Table: The need to define commodification--Marx, business and the third school?

INTRODUCTION TO TABLE:

Although there are concrete, established (dictionary) definitions of commodification, most of them rely on the meaning of the term "commodity". The definition of a commodity includes a family of notions: The ability of something to be exchange or exploited in a market, a basic (raw) material, a mass-produced and unspecialized object, a valuable human attribute or even convenience/advantage. Additionally, the Marxist notion of commodification has its own distinct meaning--not found in "mainstream" dictionaries, but popular among social scientists. This problematizes the mission to find a definition of commodification that works for everybody.

Two major schools of thought?

Additionally, there are said to be two major schools of thought: Marxist and business. While these two schools of though take in most notions of commodification (or commoditization as it is called in business literature) there seems to be an emergent third school: a hybrid approach.

Marxist school of thought

The Marxist notion of commodification refers to the way commodities are seen symbolically and socially, and the impact of social structures on those perceptions (specifically capitalism and class structures). These social structures are also said to alienate human qualities from individuals. Expansions of the Marxist school maintain that certain commodity cultures can emerge in a society and become pervasive in all aspects of human life (Adorno & Horkheimer 1994 and the notion of culture of industry being the seminal example).

Business school of thought

The business notion is centered on the way things being exchanged (usually in markets) become mass produced, unspecialized, and undifferentiated. Consumers differentiate commodities mostly on the basis of price alone, rather than some other characteristics.

Third school of thought?

Ironically, however, many studies seem to employ a notion that is not limited to one school of thought or the other. These theories describe the way market exchange, in the business sense, becomes culturally pervasive or the way people and their humanizing traits (symbols, thoughts, language, knowledge) become marketed or exchanged like commodities. These theories play off of both schools in a way that makes them not able to be categorized in one or the other.

The emergence of this third category of "hybrid" theories illustrates both a phenomenon in progress and an emergent need. In one sense, they illustrate the desire within academic circles to have a conceptualization of commodification that is not "one or the other" (Marxist or business). Instead, they seem to see commodification in a broader sense that acknowledges any transformation that creates a shift toward commodities and their place in society. Equally, Marxist notions and business notions really describe just that--a shift toward commodities and their place in society--even if business theories focus on products being exchanged on the market and Marxists focus on the relationship with people and social structures.

In the second sense, the emergence of this third category represents a need--the need to created just such a conceptualization that can be used in studies that are not interested in a framework that captures only the business conception or the Marxist conception. To date, hybrid studies have largely focused on the causes and effects of commodification in lieu of creating a conceptualization that would satisfy the full range of notions from the Marxist, to the business sense and everything in between. Many of the posts on this site are dedicated to offering the first steps in creating such a conceptualization.

(NB: there is sometimes a distinction made between the two major schools and anthropology in which commodification and commoditization seem to be used interchangeable. This also seems to strengthen the argument for the way scholars desire to use the notion in a way that does not fit neatly with commodification or commoditization only. Additionally, this note should not be construed to mean that anthropologists are the only scholars that see commodification is this way. There is abundant evidence that this is beginning to happen in a variety of disciplines.)

Broad interest in commodification

When people use the term "commodification", they are, broadly speaking, interested in processes, transitions or transformations that create a shift toward commodity-ness[1] of things, people, societies, cultures, governments or other phenomena. A universal conceptualization, therefore, would take this into account.

The table below illustrates the two major schools of thought (Marxist and business) as well as other notions that seem to hybridize the two schools--or at least that do not fit perfectly within them. It should be noted that the camps in the Hybrid section may seem like they are describing something related to but distinct from commodification. However, they are all supported by actual academic articles that define what they are seeing as commodification. In other words, there is at least one article with the main topic of commodification, that describes it in the way enumerated in the table for each of the "Hybrid" camps in the table. (Detailed analysis making this point is forthcoming.)

Table: MAJOR COMMODIFICATION SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT.

This table (and the analysis that precedes it) is the product of an extensive and ongoing review of literature as part of a project called "The need to define commodification".

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[1] I am not the first to employ this term. For just a few examples, see Timberlake (1964), Matsuoka, Nikami & Ogawa (1997), Willis (1999), Mann (2006), Morris (2010) and Goodman (2013).

LITERATURE: 

Cameron, D. (2000), Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4: 323–347. doi: 10.1111/1467-9481.0011

Cole, S. (2007). Beyond authenticity and commodification. Annals of Tourism Research, 34(4), 943-960.

Cook, D. T. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Duke University Press.

Goodman, M. (2013). Celebritus politicus, neo-liberal sustainabilities and the terrains of care. Age of icons, Toronto, University of Toronto.

Gotham, K. F. (2002). Marketing Mardi Gras: Commodification, spectacle and the political economy of tourism in New Orleans. Urban Studies, 39(10), 1735-1756.

Gottdiener, M. (Ed.). (2000). New forms of consumption: Consumers, culture, and commodification. Rowman & Littlefield.

Goulding, C. (2000). The commodification of the past, postmodern pastiche, and the search for authentic experiences at contemporary heritage attractions. European Journal of Marketing, 34(7), 835-853.

Halewood, C., & Hannam, K. (2001). Viking heritage tourism: authenticity and commodification. Annals of tourism research, 28(3), 565-580.

Harvey, D. (2009). The art of rent: globalisation, monopoly and the commodification of culture. Socialist Register, 38(38).

Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473-492.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944.Trans. John Cumming. New York: Herder.

Lawrence, S., & Sharma, U. (2002). Commodification of education and academic labour—using the balanced scorecard in a university setting. Critical perspectives on accounting, 13(5), 661-677.

Lewis, J., Campbell, M., & Huerta, C. (2008). Patterns of paid and unpaid work in Western Europe: gender, commodification, preferences and the implications for policy. Journal of European Social Policy, 18(1), 21-37.

Liverman, D. (2004). Who governs, at what scale and at what price? Geography, environmental governance, and the commodification of nature. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(4), 734-738.

Loader, I. (1999). Consumer culture and the commodification of policing and security. Sociology, 33(2), 373-392.

Lukács, G. (2010). “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”(1923).Cultural Theory: An Anthology, 172-87.

Mann, G. (2006). Reflections on Scott Prudham's Knock on Wood: Is Labor‐Power a Fictitious Commodity?. Antipode, 38(5), 1069-1072.

Marx, K. (2000). Karl Marx: selected writings. Oxford University Press.

Matsuoka, S., Nikami, A., Ogawa, H., & Ishikawa, Y. (1997, January). Towards a parallel C++ programming language based on commodity object-oriented technologies. In Scientific Computing in Object-Oriented Parallel Environments(pp. 81-88). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Mitchell, C. J. (1998). Entrepreneurialism, commodification and creative destruction: a model of post-modern community development. Journal of Rural Studies, 14(3), 273-286.

Morris, J. W. (2010). Understanding the digital music commodity (Doctoral dissertation, McGill University).

Parry, B. (2004). Trading the genome: Investigating the commodification of bio-information. Columbia University Press.

Robertson, M. M. (2006). The nature that capital can see: science, state, and market in the commodification of ecosystem services. Environment and Planning D, 24(3), 367.

Salzman, J., & Ruhl, J. B. (2000). Currencies and the commodification of environmental law. Stanford Law Review, 607-694.

Sharp, L. A. (2000). The commodification of the body and its parts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 287-328.

Shumar, W. (1997). College for sale: A critique of the commodification of higher education. Psychology Press.

Suddaby, R., & Greenwood, R. (2001). Colonizing knowledge: Commodification as a dynamic of jurisdictional expansion in professional service firms. Human relations, 54(7), 933-953.

Taft, L. (2000). Apology subverted: The commodification of apology. Yale Law Journal, 1135-1160.

Thrift, N. (2006). Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification. Economy and Society, 35(02), 279-306.

Timberlake, R. H. (1964). The stock of money and money substitutes.Southern Economic Journal, 253-260.

Timothy Burke. (1996). Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: commodification, consumption, and cleanliness in modern Zimbabwe. Duke University Press.

Ungerson, Clare (1997) Social politics and the commodification of care. Social Politics, 4, (3), 362-381.

Veblen, T. (1965). The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. AM Kelley, bookseller.

Willis, P. (1999). Labor power, culture, and the cultural commodity. Critical education in the new information age, 139-169.

Willmott, H. (1995). Managing the Academics: Commodification and Control in the Development of University Education in the UK. Human Relations, 48(9), 993-1027.

Zhou, M., & Logan, J. R. (1996). Market Transition and the Commodification of Housing in Urban China*. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 20(3), 400-421.