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In China, Ms. Hua’s elder brother migrated to Shenzhen, in that southern hub of factories that is the Guangdong Province, in the early 2000s, and found a job as a driver. He soon realized that there mobile phone factories were everywhere, and they had models that were newer and cheaper than those that could be found in his village. He proposed to his parents to open a mobile phone shop in the village: they would operate it, and he would mail the phones from Shenzhen. In 2005, they transformed a room of their home into a store. They sell Chinese brand and shanzhai phones, SIM cards, and accessories like batteries, earphones, and phone decorations. Ms. Hua, who began working in the shop full-time as soon as she graduated from middle-school, is the main salesperson as well as the technical expert, and her father is in charge of the administration and liaising with companies like China Mobile. She keeps track of the best-selling models and of trends, and then discusses orders and purchases with her brother, who sends new phones from Shenzhen about once a month, and brings a suitcase-full when he comes home during the Spring Festival holidays. She also helps clients choose and configure their phones and calling plans. She can also troubleshoot common problems and diagnose more serious ones.
Shop keepers like Ms. Hua serve the community where they grew up. These are typically small places, where everybody knows each other in a way that is the dream of front-line customer service in official businesses. Because people mostly farm the same crops, and migrate to the same areas and to similar jobs, shop keepers know exactly what is the budget of their customers, and when they will have disposable income and will be likely to buy higher value phones (around Spring Festival and at harvest time), and the periods when cheaper phones or repairs to existing ones will have to make do. There were no foreign brand-name mobile phones, nor Chinese upper market brands in the several rural shops Author 1 visited. The shop keepers were all fully aware that the shanzhai phones were copies and not real foreign brands, but were typically parsimonious in sharing this information with their clients, who often asked for a new version of their (original) Nokia, at the time still one of the most popular phones around. Ms. Hua described her strategy for balancing her customers’ requests with her inventory as one of finessing the information asymmetry between her knowledge of the market and the customer’s. She was aware that younger, more tech-savvy people were not shopping in her store, and that her clients were often looking for characteristics that she could ‘spin’ in selling her stock. For example, one morning a man in his 30s came to the store to look at her latest models. His phone—a Chinese brand feature phone—was still working perfectly well, but he declared he was tired of it, and wanted something new, with more features and better looking. Ms. Hua did not ask what kind of features he was looking for. She pulled out her most expensive phone, and started showing him how it worked. It was June, which meant that the wheat harvest had just been sold. She knew that her client had cash to spend. After some bargaining and hesitation, the man purchased a knock-off of a Sony-Ericsson. However, he did not know how to move the SIM card from the old phone to the new one, which Ms. Hua did for him. Then he asked her to choose the ringtone for him, and to show him how to listen to the music that came pre-installed on the phone. He could not operate the phone himself, so Ms. Hua spent a significant amount of time going through each function with him.
In the Little Rann of Kuch, in the state of Gujarat, the local shopkeeper was the person who provided not only basic supplies for villagers such as shampoo and soup mix, but also the mobile phones that have become a critical necessity for those who work in the salt pans of the arid desert area. Particularly for the salt-workers, the goods and services the shopkeeper provided were of the utmost importance: being so remotely located from the village themselves, often the one saltworker with a motorcycle would gather all the salt workers’ phones and transport them to the shop to be charged up, repaired, or to top up the minutes on their pre-paid account. The same was true in the villages that lie within 100 kilometers of Bangalore: villagers could not afford the trip to the city to shop for any sort of ICTs, but instead relied on the informal shop owner as the go-to person to recommend and procure, for example, a second-hand Nokia phone. In the dusty streets of Belgaum, the local phone stores are more than a village store, but the function of the store owner is much the same, as he guides each customer to a certain phone or brand. There is little to no choice of what type of phone might be had; that is all in the hands of the shopkeeper. Why this works is also a function of cultural behaviors and beliefs, which will be discussed more below.
This might seem like straight-forward customer service, even if somehow heavy-handed. However, the system of advertising, marketing, information, and peer-to-peer discussions that contributes to shape consumers’ desires and that exists in urban areas is, in rural areas in general, concentrated in one single person—the shop keeper, who then becomes a gate keeper. If we look at the concentric circles around the consumption junction, the more operators there are in a circle such as wholesale and retail, the more options a consumer will have, or at least be aware of. In the countryside, people who are not ‘mobile,’ nor educated enough are cut off from a variety of resources that shape their choice, and rely on one entry point, the shop keeper, to fulfill their consumerist aspirations.
Rural customers are limited not only to accessing the goods and information that the shop-keeper offers them, but often also depend on them to learn about different uses of ICT, or to actually use basic functions of their phone. A lot of traffic in all the rural mobile phone shops visited came from customers needing help to figure out basic functions such as locating the volume control, or changing ringing tones, as well as shopping for better calling plans and adding money to their pre-paid phones—this latter a service often offered for a small fee. This represents a second-layer of gate-keeping, but also a significant investment in time and relationship building on the part of shop-keepers.6 And in underdeveloped markets, this investment can be so disproportionate to the economic returns that it makes the business unviable (Wallis, 2012). Thus the consumption junction for the consumer is in fact a funnel, where most of the actual decisions are taken further up the chain.
THE CONSTRAINTS OF GENDER AND AGE
In rural China, transport and telecommunication infrastructure exists and is overall efficient (Baum-Snow & Turner, 2012; Yu & Li-Hua, 2010). From the perspective of shop keeper like Ms. Hua, this meant that they can travel easily to bigger towns to get parts or restock their supplies, or, if their distribution network was organized along family lines, they could get their new stock shipped reliably and affordably through the post office or through couriers. Villagers also can travel relatively easily from small and relatively isolated villages to bigger centers, and have more choice in their purchases, and younger, more educated and more mobile people did just that. In India, on the other hand, infrastructure such as roads can be challenging depending on the location. More than physical barriers to transportation, however, are the barriers to travel that come in the form of social class and gender, which can be seriously constraining.
In both places, older people and married women were less mobile. In China, the former did not typically venture outside the village by themselves, and certainly not to purchase ICT. At most, they discussed purchases with younger members of the family, and on occasions even paid for them, but left both the practical choice and the logistics of the purchase to them. Married women, unless they worked outside the village, tended to be more tied to the home and less free to take unescorted trips to urban areas. Less mobile people such as these were typical patrons of Ms. Hua’s shop, together with other local residents and passers-by attracted by the big China Telecom sign outside and the convenient location. Women of all ages tended to receive mobile phones as gifts from men, or from other family members who had migrated to urban areas. The shop keeper was then the point of reference for these purchases, and in high season Ms. Hua had several male customers per week asking her advice on what kind of phone to buy. They trusted her as someone who knew both what other women would like and what was fashionable not only in the nearby city, but in faraway places like Shenzhen, since they knew she was getting her phones there. She based her advice on her own experience (and stock), and typically recommended shanzhai phones with bright color combinations, and models that had good pre-loaded music. She dismissed the idea that older women might want different features on their phones, such as radio, or bigger fonts. If the phone she sold went to a young or middle-aged woman, they would often became her customers too, but only to buy airtime or accessories, or which she carried a large selection.
In rural India, the cultural barriers to using ICTs come not only in the form of physical distance from urban centers and all the diversity of products and services such locations offer. There are a myriad of issues—language diversity, social class, illiteracy, for example—that hinder the development of, for example, smart phone adoption. Here we will briefly examine one of them, gender roles and cultural expectations. Women’s roles and life opportunities are changing and broadening in the urbanized spaces of India, and getting an education and finding a good place of employment are now seen as equally important for young women as they have been for men. A part of being well-educated and modern is also knowing how to navigate ICTs and having one’s own mobile phone. However, in the rural villages and small towns in which the majority of Indians reside, women are still subject to more strict rules of behavior that both circumscribe their actions and their mobility (Tacchi, Kitner and Crawford 2012). Mobile phone ownership for women in rural villages is far from common, comprising about 30 percent of rural women, and when women and girls do have a phone, it is typically gifted to them by a male relative—a husband, brother, or uncle. But these same men most often get the phone they will gift from a small shop, and their purchase decision will be driven by the agreed-upon but unspoken norms around the roles that women are believed to fill in society. As such, it is commonly believed that women should not be in the streets too much, and that the home is the best place for her. Nor should a woman be on the phone too much as that might lead her to neglect the household duties. So even when the male family members decides to purchase a phone for his daughter, for example, he will have these gender themes in mind, as will the shopkeeper. Hence, many women get plain feature phones, often second-hand, as they are not seen as needing more complex technology like a smart phone.
This unspoken cultural agreement between the purchaser and the shopkeeper leads to constraining choice in the type of technology that is distributed in rural areas and how that technology is consumed. Interviews with husbands and wives in rural Gujarat bore out these observations, and women were often heard to comment that a “fancy” phone was “not for them” as they would have not use for it in the home. This gender bias in technology plays out in other areas than phones: boys are often the recipients of computers where their sisters use a phone exclusively; mothers get the old phones handed down from their sons when they buy a new phone. Shopkeepers reinforce this thinking by asking who the phone is being purchased for and then suggesting that a certain color or type would be most appropriate for a girl or boy (Author’s fieldnotes, Belgaum, 2011).
CONCLUSION
An ecosystem approach that accounts holistically for purchasing patterns in rural areas of the Global South can lead to a better understanding of the broader market and the people that live day to day within that system. This paper began to map out where the consumption junction is and what are the infrastructural as well as the social elements that make it up, from gender to age, from access to transportation to choices made by local shop keepers.
The dates when we carried out our research are important. As noted above, a defining characteristic of rural distribution networks in emerging economies is their extreme reactiveness to local and temporal circumstances, and their success is due to their ability to respond swiftly to market changes. Ms. Hua’s shop was made possible by the sudden appearance of low-cost, Chinese brands or shanzhai (i.e. pirated) mobile phones in the mid-2000 (Keane & Zhao, 2012), as well as by the lack of regulation (or enforcement of existing regulations) that characterized rural commerce. Her shop did not have a commercial license, it paid no taxes, and the accounting was done by hand in an old school notebook. At the same time, shop keepers like herself had easy access to wholesale shops within a bus ride, which churned out new models constantly. The small profit these shop keepers made came mostly from having extremely low overheads: the store itself was usually a converted room of the family’s house, the inventory was whatever can be bought in a single trip to the nearest wholesaler, and the workforce was composed of family members who could put in an indefinite number of hours, keeping the shop constantly open, but without ‘official’ wages and the related taxes and benefits. A few years earlier, there were no hole-in-the-wall mobile phone nor computer shops, because the low-cost items they sold did not exist. In a few years, many of these shops will not exist, at least in villages closer to urban areas, as the government has already started to crack down on them, by inspecting them and requiring the appropriate licenses and a following of existing rules.
In India, however, the advent of “China Phones” came a bit later, and was more of an urban phenomenon and not aimed really at all at rural dwellers. Rather, the rural shops selling phones were selling mostly second-hand phones, and in the majority were Nokia phones, and then some of the lesser brands such as Motorola and LG. The shop owners would either travel themselves to urban centers where they could buy the used phones, or they would take an order from a villager, recommend what might be bought, and then call their contact in the city to make a deal. The phones would then be delivered to the shopkeeper, and the villager would have little choice but to accept what was delivered and pay the price. Furthermore, if the phone broke or had other operational issues, the shopkeeper again was the person to go to for negotiating repairs or replacement.
In both places, the situation may be quite different today. So why focus on a phenomenon that looks so transient? Our work suggests that the changing nature of these networks is an intrinsic characteristic that will not disappear even when the informal economy becomes formal, or e-commerce reaches rural and remote areas. The network will continue to influence, directly and indirectly, the choices that final consumers make, and understanding it when its influence is particularly visible like in our field sites will help understand choices that cannot be interpreted only as cultural or personal expressions of the consumer. Consumer choices in the field of ICT are the result of a complex system that includes intrinsic motivation (that is, in turn, influenced by one’s cultural background, as suggested by Iyengar & Lepper, 1999), the availability of goods and support to understand and operate them, and finally the social environment in general.
Cowan argues that the consumption junction is “where technological diffusion occurs, and it is also the place where technologies begin to reorganize social structures” (Cowan, 1989:263). We have seen how social structures that see women as less in control of money and more dependent on males for their choices are reproduced in the purchase and use of mobile phones. However, the situation is not static. In rural China, young women migrate to urban areas as much as young men, and this experience brings them more independence and more status in the village, thanks also to an increase in financial independence. In rural India, non-governmental organizations like the Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, have been usurping the role of the shopkeeper in the rural areas, recognizing the gatekeeper role they play is detrimental to the advancement of women’s status in villages. SEWA makes available micro-loans to purchase phones, and provides women training so that all types of mobile phones (and other ICTs) are accessible and useful (Author’s fieldnotes, 2010).
With this study, we therefore want to suggest that the consumption junction is a locus of constant change, and that understanding its different components is important to understand future changes. Future studies might consider addressing small-scale entrepreneurship and new technologies in addressing issues of access and empowerment.
Elisa Oreglia is a post-doc at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where she received her PhD in Information Management and Systems. Her research is on the circulation and use of mobile phones and computers at the margins, with a particular focus on China.
Kathi R. Kitner is a cultural anthropologist and Senior Research Scientist with Intel Labs’ since 2006. She researches how the social constructs of gender and class act as a conduit for different types of technology usage and adoption and is currently exploring vibrant data, urban experiences and mobility in informal economies in South Africa.
Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2013, pp. 172–185. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.
NOTES
1 Cowan’s approach recalls in many ways the approach of Actor Network Theory (ANT), which also puts the network at the center of its inquiry. However, whereas Cowan’s perspective is ‘embedded’ in the network and attempts to recreate it from the consumer’s perspective, ANT scholars look at the network from a super partes perspective, not from a within it (Law, 1992). Rogers in his seminal work “Diffusion of Innovation” focuses mostly on the role that communication and social systems have in helping innovation spread from research labs to society, but does not really consider exogenous factors that make up the network, and that cannot be influenced by communication channels (Rogers, 2003).
2 According to estimates by the ITU, in 2012 only 12.58% of the population had access to the Internet. The percentages are higher in China, with 42.1% of the population online, but this goes down to 27.6% in rural areas (CNNIC 2013, ITU 2013).
3 A much cited example is the one of Unilever, which created single-serve doses, or sachets, of their personal care products so that they could be affordable by poorer (and often rural) consumers in India (Hammond & Prahalad, 2004). In the ICT field, Nokia’s success in Asian rural markets was attributed in part to its partnering with local distributors and adapting to local conditions through the provision of services targeted to rural users such as Nokia Life Tools (Alcacer, Khanna, Furey, & Mabud, 2011).
4 For example, when malaria specialists piloted a program in rural Kenya to train shop keepers to educate their clients about the correct amount of anti-malarial drugs, they found a marked increase in the purchase of drugs with the appropriate percentage of chloroquinine, and in the number of children with malaria fevers who were given a sufficient amount of the medicine. Although the authors acknowledged the fact that shop keepers’ motivations could prove unreliable and unlikely to make them community educators super partes, they identified them as an important nexus of information circulation and sharing about specific goods (Marsh et al., 1999).
5 It is also worth noting that our work was part of wider research projects that focused mostly on the final consumer/user of ICT, and whose results have been published or written up elsewhere (Kuriyan & Kitner, 2007; Oreglia & Kaye, 2012; Tacchi, Kitner, & Crawford, 2012)
6 Ilahiane thus describes a mobile phone shop keeper in a bazaar: “He seems always to be building a montage for his scene. He is smooth; he uses this to gain the trust of shoppers and vendors. When one goes to the cellular store in the modern district, one will never be invited behind the counter. But in Joutia, vendors will sit down with their customers, show them how to navigate the interface, and discuss the relative merits of various technologies. The Samurai and his associates spent an average of at least 30 to 40 minutes with potential buyers: ‘we provide free services here and there so that we can build trust; people are illiterate and we explain to them the functions and the basics of mobile phones. All they need to know is how to use the phone for talking. That is how we do our advertisement. Good work and good words lead to social networks; and people come from all over, even people from the Moroccan Radio and Television, to search for the Samurai.’” (Ilahiane & Sherry, 2008:251)