The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach by Stillerman Joel Polity (review)

Built on the backs of Marx and Weber, the canon of Economic Sociology has long focused on issues of production, despite a clear counter motif focusing on consumption from thinkers like Veblen, Simmel, and Bourdieu. Although this "productivist bias" (Ritzer and Slater 2001) has been recognized for more than a decade, sociology of consumption has only begun to be institutionalized in the form of recognized associations, established courses, and a canon of classics. Joel Stillerman's The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach offers a further corrective to that under-recognized scholarly history and is another step—and a critical one—in institutionalizing sociology of consumption.

So what is sociology of consumption? What goes in it? What is left out? These are decisions with which anyone writing a "text" of the subject must wrestle. Stillerman does an impressive job at synthesizing the work in sociology of consumption, weaving together disparate strands pertaining to class, globalization, gender, and race. He also admirably balances the historical with the contemporary in an effort to set us on the path toward understanding the profound shifts in thinking prompted by the emergence of consumer cultures such as China. The foundational theories of Marx, Weber, Veblen, and Simmel are adeptly linked to contemporary work by Zelizer, Schor, Slater, Miller, McCracken, and Holt. The primary contribution of this book is to institutionalize classics of sociology of consumption, synthesize some of the thinking, and provide a blue print for teaching the topic to undergraduates and early graduate students.

The book has many strengths, primarily due to its breadth of coverage. Stillerman covers marketing communication by looking at advertising and social media in addition to consumption itself. There's an interesting an even-handed balance between history and contemporary thought, and although we get a little too caught up with the admittedly fascinating miracles of malls and the development of credit, there's still room in later chapters to appreciate the depth of knowledge about consumption currently on the table by covering the role of subcultures and taste in consumption. This book takes nothing for granted, and so can be easily used in an undergraduate course where students may need to review the arguments of Marx or Bourdieu.

Yet, in my view, sociology of consumption is the marriage of economic sociology and sociology of culture. This volume does service to economic sociology, but somewhat shorts sociology of culture. To answer a question like "where do needs come from?" one needs a theory that links the socialization of identity—which is inevitably discursive—with certain consumption practices. Cultural theories offered by Ann Swidler or Clifford Geertz would be helpful in explaining how people use the consumption of cultural symbols to make sense of their lives and to form ideals and values—not simply to signal to others. To be sure, it's not that the book never addresses culture—it's that the sociology of culture takes a back seat to more materialist or structural arguments, and its treatment tends to be less systematic and theoretical than the components drawing from economic sociology.

For example, the role of myth—the ways in which discourse structures consumer desire—is largely missing here (e.g., Levy 1981; Stern 1995; Thompson 2004). Sociology of culture would be similarly helpful in systematically unpacking and explaining patterns of consumption by class, race, or gender. In lieu of this more cultural approach to understanding consumers, Stillerman falls back on psychological arguments of "active" versus "passive" consumption of advertising and the old "cultural dopes" versus "dupes" line of thought, forgetting the interesting work that draws, for example, on Foucault (e.g., Thompson 2004; Luedicke et al. 2010; Arsel and Thompson 2011) and from which perspective the active/passive distinction and questions of agency would be at best resolved and at worst moot. Yet, despite the absence of a complete argument to address these worn dualities, Stillerman does cover a comprehensive set of research on how various social categories and identities—gender, race...