Consumption (sociology)
Theories of consumption have been a part of the field of sociology since its earliest days, dating back, at least implicitly, to the work of Karl Marx in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
Many sociologists associate it with social class, identity, group membership, age and stratification as it plays a huge part in modernity.
[1] Thorstein Veblen's (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class is generally seen as the first major theoretical work to take consumption as its primary focus.
Despite these early roots, research on consumption began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century in Europe, especially Great Britain.
It studies how and why individuals and groups acquire and use goods and services in a given society, as well as the cultural meanings and social norms associated with these practices.
This immense stratification of impact has a long and rich history that has roots in the Industrial Revolution, imperialism, the World Wars, and much more especially as the global population has grown exponentially in recent centuries.
Around the world, consumption patterns revolved largely around what food could be grown and brought into the villages, towns, and cities of the day.
These production-based consequences include but are in no way limited to immense deforestation, overhunting of different animal populations (beaver hunting), and exploitative and destructive mining and resource extraction processes.
Additionally through the Marshall Plan, an American foreign policy aid program aimed at preventing broken European nations from becoming Communist by supporting a capitalist revitalization with immense economic support from the United States, European nations rebuilt extremely quickly and were able to modernize their industrial systems toward mass production as well.
While people around the world were seeing the “Made in America” stamp more and more frequently, a mirrored impact is that Americans of all classes were becoming richer in comparison.
These drastic differences have a lot of causes yet they all lead to cities that have on average significantly higher levels of per capita consumption than others around the world.
These highways, coupled with the uniquely American ability at the time for the average family to afford a car, provided the necessary infrastructure to accelerate and accommodate a massive shift into the suburbs.
[14] In the suburbs, families could have their own private single-family house, a backyard, and personal appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, and laundry machines.
This focus on personal single-family homes led to this very individualistic and socially repetitive pattern of consumption in the United States.
Whereas in America, strict urban planning restrictions limited who could live where and where businesses could be, in Europe, there was a much more lenient system that allowed for and encouraged a much higher population density.
Scholars in this area have examined the role of advertising, branding, and other forms of commercial communication in shaping consumer desires and preferences.
Consumption through the lens of CCT is not only shaped by external factors (such as socioeconomic status, marketing, and upbringing) but also is rooted in individual agency.
He argues that the consumption of goods and services is often driven by a desire to participate in particular cultural scenes or communities, and to gain recognition and approval from others within these contexts.
In this sense, goods and services are seen as part of a broader system of cultural signifiers, in which individuals use a range of material and symbolic objects to communicate their identity and social position.
Considering advertisements and branding, Jens Beckert’s Imagined Futures sheds light on the potency of symbolic value.
