Routledge Handbook on Consumption

Margit Keller, Bente Halkier, Terhi-Anna Wilska, Monica Truninger, Margit Keller, Bente Halkier, Terhi-Anna Wilska, Monica Truninger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138939387
• eBook ISBN: 9781317380894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Consumption research is burgeoning across a wide range of disciplines. The Routledge Handbook on Consumption gathers experts from around the world to provide a nuanced overview of the latest scholarship in this expanding field. At once ambitious and timely, the volume provides an ideal map for those looking to position their work, find new analytic insights and identify research gaps. With an intuitive thematic structure and resolutely international outlook, it engages with theory and methodology; markets and businesses; policies, politics and the state; and culture and everyday life. It will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social and economic sciences.

1

Consumption research revisited

Charting of the territory and introducing the handbook

Bente Halkier, Margit Keller, Monica Truninger and Terhi-Anna Wilska

A multi-disciplinary research field

In Keywords, Raymond Williams describes the historical development in the uses of the words consumer and consumption: “To consume” dates back to the fourteenth century and meant “to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust” (Williams, 1987, pp. 78–79), whereas “to consume”, “consumer” and “consumption” gained the meaning of the use of market-provided goods and services from the eighteenth century onwards, alongside the development of capitalism and political economy, but also with Romanticism (Campbell, 1987). Both meanings of consumption are still with us today in so far as the understanding of consumption as part of market relations dominates popular discourse as well as research definitions. Seeing consumption as something potentially problematic is also part of the recent consumption research history and the current societal challenges to the environment, health, well-being and equality.

To researchers of consumption, it is of course no surprise that important terms have different meanings and definitions. In the introduction to the Sage four-volume book titled Consumption, Warde (2010) argued that the research field is characterized by the lack of consistent, agreed-upon and workable definitions of its core concepts. Earlier, Warde had given a definition of consumption that is sociological in its disciplinary background, yet encompassing and nuanced enough to provide a field for versatile problem framings and empirical agendas: “Consumption is a process whereby agents engage in appropriation and appreciation, whether for utilitarian, expressive or contemplative purposes, of goods, services, performances, information or ambience, whether purchased or not, over which the agent has some discretion” (2005, p. 137).

In Consumption the contributions are grouped under three headings, reflecting three interrelated aspects of consumption processes, bearing close affinity to the above-quoted definition: acquisition, appropriation and appreciation (Warde, 2010). Acquisition refers to the dynamics, arrangements and conditions of economic and social exchange in consumption whereby goods and services are procured. Appropriation covers the variations of how consumers use goods and services and what is being done with goods and services in which processes. Appreciation concerns the meaning-making made in relation to consumption activities. We are suggesting that these terms are helpful in structuring the broad questions to be asked about consumption. We are adding disposal (Cappellini, Marshall & Parsons, 2016) since the ways in which consumers get rid of things, empty them of meaning, throw out, re-use and re-craft them have been a focus of research for some time and have gained momentum especially in the context of sustainable consumption. These terms might be used to express the recognitions of the above-outlined common – or at least cross-disciplinary and cross-perspective – ideas and potentially used for conceptual work.

Some researchers will see a search for a conceptual core or synthesis of consumption research as possible and as something worth striving for across the different intersecting disciplines of the field. This view parallels an understanding of a field such as consumption research as being potentially trans-disciplinary, whereby different disciplines meet around complex subjects and attempt to renegotiate and re-draw traditional disciplinary boundaries (Klein, 1990, pp. 27–28). As far as we can see, there is only a little of this type of research going on, primarily in parts of anthropology, sociology, critical marketing and cultural geography.

Other consumption researchers will perhaps see their research as contributing to a much more specific field of research, under the big umbrella of consumption research, and therefore perhaps not in need of conceptual synthesis. This view is parallel to an understanding of a research field as being multi-disciplinary, where the disciplines to a large degree work independently “next to” each other (Klein, 1990, pp. 56–57). It can be argued that consumption research is dominated by multi-disciplinarity across e.g. sociology, cultural studies, marketing, anthropology, communication and information, economics, psychology, nutrition and health sciences, history, and cultural and economic geography. This obviously contributes to the degree of differentiation of theoretical perspectives, concepts, methodological designs and types of empirical questions and conclusions. Moreover, multi-disciplinary studies of consumption share a lot of their theoretical and methodological foundations with the research on other topics in social, cultural and political research, such as different divisions and inequalities, leisure and lifestyles, social and political transformations, the use and meanings of technology, mobility and transport, ethnicity and multiculturalism, learning and education, social and political participation, and health, well-being and happiness – to mention only a few.

We hope that consumption researchers of both kinds find this handbook a useful partner in conversation.

Rationale of the handbook

The purpose of this handbook is not to decide whether or not to aim for conceptual syntheses across disciplines, subfields and perspectives. Rather, its main objective is to bring together and represent broadly the state-of-the-art across these variations in order to make this handbook a “one-stop shop” and a benchmark for readers interested in social scientific consumption studies. The aim of this chapter is to set the scene.

On top of this variation across the field, consumption is also part and parcel of many central societal issues, which leads to it often being treated in an unrealistic manner, as either god of the market or victim of economic, cultural and social conditions. The handbook’s objective is to give a thorough and nuanced overview of cutting-edge research and recent debates of the field. It is meant to operate as a map for scholars and students to position their work, to find new analytic nodes and research gaps. The handbook takes sociology of consumption as its main focus, yet also covers and engages with debates in adjacent disciplines in the field such as marketing research, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, communication, cultural geography and education.

The handbook stages a series of conversations on consumption, covering different sectors of society: markets and businesses; policies, politics and the state; civil society and culture. Special attention will be given to social divisions, constraints as well as opportunities and solutions that varying consumption cultures and societies afford. We also cater for readers interested in particular sub-fields by relating consumption to sustainability, body, age, gender, cultural issues and lifestyles, information and communication technologies (ICTs), consumer policies, global challenges and specific emerging markets such as Russia, China, Brazil and Turkey.

A critical review of consumption studies is timely given the burning issues societies face globally: climate change, economic crisis, sharpening inequalities, population ageing, obesity epidemic, food insecurity and poverty as well as the strengthening foothold of ICTs in everyday lives. In all these areas consumption processes play key roles, yet are often taken for granted, or rendered invisible, consumers seen as passive or isolated recipients by commercial marketing and policy rhetoric, as well as fragmented and often contradictory research results. This handbook has three specific aims. First, to encourage readers to delve deeper into issues related to consumption, and especially to fascinate the more uninitiated reader – a graduate student perhaps – with the burgeoning and intriguing field of consumption studies. Second, to persuade that much high-level analysis and theoretical thinking is done in this diverse field and deserves careful attention. This is to avoid focusing only on a few narrow analytical levels and perspectives that may become ossified in the vast and rich literature on consumption. Third, we should aim to de-ossify studies on consumption and be open to the surprising interstitial spaces of innovation and imagination.

A brief story across stories of consumption research

Attempting to tell one story of the analytical development and theoretical distinctions in an inherently multi-disciplinary research field such as consumption studies is of course almost impossible. Hence, the ambition of this section is much more humble: to set a scene for sharing the different versions of what consumption research entails by pulling together some of the often-referred-to overviews in our framing. Thus, our brief story draws upon the following accounts of different parts of the consumption research field: Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Askegaard & Linnet, 2011; Bauman, 1988, 1998, 2007; Featherstone, 1990, 1991; Fine & Leopold, 1993, Gabriel & Lang, 2015; Gronow, 1997, Gronow & Warde, 2001; Lury, 2011; McGregor & Murnane, 2010; Miller, 1998; Paterson, 2006; Ratneshwar & Mick, 2005; Ritzer & Slater, 2001; Sassatelli, 2007; Slater, 1997; Soper & Trentmann, 2008; Sulkunen, Holmwood, Radner & Schulze, 1997; Trentmann, 2016; Warde, 1994, 2010, 2014. Looking across these accounts makes it possible to see a trajectory of diversification in the international studies on consumption, and also the mainstreaming of certain ideas across perspectives and disciplines.

Within recent social science, the study of consumption has roughly followed a trajectory of working mainly from economistic assumptions in the beginning, then moving towards and including first socio-cultural structuralism, then embracing a cultural turn, and lately also covering practice and materiality turns.

The economistic strand of consumption research originally resided in two quite different research perspectives. The first was the neo-liberal economic perspective of the consumer as individual and somewhat rational decision-maker with fixed preferences, choosing on the basis of various kinds of self-interest, utility and other individual motivations. Moreover, consumption is treated abstractly, all commodities under the term consumer goods, and consumption in aggregate level as one single consumer, ignoring cultural and social aspects of consumption. Income and prices are principal factors in the consumption process in economist theories, such as Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis (1957) or Engel’s law on the relation between income and food expenditure (Fine & Leopold, 1993). This perspective dominated theoretical and empirical social scientific interest in consumption from the 1950s on, and was particularly strong in the US, where consumption research became associated more closely with marketing research and business studies.

The other standpoint in consumer research based on economistic assumptions is the neo-Marxist critical theory perspective on consumption, which tended to see consumers rather differently at one level, namely as alienated, dependent upon and manipulated by and into participation in superficial, even trivial activities of mass consumption and mass culture. Mass culture was produced and dominated by a concentrated culture industry whose sole motive was profit. This perspective, originally introduced by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the 1940s (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1981/1944), was particularly strong in European theoretical discussions about consumption in the 1960s and 1970s. The two otherwise different perspectives on consumption, however, shared one assumption: that the social and cultural practices and relations involved in consumption were dependent upon economic mechanisms.

Reactions to understanding consumption mainly as a function of economic dynamics came first from anthropology and sociology, where a perspective of seeing consumption as expressions of cultural and social relations and the reproduction of social structures came forward in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The classic work by Jean Baudrillard published in the 1970s, The Consumer Society (1998), is illustrative of this shift. Baudrillard acknowledged the highly symbolic nature of consumption, arguing also that symbols and signs do not only express pre-existing sets of meanings, but also create meanings during the consumption process. Another classic representative of this perspective, but from the 1980s, would be Mary Douglas’ (Douglas & Isherwood, 1980) anthropological approach to consumption as rituals that reflect social order and reproduce cultural markers and classifications. One last prominent example comes from sociology with Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to consumption as reproduction of patterns of cultural tastes, reflecting the place of consumers in the social hierarchy based on their habitus and forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1984). The inclusion of this perspective in consumption research meant that consumption and consumers could be defined in terms of social and cultural categories, and thus the unit of analysis was significantly broadened out, being neither only the individual consumer nor the capitalist system, but also more meso-level collective units such as cultural orders and social hierarchies.

During the 1980s and into the 1990s however, reactions towards the alleged structuralism of the above perspective formed part of a broader so-called “cultural turn” (Gronow, 1997; Warde, 1994, 2014) which strongly influenced research on consumption. The empirical study of different types of consumption was taken up across a broader range of disciplines than marketing, sociology and anthropology – e.g. cultural studies and media and communication studies. The cultural turn in studying consumption gained momentum within marketing, sociology and anthropology. It consisted in giving priority to the symbolic (and often discursive) cultural dynamics and experiential expressions of modern mass consumption activities. Theoretically, the term consumer culture was a programmatic part of the cultural turn, even giving name to a whole research program, Consumer Culture Theory, and establishing a journal, Journal of Consumer Culture. Empirically, there was a large growth in studies on detailed consumption activities, lifestyle and subculture, creative ways of engaging with consumer goods and services, semiotic meanings of material culture objects, and relations between consumption activities and consumer identities. The unit of analysis varied from the individual consumer to collective cultural dynamics. But importantly, the cultural turn paved the way for consumption activities themselves being appreciated as meaningful and enjoyable, as well as being measured, categorized and criticized.

Much-quoted examples connected with this perspective are e.g. Colin Campbell’s sociological analysis of consumers as modern hedonists (Campbell, 1987), Paul Willis’ cultural studies description of symbolic consumption in youth culture (Willis, 1990), Elisabeth Hirschman and Morris Holbrook’s article on hedonic consumption (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982) and a book on postmodern consumer research in marketing (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1992). In the 1980s and early 1990s, postmodernist theorists in sociology regarded consumption as the central element in the formation of the arguably fluid and changeable self-identity of a consumer in the conditions of reflexive modernization (Bauman, 1988; Featherstone, 1991; Giddens, 1991). Equally important was the growth in amount and diversity of empirical studies and publications on consumption and consumers in their socio-cultural contexts, paving the way for the potential of conducting comparative research across different places.

Although disciplines defined consumer culture and cultural aspects of consumption differently, researchers from around the year 2000 began to argue that the cultural turn, despite its many empirical and theoretical achievements, also had neglected particular social dynamics in consumption, namely the more inconspicuous, practical, routine, embodied and material aspects of and conditions for consumption. The emergence of this fourth broad perspective on consumption has several labels, such as the practice turn or materiality turn, and has been particularly rooted in sociology and anthropology, but also critical marketing and cultural geography. Theoretically, there has been a focus on practices and arrangements into which consumption is seen as embedded. Empirically, there has been a growth in studies on routine consumption, flows of mundane conduct in and around consumption, and processes of reproduction and change of consumption patterns. A much-stressed assumption has been that the unit of analysis should not be the individual consumer.

An early example of this practice-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Consumption research revisited: Charting of the territory and introducing the handbook
• Part I Theoretical and methodological perspectives on consumption
• Part II Consumers and markets: Introduction
• Part III Global challenges in consumption: Introduction
• Part IV Politics and policies of consumption: Introduction
• Part V Consumption and social divisions: Introduction
• Part VI Contested consumption: Introduction
• Part VII Culture, media and consumption: Introduction
• Index