Steve Miles Professor of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University Why most sociologist are wrong and ‘we’re’ right: TheorIsing the relationship between structure and agency through consumption Steve Miles Professor of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University

Structure ------------------------------- Agency Passion--------------------------- Constraint

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promisory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972: 139)

task I Two sentences that articulate your project’s angle on the relationship to structure and agency

“By wearing jeans we adopt positions of subjects within that ideology, become complicit with it, and therefore give it material expression: we “live” capitalism through its commodities, and, by living it, we validate and invigorate it” (p. 14)

“Consumerism is only the other side of the degradation of work – the elimination of playfulness and craftsmanship from the process of production” (p. 27) “…both as a worker and as a consumer, the individual learns not merely to measure himself against himself through others’ eyes” (p. 30) “… the conditions of everyday social intercourse, in societies based on mass production and mass consumption, encourage an unprecedented attention to superficial impressions and images, to the point where the self become almost indistinguishable from its surface” (p. 30)

TASK II Write an entirely original and tightly honed sentence to be read and no doubt applauded by the group that is both 1) accessible and 2) captures the imagination and leaves the reader begging for more….

“In real life, as opposed to pluralist fantasy, every moral and cultural choice of any consequence rules out a whole series of other choices… A society of consumers defines choice not as the choice to choose one course of action over another but as the freedom to choose everything at once” (Lasch 1984: 38) p. 30 “It is misleading to characterize the culture of consumption as a culture dominated by things. The consumer lives not so much by things as fantasies” (Lasch 1984: 30) “When thinking sociologically, one attempts to make sense of the human condition through analysing the web of human interdependency – that toughest of realities which explains both our motives and the effects of their activation” (Bauman 1990: 14)

Reflections on theorising consumption 1)Good theory comes from and is about you in some shape or form; 2)Theory is a creative enterprise: it is not something to be ‘learnt’; 3) Social change is constant; 4) Be reflexive about what you bring to your theory; 5) Disciplinary boundaries are constraining not enabling; 6) Theory is not a solution it’s a provocation; 7) Theory should aspire, wherever possible, to change