Overview

The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption draws on a variety of theories and research to contribute to our understanding of unsustainable mass consumption. It addresses the role of identities, social relations, interactions, belonging, and status comparison, and how perceived time scarcity is both a cause and an effect of consumption. It examines the power of consumer norms and how overconsumption is normalized and shows how consumption is embedded in the time-space arrangements of everyday life. Magnus Boström contextualizes such drivers within the larger institutional and infrastructural forces underlying mass consumption, including the economy, growth politics, and the problematic promises of consumer culture. Boström further draws on lessons from lived experiments of consuming less and discuss how insights about the flaws of consumer culture can help shape a growing critique and countermovement – a collective detox from consumerism.

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9781666902440

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Reviews

Bostr�m's analysis of consumption and the environmental crisis gets to the heart of why changing track is so difficult but also how, at the same time, it might be possible. Thoughtful, engaging, and timely, this is a difficult book to put down. --Stewart Lockie, James Cook University Consumer society is not simply a breezy marketing formulation but rather constitutes a resolute system of social and economic organization purposefully constructed to achieve specific financial and political objectives. Bostr�m does a magnificent job in this book to articulate the challenges of our contemporary consumerist lives and, most importantly, he identifies several timely pathways for transcending our current predicament. --Maurie Cohen, professor of sustainability studies, New Jersey Institute of Technology We consume because we are social, this is the main thrust of this compelling and informative book, of relevance to scholars and practitioners alike. Consumption is described as being part of social life, made up of social relations, but also playing out in specific temporal and spatial dimensions. The normalization of high levels of consumption is critiqued as preventing people from imaging other ways forward. Deep insights from theory are easily accessible and illustrated with rich empirical work, leading to ways forward that consider the delicate balance between living well and consuming less. --Marlyne Sahakian, University of Geneva

Boström's analysis of consumption and the environmental crisis gets to the heart of why changing track is so difficult but also how, at the same time, it might be possible. Thoughtful, engaging, and timely, this is a difficult book to put down. --Stewart Lockie, James Cook University Consumer society is not simply a breezy marketing formulation but rather constitutes a resolute system of social and economic organization purposefully constructed to achieve specific financial and political objectives. Boström does a magnificent job in this book to articulate the challenges of our contemporary consumerist lives and, most importantly, he identifies several timely pathways for transcending our current predicament. --Maurie Cohen, professor of sustainability studies, New Jersey Institute of Technology We consume because we are social, this is the main thrust of this compelling and informative book, of relevance to scholars and practitioners alike. Consumption is described as being part of social life, made up of social relations, but also playing out in specific temporal and spatial dimensions. The normalization of high levels of consumption is critiqued as preventing people from imaging other ways forward. Deep insights from theory are easily accessible and illustrated with rich empirical work, leading to ways forward that consider the delicate balance between living well and consuming less. --Marlyne Sahakian, University of Geneva

Author Information

Magnus Boström is professor of sociology at Örebro University.

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