SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CONSUMER PRACTICES: METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AND HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIVE
The paper justifies the necessity of solving methodological problems while analysing consumption and consumers’ behaviour. The study of culture as a factor of consumer behavior is associated with the need for a deeper analysis of the social structure of the society. The author reveals functional differences in analysing consumers’ consumption by sociologists and anthropologists, on the one hand, and economists and marketing specialists, on the other. The problem of insufficient nominalist approach to the study of social differences in consumption is posed. Moreover, a problem of social boundaries of groups is emphasized. The study of culture as a factor in consumer behavior is associated with two broad traditions in sociology. The first goes back to Karl Marx who claimed the primacy of economic reasons. The second belongs to M. Weber who treated Protestant ethics as a factor behind the emergence of modern capitalism. The author logically justifies that the external existence and coerciveness of social norms grant an individual the right to choose between personal practices. The paper reconstructs and describes consumer practices of such groups as chivalry, petty bourgeois of the era of the initial capital. Based on the example of modern British consumer practices, inadequacy of a stratification approach is shown to describe their differences as opposed to differences between social groups in modern Britain. From a historical retrospective, the paper reflects the main changes in the demonstration behavior of these groups: from forms of demonstrative behavior that is inseparable from functional, to modern demonstrative behavior, when symbolic meaning prevails over functional one and can even do without it.