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
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