Routledge Handbook on Consumption

Abstract

In this essay I reflect on how consumption serves to build and resolve tensions amplified by globalization and, its escort, neoliberal marketization, in the so-called emerging markets, in particular in Turkey. When scholars allude to "globalization," or global consumer culture, there is typically an implicit opposition between the global versus the local. The foreign global is associated with change, modernity, novelty, innovation, commodification; the familiar local with tradition and stubbornly old or romantically authentic ways of life. In addition, there are internal tensions between, for example, the rural and the urban or the dominated and the dominant, which are impacted by transnational relations. Contrary to a position "that sees the local from the outside, as a place continuously impinged upon by and encapsulated within external forces" (Lambek, 2011, p. 200), I take the perspective of the local. I examine how the consumers in a locality experience their encounters with people, things, ideologies, and images global, within the structural enablers and disablers, and if and how their ways and patterns of consumption change or not; how they define and differentiate themselves from internal Others that emerge or become amplified with globalization. My deliberations are framed by two considerations: domination and affiliation dynamics in global-local and local-local relationships and the dialogue of change and continuity.I discuss the main approaches in the literature and offer directions for future research on consumption. The works I cite are representative, but not comprehensive. The first section reviews the diverse consumer experiences of and responses to their global encounters, as they navigate local social structures, embedded in asymmetrical global flows and a structure of common differences (Wilk, 1995). The second section presents criticisms of hybridity and "flow speak." The third section focuses on the Others within the local as it navigates the global: the rural other, class-based Others, and multiple Others of the faithful or the Islamists in Turkey. Finally, I offer suggestions for research on consumption in a global world.

Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective

“…As performance, practices are enacted by people, or "carriers" who interpret and integrate the above-mentioned elements in different ways (Pettersen, 2016;Warde, 2005;Warde, Welch, & Paddock, 2017). In her analysis of lighting, Mylan (2015) (Røpke, 2009).…”