Reconceptualising prosumption beyond the ‘cultural turn’: Passive fashion prosumption in Korea and China

Abstract

While the processes of production and consumption are increasingly interrelated in society, there is a bourgeoning literature on consumers’ increased power through the prosumption process and its evolutions and manifestations in various industries, markets and social contexts. This article challenges the theoretical assumption that all types of ‘prosumers’ become directly empowered by digital technology or have an equal opportunity to participate in the production process through Web 2.0. By extending Ritzer’s reconceptualised idea of prosumption beyond the Global North, our research analysed two specific East Asian cases of fashion consumers whose countries shared rapidly rising economic status and cultural significance yet underwent different sociocultural trajectories. Using focus group interview, we investigated how these consumers interact differentially with the existing social structure, cultural values and other emergent social agents, and the extent to which they are able to exert an influence on the production of immaterial fashion. Contesting the expressivist take of the ‘cultural turn’ which overemphasises consumers’ awareness of and control over symbolic fashion, this article’s major theoretical contribution relates to symbolic consumption in the case of fashion – as a unique case blending material, immaterial and symbolic consumption – among young Chinese and Korean consumers geographically located out of the global fashion centres. We explored prosumption’s vicissitudes and limits as a theoretical concept, challenging its universality across different cultures, political-economic models and product categories, also demonstrating the multifaceted relationships and dissimilar types of power balances between production/producer and consumption/consumer. The study concluded with the new and differing orders of fashion consumption in Korea and China: the recognition of the overlapping effects of economic, sociocultural, habitual and technological factors which constitute different levels of empowerment and create different types of ‘prosumers’, including ‘elite prosumers’ and ‘passive prosumers’; and the power reshuffling among fashion producers, emergent social agents and consumers in the digital age.