An Introduction to Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County, California .. Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (eds.) University of California Press. 1991.

Basic Growth in Orange County

 Now, a century later, that "wayward sister," Orange County, has matured into an increasingly important component of a larger southern California region comprised of Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties. For several decades, this region has been one of the major industrial metropolises in the world. Within it, Orange County recently has developed its own powerful sub-regional economy, which exceeded $50 billion in 1988 (compared to $13.5 billion in 1975). That economy now ranks among the top thirty in the world, along with such nation-states as Argentina, Austria, Denmark, and Egypt, and surpassing the neighboring state of Arizona.

Since World War II, Orange County has evolved from a rural county into an industrial region and bedroom adjunct to Los Angeles, and finally into a complex metropolitan region consisting of twenty-eight separate municipalities with a substantially independent economy and cultural life. Its population multiplied by a factor of ten, from 200,000 in 1950 to more than 2,000,000 by 1987. Beginning in the late 1960s, Orange County's "informational economy" (see below) began to outstrip its industrial economy. The region's utopian promise constituted a powerful magnet, drawing many people to Orange County's communities, whose images better fit the suburban ideals of the British Garden City Movement of the late nineteenth century. Orange County's immigrants included people who had previously lived and worked in nearby Los Angeles and who were seeking more open-space and less expensive housing, as well as people elsewhere in the nation who were drawn to the county's mix of temperate climate and open-space.

 With the arrival in the 1970s and 1980s of firms that operate internationally, Orange County's regional economy has become increasingly integrated into a worldwide capitalist market system. The executives of these enterprises are eager to create a new center of world trade in the county, expressed in such orga- nizations as the International Trade League of Orange County and the World Trade Center Association of Orange County. By 1988, Orange County's growing high-tech export business had led to the opening of an export licensing office in Newport Beach, the first such branch outside of Washington, D.C. This impressive growth of the economy created more employment for the county's residents, and accordingly the amount of personal income earned outside of Orange County dropped from twenty-one percent in 1971 to less than ten percent in 1981. Furthermore, by 1985 more than eighty percent of Orange County's workforce of approximately 1,100,000 commuted to a job within the county.

 Like much of Los Angeles County, then, Orange County has been rapidly transformed from a predominantly agricultural area into one that is important both industrially and "post- industrially" or "informationally" as well. A social transformation that has taken place over the course of a century or more in most nation-states and many major cities has occurred in Orange County during a mere forty years. Between 1945 and 1965, Orange County developed from a network of small distinct towns and villages within a rural region into a sprawling suburban area. By the mid-1980s, the region had further evolved into a spatially complex and decentralized mixture of urban, suburban, and rural spaces. Unlike the traditional suburb, Orange County of the 1970's mixed large poor neighborhoods, including several Mexican barrios, with middle and upper class neighborhoods. This new "post-suburban" spatial form was pioneered in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s, has developed in other metropolitan areas since World War II, and is a key part of Orange County's character today.
 
 

Orange County as a Subject of Inquiry

 The editors of this volume bring a very different perspective to bear. We believe that Orange County is far from being a static, "kooky," backwater area. During the last two decades, new businesses and their owners, managers, and workers have transformed it into a metropolitan area that exemplifies a dynamic world beyond industrial society. In the 1940s, Orange County was a rural region distinct from Los Angeles. During the 1950s and 1960s, it developed as an almost indistinguishable part of Los Angeles's suburban fringe. In the late 1970s, it began to develop a sufficiently self-sustaining, complex economy and cul- tural life that it has become interesting and significant as a distinct object of study.

Every metropolitan area has unique characteristics. As we indicate in this book, Orange County's transformation from a rural region in the 1940s to a dynamic metropolitan region today also parallels the development of about twenty other metropolitan areas in the United States. While we are attentive to Orange County's unique features (e.g., climate, topography, location, large Spanish land grants) and their influence on the region's socio-economic and cultural devel- opment, we are particularly interested in the ways in which key themes of Orange County's development shed light on important social changes elsewhere in the nation. Most of the chapters in this book examine the ways in which develop- ments in Orange County give us deeper insights into important social changes taking place in the United States.

 We believe that Orange County's emerging social order should be presented through its spatial organization, its economy, its technologies, its cultural orientations, and its political life--and the interplay among them. This book differs from many regional studies that focus exclusively on only one slice of the social order. Through nine multifaceted case studies of a region that exemplifies and even exaggerates some key themes in postwar America, the book describes and evaluates a paradigmatic example of a larger social transformation. These case studies cannot begin to capture fully the richness and diversity of such a large and socially complex area. Many important areas of inquiry await further studies and we hope that this volume helps to stimulate them.

 The authors of these studies do not share a single theoretical or disciplinary frame of reference. In a few cases, authors use somewhat different terms for similar concepts. And the authors do not always agree on key issues, such as the role of defense-funding in Orange County's social development. But they do share many key perceptions about Orange County and elements of social analysis. They are especially sensitive to questions of spatial organization, economic change, social meaning, culture and ideology, stratification, social structure, and political power. These are not the only themes that can inform a study of a metropolitan region, but we believe they are essential ones. This book straddles a delicate balance. It focuses on Orange County's development with sufficient detail to interest readers who want to learn about recent social develop- ments in southern California. At the same time, it also illustrates more general patterns of social change in the United States that will interest urban historians and sociologists.

 We have identified four concepts to help us interpret Orange County's remarkable transformation from a minor agricultural region into a substantial metropolitan area in less than forty years: (1) post-suburban spatial organization; (2) informational capitalism; (3) consumerism; and (4) cosmopoli- tanism. These concepts help sharpen our understanding of economic, social, cultural, and political life in Orange County, as we assume they will for other similar regions. Indeed, Orange County is a "window on the future," an "antic- ipatory region" whose developments parallel those in other areas of the country, but one that also exaggerates some trends and foreshadows the future of many regions. Its residents simultaneously enjoy and suffer the prospects of tomorrow.

Post-Suburban Spatial Organization:
The Multicentered Metropolitan Region

 Suburban regions customarily have been defined as the populated areas which remain when traditional central cities are removed from a larger metropolitan area. The traditional suburbs function as peripheral bedroom communities from which commuters travel to workplaces in an urban core. As such, they are in large measure economically inert and have not been centers of "high culture." As bedroom communities, they are "sleepy" places with little of the nightlife that characterizes cities. There is a small literature devoted to "suburb-bashing" which portrays suburbs as second-class components of the urban environment, as places of standardized homogeneity and as objects of scorn and derision. Herbert Gans' pioneering study of Levittown, New Jersey showed that suburban life is not less lively than urban life. Suburban life differs from urban life by focussing much more on family activities and "private" institu- tions, such as clubs. Furthermore, it is not organized around high density housing with their substantially more active street life. Suburbs are also much less likely than cities to be the homes of "higher class" cultural institutions such as major museums, performing arts centers which can attract world-class orches- tras. Suburban cultural life is more provincial, rather than cosmopolitan, although people throughout the country share access to many of the same mass media. In the 1960s, Orange County was developing from a rural region based on a network of small towns into a into a large suburban complex. Its bedroom communities developed in the North County since southern Los Angeles had become fully developed. But Orange County today does not fit the suburban pattern. It is neither primarily urban nor rural, though it mixes these forms. Robert Fishman describes the social and spatial development of regions such as Orange County in these terms:
 
 

Postwar American development has been characterized by the almost simultaneous decentralization of housing, industry, specialized services, and office jobs; the consequent breakaway of the urban periphery from the city it no longer needs; and the creation of a decentralized environment that nevertheless possesses all the economic and technological dynamism of the city... This new city is ... a peripheral zone, perhaps as large as a county, that has emerged as a viable social and economic unit. Spread out along its highway growth corridors are shopping malls, industrial parks, campuslike office com- plexes, hospitals, schools, and a full range of housing types. Its residents look to their immediate surroundings rather than to the city for their jobs and other needs; and its industries find not only the employees they need, but also specialized services. (Emphasis in original.)
 
 

Today, the cities appear to sprawl and merge into one another because they do not have distinctive architectures or clear separation zones at their peripheries. City boundaries are commonly marked only with a sign at some point along a street or a boulevard, rather than by changing spatial arrange- ments or architectures. Moreover, the majority of structures represent a narrow array of architectural genres because much of Orange County was built up in a short period of a few decades by developers who built tracts with hundreds of homes each representing few models. Consequently, visitors and residents see less visual variety in many neighborhoods than in older urban areas -- or even in suburban areas in which homes are custom built. Today, tract homes in Orange County sell for $150,000 to $750,000, and custom built homes often cost upwards of $1,000,000. The economics of housing does much to shape the visual land- scape.

 Finally, these specialized zones are more functionally differentiated than in traditional urban areas, where combinations of land usage -- residential, commer- cial, and public -- predominate. Orange County's residential neighborhoods, like those in many other urban regions developed after World War II, are often devoted exclusively to tract houses, presenting the visitor with little variety of color or style.

 These specialized residential, commercial, and industrial zones are difficult for pedestrians to navigate, but were designed to accommodate the automobile driver. In the southern sections of Orange County, city planners designed long four and six lane boulevards in anticipation of substantially more traffic ten or twenty years after the roads were built. In most parts of Orange County, the pedestrian is likely to see a visually homogeneous landscape for block after block, with occasional transitions to different, but also internally homogeneous, areas. These homogeneous areas are not only residential; they are also commercial and industrial. Their architecture can even be quite attractive. But large areas of at- tractive buildings of similar designs deprive the county of the highly localized visual variety that is more common in older cities.

 Long stretches of flat acreage bounded by mountain ranges support a predominantly low rise landscape that spreads for miles and miles. The tallest buildings are now about twenty stories high, and are clustered in several diverse locations. The various shopping, civic, recreational, religious, and cultural cen- ters are usually miles apart, and rarely traversable by a short walk. Eight, ten, even twelve lane freeways guide hundreds of thousands of motorists between these places without beginning or terminating at any of them. The beaches, themselves major recreational "centers," stretch some thirty-five miles along a series of beach towns from the north to the south end of the county, five to ten miles from the nearest freeway.

Further, many of the residential and commercial structures are implicitly designed to emphasize private domesticity and material consumption. As in many suburbs, the single family homes are usually designed so that they open into private patios rather than into the streets. Porches, which were common in pre-war American architecture, are exceptional in modern California designs. Many of the more affluent neighborhoods are designed so that individual homes are walled off from the street with enclosed front courtyards and limited entryways. Orange County's temperate climate enables homes to have large glass windows, but these usually face out onto private patios. Such residential designs turn people inward toward the private spaces of their own homes. Residents who walk through their neighborhoods may see some of their neighbors out of doors doing yardwork by day. But such neighborhoods do not provide much support for casual "hanging out" and thereby dilute the possible richness of public social life.

 Shops, moreover, are concentrated in regional centers or "neighborhood" centers which are too far to be a convenient walk for most residents. While there is a substantial bus system, it is not widely used and the private automobile becomes essential. The newer commercial centers are designed for efficient parking and shopping. They do not provide many areas to relax and idle time away. Some even discourage teenagers from "loitering" in the malls, except in video arcades where they are confined as consumers. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the country, the regional shopping malls are designed to amplify sales and minimize the opportunities for those who wish to "hang out" without participating in a continual stream of shopping and buying. While enclosed shopping malls were not invented in Orange County, they dominate the region's retail commercial life. The multicentered spatial elements of Orange County function synergistically to highlight the core cultural value of consumerism (see below). In the prophetic terms of Paul and Percival Goodman, Orange County's spatial specialization represents a place of "efficient production and consumption."

 This multicentered region can appear as a hodge-podge of lively specialized centers built miles apart and separated by large suburban-style housing tracts. But this post-suburban spatial formation differs from the traditional suburb by having lively commercial and cultural centers for residents. It differs markedly from the more distinctly suburban regions like Marin County in California or Westchester County in New York, which are more demographically homogeneous and where the major nearby cities are the primary sources of "high culture," lively street life and ethnic diversity.

 Recent studies--such as those by Robert Fishman, Peter Muller, Carl Abbott, Kenneth Jackson, and M. Gottdiener -- have presented a picture of post- suburban regions such as Orange County which sharply differentiates them from cities and suburbs. In fact, the operating logic of these post-suburban regions would appear to be the exact opposite of the conventional suburb. They are not sleepy provincial regions, although they have their quiet suburban neighborhoods. The most important aspects of their formation, to repeat, are (1) their origins in the suburban periphery of another urban core (in this case, Los Angeles) from which they have broken away and (2) the emergence of a new decentralized environment possessing the economic and technological vitality and cultural diversity formerly associated with the traditional central city. In this process, the parochial and primarily residential suburb becomes a vital metropolitan region. This pattern occurred in Orange County and is also found in eastern Long Island, as well as in a new metro- politan area developing in a northeast corridor outside of Atlanta and in more than a dozen other areas (see Chapter Two).

 It is traditional to discuss suburban regions as located on a continuum that ranges from rural to urban, in housing density, distance from major economic and high cultural centers, and so forth. We do not locate post-suburban regions along such a continuum. They are not simply more urban than suburbs. In fact, some urban developments have been influenced by post-suburban developments -- particularly the enclosed urban shopping mall. The suburban shopping mall is often a strip of small stores and medium-sized chain stores such as K-marts. The post-suburban mall, such as South Coast Plaza, Fashion Island, and The City, differ from the suburban mall by usually being enclosed and housing several major department stores as well as many smaller shops. The enclosed urban mall, like the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, is patterned on the post-suburban mall. But it contains shops which sell goods and services that appeal to more urban tastes. For example, the urban movie theatres may be four-plexes or six- plexes, but they are more likely to show foreign films than will the equivalent suburban movie theatre complexes.

 Los Angeles County and Orange County are the most developed examples in the United States of post-suburban regions. They thereby provide the most promising places to study an important, emergent social formation. According to New York Times architectural critic, Paul Goldberger, "There is no better place to think about the American landscape and what it is turning into than in Orange County, where brand-new suburbs sprawl across the land with such intensity that Los Angeles, by comparison, seems almost an old-fashioned, traditional city...." One Orange County regional center, for example-- the Costa Mesa-Newport Beach-Irvine complex--is California's third largest "downtown," as measured by office and business park space. Office space in that complex alone now surpasses 21.1 million square feet. Though still well behind Los Angeles's 36.6 million square feet, it is not far behind that of San Francisco's 26.8 million and is rapidly gaining on both. In addition, its leading shopping mall, South Coast Plaza, has more sales than any other such center in the United States, perhaps the world. Other malls, such as those in the cities of Orange, Westminster, and Mission Viejo, also have a huge volume of sales. Thus Orange County residents, like residents of similar post-suburban regions elsewhere, seek their employment and their primary consumer and cultural satisfactions in their proximity, not in a distant city.

"Orange County, with Irvine at its heart," argues Paul Goldberger, "has become a new kind of place -- not a conventional city, not a conventional suburb, but possessing the attributes of both...." He goes on to identify high rise office towers, luxury hotels, its own jet airport, a performing arts center, and museums designed by internationally renowned architects as new features of Orange County. That county, he goes on to claim, symbolizes "the end of the traditional, dense, street-oriented city as a necessary element in American cultural life--and ... (it) now shows us, more clearly than anywhere else, exactly what kind of city builders consider the ideal for middle-class Americans at the end of the 1980s."

Post-suburban regions have become the most common form of metropolitan development in this country. And their emergence has undeniably transformed our lives, for better and for worse. Orange County's post-suburban character resembles at least twenty-two other regions in the United States. M. Gottdiener and George Kephart, in their chapter on "The Fully Urbanized County: A Comparative Analysis," set Orange County in this larger framework. These new outer cities are large conglomerates of technologically advanced industry, services, and information-processing. They are sharply differentiated by class, income, and lifestyles. In addition, demographers have noted that by the 1970s they contained the bulk of the population of the United States, thus reversing a 5,000 year old trend of urbanization. Gottdiener and Kephart call this new historical stage "deconcentration," arguing that it requires reconceptualization of our existing understanding of settlement space organization.

 Post-suburban spatial organization is no accident. It is the result of complex and weakly coordinated sets of conscious decisions by private entrepreneurs and many politicians who reflect their interests. A specific example of how this spatial form evolved is provided by Orange County's largest private landholder, the Irvine Company, which implemented its corporate vision of growth in the city of Irvine, which it developed from a large ranch into a city of some 100,000 resi- dents within twenty years. By design, Irvine itself has no downtown, but is a deconcentrated mosaic of residential "villages," small shopping centers, and industrial parks. Irvine's city hall is a warehouse-like building in a large industrial park; it is not a routine walk from any of the city's "villages."

 In Chapter Three, Martin Schiesl describes the Irvine Company's role in transforming a rural, agricultural region into a dynamic post-suburban complex. Its activities represented a bold departure in community planning and building and have been emulated by other development companies in the county who are building whole cities, such as the Mission Viejo Company and the Rancho Santa Margarita Company. Schiesl argues that the Irvine Company's vision of the future of Orange County often clashed with those of city and county planning officials. These professional planners were particularly concerned with an overdependence on automobile transportation and with what they regarded as insufficient attention to the problem of housing for low-income and moderate- income workers and their families. Popular resistance to the Irvine Company's plans for a city of 300,000 prompted the new owners of the firm in the early 1980s to reevaluate some of their cherished development policies and to work more cooperatively with different segments of the community who sought a less congested and socially more varied community. Schiesl concludes that the Irvine Company's development plans have aroused considerable controversy and intense debate among citizen groups and public officials in the local area during the 1980s.
 
 

The Transformation of Orange County's Economy:
From Agricultural to Informational Capitalism

A society's information labor force is composed of those occupations in which the processing and distribution of information is a central and time-consuming activity. These are a diverse set of occupations, including managers, lawyers, accountants, realtors, stock brokers, and clerks of all kinds. As Rob Kling and Clark Turner report in Chapter Four, the information sector in the United States accounted for more employment than either manufacturing or services as early as 1950. Furthermore, informational activities produced more than forty-six percent of United States national income by the late 1960s, a figure which has risen dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s.

 The information workforce differs significantly from the high-tech workforce which Gottdiener and Kephart examine in Chapter One. The high-tech workforce refers to people who work in a variety of technical jobs within manufacturing. The approximately 100,000 high-tech workers in Orange County in 1988 constitute about forty per cent of the manufacturing workforce and less than ten percent of the county's total workforce. Manufacturing firms, even high-tech firms, employ many low-tech workers such as equipment handlers, salespersons, and clerks in accounting, shipping, sales, and stock rooms. In contrast, information sector jobs are found in services such as finance, insurance, real estate, and travel, as well as in manufacturing. Kling and Turner calculate that about fifty- eight per cent of Orange County's workforce is in the information sector. A minority of Orange County's workforce is composed of high-tech workers, while a majority of the workforce is in the information sector. In fact, Orange County's information workforce is about six times the size of its high-tech workforce. While the county's workforce has been rapidly growing, manufacturing has been slowly declining in relative size since the late 1960's.

 The term "information society" is often invoked reverentially in accounts which assume that it constitutes a more advanced stage of social evolution. We do not accept many of the conservative premises of such evolutionary views. We see societies as changing through collective action stimulated by a small number of intentional agents rather than evolving "naturally" like flowers. In Western societies, business interests and the state are major, but not exclusive, activists which press for and shape important social changes. In Orange County, the Irvine Company and other large scale developers, the major national corporations, and grassroots social movements are some of the key actors.

We do not believe that these lead actors, such as businesses, public agencies and social movements, always get their way. There are often conflicts of interest between various business and governmental coalitions, as several authors in this book demonstrate. Moreover, particular interest groups act on a social canvass that is shaped by local environments and resources as well as larger-scale national and international actions, such as wars, inflation, or new tax structures, which they did not directly influence. But we see social changes emerging from the interplay of interest-driven behavior.

 We have found the concept of "informational capitalism" especially useful in analyzing the economic changes which led from an industrial economy to an information economy because it anchors new strategies of managing information in the practical activities of businesses and governments. Informational capi- talism refers to forms of organization in which data-intensive techniques and computerization are key strategic resources for corporate production across all sectors of the economy--agriculture, manufacturing, and services. The owners and managers of agricultural, manufacturing, and service firms increasingly are relying upon imaginative strategies to "informationalize" production. Computerized information systems have joined factory smokestacks as major signifiers of economic power.

Information usually does not replace other products or services. But the management of information through cost accounting, production monitoring, and market surveys becomes a key resource in advancing a firm's competitive edge and also in providing new vehicles for management and services. Point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, credit cards, and the widespread appearance of "desktop computing" are some of the visible byproducts of informational capitalism. Platoons of specialized information workers -- from clerks to professionals -- are hidden behind these information technologies which have become critical elements for many businesses and public agencies. Chain fast-food restaurants provide a good example of informational capitalism in action. Viewed as a service, fast-food restaurants simply sell rapidly prepared food for relatively low prices, and stimulate a high rate of customer turnover. They are simply furnished, provide no table service, and are staffed by low paid workers (often teenagers) to keep costs low. It is a traditional service managed in traditional ways to act as a low cost service provider. Fast-food chain restaurants differ from other low cost restaurants by buying in immense volume, advertising with standard menus, serving food through drive-up windows and walk-up counters, and franchising their outlets in special ways.

From the vantage point of informational capitalism, fast-food restaurant chains are especially competitive and successful when they have an infrastructure of skilled information professionals and technologies. The information component helps them to select restaurant sites, to alter their menus to match the changing tastes of their clienteles, to audit the services of each establishment, and carefully to monitor costs, cash-flows, inventory, and sales. Their operational efficiencies hinge on information technologies as much as on economies of scale--from the microphones and audio systems that make it easier for drive-through customers to order food to the simplified electronic cash registers that automatically calculate costs and change so that less skilled, high speed, teenage workers can be relied upon as labor. The skills of back-stage professional analysts consuming bytes of data expedite the large scale sale of bites of food.

Fast-food restaurant chains, it should be stressed, have not shifted from selling food to selling information, but their operations have become intensively informationalized. The major fast-food restaurant chains operate similarly in Orange County as in other areas of the United States. Their operational style simply illustrates what we mean by informational capitalism, an economic stage which, while hardly unique to Orange County, is nonetheless more highly developed there than in most other urban and suburban areas.

 Rob Kling and Clark Turner indicate in Chapter Four how different analysts posit different relationships between an "information economy" and other social formations, such as an "industrial economy" and a "postindustrial economy." The concept of an information economy is based upon the number of people who work in information handling jobs across all other economic sectors -- agriculture, manufacturing, and services. In our view, the transformation to an information economy does not necessarily require a relative decline in the number or size of traditional manufacturing or industrial goods-producing organizations, even though it does require a reduction in the proportion of workers who directly farm or manufacture goods. In fact, the United States had moved from a manufacturing-oriented economy to a service-dominated economy by 1960. By that time the United States had become the first society in history in which fewer than one-half of the labor force was engaged in the production of food or goods. In the late 1960s and 1970s, this economy became increasingly informationalized. Today such informational knowledge-producing activities are of even greater economic and political importance.

 Behind all of these changes are a variety of information-oriented workers, who have become especially important to Orange County's economic growth. Orange County epitomizes the leading occupational trends in the national economy, where most new jobs created since 1950 have been in the service and information sectors, in governmental employment, and in private corporations dependent upon federal expenditures, especially in the areas of defense and space. With one of the nation's largest per capita incomes and one of the lowest unemployment rates, for years the county has paced much of the nation in the growth of the service sector, electronics, high-tech manufacturing, and medical technology. The city of Irvine, for example, is a major center for high-tech activity. Irvine's Industrial Park established in the mid-1960s has attracted more than 3,700 firms by the early 1980s. These firms manufacture and distribute a variety of high-tech products from artificial heart valves to computers, or provide business services for these firms. Combined employment countywide in three industries critical to the future -- trade, electronics, and service -- was fifty-six percent of the Orange County work force in 1986, compared with forty-eight percent nationwide. Informational capitalism gives these industries greater leverage than their less technologically-sophisticated precursors.

 The region's growing ethnic and racial diversity complicates the structure of its labor markets so that occupational counts alone cannot reveal who does which work. In this regard, Orange County has been profoundly affected by the massive immigration (most of it from Asia and Latin America) that has trans- formed the entire southern California area in recent decades. From 1970 to 1980, for example, Hispanics, who have constituted the county's largest racial minority since 1910, increased 147 percent (to 14.8 percent of the total population of the county), while its Asian population grew 371 percent (to 4.8 percent of the total) and blacks 140 percent (to approximately one percent of the total). During the past fifteen years, Orange County's expanding service economy and its need for inexpensive blue-collar manual workers have combined to attract the nation's fourth-largest permanent settlement of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Although they have customarily been perceived primarily as agricultural labor, a significant number of Latinos and Asians are in fact employed in the industrial and high-tech sectors, where they often form the core of an army of assembly-line workers who construct computer and biomedical equipment and other products in the electronics and instruments industries.
 
 

Culture in Everyday Life: The Ethos of Consumerism

Starting in the 1920s, however, most consumers began to have their basic needs for shelter, clothing, food, and furnishings satisfied, and their demand for goods and services began to diminish. Production began to outstrip the nation's capacity to consume, given the relatively simple "needs" of the majority of the population.

 Industrialists thus faced a crisis of consumption during the middle part of this century. The solution lay in transforming the living patterns and consumption behaviors of the masses. Starting in the 1920s, producers began to slant their advertisements so as to address the symbolic value of products, as well as their functional utility. The mass media enabled advertisers to extend their message to a national level, while local markets gave way to nationwide retail chains. Commodities became indices of success and the masses became "consumers" in the sense that they adopted the task of maintaining life styles designed and advocated by advertisers. The work ethic that previously had organized the moral life of the early industrial revolution made room for a new consumerist ethic. Henri Lefebvre accurately characterized this shift when he wrote, "It is the transition from a culture based on the curbing of desires, thriftiness, and the necessity of eking out goods in short supply to a new culture resulting from production and consumption at their highest ebb, but against a background of general crisis."

 These changes took place over a period of decades, as producers, their marketing agents, and the media refined their techniques. Many of the key strategies of symbolic marketing were well established by the early 1960s, a decade before Orange County became a major national market. However, in the 1970s, marketing became more information intensive as computer systems be- came less expensive, mailing list brokers became more established, and advertisers learned how to segment their potential audiences and target demographically identified groups with customized advertising. Consumerism became linked, in short, with informational capitalism, and this linkage was especially evident in Orange County.

 Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, six huge regional shopping centers opened in Orange County, each anchored with several department stores, as well as dozens of smaller "neighborhood" centers built around supermarkets and diversified drugstores. In the 1970s and early 1980s, these regional shopping centers boomed. By the fall of 1987, Orange Countians spent more per capita at retail stores than the residents of any other county in California ($2,680 per resident, or twenty-five percent higher than the state average of $2,139).

In Chapter Five, Alladi Venkatesh shows how Orange County is a leading region in the perfection of a new brand of consumerism. He examines very specific developments that are shaping the region into a "modernistic version of consumer society," arguing that the convergence of some extraordinary forces has given the county its special consumer-oriented character. These forces are (1) a culture of information-dependent consumption that values that activity in modernistic terms, (2) the level and distribution of discretionary income that translates into buying power in a non-homogeneous market, (3) the growth of service-oriented (and often information-based) products that differentiate the market in rather unconventional terms, (4) the general level of education of consumers that accounts for market sophistication and market innovation, and (5) the relatively large proportion of newcomers to Orange County, both from within the United States and from abroad, who allow market experimentation, on the positive side, and who experience market stress and confusion, on the negative side.

 Venkatesh also links the consumption of housing to Orange County's multicentered spatial organization. In the late 1980s, the county had the most expensive housing market in the United States (with a median home price of $231,000 in the fourth quarter of 1988). Starting in the late 1960s, several large land developers, who dominated building activity in the southern portion of the county, were able to sell a vision of the "great life" in relatively homogeneous planned communities and large housing tracts. These tracts were a key element of the multicentered spatial form because they excluded substantial stores or workplaces through strict zoning regulations. Such activities were zoned into other specialized land parcels. To be sure, the five forces noted above, and the selling of tract housing with idealistic images of a good life, could be easily found in other parts of the United States. But Orange County was somewhat different in terms of at least three factors: the scale of their occurence; their time compression; and the consumer processes resulting from frenetic economic activity.

 To return to the example of fast-food restaurants, these businesses use information technologies, advertising in particular, to define the experience of frequenting their establishments in a positive light. This linguistic aspect of the information society may be termed "the mode of information" in that cultural experience is shaped by electronically mediated communications, constituting entirely new levels of language interactions. The mode of information implies a shift from a "rational," work-oriented culture to a "postrational," consumer-ori- ented culture. Several aspects of such a culture are addressed by various essays in this volume.

 Businesses and marketing experts have also refined analytical techniques to identify and target specialized markets. Disneyland, in northeast Orange County, was one of the first facilities nationwide to be located with the help of demographic surveys. In addition, Orange County's shopping center owners, especially the Irvine Company, are particularly sensitive to the mix and potential profitability of shops in a particular mall. While shopping center owners nationwide seek to profit from their investments, the Irvine Company pioneered information-intensive forecasting and accounting systems, because their leases require shop owners to pay them a fraction of their gross revenues as well as a fixed monthly rent. Beyond a demonstrated ability to turn a profit and pay the rent, the shop owner must also fit a profile which is bolstered by market studies and accounting reports. Informational capitalism thus quietly but persistently shapes the environment in which Orange County's residents play out their roles as consumers.

 Informational capitalism and consumerism have also become linked with politics in Orange County. In the late 1970s, a political consulting firm which used advanced marketing techniques opened its doors in Irvine. This firm, Butcher-Ford, employed standard marketing techniques of informational capital- ism such as sophisticated polling and customized direct-mail campaigns which identified different audiences and sent them selective materials promoting their usually conservative client candidates. However, instead of marketing services or commodities to the public, Butcher-Ford marketed political products--their client candidates--in a way that was foreshadowed in Eugene Burdick's The 480. Butcher-Ford was criticized by some for running "dirty tricks" campaigns in which they faked endorsements for their candidates and dressed their unofficial mailings to make them appear to come from government agencies. But they were seldom criticized for transforming political elections into mundane marketing campaigns.

 "Consumerism" captures a central cultural theme in contemporary Orange County. However, some consumption patterns are similar to those in other portions of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. But post-suburban consumption patterns probably differ in ways that we are beginnning to glimmer. Like suburban home owners, post-suburbanites invest heavily in cars and homes. However, the patterns of consumption are more cosmopolitan than in traditional suburban areas (see below). Orange County differs from other urbanized and suburbanized regions in the rapidity with which certain traditional institutions and practices are being displaced by others. In particular, the community as an interface with a specific, localized neighborhood has given way to geographically dispersed shopping malls and controlled recreational environments as the new "neighborhoods" for a highly mobile and fragmented population. For some residents, furthermore, especially the more affluent and recent immigrants without strong family ties in southern California, the value of the family as a center of social life is giving way to consumption as an important basis of human interaction.

In the earlier part of this century elsewhere in the United States, the change from work to consumption as the central organizing feature of life in industrial society accompanied the shift from urban neighborhoods to suburban provincialism, from community to domesticity. A relatively public local life slowly disintegrated as the streetcar and automobile enabled wide distances to separate work and home and new media (telephone, radio, television, and, most recently, video tapes) encouraged the withdrawal of the family from the community.

 Mary Ryan and Debra Hansen trace these developments in Orange County. In Chapter Six, they show how local public celebrations such as the Fourth of July became part of mass leisure and, in such amusement parks as Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, came under the control of large corporations, thereby losing their community roots. Leisure in Orange County discloses the anonymous face of the new social formation, one in which "community" is largely a term of real estate advertising, not social reality.

 These broad social changes in work, consumption, and community life have had devastating effects on the traditional nuclear family that characterized industrial society from about 1820 to 1920. Mark Poster's essay (Chapter Seven) defines the characteristics of an emerging post-nuclear family type. His exami- nation of the family in the wealthier areas of Orange County indicates that much experimentation is taking place in family life. Adult spouses and partners are exploring new styles of living together, with male-dominated households giving way to more equitable arrangements. New styles of childrearing emphasize self- development over imposed goals and self-regulation over obedience, practices that are highly controversial yet afford children a degree of freedom not dreamed of in early industrial society. This new family type is above all segmented, being much less unified and concentrated than its predecessor. Each individual within it has a particular cultural sphere of reference and pursues that significant relation by means of new communication technologies.
 
 

The Shift from Provincialism to Cosmopolitanism:
Political Economy and Political Culture

These organizations recruited key professionals and managers from national and international, as well as local, labor markets. According to a recent survey, forty-three percent of recent residents have college or graduate degrees, compared with thirty-five per cent of longer term residents. Many of these highly educated employees had developed cosmopolitan tastes in other urban areas before emigrating to Orange County. They created a ready clientele who were eager customers for ethnic restaurants, European and Japanese cars, a wide variety of imported goods, and cultural events such as modern theater, foreign films, and classical music. Not satisfied with accepting the mainstream goods and services that were available in their neighborhood shopping centers, these residents were willing to patronize establishments virtually anywhere in the county that met their standards of taste. They were able to support a sufficient number of businesses and arts organizations with world class aspirations so that, by the 1980s, a cosmopolitan culture was well-developed in the county.

 In Chapter Eight, Spencer Olin examines the relation between economic developments in Orange County since World War II and the politics of a highly fragmented metropolis. He uses the concepts of the post-suburban region, informational capitalism, and cosmopolitanism to examine how the increasing maturation of Orange County's economy has affected county and municipal poli- tics. He finds the concept of "social class" to be of great value. Focusing almost exclusively on the business, or owning, class of Orange County, he argues that a contest between provincial (or regional) and cosmopolitan (or global) entrepreneurs has dominated the region's political life. The intense controversies over the county's rate of growth are one byproduct of that contest.

 Chapter Nine continues to explore the theme of urban and postsuburban politics and is especially relevant to another aspect of Orange County's cosmopolitanism: namely, its impressive mingling of diverse cultures. Unlike Olin's inquiry into intra-class politics at the "upper" levels, Lisbeth Haas focuses on grassroots movements that have contested redevelopment and planning schemes since 1974 in Santa Ana, the county's former urban center. In the course of examining these movements, Haas illustrates an exception to the general trend in Orange County: namely, the continued existence in Santa Ana of communities that interface with geographic neighborhoods. She argues that well established community networks constituted the early foundation for grassroots urban protest. The movement developed at a time when Santa Ana was becoming the most important Hispanic urban area within the multicentered metropolitan region. By 1984, large numbers of the undocumented immigrants among the city's predominantly Hispanic population began to organize to fight threatened displacement resulting from urban policy. Two years later Hispanic and Anglo residents joined to form a larger grassroots coalition intent upon changing the structure of city government and democratizing urban planning. They have not succeeded. Instead, the political and fiscal importance of the redevelopment agency has grown and urban designs modeled after the new outer cities, and favoring middle class residents, continue to govern urban policy in Santa Ana.

 A key link between political life and consumerism in Orange County is political campaigns designed to limit public spending and turn more funds to the public for private consumption. In the late 1970s, California was rocked by a series of tax reform initiatives which aimed to limit taxes and to cap public spending. The most famous of these--Proposition 13--placed such a cap on property taxes. In Chapter Ten, William Gayk analyzes how homeownership and income, among other factors, influenced people's support for these different propositions.

An Emerging Utopia?

This utopian quest continues today in Orange County, but in a camouflaged and conservative form. For example, as Martin Schiesl indicates in Chapter Three, the Irvine Company has explicitly marketed Irvine as a carefully planned, middle class, suburban "utopia." Its advertisements stress images of neatly landscaped communities, convivial "village" life, freedom from crime and congestion, upscale consumer conveniences, and other pleasant amenities. Land developers who built up several other cities in the vast open areas of southern Orange County and numerous subdivisions throughout the entire region adopted the Irvine Company's utopian images in their own marketing strategies.

 Ironically, some of Orange County's virtues derive from its complex post- suburban character rather than from the development of "whitebread" suburban tracts. It is more culturally and visually diverse, as well as more ethnically mixed, than the suburban images suggest. The city of Santa Ana is a large Hispanic regional center, and other areas in the county have distinct con- centrations of Asian and Hispanic populations. In Westminster and Garden Grove, long boulevards post store signs almost exclusively in Korean and Vietnamese. The street signs in Garden Grove are bilingual--in English and Vietnamese. Laguna Beach, a small city with a large arts community, is also the center of a large gay community, and has had gay mayors and city council members. Orange County's large scale allows a level of anonymity and freedom of lifestyle that would be much more difficult to achieve in tightly knit "suburban villages."

 Social scientists such as Mark Baldassare, however, have observed that Orange County's citizens recently have become distraught with congested roads and high housing prices. The chapter by Spencer Olin examines the intense political battles that have arisen recently around the issue of growth. A new pessimism mars the pastoral calm of the Orange County utopia. A slight majority of Baldassare's Orange County Annual Survey respondents perceive their quality of life as likely to decline in the future. These problems emerge from the very success of the developers, because congestion and escalating housing prices are inevitable byproducts of Orange County's rapid growth. In the fourth quarter of 1988, as mentioned earlier, the median selling price for a single family home was $231,000 and only about fourteen percent of county residents could qualify for purchasing such a house. If Orange County were not perceived as a "better place," the hundreds of thousands of people who immigrated here in the last decade would not have come. Orange County would then have been less populous, less costly, and less congested.

 The combination of post-suburban spatial organization, informational capitalism, consumerism, and cosmopolitanism signal the birth of a new social formation that may turn out to be far less than utopian. In particular, the county is segmented spatially, economically, ethnically, and socially in ways that cannot sustain utopian aspirations. The chapters of this book examine the inescapable tensions inherent in Orange County's emerging economy and society, tensions that presage the future of metropolitan growth elsewhere in the United States.

Note: For references, see: Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County, California (2nd ed.)

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