Product Description

The last decade has witnessed a clear and steady rise of interest in consumer culture. Many commentators now argue that consumption rather than production is the axis of personal identity and meaningful social action - a standpoint that reverses the traditional view that consumption is an incidental, trivial feature in contemporary culture.

This shrewd and probing book seeks to theorize shopping as an autonomous realm. It avoids the reductionist characteristics of economics and marketing. At the same time it avoids the moralizing tone of many contemporary discussions of shopping and consumption. The book uses an interdisciplinary resource base and comparative data to build-up a convincing analysis of the meaning of shopping today. Contributors discuss topics such as: the importance of shopping; the cultural and theoretical significance of shopping; women, the city and the department store; the future of supermarkets; the cultural construction of shopping; the ethnography of shopping; shopping and pleasure; and the `scopic' regimes of shopping. The book also contains an appendix which gives a brief history and selected literature of shopping.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #545963 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
`Editors Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell provide a collection of hughly readable and engaging articles which help to move scholars toward greater emphasis on the practices associated with obtaining goods' - Area

`If cities are less the loci of production than they are of consumption, and class is being replaced by lifestyle, shopping certainly occupies a pivotal place in such changes. Falk and Campbell have assembled a fascinating set of essays to reflect the trend, written for the most part by sociologists and anthropologists, but which will be of much wider interest to all those concerned with the current urban condition.... There are some familiar arguments here, about the place of the shopping mall - the nature of which is explored in this volume - but, as familiar as they may have become, this hardly denies that we need to know a lot more about shopping and its meaning for different consumers. This book shows the directions such research should take and in a useful appendix an outline history and select bibliography are presented' - Urban Studies