The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach
Joel Stillerman
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0745661289
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Computational Macroeconomics for the Open Economy
End of Millennium (The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume 3)
Groundswell: The Case for Fracking
by Schor (1998), downshifting refers to individuals who seek to escape the stresses and limited satisfactions of the “work-and-spend cycle” by reducing their workforce participation. According to the author, these individuals see a tradeoff between time and money, and choose to maximize the former and sacrifice the latter. Schor (1998) also identifies a second trend, described as “simple living.” These individuals
Pop singer Beyoncé Knowles was the headline act during the Super Bowl 2013 half-time show. This event illustrates several dimensions of contemporary consumption explored in this book. The Super Bowl has the largest audience of any televised program in the United States, fans engage in many rituals while viewing the game, and Super Bowl advertisements set industry trends for the upcoming year. The game tells us something about contemporary
unlikely that they seek uniqueness or authenticity. Rather, such consumers seek an expected package of amenities. This phenomenon is evident in the annual trek of American college students to Florida, Mexico, and other places in the U.S. South for spring break. Here, the goal is to engage in an expected set of (mis)behaviors around other college students without paying attention to local residents or sites (Sheller 2003; Babb 2011; Rushkoff 1999).
Historical Origins of Modern Class Divisions To understand differences in consumption across social classes in modern societies, we first need to consider how social inequality shaped consumption in the premodern era. Under feudalism, society was divided into estates based on birth: the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners (or peasants). Social inequality was reproduced across generations based on primogeniture (inheritance). In addition to the transfer of property and social status through
of styles, but they differ from “pop voracious” listeners who consume vast quantities of music, and “classical enthusiasts” show no particular musical expertise and look more like Peterson’s “univores.” In sum, they see changing boundaries between and among musical genres that reflect generational rather than class differences. In an interesting twist on this discussion, Lizardo and Skiles (2012) return to Bourdieu to