ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a bridge between the two main sections of this volume. So far we have introduced the shopping centres, and considered their political and regional context as well as summarising information about the shoppers from our surveys and focus groups. In the subsequent chapters we will examine in more detail some specific areas of articulation between the shopping sites and their consumption with an increasing emphasis upon the ethnographic material. This chapter begins in the first mode considering the macro-context of contemporary retail development and the political debates which have determined recent changes in policy. Such discussions tend to presume the context of consumption and writers on policy often project a series of desires and demands upon consumers. By introducing the perspectives of the shoppers themselves, as revealed in both focus group discussion and ethnographic observation, we will begin to challenge the presuppositions that are implicit in public discussion of shopping and reveal their distance from the perspectives that are generated through working directly with shoppers. At the same time we do not imply that this is simply a process of ‘discovering’ the consumer, since by using a variety of methodologies we are able to demonstrate that the very assumption that there exists a consistent unit to be termed the consumer is itself invalid. Instead we will focus upon the problems of contradiction and inconsistency that are uncovered when we consider policy form the perspective of a variety of shoppers in a variety of contexts.
