Race and Consumer Inequality

This chapter examines how racialized minorities experience overt and covert discrimination when accessing goods and services. The discrimination varies between outright denial of goods and services and the degradation of the goods and services provided. Using examples in the popular press and a review of the literature of content analyses of court cases, in-depth interviews, and experiments, this chapter also demonstrates how these questions of consumer inequality have been studied and what is yet to be done.

Household Finances and Credit Visibility

This chapter addresses sociological approaches to household financial practices and credit visibility. First, the chapter identifies how social networks lead consumers to make significant decisions about spending, saving, and asset building. Sometimes financial decisions that appear to be the result of poor information turn out to be the effects of the individual’s position within a social network, along with the expectations and pressures associated with that position. Second, the chapter explains how consumers manage their social relationships through their consumption decisions in a process of relational work, but their relationship management strategies also reflect new ways of accounting for their spending decisions as they participate in various rituals and enable their socially significant others to do so as well. Consumers begin to mark, track, and design roughly shared decision rules about how to prioritize household financial decisions for these rituals in a process of relational accounting. The chapter concludes with the role that consumer credit scoring plays in shaping the life chances of households and how these effects differ by race, gender, and neighborhood.

Introduction

This chapter serves as the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Consumption. The Handbook consolidates the most innovative recent work in consumption research conducted by social scientists and identifies some of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for future research. While the book emphasizes sociocultural and qualitative research, it also includes key findings from network analyses, quantitative and comparative analysis, and social experiments. The book 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.

Food Tastes

This chapter addresses some of the central themes in the inquiry into food, taste, and consumption. Specifically, it focuses on how researchers have investigated the causes and consequences of tastes in food, including structural position and identity, and consequences for bodies, and for social and physical landscapes. It is also essential for scholars of food and taste to take seriously the role of pleasure, as well as the effects of food consumption on broader social and physical ecologies. Tastes shape landscapes, affecting carbon production and biodiversity, groundwater and air quality. Researchers cannot study food tastes as somehow disembodied, and the best work in this area today attends to this nexus of pleasure and risk, symbolism and materiality. In addition, researchers in this arena need to be highly attuned to avoiding the centering of their own tastes as markers of good taste.

Consumer Credit Surveillance

This chapter reviews the development of consumer credit surveillance in the United States from the nineteenth century, as the original problem of information asymmetry in consumer lending gave rise to consumer data registries, a process led by merchants, not by financial institutions. Regulations in the 1970s addressing discrimination and data privacy limited consumer credit surveillance, but lately two developments reversed this trend. Aided by banking deregulation and advances in information technology, the use of credit scores expanded beyond lending, while the kind of data used to calculate scores has also widened, turning the credit score into a general measure of character. This results in a pervasive new system of consumer surveillance and control that turns the original information asymmetry upside down, favoring lenders and other corporate actors, including the state, at the expense of consumers. The European Union is trying to limit this system while a full version is currently piloted in China.

A Sociological Critique and Reformulation of Brands

In just under 150 years, societies have changed from having very few brands to having almost everything branded or brandable. How, and why don’t we know more about it? This chapter provides a much-deserved critique of extant brand thought and highlights the considerable need for a sociological conception of brands. Analyzing brands as vessels of popular meaning used for promoting things, places, people, and ideas, the chapter also questions how existing research traditions restrict and retard the development of a meaningful social science of brands. Too much attention to social psychology and to consumer culture theory, and too little to traditional sociology, has meant that the general social and political processes that generate, animate, and transform brands have been sacrificed to the priorities of these dominant research traditions in marketing departments. We offer this critique in order to identify opportunities for generating empirical research tying together society, politics, and markets.

The Cultivation of Market Behaviors and Economic Decisions

What does “consumer culture” mean? Until now, consumer culture has been understood as some immaterial ideas, feelings, ideologies, knowledge, and so on. This article proposes to depart from this classic view of culture by referring to what the word means in biology and farming. It shows indeed that marketing is about “cultivating” consumers. Marketing does so by using different market strategies and market devices that play on consumers’ dispositions, of course, but that also shape and redefine consumers’ calculation, “qualculation,” and “calqulation.” In the two latter words, “qual” insists on some qualitative aspects involved in economic decision; “calq” refers to the French verb calquer, meaning “tracing” (like when using tracing paper): in several instances, consumers do not calculate alone but rather decide collectively with partners, by adjusting (tracing) their calculation to those of the others: they calqulate. The chapter reviews each notion and refers it to previous and current works. These words invite study of calculation in the making; they help to understand that economic decisions involve the agents who calculate, the agencies they mobilize to do so, and the actors who work hard to have them calculating the way they wish.

Young People and Consumption

In the last decades, sociologists and anthropologists of consumption have been increasingly interested in emotions and in the seemingly contradictory concurrence of rational and emotional ideas and practices. Drawing on Illouz (2018a), this article suggests understanding the mutual enhancement of rationalization, commodification, and emotionalization as the outcome of an accelerating co-production of consumerist actions, commodities, and emotional lives. The article offers a historical analysis of the configuration of emotions and consumption, emphasizing the influence of psychological theories on the marketing sciences. It is demonstrated that it was throughout this process that consumers became increasingly defined in emotional terms and emotional experiences converted into commodities.

The Social Embeddedness of Marketing

In both premodern and modern capitalist societies, marketing emerged as a key driver behind consumption patterns and as a facilitator of new consumer goods and services. This chapter uses historical case studies to highlight how marketing and consumption practices co-developed over time and in response to socioeconomic and technological changes. The historical evidence shows that marketing activities have never followed a narrow economic and utilitarian calculus; instead, they have always existed within and helped to maintain a wide range of relations between businesses, consumers, cultural intermediaries, and lawmakers. A key tension that runs through the history of marketing and consumption is the coexistence of efforts to control consumer behavior and attempts to provide consumers with the space needed to create entirely new kinds of consumption experiences.

Gender as a Critical Perspective in Marketing Practice

This chapter argues that marketing naively adopts gender theories from other fields that perpetuate outdated stereotypes. This is demonstrated by means of an existing example that shows how Jung’s archetypes leads to sexist advertising practices. The authors argue that a similar process will happen within consumption studies’ borrowing of evolutionary psychology. To counter this process, the authors suggest that researchers and educators need to interrupt the inertia of the wheel of marketing knowledge by applying more critical perspectives; adopting theories from other fields including the critical perspectives from these fields; publishing more studies on gender in marketing; learning from practitioners when they attempt to promote new perspectives on gender; and finally updating gender perspectives in textbooks to better educate future marketers and avoid propagation of outdated and negative stereotypes of gender.