The Social Relations of Consumption: Corporate Law and the Meaning of Consumer Culture

"There is something in the structure of the human animal which compels him to produce superfluously."Norman O. Brown1"To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk . . . mak[ing] the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine."Jonathan Franzen2I. IntroductionConsumer culture is a defining feature of modern life. It is also a cardinal normative concern. Understanding what consumerism "means" is essential to a mature assessment of the society we are making for ourselves, and the legacy we are leaving to the future. Mainstream economists and policymakers perennially insist that consumption must be encouraged in order to fuel development and ensure prosperity.3 Yet there is persistent ambiguity in theoretical discourse, and common experience, about the meaning of our consumer culture. In this Article, I argue that this ambiguity can, in part, be explained by examining the social relations of consumption in contemporary society. These social relations involve, crucially, the relationship between producer and consumer that is dictated by corporate governance law, and embodied in the decision-making dynamics of the directors who command corporate operations. The enigmatic nature of consumer culture can be understood, to some useful extent, as resulting from a lack of integrity in the social relations between corporations and consumers.If our consumer culture is (partially) a function of the social relations of consumption, then perhaps we can improve the character of that culture by introducing greater integrity into those social relations. This can be accomplished through the reform of corporate law. Specifically, I claim that legitimate concerns about consumer culture contribute to a broader set of arguments for reforming corporate governance law to require corporate directors to attend to the interests of multiple stakeholders in corporate decision-making, and not just the interests of shareholders. Regardless of whether one embraces this prescription, the analysis developed here can enrich our understanding of what is at stake in debates about our corporate law: what it is, what it does, and what it might do.Groucho Marx once said, "When I hear the word culture I reach for my wallet."4 Legal scholars, too, seem to worry that cultural analysis will operate as the pretty ruse of a theoretical pick-pocket, leaving us dazzled, perhaps, but poorer in understanding than when we started out. The conventional categories of legal analysis favor inquiries that are plainly tractable, even quantifiable. This is motivated by an estimable desire to get at the usable knowledge that objective, quasi-scientific approaches promise. It is also driven by a scrupulous commitment to avoiding methods that risk illiberally celebrating or condemning particular values or ways of life, which cultural analysis might seem to imply. 5Mainstream corporate law scholarship exemplifies this tendency. it has principally been concerned with analyzing the shareholder predicament in corporate affairs, construed in terms of financial risk and return. "Progressive" or critical corporate law scholarship looks beyond the shareholder's stake in corporate operations, but also has largely eschewed cultural assessment, tethering its analysis instead to countable versions of corporate "harm" such as environmental externalities, declining wages, or tobacco-related deaths.6 Even cutting-edge scholarship marshaling the insights of social psychology for corporate law study has restricted its attention to categories that are at least in principle measurable, such as "consumer risk perception."7 The insights supplied by these scholarly tranches are crucial, but they leave out of the conversation an important aspect of what we want to talk about when we talk about corporations. It lets pass, and thus gives a pass to, the cultural significance of corporate law, particularly as it relates to consumerism. …