Summary: Consumption and
Life-Styles. A Short
Introduction - Bögenhold & Naz
(2018)
Chapter 1 – Introduction
In contemporary societies, nearly everything can be seen as a kind of consumption. Consuming as
buying, eating, drinking, wearing clothes or travelling is processed as a kind of taking and using goods
or services. In a broad understanding, consumption is just taking something in order to receive or to
use it, e.g. a baby consuming its mother’s milk, a boyfriend consuming his girlfriend’s love and vice
versa, both of which are built upon a very normal regulation of giving and taking in modern societies.
However, in a narrower sense, consumption is almost always identified as a formal or informal
contract which accompanies processes of payment, then 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.
Consumption processes are part of many different academic disciplines. Bridges between the islands
of academic knowledge are becoming increasingly rare. This means that forms of scientific
knowledge, disciplines and intra- and interdisciplinarity are fading ever more into the background.
Consumption does not only involve a series of different processes like choosing a product, buying,
using and repairing something or managing waste, it is also about the legitimacy of products and
their markets. Norms in a society define which services or goods are legal and which are classified as
being illegal or criminal. In some countries, alcoholic drinks are forbidden while in other countries
everybody is allowed to buy alcohol in supermarkets. The same is true for other items commonly
labelled as hard drugs, which are sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, or which serve as opportunities
to earn extraordinary amounts of money when selling the stuff. Those reflections can be extended to
many other kinds of goods, services or markets, including markets for adopting children, for human
blood or semen or organs, for sexual services or erotic toys. In the words of Sandel, reflections about
consumption are always reflections about the social embeddedness of markets and their moral limits
as well. In the end, consumption processes are obviously connected to fluid borders between formal
and informal markets and their organization.
How we consume is dependent not only upon the concrete society and time in which we live 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. Therefore the discussion in the
following chapters centres around the link between consumption and lifestyles in order to explain
the rationality as to why people opt for this or that way to create their own life paths and world of
consumption. What do we want to possess, which goods are part of our dreams, for which purposes
do we save money? All of these questions provide answers as to how human beings furnish their
lives, also in relation to material goods. Lifestyle determines very much of our taste and our criteria
for happiness.
,Over the last twenty years, we have experienced two further remarkable trends in consumption:
1. The evolution of electronic markets, which has transformed the nature of what used to be
geographically fragmented markets into one central global market. Amazon or Ebay are the
best-known examples of recent electronic markets which provide new forms of consumer
behaviour. Digitalizing consumption and processes of product evaluation and buying have
become features of recent times. In the course of those digitalization processes, consumers
are accorded increasingly hybrid functions so that they change partially into prosumers
(actors who are partly consumers, but elsewhere also entrepreneurial producers, or labour
or wage dependent citizens who are more than just simple consumers). Prosumers must be
regarded as being embedded in many different roles. Binary constructions of consumers
versus laborers are all too often too simple, especially in times of digital markets.
2. The 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. Especially consumers in the digital age are better
informed than consumers in earlier times so that they multiply negative information about
brands or companies in the social media worldwide very fast, which sets up new rules for
international competition processes.
Chapter 2 – Consumption: Different Perspectives and
Academic Responsibilities
The term consumption is used in different academic disciplines in different ways. Depending on their
specific academic background, scholars ask how supply and demand or, in other words, production
and consumption in business and society, are related to each other. Or they like to investigate how
individual people or societies realize their consumption practices. These consumption practices are
illuminated by differing empirical answers concerning how much money actors spend on specific
goods and services. Consumption research also inquires into the preference structures of individual
actors and their households which govern their consumption behaviour. How consistent are
preference structures due to changing empirical backgrounds of time, space and related culture?
Finally, consumption research is also concerned with the relationship between earnings and
spending. Are observed consumption practices directly related to a specific amount of income and
the availability of other financial resources and vice versa? Which socioeconomic context variables
(historical time, geographical framework) specify the relationship and in which way do attributes
such as age, gender, class, occupation and lifestyle have their own impacts on the way in which
consumption is realized? Asking those questions, we emphasize a social perspective which was
ignored by classic economics for many decades, when preferences were almost regarded as
historically and internationally constant.
This book deals with the topic of consumption in business and society in a context of social change
and related academic reasoning. An important reason for the increased attractiveness of the topic of
consumption is that the socioeconomic practices of people related to consumption patterns are
somehow related to their material conditions in society and the division of material wealth in society,
but the two spheres cannot be opposed in a one-to-one logic since they show relative autonomy. The
question as to how much somebody earns does not allow us to directly answer the question as to
how someone furnishes his/her daily life in terms of consumption practices. There are too many
, intervening variables between both sets of questions. Historically and culturally changing times,
competing life philosophies, political attitudes and various other factors influence the (relative)
autonomy of consumption behaviour.
Over the last 70 years, consumption research has evolved in many different directions. Historians
investigate consumption from many different perspectives. Current consumption research is
becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. Among many specific perspectives, 8 empirical research
areas are of special significance:
The links between consumption behaviour 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.
Microeconomic and micro-sociological patterns and conditions of consumption behaviour
need to be exploited further. 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.
A topic which is attracting more attention nowadays is the role of consumers as active
agents. What is their role in society, how can they be protected by legal rights strengthening
the autonomy of consumers compared to traders or producers? Similarly, consumers
increasingly see themselves as political decision-makers or voters based on their own
decisions for (and against) specific products or labels. Since markets often offer a variety of
competing products to satisfy a single need, consumers decide to boycott specific brands if
negative secondary information is available, e.g. discriminatory practices in the workplace or
disrespectful treatment of the natural environment. Hence, consumers will increasingly be
able to influence, directly or indirectly, consumption decisions and patterns of available
products and markets. In other words, consumers achieve specific profiles of “market
making”, resulting in the emergence of the term prosumers.
What is the social code of consumption processes at a symbolic level? What signs are
transported for which purposes? “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
car we can drive, nor by the visual and oral substance of images and messages, but in the
organization of all this as signifying substance. Consumption is the virtual totality of all
objects and messages presently constituted in a more or less coherent discourse.
Consumption processes and their diffusion modes seem to overlap with the diffusion
processes of social trends and social fashions. The research area must integrate elements of
thought provided by separate disciplines (e.g. sociology, psychology, consumption behaviour,
history, economics, anthropology, neurobiology) in order to reintegrate individual aspects for
a better theory of the diffusion processes of consumption behaviour.
Of further interest are those research topics which treat consumption as being part of a
changing consumer society which is itself part of an international process of increasing
homogenization and heterogeneity at one and the same time. The growing trend towards so-
called issues of sustainability and the greening of industry and society creates new demands,
provides new business opportunities and changes consumer profiles and their consumption
patterns.
