This lucid introduction to the sociology of consumerism examines the relationship between production and consumption in late capitalist societies. The historical and theoretical discussion provides the student with the tools to examine key themes in the sociology of consumption. After a detailed historical overview of the advent of consumer society, Peter Corrigan examines theoretical accounts of consumption and consumer practice, including: Veblen and conspicuous consumption; Mary Douglas on the world of goods; Jean Baudrillard on the system of objects; and Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital. This historical and theoretical discussion provides the student with the tools to examine key themes in the sociology of consumption.

The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach offers college students, scholars, and interested readers a state-of-the-art overview of consumption the desire for, purchase, use, display, exchange, and disposal of goods and services. The book’s global focus, emphasis on social inequality, and analysis of consumer citizenship offer a timely, exciting, and original approach to the topic. Looking beyond the U.S. and Europe, Stillerman engages examples from his and others’ research in Chile and other Latin American countries, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East and South Asia to explore the interaction between global and local forces in consumption. The text explores the lived experience of being a consumer, demonstrating how social inequalities based on class, gender, sexuality, race, and age shape consumer practices and identities. Finally, the book uncovers the important role consumption has played in fueling local and international activism. This welcome new book will be ideal for classes on consumer culture across the social sciences, humanities, and marketing.

This book critically reviews recent social scientific investigations of consumption, a controversial topic with moral overtones, and of popular public interest and political and economic significance. The author explores how consumption affects personal identity and social position, developing a sociological analysis using theories of practice to account for everyday consumption, its role in the social order, and its consequences for environmental sustainability. The book offers a controversial analysis which explains consumption not in terms of the purchasing of commodities but of the organization and coordination of daily practices. Consumption will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, consumer research, business studies and social theory.

In this book, one of the leading social theorists and cultural commentators of modern times, turns his gaze on consumption. George Ritzer, author of the famous McDonaldization Thesis, demonstrates the irrational consequences of the rational desire to consume and commodify. He examines how McDonaldization might be resisted, and situates the reader in the new cultural spaces that are emerging in society: shopping malls, casino hotels, Disneyfied theme parks and Las Vegas -- the new `cathedrals of consumption' as he calls them. The book shows how new processes of consumption relate to globalization theory. In illuminating discussions of the work of Thorstein Veblen and the French situationists, Ritzer unearths the roots of problems of consumption in older sociological traditions. He indicates how transgression is bound up with consumption, through an investigation of the obscene in popular and postmodern culture.

This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture. Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era. Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become ‘fit for consumption.'

Featuring a collection of original chapters by leading and emerging scholars, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology presents a comprehensive and balanced overview of the major topics and emerging trends in the discipline of sociology today. Features original chapters contributed by an international cast of leading and emerging sociology scholars Represents the most innovative and 'state-of-the-art' thinking about the discipline Includes a general introduction and section introductions with chapters summaries by the editor

Theories of Consumption explores the concept of consumption from the post-disciplinary perspective of cultural studies. John Storey brings together work that up until now has been located in distinct disciplinary spaces including work on reception theory in literary studies and philosophy; work on consumer culture in sociology, anthropology and history; and work on media audiences (both ethnographic and theoretical) in media studies and sociology. Moving beyond the usual analysis of consumer culture, Storey presents a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption. In doing so, he provides an authoritative overview of a significant selection of research and analysis that has explored consumption as an object of study. This book provides an ideal introduction to consumption for students of media and cultural studies and will also be useful for students within a number of other disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, cultural geography and both literary and visual studies.