The Oxford Handbook of Consumption

The Oxford Handbook of Consumption consolidates the most innovative recent work conducted by social scientists in the field of consumption studies and identifies some of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for future research. It begins by embedding marketing in its global history, enmeshed in various political, economic, and social sites. From this embedded perspective, the book branches out to examine the rise of consumer culture theory among consumer researchers and parallel innovative developments in sociology and anthropology, with scholarship analyzing the roles that identity, social networks, organizational dynamics, institutions, market devices, materiality, and cultural meanings play across a wide variety of applications, including, but not limited to, brands and branding, the sharing economy, tastes and preferences, credit and credit scoring, consumer surveillance, race and ethnicity, status, family life, well-being, environmental sustainability, social movements, and social inequality. The volume is unique in the attention it gives to consumer research on inequality and the focus it has on consumer credit scores and consumer behaviors that shape life chances. The volume includes essays by many of the key researchers in the field, some of whom have only recently, if at all, crossed the disciplinary lines that this volume has enabled. The contributors have tried to address several key questions: What motivates consumption and what does it mean to be a consumer? What social, technical, and cultural systems integrate and give character to contemporary consumption? What actors, institutions, and understandings organize and govern consumption? And what are the social uses and effects of consumption?

Frederick F. Wherry is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Director of the Dignity and Debt Network. He served as the 2018 president of the Social Science History Association and past chair of both the Economic Sociology and the Consumers and Consumption Sections of the American Sociological Association. He is co-author of Credit Where It's Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship, editor of the four-volume Sage Encyclopedia of Economics and Society, and the author or editor of six other books or volumes. He has served in an advisory capacity to the Boston Federal Reserve and the Lloyds Banking Group Center for Responsible Business.

Ian Woodward earned his PhD in sociology at University of Queensland, Australia. He is Professor in the Department of Marketing and Management at University of Southern Denmark. A cultural sociologist, he has written extensively about consumption and material cultures, and everyday cosmopolitan ethics. His authored and co-authored books include The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism (2009), Understanding Material Culture (2007), Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (2015), and Labels: Making Independent Music (2019).

Introduction: Situating Consumers and Consumption
Frederick F. Wherry and Ian Woodward

Part I: Key Contemporary Themes

1. The Social Embeddedness of Marketing
Stefan Schwarzkopf

2. The Sharing Economy
Juliet B. Schor and Mehmet Cansoy

3. Prosumption: Contemporary Capitalism and the "New" Prosumer
George Ritzer

4. Consumer Culture Theory
Eric J. Arnould and Craig J. Thompson

5. A Sociological Critique and Reformulation of Brands
Thomas C. O'Guinn, Albert M. Muñiz, Jr., and Erika Paulson

6. Relational Work and Consumption
Nina Bandelj and Christopher W. Gibson

7. Meaningful Objects and Consumption
Sophie Woodward

8. Bourdieu, Distinction, and Aesthetic Consumption
Omar Lizardo


Part II: Organizing Consumption

9. Taste, Legitimacy, and the Organization of Consumption
Jennifer Smith Maguire

10. Cultural Markets and Consecration
Marc Verboord

11. Emotions in Consumer Studies
Eva Illouz and Yaara Benger Alaluf

12. Young People and Consumption: The Changing Nature of Youth Consumption in an Era of Uncertainty and Digital Experience
Konstantinos Theodoridis and Steven Miles

13. Consumption as Production: Data and the Reproduction of Capitalist Relations
Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry


Part III: Consumer Transactions, Relations, and Devices

14. Household Finances and Credit Visibility
Frederick F. Wherry

15. The Cultivation of Market Behaviors and Economic Decisions: Calculation, Qualculation, and Calqulation Revisited
Franck Cochoy

16. Consumer Transactions: Consumer Banking
Zsuzsanna Vargha

17. Consumer Credit Surveillance
Alya Guseva and Akos Rona-Tas


Part IV: Inequality and Stratification

18. Omnivorousness, Distinction, or Both?
Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, and Merin Oleschuk

19. The Development of Ethnoracial Market Segments: Lessons from the US Latino Media Market
G. Cristina Mora

20. Race and Consumer Inequality
Geraldine Rosa Henderson and Kathy Zhang

21. Fashion and Its Gendered Agendas
Ashley Mears

22. Gentrification and Urban Inequality
Richard E. Ocejo

23. Branding National Identity in an Unequal World
Melissa Aronczyk


Part V: Practices, Performances, and Identities

24. Subcultures and Consumption
John W. Schouten

25. Taste, Sensation, and Skill and Skill in the Sociology of Consumption
David Wright

26. Food Tastes
Jennifer A. Jordan

27. Gender as a Critical Perspective in Marketing Practice
Susan Dobscha and Gry Høngsmark-Knudsen

28. Consumer Cities, Scenes, and Ethnic restaurants
Daniel Silver and Terry Nichols Clark


Part VI: Reformulating Markets

29. Ethical Consumption
Keith Brown

30. Affluence, Anti-Consumerism, and the Politics of Consumption
Kim Humphery

31. Linking Environmental Sustainability and Consumption
Amanda M. Dewey and Dana R. Fisher