Geographies Of Consumption Research Articles

Towards teaching geographies of consumption

(2009). Towards teaching geographies of consumption. Geography: Vol. 94, No. 2, pp. 126-132.

The Role of Ethnicity in the Geography of Consumption

Two notable trends in immigrant gateway cities—the growth of immigrant-owned businesses and accelerated ethnic marketing efforts of mainstream firms—raise an interesting research question of how ethnicity interacts with accessibility in the geography of consumption. Given that many immigrants today are better educated and more affluent than their predecessors, and an ethnic business and its mass counterpart can differ little in size and product variety terms, it is intriguing to discover how urban consumers choose between businesses owned and operated by ethnic minorities and those in the mass market. Based on two surveys, this article compares the grocery shopping behavior of Chinese immigrants and the rest of the population in two study areas in one of the most culturally diverse urban regions of the world—Toronto, Canada. Although a large Chinese population and mainstream supermarkets are found in both locations, one of the study areas is characterized by a high concentration of Chinese supermarkets, and the other contains only one. Analyses show that Chinese and non-Chinese populations in Toronto exhibit distinct grocery shopping behaviors. Chinese supermarkets and mainstream supermarkets are complementary consumption sites for Chinese residents but independent ones for non-Chinese. The role of ethnicity/culture is strong. Recognizing the sociocultural embeddedness of immigrant shoppers and the cultural representation of ethnic retail spaces, this study raises the question of how effective ethnic marketing can be in the case of grocery retailing from the perspective of both mainstream and Chinese businesses, with implications for immigrant community development, urban retail planning, and national multicultural and integration policies.

“Did Ronald McDonald Also Tend To Scare You As A Child?”: Working to Emplace Consumption, Commodities and Citizen-Students in a Large Classroom Setting

So-called ‘radical’ and ‘critical’ pedagogy seems to be everywhere these days on the landscapes of geographical teaching praxis and theory. Part of the remit of radical/critical pedagogy involves a de-centring of the traditional ‘banking’ method of pedagogical praxis. Yet, how do we challenge this ‘banking’ model of knowledge transmission in both a large-class setting and around the topic of commodity geographies where the banking model of information transfer still holds sway? This paper presents a theoretically and pedagogically driven argument, as well as a series of practical teaching ‘techniques’ and tools—mind-mapping and group work—designed to promote ‘deep learning’ and a progressive political potential in a first-year large-scale geography course centred around lectures on the Geographies of Consumption and Material Culture. Here students are not only asked to place themselves within and without the academic materials and other media but are urged to make intimate connections between themselves and their own consumptive acts and the commodity networks in which they are enmeshed. Thus, perhaps pedagogy needs to be emplaced firmly within the realms of research practice rather than as simply the transference of research findings.

Geographies of consumption: the unmanageable consumer?

Geographies of consumption: the unman<i>age</i>able consumer?

Geographies of consumption: citizenship, space and practice

Geographies of consumption: citizenship, space and practice

Immigrant Grocery-Shopping Behavior: Ethnic Identity versus Accessibility

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate in the ‘new’ economic geography over the dialectic between the cultural and the economic, and in which the study of the geography of consumption is a prime example. The consumer behavior of culturally distinct immigrants is an intriguing and complex economic and cultural inquiry. In this paper we explore the grocery-shopping behavior of suburban middle-class Chinese immigrants in Toronto, where the group's ethnic economy has become full-fledged. Using a mixed approach combining focus groups and logistic modeling, we examine the preferences of Chinese immigrants between the fast-growing Chinese supermarkets and competing mainstream supermarket chains. Attention is focused upon the interplay of ethnic identity and accessibility in determining store patronage. The findings suggest a stronger effect of ethnic affinity on immigrants' choice of shopping venue than that of economic rationality. Grocery shopping, a most mundane and taken-for-granted activity, is practiced with sociocultural meanings by immigrants, and the social use of ethnic shopping spaces indicates that immigrants are not only consumers in ethnic shopping places but coactors in producing the unique ethnic retail environment.

Geographies of Consumption ‐ By Juliana Mansvelt

<i>Geographies of Consumption</i> ‐ By Juliana Mansvelt

Geographies of Consumption

Geographies of Consumption

‘Looking alright, feeling alright’: emotions, sizing and the geographies of women's experiences of clothing consumption

Recent work within geographies of consumption has focused on the practices of consumption as a means to find out ‘what people do when they go shopping’. This paper argues that few of these accounts of consumption have considered the significance of emotions in understanding the intricacies of consumer experience. Drawing on material from research about women's experiences of clothes shopping this paper, therefore, utilizes recent work in the social sciences which understands emotions not as inherent or as induced by practices or commodities and instead emphasizes the intersubjective nature of emotions whereby emotions ‘are self‐reflective, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals’ (Lupton 1998: 16). In short, this view posits that the consumer has the capacity to ‘manage’ or to experience and re‐experience emotions in particular consumption moments. Such an understanding offers a conceptualization which does not conceive of women's engagements with consumer culture within a victim/resistance dichotomy, instead uncovering geographies of consumption in which women may feel uncomfortable or depressed in a particular moment but then engage in practices through which they experience that moment differently. These emotional experiences are explored through considering the significance of the spatialities of the changing room, shop floor and the corporeal space of the ‘sized’ body, and the consumption practices of cheating, coping and connecting.

Cumming to an End

Cumming to an End

Geography of consumption I

Not only is shopping melting into everything, but everything is melting into shopping. Through successive waves of expansion – each more extensive and pervasive than the previous – shopping has methodically encroached on a widening spectrum of territories so that it is now, arguably, the defining activity of public life . . . . Shopping is the medium by which the market has solidified its grip on our spaces, buildings, cities, activities, and lives. It is the material outcome of the degree to which the market economy has shaped our surroundings, and ultimately ourselves. (Leong, 2001: 129)

The Lawn‐Chemical Economy and Its Discontents

The daily geographies of consumption represent some of the most ecologically important and economically complex frontiers for critical research. Among these, the turfgrass lawn is perhaps the most overlooked, owing to its very ordinariness. Despite the serious risks posed to human health and ecosystem viability by high‐input lawn systems, little critical scholarship has engaged the lawn, especially as a structured economic phenomenon. This paper explores the forces and political economic conditions under which the lawn is produced, promulgated, and resisted in North America. In the process, we draw attention to the deeply structured economic impetus behind the direct sale of potentially toxic chemicals to urban dwellers. Based on survey research and a review of the industry, we argue (1) that chemical demand is driven by urban growth and classed aesthetics, (2) that direct and aggressive sales of chemicals to consumers are spurred by crises in the chemical‐formulator industry, (3) that the search for consumer‐lawn markets is driven by declining margins in the worldwide chemical trade, and (4) that counterinstitutional struggles against high‐input lawns represent a salvo against otherwise abstract and daunting cultural‐economic hegemony.

Editorial: Home rules

Editorial: Home rules

Geographies of food: agro-food geographies making reconnections

There was a time, and not so very long ago, when research in the geography of agriculture had little to say about food other than as a raw commodity. By the same token, geographers of food were largely taken up with retail geography as a subspecialism within economic geography. In other words, both were about economic activity, but in separate compartments. Both focused on issues of production as against consumption. The emergence of an agro-food geography that seeks to examine issues along the food chain or within systems of food provision derives, in part, from the strengthening of political economy approaches in the 1980s. By directing attention away from the narrow confines of the farm business, hitherto examined largely through the lenses of either neoclassical economics or behaviourism, towards relations with ‘capital’ an important reorientation and reconnection was started. However, the process has been taken much further in recent years with the (re-)discovery of consumption, linked so strongly to the postmodern or poststructuralist trends in social science. Conceptualizing consumption is, in turn, linked to the discovery of ‘culture’ in economic geography, and this has had some positive impacts on agro-food studies (Goodman and DuPuis, 2002). However, Martin and Sunley (2001) have recently raised concern that ‘what these cultural economic geographers criticise as the myopic economism of ‘‘old’’ economic geography could simply be replaced by an exclusionary cultural essentialism in the ‘‘new’’ ’ (p. 152). To date, cultural essentialism has not taken hold in agro-food studies where the legacy of political economy is strong (e.g., Marsden et al., 1993). Consequently, economic realities and power remain important in many discussions of food consumption, as in Marsden et al. (2000). Nonetheless, a negative impact of the new cultural geography of consumption is perhaps apparent in how very few recent studies highlight the basic socio-economic and political issues of income inequalities which underpin and result from differential access to the process and Progress in Human Geography 27,4 (2003) pp. 505–513

Consumption, Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.

‘Gentle caring experience’: Seeking alternative health care in Canada

The starting point for this paper is a review of the literature, which seeks to explain the use of alternative medicines, therapies and practices in developed countries. Using the Statistics Canada 1996–97 National Population Health Survey—Health File, we then examine the profile of alternative service users. Our analysis shows that use of alternative health care is still limited to a relatively small segment of Canadians whose profile is similar to those in other developed countries. Women are more likely than men to use alternative medicines, therapies and practices, as are those who have higher incomes and are better educated. To move what has been an essentially empirical discussion forward, we explore critiques of conventional medical practice and propose that the analysis of alternative health care be situated within the geographies of consumption.

The Transnational Corporate Networks of Breakfast Cereals in Asia

Network perspectives have recently been proposed as a theoretical base for research in economic geography. However, there is an unclear relationship between the advocacy of network approaches and the development of methodological tactics to frame related empirical research. By reference to one episode of corporate spatial behaviour—the establishment of a manufacturing facility in Thailand by the US-headquartered breakfast-cereal company, Kellogg—an organising framework for network-inspired economic geography is suggested. Kellogg's entry into Thailand is analysed in terms of the construction and mobilisation of relational networks producing five overlapping geographies: (1) geographies of place; (2) geographies of intrafirm trade and relations; (3) regional geographies of accumulation; (4) geographies of interfirm relations; and (5) geographies of consumption.

A Corporeal Geography of Consumption

In this paper I outline a corporeal geography of consumption. By using the example of food I explore how our bodies are linked to wider consumption spaces and the ways that they are inflected by these sociospatial relations, Although discourses around eating in western cultures tend to privilege self-discipline, there are other meanings around food that emphasise its pleasurable qualities. Because our bodies are a product of the complex interaction of different discourses, social relations, and practices constituted in relation to wider locations, including other bodies, the home, and the workplace, these constellations of relationships do not always serve to produce our bodies in a coherent way. I therefore explore some of the tensions and conflicts individuals experience between different” discourses around food, bodily ideals, and sets of regulatory practices in different locations. In doing so I consider the extent to which individuals produce the space of their bodies in accordance with the disciplinary gaze of others rather than their own desires. I suggest that close spatial proximity to others can result in the erosion of individuals' body boundaries, and argue that the lack of corporeal freedom experienced by those interviewed highlights the limitations of public information and discourses about healthy eating, which are usually targeted at individuals and assume individualised patterns of consumption, rather than recognising the way that food consumption is often a shared activity and that bodily practices arc therefore inflected by wider sociospatial relations.

Geographies of Consumption: A Commodity-Chain Approach

Recent media and political events illustrate some links between consumption and production. The author explores these links through the concept of commodity chains. This concept has been partially developed in the literature, and an attempt is made to specify this further by means of the illustration of gold. The message is that the ‘geographies of consumption’ literature is insufficient by itself but becomes stronger when joined with a materialist commodity-chain analysis. The author moves from a deconstruction of the images of men and women in gold advertisements, at the consumption end, to the various places of production, beginning with Italian gold jewelry factories, then South African gold mines and apartheid, and third Lesotho, where Basotho men migrate to South African gold mines leaving behind ‘gold widows‘. The material reality of these gold widows stands in contrast to the ‘gold windows' of Tiffany's and the images of women and men in advertisements for gold. The author opines that this sort of analysis necessitates a politics of consumption in which the two ends are reconnected; and that this could lead to a new ‘commercial geography‘.

Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies

Consumption as the vanguard of history - a polemic by way of an introduction, D. Miller studies in the new consumer behaviour, R. Belk the sociology of consumption, C. Campbell from political economy to consumption, B. Fine consumption within historical studies, P. Glennie geographies of consumption, P. Jackson and N. Thrift psychological approaches to consumption - varieties of research past, present and future, P. Lunt consumption stuides as the transformation of anthropology, D. Miller theories of consumption in media studies, D. Morley.