Geographies of retailing and consumption: markets in motion

While I began my first of three reports on retailing and consumption (see Crewe, 2000;2001) bemoaning the early neglect of these topics across a number of academicdisciplines, I start my final report with an altogether different lament, namely that therehas been a recent surfeit of writings on markets, material culture and consumption.While this is no bad thing in itself, I use the word lament purposefully in order to signalmy concern about the insightfulness of some of this work (see also Miller, 2001, on thediscrepancy between the quantity and quality of recent consumption research). In thediscussion that follows, I do not propose to launch into a critique of all that is bad inconsumption studies, nor to write in the style of an annotated bibliography of consumerstudies. I am also purposefully side-stepping the now locked-in and tired refrain of‘let’s join economy and culture’, through either ‘unveiling’ commodity chains(Hartwick, 1998; Goldman and Papson, 1998) or via circuits and networks (Jackson,2002: 8). Rather, in what follows I attempt to construct a series of arguments about theconcept of the market as one way of framing and organizing what are currentlydisparate lines of inquiry. It seems to me that what unites much of the better literaturein the field at present is a concern for the ways in which particular forms of exchangeare accomplished, represented, spatialized and institutionalized (Carrier, 1997; Dilley,1992; Philo and Miller, 2001; Slater and Tonkiss, 2001: 199). A number of differentmodels of markets and exchange seem to be emerging which, in different ways, mighthelp to develop our theorization of the connections between commodities, consumersand their spatial and temporal worlds.