Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption

Magnus Boström is professor of sociology at Örebro University.

• Table of ContentsList of FiguresIntroduction: The Social Roots of Ecologically Destructive ConsumerismChapter 1: Social Relations, Everyday Rituals, and ConsumerismChapter 2: Social Comparison and Consumerism in Stratified Social LifeChapter 3: The Temporalities of Mass Consumption in Social Life: A Lost FutureChapter 4: Sites of Consumption: The Home, The Mall, The InternetChapter 5: The Social Stock of (Not) Knowing: Normalization and Ignorance of Unsustainable Mass ConsumptionConclusion: A Collective Detox from ConsumerismAfterwordReferencesAbout the Author

Consumer society is not simply a breezy marketing formulation but rather constitutes a resolute system of social and economic organization purposefully constructed to achieve specific financial and political objectives. Boström does a magnificent job in this book to articulate the challenges of our contemporary consumerist lives and, most importantly, he identifies several timely pathways for transcending our current predicament.