Culture and Consumption

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the intersections of culture and consumption. It takes up recent investigations of consumption outside of sociology; sociological studies of consumption, outside the claimed territory of economic sociology; and consequent challenges to economic sociology. Following those three points, it reviews three different sites of consumption—households, ethnic–racial communities, and retail settings—where extensive research has recently occurred, with an eye to better integration between economic sociology and empirical studies of consumption. It argues that although cultural variation plays a significant part in consumption, it is a common mistake to suppose that consumption forms a warm cultural island in a frigid economic sea. Shared understandings and their representations—the components of culture—undergird all of economic life, from e-commerce to sweatshops.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 82 citations exist upstream.