This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the possibilities these frameworks can offer.

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK. He has published widely on cultural theory, popular culture, consumption, and utopianism. He is the author of numerous books, including Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification (2010), From Popular Culture to Everyday Life (Routledge, 2014), Theories of Consumption (Routledge, 2017), Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies: On Refusing to be Realistic (Routledge, 2019), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Ninth Edition, Routledge, 2021), and Consuming Utopia: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading (Routledge, 2022). He is also editor of The Making of English Popular Culture (Routledge, 2016) and Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Routledge, 2019).

1. Consumption as a key sociological concept 2. What drives consumption? 3. Explaining consumption 4. Sustainable consumption and capitalist consumerism 5. Mediatized consumption 6. Consumption and everyday life 7. Sociology of consumption after cultural studies Postscript