Consumer Culture and Personal Finance: Money Goes to Market

Consumer Culture and Personal Finance: Money Goes to Market, by Jacqueline Botterill. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 253pp. $89.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780230008670.

As Jacqueline Botterill observes, in introducing Consumer Culture and Personal Finance, the cultural history of money and personal finance has tended to pass under the radar of both economic and cultural analysts of consumption. Economists, she argues, have been intent on mapping aggregate shifts in consumer spending and credit, and have thus largely ignored the social dynamics of everyday financial actions. Alternatively, Botterill contends, cultural studies scholars have found the concept of money to be boring, and have thus concentrated on exploring spectacular forms of consumption rather than on documenting the mundane financial practices that enable us all to be ''consumers.''

While one can take issue with this characterization of consumption scholarship as obsessed with the general or the spectacular, this book is on solid ground in arguing the need for a concerted cultural analysis of how we (or, at least, citizens of wealthy nations) have come to think about and manage our personal finances. Just as the study of consumer culture has, over the last decade or so, moved to analyze so-called ''ordinary,'' or everyday rather than luxury, acts of consumption, Botterill usefully directs us to the quotidian and culturally framed aspects of saving, borrowing and spending-at least in the United Kingdom.

The result is a detailed and useful book, though not one that is immediately engaging. Unfortunately, the introduction appears rushed in the drafting, is mechanical in delivery, and is riddled with proof-reading errors. This awkward start belies the quality...