Abstract
In this chapter, consumption will be contextualized in the non-work activities that consumers undertake in developed societies. To accomplish this, I will first discuss the dimensioning of non-work activities in terms of key characteristics of inputs to these activities. I will then address common social objectives of consumers in non-work activities. These objectives will be suggested to organize the set of activities that they construct. Identity objectives will be contrasted with status objectives in terms of their fundamental properties. The properties of identity objectives will then be used to give a form to activities which produce this objective. To further inference on consumption in an activity framework, the dynamics of the system introduced in the previous chapter will be investigated with numerical methods when the characteristics of the input factors take the form of knowledge and conventional goods. Here, as in previous discussion, the structuring of environments and the disturbances to activities they generate will be integral to the study of the dynamics of non-work activities.
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Silver, S.D. (2000). Dimensioning Consumption: The Use of Knowledge in Non-Work Activities. In: Consuming Knowledge: Studying Knowledge Use in Leisure and Work Activities. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4615-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4615-3_2
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