1st Edition

Theories of Consumption

By John Storey Copyright 2017
    158 Pages
    by Routledge

    158 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Contents

    Preface

    Acknowledgements

    1. Why We Consume

    Marx, alienation and consumption

    Social emulation

    The Romantic ethic

    Notes

    2. Consumption as Manipulation

    The Frankfurt School

    The Leavisism

    The mythologies of Roland Barthes

    Problems with the cultural-consumption-as-manipulation model

    Notes

    3. Consumption as Communication

    Conspicuous consumption

    Consumption as culture

    Consumption as class struggle

    Consumption as secondary production

    Notes

    4. Consumption as Production

    Hermeneutics

    The Constance School

    Interpretative communities

    Reading formations and paratextuality

    5. Media Consumption

    The Encoding/Decoding Model

    Watching Dallas

    Dallas and cultural imperialism

    Notes

    6. Non-Media-Centric Media Consumption

    Television talk

    Family television

    Talking with television

    Notes

    7. Consumption and Identities

    We are what we consume

    Identities and performativity

    Identities and displaced meaning

    Thinking consumption and identities historically

    Notes

    8. Consumerism and Consumer Society

    Consumption and consumerism

    Birth of consumer society

    Anti-consumption

    Advertising and the organisation of desire

    Notes

    9. Consumption and Cultural Studies

    The determining role of production

    Textualism

    Consuming with Gramsci

    Notes

    References

    Biography

    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.