Abstract
This chapter proceeds with brief sections on why consumption matters and how sociology might sit in an interdisciplinary field of scholarship. I then outline the reasoning behind fractal analysis. Thereafter I point to some features of the analysis of consumption which are distinctively canvassed by sociology. In particular, I discuss the challenge posed by some branches of sociology to the prevalent tendency to put the autonomous individual choice at the centre of analysis. That is a theme which runs throughout the book, drawing on traditions within sociology which give explanatory priority to social situations, social groups, social positioning and configurations of institutional arrangements.
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Notes
- 1.
The evidence for the greater purchase of interdisciplinary approaches is not clear one way or the other: ‘the literature does not clearly establish the dual propositions that disciplines impede the development of knowledge and that inter-disciplinary knowledge is more valuable than that emerging from within disciplines’ (Jacobs and Frickel 2009: 48).
- 2.
One of the reasons why Abbott is so interesting in his analysis of scholarly disciplines is that they operate in very similar ways to professions in the wider labour market, whose strategies and positionings he explained so well in terms of the system of professions (Abbott 1989).
- 3.
Practically, for purposes of intervention and policy, disciplines offer very different or contrasting solutions, but they do not find it totally impossible to unite in prescriptions for solutions to problems when brought together in interdisciplinary projects (although the reporting of the difficulties, misunderstandings and incomprehension involved in the experience of interdisciplinary collaborative projects should give some pause for thought).
- 4.
‘The syntactic program explains the social world by more and more abstractly modelling its particular action and interrelationships. The semantic program explains the world of social particulars by assimilating it to more and more general patterns, searching for regularities over time or across social space. Finally, the purely pragmatic program tries to separate more and more clearly the effects of different potential interventions of causes from one another’ (Abbott 2004: 29).
- 5.
This is one of the reasons why, when addressing practical political or policy intervention research, interdisciplinary cooperation proves comparatively easy. Different perspectives can be summed. Achieving compatibility between theoretical endeavours is much less attainable.
- 6.
Abbott extrapolates his analysis of fractal division and ‘the centrality of rediscovery’ to an understanding of the relationship between disciplines and to speculation about the relevance of the principle of self-similarity to other issues in social sciences. An important proviso would be that perfect self-similarity is rarely to be found in social or intellectual matters, suggesting that fractal division is an imperfect analogy. But it can still be useful.
- 7.
The only example I am aware of is a very recent application by Santoro and Solaroli (2016).
- 8.
See his argument further developed in Abbott (2004).
References
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Warde, A. (2017). Sociology and Consumption. In: Consumption. Consumption and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55682-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55682-0_2
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