Abstract
Consumption is not an obvious object of sociological study. It is my contention that consumption is only available to sociology as an object of governance. I suggest that the tendency to understand consumption as a general ‘other’ to production is extremely misleading. This tendency is quite widespread, affecting everyday talk and social scientific work, especially Marxist accounts. In this chapter I propose a framework for understanding consumption as an object of governance. In doing this I first detail my understanding of governance, an understanding which relies on work by Foucault and by Durkheim. In the second section I define consumption as an object of governance. In the third and final section, I outline the concerns of a sociology of the governance of consumption.
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© 1997 Pekka Sulkunen, John Holmwood, Hilary Radner and Gerhard Schulze
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Wickham, G. (1997). Governance of Consumption. In: Sulkunen, P., Holmwood, J., Radner, H., Schulze, G., Campling, J. (eds) Constructing the New Consumer Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25337-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25337-1_14
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