The Oxford Handbook of Consumption

Description

The Oxford Handbook of Consumption consolidates the most innovative recent work conducted by social scientists in the field of consumption studies and identifies some of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for future research. It begins by embedding marketing in its global history, enmeshed in various political, economic, and social sites. From this embedded perspective, the book branches out to examine the rise of consumer culture theory among consumer researchers and parallel innovative developments in sociology and anthropology, with scholarship analyzing the roles that identity, social networks, organizational dynamics, institutions, market devices, materiality, and cultural meanings play across a wide variety of applications, including, but not limited to, brands and branding, the sharing economy, tastes and preferences, credit and credit scoring, consumer surveillance, race and ethnicity, status, family life, well-being, environmental sustainability, social movements, and social inequality. The volume is unique in the attention it gives to consumer research on inequality and the focus it has on consumer credit scores and consumer behaviors that shape life chances. The volume includes essays by many of the key researchers in the field, some of whom have only recently, if at all, crossed the disciplinary lines that this volume has enabled. The contributors have tried to address several key questions: What motivates consumption and what does it mean to be a consumer? What social, technical, and cultural systems integrate and give character to contemporary consumption? What actors, institutions, and understandings organize and govern consumption? And what are the social uses and effects of consumption? Cover Contents About the Editors About the Contributors Introduction: Situating Consumers and Consumption PART I KEY CONTEMPORARY THEMES 1. The Social Embeddedness of Marketing 2. The Sharing Economy 3. Prosumption: Contemporary Capitalism and the “New” Prosumer 4. Consumer Culture Theory 5. A Sociological Critique and Reformulation of Brands 6. Relational Work and Consumption 7. Meaningful Objects and Consumption 8. Bourdieu, Distinction, and Aesthetic Consumption PART II ORGANIZING CONSUMPTION 9. Taste, Legitimacy, and the Organization of Consumption 10. Cultural Markets and Consecration 11. Emotions in Consumer Studies 12. Young People and Consumption 13. Consumption as Production PART III CONSUMER TRANSACTIONS, RELATIONS, AND DEVICES 14. Household Finances and Credit Visibility 15. The Cultivation of Market Behaviors and Economic Decisions 16. Consumer Transactions: Consumer Banking 17. Consumer Credit Surveillance PART IV INEQUALITY AND STRATIFICATION 18. Omnivorousness, Distinction, or Both? 19. The Development of Ethnoracial Market Segments 20. Race and Consumer Inequality 21. Fashion and Its Gendered Agendas 22. Gentrification and Urban Inequality 23. Branding National Identity in an Unequal World PART V PRACTICES, PERFORMANCES, AND IDENTITIES 24. Subcultures and Consumption 25. Taste, Sensation, and Skill in the Sociology of Consumption 26. Food Tastes 27. Gender as a Critical Perspective in Marketing Practice 28. Consumer Cities, Scenes, and Ethnic Restaurants PART VI REFORMULATING MARKETS 30. Affluence, Anti-Consumerism, and the Politics of Consumption 31. Linking Environmental Sustainability and Consumption Index