Introduction

In the midst of the Thatcher years Featherstone observed,“pre-retirement planning today is presented as the management oflife-style and consumption opportunities to enable retirement to be aprogressive set of options and choices” (1987, p 134).

The central concern of this chapter is with consumption processes,consumption patterns and the difficult issue of ‘choice’.Although consumption accounts need not be in conflict with production-basedperspectives, they are often portrayed as such. Marxism, it is thought,deals with production, whereas it is tempting to portray consumptionbasedaccounts as in some way essentially Weberian. However convenient such acontrast may be it would be misleading. There is certainly a Weberian wingamong those who use consumption approaches. Life chances, understood broadlyto include, among other things, education, status, housing, work,credentials and the opportunities that these provide for some sort of socialmobility or ‘choice’, are clearly features of consumption thatwould be amenable to Weberian sociologists. The degree to which consumerismconforms to, or confronts, the ‘Protestant ethic’ (Weber,1976) of hard work, deferred gratification and thrift would also be a tasksuited to Weberians. There is, however, another wing in the consumption campthat points toward lifestyle, identity and choice with, for example,Baudrillard (1975, p 144) claiming that people are “mobilised asconsumers, their needs become as essential as their labour power”(cited in Smart, 1992, p 121). Between Weber and Baudrillard might seem(like the proverbial rock) a hard place to be, but there are numerous anddifferent approaches pressing for their account to be given primacy (Warde,1990). Nor should the reader think in terms of a linear development ofconsumption theory, from Weber up to Baudrillard. They occupy differentplaces on the sociological map, not points along a continuum. Given thevarious features associated with consumption approaches it is, in manyrespects, easier to address these rather than identify core theoreticalcomponents. Any common ground they share derives from their insistence thatconsumption is significant in its own right, rather than in how theysubsequently analyse its significance.

This chapter begins by briefly tracing the history of consumption-basedanalyses with those versions that emerged in the UK in the 1970s and 1980sseen as the most significant.