1
Whether contemporary consumer cultures across the globe are becoming homogenized or
whether they are still characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity has been the topic of a
lively debate within the social sciences for more than a decade. On one side of this debate stand
proponents of the homogenization thesis who argue that the proliferation of large multinational
companies colonize local cultures (e.g. Ritzer 1996). On the other side are scholars who argue for
alternatives to the globalization of consumer cultures and illustrate how consumers might, to
follow the typology suggested by Belk & Ger (1996), resort to nationalism and a return to the
roots, consumer resistance, local appropriation, or creolization. Thompson and Arsel (2004)
question both the heterogenization and the homogenization strands and suggest that large,
dominant corporations might forge hegemonic brandscapes. By this, the authors mean "the
hegemonic influences that global experiential brands exert on their local competitors and the
meanings consumers derive from their experiences of these glocal servicescapes" (Thompson
and Arsel 2004: 632).
The purposes here are twofold: we wish to explore how the hegemonic brandscape may
operate in a cultural context outside of North America by exploring coffee cultural discourses in
the Scandinavian context. As a kind of commentary to, or re-inquiry of, Thompson and Arsel's
2
(2004) study of the hegemonic influence that the Seattle-based company Starbucks exerts on the
US coffee culture we explore how the logic of the hegemonic brandscape becomes glocalized in
the Scandinavian context. While we generally agree with the analysis and take seriously the
proposition that Starbucks exerts a global structure of common difference on local coffee
cultures across the globe, we wish to explore and illustrate how different local market contexts
implies different competitive and positioning roles for Starbucks and the like. Secondly, and
more importantly, our purpose is also a more general one: namely to explore whether there is
such a thing as a specific Scandinavian consumer culture that interact with global structures in the
process of glocalization. The article and the supplementary videography therefore explore how
such a consumer culture historically deals with flows of the global cultural economy. Coffee
culture seems an eminent site of exploration as Scandinavia constitutes the world's highest per
capita consumption of coffee.
Our empirical investigations in Scandinavia, a cultural setting where Starbucks has yet not
entered the market albeit gained significant cultural influence, show that there is a long-standing
historically established coffee culture that exists in parallel to both a starbuckified coffee culture
and a coffee connoisseurship culture. Our detailed analysis of this coffee consumptionscape
illustrate that there is a plurality of cultural styles along which the different types of coffee
establishments differ. At the same time, we show that there are tendencies toward the hegemonic
influx of starbuckified dimensions suggested by Thompson and Arsel.
GLOCALIZATION
Glocalization, as coined by Robertson (1992), is often held to suggest an intermingling of
the global and the local. However, the concept is more complex than that. Glocalization not only
implies how local cultures adapt and re-interpret global influences. It impies that local--or the
idea of the local--becomes global; a universal idea which becomes culturally significant exactly
because of an emerging consciousness of the "world as a whole" (Robertson 1992). In the
3
context of marketing and branding this has been explored by Ger (1999) in her suggestion of
mobilization of local cultural capital enabling local firms to "outlocal the global competition".
The other dimension of glocalization means that the global always is localized; that is, re-
interpreted to fit with local cultural frames of reference ­ as argued by Miller on Coca Cola in
Trinidad (Miller 1998).
Often research in consumption and brand culture suggest that the presence of a
transnational brand establishes structures of common difference (Wilk 1995) along which
competing (local) brands have to define themselves. For example, in Thompson and Arsel's
work, competing brand establishments have emerged as a response to the massive presence of a
single brand. Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to
Starbucks. The authors claim that there were only 200 freestanding coffee houses in 1990
compared to 14,000 in 2003 (2004: 631).
In the empirical setting of this project, there are no single competitive actors or brands
which define the competitive situation. Still, many of the structures of common difference
established by Starbucks are winning ground but interact with a historically constituted coffee
culture. This historically constituted coffee culture also comprises certain structural rules of brand
competition in the coffee culture. This hence constitutes a different hegemonic struggle in the
Scandinavian cultural context than in the US context. In this sense we understand the local coffee
culture more in terms of a hegemonic consumptionscape than a hegemonic brandscape.
COFFEE GROUNDS: THE SCANDINAVIAN COFFEE CONSUMPTIONSCAPE
In the following section we will describe the local coffee consumptionscape. The local
coffee culture and its history will be described at some length in order for the reader to be able to
follow how dominant ideas of global consumption ideals are diffused. Also, the overview of the
contemporary Scandinavian coffee consumptionscape describes the canvas on which the
structures of common differences of starbuckification needs to be inscribed. It is crucial when
4
discussing globalization tendencies to remember that globalization is by no means something that
happened all of a sudden during the latter part of the twentieth century when multinational
companies began spreading their products all over the globe. Instead, it can be seen as the
constant back and forth flow of ideas and goods that has historically characterized most parts of
the world for millenniums (Robertson 1992)1
. This perspective is for example advocated by
Elliott (2001) in her analysis of Starbucks where she sees coffee as a form of transborder
communication. For Scandinavia, located on the far northern rim of Europe, globalization has
always been of utmost centrality. During a couple of hundred years around the turn of the first
millennium Scandinavians were on the sending side of globalization as the Vikings raided large
parts of Europe, Russia, and as far down as Turkey, and thus spread the Scandinavian culture.
Since then, however, Scandinavia has mostly been on the receiving side of globalization and has
readily adopted the behaviors gleaned from continental Europe. It is in the light of this
historically longstanding willingness to accept and adopt ideas from continental Europe that the
Scandinavian coffee culture must be viewed. Coffee drinking in this part of the world has been
an integral part of social life for a long time and was initially introduced in Europe during the
latter parts of the seventeenth century. Some like to locate the beginning of European coffee
culture in London, where Brits returning from traveling in the Ottoman empire brought with
them the habit of drinking coffee. The first coffee house in London opened its doors to the
public as early as 1652. London coffee culture prospered for about a hundred years but then
gradually lost out to the tea-drinking that we to this day associate with the Brits (Ellis 2006).
Therefore, others like to point at the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 as the starting point. When
the Turks left the city, the Turkish coffee culture was left behind and the first café was opened in
1
One may argue that the Copernican revolution was a necessary component in the development
of globalization since it constituted the possibility of one of the key elements of globalization,
namely the consciousness of the world as a whole (Robertson 1992) or a global reflexivity
(Waters 2001). However, the processes of increasing time-space distantiation have occurred prior
to that, particularly in connection with historical world systems such as the Roman empire
(Friedman 1995).
5
1685 in the living room of Johannes Deodat, an Armenian spy (Öberg 2005). Throughout the
seventeenth century, coffee drinking was spread amongst the upper-class in Europe but the habit
quickly trickled down to the lower classes who drank coffee for its invigorating qualities, and to
cure hangovers and flatulence.
Shortly after the rise of coffee culture in Vienna, it was introduced in Scandinavia but for
slightly different reasons. In Sweden, for example, coffee was placed on the pharmacy list of
approved drugs in 1687 and was recommended for overall strengthening of the stamina. But
coffee drinking quickly gained popularity outside of the medical purposes and finally became so
popular in Sweden that the state saw no other solution than to ban coffee drinking in the
summer of 1794 to save the state finances. Too much money was pouring out of the country and
the state could come up with no other way to stop the outflow. A special police force was
designated to patrol the cities and those caught in the act of drinking coffee were sent to prison
(Svenska Kaffeakademien 2006). During these times, coffee houses served an important social
function and were perhaps equivalent to the so-called third spaces (Oldenburg 1989) recently
given sociological attention and attributed to some of the success of Starbucks (Thompson and
Arsel 2004). Much of the intellectual and not least political development of Europe took place in
coffee houses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Elliott 2001; Ellis 2006;
Guggenbühl 2003), and a parallel development could be detected in Scandinavia. To this day,
cafés and coffee shops have served an important social role and some of the existing coffee
serving establishments date back to the late 19th
century, a few even earlier than that.
In the latter part of the twentieth century coffee cultures flowed, creolized and materialized
in new forms as a global cultural economy emerged. Italian espresso bars were hot in 1950s Soho
in London, the American diner concept entered Scandinavia in the 1930s to become the working
class kaffebar (Biering 2003) serving early morning coffee and lunch and came to epitomize
Danish lunch culture (there are only a small number of these left). In the mid 1970s French
inspired brasseries emerged in the urban Scandinavian centres and introduced Southern
6
European coffee culture to the market (albeit in the French form ­ café au lait was all the rage in
the late 1980s, early 1990s). In the 1990s Scandinavia saw the emergence of both the
Starbuckified coffee cultural style and a connoisseurship style with the emergence of single bars
and chains of coffee shops focusing on Italian inspired coffee brewing.
We will mostly pay attention to the way coffee is served in various retail/service outlets and
not particularly to the abundance of coffee serving practices in consumers' domestic spaces. But
to give the reader a flavor of the plurality that can be found in peoples' household consumption,
and thus give a suggestion of how intertwined coffee drinking is in Scandinavians' lives, we
provide the following examples: Virtually all households in Scandinavia have a much used (and,
according to the coffee aficionados, abused) coffee maker in their possession and there are
several variations of drinking coffee. The variations include, but are not limited to, the
Laplandish practice of putting cheese in the coffee in the arctic parts of Scandinavia to the
practice of pouring coffee onto a saucer and filtering it through a sugar cube held between the
front teeth that can still be observed at nursing homes in the southern parts. Coffee is an
essential part of the conduct of everyday life, it is used on many social occasions and is an
essential part of showing hospitality--coffee is always offered when visiting most Scandinavian
homes. Coffee is traditionally integrated into the temporal structures of everyday life stemming
from rural culture: coffee at 6 a.m. for breakfast, 9 a.m. for the morning break, 3 p.m. for the
afternoon break served with a cookie or cake, 9 p.m. for the evening coffee (again, served with
something sweet). At work, a joint coffee-making break may be used for informal discussions or
negotiations. Coffee may be used as a control mechanism at times of crisis when one has to
consider the situation and what to do next. The everyday coffee culture of Scandinavia bears
many resemblances to the culture of `a cuppa tea' in the UK.
7
METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES
The empirical setting of our project is Scandinavia. One justification for conducting the
study in this setting is that there is a strong and longstanding coffee culture. Scandinavians drink
a lot of coffee; the countries have the world's highest per capita annual coffee consumption, 26.4
pounds. In comparison, the US has an annual consumption per capita of only 8,8 pounds and
Italy--by many seen as the archetype of a coffee consuming nation--has an annual consumption
per capita of 10 pounds (coffeeresearch.org 2006). Scandinavia is thus not a blank canvas on
which the Starbuckified coffee consumptionscape can inscribe hegemonic ideas of how to
structure a coffee consumption experience; Scandinavians have been drinking coffee for a long
time and they drink lots of it.
The empirical focus of this project is coffee service establishments rather than consumer
practices. We are interested in mapping the cultural terrain which structures the possible
meanings and practices of coffee cultural consumption. Data was collected via extensive
fieldwork in Stockholm and Lund, Sweden and Odense and Copenhagen, Denmark, by way of
observation and description of a variety of coffee serving establishments. Most of these
observations were video recorded and we supplemented the observational data with interviews
with owners or employees of a variety of these establishments. Table 1 provides an overview of
the locations of data collection.
Data types
Establishment Location Description
Observation Video Interview
Espresso House (2
locations)
Lund, Sweden Americana
Lundagrd Lund, Sweden Viennesia
Mormors bageri Lund, Sweden
Bakery, Viennese
remnants
Alfons Coffee Shop Stockholm, Sweden
Culinaria ­ Italiana ­
Connoiseur
Café Larté Stockholm, Sweden Viennesia
Café Vetebullen Stockholm, Sweden Viennesia
Café Vetekatten Stockholm, Sweden Viennesia
8
Data types
Establishment Location Description
Observation Video Interview
Coffee Cup (2
locations)
Stockholm, Sweden Americana
Coffehouse by
George (2 locations)
Stockholm, Sweden Americana
Espresso House Stockholm, Sweden Americana
Kafferepet Stockholm, Sweden Viennesia
McCafé Stockholm, Sweden
Americana, run by
McDonald's
Molto Stockholm, Sweden Culinaria ­ Italiana
Robert's Coffee Stockholm, Sweden Americana
Sockerbagare
Anderson
Stockholm, Sweden
Bakery, Viennese
remnants
Sosta (2 locations) Stockholm, Sweden Culinaria ­ Italiana
Sturekatten Stockholm, Sweden Viennnesia
Tintarella di Luna Stockholm, Sweden Culinaria ­ Italiana
Tösses Stockholm, Sweden Viennesia
Valand Stockholm, Sweden
Wayne's Coffee (2
locations)
Stockholm, Sweden Americana
Baresso, Strget Copenhagen, Denmark Americana
Café Amokka Copenhagen, Denmark
Culinaria with elements
of brasserie
Café Europa Copenhagen, Denmark
Culinaria with brasserie
influence
La Glace Copenhagen, Denmark
Viennesia (est. late 19th
century)
Bakers Café Odense, Denmark
Viennesia, pastry shop
with coffee serving
Baresso / Arnold
Busk
Odense, Denmark Starbuckified
Café Sct. Gertruds Odense, Denmark Brasserie
Café Optimisten
Odense, Denmark
Alternative brasserie,
Culinaria
Guldbageren Odense, Denmark
Viennesia, pastry shop
with coffee serving and
seating
Marselv Grill Odense, Denmark
Highway restaurant.
Bulk coffee ­ Diner style
University
department kitchen
Odense, Denmark
Statoil Odense, Denmark
Americana, petrol
station with extensive
food and coffee serving
University Café Odense, Denmark
Culinaria, elements of
French brasserie style
Winters Kaffe Odense, Denmark
Specialty shop, home
market
9
The ethnographic data was supplemented with monitoring of the general popular media,
website content and secondary literature. The ethnographic body of data and our readings of the
general and specifically Scandinavian cultural history of coffee culture enabled us to identity three
ideal typical overall coffee cultural styles: Americana, Culinaria and Viennesia. These styles
existed in pure forms in many establishments and creolized forms in others.
CONTEMPORARY COFFEE CULTURAL STYLES IN THE SCANDINAVIAN MARKET
We have gathered from our empirical work that the retail outlets as well as the consumers
are predominantly searching for something that can be characterized as an "authentic market
offering" (Grayson and Martinec 2004). To further elaborate on this, we use the concepts of
indexical and iconic authenticity set forth by Grayson and Martinec (2004) in describing the
different types of establishments. In the case with coffee establishments, indexical authority
implies that the retail outlet has a factual and spatio-temporal link with something else.
Indexicality thus distinguishes "the real thing" from its copies (Grayson and Martinec 2004: 298).
For example, an Italian style café can achieve indexical authenticity if the coffee is served by
immigrants from Italy or if the coffee beans are of an Italian brand. Iconic authenticity, on the
other hand, refers to situations when something whose physical manifestation resembles
something that is indexically authentic (Grayson and Martinec 2004: 298). To exemplify, a
starbuckified coffee shop is perceived as indexically authentic if consumers experience that it is
similar to coffee shops found overseas. Grayson and Martinec are careful to point out that iconic
and indexical authenticity are not mutually exclusive and that authenticity is not an attribute
inherent in an object but better understood as an assessment made by a particular evaluator in a
particular context (Grayson and Martinec 2004: 299).
10
AMERICANA
The Americana coffee cultural style is heavily influenced by the coffee cultural ideals of
Starbucks. These ideals constitute the iconic authenticity which is referred to in an interview with
an employee from the Wayne's Coffee chain ­ he refers to `traditional cafés' as "not really café-
like" since they are lacking certain elements laid out in the structures of common difference of
starbuckification ­ such as music, layout, types of coffee served. As already mentioned, the
dominant global player has yet to enter the Scandinavian market making room for plenty of simile
brands. Wayne's Coffee, Coffee House by George, Robert's Coffee, Espresso House, Coffee
Cup and Baresso all draw on the style originally laid out by Starbucks. According to an interview
with the franchisee at an Espresso House in Lund, the owners of the Espresso House
corporation travel to the US a couple of times a year just to visit Starbucks outlets and be
inspired. They proudly announce that there is no difference whatsoever between Starbucks and
the particular local variation of Espresso House.
In addition to these simile brands a number of outlets such as restaurants, hot dog stands,
and gas stations utilize the structure of common difference of the coffee shop menu. We
interpret this as an illustrative example of the historical openness that Scandinavian markets have
to global culture. Furthermore, we discovered in Stockholm the McCafé ­ the world's first
McDonald's café following the structures of common differences inherent in the Starbucks
brandscape. This suggests that the glocalization of the hegemonic brandscape occurs at a global
level of brand competition as much as it does at a local level confirming the hegemonic force of
the Starbucks brandscape.
CULINARIA
The cultural style of Culinaria makes references to a number of different types of
authenticity. One type is through what is perceived as an indexical authenticity through a
reference to place of origin, most notably Italian cafés but also French brasseries. For example,
11
many of the places in Stockholm feature baristas from Italy or at least baristas fluent in Italian
and have names like Sosta ("Pause" in Italian), Tintarella di Luna (a stanza from an 60s Italian
schlager translating into "tanned by the moon"), or Molto ("a lot" in Italian) to further reinforce
their italianness. They also have their menus written entirely in Italian. This, at closer inspection,
stands in stark contrast to the faux-Italian vernacular developed at Starbucks (cf. Elliott 2001).
These places go to great lengths to avoid being the "theme-parked" Italian coffee places like
Starbucks. Instead, they wish to present themselves as just another hole-in-the-wall Italian coffee
shop. They pretend that it is the most normal thing in the world to go through the cold
Scandinavian winter and into the overwhelmingly Italian atmosphere of these places. But again,
they emphasize that they "just are" as opposed to other places that are "trying to be." Hence they
are mustering a legitimacy rooted in indexical authenticity. Whether they are successful in this
endeavor is an entirely different story.
The Culinaria category also house a different type of connoisseur café equally obsessed
with authenticity but more eclectic in their inspiration than the Italiana cafés described above.
These places are a postmodern concoction of everything "authentic", the menus are comprised
of fascinating juxtapositions of elements from across the globe: authentic NY style bagels with
salmon and crme cheese, authentic Croque Monsieur  la Paris, authentic bulgur salads from
North Africa, authentic 97% cocoa chocolate bars from Sumatra, authentic Turkish coffee, and
to top it of something spectacular like the possibility to buy an espresso made with authentic
Kopi Luwak, a special type of coffee where the beans have passed the digestive system of a small
cat animal in Indonesia, for sale at Alfons Coffee Shop in Stockholm. Others emphasize
authenticity by selling products of certain production methods such as the range of organic and
"politically correct" products at Café Optimisten in Odense, Denmark. At these places,
everything has either an indexical authenticity in that the ingredients are imported directly from
the original sources or an iconic authenticity in that they promise to make the different dishes or
drinks "just like" they do it in the original location. This obsession with the correct links to the
12
original locations stand in stark contrast to the "caffeinated cartography" observable at Starbucks
(Elliott 2001: 374). In her analysis of Starbucks, Elliott shows how Starbucks use "Coffee
Categories" that collapse space distanciation and emphasize taste rather than geography. The
category "Bold Expressions", for example, consists of coffees from Arabia, Indonesia and
Ethiopia. Here we see a mix of indexical and iconic authenticity brought to bear.
Our screening of the media reveals that the connoisseur coffee culture has a strong
presence in popular culture. For example, baristas from famous cafés are giving hints and tips for
those trying to brew the perfect cup of espresso or latte at home (Grossman 2006), reports are
given from coffee-making courses (Utterström 2005), and the champions from the national
barista championships are interviewed and given celebrity status (Sohlström 2006). The owners
and employees of one of the central Copenhagen café Europa are active in the Danish coffee
academy, the owner of Alfons Coffee Shop in Stockholm is the head of the Swedish coffee
academy, and several of both the Copenhagen and the Stockholm cafés are proud to employ
champions from the World Barista Championships held each year.
Rather than interpreting this refined culinary experience as an opposition to the influx of
the starbuckified hegemonic consumptionscape we see it as part of a general gastronomic slow
food movement not only opposing global standardized consumer culture but equally as much
local consumer culture that has deteriorated gastronomic qualities - in this case a reaction against
the standard filter coffee culture.
VIENNESIA
Historically, the traditional cafés in Scandinavia has been of the Viennese type. Many of
these cafés have a long history and were established at the end of the nineteenth century. Some
of them are even explicitly called "Wienerkafé" to really spell out the link to their central
European origins. As a curious note and to reinforce the connection to Vienna, what is called a
"Danish pastry" in the rest of the world is called a Wienerbröd, i.e. Viennese pastry, in the
13
Scandinavian countries. Largely, the legitimacy of these classic cafés is grounded in their
craftsmanship in confectionary and pastries. The traditional cafés therefore gain iconic
authenticity by expressing that, just like in the Viennese counterparts, the goods for sale are made
in-house. Even though the baked goods are at center stage, coffee is an integrated part of the
serving and plays a key role. These classic cafés are hence culturally understood as a place where
high quality coffee is served.
More rustic cafés that still aspire to the ideals standard set by the Viennese cafés constitute
a sub-genre among the traditional cafés. These places are more like a bakery with an attached café
section. They serve coffee and various goods baked on the premises but do not aspire to the
same flare that the more explicitly Viennese cafés do. While the popularity of the Viennese
establishments has been fluctuating over the last decades they are currently, according to media
reports, experiencing a positive trend with more visitors that spend more money (Lundbäck
2006).
A SCANDINAVIAN CONSUMER CULTURE?
Of all the establishments observed none were established as a resistance to the global
coffee cultural style identified with Starbucks. We did, upon directly asking our informants, find
skepticism towards the idea of establishing that specific brand in Scandinavia but the cafés were
not established in opposition. This stands in contrast to the coffee cultural climate reported by
Thompson and Arsel (Thompson and Arsel 2004) were the brand opposition was much more
explicit. Also, while excessive coffee latte drinking among the young and upcoming is sometimes
mocked in popular culture, there is no resistance towards any on the simile brands currently
colonizing Scandinavian coffee culture in the form of e.g. doppelgänger brand images discussed
by Thompson, Rindfleisch, and Arsel (Thompson, Rindfleisch and Arsel 2006).
A potential explanation for this is the radically different political climate in Denmark and
Sweden. The long standing domination of social-democratic ideas has lead to an ethos of equality
14
and egalitarianism, a pragmatic political climate which has its roots in the Scandinavian societies'
adaptation of Lutheran Protestantism, rural pietism and ideas of the Enlightenment. In the words
of prominent Danish historian Uffe stergaard, the Nordic region--or Norden--Is (self)
perceived as something "[...] non-European, non-Catholic, anti-Rome, anti-Imperialist, non-colonial, non-
exploitative, peaceful, small and social democratic" (stergaard 1997). Peasant culture had had an early
influence on political culture from around the 15th
century (Strth and Srensen 1997) and the
implementation of the Enlightenment project in Scandinavia focused on the Bildung of the
peasant. The peasant hence represented the cultural potential in the project of Enlightenment
that had been ascribed to the Bourgoisie in other Western European cultural contexts. This led to
a culture of pragmatism, balancing freedom and equality: "the Nordic peasant was too conservative to be
radical but too radical to be conservative" (Strth and Srensen 1997). This development has resulted in
an idea of commonness in which everybody--high and low--strive to be able to identify with
the middle2
. Furthermore, that the middle is the common focal point means that seemingly
contradictory societal phenomena--such as strong state welfarism and open markets--are made
to co-exist within the system. This does not mean that there are no distinctions or contradictions
in Scandinavian consumer culture, but that they are less acknowledged at least ideologically and
discursively. This is why we see in several interviews the insistence that everybody has a right to
be present in the market--from the Italian café owner who does not like but acknowledges the
Americana coffee shop brands as legitimate market actors to Café Optimisten who most clearly
embody the Scandinavian stance to social differentiation claiming "not to believe in competition".
AN HEGEMONIC CONSUMPTIONSCAPE ?
Starbucks have not yet entered the Scandinavian market, yet there is immense influence as
the structures of common difference established by Starbucks on what a coffee shop means are
2
Which is why, to this day in Scandinavia, people born and bred in even high economic and
cultural capital social milieus will go to great lengths in explaining that they are just `common
people' (often with a reference to some ancestor who was a peasant or worker).
15
employed by local imitations as well as in creolized forms. The diversity of these local coffee
consumptionscapes leads to the hegemony operating in a different manner. Since local coffee
culture exists already the impact of the hegemonic consumptionscape is less obvious yet more
complex.
What we argue is that the inherently global origins of the existing coffee cultural
consumptionscape problematizes the notion of glocalization since the local part of the global-
local dichotomy does not represent any kind of original authentic culture. Certain coffee cultural
consumption styles may have been authenticated over time so that they have come to represent
local culture (Askegaard and Kjeldgaard 2002). In the case of the coffee cultural
consumptionscape, the symbols of the local (here represented by the classic cafés of the
Viennesia type) and the global (Starbuckified coffee culture claiming `European' heritage) all stem
from the same socio-historical cultural origins of European coffee culture in the 17th
century.
Therefore, although Starbuckification exemplifies the hegemonizing force of a recent structure of
common difference, it stands in relation to other structures of common difference which are
locally ingrained, yet global--or foreign--in origin in an historical perspective. Both as a subset
at a superordinate level--the coffee bar in general--and at the subordinate level ­ in relation to
other structures of coffee culture. These structures of common difference occasionally
materialize in creolized forms.
This creolization, in the specific context of Scandinavia, occurs through the prism
of a different consumer culture than usually used for analysis in consumer culture theory. The
Scandinavian consumer culture stands in contrast--and yet is compatible--to both central
European ideologies as well as cultural influences stemming from North America. The
Scandinavian consumer culture is characterized by its ability to absorb these cultural
contradictions through a consensus making ideology which is also well-known in Scandinavian
management culture (Byrkjeflot 2003). In its pragmatic acceptance of global capitalism combined
with concern for minorities, its fervent implementation of the Enlightenment project combined
16
with state churches, its combination of extremely lax rules of employment with extreme degrees
of unionization, and its ethos of egalitarian brand competition, the development of a uniform
hegemonic coffee brandscape in Scandinavia seems unlikely.
However, that does not mean that Scandinavian markets are not prone to
hegemonic projects in consumer culture. Many hegemonic consumptionscapes exists in
Scandinavia--the Swedish state administration of the sales and distribution of alcohol, extremely
strong private companies that control the dairy and meat sectors, etcetera. However, these forms
of consumptionscape hegemony have been found somewhat acceptable because they first of all
were local and secondly in many cases were able to find legitimacy in a close connection to `the
people'. This connection is established either through the state, through the cooperative
movements (which control the major players in the dairy and meat sectors as well as a significant
part of food retailing) or by having the good of the people as a basis for business philosophy as is
claimed by for example IKEA. In a paraphrase of an earlier quotation, we might say that the
Scandinavian consumer culture is too conservative to be radical but too radical to be conservative.
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17
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