Journal of Consumer Culture
2014, Vol. 14(3) 279–303
! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1469540514547828
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Article
After taste: Culture,
consumption and
theories of practice
Alan Warde
The University of Manchester, UK
Abstract
Multi-disciplinary studies of consumption have proliferated in the last two decades.
Heavily influenced by notions of ‘the consumer’ and tenets of ‘the cultural turn’, explan-
ations have relied preponderantly upon models of voluntary action contextualised by
webs of cultural meanings which constitute symbolic resources for individual choice.
Arguably, the cultural turn has run its course and is beginning to unwind, a consequence
of internal inconsistencies, misplaced emphases and the cycle of generational succession
in theory development in the social sciences. Theories of practice provide a competing
alternative approach which contests the colonisation of consumption by models of
individual choice and cultural expressivism. To that end, this article explores the use
of theories of practice as a lens to magnify aspects of common social processes which
generate observable patterns of consumption. It is suggested that theories of practice
might provide a general analytic framework for understanding consumption, one whose
particular emphases capture important and relevant aspects overlooked by previously
dominant approaches to consumption as culture. This article reviews reasons for the
emergence of theories of practice and isolates some of their distinctive emphases.
Strengths and weaknesses of the theory of practice as an approach to consumption
are discussed.
Keywords
Consumption, cultural turn, sociology, taste, theories of practice
Introduction: Consumption and the role of theory
There is widespread agreement about the importance of consumption in the con-
temporary world. Some argue that it is a principal driving force behind social and
economic development, others that it is the core preoccupation of populations
across much of the world. The topic has come to be studied extensively by most
Corresponding author:
Alan Warde, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: alan.warde@manchester.ac.uk
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disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities and excellent studies have
transpired. The multi-disciplinary origins of such works have produced a very
diverse topic area. Despite much contestation and controversy, most explicit gen-
eral formulations and accounts are based in cultural theories of various sorts.
Research programmes developed after the 1970s were strongly influenced by the
cultural turn, the broad public intellectual movement whose most radical manifest-
ation was postmodernism, which altered understandings about the nature of cul-
ture and the appropriate ways to give accounts and explanations of social and
cultural phenomena. Arguably, however, the cultural turn has run its course,
such that fresh theoretical approaches to consumption may be anticipated.
Social scientists do not agree about what theories should be expected to do. The
view with which I operate in this article is that theories are instruments of selective
attention. A theory is a set of propositions (discursive or algebraic) which, when
seeking to explain why or how situations (processes, events or states of affairs)
come to be the way they are, identifies what entities to look out for (relevant and
important entities, whose properties and dispositions will normally be described)
and in what relationship those entities stand vis-a-vis one another. Such relation-
ships may be classificatory, associational or causal. Theories necessarily bracket off
most parts of complex reality to give a parsimonious account of how particular
phenomena operate, with some disciplines typically seeking more parsimonious or
reductive theories than others. Consequently, a principal effect of any theory is that
it emphasises some features of the world and not others. Within a discipline,
theories differ by virtue of their emphases.
One such view of theory is supplied by Andrew Abbott (2001a) who character-
ises the development of sociological theory as revolving around fundamental, and
ultimately irreconcilable, analytic oppositions. He argues that the same fundamen-
tal disputes recur because their basic puzzles revolve around ineradicable oppos-
itions. In the process of disputation, some positions become discredited or fall from
fashion, but only temporarily. For, to embrace one side of a core opposition makes
it impossible to give sufficiently comprehensive or balanced accounts. Victory for
one generic view at any one point in time will later be redefined in a more accom-
modating fashion or reversed. Theory is thus cyclical rather than progressive.
Nevertheless, despite reverting periodically to common conceptual starting
points, we become better informed, partly through having mapped more of the
empirical terrain of the social world. This perspective can be used to chart the
unwinding of the cultural turn and the emergence of theories of practice.
In the next section, I review schematically the emergence of sociological
approaches to consumption as they developed in the later 20th century, pointing
to the influence of cultural theories and identifying some significant limitations.
The section ‘From Culture to Practice’ introduces theories of practice, which have
gathered some momentum as a potential alternative to the previously dominant
cultural approaches. Brief comment on their emergence is followed by a summary
of their principal distinctive emphases. The section ‘Theories of Practice and the
Sociology of Consumption’ reviews some recent empirical applications to various
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fields of consumption. Subsequently, the section ‘Some Problems and Limits of the
Sociology of Practice’ evaluates some critiques of theories of practice with a view to
enhancing their value for investigating consumption.
Consumption and the cultural turn
Social scientists turned their attention to consumption in response to unprece-
dented material abundance during the Long Boom. Before then, interest was
shown in consumption primarily in the context of the study of poverty or the
normative critique of leisure and luxury. Since the late 1960s, the social science
of consumption has had three broad, partly overlapping, phases of development,
each of which has had a distinctive focus. Schematically, emphasis shifted between
the three fundamental dimensions of consumption – acquisition, appreciation and
appropriation (see Warde, 2010).
In the first phase, the focus was the economic system and its reproduction in an
age of mass production and mass consumption. Sociological accounts, revolving
around themes from macroeconomics and critical political economy, were ‘econo-
mistic’ in the sense that consumption was subordinate to, and to be explained in
terms of, production; the stereotypical instance was the Marxist base and super-
structure theorem. Cultural phenomena, like taste, were, if not determined by, at
least heavily steered by the apparatus of industry, for example advertising, and
were by-products of the unequal, usually class-based, distribution of property and
income in capitalist societies. By implication, welfare provision was a consumption
issue. Debates centred on the relationship between needs and wants, and upon the
patterns and the justice of the existing distribution of access to goods and services
among the population. In this phase, the default model of the consumer was no
different to that of economic theory; a utilitarian model of the sovereign consumer
was sufficient to account for what individuals and households purchased.
Consumption was a process involving personal deliberation, albeit heavily influ-
enced by commercial pressures, leading to independent decisions in light of
preferences.
Radical new departures coincided with ‘the cultural turn’ in the humanities and
social sciences in the 1970s. Critical of ‘economism’, attention increasingly shifted
from the instrumental aspects of consumption to its symbolic dimensions, and
especially its capacity for communication. The new cultural studies was one mani-
festation providing a major stimulus to the sociology of consumption in Europe.
It contested not only economistic explanation but also the earlier moral condem-
nation of consumer behaviour. Not only did mass-produced goods and services
provide comfort and entertainment, they also expanded cultural experience for
many people, supplied materials to be used in personal self-development and
self-expression, and, as with the example of gifts, established and consolidated
social relationships (Warde, 2002). Consumption was thus re-habilitated, a cause
for celebration rather than dismay. Based in processes of globalisation, aesthetici-
sation and commodification, people’s aspirations, activities and possessions were
Warde 281
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interpreted in terms of the spread of ‘consumer culture’. Research, much of it rich
in semiotic and experiential detail, focused on style and taste, on sub-cultural
expression, on popular culture, on uses of mass media, and on the playful and
non-instrumental aspects of life. Increasingly, consumption came to be seen as a
means by which individuals and groups expressed their identities through symbolic
representation in taste and lifestyle, with their desires focused on symbolic rather
than material reward. The key emergent figure was what might be termed ‘the
expressive individual’, whose activities, possessions, meanings and judgements
were directed towards symbolic communication of identity by means of lifestyle.
1
The cultural turn did not entirely obliterate earlier concerns. Not everyone took
the cultural turn, and some who did took it without alacrity. Earlier impetuses that
sustained more sophisticated and nuanced accounts of the importance of the mater-
ial and economic phenomena were developed, for example, in the work of Pierre
Bourdieu on the sociology of taste and research on the culture industries, drawing
upon the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless, production-led understandings receded.
The imperatives of the cultural turn had become effectively hegemonic at the point of
the birth of a systematic empirical sociology of consumption in the 1990s.
Consequently, the cultural turn and its associated research programmes indelibly
marked the sociology of consumption and provided it with the bulk of its theoretical
understanding and empirical findings to date. The dominance of the cultural turn
might be evidenced by its trans-disciplinary impact, including the creation of unli-
kely genres like cultural political economy and cultural psychology, by the rapid
expansion of the sociology of culture and the attention paid to explanations of taste,
by flourishing research programmes in consumer behaviour like Consumer Culture
Theory (CCT), and of course by the establishment of cultural studies per se (e.g.
Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Hall et al., 2010; Santoro, 2011). Cultural theory
came in stronger and weaker versions, depending often on the degree of embrace of
postmodernist themes. Firat and Venkatesh (1995), for example, outline the radical
postmodernist programme for research and analysis in the area of consumption.
More moderate programmes included CCT and much work in cultural studies.
Nevertheless, as Reckwitz (2002b) pointed out, cultural explanation in different
versions was rampant and, as Kaufman (2004) observed, the tendency was to give
exclusively cultural explanations of cultural phenomena.
As Abbott might anticipate, elements side-lined in the period of the flourishing
of cultural analysis became due for re-cycling. The elaboration of the cultural turn
gradually produced a battery of objections by critics who accused it of neglect of
practical and routine activity, embodied procedures, the material and instrumental
aspects of life and mechanisms for the transmission of culture into action. The
emphases of the cultural turn diverted attention away from some empirical phe-
nomena relevant to the analysis of consumption. Because much of the work on the
culture of consumption focused on the display for others of symbols of identity the
many aspects of consumption that are routine, ordinary or inconspicuous were
obscured (Gronow and Warde, 2001). Also, investigation of class and status
became less common, and there were fewer studies of resource distribution and
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the influence of material inequalities. Moreover, the cultural turn had found little
place for objects and technologies as material forces. As Reckwitz (2002a) charged,
in cultural theory ‘[t]he material world exists only insofar as it becomes an object of
interpretation within collective meaning structures’ (p. 202). He argued that the
main theoretical problem of the cultural turn was that material entities, the copious
materiality of mass manufacture and consumer culture, are treated as objects of
knowledge and not as material sui generis.
Arguably, in addition, cultural analysis of consumption contained a further and
deeper set of theoretical weaknesses embedded in its general theory of action.
Despite its internal diversity, and thus important exceptions, primary recourse
was increasingly had to a voluntaristic theory of action, upholding models of an
active, expressive, choosing consumer motivated by concerns for personal identity
and a fashioned lifestyle. The model of an active and reflexive agent predominated,
implying that conscious and intentional decisions steer consumption behaviour and
explain its sense and direction. In key respects, its model was little different from
the sovereign consumer of neo-classical Economics. The dominant template of
consumption in all disciplines remains modelling the individual engaged in many
discrete acts wherein personal deliberation precedes personal, independent deci-
sions made with a view to the satisfaction of preferences. The ever greater prom-
inence of neo-liberal political and economic doctrine has given further impetus to
this tendency to postulate the autonomy of the individual and freedom of individ-
ual choice (Holmwood, 2010). Of course, all disciplinary approaches admit in
addition to contextual influences on decisions (income, prices, subjective norms,
socio-demographic characteristics, lifestyle group membership), but individual
choice remains the core presupposition. This persists despite increasing criticism
of individualistic explanations. For example, Warde and Southerton (2012: 5–6)
point to the failure of standard models to capture the practical, collective, sequen-
tial, repetitive and automatic aspects of consumption. New elements of such a
critique can even be found in embryo in the disciplinary heartlands of explanations
based on individual intention, economics and psychology, where recent develop-
ments in behavioural economics, cognitive psychology and neuro-science have
indicted the dominant models of rational action for their failure to accommodate
the automatic, reactive and habitual aspects of most normal human conduct (e.g.
Haidt, 2012; Kahneman, 2011; Thaler and Sunstein, 2009).
One defect of the model of the expressive individual is that it mis-defines or mis-
specifies consumption – a notoriously chaotic concept of which the active
agent model uses only one of the possible definitions, arguably a poor one, pre-
cisely because it pays insufficient attention to appropriation. Sociological and
socio-cultural studies of consumption adopted the notion of appropriation from
anthropologists who in the mid-1980s applied their discipline’s insights about non-
market exchange and material culture to modern consumption (e.g. Appadurai,
1986; Kopytoff, 1986; McCracken, 1990; Miller, 1987) in order to capture the
importance of people ‘domesticating’ mass-produced and alien products, endowing
them with particular personal meanings and converting them into items to be made
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