Being the shopper

Being the Shopper

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March 28 , 2006

Being the Shopper

Ironically , shopping itself has only rarely been the focus of work in consumption in any of these three stages commentators on consumption have rarely paid much attention to shopping . Even studies of department stores and shopping malls devote remarkably little attention to the cultural practices of shopping . Instead these practices are subsumed into a more general interest in an overarching activity called consumption . The shopper therefore nearly always figures as

a sign for something else . The book Being the Shopper by John Wiley takes the opposite tack . Wiley proclaims in the book what shoppers do and what they understand as 'shopping

Consumption is an unknown but that it is , in some senses , known too well : the unorthodox has become a new orthodoxy with all the problems that entails . Of course , this trajectory is hardly unique . A number of other recent academic subcultures have followed much the same path , for example media studies and the sociology of scientific knowledge . Academic subcultures can even be characterized in some of the same ways as the study of consumption . They are fundamentally interdisciplinary . They are unsure of their exact focus therefore they debate endlessly their central terms . And they have come to be seen as particularly concerned with different kinds of knowledge and with the nature of the object

How , then , can we understand modern consumption studies , and , most especially , the place of shopping as a crucial element of such studies Being the Shopper is a critical review of work in this field . To this end , it is in four sections . The first is a brief history of the study of consumption in three stages , highlighting the issues raised by each stage of work . The second then considers shopping itself . Here , the concern is both with the sheer diversity of approaches to shopping that are possible and with beginning to develop the framework which informs the work in the book (Lempert , 2002 ) The third section then considers the issues of place and identity as vital determinants of modern consumption . In the final section , the four different threads of consumption , shopping , place and identity are brought together again through a consideration of the literature on shopping malls

During the analysis of psychology of shopper behavior John Wiley noted that as someone who grew up in city with many big stores , who remembers its original opening and for whom it has always been a major shopping location , the recent changes to that centre have come as something of a shock . In coming to the shoppers we no longer expect some consistent or clear image of either shopping or nature instead people are faced with a series of overlapping terrains within each of which these terms gain particular meanings and evocations that are brought to bear on the architectural transformation of the centers (Lempert , 2002 ) It is only through the kind of intensive work which is represented...