ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, we examined the process by which the social norm of cleanliness came into being in the Western world, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, during the period of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century. The emergence of the norm has been explained with regard to the newly established understanding between consumer health on one side and hygiene and a clean outer appearance on the other. At a more general level, Chapter 3 has shown how patterns of cleanliness consumption have been affected by consumer learning processes about the need-satisfaction potential of specific consumption activities (cf. the corresponding hypotheses, which we derived in Chapter 2, namely the ‘Needs Hypothesis’ and the ‘Learning Hypothesis’). As to the terminology employed, we have taken recourse to Gary Becker’s ‘household production function approach’ (Becker, 1965; Michael and Becker, 1973) and defined cleanliness in the form of clean clothes as the outcome of the household production process of laundry washing. The inputs into this household production process, i.e. both expenditures on consumer goods and services as well as the utilization of the respective goods, have been referred to as cleanliness consumption. By showing how consumers have come to associate clean clothes with the basic needs of health and social recognition, Chapter 3 addressed consumer learning processes pertaining to the household production objectives.
