Italian sociologist Roberta Sassatelli is well known for her work on consumption. She was educated and has taught in Italy and the UK and writes and publishes in both languages, and her work has been widely translated. Probably best known for Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (2007), she has written extensively on consumer culture, cultural theory, gender studies, the sociology of the body, food, leisure studies and visual studies. Her recent books include the edited collection Italians and Food (Palgrave, 2019) and Corpo, genere e società
Targeted as the ‘grey consumer’, people retiring now participated in the creation of the post-war consumer culture. These consumers have grown older but have not stopped consuming.
Based on extensive analysis over two years, this unique book examines the engagement of older people with consumer society in Britain since the 1960s. It charts the changes in the experience of later life in the UK over the last 50 years, the rise of the ‘individualised consumer citizen’ and what this means for health and social policies.
The book will appeal to students, lecturers, researchers and policy analysts. It will provide material for teaching on undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses in sociology, social policy and social gerontology. It will also have considerable appeal to private industry engaged with older consumers as well as to voluntary and non-governmental organisations addressing ageing in Britain.
Key messages Making consumer culture more sustainable requires that we take fun seriously. Fun is an understudied aspect of consumption and the experience of consumers. Defining and measuring fun is challenging. We should assess and compare the environmental impacts of different kinds of fun. The urgency of finding a sustainable way for more than eight billion people to live on the planet has driven many scholars, activists and organisations to envision what a sustainable society could or should look like. The dominant form of global economy is
This radical and experimental book advances a new approach to understanding spectacle, one that helps us better understand how consumer culture paved the way for the post-truth politics of Donald Trump.
Miller innovatively blends social and political theory, newspaper articles and contemporary commentary on Trump and Trumpism to provide a unique perspective on how capitalism intersects with and enables fascistic forms of power.
His analysis contributes fresh insights to the rise of Trump and the politics of everyday consumer culture today.
general population have profound consequences for the experience of ageing in late modern society. In particular, the conditions of late modernity have given rise to increasing individualisation and a late modern sensibility based around the construction of individual identities through the pursuit and maintenance of lifestyles. These lifestyles are themselves increasingly commodified and framed by a consumer culture. In terms of levels of income and expenditure, therefore, it would appear that older people in Britain are not dissimilar in their profiles and
-selling favourite items. The process is more augmentation than substitution. The accompanying intensified communication results in a profusion of resources for the aesthetic judgement of food. Growing post-war affluence and the expansion of mass consumption were bases for the intensification of cultural communication. Marketed goods and services became more than ever bases of meaningful experience, tools for expression of personal identity, and vehicles for the organisation of sociability and the conduct of everyday life. Britain acquired a consumer culture. Consumer culture
political economic shift from production to consumption (Harvey, 2010). Emergence of consumer capitalism Service work had grown before the onset of deindustrialisation (Glyn, 2006) but the rise in service industries coincides with a political economic shift towards a consumer society (Winlow and Hall, 2006; Smart, 2010; Hall, 2012a). Consumer culture took a central role in economic growth from the 1970s onwards as global forces began to challenge the hegemony of Fordist, industrial patterns of work (Smart, 2010). While the term ‘service industry’ is frustratingly
The modern individual within consumer culture is made conscious that he speaks not only with his clothes, but with his home, furnishings, decoration, car and other activities [sic]. 1 While recognizing that the preceding comment by Featherstone had not quite caught up with changing gender politics, this general observation nonetheless identifies one of the key developments of modernity, which generates both pleasure and angst, but which has become turbocharged in the marketized neoliberal era to the extent that it challenges both the direction of our
of authentic individuation that both Bourdieu and Critical Theory categorically denied for mass culture is admittedly questionable. What is equally questionable is whether the cultural orientation of the producers and consumers in ‘late’ capitalism is, after all, radically different from their predecessors’, say, half a century ago. Or it may be more reasonable to presume that the same tendencies of standardisation and singularisation have been active in modern consumer culture almost from the start, even if they were not as dominant as they are today. Analyses
systems; • population displacement and migration (and health tourism); • war and terrorism; • increasing levels of chronic disease related to lifestyle and ageing populations; • the threat of new and highly resistant strains of infectious disease, and the spread of infectious disease through increased trade and travel; • concentration of capital and economic power; • the spread of the Western consumer culture across the world; • trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation; • the global trade in legal and illegal recreational drugs; • the movement of health
