Summary lecture notes Lifestyles and Consumption (CHL20806)
Summary Articles CHL-20806 and book 'Consumption and lifestyles, a short introduction'
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Week 1, lecture 1 Introduction, Chapter 1
Acts of consumption were only regarded as processes related to an exchange of money. It is now a wider cycle that
also includes processes such as getting eaten, burned or recycled.
- Economics: demand
- Sociology: the symbolic expression of acts of consumption
Business administration:
- Marketing: help sell products so that they become more attractive
- Entrepreneurship: how to create opportunities to establish new markets
Norms in society define which services or goods are legal and which are classified illegal or criminal. This defines
consumption.
Taboo consumption: consumption processes occurring in normative zones of darkness.
Reflections about consumption are always reflections about the social embeddedness of markets and their moral
limits as well. There is a difference between a formal perspective and a sociological, legal or psychological view on
consumption. Consumption depends on:
- upon the concrete society,
- the time in which we live,
- your preferences,
- your lifestyle and related taste
- and our position in the system of social class
- age (chapter 2)
Consumption practices:
Meanwhile, in the social sciences, (...) practices are more generally seen as a means of approaching his more central
concern: that of theorizing habitus.
Social practices are a routinised or patterned type of behaviour that brings together forms of bodily activity, forms of
mental activity, objects and their handling, types of knowledge and emotional states. Practice theory figures
individuals as 'carriers' of practices rather than agents of behaviour.
Cultural capital: related to the ability to contribute to social processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Two trends in consumption:
1. The evolution of electronic markets
prosumer: actors who are partly consumer, but elsewhere also entrepreneurial producers, or labour or wage
dependent citizens who are more than just simple consumers
2. Increasing greening of societies in the sense of a growing awareness of the topic of sustainability
Societies worldwide are experiencing serious changes in consumer behaviour in relation to product quality,
the nature of production
processes in combination with ecological and social parameters and
issues of fair trade, all of which must be taken as new facts which also
empower consumers.
Questions lecture 1: Answers
1) What is a lifestyle? The distinctive patterns of personal and social behaviour that
characterise an individual or group, and the associated patterns and
values that belong to this behaviour.
,2) How could consumption be described Broad: taking and using goods/services, exchange
broadly? And narrower?
Narrower: formal/informal contract accompanying processes of payment
3) In what 3 factors is consumption Consumption is socially embedded and not merely one single action.
socially embedded? Embedded in:
1 time, 2 society, 3 position in social class
4) What is highbrow and lowbrow Distinction between higher and lower class. Highbrow culture are
culture? considered with more luxury taste, higher class.
5) What are important aspects about 1 Different use and meanings
goods and services rather than price
and function? 2 different degrees of social acceptance
3 different forms or markets (inf/f)
6) What is the idea of circular Consumption is no longer seen as an end state, there are more
economy? opportunities like recycling and reuse.
7) What is collaborative consumption? Like liquid consumption; an economic model based on sharing,
swapping, trading, or renting products and services, enabling access
over ownership.
Consumers as obtainers AND providers. Often, a platform mediates this
process.
Part of sharing economy (sharing underutilized assets), but more triadic,
more people and a mediating platform.
e.g. vinted, Swapfiets
, 8) What are prosumers? Actors who are consumers but also entrepreneurial producers, they feed
input/content into a platform
e.g. solar panels, consume energy but produce this themselves >
presumption: interrelatedness of production and consumption
Questions reading 1: book Answers
1) How can consumption be broadly Taking something in order to receive or to use it.
described?
2) How can consumption be A formal or informal contract which accompanies processes of payment, in
described in a narrower sense? which consumption can be measured economically as a waste.
3) Why is the legitimacy of products Legitimacy of products and markets is important, since reflections about
and their markets important in consumption are also always reflections about the social embeddedness of
understanding consumption? markets and their moral limits. Goods on the market are related to different
forms of use and meaning, with different degrees of social acceptance and
different forms of markets (e.g. braces, drugs etc.)
4) What does our pattern of Society and time, preferences, lifestyles and related tastes, position in the
consumption depend on? system of social class.
5) What are 2 trends in 1 evolution electronic market causing one global market, 2 growing
consumption? awareness of sustainability
Week 1, lecture 2 different perspectives and academic responsibilities, Chapter 2
Social perspectives were ignored by classic economics. Preferences were considered constant. Nowadays; the
consumption of goods and services is a fundamental part of people’s welfare. It remains the core variable in poverty
measurements in low-in-come countries. People have changing rationalities to spend money depending on their
, position in their life cycles. There is no direct relationship between income and consumption. That is because various
other factors influence the (relative) autonomy of consumption behaviour;
- Historically and culturally changing times
- Competing life philosophies
- Political attitudes
- etc..
Adam Smith: “that consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production
Jean-Baptiste Say: saw production as being the real foundation of wealth or value (consumption originates in
production)
Keynes: demand creates its own supply. Economic growth can be created best by strengthening incentives for
consumption
Modigliani: consumers decisions differ within their life cycles
Galbraith: linked consumption to a historically new phenomenon of an affluent society
Scitovsky: related consumption to human needs
Consumer society: the rise of industrial capitalism in relation to protestant ethics. The progress and spirit of changing
times.
Conspicuous consumption: the tendencies of economic activities to be driven by non-utilitarian, even impractical
motives that are more akin to tribal and prehistoric behaviour than rational economics.
Consumption research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. Eight empirical research areas are of specific
significance:
1. Links between consumption behaviour and social order draw on the landscape of local, regional, national
and international consumption profles in contrast to different classes, household types, lifestyles and their
modifcations over time.
2. Microeconomics and micro-sociological patterns: This research area involves social conditions of learned
behaviour as well as further investigations into decision-making structures and contextualizing network
structures. These help to decode the grammar of human behaviour relevant for consumption processes,
including intentional refusal of consumption by saving or philanthropy
3. Structure and agency
4. Diffusion processes of consumption behaviour
5. Consumption as being part of a changing of increasing homogenization and heterogeneity at one and the
same time (globalization and McDonaldization).
6. Advertisements as a marketing strategy
7. How can the complex interaction between the demand and production side in business and society be
characterized and portrayed best?
Week 1, lecture 2, Article 1; Bringing Children (and Parents) into the Sociology of Consumption, LYDIA
MARTENS
Research purpose
This article has set about the task of identifying a theoretically informed empirical agenda for the further study of
children and consumption.
Production of consumption approaches fail to capture how children’s consumption is experienced ‘in practice’, nor do
they recognize, beyond symbolic value and discursive (re)construction of cultural categories, the processes through
which consumption becomes meaningful in the conduct and presentation of those practices within everyday life.
Summary
- Production of consumption
It focuses on the relationship between the market and children to the neglect of other pertinent social
relationships. There is a notable lack of interest in the symbolic meanings that people create around the
goods and services they consume. The research mostly neglects to investigate children themselves.
Moreover, they treat children as a homogenous group rather than as diverse in terms of age, abilities, sense
of self/agency and knowledge. Finally, research is mainly based on older children. Since the consumption of
younger children is engaged in by adults.
By analysing three key theoretical approaches in the sociology of consumption (mode of consumption, lifestyle and
identity, and engagement in material culture), we have identified a set of themes that further understandings of
contemporary childhoods and of processes of consumption:
1. Mode of consumption, social reproductions and learning to consume
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