Abstract

Workplace consumption and practices have been under-researched in consumer studies despite its mundane role in daily life and in defining the self. By drawing on the theories of Goffman and Bourdieu, this study takes a processual view to unveil how habitus shapes and enables impression management through the ‘act of consumption’ in the workplace.
Through retrospective narratives and walking-with interviews with senior executives to capture bodily resonances, this paper discovers that mutability and agency are key to understand the biographical evolution of consumption practices. With thin cultural capital, junior executives can only rely on extrinsic ‘sign vehicles’ (Goffman 1959) such as appearance and surface diligence to extend their work identity (Belk, 1988). Over time, with accrued cultural capital through socialization (Bourdieu, 1977; Skeggs, 2004), senior executives climb up the career ladder to differentiate themselves through embodied habitus and intrinsic cultural practices, such as performative utterance, gestalt presentation and sensing oneself for cultural fit.
The study has not only uncovered the workplace as a site of consumption, it also advances existing theories by unveiling evolving patterns of consumption choices and cultural practices, characterised by a shift of class-markers from a ‘taste of necessity’ to a ‘taste of liberty’.