Rich DeVos describes "free enterprise" as a system which "allows the people to own privately the tools of production" [from Believe! p.85]. But the only time in American history when the people owned their tools of production was when most of them were engaged in agriculture, and the family farm or cottage industry was the basic unit of economic life. That stage of society was dealt a crushing blow by the rubber barons during the Guilded Age, and then destroyed by corporate capitalism before World War II. -- Butterfield, 1985: 114

Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to tell you, you have made me an honest man in my own family. Because I was here not too many years ago, as you know, not in this exact place, but speaking to this meeting. And I went home and told Nancy, who wasn't with me at the time, about it, and I don't think I could quite make her believe it. Now she knows....

Well, it's a great pleasure to be back here and a great pleasure to be talking to you again. Because I think I told you the first time, you really are capitalism in America!

Former President Ronald Reagan speaking to an Amway function (Kerns 1982: 108) quoted in Bromley, 1995: 153

The Amway Corporation is a company that seeks to appropriate the socio-economic and political aspects of a distributor’s life into a singular, and totalizing, system. As my discussion of SA8® and The Amway House have illustrated, consumption of Amway products involves something more significant than the purchase of a product for its use-value. Indeed consumption habits are shown to both reflect and mold multiple aspects of daily living. In trying to make sense of Amway, I believe we may best understand this phenomena as evangelistic consumption. That is, a specific and important series of experiences, products, and ideas must come to be consumed and internalized (sometimes literally as in the case of vitamins, food bars, juice, etc.) in order for an Amway distributor to "convert" to the Amway dream and stay within the ranks of Amway.³³ This form of consumption differs then significantly from the "average" shopper perusing the aisles of Safeway, Fred Meyers, or Nordstrom, etc. That is, the question goes beyond one of taste and use value to an attempted conversion or shift in lifestyle (in the most dedicated Amway distributors). Consequently, in regard to this particular organization, I diverge from Campbell’s thesis that 

...there may well be good reasons for believing that it is unwise of sociologists to build theories of modern consumer behavior around the concept of ‘lifestyle’ . For whilst lifestyle-based categories may be of value in the context of marketing and advertising, there is little evidence to suggest their sociological significance....This is clearly critical because although individuals may easily develop new tastes, there is much evidence to suggest that the values that people hold do not change much throughout their lifetime. Both these considerations suggest that the majority of consumers are not actually in a position freely to adopt a new lifestyle (or identity) simply by the expedient of changing their consumption patterns; either because of the limitations imposed by their objective circumstances or because to do so would require them to undergo the equivalent of a ‘conversion’ experience. [Campbell, 1995: 133-14] (My emphasis)

What I am suggesting is that for the Amway Corporation, a conversion experience is in fact what is encouraged. In this regard, the metaphor of evangelistic consumption may then accordingly serve as a fitting analytical tool to understand what role consumption plays in the success, power, and longevity of the corporation.

As I first began to look at Amway I had initially postulated the use of the concept of charismatic consumption to help explain how consumption comes to hold a critical place in engendering and perpetuating the Amway business system. However, while the corporation attempts to showcase the charismatic moment in the rallies, seminars, motivational tapes, and the certainly numerous "charismatically qualified leader[s]," the organization itself cannot be qualified as charismatic per se [Weber, 1968: 20].

The sharp contrast between charisma and any ‘patriarchal’ structure that rests upon the ordered base of the ‘household’ lies in this rejection of rational economic conduct. In its ‘pure’ form, charisma is never a source of private gain for its holders in the sense of economic exploitation by the making of a deal.....‘Pure’ charisma is....the opposite of all ordered economy. It is the very force that disregards economy. This also holds, indeed precisely, where the charismatic leader is after the acquisition of goods, as is the case with the charismatic war hero. Charisma can do this because by its very nature it is not an ‘institutional’ and permanent structure, but rather, where its ‘pure’ type is at work, it is the very opposite of the institutional permanent. [Weber, 1968: 21]

Thus while Amway displays many charismatic qualities, it has itself become routinized. Consequently, in looking over the ways in which people become involved in the corporation, (as well as building on Butterfield’s (1984) and Kerns’s (1982) comparisons of Amway to a cult), I believe the metaphor of evangelistic conversion may prove more helpful to understanding this phenomena. However, before preceding with our discussion, it may be useful to look back over the history of consumption more generally in order to better explain why Amway emerged at the time that it did and succeeded by using an anomalous approach to consumption.

A Social History of Consumption

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood&endash;Marx. [Kamenka, 1983: 444]

In seeking to understand how consumption emerged to be such a significant factor to our everyday lives, it may indeed appear at first glance to be an issue of little importance. A particular commodity does not usually reveal all that went into producing it and getting it where you can buy (consume) it. After all, does it matter what soap I buy or what tennis shoes I wear? And yet , as I have demonstrated in the chapter on SA8® and The Amway House, what we choose to consume may in fact signify something quite important about the ways in which identity and meaning are mediated in our global economic situation. Yet how did we get to where we are now? And how does Amway fit into the larger picture of consumption?

Preceding the Industrial Revolutions that swept across Europe and the United States in the mid 18^th Century and early 20^th Centuries, the economies of these societies were based on production. Weavers, Blacksmiths, Bakers, Metallurgists, etc. often owned their own tools of production and produced a limited variety of goods and services. "Until the twentieth century, most American homes were sites not only of consumption but of production. Even as late as 1850, six out of ten people worked on farms. They made most of their own tools; they built their homes and barns;...they grew crops and animals, producing food and drink...."[Clapp, 1996:24]. How people’s identity was formed within this production based system was also closely tied to what it was a person or community produced. Thus one had the local baker, farmers, weavers, etc. However, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, we began to shift to a system of wage labor where an individual exchanged a certain amount of his/her time and energy for a moneyed wage. This wage was then used to procure the goods and services for survival as well of course those many things that (depending on context of course) are not looked upon as needs. This process paralleled the rapid growth of urban centers where the new factories and industries were located. The increasingly urban populations that resulted with the shift to wage-labor, correspondingly alienated people from the tools of production. "As the factory system and mass production came to dominance over the space of decades, it displaced home production by cheaply producing a host of commodities formerly made at home, driving out cottage industry and forcing millions into wage-labor" [Clapp 1998: 24]. This process has of course been by no means as linear or abrupt as I have described it here, however, for our purposes I wish simply to draw attention to the critical shift that resulted from changing relations of production. With the advent of industrial and increasingly global capital, the socio-economic relationships that had governed people’s way of procuring and consuming the products they depended on and were familiar with changed completely.

A central problem arose as the developing system came to produce a plethora of goods and services in excess of what was "needed." We then begin to see a shift to a consumption based society where industries could not simply presume that people would buy the expanding surplus of commodities that could be produced with the new and developing technologies and system of factory production. As I have discussed in The Amway House, Chapter V, on the role of soap opera in creating needs and the new modern consumer of the 1930s, this necessitated a shift in thinking about how commodities would come to be presented to the public as well as the roles that they could now play in society. Use-value could no longer suffice to sell products that for all purposes were not that different from each other. A far more ingenious method had to be conceived. "Obviously, objects have functional attributes, but use-value now includes these intangible, more emotional, less predictable meanings" [Gardner and Sheppard 1989: 50, qtd in. Fine, 1993: 199]. Hence we witness the advent of advertising and a shift to a consumption based economy. Fine and Leopold write:

Consumption and commodities are offered, through advertising, as the relief from these and other ‘age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction’; their inability to fulfill their promise entails further self-indulgence. Featherstone describes the process whereby the mass production of images transforms cheap, imitation goods into, ‘the symbolic promise of luxury, abundance, style and hedonism’ (Featherstone 1983: 4). But the mechanisms of doing this become part and parcel of the consumption process; commodities ‘become subjected to a continual process of symbolisation and resymbolisation...commodities masquerade as experiences and experiences are turned into commodities...to experience the image, the illusion, the spectacle’ (ibid.: 6). The ad as experience is part of the product. [Fine, 1993: 198]

Commodities therefore came to not only to offer the consumer a rapidly expanding variety of goods and services to use, but radically changed the ways in which we conceived of how products came to the places where we bought and/or consumed them. That is, by the mid 1970s with the advent of de-Industrialization, the "going global" strategy of multinational corporations (the move to foreign labor and markets), and the demise of Fordism’s epoch of great manufacturing towns (such as those centered around the steel, auto, and textile factories), consumers were increasingly unable to say where a given product originated [Harrison, 1988: 26]. Granted, there were and continue to be small labels on products stating "Made in the USA" or "Made in China," however, very few of us could probably say how our shoes were produced or indeed who made them (Nike aside, of course). Concurrently, there is no slowing down in the expansion of consumer markets and the plethora of consumer items/activities/experiences that may be exchanged for a set price. We have entered into an advanced stage of consumption that now reaches a global scale.

...we want to consume more and more. This compulsion to consume is not the consequence of some psychological determinant ("qui a bu boira?") etc., nor is simply the power of emulation. If consumption appears to be irrepressible, this is precisely because it is a total idealist practice which has no longer anything to do (beyond a certain point) with the satisfaction of needs, nor with the reality principle; it becomes energized in the project that is always dissatisfied [deçu] and implicit in the object. The project, made immediate in the sign, transfers its essential dynamics onto the systematic and indefinite possession of object-signs of consumption. Consequently, it must transcend itself and continuously reiterate itself in order to remain what it is: a reason for living. The very project of life, segmented, dissatisfied, and signified, is reclaimed and annulled in successive objects. Hence, the desire to "moderate" consumption or to establish a normalizing network of needs is naive and absurd moralism. [Baudrillard, 1988: 25]

This process continues to have important consequences upon the economy. Namely, the relations of production are now symbiotically dependent upon those of consumption. Thus this shift to consumption opened up new opportunities for capital investment. Indeed, I would argue that these economic shifts culminating in the increased globalization of the 1970s, coupled by resurgent neoconservative politics and the rise of right-wing fundamentalism during the same time period, were all critical to the successful emergence of the Amway Corporation. I would also add that these factors proved to be conducive to the rise of a particular approach to consumption that incorporated religious, political, and socio-economic affinities into a singular totalizing system - that is, Amway.

Not only are needs marketed (or goods more generally), but more critically, an entire world-view and ideology is formulated and subsequently "preached" providing a system of beliefs and understanding that attempt to address the crisis of meaning in a world inundated with goods of unimaginable proportions yet still unable to satisfy the consumer. There emerges a "frustrated desire for totality" [Baudrillard, 1988: 25] arising out of what Henri Lefebvre terms a "disappointment" due to the imaginary and transient character of consumption. He writes:

The sense of disappointment that pervades consumption has a number of causes, and we are far from understanding them all; but we have succeeded, none the less, in locating one of them in the absence of a determined split or division between the consumption of things and that of signs and images deriving from these things. The act of consuming is as much an act of the imagination...as a real act (‘reality’ itself being divided into compulsions and adaptations), and therefore metaphorical (joy in every mouthful, in every perusal of the object) and metonymical (all of consumption and all the joy of consuming in every object and every action). This in itself would not matter if consumption were not accepted as something reliable, sound and devoid of deception and mirage, but there are no natural frontiers separating imaginary consumption or the consumption of make-believe (the subject of publicity) and real consumption; or one might say that there exists a fluid frontier that is always overstepped and that can only be fixed in theory. Consumer-goods are not only glorified by signs and ‘good’ in so far as they are signified; consumption is primarily related to those signs and not to the goods themselves. [Lefebvre, 1990 (1984): 90-91]

In light of Lefebvre's remarks, I wish to suggest that the emergence and relative success of Amway reflect in part a reaction to inherent contradictions arising out of, and in reaction to, the consumption driven economy. While by no means wishing to take a materialist approach to this question, I do however wish to highlight the ways in which particular economic and political factors proved conducive to Amway's development. In this regard, we must then not see Amway as some odd phenomena arising by chance at this particular moment in time, but rather as a system that originated out of particular socio-economic and political contexts and which has subsequently capitalized on its ability to tap into deeper underlying desires for community: shared historical/political/ social visions of the USA, belief in free ente