Showing papers by "Alan Warde published in 2004"

Qualities of food

Abstract: In this book, the complexity and the significance of the foods we eat are analysed from a variety of perspectives, by sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists. Chapters address a number of intriguing questions: how do people make judgments about taste? How do such judgments come to be shared by groups of people?; What social and organisational processes result in foods being certified as of decent or proper quality? How has dissatisfaction with the food system been expressed? What alternatives are thought to be possible? The multi-disciplinary analysis of this book explores many different answers to such questions. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues, the second part considers processes of formal and informal regulation, while the third part examines social and political responses to industrialised food production and mass consumption. Qualities of food will be of interest to researchers and students in all the social science disciplines that are concerned with food, whether marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition or economics.

Qualities of food.

Abstract: In this book, the complexity and the significance of the foods we eat are analysed from a variety of perspectives, by sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists. Chapters address a number of intriguing questions: how do people make judgments about taste? How do such judgments come to be shared by groups of people?; What social and organisational processes result in foods being certified as of decent or proper quality? How has dissatisfaction with the food system been expressed? What alternatives are thought to be possible? The multi-disciplinary analysis of this book explores many different answers to such questions. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues, the second part considers processes of formal and informal regulation, while the third part examines social and political responses to industrialised food production and mass consumption. Qualities of food will be of interest to researchers and students in all the social science disciplines that are concerned with food, whether marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition or economics.

La normalità del mangiare fuori

Abstract: In the context of attempts in agro-food studies to give theoretical expression to the importance of consumption, I examine eating out as an instance of cultural consumption and advocate an approach to its analysis through a theory of practice. After offering a brief outline of some core features of such a theory, I draw upon data from two empirical studies of eating out in the UK to show that eating out has become a normal, relatively mundane, though still special, practice. It is demonstrated that it has shared understandings, a set of conventions governing performances and a shared set of justifications for engaging in it. Such understandings, procedures and justifications are socially differentiated, for not everyone engages in the practice in the same manner. Nevertheless, it is argued, as witnessed by the orderliness of restaurants, both parties to a form of commercial exchange accommodate to one another in accord with the shared conventions of a normalised and widely instituted practice.