Social Context Of Consumption Research Articles

Healing myths, yoga styles and social bodies: socio-logics of yoga as a health practice in the socially stratified city of Marseille, France

Drawing on participant observation and interviews in two yoga studios in the highly socially stratified city of Marseille, France, this paper explores the understandings of yoga as a health practice that emerge at the intersections between yoga styles and their social contexts of consumption. Its insights emerge from the comparison of three modern yoga styles that were developed for Western English-speaking cultural contexts – Iyengar, Bikram and Forrest – and which differ in form but also in the chronology of their emergence on the global yoga market and that of their reception in France. These three yoga styles are also branded through contrasting mythologies of transformational healing, and the aim of this paper is to explore how a brand conceptualization of yoga as a health practice relates to or resonates with the embodied experiences of practitioners, and to the socio-cultural contexts in which practitioners and their practices are embedded. The paper contributes a new case study to the global yoga scholarship and to a poorly studied French yoga scene, but more importantly, it cross-examines the discourses through which a yoga style is branded, the way it is transmitted, and the social context and social positioning of the individuals who practice it. Combining perspectives on the body, narrative and rituals, it identifies how yoga healing is construed in relation to gender, ethnicity and class and the points of consensus and dissent that emerge from the encounters between French social bodies and exogenous yoga styles.

Accounting for youth audiences’ resistances to HIV and AIDS messages in the television drama Tsha Tsha in South Africa

Theoretical debates and literature on E-E efforts in Africa have largely focussed on understanding how and why interventions on HIV and AIDS are effective in influencing behaviour change among target communities. Very few studies have sought to investigate and understand why a substantial number of targeted audiences resist the preferred readings that are encoded into E-E interventions on HIV and AIDS. Using cultural studies as its conceptual framework and reception analysis as its methodology, this study investigated and accounted for the oppositional readings that subaltern black South African youths negotiate from Tsha Tsha, an E-E television drama on HIV and AIDS in South Africa. Results from the study show that HIV and AIDS messages in Tsha Tsha face substantial resistances from situated youth viewers whose social contexts of consumption, shared identities, quotidian experiences and subjectivities, provide critical lines along which the E-E text is often resisted and inflected. These findings do not only hold several implications for E-E practice and research, they further reflect the utility of articulating cultural studies and reception analysis into a more nuanced theoretical and methodological framework for evaluating the ‘impact’ of E-E interventions on HIV and AIDS.

Rhetorics and Foodways

How we eat—the origin and handling of ingredients; the modes of production and distribution involved; the social contexts of consumption; and the invention and processing applied to the end product...

Engel and Simmel: sharing meals at home in Cyprus

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship between food as a shared good (or public within the household) in the economic sense, and food as a shared meal in the sociological sense.Design/methodology/approach– Quantitative data derived from a household budget survey (HBS) in Cyprus are used to set up questions to which answers are suggested using the qualitative approach of in-depth interviews.Findings– The main finding is that the relatively high expenditure by elderly couples on food for home consumption may be explained by frequent inter-household, intra-extended family meals in Cyprus.Research limitations/implications– The paper provides evidence that household expenditure on food may not be directly indicative of household consumption of food. Researchers interested in household consumption of food should therefore be aware of the differences between household and extended family and, where extended family continues to be significant, they should be wary of using data from HBSs to analyse food consumption. One limitation is that the results are derived from in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of nine households. It may be appropriate to replicate the study, either in Cyprus or in similar societies where extended family remains significant, at a larger scale.Practical implications– The evidence that household expenditure may not be indicative of household consumption suggests that questions on social context of consumption should be included in HBSs.Originality/value– This paper draws together, for the first time, economic ideas on expenditure on food derived from the quantitative research of Ernst Engel on one hand and implications of the theories of Georg Simmel on the sociology of the meal on the other. The paper shows that some issues arising from quantitative analysis of HBSs cannot be explained using data from that source; this is particularly so where consumption of food is inter-household.

The practise and practice of Bourdieu: The application of social theory to youth alcohol research

Background Some years ago Australian anthropologist David Moore criticised the predominant form of understanding youth alcohol consumption for residing with biomedical approaches that individualise and ultimately stigmatise drinking behaviour and ‘ignore’ the social context of consumption. Of interest here is the ongoing insufficient integration of alternative approaches to understanding young people's drinking. Methods This paper presents theoretically informed qualitative research that investigates why young Australian females (aged 14–17) drink and how social and cultural context form the basis, rather than the periphery, of their drinking experience. Results We demonstrate the utility of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological framework for delving beyond the dichotomy of young people's drinking decisions as either a determination of their cultural environment or the singular result of a rational individual's independent decision-making. The paper is presented in two parts. First, we provide the interpretation, or ‘practise’, of Bourdieu's concepts through an outline and application of his complex theoretical constructs. Specifically, the concept of symbolic capital (or social power) is applied. Second, our explication of Bourdieu's ‘practice’, or epistemological contributions, offers a methodologically grounded example to other researchers seeking to attain more complete understandings of the social processes underpinning youth alcohol consumption. Conclusion A sociological approach to exploring the complex relationship between drinking and contextual social factors amongst young Australian females is an unchartered area of enquiry. We contribute new theoretically supported insights to create a more complete picture of young females’ drinking behaviours.

The Social Utility of Feature Creep

Previous research has shown that consumers frequently choose products with too many features that they later find difficult to use. In this research, the authors show that this seemingly suboptimal behavior may actually confer benefits when factoring in the social context of consumption. The results demonstrate that choosing products with more capabilities (i.e., feature-rich products) provides social utility beyond inferences of wealth, signaling consumers' technological skills and openness to new experiences and that consumers' beliefs about the social utility of feature-rich products are predictive of their choices of such products. Furthermore, the authors examine when impression management concerns increase consumers' likelihood of choosing feature-rich products. They find that public choices in which participants display their preferences to others encourage feature-seeking behavior but that the anticipation of having to use a product in front of others provides an incentive to avoid additional features.

Meals and snacks from the child’s perspective: the contribution of qualitative methods to the development of dietary interventions

To explore the everyday consumption of meals and snacks from the child's perspective, among those with healthier v. less healthy dietary habits. The sample in this qualitative study comprised two groups of Danish schoolchildren aged 10 to 11 years, one with a healthier diet (n 9) and the other with a less healthy diet (n 8). Both groups were recruited from respondents to a dietary survey. Semi-structured interviews took their starting point in photographs of their meals and snacks taken by the children themselves. Both subgroups of children had a meal pattern with three main meals and two to four snacks. We found a connection between the nutritional quality of the diet and the social contexts of consumption, especially with regard to snacks. Among children with healthier eating habits, both snacks and meals tended to be shared social events and items of poor nutritional quality functioned as markers of a special social occasion. This was not the case among children with less healthy eating habits. All children described particular rules governing food consumption within their families. Although only some of them had participated in the development of these rules, and despite the fact that rules were different and were perceived as having been developed for different reasons, children from both subgroups tended to accept them. The results of the study suggest that dietary interventions designed to promote children's health should focus more on the different social contexts of consumption and more on the role of parents.