When Production and Consumption Meet: Cultural Contradictions and the Enchanting Myth of Customer Sovereignty
探讨资本主义中理性化生产与享乐消费的矛盾如何在服务互动中被管理，通过顾客主权神话的营造来引导顾客，同时分析这一神话如何系统性地为其否定创造条件。
ABSTRACT The central cultural contradiction of capitalism, argued Bell some 25 years ago, was the existence of rationalized, disciplined production alongside free and hedonistic consumption. This paper argues that this thesis, although overstated, has resonance within contemporary capitalism. The paper then considers the question of how this contradiction is managed when production and consumption meet directly within the service interaction. On the production‐side rationalization is joined by customer‐orientation, and on the consumption‐side management promotes consumption of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Here the customer is meant to experience a sense of being sovereign. At the same time the space is created for the customer to be, potentially, substantively directed and influenced to follow the requirements that flow from the rationalized elements of production. Key aspects of the service interaction, including the menu and its presentation, the display of empathy and aesthetic labour, and the use of naming within the service interaction, are analysed in terms of the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Consumption, however, is a fragile process, and remains, to an important degree, ‘unmanageable’. The analysis, therefore, also examines how the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty systematically creates the conditions for the myth's negation.