Editors' Choice Collection Consumption and Society

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Repair and maintenance of household goods facilitate longer product use lives. These activities can be considered forms of consumption work that may be critical for the realisation of the circular economy but lack visibility and the attribution of value (Hobson et al, 2021). We draw on findings of a survey of 2,717 households across Australia in which respondents were asked about their practices of maintaining and repairing three types of products: (1) clothing and accessories; (2) furniture and homewares; and (3) appliances and white goods. The analysis offers insights into socio-demographic patterning of households most and least likely to repair and maintain the different product types. Life stage, gender and income are particularly significant for household repair and maintenance practices. These patterns may be best explained in terms of economic capacity, necessity, and availability of time, skills and space. The dynamic between environmental, social and economic motivations for repair and maintenance may be fluid and there is evidence of a value–action gap. We argue that a strong foundation exists for household-scale consumer-driven practices that could be supported to complement parallel transitions in production systems towards product design for repairability and longevity, in line with circular economy principles. We reflect on the implications for changing social norms and practices as part of a societal scale transition towards more sustainable forms of material use, and position repair and maintenance within the social dimensions of a circular economy transition, particularly in relation to debates around green growth and degrowth.

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In this piece, I use consumption as a lens to argue how urban, middle-class Indians in their middle and later ages are emerging as a distinctive consumer society while rewriting the scripts of growing old in India. This cultural shift is happening at a time when novel modes of ageing are imagined against the backdrop of transnational family arrangements, market-based care and a quest for vitality and autonomy among older Indians, altering the cultural continuities of intergenerational relationships. I show how consumption as a cultural force both expands the expressive capabilities of older persons but, at the same time, imposes disciplinary discourses around the family and social relationships. Overall, I critically reflect on what the ‘downward blurring’ of the ageing self does to the contemporary frameworks of intergenerational relationships in India. I conclude by discussing both the possibility and the (cultural) limit of theories developed in the industrialised West to capture the shifting realities of transitional societies.

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Cultural hierarchies enable an understanding of how consumption takes part in the reproduction of social inequalities in current societies. The changing nature of these hierarchies reveals a tension between established and emerging forms of cultural capital. This article explores this tension in the context of an understudied European cultural semi-periphery country. It focuses on young university students in a social milieu where new trends, established legitimate culture and cosmopolitan cultural flows intersect. The article uses a mixed-method approach and analyses cultural space both through survey data and follow-up in-depth interviews. Detailed exploration of cultural repertoires shows that while survey analysis shows both established and emerging forms of legitimate culture, there is widespread deference among the students towards the former. While cultural goods associated with emerging cultural capital are widely consumed, they are not related to repertoires of legitimisation. This points to the continuing importance of national institutions and their pedagogical practices in delineating what is understood as legitimate culture.

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In contemporary society, it is widely acknowledged that current patterns of consumption are fundamentally unsustainable because a large percentage of emissions comes from consumption related to food, mobility and housing practices. However, current debates and existing research on the need to change daily practices to address climate change tend to focus on single consumption activities, thereby paying too little attention to how practices are embedded in daily routines connected to a multitude of other practices. Instead of considering consumption activities related to food, mobility and housing as separate from one another, we examined how they connect and overlap with each other in the everyday lives of young Danes and what implications this might have for the ability to transition to less resource-intensive consumption. We do so through an analysis of data from interviews, mobilities mapping and photo diaries with 20 households, for a total of 30 young Danes (age 25–35) who are in the process of moving to new housing. With an outset in theories of practice, the article shows how the relations between the householders’ routines concerning food, mobility and housing become interwoven and embedded in bundles and complexes of practices characterised by conveniencisation. We argue that the conveniencisation in the case of bundles and complexes among food, mobility and housing practices create pathways towards more resource-intensive consumption as an implication due to the ‘stickiness’ of co-dependence in complexes and even looser interdependence in the bundling of food, mobility and housing practices in everyday lives.

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In the context of the calls for sufficiency held by climate experts, consumption is a major lever of ecological transition. Following numerous social sciences studies, I suggest that the belief that such an ecological transition could rest on the shoulders of consumers alone is illusory. I highlight the strong interdependencies within a political economy of affluent consumption between public policies, corporate business models and consumer practices. Taking an economic sociological and Foucauldian perspective, I develop a research agenda to explore how affluent consumption becomes a legitimised and institutionalised norm. Affluent consumption, which is highly resource intensive, is structural in both economic policies of governments and business models of companies and is therefore constantly organised and governed. However, it is not imposed on individuals by force. The government of consumption is based on technologies of power that shape and orient consumers’ conduct, leading them to adopt the norms of affluent consumption by activating and playing on their dispositions acquired through market socialisation.

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This article discusses themes identified as aims and objectives of Consumption and Society, reflecting on connections between the journal’s two titular concepts. It contrasts two distinct definitions and understandings of consumption, as purchase via market exchange and as the use of goods and services. It argues that the latter provides a more suitable and comprehensive object for social scientific study. Briefly reviewing the legacy of the cultural turn, the article outlines socio-cultural approaches emphasising symbolic, material and practical culture, and identifies some common failings. It considers the role of consumption in domination and social hierarchy in the context of escalating material inequality. Revisiting the relation between consumption and economic production, it commends some recent advances in the analysis of commodification while proposing a more encompassing ‘modes of provision’ framework. In association with an extended concept of social embeddedness, this offers an avenue for understanding macro-social change and the effects of current and historic inequalities. The concept of ‘controversy’ is introduced to understand normative and institutional contexts of mobilisation for change arising from contestation over consumption. The article concludes with remarks about theory and the difference that definitions make, the value of the concept of social embeddedness, and the analytic space beyond culture and markets.

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