The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture

Olga Kravets,Pauline Maclaran,Steven Miles,Alladi Venkatesh

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473998773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

The question of consumption emerged as a major focus of research and scholarship in the 1990s butthe breadth and diversity of consumer culture has not been fully enough explored. The meanings of consumption, particularly in relation to lifestyle and identity, are of great importance toacademic areasincluding business studies, sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology, geography and politics. The SAGE Handbook ofConsumerCulture is a one-stop resource for scholars and students of consumption, where the key dimensions of consumer culture are critically discussed and articulated. The editors have organised contributions from a global and interdisciplinary team of scholars into six key sections: Part 1: Sociology of Consumption
Part 2: Geographies of Consumer Culture
Part 3: Consumer Culture Studies in Marketing
Part 4: Consumer Culture in Media and Cultural Studies
Part 5: Material Cultures of Consumption
Part 6: The Politics of Consumer Culture

1 Introduction

Olga Kravets

Pauline Maclaran

Steven Miles

Alladi Venkatesh

The question of consumer culture emerged as a major focus of research in the 1990s, partly in response to the Conservative governments of the 1980s’ political emphasis on consumption and the resurging critique of consumerism. Titles such as The Consumer Society (Baudrillard, 1998), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Featherstone, 1998), The World of Consumption (Fine and Leopold, 1993), Consumer Culture (Lury, 1996) and Consumer Culture and Modernity (Slater, 1997) are among the recognised classics that defined the contours of the subject. Consumer culture has now established itself as a core concern across the social sciences, the humanities and business studies. In such a rich and contested cross-disciplinary arena, there is no one accepted definition of what the term ‘consumer culture’ means, and how it is understood varies as widely as the many disciplines that pursue the phenomena of consumer and consumption in a society. The disciplinary engagements diverge in their concerns with regard to the social, cultural, aesthetic, political, economic and ethical aspects and implications of consumption. Broadly speaking, however, consumer culture is used to refer to the intensification of consumerism along with increasing prominence of consumption as social, cultural and economic activity that has come about with free-market capitalism and that is characteristic of late modernity, or what many refer to as postmodernity. The term also refers to the significance of the market in governing social worlds, including through beliefs, values, and meanings created around commodities and acts of consumption in relation to lifestyle and identity. As Roberta Sassatelli (2007: 193) astutely observed, the term is ‘imprecise and analytically wanting'. It intends to capture an abstract notion that in the current political economic system, the sphere of consumption is overriding the relations of production in ordering society as a whole. Also, the term's use often implies the idea that there is in fact a variety of socio-historically situated and differently institutionalised consumer cultures. What is more, the term aims to describe actual mundane individual and collective consumer practices from buying to fantasising about goods, as well as the commercial practices that shape and facilitate everyday consumption. In Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics, Sassatelli (2007) teases out these diverse levels of the notion, and, most notably, offers a comprehensive overview of the genesis and development of consumer society as a distinctive kind of society. In particular, drawing on an impressive array of theoretical and empirical work, she carefully outlines how consumer culture was brought about by popular, social-scientific, and institutional discourses and activity around the main dichotomies of production versus consumption, rationality versus irrationality, and freedom versus oppression. This volume aims to complement such definitive work by bringing together multiple, often conflicting in terms of basic assumptions, disciplinary approaches to studying consumer culture, thereby demarcating the subject thematically, methodologically and epistemologically. The goal here is to provide an instructive resource for scholars and students, from whatever discipline in which the key dimensions of consumer culture are critically discussed.

The Handbook emerges from the proposition that the breadth and diversity of consumer culture which overlaps several disciplines, including business studies, economics, sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, psychology, geography, history and politics, has not been fully enough explored. Above all, a divide persists between those approaching consumer culture as a psycho-economic phenomenon (e.g., psychology and behavioural economics) with a focus on decision-making patterns, and those who seek to understand consumer culture from a social scientific perspective (e.g., sociology and anthropology) with an emphasis on cultural meanings and sociality. Yet, most theories emanating from sociological or anthropological sources fail to take account of the market and the marketing system itself. They tend to look at the social categories of consumers or marketing output (advertising and promotional materials), largely ignoring the institutional dynamics of markets and that many interactions take place between consumers and marketers. In contrast, business scholars have tended until recently to focus on the micro aspects of the consumer-marketer exchange process and marketing practices, often bracketing considerations of a broader context. Given such divergent foci, it is scarcely surprising that business scholars, social scientists and humanities scholars remain largely unaware of each other's work on consumer culture. The Handbook seeks to bridge this divide by bringing together scholars from across the relevant disciplines and inviting a critical reflection on perspectives, assumptions and methods privileged within their respective approaches to consumer culture.

In the past three decades, the rise of neoliberal ideology and associated policies not only translated into an ever greater expansion of market logic into various spheres of social, cultural and personal life, but also exalted the ‘consumer’ as a primary form of agency in society (Harvey, 2005). Increasingly people are addressed primarily as consumers across social domains and institutions, including education, health care, and politics, and often accept unquestionably market solutions for social ills and improvements. A great plethora of mundane activities, forms of self-expression, and enjoyment are now coded as consumption (Graeber, 2011). Indeed, ideals of happiness and a good life for an individual, as well as prosperity and democracy for a society, are articulated predominantly in terms of consumer choice, consumer spending and consumer satisfaction. Accordingly, studies of consumers by business scholars, previously dominated by micro-economic- and cognitive-psychology-inspired approaches, seek to place consumers within their social worlds and to unpack cultural aspects of identity and group formation (Fitchett et al., 2014). This macro viewpoint conceptualises consumers as socially connected beings who seek to explore, identify and experience the world through consumption, rather than merely as rational, economic agents, who carefully process the information around potential purchase decisions. Attention has now shifted to how consumers actually behave in their everyday lives, and to the subjective, emotional and social dimensions of consumption (Bocock, 1993). Although this shift highlights the need for cross-disciplinary approaches to consumer culture, these studies have rarely reached a broader non-business audience. Similarly, scholars from social science and humanities backgrounds have appeared sceptical of more business-oriented approaches for fear of selling out and compromising the scientific status of their work. Consequently, this current volume seeks to bring different disciplines into a conversation with each other and showcase the range and variety of consumer-culture-related scholarship. The contributions illuminate various aspects of consumer culture through the juxtaposition of primary interests and key perspectives on consumption within distinct fields of study. As such, the collection foregrounds disciplinary strengths and competences as well as exposing the disciplinary biases and blind spots that hinder building a holistic understanding of consumer culture.

The Handbook consists of six key sections, each containing specific disciplinary foci. Recognising that disciplinary boundaries are often a matter of structural arrangements, reward and funding systems, the division into sections is based mainly on a disciplinary perspective reflected in a contribution, rather than authors’ institutional affiliations. We open with sociology and introduce approaches that have proved foundational in conceptualising the notion of consumer culture. The second part considers consumer cultures in historic and anthropologic perspectives across various geographies, especially in countries like Russia and China that provide contrasting contexts to the accepted western capitalist model of markets. The third part covers contemporary thinking in business studies from an interpretive consumer research perspective. This body of scholarship borrows theories from both sociology and anthropology to look at the intertwining of marketing activities with consumer culture. Part 4 draws on media and cultural studies to focus on aspects of representation and the subjectivities created through acts of consumption. The fifth part explores object-subject relations and materiality in consumer culture, showing that objects have agency also and are not just empty containers into which we as consumers pour meaning. We conclude the volume with a section on the politics of consumption to highlight and interrogate the increasing intensification of neoliberal ideology and the logics of late capitalism that define consumer culture today.

Part 1: Sociology of Consumption

The first section discusses the emergence of consumer culture and, indeed, the emergence of research into its development. There is a historical thread running through the section, as contributors consider classic sociological theories of consumption and reflect on changes in the approaches and scope in studying consumer culture. Each of the four chapters illustrates how social structures, relations and values are reproduced and constructed in everyday life through practices and places of consumption. A range of arenas of consumption, food, art, financial services, public goods and elements of class and consumer subjectivity are thus considered through this lens.

The opening chapter sets the scene with a discussion of the emergence of modern consumer culture. Steven Miles documents how the nature of consumption has changed over the last twenty years, bringing a heightened individualisation and sense of precarity that in turn fuels a quest for community and experiences that fill a perceived void. He considers key conceptual developments that have significantly impacted on the field of sociology, such as prosumption, authenticity and online forms of consumption. Using Airbnb as a case study, he undertakes an in-depth exploration of the tensions created by these developments and teases out their implications for studies of consumption.

Given the increasing complexities of consumer culture, Ben Fine, Kate Bayliss and Mary Robertson argue for more sophisticated and interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives. To this end they detail the systems of provision (SoP) approach to consumer culture, an approach that looks at the full chain of activities underpinning the material production and cultural significance of different goods. Using this theoretical lens, the authors then explore two largely ignored areas, namely the privatisation of public goods and financialisation, the proliferation of which is implicated in the consolidation of new neoliberal subjectivities. Overall, by analysing consumption within the chain of processes and structures around it, the SoP approach allows for more nuanced understanding, including policy impact and outcomes.

In ‘The Making of the Consumer’ Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel and Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier also set consumption in its wider context, this time by taking an historic perspective. Their chapter documents the ways in which market actors, the State and civil society, as well as consumers themselves, have contributed to the social making of consumers. As part of this analysis, the authors unpack how representations of the consumer are rooted in specific political or moral projects and show that consumption is a social and political practice with an impact way beyond the domestic sphere.

The final chapter in this section foregrounds a key concern of sociology, namely class inequalities and, more specifically, how consumption delineates class. Jessica Paddock revisits Bourdieu's treatise on distinction before discussing key modifications of this work and accompanying debates around the erosion of distinction implied by the increasing choice in consumer goods. She then interrogates contemporary practices of distinction, encapsulated in the phenomenon of cultural omnivorousness, and reflects on how the impetus towards sustaining class differences persists across fields of consumption such as art, music, home décor and food.

Part 2: Geographies of Consumer Cultures

The second part is inherently concerned with context, recognising that consumer cultures differ considerably from place to place, while also acknowledging a central role of consumption in societies and regions across the world. All the chapters attend to the historic and geographic diversity of consumer cultures, elucidating the divergence and convergence of consumption practices, as well as the political-economic and ethical implications thereof in an unevenly globalised world.

In ‘Debunking the Myths of Global Consumer Culture’ Güliz Ger and colleagues methodically unpick taken-for-granted assumptions to reveal ideological blind spots common to studies of global consumer culture. The authors highlight the need to historicise both the process of globalisation and seemingly global consumption practices. The chapter calls attention to inequalities at play in local/foreign cultural encounters and the persisting reification of us/other bo...