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Theories of Consumption explores the concept of consumption from the post-disciplinary perspective of cultural studies.
John Storey brings together work that up until now has been located in distinct disciplinary spaces including work on reception theory in literary studies and philosophy; work on consumer culture in sociology, anthropology and history; and work on media audiences (both ethnographic and theoretical) in media studies and sociology.
Moving beyond the usual analysis of consumer culture, Storey presents a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption. In doing so, he provides an authoritative overview of a significant selection of research and analysis that has explored consumption as an object of study.
This book provides an ideal introduction to consumption for students of media and cultural studies and will also be useful for students within a number of other disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, cultural geography and both literary and visual studies.
List of contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Why We Consume
Marx, alienation and consumption
Social emulation
The Romantic ethic
Notes
2. Consumption as Manipulation
The Frankfurt School
The Leavisism
The mythologies of Roland Barthes
Problems with the cultural-consumption-as-manipulation model
Notes
3. Consumption as Communication
Conspicuous consumption
Consumption as culture
Consumption as class struggle
Consumption as secondary production
Notes
4. Consumption as Production
Hermeneutics
The Constance School
Interpretative communities
Reading formations and paratextuality
5. Media Consumption
The Encoding/Decoding Model
Watching Dallas
Dallas and cultural imperialism
Notes
6. Non-Media-Centric Media Consumption
Television talk
Family television
Talking with television
Notes
7. Consumption and Identities
We are what we consume
Identities and performativity
Identities and displaced meaning
Thinking consumption and identities historically
Notes
8. Consumerism and Consumer Society
Consumption and consumerism
Birth of consumer society
Anti-consumption
Advertising and the organisation of desire
Notes
9. Consumption and Cultural Studies
The determining role of production
Textualism
Consuming with Gramsci
Notes
References
About the author
John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK. He has published extensively in cultural studies, including 11 books. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. He is also on editorial/advisory boards in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the USA, and has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Vienna, Henan and Wuhan and a Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden.
Summary
Theories of Consumption explores the concept of consumption from the post-disciplinary perspective of cultural studies.
John Storey brings together work that up until now has been located in distinct disciplinary spaces including work on reception theory in literary studies and philosophy; work on consumer culture in sociology, anthropology and history; and work on media audiences (both ethnographic and theoretical) in media studies and sociology.
Moving beyond the usual analysis of consumer culture, Storey presents a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption. In doing so, he provides an authoritative overview of a significant selection of research and analysis that has explored consumption as an object of study.
This book provides an ideal introduction to consumption for students of media and cultural studies and will also be useful for students within a number of other disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, cultural geography and both literary and visual studies.
