Suchergebnisse

Abstract

Although much has been written about the celebration of Christmas from a variety of perspectives, limited attention has been paid in the consumer behaviour literature to understanding the behaviours of consumers surrounding this event. Apart from insights gained from prior work on consumption rituals and meanings of festivities, our knowledge of meaning creation through Christmas consumption is partial, and written mainly from a North American perspective. Since consumer behaviour is shaped by cultural and social contexts, understanding the relationship between consumption objects and the social meanings that consumers ascribe to them is a research imperative. This paper explores the ways in which the British Christmas is consumed as a shared consumption experience, by bringing together two different approaches taken by consumer researchers and sociologists to analysing social consumption patterns. These are drawn from structuralist and post‐structuralist thinking. The findings of an exploratory qualitative study are used to demonstrate how an enhanced understanding of consumption meanings associated with this particular cultural context can lead to new insights into how consumers create social meanings through special, as well as ordinary, behaviours.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ecological modernization theory has been developed mainly with respect to the production sphere. To apply the theory to the domain of consumption, it is argued here that central concepts from the sociology of consumption are required. What results is a contextual model of (domestic) consumption that combines an actor-oriented approach with a system-of-provision perspective of consumer behavior. The relevance of the proposed model for research on the ecological modernization of domestic consumption is discussed. 3 Figures, 32 References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis article presents a simple model that reveals the reverse relation of the ratio of current account balance to inequality in income and consumption. Consumption smoothing schemes have been aggregated, among which the linchpin is a policy intervention that mitigates the worsening consumption inequality problem. However, in the long run, short‐sighted policies could have a corresponding impact on current accounts.