Consumption

My work on consumption introduces an historical awareness to how we became consumers, and draws attention to the nexus of global-local networks in our everyday spaces of consumption and consumer culture. The first edition of my book Consumption and Everyday Life was first published in 2006 with Routledge (cited 508 times, Google Scholar). It was reviewed positively by Dale Southerton in Journal of Consumer Culture in 2008: “it presents a clear and accessible overview of influential theories and concepts central to understanding the role that consumption plays in contemporary societies”. He goes on to say:

What I like most is the way that concepts are introduced so that the reader can immediately recognize their relevance and application. Once introduced, those concepts are allowed space to breathe and develop so that by the end of each chapter the reader feels reassured in their application to a broader spectrum of issues related to everyday life. Paterson has written this book with great care so that the links between theories, concepts and different substantive issues are transparent. (Southerton, 2008: 428)

 
The second edition of the book was published with Routledge in 2017, with a new chapter on the ethics of consumption, and substantially revised and expanded material in other chapters, especially with regard to globalization and to the history of the spaces of consumption. There are numerous other additions, including a section on the life-cycle of a T-shirt from manufacture to disposal, and a section on the history of the idea of ‘planned obsolescence’.

The third edition was published in 2023. There are two additional chapters, one on gender and consumption and the other on digital consumption and e-commerce. Research on consumption is now ineluctably concerned with technologies, through globalized supply chain networks at the macro level, to the negotiation of online identities and the role of social media influencers at the more personal level. I have contributed an entry on ‘Youth Culture and Consumption’ to Ritzer and Rojek’s new edition of the Wiley-Blackwell Encylopedia of Sociology (2020), and am keen to explore connections between the senses, technology and consumption in future research projects.

Future research on consumption

This year I am developing a monograph tentatively called The Archaeologies of Consumption which examines spatial and architectural innovations and the effects on urban consumers, along with exploring the rise of retail psychology in such built environments. An increasingly large proportion of consumption is online, however, and so the impacts on physical retail environments, along with the considerable transformations of the landscape in terms of warehousing, distribution networks, and cold storage logistics means that billions of square feet are being used for such purposes, and are being mapped through GIS, to support digital consumption and the infrastructures for e-commerce. Social aspects of consumption through platform capitalism (so-called ‘Uberization’) are transplanting more traditional social theories such as McDonaldization in this respect, and so the proposed monograph and series of journal articles will also put the consumer’s fluid and seamless experience of online consumption in stark contrast to the shifting physical infrastructures (for example from Critical Infrastructural Studies, Soshanna Zuboff’s idea of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, Moritz Altenreid’s concept of the globalized ‘digital factory’) that underpin such shifts.