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In affluent societies, evidence suggests that public concern and activism about "the consumption problem" is growing in many corners of everyday life—even in the paragon of the consumer society, the United States. These emerging concerns have an environmental dimension, but also embrace issues of community, work, meaning, freedom, and the overall quality of life. Yet the efforts of individuals, groups, and communities to confront consumption find little guidance or sympathy in policy-making, environmental, or academic circles—arenas dominated, perhaps as never before, by a deeply seated economistic reasoning and a politics of the sanctity of growth. Given our dissatisfaction with fragmentary approaches to consumption and its externalities, we highlight the elements of a provisional framework for confronting consumption in a more integrated fashion. We stress in particular the social embeddedness of consumption, the material and power-based linkages along commodity chains of resource use, and the hidden forms of consumption embedded in all stages of economic activity.

Huber reviews Confronting Consumption by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca.

As consumer culture pervades the social life of citizens in America and Europe, it becomes increasingly important to clarify the relationship between consumption and citizenship. With this in mind, faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference titled "The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics." Held in October 2006, the meeting provided a forum for leading scholars to discuss the interplay of markets, media, politics, and the citizen-consumer. Revised and expanded versions of the papers they presented are collected in this volume with the goal of advancing this emerging area of inquiry. It is our hope that the essays and research papers we have collected here help define the next wave of theory building and research inquiry on the intersections of consumer culture, civic culture, and mass culture.

Explores the prospect for winding back current levels of household consumption in high income societies.

This presentation will focus on the role of consumption in fostering a sustainable economy. Sustainability is typically discussed in a siloed fashion in the United States. Cradle-to-cradle production and regulation to curb greenhouse gas emissions are proffered as salves for evidenced degradation but little attention is directed to how a society can enable sustainability as a cultural norm. Further and related, the role of the individual economic agent as consumer, investor, and government participant is seemingly not acknowledged. To a large extent, the population majority delegates the powers conferred in the three roles to a minority largely through indifferent conveyance, leaving outcomes impacting society dependent on incentives of a few, who may or may not be aligned with the public welfare. Therefore, given a consumerism based economy, perhaps the most significant, powerful, and traction-inducing vehicle for instituting sustainability may be found in enabling conscious consumption at the individual level.

Ideology plays a central role in consumer decisions, actions, and practices. While there have been numerous studies of ideological formations in specific consumption contexts, an integrative theoretical framework on consumption ideology has been missing. The theoretical framework presented in this article integrates systemic, social group, and social reality perspectives from social theory with prior consumer research to conceptualize consumption ideology as ideas and ideals that are related to consumerism and manifested in consumer behavior. Consumption ideology originates from conflicts between consumer desires and the system of consumerism. It is reflected in consumers' lived experiences and expressed in social representations and communicative actions related to status-based consumption, brand affinity and antipathy, performed practices, and political consumption. By adapting to the market, consumers confirm the system, but when they resist, they accelerate conflicts in consumer experiences unless resistance is ideologically co-opted by the market. Three illustrative cases—upcycling, Zoom backgrounds, and the commercialization of TikTok—exemplify how the framework may be used to analyze consumption ideology and generate new research questions. The article concludes with future research programs that move beyond micro-theorizations to illuminate the broader role of ideology in contemporary consumerist society.

Abstract
This article introduces a new dimension of consumption as liquid or solid. Liquid consumption is defined as ephemeral, access based, and dematerialized, while solid consumption is defined as enduring, ownership based, and material. Liquid and solid consumption are conceptualized as existing on a spectrum, with four conditions leading to consumption being liquid, solid, or a combination of the two: relevance to the self, the nature of social relationships, accessibility to mobility networks, and type of precarity experienced. Liquid consumption is needed to explain behavior within digital contexts, in access-based consumption, and in conditions of global mobility. It highlights a consumption orientation around values of flexibility, adaptability, fluidity, lightness, detachment, and speed. Implications of liquid consumption are discussed for the domains of attachment and appropriation; the importance of use value; materialism; brand relationships and communities; identity; prosumption and the prosumer; and big data, quantification of the self, and surveillance. Lastly, managing the challenges of liquid consumption and its effect on consumer welfare are explored.

AbstractIdeology plays a central role in consumer decisions, actions, and practices. While there have been numerous studies of ideological formations in specific consumption contexts, an integrative theoretical framework on consumption ideology has been missing. The theoretical framework presented in this article integrates systemic, social group, and social reality perspectives from social theory with prior consumer research to conceptualize consumption ideology as ideas and ideals that are related to consumerism and manifested in consumer behavior. Consumption ideology originates from conflicts between consumer desires and the system of consumerism. It is reflected in consumers' lived experiences and expressed in social representations and communicative actions related to status-based consumption, brand affinity and antipathy, performed practices, and political consumption. By adapting to the market, consumers confirm the system, but when they resist, they accelerate conflicts in consumer experiences unless resistance is ideologically co-opted by the market. Three illustrative cases—upcycling, Zoom backgrounds, and the commercialization of TikTok—exemplify how the framework may be used to analyze consumption ideology and generate new research questions. The article concludes with future research programs that move beyond micro-theorizations to illuminate the broader role of ideology in contemporary consumerist society.

AbstractBased on an exploratory study of 29 semi‐structured interviews followed by a grounded theory analysis, this research explores the circulation of local products and brands enacted by bi‐residential consumers with geographically dispersed networks across two places. The results show that two new consumption systems are emerging at the frontier between conventional and collaborative consumption: bi‐residential and delegated consumption. In these two consumption systems, the bi‐residential consumer mediates the relationship between the retailer and the final consumer, thus informally extending the retailer's downstream value chain. Bi‐residential and delegated systems partly overlap but also differ from conventional or collaborative consumption systems in two ways: (a) they are linked in a modelized process sustained by the perception of 'access' and the 'logistic role' of the bi‐residential consumer; (b) they are embedded in a hybrid exchange system intertwining gift‐giving and monetary exchange. These consumption systems occur at the interstice between conventional and collaborative consumption. Local retailers and brands could benefit from knowledge in this area with a view to opening up new opportunities in value co‐creation with bi‐residential consumers.