ABSTRACT
The practices, materials and discourses of markets and consumption are proliferating in manners that blur conceptual boundaries commonly established between consumers and technology, objects and subjects; production and consumption, nature and culture, local and global. This book traces markets and consumer cultures through the lenses provided by the concept of assemblage. What unites ideas of assemblages, actor-networks and figurations are conceptions of the world as constituted from more or less temporary amalgamations of heterogeneous material and semiotic elements, amongst which capacities and actions emerge not as properties of individual elements, but through the relationships established between them. The book unpacks this definition, explains the new pathways that assemblage opens, and illustrates what the concept can change in terms of how people understand markets, consumption and consumers. This chapter also presents an outline of the content available in the subsequent chapters of the book.
