Schumpeter, Veblen, Mills, Bell and Wright on Advanced Industrial or Post-Industrial Society

 

Schumpeter, Veblen, Mills, Bell and Wright on Advanced Industrial or Post-Industrial Society

Gaurang R. Sahay

There are a number of scholars or sociologists who have presented basic features of economy or economic life in advanced industrial or post-industrial society. The most notable names belonging to this group of scholars are Joseph Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell and Erik Olin Wright. Their main ideas are as follows:

Joseph Schumpeter 

Schumpeter was not a Marxist but he respected Marx’s ideas. After a number of successful appointments in Europe including as the minister of finance in the Austrian Republic and as president of a Bank he emigrated to the USA where he ended up his career at Harvard University. Like Marx, Schumpeter also wrote in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: Can capitalism survive? that Capitalism could not sustain itself as system and thus would inevitably come to an end. He believed it will be replaced by socialism and socialism can survive and work.

Marx saw capitalism’s collapse in terms of its failure whereas Schumpeter viewed capitalism’s collapse in terms of its success. For Schumpeter, the working class would play no role in the collapse of capitalism. He wrote, ‘ The true pacemakers of socialism were not the intellectuals or agitators who preached it but the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers’ (Schumpeter 1942: 134).

He believed that the entrepreneurial class consisting of Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers is chiefly responsible for the powerful productive capacity of capitalism due to its willingness to take risks in the competitive market. This development happened along with the emergence of modern bureaucratic corporation which led to the economic decision making by a new and increasingly influential stratum consisting of administrators or managers in the corporate hierarchy. The ultimate outcome of this development was that the entrepreneur increasingly became irrelevant, replaced in importance by the managers, who succeed in institutionalizing methods that ensure economic progress.

For Schumpeter, capitalism demise did not entail the end of the market or the emergence of a classless society. It simply meant that the entrepreneurial class, having outlived its usefulness, ceased to exist, being supplanted by the managers of the corporate bureaucracies.

For Schumpeter, socialism is ‘an institutional pattern in which the control over the means of production and over production itself is vested with a central authority, and with this centralization, ‘the economic affairs of society belong to the public and not to the private sphere’ (Schumpeter 1942: 167). In other words, socialism means a system of centralized authorities making economic decisions on behalf of the interests of the public. Thus, Schumpeter concluded that if a revolution has taken place in Industrial society, it is what James Burnham (1941) called a ‘managerial revolution,’ the ascendance to power of a class of people equipped with the expert knowledge necessary to make a modern industrial society function and expand.

Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen lived on the margins of American academic life. He was an original thinker but a bad teacher. Though he was married, but carried on numerous amorous relationships with women. His extramarital affairs were the primary reason he was forced to leave both Chicago and Stanford. Veblen was raised in rural Minnesota in a Norwegian immigrant enclave characterized by hard work and an ascetic atmosphere.

In his most famous book, The Theory of Leisure class (1899), Veblen’s pen dripped with sarcasm in his characterization of the owners of business enterprises. He viewed the owners as the dominant class in capitalist industrial society as due to their success in the struggle for survival. Although the business owners lived off of the success of industrial society, they did little to contribute to that success. For this reason, he could refer to them as the ‘leisure class’. In his view, ‘The leisure class lives by the industrial community, rather than in it. Its relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than an industrial kind’ (Veblen 1899: 246). He viewed the giant industrialists of his era as predators and survivors from an earlier era. As such, he found it most appropriate for them to be dubbed the ‘robber barons’. By introducing the terms ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘conspicuous leisure’, he opined that the consumption pattern of the leisure class are designed not to fulfill genuine needs but to advance prestige claims. They are predicated on waste – waste of time, effort, and goods. Thus he saw them as acts of consumption that do nothing to enhance human well-being (Veblen 1899: 85-98).

For Veblen, the leisure class has never had a genuinely beneficial role to play in industrial society. It exists in a parasitical relationship to what are actually the productive classes consisting of both white collar and manual workers.

Veblen treated technological developments as a major, perhaps the major, source of social change. Technological developments made necessary cadres of workers with expert knowledge such as engineers and technicians manage the economic system effectively and efficiently.

Thus, industrial society was characterized by a dichotomy between business and industry or in Veblen’s words, between pecuniary interests and industrial interests. Although the owners were motivated by the desire to make money, it was only the experts who were capable of producing socially useful goods. Industrial society would continue to be wasteful and would fail to meet actual human needs as long as business owners belonging to leisure class constituted the dominant economic class.

The solution to this situation revolved around the ability of the engineers or technocrats to wrest control of the economy from the owners. This class of experts, and not the proletariat, was crucial to any possibility of liberating industrial society from the impediments of its capitalist moorings. However, Veblen did not explore the likelihood that these knowledge experts would be either willing to organize collectively to usurp control of the economy from the owners.

C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills, 1916, was a professor of sociology in university of Wisconsin, USA. He was interested in comprehending the new forms of stratification that were arising in a novel phase in the history of industrial society, one that involved reconfiguration of the class structure.

He published a three books on new forms of stratification in USA. The first book in the trilogy, The New Men of Power (1948), is a study of the American labour movement. Referring Marxism as labour metaphysic, he argued that Marxism was wrong to see the working class as a revolutionary class. He indicated that the labour leadership had been thoroughly co-opted by business and government. Accordingly, they have been integrated into power system as junior partner. Mills believed that the group of general workers was not a militant force. They were quite willing to pursue bread-and-butter issues, seeking to obtain a larger piece of the economic pie within capitalism rather than desiring the establishment of socialism.

Mills in his another book White Collar argues that advanced industrial society had also signaled the numerical decline of the blue-collar workforce and with it the dramatic expansion of the middle class that he termed new middle class consisting of white collar workers. In contrast to the self-employed members of the old middle class, the new middle class incorporated a wide range of occupations including, for example, managers, technicians, administrators, civil servants, salaried supervisors, clerks, etc. Like blue-collar class, the new middle class worked in the companies owned by capitalists. Mills suspected that the new middle class were inclined to moderate, careful, and conformist in matters cultural and political due to their location in the class structure. The dramatic growth of this class encouraged the homogenizing tendencies of mass society. In politics, the new middle class seemed unlikely to band together collectively to promote their interests. Their conformist tendencies meant that despite their numbers, they were inclined to be part of what Mills referred to as a ‘politics of the rearguard’.

In the third volume of trilogy, The Power Elite, Mills was convinced that American democracy was being undermined due to the growing concentration of political power in the hands of tripartite elite consisting of high ranking officials in the federal government, the corporate elite, and the highest ranking officers in the military. The emergence of the welfare state during the New Deal contributed to the growing concentration of political power, whereas the economy experienced a similar concentration because of the expansion of giant corporations. World War 2 and the ensuing Cold War signaled a bigger role for the military. The elites not only experienced a dramatic expansion in their power but also increasingly worked cooperatively. The result was a highly coordinated and remarkably unified power elite. Neither working class nor middle class opposed the establishment of elite rule in place of democratic rule in America.

Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell,1919, was Henry Ford II Professor of sociology in Harvard University, USA. He was a son of Jewish immigrants. Bell chose to employ the term postindustrial to depict advanced industrial society. The idea that we were entering a distinctly new period in the development of industrial society was related to Bell’s earlier work on ideologies, reaching its full expressions in Bell’s influential book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. The central thesis is that whereas industrial society was a ‘goods-producing-society’, ‘post-industrial society’ is organized around knowledge for the purpose of social control and the directing of innovation and change.

A post-industrial economy requires the existence of a highly educated professional class that possesses the scientific, technical, managerial and administrative training needed to insure that the economy will function well. Moreover, this class should be capable of making decisions independently. A postindustrial economy also requires more highly centralized coordination in governance. Thus, a new interconnection arises between the economy and the political system. Bell considers government to be the cockpit of the new industrial order. Therefore, the knowledge class asserts itself in government planning and policy formulation as well as decision making in economic firms.

The driving force of change is technology. Technology has reduced the levels of inequality. Bell however does not think that postindustrial society signals the end of social divisions and conflict. Far from it, because one of the characteristic features of post industrial society is a lack of coordination between economy, polity and culture. Problems arise in so far as each operates on the basis of what Bell terms differing axial principles, by which he means different norms and values.

Economy is guided by axial principles based on instrumental rationality. Polity is guided by principles that promote equality and citizen involvement. And culture is guided by the principle of fraternity. The built-in tension can at various times lead to conflict regarding how power is allocated. In The cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) Bells talks about the tension between economy and culture. In his view the youth counter culture epitomized the new cultural sensibility, which placed a premium on feelings, self expression, and individual fulfillment which are decidedly anti-rational.

The implications of these divisions are not entirely clear, but Bell is convinced that we are entering a period of great uncertainty and instability in the age of post-industrial society.

Table: Contrasting Industrial and Post Industrial societies

	Industrial	Postindustrial
Key Resource	Machinery	Knowledge
Key Institution	Business Firm	University
Key Decision Makers	Businessperson	Professional/Expert
Power Base	Property	Knowledge/Skill
Role of Politics	Laissez-faire	Government/Corporate Partnership

Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright (1947), a professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, developed a perspective that seems more useful for structural class analysis of advanced industrial society. Wright’s works, Class, Crisis and the State (1978), Class Structure and Income Determination (1979), Classes (1985), and Class Counts (1997), are theoretical, historical and quantitative, builds on earlier Marxian approaches to the study of social class, and also introduces ideas and approaches reminiscent of Max Weber and other writers. Wright’s works examine organization of jobs and enterprises along with views and characteristics of individuals in the labour force.

Some of the characteristics of Wright’s approach are as follows:

1. Economic organizations are key to understanding social structures and the organization of society. He argues that positions within the mode of production, and forms of exploitation and relationship to exploitation are key to describing and understanding social class.

2. His analysis begins with the positions and locations occupied as a result of the manner in which production is organized, rather than the individuals who fill these positions and locations. Further, these form the basis for the social relationships which are part of a totality and are reasonably stable over time, with conflicting social relationships leading to change.

3. The attitudes and behaviour of individual has a connection to the location they occupy within production relations or the division of labour and the contradictory locations that exist in capitalism.

Changes in Capitalism

The major developments in capitalism which Wright points to in “Class Boundaries and Contradictory Class Locations,” are three:

a. Loss of control over the labour process by workers

Wright traces the manner in which control over the actual work process was taken away from workers during the development of capitalism. Originally, workers owned their own tools, and controlled many of the aspects of the actual work process. The development of the factory and developments within the factory such as assembly lines and scientific management all have acted to take control away from the worker. There has been a deskilling of many jobs (Braverman), with new skills of other types being created.

The importance of these developments has been (a) to provide means of extracting more surplus labour and surplus value from the worker. In addition, (b) this has increased the gap between mental and manual labour in many sectors of the economy. The division of labour expands in such a way as to create jobs associated with high levels of skill or technology. For Wright, this is a means by which a new class location is created, that of semi-autonomous experts like computer technicians, engineers and professional teachers. This has created new divisions within the working class, perhaps creating a new class or classes, or in Wright’s terminology, a new class location.

In Classes, Wright notes that these experts, a group within working class exploit manual workers by taking surplus value directly from them. In terms of class interests and political organization, the skilled workers or semi-autonomous experts with more privileged positions in the division of labour identify with the owners and top level of management in the hierarchy. If so, then this acts to divide these more privileged workers from less privileged or uncredentialed workers. That is why Wright considers these privileged, expert workers to be in a contradictory class location because this group is not part of the bourgeoisie, or even the petite bourgeoisie – rather it occupies what Wright terms a contradictory class location between the working class and the petite bourgeoisie.

The contradictory class location of this group of workers is proven by the fact that they are unable to legally own the means of production, and are unable to establish and generate the labour process on their own. Their surplus labour may have been extorted from them by the bourgeoisie, and are generally prevented from exercising the power of the bourgeoisie who control the means of production. Further, to the extent that this is a highly educated group of workers, they may view, like other workers, the manner in which the means of production is organized as irrational. There are thus also a number of aspects to this group which lead them to identify with the less privileged working class, so that there are common interests between privileged and less privileged workers in opposing some of the political agenda of the bourgeoisie – for example, both sets of workers might have a common interest in maintaining a strong public health care system. Wright concludes that these more privileged skilled workers really do have contradictory ideological, economic and political interests.

b. Differentiation of the functions of capital

In early capitalism, the entrepreneur was both the owner and manager, organizer of capital and production, and being directly involved in capital accumulation and exploitation of workers. As the concentration and centralization of capital developed and as the economy and the corporation became more complex, it became difficult for the entrepreneur to carry out all of these functions. In particular, the development of the large scale corporation, with separate divisions, and the separation of economic and legal ownership mean that capital today itself is much more complex phenomenon than in early capitalism denoting a social relationship which is not as immediately clear as earlier. This blocked the development of class consciousness making workers struggle against their immediate managers and the representatives of capital rather than against the legal owners of capital. The intermediate layers, i.e. semi-autonomous experts, between workers and owners obscure the class relationships, making it difficult for workers to see the real contradictions inherent in these relationships. Today with large corporations having headquarters in one location and branches around the world, there are many such intermediate layers.

c. Development of complex hierarchies

Wright notes that as capitalism developed, the scale of companies increased and economic ownership (control over investments and finance) concentrated more rapidly than has possession (control over production). That is, capitalist economy can manage with relatively few owners, but requires considerable numbers of supervisors and managers. This has created multidivisional corporations within the business sector. A few of the levels of these hierarchies can be described by considering the various kinds of decisions that are made within these corporations. The decisions concern what is to be produced involve 1. control over the means of production, 2. control over how things are to be produced, and 3. control over labour power.

Each of these types of control are separate, although inter-related. Control over means of production (owners, stockholders), for example, may be quite separate from control over how things are produced (managers and technicians). As a result, each of these three aspects of decision making lead to different types of control or lack of control. They are in different dimensions so that each combination can represent a different location within the class system. Wright argues, along the Marxian lines, that “all class positions are contradictory, but ... certain positions in the class structure constitute doubly contradictory locations: they represent positions which are torn between the basic contradictory class relations of capitalist society. ... I will ... refer to them as “contradictory class locations.” For Wright, there are three primary classes within the capitalist system of organization, the capitalist class, the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. The three contradictory class locations are 1. small employers, 2. managers and supervisors, and 3. semi-autonomous employees.

According to Wright, small employers are those who employ 10-50 employees and are different from petty bourgeoisie because petty bourgeoisie are independent self-employed producers who employ no workers” (Class, Crisis and the State, p. 74). The concerns of small employers are also different from large employers regarding various issues such as workers’ wage and facilities, taxation, regulation, etc. Managers and administrators are those workers who supervise other people on the job and administer the functioning of the corporation. Senior or top-level managers are often tied directly to the owner through legal ownership of stocks and bonds as part of their pay – many corporate executives receive stock options as a bonus to their pay. They are also in possession of the means of production in the sense that they control these, give orders that are obeyed, and generally manage and superintend the process of production. As a result, senior managers are likely to have, or to develop, an ideology and political view that ties them to owners and the bourgeoisie. Middle level managers are in a more contradictory position because they do not have sufficient resources or ownership and have little actual control over the process of production, so that they may be very similar in some ways to the proletariat. Yet their position within the chain of command in an organization likely ties them ideologically to the employer and top level managers in many cases. Lower level supervisors and foremen are very close to being workers themselves, and usually begin their career as workers. In that sense their objective situation is not really very different from most workers. Wright notes that “they have moved further from workers by becoming less involved in direct production, and they have moved closer to workers by gradually having their personal power bureaucratized”. Semi-autonomous employees do not supervise others but are likely to have some autonomy in the work situation because they are professionals or have special skills or technical training. Some of these are engineers, teachers, professors, programmers, and some health professionals. These are people in occupations that have a degree of autonomy in terms of decisions related to the job, and while subject to orders, are likely to fill positions that requires their own judgment concerning production and related decisions. The semi-autonomy is described by Wright as being certain degree of control over their immediate conditions of work, over their immediate labour process. In such instances, the labour process has not been completely proletarianized.

Contradictory Class Locations determined by Assets

In his later analysis, Wright conceptualised contradictory class locations in terms of ownership or non-ownership of various forms of assets. He argues that the managers who occupy contradictory class location in class structure control organizational assets—the conditions of coordinated cooperation among producers in a complex division of labour. In an individual or family enterprise, the organizational assets belong to the owner of the business (the entrepreneur), but in a large corporation, the organizational assets are usually turned over to the top managers, who manage the corporation in the interests of the owners. Wright notes that organizational assets are closely related to authority and hierarchy, so that those who control and benefit from these organizational assets are those that exercise control some discretion concerning how production is to be organized “through a hierarchy of authority”. Wright develops a three-fold classification of (i) managers – positions with “effective authority over subordinates”, (ii) supervisors – “positions which have effective authority over subordinates, but are not involved in organizational decision-making”, and (iii) those without any organizational assets in terms of being managers or supervisors. Such managers or supervisors have credentials, skills, and knowledge that they use to establish controlling authority, own shares in corporations and appropriate some of the surplus from production”. Wright’s analysis concludes that those occupying contradictory class location are least class conscious compared to the working class (proletarians) consisting of uncredentialled and semi-credentialled workers as well as uncredentialled supervisors.

Conclusion

The analysis of Wright is similar to that of Weber – the class situation of Weber becomes the class location of Wright. Wright attaches contradiction to this, so he blends the Marxian and Weberian approaches. Like Marx, these locations and classes become the basis for the formation of class consciousness, but like Weber these classes and locations are defined on a multidimensional basis, and with more characteristics than simply ownership or non-ownership of the means of production. That is why the class relationships, class interests, class allegiances and class struggles are not as clear cut as many Marxists claim. The immediate interests of the various groupings may differ by time and place, and there are many possible combinations of interest groups. These are similar to some of the factors mentioned by Weber as making class struggle difficult.

Sociology of Consumption

 

Sociology of Consumption

 

Gaurang R. Sahay

Introduction

Many of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things we might consume, and how we might consume them, and we do this not only as individuals, but as friends, partners, and families, and so on. The things we buy and consume and the experiences we engage with are invested with material and non-material or emotional significance and central to our very identities. The consumption of goods and services is so thoroughly embedded into our ordinary, everyday lives that many aspects of its practice go largely unnoticed – not only the environmental and social consequences have got lost on the way, but also the very notion that consumption itself is a choice. One might say that contemporary reflexivity is bounded by consumption – that is to say that most of the things most of us think about in life – be they pertaining to self-construction, relationship maintenance, or instrumental goal-attainment, involve us making choices about the things we might consume.

There is widespread agreement about the importance of consumption, which is defined ‘as involving the selection, purchase, use, maintenance, repair and disposal of any given product or service’ (Campbell 1995: 101–102), in the contemporary world. Consumption is no longer regarded as a trivial by product of production but is now considered a relatively autonomous principal driving force behind social and economic change and development. There are scholars who believe that mode of production is getting replaced by mode of consumption in contemporary society. Consumption is becoming increasingly meaningful in today’s culture (Ritzer 2005; Zukin and Maguire 2004). George Ritzer claims that contemporary world or ‘the postmodern world is defined by consumption (rather than production)’ (2005: 67; see also Bauman 1997). Consumption is the core preoccupation of populations across of the world. Household consumption has grown in most countries over the last 50 years (United Nations 2007), and those years have seen considerable expansion in the places where individuals can choose to consume, from shopping malls to superstores to the home-shopping television network (Ritzer 2001: 108). Because of its ubiquitous presence in modern life, consumption is considered as a source of many sociological realities such as stratification (Bourdieu 1984), communication (Baudrillard [1970]1998), identity (Veblen [1899]1912), and a site of political struggle (Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005; Micheletti 2003; Schudson 2007). The topic has come to be studied extensively by many in the social sciences and the humanities and excellent studies of consumption have transpired.

Social Science Reasoning on Consumption: A Short Note 

One might have thought that consumption would first of all preoccupy economists, since it is the point where individual lives most obviously integrate into the economy at large. However, economists have concentrated mostly on production and distribution, and commonly threw up their arms when it came to integrating pattern of consumption or change and variation in consumer preferences directly into economic analysis. As Gary Becker himself says that ‘The economist’s normal approach to analyzing consumption and leisure choices assumes that individuals maximize utility with preferences that depend only on the goods and services they consume at that time. These preferences are assumed to be independent of both past and future consumption, and of the behavior of everyone else’ (1996, 3–4). Becker retains economics’ cherished assumption of individual as rational maximizing being but incorporates two aspects of capital: personal capital, involving past consumption and other experiences that shape present and future preferences; and social capital, involving other people’s past actions that shape the same preferences. Thus Becker clings to the economist’s individual perspective but explicitly builds in experiential and social influences on the individual. Though, there are some scholars particularly psychologists in the lineage of Herbert Simon, Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman who have mounted influential critiques of neoclassical or behavioural economics’ assumptions vis-a-vis consumption (see, e.g., Kahneman and Tversky 1982), but they have not been able to shift the attention of most economists away from production and distribution.

Consumption has attracted much more attention outside of economics. Sociologists, anthropologists, historians, socio-cultural psychologists, and cultural studies specialists have revolutionized our understandings of consumption. Rescuing consumption from the grip of economists, they began asking, “Why do people want goods?” The so-called cultural turn swept away the standard utilitarian and individualistic accounts of consumption as maximization. It also challenged deeply entrenched moralistic concerns about the corrupting effects of consumption by re-framing the purchase and use of goods and services as meaningful practices. Similarly, students of gender countered the trivialization of consumption by identifing distinctive cultural traits of woman’s world of consumption. They played a crucial part in renewing consumption studies. They made a double contribution. First, they emphasized distinctions between the consumption patterns of women and men rather than taking consumption as a homogeneous expression of class, ethinicity or nationality. Second, they often challenged understandings of consumption as mass behavior by stressing the creativity and empowerment of female consumers. They did so by carefully investigating diverse facets of consumption’s gendered practices, including interactions between saleswomen and customers in department stores (Porter Benson 1986), middle-class women shoplifters (Abelson 1989), women’s sale and use of cosmetics (Peiss 1998, 2002), immigrant housewives’ expenditures (Ewen1985), women shopping in markets.

Meanwhile, anthropologists provided noneconomic or even anti-economic models of consumption. Marshall Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason (1976) along with Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood’s World of Goods (1979) set the tone for the new consumption studies, boldly appropriating consumption into the domain of shared meanings. Two complementary trends occurred in anthropology: a shift of focus away from production and producers to consumption and consumers, as well as an increasing concentration on consumption as expressive behavior: the site of mentalities, identities, and culture. Lorna Weatherill (1993, 211) declares that ‘material goods themselves contain implicit meanings and are therefore indicative of attitudes. Through understanding the non-material attributes of goods it is possible to move to the meaning of ownership in social and other terms.’ Anthropologists have dealt with a continuing conversation on the culture of consumption that emerged out of a variety of studies of department stores, commercialized leisure, taste formation, food consumption, media advertising, and household budgets (see, e.g., Miller 1981; Rosenzweig 1983; Tiersten 2001; Mintz 1996; Lears 1994; Horowitz 1985)

In the 1990s, dissenting voices joined that conversation. Concerned that the “cultural turn” had gone too far, Lizabeth Cohen (2003) pushes forward a revised agenda and has examined the political economy of American consumption in the period following the Second World War. Consumption, in her reading, is not merely expressive behavior, but a site, cause, and effect of major changes in American experience. In Cohen’s view, the government-backed promotion of consumption during the 1930s as a cushion and antidote for economic crisis sowed the ground both for governmental intervention in wartime consumption and for postwar policies centered on consumption as foundation of a “consumer’s republic”. Cohen’s analysis demonstrates furthermore the heavy involvement of women and African-Americans in the politics of consumption.

Anthropologist Daniel Miller has investigated the place of consumption in the constitution and maintenance of significant interpersonal relations. Miller (1987) has led the way in challenging the view of consumption as a form of subjugation and exploitation, emphasizing instead the creativity of consumers. In A Theory of Shopping (1998), Miller proposes a relational approach to consumption. Closely observing shopping practices of 76 households on and around Jay Road, a North London street, Miller found consumers “making love in supermarkets.” Far from being “an expression of individual subjectivity and identity,” shopping, Miller argues, serves as “an expression of kinship and other relationships” (35). As Miller remarks, shopping can “best be understood as being about relationships and not about individuals” (2001, 41; see also Miller et al. 1998). Activities Miller includes are housewives selecting goods that will enhance their influence over the comportment of other household members, courting couples representing the current state of their relationship, and parents boosting the position of children within their peer groups. In a direct challenge to individualistic accounts of consumption, Miller provides evidence that sociability and purchasing of goods support each other, while isolation promotes withdrawal from consumption (1998, 34; 1995, 24).

During the second half of the twentieth century there was a rapid growth in the sub-discipline of the Sociology of Consumption. Consumption is now well established as a central topic for sociologists. The Sociology of Consumption is armed with a range of concepts that are capable of conceptualizing a number of issues such as sustainability, autonomy, healthy ways of living, mass culture, consumer culture, distinction, taste, etc.

Sociology of Consumption

Until the middle of the twentieth century, consumption was not a key topic in sociology. The so-called forefathers of sociology, like Marx and Weber, addressed consumption only indirectly. Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (2001[1899]) was the first work to engage with the notion of consumption in its own right. He studied how middle classes in the United States at the turn of the century distinguished themselves from those who were less well-off through overt displays of “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen’s work prompted critical and ongoing debates about the relationships between class and consumption. Apart from Veblen, George Simmel ([1904] 1957), Robert and Helen Lynd (1929), Paul Lazarsfeld (1957), David Riesman (1964), and David Caplowitz (1967) wrote important works on consumption in one vein or another.

Despite this demonstration of the economic significance of consumption, for a large part of the twentieth century work in this area remained limited. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that sociologists really began to study the process and content of consumption itself. Warde (2015) identified three distinct periods of development. The first is from classic sociological work until the 1980s, where work focused on the production of “mass culture.” The second is from the 1980s until the turn of the century, where sociologists influenced by the “cultural turn” in sociology drew attention to the creative potential of “consumer culture.” The third period of development takes us to the present day, where more recent approaches have combined previous arguments to study both the economic and cultural aspects of consumption.

Each of these various periods or approaches emphasizes different elements of consumption and deals with the notion of consumption differently. The field of the Sociology of Consumption is now well recognized as an important and broad domain of sociological inquiry consisting of a number of theoretical concepts and empirical studies. In particular, three key themes have emerged. The first is the question of how to imagine ‘the consumer’ or the consuming subject. Gabriel and Lang (1995) show that different approaches to the study of consumption imagine and define the consuming subject differently. For example ‘the consumer’ can be considered variously as: chooser, communicator, explorer, identity-seeker, hedonist, artist, victim, rebel, activist, and citizen. These representations, respectively, position the consuming subjects differently in terms of their autonomy and their use of consumption as an expression of identity (see Aldridge 2003: 16).

These different views of the consuming subject relate to classic sociological questions about how to understand the social subject: as homo-economicus or homo-sociologicus (see Vaisey 2008). Within the field of the Sociology of Consumption, some approaches consider individuals as capable of making autonomous and rational decisions in light of their own personal self-interest (homo-economicus). Others recognize and emphasize the interdependence of individuals, that people have shared norms and values as well as shared understandings, and that social institutions shape social action and therefore patterns of consumption (homo-sociologicus). The Sociology of Consumption is both informed by and speaks back to these questions about the social subject.

A second key theme that emerges is the way in which different approaches conceptualize the acquisition, appropriation, and appreciation (the three As) of goods and services (see Warde 2010). Acquisition is about how goods and services are obtained through different kinds of social and economic exchanges. Appropriation is about what people do with goods once they acquire them. And appreciation is about how things gain and lose value.

The final theme deals with a number of cross-cutting issues that plot consumption against a number of antinomies, or opposites, such as relationships between economy and culture, materialism and idealism, structure and agency, optimism and pessimism, etc.

Thus, each of these approaches outlined by Warde (2015) has tackled different key themes in the Sociology of Consumption, i.e., the consuming subject, the three As, and positioning antinomies.

Mass Culture

After World War II, countries in the West experienced a long boom. New industrial methods for the mass production and distribution of goods and increased wages created strong economic growth, improving quality of life for many and at the same time developing new kinds and increased levels of consumption. These changes in production, consumption, and affluence were intriguing sites of investigation across a range of disciplines including sociology. A revival of Marxist thought at that time meant that studies of changes in social order focused on production, the accumulation of capital, and class antagonisms. Consumption itself was never the focus of study, and neither was the minutiae of how people went about their activities of consumption. Instead, changes in consumption were understood as a result of macro-economic changes in the way in which things were produced.

The most well recognized sociological contribution to the study of consumption during this period is work by the Frankfurt School and particularly their critique of “mass culture.” Fleeing the persecution, oppression, and horrors of Nazi Germany, members of the Frankfurt School made their way to the United States, where they were confronted with the results of radical shifts in forms of production – not only in the production of goods, but of culture as well! They considered the abundant new forms of popular entertainment to have been produced by a “culture industry” meant to domesticate, distract, and dupe the masses into accepting capitalist relations of production and the socio-economic inequalities that resulted.

For the members of the Frankfurt School, new forms of popular entertainment and art were now mass produced in the same way that cars and jeans were produced in the factory. They claimed that the routines of artists and entertainers had become structured by economic ownership in that they had taken on the character of the factory floor assembly line. Adorno and Horkheimer describe this as: “the synthetic, planned method of turning out ...products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudo documentary novels, and hit songs ...)” (1979[1937]: 163). They argued that this production of a mass culture had three important consequences for the ways that people consume.

First, they argued that it resulted in standardized, “safe,” and passive forms of consumption. They write: ‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come’ (1979[1937]: 125). The culture industry produces entertainment that repeats the same tropes, stories, and passive politics that distract the working class from recognizing their position as oppressed and dupes them into consuming entertainment products that satisfy and reaffirm popular, widely held, and false understandings of the way that the world is.

The second consequence is that it leads to the loss of individuality, spontaneity, and choice. Rather than providing a wealth of products from which to choose to represent our own identities, we purchase the product or commodity which has been mass produced for “our type.” When it comes to consumption, the Frankfurt School scholars claim that choice and spontaneity are illusions. Instead, people consume repetitively in the supermarket, on the high street, and in the pub, replicating the automation of the workplace and the standardization of the assembly line.

The final consequence for Adorno and Horkheimer is that all art and the avant-garde is reduced into kitsch mass culture. For the Frankfurt School, the production of works of art no longer being judged on their content or on their ability to challenge dominant ways of thinking. Instead art is judged on how well it conforms to the prescribed formulas set out by the culture industry, so that it might become a best seller or “go platinum.”

This period of the Sociology of Consumption positioned the consuming subject as a dupe and as a victim of mass culture, tricked into ways of consuming that were presented as emancipatory. The Frankfurt School’s analysis attributes little to no autonomy to individuals in their consumption choices or at least argues that these choices are only pseudo-choices that have limited political significance. This model of “the consumer” is fully aligned with the model of homo-sociologicus, positioning the social subject as interdependent, with norms and behaviors rooted in shared norms and values which are organized and produced by economic, social, and cultural institutions.

This approach has significant consequences for understanding how goods and services are acquired, appropriated, and appreciated. For the Frankfurt School, goods and services are acquired through the volume and distribution of goods made available and they are disposed of through built-in degeneration (changes in fashion trends, new facilities on mobile phones etc.). They are not acquired as part of an expression of individual taste or through a managed display of identity. Goods are appropriated as alienating and domesticating products of mass consumption, and they are appreciated through a framework of “false needs” (see Marcuse 2002[1964]).

This approach to consumption sits on one side of a set of antinomies within the field of the Sociology of Consumption. It is pessimistic rather than optimistic about the role of consumption in human endeavors; it emphasizes economy, structure, and materialism over culture, agency, and idealism; and it deals mostly in theoretical or abstract accounts of consumption rather than in empirical studies. It is a thesis of manipulation, domination, and control that calls for the study of the material and economic conditions of production, rather than the study of cultural meanings in order to get at processes of consumption.

Consumer Culture or Cultural Turn

During the 1980s, however, the field of the Sociology of Consumption was transformed. Consumption went from being a secondary concern, after primary considerations of capitalist mode of production, to a central and organizing feature of the social order. This shift coincided with a decline in neo-Marxist approaches in the fashion of the Frankfurt School. It also coincided with the development of semiotic studies about the meaning of consumption, a recognition of the important role of culture, and the rise of postmodernism. All of these developments were part and parcel of a broader “cultural turn” happening at that time in the social sciences. French sociologist Jean Baudrillard opines that:

Consumer behavior, which appears to be focused and directed at the object and at pleasure, in fact responds to quite different objectives: the metaphoric or displaced expression of desire, and the production of a code of social values through the use of differentiating signs. That which is determinant is not the function of individual interest within a corpus of objects, but rather the specifically social functions of exchange, communication and distribution of values within a corpus of signs. (1999, 47; see also Bauman 1998, 79–85)

Scholars in what became known as cultural studies were critical of the idea of a powerful and independent culture industry. They argued that consumption could not be reduced to a blanket mass culture. For them, the acquisition of goods was not only about use value and exchange value but, importantly, about symbolic value and the meaning of goods. These studies claimed that the absence of attention to symbolic meaning left Adorno, Horkheimer, et al. incapable of understanding the creative potential of mass consumption. They were also critical of Adorno and Horkheimer’s style of grand and abstract theorizing about consumption, arguing that consumption needed to be understood empirically through observations of how people actually went about purchasing goods (e.g., Douglas 1996).

These cultural studies scholars proposed that studies of consumption should focus attention toward the symbolic nature of goods and services in order to understand the meanings behind consumption, understanding consumption choices not merely as instrumental but as expressive of emotions and desires, of individual agency and choice. This work analyzed social and symbolic exchange by studying how the consumption of signs, symbols, and images created and communicated social meaning. The result was a recognition of the virtues of a mass consumption that allowed individuals to communicate different personal and social identities, that provided different kinds of entertainment, and that developed intellectual stimulation and innovation.

In particular, Featherstone’s work Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991) emphasized a much more positive view of consumption as “consumer culture,” one that sought to understand everyday social interaction as navigated through consumption as the expression of self-identity. Moving away from theses of manipulation and control, authors like Featherstone (1991), Giddens (1991), and Slater (1997) challenged the determinism of previous studies of macro-economic phenomena, shifting emphases from rules and order toward choices and freedom. These authors viewed the idea that there was no choice but to choose as liberating. Being able to choose how, when, and what to consume was central to freedom of expression and self-identity.

As such, the Sociology of Consumption became concerned with understanding how symbolically significant goods were acquired in the pursuit of distinct “lifestyles.” Featherstone writes that ‘Rather than unreflexively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit, the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of goods, clothes, experiences ...they design together into a lifestyle. (1991: 86) Advocates of “consumer culture” emphasized the agency of individuals in designing and displaying their own lifestyles while at the same time they examined how and why consumption became the arena for this kind of work.

This approach to understanding the role of consuming subjects as designers of their own lifestyles stands in opposition to understanding “the consumer” as a victim or a dupe. In reaction to and criticism of those modern and neo-Marxist theories of capitalist mode of production, cultural studies attributes to “the consumer” a much larger degree of agency, recognizing them variously as: chooser, communicator, explorer, identity seeker, and, potentially, as activist. “The consumer,” at least within postmodern theories of “consumer culture,” is understood more or less as an active, rational actor, rather than as a passive dupe; as independent homo-economicus, rather than interdependent homo-sociologicus.

This position, therefore, has ways of understanding how goods and services are acquired, appropriated, and appreciated that are significantly different from the Frankfurt School approach. Rather than being gained only through economic exchange, goods and services are acquired through symbolic exchange, through the communication and expression of self-identity. Rather than being taken on as domesticating and alienating products of mass consumption, goods and services are appropriated through processes of decommodification, singularisation, and personalisation. And rather than being seen through a framework of “false needs,” objects are appreciated through a symbolic framework of pleasure, satisfaction, hedonism, and meaning.

Cultural studies can more or less be positioned in opposition to the Frankfurt School in sociology when it comes to the study of consumption. Cultural studies emphasizes culture, idealism, and agency over economy, materialism, and structure. It is much more optimistic, seeing in consumption the potential for creativity, play, and the opportunity for self-expression. And it provides detailed empirical studies about the micro-social interactions and sites of consumption that constitute a plurality of modes of identification and belonging.

Consumption: The Recent Position

While the cultural turn enriched the study of consumption, it also stands accused of overemphasizing certain aspects of consumption while neglecting others. Investigations of the political economy of consumption, of the relationship between consumption and class, and of materialinequalities were side-lined in favor of analyses of specific examples of different modes of personal identity creation. Cultural studies emphasized analyses of the symbolic meaning of certain goods but obscured the material role of objects and technologies within processes of consumption. A great deal of this work focused on conspicuous consumption and on consumption as displays of identity, while ordinary, routine, and everyday consumption was ignored.

Recent developments in the Sociology of Consumption have attempted to respond to these gaps and balance some of the more extreme antinomies between culture and economy, structure and agency, production and consumption, materialism and idealism. Without leaving these orienting distinctions behind, more recent contributions have incorporated understandings of meaning with understandings of the material conditions of consumption and have engaged with understandings of macroeconomic phenomena alongside and in relation to micro-situations of consumption.

One significant development can be seen in the revival of the political economy of consumption. Developed alongside and in response to a focus on consumer culture, Fine and Leopold (1993) link macro-economic processes with more micro and situated acts of consumption. Rather than maintaining a distinction between spheres of production and consumption to understand how one might affect or organize the other, Fine and Leopold suggest shifting from a vertical analysis to a horizontal one, in order to think about systems of provision. This analytical move emphasizes studying the links between consumption and production and between distribution and retail in order to explain socio-economic changes and changes in consumption more broadly. Such analyses focus on the commodity as the embodied unity of social and economic processes that reveals distinct relationships between the material and cultural practices that underpin the production, distribution, circulation, retail, and consumption of the specific commodities concerned. Following Appadurai’s (1981) suggestion to “follow the things,” studies in this vein (e.g., Cook 2004) usually start with cultural understandings of consumption and then work back along the commodity chain, often through an ethnography of various stages of the commodity’s production and consumption.

Nevertheless, despite seeking to link production and consumption, such work arguably still focuses on production (i.e.,provision). The process of working backward, or starting with “the things,” demotes cultural understandings of social change and consumption in favor of processes higher up the supply chain, such as regulatory frameworks, policy, and production.

Other contributions have sought to bridge the divide between economy and culture by focusing specifically on the role of objects. Instead of conceiving of goods as the alienating products of mass culture or studying them for their cultural meanings, more recent work has complicated understandings of how “things” are incorporated and adapted to social processes. Actor network theory (ANT) (see Latour 2005) ascribes agency to things so that, for example, shopping trolleys (Cochoy 2009) and market devices (Callon et al. 2007), play a significant role in shaping the performance of shopping in the supermarket (i.e., they permit people to shop for more items at once) and the organization of markets. The importance of such an analysis shows that objects are not appropriated simply at will, but form part of socio-technical arrangements that matter for the construction of social relationships and for social action.

Following what has been described as the “practice turn” in contemporary social theory (Schatzki et al. 2001), proponents of “theories of practice” have argued that studies of consumption can provide a more careful account of the relationship between production and consumption, between structure and agency, between systems and lifestyles and between humans and things, by taking social practices as the central unit of analysis. Theories of practice provide a particular development in understanding the role of objects in processes of consumption, by focusing on how goods are used in the accomplishment of social habits and routines that are based on shared understandings of how particular activities should be done (see Warde 2005). As such they provide an important insight into ordinary, mundane, and everyday consumption (Gronow and Warde 2001) and the “inconspicuous consumption” (Shove and Warde 2002) of water, energy, food, etc. Through an approach which is organized neither around individual choices nor around social structures but around the emergence and decline of social practices like cooking, washing, shopping, etc., theories of practice show that consumption of goods and services can effectively be understood as an outcome of the ongoing organization and reproduction of the social practices that make up everyday life. This kind of approach, in particular, has been very successfully applied in the area of environmental sustainability.

Inequality, Taste, Ethnicity and Retail and Consumption

Having outlined three different opposing positions on consumer, it will be important to say something about the contribution of some sociologists who have tried to understand consumption in context inequality, taste, ethnicity and retail. One of the prominent names among those sociologists is Pierre Bourdieu. Although Pierre Bourdieu’s work preceded, and was in many ways the target of, arguments within cultural studies, no discussion of the Sociology of Consumption could ignore the important contribution to the field made by Pierre Bourdieu, particularly in his book Distinction (1984). Rather than providing either an economistic account of the top-down production of mass culture or emphasizing the potential creativity of culture through the expression of different lifestyles, Bourdieu was one of the first theorists to engage seriously with both the cultural and economic spheres, adding the central concept of “cultural capital” as a marker of class position to the traditional distinguisher of economic capital or wealth. Again, Bourdieu’s account was not one of consumption itself but of how “taste” operates as a mechanism for maintaining, reproducing, and struggling over class inequalities.

Through the use of the concept of “habitus,” the idea that one develops embodied dispositions, competences, skills, and responses depending on experiences of being brought up and living a particular class position, Bourdieu argues that people develop a practical and semi-conscious sense of their likes and dislikes. These tastes (informed by the habitus) become a critical mechanism for distinguishing between social groups, between the “us” and “them.” According to Bourdieu, because the working classes are constrained by lower endowments of economic and cultural capital, they develop a taste for those goods which are available to them, seeing them as necessary and functional, and they reject those which are unavailable, seeing them as extravagant. Upper classes on the other hand distance themselves from such “tastes for necessity” and instead develop a “taste for the superfluous” (e.g., abstract art). Struggles over what counts as necessary and what counts as superfluous consumption then act as the subconscious battleground for social and cultural distinction.

Bourdieu’s argument that dominant classes establish the legitimacy of taste as part of the process of reproducing and representing class distinctions has, however, been contested. Thirty years on, it is questionable whether there is still a similar relationship between socio-economic and cultural inequalities in the same way. Some argue that consumption has become much more open and less restricted by class. One powerful exposition of this argument is the cultural omnivore (an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter) thesis (see Peterson and Kern 1996). The term was developed to explain a lack of relationship between high social status and the consumption of high culture in the United States. A number of empirical studies show that economically privileged and well-educated groups across several countries engage in a number of different activities of disparately high and low taste. These groups are “cultural omnivores,” capable of consuming anything and everything. Yet, while the evidence may demonstrate a dissolution of the links between high status and the consumption of high culture, the reasons for this are contested. Rather than implying a greater appreciation of different cultural objects, omnivorousness may instead simply be a new marker of distinction. These debates continue and offer fertile ground for thinking about the relationship between class and consumption.

Pierre Bourdieu has also reflected on the consumption pertaining to buying and selling of houses. Bourdieu writes that a home is a “consumer good, which, because of its high cost, represents one of the most difficult economic decisions and one of the most consequential in the entire domestic life-cycle” (2000, 33). The purchase of a home engages interactions and bargaining sessions not only between nominal buyer and seller, but among multiple parties: other household members, friends, credit agencies, and builders. Bourdieu concludes that the housing market, while profoundly structured by established political interests, legal limitations, financial constraints, and its deep symbolic charge is, nevertheless, far from being a static, prescripted set of exchanges. Buyers and sellers’ negotiations create unanticipated, often surprising outcomes. The study by Bourdieu gives us a keen sense of the importance of interpersonal ties in consumption of houses. Paul DiMaggio and Hugh Louch (1998) undertook their own investigation of how Americans acquired consumer durables, including homes, their findings pointed in the same direction as Bourdieu’s.

In the tradition of Veblen, Diana Crane treats consumption as positional effort—establishment of social location, boundaries, and hierarchies through the display of goods and services. She casts a keen eye on class differences in clothing among nineteenth-century French men. She writes that

Workers behaved as if they considered some type of fashionable items, such as gloves, canes, top hats and bowlers, as inappropriate for their own use. The reluctance to use these items cannot be explained by their expense. Workers’ incomes were rising throughout the period. . . . Instead, the explanation may lie in the fact that these items required a greater understanding of standards of middle-class etiquette than other items. In this sense, these sartorial signs were effective in distinguishing between those who knew the “rules” and were able to follow them and those who did not. (Diana 2000, 62)

Some British sociologists like Campbell (1995), Slater (1997) and du Gay (1996), while responding to earlier class analyses, used consumption studies to examine patterns of inequality and cultural change within their own country. In these studies two currents emerged; one a post-Marxist effort to shift the focus of economic studies from production to consumption as a material experience, and the other, a more postmodern effort to treat consumption as an expression of consciousness and culture (see Campbell 1995; Slater 1997; du Gay 1996).

Within North American sociology we find some important consumption studies before the third phase but they remain remarkably fragmented. One of the most important studies is by George Ritzer (1996). He has single-handedly initiated a somewhat separate analysis of what he calls “McDonaldization,” pursuing the thesis that the spread of standardized fast food franchises creates uniform practices and understandings at a world scale.

Sociologists such as Ewa Morawska (1985), Kathy Peiss (1998), George Sánchez (1993), Roberts and Morris (2003), Sarah Mahler’s (1995), and Peggy Levitt (2001) have also studied ethnic and racial character of consumption. They argue that there are four salient ways in which ethnic or racial communities approach consumption: first, members of the community often maintain their community’s internal representation through consumption of goods and practices; second, consumption marks distinctions within the ethnic or racial community, for example young/old, male/female, rich/poor, religious/nonreligious; third, households use ethnic forms of consumption to maintain their position within the community; fourth, some members of the ethnic community—ethnic entrepreneurs—specialize in retailing ethnic merchandise representing their community.

There are sociologists like Alan Warde and Lydia Martens (2000), Robin Leidner (1993), George Ritzer (1996), Lendor Calder (1999), Ellen Ross (1993), John Caskey (1994), and Alison Clarke’s (1999), who have studied retail settings for consumption. Many of them argue that culture remains an important item in retail settings. A lot of cultural works go on within and among retail establishments—places where consumers purchase goods and services. In fact, people engage in three somewhat different types of relational activity in such settings. They acquire goods and services for other people, engage in sociable interactions with fellow customers and retail personnel, and display group memberships and differences from other people by means of their purchases.

Sustainable Consumption

The debates outlined above about how to understand the consumer, about the relationship between production and consumption, inequality, distinction, taste and consumption and about how to understand how goods and services are acquired, appropriated, and appreciated are important scholarly contributions to sociological theory. They are also fundamentally important for applied approaches to “real life” social issues, not least of all to questions of sustainability. By now it is clear that unsustainable consumption is a major cause of environmental degradation. It is not consumption per se that is the culprit, but the high levels of resource consumption that are associated with so-called “consumer cultures.” For example, if the India is to meet its 2050 carbon reduction targets, the patterns of consumption that constitute people’s daily lives need to change and change much more quickly than they are currently.

The challenge of finding a path toward a more sustainable future requires radically different ways of living and consuming. This is clearly no small adjustment, but policy is required to focus on the issue concerning sustainable future. However, the policies are found to be based on limited understandings of the processes of consumption, its relationship to systems of provision and production, and a limited model of the consuming subject as homo-economicus which paints consumers as independent individuals who make rational choices. Any irrational behaviors are seen as consequences of inefficiencies, or misaligned attitudes and values. At bottom, this approach continues to understand consumption as little more than purchasing behavior. Policy responses that follow, therefore, involve intervening in prices and incentives, with social marketing campaigns to correct “information deficits” and attempts to foster attitudinal changes in order to tinker with and adjust con temporary ways of living. Crucially though, such approaches to individualizing risk and responsibility are not working at anything like the required rate of change.

The Sociology of Consumption has much to bring to these debates. It can offer “big theories” of social order and change (e.g., the Frankfurt School). It can complicate narratives about individual choice as being about lifestyle and cultural meaning (e.g., Featherstone). It can deal with technologies, infrastructures, and networks (Callon, Latour), the role of the state and systems of provision (Fine and Leopold), and account for embedded social routines, habits and ordinary, everyday consumption (Gronow and Warde).

Conclusion

The Sociology of Consumption is a diverse and contested field. This should be seen as a strength and not a weakness. Currently, policy-makers tackling social issues that are the outcomes of patterns of consumption (e.g., health and sustainability) rely on a handful of concepts about identity, the individual, consumer choice, and consumer society. It should be clear from the above that consumption is not about individuals going shopping for things that are provisioned through the market. For sociologists, consumption is about the organization and reproduction of ways of life. Some understand these ways of life as being dependent upon social structures and institutions. To change patterns of consumption, these structures need to be at the center of discussions about consumption. For others, ways of life are expressions of meanings and discourses. Such accounts identify social concerns, conventions, meanings, and judgments as potential targets of intervention. From the perspective of an emerging body of work, consumption is an outcome of the practices that people do, that make up everyday life. For these authors, sources of change in patterns of consumption lie in the development of the organization of social practices.

Different approaches will be more appropriate and successful depending on the research topic and the kinds of questions asked. But, significantly, each approach contributes important concepts, ideas, and insights that can be employed to better study, understand, and potentially shift the processes and mechanisms of consumption embedded into contemporary ways of living.

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