Much of the literature on consumption in mid twentieth century Europe was driven by macro-economic considerations. Keynesian macro- economic theory coexisted with the neo-classical tradition. Keynesian intervention, market regulation and welfare provision emphasised the rel- evance of aggregate consumption to economic stability. Th e years of the Long Boom after 1945 saw steady economic growth, low unemployment and social policies designed to make public provision for a minimum level of consumption for all. In the UK, for example, an era of so-called consensus politics was founded on agreement about the role of state- provided social security, sound housing and healthcare for its citizens.
For a period, countries experienced decommodifi cation, as the state- provided services at the point of need without the intervention of market exchange. Th e state eff ectively intervened, partly because of the power of the labour movement, to moderate the eff ects of class inequality on pat- terns of consumption through welfare services funded by national, pro- gressive taxation. At this point, it was mainly the political left in the guise of neo-Marxism that found the arrangements problematic. Neo-Marxist analysis of macro-economic shifts, for instance the infl uential Regulation School (e.g. Aglietta 1979 ), argued that mass consumption was a nec- essary condition of the existence of the Long Boom after the Second
World War and was functional to the continued accumulation of capital.
Neo-Marxism also emphasised the role that consumption played in the reproduction of labour power. Th eoretically, the role of social reproduc- tion became critical and the concept of collective consumption became a major plank of the ‘new urban sociology’ associated with Manuel Castells ( 1977 ). Th e centrality of the operation of the welfare state in Western Europe put patterns of consumption at the core of public policy, yet interest in the minutiae of consumption or its experience was limited.
In general, then, symbolic matters were muted, and consumption was a matter of the distribution of material resources, a matter of social policy.
Much of sociology, in line with its classical texts, in which industrialisation and the transformation from traditional to modern societies supplied the raison d’être for the discipline’s existence, saw economic production, the accumulation of capital, and especially the occupational order as the primary determinants of social organisation and social inequality. Hence, sociology also saw consumption as the corollary of production processes, accord- ing it little autonomy or existence in its own right. Even Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction ( 1984 [1979]), which was widely celebrated and turned out to be pivotal across disciplinary boundaries, could be read as a form of econo- mism. While grasping the importance of culture as an autonomous fi eld, and cultural capital as a distinct resource, he tended to see economic capital as a more fundamental asset and, by building his analysis of taste in France around class position and habitus, became a target for criticism because of sociologism. (By sociologism I mean the founding of explanations of conduct in social group membership, which is not necessarily unjustifi ed, but often truncates the explanation of individual behaviour by not giv- ing an explicit account of the intermediating processes, mechanisms and fi lters.) Nevertheless, he was also in the vanguard of examining dimensions of cultural practice in the generation and perpetuation of social inequality.
2 The Sociology of Consumption and the Cultural Turn
During the late 1970s the intellectual landscape was rather rapidly transformed. Th e decline of neo-Marxism, critique of economism, and the resurgence of neo-liberal market economics coincided with the
maturation of linguistic and semiotic-inspired studies and a reappraisal of the role of culture. Th e so-called ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences, later feeding on the explosion of postmodernist ideas in the humanities, had enormous ramifi cations for the analysis of consumption. If culture had previously been associated primarily with High Culture (Williams 1958 ), making it primarily a topic of relevance mostly to intellectuals and artists, the cultural turn for social scientists brought into focus many other kinds of cultural forms and processes. Culture was redesignated as an integral part of everyday life, wherein could be found meaning, personal expres- sion and identity. Everyday life had a larger aesthetic component than before as a result of commercial uses of aesthetic design (Haug 1986 ; Jameson 1998 ) which in turn required analytic techniques fi tting to the interpretation and decoding of cultural artefacts.
Important for the understanding of consumption was the new body of work, initially associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, designated ‘cultural studies’. Initially an exten- sion of sociological analysis (Chaney 1996 ), it soon abandoned those moorings and drew more extensively on the literary and philosophical traditions, particularly elements of postmodernist theory. Under the direction of Stuart Hall, it was neo-Marxist in orientation, with a spe- cial interest in subcultures and social divisions, and it trained some and strongly infl uenced other scholars who subsequently contributed to the study of consumption. Cultural studies, as Santoro ( 2012 ) noted, was a peculiarly British creature, nurtured for several decades before being exported to an international audience at the end of the twentieth cen- tury. An ambitious interdisciplinary venture, cultural studies in opera- tion drew rather indiscriminately on a diverse and eclectic set of favoured authors whose views are more easily defi ned by their antipathies than their positive propositions. It has never established a core theoretical or methodological programme, instead fi nding what coherence it might have from a loosely shared, radical, political ethos. Broadly speaking, cultural studies is sceptical of claims to scientifi city and objectivity, quantitative methodologies and positivistic epistemology, economism and sociolo- gism, and knowledge production for (and through the lenses of ) power- ful groups and organisations. Distinguishing emphases include concerns with meaning, identity, aesthetic expression, communication, globalisa- tion and individualisation. Cultural studies was notable for contesting
both formerly dominant economistic explanations and the widespread moral condemnation of consumer behaviour. In its hands, consumption was transformed from an epiphenomenon of capitalist production, where the consumer was, if not a dupe, at least passive, into a central principle of social order and a realm for individual agency and choice. Consumption became a raison d’être rather than a means to survival. Consumption was understood as not simply instrumental; non-rational elements, emotions and desires, were recognised.
Th e tension between cultural studies and the then British sociological orthodoxy, which derived its theoretical tools and substantive preoccupa- tions with modern societies largely from Marx, Weber and Durkheim, was one important spur to the formulation of the sociology of consumption in the UK. Th e contrast might be epitomised by comparing two major con- tributors to consumption sociology in the UK, Colin Campbell and Mike Featherstone. Campbell was the author of the very infl uential book Th e Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism ( 1987 ), the most fre- quently cited item in a citation database search in 2014 for the (compara- tively rare) term ‘sociology of consumption’. He was an orthodox Weberian scholar who also made important interventions on topics of explanation, theory and substantive analysis (see e.g. 1996 , 1997 ; Falk and Campbell 1997 ). Campbell also wrote the report about sociology in Miller’s ( 1995 ) infl uential edited collection of essays on disciplinary approaches to con- sumption. Observing the diffi culty of arriving at a satisfactory defi nition of consumption, the works he cited came from a wide diversity of dis- ciplines with very few bespoke sociological investigations among them.
Th ose cited came from sociologies of family, food and household, urban sociology and housing studies, and the sociology of leisure and tourism.
Featherstone, who was much more strongly infl uenced by cul- tural studies, defi ned the boundaries of the subdisciplinary fi eld in the 1990s. He was a founder of the journal Th eory, Culture & Society , which revolved around the meeting of European, and particularly French, social theory and cultural studies. His book of essays, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism ( 1991 ), is the most heavily cited work by a sociologist in the area of consumer culture, consumerism and the sociology of con- sumption. It drew on the cultural turn and the widespread preoccupation
across the humanities and social sciences with postmodernism, against which he juxtaposed Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School. Th ese were presented as three complementary approaches for a sociology of life- styles and consumption ( 1987 , 1990 ). He also engaged seriously with another propitious focal interest of Th eory, Culture & Society , globalisa- tion. Investigations into the interrelationship of globalisation and con- sumer culture proved the main inducement to the study of consumption.
However, most of the best work was historical in orientation, studying institutional arrangements to evaluate the character and extent of change.
Processes of globalisation, or Americanisation, attributed with the eff ect of creating a homogeneous consumer culture, were key objects of critical evaluation.
Th e topics of analysis of cultural studies—popular culture of diverse types, subcultures, mass media communication, television watching, systems of aesthetic and commercial symbols—entailed reading texts of many kinds to reveal meaning and signifi cance in symbolic representa- tions. Culture, it transpired, was everywhere, and its multiple manifesta- tions were eagerly identifi ed in many disciplines, with cultural psychology, cultural geography, cultural sociology and ‘cultural political economy’—
which would previously have been considered an oxymoron.
Th e theoretical ferment of the cultural turn had a signifi cant impact on research on consumption. With the possible exception of economics, all disciplines with an interest in consumption were signifi cantly aff ected.
Of course, its most radical version was espoused by only a small minor- ity; most researchers were obviously hesitant about the strong claims of postmodernism and combined its insights with those from previous tra- ditions. Nevertheless, the eff ect was palpable. Th e rapidly growing vol- ume of empirical studies was infl uenced by the imperative to understand what consumption meant to people, how and why they bought what they did buy, what sets of ideas lay behind ‘consumer culture’ and how infl uential it was, and what the characteristics of ‘the consumer’ were.
Investigations of how choices were made became de rigueur among soci- ologists who previously might have found that an irrelevant or unpro- fessional question. For answers they turned to cultural explanations of cultural phenomena.