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Summary Consumption and Lifestyles CHL20806
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A complete and comprehensive summary of the book Consumption and lifestyles. Full summary of consumption and life styles
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Summary: Consumption and Life-Styles. A Short Introduction. - Bögenhold & Naz (2018)
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Summary of the book Consumption and lifestyles a short introduction
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Summary Consumption and life-stylesA short introduction
Chapter 1: Introduction
In contemporary societies nearly everything can be seen as a kind of consumption > buying,
eating, drinking, wearing, travelling > taking and using goods or services.
Consumption is just taking something in order to receive or use it
Almost always identified as a formal or informal contract which accompanies
processes of payment
Consumption can be measures economically as a waste, in terms of items getting
eaten, used or consumed.
How we consume is dependent on society, time, our preferences, lifestyles, tastes
o Almost always related to our position in the system of social classes
The relentless growth of economics, psychology, business administration and sociology is
responsible for the ongoing fragmentation of insights in research.
All processes take place in permanently changing societies, with different histories, markets
and cultures determining the rules.
Norms define which services or goods are legal or illegal.
Reflections about consumptions are always reflections about the social embeddedness of
markets and their moral limits. It is about the legitimacy of products and their markets.
Consumption goes beyond the processes of buying, using and repair/waste.
From a formal perspective products like drugs are just products with different
functions and prices, but from a sociological perspective, these are products with
different degrees of social acceptance.
Consumption processes are obviously connected to fluid borders between formal and
informal markets and their organization.
Lifestyle determines very much of our taste and our criteria for happiness. Differentiation
between popular culture and high culture is very much about the difference between regular
consumption of practical value and consumption of distinctive forms.
Consumption always have the side effect of demonstrating and underlining social
positions in a stratified society.
Cultural capital (Bourdieu) is related to the ability to contribute to social processes of
inclusion and exclusion.
Last twenty years we experienced 2 remarkable trends in consumption:
1. Evolution of electronic markets
a. Transformed the nature of geographically fragmented markets into one global
market.
b. Digitalization results in consumers becoming prosumers. They have
increasingly hybrid functions from consumers but also entrepreneurial
producers.
c. Prosumers are regarded as being embedded in many different roles.
2. Increasing greening of societies > growing awareness of sustainability
,Chapter 2: Consumption – different perspectives and academic responsibilities
Consumption research inquires into the preference structures of individual actors,
households or classes and the rationalities which lead to their consumption behavior.
Consumption research is concerned with the relationship between earnings and
spending.
Emphasize a social perspective which was ignored by classic economics.
The consumption of goods and services is a fundamental part of people’s welfare.
Consumption remains the core variable in poverty measurement in low-income
countries > often easier to measure and provides accurate measure when income
varies seasonally.
Modigliani’s life cycle theory of consumption was a
remarkable contribution to the discussion on
consumption, economics and distinguishing between
consumers by age.
According to this theory, people have changing
rationalities to spend or save money,
depending on their position in their life cycles.
Younger people make different plans and have
differing consumption plans than older people.
In twenty-first century, an economic society is primarily portrayed by the engagement of
society in consumption practices.
Increased attractiveness of consumption due to that socioeconomic practices of
people are somehow related to their material conditions in society and their material
wealth.
Income does not directly answer how people furnish their consumption practices.
Consumption originates production > supply creates its own demand.
Keynes: economic growth can be created best by strengthening incentives for consumption.
The sphere of consumption was based upon socio-psychological dispositions of
human agents.
Historians investigate consumptions from many perspectives.
Max Weber discussed the rise of industrial capitalism in relation to protestant ethics and its
inherent consumption ascetics > later called consumer society, reflecting the progress and
spirit of changing times.
The term “conspicuous consumption” is used (by Veblen) to describe tendencies of
economic activities to be driven by non-utilitarian, even impractical motives that are more
akin to prehistoric behavior than rational economics.
This research went well beyond the possession of material objects. Also socio-
psychological analyses to religious practices, gender relations, sports, accents and
manners.
Critical of the leisure class, including its treatment of women
o Marriage was largely another acquisitive activity for men from the leisure class
Current consumption research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary.
The links between consumption behavior and social order draw on the landscape of
local, regional, national and international consumption profiles.
, In contrast to different classes, household types, lifestyles and their modifications
over time.
Inequalities become visible in terms of material and cultural disparities within vertical and
horizontal disparities through differing consumption patterns.
Microeconomic and micro-sociological patterns and conditions of consumption behavior need
to be exploited further. This involves social conditions of learned behavior as well as further
investigations into decision-making structures and contextualizing network structures.
A topic which is attracting more attention nowadays is the role of consumers as active
agents.
Consumers increasingly see themselves as political decision-makers or voters based
on their own decisions for (and against) specific products or brands.
o Consumers can decide to boycott specific brands
Consumers will increasingly be able to influence, directly or indirectly, consumption
decisions and patterns of available products and markets.
o Consumers achieve specific profiles of “market making”, resulting in the
emergence of the term prosumers.
Consumption is neither a material practice, nor a phenomenology of ‘affluence’. It is not
defined by the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the care we can drive, but is an
organization of all.
Consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages presently constituted in
a more or less coherent discourse.
Consumption is a systematic art of the manipulation of signs.
Consumption processes and their diffusion modes seem to overlap with the diffusion
processes of social trends and social fashions.
Some researches treat consumption as being part of a changing consumer society which is
itself part of an international process of increasing homogenization and heterogeneity at on
and the same time.
Growing trend towards sustainability creates new business opportunities.
Consumption processes are embedded in a web of socially constructed needs and wants
which are not driven by the DNA of humans but which are learned behavior.
This behavior changes globally between generations, classes, lifestyles and
preferences.
Advertisements as marketing strategy try to create and manipulate incentives to buy
specific products and needs.
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