Do it yourself. A different history of the consumer age

现代消费社会的大多数公民都是产消者（prosumers），他们可能没有考虑到这一点。他们购买烘焙原料、电钻或染发剂，然后把它们做成蛋糕、家具和发型。通过将购买的物品与自己的劳动结合起来，他们既是消费者又是生产者。这种位于生产和消费之间灰色地带的无形经济，是随着现代消费社会的兴起而兴起的。在现代消费社会中，人们越来越多地有机会在购买市场上的现成物品、家庭生产以及两者之间的许多选择之间做出选择。尽管私人家庭生产和消费之间的相互作用产生了巨大的影响，但学术界却很少注意到这一点。“做还是买”的决定以及介于两者之间的许多选择从来不是私事。关于提供方式的决定传达了关于身份的想法，以及关于时间、金钱和材料等资源的使用。因此，家庭如何自给自足一直是政治家、工业界和学者感兴趣的问题。我的书调查了19世纪80年代到80年代这段时期。它分析了(1)干预提供私人家庭模式的尝试，如在学校课程中引入手工培训和家庭经济学，“好家庭主妇”的理想，在世界大战期间禁止家庭屠杀，政府推动的计划增加了德意志民主共和国的家庭装修活动，尤其是家庭装修或食品工业等分支机构的经济利益。在更实际的层面上，这本书(2)研究了自己制造东西的实践：家庭在家里生产什么，如何生产，以及出于什么原因？任务是如何按照性别、阶级和世代划分的？节俭、乐趣和质量意识有多重要？什么是工作，什么是休闲？在我的书中，我对生产和消费、工作和休闲的二分法提出了质疑，这种二分法系统性地忽略了所有不符合这些坐标的活动。作为关于家庭生产的话语和实践的第一个学术和历史分析，这本书揭示了一个高度动态和分级的实践和产品的发展，它在制造和购买之间创造了大量的选择。通过解释这些话语和实践如何塑造社会和经济秩序，本书提供了对高度现代性的新解释。这本书认为，自己动手的做法在现代社会中发挥了重要的调节作用，因为它们有助于平衡生产与消费、工作与休闲，与性别、阶级和世代有关。我认为家庭生产是一个巨大的市场，也是一种道德经济，在这种经济中，供应问题与对或错的行为、身份和榜样的观念紧密交织在一起，简而言之：“制造还是购买”的决定在多大程度上影响了社会和经济秩序？

Most citizens of modern consumer societies are prosumers, presumably without thinking about it. They buy baking ingredients, electric drills, or hair color, and turn them into cakes, furniture, and hairstyles. By combining purchased items with their own labor, they are both consumers and producers. This invisible economy in the grey area between production and consumption rose together with modern consumer society when people increasingly had the opportunity to chose between purchasing ready-made items on the market, household production, and the many options in between. Despite its enormous impact the interaction between production and consumption in private households has received little scholarly attention.“Make or buy”-decisions and the many options in between never were (just) a private matter. Decisions about modes of provision transport ideas about identities and about the employment of resources such as time, money, and materials. How households provisioned themselves was therefore always of interest for politicians, industry, and scholars. My book investigates the period from the 1880s to the 1980s. It analyzes (1) attempts to intervene in modes of provision of private households such as the introduction of manual training and home economics in school curricula, the ideal of the “good housewife”, bans on home slaughtering during the World Wars, government-driven programs to increase home improvement activities in the GDR, and not least the economic interests of branches such as the home improvement or food industries. On a more practical level, the book (2) looks into practices of making things oneself: What did households produce at home, how, and for which reasons? How were tasks divided along the lines of gender, class, and generation? How important were thriftiness, fun, and quality awareness? What was considered work or leisure?In my book, I call into question the powerful dichotomies of production and consumption, work and leisure which systematically ignore all activities that do not fit into these coordinates. As the first scholarly and historical analysis of the discourses and practices around household production, the book reveals the development of a highly dynamic and graded repertoire of practices and products which created a multitude of options between make and buy. By explaining how such discourses and practices shaped social and economic order, the book offers a new interpretation of high modernity.Practices of making things oneself, the book argues, served as important regulative in modern societies, as they helped balancing out production and consumption, work and leisure with regard to gender, class, and generation. I show household production as a huge market and as a moral economy in which questions of provision were closely intertwined with ideas about right or wrong actions, identities, and role models, in short: to which degree social and economic orders were shaped by decisions about “make or buy?”