Introduction: Consumption in the Social Sciences

It's a truism that we live in a consumer society. Consumption, often understood as the private acquisition and use of goods acquired through monetary exchange in markets, is almost everywhere, engulfing the everyday life of large parts of the human population. For some, consumer society is a synonym for capitalist society, promising affluence, and freedom, but also economic differences, alienation, decadence, littering and waste. Hence, the concept is heavily loaded morally and politically and at the heart of almost every major current political debate (Sulkunen, 2015, p. 150).

The concept is often also used to pinpoint who is in charge of everything, notably the consumer. They are supposed to be ‘always right’ and thus the one producers and sellers must bow to. However, if the consumer is King, then they are also the ones to blame and shame, for cultural flattening, for resource depletion, for nature and climate crises, for exploitation of the southern working poor, and so on and on. As such, the consumer has been the hero of the political and economic liberals and the villain of the left and sometimes also by the more aristocratic inclined right. This has also had its effects on post-war consumption research. The often left-leaning sociologists have mostly shunned consumption as a research topic, while the more liberal economists and of course the marketing researchers have embraced it.