2. The SoP Approach: Theoretical Background and Empirical Practice

This chapter starts with an overview of the theoretical foundations of the SoP approach. The consumer is considered to be located within an extensive web of, often contested, social relations of production and material cultures of consumption. For the SoP approach, it is the interaction of these complex components, dependent on the context and the commodity or provision in question, which needs to be unpacked to understand fully the nature of consumption. The chapter then moves to set out the fundamentals on which SoP research can typically begin to be built. These are: agents in the chain of provisioning and associated context; structures to include the institutional forms attached to the specific SoP and the broader social factors within which it operates (such as gender, class, race); processes which again relate to the specific activities attached to the SoP as well as to more systemic and abstract forms such as globalization, neoliberalization and privatization; relations across the elements of the SoP; and material cultures (covered in detail in Chap. 3). The chapter considers how these complexities can be addressed methodologically, and shows how the SoP approach critically draws upon but diverges from other systems-based approaches.