New Politics of Consumption

New Politics of Consumption

Contemporary change in consumption has been linked to processes of globalization, which result in increasing homogeneity and social and spatial convergence—for example, the serial repetition of consumer spaces such as shopping malls, theme parks, and fast food outlets, and global availability of brand-name commodities (bostonreview.net). Western ways of consuming and rising consumerism are assumed to erase social difference and diversity, subsuming local cultures, practices, and environments under processes variously described as Americanization, Coca-colonization, and McDonaldization (bostonreview.net).

While globalization has exposed more people to a wider range of commodities and to different ways of consuming, the notion of global homogenization is partial, relying as it does on people and places as passive recipients of cultural change emanating from “outside” and failing to acknowledge the extent to which globalization is also a material practice, and one that also produces new kinds of difference in society and environment. Globalization may heighten inequalities in access to goods and services (bostonreview.net).

It can also have a role in distancing people from the effects of their actions, spatially separating consumption and production processes, and removing their immediate social and environmental consequences from households and shifting the environmental costs of consuming to other institutions or places.

While globalization has meant many people have had greater exposure to a wider range of commodities and their meanings, the geography of consumption is uneven and contradictory. The Worldwatch Institute reports 60 percent of private consumption occurs in the 12 percent of the world population that lives in North America and western Europe, while the one-third living in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa only accounts for 3.2 percent. Inequalities in access to resources, wealth, and ability to purchase cannot only be mapped between countries but within borders of nation-states as well (bostonreview.net).

While consumption provides a medium ...