Colin Campbell 
Consumption and Consumer Society 
The Craft Consumer and Other Essays

This collection of high quality, largely previously published essays,  analyses a range of controversies in the field of the sociology of culture and consumption. Campbell made a major contribution to the development of this field and he has a clear and coherent theoretical position which he employs to comment on interesting disputes among scholars seeking to understand consumer culture.





Containing a brand new expansive essay reflecting on consumption in the age of a pandemic and drawing out some of the conceptual and practical implications of the relationship between wants and needs, science and norms,  this synthesis will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of consumption, consumer and cultural sociology. 

Table of Content

Introduction.- The desire for the new: its nature and social location as presented in theories of fashion and modern consumerism.- Consuming Goods and the Good of Consuming.- Conspicuous Confusion? A Critique of Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.- The Meaning of objects and the meaning of actions: a critical note on the sociology of consumption and theories of clothing.- Shopping, Pleasure and the Sex War.- Consumption and the Rhetorics of Need and Want.- I Shop therefore I Know that I Am: The Metaphysical Basis of Modern consumerism.- The Craft Consumer: Culture, craft and consumption in a postmodern society.- The curse of the new: how the accelerating pursuit of the new is driving hyper-consumption.- A Matter of Necessity: Reflections on Need and Want in a Time of Lockdown.

About the author

Colin Campbell is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of York, UK. He is the author of a dozen books and over one hundred articles dealing with issues in the sociology of religion, consumerism, cultural change, and sociological theory. He is probably best-known as the author of The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Macmillan 1987, Palgrave Macmillan 2018), although he is also known for his work in the sociology of religion (see Toward A Sociology of Irreligion, Macmillan 1971) and cultural change (The Easternization of the West, Paradigm Publishers, 2007) and social theory (see The Myth of Social Action, CUP, 1996. His latest work is Has Sociology Progressed? (Palgrave Pivot, 2019).