Consumption and Theories of Practice

Abstract

The huge corpus of work on consumption still lacks theoretical consolidation. This is most obvious when contemplating the situations of different disciplines, where there is very little common ground (see, for example, the review in Miller 1995). But the problem is no less great in individual disciplines like sociology, for example, where output seems to me to have been bipolar, generating either abstract and speculative social theory or detailed case studies. Moreover, case studies have been skewed towards favourite, but restricted, topics—fashion, advertising and some forms of popular recreational activity—with particular attention paid to their symbolic meanings and role in the formation of self-identity. These case studies, perhaps encouraged by prominent versions of the abstract theories which say that the consumer has no choice but to choose and will be judged in terms of the symbolic adequacy of that choice (e.g. Bauman 1988; Giddens 1991), very often operated with models of highly autonomous individuals preoccupied with symbolic communication. Believing that these approaches give a partial understanding of consumption, this chapter sketches an alternative, avoiding methodological individualist accounts of ‘the consumer’, which are concerned as much with what people do and feel as what they mean. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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