The Sociology Of Consumption

This lucid introduction to the sociology of consumerism examines the relationship between production and consumption in late capitalist societies. The historical and theoretical discussion provides the student with the tools to examine key themes in the sociology of consumption. After a detailed historical overview of the advent of consumer society, Peter Corrigan examines theoretical accounts of consumption and consumer practice, including: Veblen and conspicuous consumption; Mary Douglas on the world of goods; Jean Baudrillard on the system of objects; and Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital. This historical and theoretical discussion provides the student with the tools to examine key themes in the sociology of consumption.

The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach offers college students, scholars, and interested readers a state-of-the-art overview of consumption the desire for, purchase, use, display, exchange, and disposal of goods and services. The book’s global focus, emphasis on social inequality, and analysis of consumer citizenship offer a timely, exciting, and original approach to the topic. Looking beyond the U.S. and Europe, Stillerman engages examples from his and others’ research in Chile and other Latin American countries, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East and South Asia to explore the interaction between global and local forces in consumption. The text explores the lived experience of being a consumer, demonstrating how social inequalities based on class, gender, sexuality, race, and age shape consumer practices and identities. Finally, the book uncovers the important role consumption has played in fueling local and international activism. This welcome new book will be ideal for classes on consumer culture across the social sciences, humanities, and marketing.

This book critically reviews recent social scientific investigations of consumption, a controversial topic with moral overtones, and of popular public interest and political and economic significance. The author explores how consumption affects personal identity and social position, developing a sociological analysis using theories of practice to account for everyday consumption, its role in the social order, and its consequences for environmental sustainability. The book offers a controversial analysis which explains consumption not in terms of the purchasing of commodities but of the organization and coordination of daily practices. Consumption will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, consumer research, business studies and social theory.

In this book, one of the leading social theorists and cultural commentators of modern times, turns his gaze on consumption. George Ritzer, author of the famous McDonaldization Thesis, demonstrates the irrational consequences of the rational desire to consume and commodify. He examines how McDonaldization might be resisted, and situates the reader in the new cultural spaces that are emerging in society: shopping malls, casino hotels, Disneyfied theme parks and Las Vegas -- the new `cathedrals of consumption' as he calls them. The book shows how new processes of consumption relate to globalization theory. In illuminating discussions of the work of Thorstein Veblen and the French situationists, Ritzer unearths the roots of problems of consumption in older sociological traditions. He indicates how transgression is bound up with consumption, through an investigation of the obscene in popular and postmodern culture.

This collection of high quality, largely previously published essays, analyses a range of controversies in the field of the sociology of culture and consumption. Campbell made a major contribution to the development of this field and he has a clear and coherent theoretical position which he employs to comment on interesting disputes among scholars seeking to understand consumer culture. Containing a brand new expansive essay reflecting on consumption in the age of a pandemic and drawing out some of the conceptual and practical implications of the relationship between wants and needs, science and norms, this synthesis will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of consumption, consumer and cultural sociology.

This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture. Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era. Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.'

Featuring a collection of original chapters by leading and emerging scholars, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology presents a comprehensive and balanced overview of the major topics and emerging trends in the discipline of sociology today. Features original chapters contributed by an international cast of leading and emerging sociology scholars Represents the most innovative and 'state-of-the-art' thinking about the discipline Includes a general introduction and section introductions with chapters summaries by the editor

This lucid introduction to the sociology of consumerism examines the relationship between production and consumption in late capitalist societies. The historical and theoretical discussion provides the student with the tools to examine key themes in the sociology of consumption. After a detailed historical overview of the advent of consumer society, Peter Corrigan examines theoretical accounts of consumption and consumer practice, including: Veblen and conspicuous consumption; Mary Douglas on the world of goods; Jean Baudrillard on the system of objects; and Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital. This historical and theoretical discussion provides the student with the tools to examine key themes in the sociology of consumption.