What do you think?
Rate this book
Consumption and Everyday Life
With an emphasis on everyday life, this respected text offers a lively and perceptive account of the key theories and ideas which dominate the field of consumption and consumer culture. Engaging case studies describe forms of consumption familiar to the student, provide some historical context, and illustrate how a range of theoretical perspectives – from theories of practice, to semiotics, to psychoanalysis – apply. Written by an experienced teacher, the book offers a comprehensive grounding drawing on the literature in sociology, geography, cultural studies, and anthropology. This new revised and expanded edition includes more extended discussion of gender, the senses, sustainability, globalization, and the environment, as well as a brand new chapter on the ethics of consumption.
264 pages, Paperback
First published June 27, 2023
3 people are currently reading
166 people want to read
About the author
Mark Paterson
5 books7 followersWith a BA in Philosophy, an MA in European Philosophy, and a Ph.D. in Human Geography, Mark is interested in the nexus of the body, space and technology.
He is author of 'Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes' (2016), 'Consumption and Everyday Life' (2006; second edition 2017, third edition 2023), and co-editor of 'Touching Space, Placing Touch'. His book for University of Minnesota Press, 'How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation' came out October 2021. His blog: http://www.sensory-motor.com.
Mark has lived and worked in the UK, Zimbabwe, Japan, Australia, and for the past 11 years, the USA.
He is author of 'Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes' (2016), 'Consumption and Everyday Life' (2006; second edition 2017, third edition 2023), and co-editor of 'Touching Space, Placing Touch'. His book for University of Minnesota Press, 'How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation' came out October 2021. His blog: http://www.sensory-motor.com.
Mark has lived and worked in the UK, Zimbabwe, Japan, Australia, and for the past 11 years, the USA.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 2, 2019
There are a number of ideas that run together when you think about capitalism and its relationship with consumption. The first is that without consumption (and perhaps even increasing levels of consumption) capitalism will collapse. This need to ensure that people know their role in society as consumers is best summed up by what happened after 9/11 when Bush the Second encouraged Americans to go out to shopping malls and shop as part of their duty as Americans. Similar to this is the idea that the high art of capitalism is advertising. One can go further and say that we have been mostly duped by having allowed marketers to convince us that our identities are tied up with the brand of car we drive, the type of olive oil we drizzle, the vodka we seek to drown our lost souls in, or the coloured sugar water we use to rot our teeth.
This book seeks to provide a more balanced view of consumption. The author ends the first chapter by discussing how Marx presented both the benefits and malevolencies of Capitalism in his Manifesto. In much the same way the author seeks to do the same with consumption. I think this is harder for us to hear, since consumption has distinctly negative connotations on our dying planet. The point is, however, that we do have to consume – people don’t live by left-wing memes alone. Although consumption isn’t just about purchasing things to sustain life, it has always had a fetish quality to it, where the thing bought develops a kind of aura, a kind of mystical presence so that by owning it, it is hoped that it will transfer properties to us.
Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is important here too – where consumption is a form of display that then allows others to know our status. This is discussed in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of Distinction, where social classes not only purchase things that distinguish themselves from other social classes, but also that they acquire habits, talents and tastes that are expensive in time and effort to acquire. In this sense, money itself isn’t quite enough to buy you ‘class’.
There has also been a move towards buying experiences – which is interesting too, since so many of us have so much stuff there is hardly room to put any more of it anywhere. But these experiences, such as tourism, also become problematic. Should you go for the ‘authentic’ experience – a Japanese tea ceremony, a Spanish bull fight, a cricket match at Lord’s? Or should you go for something contrived – Disney World, Beverley Hills, SeaWorld? How we now consume nature is also endlessly fascinating. Not merely in the sense that we appear to be seeking to turn the world into desert, but also in how we expect nature to match our expectations and even misconceptions. A few years ago I went to the Gold Coast and took a boat ride to view the whales – the poster advertising the trip had a huge whale breaching full body out of the water with its white belly and its blue-grey back visible against the Queensland sun and perfect blue sky. What we got to see was the nose and then tail-fin as the whale came up for air and then quickly plunged back under water, obviously more than a little annoyed by us being there in its space.
He discusses Simmel’s work on fashion – but mostly only to compare it to Veblen’s and Marx’s. I’ve recently read Simmel’s Sociology – where he discusses fashion – and what I found most interesting about this was that he said that for something to be fashionable it needs to force the body to look less 'body shaped'. Fashion is essentially ‘starched’ in the sense that it rarely ‘fits’ the body, but rather the body is mostly used as a structure to support the fashion item. Once a jacket, or other item of fashion, beings to look comfortable on one’s body, to fit in with the shape of the wearer's body, it stops being fashionable.
Most of the early work on consumption is of the kind where consumption is about showing we belong to particularly groups and therefore, since most stuff produced is mass produced, and since we think we are creating an identity for ourselves by buying this dross – we are essentially dupes. But there was a turn after the Frankfurt School where people began to see consumption as also having the potential to be counter-cultural, where people could be creative in their purchases and still use (or misuse) items as adornments and symbolic markers.
The world is going through a process of various -izations. In this book these are McDonaldization and Disneyization. Both are premised on four functions: efficiency, calculability, reliability and control. These are important to both Disney and McDonalds, but Disney also has other -izations – tied in with it being a self-contained world where hyper-cute versions of folk tales and sanitised gender roles are presented in idealised visions of what world ought to be. So the additional four processes associated with Disneyization are theming, de-differentiation (where the theming becomes so strong that what would otherwise be different areas of consumption collapse into one another - I have the Mickey Mouse ears, I need the watch too), merchandising and what gets called emotional labour (which is where the themes are enacted with so little sincerity, you know, where the poor bastard dressed in an overly hot suit says ‘have a nice day on Mickey' to the millionth customer of the day… and that this means that the inauthenticity is what makes the place 'authentic'.
Perhaps one of the issues that is coming to the fore today with consumption is the idea that people are no longer ‘people’ but essentially cyborgs. That is, we are not fully human without the various gadgets that hang off our bodies – Apple Watches, mobile phones, smart fridges, I've even seen devices that tell you when you posture is slumping – our bodies extend beyond whatever their previous limits had been and with each new movement of technology come new superpowers that extend our voice, our sight, or physical strength. And our anxiety too, I suspect.
But soon we are back to Bourdieu’s distinction – because the abundance of fast food means beyond products that our physical form becomes a means of distinguishing people by their social class or social background. And this is determined not only by what you do – as in the old days when Holmes could work out your occupation by the marks it left on your body, but today those marks are also left by the forms of exercise we engage in (a yoga body, a pumped gym body, a swimmer’s shoulders) and the requisite foods that go with these various regimes. Or not – the couch potato body is also an identifiable body type/person type/social type.
As the author says at some point here, perhaps bulimia is the archetypal capitalist disorder. The gorging beyond containment followed by purging – and where consumption leaves no lasting trace of shame, so it can be pursued again tomorrow.
The nature of nature gets a Disneyification workover too. He mentions a display of penguins at SeaWorld that had to have fewer penguins than nature would have normally provided, since we simply can’t avoid anthropomorphising animals and so their ‘normal’ would be read as us as overcrowded. The consumption of nature as a kind of human space is a terribly interesting idea and linking it to Disney is instructive too. I mean, not just in the twee sense that people say things like ‘I was put off hunting after the first time I saw Bambi’ but also the nonsense of the Lion King’s cycle of life, or of The Wonderful World of Disney where animals are presented as furry versions of middle class American families. I think a lot of the appeal of Disney films is tied in with this humanising of nature – but more in the carnivalesque inversion of the proper order that is implied in many Disney films. Where mice outsmart cats – which I’d always taken as a simple inversion of child and adult roles, but where I think now its appeal to adults is also that it inverts the ‘little guy’ and ‘master’ roles too - just as carnivals generally are intended to.
The book provides a chapter on the history of shops and malls – all the places where we buy stuff. As the author makes clear, these are places of sight, rather than ‘speaking’ – you don’t go to them to hear about the products you might want to buy, but rather to see them. And this is clear in the language we use – window shopping, for instance, where you can’t really do anything but look. The French term for this, something I didn’t know, is ‘window licking’ – and I have to say, I like that much, much more. The point of malls is that they are controlled spaces where products can be displayed to best advantage. But they also create little imaginary worlds. Worlds where, I guess, we are invited to look, but also to project ourselves into the scenes created in these product displays. As three-dimensional advertisements, they are, as Benjamin discussed at length in his arcades project and I’m only realising why now, they are like tiny panoramas. Looking, but not touching, is, of course, all part of the seduction.
Except, these spaces also suffer from the Disneyification problem – where one mall starts to look identical to the next and these all become what the author calls ‘no places’ and what Castells calls ‘spaces of flows’ – where no one really ‘belongs’ and no one really ‘lives’ – much like airports. There are some hints here that malls are also places you might go to be on display yourself, but I think this is pushing the friendship a bit too far. I do see that people might not go to them just to buy things, and therefore as a form of recreation – but I don’t think they are really places you could go to promenade, to see others and be seen by them. I think I prefer Bauman’s definition he gives somewhere, that the act of consumption might well be done in a crowd, that you might be there with hundreds of other people for the same reason and to buy the same product, but it is rarely done ‘together’. Each individual in the crowd is an isolated (and even potentially hostile) individual. Quite different from a citizen or even an audience member.
All the same, some people use malls as places to loiter in, so as to stay warm. In this sense they consume the space, if not the produces on display there. And this can become a problem for the mall – since these people might keep paying customers away – even actively blocking displays as an act of subversion.
Something I read years ago said that the reason why the food halls in malls have shiny plastic seats is that these become quite uncomfortable fairly quickly – and therefore ensure a relatively fast turnover of customers. The mall authorities (is that what they are called?) can also adjust the music if the food halls are getting too packed, upping the tempo, which effects heart rate and so also makes you want to move on.
There is a discussion at the end on brands and branding and the personality of brands. Again, this comes back to Marx and the fetish of the commodity, in the sense that the personality of brands seeks to hide the social relations that make the product that the brand seeks to sell invisible. This is particularly true for brands like Tommy Hilfiger which, as Naomi Klein says in No Logo, is a clothing labelling company – not actually one having its own factories.
This book covers a lot of ground – and discusses many sociologists and psychologists I haven’t even mentioned in this review. I think consumption is a key idea that we should try to understand if we are going to understand the world we live in – and especially if we are going to try to understand the world we can’t really live in, but that is presented to us as something we need to desire and seek to obtain - the advertised world that encourages our continued consumption. This is an interesting introduction to all that, but that said, it can only ever be an introduction.
This book seeks to provide a more balanced view of consumption. The author ends the first chapter by discussing how Marx presented both the benefits and malevolencies of Capitalism in his Manifesto. In much the same way the author seeks to do the same with consumption. I think this is harder for us to hear, since consumption has distinctly negative connotations on our dying planet. The point is, however, that we do have to consume – people don’t live by left-wing memes alone. Although consumption isn’t just about purchasing things to sustain life, it has always had a fetish quality to it, where the thing bought develops a kind of aura, a kind of mystical presence so that by owning it, it is hoped that it will transfer properties to us.
Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is important here too – where consumption is a form of display that then allows others to know our status. This is discussed in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of Distinction, where social classes not only purchase things that distinguish themselves from other social classes, but also that they acquire habits, talents and tastes that are expensive in time and effort to acquire. In this sense, money itself isn’t quite enough to buy you ‘class’.
There has also been a move towards buying experiences – which is interesting too, since so many of us have so much stuff there is hardly room to put any more of it anywhere. But these experiences, such as tourism, also become problematic. Should you go for the ‘authentic’ experience – a Japanese tea ceremony, a Spanish bull fight, a cricket match at Lord’s? Or should you go for something contrived – Disney World, Beverley Hills, SeaWorld? How we now consume nature is also endlessly fascinating. Not merely in the sense that we appear to be seeking to turn the world into desert, but also in how we expect nature to match our expectations and even misconceptions. A few years ago I went to the Gold Coast and took a boat ride to view the whales – the poster advertising the trip had a huge whale breaching full body out of the water with its white belly and its blue-grey back visible against the Queensland sun and perfect blue sky. What we got to see was the nose and then tail-fin as the whale came up for air and then quickly plunged back under water, obviously more than a little annoyed by us being there in its space.
He discusses Simmel’s work on fashion – but mostly only to compare it to Veblen’s and Marx’s. I’ve recently read Simmel’s Sociology – where he discusses fashion – and what I found most interesting about this was that he said that for something to be fashionable it needs to force the body to look less 'body shaped'. Fashion is essentially ‘starched’ in the sense that it rarely ‘fits’ the body, but rather the body is mostly used as a structure to support the fashion item. Once a jacket, or other item of fashion, beings to look comfortable on one’s body, to fit in with the shape of the wearer's body, it stops being fashionable.
Most of the early work on consumption is of the kind where consumption is about showing we belong to particularly groups and therefore, since most stuff produced is mass produced, and since we think we are creating an identity for ourselves by buying this dross – we are essentially dupes. But there was a turn after the Frankfurt School where people began to see consumption as also having the potential to be counter-cultural, where people could be creative in their purchases and still use (or misuse) items as adornments and symbolic markers.
The world is going through a process of various -izations. In this book these are McDonaldization and Disneyization. Both are premised on four functions: efficiency, calculability, reliability and control. These are important to both Disney and McDonalds, but Disney also has other -izations – tied in with it being a self-contained world where hyper-cute versions of folk tales and sanitised gender roles are presented in idealised visions of what world ought to be. So the additional four processes associated with Disneyization are theming, de-differentiation (where the theming becomes so strong that what would otherwise be different areas of consumption collapse into one another - I have the Mickey Mouse ears, I need the watch too), merchandising and what gets called emotional labour (which is where the themes are enacted with so little sincerity, you know, where the poor bastard dressed in an overly hot suit says ‘have a nice day on Mickey' to the millionth customer of the day… and that this means that the inauthenticity is what makes the place 'authentic'.
Perhaps one of the issues that is coming to the fore today with consumption is the idea that people are no longer ‘people’ but essentially cyborgs. That is, we are not fully human without the various gadgets that hang off our bodies – Apple Watches, mobile phones, smart fridges, I've even seen devices that tell you when you posture is slumping – our bodies extend beyond whatever their previous limits had been and with each new movement of technology come new superpowers that extend our voice, our sight, or physical strength. And our anxiety too, I suspect.
But soon we are back to Bourdieu’s distinction – because the abundance of fast food means beyond products that our physical form becomes a means of distinguishing people by their social class or social background. And this is determined not only by what you do – as in the old days when Holmes could work out your occupation by the marks it left on your body, but today those marks are also left by the forms of exercise we engage in (a yoga body, a pumped gym body, a swimmer’s shoulders) and the requisite foods that go with these various regimes. Or not – the couch potato body is also an identifiable body type/person type/social type.
As the author says at some point here, perhaps bulimia is the archetypal capitalist disorder. The gorging beyond containment followed by purging – and where consumption leaves no lasting trace of shame, so it can be pursued again tomorrow.
The nature of nature gets a Disneyification workover too. He mentions a display of penguins at SeaWorld that had to have fewer penguins than nature would have normally provided, since we simply can’t avoid anthropomorphising animals and so their ‘normal’ would be read as us as overcrowded. The consumption of nature as a kind of human space is a terribly interesting idea and linking it to Disney is instructive too. I mean, not just in the twee sense that people say things like ‘I was put off hunting after the first time I saw Bambi’ but also the nonsense of the Lion King’s cycle of life, or of The Wonderful World of Disney where animals are presented as furry versions of middle class American families. I think a lot of the appeal of Disney films is tied in with this humanising of nature – but more in the carnivalesque inversion of the proper order that is implied in many Disney films. Where mice outsmart cats – which I’d always taken as a simple inversion of child and adult roles, but where I think now its appeal to adults is also that it inverts the ‘little guy’ and ‘master’ roles too - just as carnivals generally are intended to.
The book provides a chapter on the history of shops and malls – all the places where we buy stuff. As the author makes clear, these are places of sight, rather than ‘speaking’ – you don’t go to them to hear about the products you might want to buy, but rather to see them. And this is clear in the language we use – window shopping, for instance, where you can’t really do anything but look. The French term for this, something I didn’t know, is ‘window licking’ – and I have to say, I like that much, much more. The point of malls is that they are controlled spaces where products can be displayed to best advantage. But they also create little imaginary worlds. Worlds where, I guess, we are invited to look, but also to project ourselves into the scenes created in these product displays. As three-dimensional advertisements, they are, as Benjamin discussed at length in his arcades project and I’m only realising why now, they are like tiny panoramas. Looking, but not touching, is, of course, all part of the seduction.
Except, these spaces also suffer from the Disneyification problem – where one mall starts to look identical to the next and these all become what the author calls ‘no places’ and what Castells calls ‘spaces of flows’ – where no one really ‘belongs’ and no one really ‘lives’ – much like airports. There are some hints here that malls are also places you might go to be on display yourself, but I think this is pushing the friendship a bit too far. I do see that people might not go to them just to buy things, and therefore as a form of recreation – but I don’t think they are really places you could go to promenade, to see others and be seen by them. I think I prefer Bauman’s definition he gives somewhere, that the act of consumption might well be done in a crowd, that you might be there with hundreds of other people for the same reason and to buy the same product, but it is rarely done ‘together’. Each individual in the crowd is an isolated (and even potentially hostile) individual. Quite different from a citizen or even an audience member.
All the same, some people use malls as places to loiter in, so as to stay warm. In this sense they consume the space, if not the produces on display there. And this can become a problem for the mall – since these people might keep paying customers away – even actively blocking displays as an act of subversion.
Something I read years ago said that the reason why the food halls in malls have shiny plastic seats is that these become quite uncomfortable fairly quickly – and therefore ensure a relatively fast turnover of customers. The mall authorities (is that what they are called?) can also adjust the music if the food halls are getting too packed, upping the tempo, which effects heart rate and so also makes you want to move on.
There is a discussion at the end on brands and branding and the personality of brands. Again, this comes back to Marx and the fetish of the commodity, in the sense that the personality of brands seeks to hide the social relations that make the product that the brand seeks to sell invisible. This is particularly true for brands like Tommy Hilfiger which, as Naomi Klein says in No Logo, is a clothing labelling company – not actually one having its own factories.
This book covers a lot of ground – and discusses many sociologists and psychologists I haven’t even mentioned in this review. I think consumption is a key idea that we should try to understand if we are going to understand the world we live in – and especially if we are going to try to understand the world we can’t really live in, but that is presented to us as something we need to desire and seek to obtain - the advertised world that encourages our continued consumption. This is an interesting introduction to all that, but that said, it can only ever be an introduction.
November 13, 2020
کتاب «مصرف و زندگی روزمره» پدیدهی مصرفگرایی را از دریچهی اقتصاد، فلسفه، فرهنگ و هویت انسان مورد مطالعه قرارداده است. شناخت علل پیداش مصرفگرایی موجب میشود افراد نگاه عمیقتری نسبت به ساختار تولید و عرضهی کالا داشته باشند. ریشهی مصرفگرایی را میتوان در فلسفههای سیاسی دولتمردان جستجو کرد. بقای نظام سرمایهداری ارتباط تنگاتنگی با مصرف کالا دارد. از این رو میکوشد با ایجاد نیاز کاذب و سواستفاده از احساسات افراد جامعه چرخهی اقتصاد را رونق ببخشد.
September 12, 2018
It isn't often you read an academic book that is thoroughly enjoyable. What Mark Paterson managed to do in 'Consumption and Everyday Life' is to take complex works and terms and, using (at the time) modern analogies and references, create a book that is easy to digest.
I particularly enjoyed the chapter on 'McDisneyfication', a term created to merge two individual terms by Paterson, it was a breeze to read and work from, without coming across like it had been dumbed-down in any way.
I will certainly be using this book for referencing when I do my essays in the upcoming semester on the subject of consumption. I'd highly recommend it if you are studying advertising or another media based course. It covers a range of opinions and issues that you could potentially explore further in your studies.
I particularly enjoyed the chapter on 'McDisneyfication', a term created to merge two individual terms by Paterson, it was a breeze to read and work from, without coming across like it had been dumbed-down in any way.
I will certainly be using this book for referencing when I do my essays in the upcoming semester on the subject of consumption. I'd highly recommend it if you are studying advertising or another media based course. It covers a range of opinions and issues that you could potentially explore further in your studies.
May 20, 2021
كتاب مفيدي بود ولي بعضي قسمتها بيش از حد تفصيل و اطناب داده شده بود. شايد همه مطالب مهم و جالبش رو ميشد در يكصد صفحه نوشت و بقيه اش رو بقول معروف آب بسته بودند
December 7, 2021
کتابی هستی با نثر نه چندان روان ولی بسیار جامع پرداخته به جنبه های خیلی مختلف مصرف. خواندش مفیده
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews