This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the possibilities these frameworks can offer.
Consumption is something we all do. It is not just another word for shopping. When we eat and drink, or when we read a book or watch TV, or visit an art gallery or spend an evening in a pub, we are consuming. There is not ‘a world of consumption’ that some of us do not enter. We are all consumers and consumption must be regarded as an important sociological concept as a result. Consumption is also connected to notions of ‘agency’ - what people do, rather than what is done to them or made available to them for their doings. Before the critical focus on consumption, it was assumed that the meaning and use of things was dictated by how they were produced or by their simple mute materiality. Focusing on consumption challenges this way of thinking: rather than the mute and predictable end point of production, it is rethought as an activity, a process, something we do that involves use and meaning. It is how most of us intervene in culture.
This thought-provoking yet accessible book offers a valuable introduction of the concept of consumption for researchers and undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of fields within the humanities and social sciences, including sociology, history, anthropology, English, media and cultural studies.
1. Consumption as a key sociological concept
Consumption and capitalist consumerism
Consumption as process
Consumption as discourse
Notes
2. What drives consumption?
Marx, alienation, and consumption
Social emulation
The Romantic ethic
Consumption and performativity
Notes
3. Explaining consumption
Consumption as Manipulation
Consumption as communication
Consumption as poaching
Notes
4. Sustainable consumption and capitalist consumerism
Consuming sustainably
Capitalist consumer society
Selling capitalism
The Anthropocene
The Capitalocene
Notes
5. Mediatized consumption
Mediatization
Media love
Preliminary conclusions
Notes
6. Consumption and everyday life
Symbolic interactionism
Ethnomethodology
Phenomenological sociology
Actor-Network-Theory
Practice theory
Notes
7. Sociology of consumption after cultural studies
Cultural studies
The uses of literacy
Consuming utopian fiction
Notes
Postscript
Anti-consumption
Biography
John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK. He has published widely on cultural theory, popular culture, consumption, and utopianism. He is the author of numerous books, including Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification (2010), From Popular Culture to Everyday Life (Routledge, 2014), Theories of Consumption (Routledge, 2017), Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies: On Refusing to be Realistic (Routledge, 2019), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Ninth Edition, Routledge, 2021), and Consuming Utopia: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading (Routledge, 2022). He is also editor of The Making of English Popular Culture (Routledge, 2016) and Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Routledge, 2019).