The Oxford Handbook of Consumption consolidates the most innovative recent work conducted by social scientists in the field of consumption studies and identifies some of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for future research. It begins by embedding marketing in its global history, enmeshed in various political, economic, and social sites. From this embedded perspective, the book branches out to examine the rise of consumer culture theory among consumer researchers and parallel innovative developments in sociology and anthropology, with scholarship analyzing the roles that identity, social networks, organizational dynamics, institutions, market devices, materiality, and cultural meanings play across a wide variety of applications, including, but not limited to, brands and branding, the sharing economy, tastes and preferences, credit and credit scoring, consumer surveillance, race and ethnicity, status, family life, well-being, environmental sustainability, social movements, and
social inequality. The volume is unique in the attention it gives to consumer research on inequality and the focus it has on consumer credit scores and consumer behaviors that shape life chances. The volume includes essays by many of the key researchers in the field, some of whom have only recently, if at all, crossed the disciplinary lines that this volume has enabled. The contributors have tried to address several key questions: What motivates consumption and what does it mean to be a consumer? What social, technical, and cultural systems integrate and give character to contemporary consumption? What actors, institutions, and understandings organize and govern consumption? And what are the social uses and effects of consumption?

About the Author:
Frederick F. Wherry is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Director of the Dignity and Debt Network. He served as the 2018 president of the Social Science History Association and past chair of both the Economic Sociology and the Consumers and Consumption Sections of the American Sociological Association. He is co-author of Credit Where It's Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship, editor of the four-volume Sage Encyclopedia of Economics and Society, and the author or editor of six other books or volumes. He has served in an advisory capacity to the Boston Federal Reserve and the Lloyds Banking Group Center for Responsible Business.

Ian Woodward earned his PhD in sociology at University of Queensland, Australia. He is Professor in the Department of Marketing and Management at University of Southern Denmark. A cultural sociologist, he has written extensively about consumption and material cultures, and everyday cosmopolitan ethics. His authored and co-authored books include The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism (2009), Understanding Material Culture (2007), Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (2015), and Labels: Making Independent Music (2019).