Narratives of Livability in American Housing: Connecting Culture and Action in the Work of Home Stagers, Home Builders, and Realtors

Buying a home is the most significant purchase most people ever make, but the cultural processes influencing this purchase are often invisible. The broad goal of this dissertation is to reveal how cultural processes shape the actions of housing professionals. Using a combination of content analysis, interviews, and observations, I investigate the discourse and practices of home stagers, homebuilders, and real estate agents, and uncover their implicit narratives of livability. Narratives of livability are actionable configurations of cultural meanings drawn from the complex semiotic space that defines “the home.” These narratives answer the questions: What do we desire? What do we value? How do we live? By targeting these narratives, I am able to clarify how housing professionals shape the home buying process in the United States as they instantiate meanings of home in their material practices and discourse.

These housing professionals are cultural intermediaries who deploy cultural meanings differently based on their field positions. Home stagers face uncertainty in their professional status, and their decisions are inflected with a concern for legitimacy. They use their assumptions about livability to construct experiences of belonging for potential buyers. Homebuilders participating in The New American Home show home program are concerned with increasing their status among industry peers, and their decisions reflect a desire for distinction. They draw on different meanings of home to justify dramatically different material structures. Real estate agents contend with an unruly market and clientele, so they focus on maintaining control of the home buying process by establishing expertise. Agents use popular property television shows as cultural resources, alternately embracing and rejecting the meanings these shows exhibit as they guide clients’ expectations and assert their expertise. In each case, cultural meanings of home are central to housing professionals’ decisions and interactions with consumers. This research bridges the gap between structural analyses of home buying and cultural analyses of domestic consumption by locating cultural meaning in the housing exchange. In so doing, I argue that the cultural work of housing professional is essential for understanding housing in the US.