BACKGROUND Some years ago Australian anthropologist David Moore criticised the predominant form of understanding youth alcohol consumption for residing with biomedical approaches that individualise and ultimately stigmatise drinking behaviour and 'ignore' the social context of consumption. Of interest here is the ongoing insufficient integration of alternative approaches to understanding young ...

The paper discusses the significance of cultural capital for the understanding of the field of housing in contemporary Britain. It explores the relationship between housing and the position of individuals in social space mapped out by means of a multiple correspondence analysis. It considers the material aspects of housing and the changing contexts that are linked to the creation and display of...

There can be little doubt that the concept of social systems is central to marketing if we are, as Latour (1993) notes, increasingly enmeshed in hybrid networks of social, ecological, and informational systems. Yet it is surprising to find such a paucity of marketing and consumer research addressing it. This paper advances the idea of social systems in marketing. A social system is what emerges...

This study explored mid-adolescents' views and experiences of socio-ecological influences on their drinking practices in order to help inform the development of interventions to reduce alcohol-related risk. We conducted 31 in-depth interviews with young people aged 13-17 in North East England. Verbatim interview transcripts and field notes were coded systematically and analysed thematically, fo...

Both the use of alcohol and its proscription are known in ancient as well as in contemporary India. From early times, consumption was strongly influenced by social caste and class, and many religions proscribed its use. The availability of alcohol increased disproportionately following the advent of the East India Company and the early excise policies of the government. The early twentieth cent...

This article proposes a multi-disciplinary and systemic approach to sustainable consumption that combines environmental considerations of energy usage from a life-cycle perspective with a social understanding of consumption grounded in economic anthropology. The goal is to understand both consumption patterns and drivers, with a focus on household energy consumption used for cooling in Metro Ma...

Cities now occupy a central role in economic regeneration. Literature on such regeneration has focused on the supply side, neo-liberal leanings of projects, the centrality of cultural production and consumption, and the undemocratic, exclusionary geographies being produced through such regeneration schemes. This paper explores how urban regeneration strategies, premised on promoting cultural pr...

This paper builds on the general connection between culture consumption and sociability which has been the focus of recent research in the sociology of culture. I propose that cultural variety, as given by the number of cultural activities that the person engages in, is tied not only to static properties of social networks (such as range), but also to the likelihood of having benefited from thi...