Theories of Consumption / Edition 1

by John Storey

Overview

Theories of Consumption explores the concept of consumption from the post-disciplinary perspective of cultural studies.

John Storey brings together work that up until now has been located in distinct disciplinary spaces including work on reception theory in literary studies and philosophy; work on consumer culture in sociology, anthropology and history; and work on media audiences (both ethnographic and theoretical) in media studies and sociology.

Moving beyond the usual analysis of consumer culture, Storey presents a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption. In doing so, he provides an authoritative overview of a significant selection of research and analysis that has explored consumption as an object of study.

This book provides an ideal introduction to consumption for students of media and cultural studies and will also be useful for students within a number of other disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, cultural geography and both literary and visual studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138678002
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/19/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK. He has published extensively in cultural studies, including 11 books. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. He is also on editorial/advisory boards in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the USA, and has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Vienna, Henan and Wuhan and a Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden.

Table of Contents

List of figures ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xiii

1 Why we consume 1

Marx, alienation and consumption 1

Social emulation 6

The Romantic ethic 11

Notes 17

2 Consumption as manipulation 19

The Frankfurt School 19

Leavisism 23

The mythologies of Roland Barthes 27

Problems with the consumption-as-manipulation model 30

Notes 33

3 Consumption as social communication 35

Conspicuous consumption 36

Consumption as culture 38

Consumption as class struggle 40

Consumption as secondary production 43

Notes 45

4 Consumption as production 47

Hermeneutics 47

The Constance School: Iser and Jauss 50

Interpretative communities 53

Reading formations and paratextuality 54

Notes 61

5 Media consumption 63

The encoding/decoding model 64

Watching Dallas 68

Dallas and cultural imperialism 73

Notes 75

6 Non-media-centric media consumption 77

Television talk 78

Family television 81

Talking with television 84

Notes 85

7 Consumption and identities 87

We are what we consume 87

Identities and performativity 91

Identities and displaced meaning 93

Thinking consumption and identities historically 99

Note 101

8 Consumerism and consumer society 103

Consumption and consumerism 103

Birth of consumer society 105

Anti-consumption 108

Advertising and the organisation of desire 111

Commodity activism 114

Notes 115

9 Consumption and cultural studies 117

The determining role of production? 117

Textualism 121

Consuming with Gramsci 123

Notes 131

References 133

Index 141