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Consumption Practices (consumption + practice)
Selected AbstractsPlaces of Privileged Consumption Practices: Spatial Capital, the Dot-Com Habitus, and San Francisco's Internet BoomCITY & COMMUNITY, Issue 3 2008Ryan Centner Drawing from interviews and fieldwork with former dot-com workers in San Francisco, this article examines how their spatialized consumption practices formed exclusionary places of privilege during the city's millennial boom of internet companies. I focus especially on the personalized deployment of uneven social power in situations where space is at stake. After considering how this group differed from a history of other urban newcomers, I develop a framework for addressing their spatial effects as gentrification involving privileged consumption practices that surpass residential encroachments. I argue there is an exertion of spatial capital that represents the misrecognition of territorial claims, enabling this cohort to literally take place. I show this through several consumption practices that convert to and from economic, cultural, and social capital. A concluding discussion reflects on the usefulness of this case and framework for reinvigorating key urban-sociological analytics while confronting influential but unsociological characterizations of contemporary city life. [source] A sociological perspective of consumption moralityJOURNAL OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR, Issue 5 2007Robert Caruana This paper considers how a sociological perspective of morality can inform understandings of consumption. In light of recent research that identifies moral forms of consumption practice at a socio-cultural level (e.g. ,ethical consumers' and ,voluntary simplifiers') it is apparent that an important relationship between consumption, society and morality continues to be of relevance and interest to consumer research. However, research into ethical consumption, fair trade, sustainability, green consumption and more recently consumer citizenship presuppose certain assumptions about the moral nature of the subject at the centre of their investigations whilst not evidencing an explicit or coherent understanding of the underlying sociological conception of morality itself. Accordingly, there is a need for consumer researchers framing their studies at a sociological level to be clearer about the conceptual nature of morality and, moreover, how it relates in a meaningful way to the theoretical claims made in their research. In response, this paper examines the dominant paradigmatic conceptualisations that constitute a sociological perspective of morality. Particularly, it considers (1) how a number of key sociological perspectives on morality can locate streams of consumer research better than is currently the case, (2) how these perspectives suggest that current research into fair trade and ethical consumption invoke a certain type of morality whereas a broader concept is available and finally (3) how a pluralist sociological conception of morality will allow consumer researchers to reframe the types of questions they can ask and so too the types of answers they may find. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Building sustainable societies: A Swedish case study on the limits of reflexive modernizationAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2010CINDY ISENHOUR ABSTRACT Environmental problems have inspired a wide range of responses from citizens and states alike. My research focuses on Swedish individuals' attempts to minimize perceived environmental risks via consumption practice. The growth of "sustainable consumerism" is often explained by generalized theories of reflexive modernization, but the Swedish case illustrates that many citizen-consumers acting in the interest of sustainability are misunderstood by these popular explanations. Their perspectives and actions support the need for a more historically and locally grounded approach to sustainable consumerism in Sweden and elsewhere, one that not only recognizes individual choice but also takes into account considerations of power and history. [source] Voluntary simplicity: an exploration of market interactionsINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSUMER STUDIES, Issue 2 2009Deirdre Shaw Abstract Voluntary simplicity is often considered to be a sustainable lifestyle phenomenon buttressed by environment-friendly consumption practices. Voluntary simplicity is shaped by the individual as well as the society, and marketplace interactions often impact voluntarily simplified approaches to consumption. Pertinent, therefore, is a consideration of how voluntary simplifiers negotiate the tensions between marketplace interactions and decisions (not) to consume, as the exploration of interactions between consumption and non-consumption choices has relevant implications for the advancement of sustainable consumption. Specifically, we seek to answer the following question: how have voluntary simplifiers in a rural context negotiated the relationship between voluntary simplicity and market-based (non-) consumption? This paper reports on a study of 28 rural voluntary simplifiers to explore the intersections between voluntary simplicity and rural markets. Findings highlight the convoluted nature and the multiple manifestations of voluntary simplicity, while the rural context allows an exploration of such tensions in relation to individual voluntary simplicity, local economy, supermarkets, fair trade and consumer culture. [source] Food consumption and political agency: on concerns and practices among Danish consumersINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSUMER STUDIES, Issue 6 2008Bente Halkier Abstract Increasingly ordinary individual consumers are expected to perform some kind of societal or political agency. In the debates about political consumption it is a recurrent topic to what degree consumption practices can be seen as political practices and how many consumers perform such practices. The aim of this article is to empirically qualify the demarcation of the political in individual consumer activities by integrating the concept of political agency in the definition of political consumption. On the basis of empirical results from a representative survey among food consumers in Denmark, the article suggests that by supplementing the criteria of consumers performing specific consumption activities with a criteria of consumers expressing political agency, a more precise empirical delimitation of political consumption can be achieved. Three groups of food consumers are identified: those who perform political consumption practices; those who perform politicized consumption practices; and those who vocalize the discourse of political consumerism. [source] Risk and food: environmental concerns and consumer practicesINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, Issue 8 2001Bente Halkier Environmental risks related to food consumption produce needs among consumers to handle such risks through their consumption practices. Consumers' ways of coping with risks are dependent on the social relations of everyday life, of which consumption practices are a part. Risk-handling in food consumption is socio-culturally broader than the cognitive rationality assumed in expert knowledge and administrative procedures on risk and risk-handling. Likewise, risk-handling in food consumption is also characterized by ambivalences. The objective of the article is to show that an important social and cultural source of ambivalence in consumers' handling of risk in food consumption comes from food consumption practices being caught in the tension between desire and control. The article proposes a heuristic theoretical device, called ,the contested space of the body', which is used to discuss the bodily dimension of consumer risk-handling. This is based on a Danish empirical study of parents with small children. A typology of consumers' risk-handling is presented which differs from traditional typologies of consumer segments by allowing for overlaps and shifts between the individual positions in the typology. The three types of risk-handling are the worried, the irritated and the pragmatic. The results suggest that in worried risk-handling control marginalizes desire, in irritated risk-handling desire is openly in conflict with control, and in pragmatic risk-handling relief from the contested space of the body is attempted. [source] Fleeting Dreams and Flowing Goods: Citizenship and Consumption in Havana CubaPOLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 1 2008Amy L. Porter This article explores the ways that consumption practices and the expectations around consumption are changing in Havana, Cuba. Drawing on studies of citizenship, I argue that consumption is a right of citizenship and, as such, has transformative power,not necessarily positive,for society and its citizens. This is especially the case when there are economic and political distinctions made about who can and cannot consume what products. Ethnography provides insights into the varying forms of consumption that Cubans encounter, and the ways that these are fragmenting socialist ideals and values, perceptions of national unity, and, ultimately, definitions of belonging and citizenship. [source] Places of Privileged Consumption Practices: Spatial Capital, the Dot-Com Habitus, and San Francisco's Internet BoomCITY & COMMUNITY, Issue 3 2008Ryan Centner Drawing from interviews and fieldwork with former dot-com workers in San Francisco, this article examines how their spatialized consumption practices formed exclusionary places of privilege during the city's millennial boom of internet companies. I focus especially on the personalized deployment of uneven social power in situations where space is at stake. After considering how this group differed from a history of other urban newcomers, I develop a framework for addressing their spatial effects as gentrification involving privileged consumption practices that surpass residential encroachments. I argue there is an exertion of spatial capital that represents the misrecognition of territorial claims, enabling this cohort to literally take place. I show this through several consumption practices that convert to and from economic, cultural, and social capital. A concluding discussion reflects on the usefulness of this case and framework for reinvigorating key urban-sociological analytics while confronting influential but unsociological characterizations of contemporary city life. [source] Real Jordanians Don't Decorate Like That!CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 2 2000The Politics of Taste among Amman's Elites Elites in Amman are divided over matters of taste, and preferences for particular villas, furnishings, and clothing extend far beyond the problem of keeping up with the Husseini's; more broadly, ideas about taste and corresponding consumption practices instantiate Jordanian conceptions of membership in various moral and political communities. This paper explores the articulation of elites' consumption practices with conceptions of the modem and the traditional as well as the role of consumption in ongoing disputes among elites over the question of who is and who is not a legitimate Jordanian citizen. [Middle East, taste, consumption, national identity, modernity] [source] | |||||||||||||