ABSTRACT
Only recently have sociologists used the concept of consumption extensively. It remains primarily a topic of interdisciplinary attention, with the related concept “consumer” more widely deployed, especially in economics, psychology, and marketing. That said, terms like consumer culture and consumer society have come to play an important role in some sociological characterizations of contemporary social arrangements. Many accounts suggest that central features of industrial capitalism-where disciplined labor in manufacturing goods was the key axis of social order in the face of material scarcity-are receding, replaced for most people in affluent societies by the appeal of consumption in a context where leisure, shopping, and the home become the focal points of everyday life. In this chapter I describe some features of the emergence of a specialized sociological sub-discipline, paying particular attention to oscillations between the normative and the empirical analysis of this crucial component of social life. Consumption is something of a chaotic concept and few sociologists have been
prepared to define it. Campbell (1995: 102) proposed a working definition of consumption “as involving the selection, purchase, use, maintenance, repair, and disposal of any product or service.” Compared to its use in economics, where consumption typically indicates the act of purchase in market exchange, it has much wider application, for instance raising issues of how people use and dispose of items. Campbell noted difficulties in this broader definition gaining acceptance because it has been pre-empted in everyday language by the economists’ notion. However, a broad definition serves to recognize the two separate historical roots of the concept, both of which continue to resonate for sociological purposes. The first, emerging from Latin into early English, had a negative connotation-to destroy, to waste, to use up. Only later, with the emergence of political economy in the eighteenth century, did a neutral sense develop in description of market relationships, in which consumer is distinguished from producer and, analogously, consumption from production. This second meaning focused more on the changing value of items being exchanged rather than the purposes to which goods and services might be put. These two meanings have existed in tension ever since. For most of the twentieth century, sociological analysis of consumption was driven
largely by normative and quasi-political considerations about the threats it posed to
pursuit of “the good life.” Puritan and Protestant cultures in particular have displayed negative and hostile attitudes towards consumption because of their suspicion toward luxury and waste. Conspicuous consumption, a term coined by Veblen (1925 [1899]), describes the competitive pursuit of social status through display of possessions by a section of the American middle class. Other scholars studied processes involving invidious comparisons between groups, employing such concepts as imitation, emulation, and the trickle-down effect. Attitudes towards mass consumption also tended to be critical, the Frankfurt School among others declaiming its uniformity, mediocrity, and tendency to induce passivity. Often such critique was associated with a more general and abstract critique of Western capitalist modernity, focusing especially on the fundamental process of commodification. According to Schudson’s (1993) summary, during the twentieth century consumption was condemned not only for encouraging cultural mediocrity and pandering to status concerns but also for promoting hedonistic materialism, creating excessive waste, causing privatization, and obscuring the relationship between producers and consumers to the detriment of working conditions. Such normative diagnoses of the nature and consequences of modern consumption
were rarely supported by evidence from systematic empirical study of consumer behavior. The one notable exception to this generalization, although usually conceptualized in other terms, was research on “under-consumption” driven by a concern that many people consumed too little to achieve socially acceptable standards of physical reproduction and cultural participation. Studies of poverty and inequality, in a long empirical tradition stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century, are precisely concerned with consumption in its wider remit. Studies of the circumstances of private households were complemented in the 1970s by analyses of collective consumption, involving examination of the role of the state in delivering to citizens’ income, goods, and public services. Supplementing or supplanting provision through the market, which implies de-commodification, was a raison d’être of the modern welfare state. However, the policies of the New Right from the 1980s gradually re-commodified (privatized), or subjected to quasi-market mechanisms (marketized), such provision. Sociologists have intensively monitored the resulting tendency to increase inequality and fragment social relations.
