Consumption and Everyday Life

Mark Paterson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Along with his interest in consumption, his research focuses on the body and the senses, particularly in relation to new technologies. He is the author of The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Routledge, 2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (2016), and How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (2021), as well as numerous journal articles. He is also co-editor of Touching Place, Spacing Touch (Routledge, 2012) and is on the editorial board of the journals Emotion, Space & Society, Multimodality and Society, and The Senses and Society.

Introduction: we are all consumers Part I: The Times of Consumption: Modernity 1. How we became consumers: historical theories of consumption 2. You are what you buy: consumption, class, and identity 3. Cathedrals, palaces, and paradises: the sites of consumption Part II: How We Consume Now 4. The counterculture becomes consumer culture: the commodification of youth and rebellion 5. ‘Just do it’: advertising and the power of the brand 6. How they make you buy: retail psychology and the role of the senses 7. Out of the kitchen at last? the gendered politics of consumption 8. Nature, Inc.: the great outdoors, the global within Part III: The Spaces of Consumption: Globalization 9. The world on your plate: food in the age of globalized agri-food networks 10. Globalization and McDonaldization: producing the global consumer 11. Digital consumption: online retail, the social industry, and the new digital worker 12. Enough! the ethics of consumption