Economics
Consumption Patterns
Consumption patterns refer to the way individuals or households allocate their spending across different goods and services. These patterns are influenced by factors such as income, preferences, prices, and cultural norms. Understanding consumption patterns is important for analyzing economic trends, forecasting demand for products, and formulating effective policies.
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7 Key excerpts on "Consumption Patterns"
eBook - PDF- Sanghee Sohn Cha, Young Sook Chung, Frances Magrabi, Se Jeong Yang(Authors)
- 1991(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Practical reasons can be advanced also. Some may look forward to travel or living in other countries and willfindit useful to identify in advance those aspects of consumption that are likely to differ from their own. Some may have philan- thropic reasons and desire information about problems and needs. Some may expect to be involved in business dealings with foreign markets and need general information about ways of life in those regions. Finally, we should note that knowledge of Consumption Patterns in other countries provides us with a wider range of behavior to study—extreme poverty, isolated rural communities, subsistence economies, households relying on earn- ings of migrant members, and so on. This wider range of data can help us gain a better understanding of the fundamental relationships that shape consumption. Consumption Patterns vary greatly even within a single country. Clearly the task of summarizing Consumption Patterns worldwide is an impossible one, even were data available. In the sections that follow, two kinds of data will be summarized: average data on selected social indicators, available through the United Nations, World Bank, and other sources, and information about selected countries. The first sections deal with population, resources, and other general characteristics. The remaining sections are concerned with Consumption Patterns. 200 Patterns and Trends GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS Population The world population is large and growing. In 1988, it was about 5.1 billion, 15 percent higher than in 1980 (World Health Statistics Quarterly [WHSQ], 1989b, p. 192). By the year 2000, it will have increased by nearly a billion (Brown, 1990, p. 5). Much of the expected growth will be in poor countries (low-income and lower- middle-income countries), which are characterized by large and growing pop- ulations. With about one-fourth of the land area of the world, they have over half the total population (World Bank, 1989).
eBook - PDF- Joao Heitor De Avila Santos(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Society Publishing(Publisher)
Cultural Variations in Consumption Patterns Chapter 3 CONTENTS 3.1. Introduction ...................................................................................... 64 3.2. Measuring Cultural Consumption ..................................................... 67 3.3. Motive Of Cultural Consumption ...................................................... 69 3.4. Variety Of Cultural Consumption Indicators ...................................... 71 3.5. Integration Of Indicators ................................................................... 73 3.6. Consumption Within Cultural Frameworks ........................................ 74 3.7. Theoretical Issues In Cultural Consumption Research ........................ 80 3.8. Conclusion ....................................................................................... 91 References ............................................................................................... 93 Consumer Behavior and Culture 64 The study of how individual customers, groups or organizations select, buy, use, and dispose ideas, goods, and services to satisfy their needs and wants consumer behavior. It defines the actions of the consumer in the marketplace and also explains the reason behind that. The relations between lived culture and social resources, between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through markets and consumers as part of an interconnected system of commercially produced Consumer culture is viewed as “social arrangement.” In this chapter, how Consumption Patterns differ according to culture has been explained. As for how people taste and preferences changes with the change in culture or place also. With the help of various examples, this thing has been defined clearly and accurately. 3.1. INTRODUCTION This chapter explains the procedural and theoretical issues that arise in contemporary analyses of cultural consumption.
eBook - PDFBetween Marriage and the Market
Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo
- Homa Hoodfar(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
CHAPTER 7 Expenditure and Consumption Patterns Survival and coping strategies should be primarily about the different ways in which a household negotiates its incorporation into the life of its community. Despite the fact that consumption is an important means by which people reaffirm their socioeconomic status in their community (Douglas and Isherwood 1978; Bloch and Parry 1989; McCracken 1990; Warde 1994), studies of survival strategies have often concentrated on income-earning activities and neglected con- sumption patterns. The significance of household income lies in the fact that it is a primary determinant of household consumption. Among low-income households, in urban and increasingly commercialized con- texts, where cash supply is limited and unpredictable, consumption strategies gain special importance since they have direct influence on people's well-being. Consumption is one of the frontiers at which "the culture is fought over and licked into shape" (Douglas and Isherwood 1978:57), and par- ticipation in this process is part of community life. In fact, the real hindrance of having a low income is that it restricts people from such participation. 1 At the extreme, this exclusion may bring a society to the verge of breakdown, both politically and socially. Most societies have 1. As early as 1977 a memorandum that was submitted by the Supplementary Benefit Commission to the Royal Commission on Distribution of Income and Wealth, U.K., defined income as "a means of access to a social system. The significance of low-income is that it restricts such access and below a certain level it may virtually exclude people from participating fully in the life of the community of which they are members" (quoted in Douglas and Isherwood 1978: 90). 188 E X P E N D I T U R E A N D Consumption Patterns 189 evolved cultural practices to prevent such an eventuality, for instance, by encouraging those who have more to provide a greater share for com- munal consumption.
eBook - PDFSystem Innovation for Sustainability 1
Perspectives on Radical Changes to Sustainable Consumption and Production
- Arnold Tukker, Martin Charter, Carlo Vezzoli, Eivind Stø, Maj Munch Andersen(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Fur-thermore, increased and growing consumption counteracts the eco-efficiencies gained by ‘green’ products (the so-called rebound effect). Against this background, more research is needed to understand consumption behaviour with regard to sustainable Consumption Patterns. Having this in mind, the social-ecological approach to sustain-able consumption focuses on the role of orientations and motivational backgrounds for consumption behaviour. Within this approach it stresses the logic of the organisation of everyday life in a multi-dimensional framework. 16.2.1 Consumption and the organisation of everyday life The way people eat or move is a result of individual and collective habits that are woven into the fabric everyday life (Shove 2004). Consumption is linked to everyday activities that can be described as social practices (Giddens 1984). Social practices are more or less institutionalised collective phenomena that are reproduced through everyday action and are governed more by habits and routines than by deliberate and rational choice. Routines are incorporated chains of action characterised by a low degree of reflexivity. Nevertheless, they rely on incorporated competences and on preconscious specific knowledge. Routines allow for immediate action and quick and easy decision-making by reducing the complexity of everyday situations. At the same time, they are invested with emotions and attitudes. Consumption has very much to do with the way in which individuals organise their daily lives (Cogoy 1999). Nevertheless, it is not an individual act. ‘Ordinary consump-tion’ (Gronow and Warde 2001) is framed by cultural and social contexts of households and family life, which are themselves characterised by structures of gendered division of labour, the societal organisation of intimacy and gendered power relations (Schultz 2006).
eBook - PDFAusterities and Aspirations
A Comparative History of Growth, Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945
- Béla Tomka(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Central European University Press(Publisher)
3 Consumption: Structures, Practices, and Policies F or a long time, historians considered the study of consumption to be syn-onymous with investigations into standards of living. The concept has gen-erally referred to material well-being and, accordingly, has been determined by measuring the quantities of goods and services consumed. However, contemporary historical accounts of consumption are more diverse. In the following chapter, this subject will be dealt with not only by assessing lev-els of consumption, but also by means of a more comprehensive approach. While consumption levels rose spectacularly in industrialized societies in the twentieth century, this was not merely a quantitative transformation. There were significant shifts in the structure of consumption and in the inequalities concerning consumption. This transformation has also exhib-ited other important features that can be called qualitative aspects includ-ing, above all, changes in consumer choice. Alongside these trends, there has also been a transformation of the role and function of consumption in society, a process that is often described as the rise of the consumer—or mass consumer—society. 1 This chapter will focus particular attention on changes in levels, pat-terns, stratification, and the qualitative aspects of consumption; similar dimensions related to the evolution of leisure will also be analyzed. Fur-thermore, the social role of consumption as well as the genesis of consumer societies and consumer cultures in Europe in the latter half of the twentieth century will be explored. Differentiating these aspects will make it possible to engage in comparisons, through which the idiosyncrasies of the con- 90 AUSTERITIES AND ASPIRATIONS sumer cultures of communist-era East Central Europe as well as variations within the region can be illustrated.
eBook - PDF- Gregory C Chow(Author)
- 1987(Publication Date)
- WSPC(Publisher)
162 CONSUMPTION Living floor space p.c, cities and towns Living floor space p.c, rural areas 1979 4.4 m 2 8.4 m 2 1981 5.3 m 2 10.2 m 2 1981/1979 % 120.5 121.4 5.2 HOUSEHOLD EXPENDITURE PATTERNS In the preceding section we discussed the changes in .total consumption per capita through time. This is an example of time-series analysis. In this section we study the composition of family consumption expenditures at the same time among different groups of consumers. This exemplifies a cross-section analysis. It is of interest to examine how households increase their expenditures on different kinds of consumption goods as their total consumption expenditure increases. Such studies of consumer expenditure patterns originated more than 100 years ago. As Houthakker (1957, p. 532) writes: Few dates in the history of econometrics are more significant than 1857. In that year Ernst Engel (1821-1896) published a study on the conditions of production and consumption in the Kingdom of Saxony, in which he formulated an empirical law concerning the relation between income and expenditure on food. Engel's law, as it has since become known, states that the proportion of income spent on food declines as income rises. Its original statement was mainly based on an examination of about two hundred budgets of Belgian laborers collected by Ducpetiaux. Since that date the law has been found to hold in many other budget surveys; similar laws have also been formulated for other items of expenditure. With the formulation of Engel's law an important branch of econometrics took its start, though it was not until our days that consumption research was placed on a sound theoretical and statistical basis. . . . His successful attempt to derive meaningful regularities from seemingly arbitrary observations will always be an inspiring example to the profession, the more so because in his day economic theory and statistical techniques were of little assistance in such an attempt.
eBook - PDF- Joseph P. Stoltman(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Consumption can signify an important rite of passage (a first driving lesson), a commitment to fashion (a tattoo), or a visible marital commitment (a wedding ring). Consumption has lasting social implications that go beyond the simple act of private spending, yet the price expended on the good or service provides us with an important measure of its magnitude. Consider dinner. We may purchase a variety of food and beverage items in different stores and apply household labor to prepare, cook, and serve the meal. Or we could purchase food service in a restaurant or in an institutional cafeteria. In either case, we consume much more than the food; we consume a whole dining situation over a period of time. The act of consumption in such a dining situation may include a social event and shared fellowship, a religious devotion, sharing information, or fulfilling a sense of obligation. Why do people consume? The answer seems trivial: just as rational to consumers seeking status as the Consumer because they want stuff. We can understand the attraction Reports "best buy" check mark is to other consumers. This of "stuff' in terms of its "utility," the capacity of goods and helps explain the attraction of "monster houses," "monster services to satisfy human wants. At the most primordial trucks," "big gulp" soft drinks, and "super-sized" fast-food level, these wants resolve into basic human needs for food, combos. shelter, and security. Once those needs are fulfilled, humans exhibit a wide variety of consumption preferences that show how consumption is an important part of social Measuring and Mapping Consumption: behavior. Thorstein Veblen, a 19th-century economist and Classical Location Theory social theorist, coined the term conspicuous consumption to show that the utility of consumption was more heavily The classic spatial measure of consumption in economic influenced by the status it confers on the consumer and the geography is market potential.
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