Liz McFall is Head of Sociology at the Open University. Her work explores how markets are made especially for challenging or controversial products like industrial life insurance, doorstep and payday loans. In 'Devising Consumption' she offers a pragmatic approach to understanding how technical, material, artistic and metaphysical elements collide in consumer markets. Liz is author of Advertising: a cultural economy (2004), co-editor of Conduct: sociology and social worlds (2008) and co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well - they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers. Consumption and consumer markets depend on such devices but their role has been poorly understood both in the social sciences and in business studies and marketing. By advancing the case for a pragmatic understanding of how ordinary, dull, everyday consumption is arranged, the book offers an alternative to orthodox approaches, which will appeal to broader interdisciplinary audiences interested in questions about how, and why, consumer markets work.

Introduction 1. Unearthing the 'Very Dirt of Private Fact': The work of market devices 2. Groovy Like the Market: Problems with fit and adaptation in government schemes to insure the poor 3. Organising Charisma: The role of doorstep finance agents 4. Following the Lines from Conversation to Marketing and Back 5. The Practical Heart of Markets 5.1. Building the Industrial Assurance Portfolio 5.2. Door-Stepping the (Relatively) Affluent Poor Epilogue