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Contrasting Theories of Consumption: a Workshop

7-8 November, 2002

Venue: CRIC, The University of Manchester & UMIST,
Harold Hankins Building, Booth Street West,
Manchester M13 9QH

As part of CRIC's on-going series of international workshops, we are organizing a two day session on theories of consumption to be held at Manchester University, UK on the 7th and 8th November, 2002. Principal themes of CRIC's research programme are markets and competition, consumption practices, innovation, and the development of the service economy. This workshop is being mounted to promote papers which, using appropriate sources of data and evidence, critically evaluate theoretical accounts of consumption as a process, and to encourage discussion of the advances and blind spots of the field to date.

Consumption has become an established topic of academic enquiry in many disciplines and of popular discourse. It is a subject diverse in application, addressing issues related to identity and lifestyle, material culture, economic growth, gender, rationalization, ethics and politics, globalisation, urban change and much more. Its strengths lie in its capacity to help explain broad changes in the organization of economy, society and culture, as captured in the debates between theories of modernity, late modernity and postmodernity. The field has, arguably, moved understanding beyond simple conceptualisations of a consumer society, brought 'culture' to the fore of academic investigation and, in many cases, questioned the simplistic dichotomies between production and consumption, work and leisure and public and private. Yet despite these many 'advances', the field has seen few significant contributions to theory regarding the relationship between production and consumption as processes, has a tendency to embed its empirical enquiry in qualitative methodology to the exclusion of especially systematic cross-cultural comparison.

The aim of this workshop is neither to celebrate achievements nor lament upon the weaknesses. Rather, we are inviting academics from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical positions to compare, contrast and debate what alternative theories of consumption bring to the field. The workshop is designed as a forum in which to review theoretical developments in the study of consumption and to anticipate areas in need of future empirical attention. Each contributor to the workshop will deliver an empirically informed theoretical paper which sets out a position in relation to one or more of the following themes:

The relationship between processes of production and processes of consumption
The relationship between the material and the cultural
The role of consumption in mediating contemporary social relations
The connection between consumption and forms of social protest
A political economy of consumption
The historical emergence of the 'consumer'

The workshop will have approximately 9 invited speakers and 20 other participants. Travel and subsistence will be paid by CRIC. Papers will be pre-circulated. We would expect to publish the papers subsequently, one option being CRIC's series with Manchester University Press.

CRIC's current research in the area of consumption includes: a study of the changing temporalities of consumption; comparative analysis of the diffusion of consumer culture in European countries; domestic technologies and the relationship between innovation and consumption; the formation of tastes in the UK; and, the development of the market research industry and profession. In addition, previous research, which still has an on-going role in the CRIC consumption agenda, includes examination of trends and practices of food consumption, the diffusion of technologies and generation of routines, and the relationship between social networks and taste.

Contact: Dale Southerton
Telephone: +44 (0)161 275 7364

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Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), The University of Manchester,
Harold Hankins Building, Booth Street West, Manchester M13 9QH, England
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