s researcher, Gabriele Calvi,trusted only ‘natural foods’, by which they seemed to mean foodstuffsthat had a place in their personal experience. Many also preferred buyingfood from relatives in the countryside. Apart from matters of taste, theyclaimed to have no control over mass-produced, pre-packaged foods andto have been subjected to a continuous series of frauds: Pre-packagedcheese was made of potatoes and apricot marmalade was made of pump-kins. Many also pointed at the unhealthy and threatening consequencesof industrial agriculture and the increasing use of chemical fertilisers:‘nothing is genuine any more, not even home made foods’.16

Misura’s psychological team, however chose not to interpret suchstatements as testimonies of a rational and conscious aversion, perhapsbased on subjective experience. Instead they chose psychoanalytic expla-nations. The resistance to modern mass-produced foods was explainedby pointing at the psychological make-up of a hypothetical ‘traditionalhousewife’, or massaia. This massaia was depicted as a fundamentallyconservative being. She was frustrated by her position in between ‘tra-dition’ and ‘modernity’ and nurtured a strong need for emotional recog-nition, something she acquired by possessively binding the othermembers of the family to herself, chiefly through the use of consumergoods. Cooking, for example, was never, to paraphrase Freud, ‘justcooking’, but an expression of her need for solid affective bonds. Con-sumer goods thus served predominantly as tools of affectionate bondingfor the massaia, something for which she, given her insecurity andgeneral neurosis, nurtured an insatiable need.17

In the case of plastics, the interpretation was very similar. Fear of orresistance to plastic materials, Misura’s researchers argued, was notlinked to any real properties of the material, but founded on a uncon-scious projection of a deeply felt fear of modernity and individual auton-omy. In particular expressed through ‘oral phobia’: ‘in many cases, fearsof losing one’s security and protection are linked to oral phobia – in thiscase, fears of contamination by swallowing foodstuffs that have been incontact with plastic materials.’ Sometimes such fears would even becaused by the durability and seemingly eternal nature of plastic materialthat would function as a kind of fearful memento mori.

Misura’s team thus immediately connected the reluctance on thepart of consumers to use plastic materials as curtains, armchairs, plates,glasses and floor coverings to an unconscious fear, either of losing thesecurity that the ‘patriarchal tradition’ could offer, or of being overcomeby the products of an omnipotent modern science.18 People that hesi-tated to use plastic glasses and plates were in fact afraid of breaking witha sacred tradition; of ‘breaking with the proportioned rituals that have


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been transferred from one generation to the other.’ The deeper signifi-cance of this was nothing less than the fear of individual autonomy:

To introduce new objects or new materials into the context of everyday life,to use new kinds of machinery or appliances, implies a capacity for choice,an ability to make one’s own decisions, beyond the reach of the norms andrules that have been inherited from older generations. It implies a necessityto decide for oneself what is good or bad, what is useful or harmful.19

This polarization between a threatened tradition and an expandingmodernity enabled Misura’s team to represent the words uttered duringthe group interview as symptomatic of a conflict between a conservativeand irrational massaia and a basically rational and benevolent, if in herirrational eyes threatening modernity, a conflict that was largely actedout through the handling of consumer goods. As Gabriele Calvi con-cluded his study of attitudes towards mass-produced foods in 1961:

The woman discovers that the use of mass-produced foods in a domesticsetting takes away a large part of her duties and deprives her of one of hermost proven weapons in securing her government over the hearts of herfamily . . . The woman consequently finds herself in a defensive position,in which natural foods become an ideal to protect, and mass-produced foodsa threat that has to be fought off.20

Looking a bit closer at the results of the research however, we seethat this psychologization of the ‘resistance’ to plastic materials was notunambiguously supported. For example, the observations most symp-tomatic of such ‘unconscious fears’, the connection between plasticmaterials and fears of oral contamination, were actually not statisticallyfrequent enough to be presented (as they were) as a general cause of con-sumer resistance. Most of the responses to the ‘free association test’ thatMisura used to measure such attachments indicated aesthetic concernsor concerns that plastic materials would signify bad taste or low classwhen used as plates, curtains or table cloths, as their main reasons fornot using them. Only in the specific case of plastics as food containersdid responses considered by Misura’s psychologists as indicative of oralphobia amount to more than 30 per cent (33%). This was treated asindicative of ‘grave oral resistance’.

It should be noted however that the responses indicating such fearswere subsumed under the heading ‘generally negative, bad odor, badtaste, nauseous, unhygenic, ugly, aesthetic refusal’. As can clearly beseen, the category also contains aesthetic concerns, like ‘ugly, aestheticrefusal’, that are not that easily, even within the prevailing frameworkof analysis, linked to such oral phobia. There is no indication as to howmany of the answers indicated aesthetic and how many ‘oral’ disgust atthe sight of plastic food containers.


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In another ‘enigma test’ the respondents were presented with ascene in which the members of a family revolted against the poor tasteof the family dinner after a housewife had begun using plastic contain-ers. The housewife then exclaimed ‘Now I understand what ruined it. Iput it in a plastic container.’ Even confronted with such a sitting duck(in itself a methodologically dubious procedure) only 38 per cent of therespondents agreed with the housewife that the use of plastic materialswas a plausible cause of this debacle. Of these, 73 per cent stated thatthe plastic container produced a bad taste or a bad smell – an answerthat was more or less conditioned by the scene (and, given the state ofplastic material in the early 1960s might very well have corresponded totheir own experiences) – and only 7 respondents, 10 per cent indicatedthat there had been some form of poisoning going on. Despite this, thefear of poisoning was reported as a general cause of the resistance toplastic materials and the experience of bad taste or foul smell as a sub-category of such a phobia.21

The connection between plastic materials and modernity and ration-ality and hence the resistance to the former with a generalized resist-ance to modernity was equally a priori assumed. In a ‘picture evaluationtest’, respondents were shown two homes, one with and one withoutobjects made of plastic. They were then to decide which one of the twofamilies living in them seemed most likeable. The result was that malerespondents, middle-class respondents and respondents below the age of35 were most sympathetic to the ‘plastic family’ (the differences weresmall, +3, +1, +2 respectively). In the face of this result, the highergeneral acceptance of plastics among males, young and middle-classpeople (as opposed to women, old people, workers or farmers) wasexplained by their more modern and rational mentality:

Obviously, for these supporters of family Z [the plastic family] the expressedconsensus for plastic materials is not a consequence of any desire to assimi-late, but rather result from utilitarian considerations like the time savedcleaning, the lower price of plastics etc.22

The problem is, however, that although Misura’s researchers claimedthat ‘the two homes featured different materials, but were equally modernso that stylistic differences would not influence replies’, a quick look atthe pictures tells us that this was simply not true.23 The home of the‘plastic family’ (La famiglia Z) contained, as we can see, non-representa-tive artworks and modernistic furniture. It was much closer to a modern,urban middle-class style than the non-plastic family one. Even so,Misura’s researchers had no concern for what Pierre Bourdieu calls class-habitus in explaining the greater sympathy for the ‘plastic family’ on thepart of middle-class respondents, but rather chose to point at psycho-logical factors, such as their more rational and modern mental make-up.


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In their motivation studies, Misura’s researchers did not just take alot of license in interpreting the results. They used the new empiricalinterface to fabricate ‘scientific’ support for their own a priori assump-tions. This was not just a matter of bending statistics or rigging ques-tioners, but the theoretical framework in which the results wereinterpreted, as well as the actual context where interaction between psy-chologists and their interviewees took place – the group interview –transformed what the women interviewed might have understood to beinnocent conversation into evidence of a generalized pathological reac-tion to modernity, calling for therapeutic solutions.

The group interview produced an abnormal attention to consumergoods. Complete strangers were brought together in comfortable sur-roundings, encouraged or even paid to talk at length about their relationsto consumer goods, a topic that probably did not occupy their minds tothe same extent in normal circumstances. The interviewer was tomanage and encourage this process, not only by helping to produce agroup atmosphere that favored inhibited reflection and conversation, butalso through encouraging and communicating recognition to inter-viewees that took the lead, said something unexpected or broke a still


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FIGURE 1 Misura’s‘Picture Evocation Test’:Family Z (left) usesplastic materials indecorating their home.Family P (below left)does not. Plastics,however, make a whollydifferent lifeworld. Thepictures speak forthemselves


prevailing taboo, or even by acting as a hidden agent provocateur.24

Women put in the situation of a group interview conducted as part of amotivation study, thus tended to appear as endowed with a subjectivityfor which consumer goods had a deep and complex significance. Theresearchers furthermore, to use a contemporary term, essentialized thisfragmented discourse into expressions of a unitary personality byturning, as Derrida would have put it, the voices of several into the voiceof one. The results of the group interview were thus read, not as expres-sions of a group of people interacting, but as revealing the authenticnature of a single unitary subjectivity – the massaia.

Theoretically, the emphasis on the unconscious inherited fromDichter’s version of motivation research made the researchers presup-pose that there was a truer reality lurking beneath overt statements.Hence women indicating negative experiences of modern consumergoods were never taken at face value, but their statements were inter-preted as ‘rationalizations’ of underlying unconscious attachments. Ideo-logically two major assumptions were at work.

First, the researchers projected their own associations of modernconsumer goods to a more modern and ‘evolved’ social order on thestatements of the interviewees. They implied, for example – as in thecase of the different representations of the ‘plastic’ and the ‘non-plastic’families – that the material presence of plastics in everyday life wouldbe enough to bring about a modern, more rational and intellectually ele-vated family life, characterized by a taste for non-representative artwork,contemporary furniture and the presence of books in the living room.Consequently, expressions of distaste for modern mass-produced mar-malade were interpreted as metonymical indications of a generalizedaversion to things like individual autonomy, freedom of choice, socialmobility, the egalitarian family, female emancipation, in short the post-traditional order, to use Ulrich Beck’s (1992) expression.

Second, the self-against-society opposition, equally inherited frommotivation research, made them read such resistances as the aversionsof an isolated, singular and maladjusted subject to a changing socialorder. Tradition and irrationality resided inside the mind of the massaia,modernity and rationality in her environment. She appeared to be a dys-functional remainder from the past, a walking culture-lag.

III. THE NEW HOUSEWIFE

Women’s fear of plastics, the research report on plastic materials from1963 concluded, had its basic foundation in ignorance. This ignorance didnot only regard the technical features of plastic materials (such as theirnot being poisonous), but, what was more important, worked on an exis-tential level. Plastic materials were perceived as alien objects that could


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not be made sense ofwithin existing frame-works.25 They appeared tothe massaia as objects thatlacked an obvious user. Shedid not know what kind ofperson she would becomeby using them. The solu-tion proposed was to useadvertising to attempt toconnect plastics, as well asmodern consumer goods ingeneral to a kind of user-identity with which shecould identify. One poss-ible solution was to createsymbolic differencesbetween different kinds ofplastic materials. Onecould, for example, differ-entiate between high classand low class plastics inorder to make it possible touse plastics as a sign ofsocial prestige.26 Suchdifferences would enablethese materials to bedomesticated in everydaylife, in ‘a reassuring andfamiliar context’ andwhere they would becomemeaningful objects ofdesire, as they would caterto the natural motivationsof a status-seeking user.Eventually they would assume the same ‘connotations of love’ that wereconnected to traditional objects.27

This reassuring strategy became something of a general response tothe fearing and resisting massaia, that appeared in several motivationstudies. Previously, advertising had often pointed at the function that aproduct could fulfill in the lifeworld of the housewife, sometimesemphasizing how it would rationalize or even substitute some of heractivities. Now this was considered inadequate, or even downrightcounterproductive. If housewives feared the competition of modern


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A

FIGURE 2 (A) Wrong: The dishwasher doesthe job of the housewife, ‘in the time it takesto smoke a cigarette’. To be made redundant bymodern consumer goods was precisely whathousewives feared(Cucina Italiana, November 1958)


consumer goods, thenadvertising had to stresshow these, rather thanthreatening her standing inthe family, would actuallycontribute in renderingher appreciation on thepart of family members,and strengthen the affec-tive bonds that she tried tocreate through her cookingand otherwise skillfulhousewifery. The producthad to be connected to theexperience of affection andpersonal recognition onthe part of familymembers that she secretlycraved.

Hence in the adver-tising agency Lintas’campaign for Gradinamargarine from the early1960s, based on a moti-vation study similar tothat on the attitudestowards mass-producedfoods quoted earlier, it wasnot the product, but thehousewife that stood at thecenter of the attention: thehusband expresses hisappreciation, ‘yes, youwere right, one eats wellwith Gradina’ and as the

smaller text points out, this is a ‘compliment that you have deserved’. Thesmall copy proceeds to explain how to use this new ingredient (that ‘itneed not be combined with oil’, for example, but works as a substitute),where the more important points are put in bold characters. Gradina is(contrary to expectations emerging in the motivation study, one pre-sumes) tasteful, nutritious and light on the stomach. It is also made outof vegetable oils only (and not petroleum, old garbage and whatever theinterviewees expressed fears of), a point that is underlined once more atthe bottom of the ad: ‘it is REALLY completely vegetarian.’ Most


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B

FIGURE 2 (B) Right: The fearsome productdomesticated. Gradina is ‘really completelyvegetarian’, it fits in the family setting, and itrenders the housewife ‘compliments that shehas deserved’(Grazia, 6(1), 1962)


importantly however, it does not compete with you as a housewife, orthreaten to replace you, au contraire, it will render you personal recog-nition. You can use it as a tool that will actually strengthen your positionin the family. The first response to the fears expressed by women inrelation to modern consumer goods thus followed a strategy of reassur-ance and tried to inscribe a traditional user into the product by present-ing its use as part of the very context that housewives felt was underthreat, the family and its economy of affection.

The individualistic assumptions of motivation research howeverintroduced a slight, yet important transformation. Rather than, as pre-viously had been the norm, presenting goods as tools for staging a role,sanctioned by traditional expectations, goods began to be pictured asconducive to being used with a touch of personal agency, as tools for thecommunication of one’s own individuality. By using Gradina and a rangeof similarly advertised goods, women could become individuals, subjectsendowed with agency and requiring appreciation and recognition fortheir own irreducible personal contribution. Previously, advertising hadgenerally represented the consuming family as an integrated socialsystem in which women were to play the role of a housewife accordingto pre-established rules and expectations. Motivation research producedadvertising that featured the housewife as an individual and that under-lined the difference between her individuality and the family as a socialsystem. During the second half of the 1960s this individualized house-wife was to crystalize into a new consumer personality, that came to betaken for granted by the advertising industry as an appropriate rep-resentation of the social reality of consumers.

This process of individualizing the housewife-user found its maininspiration in American developments. It had been known for a longtime that the ‘American woman’ was going through something of ananthropological change. The ‘new American woman’, according to theadvertising literature, wanted to coexist democratically with herhusband rather than to subordinate herself under the authority of a paterfamilias. She also wanted an influence over family decisions outside ofthe kitchen. This desire for autonomy was in part attributed to the entryof American women on the labor market, their prolonged education andsubsequent increasing economic and social independence. Of equal, ifnot greater importance, however, was the development of women’s rolesas consumers. Indeed consumption seemed to be the main arena for theiraffirmation of female individuality. Increased material wealth had madeAmerican consumers ‘more demanding’ and hence less inclined toaccept whatever producers tried to impose. Above all, the wider rangeof choice that had accompanied this development had made women dis-cover that the purchase and use of goods was less about needs in anypragmatic practical sense than about self-affirmation. By making


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consumer choices and using consumer goods, women could realizethemselves, receive recognition for their skills and fantasy, in short,agency, by the other members of their families. It seemed clear that inthe US, the consumption and use of goods was experienced as anempowering activity. It was intimately connected to the affirmation ofwomen’s individual personality rather than to tradition or the wish ofthe husband, and it allowed them to affirm that personality by activelymaking choices.28

In Italy, traces of a similar modern, empowered female subjectivityhad begun to emerge on the new interface of motivation research, in par-ticular in connection to the few, but fascinating, supermarkets thatappeared towards the end of the 1950s. Supermarkets, like plastic materi-als, were perceived as intrinsically modern objects. The construction ofa supermarket was part and parcel of modernizing investments in indus-trial infrastructure, like ENI’s housing and office complex in San Donatooutside Milan, ‘Metanopolis’, or the petrochemical works at Gela inSicily.29

The first experiment with supermarkets in Milan in 1950 was accom-panied by something of a moral panic as the sheer abundance and avail-ability of goods was thought to induce criminality.30 The supermarket washowever also a space were it seemed that individual choice could be exer-cised more freely than before, were the consumer could choose by herselfand emerge as an empowered subject, rather than the mere object of sug-gestion or ‘traditional habits’.31 If built in the right way, to permit the con-sumer to ‘wander’ and ‘give her the impression that she makes her ownchoices’, the supermarket could provide an ‘escape from the domesticwalls’ that also entailed a certain amount of individual empowerment.32

In the supermarket, the woman consumer could choose exotic ingredientsto menus and meals that arise out of her own fantasy and imagination,rather than out of traditional recipes.33 The supermarket constituted anew kind of public space where the housewife could realize herself in anunprecedented manner, even to the point of provoking, as FrancescoAlberoni argued, referring to an unpublished piece of research by Misura,delirious feelings of omnipotence, and compulsory buys.34

The first major advertiser to articulate a consumer identity that builton this newly discovered empowering dimension of consumption wasthe pasta-manufacturer Barilla, or, rather their advertising agency, CPV.CPV, a multinational agency of British origin that had set up an office inMilan in the early 1950s was perceived as something of a scientificagency. It relied heavily on psychology and market research and empha-sized sociological analysis as a necessary foundation for campaigns. CPVwas understood to be the most advanced and prestigious agency at thetime, a role it had taken over from J.Walter Thompson, which haddominated the intensely Americanized 1950s, and which CPV was to


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cede to McCann-Erickson by the end of the decade. In the early 1960sCPV worked as a virtual university, educating a new generation of adver-tisers and was, consequently the natural choice of Pietro Barilla who,perceiving that the times were changing, wanted as modern a productimage as possible (Ceserani, 1994; Valeri, 1986).

CPV began in 1962 in traditional fashion, by trying to domesticateindustrially produced pasta in the fearful lifeworld of the old massaia.This was done by underlining the genuine nature of the product. Thetheme of the campaign – featuring on television as well as in the weeklymagazines – was that ‘200,000 fresh eggs enter Barilla’s factories every-day’, to come out as ‘pasta all uovo’, until recently traditionally made inthe home, without frauds or, as they were called, ‘sophistications’. Thecontext was still that of the nuclear family gathering around the dinnertable where the housewife supplied pasta Barilla as part of her role-fulfillment and affective labor. This traditional housewife also appearedon television advertising as the intelligent, innovative, yet safe and well-heeled character Bettina, who solved everyday problems in 20 secondsto dedicate the remaining 10 to eulogies of the product (Ceserani, 1994;cf. Giusti, 1995).

In 1964, however, CPV made a decisive break with that tradition.Instead of the traditional housewife, Barilla’s ads sported a ‘newwoman’, whose use of pasta was no longer as much about duty and role-fulfillment, as it was about self-affirmation. ‘There is a great chef in you,and Barilla will reveal it’ the slogan read, illustrated by the image of ayoungish woman of indefinite social status, sometimes a housewife,sometimes seemingly not, always youthful and fashionably dressed, wholooked distinctly into the camera, facing the gaze of the audience ratherthan tending to family needs. In the kitchen she cooked, but above allacted as a subject, made her own contribution.

Together, you and Barilla will make masterpieces in the kitchen. You put inyour attention and care, Barilla the substance and flavor of its pasta all’uovo,rich and delicious, just like home-made pasta. A hint of haute cuisine evenin simple everyday dishes, a feast at the dinner table. (Ceserani, 1994)

The new woman was expressing her status as a subject and makingher own choices in the kitchen, rather than complying with a traditionalrole. This break was further accentuated in 1967, when CPV recruitedthe famous singer Mina for their TV commercials. Mina was the risingstar of Italian youth culture, with a cosmopolitan and slightly transgres-sive image, which she transposed to the brand by engaging in her usualperformances as well as by referring to the product as made for ‘yourkids and your man’ (il tuo uomo) – not ‘your husband’.

Apart from introducing a new modality of being a consumer – indi-vidualized, choosing, self secure and emancipated – the campaign also


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presented a new significance of cooking. Rather than a duty, a utilitarianfulfillment of traditionally defined family needs, cooking was now pri-marily an arena for agency and choice where the woman – housewifeor not – could project something of her personality by making choicesrather than following tradition, something original, individual, unusual,‘a hint of haute cuisine even in simple, everyday dishes.’ Accordingly,Barilla ran a series of ads in which the pasta featured in various regionalspecialities, presenting traditional cuisine, not as a tradition in Weber’ssense, but as a buffet that could offer inspiration and permit – indeedprescribe – individual choice. Pasta Barilla was presented not only aspart of a staple Italian diet, but also as a medium for individual crea-tivity.

Barilla thus presented something of a new consumer personality intheir campaigns (which were received as slightly revolutionary at thetime35): A modern woman who uses consumer goods as tools of self-affirmation, and who was furthermore sliding out of the role. Being ahousewife was no longer constitutive of her identity, her own choiceswere. She was becoming a subject, free to choose and create her ownidentity. Her position as a housewife supplied, if anything, external con-straints to that continuous self-fashioning, a socio-cultural environmentin which she could figure, but of which her identity was no longer anorganic part. Pasta, in turn, had become a means of active, subjectifiedself-construction, able to communicate a personality, the contours ofwhich were not given by tradition but rather contingent on individualchoice.

Barilla was a forerunner of what was to become a general trendduring the 1960s, at least as far as the advertisers’ understanding of con-sumer subjectivity was concerned. In the mid 1960s, new, alternativeconsumer practices were mushrooming, chiefly driven by the expansionof the fashion market. The youth market had been growing all throughthe decade. By its latter half some of these youthful, counter-culturalconsumer goods were commercialized with a wider public in mind. Thefashion industry had seen radical change during the 1960s. With thearrival of mass producing fashion chains like Krizia and Max Mara therehad been a certain democratization of high fashion and the uppermiddle-classes could embark on an artistic, or at least creative attitudeto their own appearance previously allowed only to the very rich.Towards the late 1960s, people within the world of advertising and mar-keting began to consider the playful and self-expressive attachments thatappeared to be present with youthful fashion consumers. Indeed, fashionand how to appropriate its logic in marketing consumer goods in generalbecame the talk of the day. In 1967, the marketing trade journal I Prodottidi Marca (Branded Goods) dedicated a whole issue to the fashion indus-try, claiming that the new relations between people and goods that it


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furthered were on their way to dominate consumer culture as a whole.As marketing theorist Claudio Stroppa claimed in his article on the econ-omic potentials of fashion: ‘Fashion has become one of the great powersof our times. It determines the character and direction of consumerdemand, because being outside of fashion is like being outside of theworld.’36 The initiative was accompanied by a series of inquiries into thedynamics of fashion, frequently cast in a psychoanalytic framework, likethe influential research report, La donna e la moda (Women and Fashion),prepared for the American advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding bypsychologist Antonio Miotto in 1969.37 In the same year, the new massproducer of men’s fashion – a relatively new field of mass consumptionas previous decades had been ruled by a fairly uniform set of frequentlyunbranded garments, the infamous gray suit uniform of mass–society –Gritti financed a volume La psicologia del vestire (The Psychology ofClothing) with contributions from market researchers and sociologistsFrancesco Alberoni, and Marino Livolsi, but also from figures likeUmberto Eco and rampant art critic, Gillo Dorfles.38

This new attitude to consumption that fashion seemed to producefitted an emerging notion of a subjectified consumer. In his introductoryspeech to the 1968 conference on ‘the woman and the market’, organ-ized by the Genoa chamber of commerce, market researcher GianpaoloFabris developed such a novel conception of consumption. He describedhow research showed the emergence of a ‘new housewife’ replacing theolder model. The ‘traditional housewife’, conservative and deeply con-nected to the home to which she, when not disturbed by an intrudingmodernity, lived a basically harmonious relationship, had been replacedby a woman who often had worked, but when married or forced to bythe post-1964 recession, had returned to the home. According to Fabris,she now lived a frustrating contradiction between the power and indi-vidual autonomy offered by working and earning her own income, andthe more rigid structural situation of a housewife. She resolved thistension by ceaselessly seeking to manifest her own, if only symbolic,autonomy. The most important aspect of the ‘new housewife’ was thenher continuous search for means of self-affirmation, for, and this was acrucial point, substitutes for the autonomy she had once enjoyed, or per-ceived that others enjoyed.

Cooking was one such substitute. It represented, according to Fabris,an enjoyable possibility to experiment with fantasy and creativity (in con-trast to cleaning that symbolized duty and confinement to the home). Themost important of these areas for self-expression, however, was shopping:

[Shopping] represents an existential sphere to which the housewife caneasily retreat in order to escape the boredom of an everyday existence thatgives her but few satisfactions. To shop, to wander around the shops meansnot only to feel, once again, as a full member of the community, but also


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gives a sensation of being informed, of being ‘with it’. Shopping, in thisrespect, fulfills a function similar to that of mass media, albeit in a moreintense way. To consume offers the new housewife an illusionary way tofulfill the void that characterizes her existence, to fill it with meaning [myitalics].39

The ‘new housewife’ consumed, not primarily to fulfill the needs ofher family, but primarily to ‘fill the void that characterized her existence’.The significance she gave to shopping was psychological, rather thanutilitarian. It was not so much a matter of meeting needs in a rationalway, as of simulating a freedom and an autonomy that she now perceivedas not only possible but also rightly hers. Shopping and cooking wereher main ways of expressing herself and affirming her identity, her mainraison d’être. Family, duty and tradition were but secondary to this. Tofill the gap in an illusionary and purely symbolic way, was of course animpossible task. The simulating function of consumption thus renderedthe new housewife insatiable. Unlike her conservative and fearful pre-decessor, the ‘new housewife’ was something of a compulsive shopper:‘If her husband did not stop her’, she would ‘throw herself at cans andfrozen foods head long’.40

Women were hence still understood to be frustrated, but their frus-tration was different, indeed opposed to that of the traditional massaia.They did not so much feel their safety threatened by an invading mod-ernity, as they perceived their drive to autonomy and self-affirmationconstrained by restrictive environmental conditions: On the one hand,modern ideals and modern life, in particular modern consumer culture– the wider range of choices on the market, the beginning generaliza-tion of a vaguely counter-cultural youth fashion – offered the possibilityof being an emancipated woman in control of her own life, with her ownmoney and power to make proper choices. On the other hand, the objec-tive situation of most women as housewives, sometimes combining thatrole with work, offered in most cases, as Balbo (1976) has convincinglydocumented, serious obstacles to the pursuit of such an autonomy. Con-sumer goods should thus work as a substitute, as a repressive desublim-ation of desire, to use Herbert Marcuse’s (1991[1964]) term; a substitutethat could channel desires for self-affirmation in a way that wouldendanger neither the established order, nor the psychic health ofwomen.

IV. CONCLUSION

During the 1960s, the ‘New Woman’ emerged as a new consumer per-sonality, as a new way of using and relating to consumer goods. Initially,she would mostly figure in advertising for cosmetics underwear andbody care products. Soon enough, however, more mundane goods, like


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pasta or Piaggio’s motor scooters would be presented as objects thatenabled the elaboration and expression of female subjectivity.41 As theNew Woman was rapidly adopted as a target figure by the women’smagazines – first by the more radical Amica, and latter by more tra-ditional up-scale titles like Grazia and Annabella – she became a real andtangible human kind to inhabit Italian public culture. In these maga-zines, Italian women were invited, not only to use consumer goods astools for the creative elaboration of subjectivity, but also to relate tothemselves as subjects endowed with rights and agency. (Indeed the up-scale women’s magazines aligned themselves with the Italian feministmovement in the 1970s and were among the most ardent proponents ofthe right to divorce in the context of the referendum of 1974, see Lilli,1994.)

Even if the questioning of the adequacy of the ‘older model’ of thehousewife was triggered in part by empirical observations, the emer-gence of a ‘New Woman’ can in no way be understood as a mereresponse to shifting ‘consumer values’ (cf. Holbrook, 1987). Rather,empirical data on consumers were, as we have seen, produced throughthe deployment of instruments of observation and analysis that stronglybiased interpretations. In addition, such data were mobilized by influ-ential currents within the advertising industry – the entrepreneurs ofmotivations psychology and qualitative market research – to promote anew way of organizing consumer culture, congruent with the a prioriassumptions of the theories and methods that they employed. Inspiredby predictions by American theorists like George Katona, that a ‘con-sumer society’ based on the principle of autonomous choice was on itsway to supersede the conformist ‘industrial society’ of the 1950s, orpsychologist A.H. Maslow, predicting the coming of a ‘post-material’ age,based on higher values like self-realization, expressivity and communi-cativity, these advertising professionals perceived a coming of what theyreferred to as a ‘post-conformist consumer society’.42 As Antonio Miotto,one of the rising consumer psychologists of the late 1960s stated in anoptimistic article in 1968, Italy was progressing towards a new kind ofconsumer society where consumer demand would no longer be deter-mined by income or social class but rather would result from individualcreativity and fantasy. Indeed, consumer goods would feature a ‘a com-plete involvement of the whole personality’ and their main functionwould be to offer new experiences in order to expand the range of thehuman mind in a MacLuhanesque fashion. Tomorrow, Miotto con-cluded, we might have chaos, but certainly not conformity.43 In this post-conformist consumer society, consumption was becoming the main areafor the active construction of selfhood.

The ‘New Woman’ was a result of the spread of motivation research.That technique offered a way to organize what seemed to be irrational


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or at least unintelligible expressions of resistance into a new conceptionof how people and goods could relate. As this new paradigm influencedthe actual practice of developing, marketing and advertising products,the New Woman took shape as a series of material and symbolic dispo-sitions inscribed in consumer culture. ‘She’ became a new way of beinga woman through the productive power of advertising and marketing.

Notes

1. This does not imply that actual consumers should be understood as somekind of ‘cultural dopes’, to use Garfinkel’s old term. As a whole range ofstudies have shown, such pre-produced user identities can be, and havebeen, reappropriated, recombined, transformed or even ignored in theactual everyday ‘making do’ (de Certeau, 1984) of consumers. For a classicexample, see Hebdige (1997[1979]).

2. While figures for televisions, washing machines and refrigerators are calcu-lated per family, the figure for cars is calculated per inhabitant. I have recal-culated the figures based on an average family size of 4.0 in the 1950s and3.5 in the 1960s, the result is very much a statistical construct, given thatfamily size was related to socio-economic standing and hence families morelikely to have a car were probably also more likely to be smaller. The figuresare derived from the statistical appendix to Ginsborg, 1990: 432 ff. cf.Castronovo, 1995; Gundle, 1986; Salvati, 1984.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are my own.4. See, for example, B. Gasparini, ‘Processo alla donna moderna’, Annabella 21

April, 1957–7 April, 1958.5. Apart from Dichter’s own writings, the best source on motivation research

remains Vance Packard’s old classic, The Hidden Persuaders. New York:David McKay Company, 1957.

6. E. Dichter, The Strategy of Desire, quoted from the Italian translation, Lastrategia del desiderio. Milano: Garzanti, 1963, p. 270.

7. While there are no systematic data on the relative importance of motivationresearch in Italian advertising during the 1960s, Gianpaolo Fabris one of itspioneers, and today a leading name in Italian marketing and market researchclaims that its influence was greater in Italy than anywhere else, see G.-P.Fabris, ‘Introduzione alle ricerche motivazionali’, in Aa.Vv, Le ricerche moti-vazionali, Milano: EtasKompass, 1967, p. 74. On Dichter in Italy, see ‘Laricerca dei motivi in pubblicità, L’Ufficio Moderno January 1958, Advertise-ment: E. Dichter Associati, Studi e Ricerche, 2 April, 1962.

8. Personal interview, Francesco Alberoni, 12 July, 1998.9. G. Gazzerra, ‘L’elaborazione del testo pubblicitario’, L’Ufficio Moderno,

October, 1957.10. G. Lombardi, ‘Premesse e promesse’, L’Ufficio Moderno September, 1950.11. A. Battaglia-Ferrari, ‘La Donna e la pubblicità. Aspetti psicologici, sociali ed

economici del problema’, IV congresso nazionale della pubblicità, Venice,25–28 September, 1954.

12. A. Pasqualini, ‘La pubblicità, la vendita e la donna’, L’Ufficio Moderno. July,1957; R. Tremelloni, ‘Conoscere gli aspetti del consumo’, L’Ufficio ModernoJanuary, 1961.

13. On margarine, see ‘Che cos’è una ricerca motivazionale’, Studi di Mercato 1,1959; on bouillon cubes: ‘Tre ricerche di mercato’, Studi di Mercato 1, 1956.


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14. Unpublished motivation studies by Misura, cited in F. Alberoni, Consumi esocietà, Bologna: il Mulino, 1964, pp. 170–1.

15. Consumi e impieghi di materie plastiche, Milano: Giuffré, 1963, p. 145.16. Gabrielle Calvi, ‘Gli attegiamenti psicologici nei confronti dei prodotti

dietici’, Misura, 4, 1961. The scope of the study was to investigate whetherthere was any space for ‘dietetic foods’ i.e. foods where medical drugs wereadded, but much of the discussions focused on mass-produced food ingeneral.

17. Calvi, ‘Gli attegiamenti’.18. Consumi e impieghi.19. Consumi e impieghi, p. 147.20. Calvi, ‘Gli attegiamenti’, p. 34.21. Calvi, ‘Gli attegiamenti’, p. 147.22. Calvi, ‘Gli attegiamenti’, p. 166.23. Calvi, ‘Gli attegiamenti’, p. 163.24. While the researchers recognized that the group interview thus created a

synergy effect in terms of information production/discovery, that individualswould give significance to goods that they would otherwise not have thoughtabout, this was treated as something conducive to individual self-discovery,rather than a process likely to shape that discovery. Its results, the kind of‘memories and experiences that would not have come out of an individualinterview’ were then thought to be in accordance with actual individualfeelings, and were attributed to the participating individuals as authenticattachments, discovered in the freer and more reflexive climate of the groupinterview, rather than to the group dynamic in itself. While it was recog-nized that in unfortunate cases the group could create artificial barriers toself-expression, intimidation, shame, frequently caused by the unfortunatemixture of individuals from different social classes, the interview was notconsidered to be shaping the information thus produced. On the contrary,the group made the individual emerge in a truer way. See G.-P. Fabris,‘L’Intervista di gruppo’, Le ricerche motivazionali, 2, 1964, pp. 109–25.

25. Consumi e impieghi, pp. 177–9.26. Consumi e impieghi, p. 181.27. Consumi e impieghi, p. 183.28. ‘La donna americana è in genere la donna moderna come consumatrice’,

Panorama della Pubblicità, February, 1957, Studio sulla ‘donna americana’,L’Ufficio Moderno, October, 1960.

29. ‘Tecnica e proiettazione del supermarket in Italia’, Il Direttore CommercialeJanuary 1959; S. Ravalli, ‘Prime esperienze dei “supermarket” in Italia’,Mondo Economico 1 July 1961; Crainz, 1996.

30. ‘Mercurio si meccanizza: Qui si vende senza l’ausilio di venditori’, L’UfficioModerno, April, 1950.

31. N. Plurivento, ‘Il supermercato’, L’Ufficio Moderno, November, 1958.32. N. Plurivento, ‘Il supermercato’, L’Ufficio Moderno, November, 1958.33. ‘Servitevi da sole’, Annabella 9, 1958; ‘Il supermercato sta trasformando la

nostra cucina casalinga’, Panorama della Pubblicità, April–June, 1966.34. F. Alberoni, ‘Le motivazioni del consumatore’, Rivista internazionale di

scienze sociali, XXII: IV, 1961.35. Francesco Alberoni, personal interview, 12 July 1998.36. C. Stroppa, ‘Considerazioni sul rapporto tra moda e economia’, I Prodotti di

Marca, January 1967.37. ‘La moda della moda’, I Prodotti di Marca (4) 1969.38. ‘La moda come fatto sociale’, I Prodotti di Marca (7) 1969.


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39. G. Fabris, ‘Crescente l’importanza della donna nella società dei consumi’,L’Ufficio Moderno, December, 1968.

40. E. Rava, ‘La donna e il mercato’, L’Ufficio Moderno, January, 1969.41. Here I use the term ‘subjectivity’ in the Hegelian tradition where it means

something close to ‘agency’ cf. Touraine, 1995.42. A. Reynaud, ‘La psicologia economica’, L’Ufficio Moderno, April, 1967; G.

Katona, L’Uomo consumatore, Milan: Etas Kompass, 1967; A.H. Maslow,Motivation and Personality, New York: Harper, 1954.

43. A. Miotto, ‘Le motivazioni psico-sociali’, L’Ufficio Moderno, April, 1968.

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◆ ADAM ARVIDSSON has a PhD from the European University Institute inFlorence and is a lecturer in sociology at the University of East Anglia. His mainresearch interests concern the discursive construction of subjectivity and iden-tity, in particular in relation to marketing and consumer culture. Address: Schoolof Social and Economic Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. [email:[email protected]]


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