This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the possibilities these frameworks can offer.

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK. He has published widely on cultural theory, popular culture, consumption, and utopianism. He is the author of numerous books, including Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), From Popular Culture to Everyday Life (Routledge, 2014), Theories of Consumption (Routledge, 2017), Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies: On Refusing to be Realistic (Routledge, 2019), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Ninth Edition, Routledge, 2021), and Consuming Utopia: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading (Routledge, 2022). He is also editor of The Making of English Popular Culture (Routledge, 2016) and Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Routledge, 2019).

1. Consumption as a key sociological concept

Consumption and capitalist consumerism

Consumption as process

Consumption as discourse

Notes

Marx, alienation, and consumption

Social emulation

The Romantic ethic

Consumption and performativity

Notes

Consumption as Manipulation

Consumption as communication

Consumption as poaching

Notes

Consuming sustainably

Capitalist consumer society

Selling capitalism

The Anthropocene

The Capitalocene

Notes

Mediatization

Media love

Preliminary conclusions

Notes

Symbolic interactionism

Ethnomethodology

Phenomenological sociology

Actor-Network-Theory

Practice theory

Notes

Cultural studies

The uses of literacy

Consuming utopian fiction

Notes

Anti-consumption