The Development of the Sociology of Consumption

Abstract

This chapter reviews the major trends in the sociology of consumption, putting key arguments into historical and intellectual context. I identify some gaps and neglected episodes in stories of the emergence of the sociology of consumption. I describe a history which proceeds by way of changing the central foci of analytic concern. The series begins with aspects of social pathology. Under the guise of ‘The Social Question’, sociology from its earliest days examined one particular pattern of consumption, that of the urban poor. My story proceeds by way of partial accounts in the sociological classics via the Frankfurt School to mass consumption, neo-Marxian economism where consumption was a matter of reproduction, consumption as distinction, the cultural turn, and finally a pragmatic and anthropological concern with appropriation. In the later twentieth century the main shift saw economistic accounts giving way to cultural analysis of symbolism and communication. As a consequence, the understanding of consumption improved significantly but the emphases of the cultural turn shrouded other important sociological aspects of the topic. The practical role of consumption in everyday life—its use-value—and its institutional embeddedness re-engaged attention. The early twenty-first century saw development around approaches to appropriation through practice, which promises transcendence of the cultural turn. I identify three processes, acquisition, appreciation and appropriation, as key dimensions for the explanation of consumption. I present this story as, first, a narrative account, and then as a schematic and formalised characterisation of the evolution.