Abstract
In 2015, McDonald’s tried to launch a so-called artisan Big Mac in Ireland, featuring a potato-flake bun and Irish cheddar. The artisan label lasted exactly one day, author Alessandro Gerosa tells us in The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism. Turns out, in the eyes of the Irish Food Safety Authority at least, a mass-produced burger by the world’s largest fast food chain lacked the authentic, handcrafted quality connoted by the term. To Gerosa, the high irony of an artisan Big Mac encapsulates the contradictions embedded in authenticity—that elusive and powerful concept driving both consumer behavior and a torrent of academic books and articles relating to consumer branding, social media production, and the future of work.
In The Hipster Economy, Gerosa offers sociologists and cultural critics a persuasive explanation for how and why the concept of authenticity has become so central to today’s society. Deeply grounded in theories of post-Fordist capitalism, the book examines the rise of a “hipster aesthetic of consumption,” which Gerosa defines as a set of tastes and market behaviors “centered on the experience of authenticity” (p. 5). These tastes—encompassing small-batch craft beers, cocktails inspired by local herbalists’ shelves, new takes on traditional dishes featuring innovative techniques and rarefied ingredients—signal a middle-class opposition to an “old mainstream” (p. 13) regime of Fordist mass production and standardization. Having conducted interviews with 40 Milanese micro-entrepreneurs running gourmet food trucks, specialty cocktail lounges, and grassroots cafes, Gerosa argues that these business owners serve as “meso-level taste dealers” (p. 86), operating between macro-level social forces and micro-level consumer choice. These taste dealers, he writes, want to serve as a “force for good” (p. 89) opposing capitalism’s drive for profit above all else. Ironically, however, the hipster economy also gives capitalism a means to extract value from consumers who are both saturated with and suspicious of mass consumption culture.
To make his case, Gerosa begins this brief monograph, just five chapters and 116 pages, with a history of the hip. He positions today’s hipsters, with their penchant for anachronistic beards and beanie hats, in the long tradition of (mostly middle-class) resistance to the negative externalities of Fordism, particularly to alienation in all its forms: alienation of the maker from their product, alienation of the consumer from the maker, alienation of capitalism itself from human values apart from profit. The concept of authenticity, he argues, has represented an antidote to alienation as far back as the nineteenth-century Romantic movement and the early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts movement. Through the 1950s beatniks, the 1960s hippies, the 1980s bobos (bourgeois bohemians), and the 1990s indies, an authenticity-inspired hipster aesthetic has driven hip groups to push against the current mainstream (until, in some cases, these movements and aesthetics themselves become mainstream).
The book’s second chapter dives deeply into theories of aesthetics, consumption, and taste. The author marshals Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu to explore how and why taste regimes develop, and enlists Walter Benjamin to explain the tensions between mass production and authenticity. In lucid, clearly reasoned arguments, the book usefully unpacks the most relevant aspects of these theorists to conceptualize “aesthetic regimes of consumption” (p. 41). This framework links specific configurations of tastes (for instance, pop, kitsch, old mainstream, and new mainstream) to capitalist forms of production and consumption. Here, he sets forth the elements of a “neo-craft economic imaginary” (p. 68), which in its ideal form resists standardization and advances social good. This hope for social change animates the ambitions of the idealistic bartenders and food truck owners Gerosa interviews.
After setting out this framework, the author devotes Chapter 3 to demonstrating how “neo-craft” (p. 59) industries and services—old jobs like bartending and food vending with a neoliberal twist—operationalize the values of the hipster economic imaginary, creating a “neo-craft aura” (p. 72) of authenticity. Such neo-craft products and markets, he argues, arose to satisfy consumers wanting to signal their unique values and tastes, in a lower-budget take on conspicuous consumption. This consumer turn to craft has launched near-parodic mass market “crafty” (p. 72) products and packaging, not only the short-lived artisan Big Mac but also craft-style beers from Heineken and faux handcrafted mugs from Ikea.
In Chapter 4, we finally begin to hear more from Gerosa’s hipster interview subjects, such as a food truck owner whose handcrafted cannolo brings a customer to tears, a bar owner seeking to reveal her “true self” (p. 88) in her rubber-duck-themed lounge, and another rotating the art in his bar to highlight local creators. These moments offer rare glimpses of color and humanity in a book predominantly focused on theory.
The author admirably tries to avoid overgeneralizing about hipster entrepreneurs—although not always successfully due to the book’s lack of fine-grained ethnographic description. He identifies three Weberian ideal types, each of which highlights key dimensions associated with different flavors of hipster entrepreneurs: The “dramaturgical strategic user” already in the food or beverage business but adopting hipster labels and practices to cater to current tastes, the “compliant enthusiast” equally valuing the hipster code and aligned products, and the “rebel activist,” whose products or services exist to fund their activist projects (p. 83).
Gerosa astutely draws out the contradictions and tensions between the hipster economic imaginary and real-life businesses. Gourmet food truck owners seek freedom, autonomy, and creative self-expression but end up working endless hours in a grueling pattern of self-exploitation. Hipster café owners aim to combine manual labor and traditional production techniques—but not too traditional (turns out, nobody wants World War II-era carbonara made of beans and powdered eggs). Hipster entrepreneurs in general aim to remedy the ills of capitalism, but hipster products tend to be upscale and overpriced. (As one wag wrote to The Irish Times about McDonald’s failed artisan burger, “it couldn’t possibly be classified as artisan” because it wasn’t “sold at an exorbitant price,” p. 59.) Ironically, by resisting some aspects of capitalism, the hipster economy also reinforces and strengthens it: The hipster economy gives the system an avenue to extract money even from its skeptics.
Chapter 5 extends this analysis of the hipster economy’s embedded contradictions to “hipster neighbourhood[s]” now in all major world cities: “the trendiest places to live, the coolest epicentres of nightlife—and the most looked-after investment areas for real-estate companies” (p. 93). Although this chapter draws hardly at all on the author’s empirical research and relies heavily on readings of Sharon Zukin (1989, 2009) and others, it most starkly and successfully highlights the dark ironies of hipsterism, noting how its idealistic pushback to convention has in many ways become convention itself, leading to virtually identical “urban villages” (p. 98) across the globe. In highlighting this reality, the chapter exposes two glaring negative externalities of the hipster economy: homogenization and gentrification.
In a heartfelt conclusion, Gerosa attempts to end on a more positive note, suggesting that at its core, hipsterism centers the deep human desire for meaningful work and connection. He notes that hipsterism, in all its evolving forms, inherently includes a subversive element that cannot be fully appropriated by capitalism, and thus offers potential for resisting neoliberalism’s darkest effects. He finds hope in his subjects’ interest in fair housing, environmental action, and antiracism, often referring to the “antifascist bartender” (p. 80) pin worn by one of his subjects.
Even in this ostensibly hopeful conclusion, however, the reader is left skeptical, perhaps in part because of the lack of thick description of the book’s interview subjects. The work directs most of its energy to laying out and elaborating its theoretical models and conclusions, at the expense of individual voices of hipster vendors or customers themselves. Lacking a methods section or methodological index, the book shares little description or ethnographic information about interview participants. The reader is left to wonder whether and how the lived experience of these entrepreneurs impacts their entrepreneurial aspirations and realities. For instance, do race, gender, education, or previous life histories also shape the decisions and careers of these micro-entrepreneurs? Are certain people more likely than others to be successful in the role of “meso-level dealers of taste”? (p. 86). If so, what are the implications? Further, if these taste dealers serve as brokers between a macro level of taste formation and a micro level of consumers, as the author claims, how do actors on each side of this multi-level system benefit? While much attention is paid to the nexus of hipster entrepreneurs and their customers, less analysis probes the flip side of this multi-level relationship—that is, how do institutions and organizations interact with or benefit from the interventions of these taste brokers? More concrete, empirical exploration into the role of institutions in taste creation, distribution, and consumption could help organizational scholars more clearly tease out the interaction of networked, multi-level processes in the creation of norms and cultural values. To be sure, deeper empirical engagement would be difficult to squeeze into such a brief monograph: More explicit description of these subjects—for whom Gerosa clearly has great sympathy and affection—would complicate and lengthen the author’s arguments. However, thicker description would also provide more purchase for engagement with other strong research unpacking authenticity, consumerism, and labor (think Angela McRobbie’s 2018 Be Creative, or Brooke Duffy’s 2017 (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, or Sarah Banet-Weiser’s 2012 Authentic™); engagement with these thinkers would broaden the book’s contributions.
Nevertheless, The Hipster Economy stands as a highly cogent, clearly written exploration of the mechanics of late modern capitalism, and a fine example—especially to graduate students—of a carefully developed, persuasive theoretical contribution to an ongoing debate. Even as the current image of the wild-bearded hipster fades into stereotype, Gerosa argues persuasively that the deeper aesthetic of hipsterism, with its centering of authenticity, will continue. As he notes, at heart, “most of us are all a little bit hipster” (p. 68)—a reality that will continue to pervade, empower, and trouble late modern capitalism.
