More Second Hand Stuff. Part II

September 8th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand

Using up of material goods is straight forward. A queue (anywhere from one on up) of users forms for each specific item This describes the sequence and trajectory of the using up.

A large range of goods appear to fit within this queue model:

(1) Personal wear and household furnishings, autos and boats, tools, and such.

(2) Business and industrial equipment. An example from the New York Times of Tuesday, March 31, 1981 in an item titled “Used Rubber Machinery Business is Good” datelined Akron, reporter’s name not given. The useful life of these mechanisms was very long. One built in 1915 was rehabilitated 65 years later and sold to a factory in Haiti where it was expected to continue in operation for another 65 years. (This machine might still be chugging away.)

(3) There are engineering and chemical items such as minerals and basic chemicals used in manufacturing and in making drugs. Producers here are constantly striving to recover wastes generated in manufacturing and mining and to find uses for by-products. Find some examples in essays by Primo Levi, an Italian chemist and writer, who goes through the several elements in his “The Periodic Table.” Some of his stories concern the steps needed to salvage discarded chemical materials.

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For sociologists at least two issue: (1) The formal quality of the human queue itself. and (2) The social patterns in and around it. The paradox of the queue is that it seems to set up a system of priority suggestive of social stratification while at the same time being a universally recognized sign of equality. The truly random formation of the queue is the key. If the advantageous priority is by chance the basic equality of all ranks is retained. On movie sets the senior members of the troupe (director, lead actor) usually can preempt the head of the food service line. The line breaker emphasizes status difference The sociologist should try not to presume any queue’s pattern. It should be an open question for investigation.

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For a durable good a sequence of additional work tends to accompany it through its useful life. These are the familiar re-functions: repair, rehabilitation, reconstruction, refining, recreation, restructuring, remaking and so on. From cleaning and dusting on up. To extract maximum use value requires parallel continuing production.

There is also a concern about how the item is used. A technical issue that presupposes knowledge of the design and purpose of the good. Specialists instruct and guide users here.

Whenever there is an intense socially recognized need to fully use up goods as in states of siege, embargo, or depressed economy these two, specialists-adviser and mechanic, will become prominent. Sometimes they are part of a gray or off-the-books economy, active in one sector of society but nearly unknown in another. Cuban mechanics are famous for their ingenuity in keeping old American cars, for which no parts have been locally available, in working order.

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The queue model has a limit. Certain categories of work result in no discernible object or the object made is almost instantly consumed. I can think of three examples.

(1) Services. The work is purely conceptual–it involves entertainment or education or therapeutics. The consumer walks home feeling good but empty handed. Other services have a hands on quality–dentistry and medicine and barbering and such where there is a not readily transferable physical result. No user queue can develop.

This observation takes us in an interesting direction–back to the organization of production–that I am not eager to grapple with at this time. I’ll simply note that another queue is starkly visible here. The people or groups lined up to receive the service that is actually the skilled technical actions of the worker of which he or she has a limited work-life supply. We can see the consumers/patients as sharing in the useful work-life of the service supplier.

(2) The cases of the producers-users being all together. They make and consume either in the same instant or within a very short time. The convivial social party where in the coming together and sharing a space and constructing an atmosphere/ambiance the group produces the (let’s call it) entertainment that it immediately consumes. (The analysis of the social party can be complex. David Riesman and associates worked on this a while back. A paper of their’s on parties is titled “Sociability, Permissiveness, and Equality” in Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes. Volume 23, Number 4, Nov. 1960.)

Another example: The famous Mulligan Stew of hobo camps. Everyone must contribute an acceptable food to the stew brewing in the pot to later join in its consumption. The limited group makes and uses its own good.

The band of hunters and gatherers, usually kinship based, made up of men and women with their children, are similar (For a beautiful rendering of this experience by anthropologist Richard A. Gould see his “Yiwara, Foragers of the Australian Desert” Scribner’s 1969.) All the group’s members except infants spend the day hunting and gathering local foods for the evening meal. A communal all altogether.

(3) Durable passive objects with no moving parts and no active use. Diamonds, most obviously. But anything for display and/or adornment including ordinary doodads and tsotchkes. The popular name for this category of goods is icons. Objects used as signs for something else.

Another element that fits here is the durable records. They spread from the printed to the electronic and can be long lasting–well beyond the hope of any queue to use up.
I’ll save them for one more post on this topic. .

Ciao.