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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
30
The moral
economy
of the
household
The moral economy is an umbrella term that describes the situation in the
home resulting from the domestication of material and immaterial objects.
According to Silverstone, each household develops its own moral economy
(Silverstone 1999 49). It does this by domesticating objects. Roger Silverstone
and his colleagues developed the framework to compliment the theory of a
formal, public economy with that of an alternative economy, which Silverstone
calls the economy of meanings (Silverstone 1999 48). The idea is that understanding
a household’s financial situation is not enough for understanding contemporary
consumption (Silverstone 2005). Within the framework, each home
has its own moral economy; each household is linked via this moral economy
to the shared, public world through consumption and uses it to appropriate
objects from the public pool of objects accessible to the household.
Central to the framework is the idea that an object’s symbolic meanings
change when it transcends the boundaries between public and private (Kopytoff
1986; Silverstone 1999 48). This change in meaning is not something that
the object does in and of itself. Instead, its meaning changes because the people
appropriating the object define it in their own subjective ways. The meanings
that producers and marketing assign to an object often echo in the new
meanings it is given within the home, but the producer or marketer does not
determine the meanings (Silverstone & Haddon 1996). The meanings that the
object gets during the appropriation phase are created as part of the moral
economy as the household “negotiates” what to think about the object, what to
do with it, when to use it and where to put it. Every time somebody brings a
new object into a home, it is processed within the household’s moral economy.
The arriving object is like a statement to which the household responds.
A bag of groceries is a good, familiar example of how the moral economy
works. Groceries are usually part of a household’s daily routines and go through