Methodological challenges in using practice theory in consumption research. Examples from a study on handling nutritional contestations of food consumption (original) (raw)
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Food for Thought, Thought for Food: Consumption, Identity, and Ethnography
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Movements associated with lifestyle and consumption politics have gained increasing visibility in society and in sociological research, but scholars' methodological insights for studying these issues have lagged behind. How might the lifestyles and consumption practices of researchers themselves shape data collection, and how might these movements affect researchers? The authors offer a collaborative, reflexive analysis of their experiences conducting fieldwork on three different consumption movements centered on food production. Building on feminist and symbolic interactionist methodological literature, they show how their own "consumption identities" affected their data collection, analyses, and written work. The authors also discuss how conducting research on consumption and lifestyle movements may also affect researchers' own identities and practices. They conclude by discussing how their process of "collaborative reflexivity" brings new insight into feminist methodological concerns for reflexivity.
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Consumption and Theories of Practice
This article considers the potential of a revival of interest in theories of practice for the study of consumption. It presents an abridged account of the basic precepts of a theory of practice and extracts some broad principles for its application to the analysis of final consumption. The basic assumption is that consumption occurs as items are appropriated in the course of engaging in particular practices and that being a competent practitioner requires appropriation of the requisite services, possession of appropriate tools, and devotion of a suitable level of attention to the conduct of the practice. Such a view stresses the routine, collective and conventional nature of much consumption but also emphasizes that practices are internally differentiated and dynamic. Distinctive features of the account include its understanding of the way wants emanate from practices, of the processes whereby practices emerge, develop and change, of the consequences of extensive personal involvements in many practices, and of the manner of recruitment to practices. The article concludes with discussion of some theoretical, substantive and methodological implications. speculative social theory or detailed case studies. Moreover, case studies have been skewed towards favourite, but restricted, topics -fashion, advertising and some forms of popular recreational activity -with particular attention paid to their symbolic meanings and role in the formation of self-identity. These case studies, perhaps encouraged by prominent versions of the abstract theories which say that the consumer has no choice but to choose and will be judged in terms of the symbolic adequacy of that choice (e.g. Bauman, 1988;, have very often operated with models of highly autonomous individuals preoccupied with symbolic communication. The article starts from a belief that these approaches give a partial understanding of consumption and that fruitful alternatives will avoid methodological individualist accounts of 'the consumer' and will be concerned as much with what people do and feel as what they mean.