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The Shopping Experience
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The Shopping Experience

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September 1997 | 224 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
The last decade has witnessed a clear and steady rise of interest in consumer culture. Many commentators now argue that consumption rather than production is the axis of personal identity and meaningful social actionùa situation that reverses the traditional view of consumption as an incidental, trivial feature of contemporary culture. This shrewd and probing book seeks to develop theories of shopping as an autonomous realm of experience. It aims to avoid both the reductionism characteristic of economics and marketing and the moralizing tone of many contemporary discussions of shopping and consumption. The book uses an interdisciplinary resource base and comparative data to build up a convincing analysis of the meaning of shopping today. It includes chapters by Mary Douglas on the importance of shopping; Mica Nava on women, the city, and the department store; Rachel Bowlby on supermarket features; Cecilia Fredriksson on the cultural construction of shopping; Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen and Pasi MSenpSS on the ethnography of shopping; Colin Campbell on shopping, pleasure, and the sex war; and Pasi Falk on the "scopic" regimes of shopping. The Shopping Experience provides the first comprehensive overview of the modern phenomenon of shopping. As such, it will be essential reading for students and researchers working in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology.

Colin Campbell and Pasi Falk
Introduction
Mary Douglas
In Defence of Shopping
Daniel Miller
Could Shopping Ever Really Matter?
Mica Nava
Modernity's Disavowal
Women, the City and the Department Store

 
Rachel Bowlby
Supermarket Futures
Cecilia Fredriksson
The Making of a Swedish Department Store Culture
Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen and Pasi M[um]aenp[um]a[um]a
Shopping in the East Centre Mall
Colin Campbell and Paul Hewer
Shopping, Pleasure and the Sex War
Pasi Falk
The Scopic Regimes of Shopping
Paul Hewer and Colin Campbell
Appendix: Research on Shopping
A Brief History and Selected Literature

 

`Editors Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell provide a collection of hughly readable and engaging articles which help to move scholars toward greater emphasis on the practices associated with obtaining goods' - Area

`If cities are less the loci of production than they are of consumption, and class is being replaced by lifestyle, shopping certainly occupies a pivotal place in such changes. Falk and Campbell have assembled a fascinating set of essays to reflect the trend, written for the most part by sociologists and anthropologists, but which will be of much wider interest to all those concerned with the current urban condition.... There are some familiar arguments here, about the place of the shopping mall - the nature of which is explored in this volume - but, as familiar as they may have become, this hardly denies that we need to know a lot more about shopping and its meaning for different consumers. This book shows the directions such research should take and in a useful appendix an outline history and select bibliography are presented' - Urban Studies

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