INTRODUCTION

The consumption junction is “the place and the time at which the consumer makes choices between competing technologies” (Cowan 1987:263). We take her insight that consumers’ choices are embedded in a “network of social relations that limits and controls the technological choices that she or he is capable of making” (Cowan 1987:262) and we apply it to the smaller scale choices that consumers in emerging markets make when buying a certain brand or type of mobile phone, in order to understand the sometimes significant consequences that the networks around consumption have on how people understand and use technology. We draw from ethnographic field work done in 2009-2011 in rural China and rural to small town India to illuminate one of the constraints imposed on consumers by the ‘network’: the web of small shop-keepers that sell ICT to rural populations. Rural China and India are places where there is still little online shopping, and where fragmented distribution channels of consumer goods make unusual the unified, mostly well-ordered, and predictable shopping experience that are common in the Western world. In such circumstances, the choices of shop owners, also constrained by factors such as distribution networks, local infrastructure, and policies, shape what users can buy. Moreover, given that shop owners are often the ones more familiar with their stock, and more fluent in the use of information communication technologies (ICT), they also play an important intermediary or translation role in how many consumers understand and use ICT, and importantly, the usages engendered.

In the following sections, we will first define the meaning of ‘consumption junction’ and how it relates to existing literature on user choice in emerging economies. We then describe our methods, and in particular the value of ethnographic observation to capture behaviors that usually escape other methods of gathering evidence, including interviews. We continue with evidence from our field sites and a discussion on similarities and differences between our findings. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of looking at consumers’ choices from different points of the network in which they are embedded, and why this is important even in environments where the network is less visible, and producers and consumers are seemingly in direct communication.

DEFINING THE “CONSUMPTION JUNCTION”

To understand the nexus where consumers decide what to buy, Cowan looks at the diffusion of the cast-iron stove in the United States, which was invented in the early 18^th century, and provided many advantages over hearths, from increased fuel efficiency, to superior cleanliness and comfort. However, this new type of stove did it not become common in the US until the second half of the 19^th century. Cowan points out that historians usually ignore this lag, or offer cultural explanations whereby the open fire of the earth represented something quintessentially English, which appealed to that segment of the American population and which would be lost if using a cast iron stove. For her, however, this question is the starting point for a historical investigation of the role that factors beyond consumers’ control had on the choices they could make (Cowan, 1989).

Cowan takes the perspective of consumers, and patiently reconstructs how the network that brought them cast iron stoves—a complex combination of the location of stove producers and buyers, of transportation infrastructure, of wholesale and retail intermediaries choices, etc—was organized. By doing so, she alerts us to how very little control consumers may have when the network is configured in certain ways, and how easy it is to take these constraints for ‘cultural prejudices’ or simple pigheadedness that prevent people from purchasing determinate products, or from making choices that seem superior.¹

In heading her invitation to carry out an analysis that focuses on the consumer, but extends to other socio-economic areas, we identified rural shop-keepers as a key network element that has been much overlooked, especially by qualitative researchers. Consumers’ behavior and choice is the primary focus of disciplines such as consumer research, marketing, and economic psychology (Bettman, Luce, & Payne, 1998; Hansen, 1976; Tsiotsou & Wirtz, 2012), but has also been studied from an anthropological perspective that looked beyond typical financial constraints (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979; Kitner, Kuriyan, & Mainwaring, 2011), but the eco-system that allows and constrains these choices and uses has not attracted the same amount of attention. There are a few ethnographic studies of entrepreneurship in emerging economies (Arora & Rangaswamy, n.d.; Ilahiane & Sherry, 2008; Rangaswamy & Nair, 2012; Smyth, Kumar, Mehdi, & Toyama, 2010) that illuminate the lives and perspectives of shop keepers, but do not focus on the network in which they are embedded, and on the role their choices play in the final choices (and opportunities) that their clients have. In western countries, both distribution channels and retail stores are dominated by registered and licensed businesses. But in emerging markets such as China and India the situation is very different. Both supply chains and retail shops are extremely fragmented, and characterized by the presence of a number of players who stray the lines between official and grey economy, such as hole-in-the-wall shops, itinerant or door-to-door and group sales people (Blanco, 2009). In the mid-2000s, only around 20% of retail shops in China were formal businesses (defined as businesses that are legally registered, pay taxes, have licenses, etc); and in India only about 2%, and 87% of rural villages do not have any kind of organized marketing and distribution systems (Swaminathan, 2007:149-150).

Moreover, in both countries online shopping has not penetrated rural areas yet, due to a lack of basic infrastructure such as delivery services, as well as low percentages of Internet users, and, especially in the case of India, general lack of Internet connectivity (CNNIC, 2013; International Telecommunication Union, 2013).² This will undoubtedly change in the next few years, as the number of rural Internet users increases, and creative solutions are found to infrastructural problems. But for the time being, shopping is very much an experience that takes place offline. The literature on distribution networks is dominated by a business perspective, which is mostly preoccupied with the practical organization of supply chains, and its effect on the ability of large companies to reach consumers, and to offer them appropriate goods.³

None of these studies illuminates the huge network of small distributors and shop keepers, and the role they play in not only bringing goods to final consumers, but also in selecting the kind of goods they will have access to. And yet the little research that exists that focuses on the role played by these hole-in-the-wall distribution chains has shown that they can be a fundamental link between users who are often isolated and not reached by traditional marketing, and product makers.⁴ In the next sections we will describe how the network shapes the decisions shop keepers make, and how they, in turn, influence the consumption junction of final consumers. But first, a few notes on our methods.

FINDING MIDDLEMEN AND THEIR NETWORK: NOTES ON METHODS

This paper draws from ethnographic field work done in the period 2009-2011, in rural China by the first author, and in rural and peri-urban India by the second author. Whereas our presence and research goals in our respective fields were very different, we both rely extensively on observation of the behavior of shop-keepers and their clients, and the environment in which they operated, followed by interviews with both.⁵ The Chinese field site was a small village (2-300 inhabitants) in western Shandong province, close to the border with Hebei. A two-lane paved road connected it to a nearby town, and public transport ran relatively frequently. The village itself had well-kept dirt roads, and a handful of shops, including a mobile phone one. All the shops were set up by people who had returned after having spent a few years working in urban areas, or by people who had family members who were internal migrant workers. Because of its proximity with paved roads and public transport, the village served as a hub for more remote villages, but also as a stop for passing vehicles. The mobile phone shop that was the locus of author 1’s fieldwork was owned by Ms. Hua (not her real name) and her family. Author 1 met with her several times between 2010 and 2011, in different times of the year, at both her original shop and at the one managed by her father, which she took over when her own shop was torn down to make space for a newly built 4-lane road in the summer of 2010. At first the meetings took place outside the shop, in a nearby rural shopping mall. Subsequently, author 1 spent a few days in Ms. Hua’s shop, to observe what kind of clientele she had and her interaction with them, and interviewed customers, Ms Hua, and her father. This data is triangulated and integrated with findings from interviews and observations in other mobile phone and computer shops in different villages in Shandong.

In India, almost every rural village of every size will have a small store of some sort, and these stores often serve in a social role, as do many small stores around the world. The country store in the US South, the bodega in Mexico, the toko in Indonesia—all serve as points of social gathering, a place to share gossip and knowledge, and to connect to the larger (and more distant) world outside of the village. As such, the shopkeeper serves not only as a provider of goods, but as, like Mrs. Hua above, a gatekeeper and enabler of the wider world and the goods and services associated with that world. The data on shopkeepers comes from various field sites and studies conducted in collaboration with academic partners and Intel Corporation. Observations and interviews regarding the impact of mobile phone and internet service on villagers were conducted in villages outside of Bangalore, in the rural areas of Gujarat State in Northwest India, around the town of Belgaum (in between Mumbai and Bangalore), and from work done on the project known as Daknet (Pentland, Fletcher, & Hassoon, 2004) in Rajasthan.

As we saw briefly above, there are similarities in the way rural ICT markets are organized in the two countries, especially in the ubiquity of informal retail shops and in the scarcity or indeed absence of brand names and higher-end products. Approaching these fields using the same methods, and positioning ourselves mainly as observers, gave us insights into the local, socio-cultural differences, as well as an opportunity to compare the role played by the two different systems—or networks, to echo Cowan, in shaping people’s choices. In China especially, long periods of silent observation in stores has been a key technique to understand the dynamics between shop-keepers and their clients, which were then explored in depth in interviews. The observation provided the time to become fully immersed in a reality that is very different from shopping in a Western context, and the opportunity to develop an appropriate interview protocol. Questions based on assumptions and experiences, rather than on this initial phase of observation, would have resulted in many dead-ends and much time wasted to find the right points of entry. Observation required an early investment of ‘unproductive time’ that was repaid abundantly by informed questions and rich answers.

SHOP-KEEPERS AS GATE-KEEPERS

In both sites, the network components that constrain consumers’ choices are multiple and overlapping. There are State policies, such as the “Household Goods to the Countryside” that heavily discount local brands in China (Chinese Ministry of Commerce, n.d.); rural distribution networks dominated by local, low-cost brands; a delivery service that does not reach many rural areas; and, last but not least, limited incomes. ICT shops are often improvised establishments run by returned migrants and their families in China, and locals in India, where wholesale purchase is limited to what they themselves have access to. Rural ICT purchase is therefore a negotiation between what the consumer desires, and what he has reasonable access to (and the pronoun ‘he’ is a conscious choice, as clients of rural ICT shops tend to be men); ICT use is also often shaped by the technical help that shop owners give their customers, from loading airtime on phones, to choosing ring-tones, to downloading music.

FIGURE 1. The “Consumption Junction” in rural China