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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