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Summary Articles CHL-20806 and book 'Consumption and lifestyles, a short introduction'
- Instelling
- Wageningen University (WUR)
Summary articles/readings and the book for course CHL-20806
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Lecture 1 Chapter 1 IntroductionConsumption (broad description): taking something in order to receive or use it à buying,
eating, drinking, wearing clothes or travelling
Consumption (narrow description): a formal or informal contract between parties including
payment à only processes related to an exchange of money or to reciprocal expectations are
regarded as acts of consumption. In this understanding, consumption can be measured
economically as a waste, in terms of items getting eaten, burned or, literally, in the common
sense of the word, consumed.
à How we consume is dependent not only upon the concrete society and time in which we
live but also upon our preferences, depend- ing upon our lifestyles and related tastes, which
are almost always related to our position in the system of social classes.
Consumption is part of many disciplines. The ones mentioned in this chapter are economics,
business administration and sociology.
- Economics: consumption is closely related to processes of demand
- Business administration: different fields cover different aspects of consumption
processes.
- Sociology: investigates the symbolic expression of acts of consumption and relates
those observations to classes and lifestyles
à For example, marketing tries to help sell products so that they become more attractive
to potential con- sumer markets while entrepreneurship is more concerned with
questions as to how to create opportunities and the supply of related products or
services in order to establish new markets or to enlarge existing ones
The growth of these disciplines seems to be responsible for the fragmentation of insights
and information. Which means that there is no connection between the knowledge of these
disciplines. Therefore, it is hard to conceptualize subjects as closed and single-typed.
Societies are permanently changing, they have their own histories, markets and cultures
that determine “the rules of the game” à the norms in societies determine which goods and
legal and which are illegal. This can differ per country or culture.
Goods can be seen as more complex objects with different forms, meanings, degrees of
social acceptance, and markets, depending on which discipline one looks from. Consumption
processes are obviously connected to fluid borders between formal and informal markets
and their organization.
Taboo consumption: where consumption processes occur but are sometimes located in
statistical and/or normative zones of darkness à markets for adopting children, for human
blood or semen or organs, for sexual services or erotic toys
Consumption does not only involve a series of different processes like choosing a product,
buying, using and repairing something or manag- ing waste à it is also about the legitimacy
of products and their markets.
Goods like dental braces, medical surgery, forged passports, hard drugs or organs for
transplantation are related to different forms of use and meaning, with different degrees of
social acceptance and different forms of markets.
How we consume is dependent not only upon the concrete society and time in which we are
living but also upon our preferences, depending upon our lifestyles and related tastes, which
are almost always related to our position in the system of social classes.
1
,In this book the link between consumption and lifestyle explains how and why people
consume the way they do. Lifestyle determines much of our taste. Examples of this are a)
Gans’s differentiation between popular culture and high culture, which is about practical
value of consumption versus a distinctive form of consumption (Veblen), b) Goffman’s view
of consumption as influence on one’s social position in a stratified society, c) Lamont and
Lareau on inclusion and exclusion, and d) how the middle and lower class consume, how
they only “manage material survival”.
In the last 20 years two trends in consumption have emerged:
- The evolution of electronic markets à The concept of markets changed from
fragmented, geographical markets to one central global market in which consumers
became prosumers.
- The growing awareness for sustainability, which changed consumer behavior à
Consumers are more informed partly due to digitalization. This book tries to look at
consumption from different views and different disciplines. It gives a comprehensive
and short introduction to consumption and lifestyle. Powered by TCPDF
(www.tcpdf.org)
2
,Lecture 2 Chapter 2 Consumption: Different Perspectives and
Academic Responsibilities
The term consumption is used in different disciplines. Scholars from these different
disciplines look at different aspects of it, for example
- Supply and demand
- Consumption practices
- Preference structures of individual actors
- How consistent they are due to changing empirical background of time, space and
related culture
- The relationship between earnings and spending.
“How consistent are preference structures due to changing empirical backgrounds of time,
space and related culture?”
Consumption preferences for a long time regarded as historically and internationally
constant à BUT, consumption preferences are not fixed...
Social
The social perspective on consumption was long ignored by classic economics. Preferences
in taste were almost regarded as historically and internationally consistent. I
The life cycle theory of consumption: how different phases in life account for different
consumption patterns.
à Nowadays consumption is a fundamental part of our society. Increased interest in
consumption can be explained by the connection between:
- Socioeconomic practices of people in relation to consumption patterns and
- One’s material condition in society and the division of material wealth in society.
à But these two aspects are also relative autonomous. There is no direct connection
between one’s earnings and spending’s, there are too many intervening factors.
Economics
- Adam Smith argued in his book The Wealth of Nations that “consumption is the sole end
and purpose of all production”.
- Jean-Baptiste Say criticized this by saying that production is the foundation of wealth or
value, because production proceeds consumption à supply creates its own demand,
which is a little “kort door de bocht”.
- Keynes strengthened the role of the customer at a macro-economic level (demand
create its own supply) à He believed economic growth could be created by stimulating
consumption.
History
From the historical perspective consumption is investigated by looking at:
- The goods used and consumed in different centuries
- How and why they are bought
- And how consumption patterns change because of socioeconomic change and how
society changes because of change in consumption patterns.
Historians also look at individual consumer goods and consumer practices, these both
illustrate to us the changes that happened throughout history.
In the early 20th century Max Weber discussed the rise of industrial capitalism in relation to
the protestant ethics and its inherent consumption ascetics, which later historians called
consumer society.
Socioeconomic
3
, Within socioeconomic research Thorstein B. Veblen described the term conspicuous
consumption as: economic activities driven by non-utilitarian and impractical motives, that
do not fit with rational economics, but rather to tribal and prehistoric behavior à His
discussion on this topic went beyond just material possession, he included aspects like
religious practices, sports, and manners.
Current consumption research
Consumption research nowadays is very interdisciplinary. In this chapter a few empirical
research areas of special significance are mentioned.
- The link between consumption 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 modification over time. Bourdieu’s work shows that
empirical studies of consumption van help identify society. Inequalities become visible
through differing consumption patterns.
- Further research will be exploited on microeconomic and micro-sociological patterns and
conditions of consumption behavior. This involves the social conditions of learned
behavior and decision-making structures.
- The role of consumers as active agents. How they need to be protected, but also how
they influence the market as prosumers.
- The symbolic level of consumption processes.
- Topics that regard consumption as part of changing consumer society, which itself is part
of an international proses of increasing homogenization and heterogeneity.
- Consumer processes are embedded in socially constructed needs, which are driven by
learned behavior. This behavior changes through generation, class, lifestyle and
preference. Advertising aims at manipulating consumption behavior.
- The interaction between consumption and society; and production and business.
4
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