The globally networked world, where many people have a shared sense of a planet as a whole and experience this through mobility, work, technologies and exposure to the media, seems perfectly suited to the proliferation of the idea of cosmopolitanism. The attractiveness of the concept is manifold and its implications compelling. Accordingly, cosmopolitanism today is made from a potent blend of ideology, social hope, self-narrative, social performance and social fact. Most contemporary commentators have concurred that cosmopolitanism is associated with a conscious openness to the world and the potential for a relational dialogue with people and things that are culturally different (Hannerz, 1990). The adoption of a cosmopolitan outlook involves āan everyday, historically alert, reflexive awareness of ambivalences in a milieu of blurring differentiations and cultural contradictionsā (Beck, 2006, p. 3). As summarised by Delanty, in broad terms ācosmopolitanism is about the extension of the moral and political horizons of people, societies, organisations and institutionsā (Delanty, 2012, p. 2). The cosmopolitanism question at the level of empirical inquiry concerning practices and individuals, then, is essentially whether or not people begin to develop feelings of responsibility for widening circles of strangers (Appiah, 2007). It asks how they seek to understand and be changed by incorporating othersā viewpoints and practices which are apparently very much unlike their own, and how they feel responsible for environments far away from them, including for nonhuman agents like ecological and climatic systems.
At the level of institutions and markets, the cosmopolitan question becomes one of network embeddedness and connectedness and how āthe formation of cosmopolitanism is coterminous with the growth of attachments among humans and nonhumans in certain configurations. What configurations sustain cosmopolitanism? How do they grow?ā (Saito, 2011, p. 131). In this collection, we partly set ourselves and our authors the task of exploring the links between individual practices and meanings, and the networked attachments that find and structure them through explorations of markets and consumption practices.
This collection is in line with the empirical turn that has been embraced widely within contemporary cosmopolitanism studies. While researchers currently grapple not only with the abstract philosophical dimensions of the concept, they increasingly seek to understand how every day, vernacular forms of cosmopolitanism work, and how people acquire and learn cosmopolitan competencies and habits (Kendall, Woodward, & SkrbiÅ, 2009; Noble, 2013). In this context, it is not an exaggeration to observe that consumption opportunities and practices, whether mundane or ecstatic, constitute a large part of peopleās engagements and encounters with diversity and cultural difference. Furthermore, these consumption practices connect networked topographies of capital with individuals, households, neighbourhoods and consumer tribes. In this collection, we assemble authors who address such connections, responding to the fundamental question of in what ways this consumption might matter for diffusing cosmopolitan cultures and in what ways it might complicate them, or even deform them. And, in what ways can scholarship from diverse disciplinary perspectives work with each other to shed light on these questions?
The purpose of this book is to examine the relational mediation and performance of cosmopolitan ideals and cosmopolitanisation processes for consumption and market practices. The book expands current perspectives on cosmopolitan consumption from a focus on Western-educated elites towards a global perspective, acknowledging the diversity of cosmopolitanisms in an increasingly mobile world. It combines social scientific and business and marketing approaches to cosmopolitanism, bringing the strongest and distinctive elements of both approaches to bear on the problem of how consumption relates to cosmopolitanism. Assembling a set of researchers from around the globe, it advocates an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the cosmopolitanism consequences of consumption by combining insights from research in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and consumer research. By discussing not only the positive side of cosmopolitanism but also the problems and challenges related to it, such as environmental consequences, labour exploitation and cultural domination and the way these problems become cosmopolitan questions by way of consumption, this book takes a critical look at issues and practices of cosmopolitan consumption and marketisation.
Book Structure
The chapters in the book conceptualise a range of ways that consumption, materials and attachments matter for understanding possibilities for the diffusion and adoption of cosmopolitan sensibilities, lifestyles and cosmopolitics.
In Part I of the book, the authors address broadly the dimension of personal consumption and how it may help people think in cosmopolitan ways and indeed to perform a type of cosmopolitan identity, asking how and in what ways such consumption might matter for expanding universes of belonging and overcoming boundaries and barriers of cultural difference. This section of the book therefore outlines the research questions and problems addressed in the volume, as well as conceptualises and maps key debates and questions within the field. Chapter 2 by Woodward and Emontspool offers an overview of existing research linking cosmopolitanism and consumption and delineates current challenges and questions emerging from this construct in global marketplaces. Chapter 3 by Kipnis critically assesses current cosmopolitanism studies in consumer research, highlighting that they do not necessarily differentiate between foreign and global product preferences. On this basis, the chapter offers recommendations for improving the measurement of consumer cosmopolitanism in multicultural marketplaces. Chapter 4 by Cicchelli and Octobre studies how young consumer generations approach aesthetic cosmopolitanism given the widespread global connectivity of this generation in todayās marketplaces. Specifically, this chapter addresses the link between cosmopolitanism and status for those generations and proposes a sociological way for thinking through temporal changes in consumer patterns via their idea of the ācosmopolitan amateurā.
Part II of the book addresses the idea that cosmopolitanism is more than just ideas and values, but circulates through a symbolic, material and aesthetic economy related to styles, aesthetic forms , material surfaces and cultural performances available to particular publics who are able to transform them into things with cosmopolitan consequences. Accordingly, it illustrates how cosmopolitanism is expressed in and by spatial and material contexts in the marketplace. It also allows for discussion of the ways in which cosmopolitanism is constituted by a symbolic, material and aesthetic economy related to commercial and public spaces, and cultural performances. ...