ABSTRACT
Although originally conceptualized in anthropology as fundamentally driven, shaped, and constrained by a cultural context’s ideological make-up (e.g., Geertz 1973; Mulder 1978), sharing has been reduced in the consumer literature to a singular, i.e., Western, mechanism of resource distribution. In his recent work, Belk (2010) reviews the extensive literature on sharing and gift giving in both Western and non-Western contexts and develops a framework summarizing the key characteristics of and differences among sharing, commodity exchange, and gift exchange. His model is, however, decidedly Western in orientation. Belk (2010) assumes that people act as
free individuals who are not determined by the cultural forces in which they are embedded. This concept of the individual resembles what has been described as the Western conception of the person (Geertz 1974) or the “independent self” (Markus and Kitayama 1991), and what also forms the basis for Belk’s (1988) “extended self:” an atomized, separate, autonomous, and unique individual. This assumption renders the applicability of the conceptual distinctions to nonWestern contexts hardly possible. What is considered sharing, borrowing and lending, gift giving, and commodity exchange and which of these forms of behavior are perceived as obligatory, reciprocal, or morally desirable are socially constructed and depend upon a combination of factors: the ideologies, norms, and values in a given culture (Triandis 1994; Mulder 2000), the social context (Gell 1992), the personal relationships (Fiske 1992), and the objects or information involved (Giesler 2006). More empirical work in a variety of cultural contexts is necessary to examine the funda-
mentally dialectic relationship between the individual and the societal level (Berger and Luckmann 1966), and to illuminate how sharing and its related forms of behavior manifest themselves in everyday consumer cultures. Yet it is surprising to find that there is little empirical research addressing the ubiquitous consumer behavior of sharing, using a framework that is informed by social constructionism, as well as poststructuralism. Two recent exceptions are Giesler (2008) and Humphreys and Giesler (2007). The authors demonstrate how a paradigmatic shift from ownership to access and sharing evolves through cooperative and agonistic consumerproducer conflict in the bookselling and music downloading consumption context. In his 2008 study on drama in marketplace evolution, in turn, Giesler illustrates how consumers and producers variously interpret the salient narrative of intellectual property in order to construct legitimacy for their activities in the cultural creative sphere. Although these studies are useful and visionary, they are also limited to Western ideologies and notions of sharing. In sum, there is a paucity of empirical research exploring how norms, values, and ideologies of sharing in and across different cultures shape market structures and individual consumption experiences. To address this oversight, I examine the influence of competing ideologies of sharing on the
love-relationship related identity work of Javanese smartphone consumers in Indonesia. Smartphones are digital devices that enable consumers not only to communicate with each other but also to create, transfer, access, store, and most importantly, share information about the self and its relation to the social world. As such, smartphone consumption stands at the intersection of two countervailing ideologies of sharing: a traditional Javanese ideology of sharing and a contemporary Western one. Next, I will briefly review these competing ideologies and show the tensions that exist between them. Following the neglected but central insight that humans are as much a product of society as society is a product of humans (Berger and Luckmann 1966), I then examine the identity narratives of Javanese smartphone users to demonstrate how the two ideologies are constantly blended and restructured. I conclude by discussing the implications of the study for consumer culture research on sharing and (digital) technology consumption. Data for the present analysis stems from a larger research project exploring the relationship among romantic love, globalization, and the marketplace. This research seeks to inform our understanding of sharing and technology consumption by
bringing non-Western ideologies of sharing to bear on data from the Indonesian dating scene. First, it reveals and critiques a Western bias in the Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) literature (Arnould and Thompson 2005) on sharing and offers a poststructuralist alternative theorization of sharing based on culturally competing ideologies of sharing. It also contributes to our understanding of globalized consumer culture (ibid.) by demonstrating the influence of competing ideologies of sharing on identity construction in transitional (non-Western) economies. And finally, this study makes a contribution to a nascent body of CCT literature on the consumption
of (digital) technology. Previous work has either adopted a decidedly micro-theoretical perspective (Venkatesh 2008) or has analyzed the influence of static cultural forces on technology consumption practices as a one-way process (Mick and Fournier 1998; Kozinets 2008). Thereby, these studies omit the influence of technology consumption on larger institutional and marketplace structures such as the emergent glocalized Indonesian dating marketplace.
