Summary
Contents
Subject index
The last decade has witnessed a clear and steady rise of interest in consumer culture. Many commentators now argue that consumption rather than production is the axis of personal identity and meaningful social action - a standpoint that reverses the traditional view that consumption is an incidental, trivial feature in contemporary culture. This shrewd and probing book seeks to theorize shopping as an autonomous realm. It avoids the reductionist characteristics of economics and marketing. At the same time it avoids the moralizing tone of many contemporary discussions of shopping and consumption. The book uses an interdisciplinary resource base and comparative data to build-up a convincing analysis of the meaning of shopping
Could Shopping Ever Really Matter?
Could Shopping Ever Really Matter?
In recent years the term ‘politics’ has expanded its semantic reference as almost all acts are ‘politicized’ or considered potentially political, while consumption has also become a rather general term for the use or reception of goods and services. As a result we could all too easily talk of an articulation between politics and consumption in a manner which would be vague and banal. My hope is that this would be less likely when one starts from the more specific activity of shopping. Shopping is particularly apposite because it is still commonly used to form a polarity which provides a rather narrower sense of the meaning of the term ‘political’. In British popular culture we commonly ...
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