CULTURES OF CONSUMPTION 159is the ethical framework evolved by Sen and
Nussbaum (Sen, 1985; 1987) which seeks to
understand development politics in terms of
‘empowerment’ and citizenship: that minimum
levels of consumption (whose content is defined
specifically for different communities) are required
to achieve such values as self-determination and
democracy (see also Doyal and Gough, 1991;
Soper, 1990).
Finally, in addition to the emphasis on hetero-
geneity, unevenness and the issue of authentic-
ity, contemporary approaches to the
globalization of consumption have been heavily
marked by a more general stress on enculturation
of the economy and on notions of information or
network society. For example, Malcolm Waters
offers the slogan: ‘material exchanges localize;
political exchanges internationalize; and sym-
bolic exchanges globalize’ (1995: 9). This is to
argue that the increasingly dematerialized form
of goods has an inherent tendency to global
scales of operation. Similarly, Appadurai (1986;
1990; 1995; like Castells, 1996) uses a language
of ‘flows’ and ‘scapes’ to capture the way in
which global movements of goods, people,
signs and so on are increasingly overlapping
both in terms of geography and across social
moments (culture, society, economy, politics).
Although Waters’ position does not assume
homogenization or global culture, it is certainly
in tune with critics such as Klein (2000) or
Goldman and Papson (1998) for whom the mod-
ern form of the multinational corporation is
exemplified by Nike: it owns no factories or
other industrial apparatus and yet is able to
coordinate worldwide production as well as a
seemingly international cultural allegiance
under the aegis of a symbol, the brand name and
its ‘swoosh’ logo.
The emergence of the internet and e-commerce
has come increasingly to symbolize and perform
a new geography of consumption in which the
circulation and exchange of goods are demateri-
alized and hence rendered ‘frictionless’ and
‘disintermediated’. While it is evident that the
precise relationship between online and offline
commerce is still being worked through by both
producers and consumers, the internet seems at
least capable of reforming markets through
global competition, through the identification or
organization of consumer groups independently
of physical location, and through new processes
of both commodification and decommodification
which involve challenges to the very idea of ‘a
product’ (Coombe, 1998; Lury, 1993; 1996;
Miller and Slater, 2000; Slater, 2001).NEW DIRECTIONSConsumption studies has become a fairly well-
defined and well-established field within a
number of disciplines. It has opened up a range
of research agendas that are now being pursued
as ‘normal science’. It is well accepted that con-
sumption is a significant issue of cultural, social
and economic reproduction, not to be treated as
private, natural or trivial. We might therefore
want to read some of the tea-leaves of our intel-
lectual situation to see where things might go
next. Several tendencies stand out from the
current state of the field.
Firstly, in consumption studies as elsewhere,
the high-water mark of debates over postmoder-
nity has long passed. For this field, arguably
more structured by (and structuring of) these
debates than many others, this means a move
away from an obsessive concern with the rela-
tion between identity and culture, and away from
encountering consumption through processes of
signification rather than broader constructions of
social relationships and practices. Symptomatic
of this shift is a new concern with mundane
rather than spectacular and expressive consump-
tion (for example, Gronow and Warde, 2001;
Warde and Martens, 2000), which includes a
concern with consumption as habitual, routine
and embedded in the practical reproduction of
everyday life rather than as directly consequen-
tial for self, identity and status (Ilmonen, 1997).
Finally, the postmodern roots of the first wave of
consumption studies were marked, as previously
noted, by a bias towards individual hedonism
that peculiarly mirrored liberal traditions. Partly
under the impact of both ethnographic and femi-
nist studies, there is a greater concern with
mundane consumption as social and interpersonal,
and concerned with the needs of others as much
as of self (Miller, 1998).
Secondly, the shift away from the postmodern
agenda involves a renewed concern with the
relation between consumption and persistent
social structures of power and inequality (for
example, Edwards, 2000). Debates within cultural
studies have been particularly important in point-
ing up the movement from highly optimistic
accounts of consumption as liberating and
empowering (Fiske, 1989; Nava, 1992; Nava
et al., 1996) towards understanding it as struc-
tured by the same constraints that long exercised
an older political economy. Figures such as
Bauman (1998) and McRobbie (1998; 1999) have
been exemplary in trying to move back onto this3029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 159