Conceptualising the household in consumption studies: Fieldwork lessons from India, Jordan

and the UK

Elizabeth Oughton

Centre for Rural Economy

Newcastle University

• Introduction

• Household provisioning and consumption

• The household ‘in the field’ – India– Jordan– UK

• Conclusions

• The fundamental economic problem is provisioning the household (Polanyi 1957)

• Focusing upon provisioning highlights the mediating role of the household, within which economic actors develop their beliefs and contextualise their behaviour

• What constitutes a household? Who can lay claim to the resources of the household and under what circumstances do these responsibilities, duties and rights change and differ?

Economics of the household

Activities that contribute to provisioning

Measured economy

Non-market activities

Necessary for the reproduction of the household

Production of services that could be purchased

Inter- household work

Un-measured economy

State

Market

Intra-household work

India

• Objective: to determine the effectiveness of the public distribution system in targeting subsidised food grains to poor households

• Early 1980s, 22 months in a drought prone village in western India• Methods: monthly repeat household survey of 104 households over

12 months + participant observation

• Definition of the household:– Indian Government – people sharing food cooked at the same hearth

– Oughton – as IG but also includes those who live away from home and contribute financially, regularly to the maintenance of spouse and children remaining in the village and who are dependent on the absentee’s income

Jordan• Objective: to explore the role of improved livestock

breeds and livestock husbandry on the livelihoods of Bedouin households in north-east Jordan– What are the effects of introducing these techniques on gender

relations in the Bedouin household?

• Methods: Mid 1990s to 2004, initial household census and semi-structured interviews + various participatory techniques

• ‘Household’ defined by the respondent– Nuclear household– Joint households, three generations living together– Group households, separate dwellings but closely linked livelihoods and

systems of provisioning

UK

• Objective: to investigate the provisioning of rural micro-business households

• Method: semi-structured interviews of 28 rural micro-business households in Northumberland

• Survival and flourishing of households is not necessarily related to economic growth

• Both production and consumption had intrinsic and instrumental values

• Both formal and substantive rationalities are brought to bear on decisions around the business

Conclusions

India:

• the need to change government definitions of the household to gain a better understanding of the factors affecting food availability

•Knowledge of kin relations important because they contained obligations/rights/duties

Jordan:

• significance of a decision maker outside the household over consumption within

• UK:Reference to an indicator associated with only one form of rationality provides a distorted view of household wellbeing

• Imposing a single household definition will be misleading, the household needs to be contextualised otherwise very significant power relations that affect consumption may be missed

• Important to do good exploratory work on the ground before designing a survey

• Each of the issues raises questions that could be asked in the other two places. They have both spatial and temporal relevance

• How do you find ‘households’ when people don’t live together?